Wu Wei

Some history lessons

Whilst repatriating my own books from other people's bedrooms, I came across several small books in the series "A Very Short Introduction" so my reading will be rather random as I catch up on subjects I haven't managed so far to educate myself about.

Today I started on "Medieval Britain".  Sure enough, it starts with 1066, (no mention of King Harold and the arrow) but nothing is the same ....... History was simple when I first learnt it.  Just a few kings' names to learn plus a few funny stories:  the one who burnt the cakes, the one who lost his crown in the wash, the one who got his feet wet on the beach (wrong period I know).

Now see what really happened:

On Christmas Day 1066 Duke William of Normandy was acclaimed king of England in Westminster Abbey.  It was an electrifying moment.  The shouts of acclamation  -- in English as well as in French -- alarmed the Norman guards outside the abbey. Believing that inside the church something had gone horribly wrong, they set fire to the neighbouring houses.  Half a century later, a Norman monk recalled the chaos of that day.  As the fire spread rapidly, the people in the church were thrown into confusion  and crowds of them rushed outside, some to fight the flames, others to take the chance to go looting.  Only the monks, the bishops and a few clergy remained before the altar.  Though they were terrified, they managed to carry on and complete the consecration of the king who was trembling violently.

A very good job they didn't have television in those days.  Not very likely that people would have had confidence in a king who was trembling. 

Despite his victory at Hastings, despite the surrender of London and Winchester, William's position was still a precarious one and he had good reason to tremble.  It was to take at least another five years before he could feel fairly confident that the conquest had been completed.  There were risings against Norman rule in every year from 1067 to 1070: in Kent, in the south-west, in the Welsh marches, in the Fenland, and in the north.  The Normans had to live like an army of occupation, living, eating  and sleeping together in operational units.  They had to build castles -- strong points from which a few men could dominate a subject population.  There may well have been no more than 10,000 Normans living in the midst of a hostile population of one or two millions. 

Now isn't this sounding a bit familiar? 

This is not to say that every single Englishman (sic) actively opposed the Normans.  Unquestionably there were many who cooperated with them; it was this which made possible the successful Norman takeover of so many Anglo-Saxon institutions.  But there is plenty of evidence to show that the English resented becoming an oppressed majority in their own country.  The years of insecurity were to have a profound effect on subsequent history.  They meant that England received not just a new royal family but also a new ruling class, a new culture and language.  Probably no other conquest in European history has had such disastrous consequences for the defeated.

Leaving aside the extremely anglocentric conclusion (the book was written in 1984 not in the 19th century as you might have thought), you can draw some useful conclusions.  The idea of invading a country and not taking it over would seem pretty bizarre in medieval Europe.  If you are going to successfully invade a country to take it over, the king must go too and spend a lot of time there, getting crowned as well as being seen by the population.  Secondly, pacifying an invaded country is not going to be a quick action.  It will take years.  Nothing has changed in this respect from 1066 to 2003.  I'll leave George Bush to read my blog and draw some conclusions from history.  The rest of you can fill in the cliches about history repeating itself as farce. 

 

Technorati tags: medieval England, Iraq, King William, invasion

Motherland

On Tuesday I went to Photofusion, a photographer's gallery in Brixton to see Simon Roberts' exhibition of his photos taken during a one year trip all over Russia.  I blogged about this here before as a result of the photos which appeared in Granta, and I got a lot of hits on the blog later when the BBC ran a story about an abandoned warship in Murmansk which he photoed, and I had mentioned.  I complained on the blog that the photos seemed chosen for the negative aspects that they showed, and even the colours were gloomy.  However, Simon explained that this was Granta's fault and you can see from his website that the photos are full of the strange and wonderful life that is Russia.  There are no links so I can't show any of them here.

The exhibition (and his book) is called Rodina (Motherland) and to explain the significance of this name, the book has an introduction by Rosamund Bartlett, who is an expert on Chekhov.  But the best part was Simon himself, explaining why and how he took the photos.  Unfortunately the book does not have so much of this, which is a shame. The cultural significance of a word is not always a good guide for outsiders as to what is actually going on in Russia at the moment. The photos often depict what is different about Russia from the West, because that is what is interesting.  There are no pictures showing how many Macdonalds have appeared in Russian cities.  The photos show young people with a lot of optimism for their own future. 

Someone asked a question implying the lack of (Western) style and aesthetic values based on several photos of room decorations, and my neighbour muttered "depends whose values you are talking about".  To me, and presumably her as well, the objects and style were so typical that they brought back a sense of nostalgia, in fact this was talked about a lot.  They reflect the conditions in which Russians have to live, and apart from big cities, also all they know, apart from American soaps on TV.  Although I had only been to some of the places, the scenes they show I have seen in many former Soviet cities, though not with the people or the little details that Simon has managed to capture.

The photo that Simon says he liked best is the one of the meat market with the "angel" (no 16 on his website).  She's not really an angel, as she is dressed in a puffa jacket to keep warm, with a white lacy apron and sleeves over it.  But she has the dreamy look of paintings where women looked into the distance with a faint smile rather than directly at the artist.

My favourite is no 15, the Christmas tree with lights, taken in the blue light of midwinter in Murmansk, when the sun really never rises.  It seems to be taken from a room in  a hotel in Murmansk where I have stayed  myself.

I left feeling it was time to plan another journey to Russia.  I haven't been since 1994.  Time to go again before the new authoritarianism makes it impossible.  I also feel it's very good that there are some young people who go to Russia out of curiosity and come back with their own positive experiences, despite the old Cold War prejudices still hang around. Wonderful place and people, shame about the government.

Motherland is exhibited at Photofusion, London from 13th April - 26th May.

Technorati tags: Simon Roberts, Motherland, Russia, photography, exhibition

How to write a blog?

If only it were that simple!

Don't buy Sony - happy (ier) ending

Recently  here I spent a post slagging off Sony Vaio support which this year had caused two separate big problems for us.  At least, they weren't big problems themselves, but  the way Sony support functions at the moment, it seemed they would never get solved.

In the end they did, and when Sony rang again to check if we were satisfied, they offered us some compensation.  After some negotiations, a brand new camera arrived yesterday for Bee (so I can get mine back). Thank you Sony.

So after spending Monday complaining to BT about the snail speed of broadband, I was dismayed to find on Tuesday that the charger for my Sony laptop had died.  We were down to one laptop in the family, as the regular Mac charger problem had hit Sloph's laptop  this week as well.  Bee's computer decided to play up as a result of the slow broadband speed, so getting my work done has been a bit of a nightmare.

However I can report that a new charger arrived yesterday, as promised, my computer is back to normal.  Thank you Sony.

The broadband speed is back to normal.  Thank you BT. And Sloph's computer arrived back this morning.  Thank you Mac support.

Last time this occurred we all backed up files on a separate hard drive thinking that was the solution.  Unfortunately someone dropped the hard drive...

All this goes to show that these days you can never have too many computers in a family.

 

Technorati tags: Sony Vaio, support, BT, Mac

NHS Rant again

Recently I've been struck by the fact that the NHS seems to be going through a phase of Taylorism or (so called) Scientific Management which was a fad in manufacturing management circles in the 1920s, but now seems to be being applied to services industries, as well.  The days of the men in white coats and stopwatches not stethoscopes are here.

The idea is that you break down all the actions needed into lots of component parts and look for the most cost effective (ie quick, cheap, and deskilled) option for each.  You can see why accountants might like it.

It was a pretty awful (and unsuccessful)  management fad, turning people into robots on the factory assembly line making cars, and didn't last long.  But it's even more horrifying now, applied to medical services as it makes access to fully skilled medical professionals more and more difficult.  You only have to read a bit of Random Acts of Reality, the blog of a London Ambulance driver, to see how it is being applied to save money.  And Confessions of a Psychotherapist also has detected it:

The government has responded to the Layard report, calling for 10,000 more NHS therapists, with a consultation paper outlining their proposals for National Occupational Standards for psychological therapies. This paper has a very significant bias towards CBT practitioners and Humanistic principles are largely ignored. Apparently the evidence base is that CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is the most cost-effective therapy. I say apparently because: there is very little research into the long-term benefits of other approaches; there have been no longitudinal studies into the efficacy of CBT; all meta-analyses show that the therapeutic relationship is the most significant factor in recovery, not modality, and CBT pays scant attention to the therapeutic relationship.

Next post: how the government intends to improve the well-being of the nation through 10 week training courses for CBT practitioners....keep reading..

This rant was brought on my going to my doctor's new surgery and finding that instead of seeing the nurse, as usual for my blood test, I was treated by a so-called Health Care Assistant, who went through her only routine just like a robot.  I imagine she was taught a script pretty much like the people who work in call centres are (who are monitored to make sure they don't diverge from their script).  I don't mind seeing a nurse for a blood test, because a nurse is not a robot and can have a dialogue with you about anything you need to know. Everyone knows that people go to see the doctor on one pretext while something else is worrying them, or that what is wrong turns out to be something completely different from what you thought.  By making sure that you are seen by a Health Care Assistant robot, the "managers" make sure that you get the minimum treatment in the time, so saving money and "processing more output".  

Clearly the idea of holistic medicine doesn't stand a chance.

 

Technorati tags: NHS, Taylorism, Scientific Management, deskilling, robots

Hairdressers

Over on Enidd, there has been much discussion about hairdressers, good, bad and indifferent.  It seems everybody finds it difficult to get their hair done as they would like it, for a price that seems reasonable, without being made to feel that the salon was too good for them.

It seems I must tell you about our Greek hairdresser.  We had lots of Eastern European experience, where the only thing you could say in favour was that it was cheap and at least you could see again under your fringe. The only style I could ever get was Dusty Springfield bouffant and kiss curls, or in Lithuania a style I associated with a woman politician whose values I did not admire (a bit like Margaret Thatcher). Then we found our Greek salon.

For some reason, it was situated in Maroussi, the northern suburb of Athens where we lived, although the prices they charged were surely centre of Athens.  We didn't mind that, since it saved a one hour hot and smelly journey on the train to get to the centre.  It was populated by three gay guys plus a woman manageress who tried to keep the peace. 

The first guy was the colourist but also the communicator.  He spoke excellent English and had a thorough knowledge of London, probably better than mine these days.  He obviously went there often, for shopping, as he put it, though this might well have had a wider range than usual.  After successful colouring, you were taken downstairs for a cut.  The choice was between an older rather hunchbacked and shifty character or (when we there) a transient French guy.  The choice was not made by you, since hunchback was a rather jealous and fickle sort.  If you were booked in with the French, suddenly space would appear in the hunchback's appointments and he would ask how you liked your cut last time and should he do it again.  Even if you accepted the inevitable and were booked in with the hunchback he might suddenly decide to steal other customers from the  French guy and make you wait.  Since neither the hunchback or the French guy spoke much English, it was hard to work out exactly what was going on.  The French guy didn't seem to speak much Greek either.  The scope for misunderstanding, was huge, deliberate or not. The manageress had to spend a lot of time soothing tempers and decreasing the volume of shouting that always occurs with disagreements in Greece.  After one particularly long wait, where sulks seemed to have set in all round,  I explained to the manageress that we actually came for the theatre as much as the hairdressing.  She looked at me blankly until the penny dropped.

You may ask why we accepted all this.  The three of us agreed that we always came out looking much better than when we went in, our hair was more or less how we wanted, we had been pampered, and we had enjoyed the floor show.  What more could you want!

 

Technorati tags: hairdresser, Athens

Family History

I originally started this blog thinking it would be about our family history, as we had just started trying to trace it again.  It would also mean I could write it down for my kids.  I thought I would write the story, the sisters would add comments, and it would be on the web for anyone who could fill in the gaps, to find.  However, one of my sisters was not so keen to have some of the past available on the internet, so I had to stop.  Now we have come to an agreement about what can be written and what not.  This is my version of how I understand/remember it. 

My father's history is really what we are talking about, since my mother was half English and half Welsh and had a coherent story to tell us, with real relatives we actually met.  The short story is that my father probably came from Czernowicz in the Bukovina which was in Austria before the First World War, became Cernauti in Romania between the wars, and is now called Chernovtsi and has been in Ukraine since the Second World War.

My father never talked much about his past, his relatives, his childhood, the time before the war or what happened to him during the war.  My mother always said that what she had heard was never the same each time, so she didn't know what to believe, and getting on with life after the war was more important. Anyway, we grew up thinking he was Polish, and we knew that he had lived in Brussels during the interwar period.  After the war he came back to Brussels where he met my mother and soon they were married and I appeared (or perhaps it was the other way round).  After a spell in Brazil, he came to England where he lived happily ever after (this is the short version!) with my mother and us three daughters, till he died in 1986.  Then we could look at his papers, which he always hoarded, and try to make some sense of them, according to what he had also told us.  My mother died five years later, so there wasn't much we could check with her afterwards.

It was clear that he had some Jewish background, but the story shifted as to whether it was his mother or father that was Jewish. In the 1960s, he decided he was German and claimed German nationality.  This seemed a bit contradictory, as one version of the wartime story said that he had been in Belsen.  One sister claimed he told her that he had been in the Resistance.  Certainly General de Gaulle was his hero.   However by then we regarded all these versions as a bit like the Good Soldier Schweik's stories.  Nevertheless, the German nationality seems to be correct as the document proving it has been checked by one of our friends who was the German Consul.  But to claim German nationality you have to have documentation for two generations back, so we always wondered how he had managed to prove this.

A further source of information was a long time friend in Brussels, who most of us had met, (my mother from the days of their courtship, my sisters from visits with my father).  He confirmed some parts of the story and confused others.  The confusion could have come from translations from French or his confusion through old age. 

At this point I rather gave up, being busy with my own first child.  I just assumed that we would never get to the bottom of this story, and what did it really matter?  The person who was my father was well-known to me, and what did it matter about his past.  If there were problems in the war, who was I to judge, having had a much easier life?  Obscure parts of Eastern Europe were inaccessible, and what could you learn when you had no names of relatives, and not a lot of certainty about where he came from?

But when I started working in Ukraine in the 90s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, I was at least able to go to Chernovtsi (photos on Flickr here) and see that where he was supposed to come from was not some shtetl, but had been a big flourishing cultural city with a large university, a Yiddish theatre and cemeteries indicating a multicultural world of Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews, Romanians and Austrians as well as some Germans.   The previously Polish town of Lviv (Austrian Lemberg) was not far from the previously Hungarian town of Mukachevo (Austrian Munkatsch), itself not far from the previously Romanian town of Chernovtsi (Austrian Czernowicz).  All of them were large multicultural towns in the border country of the Carpathians.

No wonder his nationality was not so clear. And no wonder he could apparently speak Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and Ukrainian when he arrived in Brussels.  We decided that his mother tongue was German as it was apparent that he counted under his breath in German, though my parents first talked together in French. 

His papers got split up between the sisters and until recently no one had made much effort to assemble a coherent story (if there was one to be had).  As the internet grows, more and more history is available and so from time to time we have all searched his name on genealogy websites, Jewish or German/Austrian, to see what had become available.  But always nothing, even trying different spellings. 

And then suddenly ...

... to be continued as developments progress.

Technorati tags: genealogy, family history, Czernowicz, Brussels

Devushkas at the Races

As Bee and I got stuck in  traffic coming into Liverpool on the way back from the Lakes (I'm not really managing to keep up on the blogging front) we eventually worked out the cause: we were near Aintree Race Course.

I was driving so Bee became a paparazzo (spelling?) out of the car window.  All the pavements were crowded with racegoers, some coming by train, some already installed outside the pub, a few by stretch limo.  You can see that the weather was unusually warm for the North of England (usual slogan: ne'er cast a clout till May is out*) and one wonders what happens when the weather is the usual April showers.  The southerners* seem more sensible in having Ascot* in the summer.

Here are the best of Bee's photos.  Unfortunately, arriving with a half mile walk down a rather rough looking street, with road works and traffic controls, does not make a Liverpool devushka at her most glamourous.  Nor is smsing your escort advisable on your grand entrance, even if he hasn't turned up on time.  But they all looked like they were having a good time.  And those without hats had silly feather things in their hair. Nice that most of the men got smartened up as well, as compared with the usual devushka escorts.

Later someone told me it was a general day out in Liverpool for "Ladies' Day" at the Races. 

   

 

*Explanation for non-Brits
Translation: Don't take off any layers of clothing until June.  This assumes you are wearing a vest, shirt, jumper and jacket. When I was a child, this seemed sensible.  But it clearly is laughable today.  Global warming now applies to people.

Southerners are the arch foes of Northerners. 

The southern location for Ladies Day at the races is during Royal Ascot Week, where silly hats are obligatory, though long dresses are not usually worn.  Ladies' Day is on June 21st this year.

 

Technorati tags: Ascot, Aintree, races, Liverpool, devushka, Ladies' Day

Easter Greetings

Before I left Ljubljana my sister made me the  traditional Easter breakfast of ham, bread and potica (a poppy seed or nut cake).  The bread had a decorated egg baked into the centre; the decorations are done by wrapping the egg in a leaf then boiling with onions, which gives the egg a brown colour except where the leaf is. Other Slovenian Easter traditions here.

Interestingly, Easter is called Velika Noc, or Great Night, rather like the Lithuanian Velykos, as opposed to derivations on Pacques in France and Paskha in Russia and Greece.

  

As for our "family traditions", (apart from overindulging in chocolate) they consist of the Easter Tree decorated with plastic eggs only found in Germany but now also in Slovenia. Though I should add it's only been a tradition since last year when we went to Berlin for Easter.  Still any excuse to decorate a tree.  This year we have Easter bunny decorations as well.  We never manage to buy those bunches of twigs (and we are not a family for outdoor walks) for indoor trees, so we just adopt any handy tree in the garden.  No leaves much in Oxford, unlike Ljubljana.

So Easter Greetings to anyone reading this.

 

Technorati tags: Easter, Lithuania, customs, Slovenia

Vilnius Characters

One of the familiar characters on Vilnius main streets is a rather strangely dressed diminutive lady who accosts you for money as she walks along.  So what, you might think, there are lots of bag-lady beggars.  But this lady has rather a painted face, and rather smarter bags, and indeed clothes, than the  usual beggar.  Her face is usually painted with rouge spots on her cheeks, and for this reason I always think of her as a kind of doll in fancy dress.  She is never threatening, unlike those gypsies who offer you a bunch of heather and then curse you if you don't give them money for it.  Though she does have a wheedling air about her similar to those gypsies. 

Anyway, she is always interesting to look at, though I doubt whether she really belongs to the so-called deserving poor.  One day I had no change and ended up giving her the smallest note I had, which was quite a lot.  I found myself following her in the queue for a coffee and cake in Ponia Laime* like the respectable Austrian fur coated lady she suddenly became.  I felt a bit of a mug, treating her like a beggar, like those occasions when you suspect that any money given goes straight on booze or drugs.  But then I thought, good for her.  If I were really some middle-aged lady down on her luck and reduced to begging, why shouldn't I have a binge in a cake shop, when I got some money.  So I have always had a soft spot for her.  Nobody I know seems to know her story.

I never had a camera with me, or really liked to snap her unawares, so I was quite pleased to spot a photo of her by Tomas Cernishevas in the Lithuanian Press Photographers' exhibition.  You can see his website here .

* Lady's Delight, a traditional coffee shop and restaurant which used to be on Gedimino, the main street in Vilnius.

 

Technorati tags: Lithuania, Vilnius, bag lady, beggar