Presumed guilty

Spoilsport Tim Jeal has written a book about Henry Stanley suggesting that he probably lied about saying “Dr Livingstone, I presume” upon finding the latter in Tanzania after a long search.

Jeal reveals that Stanley had always been impressed by the tight-lipped Englishness of army officers, and he particularly loved an anecdote about two English gentlemen who had passed each other in the wilds of Palestine and merely lifted their caps to each other. As a result he invented the famous phrase about his meeting with Livingstone, having asked himself the question: 'What would a gent have said?'

Jeal does however lament the fact that this prime example of understatement has come to be the only thing for which Stanley is remembered, while his prodigious achievements in exploration are forgotten.

In fact, it’s worse than that, because the apocryphal tale also overshadows Livingstone’s remarkable life.

David Livingstone is the embodiment of Victorian Man – all Christian drive, commercial idealism and humanitarian zeal. As a child, labouring in the Lanarkshire cotton mills, he taught himself Greek and Latin. As a missionary and explorer in Africa he was indomitable. He named the Victoria Falls, being the first European to see them. He travelled thousands of inhospitable, uncharted miles. He aimed to demolish the slave trade by opening up Africa to legitimate forms of commerce. He paved the way for colonial Africa. A great deal of what he did backfired. But the only thing most people remember him for is being presumed about.

It’s probably better now (and this is good), but when I was taught History at school there was a massive, Empire-shaped hole in the syllabus. It ran like this: 1066, Feudal Society, Magna Carta, Tudors and Stuarts, Guy Fawkes, Civil War, Cromwell, a bit about Nelson and Wellington….World War I, World War II, the End.

Men like Livingstone built the Empire. His motto was "Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation."

The Empire meant a lot of good things and a lot of bad things, but it was indisputably a whole great heap of things. Maybe that massive hole in the syllabus can only be explained by postmodern guilt about the bad ones. It would be impossible to imagine the modern world without the British Empire. You can’t even do the thought experiment.

This book should be top of any History reading list.

Sporting accolade of the year

Beating Australia at cricket once could be a fluke. Beating them thrice in succession to win an ODI tournament sees us enter the realms of the miraculous.

However, it seems we must turn to rugby - a wonderful game of 30 men wrestling in the mud when not kicking a leather egg into the crowd - to find sport’s true miracle-workers.

Perusing the free Times guide to the Six Nations championship, we find Dirk Greenwood waxing lyrical about the playing days of Brian Ashton, the current England coach:

“He was an absolutely cracking scrum half to play no.8 to,” Greenwood recalled. “Splendidly skilful and intelligent, a very good manipulator of time and space.”

Midlife crisis at eleven

At three-years-old, Mikhail is the youngest ever member of Mensa. He can multiply five figure numbers before most kids can count to 10. Ten-year old Aimee is the youngest person ever to be admitted to the Royal College of Music. Michael was reading Shakespeare and learning Mandarin when he was five – he's now one of Britain's youngest published authors.


Channel 4’s documentary on child geniuses last night was an eye-opener. The most interesting cases were the four boys with all-round genius: maths, language, philosophical concepts, general knowledge – you name it.

Three of them scored 170 in the IQ tests, which seems to be the maximum. The other, Adam, was off the scale. He gave perfect answers to each question, and then over-answered them. Asked “What is a limpet?”, he replied: “It’s a crustacean that clings to rocks. And it lives off food that is brought in by the high tide.” He is six years old.

These were not just chess or music savants, over-developed in one area and infantile in all others. Nor were they just very bright children. They were clever adults in small bodies. Their parents had all given up trying to find schools for them: the system isn’t geared up for kids so far outside the defined sets.

Dante was the oldest at eleven. He is plagued by the struggle for perfection. He wanted to be perfect in the IQ test, so the professor asked him whether he thought perfection in anything was attainable. Why can’t something always be improved, and how would you know when to stop? He thought for a nanosecond and said: “I can give perfect answers to this test, but this can never be the perfect IQ test. So you can only attain perfection within a frame of imperfection.”

He spends his free time in confrontational talks with a philosophy don. The sad thing is that he’s probably already gone as far as anyone can go intellectually: he knows about death, about the limits of answerable questions, about the misery-making futility of trying to achieve perfection but at the same time that the realisation of this futility would not enable him to stop wanting it. His genius has manifested itself in reaching his midlife existential crisis freakishly early. By thirteen he will have passed it and will be officially ‘wise’. The rest of his life will probably just be spent in the accumulation of knowledge and in tutoring ordinary, slow people.

Hate Mail

David Aarnovitch sounds off in The Times:


My [Daily Mail] coguest was essentially only a spoken version of her paper, in which all ministers are hopeless, taxpayers are being squeezed, public services are in simultaneous crisis, epidemics are imminent and have been badly handled and women falsely cry rape. A paper that is impervious to discussion or nuance and in which each necessary article is bent or altered towards this one conclusion, that Britain — once great — is now a toilet, and that Britons — once free — have been betrayed.

...Back on Daily Politics last week the second item was the Friday poll. Respondents had been asked to react to various statements, we were told. The first was “I feel better off today than I did a few years ago”. 53 per cent agreed, 47 per cent disagreed. Next we had: “The Government is to blame for people feeling worse off financially”, with which 61 per cent agreed.

I sat there, incredulous, as these figures were reported as being bad news for the Government. Did the results, for example, mean that the Government should take the blame for the 47 per cent, but could take credit for the 53 per cent? These results, on their own, were meaningless, but they were never questioned. It was a Mail headline in a BBC studio.

I know from the letters page of this newspaper that some readers consider any sort of suggestion that Britain isn’t in meltdown to be, as one correspondent described me, “Panglossian” (after Voltaire’s complacent character who considered that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds). But in a country where, as The Economist pointed out this week, GDP per head has overtaken France and Germany, and which has the second-lowest unemployment figures in the EU, it seems perverse and dangerous to begin the discussion on what now needs to be done from the untrue premise that most things are dysfunctional.

Forget Pangloss, dear reader, our real enemy is his Dacrean cousin, Dr Pandreck. Embrace him and his box of false sighs, and we will head down the road to isolation, xenophobia and protectionism.

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The political consensus on Blatcherism has had a number of strange side-effects. Not least, it has rendered the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ to mean essentially just anti or pro-American.

Because of this, The Daily Mail is not really a ‘right-wing’ paper any more. It’s just a strange, cranky old uncle of a paper. It has nothing nice to say, and it says it a great deal. It has always been the paper for the frightened and the angry: people who are angry at other people’s success, angry with a changing world they don’t understand, angry at getting old. It has no more to do with reality than the average Guardian editorial.

The founding principle of the Mail is that everything is worse than it used to be. Mostly, this is nonsense. But it is true about the BBC television news. The BBC television news has been dumbed down to a level somewhat lower than John Craven’s Newsround circa 1985, and it is a bizarre mixture of the Guardian and the Mail: crude and blatant anti-Americanism, and irrational bleating about how everything is worse than it used to be.

Interweb strangenesses

If you have a sitemeter you can look at people who look at your blog. One of the bits of information you can gather is the referring URL - the site that brought the reader to your site.

Following one of these back, I came across this story on a US Pro Ice Hockey site, which talks about the new owners of Liverpool FC and links to Think of England in the word 'jittery'.

How the hell this blog came to represent "the Liverpool faithful" is a true interweb mystery.

Mad as a March Hair

Umpire Darrell Hair is taking legal action against world cricket's governing body and the Pakistan Cricket Board for racial discrimination.

Hair feels he was made a scapegoat when he was barred from officiating Test matches after the forfeited Oval Test between England and Pakistan in August.

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This is a story of madness.

For my American or other non-cricket loving readers, suffice it to say that Darrell Hair was a top international cricket umpire who was always a bit mad (egotistical kind of mad) and then one day last summer went much madder – that is, over the acceptable level of madness even for cricket umpires (a profession that tolerates a pretty high degree of insanity). This particular bit of madness forced an entire cricket team to respond in an equally mad manner, all in the context of a game that is already perhaps the most eccentric humanity has contrived, so Hair was sacked. This has subsequently driven him completely nuts.

There is nothing particularly surprising about the fact that a mad person can make it to the top of his profession. Everyone who makes it to the top of anything is, by definition, mad. Those at the bottom can also afford to be shamelessly mad, and enjoy it. Both top and bottom level madness are all-consuming, every single day kinds of madness, and both sets of people have the comfort of not realising that they are, in fact, mad.

Those who bounce around in the middle must accept that they are either not quite mad enough, or else too aware of their own particular brand of madness, to get to the top.

It has long been my contention that everybody is mad except for me.* In his (somewhat queasy) novel Stanley and the Women, Kingsley Amis observed that whereas men are mad in specific, easily-defined compartments of their lives (cricket-watching, plinking, collecting birds eggs, serial killing etc), women have a more subtle kind of madness which is harder to pinpoint or predict but which covers everything they think, do or say.

Of course, this is a deliberate over-simplification. Susan McClary’s madness, for example, is very easy to spot (see below).


*I am merely eccentric.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: "the throttling murderous rage of a rapist"

Here’s a book I don’t want to get for Christmas: Feminine Endings, by Susan McClary.

From Wikipedia:

The publication of Feminine Endings (now in its second edition) is considered to have been a significant step in the acceptance and proliferation of feminist musicology within academia. Largely because of this influence, McClary was a 1995 winner of a MacArthur Fellowship.

In Feminine Endings, McClary describes, among other things, how sonata form may be interpreted as sexist or misogynistic and imperialistic, and that, "tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire." She analyzes the sonata procedure for its constructions of gender and sexual identity. The primary, once "masculine", key (or first subject group) represents the, always in narrative, male, self, while the secondary, "feminine" key (or second subject group), represents the other, a territory to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key.

What’s more:

A sentence by McClary which has been very widely quoted is given below. Here, "the Ninth" refers to Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

"The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist, incapable of attaining release. "

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Come Armageddon, come Armageddon, come...

Spam poem

Ok, the iambic pentameter is too hard, but this Spam Subject Line Poem covers international politics, madness, sex, globalisation and existential sadness. And it sort of rhymes:


Spam poem #2

Chinese missile shot down Russian satellite
Russian missile shot down Chinese aircraft
For maximilian go requisite
Special discount on medications!

Cappy catwoman. Nymph pantry.
Resize your one eyed monster,
Love remains. Lamb preparatory
Re Re Hi My name is Perry.

Than Fiction Tears. Think I got it?
Teen quick and. Groggy famed
Cippewa county was also up 7
We launch our Christmas campaign.

Sell out

American tycoons George Gillett and Tom Hicks have reached an agreement to take over Liverpool.

The club have called a news conference at 1400 GMT to announce the details of the buy-out.

Liverpool chairman David Moores, who will become an honorary life president, said: "This is a great step forward for its shareholders and its fans."
…
Moores added: "This club is my passion and forms a huge part of my life. After much careful consideration, I have agreed to sell my shares to assist in securing the investment needed for the new stadium and for the playing squad.

…Liverpool will become the third Premiership side to come under the control of American owners, following the takeovers of Manchester United and Aston Villa in recent years.

…A joint statement from Gillett and Hicks said: "Liverpool is a fantastic club with a remarkable history and a passionate fanbase. We fully acknowledge and appreciate the unique heritage and rich history of Liverpool and intend to respect this heritage in the future. The Hicks family and the Gillett family are extremely excited about continuing the club's legacy and tradition. We are particularly pleased that David Moores and Rick Parry will have a continuing involvement in the club. For us continuity and stability are keys to the future."

---

I am discombobulated. I’ve seen the future of top-flight English football, and it is a European Super League owned by Americans.

Even a few years ago I would have been unreservedly welcoming of the prospect of Liverpool getting all that spondoolicks to spend on shiny new players. I might even have half-believed that stuff about "we fully acknowledge and appreciate the unique heritage and rich history of Liverpool and intend to respect this heritage in the future."

But instead I find myself jittery with fear of the future, and swamped in nostalgia. How did we start caring about exploiting the lucrative Asian market and maximising revenue streams? It crept up on us. But it crept up on us really quickly. I feel ill. Stop! Turn back the tide! I want FA Cup Saturdays, cups of Bovril, hand-knitted scarfs, small boys in the park, jumpers for goalposts…

Soggy support group

Bryan Appleyard pays homage to a sign in Wells-next-the-sea which includes a fine example of ‘found poetry’. Wikipedia gives another example from William Whewell’s "Elementary Treatise on Mechanics":

And hence no force, however great,
can stretch a cord, however fine,
into a horizontal line
that shall be absolutely straight.

Apparently the miserable sod changed the wording when this was pointed out to him.

The absolute apotheosis of the found poetry phenomenon is BBC Radio 4’s strangely haunting Shipping Forecast, (all too familiar to cricket lovers, as it interrupts Test Match Special). Read in a clear, calm, rhythmic voice, a typical poem might be:

Humber, Thames. Southeast veering southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Thundery showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.
Tyne, Dogger. Northeast 3 or 4. Occasional rain. Moderate or poor.
Rockall, Malin, Hebrides. Southwest gale 8 to storm 10, veering west, severe gale 9 to violent storm 11. Rain, then squally showers. Poor, becoming moderate.

The most productive source of found poetry these days is email spam. Here's one made from a couple of days’ worth of subject lines, which I think summarises the Think of England philosophy nicely:

Non-english nut-gathering

Peach blister. New Hampshire
went into remission.

Lamb preparatory,
ore smelter mis-mark.
Thanks! Placemats Turkey

Soggy support group
And wall.

Compulsive viewing

Coinciding nicely with the Government’s licensing of a new super-casino in Manchester, Louis Theroux had a programme about gamblers in Las Vegas on BBC2 last night.

One old woman feeds the Hilton's fruit machines $500 a day, and readily admitted to having lost over $4 million on the same slot machines in 7 years. Her (non-gambling) son was philosophical to a superhuman degree about this obscene pissing away of his inheritance.

A Canadian who makes a fortune selling mattresses is flown in and treated like royalty by the Hilton. Free of charge, they give him a luxurious suite approximately the size of Belgium, a few grand free credit to go shopping with and a full time flunkie whose job it is to boost his ego and keep him at the roulette table. He didn’t admit how much he lost in a weekend, but we knew it was substantially more than $250,000.

When we think of gambling addicts, we think of people who are self-deluded: they don’t know when to stop; they think the odds are not hopelessly stacked against them; they haven’t twigged that the casinos can build these great towers because they always win; they believe in lucky streaks.

None of this applied to these blighted souls. They understood all these things. “Real gamblers don’t know when to stop. Look!” they said, not stopping.

The only point of genuine delusion was about it being 'fun'. “The main things is to have a good time” they said, as they unhappily fed another $100 bill to the machine.

There was real human despair in this programme.

Big-Endians and Little-Endians

Every day Gerry Adams argues for steps towards a united Ireland, and every day Ian Paisley argues for the maintenance of Northern Ireland as part of the UK. Those are the clear dominant themes of their lives and one day they will die and turn to dust and that will be that.

Do they never get up of a morning and wonder, “But what’s it all for?” You know, like Fungus the Bogeyman.



The Irish question that dare not speak its name is: how on earth can anyone be bothered?

Stonehenge

Apparently they've found some really old houses near Stonehenge.

Stonehenge is indeed a noteworthy place. I've been there, though not at the solstice, and I will now present the sum total of my thoughts on visiting the place...





...It's not nearly as disappointing as you might think.

Don't it always seem to go...

..that you don't know what you’ve got til it’s gone, warbled Joni Mitchell, and how right she was.

Thanks to the Heath Robinson-style eccentricities of Victorian plumbing, the builders next door managed to cut our water off the other night merely by turning a tap.

Man, it was tough. After two hours I could understand how Jean de Florette felt.

What a thin veneer of convenience separates civilisation from barbarism! You can’t even flush the loo.

...stop press...

As I write, England are in serious danger of winning a cricket match against Australia.

It will take a miracle to lose it from here. But if anyone can do it, our boys...



UPDATE: England completed their first victory over Australia since the 2005 Ashes after Ed Joyce's century in Sydney.

Just a tiny amount

Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations and US studio Dreamworks have ended a five-film deal early after two movies reportedly underperformed.

Losses were reported for their last two films, Flushed Away and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

The companies have released three films together, also including Chicken Run. Dreamworks said the firms now had "different business goals", while Bristol-based Aardman Animations said their "ambitions have moved apart".

…

Aardman spokesman Arthur Sheriff said the separation was a result of Dreamworks' move to focus on computer animation.

The UK animators wanted to continue making their distinctive "claymations", he said.

"We always knew that America would be a hard task for us - we're a very English company," he added. "We embrace the international market but we think part of our strength is our English sense of humour and we want to continue with that."

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I thought the Were-Rabbit one was a bit uncompromisingly English, which was presumably the problem. But Nick Park and co just aren’t Hollywood types.

(As Brian Appleyard also notes, and as explained in the Fast Show…)