Re. the previous post

The bibliographic details are:
http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=3&ti=1,3&Search%5FArg=hill%2C%20robert&Search%5FCode=AUTH%5F&CNT=50&PID=GKRvCD3V0nP9Tp0gaKxmmUe2Rw&SEQ=20081029175731&SID=1
There are copies of the book at British Library, Oxford University Bodleian Library, Worcester Cathedral and Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, District of Columbia (source of bib record).

Preserving the book

At the weekend I finally got around to ordering some acid-free packaging (corrugated cardboard boxes) in which to store my antiquarian book. I desperately hope that in the time I've been procrastinating on this task I haven't caused irremediable harm to my wonderful family prayer book, my most precious possession.

Printed in 1617, the various owners of this book, presumably all direct ancestors of mine, have written their signatures, poems and quotations and sometimes have simply doodled on its now decaying pages. The oldest "contribution" that I've found is the signature of one Gabrielmus Evans, dated 1686. Was he a choir boy? That's how I see many of them, especially Joseph Donnaldson who, in an undetermined century but I'd place my bets on the 18th, filled an entire empty page with ornately written ramblings beginning with "Heavens quickning grace exalts the zealous mind, And therefore be to pious ways inclined. Joseph Donnaldson aught (sic) this Book and god give him grace on it to Loook (sic) both to Lark and understand never ..." and it gradually becomes less legible. Some other anonymous wag wrote "A man of words and not of deeds, is like a garden full of weeds" over and over again. More recently, James Carson of Cheetham Hill, 1861, is someone of whom I feel I should know, yet I've no idea where he fits into my family tree.

I remember very clearly staying at my Granny's house. I must have been in my early teens, and I was lying in the big bed in the spare room when my Granny came in and took the prayer book out of a drawer. I'd never seen it before and she let me browse its contents until I fell asleep. Next day I assiduously transcribed all the entries of the book, like the librarian bibliophile I was destined to be. Before she died my Granny, who herself wrote an entry in the book on her wedding day in 1939, entrusted the book into my care, but I do wonder whether the book has deteriorated under my custodianship, as I feel sure that the handwriting was clearer when I was a teenage girl than it is now.

In any case, who am I going to hand it down to? I have no children and neither does my brother. I'm sort of hoping that the recipient isn't alive yet. My cousin Ann, who's as interested in our family history as I am, has just had her first baby, but he's a boy, and I feel that a girl might look after it better, even though my Granny is still the only woman to have signed the book in nearly 4 centuries. That's just put an idea in my head - I'm going to have a party in 2017 to celebrate 4 centuries of our prayer book, and I'm going to get all my relatives to sign it.

In the meantime, it has to be consigned to the acid-free cardboard box, if only to enable me to assuage my conscience for my less than dutiful care to date.

So farewell to Gabrielmus Evans, Joseph Donnaldson, James Carson, Edmund Williams (love your bird sketch), William Evans, George Jones, David Harry, Daniel Jones (1693), Edmond Wiliams, Thomas Jones, and of course Joyce Newall nee Vosper.

See you all in 2017.

Kenan Malik at Birmingham Book Festival

Last Thursday Birmingham Book Festival played host to Kenan Malik, journalist and author of Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate. I went along with my colleague Nad (Nadeem Shabir), an exceptionally open-minded and inquiring individual who is consistently good company. Kenan ran through a number of key arguments, some of which have been covered in earlier works such as The meaning of race. One such key argument is that 85% of human difference occurs between individuals in a single population, whereas only 30% of difference occurs between so-called racial groups. Such arguments and findings have helped to demolish racial theories particularly in the post-war period, and have led to an understanding that in fact there is no evidence of race existing (between different groups of humans) in terms of clearly delineated characteristics.

Kenan then turned his attention to the politics of anti-racism, pointing out that when he was a young anti-racist activist, "black identity" was seen in political or cultural terms, rather than in terms of race itself. It was thus seen in opposition to "white" - acknowledging a broad commonality of being non-white and therefore being subjected to racism in the UK and elsewhere. Whereas in my experience, it is now common for Asians to refer to themselves as "brown", and in fact, referring Asians as blacks now seems to jar slightly.

For me there were two really important arguments that Kenan made, both of which clarified stuff that I've been turning around in my mind.

The first of these was around multi-culturalism - Kenan put forth the idea that the politics of multi-culturalism actually undermine multi-culturalism as a lived experience. In the road where I live - Burnaston Road, Hall Green, Birmingham - there is, I would say, an exceptionally good mix of ethnic groups. Crucially, this is a very dynamic mix, and as the groups intermingle, we learn more about each other and start to change as a result. This can only be a good thing, and is one of the finest aspects of Birmingham life. However Kenan argued that what multi-cultural politics does is to preserve those groups in aspic, emphasising the differences over the universality, and slowing down the process of assimilation as a result.

The second argument that really chimed with me was around differences between France and the UK with respect to racial policies. France has very different approach to the UK: it demands in quite an inflexible way that its immigrants assimilate immediately and simply become French. Although this avoids the problems attached to a more multi-cultural approach as described above, the problem is that this ignores the reality of racism. I knew as soon as I heard this argument on Thursday, that I was going to be able to hold it in my head and use it as a tool to apply to other situations, such as people arguing that gays should stop "going on about it".

Strange fruit - food for thought.

How I won my husband in a bet

Six years ago today I met Dave for the first time in the Watershed Bar, Bristol, so it seems appropriate to relate the tale of how I won my husband in a bet not so very long ago.

Summer 2002 was not an easy time for me. I was knee-deep in my Masters dissertation on citation analysis (not the easiest area of Information Science) and working full-time for Talis, so my social life was thin, to say the least. On one of the few occasions that I did go out, to a party in Moseley, I came to the tragic realisation that everyone had somehow become younger than me, and that in relationship terms, I was almost out of options.

Into this greyish existence stepped an entertaining new friend, Manish. He'd just started going out with my friend Samira, and was about to embark on a 6 week round-the-world trip with his two teacher colleagues, Fraser and Dave (yes, the hero of this rom-com has made an early appearance). The snag was that he was so smitten with Samira that he was destined to spend a good deal of the trip missing her desperately. What better way to relieve the emotional longing, then, than to go tinkering around with the personal lives of singletons such as myself and Dave. It proved pretty easy for Manish to generate some degree of mutual interest, given that I had no life to speak of and Dave (by then nicknamed Short Fuse Dave by Samira) was surrounded by Bangkok prostitutes and lady-boys. We all tentatively agreed that in Autumn, when I'd finished my dissertation, I'd go over to Bristol and we'd meet.

In September, then, the date for this auspicious meeting was set at Saturday October 12th, and over in Birmingham, considerable interest was generated. At the Patrick Kavanagh pub in Moseley one Friday night, I announced to my friends that I was sure I could get to snog Short Fuse Dave on the same night I met him for the first time. The bets rolled in until there was £35 on the table from various friends.

On Saturday October 12th 2002, 3 days after submitting my groundbreaking dissertation (which no-one has ever read apart from my supervisor and the external examiners) I drove down to Bristol with my friend Ashley, and that evening, Ashley, Samira, Manish and I went down to the Watershed bar to meet the famous Short Fuse Dave. Dave is very easy to spot, as anyone who knows this 6'8" man will testify, so I had the benefit of prior scrutiny. What I saw was the man that I'd wanted all my dates over the past 5 years to be.

Straight away I hit a barrier - acute shyness. As I spoke with Dave and Fraser for the first time, I was so nervous that the cocktail stirrer I was twiddling with flew right out of my hands and into the hood of a man a few feet away. Dave and Fraser thought this was hilarious, but I was mortified. Tactics were formulated on the fly, consisting of avoiding Dave like the plague until I'd drunk at least 4 vodkas and could be relied on to operate in the manner of a grown-up woman.

Four vodkas later we were in bar number 2, and I wish I could remember its name, because that was where I finally mustered the courage to approach Dave and start a conversation. Our first conversation consisted of me (ever the sophisticated seductress) telling Dave how much I was looking forward to having cosmetic surgery on my nose, and Dave replying that he wished he could have part of his legs chopped off so he would be 6'4". But we just kept on talking and talking, so everyone left us alone, and suddenly we were in a gay club snogging. And at 2am, we all caught a taxi to Manish's house so I could pick up my bag and take it to Dave's.

By 5am, I knew I was onto a good thing. And then I remembered about the bet, and realised, not without some degree of trepidation, that unless I handled the issue delicately, Dave could easily misinterpret my reasons for being with him and the whole deal would be off. I turned to Dave and said "Dave I've got something to tell you", and mentally prepared my defence. But Dave just looked at me and said "Is this something to do with a bet?" I exclaimed "What? How did you know?" and Dave explained that after we'd snogged for the first time in the club, Dave had bumped into Manish who said "Damn, looks like I've lost £10."

The next day we got up at around 3pm, met everyone in the Watershed for a very late lunch, and then I drove Ashley and myself back to Birmingham. Next day I had 2 text messages from Dave (he later said he knew how much I liked him when I gave him THREE phone numbers, my full postal address and email). After a few days, I wondered how I'd feel if I got home from work one night and there wasn't an email from Dave waiting for me. But that never happened until Dave got a job in the Midlands and moved in with me 6 months later. 6 months after that we were engaged.

And that is how I won my husband in a bet.

As for my winnings, Dave and I drank the £35 at a party a few weeks after meeting.

Good grief

It's October 8th, so Happy Birthday to my wonderful Dad who would have been 71 today. Dad set off on Bank Holiday Monday, May 1999 with his best friend, cousin and cousin's best friend, for a game of at North Manchester Golf Club and never came back. He collapsed suddenly and died at hole number 7 (see pic) in spite of the best efforts of everyone who was on the course at the time, notably two heart surgeons who had been playing just behind him, and who opened him up on the spot.

We still miss you, Dad. And we still hate anything to do with golf.

Michael Frayn at Birmingham Book Festival

I've just got home from an evening out with Sandra, seeing the playwright Michael Frayn speak with David Edgar, as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Michael Frayn is an elegant self-effacing man who proved to be a reasonably engaging speaker. Sandra and I have seen at least two of his plays in the past. We saw Copenhagen, which is a dramatic representation of the meeting of two nuclear physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Nils Bohrs (thanks Wikipedia) in Copenhagen in 1941, at Malvern a few years ago. We unfortunately drank enough white wine to fog our already questionable intellectual powers, and both fell asleep during the first half hour, destined never to master what is quite a demanding play. We saw Noises Off, described this evening by David Edgar (who was interviewing Frayn on stage) as the world's funniest play, at the Birmingham Rep, and yes it was very very funny. So that's why we were there this evening.

On Copenhagen, Frayn made the point that according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics there is a theoretical barrier to knowing everything about a moving object, and that this reflects broader intellectual currents, in the sense that we now acknowledge the impossibility of understanding everything about the motivations of another individual (tell that to educational technologists). This is important to Frayn as a dramatist, and he went on to elaborate that in plays we don't know what is going on in the heads of all the characters. And this makes plays more like life itself than novels. Novelists like Philip Roth (most successfully, imo, with American Pastoral) have constructed sophisticated narrative structures to get over the problem that it's no longer acceptable for the narrator to delve confidently into the inner mental machinations of all its characters. In the 19th century, on the other hand, novelists like Tolstoy did just that. To what extent is this change attributable to the breakdown of intellectual confidence during the course of the 20th century? Frayn made the point that although quantum physics paralleled this broader trend, they did in fact have divergent causes, though Frayn didn't actually elaborate further on that point. Six years ago (actually the night before I met my husband for the first time), I went to see Jeffrey Eugenides (author of Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) speak at the Orange bar in Birmingham, again as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Eugenides stated that the generation of writers to which he belonged rediscovered the great novels of the 19th century, jealously realising the narrative powers of those novelists with their untrammeled access to their character's thoughts, and that was why novelists like Roth were so inventive in terms of narrative structure, as they would want to somehow position himself to get similar access, but in a more credible way.

We left the event at around 9pm, both feeling that the festival as a whole would benefit from improved promotion and communication, and that the organisers are clearly missing a trick, as venues such as the Birmingham Conservatoire Recital Hall will realistically only attract the usual suspects (like me and Sandra) when they could be holding events in city centre bars or out in the suburbs, attracting new audiences. This is all the more pitiful given the stellar lineup of this year's festival compared to more lacklustre events elsewhere.