Personal highlights of 2011

The Highs:

1. Arab Spring.

2. An amazing weekend visiting Jo in Paris with Charlotte. It reminded me of how wonderful continental Europe is.

3. Leaving Talis to set up a (so far) successful business.

4. Dave's 50th party at the Barton Arms.

5. I join the Prince of Wales Writers' Group and start writing a novel.

6. Fantastic weekend with Dave in St Ives. We happily blow our life savings on a stunning piece of art.

7. A week in the Lake District at Tiplog with Dave and Dave Aveston.

8. Two exciting weeks in Mumbai and Kerala. India is endlessly fascinating.

9. Bill and I meet Odyssey at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath.

10. Echo and the Bunnymen at the Symphony Hall with Sandra.

11. Jury Service in June. I loved it!

12. Dave and I meet Roy Hodgson at Bank.

13. The Academy - three days of intensive learning with the Institute of Ideas in July.

14. Working with schools - another great evening judging for the Debating Matters competition. Plus, being a Dragon in the Dragons' Den at Small Heath School, judging marketing plans.

15. Clay pigeon shooting with Dave.

Lows:

1. The summer riots

2. The Birmingham Rep is still closed and there are no theatre highlights this year, which is unprecedented.

3. Dave fell downstairs and broke his toe just after Christmas.

4. Headaches get worse again, after two years of improvement.

5. The moment when I realised I would be losing my job.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In yesterday's Guardian Review, William Boyd described the problem that faced the screenwriters of the newly-released film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:

"Adapting a novel for the cinema presents unique problems - it's not at all the straightforward process people assume, particularly if the novel is as complex and cerebral as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

You could indeed argue, as my friend Bill did on Facebook, that even the celebrated 1979 BBC serial, which had seven one-hour episodes to play with, nevertheless struggled to convey fully the labyrinthine complexity of the novel. Having stayed up all night to watch it, Bill said:

"It's classic TV drama - meditative, but tense, and subtle. Great to see all that tobacco smoke and 70s grimness. It's vividly realised but, still, I miss the atmospheric detail and the interiority that only the novel can give."

The first Le Carré novel I read, The spy who came in from the cold, is a book that I recommend to anyone who is grappling with the nuances of office politics. That's one of the many strengths of Le Carré - he takes apart the mental machinations of every individual player, and expertly rolls out the consequences on the game at hand. The dynamics he reveals are specific to the fictional situation - Le Carré is brilliant at context-building - but there is also something universal that transcends Secret Service operations during the Cold War, for example.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is certainly demanding on the audience. At a superficial level, I couldn't help but wonder, about 45 minutes into the film, how today's cinema-goers will react to this beige, hazy, grainy portrayal of a bunch of washed-up forty-something males going about their deceptively mundane business. More problematic though is the complex unwieldy plot that resists the confines of a two-hour dramatisation. There are no handy little sub-plots to cut out (an ex-BBC friend told me that when the serialisation of Martin Chuzzlewit was being planned, he overheard a colleague say "We're just going to cut out the whole of the American section") because the narrative is too tight for that, and particularly in the first half, the scene-changes are frequent as the narrative is forced to represent all the multiple agendas, suspects and possibilities, which are fundamental to the story.

For all that, there are big bold splodges of brilliance which I will remember for a long long time. My favourite scenes mostly involve the flashback to the Circus in its heyday (unanimously deemed to be World War Two). At a raucous Christmas Party at the Circus, Santa Claus is substituted by a Vladimir Lenin look-alike, dressed in scarlet red of course, and giving every impression of being an annual ritual. The whole party erupts into a joyous rendition of the Soviet Union national anthem. Everyone in the room, including the female eye candy (I assumed them to be translators, transcribers or secretaries) was absolutely word perfect.

The incongruity of Cold War Western spies fervently embracing Soviet culture was, to say the least, striking. It was only when the gramophone needle dropped on La Mer by Julio Iglesias that I truly understood the significance. In an espionage drama centrally concerned with betrayal, you have a group of operators who can only survive the deadly demands of Cold War fieldcraft by steeping themselves in every single aspect of enemy language and culture. La Mer reminded me of a time when I eagerly devoured all things francophone. I even bought my first copy of Le Monde at the age of 12 (at WH Smith in Manchester's Arndale Centre).

The central paradox of espionage is neatly encapsulated in that rapturous scene in which the enemy's anthem is sung so joyfully and sincerely that it could easily be the opposing side - Karla's team over at the Kremlin. It's hard not to grow to love a culture that you are deeply acquainted with. You could even argue that such expert knowledge is impossible without that underlying passion in place. The scene prepares the audience for the final betrayal, the end-point of the film, and maybe injects some sympathy into a character (no spoilers here - I'm following William Boyd's good example) who sees only a grinding decline in Western culture (a sentiment echoed elsewhere in the film), and who has been fatally exposed to something seductively foreign.

Almost strangers

We were all encased in our private domains. We weren’t invited to party elsewhere. We didn’t drive but we didn’t drink. We watched the wedding of almost strangers. On the telly; on our own. We watched the guests in Westminster Abbey. We judged the hats of almost strangers. We failed to enter their private world. We stayed in our homes. The shops were empty. We didn’t gather. We didn’t care. We all switched off at the boring speeches. We all drifted off and did different things.

We gathered in a public place. We worried. We cared. Desperate to help. We stared at the patient. We touched him. We stroked him. We tried to enter his private world. We all signed his book in case he survived. We bonded with visitors who were almost strangers. We formed a community – a makeshift network. We all compared notes on making a difference. We brought him juice. We brought him fruit. We brought him chocolate. We badgered nurses. We gave our time. We tried to reach him. We humanised the hospital in case he could hear us. We chatted. We laughed. To raise his spirits. To raise our spirits. It was fun. It was desperate. We groped in the dark. We helplessly watched as he sweated and suffered. We tried to interpret his feverish speeches. We shamelessly watched the most personal of battles.

And always we wondered, how could it happen? A strong healthy man cut down in his prime. As if he were governed by natural laws – of princes and paupers, pomp and disease.

An English field in winter

Grey with faint remembrance of green,
A delicate dusting of dirtied white,
But this thin coat provides no warmth,
No refuge from the cold in sight.

Frozen too the mind's imaginings,
Of future greens and autumn's flame,
Subsumed in nature's deepest coma,
Trapped in winter's freeze-frame.

Memento Mori

My friend Yvonne Thompson (@yvonnert) from Melbourne, Australia, yesterday tweeted a fascinating link to the Victorian photographic phenomenon known as Memento Mori, in which the dead were photographed, in an era where relationships to both death and photography were very different from what they are today.

One of those photos has inspired me to write a little poem, only the second poem I've written since leaving school (the first one was written on Tuesday on the train to London), so please be sparing in your criticism at this early juncture.

A modern memento


We fought, we nursed, but could not save,
Our dearest daughter from the grave.
And as we toil through deepest grief,
We clutch the thin threads of relief.

For ere she crumbles down to dust,
She will not disappear from us.
The man said "Hurry, I'll take a picture,
Then add some colour to enrich her."

He brought his black box to our dwelling,
And what would come out, there was no telling.
One last time we embraced our lost one,
Still as death all three till twas done.

Strangers, yes, to this modern mystery,
Our family won't be lost to history.
From one black box, a memento beautiful,
Eternally captured - our daughter most dutiful.

Highlights of 2009

Dave and I have been drawing up our respective annual lists of highlights for years now, but last year I reproduced mine on my blog (see 2008 Highlights and so it seemed natural to do the same this year. It's been a funny old year - well actually quite straightforward to characterise. It was a hard slog of a year at the end of which I'm in a better place in almost every way than I was back in January. My highlights can be anything from a general statement of life improvement to an individual moment, so with that in mind, here goes and as usual in no particular order:

1. Dave and I made a decision in January that 2009 would be the year of home improvements. As such, there've been no weekends away, no spectacularly expensive holidays, and very little in the way of fine dining - our usual avenues of extravagance. However the house now looks fantastic and we're totally in love with it. There are still things to do and buy - but aren't there always? It's been totally worth the lifestyle austerity of the first half of the year in particular.

2. This year was a great year for live music, one great reason for living in the UK, imo. The best live act I saw this year was The Leisure Society at The Glee Club in Birmingham (which provides a much more relaxed experience with live music than it does with comedy). The concert that meant most to me though was Magazine at the Manchester Academy, in company with what seemed like the whole of the Mancunian punk generation. Sound quality could have been better (and that's not the fault of the venue) but it was still a great experience, given that they're my all-time favourite band, and they split up in 1981, when I was only 16 hence too young to have seen them. Other good live acts I saw this year were David Byrne at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, Great Lake Swimmers at the Glee Club, Handsome Family also at the Glee, and Blue Nation at the Actress and Bishop.

3. At the beginning of April 2009 I moved into the Marketing team at Talis, and this turned out to be a great move, into what is probably the best team I've ever been a part of. Professionally, it's been a very good year - my writing has come on in leaps and bounds, becoming a lot more versatile, and I've also made a mark with podcasting in both library and educational contexts.

4. Easter. The home improvement austerity drive meant that a weekend away was out of the question, so we stayed at home instead and did loads of amazing things. We saw Nottingham Forest play Bristol City on Easter Saturday, and it was a staggering 3-2 victory (always indicative of a great game), stopping in the unassuming Swan in the Rushes pub en route for a very tasty oxtail and cheddar mash for £5.99. In the evening we met up with Fiona for a curry at Lasan's in the Jewellery Quarter, but apart from that we were on our own for the weekend, and we loved it, filling our time with the Our Friends in the North DVD, lent to us by Karen Reece, The Watchmen at the pictures, and other stuff.

5. Together with Jason Smith from Workers Education Association and Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education at University of Birmingham, I've helped set up The Birmingham Salon for debate of contemporary issues in the city. Our first meeting, in partnership with University of Birmingham and the Institute of Ideas, will be held on Tuesday 9th February 2010 at The Studio on Cannon Street. See you there?

6. We had a lovely summer holiday in France, spending a week in a gite in the Loire Valley and a week in a windmill in our own meadow just inland from La Rochelle. La Rochelle was too busy to be a highlight, and anyway, we'd had bad news from home that morning, but we had a perfect meal at the restaurant at St Savinien, which we walked to from the windmill through fields and deserted lanes, and the other French people there were really friendly, coming to our table to chat. We also had a very good meal at nearby Tailleborg. Meanwhile, our meadow provided an ideal vantage point for a spectacular meteor shower.

7. My friend Sandra invited me to her 7 year old daughter's dance show in Solihull. As a non-parent, I rarely get a chance to see stuff like that, and I loved it. In fact, this evening I'll be watching the DVD of the show with Sandra and Rachel, and then hopefully reading a bedtime story to Rachel and her elder brother Ben, before we start eating and drinking to see out 2009 with Dave, Andy, Sophie and Geoff.

8. This year I was privileged to see Usain Bolt run at Crystal Palace with my friend Sally. We saw the full two days of athletics, staying at the best B&B I've ever experienced. It was enough to make a BNP member apply for Jamaican nationality (I'd like to think). It was also good to see Mo Farah win the 5000 metres, in fact I nearly fell into the row of spectators below me with the excitement.

9. Dave and Andy Collins perform Sweet's Ballroom Blitz at Fiona's birthday Curryoke. You had to be there - I laughed so much I couldn't breathe.

10. Jo and I spent a perfect day in London, centred around a matinee performance of Carrie's War which was wonderful. We saw an exhibition and lunched at the Courtauld's Institute, and mooched around our old West End haunts.

11. I had another good day trip to London, this time with Dave. Dave's sister and her kids had bought us a wine-tasting experience for Christmas, so we built a day trip around it. We went to the Imperial War Museum, and Dave tried not to get annoyed with my delaying tactics in the Holocaust section. We launched in the Oxo Tower, browsed around the Borough Market, and then went wine tasting.

12. We remembered my Dad on May 3rd, the 10th anniversary of his sudden death on the golf course of North Manchester Golf Club.

13. The Sopranos! We've just started Series 5, and we wonder how we'll fill our lives when it's over (the answer is The Wire, according to just about everybody).

14. It was another good year for theatre, but the best play I saw was the almost unknown Orphans (by Dennis Kelly) at the Birmingham Rep. Other strong contenders were The Winter's Tale at Stratford-upon-Avon with Sandra, and The Good Soul of Szechuan (Brecht) at the Library Theatre Manchester with Bill.

15. Just before Christmas, I met up with my friends Jacqui and Brenda at the Farmer's Market in Moseley. Bought some nice Christmas treats for me and Dave, and then we went off for a coffee at The Cross. There was a light sprinkling of snow on the ground, just enough to make you feel really festive, and I saw loads of people I knew. It reminded me to count my blessings about my lovely friends and acquaintances.

16. We had a perfect Christmas Day with Dave's family at the house of my sister-in-law, Lyn. Lots of champagne cocktails, wonderful food, wii dance games, and other
treats.

My top 10 pop guilty pleasures

I'm finally getting around to publishing this top 10 list, after talking about it for weeks if not months. Putting together this list made me realise how subjective the concept of a guilty pleasure is. You might think that Chic and Abba are guilty pleasures, but as far as I'm concerned, if it belongs on the dance floor, then I'm not going to feel so much as a pang of guilt any time soon.

So here goes, in no particular order except that number 1 truly belongs at the top...

01. Mr Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra- YouTube
02. Make me smile - Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - YouTube
03. Blue Savannah song - Erasure - YouTube
04. Ruby don't take your love to town - Kenny Rogers - YouTube
05. Copacabana - Barry Manilow - YouTube
06. Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty - Listen on YouTube
07. Save a prayer - Duran Duran - YouTube
08. American Pie - Don McLean - YouTube
09. Nights in white satin - Moody Blues - YouTube
10. Breakfast in America - Supertramp - YouTube

The Cult of the Amateur

The 2004 O’Reilly-hosted FOO Camp (“countercultural Sixties meets the free-market Eighties meets the technophile Nineties”) is where Andrew Keen experienced a life-changing epiphany. As attendees proclaimed the democratisation of “media, information, knowledge, content, audience, author” by Web 2.0, and the demotion of “big experts” to “noble amateurs”, Keen was seized by a strong sense of unease that led to the writing of The Cult of the Amateur – an expose of the consequences of Web 2.0, the unleashing of user-generated content and the disintermediation of society’s cultural gatekeepers. As a consequence of this process, Keen argues, we can expect information to become steadily less reliable and more chaotic.

Most of us are aware of the devastation being wrought in industries such as music and newspapers. Keen argues that as professional content creators are forced to compete economically with free content, there are simply less resources with which to generate high quality creative works. As he says:

To make a top-quality recording today… an “exquisitely slow and detailed album… ideally would take a full year and, given the price of top contemporary musicians, could cost a million dollars. But this kind of investment… can’t be earned back in a market where people are buying fewer and fewer compact discs. So recording artists necessarily compromise their music because it is not economically viable to hire the best musicians and take enough time making the recording.

He also defends professional journalism, arguing forcibly that at best, citizen journalism can only ever complement professional journalism unless we are to resign ourselves to second-rate poorly-informed information:

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent of the Independent newspaper, for example, didn’t hatch from some obscure blog – they acquired their in-depth knowledge of the Middle East by spending years in the region.

Despite my reservations around the record of professional journalists for delivering a consistently in-depth and accurate view of conflicts such as the second Gulf War (weren't they essentially spoon-fed information from the military?), or the political demonstrations of the
past in which numbers were consistently under-reported, for example, I think that his arguments around the importance of professional journalism are important, not only in intellectual but also in democratic terms.

I’m hugely sympathetic with Keen at a cultural level. I hate the thought of snippets of content becoming so prevalent that people no longer read a book in a linear fashion – have we collectively thought about the intellectual consequences of this? And I do share his nostalgia for Tower Records – in my case based in Piccadilly Circus, just round the corner from Haymarket in London, where I worked for years in my 20s. Yes it sometimes feels like the soul has been taken out of music. Stuart Maconie recently reported on radio 2 that over 40% of people no longer listen to a complete musical track let alone album – they get what they want from it emotionally, and then move on. What room is there for the pop grower, let alone the complexity of classical or operatic works?

But, on the other hand, not everyone had access to the rich variety of music on offer at Tower Records in LA or London, whereas now the cultural divide between kids in Manchester and kids in, say, the Lake District, must surely be narrowing as access to culture levels off with ubiquitous internet availability.

He makes a very very important point with regard to Web 2.0 user-generated content, namely that it is to a great extent dependent on professionally produced content i.e. it’s highly derivative, and yet it is simultaneously destroying that content.

So basically, at the level of description at least, I find much to applaud in The Cult of the Amateur. And that’s really what I expected from this book. I truly expected to identify some sort of soul sibling who shared my commitment to ensuring intellectual integrity in a Web 2.0 context, but who nevertheless espoused new technologies in terms of their potential for furthering human progress.

However early on in the book I started to get a bit concerned. It started here, in the introduction:

It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule, on steroids.

Plus…

…if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece.

And…

… instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys – many of them with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins – are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

References to “mob rule” and comparisons of human beings with monkeys seemed to me to be a highly elitist and dangerously anti-human articulation of concerns around cultural decline. Why is Keen deploying such unattractive arguments? Personally I’d say it’s a consequence of the overall faultiness of his critique. Keen argues that reasoned informed analysis is now in short supply, as we become swamped with inexpert user-generated content. Yes, Web 2.0 may have exacerbated that trend, and it has certainly surfaced it. But is Web 2.0 really to blame? Did
some golden era of informed analysis come abruptly to an end in 2004 when a bunch of moneyed Californian geeks (that most of us have never heard of) went off camping together?

Keen’s deepest concern is a feeling that truth itself is under threat:

This undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse,
encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and stifling creativity.
When advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between
fact and fiction becomes blurred.

Surely Keen can’t be arguing that the “undermining of truth” began with the inception of Web 2.0 technologies? I’m no expert on philosophy, but didn’t cultural relativism start to gather force way back almost half a century ago in the 1960s? Yet he does seem to be saying that:

Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus
two equals five, then two plus two does equal five.

The problem is that by failing to trace back intellectual trends historically, Keen seems to be leading us irresistibly to the conclusion that only Web 2.0 can be the cause. Isn’t it more helpful,
though, to see Web 2.0 as a phenomenon that became technically feasible precisely at a point in history where humanity’s uncertainty about its mission has deepened over a period of time, and society has fragmented to the point that:

every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is
just another person’s version of the facts.

So I see the value in Keen’s descriptions of the web’s impact in areas such as music, industry and books. But I’m less certain about his ability to analyse that impact in terms of underlying causes and forces at play.

It’s a very enjoyable and engaging read though. The sheer vitriol is immensely entertaining, not to say refreshing in this politically correct world in which so many of us shy away from forthright statements of conviction.

But towards the end I came to understand that it wasn’t just the analysis that was a problem. Many of my disagreements are rooted in the fact that Keen’s motives for writing the book were at variance from my motives for reading it. When Keen writes that “our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur”, I perceive that
his interests are too narrow to enable him to write the book I want him to write.

It is surely time to examine dispassionately at the broadest level what is gained and what is lost with user-generated content. But maybe that will only become possible once we collectively re-engage with the realm of ideas and re-gain an understanding of what we need them for.

Food for thought from a virgin grazer

I was out with my new friend Jason Smith at Jyoti's on Wednesday (we're planning to set up a Birmingham Salon in conjunction with the Institute of Ideas). Because Jason reads a lot about food, I mentioned the craze that's been sweeping Talis for some time now - namely Graze. For the uninitiated, it's a service delivering a daily box of healthy snacks that costs about £3 a day. I told him that my colleague Grant White started subscribing at the beginning of this week, and that I was monitoring him carefully to see whether he survived the vertiginous drop of food intake.

By coincidence, our colleague Zach Beauvais went off on leave the following day, and forgot to cancel his Graze subscription. So he kindly emailed me and invited me to treat myself to the contents of his Graze box. I'd brought in food for that day so I saved the box for today.

I was pretty nervous, I don't mind admitting, at the thought of surviving a whole working day on only three slices of pineapple, a small portion of "fire nuts" and an even smaller portion of cashew nuts. For good measure, I took along a small banana and a raspberry yogurt to supplement what seemed like a draconian quantity of food.

For breakfast I had what I always have - two boiled eggs and a glass of cloudy apple juice. I had the banana at about 10, and around that time I started eating the fire nuts, about two at a time. By 13:50, I'd finished the fire nuts and eaten 1 of the 3 slices of pineapple. I was stunned to report to my best friend Sandra, who's taking quite an interest in this experiment, that I was feeling completely full and wouldn't be able to eat a thing for the next hour at least.

So it's now 17:15. The pineapple is now gone but most of the cashew nuts remain uneaten. And the yogurt's still in the fridge.

My usual habit is to eat a banana at around 10. Then at 12 I have a (home-made) tortilla wrap containing iceberg lettuce, red onion, red pepper, rather a lot of Pizza Express salad dressing and tuna. By 16:00 I tend to be pretty ravenous and eat a yogurt to try to stave off a trip upstairs to the Talis staff tuck shop for the ever-tempting packet of Walkers crisp.

This previously vocal cynic of the whole Graze thing is starting to get impressed. I'm only slightly hungry, so I'm probably going to tuck into the yogurt. I might take the nuts to the pub.

Dave and I are having an austerity year - saving up to do everything that needs to be done around the house. Hence the home-made lunches. It's simply not an option to spend £3 a day on an ongoing basis. However, going down the Graze route for a month before our trip to France, land of eternally skinny women, is starting to look attractive. Would I spend £60 to lose half a stone before my holiday? This "pleasantly plump" Angl0-Saxon 40-something wouldn't hesitate.

100 Spanish-speaking writers choose the 100 books that changed their lives

Last year I, in common with other Talis employees, posted a list of 100 important novels. This time I'm posting another list which is similar but different. It too is a list of books, but this one is of interest because it reveals to me how Anglocentric I can be in my reading. Maybe other people will experience a similar realisation when they read this list and will broaden their cultural horizons as a result. That could only be a good thing. It was published in El Pais magazine last August. I generally score highly in this kind of list, as I'm quite well read. I also speak fluent Spanish. And yet I've only read 18 of them and a good few I'd never even heard of. It's always good to be jolted out of complacency. I accept that the list has a strong European bias.

1. Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel de Cervantes

2. In search of lost time - Marcel Proust

3. The Odyssey - Homer

4. The trial - Franz Kafka

5. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

6. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

7. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

8. Selected stories - Anton Chekhov

9. War and peace - Leo Tolstoy

10 - Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

11. Poet in New York - Federico Garcia Lorca

12. The brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

13. Crime and punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

14. The bible

15. The magic mountain - Thomas Mann

16. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo

17. Ulysses - James Joyce

18. The sound and the fury - William Faulkner

19. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

20. 1001 Arabian nights

21. Under the volcano - Malcolm Lowry

22. The death of Virgil - Hermann Broch

23. Essays - Michel Montaigne

24. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

25. The red and the black - Stendhal

26. The Aleph - Jorge Borges

27. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

28. The heart is a lonely hunter - Carson McCullers

29. Heart of darkness - Joseph Conrad

30. The flowers of evil - Charles Baudelaire

31. The banquet - Plato

32. Catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger

33. A sentimental education - Gustave Flaubert

34. Duino elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke

35. Rhymes and legends - Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

36. This business of living - Cesare Pavese

37. The book of disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

38. Complete works - Jorge Luis Borges

39. Thus spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzche

40. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

41. Rayuela - Julio Cortazar

42. Fortunata and Jacinta - Benito Perez Galdos

43. Extraordinary stories - Edgar Allan Poe

44. The city and the dogs - Mario Vargas Llosa

45. The waste land - T.S.Eliot

46. Metamorphoses - Ovid

47. Poems - Emily Dickinson

48. King Lear - William Shakespeare

49. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

50. Trilce - Cesar Vallejo

51. The outsider - Albert Camus

52. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

53. Odes - Horace

54. The long goodbye - Raymond Chandler

55. The idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

56. The shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti

57. The first man - Albert Camus

58. The maker - Jorge Luis Borges

59 100 years of solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

60. The divine comedy - Dante Alighieri

61. La Regenta - Leopoldo Alas Clarin

62. The waves - Virginia Woolf

63. As I lay dying - William Faulkner

64. The diaries of Franz Kafka

65. Celestina - Fernando de Rojas

66. Richard The Third - William Shakespeare

67. Residence on Earth - Pablo Neruda

68. Demian - Hermann Hesse

69. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

70. Conversation in the cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa

71. Pride and prejudice - Jane Austen

72. The leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

73. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad

74. Lazarillo de Tormes - Anonymous

75. Journey to the end of the night - Louis Ferdinand Celine

76. Canto General - Pablo Neruda

77. The Iliad - Homer

78. Bohemian lights - Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan

79. The war of the end of the world - Mario Vargas Llosa

80. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

81. Aphorisms - G.C. Lichtenberg

82. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx

83. Mortal and Rose - Francisco Umbral

84. Dubliners - James Joyce

85. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

86. Peter Pan - James Matthew Barrie

87. Sonnets - Quevedo

88. Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter - Maria Vargas Llosa

89. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

90. The Alexandria quartet - Lawrence Durrell

91. The fall - Albert Camus

92. Orlando - Virginia Woolf

93. The unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro

94. Time and space - Juan Ramon Jimenez

95. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

96. The garden of the Finzi-Contini - Giorgio Bassani

97. The wild palms - William Faulkner

98. Stone and country - Gabriel Aresti

99. Complete works - Pio Baroja

100. The second sex - Simone de Beauvoir

Our Friends in the North

Months ago my colleague Karen Reece lent me the DVD of Our Friends in the North and it languished on my shelf for so long that I had to email her at one point to reassure her that I hadn't appropriated it. I knew I was going to love it but Dave had to be convinced (he has occasional laggard tendencies - not that I can talk: OFITN was first shown back in 1996!). A few days ago we got around to watching the first episode, and Dave pronounced himself "completely hooked" within the first 10 minutes. On Friday we watched the second episode before we went out (as a result we didn't leave the house until 10.30pm), and then came home early, an hour later to watch the third episode, maybe pissing off some of our social circle in the process.

Our Friends in the North is one of those TV dramas to which the term "landmark" is routinely applied. The story centres on four friends whom we first see in Newcastle in the prime of their youth as they make choices that will influence the rest of their lives. The first three episodes, which as I say we've now seen, take place in the 1960s, switching between Newcastle and London as we follow the lives of the main characters (acted by four now household names -Daniel Craig, Gina McKee, Christopher Eccleston and Mark Strong). The story will continue right up to 1995, giving it an impressive historical scope as well as a compelling narrative.

Dave and I are both well into our 40s now so "retro" is often stuff that we can remember from first time around. The first episode, then, set in 1964, made us feel really young because I hadn't been born and Dave was only 3, and as a result, the cultural references mean very little to us. This is a good thing, not least because the kind of cheesy quality that has become commonplace in depictions of the 1960s, and (especially) the 1970s, is entirely absent.

The four friends are still living in their family terraced houses in 1964; the brother of Mary (Gina McKee) is mentally and physically disabled, but whereas in the first episode he's cheerful and chatty in the family living room, by the second episode (1966), he's become so ill as a result of living in Mary's damp high-rise flat, that he's unable to speak or even raise a smile. For some reason, this has really lingered with me, and has made me reflect on the bumpy road to progress that the British working class endured in the 20th century. Indeed, at least part of the success of the drama can be attributed to a tightly integrated socio-economic backdrop to the story which is extremely well realised and apparently so accurate in its representation of real historical figures that there was a strong possibility of litigation.

We tend to cariacature the 1960s as a golden era of promise and prosperity, but in fact my Dad's family were living in housing that was more appropriate to the 19th century than the second half of the 20th (my Dad's words not mine). My parents bought a house in Radcliffe, Lancashire just before they married in 1963. They didn't move in until after the wedding (because you didn't then) so at the weekends, Dad used to go over and do DIY and decorate the place on his own. I remember him telling me of the joy with which he'd run a bath before going home, and lie in his own bath, finally able to control his own hot and cod water taps and stay in there as long as he liked. He and his family had never had a bath in their own home, and at the family's weekly visit to the public baths had always had to ask the attendant for more hot water. Years later, I dated a musician who was quite a bit older than me, and he told me what a great experience he'd had going to a public bath and having to ask for hot water. I remember thinking - you middle class twat. See "Common People" by Pulp for further details.

At the beginning of the 1970s, my Nana, who had recently become widowed, moved from 16 Johnson Street in Lower Broughton, Salford, to a newly constructed high rise called Greyfriars Court. I personally remember this as a very happy period. Nana was in a first floor flat with a balcony, and it seemed that every Sunday afternoon when we went over to visit, there was something new in the flat, often the kind of cheap ornament that kids love. It occurs to me now, watching OFITN, that some lessons might have been learnt from the Newcastle experience, as Nana, to my knowledge, never had any damp or structural problems in her flat.

So Nana's move always felt like progress to me, but I was too young to know how happy or otherwise my Nana (or indeed the rest of the family) felt about it, and that leads me in a roundabout way to another impressive quality of OFITN, namely that it's rarely clear-cut in its observations. Mary is extremely bright and is starting a university course in 1964, but by 1966 she's married with a child to Tosker (Mark Strong). Just when you're thinking how trapped and compromised she is in an empty marriage, there's a powerfully scene in which genuine love is revealed. Following 4 characters over a period of 3 decades gives ample scope to explore the nuances and ambiguities of the finely drawn characters and their relationships.

We can't wait to watch the rest of it, and if you've never seen it, try and borrow Karen's copy!

Flasher at large

After a chore-packed morning I logged onto Twitter to be confronted by multiple tweets proclaiming how beautiful the day was. Everyone seemed to be outdoors except me. So after lunch, a little neighbourhood walk with Dave was in order.

We can only have been five minutes into the walk, and we were already ambling along the River Cole, which we're lucky enough to have at the bottom of our road. As we approached Sarehole Mill (see pic), we were jolted out of our mid-afternoon reverie by some sort of fracas between a couple of men on the other side of the "river" (at the risk of compromising my neighbourhood pride, it's really more like a stream - I think I jumped it once when I was out running). My initial impression, as I focused on the situation at hand, was that they might be drunk, but in any case there was something so aggressive about the situation that I was immediately ill at ease. I smiled one of those smiles that says please don't involve me in your drama and prepared to move on, but Dave had already started to engage with them. On our side of the river there wasn't just me and Dave - there was also a family of about 6 children with their mother. I was sure that at least two of the children were laughing. I turned to the men. One of the men, who was holding the other man down, told Dave, in the midst of a seemingly unstoppable rant, that the other man had been flashing his penis to the children, but was defending himself by claiming that he was actually taking a piss. He was clearly a paedophile, the man said (ranted). Dave calmly asked whether the police had been called, to which the answer was yes. When I looked back at the children, I realised that two of them were crying their eyes out, and as their Mum moved them on, they called out to their Dad, the ranter on the other side of the river.

We passed the mill and crossed over the road, and then before we proceeded with the rest of the walk, Dave stopped and went into self-doubt mode. "Have you got your phone on you?" he asked. Neither of us had brought our phones out. It's a new sort of downturn thing with me that I delight in leaving the house with as few possessions (generally money but other stuff as well) as possible. We wondered whether the man had really phoned the police. We agonised, like the couple of middle class liberals that we are, as to whether we should go back and confront the situation. We worried that the man was going to beat the living crap out of the suspected paedophile.

Above all, however, we questioned whether the man really was the paedophile he was accused of being. He looked like a middle-aged homeless man who might well have been relieving himself after an afternoon of drinking. On the other hand, it could have been more sinister. We waited for a while but the police didn't turn up, for whatever reason.

When I was little, one of my friends was a girl called Katie Warford and she lived on Church Lane in Ashton-on-Mersey. She would delight in recounting to me that the old man in the big house down the road would stand at his front door every Sunday morning and expose himself to all the church-goers passing by. We both thought it was hilarious. We were 10.

Thinking back then to this afternoon's incident, was it really the flasher that had upset those children, or was it in fact the angry reaction of their father and the intensely disruptive effect it was having on an otherwise playful and harmonious afternoon? Does the media's treatment of paedophilia prevent us from taking a measured approach, and in turn, is this causing children even more harm on top of problem itself (horrific though the problem unquestionably is)?

Dave and I copped out of the situation in the end. I argued that I had enough problems of my own without taking on someone else's as well - a position I've pretty much maintained since I intervened in an argument at a party when I was 21 and by some miracle survived the vicious assault that ensued.

My Top 10 experiences of 2008

Along the lines of what Dave and I do every New Year's Eve, here's my favourite experiences of the year, in no particular order...

1. Re-establishing contact with my Spanish friends (lived in Santiago de Compostela in 1985) by bumping into Karen (see pic, second left) in the Modus Vivendi bar, Santiago. Thanks to Dave for giving me the space to catch up properly, and a special mention to Tito (aka Andres Pineiro on left) for travelling from El Ferrol with a day's notice to see me. I was so happy that I sat in the cathedral one day and cried. Also on the picture - Carlos.

2. Seeing David Tennant play Hamlet (my favourite play) at Stratford-upon-Avon, October, with Sandra.

3. My presentation at the ER&L Conference, Atlanta, is a resounding success, in March. Plus I make friends with the indomitable Christine Orr and we dine at Mary Mac's Tea Room - truly a unique experience.

4. The highlight of my first trip to New York at Easter with Dave is drinking cocktails at the Flat Iron Lounge, an Art Deco extravaganza.

5. Sandra and I throw a fantastic party in the room above Patrick Kavanagh pub, Kings Heath, in October. Jo, Alistair and Bill all stay over.

6. Dave and I become very good friends with our neighbours Andy and Helen over the course of the year. One particular highlight is the neighbourhood barbecue in our communal back lane in August.

7. Another great year for the national schools competition, Debating Matters. As inspiring and energising as ever.

8. My headaches become manageable for the first time in 15 years.

9. I run the 10K Great Manchester Run effortlessly in May, and enjoy the whole experience.

10. Dave and I have a fab time at Fiona's 40th in September (see previous post), staying out until 4.30am with Fiona and her friends Ros and Ben.

Manchester says No to congestion charge

Given that I'm a highly opinionated person, I express surprisingly few of my opinions on this blog. But I'm going to make an exception in this instance. Today I'm pretty proud to be a Mancunian, even though I knew really that the congestion charge vote would go to a No as I didn't know a single Mancunian who was voting in favour.

Some of the comments in the Guardian demonstrate the kind of contempt for the views of ordinary people that I've come to expect from this government. One very astutely draws parallel with the Irish referendum over the summer that rejected the European Lisbon treaty and as a result drew ugly responses negating the validity of democratic mechanisms when you don't get the result you want. Responses along the lines of "those ungrateful Irish after all that Europe has done for them" and "we'll carry on run the vote again until we get the right result" are not guaranteed to bring universal harmony across national and social divides any time soon. However, they're extremely likely to bring out the inner rebel in quite a lot of people, certainly those with any self-respect.

I don't agree with people who are saying, albeit sympathetically, that it's about reluctance to vote for extra taxes at the start of an economic downturn. And it's certainly not true that the No vote is a vote against public transport; Mancunians are justly proud of their tram system. I really think it's about people getting fed up of being told what to think (where was the No campaign, for example?), and that is a good thing, surely, for everyone, no matter where they live.

Thai green fish curry

Way back in October, Rob Styles tagged me to get me to blog a recipe. It's a token of the esteem that I hold for Rob that I'm prepared do divulge my favourite and most admired recipe.

So here's how you make the best Thai green fish curry ever, for 2-3 people. It's on the soupy side, and it's fragrant and flavoursome rather than red hot. But that's the way I like it.

Besides the fact that it tastes great and everyone loves it, the beauty of this recipe is that you can make the paste well in advance, and then the rest of the curry can be made in a matter of minutes.

Ingredients for the paste:

2 stalks of lemon grass finely chopped

3 hot green chillis, deseeded and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped

1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and chopped

1 shallot peeled and finely chopped

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only

Half a level teaspoon of ground cumin

Half a level teaspoon of ground coriander

1 tablespoon of lime juice

1 tablespoon of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

Half a level teaspoon of ground black peppercorns

Ingredients for the curry:

500g haddock fillets, skinned, cut into wide pieces

200g bag of frozen, cooked and peeled extra large prawns

1 tablespoon of groundnut oil

250ml coconut milk

250ml fish stock

8 lime leaves

15g fresh basil, leaves only, torn

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only, torn

Method:

Put all the paste ingredients into a food processor and blitz into a rough paste, stopping to scrape down sides with rubber spatula as necessary.

Fry paste in the oil for 1-2 minutes, stirring so it doesn't colour.

Pour in coconut milk and add stock, lime leaves, haddock and prawns.

Simmer until fish starts to turn opaque, stirring regularly so the sauce doesn't catch - 7-8 minutes.

Add basil and coriander leaves. Check seasoning.

Remove lime leaves before serving.

That debatable time of year...

Can it really be a year since I drove over to University of Aston one autumn evening in 2007, and had the most terrifying and also rewarding evening in years?

Once again the opening rounds of the national schools competition Debating Matters are taking place across the land, and this year the venue for me, as one of the judges, was Wolverhampton High School for Girls. The competition has presumably grown so much in the past year that there are now two opening rounds in the West Midlands instead of one. Which is utterly fantastic, as Debating Matters must be one of the finest cerebral experiences you can have, either as a sixth former or as a judge.

This year the three subjects for debate in the opening round were

• Space Travel - Manned or unmanned?
• Privacy
• Congestion charge

The passing year had not dimmed the memory of the sheer tedium of ecotourism and the various arcane offsetting schemes that I had to ingest for last year's competition, so naturally I avoided the congestion charge like the plague. This was a shame because it produced the liveliest debate of the night. Having done quite a lot of the recommended reading on space travel and privacy, then, and considered some tricky questions to ask the hapless debaters, I drove off to Wolverhampton and managed to arrive on time by some quirk of luck entirely unrelated to the degree of journey planning carried out.

In fact I felt like crap; I had done all day, so I'd worked from home, secure in the belief that the sight of me rocking back and forth in physical pain might cause some consternation among my colleagues. But by the end of the evening, I felt great, and just like last year, the whole experience gave me a boost of energy that lasted for days. I think I wrote words to this effect in my blog posting on this subject last (academic) year, but it bears repeating. When you are privileged enough to share a room with these 17 year olds who are unbelievably well prepared and arguing so passionately and skilfully, all your anxieties about our dumbed down society just fall away and you remember that the very best of humanity can prevail in the most unlikely of circumstances.

All of this was underlined by the content of the Space Travel debate. I plead guilty to having been completely ignorant about the manned vs unmanned debate prior to preparing for Debating Matters, whereas I am now a veteran of over 3 articles from The Space Review!! The arguments in favour of manned space exploration are unapologetically humanist. It's not even a pro-science versus anti-science thing. Right now, to take a purely pro-science stance involves arguing for unmanned not manned space travel - the progress that robotic and other forms of unmanned exploration have made in a number of fields vastly outweighs the scientific achievements of the Apollo missions. But apparently, as a result of those Apollo missions, admissions to undergraduate science courses doubled in the US, as did PhD applications. The very existence of Silicon Valley is testimony to the inspiration that the moon landings created among us earth-dwellers. Manned space travel is also extremely unsafe and bloody expensive! So it's pretty difficult to argue its case, particularly in the straitened economic circumstances (not to mention the prevailing mood of risk-aversion) that we're all experiencing right now. But sometimes you've just got to take a long term view. Because if a bunch of British 17 year olds, brought up in an era of Reality TV and ubiquitous corporate branding, can demonstrate rigorous and passionate debating beyond their years, just think what they might achieve if human space explorers once again go beyond what was previously considered to be unachievable.

Meanwhile, Debating Matters goes from strength to strength, as indeed it should. It was recently announced that The British Council will be bringing the competition to India, using its network of schools and educational institutions, and the plan is that the contest will gradually be developed into "a real-time television reality show" according to India edunews. Time to revise my opinions of reality TV? Let's have a debate!

Emerging Economies Question Time @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session were:

• John Dovey – acting president, UK Corporates BT Global Services
• Jim O’Neill – MD Global Economic Research, Goldman Sachs, creator of the acronym BRICS
• Stuart Simpson – Financial Analyst and journalist
• Dr Linda Yueh – Oxford University, author of Macroeconomics and globalisation and economic growth in China
• Professor Slavo Redosovich, LSE
  

Main arguments:
What will be the foreign policy consequences of the crisis for China and India?

• Linda: India and China are grappling with the potential foreign policy consequences of the global downturn. China sees itself as an emerging economy, focusing primarily on the growth of its own economy.
• Jim: Next week France will formally propose that the G7 be expanded to include the BRICs. This is long overdue, especially in view of the crisis. It’s going to be important that the Chinese economy be led by internal consumption rather than export, as there won’t be a US economy to export to .
• Stuart: We need to differentiate between China entering the world stage, and China as a global manager. China is not yet a rich country.
  

Why so much talk about China and India, why so little attention to Brazil and Russia?

• Jim: India has 1.1 bn people; China has 1.3 bn. Russian and Brazilian populations are small in comparison. With urbanisation a key driver for both China and India, the scale of their potential is of a different order. It is wrong to focus on India and China though. Brazil and Russia are much more powerful economically than in the past. Brazil keeps good macroeconomic stability, and in 30 years time could be one of the biggest 7-8 economies of the world. Brazil has handled itself very well in the crisis to date. Russia is far too dependent on oil. It needs to reduce this dependency to reach its potential.
  Traditionally economic downturns have impacted the developing world disproportionately. Is this still true?
• Stuart: The decoupling issue. China et al are becoming more self-reliant. Unless some solutions are arrived at, though, some countries will really suffer. Some countries can’t rely on national banks, foreign exchange reserves, i.e. those mechanisms currently being widely used across the globe to deal with the crisis.
• Jim: The BRIC economies are still developing in the classical sense. Now they’re an integral part of the world economy with their own multinationals and so on. The consensus is that the BRICs will continue to grow in the next 30 years.
• John: The world is a lot more complex. The average price in Chinese designer shops is a lot higher than in the Western equivalents. And most of the shoppers there are Chinese not tourists. So there’s a significant middle-class emerging.
• Linda: Are they themselves in financial crisis? All markets are interlinked. One potential problem is protectionism. The view that opening the borders for trade isn’t helpful is a bit dated. Brazil has brought actions against US and Europe and won. Virtually no country in the world truly has free trade and open borders. In the NGO world, protectionism will be strongly under consideration. The IMF will have to provide bail-out packages for Pakistan, but they shouldn’t be telling them how to run their own country. The IMF is weaker than it was 10 years ago, in any case.
• Jim: There is a difference between modest protection for countries in an emergent phase and the aggressive protectionism of the 1930s. Germany has been sustained over the past 2 years by exports to China and Russia. IMF seems strongly pro-international trade at the moment. The Norman Foster partnership, with 1400 employees the biggest employer in Wandsworth, is almost entirely dependent on China.
  

Could international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF become obsolete?

• Linda: IMF has just appointed its first Chief Economist from an emerging economy – China. So it’s trying to reinvent itself although it may be too slow.
• Slavo: World Bank started this process earlier with its “Learning from the 90s” document. It’s trying to fashion itself as a developing agency.
• Stuart: The IMF doesn’t have the resources to perform the same role as before. Partly because of BRIC growth - the reserves of China dwarf IMF reserves. Years ago, South Korea needed IMF help. So the IMF came in and dictated how South Korea was to be run. China saw this and decided the same would never happen to him,a nd built its foreign exchange reserves.
• Jim: The world has blown up. This is a very powerful and scary crisis. Without powerful responses by multiple countries, it would be a lot worse. The IMF is currently back in business because a couple of developing countries have been very irresponsible. But the IMF and the World Bank need to become institutions reflecting the complexity of the modern world. So Western nations need to agree to substantial structural changes. The IMF and World Bank are currently well past their sell-by date.

To what extent is the crisis due to under-consumption in China?

• John: Are the financial sectors of the West clearly at fault? Complex financial derivatives have produced a classic bubble.
• Jim: Indirectly, part of the crisis is caused by China saving so much. The global savings glut has led indirectly to the overheating of the US property market.
• Linda: In macroeconomics, these are just identities, rather than causes and effects. Americans were consuming too much way before China started saving too much. China needs to look internally and determine why is its consumption so low. Culturally, they have fears of catastrophic health events, and worry about their children’s education. It’s not a blame thing.
• Jim: Global economic crises happen. Human behaviour goes between greed and fear. The Chinese authorities wanted the decade to be dominated by an export strategy, and only now do we see that it was unsustainable.
• Stuart: US consumes 72% of its GDP. [Jim: This is way too much.] A lot of capital goes to the US in the form of debt, with China buying US Treasury bonds. There’s a lot of saving in the Chinese corporate sector as well. US business didn’t take advantage of the cheap credits. The money didn’t go into production. Why not?
• Linda: Usually, if there are low savings, it should be expensive to borrow.
• Jim: This is not a static environment right now. This year US’s current account deficit is starting to disappear. US is selling more cars abroad than it is importing. Surpluses in the emerging economies are slowing down – Russia, India and Brazil now have deficits. Countries will no longer be able to depend on exporting to the US.
• Jim: The current situation feels bad. But it is reality. Global growth is forecast at 3%. Last year it was 3.2%, so it isn’t the end of the world. Price mechanisms work themselves through – both sides of the US election are committed to exploring alternative forms of energy. China has done more for globalisation than the US in the past decade. Countries like Nigeria are intellectually very energised by the example of China and how they’ve raised themselves from poverty without behaving like the US.
• Stuart: There is much more political freedom for developing countries now with China in the picture.
• Linda: 56% of the Chinese population is still rural. We should be wary of learning too much from a country whose path is not yet set.
• Jim: The last decade shows that international trade is one of the few win-win games that exist. Global inequalities are no declining rapidly. In the next 30 years, there will be an additional 30 billion new members of the middle class.
  

But in Africa, aren’t some countries still undeveloped?

• Stuart: Development since the industrial revolution has been characterised by divergence between developed and developing countries. Only with China has that changed. China shows the way out of poverty – with massive infrastructural projects and engagement with the global economy, rather than the small-scale projects proposed by NGOs.
• Linda: Political reform is happening in China, but in a quiet slow way because the Chinese government wants to be responsive and stay in power. So it does it by focus groups etc. but rejects the Western model.
• Stuart? Yes! It’s following the anti-democratic practices of Western political forces like New Labour!

Growing pains: the pros and cons of economic dynamism @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session were:
· Daniel Ben-Ami, finance and economics journalist
· Dr Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge
· Paul Mason, TV broadcast journalist
· Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, Financial Times

Takeaways:

• Dynamism is the most profound concept for our civilisation. It matters because it transforms people’s lives. It underpins our life expectancy, food, the expectations of the next generation reaching adulthood. It both signifies and generates change. It generates a range of opportunities unimaginable to previous generations. In agrarian societies, serfdom was normal, and the prosperous had to live from their labours. It has also transformed the position of women, with labour devices, contraception and so forth. Political democracy is both a natural expression and a concomitant of economic dynamism. A positive sum society – with the total number of goods and services rising over time.
• In the early 1950s the life expectancy of people in the third world was 41, whereas today it’s 63-4. This is a measure of the huge benefits of growth for developing countries.
• Ha-Joon Chang was born in South Korea in 1963, and has experienced phenomenal changes in the standard of living during his lifetime. It’s not just about having more money and things – it’s life expectancy, reductions in infant mortality and so on. In one and a half generations, South Korea has acquired the life expectancy of Switzerland! But this is unachievable without brutality and dislocation. Nevertheless, in undeveloped countries, there’s a lot more violence and destitution. Child labour was abolished in South Korea in the early 1960s, so there are labour rights and freedoms in place now. So the main problem with today’s liberal democracy is that growth is not executed well enough.
• Paul Mason maintained that it’s correct to question the conditions of growth. In early capitalism, it was believed that capitalism would collapse without the labour of 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. Then we saw that after the Factories Act, regulated capitalism was actually more dynamic. This is inimical to the Ayn Rand principle – that only selfishness can act as a dynamo for growth. A mature debate is needed around the distribution of wealth.
• Martin Wolf argued that the pursuit of GDP per se is meaningless. The biggest change in economics over the past 30 years has been the integration of Asian labour into the global economy.
• Up to the 1980s, a great proportion of the gains of capitalism went to the working classes of industrialised countries. This is partly because of the internal politics of those countries. The interests of the UK and Chinese working classes are directly antithetical. Paul countered this by saying that labour movements have been a fundamental part of capitalism since the first strike in Lancashire in 1818. China has just passed its own Factories Act – The Contract Labour Law was passed this year. Some factories have moved to Cambodia as a result, but the Chinese government is firm that labour regulations will be enforced.
• Local pollution will ultimately be fixed by local political processes. But are there global constraints, and if so how will they be handled? Drinking water is a real constraint to growth in both India and China. Ditto petrol. India can’t afford oil at $100 a barrel, and it’s forecast to rise to $500. Paul argued that the issue of water in China isn’t about quantity but quality. Why is the Yangtse so polluted? It’s because of a succession of paper factories killing everything in the river. Daniel argued that there is no inevitability of water shortage in India. They need infrastructural investment, that’s all. There’s always desalination if all else fails – look at Dubai, Arizona etc. There is a classic Malthusian confusion of infrastructural issues and god-given problems. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of Stone. Martin argued back that over-dependence on fossil fuels is a problem – the water problem in India is exaggerated, but the fuel problem isn’t. India’s challenges are unique but unbelievably exciting.
• Daniel Ben-Ami argued that the problem with the term “sustainability” is that it’s used in so many ways. He opposes the idea that entire generations should hold themselves back because of the risk of damage to future generations. The real problem is unbalanced growth that is insufficiently productive.
• In Germany in the 19th century, the average number of working hours per week was 90, whereas now it’s 35. US work about 20-30% longer than us.
• In all countries, as soon as women start having a choice, they stop having the children they don’t want.
• In India and China the benefits of growth are ceasing to spread among the population – this is a significant problem.

The Credit Crunch Demystified @Battle of Ideas

This session was an on-stage debate between:
· Phil Mullan, director of Business Transformation, Easynet (in a personal capacity)
· Dr Michael Savage, Investment Banker (in a personal capacity)

God this session was packed! Standing room only in the biggest room of the building. As Phil Mullan pointed out, you can usually house the economics session in the broom cupboard, with room to spare. As an aside, at the meeting of the CILIP Update Editorial Board on Friday, the icebreaker at the start of the meeting was to state what you’re reading, and at least 2 people said they’d stopped reading novels in order to be able to follow the news and gain an understanding of the economic situation.

The essence of the debate was:

• What is the severity of the current crisis? Well, it’s very severe! But although it’s being described as the worst financial crisis ever, the human dimension is muted – having said that, it’s so far had a limited effect on the economy – unemployment isn’t as bad as it was in the 1980s for example. But there’s a lot of misery and hardship to come.
• Phil: The most important thing is that the crisis isn’t just about economic recession: it reflects a fundamental atrophy of economic activity in the West. This is very serious, with politicians unable to cope, it will be more difficult for them to contain the consequences.
• Michael: Right across the board, everyone failed to see this coming. In terms of steps taken by governments, allowing Lehmann to fail has proven catastrophic, but that this couldn’t have been foreseen. The British banking system was within hours of failing.
• Phil: The past 14 months had been characterised as panicky paralysis with intermittent firefighting. George Soros had said that governments have been consistently behind the curve, displaying oscillation and lack of imagination. We’ve lived with an economic paradigm of “There is no alternative” [to the market] for a quarter of a century now, with a very technical as opposed to political approach to running the economy. But the people elected democratically failed to see this coming. There’s been no attempt to date to grasp the fundamentals.
• Michael: Some of the growth and dynamism in the West has been false, but this has nevertheless been a period of great consistent growth and innovation, although we should have picked up on the issues in the financial sector earlier.
• Phil: This position amounts to a fetishisation of numbers – growth looked good but what about the quality of growth? In reality, the West has experienced prosperity based on growth elsewhere. Economic activity in countries such as the US and UK has been based on a. Property and retail, and the interactions between the two b. Financial services c. Public sector. So a huge amount of activity has been based on circulation and services around it, while the productive economy has shrunk. Manufacturing in the US now only represents 12% of the economy. 30 years ago, financial activity comprised only 20% of the average US corporation, whereas today that figure is 50%. Back to the drivers, only c. public spending now remains. This introduces a very real risk of a state deficit crisis. The economy has been hollowed out. When an economy doesn’t make much, and the financial, property and retail sectors implode, what’s left? Apart from making money out of the East, of course.
• Michael: US still makes up 25% of the global economy. The East is still led by the US – the only country with the financial depth and breadth to manage the crisis. The current crisis is driven by additional money in the system, not just because of bank lending, but money from Asian and oil-producing economies. Simply put, US, UK et al have been spending more money than they’ve made. Other countries, by contrast, have been saving masses of money and pumping it into the West. This has led to low interest rates in the West. The West has then made money where it can – for example from property.
• Phil: China has been keeping the West afloat. Value production continues in the West, but it’s not new value creation, but creaming off value created elsewhere in the world. China is going to have a hard time in the next two years with the spillover from this. US is the most indebted country in the world, and yet presumes to be the world leader. The economy pre-crisis was characterised as SAD – stable; anaemic; durable. The West has been able, since the 1980s, to cope with its difficulties; political stability and credit availability have together removed the need for economic restructuring. This was like a hiatus period of muddling through. The West has now had its comeuppance, and needs a long period of regeneration. Everyone is going to feel a lot of pain, but at the moment there’s a strange feeling of denial in society about the future repercussions of the downturn.
• Michael: The recent period has been characterised by consistently high growth and employment. It hasn’t been SAD at all – actually it’s been a great period in the economy. The banking sector had to be bailed out, though, because there was a blunt choice between bail-out or generalised depression. We now need to think fully about how to manage the economy, the banks and restructure society.
• Phil: 40% of GDP in China is based on economic investment. They create more values than they can use. This is much more than an economic / financial problem. Intellectually, the most important point is the hollowness of economic life, and the imbalances between economics and politics globally. We’re closer to barbarism than we were 10 years ago; we’re at a tipping point. There’s a potential to restructure using the East as an engine, but how likely is that?

Caught in the web: who controls the Internet? @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session of the Institute of Ideas' annual Battle of Ideas festival were:

• Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship
• Dr Tim Jordan, Open University, author of Hacking: digital media and technological determinism
• Rob Killick, CEO, cScape
• Cassandra Wilkinson, author of Don’t panic: nearly everything is better than you think

Key takeouts from this session were:

• An important question is – does the internet render the fight for free speech unnecessary? Or, in fact, is the internet at risk of becoming even more regulated than real life? Certainly, the great libertarian godfathers of the internet didn’t bargain for new forms of censorship to emerge. There is more potential for control and regulation in cyberspace than there is outside. Compare browsing in a library with browsing on the web, where the act of opening a page is exposable to other people or organisations.
• The new censors of the internet aren’t the usual suspects. Instead, they’re like a layer of middlemen. A great example is Smart Filter by Secure Computing in California. Used by some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes and also in the US, its list of blocked sites is so secret that even the countries using the software are kept in the dark, and can affect more sites than you might think – for example gay and lesbian sites wrongly interpreted as being porn. The list of blocked sites is the intellectual property of Secure Computing and is protected by copyright.
• This week Yahoo and Google signed up to a voluntary agreement to protect freedom of speech in their business practices. This code of conduct took 18 months to formulate, and they’re now trying to persuade hardware suppliers to sign up. Cisco were invited to the discussions, but declined to participate. They argue that in transactions such as the supply of hardware to the Chinese government, the application of the technology they supply is not their responsibility (I’m sure I’m not the only anti-censorship activist who’s broadly sympathetic with this position).
• On “takedown notices” and their censorship implications – a group of researchers put up a fake JS Mills Appreciation Society website containing quotes from the 19th century philosopher and freedom advocate, quotes which, of course, are now out of copyright. The same researchers then sent a takedown notice to the UK ISP on the basis of a copyright contravention, who immediately obliged, taking the site down even though the text is out of copyright. A significant global trend is how easy it is to get ISP to remove material on the basis of defamation. One ISP employee in the audience added that the number of takedown notices issued is actually quite low, around one per fortnight, so it is quite easy to investigate each one. His ISP has a policy of only taking down sites if the notice has the weight of the law.
• The breakdown of anonymity, an important principle in the early days of the internet, points to a fundamental problem of the internet as public space – namely that the very digital nature of the space makes this contentious, as the web operates on privately-run networks and we leave traces of pretty much everything we do on it. With social websites such as Facebook, we’re putting personal data in the hands of Facebook who can then do anything they want with it. Rob Killick called for Facebook’s ownership of all your data on the site to be an opt-in.
• In relation to the global economic downturn, we need to recontextualise much of the discourse. When governments experience threats which they don’t know how to deal with, they tend to react with authoritarian measures. So trends towards regulation are likely to accelerate in the coming period. As individuals, we feel more isolated and individuated in these conditions, and are therefore more likely to take accepting positions of this authoritarianism. However, the deep nature of the recession we’re facing, and the absence of political solutions means that as a society we actually need more freedom to debate than less.
• Nearly everything can be said, but almost anything can be recorded and is keyword searchable. The gap between production and consumption is radically altered by the internet, and this has important consequences. Free speech hasn’t gone away with increased surveillance, but the conditions have changed.
• Tim Jordan talked about Torpark servers, a system accessible via Firefox designed to ensure anonymity on the web. Interestingly, they were impounded by Google during a recent paedophile investigation. Users of Torpark servers, which are located in Europe and the US, and were in fact designed by the US Navy and the Free Haven project, are perceived to be in authoritarian regimes. They are OS, and this raises very interesting questions – in theory the code is open to all of us, but in practical terms it’s only open to that small minority of people who can understand code. This is important in this context for determining whether there are any “back doors” i.e. ways in which users can be identified and reported. So the OS geek subculture offering an opposition to regulation is in fact not straightforward.
• The paradox of the web is that it is simultaneously outside control and under control – free speech and surveillance cohabit in cyberspace.
• Freedom of speech only means something if it’s offensive, and it is an absolute. I agreed with this, but not all panellists did.
• The difference between private speech and free speech has been eroded by the internet. We say all sorts of things in private that we may or may not really mean. But online this can be a problem. This is a very interesting dimension. At the moment, people tend to know that everything seems private whereas it is in fact recorded, but don’t really care. To an extent, of course, it doesn’t matter right now, but it may matter in the future if what you’re doing becomes politicised in some way.
• An interesting case is coming up in the UK, with the prosecution of a civil servant who wrote violent porn about what he’d like to do with Girls Aloud. This is a potentially groundbreaking case that will come up in 2009.
• An interesting debate arose around the issue of incitement. Rob Killick argued that incitement shouldn’t be a crime, although it now is one. So child rape is a crime, for example. If you see it, you should report it. But the act of seeing it should not be a crime. There are difficult issues around this – are people who are paying to see child rape actually colluding?