Be who you are, 100%

On Sunday, I went to the funeral of Dave Hallsworth, aged 78. He died a few weeks ago, on 30th August, but the donation of his body to medical research - his express wish - lifted the usual constraints of time and place, so we were able to celebrate his life and mourn his passing on a Sunday in the majestic surroundings of the Palace Hotel in Manchester.

Dave, like his wife Elsie who survives him, was a life-long fighter. He was entirely true to himself, ruthlessly honest with everyone he engaged with, and battled to change the world in line with his beliefs.

Dave and Elsie had two sons and some (at least two - not sure how many exactly) grandchildren. Part of Dave will undoubtedly live on, then, in future generations.

But Dave's legacy transcends the biological. Mick Hume, one of the speakers at the funeral (who also gives Dave an honourable mention in Monday's Times), described Dave as the most vehement and uncompromising atheist that he had ever known (never having met my Dad, presumably). And yet Mick expressed his hope that Dave's spirit was at work in some way in that room on Sunday.

When someone like Dave Hallsworth, one of the great men of the British 20th century imo, dies, the sadness that we feel should gradually give way to something more enduring and edifying. Whether we remember the things someone once said, using them as a tool to fashion our own thoughts and ideas, or somehow try to incorporate something of the essence of that person in the way we live, we should apply more than a narrow biological definition to Legacy. We all have a legacy to build and offer to future generations, whether we are parents or childless.

Today, as I remembered the man who was famously court-martialled for attempting to set up a trade union in the Royal Navy (!), I thought of Dave's energetic fearlessness, his tireless drive for a more just world, and I felt that the day became more intense, more purposeful, as I endeavoured to be what I am, 100%, and all of the time.

Impressions of Thailand

I got back from our three week holiday in Thailand on Sunday (19th August – same day as their referendum on the constitution). I had a great time, especially in Bangkok which is such an exciting city (though loads of people we met couldn’t get out of the place quickly enough). I remember clearly the point, in the early 1990s, at which I realised that something really dynamic and exciting was going on in South East Asia, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get out there and see it for myself.

I particularly enjoyed getting to grips with a country about which I previously knew very very little. I read the Bangkok Post most days and tried to piece together some robust impressions, combining my reading with my observations whilst travelling.

Obviously the referendum was the most significant theme in the country and was on the front page of the Bangkok Post most days. It wasn’t difficult to get a sense of censorship and manipulation in the media’s treatment of the issue, and this impression was confirmed by my friend Supanza, who has been following the news avidly from her new home here in Birmingham. I look forward to discussing this in greater detail when she and her husband Mark come over to our house for dinner in a couple of weeks’ time. I’ll try to resist making one of the dishes that we learnt to make on our Thai cookery course on an organic farm just outside Chiang Mai.

I think that the most acute comment I read about the new constitution was in Bangkok Post about a week ago. It said that if a group of military chiefs can stage a coup simply on the basis of corruption and write a new constitution for the nation’s consideration, then the biggest problem that arises is one of ongoing instability. Because if one group of military chiefs can do that, then presumably in a year or so, some other group, making the same perception of corruption, can just go ahead and do the same thing all over again.

Of course, one of the most striking elements of Bangkok is the sex tourism. According to a thriller I read called Bangkok Eight, if you take the whole of the Thai female population that is reasonably physically attractive, 20% of them will prostitute themselves at some stage in their lives. And the second statistic that I found amazing, is that the West2East prostitution in Thailand, so prevalent in areas such as Sukhumvit Soi 4, represents only about 5% of the overall sex tourism of Thailand i.e. the rest is Thais serving Thais, in venues such as barber shops. That makes for one hell of a sex industry. The novel explores (in a fairly superficial sort of way) how Buddhism can accommodate prostitution to an extent. This made me remember our trip to Cuba a few years ago, where there was unquestionably more social tension around prostitution than is the case in Thailand – and I see that as a combination of the Catholic Church and the Revolution (which justified itself partly on the basis of eradicating exploitation of Cubans by Americans).

Another interesting discovery I made in the Bangkok Post was that the “happiness level” of Thailand (the so-called Land of Smiles) is actually quite low. The article attributed this mainly to economic factors, specifically to job insecurity (fear of low labour costs in China) and the credit boom which is engendering high stress levels over debt payment.
Maybe one of the effects of the Thai credit boom is the impressive retail sector of Bangkok. I’ve honestly never experienced anything like it. The most recent shopping mall to spring up is called the Siam Paragon (see image above), and it’s wonderful. Highlights for me were the Ferrari showroom (on the second floor!!), the amazing bookshop on the fourth floor (where I bought a disappointing Thai novel called Chalida – a Thai family drama), and the cinema on the top floor (where we were initially tempted by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 3D, but settled for The Simpsons. It was fascinating to see every single person stand up for the Thai National Anthem – I myself have only once in my life stood up for the British National Anthem, though I accept that I’m exceptional in that sense). And Siam Paragon was only one of a whole series of malls in Bangkok, many of which ran into each other, and all of which were several storeys high.

Consumerism in both Thailand and Malaysia (we stayed in Kuala Lumpur for a few days in the middle of the trip) seemed to be conducted exclusively in English language. I couldn’t help feeling that some of the impact of the branding would be lost in translation. For example, Bobby Brown’s eye-shadow colours have English names, and I wonder how many Thais will appreciate the nuances of a colour called Heather.

There are definitely pockets of poverty in Thailand, but the Economist reported last week that the rich – poor gap is not as wide in Thailand as it is in some other Asian countries.

Thankfully my enjoyment of Thailand was not confined to reading Bangkok Post. The Thai cookery course I alluded to was a fantastic day spent with a lovely international crowd, mostly childless which is always good. You can’t fail to be impressed by the ultra-modern skyline of Kuala Lumpur, and we ate wonderful food in both countries. I’m glad we tried Malayan food, which is a bit more elusive in Malaysia than Thai cuisine is in Thailand. We spent 6 days on a lovely island called Koh Chang, which is very close to Cambodia. We made friends with a really nice couple from Vienna, who were staying in a nearby resort, and we enjoyed the time we spent with them. The malls of Bangkok and also the night market of Chiang Mai are both great shopping experiences. And Thai people are really really really friendly and polite, and they’re living in one of the safest places that I’ve ever visited.

The disappointments were few and far between, but I suppose the Floating Market didn't really live up to expectations - it's little more than a tourist trap these days, elephant riding is definitely over-rated, but bamboo rafting is the experience you should avoid at all costs, as it's simply the most tedious way of spending 40 minutes that the tourist industry has yet to come up with.

Revish raises interesting branding issues around Web 2.0

My colleague Richard Wallis yesterday pointed me to a book review site www.revish.com which has been set up by Dan Champion as a serious book review, filtering out lite reviews by imposing a 250 minimum word count on each review. Intrigued, I had a look.

I spent a fair while browsing around the site, but I was more or less immediately struck by how solidly middle-brow the reviews were. As far as I can see, and I've had a good look, this seems to be quite consistent across reviews and reviewers. There were one or two heavyweights with reviews of novels such as Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (reviewer didn't like it; I loved it, but the review was solid) and Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow (reviewer loved it; I'm scared of it, having read Pynchon's The crying of lot 49, nearly losing my sanity in the process). So what I'm saying upfront is that this isn't about me thinking that I'm too good for www.revish.com, although in passing, it's a shame that the reviews aren't really much better than Amazon's.

The really interesting thing is from a marketing perspective. If you decide to target a particular market segment, in this case serious readers, to a Web 2.0 (therefore defined around participation) site, then how to control that effectively. I'm not sure whether the measure of imposing a minimum word count was effective in differentiating www.revish.com from Amazon et al. Some reviewers just fill the space with a summary of plot, rather than engage deeply and critically with the text. You may have a particular niche in mind for a Web 2.0 site, then, but the all-important participants may have different ideas, and ultimately they will determine the natureof the site, the creator of the site merely setting up a shell for their content. If the site really takes off, and the creator wants to advertise, then how to define the audience. This point is a general issue in marketing with the "new media" but I think that participative sites such as www.revish.com raise particular issues.

Gina Owens

Gina Owens died late last night at the Macmillan Unit, Frenchay Hospital, Bristol. She had her closest friends and relatives around her.

When I visited her, two weeks ago, it was clear that beneath her dressing gown she had become thin and frail. She put her hands to her bald head whilst articulating her fear of dying.

But I will remember the Gina I knew in Manchester in the 1990s, with her clear and incisive mind, strong and healthy but never overweight physical frame, and shiny thick blonde hair. The Gina that thrived before the ravages of non-Hodgkins lymphoma and two punishing rounds of chemotherapy took hold.

Above all, I will remember that it was Gina who told me that 20th century international relations wre centred on the containment of Germany. That food production and market dynamics are fundamentally incompatible. And the biggest point of contact that I had with her when I visited her two weeks ago - when I said that everything in life was about people, and she looked at me and nodded in fierce agreement.

Collaborative fiction using the blog medium

My friend Bill and I have embarked on a really exciting adventure.

Bill set up a fictional blog back in 2005, and the narrative is basically set in a futuristic institution, where a number of imprisoned inhabitants use a blog to communicate with each other, moderated by the institution's staff. It is partly a satire about New Labour forms of authoritarianism. It is called Community Fair, which as you can see features on my blogroll.

Bill is an expert on 18th century culture, and has told me in the past about novelists at that time being far more collaborative than they would subsequently become in the 19th century when individualism truly took hold on society. When Richardson, for example, was writing his epistolary novel, Clarissa, in serial form, he would receive letters from readers when it was still incomplete and this would guide the denouement of the plot to a certain extent. Bill was hinting very heavily for such feedback on his blog, but was doomed to be disappointed for a long time.

It was only when I started this blog that I saw very clearly what form such collaboration should take.

On Sunday, I decided to put a comment on one of the postings of Community Fair. I have always been particularly intrigued by one of its characters, Roxanne, who is quite feisty, so I decided to pretend that I was a long lost friend of hers and sent a posting along the lines of "Roxanne, is that really you... where have you been all this time", without telling Bill that I was doing it.

An hour or so later I received a text message from a very excited Bill, and we began to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of developing this fictional collaboration.

We briefly considered the idea of agreeing in advance a meta-narrative that would guide interactions between Sarah (it's funny being a real person AND a fictional character at the same time and it'll be interesting to see how that pans out) and Roxanne. But we dismissed that approach because it's been done before. It's basically the approach that Mike Leigh takes in his improvised plays and films. We want to do something truly experimental. For us it's not enough to do something that's more or less been done before but on a new medium.

So now that Roxanne has replied to Sarah, I have to look back at all Roxanne's previous postings as well as the reply, and compose a response that will move the narrative forward whilst remaining consistent with her past.

The novel has always been connected to a specific period in human development, and maybe it's a bit tired by now, so will it start to be superseded by more collaborative forms of story-telling? Only time will tell.

The Holocaust on YouTube

Yesterday, in a marathon 4 hour successful attempt at study evasion, I sat and watched almost endless videos on YouTube.

It was Holocaust Day - something I always remember because it's my brother Richard's birthday, and besides, we have a grandparent of Jewish lineage.

After watching God knows how many music videos, and a handful of entertaining home-made ones (I can certainly recommend Bride has Massive Hair Wig Out), I remembered it was Holocaust Day. Unusually there seemed nothing on the TV to commemorate it, so I searched for original footage on YouTube.

I found, without much difficulty, a series of videos called Nazi death camps : Cruel British footage of liberations. These clips each had a huge warning about the shocking nature of the material, how it was completely unedited, and this seemed to be borne out by the comments on the first page.

It's 8:45 long, longer than I'd usually tolerate on YouTube, and I prepared for some seriously shocking stuff. It showed the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen in Spring 1945. The thousands of emaciated corpses that awaited the liberators must have been shocking and unforgettable. However, 62 years on, to anyone who's ever watched a documentary or read about the Holocaust, it's nothing that hasn't been exposed thousands of times before.

[I'm running the risk of sounding jaded here, so I should emphasise that the Holocaust never ever should lose the capacity to shock, and indeed it hasn't. See the powerful novel Fugitive Pieces for further details. ]

So for me, easily the most fascinating material wasn't the video, but in fact the comments. So far, there are 144 comments on the first clip of the series alone. It was surprising how many nazi-sympathetic postings there were. Dare I say how refreshing it is to have uncensored access to these idiots? It's only by exposing this stuff to the oxygen of rationale to comments such as "Sieg HeiL, Sieg HeiL, fuck all jews!!" that these backward ideas will finally die.

But the stuff that shocks me again and again is something rather different. Am I alone in finding mundane responses to events such as (and not excluding) the Holocaust almost intolerably inappropriate? Is "How cruel" a comment more suitable for an incident of playground bullying than for one of the most barbaric episodes of human history? My friend Carolyn and I went to see the excellent film The Pianist a few years ago at the Mac, an arts centre in Birmingham. The scene where nazis throw an old man out of a first floor window in the Warsaw Ghetto was greated by tutting from a number of audience members! I struggle to think of a greater insult to the victims. Tutting is a response I would expect to receive if I dropped litter in the street.

In If this is a man, Primo Levi notes that if the Holocaust had continued, then over time a completely new vocabulary would have had to develop. Because the word "cold" doesn't really come close to describing spending a winter in Poland in the open air wearing only a thin shirt. And hunger is what we feel when we've skipped a meal, and to a concentration camp inhabitant would have been something of an enviable condition.

But enough of diversionary tactics such as genocide and mass suffering. It's time to do my marketing homework.

A blog wouldn't be a blog without some self-referentialism

This morning my friends Kevin and Kathy in Manchester sent my husband Dave an email saying "Word has reached us that your blog-hating wife has set up a blog."

Obviously, in the past few days, since setting up Traffic Light Musing amid a level of self-publicity that friends and family alike have come to expect from me, I've been reflecting upon the whole nature of blogging afresh, as an "insider", as it were.

The World in 2007, published by The Economist, contains an article on Web 2.0 entitled When the hype dies down. It predicts that in 2007, the Web 2.0 hype will abate and meanwhile "the rest of the world - people who may be hearing the words "blog" "wiki" and "podcast" for the first time - will begin to use the new media as they become simple and ubiquitous..." As an aside, the whole point of blog software is surely that it is simple in its essence - taking the complexity out of creating a web content and simplifying stuff like adding graphics and so on..

Back to the main thrust, as an outsider, I made the mistake of seeing blogging as an atomised activity, like a diary. But now that I'm a blogger myself, I see clearly how sociable blogging really is. Since starting my own blog, I'm much more likely to engage in other people's blogs such as my colleague Nadeem's. Instead of being an inward introverted activity, it's just a novel form of communication. Actually, I hardly know Nadeem, as he's fairly new at Talis, and we work on different teams. However, I have insights about his beliefs and thought processes through reading his blog that I would never have obtained from office small-talk, or more arguably, from a personal website.

So if The Economist is right, we'll soon be able to communicate routinely at a new level of depth with pretty much everyone.