My Mother’s memory lives on in the minds of those for whom she cooked. Her chocolate cake with its moist sponge layers haunts the taste buds of my best friend, her custard creams melted in my Father’s mouth, the smell of her macaroni cheese (Scottish variant) bubbling in the oven dish lingers in my nostrils, the mushroom vol-au-vent filling the highlight of Hogmanay hospitality when our neighbours came across for a nip of whisky. Her cabbage and onion, the stovies (I preferred them plain, without corned beef), the peelings she gathered from carrots, Swedes and potatoes to rot benignly on the compost heap. Food will forever be connected with nurture, with the sacrificial act of care, of painstaking preparation, the treat (the bar of chocolate that awaited me on the sideboard on arriving home from an arduous day at school). My daydream interrupted by a passenger taking the seat next to me on the bus, grudging the intrusion of a small part of my thigh over the arbitrary dividing line.

The social penalties of obesity are distressing and debilitating. We are subjected to a thousand petty ostracisms from seat sizes to the contents of clothes racks stopping before our size (segregated shopping for garments thus depriving us of one of womanhood’s sanctioned pleasures, the group outing to the High Street. The feelings of awkwardness at dragging them into the cramped quarters of our specialised outlets compounding the sense of exclusion they are oblivious to when we are expected to shower them with approval as they emerge from the changing rooms in a seemingly limitless succession of fashions. In stark contrast moreover to the three or four outfits that suit us if we are lucky). Constant prods to remind us (as if the looks of disgust and barbed comments from strangers did not constantly torment us) that our bodies exceed “normal” boundaries.

With the erosion of solidarity and the balking of the state at its welfare commitments, we are confronted with the paradox of ever-increasing regulation and surveillance on the part of government accompanied by ever greater reluctance to spend on care, the latter based on a pathological reluctance to increase taxes for fear of alienating the middle classes (whereas the hyper-rich, individuals and companies, more easily able to survive pressure on their accumulated fortunes, are lauded as generators of wealth – to attract new investments and protect jobs, we are told, we must not put the squeeze on them, profiting from our anxieties and insecurities). So the polarisation gains further momentum: the precariousness of employment in sectors once believed to offer rock-solid prospects unnerves us, renders us compliant, forget the final salary pension schemes, they constitute too great a drain on business, be prudent and save. The prospect of plummeting into the “underclass”, trapped on a “sink estate” where the shops have boarded up windows and gangs of knife-wielding teenagers prowl the dirty-needle-strewn streets provides a powerful incentive to tolerate any imposition on the part of our “superiors”. Thatcherism’s denial of structural inequalities triumphs in the rhetoric of “lifestyle choices”, so that the poor have only themselves to blame and their “betters” can congratulate themselves with impunity, their indifference to the fate of the less fortunate given moral justification.

The welfare state, so vaunted as the “European social model” was originally conceived to take care of the vulnerable, to compensate for inequalities, to redistribute benefits. The snobbery and prejudice concealed within the specious classification of “deserving” and “undeserving” was abandoned for a brief interlude of enlightenment when the population was in dire need of being replenished after the war. This particular expression of ill-informed condescension, callousness and contempt has returned in consumerist guise more virulently than ever before (compounded by the analytical tool of class falling out of favour). The sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy that pervade the debate about “self-inflicted” conditions (for which read lung cancer and diabetes inter alia) are particularly offensive. Drinkers and smokers pay a vast fortune in contributions to the Treasury in excise duties. If these were ploughed back directly into the NHS instead of being sucked into the black hole of government debt-servicing (or wherever the money ends up) there would be no need to contemplate the rationing of treatment. To refuse a patient care on the grounds of moral deficiencies (“she knew the risks and still persisted in puffing forty a day”) makes a mockery of any notion of equality, penalising those least able to transfer to the private sector (although, I reiterate, why should we if the health “service” was supposedly founded to assist us all regardless of whether we conform to a narrow definition of the “acceptable”?). Similarly, rumours abound of a tax on chocolate: why not tax the food manufacturers instead of punishing those of us who seek temporary solace from life’s buffetings in the sensation of Dairy Milk melting on our tongues?

The moral dimension has its utility for those who seek to keep costs down through deferring the onset of illness as long as possible (and who invariably bully the fat, equating extra inches with impending demise – as betrayed by that charming descriptive label “morbidly obese”). Not only does skinniness supply a compensatory mechanism to quell disaffection (“I might have been made redundant, but at least I haven’t let myself go”), but taking a pride in one’s appearance, reaping the rewards of complying with the standard has less obvious advantages for our elected masters. In her brilliant exposure of the ongoing oppression of working-class women and their resistance to being constituted as fair game for others to look down on Beverley Skeggs discusses compulsory (unpaid) placements for young mothers ostensibly to enhance their domestic skills, but in reality to make up for the shortage of servants in middle-class homes at the beginning of the 20th century. They were to develop a taste for drudgery and be grateful for the opportunity. Skeggs points out: “(…) how pleasure was used as a form of productive power. By trying to teach working-class women to take pleasure from bourgeois domesticity they could be induced to do it without direct, obvious control (…) if pleasure can be gained from that which is oppressive it is far easier not to notice the oppressive features of it. It also means that the women could produce themselves as acquiescent, rather than being produced by state regulation. The roles of the ideal woman were also productive, as they gave to women particular moral significance and responsibility, which gave them status, self-worth and pleasure” (Formations of Class and Gender, London, Sage, 1997, p46, emphasis in original). Similarly: “(…) the transmission of advice by the State [cf. statutory health warnings on cigarette packets, which some administrations are considering introducing on confectionery wrappers] is the means by which control of the family, and ultimately control of the population as a whole, is won. It is not a repressive intervention but an invitation to authority. Advice, like pleasure, represents a form of ‘positive power’ whereby power is exercised through norms, disciplining, manipulation of the conscience as opposed to power that operates through rules, prohibition and repression” (Skeggs, op. cit., pp47-8). Thus governments are free to reserve their more spectacular methods of repression to minority groups (by approving legislation to lock terrorist suspects up for months without charges, for example), bringing the rest of us in line in slightly more subtle, but equally insidious, fashion.

If that doesn’t work, however, there are always the more overt intimidation tactics: censure, abuse, revulsion, exclusion. Small wonder that reluctant dieters are unhappy, coerced into artificial deprivation in the midst of cornucopial abundance. We are all caught in a tug-of-war of conflicting impulses, the moral imperative to stay slim and the economic imperative to succumb to impulse buying as long as our credit cards have not maxed out. Advertisers have thrived on exploiting temptation as market niche and marketing strategy (they sell us things we don’t need, yet our entire economy would collapse if we were to pay their blandishments and crude appeals to our longing for status no heed). The obese are the victims of this exercise in dissimulation, viciously denigrated for our recalcitrance, our chronic “lack of discipline”. The drinker can camouflage the evidence of secret swigging on his breath. There is no extra strong mint to conceal our “vice”. We “wear” our weakness on our sleeve. Fat as a physical attribute is being constructed as the property of a single class, the “losers”, the “failures”, the pariahs (a moral category to which very few would voluntarily wish to belong, often conflated with the seething masses of the uneducated and poor, an economic categorisation, the spectre of being engulfed by which strikes such terror into our “superiors”). Make no mistake: fat is confused with sluggishness, immobility, being trapped, the opposite of the ethereal lightness and freedom, which supposedly encapsulate the postmodern reality.

Against this backdrop, “dissolving” fat effortlessly and painlessly is held up as the ideal. No remedy is too desperate to alleviate the suffering caused by failing to “fit in”. Jenny Hope (Daily Mail, 15th April 2005) heralded the latest such miracle cure in Wonder pill for slimmers ‘on the NHS next year’: “A ‘wonder pill’ that helps patients lose weight and give up smoking could be available on the NHS next year.
Clinical trial results show the multi-purpose drug cuts bodyweight by up to 10 per cent within a year as well as doubling the success rate of smokers trying to quit.
The drug, called Accomplia, could also slash the toll of heart disease by boosting ‘healthy’ blood fats and cutting dangerous ones”.

She quotes Dr David Haslam, chairman of the National Obesity Forum: “Although the cost of the drug has not yet been decided, Dr Haslam said it was ‘too expensive’ not to treat obesity. He added: ‘I’m optimistic because the economic case for treating obesity is so good. It can cost tens of thousands of pounds to treat a heart-attack survivor, or one person having a stroke, which was caused by the health problems related to obesity.
‘The cost of obesity drugs is a drop in the ocean by comparison’.
He said the multi-purpose drug would also save the NHS money by allowing patients to come off drugs for single conditions, such as blood pressure.
Results from a clinical trial published today in The Lancet medical journal show that taking a daily 20mg pill of Accomplia resulted in 40 per cent of overweight patients losing 10 per cent of their bodyweight.
In the trial of 1,500 patients in six European countries, a similar number lost 5 per cent of their bodyweight.
One third of patients took a dummy pill but only 12 per cent of them lost a tenth of their bodyweight – and they were more likely to drop out of the trial.
Most patients taking part had pot-bellies, carrying a high level of abdominal fat that increases the risk of cardio-vascular disease.
The drug increased levels of HDL, the protective good cholesterol, but triglycerides (harmful blood fats) fell.
Those who took the drug were also less insulin-resistant, making them better able to control their blood sugar levels. All the patients were asked to cut back by 600 calories a day but researchers said this accounted for only half the weight loss, which was as high as 20lb.
Side-effects included minor nausea, diarrhoea, dizziness and vomiting.
Since the study was carried out, further trial data on two years’ use has been released showing that much of the weight loss was maintained.
One in three patients lost 10 per cent of their body weight and 3in off their waists. Previous research found one third of heavy smokers treated for ten weeks stopped smoking.
Dr Haslam said: ‘The weight loss is very significant, yet it is only part of the benefits. Most importantly, there is a big reduction in waist circumference which is a marker for visceral fat, the fat in the abdomen which is particularly dangerous. It pours out poisonous substances which push up cardiovascular risk’.
Accomplia is the first of a new class of drugs called selective CB1 blockers. It works by blocking the primeval circuitry in the brain that regulates hunger and other urges such as alcohol cravings.
Dr Haslam said the data suggests the drug can safely be taken long-term, and some patients may need to use it for life.
‘When people stop taking it, their weight tends to go back where they started,’ he said”.

A lifetime of dependency on a chemical cocktail is therefore depicted as a breakthrough in keeping NHS costs down. Side effects a minor nuisance. The bean-counting mentality has taken root without so much as a whimper of protest. The pathologisation of fat continues unabated.

Julie Wheldon, in Fatbuster free-for-all, (Daily Mail, 29th September 2005) highlighted the scepticism of the medical profession triggered by losing their monopoly on a body of knowledge (which they correctly identify as the source of their social standing and power): “A powerful obesity drug has been made available over the counter.
Patients wanting to lose weight using Xenical previously needed a doctor’s prescription. But now they can simply go to Boots.
GPs expressed serious concerns about the scheme yesterday, warning that pharmacists would not have the necessary information on patients.
They also warned some patients may opt for the drug instead of trying to lose weight with diet and exercise first – the usual prerequisite for a prescription.
Xenical, also known as Orlistat, inhibits the absorption of fat in the intestine so the body excretes it instead. Users must stick to a low-fat diet, or face unpleasant side effects, including loss of bowel control.
(…)
The National Obesity Forum advises that only those who have tried for three months to lose weight through changing their lifestyle should receive the drug.
Now patients will be able to sign up for it at around 100 branches of Boots across the country.
They will have to enrol in the company’s weight loss programme, which costs £10 a week. They must also be classed as obese (…) As well as being able to get Xenical, they will also be advised on nutrition and how to increase their activity levels.
Boots said patients’ blood pressure and glucose levels would be measured before they receive the medication.
It said a pilot scheme in Manchester had been a success, with customers typically losing 6.5 per cent of their body weight over three months, increasing to 13.4 per cent after nine months.
Steve Churton, assistant pharmaceutical superintendent at Boots said: ‘People often don’t like going to their GPs about weight loss. By having this programme available through consultation with a pharmacist we are making it more accessible for those who want to try this effective approach to losing weight’”.

I have a certain degree of sympathy with Mr Churton, as it can be extremely unpleasant being chided by the doctor for one’s weight on every single visit for completely unrelated conditions, such as a dose of the sniffles. Self-medication is probably also unwise (fat hatred being so pervasive in our culture that underweight girls might be unable to resist purging their emaciated frames further). Mr C is, of course, staking a claim to expertise by chemists (a challenge to doctors’ exclusive rights to determine what is appropriate to improve a patient’s well-being) and, by linking the dispensing of the pill to attendance at classes, is casting a canny eye on a sure fire gain business opportunity. It is the refusal to even entertain the notion that not every overweight person is a heart attack waiting to happen within the wider context of body-loathing that contributes to our misery.

The holy grail of guaranteed weight loss, holding out the hope not of eternal life but the more earthly consolation of an eternally swelling bank balance has fired the imaginations of inventors since fat phobia was elevated to respectability. Richard Simpson, in How a wetsuit and a vacuum cleaner helped Anna regain her figure, (Daily Mail, 28th September 2005) attracted readers by the mention of a celebrity: “The speed with which Anna Friel regained her figure after giving birth to her first child did not go unnoticed.
Now the actress has revealed how she did it – with a wetsuit and a vacuum cleaner.
While the props might suggest a bizarre and potentially risky DIY regime, they are actually the components of a hi-tech alternative to liposuction which dispenses with the need for surgery.
Miss Friel, 29, gave birth to daughter Gracie in July and was immediately under pressure from studio bosses to have a ‘bikini body’ in time to film nude scenes by October.
So she turned to a machine called the Hypoxi Vacunaut, which is designed to give its user a non-surgical tummy tuck.
When she works out, Miss Friel pulls on a rubber bodysuit attached by three small hoses to the Vacunaut machine. This sucks out the air between the body and the suit, creating a vacuum around the stomach which is said to increase blood flow in that area.
The manufacturers claim the extra blood absorbs fat, which is metabolised and excreted in sweat, which in turn is sucked out by another of the hoses”.

Apparently she tortures herself on the contraption five times a week. This is the price of fame, unrelenting combat against the onslaught of time (and age) on the metabolism, scrutiny, monitoring, vigilance and never succumbing to a so much as a square of Belgium’s most popular export.

He continues: “It should, incidentally, be noted, that Miss Friel was given free loan of a Vacunaut machine at her home. Sessions normally cost around £400 for 12. She is not paid to endorse it.
Medical experts are unconvinced of its merits. Nutritionist Ros Kadir said: ‘I would be very sceptical about such claims. It reminds me of the old days of the sweat pants where liquid is simply sweated off – but replaced the next time you have a drink. The vacuum machine would have to be awfully powerful to draw blood into the area, and if it does that, I am concerned it would lead to burst blood vessels and internal bruising.
‘There are no short-cuts to weight loss – you just have to eat less and do more exercise’”.

The very next day (29th September 2005), a companion piece, The Vacunaut Report, appeared in the same paper, with writer Erin Kelly (29) giving it a test drive: “I’m walking on a treadmill dressed in a hugely unflattering black and red rubber suit, from which protrude tubes attached to a vacuum machine.
Welcome to the weird world of Vacunaut, the hi-tech exercise machine that’s whipped Anna Friel back into shape after the birth of her daughter, Gracie, in time to film sex scenes for her new film.
This futuristic regime took 20 years to develop and is the brainchild of an Austrian sports scientist called Norbert Dr Egger. A neoprene body suit is attached by three small hoses to the Vacunaut machine.
When it’s switched on, it removes the air between the body and the suit to create a low-pressure atmosphere, providing a vacuum around the stomach area.
This pulls blood directly into fatty tissue. The blood absorbs the fat and uses it to power the muscles during controlled exercise. The fat is metabolised and is then excreted through sweat, which is sucked out by a hose.
It bills itself as an alternative to plastic surgery. According to my instructor, who has an encouragingly trim tummy, the suit is padded with a network of 122 pressure chambers which are located in and around the abdominal and hip area.
Constant changes in pressure inside the suit mean the blood becomes enriched with fat from the stomach area, which is then burnt off as you exercise.
(…)
I’m simply expected to walk briskly while the treadmill is on an uphill setting.
Airtight at the wrists, neck and knees, the suit is stretchy but bulky, and I have to be helped into it and zipped up at the back by an instructor. It doesn’t smell particularly fresh. Maybe Anna Friel has her own personal Vacunaut suit which one of her celebrity assistants washes out overnight so it’s laundry-fresh every time she works out, but mine has a distinct locker-room whiff about it”.

In case you were wavering over whether to shell out: “The suit is made of hi-tech, man-made fibres, so inside it’s scratchy and sweaty. I instinctively want to tug at the tight neckline to let some cooling air circulate, but that would stop the vacuum effect and defeat the object of the exercise. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror opposite: my face is shiny and rapidly attaining the same pillarbox red hue as my suit. The results may be glamorous, but the process certainly isn’t.
However, after my first sessions, I do feel a little lighter around the middle and I’m surprised to see that I’ve lost an inch from my waist, dropping from 29in to 28in. But I wonder how much of that was water. I also wonder how much of the weight loss is down to the diet regime my instructor gave me: it involves eating lightly, not combining protein and carbohydrates, cutting out most sugary foods, avoiding certain vegetables which can cause bloating and all alcohol and severely limiting caffeine intake.
On such a puritan regime, who wouldn’t notice a slightly flatter stomach?”

Indeed. It is pricey, at £25 a session. The intrepid investigative reporter quizzed Lisa Worrell (21), an administration officer about why she puts herself through it: “So how did it come to this? The answer is that like most women, I was desperate to shift some stubborn weight from my stomach. I’ve always had a weakness for chocolate, but apart from that my diet is reasonably healthy and I avoid fatty foods.
So, when my stomach started looking distinctly bigger and a ’spare tyre’ appeared over the waistband of my jeans, I knew that my weakness had got the better of me”.
“Once you have finished the course, you are advised to eat in the same way and do ‘ordinary’ cardio-vascular exercise for three 30-minute sessions every week to keep the inches off”.

Ms Kelly herself was keener, but if her tempered enthusiasm did not persuade you to give it a whirl (or a conveyor belt jiggle) why not try the latest surgical technique? Roger Dobson (Daily Mail, 20th December 2005), in Desperate to lose some weight? Just swallow a balloon, sings the praises of the latest “advance”: “Swallowing a balloon could soon be the answer to a dieter’s prayers. The therapy works by curbing appetite in the seriously obese – and results of a recent trial have been startlingly good, with patients losing significant quantities of weight in just three months.
It is particularly exciting as it offers a non-surgical alternative to gastric bands and stomach reduction procedures – both of which are major operations.
Doctors first carry out an initial examination of the stomach with the help of an endoscopic camera, to check for abnormalities or obstructions.
The deflated balloon, made from a soft silicone material, is then fed down the throat and into the stomach.
Anaesthetic is put onto the surface of the throat to numb the tissue while the balloon is swallowed. Muscle-relaxing medication may also be used.
Once in place, the balloon is filled with 500ml of saline through a small tube that also goes down the throat and which is attached to a self-sealing valve in the neck of the balloon.
The tube is removed when filling is complete and the balloon floats around the stomach safely.
Once it is filled, the balloon is too big to get through the valve from the stomach to the bowel.
The trial by doctors in Rome shows that the whole procedure took only 10 to 15 minutes.
The idea is that the balloon reduces the working size of the stomach, without surgery. The theory is that the patient feels fuller and less need to eat.
The balloon has been designed to be used for six months. Any longer than that could be problematic as the acidic content of the stomach could have an effect on the silicone material. But if longer-term treatment is needed, a new balloon can be installed.
In the trial, the balloon treatment was used alongside a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet, and research showed that patients could lose 6lb a week (…)
But successful weight loss still requires effort from the patient.
‘You will have a much greater chance of maintaining your weight loss after balloon removal if you maintain and improve your diet and behaviour changes you made while using it,’ says Inamed [the manufacturer].
The system was designed for people who are at least 40 per cent above their ideal weight and who have failed to get prolonged success with other weight control programmes”.

In case we remained unconvinced by his sales pitch, Mr Dobson attempts to cow us into submission by bandying about the usual statistics: “It has been estimated that obesity accounts for 18 million days of sickness absence from work, and 30,000 premature deaths.
Each man and woman whose death could be put down to obesity loses, on average, nine years of life. Treating obesity costs the NHS at least £500 million a year, and the wider national costs of lower productivity are estimated at £2 billion a year”.

We fatties are so cost-ineffective, maybe we should just all be put to sleep? Oddly enough, if such eugenically-minded schemes ever were regarded as a serious course of action the diet industry may ironically prove our staunchest ally – where else could they rake in such giddying revenues from?

Julie Wheldon (Daily Mail, 5th December 2005) broke ranks with her colleagues for whom diatribes on binge-drinking have become something of a staple to highlight research done at the Texas Tech University Health Services Centre and Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in A few drinks a week ‘are a slimline tonic’: “A little alcohol now and again can help you stay slim, it was claimed yesterday.
Scientists said drinking a few times a week can cut the risk of obesity by 27 per cent compared to teetotallers.
But once drinkers start to overindulge, alcohol can have the opposite effect.
Among women, binge-drinkers and teetotallers are twice as likely to become obese as those who drink in moderation.
Researchers are unsure quite why small, regular amounts of alcohol help to keep drinkers’ weight down.
But their findings suggest complete abstinence may not be the best way to keep trim”.

Clearly, in the league table of transgressions, booze does not score as highly as a few spare tyres: “Scientists looked at more than 8,000 subjects who gave details of their drinking habits and weight as part of US national surveys between 1988 and 1994.
The study examined obesity levels by looking at body mass index – which is arrived at by dividing weight by height in metres squared.
Subjects who drank regularly were 27 per cent less likely to become obese than non-drinkers – particularly those who had fewer than five drinks a week.
But those who consumed four or more drinks a day were 30 per cent more likely to end up overweight and 46 per cent more likely to become obese. Project leader Ahmed Arif said: ‘The data gives no evidence to advise non-drinkers to start drinking alcohol to reduce body weight.
‘However, the evidence argues against complete abstinence among those who regularly drink alcohol’”.

Columnist Johann Hari (The Independent, 31st October 2005) chronicled his tribulations during a curative purge in More than he can chew: “I am a junk-food addict, scoffing KFC buckets and Wimpey Double-Burgers as casually as a butterfly flaps its wings. I may as well have a saline drip running lard into my veins. Once I found an old, cold Chicken McNugget in my bed and, reader, I ate it.
Sure, I tried taking small, incremental steps: every now and then, I would book a personal trainer, but each time, I left in despair after a few sessions. My last trainer handed me a small device that runs an electric current through your body to find out your Body Mass Index. It turns out I’m 35 per cent pure lard. If I were a sandwich, nobody would eat me, except me.
But then, this August, a sliver of salvation appeared on the horizon. A friend returned from a fortnight in a magical clinic in Austria, two stone lighter and eulogising about the theories of one Dr Franz Mayr. The late doctor practices something called ‘intestinal cleansing therapy’.
It’s simple: our bodies are clogged with toxins that damage our health, Mayr said, and they need to be cleansed and given time to heal. Once this happens, our bodies will no longer crave toxins and my pining for chicken popcorn will fade. His latter-day disciples include Sarah Ferguson, who allegedly paid £2,000 to be subjected to his structures for a week. I am a militant proselytiser for science and evidence – but when it came to my own diet, these principles disappeared and I booked myself for a fortnight in the Mayr Clinic”.
Welcomed by guides: “Then I was taken to the ‘restaurant’, and suddenly [Dr Mayr] did not seem so kindly. A bowl – no, a dribble – of soup was placed before me, along with a stale bread roll that had the texture of concrete. The woman next to me whispered, ‘I hear this is our last meal for the whole first week!’ I gave her such a severe glare that she physically recoiled”.
Staff member announced they would be given an eating plan the following morning. The bread a key component of the meals: “I was beginning to panic. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Why is the bread stale?’ ‘This is a good question,’ the hostess replied. ‘It is stale because we want to teach you to chew’.
Chew? Didn’t I learn that skill sometime before my first birthday? ‘No. Nobody in the Western world knows how to chew. Dr Mayr showed this. Most people today swallow their food after giving it one or two chews, and it enters the intestines very hard. This puts stress on the gut. Here, you will learn to chew each mouthful of food 40 times’. Forty? ‘Yes. Do not swallow anything until it is a thin liquid pulp. And you must not speak to each other or read when you are eating. This is distracting and wrong. You will sit in silence. And chew’”.

In the past, this approach was known as Fletcherism. Verily I say unto thee, there is nothing new under the sun, especially not when it comes to wacky theories about dieting. According to Hillel Schwartz’s excellent (and refreshingly tongue-in-cheek) Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat, (New York, Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990, pp124-34), Horace Fletcher had accumulated wealth in San Francisco as a manufacturer of printing ink and importer of Japanese art. An insurance company informed him in 1895 that he was too heavy for his height (5 feet 7 inches), his weight fluctuating between 198 and 217 lbs. His application for life insurance was therefore turned down. Smarting at the humiliation, he began experimenting with weight loss regimes. Schwartz writes: “As a marksman, Fletcher had invented a technique of snap-shooting without waste of effort or ammunition. He applied this to eating; the ammunition was food, the effort was digestion, the teeth pulled the trigger. Chewing was like taking aim.
The analogy was not all that good, since Fletcher’s new method of eating was neither rapid nor effortless. The ‘Great Masticator’ practiced an ‘industrious munching’ or one hundred chews to the minute. Most low-fibre foods could be dispatched in less than thirty seconds of chewing per mouthful, but shallots, for example, could take seven minutes. At dinner, Fletcher might slack off to 2,500 chews over thirty minutes, but generally a meal could be dispensed with after fifteen or twenty minutes and twelve to fifteen mouthfuls. Chewing, or fletcherizing, would convert ‘a pitiable glutton into an intelligent Epicurean’.
Fletcher was a hunger artist who counted movements of the jaw instead of days on the calendar. His was the slow fast of ‘a stomach trained down so fine that it was like a pair of apothecary’s balances, sensitive to the least inharmony’. Even milk and soups had to be chewed before being swallowed” (Schwartz, op. cit., p125).

Not that he had been the first to advocate such a strategy: “Laboured chewing had been directed against indigestion for many years. William Kitchiner in 1822 had specified thirty to forty munches for each mouthful of meat. Across the Atlantic, Sylvester Graham believed that natural foods would oblige people to exercise their teeth and prepare each morsel properly for the stomach, but he did not wax arithmetical (…) In 1885 another whole wheat cracker was put on the market with the specific appeal of being impossible to swallow without great jaw service. It was called, honestly, the Educator Cracker” (Schwartz, op. cit., pp125-6).

Schwartz beautifully captures the ridiculous extremes to which such punctiliousness can lead: “Like fasting, Fletcherism promised a ritual purification of the body. Perfect chewing, like perfect fasting, made the body clean as it made it light. The throat was ordained a filter, not a gullet; anything unable to be swallowed by physiological reflex at the back of the throat was never meant to be swallowed at all. Given the work of the teeth and the saliva, ‘If we swallow only the food which excites the sense of taste, and swallow it only after the taste has been extracted from it, removing from the mouth the tasteless residue, complete and easy digestion will be assured and perfect health maintained’. The more pre-digested the food flowing into the stomach, the less chance of strained intestines, constipation and a disrupted internal economy. We must all be ‘Competent Chauffeurs of our own Corpautomobiles’, and our exhausts must be inoffensive.
Fletcher verged on coprophilia. He weighed his faeces (2oz) and described them in dull detail. Healthy excreta were small and ashy, with ‘no more odour than a hot biscuit’. Since perfect chewing did away with most bulk – Fletcherites were forever pulling fibrous residues from their mouths – ‘there will be no invitation to discharge waste oftener than once in four or five days, when the response will be immediate, easy and final’. Fletcherite ‘mouth thoroughness’ was also an industrial education of the bowels. ‘By George!’ Fletcher exclaimed when criticised for his phrase ‘Dietetic Righteousness’. ‘Is there anything more sacred than serving faithfully at the altar of our Holy Efficiency?’” (ibid, p127).

Returning to the present day, Johann was made to undergo an examination: “‘I think, Mr Hari, we will put you on the T Diet,’ he said. I assumed he had 26 plans, running from A to Z, and he had plucked a special one for me. ‘What does this diet involve?’ I inquired. ‘For breakfast, you will have tea. And for lunch you will have tea. And for dinner you will have tea – with a hint of honey’. ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And when will I eat?’ He paused. ‘You will eat tea – as you like. But there is a strict limit on the honey’.
I laughed out loud. He ignored me. ‘And I see you take anti-depressants, Mr Hari. You will stop taking them while you are here’. ‘I have been taking them for seven years – they are a serious medication,’ I spluttered. ‘You are at the bottom of a mountain,’ he warned, ‘and you will struggle to climb to the highest heights…’ ‘I am not stopping my anti-depressant without consulting my GP,’ I insisted. He shook his head and replied: ‘Very well. But you must learn this is not a depressing place’.
All my alarm bells were ringing. What sort of doctor was this? I staggered out to begin the Mayr Clinic’s programme of activities. They discouraged vigorous exercise – my philosophy exactly – so I was led to my room to have a rest (after being awake for three hours) and to have a warm hay liver pack laid on my stomach”.

His credulity was stretched to the limit: “Next, my timetable stated, I had an appointment in the clinic’s ’saline cabin’. I was shut into a chamber while simulated sea-air began to slowly surround me. I waited for 15 minutes, breathing this…and nothing happened. I felt exactly the same.
Three days passed in a blur like this, talking to disoriented people, trying useless ‘treatments’, and feeling my stomach digest itself. Soon, I had a Hiroshima-force headache. When I asked for an Aspirin, I was offered a tube. ‘Attach this to the tap and give yourself an enema,’ the nurse said”.

Such unhealthy abstinence naturally did not agree with him: “On day four, I awoke at three in the morning, drooling after a dream where I had drowned inside a gigantic strawberry milkshake. In a frenzy, I gathered up the fluff underneath my bed, and seriously considered eating it. I scampered down to the kitchen determined to raid it, but it had been fatty-proofed: even with all my strength, I could not break into the stock of stale rolls.
Enough. I demanded an appointment with the doctor and told him I could not take this any more. He stroked his facial hair and said, ‘I think you are lacking in courage, Mr Hari’. ‘No, I am lacking in food,’ I replied. ‘Very well. We will give you a meal’. A meal! I nearly kissed him. I went to the restaurant – and was given something that would barely constitute a snack in the outside world – a tiny chunk of pizza. I wept and realised I will never, never be thin.
In despair, I checked myself out. Yes, I was half a stone lighter – but how sustainable was a diet where I eat nothing? How credible was the science of ‘inner body cleansing’ anyway? But perhaps a small part of their theories turned out to be true.
At the airport, I looked at the succulent array of sandwiches and burgers – and something miraculous happened – I craved a fruit salad. I slowly, carefully chewed an array of berries and melons and kiwi fruit and gurgled with pleasure. The cravings for lard had leeched out of my system”.

If concentrated bouts of self-deprivation leave you cold, there is always the magic potion, stuff of fairy tales…Jeremy Laurance (The Independent, 11th November 2005), gave the low down on the results of research by Professor Aaron Hsueh, endocrinologist and expert in obstetrics and gynaecology, in Hunger hormone discovery boosts fight against obesity [note throughout the recourse to military vocabulary – fat is the enemy to be conquered and subdued]: “The discovery of a new hormone that suppresses appetite has been hailed by scientists who said it opened a new front in the search for a treatment for obesity.
The hormone, obestatin, is a sibling to ghrelin, which increases appetite, leading researchers to call them the ‘duelling hunger hormones’.
The find surprised scientists, who believed all the key hormones involved in appetite had been identified. But the discovery of obestatin could explain why treatments based on existing hormones have failed.
Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine who injected rats with a synthetic version of obestatin found they ate half as much as rats given no injection. The treatment also slowed the movement of digested food from the stomach to the intestine”.

Apparently: “As the ghrelin protein stimulates appetite, scientists expected experiments in animals in which the gene was switched off would depress appetite. In fact, switching off the gene had almost no effect.
The discovery of obestatin offers an explanation. Deleting the gene for ghrelin also takes out obestatin. So the rats lost their appetite-stimulating and appetite-suppressing hormones at the same time”.

Mr Laurance recalls why we might weigh up tampering with our hormonal system: “Waistlines are expanding so fast that within 10 to 15 years it is predicted that obesity could overtake smoking as the UK’s biggest killer. There are 24 million adults who are classed as overweight.
The cause of the growth is an imbalance between the calories people consume and the energy they expend.
Although we are eating 750 fewer calories a day on average than 20 years ago, activity levels have fallen by 800 calories. Out of this small imbalance has come the wave of obesity. Numbers of obese people have trebled since the 1980s, with 22 per cent of men and 23 per cent of women now classed as obese”. How big a percentage of the population do we need to classify as “obese” before obesity is seen as normal? 100%? I suspect that as soon as it exceeds fifty, the threshold for obesity will finally be revised in favour of a saner estimation (the downside of which is that those who still qualify as obese will not have their lives made any easier).

Alok Jha’s article, Hormone raises hope of victory in war on obesity (The Guardian, 11th November 2005) opens more promisingly than most: “Neville Rigby, the director of policy at the International Obesity Taskforce, welcomed the discovery as another example of the fact that there was more to obesity than most people think. ‘It helps understand that it isn’t simply, as people would have it, a question of sloth or gluttony. There are clearly mechanisms at work in the body which differentiate why one person becomes obese while another person seems to be unaffected. As we understand more of the science of obesity, we have more sympathy for the people affected’”. So acceptance of our fellow human beings is conditional on whether we can exonerate them from “blame”, suggesting that they have no innate, intrinsic value beyond obedience to culturally imposed standards of physical attractiveness and constricting moral precepts.

Jha summarises Professor Hsueh’s work in accessible form: “He had been using the results of the human genome project to create a database of hormone receptors for which there were no known partner hormones. He then identified the ones that seemed most important biologically – the ones that have been conserved through evolution across many species.
The hunt led him to the gene that makes ghrelin, where he found DNA instructions for an unexpected hormone tacked on to the end.
Professor Hsueh set out to make the hormone, which he later named obestatin. ‘We purified this hormone in rats’ stomachs and tested its biological activity,’ he said. ‘To our surprise, we found that treatment with obestatin actually suppresses food intake. The food intake [dropped] by more than 50%. Bodyweight is more like 20% down. So the same gene codes for two hormones and these two hormones have opposing actions in bodyweight regulation’.
Prof Hsueh said his discovery had lots of potential uses. ‘Obestatin itself could have potential as an appetite-suppressing drug because one can use this small peptide by injection,’ he said. ‘The identification of the receptor for obestatin can also allow us to screen for new drugs that can also suppress appetite’”.

We have heard such claims before: “Obesity researchers have been here before with another hormone – leptin – which signals the brain to stop eating. In 1995 scientists discovered that, in mice, leptin had a near miraculous effect of reducing bodyweight by nearly a third. For a while it was hailed as a precursor to a wonder drug. But it never lived up to its promise on humans”. What is never questioned is the desirability of weight loss. It is completely inconceivable that someone might be healthy and content as well as flouting convention.

Once the newsworthiness of obestatin has faded in this era notorious for its short attention spans (another spin-off of consumerism whereby only the newest of the new is worthy of spending time, energy or money on), Alok Jha (The Guardian, 3rd December 2005) catalogues the latest big breakthrough in P57. Enough to put you off your food: “The story goes that, when the San tribe of southern Africa felt hungry but had no food around, they would chew on a plant called the hoodia gordonii. A few mouthfuls of this bitter-tasting succulent later, their hunger pangs would mysteriously disappear. Very soon, the plant will begin its journey to a plate near you. The remarkable appetite-suppressing quality of hoodia has attracted the attention of Unilever and, early next year, a clinical trial will begin on the active ingredient, a combination of molecules codenamed p57.
According to research carried out by Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company Phytopharm, the company that owns the worldwide patent on the extract, p57 suppresses hunger so well that it can make people eat 1,000 fewer calories per day compared to their usual diets. For a society facing the burden of a growing obesity epidemic, Hoodia gordonii is a mouth-watering prospect”.

Western culture’s aversion to the annoying distraction of appetites has only been fuelled further by pressure on budgets (not, please note, by genuine concern over our mental and spiritual well-being): “The search for the physiological reasons behind excessive weight gain and for a way to mitigate it occupies teams of scientists and public health officials worldwide. Much of the research has focused on working out which chemicals in the bloodstream control hunger.
There are two classes of anti-obesity drugs coming onto the market. One type, such as rimonabant, targets the areas of the brain which regulate how we feel, so that we end up eating less. The other type, such as xenical, prevents fat from being absorbed by the intestines. Hoodia seems to do neither of these things. According to Phytopharm, it seems to work as a genuine appetite suppressant. Behavioural studies on animals showed that even those which had their appetite severely suppressed by p57 seemed to show no change in mood or behaviour.
Phytopharm initially worked with Pfizer on bringing Hoodia to market. In 2002, a trial on 30 obese adults showed that the intake of people given the p57 extract dropped by 1,000 calories a day. But after spending around $25m (£14.4m), Pfizer dropped their work on the plant. Pfizer wanted to put p57 into a pill, but the extract was too complex to make artificially. In late 2004, Unilever stepped in, and in a £21m deal, said that it intended to commercially grow hoodia, an endangered plant in its native South Africa, and use the extract in its slimming foods”.

The complexities of our biology prove as exasperating to scientists as do the reasons for our recalcitrance in cutting down when we know it’s not good for us (underlying social causes resolutely overlooked, if not deliberately discounted, there’s no saving to be made in regenerating deprived areas where shelf after shelf of tinned and freezer chest after freezer chest of processed, additive-saturated rubbish seems more tempting than a brown, half-rotted cauliflower and the big supermarket chains have a vested interest in weeding out the shoplifters and protecting their premises from vandals, graffiti-artists and similar undesirables by default): “While p57 holds plenty of promise to help people without having to resort to pharmaceuticals, Prof Blundell [director of the Institute of Psychological Sciences at the University of Leeds] said that, as more of the mysteries of appetite regulation are cracked, more targets for treatments will become apparent.
Recently a new hormone was discovered to suppress appetite – obestatin. ‘It’s clear that there are many molecules floating around in our bodies doing things with some functional properties that we haven’t yet discovered,’ said Prof Blundell”.

That the well-meaning (I am being charitable here, as mentioned earlier, the amounts that could be raked in for finding a “cure” for obesity’s perceived ailment are potentially limitless) efforts of the likes of Professor Hsueh should not cause us to hold our breath in anticipation is demonstrated by as a short unattributed piece in the Daily Mail (2nd November 2005), Nature’s taste for fatty foods: “Scientists have come up with the perfect excuse to explain why some people crave fatty foods.
Liking items that are naughty but nice could all be down to the taste buds.
Until now, it was thought we could only experience five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami – the savoury flavour in mature cheeses such as parmesan. But now fat has been added to the list of tastes picked up on our tongues.
Writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers from the University of Burgundy in France describe a protein on the tip of our taste buds that makes us crave fat.
They looked at how the protein – CD36 – drives taste for fatty foods in mice.
Two sets of mice were used. One had normal taste buds and one lacked the fat-sensitive protein.
Given the choice of drinking normal water or water enriched with a fatty solution, the mice with normal taste buds preferred the fatty water. But those with defective taste buds liked both drinks equally. The animals without CD36 also showed less interest in fat-laden foods.
The researchers’ findings could open the way for new obesity treatments, based on manipulating our sense of taste to deter people from eating fatty foods.
Other experiments showed that taste buds play an important role in starting digestion.
The mice with fat-sensitive taste buds produced bile, which helps break down fat, more quickly than the others”. Evolution’s harsh dictates hard-wired us for delectation in fry-ups to ensure our perpetuation as a species. We may be sedentary now, but in the days of animal skins and clubs boy did our mouths water at the smell of sizzling bacon (ah, and chips with salt and vinegar).

Deborah Orr, in Cut wheat, sugar and caffeine from you diet – along with enjoyment, (The Independent, 5th November 2005), comments on the emerging trend whereby Angst about acquiring an extra ounce transmutes into extreme fastidiousness about what people permit to pass their lips: “I’ve been troubled for ages by the behaviour around food I’ve noticed among some of the most attractive middle-aged women I know. Slender, toned, with the boyish bodies of teenagers, they are never happier than when browsing through the shelves of health food stores like Fresh and Wild. Constantly absolutely starving, and ever on the lookout for ‘healthy snacks’, they’re never actually on something as naff as a diet – though they might embark on a ‘detox’. But they’re never in much danger of putting on weight either, because virtually all food is off-limits due to its unhealthiness.
Cutting out sugar, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast and dairy is usually just the start. According to the ‘detox guru’ Dr Joshi, beloved of Gwyneth Paltrow, even tomatoes should be given the big heave because they promote acid in the stomach. Likewise, fruit should only be eaten two hours before or after other food (unless you suffer from candida, in which case it should never be eaten), and proteins shouldn’t be eaten along with starches. Each day should start with a nice refreshing cup of hot water – with organic unwaxed lemon in if you defy the claims that citrus fruits are too acidic and can wait two hours for breakfast.
If this sounds somewhat cranky, you’ll be relieved to learn that one dietary physician at least is prepared to admit that it could even be dangerous. US doctor Steve Bratman suggests that people – particularly but not exclusively women over 30 – are becoming susceptible to a new sort of eating disorder that he calls orthorexia nervosa. Healthy eating, he says, can become pathological, and behaviour around food can become just as disruptive as any other sort of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. This may not yet be recognised officially as a medical condition. But there’s certainly rather a lot of it about”.

She rightly concludes that we are witnessing the birth of a new food-related syndrome not confined to adolescents: “(…) the massive emphasis on faddy diets and the liberation of women for being too fat (or too thin) are spawning new grown-up variations on mental illnesses that were bad enough when mainly confined to the young”.

Martin Hickman (The Independent, 14th November 2005) spreads the glad tidings that the dire warnings of anti-fat propagandists are having an impact in Britons winning the battle against obesity: “Two thirds of adults say they have improved their diet or exercise over the past year in a sign that the Government may be starting to win the war on obesity.
A poll of 2,000 adults for the National Consumer Council found that 63 per cent had changed their behaviour in the past 12 months with the deliberate intention of becoming healthier.
In an indication that the healthy eating message is getting through, the respondents were eating more fruit and vegetables, shunning salty food and cutting down on convenience meals.
If applied to the population of the UK, the findings suggest that about 30 million adults have tried to become healthier.
However, some groups, of society – the poor, the old and people living on their own – do not yet seem to be changing their diets.
The survey found that more women (66 per cent) than men (61 per cent) were likely to have changed.
Women under 34 were more likely to have sought out healthier ways while men over 55 were least likely to have made changes.
Almost half (45 per cent) of the people on lower income groups D and E had not changed their lifestyles”.

Robin McKie (The Observer, 16th October 2005) on the other hand reinjects a note of gloom in Health experts agree – emails are fattening: “Doctors have hit on a cunning plan to transform fatties into slimline wonders: stop sending emails.
Health experts believe millions of hours of vital exercise are being lost every week thanks to the explosion in electronic messaging.
Once we walked to a colleague’s desk to pass on a filthy joke or reveal what the boss and his secretary were doing on the photocopier room for three hours during the Christmas party. Now it is easier to tap a short note on the computer, hit the send button and the world knows in seconds what has happened. It’s great for gossip: bad for the figure.
As a result, Sport England, as part of its Everyday Sport campaign, is launching Email-Free Friday this week. Employers, it says, should introduce a ban on internal emails and get staff walking around their office – presumably to complain that they can no longer send emails.
‘We’re losing millions of hours of exercise through the explosion of email,’ said Dr Dorian Dugmore, a health adviser to Sport England. ‘People email colleagues who sit next to them, never mind those who work on the other side of the office. We have to change people’s lazy attitudes’. Increasing activity levels by 10 per cent could save 6,000 lives and £500 million per year, as well as leading to one million fewer obese people in England, it is argued.
The idea also reveals a growing antagonism felt by many bosses to electronic messaging. John Cauldwell, chief executive of Phone 4u, has banned his 2,500 staff from using email in the office. ‘We have email paralysis’, he said. ‘If you have a cancer, you have to cut it out’”.

The same subject matter treated in the Daily Mail (unattributed,17th October 2005), Weighty problem of workers who e-mail instead of walk, rounded out the picture: “[Dr Dugmore] said deskbound workers tended to exercise far less than the recommended minimum of 40 minutes a day.
‘We are now all familiar with the five servings of fruit and vegetables every day and now it’s time to start applying the same principle to our working lives’”.

No matter how strictly you observe the discipline, it is never enough (and that is precisely the point; ideals cannot be easily attainable in practice or they would lose their capacity to simultaneously motivate and demoralise): “Dr Dugmore said the average person would take the escalator from the train station, catch a bus to the office, take the lift to the right floor and sit at a desk all day.
‘A cocktail of couch potato and screen slave lifestyles could be a fatal combination’”. How long will it be before blogging and computer games are blamed for all the ills that beset us (not that the latter boast an unbesmirched reputation amongst self-appointed moral guardians concerned with protecting young people against corrupting influences as it is).

Having surveyed some of the options for burning away our calorie reserves should we be so inclined, let us now return to the debate on slashing health care expenditure. Professor Roger Williams set out his thoughts on the death of George Best (Daily Mail, 3rd December 2005): “Of course he deserved a second chance, not least because of research showing that 95 per cent of alcoholics who receive a new liver never drink heavily again.
George, unfortunately, was one of the five per cent who return to heavy drinking, although there was no way of knowing that. We are doctors, not gods – it is not up to us to decide who deserves to live or die; it is up to us to treat the sick to the best of our ability.
And, yes, that includes alcoholics. Indeed, around the world, alcoholic liver disease is second only to hepatitis C as the most common reason for a liver transplant.
True, it ranks lower in this country, perhaps because there is still a body of public opinion that sees this as a self-inflicted condition. But where does that argument stop?
Our hospitals are chock-full of people who smoke too much, eat too much, drive too fast, have unsafe sex, engage in dangerous sports and, yes, drink too much.
As doctors, do we just turn around and say ‘Sorry, but it’s your own fault, we can’t help you’? Of course we don’t. We do all we can to make them better”.

Professor Williams immediately pinpoints the crucial issue: the denial of health care is profoundly undemocratic. Allowing accounting principles and the desire to appease the taxpayer to take precedence over human welfare (why do we have medical care in the first place?) is pernicious in the extreme. Resources may be finite, yet surely treatment for all should be non-negotiable. If you introduce rationing, where do you stop? Failure to toe the line becomes literally life-threatening, slavish adherence to a misplaced ideal the determinant of all worth? I simply refuse to believe that doctors have eradicated every last vestige of compassion in order to please the managers and the target-setters. Or has the Hippocratic Oath been deemed irrelevant? If illness were wiped out medicine would be obsolete. Why should doctors be made to resent applying the knowledge they acquired so painstakingly?

Dr John Briffa, (Observer Magazine, 27th November 2005) disputed conventional medical views on assessing obesity in Hip service: “The fact that our collective mass has grown considerably of late has inevitably triggered warnings from health professionals about how this may swell our risk of weight-related conditions such as heart disease. Ideal weight recommendations traditionally come in the form of the body mass index (BMI) – calculated by dividing an individual’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres. However, the usefulness of the BMI in judging heart disease risk has recently been called into question in a study in The Lancet, which found that, once factors such as smoking and exercise habits were taken into consideration, the BMI has no significant bearing on heart-attack risk.
This study is not the only research that has cast some doubt on the relevance of the BMI as a predictor of our propensity to disease and death. Earlier this year, the journal Circulation published a study that found that in individuals having surgery for heart disease (coronary artery bypass), mortality after surgery was lowest in individuals whose weight was categorised as overweight (BMI of 25 to less than 30) or ‘high-normal’. These results and those of the recent Lancet study clearly cast doubt on the appropriateness of standard medical recommendations that a ‘healthy’ BMI of between 19 and 25 is ideal in terms of heart health.
While research that asks questions of the received wisdom regarding the relationship between BMI and heart health is interesting, it is perhaps not as telling as research which seeks to establish the relationship between this measure of body weight and overall risk of death. Earlier this year, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study stating that underweight and obesity (a BMI of 30 or more) were both associated with an increased risk of death. However, surprisingly, this study found that compared to those in the ‘healthy’ BMI category, those categorised as ‘overweight’ (a BMI of 25 to 29.9) were actually at reduced risk of death.
There is a growing recognition that it is not fat per se, but fat which aggregates around the middle of the body (’abdominal fat’) that is strongly linked with health issues such as heart disease. The Lancet study found that a higher ratio of waist circumference to hip circumference (waist-to-hip ratio) was very clearly associated with increased heart attack risk. Ideally, men and women should have waist-to-hip ratios no larger than about 0.90 and 0.83 respectively. From a health perspective, the evidence suggests it is an individual’s waist-to-hip ratio, rather than their BMI, that represents their vital statistic”. How often has the tyranny of BMI blighted the lives of perfectly healthy individuals, not to mention penalised them financially in the shape of hiked-up insurance premiums (of which more later)? I reproduce Dr Briffa’s deliberations to illustrate that even our most hallowed ideas are open to testing and revision and we should not be blinded into unquestioning acceptance.

The editorial in the Daily Mail, (28th November 2005) responded to the news in a slightly less blinkered manner than is its wont by admitting that other factors may be involved than simple gluttony (a lazy explanation if ever there was one), in Doctor’s orders?: “From Britain’s most risibly misnamed quango, NICE (…) comes somewhat nasty guidance. It suggests patients with ’self-inflicted’ illnesses, such as smokers and the obese, could be denied treatment.
At first blush, such an approach may seem reasonable enough. Should the late George Best, for example, have been given a liver transplant that might more beneficially have gone to somebody else?
But consider the risks if quangocrats influence the clinical judgement of doctors? Where do we draw the line? Should we deny treatment to people who indulge in dangerous sports? Or who choose difficult, stressful jobs?
No, a more sensible way of reducing strains on the NHS would be for NICE to focus on the avoidable threats to health created by 24-hour drinking or the sale of school playing fields, which is producing so many couch-potato children.
But that would mean embarrassing its political masters. Isn’t it much easier to indulge in moral posturing at the expense of patients who can’t hit back?”

On the letters page of the same edition, Roger Dollery spoke from the heart: “Another health authority is using the body mass index to limit operations. What they don’t tell anyone is that they are condemning people to a life of pain with no chance of an operation.
Ten years ago my wife was told by a consultant that she needed spinal fusion to cure her back pain – but they wouldn’t operate unless she lost three stones.
She had difficulty walking and this built up her muscles, so the diets she was on resulted in her weight increasing because muscle is heavier than fat.
Nobody could understand why her weight was not going down, but all they did was prescribe stronger painkillers. The result of these was increased lethargy.
Luckily we read (…) about Taj Medical Group arranging operations in India.
We have just returned from there, where my wife had successful back surgery. They did tests to ensure she was fit to undergo the operation, but they could not understand the use of BMI as a filter in the UK.
Recently, the Mail published the height and weight of the English and Australian rugby teams’ front-row forwards – and only one player had a body mass index lower than 30, the technical level of obesity.
I wonder of they know that if they’re injured in the UK, they might not be operated on?”

The cold wind blowing through the hospital corridors had nothing to do with the season. The dire predictions made by John Carvel (The Guardian, 2nd December 2005), in NHS crisis as deficits top £900m made for a depressing prognosis: “[Health secretary Patricia Hewitt] released confidential returns forecasting a collective overspend of £623m by the end of the financial year. A quarter of all the country’s trusts are forecasting deficits that total £948m”.

The therapy was to be drastic: “The department [of Health] said the hit squads – to be known as ‘turnaround teams’ – will be selected on Monday after a lightning tendering exercise over the weekend involving City accountancy firms. They will be instructed to cut spending to reduce the deficit to £200m by March without endangering patient safety. But quick and easy savings may be hard as trusts are already engaged in economies including ward closures, lengthening waiting times, recruitment freezes and the reduced use of emergency nurses”.

Carvel followed up with another report in The Guardian (3rd December 2005), Operations go-slow forced by NHS crisis: “In London, Staffordshire and other areas forecasting big deficits, NHS commissioners are trying to save money by quietly instructing hospitals to delay non-emergency surgery until the start of the new financial year in April.
The strategy is a response to health secretary Patricia Hewitt’s crackdown on overspending but it threatens the government’s drive to reduce waiting times.
Hospitals are being asked to meet the government’s target for a six month maximum wait – but only just. In many areas, cash-strapped primary care trusts (PCTs) are ordering consultants to introduce a five-month minimum wait unless there are medical complications”.

The overweight were the first to feel the pinch: “Within the last few days, East Suffolk PCT has been ordered by its health authority to abandon an attempt to delay paying its March salary cheques to contain its overspend. The trust said last month it would no longer provide hip replacements to obese patients, partly due to financial pressures”.

James Chapman (Daily Mail, 9th December 2005) explored the implications in greater detail in Eat, drink too much and NHS may deny you care: “Heavy smokers and drinkers and the overweight could be denied NHS treatment because of their lifestyle, it emerged yesterday.
Controversial guidance from the Health Service drugs rationing watchdog raises the prospect of them being refused help if their condition makes treatment ineffective.
Age could also be taken into account if it directly affects the success of a drug or procedure, according to a report by the National Institute For Health and Clinical Excellence.
Its findings triggered a huge political row, with Opposition MPs predicting it could encourage treatment rationing for vulnerable groups.
Details emerged just weeks after three health trusts in Suffolk announced that obese people would be denied hip and knee replacements on the NHS.
The guidance also follows Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt’s suggestion that hospitals could delay treatment to save money. Earlier this week, she said it was acceptable for NHS hospitals to make patients wait for up to two months if it meant reducing their debts.
Doctors say the risks of operating on obese patients are higher and the treatment may be less effective, with replacement joints wearing out sooner. But patient groups and MPs fear the latest NICE report could pave the way for cash-strapped hospitals to deny treatment to other patient groups in the future.
The report said: ‘If self-inflicted causes of the condition influence the clinical or cost effectiveness of the use of an intervention, it may be appropriate to take this into account’.
Dr David Haslam, clinical director of the National Obesity Forum, said: ‘This is the thin end of the wedge. If someone has got lung cancer are we going to say, ‘Bad luck mate, you’re a smoker’?
‘Or take sports injuries. If you play football and break your leg, okay, to a certain extent that’s because of your lifestyle. So where do we need to draw the line? If you are ill, you need treatment, full stop’.
Dr Haslam said he could understand why a morbidly-obese patient who might die on the operating table could be denied surgery for a non life-threatening condition. But he added: ‘These decisions must always be clinical, rather than financial’.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Steve Webb said: ‘There is no excuse for cash-strapped hospitals denying treatment to people whose lifestyle they disapprove of.
treatment decisions involving people’s lifestyle should be based on clinical reasons, not grounds of cost. The NHS is there to keep people healthy not to sit in judgement on individual lifestyles’.
Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley said: ‘There must be absolutely no discrimination in medical care unless there are clear clinical reasons to withhold it or clear evidence that treatment will not be effective.
‘The correct way to tackle poor public health is through effective public health policy. The Government has so far failed to protect public health, with worsening rates of smoking, obesity and sexually-transmitted diseases’.
Claire Rayner, president of the Patients’ Association, said the question of lifestyle choices and treatment was ‘awfully difficult’ and must be left to individual doctors.
She pointed to the case of George Best, who continued drinking after being given a liver transplant and died last month. ‘There are many people who felt it was not reasonable to remove the chance of a liver transplant from another man,’ she said. ‘So these are difficult decisions.
If someone eats a lot of salt because of their culture and they suffer kidney failure or a heart attack, are we going to refuse to treat them?
‘If someone crosses the road in a bad way because they are drunk and gets run over, would we refuse to treat their injuries?
‘If we start down that road, we will end up not treating sexually-transmitted diseases because you could say they are self-inflicted’”.

The chorus of condemnation from across the political spectrum made the NICE squirm, but not back down completely: “NICE insists there will be no ‘blanket ban’ on particular treatments for patients with certain lifestyles. But if lifestyle choices are such that they make treatment ineffective, that could be taken into account, a spokesman explained.
Dr Tonya Gillis, of NICE, said: ‘We are in no way making judgements abut people’s social and lifestyle decisions or choices.
‘The only time we are saying it’s permissible to consider lifestyle choice is when it’s going to mean that the treatment won’t work’.
The report was commissioned to consider whether social background, age or lifestyle choices should ever influence the care provided by the NHS.
It concluded that no priority should be given for treatment based on someone’s income, social class or social roles at different ages.
It said clinical guidance should only recommend a treatment for a particular age group where there was clear evidence of a difference in the treatment’s effectiveness for that group”.

The editorial in The Guardian (10th December 2005) took careful stock of the funding situation: “About one quarter of NHS trusts are in deficit and currently forecasting an aggregate deficit of £1bn.
Seasoned observers will say there is nothing new in this. NHS units always are in deficit in the run-up to Christmas and when trusts that are in surplus are included the deficit shrinks to £620m. But this year is different. First, the NHS is about to embark on probably the biggest changes in its 57-year history. The instability which Ms Hewitt hoped to create was not due to have started yet. It was supposed to happen with the launch of Labour’s sharp-elbowed market next April when financial flows to hospitals, ambulance services, primary care and mental health teams will be much more dependent on the number of patients they treat (…) Second, although there is a history of deficits, the pattern has been getting worse as a joint report from two government spending watchdogs set out in June. Third, the worsening financial situation comes despite the NHS already having received five record years of investment more than doubling its budget in cash terms to £75bn.
Certainly the top of the NHS is taking these developments seriously. For all the bullishness of Sir Nigel Crisp, the NHS chief executive, at this week’s launch of his annual report, his actions belie his assertions that the reforms are not unravelling. Budget hit squads (or in the NHS jargon ‘turnaround teams’) are being dispatched to 50 trusts in trouble to halt their escalating deficits. After eight years of calls to cut waiting times and waiting lists – which have been remarkably successful – the health secretary this week urged trusts in trouble to delay non-emergency operations, reduce other non-essential services and even leave capacity idle to ensure that deficits are reduced.
Even with these initiatives, the service may still be in trouble. Absurdly, the current system is in the middle of a radical restructuring of the 300 primary care trusts (PCTs) that hold 70% of the NHS budget. They are due over the next year to shrink by as much as a half with redundancies expected to reach 6,000. The 28 strategic health authorities are due to follow suit. More serious still, at a point when senior managers should be totally focused on planning the start of the new market, all chief executives, chairmen, and senior staff are being required to reapply for the new posts once the new structure is clear. Guess what most of their minds were focused on?”

As Antony Barnett and Solomon Hughes revealed in The Observer (11th December 2005), in ‘Stop spending’ memo reveals NHS cash crisis the sacrifices expected were significant: “An e-mail sent from the office of Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer by Sarndrah Horsfall, chief of staff: “It promises to sound the death knell for a range of public health programmes set up to tackle everything from alcohol abuse and cancer screening to STDs and obesity. Health experts believe the spending freeze could even hit attempts to reduce deadly MRSA outbreaks in hospitals and affect contingency planning in the event of an outbreak of bird flu”.

In the same edition Jo Revill (This year’s NHS bill is £87bn…) drew on a paper drawn up by the King’s Fund to show how the money had been swallowed up: “Its analysis shows that much of it [the extra spending on the NHS] has gone on ‘hidden costs’. In the past year, around 29 per cent of the money set aside for hospitals and community services was spent on a technical change to NHS pensions, known as rebasing, which is the cost of transferring inflation-proofed pensions from the Treasury to the Department of Health.
The next biggest chunk, 27 per cent, went on pay increases for staff. Another 12 per cent went on staffing reforms – the cost of modernising contracts with doctors and staff, which are aimed at getting them to work more flexibly in return for extra pay.
Setting aside money for medical negligence claims took up a further 5 per cent. After all this was allowed for, just 2.4 per cent was left over for providing new beds and extra operations – barely above the rate of inflation”.

The article cited Alastair Forbes, professor of gastroenterology at University College London Hospitals: “He has another, deeper objection to the rationing of treatment: ‘As doctors, of course, we have to realise that we have a limited budget and that you can’t give every treatment to every patient. But to deny treatment on the grounds of cost alone, without looking at what that means for the individual – that leaves us on very shaky ground indeed’”.

The editorial, Put patients first, NHS hit squads are no solution asked questions about the financial shot in the arm: “Wards closed, operations cancelled, and treatment rationed – the bad old days of the NHS lurching from crisis to crisis are once again upon us. A predicted deficit of £620 million this year has been forcing managers to make tough decisions about cuts.
Yet, this year, the NHS will have received £87 billion – £22bn more than it did three years ago. Much of this has gone on pay rises. Healthcare staff, particularly those who have been historically ill-rewarded, had to be paid more or parts of the service would have collapsed. But questions over whether all the pay rises were justified remain. General practitioners have done very well out of their new contracts, some now earning around £130,000 this year. The government intended that its deal with GPs two years ago would modernise the service, but seriously underestimated how much it would cost. Nor has there been much sign that family doctor services have improved”.

Sarah Boseley’s Hewitt defends public spending curbs (The Guardian, 12th December 2005) indicated how the embarrassment factor had affected Ms Hewitt. She had played down the significance of the document on ITV1’s Jonathan Dimbleby programme, alleging: “The memo referred solely to the department of health budget which pays for public health campaigns and other centralised projects – not that of the NHS. Primary care trusts were not affected”.

Indeed: “Ms Hewitt insisted that the department would be pressing ahead with a range of recently announced public health programmes, including ones on obesity and sexual health”.

The storm had not died down altogether, however. In the Daily Mail letters page (13th December 2005), John B. A. Wood, trauma and orthopaedic consultant at University Hospital, Lewisham, London stood up for the principle of discriminating against the overweight: “Obese patients won’t be denied treatment on the NHS, but they might not get joint replacement surgery – for several reasons.
They present technical difficulties because of the mechanical effects of a large volume of fat under the skin, and often have hypertension and Type 2 diabetes. The risk of wound infection during an operation is slightly higher.
And joint replacements tend to wear out: any engineer will tell you that wear is related to the load applied.
Revision operations, even when they go well, don’t have the same success rate as first-time surgery. Most patients reduce or lose their symptoms when they lost their excess weight.
Weight loss is a fundamental treatment for osteo-arthritis, long before surgery is contemplated.
For six months, we’ve been conducting a trial at my hospital, treating obese patients with musculo-skeletal problems.
They see an orthopaedic consultant surgeon, a clinical dietician and a physiotherapist with the aim of helping them lose weight while controlling their painful symptoms.
Dietary advice and exercise programmes are devised, including non-weight-bearing activities such as swimming or aqua-aerobics. This is still treatment, but it isn’t surgery. It still costs money, but it’s simply good value for that money.
Injuries incurred while taking part in sport should not be charged for as it’s your choice to take part in sport. There should be sports injury insurance, just as there is for road users.
The NHS no longer has a blank cheque to treat everyone’s illness – unless the Government pays for free treatment for all at the point of delivery, which is now not the case. So don’t blame the doctors, blame the Government”.

Colin Brown (The Independent, 14th December 2005), noted with satisfaction the health secretary’s admission that Government policy was not perfect in Hewitt refutes ‘meltdown’ claim but says NHS is still failing: “She said reforms were part of the solution to the ills of the NHS, not its problem. ‘While some parts of the NHS are world-beating, the NHS as a whole is not,’ she said. ‘It still fails too many people, especially the poorest, most vulnerable and most in need’”. From the mouth of a New Labour cabinet minister, such a statement represents a searing indictment.

Simon Jenkins (The Guardian, 14th December 2005), performs his own diagnosis of the rot that has been permitted to set in (The NHS needs localisation, not regulated privatisation): “Not surprisingly people have wondered where all the money has gone. Half has been spent simply inflating pay and pensions. Average GP salaries are now over £100,000, with a contract that relieves staff of night duty. Some £6bn is being blown on a toys-for-boys computer which no one claims to need. Privately run hospitals are drawing down large sums of NHS money in profit, rent and contract payments. Meanwhile patients are facing cancelled operations and the closure of much-loved hospitals.
The national health service is doomed. It is simply too big. In its first quarter century it was left alone – and was popular at home and legendary abroad. In its second quarter century it was subject to constant political fidget, first by Patrick Jenkin, Norman Fowler, Kenneth Clarke and Virginia Bottomley, then by Frank Dobson, Alan Milburn and John Reid. Now Hewitt is threatening a blitz of hit squads, zero tolerance, market testing and payment by results”.

Again, the irony is that people of my generation who grew up during the darkest hours of Thatcher’s reign had loyally voted Labour in order to guard the NHS against Tory depredations: “Ten years after blood-curdling threats that the Tories would privatise the NHS, Tony Blair is doing just that.
Whether Britons are ready to dismantle such essentially local institutions as schools or hospitals must be doubtful. Choice, diversity, competition are words which Blair clones incant as they wander the corridors of Downing Street like Hare Krishna acolytes. But there is no sign that they understand the meaning. In August a Which? poll was unequivocal: 90% of people did not want choice, just a good hospital within easy reach.
No other western nation tries to run doctors and hospitals as a civil service centrally from the capital. Health is mostly a provincial or county responsibility”.

Now that the concept of restricting health care entitlements to the “deserving”, that is, non-smoking, non-tippling, slender members of the middle-class or above has been aired I fear that sooner rather than later implementing measures will be devised (perhaps euphemistically labelled “guidelines” or “recommendations”) and put into practice. Unless we take action now.

Still on a medical theme, Jeremy Laurance (The Independent, 29th November 2005), in Expanding bottoms pose problem for medical jabs, targeted our amply-cushioned posteriors as the butt (in both the British and American senses of the term) of a joke: “The expanding size of people’s bottoms is presenting doctors with a new medical challenge: how to get injectable drugs to where they are needed.
Injections given in the buttocks are unlikely to work because patient’s bottoms are too fat, researchers said yesterday. For drugs to be effective, injections must be delivered into muscle which is supplied with microscopic blood vessels, to maximise absorption of the medicine. But the larger size of the average backside means the muscle is now covered with a layer of fat and the standard needles fitted to syringes are not long enough to penetrate it.
Researchers gave injections with a tiny air bubble to 50 men and women and then observed what happened using a CT scanner. They found that only 32 per cent of the injections reached the muscle. In men just over half the injections were successful but in women only 8 per cent were.
Injectable drugs including painkillers, contraceptives and anti-nausea medication, have traditionally been given in the bottom because it offers a substantial pad of soft tissue.
Victoria Chan, from the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, said: ‘Our study has demonstrated that a majority of people, especially women, are not getting the proper dosage from injections to the buttocks. There is no question that obesity is the underlying cause’”.

Ms Chan, however, was not one to be interrupted in her stride by such an obstacle: “Drugs companies had designed their drugs so that the proper dosage was absorbed into the bloodstream from the muscle and if it was injected into fat tissue less of it would be absorbed. The answer, she said, was to use longer needles when injecting into the buttocks”.

In the Daily Mail, letters page (8th November 2005), David Bartram lamented our schizophrenic attitudes towards food: “Last month heralded the introduction of yet more food health-related labelling, this time concerning potentially allergenic ingredients in packaged foods. Is this a benefit to the health of the nation, or merely fuel to food-related neuroses?
In the face of a welter of recent guidelines and regulations aimed at fostering better health by improving our relationship with food, food-related health problems are steadily rising.
Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are increasing while half to two-thirds of the population are, at the other extreme, either overweight or obese, predisposed to heart disease, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, to name but a few associated illnesses.
Food-related paranoia and hysteria is affecting our emotional well-being as well as our physical health.
It causes nervous checking of labels, perceived intolerances or allergies, the perception that any fat is incompatible with healthy eating, a burgeoning ’slimming industry’ based on spurious claims, assignation of moral values (’good’ or ‘bad’) to different foods, the myth of the need to ‘detox’, the anathema of GM foods, use of so-called functional foods such as cholesterol-reducing spreads, glycaemic indices, questionable health benefits of ‘going organic’, the confused perception that emaciation is the acme of body shape aesthetics, discordant claims for high-carb vs. low-carb diets etc.
It’s time for a new paradigm in food health education so we can enjoy all food again.
Moderation must be the over-riding theme: the concept that there is no such thing as bad food, just a bad diet – and that provided any single element of our diet is not eaten to excess, we should remain healthy.
Let’s put the fun back into eating – and the health of the nation will improve”.

Yet the gospel preached by the media does not fall on unreceptive, heretical ears, witness the Daily Mail on cereals no longer gracing our tables first thing in the morning (29th November 2005, unattributed, Britons go bananas for breakfast): “A banana for breakfast has become the choice of millions of health-conscious Britons before they make the daily dash to work and school, a survey reveals.
Clock-watching families find it impossible to sit down for a traditional meal to start their day so growing numbers are turning to the fruit as a healthy alternative.
According to trade magazine The Grocer, 2.5 billion bananas were eaten in the home last year – an increase of 2 per cent on the previous year – and a third of these were consumed for breakfast.
The Grocer said: ‘Bananas are quick and easy to eat and provide the health benefits that consumers want at the start of the day. This means they make an ideal breakfast replacement on hectic weekday mornings.
‘Consumers are eating bananas as a real alternative to traditional snack foods’”.

Of course, blaming women for their lack of restraint has never gone out of fashion (The Independent, 1st December 2005, unattributed), as shown, for example, by Diet warning to pregnant women: “Pregnant women who over-eat could condemn their children to a lifetime of weight problems. Two US studies said that children of women who piled on the pounds while pregnant were especially prone to obesity in later life. Experts agree it is important for pregnant women to put on some extra weight”.

John von Radowitz (The Independent, 28th November 2005) eagerly related how the slightest lapse could wreck the future of the unborn child in Mother’s diet can influence a child’s taste, says study: “Flavours experienced in the womb and later, in mother’s milk may have a significant influence on what children are willing to eat.
Research shows that the experience of food eaten by pregnant women and mothers can be transmitted to their foetuses and infants, according to a nutritionist, Julie Mennella.
Those first flavours can play a major role in determining a child’s later food preferences. The research suggests that one way to persuade children to eat their greens might be for mothers to eat vegetables themselves during and just after pregnancy”.

Apparently: “One French study had shown the children of mothers exposed to anise-flavoured drinks while breastfeeding were less likely to be put off the taste of aniseed than other babies. Similar research in Ireland found the same kind of results using garlic.
Other work involving vanilla, onions and carrots had shown that foods could flavour amniotic fluid as well as breast milk and they also influenced children’s tastes.
The effect is already well known in animals. A European study showed that newly weaned rabbits will make juniper berries their food of choice if the berries had previously been fed to their mothers.
Ms Mennella repeated the rabbit experiment with 45 human mothers, substituting carrot juice for juniper. The women were split into three groups. One was given carrot juice over several weeks during the last three months of pregnancy while another had carrot juice as the women were breastfeeding. ‘When the babies were at weaning we tested their acceptance of carrot-flavoured cereal,’ said Ms Mennella. ‘Not only did they eat more but when we looked at videotapes, the babies made less negative faces while eating’.
The same effect was not seen in babies of the third group of mothers who had not been exposed to carrot juice. They tended to turn their noses up when presented with the carrot-flavoured cereal.
Taste and smell are primitive senses developed according to evolutionary pressure to help guide us towards the most beneficial food sources, Ms Mennella told the meeting, organised by a baby food manufacturer, Nutricia. In times of scarcity, this means seeking out sweet tastes which act as ‘labels’ for high calorie foods. Unpleasant, bitter tastes, on the other hand, offer a warning of potentially harmful foods such as poisonous vegetables.
Mothers, Ms Mennella suggested, could help ‘programme’ their new-borns into knowing what is good for them through their own food choices”.

For once, however, men were also in the firing line (Daily Mail, 5th January 2006, unattributed, How smoking could make your son fat): “Men who smoke at a young age are more likely to have overweight sons, researchers have found.
The study, based on evidence from the UK and Sweden, suggests for the first time that fathers can pass the legacy of an unhealthy lifestyle on to their descendants.
The first study – of British men who had babies in the early Nineties – showed that those who took up smoking before puberty went on to have fatter than average sons. A similar effect was not seen for daughters.
A second team of scientists looked at historical records from a remote area of northern Sweden and found that people whose grandparents had eaten less between the ages of nine and 12 lived longer. The effect was gender-specific, with women passing the legacy on to grand-daughters and men to grandsons.
Chemical modifications to DNA are thought to explain how the impact of lifestyle and the environment is passed down through the generations.
In the past it was thought that such ‘epigenetic’ changes were not inherited, New Scientist magazine reports today.
Professor Marcus Pembrey, of University College London, which carried out some of the research, said: ‘The Bible says the sins of the fathers are visited upon his children unto the third and fourth generations’”.

The new insight into the influence of social factors upon genetics was expanded upon by Jenny Hope (Daily Mail, 12th December 2005), And if you’re overweight, you can blame it on your grandad: “Your weight and chances of becoming ill could be affected more by your grandparents’ experiences than those of your parents, say researchers.
The impact of stress, famine, over-eating and even smoking becomes embedded in the family’s genes – but they skip a generation, it is claimed.
The idea is based on research showing boys and girls suffering food shortages in childhood bequeath a longer lifespan to their grandchildren.
Obesity in children today might also be affected by whether their grandfather started smoking while still at school. Professor Marcus Pembrey, of the Institute of Child Health, University College London, said the notion of ‘environmental inheritance’ could explain modern epidemics of disease.
He said the new approach was a radical departure from conventional thinking, which only looked at genes inherited from our parents, coupled with lifestyle.
‘There are certain times of life when the environment can trigger a response, which has a ripple effect down the generations,’ Professor Pembrey said.
‘The benefits of understanding when this exists are very obvious from a public health point of view.
‘When looking for the causes of the current epidemic of obesity perhaps we shouldn’t just be blaming the lifestyle of this generation.
‘It could be obesity now is a response to lifestyles adopted by previous generations’.
Findings released today by Children of the 90s researchers in Bristol, along with research by Professor Lars Bygren at Umea University, Sweden, using records from the 19th century, show the impact of adaptation down the generations (…)
Professor Bygren looked at records on harvests and food prices and the health of families over three generations.
Professor Pembrey said: ‘He found the lifespan of the grandchildren seemed to be influenced by their parental grandfathers’ access to food, particularly during the grandfather’s slow growth period – between nine and 12 years old.
‘Children tended to live longer if their grandfather had endured food scarcity during this particular time of life.
‘I believe our results are signs of a response mechanism which has evolved in humans allowing us to adapt to different circumstances from one generation to another’”.

Roger Dobson and Tom Anderson (The Independent on Sunday, 11th December 2005) turned the spotlight onto research that corroborated something we had always suspected but which had always been brushed aside as making a virtue out of a necessity in Slim=sad. Fat=happy: “It is the body type that millions yearn for. They seek slender perfection, thinking it will bring sex, power and happiness. However, they should be prepared to be disappointed – and deeply depressed.
A new study has revealed that, rather than being content and confident, slim people struggle to deal with life’s woes. Anxiety and mental suffering often dominate their lives – to such a degree that they are much more likely to commit suicide than large people.
The startling new insight into the deep mental troughs many slender people sink into comes in a report led by psychologists at Bristol University. They teamed up with colleagues across Europe to study the lifestyles of thousands of people and the results were far less happy than rotund ones.
Over a 16-year period, the ups and downs of more than a million lives were examined and it was found that as a person’s body mass index (BMI) rose the risk of serious depression fell. And when the scientists considered more than 3,000 people who had committed suicide they found that their BMI was on average significantly lower than those who did not kill themselves.
Various other factors that could bias the results, such as socio-economic status, were taken into account.
‘We were quite surprised as there is a view that people who are overweight may be stigmatised and made to feel depressed,’ said Professor David Gunnell, of Bristol University, one of the authors of the study (…)
‘Our finding provide some support for the idea that fatter people are at reduced risk of the problems that lead to suicide’.
That did not come as a surprise to those who warn about the dangers of losing weight.
Joanne Roper, of Hugs International, an anti-diet pressure group, said: ‘Slimming makes you miserable. Dieting can bring people down and make them obsessed with their body image. You’ve got to be happy with what you’ve got and not worry about things too much. It takes work but if you can accept yourself as you are then you’ll be happy generally’”

Even the bullying and inferiority complexes the skinnies so desperately endeavour to instil in us do not wipe out our zest for life: “The pan-European study revealed that for each 5kg per square metre increase in BMI, the risk of suicide decreased by 15 per cent.
Exactly why is not clear, although there are a number of theories. Some research shows that people with insulin resistance, a condition associated with a raised BMI, may have a reduced risk of depression and suicidal behaviour.
Insulin resistance is associated with levels of serotonin, the feel-good hormone. One of the main types of anti-depressant drugs works by increasing the amount of serotonin.
It is possible, researchers say, that people who eat more have higher levels of serotonin, which may lower levels of depression. Other research has found a link between obesity and low levels of anxiety and depression.
‘High BMI appears to be associated with lower suicide risk,’ said Professor Gunnell. However, he added: ‘Since a high BMI is also associated with an increased risk of cardio-vascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and other important causes of morbidity and mortality, we would not recommend interventions to increase BMI to prevent suicide or increase levels of happiness’”.

Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian, 12th December 2005) parodied the news: “Psychologists at Bristol University have discovered that thin people are more likely to commit suicide than their fat counterparts. They discovered the average body mass index of 3,000 suicides was significantly lower than those who did not kill themselves.
How should the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) respond to this? By recommending that NHS counselling should be denied to thin depressives, obviously. If smokers, drinkers and overweight people can be refused treatment because their ailments are self-inflicted, then thin people must accept the consequences of their actions too. Thin people, just as much as fat, have to be responsible for their lifestyle choices. The point, surely, is not ‘diet and die’ but rather ‘diet and then die, Twiggy’”.

He cast aspersions on the study’s credibility with a twinkle in his eye: “Researchers at Clerkenwell University (i.e. me) are doing a rival study to find out if the Bristol psychologists are fat people with a grudge. We will be testing the hypothesis that this study is being published to undermine Nice’s nasty recommendations and to scupper government plans to issue so-called Fatbos which involve, I learn from my government source, keeping the 22% of the adult population who are obese indoors during shop opening hours.
Hazel Blears’ so-called ‘cake-shop curfew’, I can reveal, will follow Tony Blair’s announcement tomorrow of the creation of Asbos for under-10s or so-called ‘teeny tearaways’. ‘The challenge is to find new groups to stigmatise,’ says my source. ‘Hence Fatbos. Soon Hazel and Tony will be the only people without Asbos, which is consistent with government policy aimed at ensuring that neither of them should have to live in fear”.

He extracts every ounce of humour from inverting the clichés without, however, disputing them: “An obesity expert tells the Sunday Telegraph that parents obsessed with healthy eating and fad diets raise children who feel guilty about food and risk becoming binge eaters in later life. Surely the opposite might be true: they could risk becoming self-loathing anorexics. Some may even become obesity experts.
What will happen to such obese children when they go to hospital seeking treatment for fat-related ailments? Will they be refused it because their chubosity was self-inflicted? That would be so unfair! Surely parents should be refused NHS treatment if they raise children who overeat in order to compensate for mum and dad’s crackpot yo-yo dieting. You see, thin people are the problem in today’s society. Fat people are the solution”.

Jaya Narain gave the Daily Mail’s angle on the story (12th December 2005), in Dieters ‘have slim chance of happiness’: “Being slim has long been held as a key element in sexual attraction, success and happiness.
But a study shows that skinny people are more likely to be unhappy and commit suicide than those who are overweight”.

If only the following statement were true in the medium and long term as opposed to the few fleeting moments generated by the publicity: “The study will be a blow to the dieting business. It will also give credibility to the theory that the overweight really are jollier”.

Zoë Williams (The Guardian, 28th December 2005) was also inspired to comment in Gluttony is good for you: “Clichés only turn into clichés because they’re true. Otherwise, they just become a weird thing that someone in a bank once said to you. So I’m assuming that this will cheer you up, because I’m assuming that, at precisely this time of year, you’re probably quite fat. Or maybe just fat for you. No, no, don’t go out and change – you’ll be fine going out looking like that…
Scientists in Bristol have discovered that fat people are more cheerful than their peers. I thought this was just a revivification of the ancient (well…maybe 25-year-old) wisdom that says you shouldn’t go on a totally fat-free diet because your brain needs its fat surround to keep from crashing against your skull. That makes you depressed, apparently. But you don’t have to be obese to maintain this fatty covering; you just have to not be anorexic.
Nor is this a reworking of the slightly less ancient study that found that people with notable self-control, people who weren’t ‘appetitive’, were more likely to be depressed. The usefulness of this survey was opaque. It appeared to demonstrate that hedonists were happier than puritans. Nobody needs a scientist to tell them that. They just need to study the works of Chaucer. Or Dickens. Or watch EastEnders. The people enjoying themselves are the fat, jolly ones. The people who worry about how they look, and what people think of them, and what God might think, and whether drinking too much mead will turn out to be a signal that they are bound for hell – those people don’t enjoy themselves so much.
In fact, the new research is quite new. It merely asked whether fat people kill themselves. Are they prone to depression or anxiety? The answers were all no. Not only are you less depressed when overweight, it works in proportion. The fatter you get, the less likely you are to commit suicide. Of course it’s possible that you could be getting morbidly obese as an incremental form of suicide. Research doesn’t relate.
Doctors haphazarded a guess that thin people made themselves depressed with the effort of keeping thin. It’s feasible, I suppose, but there are plenty of fat people on diets who are making all that effort and failing, and they seem pretty cheerful. Lacking an explanation, we have to fall back on ‘comfort eating’. This is far from being a sarcastic catch-phrase, like ‘panic buying’ and ‘binge drinking’. You do actually gain comfort from eating (…)
Consider the pleasure that can be derived from food. There is: a) the comforting taste of something nice, generally with a heap of fat and let’s hope some brandy (sorry, it’s still close to Christmas); b) the more arcane pleasures of the gourmet, which are prissier and rarer; and c) the warped pleasure of self-denial. Naturally, people who go for the last band will be the most miserable. They have misery written into their DNA.
What makes this fat/happy curve so surprising is that fat people have a horrible time at the hands of society. This year it was revealed that they were less likely to land jobs, and doctors made moves to stop treating them for joint replacements. Next year it’ll probably be even worse. And they’ll still smile.
If there really is a direct correlation between body mass index and mental health, are we going to start charging skinny people for their own Prozac? Huh?”

This was not the first occasion on which the myth of a short, miserable life for the overweight had been contested, as Jeremy Laurance’s Overweight? Study shows you’ll live longer (The Independent, 21st April 2005) reminds us: “Fat people have won a healthy reprieve from a study which showed that those who are overweight tend to live longer than those of normal weight.
Doctors may have to rethink the definition of the ideal weight after researchers found that the risks of piling on the pounds do not become evident until people are extremely obese.
And the fashion world’s obsession with slenderness also comes under threat from the finding that being underweight is linked with a higher death rate”.

Mr Haslam is trundled in for his umpteenth appearance as expert: “David Haslam, chairman of the UK National Obesity Forum said: ‘The findings should certainly set us thinking. Even though we are getting fatter, in a society that is putting more emphasis on a healthier lifestyle, the impact may be lessened.
‘It does raise the possibility that we will have to change the criteria for what we regard as overweight’”. The latter prospect would be cause for celebration indeed.

Laurance dutifully puts it on record that: “There were 34,000 excess deaths among underweight people but there were 86,000 fewer deaths among the overweight than those of normal weight. The study (…) claims to be the most rigorous yet with the figures taking into account age, sex, race, smoking and drinking”.

However, reluctance to accept that the earlier figures were wrong is so ingrained as to necessitate the tired old mantra: “Extra weight increases the risk of diabetes and arthritis, but people have become more aware of the heart disease risks that obesity usually brings and of the need to keep fit, and recent evidence suggests walking may have increased.
‘The net result of these phenomena may be a population that is, paradoxically, more obese, diabetic, arthritic, disabled and medicated but with lower overall cardiovascular disease risk,’ the authors say. The researchers do not offer an explanation of why extra weight may prolong life but previous studies have suggested that the ideal weight increases with age. Older people need extra fat to tide them over when they fall ill and cannot eat normally.
The finding lends support to the theory that it is fitness not fatness that matters. But the researchers only looked at how long people lived, not at the quality of their lives”. The anti-fat brigade is not willing to make the tiniest of concessions for fear of losing its authority.

As Fiona MacRae’s Overdone the pud? (Daily Mail, 2nd January 2006) indicates, the results are being confirmed by other findings: “Stand on scales, look alarmed, pledge dramatic diet until pounds put on at Christmas are taken off again.
The scene is familiar but the ensuing effort may not be to everyone’s advantage, according to researchers.
A study of 33,000 adults has discovered that putting on a few pounds could actually lengthen your life.
And we could all be half a stone heavier than doctors recommend without harming our health.
The research (…) casts serious doubts on the way GPs in Britain judge healthy weights”.

The waiflike, semi-starved look may cost more than your happiness: “But while GPs use the [body mass] index as a general guideline to good health, the U.S. researchers have found that the average person classified as overweight in the UK actually lives longer.
Changing the current recommended BMI to 26 for men would allow the average male to carry 24lb more than is currently recommended. Women could quite happily tip the scales at half a stone more than suggested.
The study also found that adults with BMIs as high as 35 have the same life expectancy as those stick-thin people who have BMIs of 20.
According to the research, only those with BMIs over 35, equivalent to 17st 6lb for a 5ft 10in man and 15st for a 5ft 5in woman, face a marked reduction in life expectancy.
Researcher Dr Jerome Groninger, of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, said: ‘This work does not support the idea that reducing weight alone would result in any large mortality risk reduction for most of the population’”.

The largesse of Dr Ian Campbell, president of the National Obesity Forum, stretched far enough to own up that the holy charts might have been defective: “But he admitted BMI is flawed. ‘It doesn’t discriminate between fat and muscle and doesn’t look at quality of nutrition and levels of physical activity, which leads to the conundrum of being fat and fit and lean and unfit’.
He added that other measurements of weight, such as the hip-to-waist ratio or the circumference of the waist, are more reliable”.

On the same page, however, we are discouraged from toddling off to the baker’s for that forlorn cream cake we allowed to languish in the display by Becky Barrow’s Insurance goes up by the pound: “Fat people are being forced to pay up to four times more for life insurance, a study suggested yesterday.
Companies which regularly penalise obesity are now lowering their target to include those who are merely overweight.
Policies covering critical illness or life insurance have significantly changed over the past year, with premiums rising rapidly for the fatter clients.
Kevin Carr from Life Search said: ‘Height and weight is one of the questions you are asked about when you fill in a form for a life or health insurance quote. If you are considered by the insurer to be overweight, they will often ask for a report from your GP and sometimes a medical examination.
‘The likely expectation is an increase in premium. Typically, we would expect a loading to start at 50 per cent’.
The premium goes up as weight increases. In severe cases, companies will refuse to offer any insurance at all.
Young people who are overweight face higher insurance premiums than their older counterparts. Mike Owen, managing director at Special Risks Bureau, said: ‘Insurers accept that people over 55 may well put on some weight as they age.
‘However, if you’re under 55 and severely overweight, you can be asked to pay 300 per cent more than the standard premium in some cases’.
About a quarter of his customers have had problems getting insurance because of their weight, through companies ‘cherry-picking’ the low-risk customers”. This is sheer bigotry, which would be prohibited by law if it were connected with any other physical characteristic such as finger length or eye colour. Thus the heritage of life-denying asceticism and the lust of the few for status at the expense of the many makes martyrs of us all.

For anyone interested in reading intelligent articles that expose and counteract the fat hatred so ingrained in our culture I wholeheartedly recommend the first Big Fat Carnival at Alas, a Blog, an excellent and much-needed initiative.

Light is the mould upon my breast
No sound disturbs my peaceful rest
No friends I mourn no cares I have
No pains no sorrow in the grave
[Headstone inscription, 1825]

One of the treats prepared by my Mother in the faltering between childhood and adolescence was something I had only read about in books, afternoon tea. She would entrust us with her best china, removed from the display cabinet, the teapot, the delicate cups (even then my little finger was too clumsily large to fit through the handle’s ostentatious curlicue) and saucers, the cake plates their fragility a compliment in itself. Slices of plain bread (Mother’s Pride), coarse crusts carefully removed, Shipham’s salmon spread or, the ultimate in sophistication, slivers of cucumber so thin as to be almost transparent. My companion in this imitation of carefree gentility my neighbour, AM, slightly older, whom I looked up to as a sister.

The sense of community seeped out of the row of houses when her family left, almost imperceptibly, the newcomers keeping themselves to themselves whilst I returned only as other commitments permitted, saddened by the neglect implied by the overgrown gardens, the indifference (if not outright hostility) evinced by the high wooden boards separating the properties. Our respective careers swept us off to distant cities, the gaudy, superficial glamour of my line of work amidst the constant chatter in contrast to her more dignified service away from the throngs of journalists and television crews. Her unswerving determination and talents enabled her to achieve the breakthrough into a branch, which, once professionalized, was masculinised. My admiration remains.

Chameleon: Could you say a little bit about yourself and what got you into the business of being a funeral director? What made it an interesting or attractive career choice?

Grim Reaper (GR): That’s quite an easy answer because when I was eighteen – not a lot of people are aware of it, but my Dad occasionally helped out at a funeral director’s in P, driving limousines. He only did it a couple of times because he was standing in for another colleague of his and that was when I first thought this is really quite an interesting job, working with the dead. I didn’t get any further with that – I didn’t think really much about it until quite a bit later in life, in fact, eighteen years later and I then started taking actions to try and get a position in a funeral firm, but nobody would take me on because I was a woman. I just left it at that, I had a couple of interviews, but they wouldn’t you on, you didn’t have the experience, you weren’t strong enough, you know, what could a woman bring to this line of work? But three years later, one of the funeral directors I had had an interview with head-hunted me because I had impressed him, seemingly, so much, he found me again and asked if I was still interested to which I said yes. That was the start of it.

Chameleon: Why do you think that they were hostile to the idea of employing a woman? Is it because it is a male-dominated profession?

GR: Absolutely. It was always a male-orientated line of work, you know, it was always men that were funeral directors. There were women in the profession, but they only worked in the office: they dealt with the paperwork, but they all suddenly saw that women were the way forward because you have families who are losing babies and children and they don’t want the hardness of a man. Not that the men are bad at the job, but they felt there was a softer approach with having a lady funeral director and that’s what started everybody thinking about it.

Chameleon: So when would you say that this shift in attitude took place, more or less?

GR: 1998 it really started and I got my job in 1999.

Chameleon: So were you amongst the women pioneers?

GR: In Scotland, in A certainly. I was one of the first three in A. So, I’m really chuffed with that.

Chameleon: So how many years have you been in the business?

GR: This is my seventh year.

Chameleon: And you’ve never looked back.

GR: Never. Not at all.

Chameleon: You mentioned a moment ago that strength, physical strength was seen as a must. Why was that? Was it for removing bodies from the house?

GR: When we are on call, on duty we have to physically go to houses where people have died and nursing homes and take the body into our care. It’s a team of two people, normally, a funeral director and an ambulance driver. We go to wherever the body is in situ, take them onto a stretcher and take them out, you know and sometimes you are met with somebody that is quite obese, quite large and we have to call for backup from the other team that is on duty. We don’t risk our health. Most often I will manage, I’m not a weakling, in fact, there are some men at my premises that are smaller than me and can’t even lift the weight that I can lift, so what can I say?

Chameleon: So it was a bit of a myth that women were not cut out for the job?

GR: Totally, yes.

Chameleon: Do you think it was so that the men could keep hold of the sector?

GR: I think it probably was. I think the men didn’t really want women in the forefront of funerals. I don’t think they realised just how good it can look, but we’ve proven otherwise over the years, so I’m really happy with that.

Chameleon: Good! What qualities do you need to be a good funeral director?

GR: Well, empathy, rather than sympathy, empathy. Each funeral’s different, every family reacts differently, you can’t sympathise with them unless you’ve been through it yourself, but you still don’t know what they are feeling personally. Everybody’s emotions are different. There’s happiness, there’s anger, there’s sadness, there’s relief, there’s all these emotions and you’ve got to be able to deal with all these emotions, so it’s empathy rather than sympathy, good man management skills and being able to read a situation. We sometimes get into very bad situations. People are really angry and they want to take it out on you because their loved one has died. You are the first person to come and take them away, so you are the bad person. I’ve had people thump me in the chest and verbally abuse me because I was just there to take their loved one away who has died in tragic circumstances and it’s somebody’s fault, not theirs, and I’m the first person on the scene, so it’s my fault. That’s how it works.

Chameleon: That must be quite difficult to deal with.

GR: It really is. Quite a lot, you know, you get young mothers who have lost teenage children in road traffic accidents or drug overdoses and they’re the ones that are really, they’re frustrated because they just want to know why, why did it happen to them? And why are you here taking my son or daughter away? You’re going to put them in the ground or you’re going to have them cremated. You’re evil, you know, it’s your fault.

Chameleon: But presumably once they calm down they realise you’re not to blame, that they were just worked up.

GR: They do, yes. Exactly. I mean, it’s just bereavement, it’s different stages of grief. Everybody goes through these different stages of grief and they do come round quite quickly, they realise that you are there to help them, not hinder them. You’re there to do everything for them, to make it as memorable an occasion as possible and not a horrible occasion.

Chameleon: Of course. It’s horrible enough as it is.

GR: It is really, you know.

Chameleon: Do funeral directors have a morbid sense of humour?

GR: [Mock indignation] What do you mean? [Laughter] Well…I would say, yes. I mean, if you don’t have a sense of humour, not at the cost of the deceased, but something else. It’s situations we’re put into. For instance, I would say, my premises are at the end of a street and when somebody phones me and asks “How do I get to your premises?” one of my comments is, “Well, you can’t go anywhere else, we’re a dead end”…and, you know, it is a dead end job. I’m not going to go anywhere further and I don’t get my clients backchatting me or anything, I don’t get any cheek from them, they’re really quite well behaved. So I think the answer to your question is yes, we do have a morbid sense of humour. Then there was one incident that sticks in my mind. To set the scene, it was a Saturday and I was on duty, as I am today [during the interview, the Grim Reaper was on call for the entire weekend, her mobile switched on 24 hours a day with the ring tone set to loud to wake her up should she be needed in the early hours]. I had done my shift at the office as well as the work that needed done at the mortuary. My work partner and I received a call for a house death in B, so we drove out. We got past [another village on the way] and were now going through A. As we were leaving this little village, we saw a large queue of traffic and I jokingly said to my colleague: “That’s our next fatality”. He just didn’t want to know. I said: “It’ll be an RTA”. He didn’t want it as he had never attended one. I said I’d get out of the ambulance, walk up and take a look. I’m walking past this great long line of cars, dressed in black from head to foot, passengers staring at this vision. As I arrived at the scene, I saw a Range Rover, motorcycle, police, ambulances and a body on the ground. At the time we had the police contract for removals. I walked up to the police officer who about fell over when he saw me. I said “I take it this is my next fatality”. His jaw dropped: “I haven’t called you yet!” “We’re just out touting for business”. Then I added that I was only joking, that we were on the way to B for another deceased. The RTC [Road Traffic Collision] incident unit had to measure the skid marks to determine the speed, it had to record where the bike had landed, where the car had stopped and where the body ended up. I asked if we could drive through and the officer replied that we would have to take a detour round the outskirts of the village. “Fair enough,” I replied. En route back to the ambulance I walked down the driver’s side pretending to be a police officer (I was mistaken for the CID because of my outfit) and through the open windows I would explain they would have to go the other way. One guy leaned out, “Excuse me, officer, ma’am, is it bad?” [In a deep, authoritative voice] “’Fraid so, fatality here”. Just at that point, two motorcyclists came tearing up the road and stopped right at my feet. I told them they couldn’t go any further, there’s been an RTA. “Did it involve a motorcyclist?” I confirmed it was a motorcyclist. They asked, “Did he have a blue helmet on?” I confirmed that he had. Their shoulders slumped, their heads bowed and they turned and drove off. I went back to the ambulance and said to my driver, “It is a fatality. You’ll be alright, though, it’s only his head that was hanging off”. He now looked very sick. I told him we had to turn and take a detour and reassured him that although there had been a fatality, the body was intact. There was a lot of blood. When we arrived at the house we were asked why we were late, so I explained we had been held up by another incident. We knew we would get called back to the RTA so we went back to our branch in [a village] with the body from the house. Unfortunately, due to the movement, he had been faecally incontinent, so he needed a good hose down. Then the call came from the police that we needed to attend a new death. “Ah, yes, the motorbike on the B109”. The woman on the other end of the phone was surprised: “Oh, so you know about that already”. “We had passed that way earlier on”. So we went back to the incident, collected the body, picked up the body from the house death and brought them both back to the main office in A. I thought we would be let off as it had been a hard enough day, but there were two more deaths. I had been on duty for 13 hours and felt sick and hungry and wanted to get home, so I was speeding through B. I got stopped. The police officer had been in attendance at the scene earlier. “Why are you speeding when you of all people know what the outcome can be?” I was upset and told him about how I had not had a minute’s rest and he tapped me on the shoulder with his glove. “Don’t let it happen again”.

Chameleon: Well, I suppose it’s a coping mechanism as much as anything else…

GR: It is.

Chameleon: … because doctors and nurses often have a very morbid sense of humour as well and they are dealing with patients whilst they are still alive. Could you give me a run-through of a fairly typical day? What does it involve?

GR: Well, first thing in the morning we go in and we go through to the rest room and we close all the coffins that have cremations or burials that day. We will make sure that all the coffins are in the respective order for going up to the crematorium and then we get the hearses up to the door and load all the coffins on board and take them up in procession to the crematorium, unless they are going as a cortège, in which case they would wait until the family arrived and we would then leave the premises. Once that’s done we all get changed out of our black suits and get into our striped suits for the actual funeral itself. It’s a different uniform for conducting and we head off to either crematorium, church, burial site, wherever we’re going and conduct a funeral. Now, we’re not taking the service, we’re conducting the service in that we liaise with all third parties who are taking part in one funeral and make sure everything is running smoothly. That’s your minister, the florist, the flowers, you know, the hymn sheets are there on time, releasing doves if you have to release doves, you know, balloons to represent the child’s spirit going off into the sky, anything like that, we’ve got to make sure it actually takes place. We don’t really get a lunch break, you just eat on the job, snaffle a wee apple sometimes during the day, whatever. You don’t get a break because you could have one funeral in a day, you could have six funerals in a day. At our premises, at G and W we average about 30 funerals a week. There are only four funeral directors to conduct this amount, so we do have our work cut out for us. On top of conducting we also arrange funerals, we go to removals, we go to house arrangements, we have to do our community work to keep everybody happy, we’re good neighbours, if you like and we’ve got other duties that we have to conduct within the premises, keeping the vehicles clean, helping out in the mortuary to prepare deceased. We don’t really have a lot of time to ourselves.

Chameleon: It doesn’t sound like it.

GR: Then, on top of that, at the end of the day you go home. If you’re lucky enough you’re not on duty, if you’re unlucky, it’s your rota time, you’re on duty, so you’re actually on call 24 hours a day. We work 365 days a year, OK we close on Christmas Day and close on New Year’s Day, but the rest of the time we are actually physically at the office at the rest rooms, working.

Chameleon: So it’s really quite a demanding job in many ways. What about emotionally, or is it something you get used to?

GR: No, you don’t get used to it because each funeral is different. Emotionally, I mean, how do I treat it? If I go to the scene of a really bad accident where there is serious trauma to a body or badly injured people, I just treat it like the worst possible film I’ve ever seen with special effects. I can watch it on the TV screen, so why can’t I deal with it in reality? You know, that’s how I think of it. It is not the human being that is left, it’s their earthly remains, the shell of their body, their being. To me the spirit is gone by now, so, really, I can deal with it. It’s not that I’m hardened to it, it’s just that I can deal with it and it’s never bothered me. Part of my interview for the job that I did get the first time round was to be walked into a mortuary where somebody was actually being prepared. I’d never seen a dead body before and I just went, “Oh cool! Can I look?” And the manager of that premises knew right away, well she’s into this, she’s got the job. That’s how serious I was about wanting to do it. I’d done my research, I wanted to do this and I was determined I was going to do it.

Chameleon: Are there any times of year when you’re busier than others?

GR: Low season and high season? We have high season in the winter. Yes, when the cold nights and the cold weather, dark nights, I should say, and cold weather come in we have a lot more deaths. The old people, the vulnerable, the young catch bugs and any germs that are going around, they die. Also, at Christmas time people get themselves into serious, serious debt and we get an increased number of suicides just after and that is why we have the high season as the winter, the dark nights. That’s when you get many more funerals to conduct. Summer time it’s quite quiet, that’s the low season, if you want and we don’t have nearly as many funerals, but I mean it’s swings and roundabouts, it just depends what’s going on, healthwise, in the area at the time. You can have a bout of meningitis or something that will just wipe a whole heap of folk out. It’s a shame. It happens, you know, but it’s usually the dark nights. It’s much busier.

Chameleon: You don’t actually conduct the funeral services do you?

GR: I have done. I have. When a family have said to me, “Look, we’re not religious, we don’t want a minister”, we offer them the opportunity to have what is known as a humanist, that is a non-religious, ceremony. However, the Humanist Society do charge quite a considerable sum for their services and some families don’t have the means to pay that, so we, as funeral directors, some of us, can actually hold a service as well. We’re not ordained, we’re not ministers, we’re not men or women of the cloth, but we can speak at funeral services and I have done on a number of occasions.

Chameleon: How do you go about it? Do you find out about the person’s life?

GR: We get background information about the person, you know, from the family, we just sit and meet with them and talk about them and we ask if they want a poem read out. We won’t do anything religious. We’ll lead them in a singing, if they want a hymn because some folk still want a hymn, even though they’re non-religious. We will lead them in that, we will announce that we will now sing this song, or whatever, this hymn, and that’s it. Read a few words out. It is a short service, but it is still quite meaningful to them because that is what they wanted, non-religious and that’s what they get.

Chameleon: Do you prepare bodies for people of different religions, or is it always Christian?

GR: No, we have Chinese, Muslims, Jewish, we have other bodies to prepare, but most often with these other religions, representatives of their religion come in and actually prepare the body themselves, that’s just part of their belief. They have to touch the body and nobody else. So we allow them to come into our mortuary conditions and use the mortuary facilities and they will prepare and lay to rest the deceased. We stand in attendance because obviously we have to make sure they don’t touch anything they shouldn’t, but we will be there and assist them if they require it.

Chameleon: How do you prepare a body?

GR: There are two types of preparation. Normal preparation, which is washing and dressing a body. Washing them properly, washing their hair, cleaning their fingernails. What you have to do really is suture their mouth and make sure their eyes are closed because most people when they pass away they take a last breath and their mouth is open. It’s not nice for a family to come in and see a gaping open mouth, so we close the mouth and we most often have to put a suture in and then there’s embalming, which is not mummification or anything like that, the Egyptian-style, it is disinfecting the body internally and the organs and replacing the body fluids with formaldehyde, basically, and that preserves the body.

Chameleon: Are there any times when you don’t need to do an embalming?

GR: We don’t need to do embalmings if the funeral is going to be like within a week or so, but most people do want embalming because it does make the body look more presentable than just a preparation, just normal preparation. Part of the formalin, the actual chemical, has a pink pigment in it that brings back the natural skin tones, whereas if we didn’t embalm they’re not getting this fluid to give them the pink tones and then, obviously, the skin goes very, very pale, very white, very quickly, so embalming has its benefits, definitely. A person who has been embalmed certainly looks better presented than somebody who hasn’t been embalmed.

Chameleon: Do you have to put make-up on as well?

GR: Yes, make-up would be applied. Not if the person didn’t wear make-up. We would never just put make-up on and it’s always light make-up, you know, just a little bit of powder. If somebody had severe bruising on their face or anything, we would put some light foundation on to cover it up as best we can and we explain that to the families that that might be necessary.

Chameleon: I suppose you need it if somebody died in violent circumstances, such as in an accident.

GR: Yes.

Chameleon: Does that mean you have to do some reconstructive work on occasion?

GR: Reconstructive embalming, techniques and preparation, is only coming now to Britain. It has been in America for quite a number of years. We’re only getting it now really and we’re still learning. I don’t do that personally.

Chameleon: Presumably you’d need to go on a special course?

GR: Our embalmers, qualified embalmers would have to go on special courses to learn reconstructive work. It’s quite involved.

Chameleon: Do you get a lot of murder victims?

GR: We do have murder victims, yes. Not an awful lot, because A’s good, A’s not murder city. Yes, there have been murder victims.

Chameleon: Are they more difficult to cope with?

GR: It’s the circumstances surrounding it. I think it’s more difficult in that the family are so robbed; they feel so robbed of their loved one. It’s just so horrific what happens. Obviously, in most circumstances of murder, we wouldn’t be able to let the family see their loved one because of injuries inflicted. Most of them are violent.

Chameleon: I suppose the pathologist will have had to have carried out a post mortem.

GR: Yes, to establish what was the cause of death. In those cases as well, the body probably wouldn’t be released to the funeral director for approximately two to three weeks whilst all the investigations are going on. During that time decomposition will continue to take place.

Chameleon: How do people react when you meet them for the first time and introduce yourself and they ask you what you do for a living? Is it a conversation stopper?

GR: It can be. There’s only two reactions. One is that it’s a conversation stopper, instantly and they all try to get away from you as quickly as possible – I don’t know what they think I’ve got, some sort of disease or something – and the other is they’re so interested in the subject that they will ask you every question under the sun.

Chameleon: Like me.

GR: Like you [laughter].

Chameleon: Do you try to accommodate special requests from the families about how the funeral is to be run? Can you say a few words about some of the more unusual funerals you have arranged?

GR: Any requests that we get we will endeavour to do them; we always try our very best. I mentioned a couple earlier, the releasing of balloons and the releasing of doves, that is really to represent the spirit going off to the heavens and it gives a lot of people comfort. Little requests. It could be just that this person held a hankie in their hand all the time and we would ensure that this hankie was put in their hand in the coffin for them, you know, little things like that. Then we have had, can my ashes be turned into diamonds? It really can be done, they actually can. Ashes are carbon, our bodies are made up of carbon, so we can send them off to a company called Life Gems and have ashes made into diamonds. From one set of human remains you can probably get about 100 diamonds.

Chameleon: Really? How do they do that?

GR: It’s a process. I don’t know the actual ins and outs of it, but the process takes about three to four months, I think. They extract the carbon from the ashes and then they compress it at high temperatures in their machines and it produces a beautiful, beautiful coloured diamond, not white, not the pure white ones, there’s blues and greens and oranges and amber colours and they really are absolutely gorgeous. I think that came about because a gentleman in America lost his young daughter and he said that he wanted the light of her eye to always shine in his life and he co-founded Life Gems because they thought what shines in your life all the time is diamonds, you know, it glints, so they co-founded Life Gems. I think that’s how it came about, but I’ve never had anybody yet ask me to send their ashes away once they know the costs involved they kind of back down on that one. Another obscure thing that we’ve been asked is to have ashes fired into space and that was after Gene Roddenberry died, the writer of Star Trek. He wanted his ashes in space and so Heavenly Hearses or Celestius Incorporated were formed.

Chameleon: That’s priceless.

GR: A lipstick-sized phial of ashes is strapped to a rocket and fired into space.

Chameleon: Do they collect a lot of them because it must cost a fortune to send up a rocket?

GR: I really don’t know. I’ve never had anybody ask me that. I really don’t know, but I mean, gee whizz, I’ve got to be aware of all these strange things that are available just in case somebody comes up and says I want this done.

Chameleon: You haven’t had anything like in the episode of William and Mary when William’s assistant has to drive the corpse in a motorbike side-car at 100 miles an hour in front of his biker friends?

GR: No, I’ve never had a motorcycle funeral. I’ve had people who were motorcyclists at funerals and we’ve just been a normal funeral cortège and we’ve probably had many bikers following us, but we’ve never had a bike hearse [the Grim Reaper later went on to explain that a bike hearse consists of a specially modified side car]. I have had police officer’s funerals where we’ve had the traffic stopped for us with all the officers practically in A being on duty at the funeral, but I’ve never had any really weird requests. Yet. But that’s only seven years. I have years ahead yet.

Chameleon: What about amusing incidents, or near mishaps?

GR: I could write a book about them [grins]. One of them was when a gentleman said to me that he was going to sing at the graveside, which I said, “Well, that’s OK”. It was going to be a graveside service and he said: “Right, well, I’ll just sing, will I?” I replied, “Yes, I’ll tell you when you can sing”, so he stood there and he went, “A one, a two, a one, two, three, four,” and before he started singing, I just thought, “Oh my God, what is coming next?” You know, I was ready to do a shimmy on down, some Elvis number, but he actually just went “Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide”. Well, I about ended myself, I really had to hide from laughing. We’ve had some gentleman who just wouldn’t listen to what I was telling him about holding the cord for lowering the coffin and he wrapped it round his neck and turned and faced the opposite way and I said, “No, you must turn right round”, so he did a full 365 degree turn and ended up still facing the wrong way and I said, “No, sir, you’ve got to face into the grave,” and he did it once more and still faced out the way and the minister by this time was, his shoulders were going, and I just stood there and I went “Hi-ho, Hi-ho, it’s off to work we go” and the man just started laughing and said, “I am round the wrong way, amn’t I?” I said, “Yes, you are, you need to face into the grave because if you’re going that way, you’re pulling the coffin back out, you are not lowering it”. So we’ve had that. We’ve kicked spokes into graves. The coffin rests on spokes when it’s on top of the grave and we got onto the grave boards either side and, unfortunately, you slip because it’s maybe icy, wintery and you kick the spoke by accident and it falls into the grave, so you’ve just got to walk off the other end of the grave again, let the gravedigger go down into the hole, pick out this spoke and get it back up again. So it’s just like, you know, Take One! We’ve had quite a few things, I mean, I could name quite a few. That’s a few to start with.

Chameleon: Have you ever had any experiences – I know corpses can suddenly sit up and so on – has anything like that ever happened to you?

GR: Oh, yes.

Chameleon: How did you react?

GR: The private ambulances we have now have got enclosed backs to them, but the ambulances we had before were open-back, you could see into the back where the stretcher was and one of the deceased I had on board – we went over a bump and gases were released and the top half of the body did sit up slightly and you hear them groaning as they move and you just think, “Oh, get lost! Sit down again! [Laughs] Behave yourself!” So, I’ve had that.

Chameleon: Isn’t that a bit creepy?

GR: Well, it is the first time you experience it, definitely. It’s a bit creepy and I think probably the worst thing I ever saw was a totally maggotised body. A gentleman had died; he’d committed suicide in his own car. He’d been there over a week and it was the height of summer, so decomposition had set in quite severely and the flies had been at him. When we got there, oh, it was terrible, terrible, lots of maggots.

Chameleon: [Winces at the mental image conjured up from the last series of Messiah with the woman’s body crawling with maggots and bees] How do you cope with something like that?

GR: Well, I wasn’t too bad. The five burly police officers were puking at the sides and I could only think of boiled rice at the Chinese. I’m sorry, but it’s true [laughter]. I just got hungry. I just thought I want a Chinese meal later on, with fried rice or boiled rice; this is what the maggots were reminding me of, but the police officers when we moved the body, you know, there were some odours, they started being sick at the side of the scene and I was just quite happy to carry on with what I was doing.

Chameleon: Recently in the papers, an article appeared on the Top Ten funeral hits. Do people ask to have their favourite songs played a lot? Is there one song that’s very common for people to want to listen to?

GR: When I first started, seven years ago, I think one of the absolute favourites was Tina Turner’s Simply the Best and we heard it time and time and time again – it was getting on my nerves, actually, after a while. Then we went through a stage of Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli’s Time to Say Goodbye and we get Queen, the group Queen, just different things. We get Bat out of Hell, Meatloaf, ah, there’s a few requests, but nothing really sticks out other than the Tina Turner one.

Chameleon: If memory serves me well, in the newspaper article, Number One was My Way. Does anybody ever ask for that around here?

GR: Not really so much here; I think that’s based more in England, that poll because I think I’ve only had My Way about three times in all my career. I haven’t had it much. I’m glad because I don’t particularly like the song.

Chameleon: For my tastes it would be a bit too clichéd.

GR: Definitely.

Chameleon: So how would you say that funerals have changed within the course of your career? Maybe you could say a little about what a very staid and traditional funeral would be like and then compare it with one that’s not quite so traditional?

GR: Certainly they have changed, even in my seven years. It used to be very much that the family would just rely on you to tell them what was going to happen. Now, with programmes like Six Feet Under and Don’t Drop the Coffin and suchlike, people are very much more demanding, which is OK, I mean we don’t mind that. Like I said, we will try and get any request, and also when you see George Best’s funeral on television and then they do a funeral on EastEnders or something like that and folk say, “Oh, I want that, the name tribute and I want a horse-drawn hearse. So we get all these requests now, which is fine because we’ll deal with them. A very plain funeral is, basically, up to the crematorium or just straight to the graveside and a simple service at the crematorium with two hymns to sing and no fuss, no nonsense, no frills attached, if you like. Then a very elaborate funeral would be a full horse-drawn hearse, procession, cortège, about four or five cars following, choirs in the church, soloists, harpists, whatever you want, you know, that would be a really fancy one.

Chameleon: So is that more a question of budget?

GR: Yes, I would say so. Individual families they know their own means and they will come in and tell you what they want. Part of our job is that we have to tell them the costs involved and a lot of families will say, “Oh right, OK, well that’s too dear, we’ll maybe change that slightly, but then there’s some families that will say, “No, cost doesn’t matter, you don’t even need to mention it”, but it’s my job, I have to tell them the costs involved; I wouldn’t be doing the proper job if I didn’t. So I tell them all the way along what it’s going to cost them and they just say, “Right, that’s fine, that’s fine, carry on, carry on, add it on”. It is just the background they come from, or how much money they have, they will pay for what they want.

Chameleon: Do you also organise receptions after the funeral?

GR: Yes, like a funeral tea or a wake. We will arrange it for them in that we will book it for them, but they have to pay that one separately, you know, we don’t like to take on funeral accounts for catering because if an account goes to a solicitor, six months down the line, we still haven’t been paid, we’re still waiting for that catering account to be paid, but we have to pay everybody straight away. We try to avoid catering accounts.

Chameleon: Does the series Six Feet Under give an accurate portrayal of the funeral business or are things so different in America that you can’t really compare them with Scotland?

GR: It’s exactly that, I mean America is – I don’t want to insult them, but they are a bit OTT. But no, what we did see in Six Feet Under was very good. It was very lifelike in the way we have humour and we do have lives outside, although we don’t get much time for them, but we do have lives outside. It was a very good programme. I enjoyed watching it. I think every funeral director in Britain watched it to try and compare. The only thing I didn’t like about Six Feet Under was the way the man said embalming, it was very emphasised, [mimics the drawl] em-balm-ing.

Chameleon: Do you think that programmes like Six Feet Under and William and Mary have had an impact on the public perception of your profession?

GR: Probably.

Chameleon: A good one?

GR: I think so. They know that we’re there to help them and that we are human.

Chameleon: What do you think about the way that some commentators, mostly right-wing commentators, complain about the way people don’t show restraint any more, that it’s not stiff upper lip at the funeral. How do you react to that?

GR: Well, a funeral shouldn’t really be all doom and gloom; a funeral should be a celebration of a person’s life, to be honest with you. If you don’t want to wear black, don’t wear black. You don’t have to follow tradition. Victorian tradition dictates that you would go into mourning in the case of a spouse for about three years. If it was a child it would certainly be for a year of mourning and then wear a black armband for about two years after that, which is still three years. Times change. We have to get on with our lives. It’s not that we’re forgetting about the person, but we’ve got to get on with life. Life is for the living. Don’t forget the person: “Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I am the thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow”. Things like that. Life is for the living and as for the dead, let them die. Don’t forget them, let them live in your memory. They’re in your heart and they’re in your head and that’s where they should stay. With pride say, “That was my Mum, that was my Dad”. But no, commentators, they have no right. What do they know exactly? They have no right to comment, really they don’t. It’s for the living and it’s a celebration of a person’s life. And I know it’s a sad occasion when somebody young has their life cut short, either by an accident or by an illness or something, but you have still just got to accept it. It’s happened. It’s happened because the person was ill or because somebody, unfortunately, had an accident, so, you know, you’ve got to get on with it.

Chameleon: I think that what these commentators object to is public displays of grief. They think it’s vulgar. Frankly, I think that’s rubbish, but I was just curious to know what your perspective is.

GR: Well, for instance, with Diana, I certainly thought that was too much. People who never met her crying in the streets, they could grieve in private, but they didn’t meet her, they didn’t know her, why were they grieving so much? I didn’t understand that myself, I just don’t understand why they were grieving. I thought it was sad. The woman was killed in tragic circumstances and she had left two young sons behind, but I certainly wouldn’t have gone out of my way to go and lay a flower down at Buckingham Palace gates or go to the funeral or cry for a week on end or even go out to buy Elton John’s record. No way. Sorry [laughs], that was too much. The same with George best. It was over the top.

Chameleon: Do you think that Diana’s funeral was a watershed in terms of how people show their grief? Do you think it had an impact on more modest funerals shall we say?

GR: Probably. I would think so, yes. I think all that did was really just to allow people to show grief. People before then didn’t want to show that they were grieving, but the Diana incident would have opened up the floodgates for folk to have books of remembrance, to openly say, “I am grieving. I really have lost someone and I’m hurting inside. I’m very upset”. So it did open that up, but, like I say, I just felt it was over the top.

Chameleon: It probably was, but what I always assume is that it’s worse to bottle it up, it is far preferable to acknowledge it and to release it.

GR: To let it out. You should always speak about the person. Don’t hide away from it and don’t ever avoid mentioning their name again. Speak about them, as though they were still there. You should. Do you?

Chameleon: Yes. With my Mum.

GR: And I do with my Dad. I often comment about my Dad, “Oh, my dad would have loved this” or “Dad would have said this, Dad would have said that”. No, we don’t forget him and we speak openly with Mum about him. And it’s helped Mum.

Chameleon: What do you think about our society’s attitude towards death? It seems to be a bit of a taboo, which is why some people might be taken aback to see a young, attractive woman such as yourself in the role of a funeral director.

GR: Modern society, well. People of my age, no, that’s not quite true, actually, let me rephrase that, people who have lost somebody already in their life, somebody close, they will show respect, for instance, if they see a funeral cortège coming, they will show respect. Only because they have experienced this. On our way to A crematorium we have to drive past a school and quite often we are going past it at playtime or during the lunch break. Now the kids in their hundreds are coming out. They will show no respect. They will jump out in front of the cars to try and slow you down. They will shout things at the cars and make fun of the people who are sitting in the vehicles, the staff included because we’ve got to wear hats and our full dress code and everything. They make fun of you and they don’t show any respect at all to the bereaved family. We also get drivers who won’t give way to a cortège and they will break you up. In fact, they will even overtake you because they are being held up in their life. They’ll overtake you and shout obscenities out the window at you and they will make rude gestures, you know, finger gestures, etc. etc. and they just don’t show any respect. I think they are the people who have never lost anybody close – yet. And when it happens to them they will understand how awfully they have acted. As for children, I think that’s down to the parents, the parents need to start teaching them, death is a serious subject, speak about it and stop the kids behaving in such a horrendous way when they see funeral cars coming. I think it’s disgusting, I really do.

Chameleon: I had no idea that this kind of thing happens. I was merely thinking of death as a social taboo, that we need to talk about it instead of ignoring it.

GR: People do need to talk about it because quite often we’ll get families in as well, they’ve lost somebody suddenly for instance and not one member of the family would know whether the person wanted buried or cremated and it’s half the battle if you even know that, because they just won’t talk about it. They wouldn’t know what the favourite song was, or whether the person liked hymns. Did they like flowers? What’s their favourite flower? What would they want dressed in? Simple things like that, and nobody knows about it because they are so frightened to talk about any member of their family dying. It is the only thing in life that is guaranteed: you will die. Eventually. You need to speak about it as people, even if it’s just to say “When I die, I want to be buried,” or “I want to be cremated and I want my ashes thrown into the North Sea,” or something like that. Just let somebody know what you want, even if it’s written down somewhere, easily found. But folk do need to speak about it. I think our family were the same. I don’t think we ever spoke about it until I got into this line of work and now I could tell you about what every member of the family wants. Just because I have asked them.

Chameleon: Do you get the impression that the way our society is built up means that we are in constant denial of the fact that we’re going to die? Do you think that’s a healthy or a bad thing?

GR: I think it’s a bad thing, you know, you shouldn’t deny you’re going to die. It’s going to happen. You don’t know what’s round the corner. It could happen today, it could happen in ten years’ time, twenty years, thirty years. I think we all want to live forever, but it’s not going to happen and I think it would be horrible if you did live forever. You would see so many changes. Definitely it’s a bad thing. Folk need to realise that they are going to die at some point, or somebody’s going to die at some point and they need to get a hold of that. It is real.

Chameleon: If a down and out dies, what happens to the body? Do the authorities try to find out who that person was? What happens?

GR: Yes. It used to be what was known as a welfare funeral, but it’s now been given a different name, indigent death, and, basically, the council would take over and they just arrange a simple burial or a simple cremation. My company actually has the contract for that in A, so we would deal with them anyway and they just get a plain, basic coffin for cremation or burial and we will take care of the arrangements. The council pay for it.

Chameleon: Presumably you don’t necessarily know who they are…

GR: Most folk, there’s something to say who they are and we often do find out who they are because you always have to have a name plate on a coffin, but what happens is the council actually take occupation, if you like of their flat, bed-sit, wherever and they will try to recoup any money by selling off the person’s possessions. That’s how it works.

Chameleon: That sounds awfully cruel, doesn’t it?

GR: I know.

Chameleon: But what if the person has no possessions?

GR: Again it would just be the council that would arrange for them to be buried or cremated, but they do try to find out if there is any family. They always make enquiries about whether there’s brothers, sisters, cousins that want to help with something at least. And they do. I don’t think I’ve ever yet come across somebody who’s never had anybody at all. There’s always been somebody. They crawl out of the woodwork.

Chameleon: What would you say are the positive aspects of your job? What do you like about it?

GR: Gosh [pauses for a second]. The satisfaction of being able to help people in a time of need. I’m helping the family, those that have been left behind, but I’m also helping the deceased on their final journey and that gives me great job satisfaction. I really am privileged to help people and that’s how I feel. As soon as I stop feeling like that I would not do the job any more. I feel privileged to be able to help folk in their final hours, or desperate hours of need, you know, families that are left behind, that’s it.

Though greedy worms devour my skin, and gnaw
my wasting flesh, Yet God shall build my bones
again, And clothe them all afresh
[Headstone inscription, Greyfriars Kirkyard]

This interview features in the Eighth Carnival of Feminists at the unfailingly excellent Gendergeek.

“Very soon the open sea which they were leaving was only a thin rim of blue on the western horizon. Whiteness, shot with the faintest colour of gold, spread round them on every side, except where their passage had thrust the lilies apart and left an open lane of water that shone like dark green glass. To look at, this last sea was very like the Arctic; and if their eyes had not by now grown as strong as eagles’ the sun on all that whiteness – especially at early morning when the sun was hugest – would have been unbearable. And every evening the same whiteness made the daylight last longer. There seemed no end to the lilies. Day after day from all those miles and leagues of flowers there rose a smell which Lucy found it very hard to describe; sweet – yes, but not at all sleepy or overpowering, a fresh, wild, lonely smell that seemed to get into your brain and make you feel that you could go up mountains at a run or wrestle with an elephant”
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

For two weeks every summer (usually coinciding with Wimbledon fortnight, a fact that barely impinged on my consciousness before puberty’s coy flush), my parents rented a cottage set in the midst of hay fields near the shores of a loch. There was no television, only an ancient radio, some jigsaw puzzles and a few paperbacks with creased spines and yellowed pages discarded by never-glimpsed guests who had vacated the premises prior to our arrival. We had little need of such distractions when we could explore the bog unsupervised, watching the water boatmen slide miraculously across the oil-rainbowed surface of the small pools between the tussocks, brushing the clegs off our exposed claves and thighs, sneaking up on the cows with their swishing tails similarly plagued by blood-sucking insects or clambering up the haystacks. We would compete with skimmers, lean over the edge of the jetty to spot the minnows or pick our way over the boulders to reach the point, limit of the farmland, the barbed wire of the boundary fence decorated with tufts of wool where sheep had ignored such petty human injunctions against trespassing. The exertions and laughter often left me wheezing, straining for breath, every muscle taut with panic. Each bedtime, my sexless chest was smeared with Vick’s Vaporub to soothe me, a dose of Night Nurse often administered for extra reassurance. Tucked into my bed on the landing between the two bedrooms, feet warmed comfortingly by the “pig” (an earthenware hot-water bottle) I watched the evening’s reluctant retreat through the skylight, lulled by the conversation from the kitchen. In the morning, I was invariably the first to awake and tiptoe down to the bathroom, the calls of the lapwings and oyster catchers enticing me from between my covers, impatient for the grown ups to commence their routine of putting the kettle on. Whilst waiting (and on the days when wind and rain kept us forcibly indoors), I relieved my boredom by snuggling into Aslan’s mane in the magical realm of Narnia.

Since being barred from my childhood paradise by forces more mundane than an angel with a fiery sword, I have given little thought to the characters I had loved so deeply. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the only bedtime story I ever read to my son (the nature of my profession being such that silence is all that I crave on arriving home) and, in many ways, the closest any piece of writing can come to being a sacred text for me, sealed, forever untouchable, in nostalgia’s amber (I enrolled G in the ethics class at school, keen to spare him indoctrination and he has not succumbed to the dubious attractions of religious faith). My first encounter with it had indeed been in the context of proselytising during RE lessons, when Miss McLennan recited it to us in her unassuming voice. Oblivious to the fidgeting of my classmates, I was entranced and joined the Scripture Union soon afterwards.

I agree that there are manifold and manifest flaws in the texts and that perhaps if I were to peruse them in detail once again I would be disappointed, if not incensed, by their contents. I never did complete even the first chapter in The Last Battle to witness Susan’s rejection, at which I would surely balk (likewise, if I were so inclined, I would object that Susan’s gift is a bow, which means that although in theory she can engage in combat, she is removed from the action and never has to soil her hands with blood, like Peter and Edmund or that Lucy’s vial of life-restoring juice relegates her to the traditional nurturing/healing role, not to mention the fact that when a woman occupies a position of power she must be portrayed as cruel, devoid of warmth or genuine emotion and downright evil, as such usurpations are “unnatural”). Instead, what sticks in my mind are certain images (such as the passages in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Edmund, Eustace and Lucy sail to the end of the world, descriptions of searing beauty, which have haunted me ever since) and moments of pure inspiration, such as the wood between the worlds where Digory and Polly find the Guinea pig peacefully nibbling at the grass unscathed, having been transported there by a ring filled with sand (I concede that my memory may be letting me down as to the precise minutiae). Between the trees are puddles, each one of which is the gateway to a parallel world. The children jump into one which has almost dried up and inadvertently unleash Queen Jadis onto an unsuspecting London. Aslan creates Narnia with a song and the spar of a lamppost thrown by Jadis lands in the soil at this most fertile of moments, takes root and sprouts to light Lucy’s path so many years later when she emerges from the wardrobe.

In December of last year, John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL, produced a series of illuminating articles on the books in The Guardian. In the first (from 17th December), he examines the narrative strategy as well as pointing to some of the influences on the plot: “CS Lewis knew few children, yet his Narnia stories know how to give child readers narrative satisfaction. The objections to the covert Christianity of the novels continue, yet rarely is there any analysis of why Lewis’s transformation of Christian narrative is so successful. Some have complained that the presence of the apparently divine Aslan guarantees the triumph of good and takes away free agency from the child heroes and heroines. Yet the arrangement of benign fatality is native to much children’s fiction (and Shakespearian comedy, for that matter). From early on in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the talk of Aslan’s impending arrival and the prophecies about ‘two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve’ reigning in Narnia assure the reader that evil will be defeated. Lewis’s Christian certainty is felt by many readers simply as narrative confidence. The narrator is conducting his characters, as much as his reader, to a happy ending.
The narrator’s presence is the guarantee of the narrative’s benignity, as much as in a novel by Henry Fielding (…) Pace his anti-Christian foes, this does not mean that Lewis’s child characters do not make choices. (The first of his Narnia novels indeed turns on Edmund’s mean-spirited and self-deceiving choice to serve the Witch). It is just that their decisions are sanctioned by some greater power.
Lewis’s children greet their experiences with the lack of surprise that will become the entry condition for Narnia. The transition from ordinary to magical is brilliantly managed in the famous description of coats giving way to branches as Lucy pushes into the strange wardrobe. It is not so strange, to Lucy at least. The opening part of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is all about credulity – the truthful Lucy tells her disbelieving siblings about Narnia – and a kind of parable about the book’s own method. Lewis has his main characters experience new worlds unsuspiciously, as if their best bet is to apply the standards they have always trusted.
Ordinary things are still around them (…) The very title of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe emphasises the meeting of the domestic and the magical. Here Lewis learnt most from E Nesbit (…) Nesbit’s 1908 story The Aunt and Annabel features a magical world entered via ‘Bigwardrobeinspareroom’”.

He continues: “Lewis’s sources were many. Mr Tumnus tells Lucy about nymphs and dryads, Silenus and Bacchus, but also about dwarfs and intelligent trees. We encounter every kind of fabulous being: giants, unicorns, centaurs, dragons, winged horses, minotaurs and werewolves. Lewis’s friend JRR Tolkien was irritated by the inconsistency of the borrowings. The final straw was the appearance of Father Christmas, jovial harbinger of the collapse of the White Witch’s power. Tolkien’s own fiction delights in the exorbitant, internally consistent detail of the imaginative world he creates, with a fully plotted history and carefully described geography. The precedent for Lewis’s selective mingling from different narrative bestiaries (imitated by JK Rowling) was one of his favourite literary works, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a veritable kit-box of all mythologies. Lewis’s model was inclusive, adaptive, a place for any imagined being”.

In the second (24th December 2005) deliberation, Professor Mullan addresses issues of style: “For all Lewis’s freedom with myth, assorting creatures and tales from many different sources, the narrative is satisfyingly spare. He claimed to relish the fairy tale for ‘its brevity, its severe restraints on description…Its very limitations of vocabulary become an attraction’. He borrows some of this. He likes parataxis, for instance: stringing sentences together with the word ‘And’ at the beginning of each. This is not clumsiness but a way of withdrawing from prescribing to his characters the significance of their experiences. It is a habit most evident in the most charged and uncertain passages of narration”.

His subjects the culmination of the saga to critical scrutiny: “The challenge of a novel sequence, of course, is to bring it to its proper end (…). In The Last Battle, the final Narnia book, Lewis provides the end of all ends, a literal apocalypse. It attracts the ire of those who dislike Lewis’s Christian purposes because it takes us to the Last Judgement. Notoriously, the ultimate ending excludes Susan, who was brave enough in earlier novels but now prefers ‘nylons and lipstick and invitations’ to the chance of eternal life. Through the Stable Door stream the chosen, while others are turned away. ‘I don’t know what became of them,’ says the narrator with some awkwardness, about the rejected. (Should we not be told?) Yet the problem is not the Christian symbolism, but the total closure effected. (Literally so, as Peter locks the door for eternity on the created world). The reader cannot impertinently wonder about what happens afterwards to the characters. A heavenly afterlife means no fictional one”.

In his third disquisition (31st December 2005) he once again broaches the issue of sources before speculating on how Lewis might have reacted to the reception his works are given today: “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe incorporates two very profound stories, which have formed a central part of many literatures and mythologies. These are the story of the person journeying from this world to another world; and the story of the dying god, the redeemer. Lewis, one of the most voracious readers who ever lived, will have explored both themes many times in his reading life. The first is the story of Aeneas in the underworld, of Dante’s journey of sanctification with Virgil, of Alice through the looking-glass. The other story, which Euripides made into great art in the Alkestis, is the theme of the gospels and the Christian liturgy (…)
An adult coming back to the Narnia stories will be struck by their crudity. There is no subtlety at all in the borrowings, here from E Nesbit, there from Spenser, here, almost profanely, from the gospels themselves. Tolkien felt that the borrowings did not cohere into a single, imagined mythology; they were a jumble, a mess, and a bad-taste mess at that. Austere critics would agree.
Lewis wrote out of his own deep need to return to, and heal, the childhood trauma of losing his mother when he was nine. Like many religious people, Lewis had an exaggerated horror of death, shook at the mention of it, and clung with fervour to the idea of a future life as something to which one could step with the ease of a child walking through the door of a wardrobe.
How would he view his canonisation by the American Christian right and his adoption as the patron saint of creationism, fundamentalism and anti-Darwinian bigotry? No doubt the Puritanism of his modern admirers would have amused this chain-smoking, heavy-drinking man, but I have no doubt at all that, if forced to take sides in modern America, he would be firmly on the barricades with the neoconservatives.
There are many things that repel in the Narnia books, not least the effectual damnation of Susan at the end of the series, when she is not allowed to inherit eternal life with the other children because she has committed the unpardonable sin of becoming…a woman”.

Professor Mullan is not impressed by Lewis when his role as defender of the faith was not camouflaged as fantasy: “In common with his stupider modern adherents, he was in fact offering ammunition to atheists. There is something babyish about Lewis the religious apologist – babyish and ridiculous”.

David Teather (The Guardian, 9th November 2005) analysed the hard-nosed money-making impulses behind the adaptation in God meets mammon – a Disney fantasy come true: “Walt Disney is out to prove that you can serve God and mammon after all. Next month, the company will release The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a film based on the much-loved book by the British author CS Lewis. It hopes the work, a thinly veiled Christian allegory, will be the beginning of the biggest franchise in the history of its film business.
If the first instalment is a success, and the early buzz has been positive, there are another six books for the company to mine for sequels. Disney is mounting one of the most high profile campaigns ever to ensure it scores big at the box office. The film is reported to have cost about $150m (£85m) to make.
It has tie-ins with companies including McDonalds, General Mills, Virgin Atlantic, Kodak and Oral-B; more than 60 licences have been handed out to manufacture board games, dolls, trading cards and replica swords; HarperCollins is shipping out 170 related books including box sets and audio versions to more than 60 countries and a video game is in development.
‘Narnia is a big bet for them,’ says David Cohen at Hollywood trade paper, Variety. ‘It’s a huge project for a studio that doesn’t usually do this kind of visual effects-packed film. They are determined to use all of their marketing muscle to turn this into their own Lord of the Rings, which they turned down by the way. It’s going to be quite a blitz’”.

Sentimentality and reverence for the message did not figure in the equation: “The signs for Narnia are good. British authors and the fantasy genre have proved a winning combination for Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. The Narnia books have sold a combined 90m copies since they were published in the 1950s.
With the unexpected $600m box office success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ still ringing in Hollywood’s ears, Disney hopes to appeal to the evangelical Christian market as well as secular audiences. It has hired specialist marketing firms and provided sneak previews in churches as well as promotional and resource materials aimed at ministers, teachers and scout troops. It is even releasing separate soundtracks, one featuring Christian artists.
Mr Cohen concedes the approach could backfire and secular audiences could be turned off. But he thinks Disney is smart enough to keep the two markets sufficiently apart. ‘It depends on how much they push the religion in the national campaign, and I doubt they will,’ he says. ‘Hollywood as a whole is now aware there is money to be made in [the Christian] market and people will pursue cash where they see it. But I don’t think they will jeopardise the main audience’”.

After the reviewers, cultural critics could hardly contain themselves, jostling to react. Christine Odone (The Observer, 27th November 2005) fired the opening salvo with ‘In Narnia, boys are brave and bossy, while girls cook and are pure of heart’: “There will be no accusations of anti-semitism, no Aramaic, body-lashings or blood-soaked close-ups. No matter: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a child’s version of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with the same mission and probably the same impact. Gibson’s take on Christianity was the gospel as Braveheart, a violent and overblown romantic tale of a good man wronged by evil foes.
Secular liberals, even those who saw no anti-semitic strains, found the film unappetising. Here was unquestioning belief in its rawest form, a self-righteousness (Jesus was the only Messiah, his the only true path) hardly diluted for Hollywood tastes.
The same people will find watching The Lion…difficult. CS Lewis’s Narnia books, a mishmash of feudalism and fantasy, ram home a host of deeply unfashionable messages, including Christianity, and Disney has pledged to be true to the originals.
Why not? In Christian, conservative America, Lewis strikes a chord, though hard-line Bible-bashers detest him as an effete Oxford don with a malevolent influence on young innocents. There are more than 500 web sites knocking Lewis for his ‘occult fantasy’ or satanic propaganda, in which children are encouraged to drink wine, worship nature and sundry other horrors.
British liberal parents well-versed in Philip Pullman, and wary of proselytising creationists, will recoil from an attempt at Sunday school cinema. Lewis is anything but subliminal in his text; there is Edmund, obnoxious and greedy, and the Christ-like Aslan who dies in order to atone for Edmund’s treachery. Children are innocent and good and, thus, able to inhabit Narnia, but the minute they start growing up, showing a liking, for instance, for clothes and parties, they are evicted from this garden of Eden.
Christian dogma apart, Lewis’s message is unrepentantly conservative, a 1930s version of a hierarchical society where everyone – men and women, the middle classes and the proles – have their rightful place [Whereas I agree as far as the general contention is concerned, the character of Frank the cab driver in The Magician’s Nephew contradicts such a straightforward reading: this man of humble status is crowned king by Aslan. He may be a prole, but his essential dignity, nobility of spirit and goodness, which human society in its iniquity ignored and denied, are recognised and honoured by the lion. God attaches equal value to the sparrow in the dust, the Cockney in his drab uniform and the monarch in his palace. This harks back to the democratic impulses in early Christianity whereby kings and paupers alike were to be judged in accordance with their deeds, the subversive notion that accumulated wealth, honour and standing counted for nothing in terms of salvation. That such a rose-tinted, sentimental view does not feed hungry bellies or demolish walls of entrenched privilege is a question to which we shall return] Thus, we fall out of an enchanted wardrobe into Daily Mail land, where the golden-haired Narnians and Archenlanders are honest, upright, and hospitable; the working classes have warm hearts but need to be gentrified; and the countryside is the green and pleasant land of patriotic lore. Boys are brave and bossy, while girls cook, clean and are pure of heart.
In the sequel, Prince Caspian, Lewis echoes the communist takeover of Eastern Europe, placing Narnia under the despotic rule of the usurper, Miraz. But there’s no hint of democracy; what bad government needs is a proper Narnian monarch, dispensing his justice with the flat side of his sword.
When The Passion proved a blockbuster, Mel Gibson said he had known all along that people would flock to his unrepentantly Christian film. There was a hunger, he said, for passionate belief and old certainties. Disney is banking on a similar nostalgia – and not just in the realm of religion. The bog question now is whether today’s children, brought up on a diet of TV, video games, advertisements and celebrities, will find it appealing. They may simply ask their parents how they could possibly have survived such a repressed and claustrophobic time”.

Alison Lurie (The Guardian, 3rd December 2005) was next in line with a measured appraisal in His Dark Materials: “On first reading, this story and the six other Chronicles of Narnia that followed it seemed simple, entertaining and non-controversial; but they have turned some readers into passionate fans, and made others very angry. Children, too, seem to either love the books or strongly dislike them.
There are, I think, several reasons for this polarisation. The fact that Narnia was intended as a Christian allegory has made the books tremendously popular with the religious establishment, especially in fundamentalist America. It has also, according to reports, troubled the producers of the new film, who are anxious to sell The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a Christian fable without alienating filmgoers of other (or no) faiths all over the world. Recently, the immensely gifted and equally popular British writer Philip Pullman, author of the trilogy His Dark Materials who has described himself as both an agnostic and an atheist, has condemned the Narnia books as religious propaganda.
Some Christian critics, too, have expressed doubts about Lewis’s portrayal of Jesus as the huge, powerful lion Aslan. In most juvenile classics, the heroes and heroines tend to be relatively small and powerless; they are mice, rabbits, dogs, cats, hobbits and, of course, children. (When the good characters are adolescents or adults, they are usually in some way disadvantaged, though often temporarily). These heroes win through moral rather than physical strength, because they possess the standard folk-tale qualities of intelligence, courage, kindness and luck. Lewis, however, had a preference for what used to be called ‘muscular Christianity’, which recommended a strong and even militant faith, and the portrayal of Christ as athletic and super-masculine. This may have been responsible for his choice of a beautiful but terrifying lion the size of a small elephant rather than something nearer to the traditional, innocent, meek and mild Lamb of God.
Lewis has also been charged with racism as a result of his portrait of the Calormenes in The Horse and His Boy. Calormene, a desert country far to the south of Narnia, strongly suggests the Near East: its people are dark-skinned, wear turbans and carry scimitars. Their diet is heavy on oil, rice, onions and garlic. They are cruel to animals and worship a four-armed god with a vulture’s head called Tash who demands human sacrifice. Like Tash, the rulers of Calormene are autocratic, corrupt, treacherous and brutal. Slavery is common, and women cannot read or write or choose whom they will marry. However successful the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may be, it is hard to see how The Horse and His Boy could be made into a sequel today without serious political repercussions.
Other critics, with whom I have considerable sympathy, have seen the Chronicles of Narnia as anti-feminist. Philip Pullman, for instance, has called the books ‘monumentally disparaging of girls and women’. In Narnia, girls almost always come second to boys. They have fewer adventures, and none, like Shasta (The Horse and His Boy) or Caspian (Prince Caspian) has a book named after her. There is no such thing as a good and strong supernatural female figure in Narnia: the principal representation of virtuous supernatural power is male, while the principal representation of evil power is the White Witch. Here Lewis parts company with one of his two favourite predecessors in children’s literature, George MacDonald, in whose books the dominant supernatural force for good is female (…)
All these criticisms, though justified, are often partly excused on the grounds that CS Lewis was subject to the beliefs and prejudices of his time and place. His traditional Anglican Christianity, his dislike and suspicion of southern countries, his preference for all things northern (as a boy he fell in love with Norse myth and Wagner’s operas), and the fact that his good characters tend to be fair-haired, are seen as typical of conservative writers of his generation. His anti-feminism is explained by the fact that as a conventional British Tory, born in 1898, and spending most of his life in the then almost completely masculine environment of Oxford, it was natural for him to pay less attention to girls, and to assume that most of them were weaker, less interesting, and more fearful than boys. This is true especially in the first three Narnia books, written before Lewis, at 54, met the American writer Joy Davidman, a bold and outspoken fan and Christian convert whom he later married. Perhaps as a result, the later Narnia books include heroines who can ride and fight as well as boys and have exciting adventures.
Yet Lewis retained his distaste for what at the time was thought of as typically feminine – and perhaps, to judge by what happens in the final book of the series, The Last Battle, some distaste for most women. Many readers have been infuriated by his condemnation of the former wise and gentle Queen Susan, as no longer ‘a friend of Narnia’. She is cast out of paradise for ever because at 21 she speaks of her earlier experiences as only a childhood fantasy. She is also said to be ‘too keen on being grown up’ and ‘interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations’. Apart from the fact that these seem very small sins, it is hard to believe that Susan could have changed that much in only a few years, and forgotten her joy in Narnia. It seems deeply unfair that Edmund, Susan’s younger brother, who has betrayed the others to the Witch, is allowed to repent and remain King Edmund, while Susan, whose faults are much less serious, is not given the opportunity.
(…) Many readers, of whom I am one, have been made uneasy by the confusing and anachronistic borrowings in the Narnia books. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for instance, there are not only giants, dwarfs, ogres and a witch out of folk tales, but a whole zoo of talking animals including two badgers who seem to have come straight from Beatrix Potter. There is also a huge population of fauns, satyrs, dryads, naiads, minotaurs, unicorns and centaurs from Greek mythology, plus a rather modern Santa Claus in his sleigh drawn by reindeer”.

Polly Toynbee (The Guardian, 5th December 2005), however, with her uncompromising repudiation of what she regards as the insidious religious subtext, really set off a bout of gnashing of teeth amongst the Daily Mail contingent in ‘Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion’: “Narnia is a strange blend of magic, myth and Christianity, some of it brilliantly fantastical and richly imaginative, some (the clunking allegory) toe-curlingly, cringingly awful.
This new Disney film is a remarkably faithful rendition of the book – faithful in both senses. It is beautiful to look at and wonderfully acted. The four English children and their world are all authentically CS Lewis olde England. But from its opening scenes of the bombing of their Finchley home in the blitz and the tear-jerking evacuation from their mother in a (spotlessly clean) steam train, there is an emotional undertow to this film that tugs on the heart-strings from the first frames. By the end, it feels profoundly manipulative, as Disney usually does. But then, that is also deeply faithful to the book’s own arm-twisting emotional call to believers.
Disney is deliberately promoting this film to the religious – it has appointed Outreach, an evangelical publisher, to promote the Christian message behind the movie in British churches. The Christian radio station Premier is urging churches to hold services on the theme of The Gospel According to Narnia. Even the Methodists have written a special Narnia-themed service. And a Kent parish is giving away £10,000 worth of film tickets to single-parent families. (Are the children of single mothers in special need of the word?). [Surely Polly is being deliberately disingenuous here? She must be aware that to Christians single mothers are harlots, the archetypal sinners, breeding without the “legitimacy” lent by male control, not subject to a husband’s ruler-/ownership, who have by implication rejected “superior” masculine authority and that redeeming the “fallen woman” is one of the most time-honoured recreations of wealthy female congregation members swathed in their Sunday best and finest millinery, guaranteed to bolster their feelings of smugness and reassuring virtuousness in the face of human frailty when not actively ostracising their unfortunate sisters who are stigmatised as opposed to displaying the stigmata with pride].
US born-agains are using the movie. The Mission America Coalition is ‘inviting church leaders around the country to consider the fantastic ministry opportunity presented by the release of this film’. The president’s brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is organising a scheme for every child in his state to read the book. Walden Media, co-producer of the movie, offers a ’17-week Bible study for children’. The owner of Walden Media is both a big Republican donor to the Florida governor’s book promotion – a neat synergy of politics, religion and product placement. It has aroused protests from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which complains that ‘a governmental endorsement of the book’s religious message is in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution’.
Disney may come to regret this alliance with Christians, at least on this side of the Atlantic. For all the enthusiasm of the churches, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ bombed in Britain and warehouses are stuffed with unsold DVDs of that stomach-churner. There are too few practicing Christians in the empty pews of this most secular nation to pack cinemas. So there has been a queasy ambivalence about how to sell the film here. Its director, Andrew Adamson (of Shrek fame), says the movie’s Christian themes are ‘open to the audience to interpret’. One soundtrack album has been released with religious music, the other with secular pop.
Most British children will be utterly clueless about any message beyond the age-old mythic battle between good and evil. Most of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy, so only the minority who are familiar with Christian iconography will see Jesus as a lion. After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn’t say what Easter celebrated. Among the young – apart from those in faith schools – that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what ‘agony in the garden’, ‘deposition’, ‘transfiguration’ or ‘ascension’ mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers”.

No punches pulled here: “Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus’s holy head every day that you don’t eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told”.

The author’s elitism and undiluted conservatism positively made her skin creep: “Tolkien hated Narnia: the two dons may have shared the same love of unquestioning feudal power, with worlds of obedient plebs and inferior folk eager to bend the knee at any passing superior white persons – even children; both their fantasy worlds and their Christianity assumes that rigid hierarchy of power – lord of lords, king of kings, prince of peace to be worshipped and adored. But Tolkien disliked Lewis’s bully-pulpit”.

She was not alone in recoiling: “Philip Pullman – he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials – has called Narnia ‘one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read’.
Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis’s view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis’s earth.
Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religose scenes”.

Her parting comments constitute a masterpiece of debunking: “So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children’s minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy – but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.
Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan”.

Christopher Hart (Daily Mail, 6th December 2005) led the counterattack in The Battle for Narnia, subtitled, At last! A film that champions faith and morality. No wonder our sneering liberal elite are up in arms: “Already the squealing voices of our secular liberal elite are indignantly raised against such an intrusion into both their cinemas and their children’s imaginative lives, hitherto unsullied by worries about life, death, human wickedness or our possible need for redemption.
The media establishment, so insistent upon its own lofty virtues of tolerance, is spitting with ugly intolerance at this big-budget, beautifully crafted Hollywood blockbuster that refuses for once to toe the line.
Instead of simply holding up a comforting mirror to the secular, materialist world view, this film dares to suggest that the truth might be different: more complicated, more frightening and more comforting all at once.
For make no mistake: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, despite its Hollywood provenance, stands as far outside the mainstream as it is possible to get. It is, in the deepest sense, the most subversive film you’ll see all year.
That is because it has, at its core, a strong Christian message. This explains why it has found a hugely appreciative audience in the US, where such beliefs are a source of pride and comfort, and why it has been endorsed by a number of British Churches.
It also explains why its opponents are already up in arms, saying: ‘How dare those contemptible Bible bashers presume to put their own view of things to us and our children!
‘How dare they dramatise their own beliefs in such a way, for our supposed innocent entertainment! And at Christmas as well! Anyone would think Christianity wanted to take over Christmas!’
Shrillest of all the Establishment voices is that of columnist Polly Toynbee. The great advantage of having a Polly Toynbee around is that, like some faulty compass needle, she always points unerringly in the wrong direction, away from what is true and right.
She is without exception completely wrong about everything, so you can be sure of knowing exactly where the truth lies in any debate. Writing this week in The Guardian, she attacked Narnia, and C.S. Lewis with the full force of fundamentalist atheism. ‘We don’t need God!’ she raged. ‘We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass’.
Toynbee, we are told, needs neither God nor religion to know what is right. And she knows that Narnia is wrong. It is a world – as she says – ‘dark with emotional sadism’.
Like so many who hate and fear his books, this serves only to illustrate an alarming lack of understanding about the world that C.S. Lewis created, and makes no sense whatsoever to those of us – true believers or not – who have loved The Chronicles of Narnia from childhood”.

He fulminates with righteous indignation: “(…) this is a story about loyalty through thick and thin, human weakness, looking out for each other, courage, forgiveness, sacrifice and redemption.
These qualities are of universal appeal, but far from universal in the products of Hollywood, whether for adults or children.
The standard formula of a screenplay nowadays will punish the slow and stupid, reward the smart-talking and ruthless, and let such values as loyalty, courage or sacrifice go hang.
As for a Hollywood blockbuster based on the idea of ‘forgiveness’, the idea is inconceivable. But it is these values, at the heart of the Narnia story and so clearly honoured by its film-makers, which will make the film such a gripping experience for children.
Because, as any child knows, there is no drama like that between Good and Evil.
Yet for the anti-Lewis lobby, of whom there are all too many in the New Establishment, all this old-fashioned nonsense about sacrifice and redemption, is somehow setting a bad example for the young, impressionable minds to whom the film will most appeal.
In Polly Toynbee’s case, she objects in particular to Christ/Aslan’s self-sacrifice as being ‘repugnant’ on the grounds that we ‘did not ask Him’ to do it [note the subtle capitalisation of “Him”, a misquote].
While I would defend anyone’s right to free speech, this comment strikes me as being so inflammatory that, had it been written about any other divine being – Allah, for instance – Toynbee would find herself under investigation for inciting religious hatred.
Such a muddle-headed view of Narnia and its message is, alas, alarmingly prevalent in today’s cynical world in which anything that smacks of Christian faith must be demeaned and sneered at, however improbable the charges”.

He accuses Toynbee of distorting the truth: “Tolkien endured the horrors of the Somme, and both he and Lewis were wounded. Subsequently, both men detested fascism in all its forms, and there are many parallels between Lewis’s Narnia or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and Europe in the Thirties and Forties, with democratic Christian Europe assailed by the dark new powers of Nazism and Communism.
Yet the carefully wrought, painfully learned world view of these two fierce, intelligent, impassioned men is adjudged ‘neo-fascist’ by the literary revisionists. How disgraceful.
If there is any comfort to be drawn from such unjust and untrue accusations it is that the revival of a Christian message in our popular culture has clearly struck fear into the high priests and priestesses of secularism.
Such fury, such bitterness, such stark and irrational fear, from a class of people who pride themselves on their rationality, is extraordinary.
Their fear and fury will continue for years to come, as a generation of children flock delightedly to cinemas and fall in love all over again with Lewis’s enchanted world”

He cannot resist taking one last swipe: “When I first see Tilda Swinton as the White Witch, with her cold, miserabilist, bullying, authoritarian world view, then I know exactly where I will have encountered that world view before”.

Rowan Pelling (The Independent on Sunday, 11th December 2005) adopted a more moderate tone in Don’t go on about religion. Just decide, do you believe in fairies or not?: “I am amused by the ferocious battle that is currently being fought between the forces of good and evil, Enlightenment atheists and Christian moralists, over the new Narnia film. In one corner stands Polly Toynbee (…) Crikey! It’s The Passion of the Christ crossed with Nightmare on Elm Street. Cover your infants’ eyes before they’re gouged out! The other camp is cheer-led by church groups and the Daily Mail (…) The David Davis of Hollywood blockbusters. Let’s all watch King Kong instead.
It was left to a letter writer to The Independent to strike a blow for common sense and point out that CS Lewis’s Narnia books are, for most of their young readers, primarily about the belief in hidden worlds. Hear, hear. You’re more likely to become a nun after watching The Sound of Music. The question posed by Lewis is not: do you subscribe to Christianity? It is: are you prepared to take the leap of faith that says the realm of the imagination is every bit as real, as vivid, as profound and sacred as the physical world that lies around you? Do you want to visit magic snowbound realms where animals can talk and milk-skinned witches dispense Turkish delight?
For most children the answer is ‘yes’. The membrane between fact and fiction is so porous before puberty that the leap of faith from imaginary friends to the land beyond the wardrobe is easily made. Lewis’s Narnia is the classic fudge between Christian and pagan myth, where the so-called propagandist cannot help but be seduced by elements of older and even more compelling stories (…)
The wrath directed against CS Lewis has much to do with the fact that he’s now viewed as cruel and misogynistic on the grounds that the older Pevensie sister, Susan, is ultimately stranded outside Narnia because she’s stopped believing and has taken to wearing lippie. I can’t help wondering whether Lewis’s critics would’ve been quite so livid if it had been Peter disbarred from paradise because he’d started in the City and was saving for a Rover [This misses the point about Christianity’s revulsion for women and recoiling from sexuality]. In any case Lewis makes it clear that it is Susan’s free decision to deny herself the other world. Like most of us as we step on to the threshold of adulthood, she has to decide whether to relegate the world of untrammelled imagination or defend it against the derision of an increasingly sceptical world. It’s a brave person indeed who declares in mixed company, ‘I keep fairies at the bottom of my garden’. It’s not religious belief that divides most readers so much as tolerance of, or belief in, the magical”.

Her verdict: “Other people’s versions of reality are surely their own business and, in any case, fiendishly hard to disprove. Some believe in string theory, others in God, and yet others in David Cameron’s vision of a Tory Britain. I prefer to put my faith in the transporting power of magical fiction”.

Zoë Williams (The Guardian, 13th December 2005) was likewise less adamant than her colleague in Leave the lion alone, subtitled, The hollow criticism of the Narnia books’ biblical subtext smacks of mindless offence-seeking: “It bothers me that there seems to be no discussion of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that isn’t prefixed with ‘Besides the dodgy Christian subtext’ or ‘Dodgy religious allegory aside’. The critical variations are many, the only constant being the word dodgy, as if Christianity were inherently unsound, as if it had, without our noticing, ascended to the ranks of anachronistic wrong-headedness, like Nazism or hissing at single mothers.
Some people seem to object to the fact that the Narnia story refers to aspects of the Bible. It’s hard to tell what they’re objecting to (unless it’s plagiarism?) but the parallels are many. Aslan, for instance, is Jesus; I thought maybe he was God; a Christian-raised friend of mine said he was both, that the holy trinity was indivisible, but then failed to explain where the Ghost had got to. Susan and Lucy bathe his stricken body, just like the Bible’s Marys. These parallels work in direct proportion to existing knowledge; if you know the holy book well, you’ll pick up the Mary reference, and if you don’t know it at all, you might just get the sacrifice/resurrection business but the rest will be lost on you.
Assuming that children who are familiar with the Bible are being raised in Christian households, this work preaches to the converted. The unconverted have nothing to worry about [this is a well-judged point: think of all the Disney cartoons in which “resurrection” is a staple – with the exception of Bambi’s mother, although she meets her demise off screen – where tears well up in your eyes as the cute little bunnies and other assembled forest creatures weep over the body of the main character, such as Baloo in The Jungle Book, only to lapse into equal paroxysms of joy at the discovery that he was never really dead, objections to which are conspicuously thin on the ground. Our culture is saturated with redeemer-myths, think of Sleeping Beauty, a pernicious handbook of female helplessness and passivity if ever there was one or Snow White perfectly preserved in her casket, which demonstrate how girls and women are subjected to a relentless indoctrination process, our entire existence revolving around the male saviour who will lift us out of drudgery and loneliness. Before we are swept off our feet by our handsome prince, however, we are expected to wait uncomplaining and chaste].
More intricate is the argument, expressed recently by Polly Toynbee, that the film equates raw, physical power with righteousness. Aslan isn’t a character; he is raw might, an amalgam of borrowed biblical potency and slightly unreadable Britishness. All true, but how, exactly, does this differ from any other film? In what movie, let alone a blockbuster aimed at children, do the righteous turn out to be weaker than the wrong ‘uns? Can anyone name a Bruce Willis film in which his character is as developed as his pectorals? Maybe it’s a crass rendering of the Christian message but, again, surely this is one for Christians to worry about? No one outside the religion needs to worry about its interpretation from within, unless one of its interpretations is ‘let’s blow up all those outsiders’. The fact that Edmund has to labour under the guilt of being responsible for the Godhead’s death (distilling the toxic psychological burden of most religions) has to be set against what would have happened to him had he misbehaved in a regular film. He would have been killed. In a cave. By a fire-breathing snake.
One critic had a problem with the fact that Father Christmas gives Peter a sword, and said the battle that ensues is, therefore, reminiscent of the Crusades. Sure, in so far as any ancient weapon will remind us in passing of battles fought before guns, but really, this is mindless offence-seeking.
Some make the point that the film must be dodgy given the alacrity with which Christians, particularly American rightwing ones, have seized upon it. Well, that’s fundamentalist Christians for you. They would also use the spread of a terminal disease to preach the moral significance of female chastity in the developing world. You can’t trust the buggers, but it doesn’t make the film (or the disease) dubious.
The Bible is a narrative blueprint for a lot of western culture – if everything referencing it is dodgy then the nativity is dodgy, a lot of Shakespeare is dodgy, some of The Archers is dodgy, everything is dodgy. To what do we object, then? That CS Lewis’s allegories are too obvious? That there are too many of them? That he didn’t bother disguising them, as Tolkien did?
Anyone holding to this ‘dodgy’ orthodoxy, especially those who don’t explain why, is treating Christianity as inherently underhand. This is unfair to all Christians, not just hardliners. And it is not the time of year to be unfair to Christians. We’ve pinched their festival. We can hardly talk about ‘underhand’”.

Deborah Orr (The Independent, 17th December 2005) raised an eyebrow at the dust clouds kicked up during the tussle in Narnia’s message of goodness isn’t necessarily a sinister thing: “I never read the Narnia books when I was a child and left the inculcation of our own various offspring into the fantasy world of CS Lewis to my husband. They all seemed keen enough, so I was alarmed some weeks ago when the new Disney film was released amid a cacophony of accusations about brainwashing and manipulation. Children familiar with the Narnia books, it appeared, would grow up believing that homosexuality was ‘disordered’ and that contracting HIV was preferable to using a condom”.

The religious undertones did not possess such resonance on this side of the Atlantic: “In Britain, where religious evangelicalism is seen as more embarrassing and stupid than it is in the States, there was a great deal less of this sort of thing. Nevertheless, one reverend was called to account on Radio 4, and explained to a sceptical interviewer that he had meant no harm. His church had been given £10,000 worth of free tickets and had decided to make them available to single-parent families. His excuse was that these appeared to be the people for whom money was tight at this time of year. A likely story. I’m sure you’ll agree”.

She ultimately found the exchange of polemics somewhat distasteful: “My son wasn’t at all fazed by this plot twist [Aslan coming back to life]. He’s familiar already with the resurrection of Gandalf, Darth Vader and Sleeping Beauty. He’s seen back-from-the-brink moments in Harry Potter, involving all sorts of dodgy disbelief-suspensions. He understands that in made-up worlds, made-up things happen. He knows the story of Christ well, and outs that story in the same category.
What he does understand is that these stories emphasise that good is preferable to evil, as is trying to do what’s best for others rather than always looking out for number one. It’s a weird world when this sort of thing becomes a dangerous and sinister message. I’ve always found those Why-do-you-tolerate-every-religion-except-Christianity whinges extremely tiresome. But I’m beginning to change my mind”.

Whereas I have a great deal of sympathy for Toynbee’s position, and can fully relate to her visceral loathing of the organised religion, I do not attribute the potential for lasting harm to the Chronicles that she does. When I was first exposed to the books, I was too immature to have meditated on the workings of society or discern clearly that I was destined for a different (lesser) role than my brother by virtue of my anatomical characteristics. The uglier implications remained invisible. The ideals of noble self-sacrifice, laying down one’s life for others, the teachings of mutual tolerance and respect embodied in the notion of loving thy neighbour are good. I agree with Toynbee that where Christianity comes to grief is in the acceptance of one’s lot (God’s unfathomable will), unquestioning obedience to authority, blind adherence to scripture, which, far from being viewed as the blend of fact and fiction – with greater emphasis on the fiction – is “taken as gospel”, revealed, immutable and absolute truth. In spite of having devoured Lewis’ propaganda, I still mutated into a feminist, atheist, anti-monarchist. In brief, I would abolish the royal family and gift all its estates and holdings to the National Trust with sufficient resources to run the properties and land. I cannot abide unearned privilege or the uneven distribution thereof (and am wary of those who jealously guard their own definitions of merit, who have to power to enforce them and cunningly regulate it to preserve its scarcity value in a manner that keeps out undesirables). I do not subscribe to the myth of a compensatory afterlife, nor do I appreciate the smugness of the “elect” who are convinced they have a one-way ticket to the pearly gates (don’t be fooled, at best they pity you, at worst they look down on you and fear you). A more just hereafter reconciles you to the little you have, discourages social unrest and a healthy desire for mobility as “vain striving”. As such, it is more than a distraction since it gobbles up precious energies that could be more fruitfully channelled into bringing about practical reforms in the here and now. I do not need an “eye in the sky” to place constraints on my behaviour.

Yes, the enormity of knowing that I am a mere mortal is terrifying: there is no galvanising force more powerful than the beckoning of oblivion. When you stop for a moment to contemplate it, it impresses upon you the urgency of finding solutions and demands of you that you be willing to take action without prospect of reward. My abandonment of religion was long and painful and I had to go through it alone. Not that I drain the last drop of vitality from every waking second. Like most of us, I allow too much time to drift by without protest. If I were to lift the lid on my simmering discontents (not being appreciated by my boss, never having enough time to dedicate to my research) I would be scalded by the rising steam.

I remember how we used to torment ourselves with questions about how much we loved God. Were we truly willing to give up everything for Him? We used to debate which of our senses we would give up first if He asked us to. Sight was always the last for me (when I laughed at our puerile anxieties with JMCD he argued that touch was the most underrated part of our sensory equipment and he would opt to relinquish it last). I would rather surrender to an uncaring nothingness than a creator fashioned after our own image.

What Toynbee raises is the question of the limits of representation. A single volume can irrevocably alter the course of your entire life. For many, that volume might be the Bible or similar collection of sacred writings. For me it was Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. However, such moments of revelation aside, representations exert their hold over our minds and subtly shape our cognitions and interpretative schemes cumulatively and subliminally. Unless the Narnia novels are fed as part of a diet of Christian primers I tend to veer towards Orr. Narnia will not have the impact she dreads. In this clamour, in the boisterous, exuberant postmodern proliferation of pastiche, Narnia is just one alternative amongst many, the old certainties have been dealt a devastating blow. Narnia will survive outside fundamentalist circles as a serviceable if slightly heavy-handed fantasy.

David Thomson (The Independent on Sunday, 11th December 2005), in Scary Monsters, ponders the recent glut of children’s films: “There’s an odd contradiction of forces at work: older generations may long for tranquil ‘children’s films’ – thus the return of Lassie in a new version this week to divert the little ones from video games that may entail hours of questing, zapping and destroying. Yet kids also long for a taste of the grown-up world. The new Harry Potter picture has moments that are flat-out scary and intimations of adolescence blooming in our central trio. The bringing to the screen of the Narnia story is an attempt to hold on to the child audience while keeping adults interested. And some of it will work, even if sometimes kids can only prove themselves through rebellion.
Those packed houses for The Lord of the Rings were a throwback to the days when families went to mainstream films together, fairly sure that young children could follow the plot without being unduly frightened. That ‘golden age’ atmosphere is part of the opportunity seized upon by the film industry to reach ‘everyone’ at the same time. In turn, that was a measure of an age when families without the means to afford baby-sitting services liked to go, all together, to see movies. In hindsight, one can see how easily the set genres of that age appealed to everyone: action and adventure films, without undue violence; romantic stories, without too much sex; musicals – ‘Everyone loves a musical!’; and, of course, comedies”.

He detects in their popularity a longing for lost security: “There is another possibility in all of this: that film and television have helped to make childishness the central emotional condition of our life. In the Romantic age, we discovered and idealised childhood: thus the stress on childish experience in the great novel. But movies and TV concentrated on young experience and helped invent the teenager – not just the model for our economic market, but increasingly the touchstone for our romantic and erotic experience.
Once we were meant to grow up. Film has surely introduced the sweet and treacherous fantasy of remaining young (…) That is the moment in the dance when we see that the darkness is us, ourselves”.

Back to my ambivalence. I deliberately did not want to re-read the Narnia chronicles (just as I have never re-read Small World, which is thereby permitted to retain its place in my affections as the funniest book ever written unchallenged or Ulysses as the pinnacle of literary achievement in the 20th century). I wanted my memory of them to remain pristine, intact. I therefore approached the film (directed by Andrew Adamson) with some trepidation, as it would have been so very easy to utterly betray the source text. The trailers of bright light from the wardrobe appeared to confirm my deepest suspicions, but ultimately proved misleading. It acquitted itself fairly well, in fact, it would be difficult really to see where it could have been made much better. Owen Gibson, in The Guardian (29th November 2005, CS Lewis feared film would ruin Narnia) showed that Lewis himself was more than aware of the pitfalls in transposing it to the screen: “The author made clear his distaste for the idea [of a live action version of the tale] in a hitherto unpublished letter to a BBC producer with whom he collaborated on a radio version of The Magician’s Nephew, chronologically the first in the much-loved series of fantasy tales which double as Christian allegory.
In the letter, dated December 18 1959, Lewis made clear he approved of the radio version of the book produced by Lance Sieveking, a pioneering BBC radio and television producer. But in letters written shortly before the death of his wife, Joy, Lewis also said he was ‘absolutely opposed – adamant isn’t in it! – to a TV version’ of any of the books. ‘Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turns into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography,’ he wrote.
A cartoon version would be ‘another matter’, he said. But Lewis, who died in 1963, added: ‘If only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius’. In conclusion, he said that ‘a human, pantomime Aslan would to me be blasphemy’”.

Although not without the occasional hiccup, the computer animation did not drop below standard to the extent that they jeopardised the credibility of the heroes (and villains for that matter). Lewis would probably have appreciated the rendition of Aslan (though I would have preferred Sean Connery’s voice, which had been mooted at one stage). Others have commented upon Tilda Swinton’s icy perfection in the role of the White Witch, her ethereal looks suiting her to playing semi-divine beings. Another inspired piece of casting was James Cosmo as Father Christmas, able to smile warmly at last instead of leering before smashing someone’s face with his psychopathic fist. James McAvoy as Tumnus has an excruciatingly difficult task in striking the right balance between innocence and guile and because his performance is so unerring and impeccable, he steals the laurels for me. The opening frames of the bombing raid might smack of wanting to show off just what effects can convey nowadays, but the small touches, such as the scene where Tumnus reminds Lucy that Aslan is not a tame lion, after all, as we see him padding along the beach below Cair Paravel and, in the blink of an eyelid he is gone, leave more lasting traces.

The knowledge that we must moulder in the earth providing nutritious worm fodder sometimes causes a twinge, kindling a residual yearning for something more. Perhaps it is the sober realisation of our transitoriness and futility, the loss of faith that renders the stories more poignant than their competent, flashy, but sadly empty successors. For me, Narnia will always be about the pleasures only reading can bring, Aslan’s country forever beyond the horizon.

“There was no need to row, for the current drifted them steadily to the east. None of them slept or ate. All that night and all the next day they glided eastward, and when the third day dawned – with a brightness you or I could not bear even if we had dark glasses on – they saw a wonder ahead. It was as if a wall stood up between them and the sky, a greenish-grey, trembling, shimmering wall. Then up came the sun, and at its first rising they saw through the wall and it turned into wonderful rainbow colours. Then they knew that it was really a long, tall wave – a wave endlessly fixed in one place as you may often see at the edge of a waterfall. It seemed to be about thirty feet high, and the current was gliding them swiftly towards it. You might have supposed that they would have thought of their danger. They didn’t. I don’t think anyone could have in their position. For now they saw something not only behind the wave but behind the sun. They could not have seen even the sun if their eyes had not been strengthened by the water of the Last Sea. But now they could look at the rising sun and see it clearly and see things beyond it. What they saw – eastward, beyond the sun – was a range of mountains. It was so high that either they never saw the top of it or they forgot it. None of them remembers seeing any sky in that direction. And the mountains must really have been outside the world. For any mountains even a quarter or a twentieth of that height ought to have had ice and snow on them. But these were warm and green and full of forests and waterfalls however high you looked. And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all around them. It lasted only a second or so but what it brought them in that second none of those three children will ever forget. It brought both a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy would only say, ‘It would break your heart’. ‘Why,’ say I, ‘was it so sad?’ ‘Sad!! No,’ said Lucy.
No one in that boat doubted that they were seeing beyond the end of the World into Aslan’s country.
At that moment, with a crunch, the boat ran aground. The water was too shallow now for it. ‘This,’ said Reepicheep, ‘is where I go alone’.
They did not even try to stop him, for everything now felt as if it had been fated or had happened before. They helped him to lower his little coracle. Then he took off his sword (‘I shall need it no more,’ he said) and flung it far away across the lilied sea. Where it fell it stood upright with the hilt above the surface. Then he bade them goodbye, trying to be sad for their sakes; but he was quivering with happiness. Lucy, for the first and last time, did what she had always wanted to do, taking him in her arms and caressing him. Then hastily he got into his coracle and took his paddle, and the current caught it and away he went, very black against the lilies. But no lilies grew on the wave; it was a smooth and green slope. The coracle went more and more quickly, and beautifully it rushed up the wave’s side. For one split second they saw its shape and Reepicheep’s on the very top. Then it vanished, and since that moment no one can truly claim to have seen Reepicheep the Mouse. But my belief is that he came safe to Aslan’s country and is alive there to this day”.

[For Stormwind]

“If there is anything noble and good within me, it will express itself through my writings; if, however, these qualities are absent from my disposition I would strive in vain to represent the lofty and the beautiful, as the low and ignoble would always shine through”
Adalbert Stifter, Bunte Steine (Augsburg, Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1983, p7).

In my innocence as a first-year undergraduate I had still not emerged from the self-absorption necessary for my escape, an introspection encouraged by the fellowship, which left no thought, no emotion unpoliced in the relentless battle against impurity. From the bay-windowed study of the flat I shared with my elderly landlady, society seemed little more than the jostling throng of shoppers littering the pavements of Princes Street. I had no concept of its workings, at most perceiving it as a giant, mystical self-regulating mechanism. The human world was divided into believers and unbelievers, the saved and the damned and my energies (when not directed towards the welfare of my own soul and avoiding any activity that might jeopardise my salvation) went into evangelism and prayer. My allegiance to the teachings instilled in me by the (male) elders about accepting the proper place God had allotted and the belief that we were in control of our own fates (and by extension that failure to improve oneself and one’s lot was exclusively attributable to the moral shortcomings or lack of effort on the part of each individual) had not yet begun to waver. External factors were a lazy excuse. I had a duty to prosper for the greater glory of God (and by enhancing my future earning power the church would be assured a better income through tithes, which presumably had a lot to do with its tolerance for a mere female procuring an education).

Of all the literature I consumed during that year, the passage that exerted a lasting appeal came from Adalbert Stifter’s preface to Bunte Steine, which set out his theory of the “gentle law” (das sanfte Gesetz):
“Since we are talking about the great and the small I would like to set out my views, which probably differ from those held by many others. The blowing of the wind, the trickling of the water, the growing of the crops, the surging of the sea, the greening of the earth, the gleaming of the skies, the shimmering of the stars are what I consider to be great; the splendid procession of the storm, the lightning, which splits houses apart, the gale that causes the breakers to surge, the fire-spewing mountain, the earthquake, which buries countries I consider to be no greater than the phenomena listed above, indeed I consider them smaller because they are only the effects of far higher laws. They occur in isolation and are the outcomes of one-sided causes. The force, which makes the milk in the poor woman’s small pot bubble up and boil over is the same one that forces the lava upwards in the fire-belching mountain and causes it to spill down over the mountain slopes. These phenomena are simply more eye-catching and they attract the gaze of the ignorant and the unobservant to a greater extent, whilst the intellectual efforts of the researcher prefer to settle on the entirety and the general, and are able to recognise greatness in these alone, because these alone preserve and sustain the world. The details pass by and their effects are barely discernable within a short time” (p8).

The truly awe-inspiring was to be found in the humblest and least spectacular, in the tiny, anonymous actions of kindness and nurturing whose cumulative (beneficial) effect is so taken for granted as to be invisible: “The lightning is only a small characteristic of this force; the force itself is, however, a great thing in nature. Since, however, science only proceeds one tiny grain at a time, since it only makes observation upon observation and can only piece together the general from the individual, and since, ultimately, the number of phenomena and the field of the given are boundless, God has rendered the joy and bliss of the researcher inexhaustible, we too in our workshops can only represent the individual, never the general, as that would constitute creation. So too has the history of what is deemed to be great in nature been subject to a perpetual transformation of views concerning what that greatness is thought to consist of. When humanity was in its infancy, its mind’s eye had not yet been touched by science and so the imagination was captured by the obvious and the striking and captivated into fear and admiration, but when the minds were opened, when the gaze began to focus on the wider context, the individual phenomena sank ever deeper and the law rose ever higher, the miraculous events waned, the sense of wonder grew.
As it is with nature on the outside, so it is in the inside, within human beings. An entire life full of fairness, simplicity, self-restraint, rationality, activity within one’s circle, admiration of beauty, linked to a tranquil, composed death I consider to be great. Wild fluctuations of temper, terrible fulminations of wrath, the lust for revenge, the inflamed spirit striving for action, which tears down, alters, destroys and in the heat of its agitation often throws its own life away I do not consider to be greater, but smaller as these things are no more than manifestations of isolated and one-sided forces, like storms, fire-spewing mountains and earthquakes. We seek to catch sight of the gentle law, which guides the human race. There are forces, which are aimed at nurturing the individual’s existence. They take everything and make use of it, which is essential for its existence and development. They ensure the existence of the individual and through the individual of all. If, however, someone absolutely has to grab everything his being needs for himself, if he ruins the conditions of existence of another’s, something higher within us becomes incensed, we help the weak and oppressed, we restore the previous conditions so that one person can exist alongside the other and can follow his human path, and when we have done so, we feel contented, we feel ourselves to be far more elevated and profound than we can ever feel ourselves to be as individuals. We feel ourselves to be all humanity. There are therefore forces, which work for the existence of humanity as a whole, which must not be allowed to be restricted by individual forces, indeed, which, on the contrary, have a limiting effect upon themselves. It is the law of these forces, the law of justice, the law of morals, the law that wishes everyone to be respected, honoured, and to live alongside others without danger so that he may pursue his higher human trajectory, that he may win the love and admiration of his neighbours, that he be guarded like a jewel, as every human being is a jewel for every other. This law is to be found wherever people live side by side, and it manifests itself whenever people work against each other. It may be found in the love of spouses for one another, in the love of parents for their children, children for their parents, in the love of brothers and sisters and friends for each other, in the sweet affection between the sexes, in the industriousness by which we are sustained, in the activity by which one works for one’s immediate circle, for those further afield and for humanity and finally in the order and contours, with which entire societies and states surround their existence and bring it to a conclusion” (pp8-10).

Once I had prised myself from the grip of delusion, absolved from the taint of my birth by my unapologetic sisters, attentive to the innumerable discriminations perpetrated against us, I embraced rebellion. How I loathed and despised the weary who retreated behind their net curtains, who flopped onto the sofa and allowed themselves to be stupefied by mindless entertainments, the fight drained out of them. Not for me the nicotine-stained fingers and tremble of withdrawal, but the gulping of excess down to its dregs, the worship of life lived as art (hence my pilgrimage to the cemetery in Paris to adorn the Irish poet’s grave with iris and rose). The miserable bourgeois, blinkered with their petty-mindedness, their matching pair of dull-eyed “wally dugs” on the mantelpiece, not a speck of dust in sight. Contempt nourished me. The calm, the settled, the predictable were anathema, constriction. Rather Sturm und Drang than recollection in tranquillity.

The rage has all but fizzled out, the pulse throbs less urgently. In the words of the Welshman, his cheeks flushed by finest Tuscan red: “It has its compensations”. The smell of furniture polish, the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway, the vase empty, a petal on the table, chips frying, my mother’s voice through the kitchen window, catching thistledown “fairy godmothers” and releasing them having whispered a wish, the moss clambering over the stone wall, the bark of the silver birch, plucking the cotton grass as we hopped from tussock to tussock.

Serap Cileli is an indefatigable champion of the rights of Muslim women in Germany as well as being that country’s foremost expert on forced marriages and honour killings. I had the immense privilege of visiting her at home for an in-depth interview. I was deeply impressed by the depth of her warmth and compassion and by her courage in braving hecklers and the disapproval of those who disagree with her views. For many years hers was a voice crying in the wilderness, the uncomfortable truths she was determined to bring to light welcomed neither by intellectuals nor by politicians. With a visible (and justified) sense of pride, she smiled at the recent phrase in the extended pieces in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times describing the activities of her and her sisters elsewhere in Europe as “the rebellion of the Muslim women”. The story that she has to tell is one of culpable squandering of human potential and shocking political listlessness.

Chameleon: Can you tell us a little about your life and why you began campaigning against forced marriages and honour killings?

Serap: When I was fifteen I was forced into marriage against my will by my family here in Germany. I was born in Turkey and had come to Germany to join my parents at the age of eight and when I turned twelve I was forcibly engaged to a potential marriage candidate from Nuremberg. This engagement was against my will, but my Father had already made up his mind about the marriage. He was convinced that the man in question was the right man for me and wanted to marry me off to him. I did not want to be married to him, so I attempted suicide at the age of thirteen because I felt so helpless at the time. There was nobody for me to turn to, I couldn’t involve third parties, as my Father’s honour, his reputation would have been damaged if I had talked to my classmates or my teacher about it, that I was going to be forced into marriage and that the whole thing was against my will. As a thirteen-year-old child I felt completely helpless, I just wanted to die and because of the suicide attempt my prospective parents-in-law visited my parents to complain that their daughter had not been brought up according to the precepts of our religion, according to our customs and traditions, if she had been, she would not be opposing her Father’s decision and that it dishonoured our family. They didn’t want to have anything to do with this dishonour nor did they want such a rebellious daughter-in-law, so they broke off the engagement. Of course I was initially delighted at the news, but my Father told me not to rejoice too soon, that I was now entirely in his hands and that he would decide on my future whether I liked it or not. A year later, when I was fourteen, we were in Turkey where we spent six weeks on holiday every year. Shortly before we were due to leave – I was still only fourteen – my Father once again had me forcibly engaged to another man in Turkey, ten years my senior, which meant that I travelled back to Germany as a fiancée. It goes without saying that I was extremely unhappy and tried to explain to my Father that I didn’t want this marriage, to which he replied that he had given his word, that he had already warned me that a daughter who disobeyed him, who disputed his authority would soon know about it. So when I was fifteen I was married in Turkey during the summer holidays and left behind there. I stuck that marriage out for seven years, seven whole years and every time my parents came to Turkey on holiday I always pleaded with them, insisting that I didn’t want to stay in the marriage, that I couldn’t stand it any more, that I wanted a divorce, I wanted them to give me their consent to go ahead with a divorce, but my Father turned round and told me it was my fate. All of a sudden it was deemed to be my fate, because they had seen for themselves that this man was not fulfilling his marital duties. My family had been supporting us financially. If my parents had not sent me money every month I would have starved in Turkey together with my two children. They were aware of what was going on, but they kept on saying it was my fate, there was still a chance he might change and that they would continue to support us. I should stick at the marriage. After seven years I told my Father that if he didn’t agree to the divorce there and then he wouldn’t see me and the children the following year when he came back to Turkey. I was issuing a threat, letting him know that I would kill myself and the two children. Then he said (although it wasn’t quite as easy as that, there were still huge difficulties) he gave me his word that if I stayed in the marriage for another four to six months, he would give me the time, if I gave it another try, but that if after that period had elapsed I still wanted out, he would consent to the divorce. So he finally faced up to the fact that it hadn’t worked out and all of a sudden I found myself a single mother of two in Turkey. When I was still separated I fell in love with one of the neighbour’s young sons. Such a relationship was off limits firstly because although we were living apart I was not divorced yet and secondly because we were Alevites and he was a Sunni, in other words, we belonged to different religious communities, although we were both Muslims. He was the man of my choice and I had an affair with him. My parents did not accept him as a son-in-law so that my Mother, when she found out about the affair, abducted my children to Germany. She issued me an ultimatum. I had to choose between my children and the man I loved. I had to leave and join my children, which is how I ended up back in Germany in 1991. Here my Father and my Mother made another attempt at forcing me into a marriage, for the second time, in order to cleanse the “stain” on our honour caused by the affair. That was in 1992 and I fled to a Women’s Shelter with the two elder children. I lived there for 16 months and then in 1994 I began writing about my past experiences, in order to come to terms with them. It was really very difficult for me to do so; it caused me a great deal of anguish. My family no longer accepted me, they disowned me. I was left with so many questions for which I had no answers, which is when I started writing. It was through this writing that I embarked upon my present activity. My activities give me a sense of purpose and fulfilment. I regard what I do as a mission. For me it is a duty, a task, a mission to fight on behalf of the thousands of Turkish Muslim women in Europe, to fight for their rights. Because I have found happiness. I was able to get married to the neighbour’s son in 1993. He came to Germany through family reunification. I have found happiness. I have also known freedom and I want to share the freedom I enjoy today, for which I fought so long and bitterly, with as many women who have undergone similar sufferings as possible. I do not want Muslim women to be confined to their homes and tacitly kept as slaves, with everyone turning a blind eye. I have made it my objective to shake Europe, society, the politicians out of their torpor, to tell them there is a minority here in Europe, Muslim women, who, in spite of the provisions of our constitution, are unable to avail themselves of their rights, women who live in slavery in the midst of our free states. This is why I have undertaken this mission as a duty, as a responsibility.

Chameleon: How do you react to the talk of multiculturalism? Do you see it as an excuse to treat women as second-class citizens? What is your opinion of it?

Serap: This multicultural idyll, as it were, is a mere pretext for violating human as well as women’s rights, an excuse for looking away, for not wanting to face up to the realities for reasons of convenience. I always contend that those who stand up for this multicultural idyll and then frantically defend it in public debate are accomplices when human rights are violated next door. That’s what it boils down to. For almost 50 years now, there has been immigration into Germany and Europe. For almost 50 years we have never had such an intensive debate about the suffering of Muslim women, about forced marriages, domestic violence, honour killings, child marriages, incest and abuse in the family as we are having now, in 2005. These topics were all taboo and it is precisely these hypocritical advocates of the multicultural idyll who are to blame for it. It was a breeding ground for Islamists. Europe, democracy provided fertile soil for Islamists, fundamentalists and also for patriarchs. Why did Germany react in this way? I asked myself for a long time why this should be the case. I was only able to come up with a single answer, namely, the past, Germany’s Nazi history. German society was racked with guilt for years because of the crimes of their forebears. It was an appalling business. Obviously we have to stand up and say nothing like it must ever be allowed to happen again, but you cannot always carry this burden of guilt, you cannot pass on these feelings of guilt from generation to generation forever. It is precisely this feeling, precisely this manner of upbringing here in Germany that has made the suffering of these women possible because people didn’t want to confront what was going on, it was ascribed to such and such a tradition, to their culture. The reaction was a desperate effort to accept the alien elements of other cultures, of other traditions just as they were, without questioning them and without criticising them. It was out of bounds, taboo. For years on end it was taboo. What incenses me most is that the politicians kept quiet about it. Integration officials, the immigration authorities and first and foremost the members of Parliament of Turkish extraction maintained for years that the majority of the Turkish population in Germany are integrated – I am talking about the Turkish community because the Turks constitute the biggest minority group here in Germany. This is why in Germany we can talk about the problem of the failed integration of Turkish Muslims. Because I raise these issues in public I am considered a traitor to my country, a denigrator of my homeland and I take abuse at public meetings. I face insinuations that I am fanning the flames of xenophobia and I don’t just hear it from my own compatriots, but from some Germans too, good people, who very naïvely cling to their misunderstood tolerance to the extent that they almost become accomplices when women are murdered in the name of honour. That is quite bluntly how I see it from my point of view. That people just want to draw a veil of silence over it. On the other hand, of course, it costs money to carry out educational work nationwide as well as on a political level to change the laws. Thankfully, thanks to an initiative taken by the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, forced marriages have been classified as serious coercion since February 2005 carrying a sentence of between six months and five years and it goes without saying that I am really very happy about this indeed, as are my fellow campaigners. I, for example, have been engaged in my public relations work since 1994. If you think about it for a moment, my voice wasn’t heard until 2005, it took a long time. Over a period of five years I wrote to many journalists, to editors, to television producers to draw attention to the topic and in 90 per cent of cases I was turned away, 90 per cent of the time I was told, Mrs. Cileli, we cannot broach this issue or film a piece on the subject or even carry out an interview because it could stir up xenophobia. I listened to this kind of thing for years and obviously it infuriates me, it really made me fume with rage, but on the other hand I say better late than never. But, I also ask myself, did it really have to take the murder of six women one after the other in the name of honour in the space of five months before German public opinion, German politicians stood up, showed the courage of their convictions and decided to do something about tackling the problem, to say these people live here, they are not just guests any more and each and every one of us, hand in hand, has to help these people and we also have to tell these people, in a spirit of frankness, that we have equal rights here, sharia laws do not apply and we cannot allow them in Germany, nor can we allow parallel worlds, parallel societies, parallel ways of thinking to be created here in Germany or here in Europe for that matter. Anyone who approves of suchlike or even promotes them has no business being here in this Western civilisation. These people have to be deported. In other words, if people such as these fundamentalists, these Islamists in mosques at the weekends, for example, foment hatred amongst young people who were born here in Germany and grew up here we should not tolerate it. We cannot tolerate it because these young people are our future. If we say that the birth rate in Germany is declining, then it is automatically the case that the future of Germany depends on these young people of foreign parentage. We have to invest in these young people now. We have to reach out to them, integrate them. We have been looking the other way for years. We didn’t want to admit that Germany was a country of immigration. That was one point. The other is, as I mentioned earlier, Germany’s Nazi past.

Chameleon: In the British press we read about young girls ostensibly going on holiday who are then forced into marriage abroad without having suspected that this fate would befall them. Do you have any figures about the dimensions of this phenomenon?

Serap: First of all in Germany, as in Europe as a whole, we don’t have any representative figures. In France the figure of 70,000 a year has been mentioned. In Germany, the corresponding figure is 30,000. We need a representative study to determine the true extent of the phenomenon. That is extremely important. There are Turkish women, the so-called “educated” Turkish women here in Germany, for example, including some members of Parliament, who take a confrontational stance towards us and claim that we are making generalisations, that I and my fellow campaigners are exaggerating, that it only affects a certain small group who live in a highly traditional, patriarchal fashion and who place their daughters in forced marriages. However, it is not only girls who are affected by it, but boys as well. Young boys of 15, 16, 17 and 18 are forcibly betrothed. I look after persons affected who turn to me for help. Of the approximately 200 individuals to whom I have offered help since 1994 20 were boys. The youngest was 16, the oldest 48 (he was being forced into an engagement for the second time). It all comes down to upbringing. The core problem lies in the upbringing of these young people. The children, the girls, know what’s in store for them. From their infancy they are brought up to believe that their greatest responsibility is to enter into marriage as virgins. Marriage is the be all and end all for them. From their earliest childhood they are squeezed into this housewife role, they are already brought up to know what to expect later on. Their mother serves as an example. At the end of the day it is the mother that brings them up in this manner. The brothers and the fathers are those who keep tabs on their virginity, on their sexuality and monitor it. What happens is that the girls have been brought up in such a way that they know that after they reach puberty they could be forced into marriage at any time or enter into an arranged marriage. They are both the same to me, I do not draw a distinction between arranged and forced marriages because the core problem, as I pointed out, lies in the upbringing of these girls. At some stage these girls will be confronted with a forced marriage, but they already know that this will be the case. Marrying for love is synonymous with prostitution. They are like whores, in other words, they are castigated as whores if they are in love with someone whom they would like to marry or if they are glimpsed on the street with a boy. These are the rules, this is what is demanded of women in this tradition, this patriarchy and they must respect them stringently. The girls know this. They know it, but they don’t know when it might happen. There are girls, thank God, who, thanks to our public relations work, are daring more and more to rebel and say, “It’s happening to me too and I don’t want it”. By publicising the problems we are giving these girls the courage to express themselves. This is why it is so important for us to maintain a constant presence in the press, on television as well as on the internet, for example. A lot of people get in touch with me via my home page. They go online, and surf when their friends are affected by forced marriages, for example. The girl cannot get out of the house, she is locked in and another friend tries to get hold of help from outside the family, from elsewhere. Then they come across my home page and contact me and we both try to help the girl. The work that we do is essential, so that the girls do not feel that they are on their own. The majority of the girls remain silent. The majority are scared of putting up a fight, they are afraid of acts of revenge, afraid of rebelling against the family, but also afraid of losing the family. They have a huge emotional investment in the family because they are not brought up as individuals in their own right. They are part of the extended family. This is how they are taught to see themselves, they are constantly reminded: “You are only a woman. You are just a girl. You are stupid, you are not good at anything, what do you need an education for? You don’t need to go to school either. Your husband will go out to work. That’s his job. You have to be the housewife. You have to learn how to clean, you have to be able to look after the children, you have to be a good cook, you have to be able to do the laundry, those are your tasks. Domestic chores. What goes on in the outside world is your husband’s business”. This is how Turkish girls are prevented from getting a proper education. Then people here in Germany are astonished that almost 40 per cent of the children of Turkish immigrants don’t have any qualifications. It’s the same in the Netherlands. According to a recent study in Austria, published in Vienna, 40 per cent of Turkish children have neither vocational training nor school leaving certificates.

Chameleon: Does that 40 per cent only comprise girls?

Serap: 40 per cent in total, girls and boys. The figures are the same for Germany. Exactly the same. We are talking about the third generation here. The third generation. In other words if even the third generation is unable to obtain these qualifications, if the third generation is illiterate in two languages, if they cannot speak either German or Turkish and have no prospects for the future then we shouldn’t be surprised if in 10 or 15 years’ time we see the same conditions here as exist in France. This time round it will be the children of Turkish immigrants. In France it was the young people from Morocco or the Mahgreb. We shouldn’t be surprised if we end up in the same situation in Germany. Here in Germany we have barely 23-24,000 Turkish students at our universities. That is too few. Too few by far.

Chameleon: Could you remind me of the size of the Turkish community in Germany?

Serap: There are between 2.7 and 3 million Turks living in Germany. According to some official figures there are 3.5, others say 2.7. Estimates vary. Officially it is stated that 2.7 million Turks live in Germany. The figure pertains to those who have not been naturalised, only to those who have a Turkish passport. There are approximately 700,000 naturalised Turks. If you consider for a moment that people have been living in Germany for 50 years, that we have nearly three million Turkish fellow citizens and that only some 700,000 have German citizenship you will realise that you are looking at a core problem if these people do not feel a sense of belonging. This has various causes, on both sides. On the German side there has been a failure in putting forward integration measures, to include these people, to put activities on offer to young people born here either during school hours or in their free time. On the Turkish side, the German-Turkish community has not set up any lobbies here in Germany. There are around 1,600 clubs and organisations in Germany, of which about 800 are Turkish religious associations. The Turkish citizens in Germany have preferred to set up religious associations instead of founding clubs and the like for the next generation. They have not created a body to represent the interests of their own young people. What I have observed is that the lack of integration measures, be it on the German or the Turkish side, has led to Islamists stepping in and taking over these tasks. The fundamentalists have stepped into the breach and the mosques are now offering German courses. German courses for Muslims. Youth centres are being set up in mosques, taking these young people off the streets. They have taken over this function, filled the gap. It really ought to have been up to the state to take them off the streets. A young person who can’t speak either language properly is not given any support from the family – it happens quite frequently, in fact it affects the majority of Turkish youth that nobody shows an interest in the child’s school or later the vocational qualifications. The parents simply do not take an interest in their children, nor are they particularly bothered with them. They don’t go to parents’ night, nor do they even know which school the child attends, which year the child is in or the name of the form teacher. This is the kind of problem the children have to cope with at home, so of course they don’t take an interest any more. If nobody asks how they are getting on at school, if nobody asks them what they have been doing at school, what homework they have today, if they don’t ask “Can we help you?” it is small wonder they lose interest. The parents, the second generation, can’t actually speak German. For the last decade the problem has been exacerbated by imported brides, a trend that is on the increase. These are women who don’t know anything about German culture or German society, nor do they speak German and, of course, they can’t be of any help to their children either. These frustrated young people are out on the streets. They roam around in small cliques, create their own ghettoes. They say in the mosques that we must look after our own. It might perhaps be well-meant, but the people who lead the prayers, or the imams brainwash these children. The brainwashing includes stirring up animosity against majority society, against Western values, against Christians, against infidels and they point a finger of blame at Western values for the young people’s accumulated frustration. And the young people believe it. I have spoken to various young people and I always hear the same story from children and adolescents alike. They tell me: “I have experienced racism at school. My teacher couldn’t care less about me, my teacher unfairly gave me these marks, they are Germans, after all, they don’t care about us, they don’t want us here in the first place”. These are children who were born here, third generation children, some of whom have German citizenship. They are practically being armed against majority society. The children are, in a nutshell, being taught to hate German society. In our midst, in mosques and we are just standing by and letting them get on with it. And if, as I said, in a couple of years’ time see the same circumstances as in France we will ask ourselves, where did we go wrong? What did we do wrong? I personally believe, and I raise this issue every time I appear in public, that there are many people here in Germany who share my views. All we need is the political will to have a rethink and counteract it. To engage in prevention. Because the children belong here, they don’t feel accepted in Turkey either where they are considered Germans, they don’t feel at home there either, even the first generation doesn’t want to go back. That means it is up to us, to German society in general and the politicians to take action.

Chameleon: And Western values presumably also include women’s rights?

Serap: Equal rights? Between men and women.

Chameleon: Exactly.

Serap: In Turkey women have enjoyed equal rights, on paper, since 1923. Since the Republic was founded we have been able to vote and be elected. Turkey is a democratic republic, a secular state and those who commit murder in the name of honour are not given lighter sentences any more. On paper.

Chameleon: And in practice?

Serap: Here the EU directives have had an impact, the criteria that Turkey has to fulfil [to gain full EU membership]. On paper Turkish women in Turkey enjoy equal rights. The same applies to Germany. Here in Germany we espouse Western values with men and women officially given equal rights. However, as I said, we don’t know the figures. From my point of view, on the basis of my observations, the majority of Turkish women here in Germany don’t even know the letters E R of equal rights. The women do not know about the rights they have. They don’t know who they can and are supposed to turn to get help or how to go about getting help. This is why educational work – I cannot stress it often enough – in schools, in families is indispensable. We have to go directly into Turkish families with Turkish social workers. We can elaborate various projects and concepts to enable us to do so. We have to sit round a table and discuss how we can best achieve our aims, how we can engage in prevention, we have to examine what possibilities we have to go into Turkish families, to see how we can reach and inform these coming generations about our values, how we can get the message across about universal human rights and tell them that we live in a democracy not under sharia. I have to point out, though, that there are also Turkish women who reject this, who reject Western values. There are also German women who have converted to Islam and who reject both equal rights and Western values. They are the worst.

Chameleon: Don’t worry about me, I’m an atheist!

Serap: I am not afraid of these women because they deliberately turn up at every event devoted to the head scarf. The German converts always appear with their blue eyes and blonde hair as impassioned advocates of Islam.

Chameleon: Having listened to what you are telling me it seems as if this parallel society already exists.

Serap: It certainly does. There are various reasons behind it. Of course, the main reason, I have to say, is financial. People with no professional qualifications are forced to live in these areas, renting accommodation there. They can’t afford better. Unemployment is rife amongst the Turkish immigrant population in Germany. They don’t have any professional qualifications, the vast majority of the women are housewives and if their social and financial level is not sufficient they are forced to move into this council housing. Given that the majority, by which I mean the Turkish immigrants, have been affected by this, this is how the ghettoes came into being. I hear from a lot of Turkish people who live in these parallel worlds, these ghettoes, that they want to move out because they too want to offer their children a future, they want their children to get out, but it is simply beyond their financial wherewithal, they cannot afford to rent expensive flats. The Germans who live in these houses also move out, saying that they have become a minority in their own country in these ghettoes. School classes are full to overflowing, and most of the children, 80 or 90 and in some places even 100 per cent, come from immigrant families, so that there might be one single German boy in the entire class, which parents don’t want either. We have to get rid of these ghettoes. We have to give these people jobs, we have to launch social initiatives, provide them with social facilities, and we have to help them to get out by means of social projects. It is Germany’s responsibility for the future to dissolve these parallel societies. It cannot be achieved overnight. We can, however, attain our aim if we, as I mentioned, set up centres in these ghettoes, in which women who have been living as housewives, for example, can train for a profession. We have to begin with the second generation. Everyone has some special talent or another, I am quite sure of it. Maybe one woman is really good at painting, whilst another can perhaps produce beautiful ceramics, we simply don’t know because we have never bothered to find out. Another might be a skilled needle worker. We have to discover these people’s hidden qualities and talents and we can do so by setting up centres where they can acquire vocational qualifications, where they are given opportunities depending on their family circumstances. Women or indeed men could attend for half days, or women for full days, it really must be feasible and then we have to offer them jobs. We have to invite firms, even force them, to employ these people and once we have provided these people with both social and financial support and helped to build them up the entire conflict will resolve itself. This was the root cause of what happened in France. Slums, ghettoes formed and the French government left these people to get on with it. People who went hungry, people with no work, people with no future, young people with no jobs, no prospects and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise when they suddenly go on the rampage. It doesn’t just suddenly come out of the blue. We carry our share of responsibility for it as a society and as a state and we have to prevent it. We can if we want to and we mustn’t turn around in ten years’ time and say we had no idea. We said the same thing 50 years ago. It is only now, in the last two years or so, that a large number of politicians here in Germany have been saying, “Yes, we thought that the integration of the second and third generation of foreigners, of guest workers, the so-called guest workers, would be inevitable, it ought to have been automatic because the children are born here, grow up here and go to school here”. In my eyes these are mere excuses. If I welcome a foster child into my home, I have to make some plans for that child in advance, don’t I? If I want to have children of my own, as a reasonable human being I have to look after that child, take care of its future because I am responsible for its welfare. If we brought these people into Germany we ought to have known, by 1970 at the very latest, since that was when we stopped the recruitment drive and then family reunification started, it really ought to have dawned on us that, yes, the Turkish so-called guest workers were becoming permanent residents. By then at the latest we ought to have noticed whom we had fetched in, they were, after all, coming into our home, it is not as if we could simply close up a room in our own homes and say, alright, they want to get on with their lives in that room on their own. We cannot and should not respond in that way. It beggars belief that that we had no idea that integration in Germany would fail after 50 years. No politician can convince me of that. I simply don’t believe it. Because it is up to the politicians to programme and plan the future of this country, that is why they were elected. That is also why we have experts. This is why we have ethnologists who can then deal with this group. We should have known. On the other hand, we have witnessed a very pronounced trend towards reislamicisation in Turkey since 1980, something we have been feeling the effects of here in Germany too for twenty years. Home Secretaries cannot maintain that they didn’t know about this reislamicisation trend here. Only now has Otto Schilly acted in a very radical fashion and quite rightly so. We should have known about it years ago. We should never have allowed more and more Islamicists to gain a foothold here in Germany because it has an impact on women’s rights. In these families women’s rights are being trampled underfoot. These families apply their own laws, sharia laws and we are letting this happen, in our own home, in the neighbour’s flat, other laws hold sway to the laws that govern us. I can only decipher one thing from this. We were not so naïve in Germany, we knew what direction we were moving in, so it all comes down to politics. There is a Turkish proverb that “Politics are darker than the darkest night”. I do cherish hopes. What I am interested in is women’s rights, the next generation of young men, that they should think and live in a different way to their forebears, that they grant their wives and their daughters and their mothers these rights, that they acknowledge and regard them as individuals with equal rights, that they then put this into practice in everyday life, not just on paper, but in everyday life. There is a long way to go before we achieve that here in Germany or in Europe for that matter.

Chameleon: What you are telling me is that the root of the problem is political apathy.

Serap: Yes.

Chameleon: Or indifference, though it sounds as if something is finally being done on a political level…

Serap: Here in Germany as well as in the EU topics such as forced marriages and honour killings in Muslim parallel societies in Europe are being discussed and debated, as is also the case in Islamic countries. That we are now holding this debate in Europe is something I consider to be the first step. It is a step in the right direction. We have to draft legislation in which we make it clear to those who murder in the name of honour that murder is murder, the perpetrators must not receive more lenient sentences, which has actually happened on a couple of occasions quite recently in Germany, whereby German judges have given the honour murderer a “cultural bonus” because the Anatolian didn’t know any better. We should not allow it because if we do we are strengthening, encouraging them in their barbaric traditions as it were. It is extremely important. We need laws, we have to be able to protect women with laws, but that is not enough, of course. Right across Europe we have to set up facilities, such as for example crisis centres for Muslim girls. We do not have such facilities at the moment. We have to start off by creating crisis centres specifically for Muslim girls with culturally specific advice, counselling and care in the mother tongue, in their second language, as it were. That is very important. In schools, we have to put these issues on the curriculum, these breaches of human rights, such as forced marriages and honour killings must feature in lessons and teaching materials, we have to teach universal human rights. I go to schools personally, to ethics classes. The ethics teachers raise the issues as a topic for pupils before I attend the class, they talk about the questions for a week beforehand, the teachers prepare the pupils and then I come along to give my lecture and debate with these young people and a week later they write an essay on the subject. I attach a great deal of importance to it. There are many possible solutions, such as German courses. Since 2001 I have been organising German courses open only to Turkish women at local level. The course lasts two years for each woman, during which time they have half an hour’s worth of German lessons twice a week. The first year is for beginners, the second year for advanced students. We provide child care and it is free of charge for the women. And at this German course, these women subliminally absorb the message about their rights. They are informed about their rights. The anti-forced marriages poster developed by the women’s rights organisation Terre des Femmes is pinned up on the wall in the room where the lessons take place. About a month ago we had a visit from a careers advisor from the AWO (Arbeiterwohlfahrt, Workers’ Welfare Association) who gave the women information about vocational qualifications. She told them about what opportunities existed locally, what they can learn, what they can do. I am involved in various projects with these women. We go on day trips, for example. Many of them are not aware that there is a museum near where they live or where they can go for a picnic, they don’t know that we have a dam nearby that they only need to travel five or six kilometres, quite apart from the fact that they do not know that there is a bookshop in the town centre. I also show them round places. For example we went on a visit to the Red Cross, to the Fire Brigade. Last year we also attended a First Aid course for mothers arranged by the Red Cross, where I acted as interpreter. What can I do, what should I do if my child is injured? What First Aid can I administer? How can women who can neither read nor write call for help, for instance? Some of the participants on the course are illiterate. How can they call for help? How can they alert the police? How can they call in the fire brigade? We talked about this during the lessons and we also paid a visit to the local police station where the women had a chance to ask questions. These are not trivial matters, they are of vital importance to these women. Introducing these women into society in practical terms. What I do is to bring these women out of their Anatolian villages into our midst. In the confines of their homes they really are living in Anatolia. Some of them want it to stay that way, but they are in the minority. Most of them by far want out, so they need someone who will reach out to them, who will tell them, “I will get you out, I will support you”. That is what these women need and the German course enables me to do precisely that. We have a Housewives’ Association consisting only of German women. We have an afternoon session of cooking together with the Turkish women. We put on a flea market together and the women really enjoy it because it gives them the chance to practice the German they have acquired through the course. Next year I have planned practical training placements for the women. We are going to sit down and write the applications together. I don’t know how it will work out, but it is an idea of mine. Many of the women have never had a job, at most they might have been cleaning ladies, you know? They don’t communicate with the Germans in such situations, they don’t get a chance to exchange a few words, so what we have to do is let them put their knowledge into practice and they can only do so by coming into contact with majority society. We have to do things together. We’ve had day rambles, where we spend a day walking with German women and the participants in the German course. There are various associations and clubs, so we take a look at them and ask them if they feel like spending a day with us, doing something together. They are quite happy about it. Friendships are also formed this way. One woman, for example, has been living in Germany for thirty years, but had never had a German friend. She couldn’t speak German and had wanted to obtain German citizenship, had applied for it, but had been turned down due to her lack of knowledge of the language. I was full of admiration for her for taking part – she has been awarded German citizenship in the meantime, by the way – I asked her, „What was the best thing about the German course for you? Was it having the opportunity to learn the language?” She replied: “For me, the best thing about the German course was that now, for the first time in 30 years, answer the phone. I could never go to the phone whenever it rang at home. Now I can pick up the receiver and say, ‘Hello, who is it?’” I thought that was splendid. Not just that she had finally been given German citizenship, but imagine, this woman couldn’t even go to the telephone in her own home. She told me that if her husband or children were not at home she would panic if the phone rang. Can you even begin to imagine what that must have been like? She also told me that if something had happened to her, she would not have known who to call, how to communicate, how to get the police to come. They are afraid of the police somehow when they can’t speak the language. These are the small, but extremely important aspects of these women’s lives. There were also women who were battered by their parents-in-law and their husbands, who were not permitted to attend the course. They were told, “You don’t need to be able to speak German, why do suddenly want to learn German?” There are such individuals. I have experience of them and every time I have tried to get in touch with them to talk to them my efforts have been futile. Such a pity. The most frequent victims are the imported brides, the young women, the young children imported to Germany fro Turkey who are then confined within the walls of their homes.

Chameleon: There is nothing you can do about it, or am I assuming wrongly?

Serap: There is nothing we can do about it. We live in a democracy and what would it make us, where would it get us if we were to remove these young women by force? At this juncture political will comes into play. If we were to say German courses are mandatory, people who wanted to come to Germany ought to furnish proof of knowledge of the German language beforehand. So that we can clear that up in advance. We could also prevent forced marriages on that basis. For family reunification purposes, if partners are being brought from Turkey to Germany, although the rules would apply equally to all foreign nationals, they would not be allowed in until they had reached 21 years of age. By so doing we could also prevent child marriages. We could also prevent illiterate people from coming into the country, as we have very high illiteracy rates amongst the Turkish immigrant population, particularly amongst the imported brides and other women. So, as you can see, just by talking about it at sufficient length a variety of possible solutions emerge. I can’t take the decisions alone. It’s not enough for me to come up with ideas. It’s not enough for me to debate such possible solutions again and again. They have to be put into practice, which is why we need, firstly the politicians on board and secondly money to implement the proposals. We don’t have either at the moment, unfortunately. At the moment, anyway.

Chameleon: I couldn’t agree more. The ideas are there, but the funding isn’t.

Serap: Both the government and financial experts have to be called in. We need the funding. How are we supposed to organise German courses otherwise? Thankfully, the new immigration law has made German courses mandatory, but we have to check up on them and we have to be able to impose penalties on those who fail to comply. If need be, perhaps their social security payments could be cut, their unemployment benefit or child benefit, depending. These people have to complete a 600 hour course and in order to pass they have to turn up at classes. They are not just taught the language, but also ethnology and German history. Having said that, I have to point out that I have never been on such a course myself. Perhaps inspections should also be carried out to check on how the people are being taught. I have heard about such courses from people without vocational qualifications who have been sent to the training centres directly from the employment agency, allegedly to undergo further training so that they can be reintegrated into the labour market. Some of the courses last one month, others three, six or even eight months and quite a lot of money goes into them. They cost really quite a lot, I have to say, something between five and six thousand Euros. I also know that in these further training courses everything but German or computer skills or suchlike are being taught. Someone has to be charged with the task of inspecting these German courses, of looking at how they are being taught. Do these people really need what we are asking for? It should not be mere window-dressing, a cosmetic exercise, so that we can say we have put these courses on offer, they are compulsory and now it’s up to you to determine how to organise them. We don’t monitor the courses and we badly need to. I heard from a person who had to take part in such a course who had been sent by the employment exchange. He was depressed. He wanted to learn something, he had all sorts of hopes, he was really delighted and had major expectations about really acquiring new skills there. The teachers were not qualified, indeed the teachers behaved very coarsely towards their students who were of differing nationalities and who, moreover, possessed quite diverse qualifications. As I said, the teachers had no appropriate qualifications to teach, yet they were supposed to stand up in front of the heterogeneous group and get on with it. All of the students in the class knew how to use a computer, yet the teacher in charge of the computer skills course, just to quote one example, endeavoured to teach them how to open a file and save it. These “students” included computer experts.

Chameleon: Ludicrous.

Serap: Indeed. Now I don’t know how things are shaping up with the German language courses, but we need to have inspections.

Chameleon: Turning back to honour killings, you talked about the six women who tragically lost their lives. Perhaps we should kick off by exploring the concept, which is quite alien to those of us who come from a different cultural background.

Serap: The concept of “honour” is a key concept in Muslim families, it is not specific to Turkish families in particular. The Koran stipulates that the woman must preserve her chastity, she must be virtuous and not commit adultery. The same applies to men, of course, officially, in the Koran, the avoidance of adultery and entering into marriage as a virgin also applies to men, not just to women. Islamic and patriarchal tradition turns a blind eye in the case of men. Adultery on the part of men is not punished in the same way as it is when committed by women. It is more important for women, in actual practice it is important only for women that they enter into marriage as virgins, do not commit adultery, are demure, virtuous, obedient, that they practically have their sexuality under control. These are the rules and responsibilities the women have to fulfil. Women are the guardians of reputation and honour; they are the repositories of the man’s honour. This is how they are perceived. Of course there are certain suras in the Koran where women are deemed subordinate, where they are regarded as inferior beings, but I am not able to delve into that now because the interpretation of the Koran is ambiguous, depending on who interprets it and how they do so. For me it is important to look at the traditional and patriarchal perspective, that, for whatever reasons, whether because of Islam, Islamic tradition, the sunna and the hadis, or from a patriarchal point of view, women are being murdered in the name of honour. What concerns me in these violations of human rights is simply that these women have been married against their will, are chased away, have acid poured over them, are decapitated, that women have to flee from their families for the rest of their lives, are forced to live in anonymity, that there are women who are kept as slaves, all these varieties and manifestations of violence. What concerns me is that human rights are being violated, regardless of the reasons behind the acts; I am not interested in the latter. I maintain that there is no justification for violence against women. That is my work and that is what I talk about. Something is going on here, women are being murdered in the name of honour by members of their own families, like the six young Turkish and Kurdish women who were killed one after the other. It is going on all the time, it is not an isolated incident. Nor are the forced marriages isolated cases. This kind of thing has been going on in Europe all along, people just didn’t want to know about it. They didn’t want to become aware of it. People always thought it is their tradition and their culture, they can sort it out amongst themselves. The prevailing view in Germany was that we had to accept how the neighbours wanted to live their lives. The same is true of Europe. Of course honour killings occur in various religions and in various countries, but the majority are committed in Islamic countries, such as Turkey. Unfortunately this is not just happening a long way away from us, in Islamic countries, but also in our immediate vicinity, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of our civilisation, of which we are so proud. Naturally, we puff ourselves up and boast that we guarantee human rights in our part of the world, and we compare the Islamic countries unfavourably as backward, although the same kind of thing happens here in our midst. For years on end we have ignored this femicide, as it were, this butchering of women. We are partly to blame because we looked away, we are implicated in the deaths of all those women who were murdered in the name of honour here in Europe. Those who failed to raise their voices in protest, unfortunately the majority of people in Europe, also bear part of the blame for every woman whose life was cut short in her tender youth, who was violently dispatched from the ranks of the living, for allowing her own father to become her enemy, her own brother, her own husband. Women are living in fear of their lives, even have to move abroad from one European country to another because the families cannot forgive the alleged “dishonour” incurred by their daughters. They can only cleanse it with blood, it is their attitude that only the blood of the female sinner can restore the honour of the man who lost it. This is an extremely radical mindset, which people in Germany are afraid of. People are also afraid of being confronted with a father like this. Even the police are sometimes afraid when all of a sudden a father appears at the station and asks for the daughter to be reported missing, even though he knows full well that the daughter has run away from home. The police have to do their job by entering her in the register of missing persons. I have had experiences where the police have supported us in protecting the girl, but I have also had experiences where the police have handed the girl, who was still a minor, back to the family and the child welfare authorities also failed to step in to give support. My experience has varied and I cannot generalise, but I have to admit that in the past I have had negative experiences with both the police and the child welfare authorities. They could neither assess the danger, nor could they guarantee the protection the girl needed. As I said, however, this whole public debate has meant that the police, the child welfare authorities and the social workers have been shaken up a little concerning the extent of the problem and they are also trying to take a slightly different approach, so that now when I go to the police and tell them “I have a girl here who has been affected by this and I want her to receive police protection” they don’t think twice before making the protection available to the child. However, having said that, the majority of the staff of the relevant services have not got the message yet and that is something we have to tackle.

Chameleon: Would it be useful to send the police on training courses?

Serap: On dedicated further training courses? Absolutely. That is something we are calling for. We would like the staff of all the relevant support services to complete such training courses, in which they would be taught about this mentality, this culture, well, actually I don’t think I can call it by the name of culture, that this tradition, this bloodthirsty tradition, be brought home to them, that we should discuss with them what the dangers are, give them guidelines as to how they should respond. There was one case, for example, when I was looking after a girl who had been registered as unemployed before she fled from home. She had been put up in a refuge and the family left no stone unturned in trying to ascertain her whereabouts. Sometimes I feel like the author of crime novels, because in situations like that I always have to put myself in the family’s shoes and figure out what subterfuges they might resort to. Sometimes they have the equipment to intercept the calls, so that when the daughter rings them up they can trace where the call came from, which means that they can be lying in wait for the daughter within a couple of hours and try to catch her. The families have all sorts of ruses up their sleeves to get back their “dishonoured” daughters and restore their honour. You can barely imagine the kind of things that go on. Just to give you a topical example, the brother went to the employment exchange and said, “My mother is ill and believes that my sister has committed suicide”. The civil servant behind the counter was naïve enough to blurt out: “No, no, your sister isn’t dead, she’s alive and well and lives in such and such”. By pure coincidence the girl phoned up her friend and confidante who was also acting as our spy so that we could be kept informed about what was going on at home to determine whether the family had caught wind of anything and she warned us that the brother had found out where she lived, that he had gotten hold of her address and in the space of half an hour we had to whisk her away from one federal state to another. It can happen at the drop of a hat.

Chameleon: What are your feelings about headscarves? Perhaps you could also say a few words about the recent attempt in Canada to introduce sharia law.

Serap: There has of course been a major debate about the headscarf. From my point of view the headscarf is a form of oppression of women. As far as I can see, women wear the headscarf in all likelihood because of the Koran, although, as I pointed out earlier, the Koran is interpreted ambiguously. People who represent the liberal form of Islam and are of a secular bent, feel that the Koran does not state that women must wear a headscarf, that it is only a commandment, not a duty, as to whether women cover themselves or not. I agree with this way of looking at it, in other words, the Koran does not rigidly prescribe that women must cover up their charms. Now who can explain it to me when teachers at our state schools wear headscarves whilst they teach, that they have to cover up their charms in front of six, seven or eight-year-old Turkish or Muslim boys so that they do not sexually excite them? Who can explain this to me? Many women who wear the headscarf, for example, feel that they are only doing so for religious reasons. Now, if they are wearing it for religious reasons it means that they have to protect their feminine charms from men. That is the rationale. However, if we turn the argument on its head, this means that on the one hand men are being discriminated against, and on the other, that men do not have their sexual urges under control. I mean, if we are living in the 21st century it is a humiliation, a form of discrimination against the male sex, isn’t it? This is why I call upon enlightened men to stand up and be counted and speak out against the women who are in favour of the headscarf. What we don’t have is men standing up and rebelling against it. More’s the pity. In Canada an attempt was made recently to introduce the sharia as law in the parallel societies. That would mean that if someone had stolen something he could have his hand lopped off. If someone committed adultery, like in Iran, for example, the woman, or both parties involved, could be stoned to death. It is absurd that in a democracy people wanted to accept a law as backward as sharia. To the best of my knowledge it didn’t get through, the debate was fired up and thanks to many feminists and members of women’s movements, the Canadian government could be prevented from committing a very grave error. We have to fight against it instead of approving it, let alone giving it our express support or even introducing it into our democracy. Sharia laws here, in a civilised society, are quite clearly unacceptable.

Chameleon: It would certainly constitute discrimination against Muslim women as it would only apply to them.

Serap: If we, with our values, with our enlightened values, here in our midst were to turn the clock back almost 2,400 years and say “You are Muslims, you have to continue to live in the times of Mohammed, as it were, in the Middle Ages” that would not simply represent discrimination, but also exploitation and stripping Muslim women of rights. We would be practically sitting back and letting half of society be murdered, be deprived of rights, be exploited. I can’t interpret it in any other way. That anyone went so far as to contemplate it, that it crossed anyone’s mind to debate it in the first place, you know? It is not merely an absurdity, but a crime, to my mind, a crime against the rights of Muslim women.

Chameleon: I agree.

Serap: When, for example, the rights of Muslim women here in Germany are breached, the German politicians point the finger at the Islamic countries and at Turkey in conjunction with the latter’s EU-accession. It was said that in Turkey, more lenient sentences for the perpetrators of honour killings have to be scrapped, women have to be given equal rights, not just on paper, but also in practice. In all of Turkey there are only 14 women’s shelters, so clearly we need far more refuges. So attempts are being made to improve women’s rights whilst in our own country, in Germany, the rights of Muslims, of Turkish women are being violated. To my mind this constitutes a paradox. We have to clean up our own act first and then we can bring pressure to bear on Muslim countries, telling them that they have to do such and such to guarantee women’s, children’s and more generally human rights. Of course those rights are not guaranteed in the countries in question, but if we want to serve as an example we have to get our own act together first. If I have a sick person at home, I have to nurse that person first before I go next door to start taking care of the neighbour’s children or family. We have to tackle poverty at home first, we have to guarantee human rights at home first before we go across to the neighbour’s and offer support and start making demands of them, such as asking for guarantees of women’s and children’s rights or that torture should not be allowed to take place in prisons any more, or that the rape of Kurdish women in prisons should stop, for example, it is standard practice there, another taboo topic. If you talk about it, you are branded a traitor.

Chameleon: Do you think Turkish accession to the EU will help improve women’s rights in Turkey?

Serap: It already has. There has been an EU-wide debate about Turkish accession and the EU has helped in that the current government, and here we have to give him [Mr Erdogan] credit where it is due, although from my point of view he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and has considerable conservative Islamic leanings, everyone is aware of his past, where he grew up, where he comes from, as it were, everyone knows about it, but you are not allowed to talk about it openly. Nevertheless, although he has his own interests and is pursuing them, I have to say I think what he is doing is greatly to his credit. This is why he amended the relevant legislation within a very short space of time and was able to get them adopted. The prospect of EU accession has had a positive influence on Turkey, but I believe that at least another two or three generations will still need to go by before we have the same conditions in society in Turkey as we have here in Europe, because a change in mentality has to occur. A society that approves of child marriages, a society that approves of honour killings, a society that approves of forced marriages – Turkey has undergone a reversal in its development since the 1980s after the military putsch; it has been backsliding as a result of reislamicisation. The present government would now like to repeal the ban on wearing headscarves in schools, for example. Religious secondary schools, the so-called Imam Hatip schools have been opened, they have been positively mushrooming in number. The youngsters who graduate from them do so as preachers. There is a great deal of unemployment in Turkey and the entire social welfare system simply does not function. There is a chronic lack of vocational qualifications amongst women far in excess of the average. Only around 21 or 24 per cent of women in Turkey go out to work. That figure includes women in the agricultural sector, in their own families, their own villages whose work is not even remunerated. The 24 per cent includes them. This is the kind of problem we still have to contend with in Turkey. This represents an enormous task for Turkey, which it will not be able to resolve within ten or fifteen years. It is an illusion to believe otherwise. Of course I always point out and it is very important to bear in mind that Turkey should not be carrying out all these reforms under orders from the outside, as it were, due to pressure from the EU, but out of its own conviction. Turkey has to take these steps for its own sake, for the sake of its own country, for the sake of its own people; it has to fulfil the criteria for its own benefit, not just because the EU says so. As far as I can determine it is merely a cosmetic exercise. There is no other way I can describe it. That is what Turkey is doing at present with the various amendments to the statute books, engaging in window-dressing, going through the motions. Now we have to wait and see how things shape up in Turkey over the next few years. We will have to wait and see and monitor developments very rigorously. Not just keep tabs on economic development or defend purely economic interests, but keep a close eye on how human rights, women’s rights and children’s rights evolve in Turkey. The Bozkurt [Member of the European Parliament] Report on the status of women in Turkey is very welcome. Of course, it has certain defects, but it at least represents an initial step. I think the rest will fall into place if we really do take it seriously. A report of this type should be drawn up once every six months, so that we can take stock of what is going on in Turkey, what is still missing, what ought to have been done, what Turkey has failed to do and we really have to be strict, really tough on the Turkish government and really demand action on what has not yet been guaranteed. As far as the EU criteria are concerned Turkey has to reckon with sanctions, we have to show that we mean business with the criteria if Turkey wants into the EU. It is of the utmost importance that we have Europe-wide draft legislation prohibiting forced marriages, prohibiting honour killings. The Member States of the EU have to be instructed to press ahead with information campaigns and educational initiatives and make resources available because we need it. As I say, it is absolutely vital that legislation be drawn up and to the best of my knowledge the Council of Europe has broached the subject of such a draft on forced marriages and honour killings. I know that women’s movements have been active in lobbying the European Council, so hopefully we will see these efforts come to fruition.

Chameleon: I would like to come back to a question that slipped my mind earlier. Are there statistics covering the whole of Germany on how many honour killings are committed each year?

Serap: In Germany we do not know exactly how many honour killings occur each year. The only official figure is based on a single study carried out by Terre des Femmes and Papataya, according to which between 1996 and 2004 49 women were murdered. All I can tell you is that the list is very long, as I too am carrying out research into the phenomenon of honour killings. The first murder that I was able to uncover dates back to 1984 and I will talk about it in my new book, so we will have to wait and see. I don’t want to bandy about any figures right now.

Chameleon: No problem. Could you perhaps say a few words about your memorial initiative?

Serap: Yes, it is quite unique. The memorial is very important to us. When I began drawing the public’s attention to the issues of forced marriages and honour killings in 1984, these being the main subjects on which I focus, although they are only the tip of the iceberg and domestic violence, abuse and incest also form part and parcel of what I deal with in the course of my activities, it struck me that we have read about the murders in the newspapers, simply skimmed through the articles about the murdered women in the Turkish newspapers, said to ourselves, “My God, how terrible!” before moving on and thinking no more about it. We have simply gone back to getting on with our everyday lives. It struck me that we react in this way and I started to take a closer look at it and noticed that in the German press, the German media neither the nationality nor the name of the victim is printed if they were of foreign extraction. It was only deemed to be worthy of a small footnote. Research into the topic was very painstaking, time-consuming and difficult. I carefully sifted through all the newspaper articles and tried to uncover all the murders and manslaughter cases, which bore as close a resemblance as possible to honour killings. I put question marks next to a lot of them and then stepped up my research efforts and discovered that Turkish families were involved, that it was a Turkish woman or a Turkish girl who had been murdered by her brother or husband depending. Then I also gradually noticed that it was the names of the perpetrators that stuck in the mind, that the names of the victims were being consigned to oblivion and it became a matter of personal importance to me to give the victims back their names. They have a name and a face and a story and these were very important to me. This is why I created this memorial. I wanted to give the debate on forced marriage greater public prominence and get the message across that a forced marriage can also end in an honour killing, if girls oppose a forced marriage or if a woman asks for a divorce. Of course it doesn’t always end in an honour killing, they are confined to the most extreme cases, but we have to recognise that the two are linked; both conflicts have to be dealt with and put on the agenda together. I did not want the victims to be forgotten, I wanted their memory to live on, I wanted us to see their faces, so that every time I see the face of one of these women it should remind me, but also other women, of what we have neglected to do. We know that they were murdered, but what did they have to endure up to that day? What did they have to live through and what did we do wrong? How did we support these families? We didn’t lift a finger. If we take Hatun Sürücü, for example, or Gönül Karabey, how many times did they seek help before they were murdered? They might have gone looking for help x number of times, they might have visited friends, they might have talked about how scared they were, they might have sought protection and nobody really noticed quite how real their fears were, nobody protected them, nobody took them under their wing, nobody was looking out for them, they never felt secure. I want to raise this issue in my book, to say they are dead now, but what did they actually go through prior to their deaths? We have to open our eyes so that no more Hatuns or Gönüls are murdered. Not just set up a memorial or organise a demonstration. We have to take action so that we can move on to a time where we don’t need that kind of thing any more, so that we can prevent these deaths, so that no more Hatuns, Meleks, Meryems or Gönüls are murdered. This is why I created the memorial, so that the women are not forgotten. On the one hand, I was saying to my husband today that a friend of my daughter was lost in a car accident. The family is devastated with grief, weeping and mourning their lost child. On the other hand, there are families who murder their own flesh and blood. It makes no sense to me, it is beyond my comprehension how a girl such as Hatun or Gönül, for example, can be murdered simply because they were in love with a German, simply because they dared to love. The love that these patriarchal families feel for their children is not the same as what we understand by love. In my opinion it is just ignorance, dictatorship, power play. The children are regarded as mere commodities. If the life of a child is worth less than honour, if honour takes precedence over the life of a child it is not love any more in my opinion. We cannot reach these people on the basis of educational initiatives alone, but we can endeavour to get the message across to their children. That is my only hope. That we can reach the fifth and sixth generation of immigrant children, but we cannot prevaricate, have to act now, otherwise we won’t succeed, otherwise we are kidding ourselves, otherwise hundreds and thousands of Gönüls and Hatuns will have to die. Then it is not only the families or the murderers who have blood on their hands, but us as well.

Photograph by Ida Henschel
© Serap Cileli
This image has been reproduced by kind permission of Serap Cileli, and may not be copied or reproduced in any form without the express written authorisation of the copyright holder.

Serap’s home page
A revised and extended edition of Serap Cileli’s book is due to be published in June.

This interview will also appear in Subtext Magazine.

Interview © Chameleon, 2005. No part of this interview may be reproduced without written authorisation, which may be obtained via e-mail (see profile page).

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