Hungarian Parliament

Popular Sentiment

Ödön Lechner’s Post Office Savings Bank, Budapest

Chain Bridge

Chain Bridge Lion

Art Nouveau Mosaic, Budapest

Centrál Kávéház

Szomorú kutyus

[These photographs were taken during the housewarming weekend in May 2008.  The complete set may be viewed here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three]

Welcome to the hot, sticky, sweaty edition of the Britblog Roundup spread out for your delectation like a tablecloth on a perfectly mown lawn covered with a wicker picnic basket’s worth of naughty indulgences. The sap is rising along with the temperature and trees and shrubs everywhere shamelessly flash passers-by, intoxicating them with the heady perfume of their lust…

Enough of such distractions, let’s get down and dirty with the more serious business of the week…

Politics

Allow me, by way of a preface, to quote from a non-blog source. In Short Cuts (London Review of Books, 10^th April 2008) John Lanchester contemplates the notion of a Boris incumbency with a modicum of dread: “Boris Johnson as mayor of London? It’s hard to imagine, and if it happens it’ll be hard to take. I know quite a few people who know him (we overlapped at university) and the general view is that he put on a buffoon mask to become a celebrity, and now he can’t take it off. He’s very ambitious, everyone agrees on that, and he deliberately sought to become famous as a way of furthering his political career. The idea was that celebrity is the currency of politics in the way that money once was: instead of becoming rich before going into politics, as Tories once did (the Heseltine route), the contemporary path to power is first to become famous. Electors are much more likely to vote for you if they know who you are. For someone who markets himself as a bit of a throwback, this is a very modern and very American idea. Johnson is the first British politician to give it a real try.

Johnson’s electoral prospects improve by being viewed at a distance. Not that people don’t like him at close range – they do. Some people think he’s funny, and he clearly enjoys his own schtick, but that isn’t really the secret of his appeal, which is more to do with amiability and the ability to get himself into scrapes in a way which seems endearingly unpolitical. I find him likeable, but I wouldn’t want him to be in charge of Key Stage One at my son’s primary school. Livingstone must have wondered whether to portray Johnson as a serious person and therefore a serious menace to London, or to laugh him off, and let us marinate in the implausibility of Johnson as mayor. So far he’s done the first thing, which is understandable but might be a mistake. Just as 12 years for ken would be too much, Boris is surely unthinkable in a major public office with real executive power”.

Although I admired Red Ken in the 1980s when he appeared to be the only person with the gumption to stand up to Maggie, deftly dodging the lethal swing of her handbag, he fell out of favour with me when he decreed that feeding the pigeons of Trafalgar Square a punishable offence. There may be fewer spatters on the pavements and facades, perhaps it was a bit of a menace wading knee-deep through the ground-strutting flocks that gathered around the old biddies scattering breadcrumbs (not to mention the tourists for whom the experience of feeding the birds meant partaking in a ritual that had passed into the mythology of the city), but the ban served as neat shorthand for all the hectoring, killjoy impulses associated with the Left.

Not that I would seek to reduce the result to performance in front of the relentless and unforgiving lenses of cameras and microphones sensitive enough to pick up on the slightest faux pas, but Ken’s media presence was hardly the most imposing and I cannot be the only outside observer who had long since grown tired of his whiny, snivelly voice. New Labour’s misery was compounded by the drubbing they received at the local elections, a clear indicator of the extent of the disillusionment that has set in, the electorate beyond the confines of the capital likewise throwing out the lumber in a cathartic bout of spring cleaning (Justin Hinchcliffe of Hunter and Shooter speculates on the Red Warrior’s future in Exclusive: Sensational news from the Haringey Soviet!).

Meanwhile, as the furore dies down Quaequam Blog wonders Just how many spoilt ballot papers were there?

There will be no honeymoon period for Boris, I suspect. He will have to shake off his bumbling, fumbling for words tendencies (as commented upon by Arnie in an unguarded moment) and prove that his appointment was not an error of colossal proportions. One of the first tests of political mettle he and his fellow Assembly members will have to face is, as Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblogium points out in London Tories hint at trouble for BNP, how to deal with the uncomfortable fact of that party having gained a seat. As Andrew correctly notes, Richard Barnes’ response (haughtily refusing to cooperate in finding them the staff to which they – like it or not – are entitled) is calculated to fuel their strategically adopted martyrdom complex (“See what a bunch of snobs they are? They don’t respect their own rules – we were legitimately voted in and yet they deny us the share of the resources to which we have a right. Foul play!”): “Are they trying to give the BNP more publicity? Petty moves like this are just foolish and counterproductive. This also feeds into the BNP mindset that they and their voters are being shut out by the establishment.

These sorts of ideas are why the BNP got more than 5%.

He will press for the Union Jack to be flown permanently over City Hall, for burkas to be banned from public buildings and for official celebrations to mark St George’s Day. He will resist the planned construction of a huge new mosque, the biggest place of worship in Britain, in Newham, East London.

One thing about neo-Nazis is they know how to be populist and talk out of both sides of their mouths. I bet that if you said the above to many people without mentioning the BNP they would agree.

If you want to quell the BNP vote then politicians need to address the issues of the most disenfranchised grouping in Ken’s London…the white working class. They need to be address and made to feel as though people in city hall are actually listening to them. Under Ken any criticisms of his policies were met with charges of one or more isms. The bullying and intimidation of working class whites was palpable.

A city hall sponsored St George’s Day parade would be a very good start.

Boris needs to be a mayor for all Londoners not just the ones who bitch the loudest or have the pushiest representatives”.

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe) alerts us to the extremely disturbing news of Frank Ogboru’s death at the hands of police in Another day another death by cop: “What’s clear from the report is that Ogboru was completely calm and presented no threat to the police. They only decided to arrest him when they said he had to leave the place he was temporarily staying on his visit to England, which had all of his things. He was sprayed with cs gas in order to handcuff him, despite the fact he does not seem to have resisted arrest and was then restrained by four police officers who held him face down. Caught on film one officer’s knee is over Mr Ogboru’s neck while his head hangs over the kerb. Despite his cries they continued to restrain this man who had committed no offence”.

This blatant instance of unreasonable force will not be greeted with so much as a slap on the wrist: “These officers will not face prosecution or disciplinary charges despite being caught on film and being seen by dozens of witnesses. Unfortunately this is not the first nor the last time that the Met police will kill unnecessarily. According to the [source article in the Daily] Mirror there have been 501 deaths in custody in ten years – the number of prosecutions? Zero. That’s right my friends, zero”.

Thus another challenge for young Boris and his team becomes immediately apparent: “They often say the police have rooted out much of their racism – and I want to believe them, I can’t believe things are as bad as the seventies – but the evidence points to a very disturbing story of an unaccountable police force who can and do use lethal force without fear of having to properly account for their actions. There’s a long way to go before we have truly accountable law enforcement agencies and with Sir Ian Blair still in charge of the Met, still complicit in shielding his men from the consequences of the deaths they cause, there is little hope that things are about to start changing anytime soon”.

Susanne Lamido of Suz Blog resoundingly endorses Mr J’s swift fulfilment of one of his election pledges in Boris bans alcohol on the Tube: “All I can say is that’s just great. Good on you Boris. It’s so horrible to have to sit with the lager louts drinking on the tube. The smell is bad enough but it fuels shouting and bad behaviour. Very unnerving

Folks are asking how they will enforce it. Don’t think it will be a problem, people will snitch on drinkers I’m quite sure about that. Most people hate it as much as I do. There’s already continual announcements about not smoking over the loud speakers at all stations so now we can expect it to include alcohol”.

This is not, of course, the only promise on which Boris has already begun to deliver, as MayorWatch make clear in Mayor Asks LDA Bosses to Quit and Announces Audit.

One further item on the democratic process pertains to the forthcoming trek back to the polling booths in Crewe and Nantwich. Guido Fawkes positively salivates at the news that ICM Whisper Number Puts By-Election Closer Than Thought: “What will have the mobile phone ricocheting around No. 10 is the startling finding that Labour voters would rather have Cameron than Brown as PM. Gordon is a dead man ranting”. The words of his fictional compatriot Fraser from Dad’s Army must surely be ringing in Mr B’s ears: “We’re doomed, we’re doomed!”

However, as Rupa Huq surmises in The British Cicciolina? journalists might not concentrate on the litmus test for a Labour rout angle with Gemma Garrett of the Beauties for Britain Party in the running…whether you wish to interpret her candidacy as a symptom of the debasement of politics with the intrusion of pseudo-celebrities (ahem, Boris), or a breath of fresh air to blow away the fusty old cobwebs is entirely up to you.

Venturing slightly further afield than the capital, greenman of Greenman’s Occasional Organ provides a date for the diaries for all those seeking an antidote to and defence against rampant global neo-liberalism in IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] To Hold Historic Meeting in Notts: “The IWW continues to grow rapidly in Britain and now has over 400 members in this part of the world. These are organisers in workplaces and communities, some holding dual card membership of existing TUC affiliated unions and long histories of activism. The basic idea of the IWW is to organise industrially rather than by craft or trade and to be uncompromising in rejection of business unionism, bureaucracy and sell-outs. As an organisation based on our common class interest as employees rather than the finer points of political programmes the IWW unites workers with a variety of political viewpoints and all workers are welcome provided they agree to the aims and principles and do not seek to use the IWW for the benefit of their own current or party. This is a refreshing atmosphere for those of us used to the sectarian wrangling of much of the British Left. Unity is strength!”

Sticking with Green issues (well the colour at least matches the verdant splendour of the foliage around us), Molly of Gaian Economics extols the virtues of buying locally in From ethical to bioregional consumption…and production illustrated by photographs of the purchases concerned, a mug and a rather fetching piece of headgear: “For me these items exemplify everything about bioregional consumption. Obviously the first and most important factor is that they are made locally with local inputs. But there is the depth of relationship between me and the person who made the item that fills me with delight every time I have a cup of coffee or go out wearing my hat. Of course for me they are also object lessons which people I meet – unfortunately for them – cannot escape.

Perhaps most importantly of all, they are expensive. In the global economy you seek the lowest price. In the bioregional economy the adman’s slogan ‘reassuringly expensive’ may be a better guide. My rush hat cost £24. Given the amount of work for Sheila in cutting the rushes, preparing them, and weaving the hat this is an absurdly small amount of money. But if it had been made by a Chinese slave it would have cost a fifth of this price. So when you consume bioregionally you will have much less stuff, but it will be of vastly better quality.

It’s not just about consumption; it’s also about production. I came to know Sheila because I am learning basket-making from her. If you are the sort of person who bemoans the fact that there is so little available to buy from local producers you can start by choosing to buy what there is and paying a just price. But the next step is to start making something yourself – the guidelines are that it should be something that is genuinely needed in the community and that you can find the materials locally”.

A mere year or two ago who would have imagined that the subject of rubbish could enflame the passions as much as it currently does? The ubiquitous wheelie-bin has been transformed into a symbol of the struggle for civil liberties, indeed of everything that has gone so badly wrong in contemporary British society, with continuous interference from over-zealous, petty officials and their self-righteous intrusion into every aspect of our personal lives raising the blood pressure of suburb-dwellers behind their privet hedges across the country. That ever-reliable source of indignation, the Daily Mail (or Daily Müll as my German friend aptly calls it, which will be the focus of our scorn soon) seethes with stories of spy chips recording the weight of waste deposited with a view to imposing fines for failing to recycle enough, or cases such as the young bus driver who overfilled his bin by four inches and now has a criminal record to show for it, none of which is calculated to popularise the activity of careful sorting of refuse to the general public.

As Recess Monkey informs us in Rubbish Tory in court (and it is not his political performance that has landed him in trouble), alleged fly-tippers are being relentlessly pursued irrespective of rank.

Against this backdrop, Glenn Vowles of Vowles the Green in Knowles reports on the latest wrangle in Row over the introduction of corn starch bioplastic bags in Bristol is the wrong row to have!!! The council seems to be ignorant of world events (now there’s a surprise…). Apparently, the controversy has centred on the matter of the price of these bin liners (proposed in reaction to complaints about maggots and vermin being attracted to food scraps – yet another justified lament being the inconvenience of fortnightly as opposed to weekly visits by the scaffies – refuse collectors to translate for the benefit of anyone born outside of Tayside – just long enough in weather like this for the contents to come back to life again albeit in slightly less appetising form), which the council wants residents to obtain from the supermarket, where they are likely to be charged up to ten times as much as the cost price of tuppence. This reminds me of the system we have over here, whereby we fund disposal through the hefty 30 Euros that we stump up for 20 brown bags (for general waste, with slightly less expensive blue bags for tins and plastic bottles and brown bags for grass and other clippings and other compostable material). What might have seemed like a chore at the beginning quickly becomes a habit like any other as the counter-productive punitive approach has been recognised as unworkable. Indeed, the only reprimand the non-compliant will ever receive is the scolding “wrong contents” sticker, which is not only embarrassing in front of the smugly perfect neighbours, but also means that the bag in question is unceremoniously left behind, thereby entailing the hassle of emptying it and transferring the articles into a pristine replacement (my knowledge stems from the one and only occasion on which my other half failed to rinse out the cocoa milk bottle, leaving it to advertise his neglect through a chocolate-coloured stain – he has never repeated the mistake). Loath though I am to admit it, the Belgians – who splosh mayonnaise on their chips with gay abandon – can sometimes behave more sensibly than us Brits…

I am in complete agreement with Mr Vowles when he writes: “Clearly the bags should not be introduced at all and we should continue to contain brown bin food waste in material that already exists, such as used newspaper or other waste paper such as paper bags. Just like the push for biofuels has helped to force up food prices so has the push for bioplastics. In addition just as there is great controversy about how biofuels actually increase environmental impacts instead of decreasing them, so the same argument applies to bioplastics. As soon as you start to grow crops for turning into fuel or plastics you are competing with food production and are clearing land as well as using chemicals and fossil fuels for the farming and processing (…)To be sustainable biofuel and bioplastic production should be from waste oils and fats that already exist”.

In the aftermath of Cyclone Nagris, Sid of Pickled Politics reveals that something that ought to be perfectly straightforward (helping the desperate victims of a natural disaster) can become fraught in unfavourable political circumstances: “Can there be a case for refusing to supply humanitarian aid? There is nothing to stop the Burmese junta refusing to accept aid if they feel that they are being pressured into reforms and compromises which they are simply unwilling to accept. The dilemma is that this is a government which permits its armed forces to open fire on its own citizens. If they refuse to comply with the ‘advocacy package’ that comes with the aid, it will only increase the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable people”.

The vote at Second Reading stage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill has been brought forward at short notice and two demonstrations have been scheduled accordingly. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science highlights the first (in support of the Bill) in White coats protest on hybrid research bill: “Like most people I generally can’t be bothered to protest or write huffy letters to my MP about things like embryonic stem cell science and animal-human hybrid embryo research, because I have a vague notion that nobody will listen to the religious fruitcakes anyway and it will all take care of itself.

In the case of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill I’m no longer convinced that sense will prevail”.

Mr Goldacre’s fears are well-founded – emboldened by all the attention that has been paid them over recent months, the religious fringe has become increasingly vocal and increasingly militant. Do we really wish to emulate our American cousins when it comes to the hysteria surrounding the mere mention of reproduction, “tampering with God’s creation”, precluding any rational debate?

Penny Red of the eponymous blog gives notice of the emergency gathering outside Parliament in defence of abortion rights, more specifically to oppose the amendments tabled by Nadine Dorries, which would perniciously lower the 24-week limit. In 24 reasons for 24 weeks: a pro-choice call to arms…Penny Red exposes the pseudo-science and downright lies that have been marshalled by those who would overturn a key achievement of feminism and drive women back into the clutches of shady “practitioners” whose methods might not be more subtle than the coat hanger of yore. Whereas I would happily paste the entire rebuttal here, I will show uncharacteristic restraint and confine myself to two of the arguments: “There are many far better ways to reduce the number of late-term abortions. People who object to late term abortions should be fighting to make early abortions easier to access, and to increase the availability of proper sex education and access to contraceptives”.

And: “Some vulnerable women need late-term abortions because severe abnormalities in pregnancy, such as Edward’s syndrome, are rarely identified until 20-21 weeks. Reducing the time limit would force some women to carry severely impaired or dying foetuses to term – an horrific experience”.

Blogging and Journalism

Now to a topic which has become something of a recurrent theme of late, the schizoid relationship between creative writers who are paid for their efforts and who have a built-in readership through sharing in the prestige of the publication employing them and those whose rewards (by and large, there are exceptions) are not financial. (Please note my steadfast and deliberate avoidance of the terms “amateur” and “professional” – although dross is to be found everywhere, much of the output of the blogosphere is nevertheless of far superior quality to the dismal column-inch-padding regularly found in papers).

Summer is often referred to as the silly season for journalists (and let’s face it, we have moved from winter to summer without the transition formerly known as spring), the heat seems to addle their brains, the world seems a more hospitable place, the doom, gloom and despair which they peddle is temporarily banished, our political masters migrate to the residences of their chums abroad, in short, there is no ready inspiration, so they attach a peg to their noses and turn to the Great Unwashed of Blogdom…

On the one hand, journalists are only too happy to sneer at us, condescendingly reminding us of their lofty status by emphasising the constraints within which they operate (editorial control, accountability and the like), whilst on the other, they have no qualms whatsoever about shamelessly filching from blogs when it yields a salacious story, nor do they – in spite of the much-vaunted safeguards – balk at distorting and misrepresenting blogs in the process. Gordon McLean draws our attention to a particularly flagrant violation of any semblance of ethical conduct in An open letter to journalists (to which we shall return in a moment).

By way of background, a contributor to the Daily Mail’s Femail section contacted Natalie Lue, author of Tired of Men who agreed to be interviewed as a means of promoting another of her blogs, Baggage Reclaim and was left reeling when she discovered that her entire blogging career had been diminished to a one-dimensional parody: e-venge. This galvanised Ms Lue into carrying out a detailed statistical analysis of the relevant archives: “That means that out of 72 posts written in 3 months, 1 PERCENT of the posts were dedicated to him!

8% referenced him.

1% referenced the engagement ring.

Now what they don’t know is that FORTY THREE PERCENT!!! of posts in June 2004 seem to mention toilet seats and the fact that I was living with that strange man boy who literally couldn’t p*ss on a toilet seat to save his life!

Now, how the hell did the Daily Mail come up with the idea that I set up a revenge blog when I wasn’t even writing about him, never mind taking revenge? What was I doing? Taking revenge on toilet seats and men that can’t pee right?

Oh and I went from being engaged for 14/15 months (I forget now after soooo much time has passed) to being engaged for FIVE years! We’ve been broken up for five years and I’ve lived in London for seven… I’m only thirty so did they think I was some sort of frickin’ child bride?!

Twenty frickin’ bloody six inaccuracies or just outright fabrications about me in one poxy article and to add insult to injury, they didn’t even mention Baggage Reclaim which was the only reason why I had initially agreed”.

Her conclusion (as featured in Dollymix): “The Daily Mail have confirmed what I have long suspected, which is that they seem to have a pathological dislike of women. That and the fact that they employ lazy journalism tactics and choose to write what they want as opposed to dabbling with the truth. Their articles love ‘pouring scorn’ on us with digs about women’s weight, weighing in with their voice of doom and judgment and lacking any sort of sisterhood in their editorial room. They don’t empower women; they just try to hobble us at the frickin’ knees!”

Indeed, which is why I find it so invaluable as a seam of information about prevailing attitudes. It articulates what many would hesitate to stammer if put on the spot in an actual conversation.

Gordon’s characteristically mild-mannered, courteous rebuke eloquently demonstrates why sloppiness will always backfire: “Like I say, I know that it’s only a few of you that are falling into this bad habit, and I guess that if you weren’t misquoting and badly researching your articles around blog stories, you’d be doing it on some other topic, but here’s the kicker.

We bloggers read each others blogs. We know them well, like old friends. We know the history, we know the personality behind the blog, so we know when all you’ve done is do a few quick searches and cobbled together a twisted view of reality.

And, really, we’d all kinda like you to stop doing that. Feel free to contact us, ask us questions, learn about who we are and why we blog, and most times we’ll be so accommodating you won’t believe it. Honest, most of us are pretty decent people just like most of you”.

He also encourages us to follow Natalie’s example and notify the Press Complaints Commission of such abuses. Sound advice.

In a similar vein, Johnny B of Private Secret Diary fame was alerted by a neighbour to the Sunday edition of the same paper in I receive an alarming telephone call!!! A 392-word excerpt had mysteriously found its way into the tabloid-with-pretensions-above-its-station without Mr B’s knowledge or permission. He decided to send the editor a bill: “Not having worked for the Mail on Sunday before, and a stated wordage figure proving elusive, I pluck a conservative amount out of the air and stick it on the bottom of an invoice, which goes off via the kind auspices of the G.P.O. To the Mail on Sunday’s credit, they pay me my two hundred quid quicker than most biggish companies would, and John Wellington sends me his (what I am sure are sincere) apologies.

There’s nothing quite so Rikfromtheyoungonesesque about people with blogs getting on their high horse about print journalists, except perhaps print journalists getting on their high horse about people with blogs. Clearly, however, there’s a little bit of a mutual-understanding issue here. I always go for cock-up over conspiracy, but one paragraph of his reply to me does seem a bit… a bit not quite fitting in with what I thought things were about.

‘We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.’

Discuss”.

Apart from its mind-boggling arrogance, the editor’s Snot Factor Nine (to adapt a phrase from the Star Trek universe – and in this particular case, the chief engineer would most definitely be proclaiming with impeccable Scottish dourness “She canna take it, Captain!”) remarks are very revealing of the mindset of Fleet Street’s finest: we dilettantes should, like some submissive toy poodle, ravenous for affection roll over and allow our tummies to be tickled in tongue-lolling, ecstatic gratitude. A raised middle-digit to you, sir!

The incident prompted Zoë Margolis of Girl with a One-Track Mind to address the issue of copyright in relation to blogs in Fight for your writes: “With the proliferation of blogs in the world (112 million and counting, according to Technorati), and their availability for viewing open for all (if you’re not in a country that filters the internet, that is), do newspapers have the right to use content from them for free? Many bloggers, myself included, think not. Online publishing does not mean an automatic negation of copyright; the creator of the material still has the right to be asked permission for usage and paid for their work, especially if it is used for commercial gain”.

According to the UK Intellectual Property Office, protection of original writing as a literary work extends to web-published musings. Acknowledging that further clarification is probably needed, Ms Margolis judiciously surmises that our patience is wearing thin: “The free culture movement, (including the widely used Creative Commons copyright notices, found on many blogs), which stems from the free software movement, argues that having the freedom to distribute and modify creative works prevents intellectual monopolies occurring, and that laws protecting companies that seek such protectivist [sic] legislation are against the public interest.

However, that said, when it comes to commercial companies – newspapers – using bloggers’ content for free, if the context of the material is not ‘fair use’ (e.g. for a critique or review by the publication), I think payment to the original writer needs to be made, ‘amateur’ blogger or not. Newspapers pay journalists to fill space, so if they’re going to use material from bloggers, they need to pay for that too. With more and more bloggers learning of their rights, the ‘in the public domain’ argument is not going to suffice for much longer. ‘Old media’ watch out: expect a few more invoices coming your way, soon”.

Feminism

In an essay which endeavours to salvage pornography as a literary genre, Susan Sontag, distinguishes between pornography in social history, as a psychological phenomenon and a minor convention within the arts. Her The Pornographic Imagination (1967) sums up the Establishment’s attitudes towards texts designed to stir the loins: “At least in England and America, the reasoned scrutiny and assessment of pornography is held firmly within the limits of the discourse employed by psychologists, sociologists, historians, jurists, professional moralists, and social critics. Pornography is a malady to be diagnosed and an occasion for judgement. It’s something one is for or against (…) A near unanimous consensus exists as to what pornography is – this being identified with notions about the sources of the impulse to produce and consume these curious goods. When viewed as a theme for psychological analysis, pornography is rarely seen as anything more interesting than texts which illustrate a deplorable arrest in normal adult sexual development. In this view, all pornography amounts to is the representation of the fantasies of infantile sexual life, these fantasies having been edited by the more skilled, less innocent consciousness of the masturbatory adolescent , for purchase by so-called adults. As a social phenomenon – for instance, the boom in the production of pornography in the societies of Western Europe and America since the eighteenth century – the approach is no less unequivocally clinical. Pornography becomes a group pathology; the disease of a whole culture, about whose cause everyone is pretty well agreed. The mounting output of dirty books is attributed to a festering legacy of Christian sexual repression and to sheer physiological ignorance, these ancient disabilities being now compounded by more proximate historic events, the impact of drastic dislocations in traditional modes of family and political order and unsettling changes in the roles of the sexes” (in Styles of Radical Will, London, Vintage, 2001, pp36-8, emphasis in original).

She perceived in the more “sophisticated” works more than mere bald reductionism: “The prominent characteristics of all products of the pornographic imagination are their energy and their absolutism.

The books generally called pornographic are those whose primary, exclusive, and overriding preoccupation is one with the depiction of sexual ‘intentions’ and ‘activities’. One could also say sexual ‘feelings’, except that the word seems redundant. The feelings of the personages deployed by the pornographic imagination are, at any given moment, either identical with their ‘behaviour’ or else a preparatory phase, that of ‘intention’, on the verge of breaking into ‘behaviour’ unless physically thwarted. Pornography uses a small crude vocabulary of feeling, all relating to the prospects of action: feeling one would like to act (lust); feeling one would not like to act (shame, fear, aversion). There are no gratuitous or non-functioning feelings; no musings, whether speculative or imaginistic, which are irrelevant to the business at hand. Thus, the pornographic imagination inhabits a universe that is, however repetitive the incidents occurring within it, incomparably economical. The strictest possible criterion of relevance applies: everything must bear upon the erotic situation.

The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived as a set of sexual exchanges. Thus, the reason why pornography refuses to make fixed distinctions between the sexes or allow any kind of sexual preference or sexual taboo to endure can be explained ‘structurally” (op. cit., pp66-7, emphasis in original).

Pornography has displayed an unparalleled ability to divide feminist opinion into warring factions. Pamela Paul recently interviewed over a hundred self-confessed (heterosexual) porn users, ranging in age from 21 to 59 (approximately 80% of whom were male) about the role pornography plays in their lives as well as commissioning the first nationally representative poll of Americans to deal with pornography for her book Pornified (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2005). In it she examines the profound change in context brought about by ease of access and the sheer volume of the stuff: “Men and women who came of age during the sixties, seventies, or eighties, or whose experience with pornography dates to those eras, think of pornography in terms of gauzy centrefolds, outré sexuality, women’s liberation, and the Hugh Hefner lifestyle. Back then, the lines between softcore and hardcore pornography were clear and distinguishable. Mainstream nudie magazines differed fundamentally from the tawdry interiors of adult stores and even from the pages of Hustler magazine. You could easily limit your consumption by selecting the desired publication. Likewise, the lines between the pro-pornography and the anti-pornography forces were distinct. To be for pornography was to stand in favour of civil liberties, sexual liberation, and science. Opposition to pornography was considered repressive, reactionary, and anti-sex. Dislike or disgust with obscenity could simply be reduced to some form of religious superstition, sexual shame, or fear” (Paul, op. cit., pp3-4).

The parameters of the debate need to shift to keep pace: “The latest wave of pornography crusaders is not only railing against moralising on the part of the government and organised religion, the argument that dominated the family values-obsessed eighties. Nor is it just about a libertarian or free-market fight against government regulation. Today, pornography advocates are also and perhaps equally rebelling against what they view as the excesses of liberalism and feminism of the early nineties, in particular, the extremes of political correctness. Defending pornography seems to have become a way for people who think of themselves as progressive, liberal, and open-minded to revolt against the closed-minded, PC police of university campuses and corporate human resources guidelines. Denouncing pornography is akin to mocking what is derisively known as ‘sexual correctness’.

But no matter how distasteful knee-jerk political correctness may be, it’s hard to ignore the equally illiberal nature of porn itself. Certainly, it’s hard to find anything more retrograde, repressive, or closed-minded than the sexual clichés peddled by pornography. Rather than a mark of escape from the past, the dominant morality of pornography reeks of Puritan and Victorian prudery; it creates a world populated by virgins and whores, by women who are used and shamed for being sexually voracious. Their degradation is deserved, according to the prim sexual vision of the pornographer. Even when the woman isn’t overtly degraded, she is deemed less than the man watching her by dint of being paid to please him sexually in a public forum (…) In pornography, sexuality frequently accompanies or provokes disgust and hatred – something to be done quickly, and just as quickly disposed of. In the world of pornography, sex is generally dirty, cheap, and – in the end – not much fun. Surely it is this Pornified version of sexuality that deserves denigration, mockery, and rebellion” (Paul, op. cit., p248).

Uncomfortable a topic as it may be, no parent can afford to turn a blind eye to the effect it might have on their child’s development: “Pornography is frequently the first place boys learn about sex and gain an understanding of their own sexuality, whims, preferences, and predilections – their desires filtered and informed by whatever the pornography they watch has to offer. As adolescents, many boys learn through pornography to direct their sexual feelings toward the opposite sex, to explain the source of their desires and the means to satisfy them – lessons traditionally supplemented by sex education, paternal guidance, peer conversation, and real-life experience. Whether mediated by outside sources or not, the pornography lesson is nothing if not straightforward; most is geared toward the adolescent mind: simple, primal, hormone-driven, results-oriented, a winnable game. Pornography depicts sex as an easy process that provides a welcome refuge from the tangle of sexual politics teenagers encounter in the real world” (Paul, op. cit., pp16-7).

Its ready availability has led to its incorporation into everyday life: “In a pornified world, pornography has become seamlessly woven into the wake-up routine, the workday Internet break, and the bedtime ritual. It’s part of revving up in the morning and relaxing at the end of the day. It’s a prelude to sex or an alternative to sex. As an accompaniment to masturbation alone, pornography exerts a powerful pull” (Paul, op. cit., p24).

Paul explains its appeal to men: “In so many ways, a man’s ability to observe is restricted by social norms that demand men not treat women as sexual objects, no matter how provocatively tight her jeans. But in the porn world, none of those restrictions apply. Men can look at whatever they want in whatever way they choose for as long as they desire to do so.

Walking down the street, a woman has the ability to look the other way or to sneer at the man who passes by her. In the office, she can write a more effective business plan than her male co-worker or outperform him in a board meeting. In a bar, she can refuse to give a guy her phone number or brush off his attempts at conversation. But in the porn world, she has none of these options. She may retain the power to reject a man by the very nature of her femininity, but in pornography she chooses not to reject. In porn, she treats a man the way he wants to be treated, relieving him of the fears that plague everyday male-female interaction. In the porn world, men retain the power and the control. It’s an incredibly seductive fantasy” (Paul, op. cit., pp32-3).

Part of its allure lies in the elimination of the distractions, uncertainties, anxieties and insecurities of skin-to-skin interactions in the real world: “The beauty of pornography is that there are never any hiccups in courtship. Nobody fails to get an erection, the woman doesn’t have trouble achieving orgasm, nobody fears their guts look too big or they’re sweating too much or they can’t catch their breath. If a man tries to take a woman from behind or tie her up or asks her to spank him or ejaculates on her body, the woman doesn’t wince or object or ask questions. In pornography, no one needs to make pillow talk. There’s no expectation that a man will tell a woman he loves her, or to get up and make her breakfast. Nobody gets genital warts or heaven forbid the AIDS virus. Nobody gets pregnant or wants to get married or tries to pin down a date for next weekend” (Paul, op. cit., p41).

The actresses are endlessly nubile and pliable, bending to His Inexorable Will: “The women in pornography exist in order to please men, and are therefore willing to do anything. They will dominate or act submissive. They can play dumb or talk back, moan quietly or scream, cry in anger or in pleasure. They will accommodate whatever a man wants them to do, be it anal sex, double penetration, or multiple orgasms. The porn star is always responsive; she would never complain about a man being late or taking too long to come. Her hair never gets trapped under his elbow and her thighs never tire. She’s easily aroused, naturally and consistently orgasmic, and malleable. She is what he wants her to be. She’s a cheerleader, a nurse, a dominatrix, a nymphomaniac, a virgin, a teenager, your best friend’s mother. She is every woman who was ever out of your league. She’s the girl next door, the prom queen, the hot teacher, the supermodel, the celebrity. She is every woman who ever did the rejecting. She used to be the lesbian, she used to be frigid, she used to be afraid of sex. She is every woman who cannot be had. Now she loves sex, she can’t get enough of it; she can’t get enough of sex with you. She is every woman who should appreciate you. The women in pornography are undiscriminating – it doesn’t matter what you look like, if you’ve got bad breath or can’t keep an erection. She certainly doesn’t care about occupation, reputation, or history. Each encounter begins anew, meeting as welcome strangers and parting with gratitude.

Of all the requirements for enjoyable pornography, men most commonly cite the appearance of a woman’s reciprocal pleasure as key. She has to seem as if she’s having fun; she should be smiling, welcoming, and at ease, and she should make the viewer feel that she’s doing what she does because she wants to – not because she’s being paid. Even when the sex acts depicted are clearly made to look non-consensual or painful, most men (there are exceptions) insist that she not seem too distraught” (Paul, op. cit., pp44-5, emphasis in original).

The introduction and spread of video recorders was responsible for the first major expansion in the market, but the real revolution was brought about by the Internet (and the plethora of new devices able to download digital content), which has made it possible to cater for every conceivable appetite, however unsavoury: “According to a major study of pornography across various media, with each iteration in technological advancement, pornography has become increasingly violent and non-consensual. For example, in one study, a random selection of pornographic material, 25 percent of pornographic magazines showed some form of violence, ranging from verbal aggression to torture and mutilation, compared with 27 percent of pornographic videos. Usenet groups on the Internet depicted violence 42 percent of the time (…) The authors then concluded that as new pornographic technologies emerged, pornography would become increasingly violent – both to satisfy earlier, upgraded demand and to bring the viewer to the next level” (Paul, op. cit., pp59-9).

Saturation can have a detrimental numbing effect that can compel addicts to seek out ever more disturbing “entertainments” for stimulus in a diminishing returns trap: “Pornography leaves men desensitised to both outrage and to excitement, leading to an overall diminishment of feeling and eventually to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of everyday life. Men find themselves upgrading to the most intense forms of pornography, glutting themselves on extreme imagery and outrageous orgasms” (Paul, op. cit., p90).

Personally, the gape-mouthed, simulated ecstasy phallic worship of pornography makes me queasy with its population of women who are nothing more than a collection of orifices to be poked, prodded, skewered or whatever other verb you might find apposite to describe penetration. Completely devoid of autonomy and humanity, they represent an absolute and abject negation of everything that feminism has fought for, conniving at, indeed exulting in their own debasement (self-abasement), revelling in the nihilistic extinction of their selves that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the believer aching to merge with God (as Sontag hints at).

Laura Woodhouse of The F-Word expresses her concern that Internet porn has relentlessly pushed back the boundaries of the acceptable in Porn and Abuse: “If, like me, you grew up without directly accessing porn, you may well learn a lot about sex from experiences with someone who did. And in today’s culture, even if both partners grow up without watching porn, the porn industry’s influence is growing: the images of women on lads’ mags covers in your local newsagent, the trend in ripping out all your pubic hair, thongs for tweenies, women performing stripper moves in music videos, the list goes on.

If it wasn’t for porn, would this guy (and many more, if you read the comments thread) think it was fine and dandy to shoot off in a woman’s face without so much as a by your leave? Would some guys think ejaculating on a woman’s body is similarly bog standard, no-need-to-ask-first behaviour? Would so many young women think sex with a guy requires pre-removal of all body hair? Or fake orgasm noises?”

As the mother of a 16-going-on-17-year -old boy I have an understandable interest on how porn might be corroding his perceptions of a healthy sexual relationship. His best friend regularly sends links to sites that fill me with revulsion, such as one dedicated to celebrating freakishly large male members (I know because he found it so hilarious that he treated me to the main page). Insistent that the purpose of the visit is to derive amusement from the feeble plots that justify the action the impression he gained was plainly different to my own, which could not see beyond the girls’ faces plastered with spurted semen and their accounts of how much it hurt to insert such a prodigious piece of equipment and the portrayal of an exaggerated hyper-masculinity based on brutality, sadism and inflicting pain in the pursuit of possession and domination.

And I am fairly certain that what he and his classmates laughed at was pretty tame compared to some of the online fare on offer, which is why I welcome the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill’s initiative to curb the worst excesses. It defines an “extreme image” as follows: an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life; an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals; an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse, a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.

Red Pepper carefully sets out both sides of the argument in a series of articles on the subject, including An extreme insult by Penny (from the campaigning group Backlash): “Right… so what is ‘life-threatening’ or ‘serious’? And what do ‘appears to’ and ‘likely’ mean? Is fisting imagery going to be banned because incompetent fisting can cause tissue damage? If you take a picture of the office lads doing naked skydiving for charity, do you become an ‘extreme pornographer’ based on whether or not you get the parachute in the picture?”

And: “The only possible use for that self-congratulatory impulse is as a distraction from real issues, such as trafficking and the need for regulation in the porn industry. Nobody doubts that a very small minority of porn is made under coercive conditions – but this porn is just as likely to be ‘mainstream’ as ‘extreme’, and a witch-hunt against ‘extreme’ material that is produced by consenting adults for consenting adults can only draw police resources away from the investigation of real crimes”.

Debs of The Burning Times in When does kinky sex become illegal? is also sceptical of the Bill, but on quite different grounds, returning to the murder that sparked calls for a clampdown: “So, someone somewhere has decided that these are the types of images which are damaging, and all other pornography is okay? I don’t get it. Seriously. It’s either porn or it’s not, and if it is porn it exemplifies a world in which women’s only role is as a fuck-doll for men, and that is always damaging. To decide that some of it is damaging, whilst some of it isn’t makes no sense at all, and is where a lot of the confusion and criticism of this Bill comes from. I can understand people criticising it, because it appears very rushed and ill-thought-through, which is not to say that something like this Bill should not exist. It is definitely a step in the right direction, but I do worry that it will cause more trouble than it solves.

Just have a look at the criteria for ‘extreme porn’ again, and keep in mind what most porn users would have you believe is the primary purpose of pornography, i.e. to ‘get off’ as one so-called ‘feminist’ once told me. (How on earth did people ‘get off’ before the existence of porn? She couldn’t answer that one…) So, we not only have ‘softcore’ porn, and ‘hardcore’ porn, but also ‘extreme porn’, which is somehow even worse than the other two.

I have said before how ridiculous it is to speak about degrees of porn. Porn is porn, and porn kills and destroys women every day of every week of every year. Men use it to kill women, whether it is this ‘extreme’ variety, or the latest Sloggi knickers ad campaign, or just living in a culture that is so saturated with porn it is impossible to escape, and our boys and girls are learning, just from what they see and hear around them, that it is normal, and that this is what sex is like, and it is cool to like it, and not cool to not. I really hate the phrase ‘extreme porn’, as it makes it sounds like any form of porn not deemed ‘extreme’ is mild by comparison, and therefore harmless. There is no such thing as harmless porn. It is all harmful; it overflows with harm, it floods our lives, and we have to fight to stay afloat”.

It brings us back to the unresolved issue of whether prolonged exposure to images of violence might breed violent behaviour (no simple causal link has ever been established by research). In crude terms, would a toddler plonked in front of a telly all day watching nothing but Tom and Jerry be moved to whack his sister over the head with a hammer? Or a teenager hooked up to a games console playing the likes of Hitman inevitably evolve into a sociopath? The Bulger case exemplified these fears in the video age, the Longhurst case encapsulated them in the era of digital porn overload. This does not, however, imply that we should not attempt to reach agreement on the limits of what we in a nominally civilised society should tolerate or that images have no potential to harm.

Debs harbours no doubts: “Mrs Longhurst’s daughter is dead because of pornography. Not, as some people in the comments to the article [on the BBC News website] have suggested, because she was prayed upon by a crazed psychopath in a one-off attack. Not because this man just ‘flipped’ for no reason and murdered a woman. Not as a result of an ‘isolated incident’. But because of pornography. No-one dares to put all these ‘isolated incidents’ together, because if we did, we would be looking at an epidemic of male violence against women too horrific to contemplate. The male-centric media makes sure we are made aware, each time this happens, that it is a madman, a one-off occurrence, that this sort of thing doesn’t usually happen, you can all go back to your soap operas now. But the media lies. It happens all the time, every day, and every time it is men killing women, men killing women, men killing women. They do it again and again and again; they never stop. And the media lies to us, telling us it’s just this one time, it won’t happen again, it’s really unusual. And of all the ‘media’ in the world today, pornography is the biggest liar. Pornography says, it’s not even real, she’s acting; she likes it, all women do. Pornography says, here she is, do what you like with her, she’s aching for you to do it, she is only here for you; without you she ceases to exist. Pornography says; this is what women like, this is “sex” to women, if you don’t do it like this, you’re doing it wrong and she will laugh at you. Pornography lies and manipulates and divides; it turns women into things that have things done to them. But pornography is not a fantasy. Real men in the real world use pornography to harm women. Some men use it to kill women. Pornography killed Jane Longhurst”.

As we attempt to make up for the Vitamin-D deficiency we have incurred over the rest of the sun-deprived year and shed extraneous layers of winter lagging, our seasonally skimpier attire can bring out the most retrograde of behaviour and leering tendencies in the male of the species, which at best is mildly annoying and at worst intimidating. Holly Coombe of The F-Word excoriates a dismal publication from across the Channel in Tourist Guide for Woman-Watchers. Pierre Louis Colin, speech writer for the French Foreign Minister (who ought never to have ventured beyond political rhetoric) has penned an opus upholding all the myths about the lack of prudish inhibition prevailing in the romantic capital of the world, The Pretty Women of Paris, a more accurate title for which might have been The Pervert’s Guide to Ogling Spots. Naturally, since the esteemed author fancies himself as something of a philosopher, he cannot resist boasting that his intention was to strike a blow against prissy, pussy-whipped American political correctness. I swither between despair that a graduate of the elite École Normale Supérieure could have perpetrated this volume and depressed acknowledgement that attendance at the hallowed institution was probably what fostered such a finely honed sense of privilege in the first place.

I hand over to Holly: “I’ll admit that I have been known to ‘shoot the breeze’ about men. I’ve also done a fair bit of roaming about, quietly observing and contemplating them. Of course, all that hanging out alone in public spaces sometimes leads to me being interrupted by some random guy who has decided to loudly make it clear that he is going to contemplate me but, hey, what the hell. As we are constantly told -in no uncertain terms- equality has been achieved! If I get frustrated, I can always pop to my local newsagent to grab one of the many magazines showcasing sexy men with full boners, getting thoroughly rogered by anonymous women for my pleasure…

All that talk of the freedom to “contemplate,” along with the author saying he is on a “high mission,” seems to allude to the intellectual. Perhaps such high-mindedness is beyond me because I have to admit I’m having trouble appreciating the great philosophical high ground to be gained from making a special trip to the Spiral staircase at Cafe Louis Philippe to look up women’s skirts (one of Pierre Louis Colin’s recommendations in the book). Perhaps I would understand if some randy lover of men informed me of the cunning ways that I could invade men’s privacy by sneaking a look at their cocks without their permission. Perhaps a tour of the urinals is in order?”

Laura Woodhouse (likewise of The F-Word) relates to us the reasons behind her decision to bin (not burn!) her bra (coincidentally taken in Paris of all places…) in More summery reflections: the boob taboo: “Despite the fact that they are a major and visible part of the bodies of millions of people in this country, breasts are taboo. Sexualised to the point at which breast feeding in public is viewed by many as offensive and disgusting, while the photoshopped boobs on lads mags covers are highly visible in shops across the land, breasts are a sign of sexual availability, the outline of a nipple a sign of sexual excitement, viewed by some as an invitation to instigate sexual activity. In order to avoid giving out these signals, many of us wear padded cups over our breasts, moulding them into an often unnatural, smooth shape, an inoffensive, and much less sexual, rigid mound under our clothes.

When you stop and think about it, the bra, far from being a sign of womanliness and femininity, could be said to alienate woman from her feminine body and breasts, which are defined by external judgement: braless, they are too openly sexual for the public’s gaze (or not sexual enough: god spare us the hideous sagging boobs), covered up they must be standardised and pushed up to meet the exacting demands of patriarchal femininity.

I do recognise that some women do genuinely need bras for support, particularly those with bigger breasts and those who play sport. But in many cases I think the wearing of a bra is simply to enable us to fit into a patriarchal society that has an age long fear of the female body, either claiming parts of it as its own and defining and controlling them to its own ends (breasts, womb) or portraying it as disgusting and, again, in need of control (body hair)”.

Let them hang loose!

By way of a coda (and some light relief) on the current craze for purging our mother tongue of any elements which might putatively upset the sensitive reader (pass the smelling salts, darling!), Malcolm Redfellow’s World Service provides us with an absolute gem in There’s not much the BBC website has to learn about building traffic, the Corporation having – shame on it! – resorted to tabloid tactics in attracting the casual browser with its headline Great tits cope well with warming (subsequently altered to the infinitely more anodyne Great tits seem to be adapting to global warming). This sad symptom of our Zeitgeist inspired Mr Redfellow to reflect on similar craven acts of censorship: “One can never be too careful with certain words in such a context, as for example:

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has banned the use of the word ‘cock’ when applied to the male of the species, in case it causes offence.

An RSPB spokesman confirmed that it did not use the word ‘cock’ on its website.

In a move condemned for ‘taking political correctness too far’, a correspondent on an RSPB online forum was surprised to find that his use of the word ‘cock’, when referring to a male blackbird, was replaced with four asterisks.

To which Malcolm can only add ‘****!’”

Have they never considered that some of us might be offended by the gratuitous butchering of our language? Or that if they outlaw the “legitimate” usage only the subsidiary, “naughty” one will remain? And, while we’re at it, why is the word cock deemed so objectionable whilst tit is perfectly acceptable? Consistency, anyone?

Mr Redfellow goes on to reminisce about a classic of children’s literature (which my never-married Scripture Union teacher read out to us in instalments in class and I have no recollection of giggles at the appropriate juncture, suppressed or otherwise). Hopefully the brigade of cultural vandals who have reputedly been rewriting Enid Blyton’s oeuvre will not get their grubby mitts on Serraillier’s masterpiece. When I was of an age to be engrossed by the adventures of The Famous Five, far from being brainwashed into a lifetime of cooking and cleaning, I simply identified with the boys and determined never to grow into one of the terminally boring girls. It did not do any irreversible damage to my psyche (unless, of course, you are inclined to characterise my feminism as such).

Culture

There was a time in the not too distant past when, as that astute and witty observer of the English, George Mikes, quipped, being able to claim Magyar ancestry was de rigueur: “Yes of course, everybody is Hungarian. And if he isn’t then his father or his grandmother was. Alexander Korda, the father of the British film industry, is one of the very obvious examples. When Leo Amery – one of the flag-bearers of the British Imperial idea – died, I learned from his obituaries that his mother had been Hungarian. Leslie Howard, the incarnation, indeed the prototype – both in manners and in appearance – of the modern Briton, was…Well, need I go on? I am Hungarian; André Deutsch is Hungarian. Nicolas Bentley, by now, is at least half Hungarian. Queen Mary was not a Hungarian. But whenever she received a Hungarian she was fond of telling him that two of her grandparents were” (How to be a Brit, London, Penguin, 1986, pp179-80).

Mikes’ most widely-quoted aphorism: “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles” (op.cit., p35) might not have aged as well as a vintage Tokaji, but another of the attributes he chronicled possesses eternal validity: “Queuing is the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race. The English are rather shy about it, and deny that they adore it.

On the Continent, if people are waiting at a bus-stop they loiter around in a seemingly vague fashion. When the bus arrives they make a dash for it; most of them leave by the bus and a lucky minority is taken away by an elegant black ambulance car. An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one” (op. cit., p54)

My first Hungarian lover could boast that he came from one of the handful of genuinely noble families (as opposed to the ones who had used their vulgar parvenu wealth to procure a title) with legends handed down over the generations of how one of their number was responsible for the tilt of the cross atop the Holy Crown by putting a cushion over it and sitting on top of it to protect it from plundering invaders, the nonchalance with which a more recent forebear had gambled away thousands of hectares of prime forest land at the card table or the 90-year-old Count who had sucked the marrow out of life and committed suicide out of sheer boredom. I remember a gathering where one of the shrivelled aristocratic matrons informed me (with the variety of withering disdain reserved for anyone tainted by association with trade) that Mikes was not his real name, that he was a mere commoner masquerading to pull the wool over the eyes of the English and reap deference that was not his due. But she knew better.

Now that the Iron Curtain has been consigned to historical metaphor we have an opportunity to return the compliment, by subjecting the Hungarians to inquisitive scrutiny. Peggy of Day to Day Life of a Very Lazy Gardener initiates us into the delights of szalonnacsurdítás (more widely known as szalonnasütés) with a step-by-step guide to the custom in Vegetarians, Please Avert Your Eyes! before paying homage to the strange obsession with extravagant facial hair in The Magnificent Hungarian Moustache.

Moving to the wonders of celluloid, Jonathan Calder of Liberal England unearths a nugget of trivia in Hazel Blears in ‘A Taste of Honey’? I can only recommend browsing through Jonathan’s extensive array of entries tagged film (which includes such classics as A Matter of Life and Death, given honourable mention here because the scriptwriter, though that surely is too prosaic a word to encompass his genius, Emeric Pressburger, was Hungarian).

Sharon of Early Modern Notes dispenses some valuable advice to anyone contemplating a future lecturing in the humanities in New resources for making digital history: “And there are going to be real job opportunities for those who take the initiative now and acquire the practical skills and understanding of what creating digital history needs. The generation of historians (and humanities academics more generally) in charge of hiring mostly doesn’t care about (or for) blogging. Wikipedia brings it out in a collective rash. But it’s well aware that there is quite a lot of grant money becoming available for digital history/humanities. And that’s something it does care about.

The technical skills needed aren’t taught in more than a handful of history departments (I don’t know of any in the UK): students and junior academics who want to exploit these new opportunities are largely going to have to teach themselves, with the help of resources like The Programming Historian. Get in ahead of the crowd now. Your career might depend on it”.

Pliable of On An Overgrown Path meanders sedately from John Stuart Mill’s gravestone on the outskirts of Avignon to the music of Elisabeth Lutyens in The individual is sovereign.

Peter Ashley of the ever-enjoyable and informative Unmitigated England, with his beautiful photograph of a sun-dappled but otherwise mercifully shady path, proves that Leicestershire can hold its own with Dorset or Devon and why the epithet “green and pleasant land” has lost none of its resonance.

Juliet Doyle of Musings from a muddy island provides us with stunning images from a beach that is the complete antithesis of the sun factor 50 smearing overcrowded tourist trap. I particularly appreciated the irresistibly poignant final photograph of a message written in shells, a transitory monument destined to be devoured by the incoming tide as we are all devoured and our memory erased by time.

Natalie of Philobiblon puts the BBC’s iPlayer facility to fruitful use in her tantalisingly economical sketch of No, not that Chaucer, but Alice.

Tractorboy of Green Jellybean publicises the Launch of first free eco search engine in the UK. This laudable undertaking seems almost too good to be true, the perfect means for the armchair ecologist and stressed business traveller alike to salve their consciences with a few simple clicks: “It is a free search engine, which plants up to two trees for every 1000 searches made via the engine.

With over 1.5 billion internet searches made in the UK every month, if every search was made via ecocho.co.uk, that would equate to a maximum of 3 million trees every month. It’s essentially a really easy way to offset your carbon footprint”.

Theo Blackwell of Theo’s Blog answers the call of the meme in ‘Tag’ Email chain (and my goodness me it is one that has been doing the rounds forever!).

If you are feeling peckish and just so happen to be in the vicinity of Broadhurst Gardens, Grievous Angel of Northwest 6 would nudge you in the direction of The Green Room, whilst Camden Kiwi champions Chez Georges for a Perfect Chocolate Mousse: “Different cuisines have different signature dishes. By these shall ye know them. They may be hackneyed and traditional, but if they’re good, chances are everything else will be too. For Indian restaurants, its the chana marsala. The chick peas should be firm, not soft, and the flavours pungent with clean tastes of coriander and lemon.

For a French bistro, it has to be the chocolate mousse. If you get one of those gelatine-reinforced, individual ‘we made it this morning and stuck it in the fridge’ things in a Marie Antoinette champagne glass, you know you’ve made a mistake. Ask to check the fridge before you order your starter. They’ll think you’re odd, but it is worth it”.

Don’t take my word for it, but if you are in London, why not hop aboard the Eurostar (guilt-free, it’s carbon neutral after all) and carry out a taste comparison with the trio of mousses in La Quincaillerie? The Belgians may be unremarkable in almost every respect (except for their inexplicable superiority complex), but one thing they do understand is how to extract maximum pleasure from the cocoa bean.

Miscellany

Ellee Seymour of ProActive PR passes on an appeal for information concerning the disappearance of 15-year-old Amy Fitzpatrick (no disrespect is intended by the inclusion under this heading – such a heartrending trauma simply cannot be subsumed under the other categories).

Bystander of The Magistrate’s Blog has his hackles raised by some distinctly dodgy characters hanging around our streets in broad daylight in Web of Deceit: “(…) there, in the corner of the car park, was a white Escort-type van bearing the name of the clamping (sorry, ‘parking control’) company that I remembered from the trial. In the van were two crop-headed tattooed men, feet up, reading their newspapers.

Knowing as I do the modus operandi of these charmless fellows, I was irresistibly reminded of a big spider, sitting in the corner of his web, waiting for prey.

Park in their bit of space, and they will emerge from their van as soon as you turn the corner. The clamp will go on, and they will straight away call for a tow truck to take away your car. The clamp fee is £80, the towing fee £200, plus a per-day charge for storage if you cannot get to their yard before 6 pm. The clampers are paid on commission, so it’s clamp or starve for them”.

In Rowan Pelling and the white witch, Dr John Crippen of NHS Blog Doctor chastises Rowan Pelling for a long piece in The Daily Telegraph in which she waxes lyrical about the advantages of home birthing: “The independent midwifery lobby is doing well. It’s so politically correct, isn’t it? Why do those nasty doctors keep worrying about the dangers of home births?”

He clearly registers his disapproval at how the happy event unfolded: “Rowan went into labour shortly after midnight. The white witch did not arrive for some hours. She then helped Rowan through a 20 hour labour during which, at times, Rowan was crawling round the floor on her hands and knees, close to despair. Sounds fun. The baby was finally born alive so all was deemed to be well. And that is the problem with white witches and people like Rowan. They got away with it without mother or child dying. They assume that that retrospectively validates the management of the birth. It does not.

A 40 year old woman in her second pregnancy with a Caesarean scarred uterus having a prolonged and painful labour at home with no medical back up.

Bonkers. Utterly bonkers”.

For those with the means to foot the bill, an independent midwife can indeed offer something your average, overworked NHS doctor cannot: she has time to build up a rapport with the expectant mother, displays empathy and actually listens rather than bossing around. Without such qualities the lobbying would hardly make an impact. Callousness and overweening arrogance are – alas – not in short supply amongst medical professionals, many of whom have a less considerate bedside manner than Gregory House. Nor would I dismiss the testimonies of women who have suffered appallingly at the hands of obstetricians, as attested to by Amity Reed in her devastating critique Not a happy birthday. Nor is medical rape confined to the maternity suites.

Humour

Mr Potarto of Potato Potarto tackles the perils and pitfalls of an allegedly common language in Ne’er cast a clout till August be out.

Norbert Trouser Quandary of the splendidly-titled Little Frigging on the Wold (located deep in the recesses of Upper Thyghspreader) on The Top 10 Most Annoying Things on the Web. Just to correct the impression that all lists are by definition irredeemably naff, I cite The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon on Things That make One’s Heart Beat Faster: “Sparrows feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing. To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt. To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy. To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one’s gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival. To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.

It is night time and one is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of rain-drops, which the wind blows against the shutters” (Harmondsworth, Penguin Classics, 1982, p51).

In a magnificent parody, NewsBiscuit throws the spotlight on the plight of ‘Supply vicars’ unable to control unruly congregations: “One temporary priest was reduced to tears with heckling and catcalling during his sermon, and when he looked up he saw that all the church-goers had turned their pews round to face the opposite direction. ‘These young supply vicars do not have the experience to be able to hold the attention of wayward Christians,’ admitted the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘The moment they turn their back they are pelted with screwed up service sheets and Alpha Course leaflets made into paper planes, and many of them just don’t know what to do’.

In a small church in South Devon, one vicar was subjected to mass humming, while another gradually became aware that the mumbling and feigned coughing around the congregation was part of a daring game where each church-goer had to say the word ‘bollocks’ slightly louder than the last. In extreme cases of disruption, tearful vicars have run out to the vestry and phoned for the bishop, who has had to come down and give the congregation a serious talking to”.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by Jackart of A Very British Dude. As always, nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

Farewell, adieu and tot ziens!

Anthropologist Kate Fox in Watching the English (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2004) carefully dissects every foible of the nation’s behaviour, investigating the minutiae in a spirit of scientific rigour, uncovering vital clues in the most unlikely of places: “We read compulsively, anytime, anywhere.  In many English homes, you will find what I call ‘bogside reading’: piles of books and magazines placed next to the loo, or even neatly arranged in a special rack or bookcase for reading while sitting on the loo” (pp220-1).

There is a gender-specific dimension to this (though I would note, on the basis of having shared a home with a Hungarian for over a decade that this phenomenon would appear to be cross-cultural – apart from the customary stack of computer gaming monthlies, he has snaffled my son’s copy of The Book of General Ignorance to keep himself entertained): “There are many English people – particularly males – who find it very hard to defecate at all unless they have something to read.  If there is no proper bogside reading, they will read the instructions on the soap-dispenser or the list of ingredients on the spray-can of air-freshener” (p221).

Whilst the body is under strain, the mind should be otherwise occupied in the sanctum of solitude, preferable to the ignominious fate of an aneurysm from unseemly haste: “The unwritten rules of bogside reading state that the books and magazines should be of a relatively unserious nature – humour, books of quotations, collections of letters or diaries, odd or obscure reference books, old magazines; anything that can be dipped into casually, rather than heavy tomes requiring sustained concentration” (p221).

Indeed, Fox gleans valuable information concerning social class from the loo library (you may be a self-conscious and meticulous image-manager with pretensions to gentility, but, like Hyacinth Bucket, your true origins will be painfully revealed if you allow a sociologist to relieve herself): “Working-class bogside reading tends to be mostly humorous, light entertainment or sports-related – books of jokes, cartoons, maybe the occasional puzzle-book or quiz-book, and perhaps a few glossy-gossip or sports magazines.  You will also sometimes find magazines about hobbies and interests, such as motorcycles, music or skateboarding.

Lower-middles or middles-middles are not so keen on bogside reading: they may well take a book or newspaper into the loo with them, but do not like to advertise this habit by having a permanent bogside collection, which they think might look vulgar.  Females of these classes may be reluctant to admit to reading on the loo at all.

Upper-middles are generally much less prudish about such things, and often have mini-libraries in their loos.  Some upper-middle bogside collections are a bit pretentious, with books and magazines that appear to have been selected to impress, rather than entertain, but many are so eclectic, and so amusing that guests often get engrossed in them and have to be shouted at to come back to the dinner table.

Upper-class bogside reading is usually closer to working-class tastes, consisting mainly of sport and humour, although the sporting magazines are more likely to be of the hunting/shooting/fishing sort than, say, football.  Some upper-class bogside libraries include fascinating old children’s books, and ancient, crumbling copies of Horse and Hound or Country Life, in which you might come across the 1950s engagement-portrait of the lady of the house” (pp221-2).

I should point out at this stage that I am a Scot (hence many of the classificatory indicators deployed by Fox do not apply), an academic of staunch peasant/working class roots (my family on my mother’s side were itinerant agricultural labourers, whilst on my father’s side they were tenant farmers of the Duke of Atholl, the principle reading matter in the cottage in which they shivered the sun-yellowed newspaper pages from the 1920s covering the interior in lieu of wallpaper), whose upward mobility depended on study.  The very idea of polluting sacred tomes by lugging them into the most profane of spaces fills me with horror and revulsion.  One of the great pleasures of ex-pat existence (though not quite enough to compensate for the dreary flatness of Waffleland or quell homesickness altogether) is the separation of the room for expelling waste products from the room in which cleansing and restful soaking occurs.  The most magnificent example of bogside bliss I have yet encountered did tend to corroborate Fox’s analysis.  In the downstairs toilet of a maison de maître owned by a Tory colleague I was confronted by a splendid array of volumes on fitted shelves, so compelling that the guest cannot help but agonise over making a selection, legs crossed, buttocks clenched.

Why dwell at such length on an inescapable necessity that unites the most humble shelf-stacker and the exalted ermine-trimmed peer of the realm (and I am not talking about reading)?  Because in a personal communication the author of My Boyfriend is a Twat (London, Friday Books, 2007) self-deprecatingly described her “manual about recognising, dealing and coping with a complete and utter twat” (px) as a “toilet book”.  Consisting of witty, episodic snippets, it can be consulted for entertainment to banish the dullness of a commute (never a bad thing when the person sitting opposite you on the retina-scaldingly bright orange seat of the metro carriage happens to be a stern bourgeois matron with a face next to which that of the pampered pug in her lap appears both cheerful and oddly attractive).

For the benefit of her female readers who, in the throes of the initial rush of tender affection, might be contemplating throwing in their lot with an average bloke, Zoë conscientiously and candidly urges caution by offering insights into the workings of the male mind: “I don’t regret my decision to take a twat under my roof; in fact, he has made a rather interesting contribution to my household and for that I thank him.  It’s the rest of the things that he does that I don’t thank him for, such as breathing.  And farting.  Especially the farting.  What can you do when you live with a man whose idea of cultural sensitivity is being able to fart along to the Belgian National Anthem?  Or who thinks of me as someone who: every 28 days has her period, every 21 days renews A Suitable Boy at the library and every 1,825 days gets her coil replaced?” (pxi).

Interspersed with the accounts of the perils of shopping, satellite dishes and sheds and of accommodations such as resigning oneself to the fridge being in a state of permanent, post-scavenged emptiness apart from the jars containing fossilised sediment of what was once jam or Marmite (the curry sauces having been more carefully excavated) is the occasional anecdote about the inconveniences and frustrations of life in exile: “As my boyfriend hardly knows Europe, he was far from ready to find himself living in a country where the shops are shut on Sundays and the offices are very fond of their bank holidays.  During the Twat’s first year here, he found himself getting very frustrated due to the lackadaisical lifestyle that the Belgians appear to have adopted.  I very clearly remember the Twat getting into the car one Saturday announcing that he was just popping round to see his doctor for a prescription renewal as he had run out of Ventolin.  I replied by saying that you have to have an appointment first, and besides, it being a Saturday, the doctor wouldn’t be at the clinic.  Not only that but, unless he could find a pharmacy ‘on call’, or was prepared to venture into the centre of town, he’d be out of luck as most pharmacies are shut over the weekends” (pp19-20).

Waffle Central can hardly compete with the cachet, romantic associations or bombastic self-confidence of Paris (beyond chocolate and beer, probably the only connotation is that of abject and irredeemable insignificance, although I believe Zoë when she assures us that she can indeed name ten famous Belgians), but the contradiction between its claim to being the (administrative) heart of Europe and the inferiority complex concerning its diminutiveness and cultural backwater status does give rise to some interesting tensions and at least the Twat has not adopted the entire gamut of local eccentricities.  For example, the somewhat disturbing propensity of native males to whip out their manhood unabashed in the most public of places (it really isn’t confined to an emergency watering of the lay-by’s grassy verge) in search of relief.  Their lack of inhibition or embarrassment in this respect is quite mind-boggling to the outsider (I have more than once considered snapping the worst offenders and posting their images in an effort to shame them into greater modesty as they direct their mictural flow onto the neighbour’s hedge in full view of our living room).  Whereas this might in part be attributable to the chronic under-provision of appropriate facilities (certainly true of the accumulation of retail hangars beyond our garden boundary), I suspect that it reflects something dark and unsavoury buried deep within the national psyche (or maybe symbolic revenge, “You refuse to take us seriously, but we piss on your opinion”).  After all, the most famous monument here is the Mannekin Pis (with a wardrobe of more than 600 costumes, including an Elvis number in rhinestone-studded white leather), whose image is ubiquitous (its latest manifestation is on the Coke vending machine at Zaventem Airport, the stream worryingly aimed straight at the delivery slot – no wonder the recipe remains a closely guarded secret).

For all his faults, the Twat was quick to discover the country’s chief merit, namely that if you travel for two hours in any direction you will have left its borders behind: “When our car was still running, the Twat found it incredible that he could, if he fancied, visit five different countries in one day without either having a passport or having to change currency.  In fact, you can visit three of those five countries and speak French in all three of them, although it is one of the Twat’s major achievements that he manages to get by with speaking English in any European country, including France.  He simply plays the village idiot again, which is neither a hard task for him nor is it far from the truth” (p24).

Certain aspects of masculinity in its contemporary cultural construction appear to transcend frontiers (taking the old Scottish proverb ‘Where’er ye be, let yer wind blow free’ a tad too literally): “Experience has taught me that most men tend to suffer badly from flatulence, which can not only be incredibly pungent but is often expelled from the body so noisily that even I have been woken up in the middle of the night during one of my boyfriend’s long and loud farts.  This is surprising, as very little wakes me up during the night and it is only on very rare occasions that the DHL flights landing at the airport not far from where we live manage to wake me, by sounding as if they are landing in the bedroom.  But when I say that sharing a bed with the Twat is like sleeping with someone who has a trumpet stuck up their arse, I couldn’t be closer to the truth” (p48).

The predilection for sloppiness extends from selective amnesia (whenever tidying up is involved, in the case of my household, stray plastic bottles gathering dust beneath the dining table and sofa) to dress sense: “Buying clothes for a twat is extremely difficult and could almost be compared to buying a book for a blind man.  The reason for this is because they simply aren’t bothered and can quite happily carry on through life with their existing clothes, or at least, until those clothes fall apart – although a true, thoroughbred twat will not be put off there.

My boyfriend’s tracksuit bottoms have a split seam on the right thigh, a hole where he dropped his ice-pick into his leg during a mountaineering accident, cigarette burns plus burns from burning rhododendrons, and the material covering his arse has worn so thin that it is almost transparent.  But that doesn’t put him off – he even wears them to work” (pp120-1).

In sum, My Boyfriend is a Twat successfully makes the transition from blog to book, combining the chaotic warmth of the original with a refreshing absence of pretension.