Across the pond

Sigmund Freud has had a bad press in the last few decades. Classic five days a week psycho-analysis has gone into near terminal decline; cognitive behavioural therapy has become the new orthodoxy for those who favour the talking cure. Scientists have poured scorn on his ‘non-scientific’ thinking, demolishing the oepidus complex, and proclaiming the advantages of drugs for curing the mentally ill. The investigative journalists have had a field day exposing his private life, and the way he treated his wife and they have found evidence to suggest that he may not even have cured his patients.

But last week’s BBC Horizon programme, which collected together a lot of the latest scientific evidence about the nature of dreaming, should give the vast body of anti-Freudians pause for thought. Thanks to the invention of the sleep laboratory, scientists have been able to discover about how the brain works when we are asleep and this in turn has helped our understanding of how the brain works when we are awake.

But, as well as that, the sleep scientists have been gathering a vast amount of evidence as to how to the mind works. For several decades now they have been waking people up, immediately after, the bed-side screen indicated they were dreaming, and asking them to relate their dreams.

This evidence demonstrates that Freud got at least one thing right; the although what we remember of our dreams are mostly only fragments. And that the whole dream is far from the random nonsense, which scientists in the early years of computers likened to down time of computers. Dreams are more like novels, poems or pictures. And like these art forms they are telling us something which can be useful in our waking lives.

So there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that remembed dreams can help us to solve problems in our daily lives.

And perhaps more important the sleep studies suggest that even those dreams which we do not remember at all may have helped us to solve problems and increase our understanding of our own behaviour and of the behaviour of others. In other words some of the time when we are asleep, we are thinking, but in a different way that when we are awake.

In the early years of the sleep laboratory studies, the scientists thought that dreaming happened when the sleeper’s brain waves indicated REM sleep. But more recently they have discovered that we dream sometimes when the brain-waves are showing a non-REM pattern.

One intrepid scientist conducted an interesting experiment to try and establish the differences between the REM dreams and the others. He asked the sleepers to fill in a questionairre about how they were feeling immediately after they were woken up.

He found that after REM dreams the sleepers most often reported feeling bad about themselves and pessimistic. But after non-REM dreams, they were feeling good about themselves and optimistic.

That suggests to me that non-REM dreams are much more like the ‘day-dreaming’ we do when we are awake, when we see the world through rosy-coloured spectacles and imagine we can move mountains and win the heart of our beloved.

Whereas night dreams all too often leave us troubled. We feel there is something nasty in the woodshed, even though we are none too sure what it is.

So overall the scientists are now finding evidence to suggest that Sigmund was ahead of his time and that he was not a Fraud. Although his method involved probing into the unconscious mind, he was very cautious about interfering with it. Unlike many today’s therapists and the hypnotists.

His essential message was never more relevant than in our 24/7 world. In you’ve got a problem don’t stay up all night trying to find the answer on the internet.

Just go to bed and sleep on it.

Thanks to BBC Four an upbeat end to a rainy British bloody Sunday. Watched the first part of the 1970s television version of The History Man. Anthony Scher leapt around the screen as the gum-chewing Howard, the lecherous lecturer of Sociology. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel is full of the venom he felt as the Angry Young Men of the 1950s grew up to take power in the permissive society. The skinny Howard has abandoned his books and the lecture format to concentrate on teaching the students to think for themselves and express their ideas spontaneously in cosy seminars.

Howard is enjoying the good life. Driving his minivan around the lily pond on the campus of one of the new universities (Sussex or East Anglia?). Basking in the adulation of the young female students, only too eager to join him in bonking games. Launching his own revolutionary ideas on a sea of cheap wine and pot.

It is all a romp, until the last few minutes of last night’s episode when an over-serious young male student staggers into the seminar and insists on trying to read a paper discussing the ideas of Marx and Weber. Howard humiliates him but he stands his ground and asks Howard to re-read his essays, which Howard has failed. Howard explodes with rage, and the professor, played by Michael Hordern, has been called in to adjudicate.

Can’t wait to see what happens in next week’s episode. But last night BBC Four brought me right up to date with a 2009 interview with the real Anthony Scher, a rotund and genial figure, now a knight of the realm, and holding his audience by wit and wisdom.

Even Malcolm Bradbury would have been impressed.

When I began this blog in August 2006 I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. But then, neither did those who started the first newspapers, and those who start, or change, newspapers now. So I decided to get it up and running now. And let it change with the times. And as a result of my exerience in writing it.

The last time I changed the top headline to ‘Views from the other side of the pond’ was when I realised I was writing most of my blogs about the US Presidential election. Since the inauguration I have written little about it, although I remain as interested in ever in US politics.

The new headline popped into my head this morning when I awoke from a half-remembered dream:

For those who follow their dreams

Today’s America was created by those Europeans who dreamed of a better world and set off in small boats to found it on the other side of the ‘pond’, which at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers was a vast and stormy ocean. Today it has been reduced to the size of a pond, because you can fly over it in five hours and at a cost not much more than it costs to fly to Glasgow.

So the Pilgrim Fathers, and the thousands of poor Europeans, who made the same journey in the nineteenth century, were ‘dreamers’, but they also men and women who were prepared to take the risks and endure the hardships of making their dreams a reality.

So ‘The American Dream’ embraces idealism and the pragmatism which is one of the outstanding national charateristics of the America we know today.

Barack Obama built his campaign on the ‘I have a dream’ speech by Martin Luther King over fifty years ago. That appeal was initially most successful with America’s youth. But as the battle developed more and more of the oldies were converted.

By the time he was inaugurated his approval ratings in America and in the world had soared. Desite the realities of global warming and the growing evidence of a recession worse than any since the 1930s he provided everyone with a reason to be hopeful.

As George Bernard Shaw wrote:

‘The world has need of men who dream of how things never were, and ask, Why Not.’

it’s Sunday. I know because the vicar has just walked past my house walking back to his house. He looks happy. He still has his long black cassack on and he is swinging his white surplice from side to side. Since it’s 9 AM he has probably been doing 8 o’clock Communion. And is now already savouring the bacon and eggs he can now eat with a clear conscience. Like all good vicars he has held his greed in check and fasted before he sipped the consecrated wine.

Actually, I don’t think he is a Christian Socialist, but he has one of the qualities that I admire in Christian Socialists. He is the opposite of a fundamentalist.

Though they talk to God every day they also listen to the Voice of Reason and Reason’s Apostles on earth, the Scientists. Though they are deeply serious men they enjoy a laugh and can spot a paradox when it trips them up.

Equally many scientists manage to combine a commitment to the scientific discipline with a faith in Jesus Christ, Allah, Buddha, or one of the many other Gods who have ruled, and still rule, some human hearts.

Praise the Lord that we have such men, and women, as these.

Probably, more of the non-religious scientists are the biologists. Because they have collected enough evidence, with some help from the geologists, to demonstrate conclusively that the world was not created in seven days and that Adam and Eve lived several million years earlier than the Bible tells us.

(Correction the Bible tells that God did in six days, and rested on the seventh. God did not work 24/7.  But since he was doing such  big job he probably did not stop to sleep on those six days.)

Probably more of the religious scientists studied physics, who have not managed to prove the negative.

The biologists have found the evidence which shows that God did not create Adam and then create Eve from one of Adam’s rib.

The physics lot have not managed to prove that God did not create the earth, our universe and all the other universes. So, maybe, the big bang, was detonated by God (or a bunch of Martian-like figures from yet another undiscovered universe).

Not very probable. But not impossible.

So on this Sunday morning as we move into all the unknowns of the twenty-first century, let us praise the Lord for those who believe in Holy Matrimony between the two great guiding principles of life, Faith and Reason.

Because we need ‘em both. Despite all those rival messages on the London buses, neither religion nor agnosticism, is primarily about ‘enjoying ourselves’.

Regular readers of this blog will have observed that I am in a manic phase, as I was last night when I wrote that too long,  too confused blog about journalistic truth. The words are forming so fast in my head that when I write them down I miss out whole paragraphs.

Since I have missed church I’d better confess here.

I sinned last night, Lord. And I am still showing what a miserable sinner I am this morning. Although my main skill is that of hack journalism I am writing as if I was a Philospher.

Or a Prophet.

Time for me to put aside such childish aspirations.

Time for me to do another thing I can acutally do quite well. Cook some bacon and eggs. And Break my voluntary Fast.

Bye for now.

As everyone knows British journalists, ever since the greatest of the great, Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, founded the Daily Mail in 1894 have been fearless in their pursuit of the truth. They leave no stone unturned, even when it means going to the other side of the globe. They work 24/7 for pay, which is rubbish compared to that of the lawyers, who are called in on those rare occasions when they have to prove that their stories are true.

So naturally, I was deeply shocked tonight when over dinner when I mentioned a story whose headline I had read about a woman who had tried and failed the driving test 771 times, and got an earful.

How could I be so naive to believe such nonsense? I hastened to re-assure her that I had not read this story in the Daily Mail, whose opinions she does not rate, but in one of the heavies, from which she gets her info.

She went quiet for a bit. And then delivered the knock-out blow.

‘That means she must have been trying every month for sixty years. I don’t believe it. Do you.’

At this point I did not want to give in. I had only mentioned it at dinner because one of my daughters is currently having driving lessons, which is why the headline had caught my attention.

So I told her I would go and do some more ‘research’ to check the facts.

Went to my study and keyed in ‘driving test’ into Google. 27.5 million results in less than a second. Scrolled down to ‘Search within results’ and typed in ’771 times’

That reduced my search results to a paltry 935,000 results. And joy of joys, there at number three was the Daily Torygraph, right-wing but respected by journalists for taking care to get their facts right. Definitely one of the heavies.

I had enough ammunition to win the argument. But by then my own scepticism had been engaged. All the reports I had read were clearly second-hand.

It took me much longer to find out who had origginated the story. By which time Janet had gone to bed.

Number one on the Google search list was Sky news, controlled by Rupert Murdoch. But they got it at 3.07 PM from the BBC, Murdoch’s arch enemy, who had carried it at 12.58 PM. The BBC is tthe champion of public service broadcasting, funded by the tax-payer, rather than by rich bosses. Since the license fee is no longer enough to fund a multi-media empire, the BBC cannot afford to employ enough journalists to source all its own stories.

But at least their story told me that their source was the Korea Times. Which proved to be the original source.

Their report told me that, Cha, who has broken all the Korean records, did not take her first test until April 13 2005. The Korean test, like ours here, is in two parts, and you have to pass the written test before you can go on to the practical test. According to staff reporter, Kim Rahn, she has been taking the written test ‘almost daily’ at a total cost of the equivalent of £1,600. He quotes the police and the driving agency.

So, the story is almost certainly true.

But is it news?

It would certainly have interested Northcrliffe, who loved trivia. And it obviously interested me. Although I doubt whether I would have noticed it if it had been headlined:

Sixty-eight year old Korean woman fails the first part of her driving test for the 771st time.

And it certainly was not ‘news in the public interest’ to which both the BBC and the serious heavies aspire.

So, in a more sombre mood than when I began this article, I did a bit more work, despite the lateness of the hour.

I found that both the London Times and the New York Times ignored the story. But both The Guardian and the Washington Post ran it, but as a shortie, by-lined to Associated Press, the US news agency, to which they subscribe. (The Telegraph got it from Agence France Press on a similar basis, but they had got one of their reporters to write the copy, and make it look like their own story.

So I thought I should check whether the Daily Mail had carried it. Not wanting to scroll through over 900,000 Google links, I went to their site.

Although the Mail staff were very busy proving Carol Thatcher was being hounded by the BBC for talking about golliwogs in their hallowed Green Room, they did not just reprint agency copy.

They got their Foreign Service to make a real story. There are lots of quotes from the folk on the street whom journalists are supposed to talk to. But if you read the story carefullly, you may decide, as I did, that no Daily Mail reporter had left the office and that their only credible source, was CNN.

Their story is below so that you can check it out for yourself.

By Mail Foreign Service

A South Korean woman this week signed up to take her driving test once again – after failing to earn a license the first 771 times.

The woman, identified only as Cha, first took the written portion of the exam in April 2005, said Choi Young-cheol of the Driver’s License Agency in the southwestern city of Jeonju.

At the time, she made her living selling goods door-to-door and figured she would need a car to help her get around, Choi told CNN.

The 68-year-old failed the test but retook it the next day and failed again. And again. And again.

‘You have to get at least 60 points to pass the written part,’ said Kim Rahn, who wrote about the unflappable woman in the Korea Times, an English-language daily.

‘She usually gets under 50.’

In the beginning, Cha went to the license office almost every day. Now, she no longer works but still turns up once a week, Choi said.

The office estimates she has spent more than 4 million won £1,600 in exam fees.

Cha’s last failed attempt was on Monday.

She is expected to try for the 772nd time either today or tomorrow.

Officials said they were protecting the identity of the grandmother to save her from public ridicule.

But already bloggers have been at work with comments that range from sorrow to plain contempt.

One wrote: ‘There comes a time in every person’s life when they fail something over 700 times and need to tell themselves “I suck”…and just stop.’

Another commented: ‘I fear for the safety of South Korean drivers if she ever passes the test.’

While many bloggers have questioned whether Granny Cha is illiterate – or even ‘dumb’ – some have cruelly added that she’s ‘female and old’.

A male commented: ‘That’s a pretty stupid system if you can take the test as often as you want. I mean, there is good reason to believe that she will be a danger to other people even if she passes the test after the 1001st try.’

One writer wondered why she hadn’t learned all the questions by now and found the answers, while another suggested a conspiracy to keep her off the road because of her age.

…….. or that’s how it seemed when I got to the prom at Lyme Regis this afternoon. So much so that a yelp of delight leapt from my lips, startling an elderly couple sitting on a bench. The hills were all clear of the snow brought by this week’s Arctic blizzards, which filled many pages in the newspapers. And, for once, it was mostly the good news that was emphasised. Kids and adults frolicking in the snow.

The biggest falls in these parts happened on Thursday night, when two hundred cars got stuck on the A38 just after the M5 junction and another fifty were stranded on the road to Tavistock. But no-one died of hypothermia.

Janet went to see friends in Bath for the day on Wednesday and encountered some of the heaviest falls of week. She left her camera here so I cannot show a picture of the huge Cypress tree in front of our friend’s house, whose branches were touching the ground under the weight of the snow, so today’s view of Lyme Bay will have to suffice.

There were still drifts when she finally escaped from Bath this morning, but most of the roads were clear. Through the Mendips and for much of the journey the fast lane of the M5 was closed and from Taunton on towards Dartmoor, the hard shoulder was thickly covered.

When I woke up this morning there was still a sprinkling of snow on the hills and some serious patches of ice on the local roads. The sun wiped most of it away but even at noon there was an inch of ice in my giant ashtray on the garden table.

Tonight we have been promised seven degrees below zero.

So it isn’t really Spring.

Yesterday us folks down here felt less left out from the winter holiday mood that the rest ouf the country has been enjoying and which took up about five pages of each of the serious newspapers yesterday. Not enough to frolic in. But enough to cover the garden and part of Stonebarrow Hill for an hour or do. And enough to put the decorator’s van into a small skid on our steep drive.

Today the ground looks dry as a bone. So Janet has  gone off to Bath to have a bath. Leaving me free to idle, write a blog and take the waters in my own bathroom.

Decisions, decisions.

Shall I have a shower? Or shall I lie back and enjoy the luxury of a lie in in my own old-fashioned bath, perhaps adding a dash of rock salt to the tap water?

Deeply disappointed when I opened the curtains this morning. To sign of the expected blizzard down here in Dorset. There were a few show flakes drifting past and the drive has a sprinkling of snow but the fields on Stonebarrow Hill are still coloured green, the sand on the beach is still light brown and the sea is calm down here. Small waves are lapping the beach not hurling pebbles all over the car park.

Since I had a morning away the broadcasting media and the computer it was not til lunchtime that I found out what was happening in the rest of the country. Kathy rang from Colchester could not get to her job I Ipswich because trains and the buses were not running. Holly rang from Hampsead Heath to say to say, ‘The schools are closed and all of London is here’, even more crowded than the summer bank holiday. The grandchildren were having the time of their on their snow boards. The snow on the heath, she said, was the deepest she has even seen, and she has spent most of her forty years within walking distance of Hampstead Heath.

When I finally got to the computer I discovered that Holly was not over-egging the story. Weather experts were saying it was the heaviest snow fall since 1947, when I remember that I had a month off school, though that had much to do with the fact that the school had run out of coal to fuel the boilers.

The British media has, of course, risen to the occasion with lots of pics and videos and personal accounts of successful and unsuccessful attempts to get to work. And just to prove that they know how to get to the internet generation both The Times and The Guardian have started snow blogs!

When I opened the curtains on Wednesday morning I was plunged into depression. Not only could I not see the sea and Chesil Beach and Portland Bill, as in my sunset picture on top of this blog, I could not see the cars on the A35 and I could not see anything beyond my front hedge.

It took me right back to the quite horrible depressions of my youth, when fogs as dense as this were frequent in Wolverhampton and around, which was rightly called the Black Country. Which is one reason why I wanted to get away from Wolverhampton.

So I came to London to start my first job. And found the fogs quite as bad. And equally depressing. By the time my daughters were born, those nasty depressing fogs had been banished from London. As far as they were concerned London fogs were history, the history of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes.

But they lasted at least until 1955. I know because I was there.

And I also know, that they affected me more than many of my friends. Because, as I now know, I am a manic depressive.

But a few days ago I read a newspaper report of a properly researched academic study, which suggested that seasonably affective depression, which has been much talked about in my adult years, was a myth. This study proved by statistics, that serious depression happened just as often in the spring and summer.

They may be able to use this blog to support their findings.

But that is not my intention.

My depression vanished when I went downstairs to my study, which the decorator has just finished. Gone forever is the grey carpet and the grey walls. Now I have a restful green carpet and magnolia walls. The view from the windows was still deeply depressing fog. There is no cheer from the pictures which are still stacked in the grand-childrens room. And the book shelves are bare, because I have not yet had time to get them out of the boxes.

But my mood switched to exhuberant happiness, or, as the shrinks might say, dangerous manic feelings.

This blog reflects my feelings as they were at 9.30 AM on Wednesday morning. And I am well aware that it is now Thursday.

But I have been busy on other concerns during this day, and during the last week or two.

So much so that I have not even achieved the objective of this blog, which was to make a daily comment, however short.

I think I probably hoped to show by this blog that manic depressives were not mad, although the way they think and feel gets them into all sorts of trouble. But that for most of the time manic depressives are not dangerous psychopaths.

They are only dangerous to others when they get swept away by the manic side, and to themselves, when they are incapacitated by depression.

But for most of the time their reasoning power is quite as good as that of the majority who are not manic depressives.

And this manic depressive knows that he is more incapacitated by depression in the English winter. But that depression can be lifted by many of the things that human beings have invented.

Like electric light. Like the warmth of central heating. Like green carpets and magnolia walls and inspring pictures.

Outside it may be grey and cold.

But inside does not have to be grey and cold.

The painter is now doing the kitchen/dining area in the warmest of reds. For most of the year, here in Dorset we won’t notice it, because the infinitely more warming sun, is shining in through the windows.

But on grey, foggy days it is a tonic.

There is mass of grey cloud obscuring Portland Bill, relieved by a few streaks of pink, a pint of hopefulness amongst gallons of grey. But as I stand at the kitchen window a yellow disc emerges above Chesil Beach. It is just gone 8 AM. In Washington many of the young folk are probably still dancing away at Inaugural Balls.

By the time I reach the study the disc of light is literally blinding me, but if I screw up my eyes, I can see that it is making a path of light to Charmouth Beach, down the hill from my house. An invitation to me to walk along it to the source of light and heat.

The sea is placid, with not a hint of the storms that Obama described yesterday. The waves are gently lapping the beach. Since I have to get the timer right at last the house is already warmed by the central heating, but when I open the door to the decorator, I am met by a blast of chill air.

Last night I wrote a jokey blog making fun of the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips who was mocking the 80 per cent of the world who are hailing Obamania as if it were the Second Coming.

I certainly admit to a great surge of hopefulness when I watched, heard and re-read yesterday’s speech. This young black who has been elevated by the people of America clearly could have made it as a preacher, if he had chosen that career path. And he seems to believe that God exists, whereas, like the people buying advertising on London’s red buses, my own view is that he probably does not.

But unlike JC, Obama is not urging us to leave our fishing boats and families and follow him. And unlike the American christian right, he is not telling us that if only we have faith, the good lord will make us very rich indeed. He is telling us that it is up to us to do the work to improve our own lives. He is asking us to care for the poor and homeless, and to join with him in reducing the gulf between the rich and the poor.

He is not saying, that if we do what he says, we will have a better life in Heaven. He is not trying to cheer up the poor by telling them that have a better chance to get tickets to enter the Heavenly Gates.

He is not warning the rich they will find it is as difficult to get through that gateway as a camel through the eye of a needle. He is warning the rich and powerful that:

‘without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control – that a nation cannot prosper long when it favours only the prosperous’.

That is not the Christian message. That is the American dream. That inventiveness and hard work can produce, even for the poorest and humblest, a better life in this world.

Of course, it’s only words. But Obama comes over to me as a man who means what he says and says what he means. His good intensions may he corrupted by the enormous executive power which rests in the US presidency.

But today I am welling with cautious optimism.

I believe this man from a poor black family will probably make the world a little bit better for Americans and the rest of us, given time and a dash of luck.

God (if he exists) bless America.