Across the pond

It is now 4 PM. Seven hours since I decided on the no smoking experiment, seventeen hours since I had my last cigarette before going to bed last night. My dominant feeling for the last two or three hours has been almost constant irritability. Happily I am alone this weekend; if there were anyone in the house I would be biting their heads off constantly.

Lunch was mixed. I chose the beef consomme, which was delicious. But the tunafish tasted mildly disgusting and I did not finish the whole tin. Maybe smokers are still longing for mummy’s milk.

Settling down to write this I am longing for a fag. Am seriously afraid that I won’t be able to last even seven days with out a cigarette. Remind myself it is in the interests of science. To see whether I can do it and see how it affects my health and behaviour.

My fear is that my lungs are so full of smoke that even if I never smoke again, my breathlessness will remain as bad and I shall go on coughing.

My other fear is that I shall go out of control and make a mess of something. Because unlike alcohol, pot and heroin, nicotine does not help you to abandon yourself to blissful feelings or give you the feeling that you are a great chap, who has the right to punch anyone who does not share your opinion.

By contrast nicotine enables you to keep control, not to be overwhelmed by external threats and by your own feelings of anger, grief, etc. And nicotine rewards you with minute injections of euphoria, which helps you to concentrate on difficult tasks.

Picture is  of the shrine of my favourite smoking objects. Let’s there is no more ash in the ashtrays.

The telephone was ringing as I came downstairs this morning . I could scarcely speak for coughing. It is now so bad  just after I wake up that I am exhausted before I have had breakfast. I realised that I have to stop. My lungs have no room for any more smoke. Since I started smoking aged 17 I have inhaled 420,000 cigarettes.  That’s 7,000 a  year which has cost me £126,000 at today’s prices. If I go on the coughing will kill me.

So that’s settled then. And in 2010 I can give myself a real treat with that two grand which will not go up in smoke.

Except for one small problem. I came to the same conclusion a few weeks ago. I began to gradually reduce my consumption. Successfully for a time. But by the time I was writing the blog on the new film Bright Star about Keats and Fanny Brawne I was compensating by smoking more than usual. The weed helped to dull the pain of re-reading about his doomed love affair and painful death at 25.

I have not smoked today and when I looked at my watch just now I was astonished. It is now 1 PM. I stop after every couple of sentences, to reach for a cigarette, although just three hours ago I made the decision to stop smoking immediately. Not smoking slows me down, leaves me with a permanent sense that something is wrong.

This time my intention is to stop for one week and then review the situation. If the cough has abated somewhat I shall then experiment with another week of not smoking.

But, – and here’s a tip for the government – having an extra two grand to spend is no incentive. Right from when I started as a student I was spending more on cigarettes than I could afford. Putting the tax up does not change the behaviour of those who are addicted to smoking. For the poor – and a greater percentage of the surviving smokers are poor – that my mean cutting down on food, drink and shelter. Because for the true addict promises more pleasure than indulging the addiction.

These days nearly all smokers are addicts, who smoke despite the ‘smoking kills’ message on the box. The ‘social smokers’ no longer exist, because it is no longer socially acceptable to smoke.

(The picture is tthere to relieve the tedium of the smoking story. I took it on Wendnesday night experimenting with night photography in Lyme Regis. But the red telephone kxosk is also one of the icons of the age when nearly everybody smoked. Nobody uses it any more. But it is cheering street architecture. It should be preserved.)

To the Renoir cinema in Bloomsbury for the last performance. All quiet and peacefull until we climbed the steps to the square, when we were given, unasked, a peformance of Hark the Herald Angels Sing. On the 21st of November. Although Obama has been in the White House for nearly a year, the coalition between American consumer capitalism and the brand of Christianity embraced by George W Bush and his friends is still a power in the universe. Their Jesus Christ rejoices in the merry tinkle of the shop tills filling the pockets of the capitalists. Surely can’t be the same man as he who expelled the money changers from the Temple courtyard?

The film was Bright Star, which tells a story heard by British school children almost as often as the Bible stories, about the doomed love affair between  Fanny Brawne and John Keats, the poet who produced a battery of memorable poems before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25. But the Australian director, Jane Campion, has  brought a fresh perspective to this oft told tale. The audience, deeply moved, remained rooted in their seats as the titles scrolled across the screen, accompanied by the muffled sound of a Keats poem it was impossible to identify. In the final scenes the children can seen through the window playing in the snow on Hampstead Heath, while indoors Keats is coughing up blood, alongside Fanny, played by Abbie Cornish. Moments later the coffin is seen, on a sombre white background, but in Rome, not in Hampstead. And we are told that for years afterwards, Fanny continued to walk  the wooded paths of Hampstead Heath, no doubt, hearing yet again  the voice of the nightingale, which inspired one of Keats’ finest poems.

As always with factions such as this film, I was curious about what was true and what was fake about this film. Several scenes were shot on what was most definitely that part of Hampstead Hearth near Keats’ House. This part of the heath looks much the same as it did 1821. A does Keats’ House, which is in a street which is now called Keats’ Grove. But the house in the film was most definitely not Keats’ house. According to Wikipedia, Campion used Hyde House in Bedfordshire. Presumably because the main house is now a thriving museum, too busy to have a film crew crawling all over it.

The characterisation of the main characters was, however, authentic. Not much is known about Fanny, but Campion’s  portrayal of her as a strong-minded independent woman fits with what we do know.  She is very modern in giving voice to the anger she felt that Keats, by dying was leaving her. And the ear-splitting expression of the despair she felt when she was told he was dead, was even more harrowing.

But I was prepared to believe that Fanny may well have behaved like that, way back in 1821.

Contrast Keats, about which much is known. In real life, as in the film,and  despite his exceptional talents, he was full of self-doubt and considered himself a failure. Unsurprisingly, because some of the critics of the time, mocked him for his Cockney origins, ‘the most incongrous ideas in the most uncouth language’. One critic even suggested he was insane.

In fact, he was the son of an ostler born in Moorgate within the sound of Bow Bells. His father  died when he was eight and his mother when he was  fourteen. He was  brought up by his grandparents in humble circumstances. But nevertheless he somehow got a  decent education, which gave  him a good understanding of Greek literature for instance. And which enabled him to hold his own with the likes of Samuel Taylor  Coleridge, who also lived in Hampstead.

Currently the leading academic authority on Keats is Andrew Motion, whose vast biography of the poet provided the spark which caused Campion to make the film. He also acted as consultant during the making of the film. You can read his 67 page chapter on the relationship of Keats and Fanny on the web. That chapter quotes extensively from the poetry and their letters but Motion loses me  with his Freudian interpretations. He identifies sexual frustration as a key element in their love affair and then goes on to dissect the poem, Bright Star, inspired by Fanny. So much so that he takes the line from that poem and provides this interpretaion:

This is why the last phrase of the poem, “or else swoon to death,” seems to carry more weight than all the accumulated reassurances of the preceding lines. Even if “death” punningly connotes sexual satisfaction rather than actual mortality, it still suggests that the “ever” Keats wants is an impossibility.This is why the last phrase of the poem, “or else swoon to death,” seems to carry more weight than all the accumulated reassurances of the preceding lines. Even if “death” punningly connotes sexual satisfaction rather than actual mortality, it still suggests that the “ever” Keats wants is an impossibility.

This line is also an echo of Keats’ awareness of the reality of early death, expressed so forcefully in Ode to a Nightingale, written after the death of his brother:

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight without pain.

Keats nursed his brother through the final weeks of his life, and finds comfort from the fact that  he is now released from pain and suffering. In so doing Keats wrote his own death sentence. True  he diid not actually know what we know about turberculosis, but he did know about the probablity of early deaths which has also struck down his mother and father. So the last lines of the poem contrasts the hope for an impossible everlasting love with the fear of impending death.

And the poem reflects Keats’ manic depressive temparament. Jane Campion catches the manic side beautifully in one scene when Keats is clowing to amuse the children of the extended Brawne family, who were frequently present at his meetings with Fanny. It is a stage performance in the kitchen. Spike Milligan could not have done it better. And the children loved it.

The top picture, from The Observer, shows Keats (Ben Whishaw) tapping on the wall to talk to Fanny, who indeed lived in the house next door, though whether they communicated this way is open to doubt The bottom picture is from the Keats’ House collection.

The anemometer went beserk this morning and the wind chimes sounded like a full orchestra.

  Down on the prom the car was rocking and I had to struggle to stand upright to take this photo.

Wind machine

Trying to learn macro photography. 

This picture of items found on the beach after last year’s land slip just east of Lyme Regis on the Jurassic Coast. It brought down a 1950′s Council dump as well as a fresh collection of fossils.

The ammonite fragment is just like the first one I found here on my first visit fifty years ago. The sparking plug is a fossil in the making which might puzzle future generations when all cars are electric.

It could not be a more depressing today in Lyme Bay. It is nearly dark at 2 PM. The sand on Chesil Beach now appears dark grey. The wind is sending down the rain at 45 degrees in the faces of the gas men who were digging up the road in front of my house. It is enough to dash the spirits of the sunniest temparament, let alone a manic depressive always ready to plunge into seasonably affecttive depression.

The news is even more depressing than the weather. Gordon Brown has just addressed the nation to re-assure us in the wake of the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan in the last few years.  All he had to tell us was that was still determined to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq and that this was protecting us from the threat of international terrorism.

President Obama is facing even more depressing news. Yesterday’s shooting by the gunman who went on the rampage at the army base in Texas ended the lives of thirteen US soldiers, and  Obama is dealing with a killer who is a major in his own army,  a psychartrist charged with healing the traumas of the troops who have been fighting these wars.

Yet my own internal bi-polar reglator is propelling me out of yesterday’s black mood. Presestly I am neither depressed nor euphoric. And wondering what  drove Nidal Hasan, an expert in mental health, to behave as he did.

According to the latest detailed news story in the Washington Post, Hasan is the 39-year-old son of Palestian immigrants from the West Bank.  He was born in Arlington, Virginnia, and has spent his working life at the nearby highly regarded Walter Reed Medical Center and more recently at the Fort Hood Texas army base. They have found no evidence of terrorist connections but they have found that he was against the Iraq war, that he felt he was being taunted by some colleagues because he is a devout Muslim, and he wanted to get out of the army. He is single, but according to his wife had been looking for a wife, unsuccessfully, who shared his devout Muslim faith.

So on this evidence it looks as if Hasan has less in common with terrerists than he has with other Americans who have gone on a killing spree,  loners who have been pushed over the edge by intolerable personal stresses.  But of course as more details emerge this picture may change.

While writing this story I have become not increasingly numb.

It is deeply shocking when a healer, be he a psychiartrist or a GP, becomes a mass murderer. One can only hope that something will be learned from the subsequent investigations.

It’s been raining in Lyme Bay and and now it’s dark, although only 6 PM. As the day progressed I sank deeper and deeper into depression. By the afternoon I could not even write a sentance in my head which I wanted to publish. I was drowning. No point in waving.  No signal I could give would make the slightest difference. Why should anyone anywhere bother to read what I say?

Because, I know, I am an incompetant. Why should anyone take notice of anything I have so say about politics, journalism or education? There are many others who know much more about what is happening in these areas.

But what I DO know more about than the leaders in politics, journalism and education is computers, the digital worrld aed the internet.

But I loused up. I messed up the visit of my grandchildren last week, by relying on my mobile phone. Which told me at the critical moment, ‘ Emergency Calls only. So, I, and they, spent the whole day, not making contact.

What was wrong, as I subsequently discovered from the helpline, was that there was a speck of dust on my SYM card. It had happened to me before, and I cursed myself because I had forgotten.

Me and millions of others. As we all try to grapple with the digital age.

So tonight I don’t feel suicidal. How could I. Since as my picture shows, I had every reason to feel good on the day I messed up. The sun was shining over Lyme Bay, and the Golden Cap was really golden.

But what has been depressing me over the last week or two is the state of British politics, 2009.

Very, very, depressing. Our leaders are floundering as hopelessly as me in this new global age. Capitalism as we know it has collapsed. And Britain’s New Labour has found itself owning major banks. Not because they want  to nationalise them, but because they could see no alternative.

They don’t know what to do. Our leaders, Gordon Brown and his team. Gordon is soldiering on and will fight the election next year. But he does not have any idea about what he will do, if, contrary to all the polls, he wins the election. Neither do Labour’s leaders in waiting. David Milibrand is not prepared to pitch to be the new Europe’s first Foreign Secretary. A new role, and one which offers much influence but little power.

Alan Johnson, the minister who is best placed to get traditional Labour voters to the polls, since  he is actually is white working class, has messed up even more spectacularly.

He has fired his leading scientific adviser on drugs, for telling him, what has been crystal clear for years now – Alcohol, which is legal and taken daily in large doses by Labour voters, Conservative voters and even the Lib Dems, who do not spend all their time drinking green tea, damages far more lives than canabis. Not only from those who drink, but because the drinkers beat up their wives. And because the number of teenagers who are sent psychotic by pot is tiny, comapred with the number of teenagers, who get pissed on booze and charge around the streets late at night.

Johnson could have shown himself a leader. By speaking out to the white working class.

Instead, he pandered to their prejudices.

Get tough with sciance professors. Pander to the public fear, whipped up by sections of the media, about illegal drugs and the remote danger of being mugged by pot smokers.

With not much challenge for the opposition. Because David Cameron is far too pre-occupied with getting himself out of the hole he has dug for himself over another referendum on Europe.

But that should be the subject of another blog.

Notsomuch the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, today’s autumn in Charmouth battered and drenched all those who dared to get out of their cars. The wind whipped up the sea and cleared the prom of all  but one hardy fossil hunter. The pictures are too late for The Guardian autumn photo competition, but you can see them here.

From second top.

Lyme Regis through the rain. 

No-one was on the prom gazing at the not so Golden Cap right ahead.

Angry Sea.

When I first met Professor John Ramsden, who died last Friday,  aged 61, I was struck by his military bearing and his rather brusque manner. He led the way from his office at Queen Mary, University of London, to a restaurant on the other side of the Mile End Road, walking at his usual brisk pace, which forced me into a trot to keep up. Before I had a chance to catch my breath, let alone think about what to eat, we were down to business. He had prepared himself and he put his cards down on the table.

The business was a suggestion I had made to Professor Peter Hennessy three weeks earlier, for a joint degree, Journalism and Contemporary History, with City University doing the journalism teaching and QM’s history department teaching the contemporary history. Hennessy had liked the idea but for it to be a starter it required the support of his colleagues and, most particularly, of his then Head of Department, Ramsden.

Since Ramsden was in New Zealand, I had ample time to prepare myself for the fateful lunch. What I learnt did not cheer me up.

Unlike Hennessy,  who like me had been a journalist for several years before he became a university teacher, Ramsden was a career academic, many of whom even now think journalism is not a serious subject. And, unlike Hennessy, who has pictures of Harold Wilson in his office, Ramsden had made his reputation as the historian of the Conservative Party. His sixth book on the Conservative Party, An Appetite for Power, was published in 1998, the year of my first meeting with him, to considerable acclaim. He had also been very active in Conservative politics as a councillor and constituency chairman and councillor.

So I went into that lunch not expecting a meeting of minds, and halfway through the lunch I was already thinking I would have been better off approaching King’s College, in the Strand, which many of my own colleagues favoured, not least because it was much closer geographically than QM. Ramsden was not against a joint degree but he favoured the option of doing a joint Masters degree rather an undergraduate degree. Masters’ degrees were favoured by university bosses because they made money and by most university staff because they required less teaching, and therefore ate less of the time staff had to do their own research and publishing.

From the student’s point of view, however, there was a major snag. There was no time at all to give student’s a proper grounding in contemporary history as well as practical journalism in a one year course. And, Ramsden made his decisions primarily on what was in the best interests of the students. At the end of the lunch he announced that he was willing to give it a try, despite the considerable problems of winning the support of his own colleagues and bosses and of the University of London Senate.

He was a joy to work with, combining a boyish enthusiasm with the skills of a general planning a campaign. He continued to support the joint BA in Journalism and Contemporary History long after he had stepped down as head of department and started to work on his massive book, Man of the Century, Winston Churchill, and his legand since 1945.

The JCH is only one thing he did in his life. For a much fuller appreciation go Hennessy’s obituary in The Guardian.

I will conclude with a few more observations about the man as I knew him. He enjoyed his moments of glory, as when he was invited by Churchill societies in the US to talk to them about their hero. But he was much better at giving his colleagues credit for what was achieved. When I was looking for a photo to go with this blog, I went to the celebatory photos of the graduation ceremony of 2004 of the five students who had been awarded first class degrees (out of a cohort of 24) with their main teachers.

Ramsden is not on them.

The photo here was taken in the garden of my house, where he came more than once when we had plots to hatch during the vacation. He was scrupulous in insisting that we took it in turns to meet on our own territory. Totally ignoring the fact that it was for him a tedious one hour journey by tube and bus, whereas for me it was a mostly enjoyable twenty minute ride on my scooter.

A small thing. But an important one.