Across the pond

>mebeli sofiahe Andrew Marr Sunday morning television show. Harry Evans, who according to one award is the greatest British journalist of my lifetime was on the programme to review the Sunday papers with Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist who has been urging the Labour Party to save itself by sticking to its socialist principles, whereas Harry has been reported as having misgivings about President Obama, because of his dangerously left-wing views.

Nothing either of them had to say about the morning papers is worth reporting here. But I was transfixed by the non-verbals.

At the start Harry’s face seemed to be permanently fixed in a slant to the right, so much so that I feared he had a stroke. Not so, I now know, because I am just back from a do at the Wapping Project in his honour. Harry assured me that his health is fine and that he is still doing his daily exercises which always put me to shame. But he did ramble on in the scheduled debate with Simon Jenkins. But he is three years older than me, and as readers may have noticed, I ramble on from time to time.

As the Marr show went on Harry was putting his arm around Polly with all the tactile abandon that is the norm in New York where he been living for nearly thirty years. This was amusing to watch, because Harry is about the same height as Napoleon, but much thinner,and Polly is taller and pleasantly rotund. While this was happening they were talking about the need to treat women as the equals of men, which Harry has always been in favour of, though nearly all his trusted aides were men.

But Polly who is somewhat younger has lived in an age when men putting their arms around women is an invasion and a patronising putdown.

Polly disguised her discomfort, Without difficulty, becaue she is the grand-daughter of Arnold Toynbee and the daughter of a distingished Obsever journalist. She has been used to men pawing her, since she was below the age of consent.

After writing this I have to correct my comment above. In class terms, Harry the son of the engine driver, was not imitating the Americans, but behaving much like many working class families, who were not as inhibited as the middle classes in demonstrating physical affection.

So the non-verbals indicate the power and continuing effects of the British class system. In his book, My Paper Chase, Harry has a perceptive paragraph about Sir Denis Hamilton, who recruited him to the Sunday Times, when he was editing the Northern Echo. In my words, Denis had learnt to talk the talk. He came over as upper middle class, but actually, as Harry discovered when he got to know him, he was the son of an engineer from the north-east, with a class background much closer to that of Harry than to Polly Toynbee.

There is another major difference between Harry and Polly. Harry has acted, and still does, according to the jounalistic myth, of keeping the journalist’s own political opinions out of the story. Polly, however, belongs to another generation who saw the sense of the journalist disclosing his or her convictions.

So she became, very publicly, a committed journalist, most notably when she became a founder member of the Social Democratic Party.

This is not yet my review of My Paper Chase, which I am currently half-way through, because I have also been reading the auto-biography of Shirley Williams, one of the gang of four who founded the SDP, and also Shirley’s mother’s Testament of Youth.

These books have re-inforced my own life experience of the close relationship between policians and the journalists who report them. Williams’ first job was in journalism. I had always thought her first job was on the Financial Times, mainly because my first job was on another paper in the same group.

In fact, as I discovered when I read her biog, she joined the Daily Mirror for two years, hired not by the editor, but by the boss, Cecil King. She was appalled by the things she was required to do, particularly on bereavment stories. The Financial Times was her second job.

This is directly relevant to what happened tonight in the debate at Wapping. Harry was asked which was best, US journalism or British journalism. Harry replied, not once but twice, that American journalism was more credible.

This is the kind of question that cannot be answered in a late night debate fuelled with champagne.

It requires a lecture.

Harry’s answer is spot on if you compare the New York Times and the Washington Post to Britain’s national newspapers. The distortions of the Sun, the Express, the Mail and Mirror, dwarf in terms of circulations those of  The Times, the Telegraph, the Guardain and the Independent.

His answer might have been quite different if he had been asked to rate the New York Times against the London Times and the Washington Post against the The Guardian.

There is a delightful irony in the sub-title of Harold Evans’ autobiography, My Paper Chase; True Stories of Vanished Times. The sub-title is meant to suggest that the glorious days of British investigative journalism in which Evans played such an important part, are over. Most of the reviewers seem to agree with thesis. Unsurprisingly, because several of them used to work for Harry at the Sunday Times in the 1960s, and they, like me, still relish those days, when Harry dashed around the newsroom in Gray’s Inn Road, cocking a snoop at the establishment and challenging big companies like Distillers and McDonnell Douglas and challenging the government of the day by publishing the riveting Crossman diaries, which revealed just exactly what ministers said to each other in the cabinet room.

They were great days and they have most definitely not vanished, despite the near-bankrupt state of the newspaper industry. This week Britain’s biggest defence company, BAE Systems, is being brought to account in the courts for paying bribes, thanks in part to the persistent investigative journalism over several years by The Guardian investigative reporters, notably David Leigh. The Daily Telegraph is publishing in book form, the results of its investigation into MP’s expenses. That investigation has had an even bigger impact on our political life than anything the Sunday Times did.

This is not to belittle the achievments of Evans and the other Sunday Times journalists who started the Insight team, which Evans inherited – Sir Denis Hamilton and Clive Irving. The investigative journalist working today (and there are several working for the BBC and elsewhere in radio and television) were inspired by their example. But what needs to be hammered home to all journalists is that Harry’s True Stories, though all true and carefully checked in no way reflect the whole truth of those times.

 Neither does the biography of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, which has hit the bookshops at the same time as Evans book. William Shawcross, like Harry Evans, writes like a novelist, feeding the reader with direct quotes from the hithertoo unpublished letters of the Queen, and making the reader live through again the events of the last century, including the two world wars, when the Royal Family, in a very real sense shared the experiences of their subjects, most particularly losing like them friends and relatives on war service. (And also, managing with five inches of water in their bath to save fuel!)

But it is the story of their times, not our times. Not because what Shawcross wrote was censored by the Queen, who read the manuscript, but because Shawcross has become a fervant monachist, and his story is about how the monarchy recovered from the blows to their prestige as the love lives of King Edward VIII, Princess Margaret and Prince Charles distracted their, and the public’s attention, from their constitutional role.

Those days now seem like ancient history. The People’s Princess has been superceded by Camilla Parker Bowles. Prince Charles no longer talks to flowers and only the architects are upset by his continuing efforts to preserve the appearance of a bygone age.

The challenge to the establishment in the 1960s, of which the Harry Evans Sunday Times was a part, is now a distant memory. There are a few Republicans left at The Guardian, but even they don’t expect the revolution to come in their lifetime.

As it happens William Shawcross cut his journalistic teeth as part of the Evans team at the Sunday Times. He went on to do some brilliant investigative journalism which challenged Anglo American policies and actions, most notably in Cambodia. In those days he was a Young Turk, more in tune with the New Statesman than the Daily Telegraph. One of his colleagues was Lord Snowdon, but he does not betray any personal confidences in his latest book. Nor does he give the reader any clue about the elements in his own personal biography which led to his lurch to the right.

What he does do is let the Queen Mother, and some of the other Royals, speak for themselves. He lends them a sympathetic ear, just as he did to Rupert Murdoch, in his 1992 biography of that well known critic of the monarchy. And the Queen Mother’s voices comes over clear as a bell as the voice of the Conservative Party at prayer, who asserted women’s rights by going big game hunting with the men and insisting on shooting the antelopes and crocodiles herself.

So my belief is that, despite Shawcross’s intentions, this official biography might fan the embers of Republicanism. Do we really need them and all their castles, houses and servants? The Windsors are brilliant at surviving themselves but do they really help the country survive in the global economy?

Had to stop on Page 406 of The Smoke Jumper, the third Nicholas Evans novel which I bought for £2 one on the front at Beer on a rainy day earlier this week. The sadness was drowning me. I had to leave it for a while and come up for air.  I began to drown in Chapter 22, when one of the three main characters, Connor, a war photographer, is at at the launch party for an exhibition of his own photographs in New York. He is just back from covering the atrocities in Rwanda, and he is not enjoying the superficial chatter that fills the spaces in all such parties. Then a young woman reporter from Vanity Fair, who actually knows the work of his heroes, Robert Capa, Don McCullin, Eve Arnold and Henry Cartier-Bresson.

Eloise walks him round the gallery from beginning to end, then asks what he was looking for. He replies, ‘Hope’. She does not agree, and when he presses her, she says: ‘I think you’re looking for a mirror of your own sadness.’

Not at all the kind of emotional experience that I expected when I bought the book. The Smoke Jumper promised a boy’s own adventure story, of young men being parachuted into the Montana forests, risking their lives to chop down trees to halt the advancing fire.  However, Connor and his best friend, Ed, a musician, are sensitive souls, not macho types, and they fall in love with the same woman, like Jules et Jim.

They started smoke jumping as a summer vacation job but by Page 406, they are both deeply involved in their own day jobs. And Ed the musician is married to Julia and they have a seven-year-old daughter,  Amy.  Won’t say more because I don’t want to give away too much of the plot.

What I can say is that the emotional impact on me was heightened by other things I have been doing this week. Thinking about the reporting of the war reporting of the atrocities in Afghanistan, which has hit the headlines this week because of the kidnapping and rescue of the New York Times reporter,  Stephen Farrell.

This incident has provoked a lot of anger, for three reasons.  Farrell was rescued un-injured, but his Afghan translator,  Sultan Munadi, was killed. The Afghans were upset because some felt this was because of double standards on the part of the British troops. Brits were angry because a British soldier, Corporal John Harrison was killed in the operation. And because the New York Times was employing foreigners (Farrell is British) to report the war, rather than Americans.

This war of words, as Martin Bell points out in a column for The Guardian, threatens the ‘old fashioned boots-on-the-ground reporting’ which is necessary if the world is to know the effects of the Allied air strikes. Bell asserts:

‘The truth is that such journalism is no longer possible in war zones. Hence the rise of rooftop journalism, in which sharply dressed reporters address the camera inside fortified compounds.’

I hope he’s wrong. After all, Farrell was doing just what Bell admires. And, not just in our age, but going back to the Crimean War, only a minority of war reporters and photographers took the huge risks of leaving their minders and heading for the battle-ground.

I was reminded of this last week when writing a book chapter about James Cameron, who did such reporting for Picture Post, the Daily Express and the News Chronicle.  Cameron was the opposite of the gung ho reporter. Like the fictional Connor he did what he had to do. Had to do because of his own demons and because he was blessed, or cursed, with a sensitivity to feeling. And perhaps because he was driven to do what he did as a way of dealing with the scarcely bearable tragedies in his personal life, including the death of his first wife in childbirth and the consequences of his father’s alcoholism.

Incidentally, while I was reading  The Smoke Jumper I thought Evas was American, because the dialogue and the characters of  the main characters are so authentic.  In fact he was born in Worcestershire, a cycle ride from my own boyhood home.  But according to his web page he has spent a lot of time in the US. And he is a former journalist. Not, however, in war zones. He spent three years on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and then moved into television making films for Weekend World about US and Middle East politics.

The Smoke Jumper by Nicholas Evans. Random House, New York, 2001

Tranquillity restored. The sun is shining through the trees on Parliament Hill.  A jogger pounds down the middle of the road, his face glistening with sweat in his efforts to keep fit and to give himself an adrenalin high. A young woman is meandering up the hill, going at the pace of her child, not yet two years old. She uses the pauses to let the sun warm her and to gaze around at this osasis of peace in the middle of London.

The street is still disfigured by the barriers erected by the EDF men, who have had the pavement up these last few weeks while they lay new electricity cables. But they have not brought their infernal machines, which have been shattering my ear drums during working hours.

It is warm enough to breakfast of the terrace without a dressing gown, whereas yesterday I was shivering. My own digagnostics have cured the computer of its total breakdown, and today it is co-operating with my efforts to publish the Daily Novel.

The landline is still not dead. But I am no longer grinding my teeth with frustration and rage against Mr Richard Branson, to whom I am paying a lot of money.  And I am already calculating that I can probably save money by using the mobile and Skype while in London.

I am still in fury at the loss of my black tub ashtray. It is probably lying in a gutter somewhere where the young criminals tossed it. But maybe it will be picked up and given a second home by another tidy smoker.  And I can always buy a replica, whereas my tearaway teenagers will go on steadily smashing car windows until they are caught and put in a remand home.

This could have been headlined ‘Crime wave in Hampstead’, but since I am not working for the Daily Mail, it will report the facts in context. And it will be written from the journalist’s perspective. And journalists, however well trained and well intentioned, are subject in their daily lives to the pressure of the events in their own lives. Which are not much different in this respect from the lives of the readers.

Troubles rarely come singly. But when I drove up to London on Wednesday I had forgotten that. I thought I had one problem. My daughter had phoned to say that her problem had stopped working. The lights on the modem were flashing merrily, but when she pressed the button nothing happened. So I promised to drive to Colchester on Thursday and sort it out.

Blissful optimist that I am.

But when I arrived I found that my London computer was behavinig in a somewhat similar way. When I pressed the button it summoned Windows XP in the usual manner but then immediately switched itself off. I unplugged everything and tried again and again.

By which time there were howls of anger from the kitchen from my wife who insisted that the phone, also supplied by Virgin Media, was not working. But at least I had an explanation, since my daughter was also on Virgin. Finally, Richard Branson had overstretched himself too much, and his empire was failing to meet the demands generated by his brilliant self publicity. (And you have to hand it to him, not many rogues would have the nerve to call their company, ‘Virgin’.

I had the bit between my teeth, but, as you all know, you have to be patient to deal with problems like this. You have to listen to the propaganda and the option list, and the ‘virginal’ messages, which informs you, that since you are calling from a mobile this call will cost you. (They never say how much!).

By the time I went to bed I had at least got an admission from Virgin that the landline had a fault and they would send someone to fix it – a weed of Friday. And I did not answer the door between 8 and 11 I would be subject to a penalty charge. I slept soundly. Notsomuch the sleep of the just but sheer exhaustion.

Over breakfast my wife reminded me that my daughter had switched to Sky when she moved to Colchester, so that her problems, whatever they were, were happening under the rule of Rupert Murdoch, not Richard Branson. So I used my own diagnostic tools to try and discover why my computer was not listening to me.

I was making some progress, when at lunchtime, a neigbour popped over to tell me that the front passenger window of our Toyota Prius had been shattered during the night. We rushed over to investigate. All the newly bought camping gear belonging to my elder daughter was still there. Probably the criminals could no get them out of the windows, and the doors were still locked and the lights flashing and the alarm sounding.

The CD compartment had been opened, but they were all there.  They would not have time to look at them all, but obviously Acker Bilk, Humphrey Lyttelton and Frank Sinatra were not very appealing.

What was missing was a tin of sweets from the glove compartment and my car ashtray, a plain black tub, with a top on,  settling in what is meant to the coffee hole in the Prius. Because the Prius, selling on its greeness is for people who have given up smoking years ago.

My ashtray, given for free by the salesman who wanted to clinch the deal, does not compare with the Bohemian crystal. But in the last two years I have loved it, because it enabled me to smoke my camels tidily, preserving the image of the Prius brand.

What on earth the thieves did with it, I know not. And most likely my theives will end up in care or prision. But neither do I know what Branson and Murdoch do with the considerable monies they continue to accumulate.

Today’s news includes an attack by the President of the CBI, Richard Lambert, on the proposals to limit the hefty bonuses the City financiers are still paying themselves despite the mess they have made of the global economy. And news of one of the consequences of their actions, another rise in American un-employment.

Given the greed of these bankers and corporate bosses, and the willingness of many of the rest of us to let them get away with it, it is amazing their is not a serious crime wave from the council flats around Hampstead.

But there isn’t. And although this is the first time that my car window has been smashed after fifty years in the neighbourhood, I do remember that throughout those fifty years it has been happening to other people in the street.

It was a dark and dreary day in Dorset yesterday. It did not dampen the spirits of for the locals at the Melplas Show, which is THE event of the year in these parts. But it did tax the equipment and the skills of the photographer (i. e. me). So you will have to take my word for it that the picture shows a woman on a horse who is about to make a spectacular demonstration of Wild West horsewomanship, by hanging upside down while the horse gallops on. The grandchildren held their breaths but she managed to pull herself back to upright position, and to show that whatever the cowboys can do, the cow girls can do better. Sorry about the quality of the picture, but at least you can see that the horse is galloping.

Winter is rushing in this morning on the Dorset coast. Noisily. it got me out of bed at 6.30 AM. Blowing from the west bending trees to its will. Assaulting the flowers, struggling to hold on their petals for a few more weeks. I can just about see the beach. Two hardy holiday makers, standing a few feet apart, holding fishing rods in the rain. Determined to make the most of their stay-at-home holiday by the sea.

That’s nature for you.

But human beings are helping it along. The fat cat bloated capitalist footballers have already elbowed their way to our attention, kicking the cricketers off the front pages of the sports sections. I am going to have a nail-biting season because my team, Wolverhampton Wanderers, is back in the Premier League. But for how long? They were visited for the first match of the season by West Ham, a not-very-good London team who used to be in the third division when football was my driving passion. No Molyneux roar, but the Molyneux moan, which I can still hear in my head.  Not quite as harmful to the ear drums, but shivering every fibre of the body.

Hammered by the Hammers, two nil.

Thought I had better check the Wolves web site to see what they had to say for themselves. Amazement. They had played again on Tuesday, and I had not even noticed since I was struggling to meet an overdue deadline. They beat Wigan Athletic one nil and on their ground. Golly. The supporters must have been really whooping it up on Wigan Pier on Tuesday night.

Perhaps the season will be bearable after all.

The wind has dropped. The rain has stopped. A sea gull is flying around in front of the study window, swooping not sqawking.

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.

What I did not get around to writing in my blog yesterday was the good news. On Thursday I went to see my doctor. He listened to my chest and pronounced that he could detect no signs of emphysemnia or chronic bronchitis. Despite the fact that I had smoked more than twenty cigarettes the previous day while struggling to write an external examiner’s report for a Ph D thesis. It does not prove that I have not got it. But since the hourly coughing that my family has had to endure for the past three weeks had already begun to abate, he is probably right.

I was probably suffering from nothing more serious than a version of the common cold rather than anything terminal. So clearly for the present there is no need to waste NHS money on X-rays, etc, or even on a course of anti-biotics. Equally clearly I can expect to suffer increasingly frequent bouts of coughing unless I stop smoking. So, following up the comment of my blog from Svetla I have booked myself a session with an Alexander practioner for next Thursday.

Meanwhile I am smoking over a pack a day meeting an overdue deadline for a book chapter about the journalist, James Cameron, who was, and is, a hero for many of the best British journalists editing and writing the newspapers we read today.

In reseaching for, and writing that chapter, I realised with increasing certainty, that both Cameron, and his best friend, Vicky, the political cartoonist, were manic depressives, although neither was diagnosed as such.

Cameron wrote this about him, in his introduction to the selection of Vicky’s cartoons published by Penguin in 1967, shortly after Vicky’s death.

‘He was a man who carried always with him a mingled charge of delight and despair. He chose with us, his friends, to enchant us with the one and conceal from us the other.’

Lower down in that article Cameron wrote this paragraph.

‘On 20 February 1966 he went where he always went in time of trouble, to the concert hall, to hear Klemperer conducting Beethoven’s Eighth. Three days later he went to bed in Upper Wimpole Street and made provision that this night, at least, he would sleep, and that tomorrow’s papers would bring him no more sadness.’

Cameron’s verdict was that Vicky killed himself because of his despair at the state of the world.

No coroner would have brought in such a verdict. No expert psychiartrist witness would have dared testify that this was even a possibility.

But maybe, just maybe, Cameron knew more about his best friend, than any expert could discover from studying the ‘evidence’.

It is a grey morning in Dorset. The top of Stonebarrow Hill is obscured by dark grey cloud and it is drizzling with rain. But I am humming one of the tunes of my childhood and enjoying the luxury of a cigarette before breakfast. Not all depressed. The weather is a relief after the baking heat of the last two days when the thermometer has been pushing into the eighties. Feelings of well-being, of being at peace with the world are welling up inside me. I am momentarily irritated by the yelping of a small dog but even that reminds me of the prevailing silence, such a contrast to the perpetual noise of the cities and towns I have lived in for most of my life.

Moments later a seagull squawks loudly but it is music to ears, which still remember the perpetual noise of the heavy lorries on the Stafford Road in Wolverhampton. And I watch the bird as it spreads its wings and glides gracefully down towards the sea. I share its joy in silent effortless flight. As if on cue the silence is well and truly shatttered by the coastal helicopter which has a decibel count which must equal that of at least dozen of the lorries of my youth.

But even that does not disturb my tranquillity, which is only partly due to the powerful, though short-lived, effects of the nicotine drug. Readers of this blog should be told that I am still thinking about giving up smoking. This morning I was doing precisely what the NHS SmokeFree hotline recommends, smoking a cigarette with full awareness so as to equip myself to prepare a plan to kick the habit.

The result was the opposite to that intended by the medics. My Lady Nicotine is almost certainly killing me. But not just yet. Meanwhile her caress is spreading a glow throughout my body and inducing feelings of bliss as I make the long exhalation to clear the smoke from my lungs.

As I start this paragraph I find myself reaching unconsciously for yet another cigarette. This time to help me forget my hunger pangs, because I have not yet had breakfast.

So I must pause. But before I log out, I must tell, you that the weather has changed dramatically. The cloud has lifted from the hill and the ocean is shimmering in the sunlight.

It is good to be alive, even when you get out of breath when you walk up hill.

And as I write I realise that as well as coughing hourly for the past three weeks I have been depressed without realising it, because these days my depression is not a black dog oozing despair, but more like a dark grey cloud obscuring the sunlight and nurturing gloomy thoughts. Now I am moving into a manic phase, which is like riding a frisky horse.

So I had better build up my strength before I gallop down to the sea.

Bacon, eggs and tomatoes.

Can’t wait.

See you later.

……is not a happy one.

Waking each day to a fit of coughing. The dedicated smokers’ early morning cough. But now it goes on all day, probably because I caught a cold on my recent summer holiday in Brittany. Torture to smoke. Torture not to smoke.

But even when free of infections it’s bad. Cannot smoke in a seaside shelter, even when there is Force 10 gale blowing and the risk of making any other human being ill from passive smoking is nil. Cannot smoke after dinner in any restaurant or pub. Have to go into the garden to smoke at the houses of many friends.

And on top of that it costs. Now frequently six pounds a pack, so that soon smokers, like heroin junkies will be stealing in order to finance their addiction.

And it’s bound to get worse as each year goes by. I have never been one of those smokers who thought they never have to suffer the negative consquences. Even before Sir Richard Doll established that smoking probably caused long cancer, I had spent year’s listening to my father coughing every morning. Being confined to bed with bronchitis. And in later years getting out of breath when he walked up hill.

In the event he died, aged 67, of prostate cancer, before his smoking habit killed him. I have now lived eight years longer, and the chances that some smoking related disease will be on my death certificate increase exponentially every year. It will probably be emphysema or chronic bronchitis, or a mixture of the two.

So it is obviously about time I had another attempt at giving up. Today there is lot’s of help and advice available. But on my preliminary trawl of the web just now, I cannot find anything that is addressed at people like me.

Smokers who are also manic depressives. The healing effects of the nicotine drug but also in my view the other comforts of smoking. There is the joy of the long exhalation, where you get rid of all that nasty irritating smoke you have just taken in. Very relaxing and calming.

 Smoking helps to relieve the glooms, and, equally important, makes sure that we pause, and take a few deep breaths, before we get carried away by some particular manic enthusiasm.

Maybe there is another smoker out there of my irlk, who has successfully given up, perhaps found something as good as nicotine.

Meanwhile I am doing what the NHS tells me to do – making a plan to stop in a few days time. And drawing up that plan using the help available.

The nearest smokefree adviser to here is in Boots in Lyme Regis, so I am off there tomorrow to see what they advise, and maybe pick up patches or gum.

But, whatever happens, I count myself lucky to have enjoyed the benefits of smoking for so long. Unlike R. J. Reynolds the founder of the Reynolds tobacco company of the Camel cigarette which has brought me hours of enjoyment since I discovered it in New York in 1960. He got nasty emphysema though pancreatic cancer got him before it could kill him. However the son and nephew and several other members of the family died youngest of lung cancer or emphysema.

Patrick Reynolds, the founder’s grandson, has devoted most of his life to campaigning against smoking, not only working to save the lives of Americans, where anti-smoking legislation has been tough for many years, but working to persuade the governments of such smokers’ paradises as Greece and China to see the error of their ways.

Reynolds is the second largest US tobacco company and its Camels are one of the leading international brands. So far as I can glean from a quick trawl of the web, the Reynolds family is not currently involved in the management. The majority owner and the top management are from British American Tobacco (Ken Clarke’s lot) so its Brits not Yanks who are the leading merchants of death.

Thus far I have written this with two fags and am now screaming for more. So am not at all sure that I can manage without the weed.

Better men than me have tried and failed. According to a recent CBS report Barack Obama is still smoking despite what the White House press office has been asserting.