Across the pond

Times Higher Education has a background story on the shock resignation of Malcolm Gillies, vice chancellor of City University, London. Have just given it a quick read at the internet cafe down the road from the house I am staying in on Cap Frehel in Brittany. The Higher Ed reports that there have been long-standing differences between Council and Gillies, which began with the previous chair, an accountant who had to retire from ill-health.

Nothing in the Higher Ed contradicts last week’s reports in The Times, The Guardian and The Independent. The Higher Ed say that the chairs of Council felt Gillies was acting too much like a chief executive. Whereas Gillies felt that the Council was too much influenced by business thinking and wanted new members of Council with experience of education, including an ex-vice-chancellor.

More on this saga next week when I get back. But today the sun is shining here so am off to the stunning beaches around the Cap.

Here is the link to the Higher Ed story and the link to last week’s Times report.

Cap Frehel. The rest of the house has gone to the market, leaving me to recover from a few days away from the keyboard, mostly travelling the rain. We now in Brittany and I am typing in the garden, where the grass is water-logged. The sun has just broken through the cloud and I can take off my jacket without feeling chilled. At last this is beginning to feel like a holiday. And just now I am feeling tranquil. Sitting in the garden with only a cabbage white butterfly for company.

It won’t last. Up above, there are several dark clouds promising more rain soon. But since all my holidays as a boy were spent in North Wales an hour or two of sunshine a day is sufficient to raise my spirits.

My journey began in Friday when I went from Dorset to Cardiff Bay for the second WordCampUK. That journey took nearly five hours. The schools had just broken up and thousands down in the south-west were heading north on the M5. It was dinner time when I arrived at the cottage of my niece on the outskirts of the city. Just in time to catch the last of the evening sun for a drink on the patio by the stream at the bottom of the garden. But only just in time. The rains came again and we had to run indoors.

The conference was being held in the Future Inn, one of those chains like Hilton, whose hotels look exactly the same be they in Birmingham or Bangkok. The main room provided for WordCampUK was L-shaped, fine for the top-down communications of the dominant culture. But not for WordPress folk, who are following the imperatives of that school of computing nurtured by MIT in the US and Tim Berners Lee in the UK. Using computers as a tool for democracy, through which the people can make their needs and wants and opinions known to the political leaders and the big company bosses, and to other people everywhere.

I found a place at the bottom of the short L which was fine for hearing and seeing the speakers. But not suitable for the introductions session led by Simon Dickson, in which we introduced ourselves to each other. Amazingly the more than one hundred participants compressed that into half an hour. But I could not see more than thirty of them, and they could not see me.

But we could hear each other. And so despite the venue the WordPress spirit triumphed. I hope to report in a later blog.

But I had to leave mid-day on Sunday to get back to Dorset, pick up the next generation of my family in time to catch the Monday morning ferry from Poole to St Malo. It stops in Guernsey and so many people got off and on there that we were half an hour late to join our French friends waiting at the ferry terminal. We followed them in convoy in the drizzle. Winding our way up to the hills and down to the many estuaries on the way. And up the eastern side of Cap Frehel to their converted barn in La Plevenon.

Just in time for a late dinner.

Tuesday brought more rain, so I stayed in bed half the day, while the rest of the house braved the storms and found enough mussels on the beach to provide dinner for all.

The barn has most mod cons. But no WiFi, So this will not get posted until I find an internet café.

Frederic Arnoult, aged 42, hanged himself in his flat by the Gare du Nord in Paris on Sunday 21 June 2009. As I sit down to write this four weeks later, I still cannot believe that I will never talk to him again. And, like all the two hundred friends and relations who gathered at the crematorium on the banks of the Seine on Thursday 2 July, I am left wondering, why he killed himself. He was a talented and successful architect. He was in a happy relationship with his partner of several years, Regis. He had many close friends, because he also had a gift for friendship. Whatever his own problems, he found time to listen to the their concerns.

But as I write I realise it was his talent for living theatre that most endeared him to me. Which came to life in the living room of my house in London, on the bridges of Paris and in front of the Louvre. Where he hammed it up with a ‘script’ which borrowed from the Goons, Spike Milligan and Monty Python. But which was pure Fred. And which got the rest of us, joining in, creating this living theatre for our own entertainment.

So much for joie de vivre. And yet for an hour or two on Sunday morning a month ago, he was feeling such despair that he killed himself.

He left a note to Regis, in which, as I had heard before I went to Paris, he felt that he could no longer cope with the demands of his work for one of France’s most respected firms of architects. But when I questioned Regis about it, he told me that he had also said that the work stress was affecting his ability to be there for his friends.

Fred was French, not a buttoned up Englishman, who suffered in silence until life became unbearable. His friends knew he was under serious pressure and had rallied round. On Saturday lunchtime several of them went to lunch at his flat and left convinced that they had cheered him up. That he was now looking forward to the holidays that all the French take for the whole of August.

On Sunday morning Regis was not at all worried when he left to go to his job at Christian Dior, which, like many of the big names is reacting to the credit crunch by calling its staff to work on Sundays as well as the rest of the week.

Fred must have killed himself just after Regis left the house.

Fred did not have a long history of depressive illness. But two or three years ago he had reached a similar low because of work pressures. He had then been persuaded to go to a psycho-analyst with whom he spent many hours, during which he was  prescribed anti-depressants to get him over the immediate crisis. After a few months Fred decided he was cured, and stopped going. The analyst rang him. According to what Fred told his friends, the analyst had told him that he loved him. Fred had replied that the analyst was no better than a prostitute, because he was paying for his services. He could not possibly really love him.

According to his friends there were still anti-depressants in the medicine cabinet, and Fred had been taking them in the last two or three days. No-one knows how many. But the medical literature is clear. If you take a lot they can produce the opposite effect – severe depression. If you take a few too many they can make you euphoric, manic and dangerously irrational.

On Eurostar going to Paris I had been conjecturing that Fred may have been driven to kill himself by pressures on him from his employers, who must surely be feeling the credit crunch. At the funeral I talked to several of his architect colleagues. I discovered that his firm was doing well, despite the credit crunch. And that Fred was regarded by his colleagues, as a strong man, who was on top of his own job, and had time to spare to help them.

So my conclusion is that Fred killed himself because of his own imperatives. He felt, in that moment, that he was no longer good enough to meet his own idea of what he wanted to be.

I am tempted to assert that he was unbalanced by the anti-depressives. But that would be dishonest, because my own experience of the pills, chronicled in this blog, is that, powerful though they are, they are not as powerful as the human will.

So I don’t know why he killed himself.

But I shall end with the comments of two of his closest friends.

Sophie said he must have got into a ‘black hole’.

Francois said, ‘It is the end of youth.’

Their views are as valid as those of the experts.

And they, like me, feel their lives have been enriched by knowing him.

Keats and Rupert Brooke only lived into their twenties. Fred had twice as long on earth but his early death, to those who knew him, is just as much a tragedy.

Woke up ravenous this morning. So put four rashers of bacon, two huge tomatoes and two eggs into the frying pan, which I was enjoying when Radio Four’s 9 o-clock news came on. Almost the whole bulletin was devoted to the sudden death of Michael Jackson, aged fifty. Suddenly yesterday’s stories about BBC top brass expenses and the parade of Tory MPs, ordered by David Cameron to pay back thousands of their expenses, are no longer news. Compared with the shock waves arising from the death of a youngish man still full of zest.

I was not a fan of Michael Jackson but I am feeling some of the emotions his fans  must be feeling. Because yesterday I learnt of the sudden death of a young Frenchman, Fred Arnoult, from Toulouse.  Fred was only just over forty. He was one of those rare human beings who responded to my sense of humour. He lived in my house for a year, while he was an assistant at William Ellis school and became a life-long friend of all my family.

I still cannot believe I shall never hear his laugh again.

Today’s revelations from the Daily Telegraph, were very small drips, but the political fallout during the day has been building up to an avalanche. Gordon Brown looks ever more desperate, as he sticks his finger in the dyke, to try and stem the tides of outrageous fortune. Unlike King Canute Brown has been bruised and battered by tides unleashed by the now-twenty-five day drip by drip Telegraph stories. We used to call it the Torygraph. But perhaps we should rename it the Dripagraph. Because this story is now virtually certain to get a place for the Daily Telegraph in history next the Washington Post, who brought us Watergate.

By this evening Brown has dug himself into a hole where he seems to be repudiating his own Chancellor of the Exchequer, when the nation is in a financial crisis. He still says he is determined to tough it out til next year.

But in a situation like this, the British Prime Minister, is an Emperor with no clothes. Unlike a US President a British Prime Minister is not a chief executive. In order to take executive action he needs to have the support of his cabinet. As of now most of them are still maintaining a loyal courtier’s position in public. But their lack of enthusiasm is demonstrated by their silence.

So if I was a betting man, I would be putting my money down not on a cabinet reshuffle after Thursday’s local and European elections. But on a Brown resignation instead.

The picture I see in my study window changes every day, and frequently several times a day. When the sky suddenly clears and the sun-light picks out the Chesil Beach the summit of Stonebarrow Hill. Mostly it is nature who rings the changes. But in the last few days the famer has been showing an artistic capacity worthy of a talent contest. It is not exactly Vincent Van Gogh.

But, could you do better if your paint brush was a tractor?

In the middle of the heat wave work on my bungalow on Lyme Bay has been going on apace. Until a week last Friday, when the man who was reconstructing the shed decking to take a summer house came charging down to the house, chased by a swarm of bees. He would come back next week, he said, after I had removed the offending nest thereby making my garden a safe place to work for today’s health and safety regs. Which required a lot more work by me than I had bargained for.

My next door neighbour gave me a can of spray to kill them off, but the family insisted that insisted on a more ecological appoach. The web provided a welter of helpful suggestions. All I needed to do was to get an old shoe box, go into the garden in the middle of night, finding my way with red light, which apparently does not wake bees up, scoop up the nest and put it in a suitable hedge. This proved not a viable option, because this bee nest was buried in the earth.

But I did find on the web the telephone number of a Dorchester bee-keeper, who said I must first establish what kind of bee I was dealing with. It is the white tailed bumble bee, which does not normally sting, but could not be relied upon not to fight if the nest was under threat. It needed an expert with the right protective gear. He could not do the job himself. Nor could he recommend anyone, because most of the people on the council list killed them off.

I would have rung the council then, had I not be writing all those blogs urging more ethical behaviour by our MP’s. How could I go on complaining about them bumping up their expenses if I was prepared to bump off an endangered species?

So I did another trawl of the neighbours and got the telephone number of another local bee keeper, who had dealt with a sudden swarm of bees at Forde Abbey, the local stately home. He agreed to come over and investigate. His verdict was that moving the nest was not practical, so they would have to be killed.

So I told him to go ahead.

But ethically does that not make me just as bad as all those MPs who are telling us that everything they claimed on expenses was sanctioned by ‘experts’ from the fees office, accountants, advisers, etc?

Probably not. But at least I am spending my own money. And am once again doing my bit to fight the recession by spending my money on British labour, not stashing it away in a tax haven.

Standing room only at the Charmouth local school tonight for the talk by Andy Ford, a geographer from Bournemouth University. What we all wanted to know was how much more of our area of outstanding natural beauty is going to fall into the sea, and when. Even newcomers to the area like us, are acutely aware that the coast around here is notoriously unstable. Because there was a massive cliff fall last year, which even attracted the attention of the national media. Which I chronicled in my blog at the time. That fall was much nearer to Lyme Regis than to Charmouth. But since the fall blocked access from Lyme Regis the readers of the newspapers and the television viewers flocked to Charmouth.

Some of them were fossil hunters, who knew that most of the fossils on this Jurassic coast, have long since been harvested, so that on bank holidays you can spend all day looking for them, but, if you want to take one home, you have to buy it from the local shop. But a new cliff fall brings down more fossils. But most of the scaveneners were notsomuch interested in fossils, as in the icons of the 1950s. These were hurled down on to our beach, because the 2008 landslide started at an old council rubbish dump at the top of the hill. I took a picture of an old motor car engine, but what had the visitors squealing with delight, was the variety of 1950s bottles, which apparently are now collector’s items.

Unsurprisingly, Andy Ford, did not tell us what we most wanted to know. Because, as a serious academic, as opposed to those academics who will do anything to get themselves a mention in the media, Ford kept emphasising that coastal erosion is a ‘complex’ problem. He refused to give us easy answers.

For instance, when he was a asked a question about whether global warming meant that the problem we were facing was much worse, he prefaced his answer, with ‘if the forecasts are correct’. Because, he knows, as I know, that these forecasts are ‘probably’ correct, but they are forecasts. And as anyone who reads the Murdoch press and the right-wing press in the US knows, there are other fully qualified academics, who are prepared to proclaim that ‘global warming’ is a scare story.

He then went on to say that the threat from global warming was from the predicted rise in sea levels. (That predicted rise would indeed demolish much of Charmouth probably including my bungalow half-way up the hill. But it would also drown my flat in London in happy Hampstead. This is in brackets, because it is me editorialising. Not Andy speaking.)

My wife, like many of the people of Charmouth, was disappointed with the talk. What she wanted to know, was what was happening on Stonebarrow Hill, which is the hill directly above the beach in Charmouth, where my grandchildren play when they are visiting. Were they, and us at risk, of that falling down on our heads, one stormy day?

Andy Ford, made it plain, that his research study, is monitoring Black Ven, the area on the Lyme Regis side, and that he could not give us any information on Stonebarrow, where there was a much smaller cliff fall recently.

But, unlike my wife, I felt I had learnt important things I wanted to know from his talk, about this place, which I have made my home.

First the nasty cliff fall was probably not due to coastal erosion (i. e. the sea encroaching upon the land, which is what will happen with global warming) but by ‘ground water’. The massive cliff fall in 2008 happened after serious rain, and on a very stormy night, when my bungalow was rocking in the storm.

But, note the ‘probably’. Because that is a sign that you are listening to an academic, who knows that his research study, although done to the best of his ability, may not tell you the whole truth.

Second, again in response to questions, the Bournemouth University team, said that the cliff falls were ‘probably’ not caused by the activities of the hordes of fossil hunters, but by ‘natural forces’. So I shall not stop my grandson, smashing away with his geological hammer.

He is ‘probably’ not likely to start a ciff fall.

The evening began with a contribution from Andy Ford’s side-kick, Sam Scrivener, who gave us the context. This area of the coast, into which I have put the savings of my lifetime, is ‘the largest landslide in Europe’, which neither the estate agent, nor the surveyor, I paid to look at the bungalow, told me. (But, I did not buy in total ignorance, because the solitary academic qualification in my cv is a degree in Geography, and although that was 54 years ago, I have not forgotten everything I was taught then.)

Sam also said that our neighbourhood is

of outstanding universal value because it shows the geology

In other words, those same cliff falls which worry us, are revealing the history of the earth. And helping the scientists to devise strategies to cope with the problems we face today.

We are still subject to the cyclical climatic changes, which produced the ice ages. But we also have to face the consequences of the effects on the environment of our own power stations and motor cars, etc, etc.

And the debate about how we deal with that will go on and on and on. But we need to have that debate informed by those the geographers and the geologists, who are still working away to increase our knowledge about those mighty ‘natural forces’.

Since this blog is based on eye-witness reporting from Bridport, Dorset, UK I had better make it clear in the first sentence, that the streets here have not suddenly become rivers of blood. The bloody left-wing revolution in Britain, when the workers unite with their international comrades, to get rid of the capitalists, who have been exploiting the workers, has still not arrived. The Bridport revolutions, which I am bringing to your attention, were around the May Pole. And the master conspirator of these revolutions, was in fact a ‘mistress’. A female teacher at the local primary school who had clearly spent many hours of her time teaching these children all sorts of things which are not a central part of the national curriculum.

She was training these vulnerable children to enact the act of worship in which their ancestors might have participated. Not to Jesus Christ, currently represented by the Pope, world-wide, and the Archbishop of Canterbury in Britain. Not to the Old Testament God of Jehovah, who is currently a figure of controversy, because what he has to say does not quite fit in with what, that other religious leader, Allah, has to say about HIS messages from God.

This Bridport teacher was training the children to behave like their ancestors who worshipped the Pagan Gods, who were far nastier than Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Allah and the rest. (Well, that is what our modern religious leaders believe.)

But, of course, even if the ‘authorities’ read this blog the Bridport teacher is unlikely to be fired because lots of teachers are doing the same thing. And paganism, though it has been on a rising trend over the last few decades is still a minority sport, with an electorate which is probably no bigger than the voters for the BNP.

And as I watched this teacher, I thought that what she was trying to teach the children was how to co-operate with each other. To put on a performance, in which there was no ‘star’. In which they were encouraged to act as a group with their fellow human beings, and not to just further their own wants and needs, which might include being a ‘star’, or ‘acting as if they were God’.

When they got it wrong, which they did quite often, as do adult human beings, the teacher helped them untangle the knots around the May Pole. So what they were learning in this exercise was how to subject their own imperatives, and co-operate with other human beings.

But someone with a different life view than me, witnessing the events I witnessed, might well have concluded, that what the teacher was teaching, is that the best group performance was only possible if you did what teacher told you to do.

The last stage of Spring has come with a great rush in the last few days. Last weekend I thought the beech tree had died. There was not a leaf in sight This morning it is covered by its summer green overcoat. And the huge old apple tree has produced splashes of pink, a long way from the kitchen sink. You can just about see them on my picture if you have a decent computer. And behind the chimney, impossible to photograph, a seagull has nested. Any day now we shall have the first seagulls born in the Obama age flying around the garden.

I have had no time to blog about Obama’s first hundred days. My priorities are to vanish the horrors in the garden. The old grey shed which is falling down. The bamboo which dominated one side of the garden and was suffocating other plants. And, sadly, the holly tree, because it lifting the paving slabs on my neighbour’s path. Hopefully it will survive replanting.

This morning it is more like mid-summer. The thermometer on the terrace was just over 60 degrees at 9 AM. Just the right kind of day for croissants for breakfast. We had got in a supply because we have a French family visiting. But Pere decided that in Britain he would do as the Brits do. So he sampled some of my black treacle on toast.