William Nicholson's Blog, page 4

The death of love

I’m reading a book that I suspect is out of print called ‘Flannelled Fool’ by T.C.Worsley. It’s a memoir of his experiences in the public school system, as a boy at Marlborough and as a very young teacher at an unnamed school that I think must be Wellington. So far we’re in the 1930s, so it’s all very long ago, but even so, I’m taken aback by the strength of my reaction. His account of the athlete-worshipping, bullying, homoerotic hell that was public school then is deeply distressing.

Everyone believes their world is normal, and the masters and schoolboys would be astonished to be told otherwise, but from this distance his account presents a shocking perversion of all that is decent, honourable and loving. Such an adolescence could not fail to damage every boy who passed through it, at a profoundly deep level. And these became the men who governed the country! I know this is unoriginal as a thought, but the sheer vicious nonsense generated by the public school system has never struck me so forcibly before.

I was at a public school (Downside) in the 1960s, and it was heaven compared to Worsley’s schools. I’ve been to the Marlborough and the Wellington of today, both of which are co-ed, enlightened, and caring.  But even so, a trace of the old ideology lingers, like a stubborn smell. These schools sell access to privilege; which means, to advantages not available to the many; so by definition everyone who uses them sees the world as a battleground where there are winners and losers. This is the link with the past. In the 1930s you tolerated being ‘basketed’ and caned and humiliated into conformity because you were gaining access to the elite. The suffering today is less; the goals remain the same.

Of course it’s commonplace to attack public schools for the unearned privilege they pass on, and the unfair advantages they sell. My dismay is at the smashing of human hearts. There are no great revelations in Worsley’s book, but as I read it I tremble for the generations of youths who were given self-confidence in shoddy exchange for the death of love.

The Blue Flower

What a book! ‘The Blue Flower’ by Penelope Fitzgerald is the most perfect instance of historical imagining I’ve ever read. She enters the world and minds of people in late 18th century Germany so effortlessly that it can’t be called historical writing at all. It’s not my way to admire a writer’s style – I don’t know how to separate the words a writer chooses and the order in which they’re arranged from the thing being said, the insight and truth – form and content seem to me to flow together – which is why I so dislike writers whose style demands a level of admiration their understanding doesn’t merit – but here I’m acutely conscious of a miracle of style. Never obtrusive, never ‘fine writing’: just observations, insights, reflections, images, lightly placed just where they fit, like someone building a dry-stone wall.

As I read I found myself comparing ‘The Blue Flower’ with Goethe’s ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ (Goethe has a walk-on part in Fitzgerald’s novel), much to the detriment of Goethe. Both novels centre on a young man’s romantic obsession with a young woman; but where I found Goethe’s understanding of romantic love to be naive, Fitzgerald maintains a quiet authorial distance from her hero’s projected emotions. Somehow she pulls off the trick of showing sympathy for her hero, and allowing us too be moved by his plight, while never sharing his illusions. Her gaze is deeply unillusioned. The result is tender, wry, sad, and dispassionate. I don’t love this book in the way I love, say, Tolstoy, or to take a better comparison, Chekhov; but I loved reading it, and I admire it, and I wonder greatly about how it was done. How does she know so much detail? How has she been able to transform mere research into a living world?

Penelope Knox, as she was then, was at Somerville with my mother, they were in a sense rivals, and my mother was awarded a higher First. Throughout her life my mother hoped to be a writer, and watched Fitzgerald’s rise to fame with open envy. For this reason, not wanting to hurt my mother more, I never read Fitzgerald’s novels. But my mother died last year, and I’m now free to read her, and to acknowledge that she is a modern master.

Snack-urge

A friend visiting us has described her unsuccessful battle to keep her weight down. She’s not obese, just cuddly, but she is fatter than she wants to be. She has some very thoughtful reasons about why this is so, and why she seems unable to do anything about it. She is in her own words a ‘control freak’, a much-loved GP who runs her work life and family with enormous efficiency. But this is the one part of her life that she can’t control. She grazes on snacks all through the day; longs for a slice of cake with her coffee, and surrenders to the longing; and salivates as she pulls up at a filling station, because she always buys herself a bar of chocolate with the petrol. Filling station indeed. The pleasure she gets from these constant treats is very real, if short-lived. The only times she’s safe from the snack-urge is when she’s working so hard she’s distracted. At home the snacks in the larder are for the children; but her own hand reaches out, as it were unnoticed by her mind, for the biscuit tin. She has become able to snack without knowing that she’s doing it. The snack-urge has taken control of her conscious mind and found the pause button.

Her conclusion, and she speaks as a doctor, is that she has become addicted. Her behaviour is that of an alcoholic or a drug user. She has tried many diets, but been forced to accept that no diet will save her. So what can be done, for her, and for our growing nation of snack abusers?

Her answer is: regulation. Treat sugar-fat snacks like cigarettes. Put them out of reach, in plain packaging, and tax them so heavily the price alone is a deterrent. At present the world is a whorehouse of temptation for the snackaholic. Every shop places quick bites heavy in sugar and fat right where you can scoop them up as you pay your bill. Every fast food outlet offers sugar-fat meals that are easier to get, as cheap or cheaper than eating at home, and far more delicious. The culture of the workplace revolves round cookies, doughnuts, cupcakes. Every railway station lures eyes and taste buds with multiple pastry outlets. How is the poor snack addict to resist? It’s more than the sugar-fat addled brain can endure.

Shut the snacks away in high white cupboards with sliding doors, like the cigarettes in supermarkets. Let consenting adults only ask for their fix in low voices, giving wads of notes in return, before shuffling off to get their high beneath the railway arches. The day will yet come when we’ll pass a sad heap of failed humanity begging on the pavement and will shake our heads and say, ‘Sugar addict.’ We won’t drop a coin in the hat because we’ll know that money only feeds the addiction. Big pharma will come up with sugar-fat substitutes – ‘You won’t believe it’s not pizza!’ A new generation will grow up that has never known temptation, and will look with scorn at the few remaining blubber mountains that tour their schools as living warnings.

One step I believe we should not take. The use of sugar-fat should not be criminalised. Let there be no War on Snacks. Look what happened in the Prohibition era. Look at the disastrous failure of the so-called War on Drugs. Let’s not abandon our housing estates to roaming gangs of violent criminals peddling cookies in plain wrappers, and slipping bags of crisps to dead-eyed teenagers. They’ll adulterate the cake mix, and who knows what they’ll put into the fizzy drinks. So we have to keep this thing in proportion. Don’t panic. After all, there are people we all know who’ve snacked all their lives, and reached a grand old age.

Reading Zia Haider Rahman

I’ve just finished Zia Haider Rahman’s acclaimed new novel ‘In the Light of What We know’: in itself an unusual statement for me to make. My regular experience is that I begin a new novel and give up after about fifty pages. When asked why, I tend to say, ‘I didn’t believe it.’ This is an odd demand to make of a novel, and I’m not sure I quite understand it, but I think what I mean is that I require any book that makes serious claims to convince me of its writer’s authority. Again and again, as I read I see the tricks used to cover up real knowledge, to generate the illusion of cleverness or depth. It’s as if I can smell the author’s need to pose for me, just as when someone who talks too much you sense all he’s saying is: please respect me. But here is a book that from the first few pages gripped me. I knew I wanted to be in the presence of this writer’s mind. And so I read to the end, and read fast.

There’s no real story, and no real characters. There’s a sort of play at creating plot tension, all smoked about with portentous intimations of grand crises, but it’s fairly childish. Near the end there’s a flurry of activity that tries to generate the twists of a spy novel, but his heart’s not in it. The big reveal reveals nothing much, and is lost in the endless digressions. Moreover, with almost pitiful earnestness, the writer bombards the reader with profundities from great minds of the past, some in the epigrams that begin each chapter, some in anecdotes as the pages turn, all crying out: see! I’m a polymath! I’ve read Montaigne, and Godel, and Calvino, and Brodsky, and St Augustine, and Somerset Maugham! I understand high finance, and Islam, and international development, and mathematics, and class war, and literature! So a feast for the autodidact, for the kind of reader who needs to be flattered that he is in the presence of a large mind.

Which is me. Through all the foggy misdirection of its construction, I kept reading because on almost every page there was a passage that intrigued me, and made me think something I hadn’t thought before. The book pretends to be an extended conversation between the unnamed narrator and his mysterious friend Zafar. In fact it’s a conversation between Zia Haider Rahman and me, his reader. And that conversation never flags. The journey gets nowhere, but it’s a journey I’ve been delighted to share with him. Is it ‘the first truly great book of the new century’, as one reader claims on the cover? Well, I can’t think of much competition.

One example: the narrator is asked if he knows the Shahadah in English, and replies by citing it: ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.’ His answer, he is told, is wrong. A precise translation would be, ‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his messenger.’ So the wrong translation (this is now me, unpacking the insight) reveals the bias of the colonialists: that ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ are different concepts. By using the word ‘Allah’ in an otherwise all-English sentence the translator encourages the patronising error that Islam worships a local deity, inferior to the one God of Christianity. I find that illuminating in so many ways.

The wickedness of designers (Part 2)

The solution to my radio alarm problem seemed to be an Oregon Scientific EC101, so I sent off for it and set it up. A find clear set of numerals, but other disappointments began to emerge: the radio is tinny, the projection beam is fixed, and worst of all, the radio alarm is only able to come on at high volume. It can be controlled, but not in alarm mode. This means we can only be woken by a shocking yell from the Today programme. By the time I’d worked out that this was not a fault of my own, but is built in to the machine, it was too late to send the whole thing back for a replacement. So now I’m searching the internet for a better clock. For a while the Philips AJ5030 looked perfect, until I found a review which complained that the radio sound volume comes on with the alarm at high volume, and can’t be stopped. The same defect. Astonishing! Do the designers never test their own products? I’m intrigued to find that our fabled capitalist system, which is supposed to serve customers by building an ever-better mousetrap, is unable to learn customers needs and serve them. On scanning the web I find streams of disappointed customers all repeating the same complaints that I’ve listed. There are so many models and types of radio alarm clocks on the market that you would have thought one manufacturer would have done their homework and so achieved market dominance, as Apple has in its own field. What is preventing this from happening? Are there any industrial designers out there who can allow me a peep into their mindset? I long to visit Philips, or Oregon Scientific, and engage in a frank discussion with them. What gets them out of bed in the morning? Whose praise do they seek? How are they rewarded? My suspicion is that they’re designing for each other, not for me. I picture them sitting round a test lab necking Jack Daniels and competing with each other to find ways to outsmart the consumer. ‘How about we put the radio on/off button really close to the alarm set button, so they hit the wrong one and turn off the alarm?’ ‘And let’s make the buttons look exactly alike, and colour them black so they can’t read them at night!’ ‘And give ‘em something they don’t want, like four different alarm settings!’ ‘Hey, do you ever use the Snooze button?’ ‘Hell, no. Who wants to turn the damn thing off and have it come on again while you’re cleaning your teeth?’ ‘Okay, so let’s make the Snooze button the only really big one they can find.’ ‘And we just have to lock in the alarm volume so it makes them shit in their sheets when it goes off!’ The devil is at work here, my friends. This is not incompetence, this is wickedness. As for my own needs, I have now decided my only solution is a combination of two alarm clock radios, one beside the other. One will manage the time display, the other the wake-up radio alarm. Perhaps that’s all part of the evil plan too. ‘Make’em buy more than one…’

The wickedness of designers (Part 1)

Our radio alarm clock needs to be replaced, and this is prompting deep thoughts about design. The clock’s defect is that when we have a power cut it switches off the stored alarm time, sending it to a default setting of midnight; which means when the power flicks off and on in the night, something that happens several times a year when there are storms, we’re either woken at midnight, or not woken at all. New radio alarms have a system that updates the clock automatically, by receiving signals from somewhere in, I believe, Rugby. So I have decided to find a new clock. This has caused me to reflect on what other qualities I would want in the device. My list is not eccentric, I think: I want large numerals that I can see across the room; I want a display that is not cluttered with other information such as temperature (I can feel that) or day and date (I don’t need to know that in the night); I want control buttons that are easy to access and set the alarm in a simple way; and I do not want all the control knobs to be so designed that they are identical to each other. This makes it hard to locate the key knobs as I fumble sleepily at the machine before going to bed. Not an over-demanding list. But what do I find? Tiny buttons hidden down the side, rows of buttons all the same as each other on which I have to shine a raking light to work out which is which, spindly numeral displays, and modes of setting the alarm time that require three hands operating independently.

Who designs these things? Why haven’t they learned from companies like Apple that there’s money to be made from sheer simplicity?

A further source of grief relates specifically to digital radios. I have one that sits in the bathroom which takes 15 seconds after I press the ON button to come on, and stays on for several seconds after I turn it off. Why? It sounds such a small thing, but until the radio comes on I’m not sure what volume it’s going to produce, and because I get up earlier than Virginia I don’t like to blast the Today programme at her through the bathroom door as she sleeps. This means I must hover over the radio until it deigns to wake up, and give a hasty twist to the volume control if necessary. And for all those 15 seconds I’m desperate to have a pee. No doubt newer models have overcome this strange sleepiness (of the radio, not me), but when I bought it there was nothing to tell me it had this defect.

Why is the radio market so poorly served? I think there are two reasons. First, it’s mostly older people who buy radios, and this sector of the market finds it hard to imagine that things could ever be other than they are. When I complain to my friends about the poor design of radio buttons they look astonished. Radios have always looked this way, they seem to say. How could it be otherwise? So there’s no market pressure to create more user-friendly devices. And secondly, I blame industrial designers.

These wicked people are in love with symmetry, elegance, and formal pattern. Given a dozen buttons to arrange, they’ll place them in three rows of four, make them all identical, and colour them the same as the body of the device (almost always black: how they love black). What I want is a big fat button for ON/OFF, and buttons of different shapes, sizes and colours for other functions so that I can find them with my eyes half-closed. Why are designers so obsessed with orderliness? I don’t want to be tidied up in this way. I have a further suspicion, which is that this is a male characteristic, and that most industrial designers are men. They don’t want to be user-friendly, they want to be user-controlling. Look at the dashboards of cars. When I drive I have my eyes on the road, I don’t want to have to send out a search party to identify which of the line of identical buttons does what. How about a dashboard of bumps that squish and switches that click and wheels that twiddle and levers that go up and down?

Muddle it up, guys. Our brains enjoy that. But I know I might as well piss into the wind. No car manufacturer will ever dare to offer a vehicle instrument panel that doesn’t look like a cross between a fighter plane cockpit and an operating theatre. Driving is strong and clean and pure and male… Please God, raise me up a generation of female designers who build machines that are odd-shaped and knobbly and fit my hands.

The wickedness of designers

Our radio alarm clock needs to be replaced, and this is prompting deep thoughts about design. The clock’s defect is that when we have a power cut it switches off the stored alarm time, sending it to a default setting of midnight; which means when the power flicks off and on in the night, something that happens several times a year when there are storms, we’re either woken at midnight, or not woken at all. New radio alarms have a system that updates the clock automatically, by receiving signals from somewhere in, I believe, Rugby. So I have decided to find a new clock. This has caused me to reflect on what other qualities I would want in the device. My list is not eccentric, I think: I want large numerals that I can see across the room; I want a display that is not cluttered with other information such as temperature (I can feel that) or day and date (I don’t need to know that in the night); I want control buttons that are easy to access and set the alarm in a simple way; and I do not want all the control knobs to be so designed that they are identical to each other. This makes it hard to locate the key knobs as I fumble sleepily at the machine before going to bed. Not an over-demanding list. But what do I find? Tiny buttons hidden down the side, rows of buttons all the same as each other on which I have to shine a raking light to work out which is which, spindly numeral displays, and modes of setting the alarm time that require three hands operating independently. Who designs these things? Why haven’t they learned from companies like Apple that there’s money to be made from sheer simplicity? A further source of grief relates specifically to digital radios. I have one that sits in the bathroom which takes 15 seconds after I press the ON button to come on, and stays on for several seconds after I turn it off. Why? It sounds such a small thing, but until the radio comes on I’m not sure what volume it’s going to produce, and because I get up earlier than Virginia I don’t like to blast the Today programme at her through the bathroom door as she sleeps. This means I must hover over the radio until it deigns to wake up, and give a hasty twist to the volume control if necessary. And for all those 15 seconds I’m desperate to have a pee. No doubt newer models have overcome this strange sleepiness (of the radio, not me), but when I bought it there was nothing to tell me it had this defect. Why is the radio market so poorly served? I think there are two reasons. First, it’s mostly older people who buy radios, and this sector of the market finds it hard to imagine that things could ever be other than they are. When I complain to my friends about the poor design of radio buttons they look astonished. Radios have always looked this way, they seem to say. How could it be otherwise? So there’s no market pressure to create more user-friendly devices. And secondly, I blame industrial designers. These wicked people are in love with symmetry, elegance, and formal pattern. Given a dozen buttons to arrange, they’ll place them in three rows of four, make them all identical, and colour them the same as the body of the device (almost always black: how they love black). What I want is a big fat button for ON/OFF, and buttons of different shapes, sizes and colours for other functions so that I can find them with my eyes half-closed. Why are designers so obsessed with orderliness? I don’t want to be tidied up in this way. I have a further suspicion, which is that this is a male characteristic, and that most industrial designers are men. They don’t want to be user-friendly, they want to be user-controlling. Look at the dashboards of cars. When I drive I have my eyes on the road, I don’t want to have to send out a search party to identify which of the line of identical buttons does what. How about a dashboard of bumps that squish and switches that click and wheels that twiddle and levers that go up and down? Muddle it up, guys. Our brains enjoy that. But I know I might as well piss into the wind. No car manufacturer will ever dare to offer a vehicle instrument panel that doesn’t look like a cross between a fighter plane cockpit and an operating theatre. Driving is strong and clean and pure and male… Please God, raise me up a generation of female designers who build machines that are odd-shaped and knobbly and fit my hands.

Early morning virtue

This week our newspaper deliverer is on holiday, so each morning just before seven I’ve been biking the two miles or so into the village and back to pick up the paper myself. Happily it’s been a week of perfect summer. Already, after only seven trips the route has become familiar as a repeated dream. The first stretch is a long steady pull up a hill lined with oaks, where rabbits dash out before me and scuttle into the verges. The sunlight falls over my right shoulder, the sun still low in the sky. Where the hill levels out I meet a young man in shorts, striding in the opposite direction, perhaps to the station at Cooksbridge for an early train. We nod at each other as I roll past. Then comes the long downhill run, a blissful hurtle into cool air, that carries me almost all the way up again into the village road. Here I turn to face the the rising sun and it dazzles my eyes. I pump hard and drop a gear to climb the bridge over the long-disused railway, and so pass between silent houses and parked cars to the village shop. Gordon hands me my paper with a smile, and I’m on the road again, my shadow hurrying before me as I ride. Then onto the long green lane home, returning in a circle now from the east, sunlight blazing on the distant Downs above Lewes, the sky clear blue. Into the shadow of a tree tunnel, down the short steep hill which is so treacherous to cars in an icy winter, a moment of wild flight paid for with hard labour up the other side. Over another bridge, crossing the same disused railway, calling out greetings to a neighbour out with his labradors, past the cottage where my mother lived and died, to turn at last into our short drive. The entire journey lasts no more that fifteen minutes, but in this brief time I feel as if I’ve been on some great adventure, in which I’ve been called upon to strive and to suffer and to be granted sweet reward. Somehow the journey is moral as well as physical, and as I enter the house again, clutching the daily paper, the tingle of light sweat on my skin feels very like the glow of virtue. And yet when Martin returns from his holiday I know I’ll put my bike away again, and be content to loiter in the kitchen until I hear the snap of the letter box and the thud as the paper hits the hall floor. What does this prove? That the easy option always wins. That we need to be saved from our own idleness by forces outside our control. That the breakdown of the systems we establish to make our lives run smoothly opens hidden doors to unpredicted joys.

Vinyl wrap

I’ve been puzzling over whether to buy a new car, and if so what – our Saab is getting old and bits are dropping off. The problem is, absurdly, car colour. Cars these days are such dreary colours: black, white, grey, silver, dull blue, dull green. True, there’s plenty of red about: we’re allowed a strong colour so long as it’s angry. But what about the blue of the cockerel in Trafalgar Square, or the green of spring grass, or sunset orange, or sunrise gold? There’s no demand, I’m told. Why? Because no one dares get a car in an unusual colour in case they can’t sell it on for a decent price later. This seems to me to be symptomatic of consumerism. Despite our craze to consume, we view the act of consumption as only a way station to further acquisition. So we buy  houses to make investment gains, we eat to achieve better health, we walk to prolong our active life. Everything’s a ladder to something else. Climbing, always climbing. I’m tired of climbing. I think I’m old enough to be allowed to lie down in the shade on a sunny summer afternoon. And old enough to have a bright gold car, one that I can find in a car park. Of course I could always buy a new car and pay for a bespoke colour, but the cost is huge. So I’ve been dickering around the internet, putting in search terms such as ‘Personal car colour’, and I’ve stumbled upon something called ‘vinyl wrap’. Apparently you can have your car sheathed in coloured vinyl for a few hundred pounds, in any colour or pattern you want. It protects the underlying paintwork, lasts for a few years, and then you can change it for another colour. Can this be true? If so, the implications are mind-blowing. What else can I wrap in coloured vinyl? The fridge, the dishwasher, the washing machine, all chaste white, so white they’re known as ‘white goods’. Not any more. Cherry goods, plum goods, pistachio goods. Then I could move on to doors. Window frames. Tables. Why not the floors? Suddenly it seems possible to play dressing up with the whole world.

Eunuchs weeping

I’ve been going to sessions at the Charleston Literary Festival for the last three days, and the result is a glorious muddle in my head. Jung Chang (who wrote ‘Wild Swans’) told us how the Dowager Empress Cixi tried, in the 19th century, to abolish the system of castrating small boys to supply eunuchs to the imperial court. The main opposition to this compassionate reform came from the eunuchs themselves, who initiated a ‘campaign of weeping’, that successfully stymied the reform. Then in another session David Hare startled us by saying he didn’t rate either Beckett’s plays or his glum philosophy. In a rush of liberation I found myself  feeling: yes, he’s right. For all Beckett’s magnificent power as a writer, which I acknowledge and celebrate, his take on the business of living is false to my experience. So for me at least Beckett’s campaign of weeping is over, the era of the eunuchs is at an end, and the sheer fertility of existence can rule the day. True, I write this in hot spring sunshine, as our wildflower meadow prepares to explode in cornflower blue and poppy red. In the long chilly winter evenings I’m sure I’ll return to Beckett’s wry wisdom.