Catching up

Recent blogs have been diverted by various inept attempts to prepare for my vacation to America, undermined by other emotional concerns. As regards the accutane diaries, it is now playing merry hell with my forehead. Everybody tells me that it works beautifully in the end, so this is my little slice of purgatory to be endured before arrival at the blessed mountain. Oh well. Could be worse - I could have had my hair cut before I flew out.

A couple of weeks back I was stuck in one of those devil/deep blue sea moments. Attending a quiz, did I admit that I actually knew who recorded the Birdie Song and therefore hole my reputation below the waterline, or did I keep quiet and imperil our chances?

I took the only honest course: I 'fessed up and blamed my parents.

But really, my parents' taste in music evaporated - if their vinyl collection is any guide - almost exactly when they married. Apart from Nancy and Lee and Abba (and I can foresee some raised eyebrows there), all their record purchases after 1967 were the subgenre that is collated and used in quizzes under the title 'Someone Must Have Bought It!' This included 'Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs,' 'Black Superman,' 'Seven Tears' (which I think is actually not a bad record) and Terry Wogan's 'The Floral Dance.' It's a wonder I ever recovered, and there are plenty of people who would say I didn't. I don't think exposure to this music can altogether account for my homosexuality - my brother and sister are straight - but it might be a contributory factor.

About my brother and sister. Just before I left the country, my sister-in-law gave birth to a fine daughter, the first grandchild in the family, whom I was fortunate enought to see before I left. Now, small children do nothing for me at all, and my insistence that I don't want children was only strengthened by the parents' agreement that they never knew poo could be such a riveting topic of conversation. But she is my niece and, thankfully, all the avuncular feelings seem to be in place.

She was unnamed when I left, having been called Honeysuckle in the womb, and only recently have I learnt that she is to be named Robyn Hebe Gaia. The only Hebe I knew was a character in HMS Pinafore, but a quick googling reveals that Hebe is the goddess of youth and the duaghter of Zeus and Hera. Which is all well and good, but hebe is also a plant native to New Zealand, and as my sister-in-law is a botanist...

My sister, by contrast, has been locked in an ex-Soviet sanitorium outside Kiev. Readers will remember my dash to the Ukrainian Embassy (Visa/Consular Section) and this is what happens as an indirect result. She described it - along with the chains and cages left in situ by those caring professionals in the Communist bloc - as the most despair-inducing place she's ever been. As she's been to Digbeth Bus Station, this is no small statement.

That cheap crack could also have easily been applied to Buffalo, where my family was once impounded at immigration. I had thought nothing could beat Buffalo for humorlessness, but one should never underestimate the capacity of the human race to push back the frontiers of achievement, and a lady called Spence at JFK immigration now holds the laurel for least welcoming and generally unpleasant introduction to America. Rude, surly and obnoxious, she couldn't or wouldn't grasp that although I was a registered Yale student, I wasn't at the moment physically resident at Yale because I was engaged in working toward my PhD.

Eventually, having concluded with regret that my papers had neither error nor omission that would require me to be given unto the tender mercies of unsmiling men with guns, she pushed them back across the counter and huffed 'it sounds like yo' registered a Yale student but yo' don't actually go to school!'

Well, tough. I've done my time, honey. And I know who recorded the Birdie Song.

Museums postscript

I should perhaps have included the Imperial War Museum in my Top Ten.

But that blog drew an interesting comment from a very interesting Kiwi blogger, who finds BoB 'interesting' (a pleasingly neutral adjective). However, said blogger accused me of having a 'deep and unwarranted pro-New Zealand bias,' which I reject utterly. Deep yes, but entirely warranted. This comment was partly because Te Papa was Number One: I should have specified that the museums were not in ranked order, but merely as they occurred to me. So if anyone at Te Papa is readying a campaign claiming that I consider them to be the World's Finest Museum, they can stop right now.

I might also now include the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.

Anyway, the very entertaining blog is called Where in the World is Gwannel Sandiego and can be found at http://gwannelsandiego.blogspot.com/. And I quote, with permission, the scalpel-sharp dismissal of one of my least favourite museums:

'The National Museum in Prague is one giant yawn-fest, let me warn you! It's pretty much an unreformed old-school museum, full of acres of glass cabinets containing different rocks or bugs, stuffed animals and bones.'

Right on the money. Read the whole thing.

Weird, just weird

It's been a very odd ten days and I feel like typing out my frustration on something but I'm not sure what. It's nobody's fault as such, except possibly mine, as I seem to have the ability, doubtless gifted to me at my birth by the cacalogic fairy, to make statements that seem perfectly clear to me but are apparently misleading, abstruse or just plain contrary to other people.

It may be because I've started on accutane, a direct result of which is to make all skin beneath my mouth incredibly dry and tight so that I look like the guy at the denoument of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and consequently to make everything taste of lipsalve. I'm just praying that American Airlines allows moisturizer on board, or I shall be arrested on landing at JFK as one of the Living Dead.

Enough vaporous naval-gazing. Today I spotted a sign in a shop window advertising Hallowe'en costumes, including one of the 'Grim Ripper' [sic]. I know scythes are somewhat out of fashion these days, but this is beyond parody...and irreovcably reminds me of the I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again episode about the Ripper (anyone who doesn't know the wonder of this show should follow this link immediately http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Sorry,_I'll_Read_That_Again)

Okay, happy now. And now I present the first in an occasional series of lists, to which all readers are warmly invited to contribute. This week, we choose top Museums and Galleries (I know, but one has to make one's own entertainment on the Birmingham-London train):

(apologies if some of the names aren't quite accurate)

1 Te Papa/Museum of New Zealand, Wellington
2 Jewish Museum, Prague
3 International Spy Museum, Washington DC
4 The Accademia Gallery, Florence
5 The National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, London (ok, I know that's cheating)
6 International Tennis Hall of Fame Museum, Newport RI
7 Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne
8 War Memorial Museum, Auckland
9 British Art Center, New Haven
10 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Don't Ukraine on my parade

I blog about promiscuous sex, and what happens? The world joins in. Clive Owen on becoming a gay icon through The Children of Men: 'I'm putting it down to the fact my character is mean, rugged - and above all available.' And then Scarlett Johansson declares that it's 'irresponsible' not be regularly tested for STDs. 'One has to be socially aware. It's part of being a decent human,' she affirmed, adding that 'on some basic level we are animals and by instinct we breed accordingly.' So we can fuck like rabbits (on a basic level) but be socially aware (on a non-basic level)? Nothing like having it both ways, I guess. I've already admitted (in the YDN) that no-strings sex has its pleasures and, in a world with many small cruelties, is at least rarely designed to hurt the partner. But as for being socially aware - well, I'm now prohibited from giving blood due to my (gay) sexual history, which isn't very socially aware, I shouldn't have thought.

More words to be reclaimed: progressive (depends where you're going), democrat (very rarely used by believers in majority rule) and indeed Progressive Democrat (highly debatable).

Catching up with old friends at the weekend, a fellow former undergrad was reported as being a national champion at a French martial art.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. Presumably they run away, but do so very fiercely.


Due to a complicated set of circumstances, I was despatched to the Ukraine Embassy (Visa/Consular Section) in Notting Hill today. This is basically a dentist's reception area with two glass grilles, behind one of which you can collect visas for 20 minutes each day, so heaven help you if you can't make it between 11 and 11.20, and behind the other you can speak to a real person, a real person so obviously Ukrainian (blue eyes, broad forehead, slightly flattened features) that he could, with no trouble at all, be readily plucked from an identity parade of Eastern Europeans. This said archetype informed me that the passports I'd come to collect had been posted the previous day.

I questioned this. He confirmed it. And then I received the sort of smile that, in previous days, would have translated as 'your relative will be spending 30 years in the Gulag.'

To make matters worse, the damn Ukrainians beat Scotland 2-0. And it fluctuated between shower and downpour in London, cats and dogs and random quadrupeds, and now my suit smells like wet border collie.

Moreover, having been nice about the trains, this morning's return ticket from Birmingham to London cost £108 (not my money, thankfully). And it was delayed just south of Watford.

En route to the Ukrainian Embassy (Visa/Consular Section), I was stopped and asked directions by a couple. Now, what if my assistance enabled that couple to commit crime, eg burglary of a house on the street they were seeking? Moral: you are not responsible for the consequences of other persons' actions. You can only do the good deed (the right thing) and not give thought to the morrow. Okay, Kant (amongst many many others) got there first, but today was a nice illustration.

I also learn that today, October 11, is National Coming Out Day in the US. Okay, I'm gay. Now can I get on with my life?

And then because I was getting altogether too pleased with myself, God left me a copy of Metro in the return train, open at the METROscope. I believe neither in astrology nor Metro's version, but here was Leo for today:

'Forgiveness and compassion feature in your relationships now. Can you bring yourself to step down off your Leo high horse and see that others are only human - and that you're not perfect yourself?'

Mea culpa. For all some causes (and means by which they are promoted) rub me up the wrong way, I can hardly regard a 'Breast Cancer Month Awareness' group as anything other than unutterably right. For all I may believe my opinions are right (and if you don't believe yours are right, why precisely do you have them?), others may differ and even the ways in which they are wrong can illuminate my understanding. For all I think I have factored in the influence of my background, I can't possibly have learnt everything about a subject, and others from different backgrounds who matured with a different set of assumptions - I think of New Yorkers, for some reason - can help me defend my assumptions and sharpen my thoughts. One need not live in an intellectual or spiritual vacuum to do this. Everybody is agnostic at some level.

As well as little cruelties, life is also filled with many small kindnesses, some of which, being founded in restraint, will not be known this side of the grave. But it is well to thank God for them and to confess those moments when we did not offer such kindnesses. It is one of His great mercies that we can never know just what others have done for us.

I remain dubious about the wisdom or sanctity of public confession, at least in this therapeutic age, so I note that 'compassion' means not merely kindness or sympathy, but 'fellow suffering.' This emphaises its nature as a heavier spiritual task than 'mere' kindness, though kindness is not to be undervalued; but rather. as I think Charles Williams put it, its reciprocal nature as echo of and participation in the Atonement.

I can sympathise but hardly compassionate with the family of Paul Hunter, the snooker player who died this week just short of his 28th birthday. To be brutally honest, it came as a huge shock that somebody famous younger than me could possibly be dead, leaving a wife and baby daughter. Cancer is not a 'crime against our species', as the usually reliable Paul Hayward wrote in the Mail, but it is a killer of the young and innocent, and it is at these moments that the sky darkens and the Atonement looks very bleak indeed.

RIP.

Autumn Days (when the grass is jewelled)

I still haven't blogged about the very good party I attended two weeks ago. In short, it was a party of glamour and sophistication, filled with attractive young people in black tie. This is the sort of evening I could attend more or less for ever. It was so impressive that I even had a brief pang - very rare for me - of concern about the conspicuous consumption. There's a fine moral argument to be made against consumption qua consumption; and then there's the argument as addressed by the school's Harvest Festival, which implored God to 'make the rich consume less, so that the poor may have more.' In practice, of course, a decline in consumption by the rich would lead to a decline in production, so the poor wouldn't end up getting any more in consequence. The world is not simply The Mouse and the Plum Cake on a bigger scale.

The major point about this party was that it was full of Oxonians. While I like and respect my Oxonian friends, and indeed most of the people I met at this party, I can't shake the feeling that the're a different breed. This may be sheer prejudice, but I'm convinced that Cambridge students are generally more down-to-earth, less hearty (in the pejorative sense) and a little more humble. Oxonians are the most sociable people on earth, but they have always struck me as being slightly too imbued with a sense of their own superiority (yes, I know that I spend a lot of my time arrogantly complaining that other people are arrogant, but there's always a good reason. Not for nothing, perhaps, is one of my favourite prayers 'Lord, help me consider the feelings of others, even if they are being oversensitive').

Which may explain why a disproportionate number of politicians and prime ministers are Oxford grads. The following were Oxford: Blair, Thatcher, Wilson, Heath, Douglas-Home, Macmillan, Eden, Attlee, Asquith, Salisbury, Rosebery, Gladstone, Peel and a lot of men vanished into history. David Cameron is Oxford, as is Boris Johnson, who seems to be letting his intelligence go and drifting into self-parodic Blimpishness. Be warned, is all I say.

Words that need to be rescued - an occasional series: sentimental, discriminate, 'social justice' and Manichean, which does not mean viewing the world in black and white. Rather, it is the serious heresy of believing that matter is bad and spirit good.

Reasons I like my parents: they call me at random to ask the name of Babar's wife. And yes, I did know she was called Celeste.

Overheard in the staff centre (rather depressingly): maybe our negative view of North Korea is just western capitalist propaganda?

Questions begged here: Peter Hain, who said "if you have a great big house, then it is right that you should pay more." Why?

If the Republicans lose hold of Congress, they should club together and send Mike Foley on a long trip far away. Foley is a fool, agreed, but it's amusing to see the tap-dancing around his actual offence. The problem is not that he was gay, no no no, but that he was sexually predatory towards a sixteen year-old boy - because, naturally, sixteen year-old boys are totally off limits to gay men, right? Oh, and that he wasn't openly gay. That was the real problem, which is why it's all the fault of the Republicans, and (better still) the Behemoth of the Religious Right (so-called, although in fact a greater percentage of Protestants vote Democrat than Jews or blacks vote Republican).

WhenI saw a gay friend in London, he passed a mag my way, which included an interview with Alan Cumming saying that monogamy was impossible because gay men aren't naturally mongamous. Siena Miller told Rolling Stone that monogamy was "an overrated virtue, because, let's face it, we're fucking animals." I'd like to think that she was intentionally witty, but I'm not totally convinced.

Well no, we're not animals, fucking or otherwise, and it strikes me as pretty feeble to claim that you're free and mature when you're in hock to your cock.

And yes, goodness knows I can hardly speak from a position of inexperience. I can't say more without discussing former partners (casual and non-), so I won't, but if I ever end up with a boyfriend, I'm striving for monogamy.

I went to London by train, and once again the train - this time from Birmingham - was excellent. It was also cheap (£15 return), which provided the surreal experience of paying more for overnight car parking than for the train ticket. It took me a good while to find somewhere to park as they seemed to be digging up the centre of Birmingham, although on reflection that's probably the best thing to do with the centre of Birmingham.

(Is that caustic? I have a reader who thinks I'm caustic. If only he knew what I don't write, he'd think I was somewhat restrained. It's very easy to sit here and indulge oneself, a sort of journalistic masturbation, but this is fraught with danger. If one must be a soda, it's probably better to be baking than caustic).

And finally it's a pleasure to report that ISBO (the Institute for Stating the Blindingly Obvious) has reported again. It's also a pleasant surprise to find that ISBO works at Yale; I'd always assumed that Yale was the sort of place where common sense was regarded as a Copernican relic. Nonetheless, Dr Joseph Mahoney reports that "children who kept up a schedule of classes such as sport, drama and music were found to achieve more impressive exam results and stand a better chance of staying on at school than peers who did none. They were also less likely to smoke or take drugs and had better relationships with their parents. Even children who threw themselves into 20 hours or more of organised activities were happier than youngsters who participated in none."

Busy people engaged in stimulating activities are happier than idlers. Gee, who knew?

And finally finally, the crane flies have finally gone.

Postscript

Well, I got bugger-all done today, so I thought I may as well blog a couple of random thoughts. To be fair, it was quite a good day: I dropped into Harvington Hall, and if you ever find yourself on the Bromsgrove-Kidderminster road (is there anyone reading this to whom that might apply?), you should do the same. It was built in the sixteenth century and has the country's most impressive collection of intact priest-hides. 'Priest-hides' is not ideal, evoking as it does the image of tanned clerical epidermis, but it might be marginally preferable to 'priest-holes,' certainly as I don't want to say that I climbed into a priest-hole for the first time today.

The architectural genius required for these hides would be impressive today. To enter the hide I visited, which was only slightly smaller than my second-year undergraduate accommodation, you lean on what appears to be a structural beam and the whole thing pivots. It's brilliant, but my favourite is the hide that appears when you remove a couple of perfectly solid-seeming steps.

On a different but not entirely unrelated subject, this is particularly special from Mark Steyn, talking about Guantanamo:

'it surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terrorist detention camp to offer homemade Ramadan pastries a byword for horror and brutality.'

And finally, a YouGov poll found 54% of those questioned thought it was "hard to know what the Conservative Party stands for at the moment."

Is that all? What were the other 46% thinking? Just cut-and-pasting examples from the BBC website makes a marshmallow look vertebrate:

'The party must claim the political centre ground and become the champions of a "new spirit of social responsibility," said Mr Cameron.
It must also trust ordinary people to make decisions about their own lives, said Mr Cameron.

Speaking against a backdrop of green foliage and bright sunlight, he told delegates: "Our party's history tells us the ground on which political success is built."
"It is the centre ground. Not the bog of political compromise. Not the ideological wilderness, out of the fringes of debate. But the solid ground where people are."'

I don't think his party's history actually tells him anything of the sort, but he had already got lost in a metaphorical thicket. Quick, somebody call the copse.

'Speaking against a backdrop of green foliage and bright sunlight', he urged delegates to 'let sunshine win the day.'

What the hell...? Was the foliage and sunlight accompanied by rainforest noises and soothing pan pipes, or did they all join hands with a rousing (but inclusive) chorus of I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing? It seems more that David Cameron is proclaiming the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Not only is he 40 years out of date (summers of love are so passe, darling), but it raises the horrible prospect of the Shadow Cabinet dancing naked.

I confidently expect the Conservative rallying cry at the next election would seem to be, 'let the people go ever so slightly free, if that's what they want!' And if by some miracle they win, Prime Minister Cameron's first action will be to appoint a Hugging Tsar and oversee a national tissue bank in case anyone gets ever-so-slightly upset.

What was John McCain doing there? And did nobody tell him that the axiom "government that governs best, governs least" was abandoned in the UK some decades ago?

A friend of mine used to work for Cameron and published a defence in a recent edition of the Salisbury Review, a defence that seemed willing rather than convinced, like a barrister going through the motions. I wonder what - we'll call him John - thinks now?

Pharisees

'Pharisees' may be a bit harsh. And I might just be grumpy because Liverpool lost 2-0 at Bolton. But I'm fed up with public caring.

This is all about the facebook.com, a generally excellent invention that (in short) connects college students. Recently, people have been commenting on Election 2006, which is all well and good, and declaring that they 'care' about certain issues. This is what annoys me: I have nothing against people declaring support for or opposition to policies or candidates, but my hackles rise at having other people's goodness waved in my face. I might be particularly sensitive to this after 3 years at Yale, but the motivation behind this isn't too far from witchhunts. Example:

Poster: 'What are you doing to stop sexual violence on campus?'
Me (thinks): 'I'm not committing it.'
Implication: If you are not vocal and public in your opposition to sexual violence (or racism, or homophobia - a construction which creates its own problems for me - or whatever), you are to be regarded with suspicion.

Facebook groups 'care' about gay marriage, the right to choose [to kill your unborn child], the defence of civil liberties, global warming etc etc. This of course reminded me of Chesterton's observation that it was easy to love humanity in the abstract because you don't have to deal with it.

And it doesn't help that I'm English and find the idea of standing up and implying that I am a Good Person nauseating. Spending too much time searching on the messageboards, I found one girl stating that although she was an atheist she was a good person because she did a lot of good work in the community (and that's nearly a verbatim quote). This takes us straight back to Dickens, hasn't been satirised nearly enough and brings to mind CS Lewis' line about 'the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expressions.'

Ok, my tendancy towards individualism and (theologically) pietism can become resignation, and you can reasonably say that as a Christian I want to tell people how to behave, and it's important to campaign and to raise awareness...but there's an element of secular moral bullying that is, at the least, uncharitable.

Of course, this is the Conservative political problem - the Left has self-proclaimed moral authority on its side. Sometimes it actually does have moral authority. The essential raison d'etre of the political Left is that it cares more, and there is enough truth in this to make it justifiable. More on this anon.

The straw that broke this camel's back was a post from a facebook friend stating that he was 'so disgusted' at the actions of Rep Mark Foley, who has quit after admitting he sent inappropriate (ie sexual) emails and txts to teenage boys. He didn't have an affair with them, or (like former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey) appoint his lover to an official position, but he was immensely stupid and deserves to go.

All well and good, but the post somehow equated Rep Foley with a Republican campaign to use middle america [sic] for their own greediness [sic] in an attempt to destroy democracy [sic]. Rep Foley's campaign against sex offenders was a scapegoat [sic] for his own perversions [sic] and despite claiming to stand for so-called Christian morals [sic] he obviously had no morals at all [sic].

This is the sort of hysterical and ill-disciplined rant that should give Yale a bad name but doesn't. I suspect, knowing the author, that he was slightly miffed because Rep Foley was not in the vanguard of the gay rights campaign (which makes one wonder what on earth he meant by 'perversions'). In hock to the bigoted Evangelical Right, Mark Foley was forced to deny himself, remain in the closet and take it out (sort of) on teenage boys.

My ex-boyfriend pointed out that I don't like 'flamboyant gays' very much. That's true (although we might discuss the adjective), but I maintain that isn't the point here.

To conclude with an attempt at balance, when I went looking into the campaign issues, I did find plenty on the Right who need intellectually (and perhaps phsyically) slapping just as much. But I've been at Yale, and it's their idiocies which have grated most.

Speaking of which, Max might be all right, because however bad the arguments in favour of Iraq, the opponents can always produce worse.

And finally finally, I love realclearpolitics.com