Recently in Culture Category

That's a big cup of Poutine, eh?

A few weeks ago the Financial Times re-designed its web site to mixed reviews. I quite like the new design, which makes the site much easier to read, but the silly subscription packages are getting on my nerves:

• Unregistered browsers of ft.com can read three free articles every 30 days.
• Register at no charge and you can read up to 19 articles in any 30-day period.
• Subscribe for £98.99 per year and you can access an unlimited number of articles any time you like.
• Pay the FT £199.00 annually and you can read Lex, its "agenda-setting column on business and financial topics".

I've been a registered user for a long time, but since September's banking crisis I have hit the limit of 19 free articles a month on many occasions. The latest frustrating experience occurred today. The paper has published Jancis Robinson's red wine recommendations for this holiday season, but due to the site's article constraint I am not allowed to view the page!

Such frustration is not to be tolerated, so I simply switched to Ms Robinson's own web site, where she always posts her FT articles in full. Fortunately this week was no exception — except that there were three times as many recommended wines on her site as there were in the FT article. In the author's own words:

Every year I try to assemble a collection of wines for Financial Times readers that I think should be drinking particularly well for celebrations over the year end. There is a horrible shortage of space in the paper so I had to trim my list considerably for the pink pages - down to 30 from a total of 100 - but the following is the list in full, culled from the thousands of wines I have tasted over the last few months.

So what's the point of the FT's frustrating limitations? It's almost always possible to obtain the information published on the web site from another source, if not for free then for much less than the cost of an annual subscription. Restricting access only serves to drive readers elsewhere. It's an approach that risks marginalizing the UK's National Newspaper of the Year 2008.

I'm currently dropping in and out of Letter from America by Alistair Cooke.

The following passage from The Immigrant Strain, the first essay in the book and dated 6 May 1946, jumped off the page for obvious reasons:

If you feel baffled and alarmed at the prospect of differentiating one American type from another, you can take heart. You have more hope of success than Americans, who shuffle through every stereotype of every foreign culture as confidently as they handle the family's pack of cards. Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their heart of hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power had done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves.

Apart from the now-dated reference to families shuffling cards badly — families no longer shuffle cards much — Cooke's prophecy seems strikingly accurate today.

El Born, Barcelona 1962

Ten years ago I purchased an original photographic print titled El Born, Barcelona 1962 by Xavier Miserachs. I did so simply because I loved the image. At the time I attempted to find out more about the photographer, but the only fact that I could establish was that he was Spanish.

Last month I once again tried to find out more, and this time my search was more productive. Here is what I found at Photolounge.eu (which has additional images taken by Miserachs):

Xavier Miserachs belongs to a generation of photographers who modernised Catalan photography at the beginning of the sixties. Maspons, Colita and Pomés, in Barcelona, or Ontañón and Masats in Madrid are some of his most important contemporaries. He studied medicine which he gave up to pursue a photographic career. He was a multifaceted person with interests in many fields, e.g. worked as a disk-jockey, was a member of the "gauche divine" in Barcelona, an advertising photographer, a teacher and a columnist. Miserachs was all of this and more as we can see in his memories, "Contact sheet" which he wrote just before leaving us, still young, in his sixties. His photography is direct, fresh, full of irony and a sense of humour; definitively without any complexes, which reflected his attitude to life. The archive of this unique artist fortunately is well taken care of by his two daugthers Arena and Mar, who even have the initiative to come up with new book projects (Memories de la Costa Brava, 2005, Miserachs / Català-Roca), and sign all modern prints.

I also found an interview given by Miserachs just before his death in 1998, which you can read online (if your Spanish is up to it), and last but not least, I discovered that the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya has its own print of this image and included it in one of its recent promotional leaflets (available as a PDF file 836Kb).

So it seems that I'm in good company, and I now know a lot more about the photograph that hangs on my wall.

PS — My print is dated 1988 and is signed by the photographer.

I love the warning that preceeds the pop and rock listings in The New Yorker:

"Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it's advisable to call ahead to confirm engagements."

I think I'll use the same excuse when I next can't make it into work.

From the latest edition of The New Yorker comes this striking observation:

The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States today is business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor's degrees are awarded in that field. Eight per cent are awarded in education, five per cent in the health professions. By contrast, fewer than four per cent of college graduates major in English, and only two per cent major in history. There are more bachelor's degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined.

See The Graduates by Louis Menand.

ARMED AMERICA Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes

In the 48 hours since the Virginia Tech massacre I have heard several radio reports in which different witnesses described their experiences. Not a single journalist or interviewer has felt it necessary to define the word "clip", which strikes me as significant.

I don't think I have ever seen a "clip", and yet I too know what it is. Clearly, America's gun culture has had a significant influence on everyone. Thanks are due to Hollywood, I suppose.

To get a sense of how wide-spread guns have become in American culture, visit ARMED AMERICA Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes. It's a promotional web site for a forthcoming book of photographs by Kyle Cassidy. I personally found it terrifying.

Here's news of "the most amazing scandal in the polite world of classical music". If your record collection contains performances by the British pianist Joyce Hatto, you may have to re-catalogue them soon.

Believe it or not, this tree is already in flower.

The last two weeks have been relatively cold in the UK, but it hasn't deterred mother nature. Every year trees start to bloom here in the first week of February, and this year is no exception.

Compared to the climate in Calgary, Alberta, where spring, if it happens at all, is confined to two weeks in May, the UK's climate is a wonderful anti-depressant. Just as the dark days of January start to take their toll on your energy and mood, nature reminds you that a new year really has arrived.

Thank goodness for the Gulf Stream!

So, England is to face Trinidad & Tobago in the World Cup this summer. I bet those football-mad Calypsonians are already writing songs about it.

Of course the event is still a long way off, but in today's Observer the UK's best known Trinidadian news anchor, Sir Trevor McDonald, explains what the whole thing means: Why, just this once, I'll be cheering for Trinidad.

Newspapers are struggling these days. It seems fewer and fewer people read a newspaper regularly, and circulation revenue has decreased as a result. So the press is trying all kinds of ploys to attract "readers", even going so far as to give away DVDs of full-length movies each week in the attempt.

Today, for example, the following papers are giving away the following films:

• The Daily Telegraph - Whistle Down the Wind
• The Independent - Wings of Desire (aka Der Himmel über Berlin)
• The Times - The Last Emperor

In keeping with the national trend, my wife and I rarely buy a weekend paper. However, in recent weeks we've been tempted to do so just to obtain the free DVD with which to improve our weekend viewing. Not long ago, your choice of newspaper was often seen as an expression of your political views. Now it's more likely to reflect your taste in films!

You can read more about how these DVD offers are turning readers into "newspaper tarts" at the BBC's web site (see How can papers afford to give away DVDs?).

The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager is interesting. It displays a dynamic frequency distribution for the most popular (top 1,000) first names for American children born since 1880.

Having run some of my relatives' names through it I can see that my extended family has been pretty conventional in its choice of names over the years, despite not residing in the US.

Excerpts from Stet by Diana Athill, who was apparently considered the best editor in London during the second half of the twentieth century.

Writing about the first book she was responsible for publishing at André Deutshe:

I would soon begin to find such fantasies a waste of time — of my time, anyway — but then, in addition to liking the sobriety and precision of the style, I felt the pull of mystification: 'I can't understand this — probably, being beyond me, it is very special.' This common response to not seeing the point of something has a rather touching humility, but that doesn't save it — or so I now believe — from being a betrayal of intelligence which has allowed a good deal of junk to masquerade as art. Whether that matters much is another question: throughout my publishing life I thought it did, so I am glad to say that the publication of The Tailor's Cake in 1946, beautifully translated by Betty Askwith, was the only occasion on which I succumbed to the charm of mystification.

On her love of books:

I loved that book [The Toe-Rags by Daphne Anderson] even more than I loved Morris Stock's [Parents Unknown: A Ukrainian Childhood]; and both of them I loved not for being well-written (though both were written well enough for their purposes), but because of what those two people were like. They brought home to me the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also — thank God — of the light which continues to struggle through.

Much to my surprise Diana Athill writes a lot about Caribbean literature in Stet. Not only are there long chapters on Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul, but Athill was also Eric Williams' editor and travelled to both Dominica and Trinidad & Tobago in the course of her career. In addition, she had an affair with Hakim Jamal, an American disciple of Malcolm X, who was involved in the murders in 1972 that formed the subject of Naipaul's story The Killings in Trinidad. I found it all quite unexpectedly fascinating and would recommend it, not least because it's exceptionally well-written.

Here's a link to a striking Guardian article about the changes in Britain during the last 50 years: The nation in numbers.

Did you know, for example, that Mohammed was the country's 20th most popular name in 2004?

Things are changing…

Umbrellas are useless in the snow

A photograph very similar to the one at right appeared on the cover of one of Britain's national newspapers today, and perfectly illustrates a point I've made before: namely that umbrellas are a useless defence against snow.

Almost half of the British Isles is further north than Moscow, yet many of the British still have no idea how to cope with winter weather.

Palaces are for royalty. We're just people with a bank account.

Grace Kelly to Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch A Thief (1955)

The Highway Code

Today's silly news that the A to Z is one of Londoners' best loved books reminded me that one of the most consistently best-selling books in the UK is the Department of Transport's Highway Code.

On the last day of 2004 BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour featured an interesting report on the history of crossword puzzles (RealPlayer required). Did you know that the first crossword appeared in 1913? Or that the first collection of puzzles gave Simon & Schuster its start?

The best book review that I read this year was published in the London Review of Books. In Mao meets Oakeshott, John Lanchester reviewed Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain by Ferdinand Mount.

Here's the blurb:

In this provocative and ruthlessly frank book, Ferdinand Mount argues that there is a new class divide in Britain which is just as vicious and hard to get rid of as the old one. Through acute observation - drawing on every aspect of life from soap operas, speech patterns and gardening to education and the distribution of wealth - he demolishes the illusion that we live in a classless society and shows how the worst-off in Britain today are more culturally deprived than their parents or grandparents.

I have to admit straight away that I haven't read Mind the Gap, but I found Lanchester's review so interesting that I've read it more than once.

There are just so many observations in it that ring true to me, beginning with these two sentences from the first paragraph:

Britain produces an extraordinary amount of commentary, in print, on television and on radio; so much that the production of opinion can seem to be our dominant industry, the thing we are best at and most take to.

The problem with our public culture is not that it is low-grade: it is that it is fluent, clear, coherent, often vividly expressed, and more or less entirely free of fresh intellectual content. You can go whole weeks reading the broadsheet press without encountering a new idea; you can listen to hundreds of hours of broadcast debate and encounter nothing but received wisdoms.

And then there's The crisis is related to the fact that our culture now values only two things, money and celebrity, and the poor by definition don't have either.

It's a great review of what sounds like a really interesting, if depressing, book. When I re-read it recently, however, one section in particular stood out:

Our Downers - to use Mount's preferred term for the losers in the British class system - are, by world standards, culturally impoverished. It is difficult to be precise and non-subjective about this, but there seems to be a genre of working-class life in England which has no equivalent in the rest of the developed world. The deprivation in question is not material: we're not talking about child labour, or anything which by global standards - the standards of the four billion people who live on less than $4 a day - is considered absolute poverty. It is difficult to quantify this deprivation, though Mount does have one or two good examples, such as the fact that 42 per cent of all burglaries happen to 1 per cent of all homes, principally those belonging to the poor and/or single parents: so the less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen.

That last statement is in direct contrast to the reporting of recent events here in London. As this month's Economist London Briefing pointed out:

The murder of a respected City financier in late November shocked Londoners. John Monckton, a 49-year-old fund manager, was stabbed to death by two burglars who forced their way into his £3m home in Chelsea, a smart neighbourhood. His wife, Homeyra, was severely injured. Police arrested two men in connection with the killing on December 14th. A third suspect was arrested and bailed last month.

This was the latest in a string of violent assaults on householders in London's richer parts. In October, Robert Symons, a 45-year-old-teacher, died in similar circumstances in his home in Chiswick. And in September, a retired paediatrician and his wife were stabbed to death in a gated estate in Highgate Hill. Violent crime is worsening across the capital, particularly knife-crime in some boroughs, according to crime statistics.

So what's the lesson in all this? The less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen; but the more you had, the more likely it'll appear in the press.

Yesterday's Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4 struck a chord with me. Written and presented by Elaine Storkey, it was about the ambiguity of language and the arrogance of conceit. It's well worth reading, but for anyone who can't be bothered to click on the link above, here are two of the best parts:

There is nothing more telling than language for conveying differences of outlook and perception. That is very evident right now in Iraq. Even amongst the key players words tell their own story. One of the marine Commanders outside Falluja describes the assault about to take place on that city as an 'epic battle', whilst the Prime Minister of Iraq, declares a 60 day 'state of emergency.' The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan refers to an attack on Falluja as 'an escalation in violence which could disrupt Iraq's political transition', whilst Lt Colonel Brandl commanding one the battalions of the American marines talks about it as uncovering the hidden face of the enemy. His words are graphic. He says, 'The enemy has a face. He is called Satan. He lives in Falluja and we're going to destroy him.'

So why does language offer so many perceptions of reality, especially the shape and meaning of evil? One of the obvious answers is that we are all partisan. Each of us uses language to depict our own point of view. We notice most fully the evil done to us or to our group, whilst rephrasing the evil we do to others with the language of justification and exoneration. And when this becomes habitual and uncritical, partisanship can move into self-deception. We can come to believe, at both personal and national levels, that we own the language of evil, that we decide on its use, and it is one from which we are excluded.

As if in support of Storkey's commentary, today's Guardian carries a frightening story on its front page that includes the following quote: "They call us terrorists because we resist them. If defending the truth is terrorism, then we are terrorists." It seems language is also a weapon in this war.

The BBC is reporting that John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, has topped the US dance chart at the age of 71 with a song supporting gay marriage (see Yoko's gay wedding song is US hit).

I can't understand how George W. Bush can argue that he's in favour of greater freedom for people when he "wants to change the US constitution to specify that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman".

Thirty-seven years ago while Justice Minister, a famous Canadian communist declared "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation". The left-wing Liberal Pierre Trudeau was in favour of freedoms that the current "leader of the western world" is unwilling to give his own nation.

Whenever I hear the Bush Administration arguing rhetorically about freeing foreign peoples, I can't help thinking of Cole Porter (an active homosexual, but at least he married a woman!). Porter hit the nail on the head when he wrote Anything Goes:

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos
And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that I'm bound to answer
When you propose,
Anything goes

It seems to me that the people who talk most about freedom, are really opportunistic control freaks who disguise themselves as liberals (i.e. freedom fighters) whenever it helps their selfish cause. Things are not what they seem, and anything goes!

PS - Is dancing allowed in Texas?

Have you ever wondered what it's like to judge the world's most prestigious English-language book award? If so, Fiammetta Rocco's article Man Booker prize in this week's Economist is for you.

Apparently "More than 100,000 books are published in Britain each year, virtually the same number as in America, which has five times the population".

Given its origin, it's ironic that the term "liberal" should have become a dirty word in the US. It's derived from the Latin word liber meaning to be "free", so you'd think that a nation that was willing to make great sacrifices in the name of freedom must be full of liberals wouldn't you? Not so apparently, which makes me wonder what all that talk about encouraging democracy and freedom is all about.

The Online Etymology Dictionary has an entry for "liberal" and it's quite interesting:

liberal (adj.)

c.1375, from O.Fr. liberal "befitting free men, noble, generous," from L. liberalis "noble, generous," lit. "pertaining to a free man," from liber "free," from PIE base *leudheros (cf. Gk. eleutheros "free"), probably originally "belonging to the people" (though the precise semantic development is obscure), from *leudho- "people" (cf. O.C.S. ljudu, Lith. liaudis, O.E. leod, Ger. Leute "nation, people"). Earliest reference in Eng. is to the liberal arts (L. artes liberales; see art (n.)), the seven attainments directed to intellectual enlargement, not immediate practical purpose, and thus deemed worthy of a free man (the word in this sense was opposed to servile or mechanical). Sense of "free in bestowing" is from 1387. With a meaning "free from restraint in speech or action" (1490) liberal was used 16c.-17c. as a term of reproach. It revived in a positive sense in the Enlightenment, with a meaning "free from prejudice, tolerant," which emerged 1776-88. Purely in ref. to political opinion, "tending in favor of freedom and democracy" it dates from c.1801, from Fr. libéral, originally applied in Eng. by its opponents (often in Fr. form and with suggestions of foreign lawlessness) to the party favorable to individual political freedoms. But also (especially in U.S. politics) tending to mean "favorable to government action to effect social change," which seems at times to draw more from the religious sense of "free from prejudice in favor of traditional opinions and established institutions" (and thus open to new ideas and plans of reform), which dates from 1823.

"Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others." [Ambrose Bierce, "Devil's Dictionary," 1911]

The world is currently in such a mess that almost everybody I know thinks things need to change. I guess that makes us all liberals at heart.

Just a note to myself regarding another vinyard to explore in the future: Domaine de Rimauresq near Pignans, north-east of Toulon.

www.rimauresq.fr

Last weekend Kew Gardens held its sixth annual Woodland Wonders Festival, and fortunately we chose the best day weather-wise to visit.

Bluebells behind Queen Charlotte's Cottage

This festival is the one event in the year when Kew opens Queen Charlotte's Cottage to the public, and so we toured the interior of this former royal garden shed along with thousands of others. It turns out that the building is deceptively narrow; really just wide enough for one room plus connecting hallway. It contains two spacious, opposing staircases (very impractical; not even the royals need two ways to go up and down in such a small space), and upstairs the wallpaper of the largest room was designed by one of the Victorian princesses. Apart from a collection of 18th century framed prints (reproductions) which decorate some of the rooms, the cottage is largely unfurnished. All in all it was pretty underwhelming.

Morris dancing at Kew - what's with those handkerchiefs?

On the other hand the rest of the festival was impressive. Many skilled, woodsy folk had set up tents in which they displayed ecologically-friendly activites: bee-keeping, wood carving, archery, etc. A troop of kooky Morris dancers put on several shows, and swings for children were hung from some of Kew's enormous trees, while free samples of Kew Brew (a premium ale brewed with hops grown at Kew) were handed out to their parents.

Some azaleas were in full bloom

The plants and flowers were brilliant as usual. Not only were the bluebells all out, but a few of the azaleas and rhododendrons were also in full bloom (many will need another week I think). By far the most spectacular display, however, was put on by the lilacs, most of which were clearly at their fragrant peak; and in the process of admiring them I discovered a strong Canadian connection.

The lilacs were at their peak

British-born Isabella Preston (1881 - 1964) immigrated to Canada at the age of 31 and became one of the world's foremost lilac hybridists. Working in Guelph, Ontario, she developed lilacs ideally suited to northern climes - late flowering shrubs with prolific blooms. Kew now has several specimens of these eponymous Syringa xprestoniae.

All in all, it was an excellent day out.

We've just returned from seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I have to admit that I was really impressed.

I won't bother explaining the plot, which can easily be found (if not easily described) elsewhere on the web, but it's one of the most profound, thought-provoking movies I have seen in a very long time.

In places it's quite scary. It forces you to remember (!) that everything good about you, everything bad about you, everything you love and everything you hate is contained in the fragile space between your ears. Everything, including you, is in your head; and there's no escape. I came out thinking about the fragility of even "normal" mental health, never mind the additional difficulties posed by abnormal psychology.

I really need to view it again. All three critics on last night's edition of Newsnight Review had seen it twice and even the New Yorker admitted that "On the eighth viewing, say, the damn thing might even make sense". Even if it doesn't make sense, go see it. It'll make you think.

Newsmap provides an interesting view of the news media's priorities, as captured and classified by Google News.

The news in Canada, the UK and the US as displayed on Newsmap

Each news item is allocated screen space according to the number of stories published about it. More popular stories appear larger; less popular stories are smaller. The stories are also colour-coded according to the "section" in which they would appear in a newspaper: World - dark brown, Nation (domestic news) - light brown, Sports - olive green, Business - blue, Entertainment - teal, for example. It's also possible to compare several of Google's national versions, all of which means that you can use Newsmap to analyse cultural differences in the world's news media.

And what do you find if you do?

Here are the top three priorities (as of earlier today) for three countries with which I'm familiar:

• Canada: World, Sports, Business
• UK: World, Sports, Business
• US: Sports, World, Nation (domestic news)

A closer examination reveals some even more interesting differences. World news receives two and half times as much coverage in the UK than in the US, and even Canada publishes approximately 30% more World news (proportionally) than the US. Instead of World news the US devotes its attention to Sports (2.5 times more than the UK) and domestic news (Nation).

Domestic news (Nation) is lowest in Canada, which also gives the most space/time to Entertainment. Business and technology are very similar in all three countries. Health is the smallest category everywhere.

So what does this tell us? Well, it would seem that the stereotypical cliches are all true. America is obsessed with itself; nothing much happens in Canada; and Britain still believes it can punch above its weight on the world stage.

Yesterday shortly after leaving the National Portrait Gallery I came across the following scene in Trafalgar Square:

Click the image above for a larger view

Two people sitting in a glass box and alternately reciting dates (years only) to the perplexed crowd passing by.

This mind-numbing activity was explained on the back of a postcard, which someone was handing out, as follows:

On Kawara Reading One Million Years
Presented by the South London Gallery in Trafalgar Square

8am 29 March - 8am 5 April 2004

An epic work of conceptual art by the acclaimed Japanese artist, On Kawara, is presented in the UK for the first time in Trafalgar Square. A continuous reading lasting seven days and nights from the artist's ten-volume work, One Million Years, takes extracts from Past, listing every year from 998,031 BC to 1969 AD, and Future, listing the years 1980 AD to 1,001,980 AD. On Kawara's work speaks simply and directly about a subject relevant to us all, the passage and marking of time.

Some brief on-line research indicates that the work was reported in the Guardian last week. Performance art that's defiantly dated, revealed that the recital is to be released as a four-volume limited edition boxed CD set. So if you miss the event itself, you know what to put on your Christmas list.

In the meantime, a selection of the public's responses can be read in Let us begin. When asked if it made him think about time, John, 26, from Wimbledon, said "Well, I had a look at my watch a minute ago."

Thursday was April Fool's Day of course.

Last week the long-list for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize (Britain's "most important" prize for non-fiction) was announced, and I just happen to be reading one of the nominees at the moment — A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton by Kate Colquhoun.

Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) was the 6th Duke of Devonshire's gardener, and he became famous as the architect of the Crystal Palace, home to Britain's first international exhibition of industrial accomplishment, The Great Exhibition of 1851.

Chiswick House, London

Initially Paxton worked for the Duke of Devonshire at Chiswick House, which is approximately a mile from where we live in west London. According to English Heritage, which now manages the property, "Chiswick House is the first and finest 18th century Palladian villa in the country". It was built in 1728, and was essentially the Duke's country house closest to London.

Not much appears to be known about Paxton's early career at Chiswick, but having read about its garden and greenhouse in his biography, Sudsy Dame and I walked over on Sunday to have a look. According to Colquhoun:

Domed conservatory in the Italian garden

When the 5th Duke of Devonshire inherited the house, he commissioned Wyatt to add two substantial wings to the building and, in 1813, the 6th Duke, wealthy enough to indulge his passion for building and for horticulture, gilded the velvet-hung staterooms and commissioned Lewis Kennedy to create a formal Italian garden. Samuel Ware — later the architect of the Burlington Arcade — built a 300-foot long conservatory in the formal garden, backed by a brick wall, with a central glass and wood dome. In time, it would be filled with the recently introduced camellias which, along with the exotic animals, captured the very height of Regency fashion.

Interior view of the conservatory.

In a subsequent footnote, Colquhoun writes:

The Italian garden, the conservatory and many of the original camellia plants still exist at Chiswick House Gardens, London, W4. The first book on the subject of the camellia appeared in 1819, Monograph on the genus Camellia by Samuel Curtis, and listed 29 varieties being grown in England.

Click on the image above for a larger view.

Well as you can see, the camellias are still blooming. It is amazing to think that these shrubs have grown here for almost two hundred years, but we saw one label stating 1823 and another citing 1795. Despite the genteel decay that now pervades Chiswick House and its garden, the flowers remain magnificent. It's yet another example of how history is positively tangible in this crowded, over-developed part of the world.

Well, I guess it would have happened sooner or later: Londoners learn to love their grits.

The 10th annual orchid festival at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, opened yesterday and orchids exposed is proving very popular. Today the Princess of Wales Conservatory was crowded with orchid fans, which made viewing the impressive displays rather difficult at times, but it was still well worth it.

The six-foot tall Phalaenopsis swan.

The exhibition is sponsored by the cruise ship company, Swan Hellenic, and someone had the bright idea of constructing a giant swan out of white Phalaenopsis orchids. As you might expect, it's displayed prominently at the entrance to the exhibition.

The same flowers were used quite artfully in the main display around a pool of giant carp. A large group of moth orchids were placed as if they'd just fallen out of an enormous terracotta urn.

There must be thousands of orchids on display in this exhibition, which runs for the next month; and if you can visit on a weekday you might even be able to enjoy the numerous blooms without the thousands of amateur orchidologists.

The Pitons, St Lucia

This week's edition of The New Yorker magazine has an interesting article on Derek Walcott, the nobel laureate from the Caribbean island of St Lucia. Here's an excerpt:

As a young man, Warwick [Derek's father] worked as a copyist at the Education Office. (Subsequently, he worked for St. Lucia's Attorney General and Acting Chief Justice.) At night and on weekends, Warwick painted, read Shakespeare and Dickens, and gathered around him like-minded friends, who put on amateur theatricals. One of the members of this group, which Warwick christened the Star Literary Club, was Alix Maarlin [subsequently Derek's mother], the daughter of Johannes van Romondt, a white estate owner on St. Maarten, and Caroline Maarlin, a brown woman. Alix had moved to St. Lucia as a young girl, apparently to finish her schooling. Her guardian, a Dutch trader, was part of a small clan who helped establish the Methodist presence on St. Lucia. Alix, too, practiced Methodism, which was practically a cult on the Catholic-dominated island.

Many of my paternal ancestors were prominent Methodists in the Caribbean. It's amusing to think that they were at the centre of a "cult". It explains a lot!

Writing in The Spectator this week Victoria Lane had nothing but praise for her recent skiing holiday at Whistler, British Columbia:

…Now this is all very nice, but a distraction from the main point of Whistler. This is not the skiing or the snowboarding, but the service. The service! You are bombarded with attention. In the ski-hire shops there are more assistants than customers, and they treat you with incredible solicitude, inquiring lovingly after your toes.

All the attention, combined with the upbeat demeanour of Whistler's workers, was too much for one of Victoria's friends:

Another of my companions was having a struggle. Everyone was too cheerful, and it was putting him in bad humour. "They tax everything here," he observed at one point. "They should tax happiness — that would sort them out." He reminisced fondly about a skiing holiday in a small town in Spain, which was run by a family or company called Crap. There was the Crap restaurant, the Crap bar, the Crap ski-hire. Oh for something Crap!

Her friend is right. In terms of happiness, most Canadians are incredibly rich.

The Woman's Hour web page

…is not the question. Instead, it seems to be when? The BBC Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour discussed the subject of "late motherhood" the other day, and all kinds of passionate opinions were expressed during the phone-in about the dilemma faced by modern women in choosing between children and a career.

Isn't it odd how the tables have turned? Twenty years ago, when my generation was just about to graduate from university, preganancy was almost the worst thing that could happen to a girl. Now, the inability to have children is the great tragedy of my age group. From one extreme to the other in 20 years. Hindsight is often considered a wonderful thing, but what will we tell our daughters to do when it's their turn to choose?

The New Year has started strongly on BBC Radio 4, with several thought-provoking programmes:

Last week In Business examined why so few novels are set in the world of work, and attempted to explore the consequences for both business and society. As presenter Peter Day said "fiction normally shuns the working world or is deeply suspicious of it". He wanted to investigate "why creative types don't respond to this thing called work".

Fiammetta Rocco, literary editor of the Economist, was interviewed and expressed a feeling I've had for a long time:

"We've really lost that sense that business is about progress and doing good. There's no sense of that anymore. It's very, very hard when people don't feel strongly about something to create fiction out of it."

Peter Day then pointed out that:

"The way business is presented to people is part of the culture. If decent people think that it's not a subject that engages the imagination, or the intelligence, or the humanity of themselves, and don't go into business, then you kind of get the second-raters all joining up for it. So we need decent artistic representation of the business world."

However, the hottest tip of the year came from Rocco:

"We do review a lot of fiction in the Economist. We review it every single week and I'm always looking for great books. But a book that really told a story that developed a fantastic hero, that armed itself with this person's struggles and fears and difficulties and problems and triumphed in the end, in a business setting would be truly fantastic. I think that one of the enormous difficulties that exist now is that we're more comfortable with the idea of business than we may have been in the 19th century, and that makes it much harder to explore, it's a much bigger challenge to create something which is subtle and interesting and not a caricature. Somebody should do it."

So there you go. There's still time for one more New Year's resolution — write a great novel about business. For inspiration, here are a few of the authors or novels mentioned in the programme:

• Hard Times by Charles Dickens.
• The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope.
• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos.
• Nice Work by David Lodge.
• Free to Trade by Michael Ridpath.
• Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.

From Radio Canada International's Cyberjournal for January 9, 2004:

IT'S COLD IN CANADA

Several regions of Canada are enduring extreme cold conditions. The cold has led to the deaths of at least five people in Western Canada. Areas of the central provinces of Ontario and Quebec also are enduring severe cold. The temperature reached -39 Celsius in the northwestern town of Royun-Noranda, Qué, on Friday. Eastern Canada also is experiencing extreme cold.

Last night Channel 4 broadcast a programme titled Britain's Real Monarch, in which Tony Robinson (of Time Team and Blackadder fame) presented the theory that the current Queen is not the rightful heir to the throne.

It seems that substantial evidence suggests that Edward IV was illegitimate, and that the crown should have passed instead to his half-brother George, the Duke of Clarence; and subsequently to a completely different family line than those of the Tudors, the House of Hanover and the House of Windsor.

Robinson concluded that the history of Britain might have been very different if the "real" King George I had succeeded to the throne in 1461. Without Henry VIII England might have remained a Catholic country, and the United Kingdom might never have been formed if an independent Scotland had retained its own monarch.

Selina, Countess of Huntingdon.

The programme's web site contains a full family tree that illustrates both the present and alternative royal lines. If you follow the alternative line closely you will see that King Theophilus II should have succeeded to the throne in 1705. In 1728 he married Selina Shirley, aka the Countess of Huntingdon, who converted to Methodism in 1738 and went on to establish many non-conformist chapels and eventually founded her own "connexion" within the Methodist church.

So if Theophilus had been King, Selina would have been Queen, and Methodism might have become the dominant denomination in England. Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, once called the "Queen of Methodists", would have been Queen of England too.

For more information on Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, see Making History: The Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion or The Elect Lady by Gilbert W. Kirby.

The International Herald Tribune deserves to be more widely read, particularly the online edition. Not only does it have the best design of any newspaper on the web, with really useful features such as "Clippings", but it also has some extremely knowledgeable writers on its staff, including Patricia Wells and Souren Melikian.

Yesterday the IHT published an article that warms the cockles of my heart. In London's restaurant revolution Roger Collis wrote:

Today, eating out in London is better than eating out in Paris; food here has become some of the best in the world in a relatively short period of time - an incredible revolution, similar to that in New York, because of the nature of the way people live today and the diversity of ethnic food.

Good food in Britain is really not news these days. London in particular has had first rate restaurants for at least a decade. Instead the heart warming element of Collis' article comes later when he quotes Tim and Nina Zagat, publishers of several well-known restaurant guides:

"…one thing that can destroy a good experience or make a modest experience into a good one is hospitality, not service, when you are made welcome by someone who looks like they're glad to see you. Hospitality can make or break an experience. It's the weak link everywhere we have surveyed - at any level. People are either nice or they're not nice."

Nina Zagat adds: "There are no schools for hospitality and training here or in the States as there are for chefs. Sixty-seven percent of complaints in our London survey related to service; while the combined complaints about the food, parking, smoking, noise, crowding, everything else, was only about 30 percent. That tells you the problem. The industry should hire nice people, hire for hospitality and understanding.

"Danny Meyer, who owns the Union Square Café, voted the most popular restaurant in New York in our 2004 New York City Restaurants Survey, says that his secret is to hire by what he calls the 'Audrey Rule,' people he thinks his wife, Audrey, would like. 'I can train people to do things properly,' he says, 'but I can't train them to be nice, hospitable.'"

Nice people win out in the end. That's a world-view in which I desparately want to believe, so it's great to see there's a least one business where it's finally being recognised. Of course, I'd argue that all service businesses will eventually realise that nice people are crucial for commercial success, all else being equal.

The only remaining question is how do you test for niceness? We can't all get to know Audrey.

From Thoughts in Westminster Abbey by Joseph Addison (1672-1719):

When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

I've written previously about Mark's Mailbox, the letters section of Canadian journalist Mark Steyn's web site, but I just had to share the following excerpt from a piece of fan mail published there this week:

Mark, I'm a long-time reader going back to National Post. As it happens, I'm a Canadian actuary currently living and working in Trinidad, a beautiful and wonderful country where we get garbage pick-up 4 times a week, no limit on number of bags or anything, no recycling, they take it all, and you couldn't find nicer, more courteous guys - stark contrast from that socialist paradise Chrétien is so proud of, where the unions have the run of the place…

Gene Dziadyk
Westmoorings by the Sea
Trinidad, West Indies

People are strange. Since when is a great place to live defined by the frequency of the garbage collection? How much rubbish does Mr. Dziadyk produce in a average week? And when did a failure to recycle become a good thing?

On the other hand, perhaps the lack of recycling is a good thing in Trinidad. Some years ago, a Rough Guide television programme about Trinidad was broadcast, in which the country's poor were shown crawling all over the municipal dump in search of things to use or sell. The narrator explained that this shocking behaviour was necessary because Trinidad had no welfare system for its unemployed whatsoever. So the lack of recycling presumeably means better pickings for Trinidad's poor.

The saying one man's rubbish is another man's gold clearly applies in this case; not just to Trinidad's poor, but also apparently to Mr. Dziadyk.

PS - What deluded developer came up with the name Westmoorings by the Sea? It sounds like it should be in Sussex; not near Port-of-Spain, Chaguaramas, Guayaguayre, or Tunapuna. It would be just as appropriate to call the place Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

Speaking of Camembert, a review of Camembert: A National Myth by Pierre Boisard was published this week in the Guardian:

Pierre Boisard seeks to show how, over the past 150 years or so, the cheese has been ruined: industrialised, homogenised, delocalised and, finally, pasteurised - and all without the assistance of American multinational corporations. It's almost wholly an indigenous French story: the Camembert producers made it into the national cheese - the most popular and best-selling of any cheese in France - and then into an internationally recognised and traded commodity. Camembert is a gripping read, and if it winds up using cheese as a perspicuous site for understanding the making of modernity, well, there are lots of other cheese books which really are just about cheese.

So it seems the French weren't such cheese-eating surrender monkeys after all. Cheese-eating, yes; but they practised modern methods of globalization and began conquering the commercial world long before Coca-Cola or McDonald's.

The Marriage Contract by William Hogarth

The Eonomist's New York Briefing arrived in my inbox this morning and it contained the following statistic:

New York has more single people than any other state, with most of them living in the city, according to a report released in October by the US Census Bureau. The city's five boroughs boast some 2.4m people who have never walked down the aisle. And the New York metropolitan area ranks fifth in the country for its number of young singles with degrees.

That explains the article Love For Sale by Rebecca Mead in last week's New Yorker magazine, which reviewed the book Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School by Rachel Greenwald.

I suppose it's one way of putting your education to practical use; and who knows, perhaps this approach will breathe new life into the flagging business book sector.

I had no idea that an election was imminent in Toronto until I read about it in this weekend's Financial Times of all places: Election is a turning point for Toronto.

Having not lived in Toronto for 11 years, I found the following excerpt interesting:

Canada's largest and richest urban centre goes to the polls on Monday to elect a mayor amid a pervasive sense of decline. Once lauded across North America as a beacon of intelligent urban development, US academics and civic leaders would come and gaze in wonder at "the city that works".

But rising crime, traffic gridlock and growing homelessness have quashed that sense of easy superiority.

"In the past decade or so there has been a slow wearing down of the infrastructure. The level of dynamism on the cultural and economic front is also not what it was," says Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto.

Somehow I had a feeling that Toronto had declined culturally. I'm not sure why I would get that feeling, given that I've only been back three times in the last decade. I guess it's just the lack of good news: a weakened TSO, the usual chronic disarray at the CBC, and still no new opera house on the scene. Whatever happened to progress?

Adam Gopnik writing seriously in The New Yorker about this newsworthy greeting, which promted the headline "Laura braves weasel kiss!", offered the following suggestion:

A good piece of advice for the weasel-bashers would be that, every time France makes their blood boil, they should substitute the magically pacifying word "Canada." For the truth is that the Canadians — who, last time we checked, kissed a woman's hand only when they couldn't get at her face through all the winter wear — have virtually the same policy of emphatic non-participation in the war on Iraq.

Obviously, Chirac was just thinking of that old saying a bird in the hand is worth two in the Bush.

These days some of the most interesting writing, both on and off the web, is about cultural exchange, by which I mean people writing about their experiences as they visit or live in new places. One of my latest weblog discoveries, dervala.net, is a good example.

Dervala is an Irish casualty of the US dot.com bust, and she's spent the last few months living alone on the shore of Lake Superior, discovering life in the Canadian wilderness. Previously Dervala lived and worked in Manhattan with everything she could possibly want right on her doorstep. Now, she carefully plans her grocery shopping in advance because the nearest store is an hour and a half's drive away in Sault Ste Marie.

Until recently that is, because Dervala is on the move again. This time she's on her way to visit her sister in Ottawa, but she continues to write about and post her adventures along the way.

Dervala's writing is crisp and imaginative, and the thought of her trapped in an office job seems like a terrible waste of good talent. A retrospective trawl through her weblog is an impressively good read.

Canada has a disproportionately low profile in the UK in my opinion. Australia, which is much farther away, is frequently in the news and kept at the front of British minds, thanks to among other things, the popular Antipodean daytime soap-opera Neighbours. Canada on the other hand is hardly ever mentioned, being judged by the UK's media and "chattering classes" as too dull.

But perhaps that perception is beginning to change? Not only has the Economist recognised Canada's hidden depths, but yesterday BBC Radio 4's Sunday morning current affairs show, Broadcasting House, aired an interview (available for the next 6 days; RealPlayer required) with the outspoken mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman. He can hardly be considered dull, having confessed to being afraid of Kenyans boiling him alive.

So thanks to Canada's emerging liberalism and some of its less tactful politicians (Ralph Klein, the Premier of Alberta, is another that comes to mind), Canada may finally be shaking off its reputation for being boring.

The British will soon need to find another country for that old joke:

Canada's a fabulously beautiful country. Wonderful place to visit. But not for the whole weekend.

P.S. - The Lastman interview occurs 51 minutes into the programme.

I read this today, the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States, and it seemed appropriate to just post it:

Hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people. Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We need this badly; America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home. We can't go on much longer depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage-taking to “bring us together.”

Florence King (b. 1936), U.S. humorist, essayist, social critic.
From Why I Am a Royalist, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye p. 125, New York, St. Martin's Press (1989).

Salon.com reports that American immigration to Canada may be increasing (see Salon.com Life | Discontented Americans consider Canada).

It's amazing how irrational human beings can be. Most cite Canada's health care system as a positive reason for immigrating, and yet until recently hospitals in Toronto were one of the best places in the world to catch SARS. Others like Canada's gun control laws, and yet in recent months Canadians have been up in arms (excuse the pun) about the country's exceedingly expensive gun control registry. One Minnesotan even wants to go for the Canadian climate! She dreamily described Vancouver as "Green all year, no mosquitos".

Given that more Canadians continue to move to America each year than vice versa, I guess the grass really is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Some people claim that Canada becomes more like the United States every day, but the Washington Post published an article on Canada Day that argues against that trend: Whoa! Canada! Legal Marijuana. Gay Marriage. Peace. What the Heck's Going On Up North, Eh?.

It refers to a best-selling Canadian book titled Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values which includes a New Yorker cartoon showing a man and woman enjoying drinks before dinner. The man says, "You seem familiar, yet somehow strange -- are you by any chance Canadian?"

For more on the reaction to this book see The Christian Science Monitor and The Nation.

Anyone interested in the Arts should be reading ArtsJournal.com at least weekly. The New York Times has published an article (see Conversing on the Arts by Clicking a Mouse) about its editor and founder, Douglas McLennan (a Canadian now living in Seattle), who recently wrote an interesting article on the perceived decline in cultural importance of classical music (see Requiem).

Also interesting is The Do Re Mi's of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences by Peter J. Rentfrow and Samuel D. Gosling in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 2003, Volume 84, Number 6. Unfortunately, it's not online, so you can only read about the research in The Age: You probably think this song is about you ....

Of course the idea that your taste in music can reveal your personality is the premise behind Desert Island Discs.

It's a commonly expressed idea that as technology shrinks the world, we are all bound to become more alike. However, the major literary event of the week (year?) in the English speaking world seems to prove this assumption wrong.

International media coverage of the launch of J. K. Rowling's latest novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, has revealed significant cultural differences between at least three countries with which I'm familiar.

In Britain the BBC was quick to report on a new world record, as if it might re-establish Britain's place on the world stage (see Potter 'is fastest-selling book ever' from the BBC).

In the USA, where the culture is business, the focus was naturally on the sales volume and money. National Public Radio advised its listeners on whether or not they should buy shares in Rowling's American publisher, Scholastic, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (see Harry Potter and the Pitfalls of Success, but take care -- there are apparently better buys on the NYSE).

NPR also reported that given the staggering 8.5 million copies of the book being printed in the US, Saturday Night Live had joked that Rowling's next book should be titled 'Harry Potter and the End of Trees'.

Trees concerned the Canadians too, but they had good news to report since many were saved by printing all 935,000 Canadian editions on recycled paper (see Harry Potter goes green for Canadian buyers).

Who says cultural differences are disappearing? Everyone is behaving true to form.

There's been a lot of news about the recession currently affecting businesses in Silicon Valley, but I bet you can't guess what business is still booming there -- the fantasy world of Thomas Kinkade.

I don't know when I first discovered his incredibly kitsch paintings, but recently I was stunned to discover he has a gallery in London. I should have known better, because it's only one of five galleries that feature his work here in the UK.

Today, just by chance, I discovered that the BBC's Peter Day reported on Kinkade's multimillion-dollar business, Media Arts Group Inc. which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, in a 30-minute programme on In Business (you will need Realaudio software to hear the programme). It's well worth listening to if you're at all interested in the interaction of art and business, but it's also amusing to hear Peter Day struggling to contain his disbelief. How could such syrupy and sentimental representations of a completely fictional landscape be so popular?

The inevitable conclusion of course is that there's no accounting for taste (just the money!), but it's also clear that Kinkade's work is as intentionally commercial as anything Hollywood might produce. In fact, the more time you spend looking at his paintings the more familiar they seem. Where have I seen this before? ... Ah, I know. Kinkade is painting the flip side of The Lord of the Rings. His landscapes portray the best parts of Middle-earth; all the safe, twee places where Hobbits live. No wonder he's making a fortune.

More snow, more umbrellas.

Friday is the deadline for filing your 2001/02 tax return here in the UK and as usual I've left it to the last minute. Well, almost the last minute. I filed my return today using the Inland Revenue's on-line filing service for the first time.

The system worked well for me, despite receiving some bad press earlier in the year regarding its security. I was able to complete the tax return form quite easily and more quickly than in previous years because the system only asked me questions that are relevant to my tax situation. I didn't have to read the entire form in order to work out which bits apply to me. Also, it calculated my tax bill immediately, which inspired a degree of confidence that didn't exist in the past. Previously it was difficult to know if you had completed the return correctly simply because there was no way of checking it without consulting a tax professional. Now, it's checked and the numbers crunched in a matter of seconds, and when it turns out as you expected, it's all very reassuring.

Although the deadline for filing is January 31st, the tax year always ends on April 5th in the UK, and a few weeks ago I wondered how this odd year-end came to be. Thanks to the Internet, I found out. The Notes & Queries section of the Guardian once asked the same question, and Luke of Birmingham had an interesting reply:

The calendar year used to start in March. Hence "September" (7th), "October", "November" (9th) and "December" (10th). Perhaps the first month of the year was set aside for producing accounts, end of year reconciliations, business plans, mission statements and blue-skies thinking - all important elements of a successful Roman business. Quis enumerabit ipsos fabarum enumeratores?

However, the definitive answer must be that of the Inland Revenue itself, which much to my surprise includes the question on its FAQ:

7. Why does the tax year start on April 6?

The reason for the tax year running from 6 April to 5 April is primarily historical and has its origin in the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. It had been calculated in the 16th Century that the Julian calendar had lost 9 days since its introduction in 46 BC. Most of Europe changed to the new, more accurate, Gregorian calendar in 1582, but this country continued with the old one until September 1752 by which time the error had increased to 11 days. These 11 days were 'caught up' by being removed from the calendar altogether - 2 September was followed by 14 September. In order not to lose 11 days' tax revenue in that tax year, though, the authorities decided to tack the missing days on at the end, which meant moving the beginning of the tax year from the 25 March, Lady Day, (which since the Middle Ages has been regarded as the beginning of the legal year) to 6 April. The dates were adopted for income tax on its re-imposition in 1842 and have not changed since.

I received a new driving licence today, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) included the following note:

Important Notice
Plastic Wallets

DVLA no longer issue plastic wallets with photocard driving licenses. This decision was taken primarily to help minimise the administrative costs of issuing licenses to the public. The Agency has also received numerous complaints from members of the public about the size of the plastic wallet [my emphasis]. Consequently, many drivers discard the wallet and use a different way of protecting their licence.

Please note: Old plastic wallets sent in to the Agency cannot be returned.

Who on earth would go to the trouble of complaining about the plastic wallet supplied with your driver's licence? If you don't like it, discard it by all means, but complain? Why? Do you really think the civil servants working at the DVLA care whether you like it or not? What a complete waste of time.

Who said the British don't like to complain? Clearly that's not true anymore.

P.S. - I'm pleased to say I didn't return my old plastic wallet, so I still have one; but please don't tell the DVLA!

It's been unusually cold and wintry in London the last few days (cold is relative - around here it means 0°C). In fact, we woke to a light dusting of snow yesterday morning, but it had all gone by the end of the day. This morning it snowed quite heavily for a couple of hours and there is now an inch and a half collected on the ground and in our garden.

As I watched the midday news on television, I noticed something that struck me as very odd when I first moved to the UK ten years ago. One of the reporters taped his report while the snow was falling at its heaviest, and he was pictured holding an umbrella above his head while speaking. He's not the first person I've seen behaving so strangely. What makes the British think that an umbrella is appropriate protection from all types of precipitation?

To a Canadian, fending off the snow with an umbrella just looks ridiculous. After all, snow doesn't make you wet unless it melts, and that doesn't happen until you go inside a warm building. Besides, blowing snow easily circumvents any umbrella, making it useless. Think about it. When was the last time you saw pictures of any Inuit (aka Eskimos) carrying umbrellas? You didn't, because they don't. Umbrellas are pointless in the snow, and the fact that the British attempt to use them just shows you how unprepared they are for real winter when it occasionally hits them.

[Update - Various news organisations have reported that the snowfall in London today was the heaviest for nine years.]

When I was studying Psychology at university 20 years ago, one of my professors told me that after much consideration he had concluded that most natural phenomena and all human behaviours are cyclical. "Everything", he said, "waxes and wanes."

He cited the example of a driver given a ticket for speeding. Having been penalised, the driver reduces his speed in order not to get punished again. After a while, however, the driver forgets about his previous violation, and the effect of the punishment wears off. Consequently his speed begins to creep up to its previous, normal level, and before long he gets caught speeding once again. The second penalty produces the same response as the original punishment - the driver once again reduces his speed, but again only temporarily. In this way the cycle repeats itself continuously.

An article in the most recent weekend edition of the Financial Times made me wonder if this pattern is applicable to property. In What your money can buy in Britain's best place to live journalist Christian Dymond "finds out what is selling - and who is buying - in the Northumberland market town of Alnwick".

The article caught my eye because last November I celebrated Thanksgiving with friends who currently live in the village of Longhoughton, Northumberland, which is less than four miles from Alnwick. At the time I was surprised to learn that Alnwick had recently been chosen as the best place to live in Britain, but the FT article confirms the story and attributes it to a recent survey in Country Life magazine (let's simply ignore the implicit assumption that the best place to live has to be in the "country").

History, relatively low house prices, location, local identity, a low crime rate, schooling, health care and the local farmers market all contributed to Alnwick's pole position. Alnwick Castle, used as a location for the two Harry Potter films, has been the seat of the Dukes of Northumberland since 1309, while its £7m garden project has brought major benefits to the town.

A final, clinching attribute, said Country Life, was that Northumberland is projected to have a smaller increase in new households over the next 20 years than any other county. Until 2006, at least, the figure given by Northumberland County Council is about 700 a year. And that is in a county of 2,000 square miles, with a population of just over 300,000, the majority of whom live in the south-east corner.

So, Alnwick has been chosen as the best place to live in Britain because few people are going to live there. Alnwick is popular because it will remain unpopular - or at least relatively unpopulated, for whatever reason - in the future.

I like that circular irony very much, and if it's true, we can predict with some confidence that Alnwick will cease being the best place to live once it has become sufficiently popular to attract lots of people. What goes around, comes around. Everything waxes and wanes.

Recently while in New York, my wife and I saw the production of La Bohème directed by Baz Luhrmann and currently playing on Broadway. This production has attracted a lot of media attention, not only because it's directed by Luhrmann, currently one of Hollywood's favourite directors, but also because it's sung in the original Italian, features young, classically trained singers, and is playing on Broadway, an unusual location for "traditional" opera in New York.

My wife and I both enjoyed the performance, which was clearly the source for much of the style and content of Luhrmann's film Moulin Rouge (this production of La Bohème is largely 13 years old having been first produced by Australian Opera in 1989). However, we wondered about the use of microphones during the performance. We couldn't decide if all the singers' voices were amplified or not. In the end we concluded they were all wearing microphones, but were perhaps being amplified to different degrees at different times. There was no doubt that the production's sound quality was given a great deal of care and attention. Amplified voices are normally very easy to detect in traditional theatres, but in this case it really required some careful listening to work out what was going on.

A few days after we attended a matinée performance, Anthony Tommasini, writing in The New York Times, criticised the production's use of amplification (see Look What They're Doing to Opera):

...from a musical perspective, many veteran opera buffs will be dismayed, as I was, by the compromises the production has made, most grievously in its use of body microphones to amplify the singers and two digital sampling keyboards to fill in the instrumental textures that the meager (for Puccini) 26-piece orchestra leaves blank. Newcomers to opera who think they are experiencing the real thing are not.

The amplification of "La Bohème" at the Broadway Theater is far more subtle than the blasting sound systems so common at musicals these days. Still, the actual voices are flattened into an amplified wall of sound, and the spatial element of operatic singing, with voices coming from different locations on the stage, is completely undermined. It's sometimes difficult, especially in the crowd scenes, to tell who is singing without checking to see whose lips are moving. And the voices are thrust at you, even those of the milk maids who, as they pass the city gates in Act III, sing a wistful little tune that is supposed to be subdued and gentle.

I'd agree that amplification certainly does change the sound, but I am not convinced that it is necessarily worse. Some singers struggle to project their voice in large, modern venues, so the "subdued and gentle" sounds can be very difficult to hear. Furthermore, who's to say what the "real thing" is in opera? Like all art forms, opera has changed over time, and the characteristics and conditions typical of Monteverdi are not the same as those of Bizet or Strauss. How do we know that Mozart wouldn't have embraced the microphone had he been given the chance? Opera fans should not be distracted by concerns about the illusory "real thing"; instead, they should jump at this chance to see the latest thing. It's unlikely to be around forever.

Some reflections on being in America:

• At breakfast in the Brooklyn Diner on 57th Street Bing Crosby is singing about "tidings of comfort and joy", while the headline in the New York Times states "Bush has widened authority of C.I.A. to kill terrorists". Some tidings, some joy.
• The Borders bookstore on Broadway states books are sorted "Alphabetical by Aurthor".

December is going to be a busy month. I haven't posted anything to this weblog as yet, and the rest of the month doesn't look good, given that my wife and I will soon be in the US for two weeks.

I'm looking forward to our trip, despite the travelling and, what I assume will be, increased scrutiny from US customs and immigration officials. It will be a chance to take stock of the public mood at an unusual time of year in an unique period of US history.

Luckily for me, BBC 4 has just begun the re-broadcast of Alistair Cooke's 1972 television series on the history of America (see Alistair Cooke: America 30 Years On), so I can brush up on all the US history I never learned. Episode one was televised tonight and the series continues for the next twelve days. Unfortunately we'll have left before it finishes, so I'll have to record some of the episodes that we miss.

Yesterday, while waiting in line for the cashier at the grocery store I looked to my left and right. On my right were lots of exotic convenience foods, such as single servings of Thai pineapple rice, and on my left I saw "instant Miso soup", "Organic Japanese green tea" and bottles of Sake. This was in a small urban branch of Sainsbury's, although admittedly it was in central London.

I can't think of an aspect of British life that has changed as much as food in the last three decades. If you transported someone here from even 1980 they wouldn't recognise the country's culinary choices at all. Prospect magazine wants to provoke a debate and so has asked Did British food really get better? It's an interesting question. There can be no doubt that British food has changed.

An acquaintance of mine, Yann Martel, won the Man Booker prize last night for his novel Life of Pi. His life will almost certainly never be the same. As I write, he's being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme Today after having been up all night partying somewhere in London.

The best newspaper coverage has been in the Guardian. The day before the winner was announced, novelist and prize judge Russell Celyn Jones wrote (Read between the hype):

The whole point of the Booker prize is to bring attention and new readers to such books that would otherwise struggle in a market dominated by commercial fiction. Life of Pi is a good example.

More can found in the following two Guardian stories. The first, more interesting piece, is about Yann; the second focuses on the prize itself.

• Third time lucky
• Magical realist triumphs - but behind the scenes it's the same old story

I can't comment on his book because I haven't read it. I hardly ever read fiction. Real life is so fascinatingly bizarre who needs to make stuff up?

Earlier this month Martin Kettle questioned the current state of the piano recital in the pages of The Guardian (Why are today's concert pianists so boring?), and Susan Tomes responded in kind by suggesting that the modern music business is the cause of the pianists' demise (The visonary thing).

It seems however, that this complaint is not new. Arts & Letters Daily has compiled a number of links to celebrate the work of Glenn Gould, who would have turned 70 today had he lived. Among them is an essay written in 1983 by Denis Dutton (The Ecstasy of Glenn Gould):

Though the world of music and art has always been thought to thrive on novelty, history teaches us that it often rejects the imaginatively new simply because it is too new. Examples are limitless, but I have in mind something that interested me back in the late 1950s. It was then common to complain that virtually all of the younger generation of pianists (and not only pianists) were musically indistinguishable from one another. All very fine technically, so the story went, but what of spirit? They all played "like machines," devoid of temperament, of individual personality.

It looks like we could do with another Glenn Gould.

How do you like your toast? Delia Smith suggests:

"When the toast is done, remove it immediately to a toast rack. Why a toast rack? Because they are a brilliant invention. Freshly made toast contains steam, and if you place it in a vertical position, in which the air is allowed to circulate, the steam escapes and the toast becomes crisp and crunchy. Putting it straight on to a plate means the steam is trapped underneath, making it damp and soggy. If you don't possess a toast rack you really ought to invest in a modest one."

On the other hand I have just found the antidote for Delia's recipe in a recent Letter From America by Alistair Cooke. In writing about the lack of toast racks in America (!), he attributes the following quote to Mark Twain:

"In the heyday of the industrial revolution it took the mechanical genius of the English to devise a receptacle which guaranteed to deliver in the shortest possible time toast that was both cold and hard."

I'm with Mark Twain.

Nick Denton has written an interesting piece on The myth of American efficiency, and it has motivated me to write about a similar subject, one that I've been thinking about for some time and might be called The myth of British resistance to change.

I moved to the UK ten years ago, in April 1992, and I've been thinking about the changes I've seen take place here during the last decade. The changes I have in mind are those that have occurred in the frequent, ordinary activities that fill daily life, and upon reflection I'm surprised to find they all appear to be positive improvements. Of course, this is very much a personal view, and other residents of the UK may not appreciate these changes to the same extent.

Retail Banking

I moved to Britain after accepting a job with a classical music agent in London, and one of the first things I needed to do was open a bank account. I visited my local branch of Barclays Bank thinking it would only take a few minutes to apply and deposit my savings, but quickly discovered that in Britain banking was not so simple. In addition to a lengthy application form, the bank required a letter from my employer confirming my employment and six weeks in which to process my application!

I couldn't believe this inefficiency. A few months earlier in Toronto, I had opened three accounts at the same bank within 15 minutes. I complained to my employer's accountant about the British delay, and she kindly called the manager at the company's bank (a different bank in a totally different part of London) who provided me with a chequing account by the end of the week (still poor service by Canadian standards).

(As an aside, I had a Kafkaesque experience a few years later when I returned to university. I negotiated a government-sponsored loan through Barclays Bank, which agreed to lend me the money on condition that I open an account. I did so immediately, and had access to the loan within two days. So whereas it took six weeks to deposit money, it only took 48 hours to borrow it!)

Ten years later, the vast majority of my banking is done electronically and the last account I opened was done so on-line without talking to a single bank employee. I now pay all my bills using the telephone or internet, only visiting a bank on the very odd occasion when someone sends me an increasingly rare cheque for deposit.

Retail Food Industry

Food retailing has been very competitive in the UK for years, but technology has really improved its customer service recently (see my previous blog on Re-engineering the Grocery Shopping). So much so, that I rarely visit any of the large grocery stores anymore (What bliss this is! I can't tell you how much I appreciate not having to waste time shopping!).

Telephone Bills

Ten years ago it was difficult to obtain an itemised telephone bill in Britain. Not only was it a special request, but all calls costing 40p or less were lumped together anyway. You could only obtain specific information about expensive, usually long-distance, calls. Now I can view my telephone bills on-line, including all the information about every single call, and pay them automatically via direct debit. The process has become truly paperless. I can even download all the information and manipulate it to my heart's content in my electronic spreadsheet to obtain a complete picture of how I use the telephone. We've gone from one extreme to the other; from not enough information to almost having too much.

Arts Marketing

When I first moved to the UK, arts organisations used to charge £5 annually for the privilege of adding you to their mailing list! Consequently, I did not subscribe to any such lists. Now, having obtained my name and address when I purchase tickets, they send me brochures and pamphlets regularly for free. It took them a while, but British arts organisations now understand the need for self-promotion and they are beginning to learn how to do it. Fund raising will be next.

In all these ways living in Britain has improved. No doubt there are others as well. I know that many people complain about the deterioration in transportation and educational standards here, but these issues rarely affect me. Perhaps the key, no matter where you live, is to be selective. Seek out those things that work well wherever you are, and avoid those activities that don't work until they get better. Now I know why I don't own a car!

At the Victoria and Alberta Museum this afternoon, I came across an exhibit that asked people to write notes for the museum about their own personal collections. The question was "What do you collect?" Most of the responses were from school children, and the first one was as follows:

I collect ideas. Every now and then I change them. I throw the old ones away to make room for the new ones. Some ideas never change, they look old but they can be trusted. - George, London.

Can this amazing statement really be that of a child?

I turned on the radio this morning in the middle of a discussion about Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl Marx. It seems there's a play on in Hampstead based on the story of her life. I wonder how well she knew her neighbours (see below)?

The American Dialect Society has decided that the 2001 Word of the Year is the expression "9/11" in its various forms (e.g. nine eleven, 9.11, 9-11). It would be interesting to discover who first coined the phrase and the source of their inspiration, but I fear it's probably a simple case of laziness.

I suspect whoever it was tried to apply the same logic as "24/7" (an abbreviation for "24 hours a day, 7 days a week"). Except, of course, that they got it wrong. In the case of 24/7 the units of time increase; hours are followed by days which are followed by weeks. But 9/11 is the opposite; the units of time decrease. So, the logic isn't the same.

Of course, 9/11 is consistent with the standard US format for abbreviating the date in writing (i.e. month/day/year). But it seems strange that our spoken language should adopt the format of written English (or should I say "American"?). I was always taught that good writing should reflect the way we speak, but 9/11 is a case of speaking the way North Americans write. Here in Europe where the standard format is day/month/year, it's only due to the incredible speed of the modern-day news media that we have realised those appalling events did not take place on the 9th of November!

Now, I gather someone has used the term to define an entire generation. "Generation 9/11" includes all those students who entered school in September 2001. I guess they'll all talk like this:

"So, are you doing anything special for 12/25?"

"Yeah, I'm flying to Florida for 2 weeks. Leavin' on 12/24 and I'm gonna party 24/7 the whole time! But don't worry, I'll be back for your big bash on 1/1. "

"Man, you oughta be more careful. That's all so Sept 10th!"

From Radio Canada International's Cyberjournal:

"TORONTO: CANADIANS TAKE TO STREETS IN VICTORY There was jubilation among Canadian hockey fans Sunday as they celebrated the country's first Olympic men's hockey gold medal in half a century. Car horns blared and fans streamed into the streets moments after Team Canada notched a 5-2 win over the United States. In downtown Toronto, euphoric fans streamed down bustling Yonge Street, many clad in Canadian colours and draped in Maple Leaf flags. Some leaned precariously out of car windows, horns blaring. In Ottawa, police closed off streets in front of the Parliament buildings as a spontaneous parade made its way to the Peace Tower. In Montreal, traffic on Ste-Catherine Street was jammed for blocks. The street was awash in red and white flags and Team Canada togs in a display reminiscent of the 1995 referendum rally. Similar celebrations took place across the country. In a written statement, Prime Minister Chretien said the Canadian hockey team showed "matchless drive and talent" in winning the gold medal. The prime minister congratulated the team, saying Canada's men's and women's hockey teams have united the country "in a way that only hockey can bring us together." The women's team had earlier won gold, also against the US."

Why is the best-selling TV guide still called the "Radio Times"?