Recently in Culture Category

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.