Martial arts: check up and maintenace.

I’ve been getting fairly frustrated with my training recently. Inevitably after so many years the learning curve is going to flatten out. But I’ve often come away with the feeling that I’m actually getting worse. This may or may not be true but it isn’t a good feeling.

But last night I had a session where I felt as if I had progressed more in a half hour than I had in the previous three months.

One of my problems is that as a supposed ‘senior’, I tend to spend a lot of my training time teaching less experienced people. Doing so is a blessing in many ways because you don’t really get to understand something until you have to deconstruct it and explain it to someone else. But is has a downside too: If you don’t want to be the kind of bullying teacher who beats up on his students, you can end up with some bad habits. Like letting your opponents into openings so they can try moves out, or over-elaborating your moves so that you can demonstrate things, or breaking your flow to explain something.

Which are exactly the traps I seem to have fallen into. And it only took a half hour with my Sihing (elder brother) to point this out. Of course it’s going to take a lot longer to eradicate ingrained bad habits but at least I now know the cause of my frustrations.

It makes me quite realise how lucky I am to have found the school that I have: small private and old-skool with a high student retention rate. At most ‘McMartial Arts franchises’ I would long ago have been pushed out to teach my own students. But at our place, even though my own teacher (Sifu)is no longer around, with sixteen years training behind me, I still have maybe five or six Sihings who train regularly. And that keeps me (or gets me back) on course.

And it does make me wonder about all those ‘black belts’ that you will find running martial arts classes at just about every sports-hall in the country. If they are not regularly checked out and stretched by their seniors at best they are going stagnate, or worse, if they are not honest with themselves, develop some serious ego problems.

Plastic bags make strange bed fellows

My front yard is a magnet for a particular variety of bright blue plastic bags that are given away with EVERY purchase from the Turkish general stores we have in either direction on our street.

Cans of Special Brew and cheap imported Polish lager are the most common purchases - consumed pretty much on the spot and the unnecessary wrappers discarded almost instantly – into my hedge and yard.

Indoors we also seem to have accumulated more than a lifetime’s supply of plastic bags. I’m not sure if my partner is just an obsessive hoarder, or if she is making an environmental statement, but we never throw the fucking things away. And of course the council’s re-cycling service aren’t interested in them. We used to have one of those long sausage bags to store and dispense them – but we’ve long outgrown that and the unwanted plastic bags now leap out at us whenever we open a cupboard door.

So all of this, along obviously with the sea life being killed by the millions of bags dumped into our oceans, leads me to support the anti-plastic bag campaign of the Daily Mail. And M&S’s initiative to charge their customers for plastic bags. Now there’s something I never thought I’d see myself writing. Bloody hell.

Whatever happened to those brown papers bags and sacks that we see in the movies but never have in real life in this country ?

Opiate for the star struck

Is it just me or is there more than the usual amount of bollocks about the Oscars this year? When I turned on the TV before going to work this morning it was actually the lead item on the BBC breakfast news.

Possible explanations for this unjustified hype:

• Something serious is really going on in the world and this is just a diversion before we hear tomorrow that the invasion of Iran had begun.

• It’s part of a well orchestrated PR campaign by the film industry to down play the effect of the screen-writers’ strike.

• We have become a generation of morons: Celebrity is the new aristocracy and star–gazing the new religion.

I like films. But I don’t give a shit about stars or their industry awards or what they are wearing on the red carpet. Much as I don’t imagine they are too bothered about the packaging design or pre-press awards.

(I’m not in a good mood today).

Unfortunate tattoos

I don’t flaunt my tattoos at work but I don’t particularly hide them either. Consequently people tend to come up and talk to me about tattooing.

One guy recently proudly showed off some Kanji characters that he’d had on his bicep. Apparently they spelt out his daughter's name – Sharon. I tried to show a sort of non-committal politeness and conceal my feelings that it was total bollocks.

I’ve never heard of any Asian girls called Sharon so I’m guessing that it is spelt out pseudo-phonetically. Which of course is nonsense and liable to produce the kind of comic ambiguities that ended up recently with one girl being tattooed with what was dangerously similar to the name of a Hong Kong supermarket chain (which is actually funnier than simply the word ‘supermarket’ as reported by the BBC).

Having something tattooed that you can’t actually read just seems like a recipe for disaster. From my martial arts experience I know the huge arguments (and actual fights) that have raged for years over differing interpretations of the characters that represent my chosen style of Wing Chun – ‘Forever Spring’ or ‘Praise Spring’ or ‘Beautiful Spring’. And this is between people who can actually speak the language but where context is everything and interpretation is not literal but contextual.

There also seems something inherently disrespectful about appropriating an aspect of another culture and then using it out of context. Ironically there is a beautiful and fascinating tradition of Japanese tattooing (horimono) going back for centuries, and none of it, to my knowledge, uses characters.

Come to think of it, I’m really not convinced about any sort of lettering as the basis of a tattoo, even if you do understand the language. As a means of commemorating a loved one it shows a distinct lack of imagination, or maybe it just means that you’re not good with names and feel the need for a memory-aid.

A tale of two diaries

For the past four years I’ve been using a Molskine diary. Not in a Samuel Pepys sort of way, just as a practical organiser; I carry it everywhere because my memory is like a sieve.

Also, because I’m a bit sad that way, I keep the old ones in my desk at work in case I need to check back on the date of a meeting or something. Most of the time I don’t – which is why I only just remembered that they were there this morning. Flicking through them got me thinking:

I usually go for the version of the diary that has a week on one side and a blank page for notes opposite. Most of the stuff on the left hand (diary) side consists of the times of various meetings, deadlines for projects and domestic arrangements. On the right hand (notes) side the entries are titles of books and CDs I want to remind myself to buy, websites I want to remember, Harley Davidson parts numbers of stuff I need to order, little nuggets of information I have picked up whilst surfing at work – usually bikes, martial arts, politics or history – often they end up getting regurgitated in this blog.

What does it say about me that re-reading the right hand pages fills with memories and ideas, whilst reading the left hand side just makes me want to groan ? To paraphrase John Lennon: “Life happens when you’re busy not working”

Politicians with bottle

Politicians often talk about taking up a fight against something or other. But generally they’re a pretty wimpy bunch and don’t really mean it.

Which is why I loved the story about Obama-supporting Democrat congressman Jesse Jackson Junior (pictured here). After a row in the House with geeky conservative Republican Lee Terry, Jackson suggested that the pair of them ‘take it outside’.

Washington-insiders seem unanimous in the view that Jackson, a martial arts practitioner, would have kicked Terry’s ass.

Nice to see a return to principled, confrontational politics.

Bloody scooters

I find myself developing a loathing of scooters and their riders.

I don’t mean that in a mods and rockers kind of way. Funnily enough proper scooterists, the guys who run old Lambrettas and Vespas, and bikers rub along quite happily these days.

They even turn up at the same rallies and shows, we pass them on the roads to the coast, playing a kind of group leap-frog as they pull over at the roadside one breakdown after another. There is a kind of respect for their perversity in choosing a vehicle that is so mechanically unsuitable for long distance riding.

The scooter riders I loathe are the hoards of non-riders in London who have taken to two wheels to avoid the congestion charge and the horrors of public transport.

On the road they are a liability. Perhaps because they are supposedly easy to ride ‘twist and go’ machines, it is assumed that no training or skill is required. Or fucking common-sense either. So I constantly find them overtaking on the inside, cutting me up and generally entrenching the already homicidal feelings of four wheel users towards anyone on two.

It gets worse when they come to park.

Despite the massive increase in scooters, the London boroughs have not increased the number of bike-parks as this would mean turning over car parking spaces and losing revenue. So bikes and scooters are jammed in solid next to each other in the few bike-parks available. The scooters have no prop stands, and this along and with the engine over the rear-wheel, means they often can take up as much width as the heaviest touring bike.

The riders have no sense of biking etiquette or camaraderie: Four times now I’ve come back to my bike to find it damaged by scooters jammed in solid alongside it. I’ve had my speedo smashed, a mirror cracked, my number-plate broken in half and now scratches put down the side of my exhaust. And never once a note of apology or contact details left. On the other-hand I damaged a bike I was parked alongside last year. I felt mortified and obligated to do the right the thing. It cost me about £200 and a bottle of Jack Daniels, but I would expect any other biker to do the same in return.

Why don’t these tossers just learn to ride and get themselves a little trail bike for the city? Or better still, stay on the bus?

Sun ...& simple pleasures.

We are simple creatures at heart – well at least I am – and a bit of sunshine this weekend, a ‘false spring’ in fact, was all it took to put a smile on my face.

I had Friday off work to get my bike through the MOT test. For some reason every year I feel inexplicably nervous about my baby being examined. It passed, with an advisory note about the loud exhaust, the small number-plate and the solo seat fitted with pillion pegs. This is a very English ritual – the shop knows it’s bullshit – I know it’s bullshit – but it covers their arse if I get pulled over on my way back from the test.

I celebrated the fine weather and legal status by heading off to Cambridge. Had lunch in the Eagle and wondered around for a short while – always strange to return to somewhere you used to live and find that it has managed to carry on quite well without you. For a few minutes I am seduced by its charm and I get nostalgia for being student, then I hear a few braying voices and their uniquely penetrating irritation and I remember everything I hated about those students when I was one.

Saturday - off to the tattooist for the next part of my half-sleeve. It’s developing slowly bit by bit as I find suitable images from pieces of Celtic-Norse-Pictish-Saxon archaeology: Not only do the pieces have to appeal to me, they have to be suitable for tattooing and be able to fit together. They also have to avoid any of the associations with Aryan Brotherhood/neo-fascism which seems to has taken over much of this iconography.

It may be a form of masochism, but I love the whole process of being tattooed – the anticipation waiting around whilst the drawing and stencil is done, then the permanent design being applied, even the small talk whilst in the chair. And the after-glow of having acquired a new bit of personal art. Extra entertainment was provided this Saturday when the two very slight female staff cleared out half a dozen pissed-up football fans who weren’t happy to be told that they couldn’t turn up for an appointment in a drunken state. They handled the situation wonderfully, and I suspect that if it had been a bloke who had turned them away the whole situation would have turned ugly …

Sunday and I was on the bike again to see my parents down in Kent - open face helmet, shades, and a smile again.

See – it only takes a bit of sun.

Return to the tied-cottage & workhouse.

Housing Minister Caroline Flint wants to kick claimants out of social housing if they are able to work but not actively seeking employment. More compassionate ‘social justice’ from New Labour.

Before the Daily Mail digs up a story about some family with 12 kids who are caning the welfare system and make Shameless look like the Archers, I have to accept that such people do exist. And I wouldn’t fancy living next door to them. But I don’t see how making them homeless is going to improve the situation.

It’s not as if social housing is a charitable venture; only available to the deserving poor who if they misbehave forfeit their rights. Well actually that’s exactly how New Labour see it – and whether you call it ‘work-fare’ or whatever else, it is a return to the Victorian politics of the workhouse.

There’s a couple of very obvious reasons why much social housing has been turned into sink-estates for the poorest and most troubled sections of society. Housing benefit tends to be accepted only by councils and the very worst private landlords. And ever since we had the right-to-buy and the myth of the property owning democracy, the better off sections of the working class have moved away from social housing.

The vision of the sixties planners that council estates could provide a model for living (a mechanism of social justice in today’s bollock-speak) is now universally derided. But it was not the concept that was doomed to fail, housing and education can provide progressive social engineering (now there’s an apparently dirty word) but the vision failed because pro-market politicians chose to sabotage it.

Caroline Flint is tipped as a future rising star of New Labour. She’s definitely more photogenic than pudding-faced Brown. I remember her from Labour Students as an earnest and joyless Kinnock-ite careerist zealot. With her current Thatcherism and disregard for the most vulnerable I’m sure she’ll go far.

Grindhouse: DeathProof

Watched Tarantino’s Grindhouse feature DeathProof last night.

Su-fucking-perb.

Simply cannot understand how it hasn't been as well received as his previous offerings.

Of course it’s ridiculously self-indulgent. That’s the whole point. Not only is Tarantino referencing all those cult B-movies he watched as a clerk in a video store, he’s now referencing his own previous movies as well.

In the early 80’s I used to frequent what I imagine was a pretty similar video store. It was a couple of miles out of town, at the end of an unpaved track in a builder’s yard and over a 24hour mini-cab office, entered by a steel fire escape. It didn’t open until the evening and then it seemed to be open all night, I’m fairly sure it was a front for something else, but I never found out what. In fact I can’t even remember how we found out about it in the first place. But having joined, you felt like you were a member of some underground club that was in the know.

The choice of films was pretty limited, not helped by the fact that the stock was doubled up with Betamax as well as VHS. So we got to see Death Race 2000, Assault on Precinct 13, Dawn of the Dead, The Warriors, Escape From New York etc again and again. Come to thing of it, Tarantino could well have been the nerdy clerk working there. (He probably never lived in East Anglia though)

McEducation ?

Working for McDonalds seems to have taken the place of national service for a new generation.

Something along the lines of ‘well it might be shit but at least it taught me a thing or two about life’.

News that McDonalds will be able to award qualifications that are the equivalent of A-levels has not been greeted with the derision that I would expect. People are rallying to the defense of vocational education and branding those who joke about degrees in hamburger flipping as intellectual snobs.

I know a thing or two about this: I've introduced a vocational qualification scheme into my workplace; the Level 3 NVQ Advanced Modern Apprenticeship , which is also supposedly the equivalent of an A Level. And I’ve also been occasionally accused of being an intellectual snob because I believe in learning for learning’s sake.

The apprenticeship scheme is not perfect by any means; the self-development side of it seems to come from the back of a second-rate self-help book, and the technical side of it is out of step with current technology and practice. BUT it does give new entrants some sort of career structure and a sense that they are entering a skilled trade. And for a whole period of ten years, between the old craft apprenticeships being obsolete and the present scheme being adopted, this was not clear and many youngsters fell by the wayside.

It’s proper vocational training and it’s a good thing. So why don’t McDonalds just do the same? And why are the government recognising their home-grown scheme ?

Maybe because:

• Making hamburgers is not a skilled trade and doesn’t merit a full apprenticeship – the whole slick McDonalds operation is down to standardisation and de-skilling so that their burgers are the same everywhere – that’s actually the precise opposite of what a proper catering apprenticeship would be about.

• An apprenticeship teaches a general skill or trade rather than simply how to do specific tasks. But a large part of McDonalds' ‘training’ pride itself on learning to do things the McDonalds way. Or corporate brain-washing. Not really the kind of thing that City & Guilds is able to teach or evaluate.

• Muddled thinking on education and training: Vocational and non-vocational education are both good and should have equal status. But trying to come up with a system of equivalency will tie us in knots - hence the BA in Hamburger-Studies joke. The muddle can be seen in the fact that firms can't get funding for graduates to do an apprenticeship. Because degrees are deemed to be the equivalent of a Level 5 NVQ ! The idea that a graduate might want to pursue a skilled trade apparently just doesn’t compute – (that one jars with me personally).

• The new consensus that public bad / private good means that businesses are creeping more and more into education. We’ve already got city/technical academies – and before we realise it, commercially ‘useless' subjects will be unavailable to all but the most privileged.

But we can still at least all get a BA (McD).

Britannia ... or Boudica ?

A bit of consternation in Little Britain that Britannia is to be removed from the 50p coin.

Apparently it's 'political correctness gone mad again' and an attack on British values. Tory historian, Churchill hagiographer and British Empire cheerleader Andrew Roberts has lent some intellectual gravitas to the cause.

But why the fuss ?

Britannia was the invention of a repressive superpower who gave the name to these islands when we were a far flung colony, and created a quasi-goddesss as its personification. (I’m talking of course about the Romans not the Americans, they are far less colourful and prefer to call us simply ‘Yuurp’).

She then fell into disuse for a long time until it was politically expedient in the seventeenth century to find something to tie together the new and far from united kingdoms of England and Scotland. So one of Charles II’s mistresses posed for the design that was used on the farthing coin. Ironically once things had gone full circle for Britain, from Roman colony to world superpower, ‘Rule Britannia’ became the theme tune for our own brand of imperialism.

Over the years she may have become confused in the national psyche with Boudica, a confusion that the Romans would have found highly ironic. But in Boudica there really is a genuine national icon worthy of commemoration.

A female war leader who took ferocious revenge against injustice and came close to driving out a tyrannical empire. A proto-femminist with wild red hair and probably tattoos as well. I suspect that Andrew Roberts and company would not have approved of her at all.

Tribute to Tower Colliery

The Tower Colliery closes today – the last deep mine in Wales and possibly the longest operating mine of this kind in the world - a poignant footnote to the death of the British mining industry.

It’s now easy to see that when Thatcher embarked on her programme of pit closures her motivation came from a sense of revenge for the NUM bringing down the Tories in 1974, and a strategy to take on the strongest section of the labour movement as the first stage in a general campaign to break the power of the unions. But at the time the Great Lie was perpetuated that mining was no longer economically viable, and that those who questioned this were dinosaurs refusing to acknowledge the march of progress.

So when the Tower Colliery was up for closure in 1994 and the miners pooled their redundancy money to buy the pit from British Coal, and then managed the mine profitably for the next thirteen years, the Great Lie was exposed. And the workers-run mine became something of a symbol of pride and an inspiration. Now the mine is finally worked-out and truly uneconomical. Happily it appears that those miners who wish to continue in the industry are going to be working on two nearby open cast collieries.

Only those of us who never had to endure the danger and hardship of working underground can afford the luxury of sentimentality about the end of an era. But having lived through the miners’ strike and had the privilege at that time to meet striking miners from Wales, the closure brought a lump to my throat; The same sense of sadness and pride as when the miners marched back to work in 1985, defeated but defiant behind their banners and bands.

Judged by the company you keep ?

This is delicious.

I can't count the number of times that a legitimate protest has been undermined by the police and the media.

Demonstrations are portrayed as an excuse for 'rent-a-mob' and other assorted malcontents to block the streets at great inconvenience, expense and even danger to the general public. (The general public by the way are obviously a completely separate body of people who NEVER want to demonstrate about anything.)

Yesterday we were inconvenienced here in the capital by the police pay demonstration. I believe that the demonstration passed off peacefully - but this was despite the presence of a hardcore of troublemakers.

The bloke circled in the picture is none other than Richard Barnbrook - the BNP's mayoral candidate for London. He represents the 'acceptable metropolitan' face of the fascists; he is a sculptor and film director, and his partner is the fascist ballerina who caused such a stir a few years ago. So what the FUCK was he doing on the march and why was his presence tolerated ?

Ironically I can remember a few years ago a group of us tried to kick the fascists off a Remembrance Day parade - and were violently prevented from doing by - you've guessed it - the police. Hmmm.

Smith out of touch on the streets

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says that walking around the streets of Hackney late at night is not ‘a thing that people do’ and that she wouldn’t feel safe. Tory Shadow Home Secretary David Davis says you can walk around the streets of other capital cities but not London.

What planet do these people live on?

Certainly not the same one as most of us. We have to walk around the streets of the cities at night: because we fucking LIVE HERE. And how else are we going to get back from the tube or pop out to the off-licence or grab a late night kebab or experience any other of the many joys of city-living denied to those in small towns and shires ?

Is it more dangerous here than any where else ? I grew up in the suburbs and can remember that walking home around closing time I had the choice of how many fights I could get into - and quite a few where I didn’t have any choice at all.

Is it more dangerous now than at any other time in the past ? Not when we had real Victorian values and the Whitechapel murders, or when we had the ‘spirit of the blitz’ and a crime-spree in the blackout.

Where did the most horrific spate of murders in recent times take place ? Not in Hackney, Brixton, Toxteth or Mosside but in the East Anglian backwater of Ipswich.

Sherlock Holmes actually has a better handle on it than our current politicians:

‘…the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside… The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser."

The N-Word

No - not the racist one (regardless of how it’s spelt). The one that New Labour have such a problem with, and which they find so deeply embarrassing whenever anyone else mentions it: Nationalisation.

Instead, they've come up with a convoluted solution to bail out Northern Rock: A scheme which if I’ve understood it correctly (and I could be forgiven if I hadn’t) creates government bonds out of the money so far loaned to prop up the bank, until such time that a private sale can be arranged. The important thing though is that it is intended to protect shareholders – and this seems to have worked because the shares have gone up 42%.

But these shareholders are not little old ladies who have poured their life’s savings into Northern Rock. 80% of the shareholders are hedge funds who only brought into Northern Rock after it got into trouble in the hope that they would make some easy money out of the government’s rescue scheme (obviously they were right).

So in the space of a few months public opinion has swung from sympathy for savers and a feeling that the government should do something to protect them, to resentment that public money is being used to bail out an unprofitable business just because it’s a bank.

It wouldn’t have been too difficult to have set a threshold that protected individual savers and kept the big investors out. Remember the old slogan of ‘nationalism with compensation only in cases of proven need' ? Very much Old Labour of course.

New Labour is so afraid of the n-word that it never featured as a possible solution; same as it doesn’t with the railways, the water companies, the energy companies, healthcare …

Japanese Whaling

Much to my whale and dolphin - loving daughter’s dismay, one side of my family comes from Whitby where for generations they were fishermen, seamen … and whalers.

I haven’t been there for a long time, but a focal point of civic pride, along with a statue of Captain Cook and the cliff-top abbey, is this giant jaw-bone of a whale. I have a sense of history so I can understand pride in the men who did a tough and dangerous job. I also know that in a pre-petrochemical age whale oil was a multi-purpose raw material - and that the techniques of whaling at that time did not threaten extinction. I'm also not a vegetarian or militant tree-hugger. All of which is why I don’t really have a problem with the small-scale whaling of indigenous peoples like the Inuit in Canada.

BUT: The Japanese whaling industry threatens to exterminate whole species, seriously damage the ecological balance of the oceans, and uses inhumane practices of killing (explosive harpoons).

Whether or not what they are currently doing is actually in breach of international agreements is a moot point - and largely irrelevant; the IWC has always been more concerned with industry regulation than the underlying ethics.

But legal or not, international opinion is now overwhelming against Japanese whaling. Which begs the question why the fuck do they carry on ?The Japanese give two answers:

• Whale meat is a traditional delicacy in Japan – so was swan in England at one time but we managed to get over it.
• Scientific research – a smokescreen; no international body has ever commissioned any project from the Japanese scientific institute responsible.

Remember the ‘Cod War’ of the 1970s when the Royal Navy, would cut the lines of Icelandic fishing boats operating in contested waters ? It would be nice to see an international task force doing the same with the Japanese whalers. It isn’t going to happen of course - so until then, good luck to the Greenpeace and SeaShepherd.

Corruption & hypocrisy

Remember this scary big-brother-is-watching-you campaign from the Department Of Work and Pensions ?

No excuses, no mitigating circumstances, the poorest people in society were to be intimidated into declaring any changes in their circumstances or any casual work they might do to supplement their benefits, at the risk of not only losing their benefit but also criminal prosecution.

Meanwhile Peter Hain failed to declare having received £100,000+ for his deputy leadership campaign through a highly spurious think-tank. He's been defended by Gordon Brown; apparently he is guilty only of incompetence and it is quite sufficient for him to apologise.

His job ? Minister for Work and Pensions. Wanker.

'British' Museum ?

Today is the anniversary of the opening of the British Museum in 1753.

Partly because it’s free, partly because it’s only 15 minutes away from where I work, but largely because I think it’s the best way to use public museums and galleries, I often nip out for a cheeky visit at lunchtime. Usually a half hour looking at a couple of specific galleries, rather than trying to digest three millenia in an afternoon.

I love it, but I do have a problem with the British Museum: It actually has very little to do with Britain. In fact you’ll find out much more about the Assyrian empire than about how our own ancestors lived. This is because in the past 255 years much of the museum's contents has been built up by the assorted plunderings of the British Empire. Not surprising given Britain’s historical role in the world - (although it’s highly dubious to try and now retro-fit our own values - I think we could now trust the Greeks to have the Elgin Marbles back).

This pre-occupation with the Classical world was probably the product of opportunism and an ideological empathy for empire as the by-word for civilisation and culture.As a result, the development of these islands in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, and the culture of the Celts, Saxons, Picts, and Norse, were eclipsed or relegated to footnotes. So school-kids are still taught a disproportionate amount about the Romans in Britain, as if nothing much was going on before or until ‘real’ history begins with the middle ages.

When Little-Englanders say that we are ill-informed about our own history, their remedy is usually more lessons featuring Elizabeth 1st, Lord Nelson and Winston Churchill. But actually studying the complex and subtle interactions of all the peoples that made up ‘the British’ from earliest times might give kids (and most adults) a better understanding of our own ploygot and mongrol identity .

Camden Town Nudes

Snuck out at lunchtime to have a look at the Walter Sickert exhibition at Somerset House. Looking at the brutal realism of his nudes, there is still something rather unsettling and compelling about them.

It’s easy to understand why the Victorians were shocked and regarded them as pornographic. Though less easy to see why Patricia Cornwall should have concluded a few years ago that they must be the work of a serial killer.

The Jack-The-Ripper factor probably explains the surprisingly large number of National Trust / Middle-England types at the exhibition. I can’t help wondering what their reactions would be if they were looking at the work of a contemporary photographer with the same bohemian fascination for the seedier side of life …