The Daily Novel

Journalists need to have some idea in their head and in their heart of the audience they are writing for. The core readership of this blog is the ex-students of the Department of Journalism. That is an audience I am used to addressing because I was employed by City University to teach journalism students for 26 years ending last year. And I hope that as the site develops most of the guest blogs will written by ex-students. And that together we shall find an audience amongst all those who are interested in the things that concern us.

But it needs to be made to be made crystal clear that this site is entirely my own personal playground. It is not a City University project. Indeed, rather the opposite. I shall feel entirely free to write things from time to time which will irritate the Vice Chancellor of City University. Neither David Rhind, the present holder of that office, nor Raoul Franklin, his predecessor in the role, will be surprised by this, because on a few occasions I was quite the most irritating member of the university staff particularly in those years I spent on the union branch committee.

Those people who know me realise that I find impossible not to be irritating when I get upset about some perceived injustice. This is partly due to my own personality. But it also due to the trade I have been committed to since I edited the student newspaper of the University of Birmingham aged 20. One, but only one, of the main functions of journalism is to irritate those in power. But it is a crucial function if the media are to justify the claim that the free press is a central plank of a democratic society.

City ex-students come from all the major countries of the world. They include devotees of all the major religions as well as the non-religious. Most of them are in full time employment in journalistic jobs but some have gone on to other jobs. Social work, teaching, the law and politics. One (Peter Hyman ) was for many years in Tony Blair’s office. Another worked as a bin man for Islington. One woman became a nun.

Like all journalists they have to know something about everything and everything about something. Which is why this blog has no focus in terms of subject matter. It is open to everything. What the journalist learns from following a particular beat is different in kind from what the university professor learns by studying books and interviewing people in a systematic way. Different but not worse.

Ex-students will have to write something which does not conflict with their obligation to their employer. But I do not think this will be a problem. Particularly because they are free on this site to experiment. To push out the boundaries of what is ‘journalism’.

Suggestions for main posts should come in a brief email to me giving me a telephone number so we can discuss it.

The new url for the blog is www.xcitybob.com. I am also changing my main email from bobcity@blueyonder.co.uk to xcitybob@blueyonder.co.uk. The changes make it clear that I am no longer employed by City University, though the content of the blog will be influenced by what I have learnt in the 26 years I was on the staff and the friends I made during that time.

Bad tempered, suffering from a mild hangover, I was eating my breakfast this morning half listening to the Today programme. Not because I wanted to. But because I have a digital radio and my technologically-minded nephew programmed it to turn on automatically at 8 AM to BBC Radio 4. And just to make sure I don’t get addicted to the BBC it also turns off automatically at 9 AM.

One of the Today team was interviewing a depressive. They were talking about some research that had demonstrated that the music of Shostakovich was good for depression. One sentence suddenly got my whole attention. The depressive said: ‘I am talking of depression as an illness rather than just being down.’

Now I am not against Shostakovich being prescribed for manic depressives. It would save the National Health Service an awful lot of money if manics were told to download a chunk of Shostakovich from the internet every day instead of taking an expensive pill. And while I am not a fan of Shostakovich I can vouch for the beneficial effects of my particular fix which is jazz and particularly the music of Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald.

And I totally agree that what the manic depressive experiences when down is very much worse than what the most people experience when down in the dumps. How could I think otherwise because as I write now I can remember how it felt in my own family home when my father was in one of his ‘black’ moods. It was like a huge black cloud which oppressed the spirits of the whole household. My father sat in his chair totally unable to communicate. Inside, as I realise now, he was suffering even more than we were. He could not be cheered up. Although very occasionally the combined effects of the humour of my sister and myself would penetrate the wall surrounding his inner misery and his face would break into a slight smile, but never a body shaking laugh.

What I do disagree with is the modern fashion for labelling manic depression as an illness or, in the latest psychological jargon, ‘bi-polar disorder’. My own view is that it is neither. It is not easy to find the right word for it. And I don’t want to get mired down in words used by the psychologists and the psychiatrists to classify personality traits. And I don’t want to get side-tracked into debates about the extent to which what we are is dictated by our genes and how much results from the social, economic and political environment into which we are born.

Until I can think of a better word I will stick with characteristics as a word.

Some human beings are born left-handed, some are born gay and some are born manic depressives. The majority are right-handed, heterosexual, and, guess what, we do not have a word for what the majority are. (The point I was going to make was that in all these cases the majority and the minority are not better or worse but simply different. The sudden realisation that we do not have a word for the majority in the third example means that I shall write something different today than I intended when I sat down at the keyboard.)

So I shall have to invent a word. Manic depressives are subject to much wider mood swings from depression to elation than the majority. So the majority must have something like a built-in thermostat that protects them from such mood swings, in the same way that a thermostat turns the boiler off when it becomes too hot. Since I don’t like long words I will call them the therms.

Sometimes I envy the thermos. Their feelings switch off before they reach the extremes of elation or depression, so they can go on with ordinary work and ordinary human relations rather than be swamped by overwhelming feelings. But if I had the chance of another life I would ask to come back as a manic, not a therm. It brings some exceptional benefits. Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist, once strode through the Manhattan streets in the middle of the night shouting ‘I wrote 10,000 words today’. Both the gushing stream of writing and the exultant shouting help to channel the manic energies. He is only one example. The list of manic depressive novelists is huge. (Perhaps one day I should make a list and put it up on the web site.) What is written in manic mood may contain some rubbish but it often stimulates poetry and insights.

The thermostatic analogy is, I think, a useful one in getting a better understanding between therms and manics. The nearest therms get to experiencing what manics feel in the depressive phase is in grief for the loss of a spouse, parent or child. The feelings are so powerful that they blow the thermostat letting in overwhelming feelings of loss.

At the other end of the scale the nearest the therms get to what it is like on a manic high is when they rock with laughter at the Goon Show or Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The Goon’s humour was fuelled by the manic depression of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers particularly. The best example in the Pythons is John Cleese. The character he plays is the extreme therm, the uptight English gentleman. The humour comes when the character goes totally bananas charging around with a demented smile on his face. We laugh because we recognise that inside every uptight English gentleman there is such a loony tightly controlled by an inner thermostat which is set not very much above freezing point.

In the world of journalism one example of a manic depressive is James Cameron, one of the most admired British journalists who ever lived. Cameron was an excellent eyewitness reporter, reporting the facts, exposing himself to danger by going to the front line, while most of the press corp stayed in the hotel getting the story from the army public relations officiers. But the thing that makes Cameron’s work so outstanding is that he opened himself to the feelings of the people he was reporting on; the suffering of the wounded in war and the suffering of poor and oppressed peoples in peace.

He was the only British journalist allowed by the Americans to witness the test nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll. Quite why the Americans picked him I do not know but they probably thought that because he was then the star foreign reporter of the Daily Express, not a newspaper renowned for supporting left wing loonies or peaceniks, he was a safe choice.

In fact, the experience radicalised Cameron. He reacted with his heart and on this issue he moved over, from what is usually called in the trade called objectivity, to campaigning journalism. He became a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and reported many times on the devastating effects of the test explosion on the people in nearby islands and on the environment.

Thinking about James Cameron reminds me that one of the classic symptoms of the manic depressive is a tendency to exhibit ‘inappropriate sexual behaviour’ when in the manic mood. I had some graphic accounts when I interviewed his second wife, Elisabeth. She told me how he had a wife in every port, which caused her some pain, but nothing like the pain she felt when he left her and set up permanent house with Moni, one of his ‘wives’ in the Indian port. It was several years after that when I interviewed Elisabeth. She still loved him.

But I am not at all sure what inappropriate sexual behaviour is. The social norms, set by the majority therm party, vary hugely between different cultures and they vary hugely over time. In the 1960s pressure from the minority party shifted the thermometer way up to near boiling point. University teachers were jumping into bed with their students all over the land and not just in the Oxford colleges where the elite had always made their own rules.

The therms fought back and today university teachers are told they should not touch a student at all.

Two anecdotes to illustrate the absurdity of this.

This year’s annual Cameron lecture at City University was given by Baroness Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer, whom I had never met before. At the party afterwards we had a conversation about Cameron which brought about a meeting of both our hearts and minds. Before she moved away to talk to another person she turned her face towards me and our lips met in a full-blooded kiss.

Back in the 1980’s at the Christmas party I became involved in a heated discussion with a South African student, Neil Lewis. At the climax he was shouting ‘You cannot possibly know what it is like be a black in South Africa.’ And I was shouting ‘So what, you cannot possibly know what it is like to be white working class born in Wolverhampton.’ We got to the point of punching each other and students nearby were trying to separate us. We ignored them. And ended up in a bear hug.

Is the behaviour described ‘inappropriate’ ? Is it ’sexual’? There is much more to say on this subject but I have already far exceeded the word length for a blog I set when I started out this venture.

However the blogging norms have been changed dramatically since I started last week. The President of Iran, acting on direct instructions from God, has made it known that a blog can be 2,200 words long. And I have only written 1,618 words.

I did not post this article, which I wrote yesterday, because I wanted to have another look at it. What I write in manic flow is not rubbish but it may seem like rubbish to the reader because it depends on all the things that are happening in my mind which produce the sudden leaps from one subject to another. Thomas Wolfe would never have been able to get Look Homeward Angel into publishable form without Maxwell Perkins, perhaps the best American publisher’s editor ever. Perkins cut nearly half of the original draft while still maintaining the flow of Wolfe’s writing. I need to sub-edit manic pieces for the same reasons.

Two other issues.

Length. The intention of this diary to articulate what it is like to be a manic depressive. That would mean posts of 5000 words on the manic days and nothing on those days when Black Dog, which was Winston Churchill’s name for his depression, takes over. The only thing I can do on the computer then is play Hearts.

This conflicts with my other intention to publish the blog at regular intervals. After all, you would be pretty annoyed if you turned up at the newsagents to be told that your newspaper had not published today. Clearly, I shall have to find some compromise between these two intentions.

When I read it I felt I had not fully conveyed what it is like in manic flow. At such times I am convinced that far from being an illness manic depression is a precious gift. When I finished the article and broke for lunch several more articles appeared in my head, which would have taken me hours to get on the computer. But they were there in my head.

There was a point yesterday when I suddenly realised that I was typing much more quickly than usual with no mistakes. My fingers were dancing over the keys. Heart, mind and body were working in seamless unison. Bliss it was.

That reminded me of typingbytouch. Bliss is not available to those who try and manage the keyboard with two or three fingers.

Final word count 1,985 words which still undercuts the President.

If My autobiography Iranian style did not raise a smile it was probably because of my difficulties in learning this new technology. I typed in a link to the President’s blog which you need to read before my contribution. If the link here does not work you can click on it in the sidebar under Links about blogging.

QWERTY is 138 years old this year. It was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1868 to solve the then major problem preventing people from typing at speed. If adjacent keys were typed in rapid succession the keys stuck together in mid-air so that the typist had to stop and untangle the keys.

Thanks to the power of Remington, which bought the patent from Scholes and marketed it QWERTY has dominated the world of typewriting ever since. That dominance has continued into the computer age so that all computer keyboards for English and European languages are engraved with the QWERTY layout.

Touch typing was not invented until eight years after QWERTY. But the men at Remington did not have to learn it. They had scores of women, who went off on a one-year course to learn QWERTY and to translate the dictated words, or the handwriting, of their bosses into typescript.

Today the vast majority of the millions who use computers do not have secretaries to input their words. And most of them manage with two or three fingers but they don’t know how quickly and easily they could learn to touch type.

What they do not know is that a far better keyboard layout was invented by August Dvorak in 1934 and that this layout is available on their computers in all the leading operating systems, such as Windows, Applemac , Linux and Unix. Find out how to use it by going to my typingbytouch site.
The minority who have heard of Dvorak are deterred from making the change because the computers they have to use do not have the Dvorak layout printed on the keyboard. Although once you have learnt to touch type this does not matter because your fingers have learnt to find the correct keys by touch, it is a substantial deterrent in the learning period.

Since Dvorak can be learnt in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY most computer users could surpass their existing typing speed by no more than three or four weeks practice for half an hour a day. But many are unlikely to make the effort until the leading manufacturers produce keyboards which have both the QWERTY and the keyboard layouts on the keyboard.

This is highly unlikely to happen if left to the forces of the free market because, although the investment required is quite small, there is no prospect of the change leading to bigger profits.

It is also unlikely that the public sector will fund such a move. Governments have many other priorities. Individual teachers, who may see the advantages of children and young people learning Dvorak, are not in a position to make the change while computers just have QWERTY engraved on their keyboards.

Change will only happen via the third way, the charitable sector. It requires a philanthropist, rich enough to fund the initial changes and to market them to a sceptical world.

Stand up Bill Gates, who has just announced that he is stepping down as the boss of Microsoft to devote himself to charitable works. The change would enable people to use the Microsoft software more efficiently. And the big beneficiaries would be the children of the world.

How about it, Bill.

(This post was inspired by the President’s new blog.)

In the name of God, if you exist, and if you are a merciful God rather than a vengeful God.

I was born six years before the first American invasion of 1940 in the small town of Wolverhampton, 128 miles north of London, and part of the Black Country, where when you blew your nose your handkerchief turned black. We were poorish but lacking for none of the really important things in life. My father sweated over a huge machine in the local tyre factory for five days a week. But on Saturday everyone was free to join the 70,000 at Molineux to cheer on our world renowned football team. And on Sundays we had our bicycles to take us out of the smoke into the green and pleasant countryside nearby.

After we had been to church, of course, where the vicar instilled in us the virtues of humility and turning the other cheek. That message was re-inforced every day at School Assembly, where we sang lustily, accompanied by the maths teacher, who played the piano much better than he taught maths.

The direction of our secular lives was taken care of by the Daily Mail, which came through our letter box every day. The Mail told us to concentrate on working hard and living our lives the way the vicar told us. As for the direction of the country we should trust that to the Conservatives, who could be relied upon to maintain the glories of the Empire, which had brought peace and justice to all those huge countries of the world coloured pink on the map.

We knew our place. And we knew how to behave.

And then in 1940 the Americans arrived. They took our women, seducing them with the favoured American drugs of alcohol and tobacco. They corrupted our children, throwing out packs of flavoured chewing gum as their tanks drove along the main road outside our house.

But the British people then were made of sterner stuff. When they got the chance to vote again in 1945 they rejected Winston Churchill, and his American mother, and voted in the Labour leader, Clement Attlee with a huge majority. His revolutionary government took several of our leading industries away from the capitalists and put them under the control of the state.

Even though I did not understand the meaning of that issue at that time, I never forget the speeches during those years, which was very persuasive and appealing, made by Attlee’s most eloquent minister, Nye Bevan. It was Bevan who started the National Health Service, which was to save my life when I contracted a near fatal illness aged 19.

Alas, it was a false dawn. In 1951 the British people voted in another Conservative government. The workers were softened up with new houses and motor cars. Their children were fattened up by American junk food and their teeth were rotted by Coca Cola..

In the 1990s things got even worse. The leadership of the Labour Party passed to a young man called Tony Blair who had never been touched by the spirit of Nye Bevan.

Today he kneels down to pray with George Bush. They think that they are praying to the one true God. To most others it is entirely obvious that they are praying to the Great Satan, the twin-headed false God of extreme Christian fundamentalism and American economic imperialism.

Forgive them, dear God. But, if you do exist, could you ring their mobiles and tell them to stop trying to dictate to other countries and to devote the rest of their lives to helping to improve the lot of the quite large numbers of poor people living in Britain and America.

Godfrey Hodgson explains last week’s upset in the US Democratic Party in our first guest blog.

One of the most cherished myths of the conservancy persuasion, in Britain as in the United States has been the idea that liberals are all millionaires, and millionaires are all to be suspected of being liberals.
This is part of the belief system of the Murdoch tendency, and it is cherished by serried ranks of American conservatives. Tom Frank, author of What’s Wrong with Kansas? called this dogma “market populism”. The idea is that you, little man, are better looked after by the masters of the corporate universe than by your elected representatives and the government they control, let alone by civil servants employed to carry out the purposes of democratically elected government. .
It is, of course, self-interested nonsense. Most liberals are far from being millionaires, and most millionaires, in spite of a handful of exceptions, are even farther from being liberals.
Every now and again, though, a story comes along that seems to confirm the Big Lie of market populism. Such a story has just been enacted in Connecticut. Joe Lieberman, three times elected Democratic senator from the Constitution State, and the Democratic party’s standard-bearer for Vice President in 2000, has just been beaten, 52 per cent to 48 per cent, by a rank outsider.
Ned Lamont is an amateur, whose only previous political credit was to have been elected Selectman (roughly, councillor) from Greenwich, Connecticut, best-known as the opulent New York commuter suburb that is the home of many hedge funds and those who have profited mightily from them.
Not that Ned Lamont, the conqueror of Joe Lieberman, owes his fortune to hedge funds. He and his wife were both comfortably rich, thank you, before hedge funds were invented. Ned is the great-grandson of Thomas W. Lamont, partner of the great J. P. Morgan. It was Morgan in his pride who, accused of breaking the law, protested to President Teddy Roosevelt, ““If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”
Not that Ned has been sitting back and clipping the coupons on his stock. He is the successful founder and boss of a cable TV company. His income last year was $2.8 million. So how does it come about that, in the American equivalent of the People’s Party, honest Joe Lieberman, after labouring in the Democratic vineyard for decades, is cast aside in favour of a scion of hereditary wealth?
Lamont’s victory can be explained n a single word.
Iraq.
Or, to be more precise, in two words: Iraq and Lebanon.
Lieberman was the victim of an insurgency — a sort of silk stocking jacquerie — because he supported the Iraq war, did not apologize for supporting it, was even observed giving President Bush the equivalent of a Latin abrazo or bear-hug. It goes without saying that, like many Democrats of his generation, he has been an absolutely unquestioning supporter not only of Israel, but of whatever even the most Right-wing Israeli government might do.
Lieberman is an Orthodox Jew and a strict one. It is perhaps normal that he should display this loyalty. The trouble is that, in his attitude to the politics of the Middle East, and on many domestic issues as well, Lieberman had become indistinguishable from a Republican. He was chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, which might be called the Blairite tendency in the Democratic party. He consistently took strong positions on “moral” issues, campaigning against rude words on television and denouncing the wickedness of President Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. (It takes two to tango.)
He has been, according to the Washington Post’s sage commentator David Broder, an “apostle of a Democratic philosophy that incorporates market-oriented thinking of the Reagan revolution and a muscular defense and foreign policy.” He was not alone in a Democratic party where union power and working class politicians are both hard to find.
It may seem odd that it takes a Lamont, a fourth generation millionaire educated at private boarding school and at both Harvard and Yale, to spot that the Democratic party has taken leave of its roots in the people. But if the Democrats are to defeat a Republican party that is discredited on every front, from New Orleans to Iraq, someone has got to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
Say what you like about Hillary Clinton, but no one has ever said she was stupid. (Yale Law, again.) Last week she finally showed that she has understood what support for the disastrous Iraq venture is doing to the Democrats. She goaded the ineffable Donald Rumsfeld, who as Secretary of Defense has been formally as well as really responsible for the disasters of Iraq, into appearing before a Senate committee, and when he got there, gave him the sharp edge of a very sharp tongue. Then she called formally on President Bush to fire the former Greco-Roman wrestler.
Joe Lieberman has not knuckled under. He threatens to run against his fellow Democrat, Lamont, in the autumn. If he does, the odds seem to be that the voters of Connecticut, will add insult to injury. Connecticut, of course, is not America. It is so much part of the “blue” (we would say pink) political culture that its three seats in Congress may all go to the Democrats in November. But more than 60 per cent of all Americans now say they oppose the Iraq war.
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN . Those words were written by a mysterious hand on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. The meaning is obscure, but the usual interpretation is that the king was found wanting, his reign numbered, and his kingdom would be given to the Medes and Persians.
For all the successes of the Persians’ Hizbullah proxies, George Bush’s kingdom is in no danger from the Persians yet. It is rather a rich irony that a grandson of the great Republican House of Morgan has put the writing on the Republican wall. Perhaps Ned Lamont has numbered George Bush’s political reign and handed his kingdom over to the Democrats.

Godfrey Hodgson is an associate fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University. He was The Observer’s correspondent in the United States, and foreign editor of The Independent. Among his books are The World Turned Right Side Up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (1996), The Gentleman from New York: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (2000), and More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the new century. His latest book is Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand: a biography of Colonel Edward House.

Britain’s landowners will be out on the moors today for the start of the grouse shooting season. They are not expecting to match the glorious bags of the past. Disease, the July drought and fires on the moors have all taken their toll on this favoured August sport.

All is not doom and gloom, however, for the upper classes. Their old school chums are dominating the front bench of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. The new leader, David Cameron, himself an Old Etonian, has appointed no fewer than 14 from his old school which is handily situated a short distance from one of the Queen’s homes in Windsor Castle.

Of course, it no longer matters where you went to school. It is just a co-incidence that all these Conservative spokesman went to Eton. Cameron picked them because they were the best men for the jobs.

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