The Daily Novel

One of the several co-incidences around Patrick Casement’s talk at Hampstead Town Hall on Monday night about his book, Learning from Life, was that a friend I had known 32 years ago turned up. I had recognised her as she walked in and took her place on the other side of the crowded hall. Or, to be strictly truthful, I thought I recognised her.

You all know how it is. You see someone you think you recognise, go up and talk to them, and discover you have made a mistake. They don’t know you from Adam. Or even worse, they are the person you once knew, but you have to spend a lot of time reminding them of who you are, or were, because they have totally forgotten you. Because you had not done anything, or said, anything which they thought was worth remembering.

This time there was no embarrassment. When we came face to face in the melee at the front of the hall after the meeting we both recognised each other. And we started to make the bridge between what we were in 1974 and what we are today. One of the odd things is, that although we both remembered each other very clearly, we had a little problem with names. She had forgotten my surname, and I had forgotten her first name.

1974 was the only year of my life when I have not been working for some august organisation like City University or The Times. I was, in the jargon of the times, doing my own thing. What I really wanted to do in life. I was part of a small poorly funded group called Community, which operated from an old Victorian house in Harley Road, a few minutes walk from Swiss Cottage tube station. This was part of the alternative culture. It was running groups for people who had suffered some crisis in their lives and were wanting to recover from that, and find a new direction in their lives.

These encounter groups, were part of what had begun to be known as humanistic psychology. This was influenced by a whole variety of ideas. American psychology, which rested on the foundations laid down by William James in the first half of his life (that is before he got interested in religious experience). They were also influenced by psychoanalysis and other branches of psychotherapy. And, even worse, those involved were beginning to see parallels with eastern meditation practices, so some of them were going off to India to sit at the feet of Indian gurus.

I have given enough of the flavour for today’s reader to understand why established leaders in the people helping business, like the Society of Psychoanalysts, thought them plain irresponsible. It also made encounter groups an easy target for exposure by newspapers like the Daily Mail. Undercover reporters posed as people with problems, infiltrated the groups, and then exposed their activities. It was not to difficult to get a sensational tabloid story. After all, some of these groups occasionally took their clothes off and continued in the altogether.

In fact what went on was not as daft as this account might suggest.

Encounter groups were based on a sound and proven theoretical model. Bill Schwartz, the American who invented the model, had spent most of his working life as a leader of groups for training managers in Bethel, Maine. Several of the British people who became involved were either influenced by the Bethel approach (taught as a post-graduate MA at Leeds University) or by the group training methods fostered by the Tavistock in London, and used in many large British companies, including ICI.

Second most of the people who were leading the groups, were not irresponsible. They were experimenting, yes, and most certainly they did not get everything right. But they were mostly just as careful not to damage the people they working with, as are empathetic psychoanalysts like Casement. I shall have more to say about this in Part Two.

I want to bring this blog back to the personal and to what happens when we meet someone from the dim and distant past. My old friend, whom I will call Mrs Blue, and I, rapidly established that we have both been living lives since then that are more bourgoise than hippy. And we related on that level in our brief conversation.

It was a happy meeting. In some ways we were talking as the people we are now, but underneath we were both recognising, and valuing, the people we were in 1974. I was particularly pleased that she remembered me as ‘Bob’,

Why this was so important to me did not occur to me until last night. Yesterday my blogging friend, Andrew Grant Adamson visiting. We were talking about what we were writing in our blogs and how it was evolving all the time. It was different from what we thought we were going to do before we started. I tried to explain to him, my notion of the journalism of the mind. Unsurpisingly he was not very impressed. My current thinking about it is still woolly.

Andrew had walked in with a print out of an attack the BBC had made on his series of blogs revealing the Technorati ratings for blogs done by the newspapers and the BBC. (This revealed that the top blogger is Ruth Gledhill, the Religion correspondent of The Times.) He did not like the fact that they were accusing him of relying too much on the Technorati ratings, which don’t rate the BBC as highly as their own internal ratings. In fact, Andrew wrote that he doubted the accuracy of the Technorati ratings. But they are important because Technorati dominates the web on ratings. If you type in ‘blogging’ in Google you are guided to the Technorati ratings. Andrew’s exercise has called attention to their inconsistencies. Not least because his top blogger, Gledhill, was rated much lower two days later for reasons not yet explained.

Andrew was also irritated by the fact that the BBC had got his name wrong. They called him Adamson Grant.

Which got me back to thinking about names, and why I was so pleased to be remembered as ‘Bob’. My surname does not matter nearly as much, as I realised a few weeks ago when I discovered more about my own ancestors. So I had no wish to go and join with the other thousands of Joneses in the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff. Not only because that I had discovered by despite family myth, my ancestors had been in the midlands since the sixteenth century. But because I realised that now knew I was not a Celtic Jones, but the also because the ancestry exercise had made me realise, that neither racial origin, nor religious upbringing, determines which human beings I empathise with. The person I have become has found, through experience, that I can emphasise with some Jewish Weinstocks and some Mulim Patels, much better than with many Joneses from the Midlands.

‘Bob’ is not the name given to me by my parents. It is not on my birth certificate, my passport, driving licence or on my employment records. As a professional journalist I have always written under the name of Robert Jones, and that is the name I use as the author of this blog. But Bob is the name that I have been called by most people for the whole of my life. Bob is me, the the symbolic representation of what I was and have become, which is more than the sum of the influences on me, from parents, social, economic and political background, etc.

I made ian immediate link in my mind to what I am attempting in my blog; finding my authentic voice as a writer. Quite common amongst writers. (Patrick Casement discusses in his book the interesting example of Samuel Beckett, who had to discover his authentic voice by writing in French, and could only several years later write authentically in English.)

It also jolted me into the realisation that my evolving style borrows something from sermons I heard in my boyhood and early manhood. (Before readers flee away for ever I must stress that some of those sermons were full of insight and had quite a bit of humour.) More on this in Part Two.

Since my first name is so important to me I felt a bit guilty that I did not remember the first name of my friend. But now I remember that at the time we knew each other she was not very happy with her first name. If my memory is accurate it was partly to do with the fact that it was a biblical name and she did not much like the character in the Old Testament whose name she bore. She herself then identified more with her surname more than her first name.

That was going to be the end. But as I was correcting the article I remembered that bottom of Technorati ratings was the blog written by Lord Rees-Mogg. Paradoxically, it was Rees-Mogg who laid the foundations on which Ruth Gledhill’s current popularity is built. When he became editor of The Times religion was dealt with by a column written by a Church of England vicar. Sometime in 1968 he decided that it should be written by a trained journalist like any other important specialist area. He appointed a staff member, Clifford Longley, who as it happens was a Catholic like Rees-Mogg himself. (Longley now writes mostly for The Tablet) But he appointed Longley with a brief that the Religious Affairs correspondent must try and cover all the world’s major religions. This was then, and is now, unusual amongst newspaper God-slot journalists. In 1968 the rise of religious fundamentalism in some middle eastern countries was becoming an important threat to international stability and the religious convictions of some of the new waves of immigrants, Muslims amongst them, was beginning to be a factor in tensions affecting Britain. The passions inflamed by Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech excited religious as well as racial prejudices. On both count’s these problems are much more serious than they were in 1968.

Now I have another ending for this blog. Because I have remembered that I had lunch with Rees-Mogg and another mutual friend, a year or two ago. It was a happy meeting. We talked easily as the people we are now. Equally, I could still see in him the man I knew when I left The Times in the early 1970s. The spirit that guided the fountain pen that wrote what I think was his best ever Times leader, ‘Butterfly on the wheel’, about the sentence Mick Jagger received for drug taking, is still there. Or so I thought. I had a quick look for it in some of his recent blogs and did not find it. Perhaps I did not search long enough.

Or perhaps I was wrong in what I am inferring about him. But I do believe his risk-taking side is still alive so I might as well go even further and ask him to read my other web site as web site, www.typingbytouch.com. And if he is convinced by the rational arguments put forward for the adoption of the Dvorak keyboard, urge him to blog about it.

Oh, well, I might as well go the whole hog and ask him learn to touch type himself as an experiment, while continuing to write his articles with a fountain pen. That would really help my campaign to get the Dvorak letters on the world’s keyboard. I am already thinking up possible headlines for when he reaches 60 words per minute. Notsomuch a butterfly on the wheel but something that conveys the image of mature fingers dancing on the keyboard. Because, you see, that is the message that the QWERTY typing teachers did not get over. Touch typing, when you are in full flow, is something you enjoy, and the keyboard becomes as much an extension of your hand, as the pen is; seamlessly following the rhythms dictated by your mind as it composes the words.