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.

A few items from this morning’s papers. The Guardian leads with a story saying that George Bush is planning ‘a last big push’ to win the war in Iraq. He is apparently ignoring the people who are calling for a radical re-think in Iraq. If true it also means that he is ignoring the message the electorate has just given. In effect, rejecting demoncracy at home in favour of his form theocracy based on right wing Christian fundamentalism.

Another highlighted story is a call by Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, urging the church to ban members of the BNP from taking communion. He argues that the party is using Christianity as a cloak to push their policies of excluding people of other races and other religions.

The Prime Minister’s speech at the opening of Parliament gets the full treatment from The Times, which leads on his call for nuclear power stations as the main weapon in the battle against climate change.

The Guardian highlights Blair’s endorsement of George Brown as his successor. He delighted his own supporters by suggesting the next election would be a battle between an unsubstantial flyweight (David Cameron the popular new Conservative leader) and the heavyweight with the ‘big clunking fist’.

It did not delight me. It is the bullying element in George Brown’s make-up that worries me. Heavyweights are not known for their statesmanlike qualities. My fear is that instead of Blair’s poodle-like demeanour towards George Bush and Rupert Murdoch, Brown might be only to willing to join their stable of big punchers for cause of Christian fundamentalism.

Meanwhile we hear that an actual heavyweight, O. J. Simpson is to appear on Murdoch’s Fox Television channel tonight. Simpson, you will remember, was acquitted of killing his ex-wife and a friend. He still denies it but tonight he will explain to viewers how he would have done the murders had he wanted to do a bit of killing.

Last Friday morning I woke from a dream in an absolute fury which jerked me up into a sitting position, It was the most intense anger and rage I have ever felt in my life. There was only one thought in my head, ‘They have closed down my blog’.

It took all my journalistic training and experience of keeping cool in a crisis to let the tides of anger sweep through me while keeping calm. What to do? Run downstairs and check my computer to discover whether my blog actually had been closed down? No. Much more likely that this thought had come from a dream. Maybe the dream would give me a clue about who I thought would want to stop my blog?

So I lay back and tried to open my mind to the dreams I had had. Quite often when I do that fragments of the dreams come into my mind and I have a lot of experience in distinguishing between what is a dream fragment and what has been invented by my waking imagination.

First thought that comes in the prone position is that my anger is so intense that it might relate to the murderous rage all children feel, from time to time, towards their parents, or to the sibling born after them who has become the new focus of attention. Perhaps I had had one of those big dreams which are better than any play you see in television because are taking part in the action as well as seeing and hearing the play?

Then an actual fragment popped up. Just two words written on the screen in my mind: ‘The Observer‘. Not surprising, because my dreams quite often are not like scenes from a film, they are just words that are spoken or written down. But at least these words were obviously related to my blog with is a journalistic blog.

But I do not like the word ‘observer’ used to describe what the journalist does. It smacks too much of the journalistic convention that urges the journalist to be an ‘objective’ observer, suppressing his own opinions and feelings, and just writing what he can see and writing down exactly what the people he talks with tell him. I prefer the word ‘reporter’ or the word ‘witness’.

Then I suddenly realised that what I was looking at in the screen of my mind was not ‘the observer’ but ‘The Observer‘ written in the same type face as the mast head of The Observer newspaper. In that instant my third ‘religious’ experience happened. The anger and the thoughts vanished and I slipped into feelings of peace, well-being, bliss, etc. The words give some clues as to how it feels. But they are grossly inadequate.

The experience lasted probably two or three minutes. But I lay quietly in bed allowing the thoughts and feelings to float through my mind for half an hour afterwards.

(Annoyingly, another thought has come into my mind now as I write. I shall have to include it before I go on. These experiences are so powerful that the person who has them feels that he has to do something really momentous with his life from now on. So St Paul, after his vision on the road to Damascus was impelled to develop a slightly different brand of Christianity and to evangelise the whole world. When John Wesley had his vision in City Road, (which as it happens runs alongside City University so I have walked in his footsteps many thousands of times), it caused him to found the Methodist branch of the Christian religion. Having written this I can go on.)

The difference between The Observer and ‘the observer for me goes right back to the core of my own particular commitment to journalism. It was David Astor’s Observer which I began to read in the 1950s that inspired me, not the Daily Mail and the Express & Star, which I read as a boy.

David Astor’s Observer was famous for many things. What inspired me particularly? First, there was the reporting of the many revolutionary movements in different parts of the British Empire, which helped to bring the geography books I was reading for my degree up to date. And The Observer gave me quite a different picture of Empire from that painted by the Daily Mail. Next was the drama criticism of Kenneth Tynan, which had an impact far beyond most criticism. It caused me to challenge a lot of values I had been brought up with. Next was the women’s column written by Katharine Whitehorn, which was in fact, a new kind of journalism which happened to be written by a woman, rather than a column for women. She wrote about her own personal life and her own feelings, not in a gossipy way, but linked to the serious issues of the day. She it was who helped me to first realise that ‘the personal is political’.

Finally there was the business writing of Anthony Sampson, who pioneered in the Mammon column a new form of business journalism, much of which was sycophantic and plain boring to anyone not in the City or in business. Sampson brought it too life by writing about the personalities of the businessmen and the power battles which went on behind the scenes. I started to read it regularly as soon as I became a business journalist myself in 1955 and whatever success I had in that field owes much to Sampson and his book of those years, Anatomy of Britain.

As I write now I see that I can use this dream to develop the style of those of my blogs which I think of as the journalism of the mind. And which sometimes read much more like a character thinking in a novel than journalism.

In writing this way I am influenced by two disciplines, journalism and psychotherapy. The psychotherapist seeks, by using what Casement describes as ‘non-certainty’, to discover what is going on in the mind of the patient. By adopting this attitude and by providing a safe place for the patient to talk about the hidden fears which produced the crisis which led them to seek help, the psychotherapist helps patients to resolve the inner conflicts in the best way for them. Instead of conforming to what someone else thinks is best for them.

I have learnt the discipline of psychotherapy mostly from my many years in the patient position, although I did spend a few years being a therapist in early 1970s. I went into therapy myself in New York in 1959 because of a crisis accompanied by suicidal feelings. But I have realised over the years that one of the by-products of my therapy is that it has enabled me to be a better journalist and a better teacher than I would have been otherwise. The two disciplines have much to offer each other.

No time today for more of this.

But I can end by reassuring readers that, despite my momentous experience on Friday, I am not going to found yet another new religion. But I will be carrying on with my various crusades, including my attempts to get Dvorak on to the world’s computer keyboards. And I will be writing in an adventurous way, so that it is possible someone, some day, will try to close my blog down. So, readers, watch my back please.

Patrick Casement, in one section of his new book, which I blogged on yesterday gives some examples of odd co-incidences and poses the question about whether they are just due to chance, or whether there are other forces involved which we cannot explain. Raising this issue is like marching into a battle field where the big guns are firing from all sides. Perhaps that is one of his most appealing characteristics. He is willing to raise his head above the ramparts and risk being shot at.

This is one of the issues which divided Freud and Jung, with Freud as ever searching for a scientific explanation and Jung developing his theory of synchronicity. As I understand it, this theory postulates that there is cause and effect, and there is chance, but there is also some area in between, where things happen together. It is one of Jung’s most woolly theories. It really fails to explain anything at all.

I thought I had better update myself on this controversy, which I have followed through most of my adult life. So I went into the web and keyed in ’synchronicity’, which had thousands of references. The top one was www.synchronicity.org.

Go in to it yourself. You will find it is based in Virginia, (the state that invented the Camel cigarette and voted last week to give the Democrats control of the American Senate). This group turns out to be fundamental Christians and you are invited to click on the box in the middle, which announces:

Miraculous Apparition of the Blessed Mother manifests within the Shrine of the Heart at the center of Synchronicity Sanctuary.

When you click here you don’t get a photo of the virgin (which I was rather hoping for) you get an invitation to participate in their courses, where you too can meditate and learn to see such visions. I decided my time would be better employed in summarising this debate on information gleaned over the years from books and people who have studied these things.

The best starting point is the early twentieth century when leading intellectuals were interested in investigating the possibility that there was some form of extra-sensory perception. The founding father of American psychology, William James, became interested the possibility. (He also looked into Freud’s ideas and visited him in Vienna shortly before he died in 1911, and the two men found much in common apparently.) But probably not on this subject.

James had become convinced that there were other forces at work, not yet explained. He had floated this in his Gifford lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience, to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 They are still worth reading. James had looked at many examples of people who felt they had had religious experiences, and looked for what was common in those experiences. Christians tended to see the Virgin Mary, Buddhists tended to have a deep awareness of the connections between all beings and all things. A kind of uniiversal consciousness. This is rather like Wordsworth’s experience which we all learnt to recite at school: ‘a pulse in the eternal mind no less’

William’s novelist brother, Henry James, was much more sceptical and thought that the medium of the day, Mrs Gilbert, was a fraud. But one incident challenged his thinking. When William came over to England to see Henry’s new house at Rye, he paused in London to go to a Gilbert séance. She looked into her crystal ball and described in great detail the house and Henry’s study. William was gobsmacked when he got to Rye later that day and found that she had got it absolutely right.

Abraham Maslow, another American psychologist did some research in the 1960s amongst people having experiences of bliss similar to the James reports. What he found is that some people had them with no religious insights. But they did have the feelings of incredible well-being and energy. So he coined the term ‘peak experiences’, for these very powerful emotional experiences.

Fast forward to the present. Masses of research studies have been done to try and discover whether extra-sensory perception exists, including those at Edinburgh in a centre funded in the will of the late Arthur Koestler. The results have been inconclusive. Nevertheless, the possibility that there is something in this area that we do not yet understand persists.

It persists partly, because, as Casement notes in his book, most of us have had experiences, such as thinking about someone, and, suddenly the phone rings, and it is the person we were thinking about. The statisticians say that this is simply the laws of chance. We attach significance to one occasion, forgetting the hundreds of times the phone rings and we have no idea who it is.

Casement gives several examples. Some are easily explicable by what we already know. Such as his sense that women are pregnant before they actually tell him. There are lots of non-verbal cues which a woman gives off when she has just discovered that she is going to have a baby, and long before the bump becomes obvious.

There are two examples he gives which are very compelling. The first happened when he was 17 at home for the Easter holidays. His grandmother was dying and the thing she most wanted was to see her best friend from childhood whom she had lost touch with many years before. On Easter Sunday Patrick had gone to church and afterwards he decided to walk the four miles to his grandmother’s house. He was going to walk and try and beat the bus. He had decided not to hitch-hike though several cars had gone by. Then a big car came by: ‘my right hand took over as if by some reflex’ The chauffeur opened the door and there on the back seat was the long-lost friend who told him that she had been trying to locate his grandmother to renew the friendship.

The second example is also about death. It concerns a patient whose husband was dying. During the analytic session the phone went and Casement, who does not usually answer the phone in a session picked it up, again by a reflex action, and it was the daughter ringing to say the husband had just died. There is more convincing detail in his account which I do not have space for.

I would like to close with my own view. One of the things I have noticed about the predicted phone calls is that they almost happen when I have something important, and with emotional weight, to report to the person who is telephoning.

The other example comes from my own first ‘religious’ experience over twenty years ago. It was more Buddhist than Roman Catholic but extremely powerful and creating feelings of overwhelming bliss and happiness. The co-incidence was that at precisely that moment the pendulum clock on the wall in the room I was working stopped. This is even worse than extra-sensory perception. An inanimate object was affected!

It was gob-smacking because this clock was of enormous emotional significance to me. It was made for my great grandfather in Walsall about 1860. It was inherited by my favourite grandfather (he was the one who took me to football matches). The face had been restored by my grandfather who was a dab hand at lettering. When I was a boy my father, whose hobby was watch and clock repairing, had given it a thorough overhaul. The inside of it was in the corner of our dining room for several months resting on a plank between two pairs of steps.

I was not able to see my grandfather immediately before he died but a year or two later, when his daughter was selling the house, she rang to say she was thinking of throwing the clock out. Did I want it? Of course, I jumped at the chance and when I got it I found that my grandfather had scratched my name inside the door. Though he had not left a will he had obviously intended me to have it.

Before I go on perhaps I should report that old pendulum clocks do sometimes stop without the intervention of mystical forces.

Nevertheless these examples make you think. What might be going on? First the predicted telephone calls. Perhaps telepathy does happen when the two people concerned have an important emotional experience to communicate with each other. Which would explain while all those experiments with random people in separate rooms picking out playing cards obey the laws of chance rather than validate ESP.

As for the clock, maybe it is something to do with energy fields which the scientists have not yet discovered. All three ‘religious’ experiences have given me my quite incredible energy. So it is not entirely impossible that such powerful human experiences might create some kind of energy field which affects other things.

Whether these incidents result from forces in nature which Richard Dawkins and his ilk would approve of or whether they result from the President of the Immortals having his sport with Tess and the rest of us is not yet proven.

If you hover on religion in the sidebar of this blog it should say something like: ‘Did God invent man or did man invent God?’ That sums up my view. But maybe some researcher some day will discover somethting that will provide an explanation.

Learning from Life is published by Routledge. Amazon advertises it at £17.99.

Patrick Casement’s latest book, ‘Learning from Life‘ (Routledge £20) is primarily written for a readership of psychotherapists, like his three other books, ‘On Learning from the Patient‘, Further Learning from the Patient and ‘Learning from our Mistakes‘. The last of those won the Gradiva prize for its contribution to psychoanalysis. The new book is different in kind to the other three, because Casement has decided to come out from behind the couch and reveal what goes on in his own head.

It is an autobiographical memoir in which he reveals the relevant details of his own personal life which led him to train as a psychoanalyst in the first place. He then goes on to discuss some of his own case histories, choosing those which changed his own thinking about what is the best clinical practice, and which also changed his own personal beliefs. One of the refreshing things about this section is that he relates in detail cases in which the patient was not cured. In the final chapters he deals with some events in his life, which he finds it difficult to explain, either by the theories of psychoanalysis or by what science has discovered about how the human mind works.

The back cover has a quote from Professor Andrew Cooper of the Tavistock Clinic and the University of East London, which asserts that the book has much to offer ‘anyone who works with mental pain in a professional capacity’. I would go even further and say that it is a book which ought to be read also by policy makers in government and managers in the national health service. And, for reasons explained later, journalists.

The dominant form of treatment of mental health problems in the national health service is still drugs administered by psychiatrists, not psychotherapists. There has been a breakthrough in the past year when, thanks to the Layard report, the government has decided to allocate some millions of pounds to the talking treatment. But they have chosen to funnel this money to cognitive behavioural therapists, who don’t learn any more about psychotherapy than the psychiatrists do.

Anyone reading this book is likely to want to question this decision and ask why the money should not be diverted to psychotherapy, which has a much longer history and has practioners far more experienced in dealing with mental health problems. This is not because Casement is propagandising. On the contrary he tells the story of his life straight, of how he stumbled into his ultimate trade, and of how he gradually learnt to do the job properly, after making many mistakes. Most of the book does not require a detailed knowledge of psychotherapy. The exceptions are the two or three chapters in the middle which are reprints of scholarly articles in the journals. They should not have been there in any case, because the experts have probably read them already.

One of them, about why Samuel Beckett had to learn another language (French) and write in it, before he could found the voice which made him a great playwright, annoyed me intensely. It was full of the jargon of the trade. Casement could have done something much better by revisiting this subject from the perspective he writes from in for most of the rest of this book. There his voice is that of the human being reflecting on how he has lived his life, rather than the lecturer addressing the students.

Back to Casement’s life story. He was born into a British upper middle class family which is distantly related to Sir Roger Casement. His grandfather was an Admiral and all the male members of his family on the paternal side had been in the Royal Navy. He felt that he was expected to follow in their footsteps but he was a difficult child who did not want to conform. His father was away from home a lot and he was sent to boarding school at Winchester, where he found substitute father figures who were thinkers rather than fighters.

During his last year in Winchester he came under the influence of a group of evangelical Christians. At the time, he thought he was rebelling, but he sees it from today’s perspective as ‘a flirtation with certainty’. When he went back home to his parents, who were in fact regular attenders at the local church, he urged them to recognise the error of their ways and join him on his evangelical crusade. He felt that he might have a vocation to be a priest. His family was not impressed: ‘What career prospects are there in that?’ said one.

By the time he got to Trinity College, Cambridge, after doing his national service in the navy, he was in a state of confusion. He had got a place to read economics, but had no interest in it. His tutor told him he could change and together they went through the whole range of subjects on offer. Casement had no enthusiasm for any of them. His tutor suggested he study anthropology, because he seemed to dislike that least. Patrick agreed when he discovered that anthropology was the ’study of Man – embracing women.’

What he learnt in his first year became the central issue of the particular style of psycho-analysis he was to develop years later; ‘the essential discipline of maintaining an open mind, especially when trying to understand how others live their lives, and how societies different from our own are structured and maintained.’ In Freud speak he was beginning to learn about ‘the otherness of others’. He now has regrets that he did not continue. Instead he switched to theology, partly to test his possible priestly vocation and partly because it meant being taught by Trinity’s Dean of Chapel, who was one of the most inspiring minds in Cambridge.

He left Cambridge with a degree but no clear idea of what he wanted to do with it. He thought he probably would not become a priest but he decided to enlist on an innovative training programme for priests which started with six months working as a bricklayer’s mate in a steel factory. This brought him face to face with the ‘otherness’ of the British working classes. It also led him to opt for a career in the Probation Service. This meant he had to gain a diploma in Social Studies first, which he did at Barnet House, Oxford.

It was in that year that he suffered a serious breakdown. The trigger event was that he was dumped by his girl friend. She told him that she could not marry him because she suffering from a terminal illness and wanted to stop seeing him. Some time later he learnt that she was going to marry a friend of his. Casement writes: ‘Not only had I lost her, but I felt I had lost the only way I could imagine for coping with her dying: being with her at the end.’

Casement was referred by his GP to the local mental hospital, where they decided to offer him assisted sleep treatment, which was fashionable at the time. Casement describes his treatment there in detail. Below is his summary paragraph.

‘I left the hospital feeling that a successful suicide would be what they all deserved. What had they done except to make my life almost unbearable? But I also began to think that there must be better ways of treating patients. In the 17 weeks I had been an inpatient I had been allowed a total of 15 minutes alone with a doctor: ten minutes when I arrived and five at my discharge. For the rest of the time I was spoken to by the medical director only when he came on his ward rounds, always in the company of his junior doctors. The notion that anyone desperate enough to attempt suicide could be discharged without further discussion or enquiry seemed extraordinary. I became determined to find something better than that.’

But before he could change the world he had to find a way to earn his living. And because he had been in the bin the Home Office required him to be vetted by a consultant before he could resume his probation service training. By co-incidence the consultant who was appointed to decide his fate was also a Jungian analyst. After listening carefully he told Casement that he preferred to believe his account of what had happened rather than the report from the hospital.

Casement spent several years in probation work. Many of his clients were suffering from mental health problems as well as getting themselves in trouble with the law. He often had to see them in their own homes and with other members of the family so that he learnt something of the dynamics of the family in relation to mental health. This period also helped him to understand people from working class backgrounds.

I found it impossible to find two or three quotes which would convey the key insights he obtained from his practice as a psycho-analyst. But I will attempt to summarise them.

The core is how the analyst handles the interview process. The analyst not only has to clear of his mind of all the theory he has learnt, he has to ‘forget’ the ways of behaving he has learnt in his training. He also has to ‘forget’ what he has decided about this patient already. He must treat the patient coming through the door as if they were a new person. He must not only give them a chance to tell him what has happened and to express their powerful feelings about their lives and about how they feel about the analyst, he must resist the impulse to jump in too soon with an interpretation.

While doing all this the analyst has to stay in touch with his own emotions and particularly with what happens inside him when he is verbally attacked with huge anger or moved to incredible sadness. Casement found in his clinical practice that when he was moved to sadness the tears started to stream down his face. Since he often faces patients, in a chair, these tears were visible to the patient. Casement has found that such expressions of his own emotion helps the healing process, whereas an interpretation or expression of his own opinions at such critical moments, causes the patient to clam up and adopt his usual compliant behaviour, burying the real problem.

This example would be misleading if I did not also say that Casement gives other examples where it is necessary to confront the patient.

Another key core issue is the fact that success or failure in therapy depends not on uncovering traumas in the past, which have created the problems, it depends on how these revelations are dealt with in the analytical situation. It is what happens in the present that is important. Theory and training can help but in the instant the analyst has to make a judgement and then act decisively. That is always a risk, because the analyst can never be quite sure he is right.

At this point I can use an example from the book. He notes that in Sanskrit the word for uncertainty is the same for the word for freedom. Then he writes: ‘I see non-certainty as very different from uncertainty. Non-certainty is not about indecision, nor is it about ignorance. Rather we can make a positive choice to remain, for the time being non-certain. This can help to keep us open to meaning that we have not yet arrived at. I also try to return to a position of non-certainty when I notice I am beginning to claim too much sureness in relation to others, because anyone who is too sure can quickly become someone who is sure that those who disagree must be in the wrong.’

This paragraph is worth thinking about in relation to the journalistic interview. The journalist, like the analyst, has to choose, in the instant, whether to adopt a questioning/confronting style or a listening/drawing out style. The dilemma for the radio and television journalist is that the confronting style can cause listeners and viewers to think that the interviewer is one of those people who thinks that those who don’t agree with him are wrong. Why does Jeremy Paxman not give Michael Howard or Tony Blair have a chance to say what they want to say?

There is not much that the journalist can do to avoid giving this impression, because he does not have time to demonstrate that his style is chosen, not from ignorance or prejudice, but because journalists actually know that the minister is concealing things, although they don’t have the proof. So it is absolutely imperative to challenge ministers on matters such as the existence of weapons of mass destruction, even if it is months before the full facts become generally available.

Jeremy Paxman, in fact, finds out much of what he knows, by using the listening/drawing out style of interviewing. I know that because I have met him several times, and noticed how he cocks an ear and listens to what other people are saying, and then draws them out. The public perception of his dominant style arises from what he does on Newsnight. I think it a pity that the BBC management did not give him the Desert Island Discs job which would have given the public a chance to see him operating in quite a different way. (The format used, and the style of interviewing adopted on Desert Island, is frequently extremely revealing of the person being interviewed, and on matters far beyond their choice of records.)

Journalism students, in my experience, find it easier to develop the confronting style, than they do to develop the drawing out/listening style. Because of their need to ask the questions to get a particular story. And because it really is difficult to learn how to temporarily suspend your own beliefs, assumptions and prejudices and draw out what the ‘other’ knows.

To round off on mental health. My own view is that mental hospitals have not changed that much since Casement was inside about fifty years ago. Individual psycho-therapy is not on offer. And the medical teams which treat patients are dominated by the psychiatrists, who are taught no more about psychotherapy than when I was at university. The few clinical psychologists, have often studied psychotherapy but they have mostly not been trained in it.

The psycho-analysts, on the other hand, have changed significantly. One reason is that they have to satisfy the market. In order to make a living comparable to that of other middle class professionals, like university teachers, they need to persuade the well-off clients who want the classic five day a week treatment to fork out £10,000 a year. (Nearly all of them spend part of their time treating people who can only afford a fraction of that.) There are also a large number of psychotherapists, trained in theory and practice, who work for lower fees and manage to achieve results with sessions of two or three times a week.

Rich people do not usually throw their money away on something that does not work. But I realise that I should not conclude this article without addressing the readers of this blog who know nothing of psychotherapy except that some research studies have shown that psychotherapy does no better statistically with patients who suffer breakdowns of various kinds, than some who recover with no treatment at all.

There are all sorts of theoretical reasons why it is very difficult to design a research study which would prove scientifically that psychotherapy works, or does not work. I do not have time today to discuss them, but may return to it in some future blog. The important thing I want to ram home now is that the no-one has proved satisfactorily the negative case that it does not work

But Casement’s books (and no doubt many others that I have not read) do offer a different kind of proof that the treatment does work. They also show that it does not work in every case. One reason for this is that unlike the drug, which is made to a uniform standard and given to the patient, therapy varies as to the personality, training and skills of each individual therapist. One of the paradoxes of therapy is that the theory has a full explanation for why it sometimes does not work. That is because the critical points in the therapy are often when the patients’ anger or depression is at its peak. Theory demands that these feelings are projected on to the therapist. But sometimes the patient cannot face doing that so he breaks off the therapy, believing instead that the therapist is no good at his job.

What the therapist is seeking to do is something different in kind to what the doctor is doing in administering a drug. He is seeking to bring the patient to the point when he can take command of his own therapy and avoid future breakdowns. This is an educational approach rather than a medical approach.

One useful way of regarding therapy is that it is a tutorial in the emotions. As far as the patient is concerned what matters is not whether they are ‘cured’ but whether they have learnt enough to enable them to cope with their lives better.

This long blog has not dealt with the other subject in Casement’s book – religion. He moved in life away from the evangelical Christianity that nearly ensnared him when he was 21 and made a quite conscious decision to become a Freudian analyst. He spent the whole of his career maintaining an agnostic position. And worked in a world where anyone who believed in God was regarded as someone who needed further analysis. In his retirement he has started to go to church again, not from a revival of evangelical fervou,r but from an intellectual commitment to his non-certainty principle. There are several things he has experienced in his life which are not explained by science or any psychological theory. And so he now feels: ‘Just possibly there is something that lies entirely beyond us that will always defy definition, that cannot be grasped or owned. I have therefore come to believe that there is still a place for bowing before mystery.’

I will blog tomorrow on the events which brought Casement to this position. Meanwhile the book is published by Routledge. I wanted to quote the Amazon price, but, guess what, the web site says, ’service unavailable’.

Sigmund Freud would have had a few surprises if he had come along with me last night to the book launch in the Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. The museum is housed in the house in which he lived for the last year of his life.. He had to flee his native Vienna 1938 when the Nazis began to round up the Jews. After his death it was lived in for many years by his daughter, Anna, the child psychotherapist.

He would have delighted to find all the books, letters and papers which was all he and Anna managed to bring with them when they fled in the middle of the night from Vienna, after a visit from the Gestapo. He would have been very pleased that the house is full of the kind of archaeological artefacts that he had collected from all parts of the world in his house in Vienna. He would have enjoyed the bubble of conversation and the gales of laughter from the hundred or so psychoanalysts at the party, letting their hair down after a hard day’s labour by the couch, keeping their mouths shut so as not to interrupt too soon the stories which their patients were telling them.

But when he came to the shop he would have puked. The face of the man who based his theory and practice on the analyst remaining invisible and silent so that the patient could project on to him the feelings they have for their own parents and other important figures in their lives, is emblazoned on all manner of contemporary artefacts. You can buy T-Shirts, finger puppets, mugs, and jigsaw puzzles with his picture. You can get key rings labelled ego, id or super-ego, to suit your mood. My favourite was the fluffy slippers with a bobble containing Freud’s distinctive face and spectacles on them (£18.50 if you are interested). The only thing I did not see was a Freudian silk slip with the great man’s image imprinted on it. But perhaps they had sold out.

Freud would had got a few shocks too if he had read the book by Patrick Casement, Learning from Life. Particularly when he got to the penultimate chapter, which reveals that after retiring from taking new patients Casement has come round to the belief that God might well exist. He now spends his Sunday evenings singing his praises in our local Church. Poor Sigmund. All those attempts to denounce his former friend, Carl Gustav Jung, have been in vain. One of his most popular followers has finally come to a position which is closer to Jung than to Freud.

More on this most interesting journey through life in my next blog.

Last night I went up to deepest Finchley to sample their night life at the Arts Depot, near Tally Ho Corner. I thought I was going to hear my nephew, Pete Rosser, who is a jazz composer and musician, play the Roderick Road rag, a work that was composed when he was staying in my house and which, he told me, is meant to reflect the feelings he can gets when he stays here. It was not easy to get to my seat in the middle of the back row. Although it is a modern theatre the gaps between the rows are narrower than they were in the gods of the old St James’s theatre which was demolished years ago. People have to climb back on their seats in order for you to get by.

By the time I had settled in my seat the lights had gone down. There was a not very clear voiceover going on about Argentina while three giant screens were moved into position and a crude outline of a map of the world was projected on to them. Then a bunch of actors, none of whom I knew, came on the stage and started dancing. By this time I was beginning to think I was in the wrong place. Happily the young woman sitting next to me had a programme.

I learnt that I was watching a performance of Romance D’Carnival by Tiempo de Tango, and that it was a story of tango, carnival and passion. The programme told me that Tiempo de Tango is the UK’s only professional Latin American collaboration of multi-disciplinary performance artists, mostly dancers and musicians. The musicians were another group, Tango Siempre, which is the group my nephew developed in order to pay the rent.

A bit of context here for foreign readers. Britain no longer rocks and rolls to the kind of jazz music I used to listen to at 100 Oxford Street in the 1950s. The modern passion is for tango. Up and down the country people are forming clubs and learning the formal style of tango dancing. Tango Siempre is ‘a unique and eclectic style of tango, jazz and contemporary music’ to which they dance. (Just to show that I am not completely stupid, the last time Pete was in London he was doing his old-style jazz gig, which is the kind of music I still prefer.)

Nevertheless, I settled down to listen to the music which was on offer. At that moment the band came out of the darkness along the aisle to my left, led by someone bashing the big drum. Following in the rear was a man on stilts covered by a gigantic paper mache head looking to me rather like President Peron. I learned later he was actually a brutal Argentinean military leader, General Vidella.

The story, based on fact, spans some 70 years of Argentinean history starting in the 1930s. It is partly a love story. El Nino Bien, a young aristocrat, is about to marry his sweetheart Malena. At the carnival she gets caught up with the spirit of abandon and dances with a working class man. El Nino stabs him to death in a fit of jealousy, for which he gets twenty years in prison. When he comes out he has to deal with the ups and downs of his country’s history. By the 1970s the dictators were not only kidnapping and murdering their opponents they were introducing all sorts of measures to keep the working classes in line. Including the banning of tango! Apparently the vigorous acrobatics of the dance arouse the spirit of political revolt.

It had been my intention when I went to Finchley to do a blog on the gig. But while I was there I realised that I could not find words to describe music which would convey anything to readers. So I decided to stick in this article to what I can do. To talk about what goes on in the minds of journalists.

Reviewers frequently start writing the review of the play, the ballet and the concert in their heads during the performance. Lots of other journalists when they go to the theatre are writing in their heads. If they are working on a big story, which is unfolding day by day, they rush to the theatre in a taxi, already remembering what they have not had room for in today’s story, and starting to write paragraphs in their head for tomorrow’s story. Because the human mind is so extraordinarily versatile it is possible to do this while also paying attention to the play or to the music.

The finale came accompanied by rousing and exhuberant music. The applause from the audience, which nearly filled the stalls of the theatre, was long and enthusiastic. Suddenly I was aware of my nephew, as he led the encore, on his accordion. And the tears started to stream down my face.

Which faced me with another problem. How do you report on an emotion? I was certainly having some powerful feelings, but what were they? I can only conjecture. Tears are usually associated with grief. I was certainly not feeling that. What I was feelings was a complex of emotions some inspired by the music, which is a powerful releaser of emotions, and some by my relationship to my nephew.

The thing that I was impressed with in the moment he started the encore was enormous confidence and exuberance. That was the only thought I had. But maybe the emotions work in a quite different way and manage to access in the instant the memories of forty-odd years. So that I felt in that moment the baby I first saw in my sister’s arms, the boy who was not very articulate, but gradually developed a mastery of the piano keyboard, and the man who had many years of struggle to go on creating his music and to earn sufficient to support himself, his partner and his children.

This is not very satisfactory but tomorrow I may return to this subject because I am due to go to the Freud Museum to a book launch by one my neighbours, Patrick Casement. He is a Freudian shrink and, according to the neighbourhood gossip, he has been known to weep in front of his patients. The great Sigmund always insisted on sitting behind the patient and never betraying any of his emotions at all.

Oh, for any of you living within range of North Finchley whose interest has been aroused by this non-review, the performance is being repeated tonight at 8 PM. Tickets £16.

My head of department at City University’s Department of Journalism today gets the first ever Xcitybob Blogging Journalist of the Year Award. He gets his gong not for anything he has done in his day job but for a post on Adrian Monck Online, which he regards as his hobby and which I call moonlighting.

His post on Wednesday night was called ‘Balfour Remembered’. The category under which he gets his award (which I have just invented) is for ‘Insightful connections between events in history and important contemporary events’. I promise to think of a shorter title before the actual awards dinner at the Ritz Hotel, when I hope to get Madonna to present the awards.

The essence of the post is:

‘Arthur Balfour was a former British Prime Minister. In 1917 he was the Foreign Secretary and this was his declaration:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

In the Middle East that paragraph, written on November 2nd that year, carries a historic resonance far beyond its impact here in the UK.’

The first point I want to make is journalistic. Monck is following a journalistic tradition of pegging a story to an anniversary when there is not enough ‘news’ to fill tomorrow’s newspaper. Except that he pegs it to the 89th anniversary, rather than waiting next year for the ninetieth! Further down the story he reminds his readers that this year is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David’s Hotel, when 92 people were killed, 28 of them Britons.

The journalistic point is the emphasis in journalism of justifying what we put in the papers because it is fresh news (and hopefully an exclusive ’scoop’). Journalists, and journalism teachers, do not pay sufficient attention to the need to put what is happening today in its historical context.

At its extreme this journalistic convention is taken to the point of absurdity. When I first went to live in New York in 1959 I was freelancing. There was no internet then so the lack of a newspaper library was a substantial disadvantage for the kind of stories I was writing for the Financial Times in London. There was a financial newspaper near my flat called, I think, the Journal of Commerce. So I visited the editor and, after asking his opinions on the current state of Wall Street, asked if I could use their cuttings library occasionally. ‘We don’t have a library’, he told me proudly, ‘We print news not history.’

My second point is to do with what these two anniversaries remind us of.

The coverage of the bombing of the King David’s Hotel in 1946 had a big impact on me because it came at the time that I was just becoming an avid newspaper reader. The coverage that still sticks in my memory now is that of the Wolverhampton Express & Star, which gave it massive coverage. Local evening newspapers in those days had got used to devoting a lot more space to national affairs, because during the war the readers wanted to get the national news in the evening as well as from their national morning. (And, of course, there was no television and many of my neighbours did not even have a radio.) Additionally one of the men killed in the explosion, was a British Army officer from a well-known local family.

The angle of the Express & Star, and that of the Daily Mail, which came through our letter box in the morning, has many similarities to the way many newspapers today cover the war against terror. The Bin Laden of the day was the Stern Gang, the ‘terrorists’ who must be exterminated. In retrospect the coverage was blatantly partisan and possibly was fuelled by unconscious anti-semitism. That vein continued for many years, so that Ernie Bevin, then Labour’s Foreign Secretary, got an easy ride, and it was not until I started to read contemporary history, that I discovered that Bevin was actually helping the Stern Gang’s recruitment by turning back ships which were taking the victims of the concentration camps to a new life in Palestine. What this story also reminds us of is that yesterday’s ‘terrorists’ often become today’s political leaders, like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the Stern Gang’s Begin, who some years later became Prime Minister of Israel.

The Balfour declaration is also a timely reminder that the British bear some responsibility for the creation of Israel and some responsibility for the subsequent problems because of our policies and the way we handled the Palestine mandate. More importantly they remind us of Balfour’s insistence ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.

That is the nub of the Middle Eastern conflict and the reason the Hizbullah ‘terrorists’ are firing their rockets at Israel. And all journalists need remind their readers of it. Consider the massive coverage this week of the trial and forty-year sentence of the Muslim convert who was plotting to blow up the Thames (as one of the newspapers put it). He was making plans for atrocities equal to 9/11 and I am thankful that the police have caught him and locked him up. But I want to make a point about the newspaper coverage not the conduct of the trial.

You don’t get locked up for forty years in Britain for having wicked intentions. So the prosecution case was based on the fact that he had met with a Bin Laden man in Pakistan and he knew another of the actual bombers. I have no way of knowing the truth of this, And covering terrorism is not one of my specialist areas. But I do have journalist friends who have covered international intelligence matters for many years. They doubt whether there is a Bin Laden gang at all in the sense of a group who know each other and have a recognised leader.

This point, although it is made from time to time by the serious media, gets totally drowned by the blanket coverage of terrorists as in this week’s trial. This has two serious results.

It inflames the fears of readers. So that we wonder when we walk the streets that the matronly woman doing her shopping might be carrying a bomb under her burkha. And we worry, like Jack Straw, whether the niqab is covering an expression of hate. Is she going to whip out a gun and shoot me in the middle of surgery? This in turn makes all Muslims feel alienated and distrustful. And it makes it less likely than they will pass on information to the police about someone they know who is possibly a terrorist.

The second point, is that it focuses public attention on just one threat. While I totally accept that training camps for Muslim terrorists do exist, the reality of the world in which we live is that tomorrow’s atrocity might be committed by someone totally different. It is not too difficult to get hold of weapons of considerable destruction. The next time it might be a Christian fundamentalist or someone like those American fathers with a grudge who go to their local school and shoot a bunch of the children and their teachers.

All this goes to show that doing responsible journalism is a difficult job. And it makes me feel a little guilty about yesterday’s blog about George Bush and his daily conversations with the Texan oil God. George Bush needs to be reminded of the Balfour declaration before he sends his next dollop of dollars to the Israeli war treasury. But also I should not overdo the caricature. Particularly since he has just had a smack in the face from the American electorate. Above all I don’t want to make him so angry so that he starts bombing my street.

Acutally George Bush is not a Texan. He was born in New England, the heartland of America’s white Anglo Saxon Protestants. But he has spent a lot of his working life with American oil men, who mostly side with the Arabs in Middle Eastern conflicts. So I should not make jokes suggesting he is taking his instructions from on high. His policy on Israel is probably much more to do with a quite pragmatic assessment of the importance of the Jewish vote in American politics.

This blog and the previous one about Adrian Monck Online arose out our little private war. On reflection I thing that blogging journalists should from time to time let the readers know about such things, which cause them to write the things they write.

Another long blog. But I promise that my speech to the Ritz Hotel Awards Ceremony will be a lot shorter, and I hope, a lot funnier.

Democracy has been restored in America, without a bomb being dropped or a shot being fired. The people of America have filed quietly into the polling booths and told the bible punching cowboy from Texas and his posse of Christian fundamentalist money makers that they want democracy in the United States. They have had enough of a President who imposed his policies on the country although half of the country voted against him (more than half if those Florida votes actually were fraudulent).

The Democratic Party has swept the House of Representatives and secured a majority of state governorships, which have enormous local power in a country which is much more de-centralised than Britain. As I write it seems possible that they might even win the Senate as well, where only one third of the senators were up for re-election. It all depends on the voters of Montana and Virginia (one of my favourite states. It’s where they make my Camel cigarettes. And as all smokers know Camels are a unique multi-cultural cigarette, with that touch of Turkish which gives them their distinctive flavour).

Yes, I do know that the American President has all the executive power. But a President who halfway through his last term loses control of Congress is crippled in both legs. He cannot just plough on regardless with his wars because he needs Congress to vote the money. And, if Congress is so inclined, it can set up those devastating Congressional committees to investigate things like the conduct of the Iraq war and corruption on the part of some Bush supporters. The other leg is crippled because Republicans everywhere want to be in a position to win back all those seats in Congress and, above all, to try and win the Presidency.

So for the next two years Bush will have little time to spend on his knees asking God to tell him to do the things he wants to do. He will have to learn how to do the always difficult job of being the leader of a real democracy. Which means listening to other human beings who don’t agree him, and who pray to different Gods or no Gods at all.

It is great news for the planet, which is threatened because of terror and the war on terror, the war in Iraq and climate change. None of these threats are easy to deal with. But from now on the way they are approached will have to be different. Bush will have to listen to ‘liberal’ Americans, to internationally minded Americans, and to traditionalist Americans who never wanted America to follow the Brits and get themselves an Empire.

Not only that, although he will continue to make a lot of speeches he will no longer be THE voice of America. From now on it will be voices of America.

One of the most feisty is likely to be Nancy Pelosi, who is the first woman ever to take the key role of Speaker of the House of Representatives. (British feminists please note, America still does better than us in putting women in top positions in government and business.) She hails from San Francisco (another of my favourite American places). Hilary, fresh from a resounding election victory, will be bidding for the Presidency, with Bill tagging along, and looking more and more the wise elder statesman, compared with the Bush brigade. And Al Gore, too, is likely to win respect and an international audience now that he has made it clear he is no longer running for political office but is concerned to help save the planet.

Much further down the pecking order there is another interesting voice. The new senator for Vermont is the first Senator ever who is a socialist. Bernie Saunders is no chicken. He has got his big chance at 65, when most men are content to dig their gardens. He hails from Brooklyn, across the river from Manhattan, and started work as a carpenter. Somehow or other he ended up as a teacher at Harvard. He has persuaded the voters of Vermont in New England, another most beautiful spot, inhabited by many of descendents of the original Anglo-Saxon lot who first settled in America to vote for him. He stood as an independent but is a committed individual socialist. For all of my lifetime socialists in American politics have been regarded as little better than Communists. Senator Macarthy must be hammering on the lid of his grave, demanding to be let out to come and denounce Bernie Saunders.

I felt relaxed today as I walked down multi-cultural Kentish Town High Street to do a bit of shopping. The world is I think a somewhat safer place than it was yesterday. In the supermarket a woman helped me when I was struggling to pull out one those filmy plastic bags to put my bread in. I turned and she was standing there dressed head to toe in the burka. Her face was entirely visible. And on it was the most beautiful smile.

(You won’t find the answer til you get to the end of this blog)

Just heard from an eighteen year old American student who has reached 94 words per minute using the Dvorak keyboard layout. I first heard from him last July when he found out about Dvorak from the alt-keyboard user group on Yahoo. On 7 July he started the switch from QWERTY and had reached 12 wpm touch typing by the end of his first day. Despite taking a five-week holiday in Switzerland and starting his undergraduate degree, with all the extra work that involved, in late August he has clearly made time to practise more or less every day.

It reminded me of the comment I quoted in my first blog today which quoted Peter Preston, the former editor of The Guardian, asking why long suffering journalism students are required to sit exams twice over, ‘with a pile of shorthand thrown in’. And it reminded me of the article in The Guardian last Friday, when Simon Jenkins revealed that he did not even know there was a better keyboard layout than QWERTY.

Quite a lot of British journalism students (but not any longer those at City University) are forced to learn shorthand to reach the NCTJ target of 100 wpm before they pass, which takes most students at least 200 hours of class and practice at home to learn. If they were caused to spend the same amount of time learning typing from a disk tutorial the best of them could reach speeds of around 130 wpm so long as they learnt the Dvorak layout. Even the average ones would probably reach over 80 wpm without any strain so long as they took it steadily and obeyed the rule of not doing more than between half an hour and an hour each day working with the tutorial.

That would make it totally un-necessary for any more British students to learn shorthand. In many situations they could use their lap tops to input the spoken word. In the pub or at the lunch table they could use the texting shorthand, which, as Simon Jenkins pointed out, is now learnt by most school children. While I doubt they would reach 100 words a minute they could easily do it fast enough to take down the verbatim quotes which journalists need.

I must now reveal that my American friend started learning typing at the age of 7 and had reached 130 words a minute in QWERTY. At the rate he is going I reckon he will reach 150 wpm in Dvorak by Christmas. (He still has to use some QWERTY and his speed in that has fallen to 54 wpm.)

Sceptics will say that he has a totally exceptional talent. My own view is that it is equally likely that he was motivated to learn this not very difficult and rather humble skill. So he went on practising long after he was typing much faster than his class mates or his teachers.

So the answer to the question at the top is:

1. You have never heard of Dvorak

Or 2. You are not sufficiently motivated to learn touch typing.

Or 3. You can’t believe that you too could type at what must seem fantastic speeds.

My other site, typingbytouch, shows you how it can be done and provides a free disk tutorial to download.

Simon Jenkins, in the article referred to above, quoted George Bernard Shaw. Shaw also said something like this:

‘The world has need of men who dream of how things never were. And ask, why not?’

I dream of a world with keyboards engraved with Dvorak available in every school and every computer shop by the time my grandchildren are ready to start. We won’t get there unless a sufficient number of journalists and academics start asking the Why? question. And between them they need to get some decent research going which will prove again, what August Dvorak proved in 1934, that Dvorak can be learnt in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY.