The Daily Novel

Re my speculation yesterday on City University’s new Vice-Chancellor.

According to one of my colleagues he is a fan of Mozart. Co-incidentally the first theatre review I caused City University’s journalism students to write in 1980 was of the Peter Shaffer play, Amadeus. You will remember that the story line is the battle between the creative genius and Salieri, depicted as the conservative self-seeking bureaucrat.

As you can see from the Wikipedia article, Shaffer used his imagination to beef up the Sailieri character. But it was a rattling good play. So I choose to see it an omen for creative leadership at City U.

City University, London has just appointed a new vice-chancellor, Professor Malcolm Gillies, an Australian who is currently Vice President (Development) at the Australian National University. His current job is based on Yale University in the US because, according to the press release, he is responsible for finding ‘more diverse and international income sources.’ The press release also tells me that he was Pro-Vice Chancellor responsible for commercialisation at the University of Adelaide a few years ago. I groaned. Looks like we are in for another heavy dose of the new managerialism.

But I don’t intend to write him off before I meet him when he takes up post next August. There are other parts of his cv which suggest he might have quite different imperatives, and might even be in favour of what I call real education, rather the training academies for the high priests of American consumer capitalism favoured by both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

First, his original discipline was music and he was Dean of Music at the University of Queensland for seven years in the nineties. Second, and much more important, he made an impact on the Australian national scene as President for Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. He was also President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which is apparently one of Australia’s four learned societies.

A bit of googling made me feel almost optimistic. I immediately clicked on Thinking in Four Dimensions. This turned out to be a speech Gillies made about a book published in 2005 entitled Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance

The paragraph below summarises what Gillies thought about it.

Why is such research as found in Thinking in Four Dimensions so important? The book affords many answers:

because most people—most researchers—have difficulty in thinking even in three dimensions;

because this is truly ground-breaking research. Creativity and cognition are not necessarily natural bed-fellows. These studies do rattle at the cage of preconceptions in psychology, in dance, and, more broadly, in the creative arts;

because it lays—and has already laid—the basis to new approaches to creative work in dance, and, with that, creative new expectations of professional practice;

because this research is integral to the ever-needed renewal and challenges required of all creative arts, and of the creative industries. Through it, the health and diversity of the dance industry is better assured.

At last, I thought, City University has a boss who is on my wave length. It reminded me of the vigourous debates at London Business School, when I was part of the group which was challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that quantification was all. If it was worth researching it was measurable.

That orthodoxy still prevails today.

I got even more optimistic when I read a long speech Gillies made in 2005 entitled, RETHINKING AUSTRALIAN INNOVATION. It is a thoughtful speech, in which he deals insightfully with some of the tensions between the sciences, the arts and the social sciences. It is not easy to sum it up, but I have chosen these two paragraphs:

And we need social innovation, a growing field in Britain and the United States. Innovation that is not concerned with one bottom line, but concerned with three or four. What are the environmental consequences? What are the consequences for people? And what is the ethical bottom line?

And then there’s creative innovation. A wonderful area in which technology can assist us to create the content which most of us enjoy when we go to a film, when we play a computer game, when we listen to recorded music, when we plug in the headphones of our iPod. The technology is wonderful but I must say personally, I don’t sit there wowing at the technology. I sit there thinking: isn’t this a wonderful artistic product, a wonderful film, an enjoyable experience.

This kind of thinking is music to my ears, and to the ears of many of my colleagues in innovative areas at City University.

But, of course, Gillies has spent the last two years at Yale, which has never been my favourite American university. Too many conservatives. Too much devotion to the gospel of consumer capitalism and managerialism. So I cannot be at all certain about what Gillies will be preaching when he arrives in Northampton Square.

But I am inclined to optimism. The mind that wrote those words in 2005 was clearly not a sucker for the conventional wisdom.

Who knows, he might even listen to my colleagues, when they tell him that it is not a sensible use of their mostly innovative minds, to cause them to spend so much time filling in forms, to satisfy the new managers who have been eating away at the heart of the British university system.

I picked this up just now from Roy Greenslade’s Guardian blog.

Since I have been writing this blog co-incidences seem to be happening to me all the time. So much so that I am beginning to think that God might actually exist. And that he might be running my life.

Take this morning, for instance.

I turned on my green-friendly wind-up radio in the bedroom, hoping to listen to Radio Four. Some unseen hand had moved the pointer to a pop station. I fiddled around. Radio Four seemed to have disappeared. So I settled for the World Service. The first item I heard was the breaking news of the arrest of a suspect for the murder of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist, about which I had been thinking of blogging on.

When I eventually got down to the breakfast table my wife was reading Page 13 of The Observer, which contained an article by Jasper Gerard, an ex-City University journalism student. I knew that, but what I did not know until I read the article, was that he was an Armenian.

After breakfast I sat down to write my blog. The very instant I was typing in the word ‘boss’ my wife appeared in the room. That struck me as funny because that is what I call her for all the obvious reasons. (She runs the house and frequently tells me what to do, like put on a clean shirt when I am off to mix with the great and good.)

She told me we must go instantly to my daughter’s house where we were expected for morning coffee. As we drove up Denis Campbell appeared at the door bearing his baby child. Like Gerard, Campbell is both an Observer journalist and an ex-City University journalism student (class of 1991). Campbell told me he had just been reading a hatchet job on Gerard in the Private Eye. So he ran upstairs and gave it to me.

When I told my daughter, Holly, about this she said sceptically; ‘Dad, Denis is always coming out of his front door.’ So I better leave aside matters of divine intervention and concern myself with things I really know about like journalism and Private Eye.

The Gerard article is in their Hackwatch slot in issue number 1175. I could not find it on their web site, so if you want to read it you have to buy the printed version. It is a hatchet job par excellence.

The thrust of the article is that Gerard, far from being a ‘brilliant new columnist’ is a ham-fisted half-wit who’d be more at home on the Daily Express.’ They see it as an example of the tabloidisation of The Observer; ‘Amongst Observer readers, fears grow that “Jasper Gerard” is the new pseudonym of Gerry Bushell.’

To be fair to Private Eye Gerard does occasionally let his sense of humour run away with him, so that he becomes downright offensive. There is one quote in their article, which I remembered being disgusted by at the time I read it. After making the point that the Suffolk murder victims were particularly vulnerable because they were drug addicts Gerard wrote that the solution was to stop the Afghans growing poppies and then he added; ‘if farmers still sow fields of poison, bomb the buggers’.

On the other hand, I was not all shocked, when Gerard referred to Jordan’s breasts, ‘which have, by their very high standards, not had enough exposure this year.’ And I thought Gerard’s satirical article about Christmas was very funny. He said it was dead, ‘killed by us, nailed on the cross. Brent Cross.’ Later in that article he wrote:

‘The jury might be out on Christ, but you don’t need to be a wise man to see Christmas has risen again.’

Not a few Christians I know would not have been offended by this. Most would have agreed with the salient point that commercialisation has killed the Christian message. We have made shopping malls like Brent Cross into the temples of our age. Where the multitude are wooed by their favourite Christmas carols as the tills ring up the takings.

I think Ruth Gledhill, the Religion correspondent of The Times, probably shocks more Christians than Gerard does. Remember her article about the fatness of our Archbishop? Look at her latest story on Jade’s eviction and you will see what I mean. She is sometimes deliberately populist and provocative. But her long and mostly serious articles are read by far more people than any other Times blogger. And the God Slot is not exactly the most read section in newspapers.

In conclusion, Gerard is not that different to many of the other young humourous writers in the Guardian/Observer camp. They occasionally offend me by using words like ‘bollocks’ which I cannot write without hesitating. That is a generational thing. But I would rather be provoked and shocked than bored.

According to BBC World Service a young Turk has just been arrested for the murder of the Armenian journalist. Hrant Dink was shot for daring to remind the Turkish public of the massacre of a million Armenians over 80 years ago. It adds to the growing number of journalists killed for trying to do a half-way decent job of reporting what is happening in the world. Including many killed by friendly and unfriendly fire in Iraq.
I learnt about the savage treatment of Armenians, not from books, but from two Armenians I worked with in the 1980s. One was a student, Haro Chakmakjian (class of 1982), who did his project on this subject. The other was Gerard Mansell, with whom I used to have long dinners up the hill in Hampstead. Mansell knew the story, not only because he was Armenian but because he spent most of his working life with the BBC World Service, eventually ending up as the boss. He was born during the Second World War, and grew up while these atrocities were happening. (Wikipedia gives a good potted history of the Armenians.)
I started to write this story in my head in bed. But over breakfast I came across the column in The Observer today written by another ex-City journalism student, Jasper Gerard (class of 1991). He is Armenian so I will let him take up the story, which is headed, ‘We must never forget Turkey’s ‘first solution’. This is his intro:

My wife is only alive because her great-grandmother hid in a laundry basket, peeking through slats as troops bayoneted the rest of her family to death. She is crying upstairs as I write because history stubbornly refuses to move on.

He goes on to make several points. Turkey has not apologised for this genocide. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s greatest novelist, was recently prosecuted for criticising the regime. Criticism of Turkey is muted in Britain and America because we need the support of moderate Muslim states in the war against terror. He then writes:

To qualify, this is not all about religion, about Muslims (Turks) versus Christians (Armenians): nationalism as much as religion prevents Turkey uttering the fearful ’sorry’. But if Armenians weren’t Christian, would Turkey have refused for so long? And would the West have been quite so squeamish about pressuring Ankara?

Lower down he reminds readers that Winston Churchill once described the treatment of the Armenians as a ‘holocaust’.

These are all very serious points. My own considered viewpoint is that the treatment of the Armenians, by many countries, including countries in the old Soviet bloc, ranks as a series of crimes against a minority group, which is almost as awful as the treatment of the Jews. Like the Jews, Armenians have frequently been forced to flee their native country because of persection. And like the Jews they have developed a talent for international business and trading, turning to advantage the fact that their extended families are scattered all around the globe.

So I decided to award Gerard one of the much coveted dailynovel awards for journalism I like. Because of the serious points made. Because of his intro, which I found very moving, and which fits in with my own conviction that the personal is political and that journalists should disclose more of their personal lives, so that readers know more about what is causing them to write the things they do.

And for a third reason. I like the fact that he dares to mix humour with serious matters. Not everyone likes that. Just now I discovered that the current issue of Private Eye has done a hatchet job on him. But that is best told in a separate article which I will write later today.

According to one of my neighbours who knows about such things the wall that killed two-year old Saurau Shai was sub-standard. A wall that high, he says, should be buttressed. Maybe he’s right. I passed that way just now on the way to the supermarket. The council workmen have now knocked down the whole wall. Clearly a suitable case for the intrepid young reporters of the Camden New Journal to get on to when they come in tomorrow morning.

James Hawkins says in his comment that I was unfair to the CNJ in my Friday story. Not so. I did explain that they were still in the middle of the very tedious business of revamping their web site, which I know only too well can be a nightmare.

I had to wait ten minutes at the supermarket to get my fags. Their official opening time is 10 AM. Another example of progress going backwards. Sixty years ago I had to walk twenty yards from my parent’s house to the newsagents. Mr Moore would be up at 7 AM sorting out the papers for delivery. He did not tell me to wait until his official opening time of 9 AM.

And, of course, he filled me in on the latest neighbourhood gossip. Usually, some ‘atrocity’ committed by an American soldier on our defenceless young women!

The battle to be next President of the U.S. of A. is already hotting up. It is increasingly looking like a fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The woman is in the ring first with a campaign video just released on her web site.

Godfrey Hodgson is writing a think piece on the current state of play. A dailynovel exclusive!

Remember. You thought it here first.

Well, if not in the news, at least in the newspapers. Unbeknown to me when I was writing my earlier blog, there is an article in the Let’s move to… slot of The Guardian Weekend magazine today about it.

By journalistic standards it is pretty accurate. If you deconstruct for journalistic exaggeration and Guardian humour, which is mandatory for writers in this section of the magazine. It should be accurate, because the author, Tom Dyckoff, discloses he lives in the area. More about him later. But let’s start with what he wrote.

Savour the first two sentences.

Living as I do in one of the grimier holes of north-ish London, I’m forever looking up to Hampstead - literally - like a Dickensian urchin with his nose pressed against the window of a smart and glittery sweet shop. Oh, ‘ow the ‘uvver ‘arf lives.

Next read what he has to say about under the title; The Case Against.

There are rather a lot of estates. Many pretty edgy for the uninitiated. Slightly ill-defined: left off most people’s list of more desirable Hampstead satellites: Tufnell Park, Dartmouth Park and Kentish Town.

The second sentence is plain wrong.

Gospel Oak is way above the other three places mentioned, not least because it is far nearer to Hampstead Heath. What’s puts people off is the current level of house prices which is far above the level of estimate of £500,000 plus. The last two houses in my bit of Gospel Oak sold for £1.2 million and £1.4 million. The only houses in the other three areas which sell for that sort of figure are huge. So huge that most of them are split into flats.

In Gospel Oak even the tiny but trendy houses in Oak Village (two beds and a boxroom) sell for near a million. They were built for the workers who toiled on laying the tracks of the North London line in the first half of the nineteenth century. But they are tiny. Which is why Michael Palin bought the two houses next door, once the success of Monty Python gave him enough money to buy the extra space.

My wife drew my attention to the Let’s Move to… article over dinner. When I snorted about Guardian journalists getting carried away by their wit once again, she contradicted me. She thought that this section was written by ‘ordinary’ Guardian readers.

So I looked up Tom Dyckoff. Apparently, he is the architecture and design critic of The Times and moonlights as a teacher in the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. But, a few years ago he was the deputy editor of The Guardian Space magazine, which started the Let’s Move to… series now run in Guardian Weekend.

Oh, what a cosy world we journalists inhabit.

Like me Dyckoff’s first discipline was geography. And in writing about Gospel Oak he has mostly got the geography right. But not the history.

Today’s Hampstead posh oiks, whom he wanted to avoid by moving to Gospel Oak, have moved down the hill. In my street there is for instance a merchant banker and a judge. When I moved here in 1976 I was working for The Economist. By co-incidence I shared an estate agent with the new editor, Andrew Knight, who was celebrating his new job by moving to Hampstead, up the hill from where I live. Three years ago I shared a taxi back home with Bill Emmott, the editor of The Economist from 1993 til last year. He had a small house (or a big flat) half way down the hill in Belsize Park. If the new editor of The Economist wants to move house he might well be tempted by the attractions of Gospel Oak, nearer the heath and much below Belsize Park prices.

This article is not just another example of dog eats dog journalism. I am conscious of my awesome responsibilities as the proprietor of this blog. So I will end with a stunt in the tradition of the founding father of modern British journalism, Lord Northcliffe.

I offer Dyckoff a prize if he will find me a truly three bedroom house to my liking in this area for near £500,000. The prize will be the equivalent of the estate agent’s commission, which should be over £10,000, or more than twenty times what he gets paid for short articles in The Guardian.

If my maths are right.

It is not surprising the national newspapers got the name of my neighbourhood wrong yesterday and again today. Not only is it on the fringe of two quite different areas but, legally, it has several names. Belsize Park, which is what the national newspapers called it, is plain wrong. The local paper, the Ham&High, was legally correct in calling it Kentish Town but the name the locals use is Gospel Oak. Just why is an interesting story and reveals something about what constitutes a neighbourhood in London, which is really a collection of urban villages huddled together in close proximity.

As far as the postman is concerned the place where two-year old Saurau Shai was killed by a falling wall on Thursday is Kentish Town, post code NW5. My house, one-hundred yards north, on the other side of Mansfield Road, is in Hampstead, post code NW3. But the people who live on both sides of the road talk about their neighbourhood as Gospel Oak, which does not exist as a postal area.

Gospel Oak is a ward, with clearly defined geographical boundaries, for local and parliamentary elections. Which means that I vote at Gospel Oak School along with the residents of the vast council estates south of Mansfield Road. When I moved here in 1976 Gospel Oak Ward was part of the rock solid Labour St Pancras North parliamentary constituency. The local MP, Jock Stallard, was authentic working class. He regularly trounced the Conservative candidate, old Etonian Oliver Letwin, who is one of the inner core of the new Conservative Party leader, David Cameron.

Gospel Oak was switched from St Pancras North to Hampstead in the last re-defining of parliamentary constituencies, designed to even up the numbers of voters in each constituency. It is usually Labour, and the switch helped the votes of the sitting member for Hampstead, Labour’s Glenda Jackson. Hampstead usually votes Conservative. Jackson was an inspired choice for Labour, because her left-wing views were welcomed by the trendy middle class leftists living alongside the bankers up the hill. And, of course, lovers of the theatre of all classes were pleased to have a famous and articulate actor as their local MP.

(Off the subject, but interesting. At the last local election the Conservatives swept Labour from power in Gospel Oak on the crest of anti-Blair feeling, which crossed the class divide. The Conservatives, crafty as ever, chose one of the councillors from the street next to me and another living in the heart of the council estate across Mansfield Road.)

Back to geography.

The vast collection of council blocks stretching from Mansfield Road towards Camden Town in the south and Kentish Town in the west, are not a legal entity. But they are an informal neighbourhood. The district housing office, which deals with the problems of many residents, is called Gospel Oak and has its own on-line newsletter, run by the Council.

My own neighbourhood I would define as the streets of terraced houses wedged in between Mansfield Road and the southern part of Hampstead Heath, which contains the running track and Parliament Hill, where the beacons would have been lit had Napoleon invaded Britain in the days when we really did hate the French. This area has no legal status. But it does have a residents’ association and its own web site, which is updated mostly just after the annual street party.

This area is mixed in political and class terms. Some houses are owner occupied. Others are owned by the Council or by housing associations. These houses were built for rent by speculative builders in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. The ideal target resident was the bank clerk working in the city or the West End. There was excellent transport from the new North London Railway from Gospel Oak station and from the trams which follow the route of the present 24 bus, which takes you to Trafalgar Square, the West End shops and the Houses of Parliament. (Michael Foot was often photographed getting on to it in his duffle coat, when he was leader of the Labour Party and trying, not very successfully, to stop the headlong rush into de-regulation, when the House of Commons was dominated by Margaret Thatcher.)

Neighbourhoods are defined by all sorts of informal contacts. The newspapers are not exactly wrong in defining a neighbourhood by its tube station, which is still the quickest and most frequent public transport in London. But when people in Gospel Oak use the tube they divide between those who walk to Belsize Park and those who walk to Kentish Town, both ten to fifteen minutes walk away.

So many of them hop on the bus instead. Only a few use the North London line. Because a few years ago the managers decided to close the stop at Broad Street station, which gave easy access to those who work in the City of London. In the interests of efficiency and profit!

Oh, in case you’re wondering, where did the name come from? That goes back to the days when neighbourhoods were often defined by the parish and social meetings at the parish church. Allegedly there was an oak tree on the site of Gospel Oak railway station, where the parishioners stopped in the annual ceremony of beating the bounds of the parish.

Today there is no Gospel Oak Church. But there is a Gospel Oak Methodist Chapel, which is the nearest place to my house where I can pray to the Christian God.

(This post also answers the points made by Matt in a comment to my article yesterday. And just to make it clear, I like it just as much as he does.)

My wife came in just now upset. A two-year child, Saurac Ghai was killed yesterday when gale force winds blew down a six foot wall in front of a council estate on Southampton Road, Gospel Oak, about one hundred yards from our house. A shocking enough event on its own, but made even worse by the fact that she had walked by that wall only an hour or two earlier, with our own two-year old grandchild, little Dulcie.

The world knew about this event before we did. The BBC and the media reported the death as having taken place in Belsize Park, which happens to be the nearest tube station to where we live (still over ten minutes walk away). Our neighbourhood is Gospel Oak, which the media used to know existed, because Tony Blair’s controversial media man, Alastair Campbell lives here, and the media regularly camped on his doorstep, and followed him on his daily jog on the heath. Today, Gospel Oak has disappeared from the public eye even more completely than Alastair Campbell.
But it left me with an odd feeling. Though we are quite a neighbourly street, I learn later about a local tragedy than people living on the other side of the globe. Much of it is to do with shopping habits. My wife no longer gets the fresh bread from the bakery on the corner, because it has long since closed down. She no longer walks to the local butcher to get the meat, because the only decent one left is up towards Highgate. So she either goes there or to the supermarket. I no longer go to the newsagents to buy my Camels, now £5.40 a pack. I jump on my scooter and go to the supermarket and buy them at £4.97.

But having heard I picked up my camera and walked around to Southampton Road. My photos show quite clearly that near the part of the wall that fell down was a section of new wall. The council workmen were knocking down that as well as some more of the old wall.

On returning home I checked the web. The Daily Mail has the most detailed report and a very good picture. Their story reports locals as saying that the wall was rebuilt three years ago after a previous storm. Presumably the Council investigators will have noticed what I noticed; the part of the wall that fell down had not been rebuilt.

Whether this accident was caused just by a freak wind or whether the repair job three years ago was imperfectly done, will take some time to establish. By which time the national media will have forgotten all about it.

Gospel Oak is on the fringe of mostly posh Hampstead and mostly council estate Kentish Town. So it is covered, or not covered, by one of two newspapers.

The Ham&High, now part of a chain. And the Camden New Journal, one of the few surviving independent weekly newspapers.

Today, the Ham&High leads with the story. But there is no detail and, a picture of storm damage at Lord’s cricket ground, which is in St John’s Wood.

The Camden New Journal has no mention of it. But they are still updating their site.