The Daily Novel

The storm continued through the night, over-filling my huge Bohemian ashtray on the terrace. It is not a 90 mph gale but it sounds and feels like one. My small bungalow is creaking and complaining like an old boat in a typhoon and it sounds as if it wants to take off any moment. But so far I have survived despite the soaking I got on the prom yesterday.

So I decided that if I can survive this I can take up camping again. Went straight online to book my ticket for the first UK

WordCamp

in Birmingham on the weekend of 19 July. Actually this event is not taking place under canvas. It is in a posh new conference centre, The Studio, in the heart of the City. Or rather what’s left of the heart of the City, which has been vandalised since my youth by the new architecture. More Clockwork Orange than getting back to nature. But at least you now have a choice on the restaurant menus that goes beyond roast beef and two veg. And most of the many pubs now serve food and some even have carpets on the floor. The younger generation just don’t realise that Brummies have never had it so good. Back in the 1950s I had to go out to the transport café at Northfield to get a bite to eat on a Sunday night after putting the university newspaper to bed.

But is imbued with the spirit of camping as I knew it. The work gets done not by orders from the boss but when the spirit moves the group of organisers, who are doing it not primarily to earn their bread, but because they are committed to this new world of blogging. And because it’s fun grappling with computers who throw spanners in the works whenever mere human beings seek to create global villages.

I was reminded of this just now when I tried to buy my ticket on the new online booking system. I only got as far as this message:

Ticket purchasing temporarily off-line

If you are new to this site do not give up. Put it in your diary. I have been watching the efforts made to get this event going by email. And several times I have feared that they would never get it together in time. But they have. Sponsors have appeared. The programme has been drawn up. The T-shirts are ready. The venue has been booked, backed by personal cheques from some of the organisers.

Although there is no authority hierarchy this is not government by committee. It is a management method based on individuals learning to work together as a group. A method well-suited to the twenty-first century and the new realities of the blogosphere. Because it is new, this method is distrusted by the majority, and dismissed daily by articles in the mass media suggesting that anyone who tries to create new ways of organising people is either hopelessly idealistic, mad or a Californian New Age junkie.

For any sceptics who happen upon this blog, I will end with a couple of anecdotes about the real world of the organisations who govern all our lives.

For the past week I have been trying to get my motor scooter back on the road with an up-to-date tax disc. I had to abandon my attempt to do it online via the DLVA site, because I have changed my address. So I resorted to the telephone, a piece of technology that was invented in the nineteenth century. For the last four days I have been ringing up and going through the hierarchy of options, but still ending up with the same frustrating message, something like this:

‘Your details have changed so it will be twenty-four hours before you can use this service’

DLVA, of course, was run by civil servants, and’ as we all know from the Daily Mail civil servants cannot manage anything efficiently.

So on to my second anecdote, BT, which Margaret Thatcher created out of half of the corpse of the old Post Office. They have sent me yet another bill for my phone in my London flat, despite the fact they have totally failed to connect the line. I cancelled the order last September but they still keep sending me bills, adding £12.75 each month for a service they have not provided.

Now, can you get more inefficient than that?

Needed a breath of fresh air before dinner. Got more than I bargained for. Even though the sun was shining on the Williams sisters at Wimbledon down here on the Dorset coast, summer was having an away day. The wind had been howling around my house all night and it continued all day, bringing a lot of rain with it. More like November than July.

I arrived at the prom at the same time as a quite spectacular wave, which filled my boots and gave me a mouthful of salt water, My mobile phone got seriously wet, but I managed to get one picture of the scene after the big wave.

Back at the ranch I was forced to change before dinner, although I have no visitors. I washed my mouth out with a malt and water. Don’t know what I am going to cook for dinner but the desert is taken care of by this cake produced by my sister.

Sir Charles Wheeler, who died yesterday aged 85, was frequently described as ‘the journalists’ journalist. Understandedly because, although he made his reputation and spent most of his working life with the BBC, he learnt his journalism, not on the BBC training scheme, but on the job. He joined the Daily Sketch as a copy boy in 1940, and like James Cameron, with whom he shared many characteristics, spent part of the second world war doing a desk job in Fleet Street.

But above all he was one of those journalists who was a human being first, and within the heavy constraints of BBC journalism strove to report honestly what he saw and how it made him feel, not in an emotional way, but coolly and without fear of the consequences when he tackled people in power. In his reporting he drew on his experience of life as much as from what he learnt in Fleet Street and the BBC.

As a youth he experienced at first hand the realities of how Nazism took power in Germany, living in Hamburg where his father was working. In 1942 he joined the Royal Marines. He was a combat engineer in the Normandy landings. He made his mark in the intelligence unit run by Ian Fleming, thanks in part to his fluent German. Like many journalists I have known, his work for the intelligence services provided an excellent training for the work of serious journalism.

But Wheeler, again like James Cameron, was a late developer. When he joined the BBC World Service in 1947 it was as a sub-editor, correcting the copy of other journalists doing the reporting. He did not begin his reporting career until 1950 when he was already 27. He was posted to Germany in the dying years of the Adenhauer government, which did not give him many opportunities for exciting news. It was not until he was posted to New Delhi in 1958 that he began to cover major stories, like
the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet. He first made the headlines on a trip from there to Ceylon, as noted by Harold Jackson in his Guardian obituary:

‘The greatest furore came after a trip to Ceylon (which became Sri Lanka in 1972), where the government threatened to leave the Commonwealth after Wheeler had called its prime minister “an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a cabinet of mediocrities”. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was forced to issue a public apology to defuse the crisis.’

I first became aware of him when he moved to the BBC’s Washington bureau in 1965, and turned himself in to the most perceptive British reporter covering US politics. He arrived there when Lyndon Johnson was President in the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy. He covered the hectic years of the Civil Rights movement and the Watergate scandal. He listened to everyone, Presidents, congressmen and the people he met out and about in America. But he made up his own mind about how to angle the story, never trying to curry favour with whose who held the most power.

John Tusa, a former head of the World Service, in his tribute in The Guardian summed up his qualities thus:

‘I think he was the audience’s journalist, because he put them at the head of his priorities……Why should any journalist try to follow Charles’s example? Because he put fact before effect, thought before impact, intelligence before emotion; because he put us, his audience, before himself, the intermediary. His reward: to be admired, listened to, trusted and loved.’
He went on working regularly long after retirement age, particularly for Newsnight. He was still working a few weeks ago on a television programme while suffering from lung cancer. He was born the year before the BBC was founded. He earned his spurs in radio but he was equally successful on television and was one of the band of BBC people, who fought to bring serious journalism, rather than sound bites, to the television screen.
From his UK base in London he lived through the rise of the LCC to the much bigger GLC and noted the consequences of its abolition. He witnessed the first rise and fall of Ken Livingstone when Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC. And he lived just long enough to see the second fall of Livingstone, when his son-in-law, Boris Johnson, beat him to become the new Mayor of London.

Imperial College is in the news for the second time this week, because of the brutal murder of two French exchange students who were studying there, but living in the more affordable area of New Cross. Imperial College sits next to the Albert Hall in one of London’s highest rent areas. The students, including the post-graduate researchers, have to find their digs elsewhere.

This is not the fault of Imperial College.

But their decision to stop Majid Ahmed from studying there to gain his medical degree is totally their responsibility. Ahmed won a place on merit, but later on he wrote and told them that he had a criminal conviction. He had served his time and repented. He wanted to make amends by devoting his life to healing the sick.

Imperial interviewed him and decided that, although he would be quite acceptable to study any other subject, he was not suitable for a medical degree, because of the ethical standards which doctors must abide by in caring for the vulnerable.

In blunt terms Imperial College rejected the penitent sinner. They don’t seem to be aware of the several doctors, who have been un-penitent sinners. Shipman is one name that comes to mind.

Imperial College is one of the most elitist of British educational institutions. They were part of the old London University, so they had the luxury of teaching only science subjects. They did not have to confront the paradoxes and uncertainties of the arts and the social sciences. Because their students could take other courses at London University, which knew about such things.

Imperial College prospered. And it spawned some of the finest scientists and engineers this country has produced.

But today, it is a very inadequate university in its own right. It does not have the range of Arts subjects, which have give science students the opportunity to increase their knowledge of other parts of human achievement.

The new rector, Sir Roy Anderson, has come to Imperial after being the chief scientific adviser for the British Ministry of Defence. Before that he was a distinguished medical man and an expert on infectious diseases. But from 2004 he was working for the Tony Blair government which went into the war with Iraq, etc, etc.

I hope that he will reconsider the Imperial decision to reject Majid Ahmed. Elitist institutions like Imperial can give enormous help to people like Ahmed, who, on
his own account, got in with a gang of near criminals. He now wants to help other people.

That surely, Sir Roy, is what education should be about. Helping those who do not have priviledged parents, to make a decent fist of their lives.

Only the day after hundreds of young people marched through North London in protest at the knife murder of Ben Kinsinella in a favourite partying area between King’s Cross and Camden Town, there has been an even more horrific murder of two French students at New Cross in South London. Laurent Bonomo had 194 stab wounds and his colleague, Gabriel Ferez, had 47 injuries. Both students were here on an exchange programme to do post-graduate research at Imperial College.

As yet the police have no idea who killed the two French students. Kinsinella was the 17th teenager to be killed by a knife attack in London this year. His murder resulted in a spate of articles about the propensity of today’s youth’s to carry knives for their nights out. The murder of the two French students is particularly poignant, because they were both the kind of people which gives oldies like me hope for the rising generation. Both were aged 23, not using their considerable intelligence to make a fortune in the city. But, at aged 23, they were not mesmerised by the chase for wealth to buy the many seductive products of our generation. Bonomo was studying a parasite which can spread from cats to human foetuses, the kind of thing that is a danger to us all in this era of mass travel where such things can travel around the world in weeks. Ferez was working on using bacteria to create ethanol for use as fuel, doing his bit to stave off global warming.

There is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed by the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the rest of us. But just how serious it is, and how much worse it is today, than it was when I first came to London in 1955, is not yet clear. The rest of this blog seeks to put it in perspective.

The scene of the Kinsinella killing is a few hundred yards from Gospel Oak where I lived for over forty years. Both of my daughters partied there, and at Camden Lock, and managed to survive, despite the presence of the drug dealers and the gangs. I also know the New Cross area, another tough inner London area where the gangs of the 1950s ruled the territory. But where Goldsmiths University, flourished and made a notable contribution in providing a very good education for thousands of students, including a large number of blacks. I have had many friends amongst the teachers and the students and some of my white middle class neighbours sent their children there without them coming to any harm.

I also taught daily for 27 years at City University, London, near the Angel. This, like King’s Cross and New Cross, was a tough inner city area, where gangs were extremely powerful. It had several pubs ruled by skin heads whose idea of a good time was beating up blacks. They mostly used their fists and boots. But what is truly remarkable is that only a tiny minority of City students came to any harm. Although City had a huge percentage of coloured students, from overseas and from the immigrant populations of the UK.

The punch-ups were not widely reported in the press. It was certainly not news in the 1980s, let alone the 1960s, that people got beaten up in pubs is such areas. Which have always attracted a criminal element, seeking to enlist newcomers to the area into prostitution or thieving. Just as it was in the time of Charles Dickens.

What is truly amazing is that all three of these areas have hosted thousands of students in the last thirty years and that mostly those students have not been mugged, or knifed. They have even managed to find the tranquillity to study. And, of course, combining that with many opportunities to let off steam by partying.

These inner city areas have been reclaimed for their law-abiding inhabitants. There are no such powerful gangs as the Kray Brothers, whose nastiness was quite equal to whoever killed the two French students. And, who despite their obvious wickedness, managed to mix socially with British ministers and friends of Winston S. Churchill, like Bob Boothby.

These areas of London are SAFER than they used to be.

Wake up early. How early I don’t know, but I cannot see any chink of light through the curtains. There are immediately two or three blogs in my head, which I want to get down on paper. But I don’t jump out of bed. The energy is there but my limbs are frozen by the voices in my head. ‘Are you getting enough sleep, Robert.’ ‘Stay in bed otherwise you will be falling asleep again by lunchtime.’

Turn on my bedside lamp. The light blinds me, so I turn it right off again. Pick up my led pocket torch which I keep on the bedside table, so that if I do wake early in pitch dark I can get out of the room without falling over something and waking my wife. It is 3.30 PM, a lot earlier than I thought. But I don’t feel at all sleepy. And since I am alone in the house I don’t have to worry about disturbing anyone. Or face worried voices at breakfast, ‘Were you up all night, Dad?’.

Free to please myself and behave in whatever way I want to behave. So instead of blinding myself again I use my torch to light the stairs and take me to the kitchen to make my first cup of tea of the day. I don’t switch on the hallway light and I don’t switch on the sitting room light. Dawn is surely near. The lights of Portland Bill are sparkling but the sky is grey not black. And when I out on to the terrace I find a light grey sky with a few small black clouds. The moon is shining in the eastern sky, but all I can see of it is the last slender curve of an old moon. Beneath it the sky is much lighter. Is that the light of the moon or is the sun already rising?

Inside the house it is still darkish, but I can see quite well enough not to need the hallway light, nor the dining room light, and when I get to the kitchen I realise that I don’t really need the kitchen light either.

By now I am into an experiment of doing something in my own personal lifestyle to help stave off global warming. I realise how much energy I am wasting by turning on all these lights and leaving them on, until I remember to turn them off again. I keep my torch on, although I can actually see quite well enough to fish a tea bag out of the tin and fill the kettle. And there is no problem in finding the milk because as soon as I open the fridge door the light comes on automatically.

I cannot remember what time sun-rise is at this time of year, but there is a newspaper on the kitchen table. It tells me that sun will rise at 4.57 A.M. in Bristol, which is the nearest place in their table to Charmouth. An hour and half to go, yet it is light enough for me to write in my notebook, and read what I have written, without any strain.

Now I am at the computer there is absolutely no need to turn on the light in the study. The screen is brighter than it is at the middle of the day and I can read the smallest print without any strain. And I can read my notebook. But it feels odd. It is still darkish and normally I would have the study light on.

Habit is the most powerful of all the rulers of human emotions. And it affects one hundred per cent of human beings, not just those who become habitual users of alcohol and the far more powerful pills that today’s teenagers seem to be able to buy on street corners.

Habit is so powerful because it helps us to be more efficient. Our unconscious minds take over and guide our actions like sleepwalkers, leaving our conscious minds free to wrestle with more important and difficult choices we have to make while getting through the day. Even now, nearly three years after my final, final retirement, when I jump on my bike in Gospel Oak I find myself riding the route to City University. To go anywhere else I have to concentrate hard on the route I am taking. How much more difficult for us all to make the radical changes in our habits, necessary if global warming is going to be turned back.

But human beings can change their habits. In my regular trips up and down the M3 since I moved to Dorset just under a year ago, I had noticed how the average motorway speed had increased. Most of the traffic was moving in two of the three lanes at between 80 and 85 miles an hour. On my last trip down it was radically different. Apart from a few impatient idiots, weaving in and out of the traffic in their urge to get somewhere as soon as possible, everyone was keeping to 70 mph or a little above. They were even obeying the 50 mph sections, even when there was no obvious evidence of any road work actually going on.

This change has come about not because everyone now accepts the threat of global warming. But simply because of the surge in the petrol price which means that even the owners of modest family cars now have to take £50 from their wallets to fill their tanks.