August Editor's blog

"it is nobody’s business
who I am or
what I am doing"

In the newspaper world, August is known as the silly season. The general shutdown means there is so little news around that editors end up running bits of nonsense - singing dogs, alien landings etc - to fill their pages.

No need to go scouting for nonsense this August, however, with these real stories making the UK headlines: local councils spending tax payers money on sending officers out “disguised” as dog walkers and with hidden cameras to catch real walkers failing to clear up their dogs’ mess. Council teams tailing families for weeks to check they really live in the school catchment area they claim.

Just think of the employment opportunities if we continue down this route! What with all the cctv footage to be monitored as well, that’s half the country with a job for life spying on the other half. From nation of shopkeepers to nation of snoopers.

But of course these aren’t just silly season stories, they leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Think of Zimbabwe where neighbours are encouraged to monitor each other’s voting habits. Think of the Soviet Union where the most feted role model for schoolchildren was the little boy who shopped his parents and got them executed for anti-soviet sentiments.

The rise in official snooping comes as we learn that the government is considering allowing the police unquestioned access to telephone information (at present, their requests for such information can be challenged) and talk about putting cameras in the back of every airline seat to check if passengers are behaving suspiciously.

Then there’s the forty two day detention issue, of course, which prompted Conservative MP David Davis to resign his seat and stand for re-election.

Just as a country at war has a great excuse for clamping down on dissent at home, there’s nothing like a good terrorist threat - and what better than putative Islamic bombers - as a tool to curtail individual freedoms.

David Davis, opposing the introduction of 42 day detention, was reelected although I suspect that was because he is Tory in a very Tory area rather than because too may people give a toss about Muslims being thrown into jail.

The ensuing debate, however, prompted one joyous moment for Britain when the former head of the Security Service MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller told the Lords that she opposed 42 day detention on the grounds that there is no such thing as complete security and that lengthy detention without trial flies in the face of hard won British civil liberties.

It is heartening indeed that the woman once charged with domestic surveillance and who had the power to order phone taps and letter opening and teams of followers, holds individual freedom dear.

And she is quite right. You cannot have 100% security any more than you can guarantee the safety of your children. Unless, of course, you lock them in their bedrooms for life and never let them walk into town or climb a tree - in which case what kind of sick children would they be? Similarly, how sick is a society where everybody is spied on? Orwell tried to tell us.

Of course, even the freest democracies need some degree of internal surveillance. And, of course, as a mother, I sympathise with parents terrified of the increasing prevalence of knife crime who want cctv cameras on every street corner. But this is a symptom of a sick society not a solution.

Excessive monitoring is a tool of state control. Forcing citizens to carry identity papers is the state’s way of asserting ownership of the individual. Overwhelming citizens with red tape and bureaucracy is another way of making the same point.

In these respects France, despite her reputation for being quick to the barricades, is far less free than Britain.

To ensure that not one child slips unfairly into a better school nor one potential criminal ever remains at liberty you would have to monitor all of the people all of the time. It means challenging the innocent to identify and explain themselves.

The argument used, not only by the organs of state intent on attacking civil liberties, but, too often, by those whose liberties are under attack, is: if you’ve nothing to hide and are doing nothing wrong, why would you mind carrying an ID card or being watched?

But if I have nothing to hide and am doing nothing wrong, it is nobody’s business who I am or what I am doing.

July Editor's blog

"Losing our identities:
the Nobody Scenario"

There is a computer game which, so the blurb goes, has been specially designed to tax the older brain and keep it perky. I don’t need this software - I get more than enough mental stimulation trying to make head and tail of my daughter’s text messages. Take this one, from last month’s school trip to Italy: Ostia zin.

She had already explained to me that’s it all phonetic. So - Ostia is...thin? Is the ancient Roman port spectacularly narrow? Maybe she meant Ostia, seen - as in: done that, got the t-shirt ? But still my mind kept straying back to that picture of a very narrow set of ancient ruins.

“Amazin” she sighed when she got back.

God save these poor teenagers - their parents are so dim.

But far from, as BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys would have it, “doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago” texting, according to a new report, is good for children. It improves literacy.

Frequent texting develops their reading and writing because of the imaginative abbreviations needed, according to the latest academic research. These help vocabulary and phonological awareness.

Hmmm. I can hear it now: but mum, you know texting is good for me…

As we gear up for that annual screen fest which is the summer holidays (especially, God forbid, if the weather is anything like last year) parents throughout the developed world are plotting strategies to lure their offspring away from the virtual world and into the real one.

Bang on cue, the maverick British scientist Susan Greenfield has come to some really scary conclusions. A specialist in brain degeneration and the loss of identity associated with Alzheimer’s, Greenfield says that today’s teens are heading not just for an identity crisis but are in danger of losing their identity altogether. She calls it the Nobody Scenario.

And she goes further: the actual make-up of the brain changing in response to the hours spent in the unreal world.

When you, say, rescue the princess from the tower during a computer game you don’t know - as you would if you were reading the story - anything about the princess, her personality, why she is in the tower, why it is your job to rescue her? There is no narrative and we human beings need narrative both to make sense of who we are and to understand the world around us.
Add spoon-fed menu options which avoid the need for free ranging enquiry, tick box multiple choice options, the death of imagination and creativity, a text language which avoids the need for the verbs and the conditional structures essential to complex thought process and you create a generation of screen addicts unable to link facts together and understand how they are related to each other.

To create our unique identities we need unique adventures, conversations and interactions with the real world around us. But individuality is being obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations - a “yuck” and “wow” mentality where the ability to make connections is entirely lost.

A generation which won’t be able to build the mental framework necessary to link actions to consequences - a moral compass in other words.

The Nobody Scenario is particularly scary because nobodies want to become somebodies and those without a sense of personal identity are more likely to opt for a collective identity: within a gang, for example, or political or religious extremist group. Fundamentalism is, after all, the suppression of uniqueness.

Greenfield’s hypothesis gets worse. The constant “hits” of wham bam computer games promote the addictive over-release of the brain’s natural feel good chemical, dopamine. The brain is a supremely malleable organ and excessive dopamine hits could, she believes, be leading to an underfunctioning of the prefrontal cortex - i.e. an inability to make connections typified by a total absorption in the here and now and an inability to consider past and future actions. It could lead, in other words, to a generation literally unable to understand the meaning of their actions.

She is talking about children who spend between six to nine hours a day in front of one screen or other - apparently not uncommon. Of course none of our children fall into this category. Do they?

Go on: count the hours.

One of my concerns about particularly, hand held computer games, has always been the effect on the eyesight of scowling at tiny screens for hours. But I’ve just unpacked a box of my childhood books, saved for my own children’s long summer holidays, and had to go in search of a magnifying glass. The writing is miniscule - far smaller than your average text message . Ditto all those old Penguins, price 1/- , inherited from my mother. No wonder we didn’t have any holes in the ozone layer in those days - one tree must have been enough for an entire print run. It’s a wonder that those of us who spent eight summer weeks with our nose in a book, not to mention all those hours with a torch under the bedclothes, have any eyesight left.

June blog

"That friend with the
bigger car and salon tan
is so last year"

We’ve covered the planet in maize so that we can pump the new biofuels into our SUV’s without increasing the hole in the ozone layer. Brilliant!

Now we discover that all those crops that are no longer being grown in order to make way for planet solutions means that there’s a famine in the third world. Oops. Shouldn’t somebody have thought of that?

Suddenly anyone with a back window sticker proclaiming “this car runs on biofuels” is guilty of the death of millions by starvation and liable to get beaten up like models wearing fur. A bowl of rice is about to become a luxury item because harvests are low. But this doesn’t matter because, economists have just realised, the people who used to survive on rice - most of Asia - are now rich enough to eat meat. However, as it takes eight times as much grain to put a Big Mac on your plate as a bowl of, well, grain, there’s another reason why switching from edible crops to biofuels was a bit of a no-brainer.

Carbon emissions labelling of foods has just hit UK supermarkets meaning you now have the moral choice to choose between fair trade products which keep third world farmers alive OR saving the planet.

Help! It’s all about as clear as US policy for post-Saddam Iraq. Sometimes it’s downright suspicious too. Look at carbon offsets. You want to fly around all day in a big fat jumbo? All you have to do is bung a few quid to a carbon offset operative, or whatever they call themselves, they plant a tree in Africa and hey, presto: guilt free trip!

Forgive a note of cynicism but are some people - probably those carbon operatives - making a wad of money out of this like black-marketeers in a time of sanctions? It sounds too much like a brilliant marketing wheeze like feng shui or bottled water (which we now know is really, really evil as it takes ten litres of water and a factory load of emissions to produce a few glugs on a hot day ).

I mean, give me the cash and I’ll rearrange your furniture, plonk a twig in the ground and let you fill your bottle from my garden well any time.

Nevertheless, some good has come out of it all and that’s the great news that it’s now cool to be a penny-pincher. Conspicuous consumption , overloaded credit cards and waste are out and you no longer need be embarrassed about buying eco (as in eco-nomy not eco-logically sound) bulk packs or turning the heating down. You can serve spag bol and cheap plonk to guests, not worry if the stair carpet is worn and send the kids to school in patched trousers.

We are now in the PCC (post credit crunch) era and meanness is the new lifestyle choice.
Frankly, this is a relief to most. Your hair doesn’t have to be permanently glossed, the garden immaculate and it is positively good to venture out in last year’s summer dress.

Better still, that friend with the bigger car and salon tan who used to make you feel a bit of a slob is now sooo last year.

A recent report says that children who grow up with less are more contented. (Although when I tried this theory on my teenagers I was met by alarming discontent: hang the washing outside instead of bunging it in the drier?? Mum, are you serious? I guess the contentment comes later on).

But figures reveal that a tiddly west European country like Great Britain throws out £10 billion worth of food every year. This would be obscene even if we were on the brink of a worldwide glut rather than a famine.

OK, no-one but the eco-hardliners wants to go back to darning tights, reusing tea bags or reading in bed by candle light. We don’t want to trek to Spain on a donkey for two weeks sunshine or forage in the woods for supper.

But I defy any reader of this magazine to not go shopping for a week and still find enough to eat at the back of the ‘fridge, freezer or kitchen cupboard.

Or try seeing how many items on your “must have” list could correctly be reclassified as “luxuries”.

Since this June edition of the magazine has, inevitably in Normandy, a remembrance theme, one last thought: the idea that recycling is some sort of new idea must leave the veterans rolling in the aisles.

But their recycling wasn’t about bundling rubbish into different coloured bin bags, driving (carbon emissions) to a dump and having the waste taken off (more emissions) for melt down (yet more emissions.) It was about reusing things. Think Blue Peter.

Anyone who, like me, grew up with parents influenced by the war years (or, like my husband, grew up in the consumer desert of the Soviet Union), knows perfectly well that yoghurt pots and broken furniture have their second uses. Cutting out waste is in fact oddly calming.

If nothing else, it’s a cool way to get your finances in order before we all get credit-crunched, starve to death or are fried by excess sunshine.

Send us your best money-saving, waste-reducing ideas to editor@therendzvous.info

1968 remembered: barricades forever

May 2008

Paris, May 1968 and French youth was famously manning the barricades. It was a protest which began in the Universities, lead to running battles in the streets, a general strike and the ultimate collapse of the de Gaulle government.

With protest in the air, further demonstrations broke out across Europe while in America they were protesting the Vietnam war. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia saw a fleeting glimmer of freedom before being crushed by Soviet tanks. In China, Mao was overseeing the worst excesses of the cultural revolution (while Western Maoists ignorantly espoused his doctrine). Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were also assassinated in 1968. Some year.
But back to those Paris barricades. The protests were, as protests generally are, anti-establishment: down with the bosses - i.e. anyone in a suit - who are capitalist pigs all, and the police, the tools of oppression, fascist pigs the lot of them.

(Plus ça change. Today’s protests may be against GM crops, oil wars or the destruction of the planet but the baddies are still the capitalist and “fascist” pigs.)

Of course we know that all this anti-establishment, anti- bourgeois rage is eventually tempered by marriages, mortgages and cleaning ladies.

"I hope that my children
will man their own barricades one day"

Perhaps that’s why we look back with a certain nostalgia on the long-haired, unwashed anger of the moment, the tatty banners with their great slogans.

Although students and CS gas are back on the streets of Paris as I write, it has been a long time since Western Europe was truly gripped by revolutionary fervour. Indeed it can be hard work, in the relatively comfortable, relatively free West to feel truly oppressed.

The great British playwright Tom Stoppard recently recalled how he tried to throw himself into the 60’s protests but having just witnessed tanks rolling into his homeland, Czechoslovakia, found it hard to empathise with the “oppression” in London. In the 1980’s I shared a flat in London with a left-wing South African refugee who, having fled a police force which shot demonstrators dead, found it hard to shout ‘fascist pigs’ at London Bobbies.

But the spirit of revolution has thrived elsewhere. As a foreign correspondent, I was lucky enough to watch crowds dismantling the Berlin Wall by hand and later I met my husband on the barricades surrounding the Russian parliament building, just feet from where Yeltsin was famously clambering on top of a tank in defiance of the right-wing coup attempt. To be part of these crowds was to witness what it means to be alive.

OK, it’s naïve to believe that practical economics and politics don’t play a greater role in the collapse of untenable regimes than a handful of brilliant slogans: Communism couldn’t sustain itself.

And, let’s face it, Nelson Mandela probably didn’t walk free just because we danced along to the Specials’ “Free-ee-ee... Nelson Man-DE-la”.

But let’s not give way entirely to cynicism either. Protest is essential. It is only our refusal to accept the way things are that keeps society alive and moving forward. Questioning the status quo and seeking to overturn it is what makes us intelligent beings.

Stop doing this and we might as well line-up to become delta-minuses in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Which is why my heart still gladdens at the sight of a bunch of angry students clutching (still badly made) placards, bringing traffic to a halt and getting in the way of those of us with deadlines to meet and dinner to get on the table.

At least they are tasting the spirit of revolt and if it’s against the size of their grants today it might be repression in Tibet tomorrow.

So although, like most parents, I bring up my children to respect the teachers and do as they say, I also sincerely hope that they will grow up to question and reject, to stand up and be counted and, if necessary, (peacefully) man their own barricades one day.

Of course the next generation of youth may be too fat to go out onto the streets and have to confine itself to virtual protests online.

But let’s hope the croonings of boy bands being pumped directly into their brains via their iPods doesn’t render them too comatose to care.

As graffiti on the 1968 Paris barricades proclaimed: “We don’t want a world where the certainty that we won’t die from hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom”.

Long live the revolution!

***********

You may have seen the picture of the English setter in last month’s Noticeboard, “abandoned by owner and looking for a good home”. He was chained up outside the owner’s property which was up for sale when we went to photograph him so, being soppy English animal lovers, we took him back with us to await the flood of calls offering him a good home. And the calls came in - but too late.

He is so funny and clever and loveable that, even though the last thing we need is more animals, we couldn’t part with him. He’d been on his chain for three weeks when we collected him. Awful the way the French treat their dogs, isn’t it? Except - his owner was English.

Virtual Passions - April blog 2008

I am one of those mean parents who considers that a television, computer and Game Boy is quite enough screens for one child and am thus deaf to pleas for Gamecubes, Nintendo Wiis, PlayStations, X boxes or whatever else is on the market.

Of course there are excellent and informative television programmes, great films on DVD and brilliant computer games like the Civilisation series or Age of Empires which are not just absorbing and creative but educational, imaginative and thought-provoking as well.

And we all need a dose of junk TV from time to time - not least children who have just walked in from a ten-hour school day.

Recently, however, my son’s best friend lent him a Gamecube installed with the most mindless games whose sole purpose is to run around empty warehouses or bits of no man’s land blasting opponents to a bloody pulp using an arsenal ranging from snipers to bazookas and hand grenades.

“I too had become
a zombie,
jabbing
incessantly at buttons”

The two of them not only played for hours on end but morphed into hyperactive zombies - jabbing incessantly at buttons whilst so transfixed by their quest that they were unaware of anything going on in the room around them and deaf to repeated attempts to distract them.

Then the friend fell ill and couldn’t come round any more. But we still had the Game cube. My son tried to interest his sister in playing but she said she “couldn’t see the point” of a game that consisted only of shooting people without any strategies or creative content. (Boy, was I proud of her!).

He approached his father, who tried to interest him in a bike ride or some target practice with his new bow and arrow instead.

Adolescents spend an increasing amount of time in the virtual world and thus, inevitably, significantly less time in the real world while we parents try to explain that “taking a break from the TV” does not mean switching to the computer, it means throwing a ball for the dogs or baking a cake or having a face to face conversation with a live human being.

In desperation he turned to me and I took pity on him: the cube was only on loan for a few more days and his horrible parents wouldn’t buy him one of his own. I offered to be taught and to play with him.

I am not a techno-Luddite but nevertheless I was useless. With a set of buttons in each hand controlling different movements it was a bit like an IT version of the old trick where you have to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time.

My choice of weapons was pathetic. Generally I opted for the bazookas and machine guns to give me the best chance of hitting something when, my son pointed out, a revolver or shotgun would have been more appropriate (how is it boys know these things?). Every time I threw a hand grenade I forgot to run away but just stood and watched, thus blowing myself up rather than my opponent (who had run away).

My son was patient. He invested time in “training” me (to turn me into me a more interesting opponent, I suppose). He encouraged me, commenting periodically on my improvement and he congratulated me on a good shot.

It was fun spending time with him doing something he wanted to do and I was impressed with the range of skills and co-ordination he had mastered to be able to play so well as well as by his ability to instruct me.

And there was a moving moment when he said proudly that he didn’t think “any of the other boys in my class have a mother who plays Medal of Honour with them”.

Gradually I got better. Not just that, I got hooked. Absolutely bowled over addicted. My daughter might ask for help with her homework, my husband try to establish if the animals had been fed and I didn’t hear a word. This is such a fast moving game you don’t have time to break concentration for a second to answer irrelevant domestic queries. I too had become a zombie, jabbing incessantly at buttons. Worse still, when I wasn’t playing, my fingers were itching to play.

It was a secret vice I shared with my son. I would be busy proofing pages of the Rendezvous and he would sidle into the room and suggest a quick game.

“Only twenty minutes - max”. He nodded. Two hours later we were still playing.
If you are tearing your hair out watching your kids fritter away their lives playing mindless electronic games, believe me, they can’t help it. It’s frightening.

Eventually, the friend reclaimed his Cube and of course I was as disappointed as my son.
“Now you know what fun it is I don’t suppose you’d think of buying one for us?” he asked hopefully. But he knew the answer already.

Absolutely no way.

Mother's Day - editor's blog for March 2008

Whether you still celebrate UK Mother’s Day or now mark the French date - depending on where your mothers and children are - March daffodils and the reawakening of spring still evoke Mothering Sunday for many - be it looking forward to a hand drawn card and tea in bed or a dash to Interflora.

This annual recognition is pretty fleeting - but everyone takes mothers for granted, so long as they have one.

If only the reverse were true! If we could take our children for granted, how much more bearable motherhood might be.

"the only time a mother can be really, truly happy is when her children are at home, in bed, asleep"

Instead, as soon as that first bundle is placed in our arms we turn animal like in our passion to protect. Understanding that you will never again be the most important person in your own life is a shock. The enduring state is one of exquisite agony.

When mothers say “kids - who’d have ’em?” or tell childless women they are lucky, I long to silence them quickly: that’s such a lie! And, call it a latent protestant background or plain superstition, but: what if somebody’s listening?

Yet while our instincts cry out to lock our children in a room and keep them safe for ever, the true story is of a journey separation - and one which it is our job to encourage.

Each success is a stab to the heart. The first time they smile at a child minder. Leaving them at pre-school while they beg you to stay and you pretend to be hard hearted and turn your back. When they start secondary school, you burst into tears because you have no babies left and any minute now - that’s what six years will feel like - they’ll be leaving home for good.

Each morning, I scowl at the bus driver in case he’s had a heavy night and in any case because he whisks my children away to a life in which I have no place.

In the evenings I am kinder because he has returned them safely, prompting a little leap of joy and relief.

For it is this, this fear of the ultimate separation - every time they go out on their bikes or on a coach trip - which means that the only time a mother can be really, truly happy is when her children are at home, in bed, asleep.

Then, whatever their age, we are allowed to brush their forehead lightly and know that, for the next few hours at least, our babies are safe.

Editor's blog February 2008

Love...
You may get a Valentine’s Day card this month or at least a text message: luv u :). Which your phone will store for about a week. Or maybe you’ll find a loving email in your inbox - to treasure until your next computer crash.

But do you have any love letters? Any hand-written words of endearment? Correspondence from friends and family?

OK, this is the modern world and a transitory one. We are urged not to print out emails and digital photos to save the planet.

But we are missing out on sensory pleasures: the thrill of seeing the familiar handwriting of a loved one on an envelope, the tactile pleasure of pulling out the letter and smoothing the pages, carrying it to a quiet spot to read.

A friend and I still determinedly correspond by post. We no longer manage the hand-written bit but send real letters for the sheer near-obsolete - pleasure of opening something that is neither bill nor junk mail.

Photographs, too, are now digitally stored on disk or in the ether rather than in boxes in the attic. We are moving into an age when we will leave nothing physical behind, no clues to who we were. Yet, it is only when parents die that children wonder who they were.

Clearing the family home after my parents died I spent hours sifting through old photographs, remembering some, turning others over to see what was written on the back. Often they were unmarked and I have no idea who the people were - but even that mystery is appealing. There were letters and diaries, even old lists - my mother was a hoarder. But it was physical evidence of a life lived and, sitting on the floor surrounded by it, I suspect more comforting than staring at the same details on a screen.

Our delete-in-a-click existence will make the biographers’ task almost impossible. And some of our greatest literature or most fascinating glimpses into the past come from posthumously published letters: Tolstoy’s daily outpourings to his wife and her’s to him or, published last year, the Mitford sisters’ letters. We learn much from the passions of the past - future generations may find little evidence of ours.

...& Politics don’t necessarily make happy bedfellows.

While many a great leader has been sustained by the steady love of an excellent spouse, going doolally whilst actually being a world leader frequently leads to trouble.

Traditionally, it has been the British who are served the fulsome details of politicians’ private lives over breakfast but, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine PM Brown, one month divorced, cavorting with the likes of, say, Nancy Dell’Olio.

“We don’t know whether to laugh, cry or just scream” remarks a French colleague as toute la France is hypnotised by the Sarko-Bruno shenanigans. The man who devoted his entire life to becoming president is now in thrall to a woman who reputedly sends herself to sleep by counting the number of her famous lovers including, of course, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.

Hands up who thinks a middle-aged man who has just started going out with a super model is going to be able to sit at his desk and concentrate deeply on the minutiae of the next G8 summit, say, or third world carbon footprints?