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The 12th September there were clouds in the sky and sometimes the weather seemed threatening, but mostly the sun shone. In London for my sister’s wedding and to house-sit, my wife and I took this opportunity to visit the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Here are some of the photos I took that day – and one of me that Agneta took, standing up on Kew’s treetop walkway.  My plans for today were sidetracked by the Word for Today on Artwiculate.com: Disparate. Disparate means various, utterly different, unlike. Long a go I started writing a book with the working title Disparate Days. It was a memoir of the year and a half I spent as a student in Leeds, where my housemate was Jonathan Kershaw.
When he was “down†though, it was often difficult to know what to do. I had never before met someone with clinical depression (not knowingly – and it was 20 years before my own diagnosis). I just did not know what to do, but I did what seemed best at the time. He was my friend, I wanted to help, and I remembered the “ups†and tried to treat him in his depths in the same way as I did when he was happy. Sometimes I seemed to make headway, but my own humour and charisma were neither of them catalytic, and when Jon climbed out of a low I think he did it more by himself (or with help from the medication he was sometimes prescribed). It seems very odd to me now, but it never crossed my mind to discuss with anyone my difficulties when Jon was down. Anyone not a fellow student that is. Jon himself had a very good relationship with the college Chaplain, who I met, but never thought to approach for advice. Years after, meeting him again, the man said “I had no idea you were coping with him on your own. Why didn’t you come to me?â€
Still, I look back on the experience and on Jonathan with great warmth. I learned so much more about myself and about others, and had so much fun as well as heartache. Later in life, with more experience, I began to see things about Jonathan that I didn’t see at the time, or saw but didn’t know how to interpret. I’m fairly sure now that he was a repressed homosexual. Not gay. Gay doesn’t seem to me at all a satisfactory description. He wasn’t queer either. Peculiar, yes, eccentric, inspirational, brilliant, beautiful. All of those. And someone who was deeply unsure of his own sexuality. It didn’t help, I think, that he was as attractive to men as he was to women.
At the time, as I say, I didn’t see what seems so plain now. Though I found his personality so attractive, though I regarded him as my best friend, I did not feel any sexual attraction to Jon myself. I made the common hetero assumption that he was “like meâ€, and I made a mistake that has embarrassed me ever since. We had a friend, she was closer to Jon than to me and not a student with us but someone Jon had met when he was doing voluntary work after dropping out the first time. Eileen stayed with us in the house in Leeds. She was in love with Jon and came and asked me whether I though she should tell him, whether she had a chance. I was a fool. Couldn’t think of anything but that if a girl told me she was in love with me how happy I would be. (I was lonely and had no girlfriend – but that’s another story.) So I encouraged her to speak up. It was an utter disaster. I never learned exactly what happened, but I saw the consequences. Eileen left us hurriedly and Jon tipped over into another depression. Ten years later, after I moved abroad, after Jon moved to the West Country, after years of medication and psychotherapy and organ playing in village churches, he found a sort of peace at last. He took his own life. Jon believed in a life after this, but as a Christian, he also believed it was wrong to kill himself. I hope he found his God more forgiving than some of His mortal mouthpieces. Those days in that student house, they were disparate in ways it’s hard to describe in a short (now rather long) Internet article. That’s why I thought I needed a book. And, who knows, I might still write it. (Though with my track record that seems a tad unlikely.)
I spent the whole morning writing the above and searching through boxes for a decent photo of Jon. I know I’ve got a couple, but could I find them? The above are all photos of photos. The last from a memorable week’s sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Â Jon and I and Eileen and her sister shared the boat, but only Jon knew anything about sailing. We learned a lot – including (I speak for myself) a wealth of swearwords I never knew before – and never knew Jon knew either. I just got back from London where my wife and I spent two very full weeks. This was the first photo I took while I was there. The idea of a pigeon dressing up as a parrot for the carnival tickled my fancy — and I thought of a couple of Twitter friends (tWordBird and Squawkingalah). The poster was still up on the wall on several Underground stations, though we’d just missed the reason for it. Get ready for the Notting Hill Carnival. We arrived on 1st September. More from London is likely over the next few days …
Both books are wonderful and inspirational, in terms of the foods they discuss and in terms of the writing style. The Kitchen Diaries describe meals Nigel Slater makes with fresh vegetables or fruit from his own garden or with (mostly) locally produced fresh ingredients bought at shops and markets near where he lives. The food is seasonal and that means I have a hope of emulating some of the recepies here in Sweden (something my sister, the giver, had in mind I suspect), if I allow for the spring-time lag and the autumn acceleration. Slater seems to live in the south of England – London – so especially his spring and autumn are longer, more drawn out. Gothenburg lies on the same parallel as Aberdeen, but tends to have more continental-style winters: longer and colder. Toast (sub-title: The story of a boy’s hunger) is broken into short, evocative chapters. Mostly these have titles like “Christmas Cakeâ€, “Rice Puddingâ€, “Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delightâ€, but occasionally there is a title that is not the name of a food. “The Lunch Box†is about Josh the gardener, “Percy Salt†turns out to be the name of the grocer’s where Nigel’s mother does her shopping. Each chapter encapsulates a food-related memory and opens a glimpse into a boy’s childhood in the 1960s, which bears close comparison to my own childhood memories also from the 60s. Very satisfying. I am so captivated by both these books that I have to read sections of them aloud over the dinner table. We are eating a spaghetti carbonara with a typically Swedish salad of grated carrot and thinly sliced summer cabbage which I have enlivened with rounds of a red spring onion and a simple vinaigrette dressing. (Nigel Slater: His influence!) So I read Slater’s account of his family’s first and only attempt to make spaghetti bolognese. This sets us off remembering. I too remember the long blue packets of spaghetti, “for all the world like a great long firework†and the way the strands, dumped into a pan of boiling water “splay out like one of those fibre-optic lightsâ€. But my Mum had had an Italian boyfriend before she married Dad, so she knew how to cook spaghetti, and to make a bolognese sauce that didn’t come from a can. Like Slater’s family, though, we also had powdered parmesan shaken from a cardboard drum, and I also remember thinking “this cheese smells like sickâ€.
We put away a bottle of red wine between us (this is still the lag of celebrating my birthday) and I think how much fun we’re having with these memories and how easy it would be to emulate Nigel Slater and write a book about Swedish food as a memory trigger. About how it would be popular on both sides of the North Sea. Ha! The following morning, sitting here at my keyboard, I can’t remember clearly a single anecdote or incident. Curse that red, red wine! Agneta’s memories of spaghetti in tomato sauce are all from her bamba (barnmatsbespisning = school dinner hall).
 Norman Tebbit & Margaret Thatcher, 1985 In the wake of the recent general election in Britain, and while the parties negotiate to decide the complexion of the next government, on 8th May blogger Milo Yiannopoulos, aka “Nero“, tweeted from London: Lord Tebbit asks a good question: if the Thatcher years were so bad, why did so many people vote for her again and again? I would say it’s an interesting question. I’m not sure it’s a good one. It’s an example of a crafty old politician (Tebbit, that is, not Nero) performing a bit of misdirection. Good questions – especially just now – are:
The answer to both lies in the iniquity of Britain’s “First Past the Post” electoral system. Mrs Thatcher led the Conservative Party to victory in three elections: in 1979, 1983 and 1987. In each election, Conservatives attracted less than 45% of the votes cast. (Respectively 43.9%, 42.4% and 42.2% to be precise.) They were never supported by more than about 13.8 million voters, out of a voting population that rose from 41 to more than 43 million in the 8 years. In 1979 more than 27 million people did not vote for the Tories, yet the Tories took a 43 seat majority. In 1983 more than 29 million people did not vote for the Tories, yet the Tories took a 144 seat majority. In 1987 more than 29.5 million people did not vote for the Tories, yet the Tories took a 102 seat majority.
Why take part in the farce? With a system of proportional representation, given 72.7% rate of participation, then 1983 would have seen a the Tories gain 267 seats (instead of 397), Labour would have won 173 seats (instead of 209) and the SDP-Liberal Alliance would have taken 158 seats (instead of 23). If that hadn’t put an end to Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, it would certainly have forced her to moderate her draconian policies. Defenders of the First Past the Post system argue that it makes for strong government. But then so does one-party dictatorship. A democratic system must surely seek to represent the opinions and wishes of as broad a spectrum of its members as it can. The British system assumes that there are two sides to every issue and that two parties can represent these points of view. If that was ever true, it certainly is not any more. By denying a voice in government to a large group of its citizens, the British system brings democracy into disrepute. It also encourages people to try to solve their problems and to get their voice heard by non-democratic means whether through civil disobedience, violent protest or bribery and corruption.
————————————————————————————— The Reuters copyright image of Norman Tebbit and Mrs Thatcher accepting applause at the Conservative Party Congress in 1985 is reproduced from a Daily Mail article by Norman Tebbit “Battle for Britain”, dated 13th March 2009. Boil your blood,  read the article. It’s ridiculous to be so taken up with an election from which I have been disenfranchised, but nevertheless. Last night’s election count from the UK had me sitting up till midnight, and up again before 6 this morning, to follow on TV and Internet.  The morning after I’ve been disenfranchised by the UK twice now. The first time was when I moved abroad in 1982, the second was in 1995 when my grandmother died. Two lesser known bizarrities of the same British electoral system that looks set to give the â€moral right†to govern to a party that commands around a third of the popular vote and the support (if the 69% electoral turnout the BBC is claiming is true) of only about a quarter of the voting population. It was like this. In 1982 I moved abroad for the first time to work. In the spring of 1983, Mrs Thatcher called an election. A number of my Scandinavian colleagues had recently taken part in elections and voted at their embassies, so I thought I could do the same. Went off to the British Embassy where they smirked at me and told me that by moving abroad I had disqualified myself. “Well, what about you lot then,†I asked. “Are you disqualified because you’re working abroad?†Of course they weren’t. Diplomats (if they aren’t members of the aristocracy for whom other rules apply) are still technically working on British soil and so have a vote to cast. Where, I’m not sure. Westminster, perhaps. So I watched the election from afar and comforted myself with the thought that most people who live and work abroad would probably cast their vote for the Tories anyway. Had ex-pats had the vote, mine for Labour, or Liberal, or Social Democrat would have drowned in the blue sea of Tory votes the others would have cast. Still, I was disappointed. At the time I was living in Bulgaria, behind the Iron Curtain. Bulgaria under Todor Zhivkov was hardly what you would call a democracy. The Bulgarians called it a People’s Democracy, of course, and had their own elections with a 99% or better turn out and 99% or better approval rate for the ruling party. Bulgarian friends and teacher colleagues who expressed an opinion thought it was quite amusing that I had been disenfranchised: “So this is what you mean by democracy?†By 1985 Mrs T and her government, scrambling around for all the votes they could get, had changed the law and enfranchised British citizens living abroad. I was living in Finland then, and duly got in touch with the British Embassy in Helsinki, filled out the forms and got my vote all in time for the 1987 election. Unfortunately, there were snags. Because of the antiquated and invidious electoral system Britain espouses, I could only vote in the constituency where I had last been registered as a voter. More, I could not cast a postal vote, but had to give my vote to another voter living in the constituency who would cast it on my behalf. Tough decision. I would have liked to have been able to vote in Leeds or in Birmingham, both cities where I’d lived as a student and where my vote might have made a difference. Unfortunately, the last place I’d been registered to vote was in core Conservative territory; West Hove and Portslade. And the only person I knew still living and voting in the constituency was my grandmother. Gran was at a heart a communist, but pragmatically a lifelong Labour voter and she wasn’t having anything to do with tactical voting. The whole business felt rather futile, but I still went through the motions. Gran got my vote, had to take a taxi from her own polling station to the one where she could cast my vote, and Labour’s candidate in Hove got two votes instead of one from us. Labour still came in third that time. The next election was in April 1992, I was living in the north of Sweden, and if I remember rightly I still had my vote, but Gran was not in a state to help or care. She’d died in February. At various points the qualification requirements for enfranchisement for Brits abroad have bounced about like rubber balls. You had to have lived and been registered in Britain within the last 5 years, or 20 years, or 15 years. (It’s 15 years at the moment, and postal votes are allowed now.) I don’t know what the situation was in 1997, but I didn’t have a vote then. Still, I sat up all night and when Labour won West Hove and Portslade, I knew I was seeing an earthquake in British politics.
Because regardless of the result, a hung parliament or a clear majority, today:
So this is what you mean by democracy? This screenshot from a news film on the BBC’s Election 2010 site (here).
Tory leader David Cameron and wife leave the polling station after having voted – preceded by the Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt!  Fredrik Reinfeldt  Splash In the baths today, swimming my 40 lengths, I was trying to remember learning to swim, but the memory’s lost somewhere in the chlorine haze. My mother would probably say I learned when we lived abroad, in Qatar or Ghana. But in Arabia I was only 2 years old and paddling. In Ghana, aged 6, I remember playing by the sea, and splashing about in half-empty swimmingpools (very JG Ballard), but no swimming. No comic memories of dry practices, lying on table tops or lawns, turning head to left and right, reaching over kicking out. But then I do find one thread of recollection. I pinch at it awkwardly, get a grip, draw it out. Learning to float in a pool somewhere. The sun is bright and warm in the sky, so it can’t be indoors and can’t be England. My 6 or 8 year-old self, falling back in the water, my mother’s hand on the back of my neck. Back straight, arms limp, head back, my ears fill with water, and I fight panic, win, but then she takes her hand from behind my neck and my head goes under. |
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