Redemption Blues

Pale Imitation

2007-12-01T16:00:00.000+01:00

This is the original version of the blog - the properly maintained (and far more attractive) one is here. I only occasionally update this for reasons of sheer nostalgia and to maintain a blogger.com presence (for the reader who happens to stray this way).

"50 Lost Years" Serap Cileli's Speech at the Bul le mérite Award Ceremony

2007-11-19T10:13:00.000+01:00

[To read Serap Cileli's speech at the Bul le mérite award ceremony in Potsdam, 18th September 2007, please click here]

Nocturne

2007-08-21T11:37:00.000+02:00

The diffident sunshine did not suffice to banish a tinge of grey from the sky as I boarded the bus, seasonally depopulated of all but the lower income brackets (pensioners, unemployed) and the occasional waif such as myself inward bound to sign the register (timetable vagaries necessitating the trip). The tramp with his characteristically matted hair and copious beard who had so carefully arranged his belongings (mattress rolled up and tied within a protective plastic sheet to prevent its being soaked in his absence, various carrier bags bulging indeterminately) in his modest corner (astutely selected in a part of the city abandoned after the offices close) next to the bridge with its pigeon-spattered pavements, scraggy bushes offering a modicum of privacy at least for part of the year has been definitively evicted by the removal of the bench on which he slumbered so deeply that one of my colleagues phoned the police, believing him dead.

My body trapped here, at my employers’ command, my mind at the cottage, my brother signalling with the headlights to his friends camped on the opposite shore, their bonfire the only visible token of human presence in the all-engulfing blackness. Dropping in on them, he was confronted with Spike, horror film addict with a particular fondness for zombies, recovering from the shock of the bin bag taking on a life of its own. Assailed by visions of dismembered limbs reanimated by canister gas to twitch menacingly, he screamed for a stick before tentatively tipping it on to its side to spew its contents. Poised for the worst abomination, branch at the ready, he sagged with relief when a half-dazed hedgehog scuttled out.

A few hours later, as my brother pulled out of the lay-by, he noticed a prickly ball curled up defensively in the middle of the road. Spike gently scooped up the campsite intruder and proceeded to run it through his hair like a brush. Having deposited it amongst the ferns at a safe distance and satisfied himself that it was not suicidally heading back in the direction of the tarmac he returned to the car where my brother cheerfully informed him that hedgehogs are notorious for being infested with fleas.

Sepia

2007-08-19T09:28:00.000+02:00

[From my Grandfather's Notebook]

Buller

Ye ane-time faithfu’, lovin’ baist.
In ma opinion ye’re disgraced
Sin’ ye hae yer affections placed
Wi’ Dame Buchanan.
Yer new-developed kin’ o’ taste
Taks understan’in.

Och, dug, wad ye no’ sooner hae
The kin’ o’ sport we used tae play,
Tae poach a’ nicht an’ sleep a’ day,
Content wi’ me,
Than bein’ a pet companion tae
A very ‘She’?

Ah’ve seen the day ye’d tak yer dose
O’ kail an’ tatties, aye, an’ brose –
Bit noo ye winna pit yer nose
Tae sic guid feedin’.
Thae trashy sweetstuffs, Ah suppose,
Hae sp’ilt yer breedin’.

Bit still, Ah’m telt that Mrs. B.
Is guid o’ he’rt an’ fond o’ ye.
An’ that ye baith gey weel agree
Wi’ ane anither;
Sae, gin ye like her mair nor me,
Bide ye thegither.

[For an image of Buller, click here]

Aranybilincs

2007-07-27T10:57:00.000+02:00

Avagy a középosztálybeli élet kis vigaszai...

The heat haze shimmered ahead, tantalisingly out of reach like the rainbow’s end as the Hungarian expertly dodged the potholes, the uneven road testing the suspension more effectively than any manufacturer-devised simulation. The yellow trams trundled sedately along their parallel tracks, even the prefabricated high rises seemed benign as they observed the frantic scurry below with their grey, unblinking satellite dish eyes.

Past the melon stands, the plump wares of which were described without poetic licence as honey sweet. Beyond the suburbs to the green-clad hills, away from the buildings which still bear the scars of the longing for freedom. Pilisvörösvár, Pilisszentiván, heart-shaped black granite headstones on display in the gravel-strewn yards waiting patiently for the inscriptions to give them purpose. Past the gleaming-eyed tramp foraging in the orange bins for any scraps of food near the pancake kiosk, stuffing half rotted hamburger discards into his mouth with the voracity of desperation, poignant symbol of the shift from the insidious cosseting of Állam Bácsi, the state that provided a modicum of existential security for the masses in return for ideological conformity and the obscene prospering of a small elite to capitalism in its most brutal and unalloyed manifestation where the elderly and the vulnerable are faced with the stark choice between eating or paying the utility bills. Where many look back on oppression with the fond glow of nostalgia (at least they can complain without fear of reprisal), when the forint went further, when only the work-shy were ostracised, when the Party told you whom to applaud and who to turn away from, when you were expected to go through the motions. Now the prevailing mood is envy and (justified) suspicion, the nouveau riche merely the most conspicuously successful asset-strippers in their unapologetic vulgarity and contempt for the less unscrupulous. This is the country where a bank robber demanded the modest amount of five million (about £13,000) before being shot down like a dog. His motive was not personal gain: the money was to have been spent on paying off his disabled father’s debts and preventing his forcible eviction. One of the officers at the crime scene opportunistically pocketed 200,000 forints (about £500) of the would-be haul. This is the country where a woman driving home alone in the small hours was pulled over on the pretext of allegedly not having fastened her seatbelt. She was ordered down a side street and raped by two of the policemen whilst the remaining three looked on. Having accompanied her back to her flat they threatened her with dire retribution if she dared to open her mouth (nobody will believe you anyway, you slut, it’s your word against ours), stealing 20,000 forint (£50) into the bargain (the equivalent of half a month’s worth of old age pension payments). The incident has already become embedded in the public consciousness as demonstrated by the joke: A woman is hurrying down the street in a rough area, clutching her handbag defensively when a tall, burly man steps out of the shadows blocking her path. “Madam, please allow me to escort you home. This is a very dangerous part of town; it’s crawling with police”.

The streets softened by lime-green acacia drifts, a moth’s tongue sipping nectar. Neighbours who know each other’s business, the seasonal abundance of vegetable patches and branches laden with cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, a church tower in the distance. I notice my sun-sleeves in the shower, where the rays have conspired to join the dots, blurring one freckle into another. I discard the duvet and the blankets, aware of the perspiration on the back of my neck and drift into oblivion to the soothing sound of his snores.

Singed

2007-07-07T09:48:00.000+02:00

Swapping the gale force air-conditioning and sun-loungers draped with orange pool-side towels for the rocky bay and the caress of the sea breeze, transient status on display in the glisten of factor 45 on pale flesh and the wide-brimmed hat purchased moments earlier we wove our way sedately through groups of teenagers in beach attire, short skirts (the boys bare-chested) and flip-flops.

Beneath the gaze of the posters for the local brew we attempted to cross the road with no apparent crossings or traffic lights to check the anarchic progress of the buses from a different era, Leyland proudly emblazoned across their fronts, transplanted from the drizzle and the fertile green to the unremitting urban sprawl and cloudless blue.

The waitress unwrapped my sea bass from the foil in which it had been baked, excavating it expertly from the salt crust before arranging the moist fillets aesthetically on the plate. Not that the service was perfect. Her colleague, looking down his nose at us as if we were flotsam washed up on the shore had not bothered to listen to Lisa’s order in her flawless Italian (the dishes being somewhat pretentiously listed in that melodic tongue), placing a medium rare slab of meat in front of her instead of the red mullet with succulent olives. With her enviable line in steely politeness, she turned it away, forcing him to look her in the eye as he apologised (not that this redeemed him – as he was clearing away the main course, he knocked over an entire glass of white straight into the lap of our companion, MS with such force that his shirt was liberally spattered and the tablecloth soaked).

Having been forewarned the evening before that one of her periodic bouts of catharsis was imminent I had prepared myself mentally. Her appearance of strength conceals a perpetual insecurity, a self-destructive streak which impels her to test the boundaries with those who call themselves her friends, lashing out viciously with a smile (a tendency that coincides with alcohol consumption, the wine functioning as an alibi to absolve her of the excesses committed should she discover that she really has gone too far), asserting her domination. Love, even in its manifestation through friendship’s powerful affection, must be entirely on her terms. She takes pride in being untamed, yet longs for stability. Perfectly capable of filling in the forms on time she chooses not to in order to maintain her reputation as chaotic and anarchical, her protest against the superfluous irritations of excessive bureaucracy sadly detrimental to her career. An embodiment of the contradictions of longing for the consolations of a more traditional model of femininity in the full knowledge that adherence to its demands would stifle her. Like my older self, she takes great pleasure in shocking the listener, MS with his (at least projected) relative guilelessness the perfect audience.

She presented us with the dilemma tearing her apart: should she dump Patrick, with whose doe-eyed adoration she has become thoroughly bored? The question is more complicated than it might at first seem, as she claims to spend every waking moment wishing she was with her previous – married – lover, the alcoholic Michael who had messed with her head by predicting eighteen months previously that she would find herself in her current tortured state. More succinctly, the choice between settling down and pursuing a potentially dangerous passion, risking losing both. “I am not quite ready to become a mad woman with a cat,” she pronounced with complete conviction.

I patiently explained that long-term relationships require the ability to compromise and make sacrifices (specifically fidelity, though I had no need to make that explicit). MS concurred. Ultimately, Lisa was not seeking our approval, as I pointed out. What she really wanted was to know that when she emerges from the candle flame, wings singed from the heat, we will support her unconditionally without indulging in churlish “I told you sos”.

Patrick shied away from making decisions, whereas what infuriated her about Michael when still involved with him was his habit of deciding on everything without consulting her or taking her preferences into account (as shown by his restaurant bookings where he would automatically reserve a table at the Thai whereas she loathes that coconut milk drenched cuisine). Unpalatable though I knew it would be I warned her that Michael would not abandon his wife, as this would be equivalent to relinquishing the hold he had over her, a voluntary renunciation of power in a game where he desperately wanted to remain in control. Lisa’s voracious desire to “beat” her rival and exalt in her prize kept her in his thrall, in constant frustration, compliant, determined to please him, to prove that she is better, that they are made for each other. That, should she actually succeed in her objective, she would in some other Mediterranean port a few months on, pour out her woes again, about how she had made the wrong choice, how their attraction had turned sour.

Michael is a squat, ugly man with boyish curls and an air of insufferable arrogance quite typical of the suited administrators who delight in throwing their literal and metaphorical weight around. He is well-educated, but entirely self-absorbed like the addict that he is. I remember how she had to take an afternoon off work to drag him to the clinic when he poisoned himself with the booze. I have no sympathy for him, yet she feels a deep empathy that comes from having peered into the hypnotic depths of the abyss herself (Lisa drinks an average of two and a half bottles of wine a day, yet resents the reputation she has acquired amongst her colleagues as a result).

Patrick is the consummate bullshitter, applying for job after job for which he is patently not qualified, anything in order to impress her, his soft, half-mumbling voice, striking blue eyes and battered face in absolute contrast to his rival’s brashness. It is precisely his worship of Lisa that endears me to him, although I possess a certain scepticism about how long such complete besottedness can last. I agree with her that Patrick is not in her league intellectually (she lamented her own snobbery about how his children’s talents lie in music and art as opposed to more academic subjects and her amazement that his ex-wife firmly steered them away from university in order to leech off their wages). He admires her wildness, failing to understand that she occasionally wants him to admonish her gently, to keep her in check before too much damage has been done.

“But what do you want, Lisa?” MS enquired, exasperated.
“I want it all!”
She wants reassurance, the freedom to surrender her fiercely asserted autonomy, to be weak instead of in charge, to rely on the emotional resources of a partner for respite, however brief. To be cherished without her independence being fatally compromised. Neither of these men can offer her this. And I know that she will inflict pain upon herself both through succumbing to guilt over Patrick who has done nothing to deserve being cast aside and striving to assuage her restlessness with a man infinitely more selfish and needy than her (according to her, Patrick is the needy one, she refuses to see how Michael will absorb every ounce of her energy in an unfair exchange for the insubstantial convulsions of thwarted desire, the illusion of scorning convention furnished by sentiments on an allegedly grander scale).

Wynd

2007-05-22T15:54:00.000+02:00

Even without the obligatory sign announcing the invisible frontier, the check points long since abandoned (unless the French are in one of their periodic strops, guards peering into your car as you crawl along the lane marked out by traffic cones), you can immediately tell when you have entered Waffleland by the proliferation of caravans and kiosks crowding the roadside purveying the national weakness, frites or frieten, the one element uniting the disparate and mutually hostile communities, the symbol of homecoming. Excavating them with a tiny plastic fork from beneath the more than generous dollops of mayonnaise an art in itself (perhaps if a citizenship test were introduced this should be considered the true proof of successful assimilation).

The streetscape of the city of spires and blackened sandstone has become gentrified, the small chippies with their specimen jars of pickled eggs and onions, their bottles of Cream Soda and competing concoctions with lurid, chemically enhanced hues, ousted by sandwich bars and coffee parlours, forced to seek refuge in the suburbs, slightly incongruous amongst the anonymous rows of bay windows. No pretensions, no freshly squeezed orange proclaiming its purity with a halo, just sizzling fat and the irresistable smell that attracts the hungry hordes to stagger semi-conscious in the direction of the haddock in crispy golden brown batter. Once, crossing the Meadows by the central walkway at night undeterred by the warnings of muggers lurking in the pools of darkness beyond the reach of the harsh orange glow, we flung our coagulated blood and oatmeal puddings against a tree trunk in disgust, having ordered the white variety, more palatable to a vegetarian (in the days when I would carefully enquire what kind of fat the establishment used for frying, although genuine consistency would have dictated abstinence from a dish containing suet immersed in the same oil as the sausages and other assorted items reserved for the carnivore).

The decline of organised religion visible in signs outside the Elim Pentecostal Church where worshippers formerly swayed, hands held heavenward, eyes firmly closed to gaze upon the divine by freeing the mind of distractions, muttering prayers in the tongues of angels where now that the pews have been removed the serious business of dancing is dedicated to the gratification of the flesh in a Frankenstein-themed nightclub rather than an expression of the spontaneous outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The sour fragrance of fermentation borne by the wind over the expanses of rubble a constant reminder of the bleak industrial monuments levelled by the bulldozers and cranes less profitable than the conveniently located two-bedroom luxury developments. Even that dingy yet somehow tantalising institution the Fingertips Massage Parlour has succumbed to the relentless pressure for accommodation. With no windows to board up, the sense of desolation invoked by its deserted doorway is absolute, the seedy venues for seekers of cheap thrills and simulated desire displaced to the fringes of the Grassmarket (itself sanitised since the shelter for the homeless was moved elsewhere, the men in multiple layers of greasy overcoats and tangled beards accosting the tourists with slurred requests for the price of a cup of tea presumably too intimidating to the visitor to be tolerated in the long term. We cannot allow the pristine image of our capital be tarnished by its shambling underclass, whose existence must be rigorously denied. Besides, hotels are profitable, whereas hostels represent a drain on the budget).

As the parked coaches slumber does the nightingale's song still pierce the sombre silence of the hillside beneath Statecraft's austere and disapproving gaze?

Emergence

2007-05-14T11:55:00.001+02:00

I have recently undergone a sex change, aligning myself with my true gender. It wasn’t an easy decision to make and I admit to some trepidation as to the reception I would be given by strangers. The initial shock of realisation, the double-take (even if only betrayed in the hesitation, or vehemently disavowed yet still manifested, however subtly, in the tone of voice). Only in an environment with no physical attributes on display did I feel genuinely uninhibited, safe in the knowledge that I would be judged on my skill alone, no whispering, no taunts, just the heady thrill of fitting in, the relief of inconspicuousness.

I soon became hopelessly addicted to a life from which I had previously been excluded, with its bonds of comradeship in the midst of adversity. I put up with the gratuitously macho comments (though I never indulged in them myself). We were surrounded by death, after all, by blood and brutality and I swiftly became popular, my reputation assured by my combat record and my sense of honour which meant I could always be relied upon to fight to the bitter end. My allies knew I would perish in the attempt to save them (and I expected nothing less in return from them).

Before coming clean, I cultivated my alternative identity assiduously (and my loving partner was always on hand to brief me on car models, engine parts, the virtues of one processor above another, the intricacies of the off-side rule). I had cultivated that peculiar form of inarticulacy pared of adjectives and peppered with expletives, language purged of affection, or rather speech where warmth is encoded through understatement and the gentle teasing of feigned disrespect, perhaps since overt acknowledgements of fondness would run the risk of invoking denigration, where the ultimate term of endearment, the crowning achievement of countless shared missions is “old pal”, delivered with an ironic wink.

It was not just that technology had caught up with me – coordinated strategy requires the ability to adapt instantly to rapidly shifting parameters, to send back-up or to warn of impending sneak-attacks when your ally is occupied elsewhere – but I had taken the enormous step of meeting my constant companion, my closest friend outside the confines of virtuality. We had fought alongside each other for over two years, day after day, week after week when I would test my physical and mental endurance to the limits before flopping into bed at 4am in a state of elated exhaustion. Our styles complemented each other to perfection and over time as we grew into our partnership, our grasp of each other’s responses shifted from conscious observation to instinct. I knew he would never let me down in combat. He possessed all the qualities I desired from a brother-in-arms: even in extremis he would remain imperturbably level-headed, trading insults with our enemies only if they initiated a tirade of verbal abuse. I knew that, like me, he would never give up, that if I had my back to the wall he would rather engage in a futile act of heroic self-sacrifice than leave me to perish in ignominy. My admiration for him was (and remains) boundless. Although initially taken aback when we admitted the truth (the circumstances of the encounter dictated that my partner had to act as my stand-in until I could snatch a few moments with him alone), he soon adjusted and we continue to play as a team even now. Together with my son.

Victory and defeat are equated with possessing and being possessed in a sexualised metaphor as epitomised by the term “ownage” denoting complete domination of the vanquished. The male gamers who pose as women by choosing female nicks (women who openly admit to that pariahdom-conferring status are inevitably ganged up on by their opponents desperate to reinforce their own prejudices concerning male superiority and to punish her for trespassing on their patch, banishing her with a forceful and ugly demonstration of the unwelcome nature of her presence in much the same way as I imagine the atmosphere in a Gentleman’s Club would chill should a woman stroll in to such a sanctum of maleness before being forcibly ejected by the porters) are the most eager employers of the swaggering and derogatory vocabulary of unalloyed sexism, casually, indeed gleefully bandying about the vicious terminology of violation (“We’ll rape you, man”; “I have a huge strap-on”). It is not that they are compensating for the penalties they incur through feminising themselves (which they do voluntarily, after all), such as opening themselves up to ridicule, but is based on a deeper misogyny still, as to be beaten by a female represents the ultimate in humiliation. You can rest assured that such players are not only supremely self-confident, but highly proficient, as ruthless as they are arrogant (and I admit that in my more immature moments I am not above using their hatred of womankind against them by announcing over their speakers that they have been “owned” by a member of the “weaker” sex, softness and weakness being the qualities they most despise. Their fury is impotent by comparison to the injury to their pride I have thereby inflicted).

In spite of my careful efforts to provide a feminist upbringing (with a certain degree of success, as shown by statements such as “I don’t think it is fair that I should have so many advantages simply because I am white and male. I didn’t ask for them” when recounting a tale of how one of his teachers never misses an opportunity to pick on his best friend who happens to be black), my son still refuses to believe that incidents such as we recently experienced when we inadvertently permitted our adversaries to catch the sound of my voice are the norm rather than the exception and can be attributed to something more than an isolated case of “He’s just a wanker, Mum”. As we discussed our next move the following text appeared on the screen in capital letters (the equivalent of shouting): DOES SHE SUCK YOUR COCK? I did not appreciate being subjected to such embarrassment in front of my 15-going-on-16-year-old, though he was every bit as shocked as I was. A couple of seconds went by and the next message popped up in the bottom left of the screen: DOES SHE HAVE BIG TITS? To which I replied: “Well, as you can see fuckwit, my tits are bigger than your brain”. Of all the traits for my son to inherit from me, the gift of withering sarcasm has proven the most useful and he showered the enemy with as many quick-fire retorts as virtual bullets. I was positively seething with indignation, my hands trembling with the adrenaline rush triggered by the enemy’s impudence. Needless to say, we trounced him in a matter of minutes. After being routed my detractor actually had the temerity to show his face again in the staging room for the next game. “Oh, it’s you,” I ventured. “Kindly keep your puerile and misogynistic remarks to yourself. Oops, I forgot, you don’t understand words of more than one syllable”.

Then the other day when an opponent invited him to “Go and fuck your mother”, his rejoinder: “That would be purple [the colour I always choose], who is too busy blowing your base apart right now” and I chimed in with: “Yes, that’s me, but the only person I can see getting fucked around here is YOU!” I know I shouldn’t let it get to me. I know I shouldn’t reinforce stereotypes through replication of sexist discourses, but I relish usurping their preconceived notions of appropriate, gender-segregated pursuits (girls should stick to Barbies, guns are for the boys).

VOIP facilitates communication and boosts your chances of success by obviating the need to concentrate on typing, a distraction for someone like myself who stubbornly searches for the letters on the keyboard (I have always eschewed cultivating such “feminine” proficiencies as cooking, knitting and touch-typing), a perilous (and potentially fatal) distraction in the heat of battle. Gaming is my life. I have come out at last and now sally forth with pride in my Amazon's armour.

The Tripod and the Temptress: Review of Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars

2007-05-13T12:28:00.000+02:00

[To read this review, originally published in PC Dome Magazine, please click here]

Intimate Instrusions: Interview with Professor Liz Kelly

2007-05-04T17:20:00.000+02:00

[To read this in-depth interview with one of the UK's foremost experts on violence against women, please go to the "de luxe" version of this blog, here]

Refutation

2007-04-11T10:12:00.000+02:00

[A response to Oliver Kamm’s ill-informed denunciation of political bloggers]

I find Mr Kamm’s argumentation somewhat myopic and mean-spirited. It has become fashionable for mainstream journalists (or those who aspire to the category) to snipe at bloggers, accusing us of various shortcomings, from narcissism (when such output is made available in the traditional medium of the printed volume, it is referred to as “autobiography”), to a lack of originality, or, as Mr Kamm phrases it, being “purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide”.
The latter contention betrays a rather unsavoury elitism as well as blithely ignoring the constraints within which bloggers operate (more of which in a moment).
I suspect that, these days, very few individuals purchase newspapers for their actual news content, which is more quickly and readily available on television and the internet. Newspapers cannot compete in terms of instantaneousness (admittedly, many subscribe to online editions, but these generally have the same format as the printed versions and therefore are a day late in comparison with, say, the BBC. This implies that many buy papers for their comment (and analysis) content (and, as time is a finite resource, in all likelihood buy the organ – deliberate singular – most likely to reflect their own sympathies, in other words, “the conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected”, the very source of their appeal and motivation for parting with cash).
The authors of comment pieces/regular columns in the most venerable papers possess a certain authority, cultural capital, if you will. They function as “manufacturers of public opinion”. Hardly surprising that they attract the attention of the “great unwashed” of the blogosphere, since by definition they are claiming superior insight, whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not. Taking them on and exposing the flaws in their writings or simply demolishing their views could be considered a rite of passage.
What rankles, I imagine, is that the bloggers are often devastatingly accurate in their criticisms without necessarily having received any formal training in the art of commercial journalism. Nobody is infallible and it cannot be pleasant to be reminded publicly of one’s shortcomings, but peer review or the sanctification of print does not automatically imply that your output is of inherently higher quality. It would be disingenuous and plain dishonest to maintain otherwise. Bloggers do not appreciate pomposity or being patronised.
In a blatant manifestation of snobbery, Mr Kamm lumps together all bloggers, as if we were a homogenous bunch of semi-articulate whingers, whereas many of us are more highly academically qualified than the targets of our ire. We simply didn’t go down the journalism route. Is that any reason to stifle debate? More pertinently, is that any reason for us to stifle our derision where it is obviously merited? Our creativity is irrepressible and refuses to be beaten down or belittled by individuals whose sense of entitlement derives from institutional recognition alone.
To conclude, a word on constraints. Far too many bloggers have been sacked for their online activity (to the extent that a new verb has been invented to encompass the phenomenon, “to dooce”). Anonymity is fragile, perhaps too much so for many to venture into the fray. I, for one, engage in self-censorship, voluntary muzzling myself, in order to protect my capacity to earn (without which I could not blog).
Compared with journalists, bloggers suffer both a recognition (as opposed to credibility) and a resources deficit, the second of which is by far the more pernicious. We are limited by income (which, with the exception of a happy few, does not come from writing, although to say so does not obliquely vindicate Mr Kamm: popularity is an elusive and capricious good and, to invoke the analogy of the best-seller, is, in itself no mark of calibre) and the amount of time left over from the day job which we can devote to our pursuit.
True, journalists had to serve an extended apprenticeship with long stints of unremunerated labour (which acts as a barrier to all but those with sufficient means to sustain themselves until success beckons, actual talent not being a factor, a sad state of affairs that even the newspapers recognised and indeed lamented in a flurry of breast-beating articles about the chronic lack of social mobility in today’s Britain in June 2006), but, once embraced into the professional ranks, they can invoke the prestige of the publication with which they are affiliated and bask in the satisfaction of its almost magical, door-opening properties. Once they have gained a certain standing, even prominent figures think twice about refusing an interview.
The real difference between bloggers and the newspaper commentariat is that, to modify Mr Kamm’s definition, the latter constitute “a self-selecting group of the politically motivated who have time on their hands and are rewarded (financially and with status) for their musings”.

Bluestocking

2007-04-03T12:36:00.000+02:00

[Excerpt from an interview on A Blog Without a Bicycle]

It is always worthwhile as an intellectual exercise to remind yourself why feminism is relevant in spite of the constant onslaught of the apathetic who claim that now we have the vote and a handful of us are paid wages almost on a par with men that we should shut up and stop whingeing. Once your eyes have been opened you can never see anything in the same way again: what once appeared trivial or harmless is revealed as a small component of a series of representations reinforcing the status quo, however subtly (in fact the very subtlety is what renders the effort so successful, as it assumes the appearance of being “natural”, that is, “meant” to be or “the way things are”, beyond the reach of social intervention).
Becoming a feminist reminds me of the scene in The Matrix when Neo is given the choice between two coloured pills: feminism is definitely the red pill, ripping you out of whatever uneasy compromise you may have had with your oppression and plunging you into a harsher environment of constant struggle.
From an early age, I was determined not to make do with my mother’s lot. She had been denied an education by her own mother, who used the excuse of not being able to afford the uniform to prevent her from attending the private school to which she had won a scholarship. Whereas my grandmother took out her bitterness at having toiled away on farms as the wife of an itinerant ploughman, giving birth to five children, and never being permitted to achieve her potential on her daughters, my mother was more generous in spirit and gave me every possible encouragement to improve my chances through study. Fortunately for me, I was able to benefit from a social mobility, which has been almost completely eliminated in contemporary Britain.
My mother stayed at home during the day, cooking and cleaning, before working part-time in the evenings as a hospital cleaner and, once she had obtained the relevant qualifications at college, a domestic supervisor. Having been brought up in a working-class environment it never occurred to me that I would not have to earn my living independently.
At school, I was reviled as a “swot” and for my denunciations of marriage. Again, it was a fairly inchoate sense of innate injustice that inspired me, an abhorrence of containment, stifling, like putting on a corset and pulling the cords so tight you can never breathe freely again – I still had not even heard of feminism. Outcast status left me yearning for company. When I converted to Christianity at the age of 14 at a “Christ is the answer crusade” meeting in the local city hall, I swallowed the teachings of the church wholesale. I felt that I belonged, fitted in for the first time, so poured every ounce of devotion into the fellowship. The message preached was one of utter subordination and obedience to men. The wife must accept the authority of her husband. Women could not occupy any leadership positions in the church either. The most that a female believer could aspire to spiritually was heading a prayer or house group, but only if its membership was exclusively feminine. As soon as a male put in an appearance, he was in charge. Divinely ordained superiority.
For a few years the relief of being accepted outweighed any reservations that might have caused me to question the doctrines. Then the anarchy of sexual desire threw my faith into turmoil. Two of the men wanted me as their girlfriend. I felt completely trapped. I couldn’t be expected to take such a momentous decision (not even a relatively innocuous kiss on the lips was sanctioned outside marriage), God had to intervene and reveal His will to one of them. I had to abdicate all responsibility to follow the teachings I had absorbed, yet I was supposed to submit to both suitors, which presented me with an intractable dilemma. I attempted to express my desperation in a short story, a thinly fictionalised version of what was happening, a copy of which I gave to the pastor. The result? I was punished by being forced to burn the story along with all my other writings. It was all my fault. I must have led them both on, teased them, played them off against each other. So much for my dutiful, righteous passivity. I was accused of false prophecy and the demons that had possessed me had to be cast out. With the emotional distance I have now, it all seems perfectly absurd, yet I willingly embraced humiliation rather than renounce my God.
The situation had still not been resolved when I left for university, but, away from the direct surveillance of the fellowship, I slowly began to extricate myself from its grip. This was no easy undertaking: my immortal soul was in jeopardy. We had been taught to sneer at the “established church” in a most uncharitable and intolerant fashion, so a more conventional, non-charismatic brand of Christianity offered no refuge. The choice was stark: stay with the new covenanters or face eternal damnation. I responded by devising my own set of beliefs, a bespoke blend of pantheism and reincarnation with cosmic balance (as opposed to sin) thrown in for good measure, my primary and more urgent concern being to demonstrate my spiritual purity in spite of the mockery of my detractors. This involved purging my body of meat. Blood was the carrier of life and consuming it blunted sensitivity. I lived as a vegetarian for eight years.
In the meantime, I became a single mother and started in remunerated employment. Although a friend from university never tired of extolling the virtues of Simone de Beauvoir, I had never really listened to her. In my isolation abroad, cut off from all support networks, I purchased a copy of The Beauty Myth, the first feminist book I read. I had my reasons, transgressing more than one norm with my unrepentant unattached state and having put on 30 kilos during the pregnancy. After that, I spent a substantial proportion of my disposable income on feminist literature, one bibliography leading to another.
It was not feminism that finally freed me from the residual guilt of religion, however, but Emile Durkheim’s masterpiece The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Feminism equipped me with an interpretative framework with which to decipher my experiences and place them within a wider context of discrimination and oppression. Feminism is an emancipatory project beneficial to women and men alike. It focuses on the here and now and demands an end to inequality, unlike the sop of religion, which might afford some comfort, a compensatory fantasy of better things to come for the conformist (I am tempted to say defeatist). It both absolves and imparts a greater burden of responsibility. It engages with arguments, never shying away from controversy. It quickens the mind and removes the fetters of passivity. It glories in its subversiveness: feminists will always challenge the dominant social order.

88:88

2007-03-19T10:11:00.000+01:00

[1985]
The Nature of Things
The panther rippled sleek through the proud grasses, green eyes shining, searching.
Beauty and grace and perfect motion, rich, dark fur, a furnace within; green eyes searching, shining.
Nostrils dilating, tail flicking, muscles flowing in swift pounce of death; green eyes searching, finding.

[1991]
I used to believe in the redemptive power of beauty – that if you surrounded yourself with works of art, rich fabrics and furnishings your soul would be uplifted, elevated above every evil act – a Wildean fable of sensuality in which lust masqueraded as sternest purity, a whiff of decadence, of sickliness. It was an impossible ideal, yet continues to exert a fascination. A life purged, incense, bells and embroidery, stained glass, vivid colour. It was never a matter of simple vanity or affectation – in the natural world beauty, the ornamental and the functional are intertwined – shimmering hummingbirds. Artifice is the very perpetuation of nature, its validation – plumage, horns, beaks, extravagant to the point of excess. Good is pallid, sterile. The flush of a wine-warmed cheek, the fingers dripping with balm, these are transient and by virtue of that transience poignant, fragile, in bloom suffused with a sweet and alarming hint of decay, the autumn swirl, how much more intriguing than cold chastity, how much more human.

[2007]
We might have been shabby, but we nurtured compensatory aesthetic sensibilities as we dreamed of the next plate of chocolate porridge (with a sprinkle of cinnamon), trudging through the streets, eyes fixed on the pavement not to avoid the dog-laid landmines, but scanning for dropped coins (or the occasional pound note blowing along the gutter). If we had been a little less proud, we might even have resorted to the tramps’ tactic of visiting phone booths and inserting a probing finger in the returned coins slot in hope of a jackpot. To survive the poverty induced by a corrupt landlord whose eviction method was increasing the rent from one month to the next until the grant money ran out we banished the crude and vulgar from our unheated rooms, retreating behind the glass-panelled door, allowing nothing from the outside to intrude.

The grey relieved only by graffitied initials, peeling paint on neglected walls. Beauty is the dandelion growing from the pavement crack, the buddleia with its butterfly attendants in the gap site, roots anchored in the rubble of demolished dwellings, anarchic, tenacious, surprising.

The Swan Principle

2007-03-16T09:21:00.000+01:00

Smooth millpond with majestic white bird - the seemingly effortless forward motion, means of propulsion conveniently (in aesthetic terms) out of view. Just a note to announce that I am not in the midst of a blogging hiatus - just because you can't see it, doesn't mean I am not paddling away furiously in the background. Nor does it mean that newly wed status has so addled my brains that my creativity has been fatally compromised.

I am completing a project for the blog that has been going on since 2005, namely, Women and Binge-Drinking: Anatomy of a Moral Panic. I estimate that it will take me another couple of months at least to finish sorting through the material (this does not mean that I will be posting nothing at all, merely that what I do post will be of necessity light and not very serious. I would literally rather leave the blog unupdated than sully it with sub-standard content - hence this notice will be erased as soon as it ceases to be relevant).

Then I intend to finish another long essay on women in James Cameron's sci-fi films. I also have an interview with an eminent professor in London scheduled for the end of April and several other pieces in the pipeline, including a follow-up to Puppy Fat.

All that I ask is that you bear with me in the meantime - hopefully it will be worth the wait. I certainly promise to do my best.

The Submariner

2007-03-10T11:50:00.001+01:00

[From my Grandfather's Notebook]

SUBMARINER SAM.

(With due apologies to Stanley Holloway)

Sam Small, when Second World War were declared,
Had been drawing his pension for years;
“Old England’s in danger once more”, he exclaimed,
And she’ll need me again, it appears.
But Duke Wellington’s dead now, like rest of brave lads,
So Army to-day will be strange,
And I’ve fought enough battles on land, anyway,
I think I’ll try Navy, for change”.
So he out his old Waterloo uniform on,
With medal he’d got from George Four
And sadly took leave of his famous old musket
That hung there for years upon door.
Then he marched into Whitehall as bravely could be
And said, in a voice firm and clear,
“Will somebody please go and find the First Lord
And tell him that Sam Small is here?”.
As soon as the First Lord were given the news
He got in a proper flat spin;
He sent his Staff Captain to usher Sam up
And got out fresh bottle of gin.
When old Sam comed in, First Lord shook him by hand
Saying “Sam, what can I do for thee?”.
So, while they sat there sipping gin, Sam explained
That he’d like to fight war upon sea;
And although he were over a century old,
He were feeling quite agile and nifty,
He’d been taking a course of these ‘ere Monkey Glands
And he felt like a young man of fifty.
The First Lord then asked him which branch he preferred,
Sam replied – “As I ain’t nohow nervous,
I’d like to have go at most dangerous job
So I think I’ll try Submarine Service”.
And so Sam did his training and sat his exams
Which he just passed, with nothing to spare.
He seemed to be lacking in gumption, and so
‘t were decided to rate him Gunlayer.
And then comed the day Sam were due for a draft,
So they sent him ’way out to the Med. [Mediterranean, marked in margin]
And put him on Submarine, same as whose Chef
Were notorious baker of bread.
Ship went on patrols but she seldom used gun
Though she did gradely work with torpedoes,
And each time the Captain sank ship, Sam would growl,
“He gets all the recommends, he does”.
Not that Sam didn’t have no gun-action at all
But then ‘twere all small stuff, the likes
Of a couple of barges, a schooner, a factory,
A train, and some half dozen caiques.
Then comed a patrol when they’d fired all their fish [Torpedoes, marked in margin]
And been depth-charged for nearly two days;
The batteries were low and the boat needed air.
“We must surface soon now”, Captain says.
Old Sam were fair downcast and thinking as how
He could still have been home wearing mufti,
When Captain, who’s anxiously peering through look-stick
Calls out – “Here Sam lad, have a shufti”. [Look – Arabic, marked in margin]
And, looking through periscope, Sam saw a sight
That sunk his heart down to his feet,
For there, all around them, he saw, with dismay,
Best part of Italian Fleet.
“I’M depending on thee now”, said Captain to Sam
‘We must surface when all’s said and done,
So we’ll charge up the batteries for couple of hours
While tha holds them off with thy gun”.
Old Sam were elated, his moment had come,
When sudden thought flashed through his head –
He hadn’t got key for the magazine hatch,
He’d lost it ashore in Port Said.
He had to tell Captain the state of affairs
And he simply murmured “Good Gracious”,
“Well then, tha must think up alternative plan.
Coom, coom, Sam, each moment is precious”.
But, try as he might, Sam could think of no way
To open up magazine hatch,
When, all of a sudden, his gaze fell upon
The bread chef had made, a fresh batch.
And there in a moment his problem were solved,
To the Captain he said “It’s a cinch;
Just rig up long hose-pipe to H.P. Air Line [High Pressure, marked in margin]
Three thousand pounds pressure, square inch”.
So that were soon done, then Sam gathered gun’s crew
And armed them with hose-pipe and bread.
He gave them their final instructions and then
“All ready in tower, sir,” he said.
Then up to the surface shot brave submarine
And when whistle sounded “Gun Action”
Sam, followed by crew, opened hatch and manned gun
In one second, one half and one fraction.
The loader shoved loaf down the front end of spout,
Called “Ready” – Sam ordered “Fire one”,
And the chap with the hose-pipe switched pressure on full
And poked it up blunt end of gun.
And away flew the bread towards enemy fleet,
Sam’s aim it were steady and true
For the terrible missile hit foremost destroyer
Fair ’midships and smashed her in two.
Then round followed round with incredible speed,
You may not believe, but it’s true, sir,
In just little over ten minutes Sam sank
Four destroyers, two sloops and a cruiser.
The rest fled in panic, but Sam still fired on
And just how the fray would have ended
Is hard to conjecture, for just at that moment
Came cry – “Ammunition expended”.
And when it were over, they all shook Sam’s hand,
“I’ll get thee promoted” said Skipper.
While Jimmy the One, with his eyes full of tears [First Lieutenant, marked in margin]
Said “Sam, lad, coom round for a ‘sipper’ [sip of a tot of rum: Naval expression, marked in margin]
So that’s how Sam Small beat Italian Fleet
And in well-informed circles ‘tis said
They refused to poke nose out of harbour again
As long as Sam stayed in the Med.
And for many a day, Mussolini, in vain,
Were trying to give explanation
To Hitler, as how Britain’s new secret weapon
Had caused such a grave situation.
When Submarine got back to base, Captain (S) [Submarines, marked in margin]
Comed aboard in his cocked hat and sword,
“I’ve come to congratulate Sam,” he explained
“And I’ve brought message from the First Lord.
He says that Old England is proud of Sam Small
And King has got medal for thee
And their Majesties both hope that when tha gets home
Tha’lt coom up to Palace for tea”.
There were also a message from Armaments Chiefs
Who were offering Chef a commission,
Inviting him to take charge of big works
And produce his new secret munition.
The very next day Skipper sent for old Sam
Concerning the promised promotion,
And there and then gave him the highest award
For bravery and for devotion.
You may think the honour were paltry enough
Unless you had sampled Chef’s bread,
For the Captain’s award to our hero was this –
He’d be served with ship’s biscuits instead.

[A second copy is stamped and signed by the censor and dated 20th April 1945]

Melancholy

2007-03-02T12:56:00.000+01:00

[Saturday 23rd January 1988]

All is frosty. Roof slates, lawns, evergreen fronds and needles. My brother is in the driveway with his yellow Mini, he has scraped the ice off the windscreen and is continually switching on the engine, revving it up and switching it off again. The vociferous gulls and the occasional bus along the (to me still) new route interrupt the peaceful morning. The noise of water travelling through pipes and the tank, the view of the telephone cable stretching between our houses where blackbirds, starlings and thrushes love to perch a while, even sing. The monkey puzzle tree, rising like a great, jagged pillar, the garages: our own, with black-painted doors, the more distant flat-roofed ones belonging to the neighbours two doors down. The hospital beyond, red brick chimney rising above the huddle of box-shaped buildings, the wooded hills of the valley in the distance. The window opposite, from which Annette would call across; the front gate and path; the road, neatly trimmed yellow-leaved hedges. The entrance to the cul-de-sac where my Granddad lived; the swings and the school grounds beyond, churned mud of the playing fields half solid in the chill. Once these marked the boundaries of my existence, stretching to the public baths on the Crieff Road and to the red sandstone of the Sandeman Library (I was never allowed there unaccompanied, though).

[2007]

Squabbling sparrows congregated unseen amongst the lilac twigs waiting to cadge some mouldy crusts (now that the preservatives have been removed, bread does not keep anything like as long as it used to). Folded tea towel beneath her elbows (bruised dark purple in spite of the padding), my Mother leaned on the draining board as she filled in the crossword, Ally Bally’s phone-in quiz blaring in the background, the window open in a vain attempt to conceal her fly smoke and avert the slight flicker of disappointment that registered on our faces (we never challenged her directly). Sometimes she would hastily stub out the evidence in the blue glass ashtray on the sill, which she would then slide behind the pot draped with the spider plant’s prolific fronds. Or else she would shut herself away in the bathroom, knowing that the sound of the lock would make us aware of the urge.

In earlier years I had always dreaded the request: “Would you nick down to Johnny’s for twenty Benson and Hedges?” even though she would sweeten it with a bribe. I loathed the errand, as if the malignant yellow stain of the nicotine would seep through the packet and contaminate my fingers as I laboured up the steep slope from the shop, lungs like lead. Annette and I had long since ceased pacing up and down the bench in the back garden pretending to be prisoners, picking up the butts from the gravel and inhaling deeply on unpolluted air, a fantasy of toughness.

Even the shed has been emptied, the old dog’s bones in the soft earth of the border an invisible token of our former occupancy.

Slings and Arrows

2007-02-11T11:27:00.001+01:00

One of the lesser known changes the 1956 Revolution brought in its wake was the abolition of the despised “peace loan”, which had involved the deduction of a small portion of every worker’s salary in exchange for a bond, in essence completely worthless. Once a year a draw was held and the winners were paid back its value plus a modest dividend. Shaken by the outpouring of popular resentment and the mass exodus of Hungary’s intellectuals and middle classes, the regime devised a more palatable method of extracting money from its recalcitrant subjects: the state lottery. The bulk of the revenue was used to prop up the budget, but between fifteen and twenty per cent was redistributed as prize money, the precise amount of the jackpot variable, but hovering around the million mark at a time when the average monthly wage comprised 1,500 to 2,000 forints. Unsurprisingly, the lottery proved an infinitely superior money-spinner for the government than its predecessor.

Having selected the numbers, players posted their tickets, keeping a slip by way of proof, each of which possessed a unique serial number. The draw took place once a week, on a Friday morning. To ensure that the entries arrived on time, they had to be posted by Wednesday evening at the very latest from outside Budapest, although popping them in the box on Thursday morning sufficed for residents of the capital.

Sándor’s colleague in the abattoir office was a quiet man, counting out the notes for the pay packets with nervous, but efficient fingers. He kept himself to himself in the canteen whilst the slaughtermen laughed, appetite not spoiled by the brutal nature of their trade. Sándor, in charge of guaranteeing that most vaunted yet least often attained Communist goal of maximum efficiency through meticulously planning the delivery routes, felt sorry for his reclusive comrade, whose eyes inevitably settled on the spatters of blood the aprons (now hanging on pegs outside the dining area) had not caught.

After many unsuccessful attempts to coax a conversation out of him, Sándor was surprised when, one otherwise dull afternoon, his workmate’s spindly voice cut through the customary silence like a razor blade. Week in, week out he had religiously filled in his chosen numbers, floating to the post box in a pleasant reverie of indolence and escape. He wouldn’t throw his cash around like the vulgar little fellow in the ad. The only visible (and not overly immodest) sign of his new status as a man of leisure would be a Cuban cigar, imported in bulk from our brave fellow-combatants in the Socialist paradise across the oceans, defying the imperialists on their very doorstep. His credentials as a loyal Communist could not be impeached as a result of lighting up: he was, after all, actively supporting their economy. That day, however, everything had conspired to distract him. He had slept in for no reason he could discern and missed the usual tram. Trapped in the rush hour throng, he had been unable to squeeze his way out on time and travelled one stop too far, sprinting back so that he would not arrive late. Flustered at this rude disruption of his normal routine, it was only when he fumbled in his pocket for some loose change that evening that the smoothness of the paper betrayed the presence of the envelope. His heart sank, yet all was not lost.

Brilliant sunshine penetrated the chinks in the ancient shutters, rousing him from a fitful slumber and he leapt out from beneath the thin summer duvet. Gulping down the thimbleful of tar-like black coffee he had sugared and left on the table the night before, he rushed to the bus station as the early coach would pull in early enough for a passenger to pop the slip into the nearest post-box before the first collection. One kindly soul agreed to assist him and he walked through the abattoir gates with an uncharacteristic grin spread over his features. It took years off him.

On Friday, he switched on his set to listen to the results of the draw at the end of the news as usual. His palms grew clammy with excitement as his numbers were chosen in exact sequence. Perhaps the neighbours were puzzled by the single strange whoop from below, but they didn’t report it to the authorities as suspicious.

He could barely contain himself as he queued with his slip to claim his winnings. A thousand unexpected plans had rattled through his brain, banishing sleep. The official calmly looked through every line recorded in the tome. “I’m sorry sir, but we have no record of your entry”. Bright lights like shards of glass obscured his vision. “Please could you check again,” he gasped, proffering the flimsy slip, proof of fortune’s benevolence. “I really am very sorry…” came the reply, as blackness engulfed him. The stranger at the bus station had not been entirely sincere about his intentions.

For three years, he had wandered through the corridors of the asylum in a stupor of disbelief, the irony not entirely lost on him even in his bleakest moments. He would watch the other wretches from an armchair in a daze, until the bitterness slowly began to evaporate like an autumn fog chivvied away by the light. When he was deemed to have recovered sufficiently to function in a normal setting, he was released and immediately started to play the lottery again. As a reminder to himself that he had regained his sanity.

He never so much as recouped the cost of a ticket.

Trousseau

2007-01-28T11:24:00.000+01:00

The metallic chirping of the overhead wires announced the imminent arrival of the 7.42. The same committee yet again in the company of DW, whose surfeit of mental energy has to be released in an uninterrupted flow of learned expatiation of the most obscure lexical items in Polish, his current darling (postulating impossible vocabulary connections between unrelated tongues in an effort to gauge whether his audience’s attention has strayed), whose CD player pounds out the repetitive rhythms of folk dances and rap alike on the monthly 500-kilometre pilgrimage and whose novel approach to language acquisition involves grappling with crosswords as opposed to sampling the literary greats of a given culture.

My guess as to the exact positioning of the first-class compartment proved accurate (not always as prosaically predictable as it might seem, this being Waffleland after all, where the stifling unimaginativeness of the bourgeois is surpassed only by the bloody-minded pursuit of causing maximum inconvenience on the part of officials in the state apparatus. If, for example, you have the temerity to disturb the salesperson behind the counter by actually attempting to purchase a ticket, you are greeted by a sullen grunt and eyes flinging a thousand daggers bang on target, customer service being an entirely alien concept, the country having resisted importing the vacuous superficiality of transaction politeness from the States). I do not need to depart so early, but the thought of squeezing in alongside self-important suited bureaucrats who might have gone heavy on the garlic the night before fills me with revulsion.

The stations and shelters a mess of graffiti (my favourite, depicting a parade of militant ladybirds marching bipedally, warm smiles reassuring the onlookers that they posed no threat, the slogan “Cocc’s army, peacelly ready” confirming the impression of a non-violent demonstration, having long since being sprayed over with some inanity), the conductor with his twirled walrus moustache scolding a passenger for not having written the destination in full (ignoring all protestations that there simply isn’t space for the double-barrelled designation). Coffee and couque suisse for breakfast at the bar, before being subjected to the umpteenth paper delivered in a monotone by a non-native speaker (with the concomitant paucity of expression or wit) on the inconsistencies and iniquities of roaming prices.

Halfway through the morning, the lovely and generous AS dropped off a John Lewis carrier bag full of expensive sexy scarlet underwear as well as a few vests for my niece (soon to be flower girl) and a beautiful handbag in shimmering blue to match the silk dress her mother has tailored with consummate skill. DW insisted on examining the contents, his irrepressible curiosity extending to such trivia.

Relief at finally being freed from the obligations of toil (just a couple of sessions on standby duty before departing on leave) and familiarity with the timetable propelled me out of the building and down onto the platform. It was only when three-quarters of the way back that it occurred to me that only one plastic bag, with the day’s newspaper clippings, rested on the seat opposite. Details had fully absorbed my mind, from the favours (small boxes of exquisite, hand-made chocolate and whisky miniatures) to the petals to be strewn in lieu of confetti, rudely elbowing out any thought beyond the normal routine. Several panicked phone calls later, I was trundling back, hoping desperately that the room had not been cleared (I have never forgotten the trauma of leaving a folder with the irreplaceable manuscript of a short story along with some magazines, clearly marked “Please do not remove” in several languages only to return after lunch to find it had all disappeared. A kind-hearted colleague, taking pity on me in my anguish, set off in search of the cleaning ladies who denied all knowledge. She insisted that they rummage through the black bags from the meeting room. Without her stern intervention, the sole copy would never have been retrieved, unscathed, the glossies having soaked up the coffee dregs poured in from the cups).

The male tea servers (whose responsibilities also include replacing opened bottles of mineral water) were wheeling out the stack of trays with dirty glasses and lipstick-stained cups sporting the institution logo, flirting with the cleaning staff. I was poised to intercept them, but the bag was exactly where I had left it, all contents accounted for. Then another dash for the train to make it home in the nick of time for the beginning of my afternoon on-call (fixed line only).

The Hungarian awaited me, a bemused smile on his face. I was not immune to the stress of the occasion in spite of a lack of obvious nerves. In the car, my mobile rang. It was DW, one of the recipients of my numerous distress calls. He had been the last to gather his bits and bobs together and I had left him a message in case he had noticed my oversight. Like a true gentleman, he had come to my assistance, immediately heading back to the room in search of the lost property. On finding the booth empty, he ran after the cleaners, enquiring if they had happened upon a plastic bag. They shook their heads, asking what had been inside it. “Items of feminine apparel of an intimate nature, in ruby lace,” he stammered. The raised eyebrows accompanying the sympathetic shrugs brought a blush to his cheeks. It was obvious that they had him down for a man caught out. I did not press him over whether, in his opinion, they thought he had bought them for a mistress or to try on himself in the privacy of his own home.

Fractured Idyll

2007-01-27T13:34:00.000+01:00

On any normal evening I would snuggle under the covers, turning down the electric blanket from “High” (my parents comforting me that the wheezing would pass, my body was simply directing all its energy into growing back my long tresses after they had been swept away on the hairdresser’s floor, the remaining locks styled into a neat and demure “page boy”). As long as my shoulders were warm, the rest of me would be warm too. Then I would switch on the transistor (my pride and joy before the black and white portable took up residence on top of the record cabinet) and tune in to Radio Four for the latest instalment of A Book at Bedtime, eagerly absorbing the narratives of J G Farrell’s Troubles and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Not for me the vulgarities of Radio One with its incessant blare of inane ditties condensing the pleasures and disappointments of carnality into the standard three minute format, the preferred amusement of my classmates. Sometimes I would deviate from my ritual and listen on afterwards. I remember a vivid account of a trek across the desert, the explorer lamenting the stubbornness of camels and passing on his top travel tip of how to overcome their reluctance (of which no animal welfare organisation would approve): shoving a sharp stick up their backsides. Crude, but effective.

Twice a year, however, no soothing stream of speech would suffice to induce slumber. Christmas Eve and the night before setting off on holiday. In the days before the town was encircled by supermarkets, my Mother had put in her order to Johnny the grocer (son of Italian immigrants, whose perfectly assimilated local accent contrasted with his Mother’s sun-drenched lilt, “Two-a-pennies, please!”). The cardboard boxes stacked with tins were always delivered on time, my Father carrying out a nervous stocktaking to make sure nothing had been forgotten. A bulging sack of potatoes, carrots, milk, an industrial-sized bottle of Spry Crisp ‘n Dry (the advert proudly demonstrating the aptness of the brand name with a housewife tipping the contents of her chip pan onto a sheet of kitchen roll, the golden brown slivers leaving no greasy smudges behind)…all to be loaded into the boot along with the blankets (for dog and humans), bright plastic buckets and spades (although the shore was for the most part a mixture of boulders and gravel), all-contingency-covering paraffin lamp and cylinder of Calor Gas for excursions until the view through the rear window was completely blocked.

My Father was itching to depart, desperate to arrive before our cousins from Edinburgh. Jean would not hand over the key to the cottage until she had cleaned it to her satisfaction, always at two. She might be waiting for us in the post-office, a corrugated iron hut opposite her house, the wiry black and white mongrel Spot and colour-coordinated Border collie Sheila barking a guarded welcome. Progress seemed painfully slow in the excitement, my Father driving cautiously, tooting the horn at the two blind bends on the perilously narrow road to alert oncoming traffic, following the example of the bus drivers in his youth. As we crossed the River Garry, he would recount the tale behind the Soldier’s Leap, then point out the gable end and the wine glass tree by the entrance road to the youth hostel. Then there was the well with its Biblical inscription rendered almost illegible by moss: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst”. Then came “the bumps”, where he would accelerate until the car practically lifted off the ground and we would screech with delight at the feeling in our stomachs like doing a pile-up on the swings or taking a spin on the Waltzers at the shows.

We would park by the abandoned barn with its exposed rafters and rusted roofing and arrange the food in the cupboards and claim our beds before Mum put the kettle on for the obligatory cup of tea. Rory and I would keep a lookout for their car from the cattle-studded field or from the den with its treacherously slidy slopes, our knee-high wellies designed to afford protection against the wet rather than providing grip. We would hurtle down alongside the car as it lurched its way along the winding, tractor-rutted track, a trail of dust in its wake.

Martin and Matthew in the back, barrel-shaped Ronnie behind the wheel, Cathy. It never bothered me that their car was always bigger than ours and the registration number newer. Only my Dad noticed or seemed to care. My uncle was an architect and the family lived in a substantial bungalow with garden all round at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. Cathy was the only one of the three sisters to have kept her slender figure, a fact once commented upon by one of my exes as proof that my plumpness was not inevitable, but she subsisted on nicotine and black, unsweetened tea, her body shape a constant reminder of having attained superior social status (Ronnie no doubt insisting she remain fit to be seen on his arm at parties). He walked with the swagger of success, asserting his dominance at every available opportunity (the most hated manifestation of which was when he, after demolishing a mountain of chips on his own plate – he was served first - reached over to each of ours to steal yet more).

As I stared up at the skylight from my bed on the landing at the top of the stairs I could hear them playing whist and laughing, the sickly fragrance of Ronnie’s cigars mingling with the women’s cheaper Benson and Hedges smoke.

Martin, the eldest son, was presented as the little genius. We stopped playing chess eventually because I had an annoying habit of winning. He was remote and introverted, silent for the most part and completely passionless. His little brother by contrast did not conceal his moods, but ran around untamed and chaotic like his tousled blond hair. When rain did not confine us to the sitting room with its round polished wood table and jigsaws of The Seven Wonders of the World and honeysuckle-trellised thatched cottages, we picked our way along to the Point, the limit of the territory we were entitled to roam, with its primroses and bluebell carpet where the burn flowed into the loch. The boundary was marked by a dilapidated fence with jagged wire, barbs decorated with tufts of wool where sheep had wriggled through. The peak of Schiehallion rose, unperturbed by our petty squabbles over who had caught the biggest minnow in the jar. We competed at skimmers, searching for the most promising flat stones. Matthew was the expert, in spite of his tender years. This rivalry could not match the simmering resentments between the adults, however.

Whilst my Mother and Cathy sunbathed and puffed away at their cigarettes (which they claimed were excellent at keeping the dreaded midges at bay) or swapped library books with repetitive tales of ravished maidens and heaving bosoms, my Dad and Ronnie would pull on their waders and select the appropriate fly. Pike they would throw back, likewise perch (unless my Granddad was there to devour his favourite fish, never understanding their disdain for the catch), brown trout the elusive prize. Ronnie would smirk over his rod, longer, lighter, more flexible, more exclusive. We were always shooed away when they were waist deep, my Dad’s dentures gritted with determination. The scrunching sound we made as we walked might send vibrations into the water and scare off the fish and our guts would be worn as garters if we so much as contemplated throwing any stones in (another area in which the male power struggle was periodically played out over who could throw the heaviest rock furthest, cheered on by admiring offspring).

I would often head off for the bog on my own, jumping from tussock to tussock to stare at the pond skaters skimming over the rainbowed surface of the oily pools. If you landed in the mud by mistake, your wellie could easily be sucked off and all your strength would be needed to reclaim it from the marsh’s insistent tug. I would sit and pick the cotton grass as the lapwings called, swatting clegs as they settled on my exposed skin ready to pierce it and drain my blood. Or I would pick gooseberries from the bush near the log pile, leaving the boys to search for the abandoned Mini that so fascinated them. When the hay bales had been stacked into towers like oversized prickly building blocks, we would climb up them. They were our fortresses, our ships or our sweet-smelling shelters until our appointed sentry spotted Bertie the farmer patrolling on his Massey Ferguson and we would scatter like panicked hens.

In the end, Ronnie drank himself into an early grave, but not before Cathy’s ascent was cut short by divorce. She then married her childhood sweetheart, a short, rotund man who could almost pass for Ronnie’s double, though coarser, gruffer and contemptuous of the social graces. Every week she would pop in through the back door for a cuppa and a chat, picking up her carrier bag full of used tea bags for compost, her thwarted ambition etched deep in the lines across her brow.

Kate

2007-01-14T12:50:00.000+01:00

Every week my Mother would drive up to 12 Campsie Road in her dark green Austin Allegro nicknamed Syd after the fortuitous arrangement of numbers on the registration plate to enquire after my Grandmother Kate’s shopping needs (usually a few tins and a half loaf from the nearby Co-op), to deliver the Daily Mail (she would turn immediately to the Fred Basset cartoon strip, which always made her chuckle) and to clean the house, kneeling on the linoleum to scrub the kitchen floor, wiping the windows, vacuuming the carpets and removing the crumbs and brown spill stains from the gas cooker’s white top, leaving it gleaming.

I would stay behind to keep her company. A smell of rancid butter and fustiness clung to her as she shuffled through in her peenie [apron]. The scrape of the match summoning the blue flame to life, the mugs and the thick slices of white bread, slightly salted and marmalade, perhaps a Digestive biscuit and the pot on the tray, two bags left to infuse. Once when she was “ben the hoose”, the largest of the three ducks flying along the wall nodded at me. For many years afterwards I stared at it, yet it never attempted to communicate again.

She would shout at the wrestlers on the black and white screen, revelling in the villain’s perfidy. She knew them all by name, but I could never understand the appeal of the ludicrous sight of middle-aged men strutting around the ring in their underpants, the palpable fakery of the performances (no doubt having absorbed my Father’s disdain for the sport), the preordained outcome of the morality play.

The ground floor flat where she lived was sparsely furnished, a display cabinet for a few brass ornaments (mostly miniature implements, coal scuttles, bellows and the like, a source of endless fascination for G as a toddler) and a cocktail cabinet stocked with glasses and half bottles opened only for first footers. Above her bed an icon of Virgin and Child, the sole visible token of her Catholic faith (apart from the size of her brood).

She seldom reminisced about her days as the wife of an itinerant agricultural labourer (my Father confided that Kate would pick a quarrel to sour relations whenever it looked like her man might be in danger of settling down too comfortably), always intending to chronicle the hardships of a vanished way of life in a memoir. It was never written, yet I gleaned what I could.

The women on the farm were made to do men’s work, loading sacks of potatoes onto carts, each of which weighed 112 pounds. Usually two tons had to be shifted. There were two “lugs” [ears] at the top of the sack and Kate would form another two at the bottom. She and a friend who had a good lifting rhythm would count to three as they swung the sack to gather momentum before finally throwing it onto the vehicle. The men would tease them and their laughter in response distracted them to the extent that they hardly noticed how exhausting their toil was.

During the Second World War Kate was in the Land Army, driving four different tractors in a rota, taking workers to the fields, dropping them off, taking the harvest back to the farm and picking up more workers to take them out. The lady of the house “brocht oot pieces” [brought out sandwiches], as all the men were provided with sustenance, however meagre. She announced to her husband with a hint of pride that he would need it after his exertions to which he replied that Mrs Wilkie deserved it more as she had never stopped.

Another of her many duties consisted of feeding two intimidatingly large breeding sows (she was five feet three). The pen they were kept in appeared flimsy in relation to their weight, strength and the frenzy of their greed. When they heard the clatter of the swill bucket they would come rushing towards her, frantic with the desire to immerse their snouts in the mixture, so she would fling several handfuls to the opposite end of the sty. The ruse never failed: they would run as quickly as their stumpy legs would carry them to the opposite end of the sty, freeing her passage to the trough where she would empty the bucket and retreat unscathed. Although he was of slight build (five feet two), her ploughman husband was very strong. She warned him never to have anything to do with keeping pigs or she would end up “Widow Wilkie”, so great was her wariness of the animals.

She always encouraged him to find better employment than the drudgery of farming as he did not lack the brains, but he refused. When he finally retired and they were forced to leave the countryside her heart was heavy with the prospect of being tied down. Her sisters could never understand the attraction of the straw and the mud, only visiting her for holidays (during which they constantly complained of the stench of dung, which Kate herself did not notice, it filling her nostrils all the time).

She would try her hand at any task once, including calving. The calf was coming too slowly and they were afraid that it would die. Kate offered to help her husband. He had to sit on the cow’s neck to keep its head down, preventing it from rising too fast, which would mean that the calf would drop to its death. Her job was to take a rope and tie it to the calf’s protruding feet. Every time the cow winced in a convulsion of pain, she would tug the rope until, at last, the calf emerged. There was so much blood and such an overpowering smell that she was prompted to remark that had she known in advance it would be so messy and unpleasant she would never have volunteered.

The calf “grew up braw” and she would occasionally be sent out to feed it. The cow would be milked into a pail, which she would take to the calf. As it needed something to suck on, she would place her fingers in its mouth, withdrawing them once it had begun. She expressed her anxiety to her husband that one day it would take her fingers off, but he dismissed her concerns: “Och awa’, it’ll no dae that!” He was right.

He taught her many skills – farming was not nearly as simple as it appeared and there was a lot of learning to be done. He refused to instruct her in the art of milking, however, in spite of her nimble fingers. The reason: if she were asked, she could truthfully deny being able to and the farmer could not force her to work on Saturdays and Sundays as well, leaving her some time to herself. She did not start in the mornings until nine, walking the children part of the way to school, but that suited the farmer, as she could then harness and lead out the horse. Acquiring the technique took a great deal of practice and the horse took perverse delight in trampling on her toes as they came out of the stables.

It was a spoiled beast and the children had once made the mistake of giving it a morsel from their sandwiches. Ever since it had refused to budge until offered a similar treat. She “got fly for it” and put a sandwich on the byre. The horse would spot the bread and jam, munch it and then be perfectly content to walk off to the fields.

All her acquaintances called her “Auntie Kate” and she was used to catering for large groups. They never went hungry as she had a potato ration. If they wanted a neep [Swede] they knew they just had to go to the shed where they were stored. Nobody had much money and Kate wished for a little more.

After they had moved to the town, she bumped into one of her former employers in Canal Street. He doffed his cap in greeting and when she asked “How’s yersel’?” he replied that he missed her and could use her on the farm, would they not relent and come back? She had looked both healthier and happier in the days when the unpolluted air had painted roses on her cheeks.

She shocked me once by confiding that the best thing that had ever happened to her was a hysterectomy operation (much later on, my Mother unburdened the traumatic memory of her lost brother. It was stormy and Kate had gone into labour, her last pregnancy. My Mother wanted to fetch the midwife, but Kate was adamant that she could manage herself. When she finally admitted that something had gone wrong and called for outside intervention, it was too late. My Mother was forever haunted by the sight of a perfect baby boy strangled on his own umbilical cord). Hers was a tale of thwarted potential, the doors to intellectual attainment slammed shut in her face because of her class and gender. She grudged her daughters success, however, resentment festering within at the prospect that they might transcend the limitations of their lowly station. When my Mother passed the scholarship exam to the fee-paying Academy Kate used the pretext of not being able to afford the uniform to snuff out her hopes. The family could not do without her income, so she cycled the miles into town every day to her sales assistant’s position in Largs record department (whence her considerable knowledge of classical music, opera in particular).

Cathy, my Mother’s younger sister, sought refuge from the spiteful stifling through marriage, landing an architect with a large detached house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Evelyn, the third sister, travelled even further to escape Kate’s influence, disappearing to England. Their absence left my Mother at her mercy, to be treated like a skivvy, with all the attendant contempt. Following her divorce and her husband’s protracted suicide through alcoholism, Cathy returned, her hatred for her mother tinged with guilt from the knowledge that her unwillingness to become involved placed a disproportionate burden upon her sister for Kate’s care.

She exploited my Mother’s love without giving in return, lacking her daughter’s kindness and generosity of spirit. My Mother did not replicate her behaviour, never ceasing to give me encouragement, a debt that I have always sought to repay through achievement, through showing her what might have been had she only been given the chance to prove herself.

Kate ended her life in a home. My Mother had to fight long and hard for her to be given accommodation there, as she had no assets to sell to fund her place (the cruel practice of local councils stripping the elderly of their property and depriving their children of any inheritance has only recently been outlawed). The urn with her ashes lies on a shelf in the shed at the bottom of the garden. Her children will never scatter them.

Taut

2006-12-30T09:34:00.000+01:00

The shelf-stacker was in festive mood with his blue tinsel wig as he expertly sorted the bewildering variety of cheeses into their respective niches. Aisle after aisle heaped with every imaginable temptation. We were stocking up, only G’s existence having been acknowledged in the pantry, Irn Bru, Crunchies and breakfast cereal with post-it messages offering appeasement.

My room had been left intact, although between my brother’s inventory over the phone and our arrival, he had removed the printer. The aerials point skyward, naked now that the starlings have fled. Pigeons huddle on Tam’s roof, despondent in the drizzle, hoping for a crust, stray feathers littering the patio and droplets hang from the washing line. The fairy rings have gone, banished by the concrete slabs. My brother laments the ignorance of the incomers who have transformed our community to “Muirton on the Hill” with their unnecessary shouting and their habits of parking right in front of their gates to maximise the inconvenience of the bus drivers whose manoeuvring skills are already tested to the limit as they weave their way townward. The utter lack of consideration for others a defining trait in which they take a perverse pride. No words of greeting from them even if we pass mere inches apart and cannot pretend that we have not seen each other. Although litter does not yet clog the front gardens, most of the patches of lawn have been replaced by gravel, the roses torn out, their pink heads a memory, vanished with my Mother’s gloves and pruning shears.

Throughout the night the gas central heating sighs in an uninterrupted exhalation. The Hungarian’s snores from the other bedroom not loud enough to keep me awake, his exile from the soft mattress voluntary. The new development on the sloping pasture land absorbs the melancholy pealing of the Academy bell, the white, soulless “desirable area” properties spoiling the view where once cattle flicked their tails in a futile effort to dislodge the blood-sucking clegs.

The air is damp, the cleansing autumn gales long since spent. The loft hatch would snap angrily in such storms and I would pull the covers over my head, terrified. Sometimes I would awake to find it open, gaping like a corpse’s mouth. I could sense a malevolent presence up there, which I referred to as “The Man”. His main dwelling was among the rafters where only the pigeons ventured, that little wooden door my only protection against Him, although He also lurked in the “boley holes”, the cramped spaces between the inner and outer walls accessible from my parents’ bedroom again through narrow entrances, one mercifully concealed in the cupboard, the other troublingly exposed. When I opened my door, alone upstairs, my pulse would race and I would hurtle downstairs and into the safety of the living room, evading his grasp.

My Father’s constant reassurances that there was nothing in the loft and that, since we had been the only occupants of the house, regrets or unquenched wrath of unknown predecessors had not seeped into its bricks, failed to calm me. As night descended I could feel Him stirring, listening, waiting. Whenever the telephone in the hallway imperiously issued its shrill summons, my trembling hand picked up the receiver (it could be Him on the other end; He wouldn’t have to say a word, His silence sufficient to penetrate my marrow), my voice tense as I stared at the mirror in which the stairs were reflected, instantly relaying the slightest movement.

My Mother’s shift started in the early evening and when we were deemed old enough to cope with five hours on our own she would put our supper on the plates beside the mugs into which she had already thoughtfully deposited teabags and walk to the hospital to inspect its corridors and toilets for dirt and to supervise the cleaning staff. At first my brother and I would watch our programmes, feet never touching the carpets for fear that scissor-wielding hands would dart out from beneath the chairs to cut them off at the ankles. By around eight, however, unexplained creaking of the floorboards from above had usually driven us beneath the sideboard, which we barricaded with cushions, callously evicting our Pomeranian from her corner, behind the settee, which we likewise blocked off at either end or into the narrow cupboard in my brother’s room, behind the rail of coats, occasionally plucking up the courage to peep through the crack, ears straining for any sound betraying an approach. In that latter hideout we switched off the lights in the room in a feeble attempt to deceive Him, clutching plastic swords and bread knives, emerging with impeccable timing just before we heard her key turn in the lock.

Intrepid Uncle Ian with his mop of black hair once clambered up, undaunted by my palpable dread, pushing his slender frame through to send Him scurrying into the recesses before the beam of the torch. A large hammer propped against the wall, nothing else. Even this did not convince me when I felt Him coiled and deceptively still, like a snake poised to inject its venom, so my Father decided to fit hooks in the ceiling on either side as well as in the wooden hatch itself, to which he attached a sink chain from which the plug had been detached, enough to prevent the strongest winds wrenching open the entrance to His domain.

The Church, with an explanatory framework incorporating supernatural forces, could entertain the possibility, however reluctantly, of an evil spirit. CC, in his zeal to prove that he was the most worthy candidate for my affections, decided to exorcise the demon that had caused me such torment. Bible in hand, he unhooked the zigzag of chains and slid through into the darkness. I took refuge outside, where the orange street lights blotted out all but the brightest stars. A few moments later he joined me, unscathed, but slightly ruffled. As he had begun reciting the verses unease had gripped him, as if some unknown entity were skulking in the shadows, intent on mischief. Slowly gaining comfort and confidence from the selected passage he felt it retreat until finally a scratching sound directed his attention towards the far end where the cable connecting my TV set to the roof aerial lay. With a start he witnessed it jerking suddenly as if someone had just tripped over it in a frantic bid to escape. The Lord had cast them out at last.

With age, my sensitivity to such malignant beings has diminished. There are no invisible occupants lingering, unwelcome, in the attic or crowding round the bed, slender fingers eager to wrap themselves round my neck, the threat relegated to beyond the walls, where a face might loom towards the window as I boil the kettle.

Meltdown

2006-12-17T12:26:00.000+01:00

The reverential hush of the reading room would occasionally be interrupted by the squeaking wheels of the trolley piled with books and files conveyed from vaults lit only by naked bulbs. I would grudge the tyranny of my body’s insistent promptings whether to seek relief or corporeal (as opposed to intellectual) sustenance (not even bottled water permitted into the sanctum), both necessitating a temporary abandonment of the pages perhaps only I had pillaged. Emerging into the sunlight from the grand marble entrance halls, I would be seized with a pang, aware suddenly of my pulse, the youthful vitality throbbing through my arteries. Double-deckers would trundle past, spewing clouds of filth from their exhausts. The homeless man we had nicknamed “The Corpse” due to his extraordinary capacity to sleep through any amount of din from revellers stupefied by an excess of distillate-measures in the doorway recesses of major fashion retailers on Princes Street would also lumber by, his gait and his shape distorted by layer upon layer of grease and dust-impregnated coats which had long since ceased to be waterproof, cursing randomly and incoherently at his fate.

My impulse would be to run, to release this surfeit of energy, to seek out the sprawling lawns beneath the cliffs, where the infirm basked in the benevolent summer rays on the benches donated in memory of others who had tarried there, surveying the couples and wandering tourists to the accompaniment of a dissonant symphony of wind-borne notes from buskers’ pipes, guitars and accordions competing for meagre pickings of loose change. Excluded from the buoyant surge of the swirling torrents of humanity I would stand on the pavement as they flowed by, my presence registering only as an obstacle to be negotiated. Minute after minute slipping away like an autumn leaf on the current I might snatch after, yet never retrieve. I ought to be idly watching the northbound trains from the iron bridge, I ought to be wandering through the cobbled streets, the sour smell of brewery yeast filling my nostrils; I ought to be counting the discarded shopping trolleys in the disused canals instead of squandering my best years accumulating knowledge that would not compensate for my mortality. Yet I would always drag myself back to the archives, perhaps because I did not want to let my parents down, perhaps because I felt the burden of presenting our narrow-minded detractors with undeniable proof of our potential, that birth has always been far less of a determinant than social strictures in spite of the most eloquent avowals of those who in jealously guarding their privilege deny opportunity and mobility to their “inferiors”.

My Father would spread his dreams of an itinerant life in a motor home in front of us wistfully. Think of being able to decide on the view from your front window in the mornings, he would enthuse. I had always interpreted these dark mutterings as the expression of a longing to escape, the longing that tugs at us all, the longing which must be suppressed to enable us to stagger on. Instead he has thrown himself willingly over the edge of the precipice. He is marrying her exactly a fortnight before I tie the knot myself and has already removed the new three-piece suite he had installed for her, replacing my Mother’s portrait with her wizened features.

The wall where the framed tourist board poster of Queen’s View reminded us of untainted summers now stares blank for the first time in the fifty-three years of his tenancy (our home is owned by a charity, bequeathed by a bereaved colonel for the use of disabled war veterans in perpetuity; nobody but our family has ever lived there). Its absence signifying my impending banishment (not the exile abroad imposed on me by the need to provide for my dependents), my having been disowned.

“What is it about men that they can abandon their children so easily? How can he walk out on you and your brother for the sake of a mummified old slut?” Harsh words spoken by a close friend in loyalty and exasperation born from unconditional support. I had not realised before how much of a calming and restraining influence my Mother had been on him. That she had stabilised him and mitigated his worst tendencies. He claimed that he had thrown himself into his activities (Korean veterans, local table tennis league and training young players, the Christian fellowship he has been a member of since his conversion in 1981, first aid lecturing) to blunt his loneliness, yet my Mother complained bitterly about how he had deserted her, lavishing more loving care on the ambulance he was in charge of and which he drove to various events than on his wife. The less mobile she became, the more desperate he seemed to stay away from the house, to deny her decline (for a good decade prior to her death he would tell me how, a light sleeper, he would lie awake at night listening to her wheezing chest, the gurgling of her ailing lungs).

When my brother informed me that he had announced a date a bare month after making her acquaintance, that he was flitting about like a “drunken butterfly”, I attempted to reason with him in the mistaken belief that our relationship could withstand the stark truth of my disapproval. I have never openly criticised him, true to the stereotype of the dutiful daughter. Mild teasing had always been my tactic, but the enormity of what I still perceive to be a massive mistake warranted greater forthrightness. His pathological aversion to conflict has resulted in an abrupt and callous severance, we are to be amputated like a cancer with the brisk and clinical efficiency of a practiced surgeon and left, dazed, to ponder why he views us in purely negative terms, as an encumbrance to be resented. He refuses to discern the pain behind my words, lamenting my inability to trust in his judgement – how can I, however, when his response has been so final, so drastic? I have no doubt that he is using her as an excuse (although she is no innocent bystander), that it is easer for him to ascribe his decision to uproot himself to my scepticism about the wisdom of his impetuous and precipitate decision (motivated as much by concern for his future welfare as dismay at the suddenness of the communication of his intent without any room for input or gradual adjustment to the idea). It is less traumatic for him to cut us off completely than confront his share of the responsibility for our rejection.

He prefers to delude himself that I do not care about his happiness, that my only wish is to deprive him of solace and companionship. Whereas what I object to in reality is the rashness of his actions, the sheer ineptitude of his handling of the matter, the failure to take the slightest account of our feelings. All of this anguish could have been circumvented by a slower and more tactful approach. “You’re big and daft enough to look after yourself,” he always shrugged when I was about to embark on some foolhardy undertaking. This usually proved sufficient to prompt me to reconsider. Perhaps he has been so thoroughly contaminated by the church that he cannot help himself but retaliate for the spurning of his patriarchal authority by exercising the sole power left to him, the power of repudiation. For possessing the temerity to question him I am to be punished by being excised.

Other friends have endeavoured to console me by suggesting that perhaps her children and grandchildren will greet the development with equal delight. Apparently they have all been invited to the ceremony (we have not) and have accepted. She has been alone for twenty-six years and he will be fired by a desire to prove our gloomy predictions about their longer-term prospects wrong. He is eager to show us that he has no further need for us; his new surrogates will endorse his role as her spouse, gratefully showering him with all the gratitude and affirmation he could ever hope for.

What he has entirely neglected to entertain is the possibility that they might discover they are not quite as compatible as he initially thought once they settle down together and novelty capitulates beneath the relentless onslaught of mundane familiarity. By relinquishing his bolthole, he is placing himself entirely at her mercy. She will try to mould him, to fashion him in the image she deems appropriate. Ripped away from his family, without alternative refuge and too stubborn to admit he may have been mistaken his choices will be between vegetation in front of the TV set (he cannot assume that she will let him wield the remote control and flick restlessly through the satellite channels as my Mother did) and slow decline in a village where he cannot keep up the pursuits that have given him an outlet, a modicum of independence (the isolation of the partner from contact with the outside world, friends and family the sly but proven tactic of the abuser). If her affection for him were sincere she would surely advise him against creating a rift he might come to regret. Then again, never having been met us we are nothing to her in the same way as she is nothing to us.

I relented and made a gesture of reconciliation: I would pay the rent on the home I grew up in for an indeterminate period so that he would have somewhere to go should the emotions curdle and disillusionment set in. I appealed to him to allow us to meet him on his 75^th birthday (having made it plain in the course of the conversation he has seized upon as a pretext to justify his childish shunning that I would, out of sheer respect for him, be polite and friendly towards her), the main reason for our forthcoming trip home. Once again, he has wilfully misconstrued my intentions, citing the illegality of subletting the property (it was absolutely clear that I was indicating my willingness to sacrifice a substantial slice of my income to preserve his access to a house that would stand empty in case he required it). I have failed to dissuade him from being reckless and I have inherited his stubbornness. Neither of us will be the first to yield. I do not want to lose my Father, but he has made up his mind that she is more important to him than we are. I cannot forgive her for wrenching him from me, for forcing him to take sides when it was never an “either or” situation. For actively encouraging him to turn his back on us.

I do not derive pleasure from daydreaming that I will one day be able to gloat when he comes crawling back. I am too busy reeling from the realisation that our bond was nothing more than a mirage, no more palpable than the caress of a spring breeze. When I lie in my bedroom, restless and aching, the last sounds I hear will no longer be the creak of the stairs, the swish of him drawing the curtains on the landing, the soft “Night, night” and the click of the light switch plunging me into darkness.

SBS

2006-11-30T07:49:00.000+01:00

[Because the last paragraph just doesn't work in writing...]

The Politics of Undesirability

2006-11-26T11:24:00.000+01:00

In these days of voter apathy and eroded social solidarity, politicians seem to believe that the last vestiges of their beleaguered credibility rely on preaching the gospel of cost-cutting (which is one of the reasons why reports on their expenses, voted through pay rises and more than generous pension entitlements never fail to make them squirm). Tellingly, the vocabulary they employ draws on the imagery of dieting: slim or trim down, removing flab, becoming lean and mean. More and more the value of human life is portrayed as depending on whether the individual in question contributes to or constitutes a drain on collective resources (by which I am referring primarily to the health care systems, since the physical survival of every last one of us, fat or thin, inevitably relies on consumption). We have drifted into the era of the bean-counter where “rationalisation” and “efficiency” rule and there is no room for compassion, for ordinary frailty, for variety of experience, where the elite playfully cast off the constraints of convention leaving the rest of us trapped within boundaries more hopelessly than before, where mobility is held up as the greatest good, masking the depressing fact that fewer and fewer are able to benefit from it.

It is no coincidence that euthanasia and denial of treatment to prematurely born children have become the latest hot topics on the liberal agenda. After all, killing off the terminally ill or ultra-dependent at either end of the life course would save enough to warm the cockles of any accountant’s heart. Dominic Lawson (The Independent, 14th November 2006) eloquently cautions us about the dangers of being seduced by budget-pruning rhetoric dressed up as the epitome of disinterested rationality in Doctors, disabled children and euthanasia: “There seems to be a great confusion about what constitutes ‘a very ill child’. Many of the conditions which are frequently spoken of as illnesses are nothing of the sort. A person born with a severe physical handicap is not physically sick. A person with a mental handicap does not have a mental illness. In neither case is there anything to be cured.
A baby born with Down’s syndrome is not ‘suffering’ from anything. Accordingly, it could never correctly be described as a compassionate act to do anything to bring about the end of such a life. At the risk of sounding harsh, I think it is necessary to state clearly that those who wish to make it easier to destroy such lives are not thinking about the interests of the child: they are thinking about the interests of the parents.
The more interesting question is: how clearly are parents in such a situation able to assess their own future? As I know myself, when you are told that your newborn child has some kind of genetic abnormality, you are in no condition to make any sort of decision, still less one involving life and death. Most prospective parents have a horror of having a child with Down’s syndrome: but there are few, who, having had such a child, are not fiercely protective and loving”.

The anti-democratic rot has already set in when it comes to health care, however. Smokers struggling for their every breath are greeted with a shrug of indifference and a smug “Well, we did warn you and yet you kept on lighting up with your filthy yellow-stained fingers forty times a day”. Do not delude yourself: after the nicotine-puffers and alcohol-swiggers we are next in line to be sent packing on the grounds that our woes were self-inflicted. Your passion and vibrancy, your fury and creativity count for nothing. You are a statistic (an abstraction as worthy of pity as the random passers-by Harry Lime sneers at from his vantage point on the Riesenrad in The Third Man, as opposed to a real individual in flesh and blood glory, complete with foibles, blemishes and all), a burden, a nuisance, a throwback, a roly-poly degenerate, an uncomfortable reminder of the propensity of the human body to lay down reserves for times of hardship in the midst of unprecedented abundance.

We are already subject to a sustained attack in the realm of non-essential therapy. Maxine Frith reveals that beyond the much-publicised waiting lists for hip operations, rationing is the order of the day (The Independent, 9th October 2006), in Almost all NHS trusts fail on IVF pledge: “The financial crisis in the health service means that many trusts are cutting back even further on IVF provision, denying thousands of couples the chance of a family and resulting in a postcode lottery of care.
At least four PCTs have suspended all fertility treatment provision in the past six months, while others have cut back on the number of cycles and many have introduced restrictive criteria that make more couples ineligible.
Some trusts now have waiting lists of five years for treatment, by which time the success rates for many women will have plummeted because of their age”.

Decisions are taken on the basis of how neatly the recipient fits into a pattern of social “desirability”: “The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) ruled in 2004 that all PCTs should offer three cycles of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to couples [note that the author does not specify whether these are nuclear-families-in-waiting – we are invited to fill in the gap, however, and assume that they are].
Nice set a small number of eligibility criteria, including that women should be between 23 and 39, and couples should have either a proven fertility problem or have been trying to conceive for three years”.

The gulf between the Government’s vision of what should be on offer and the reality yawns wide: “Four trusts have suspended treatment since May because of budget cutbacks and new patients in their areas cannot be referred for or receive treatment (...)
Two thirds of trusts – 68 per cent – offer just one IVF cycle per couple and 17 per cent provide funds for two cycles. Just six PCTs offer three cycles, but these trusts also have some of the longest waiting times for new patients. Only three of the trusts not yet providing three cycles said they had plans to reach the standard, and two of those did not intend to achieve it before 2010”.

Returning to the standardised eligibility criteria for a moment, who is likely to fall into the category of having “a proven fertility problem”? According to a piece in the Daily Mail (4th September 2006, unattributed), Fat men ‘are 10% less fertile’: “Men’s fertility is ‘significantly reduced’ if they are overweight, research revealed yesterday.
Carrying just an extra stone and a half can cut the chances of being able to father a child by 10 per cent, scientists found.
And being obese halves the odds, according to a study of 1,468 couples in Iowa and North Carolina published in the journal Epidemiology.
Last week it was suggested that obese women should be denied IVF treatment because they have less chance of conceiving. But these findings reveal that men’s fertility is also affected by extra weight – which it is thought affects sperm quality and causes hormone problems.
Adjusting the figures for other factors, such as smoking and alcohol consumption, the scientists concluded that ‘the men’s Body Mass Index was an independent risk factor for infertility’”.

Julie Wheldon (Daily Mail, 6th October 2006) picked up on the theme in Obesity could be the biggest threat to female fertility: “Obesity in women is threatening to cause a fertility crisis, doctors warned yesterday.
More than half of women attending fertility clinics are overweight but often unaware of the damage it is doing to their reproductive health, said experts.
With obesity rates forecast to rise to 70 per cent within a decade, doctors warned that the problem is a greater threat to fertility than the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia or conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome.
Not only are severely overweight women more likely to struggle to conceive, they are more prone to complications in pregnancy and having babies with birth defects.
Professor Adam Balen of the Leeds Reproductive Medicine Unit said typically more than 50 per cent of women attending UK fertility clinics are overweight.
By comparison around one in three are there because of damage to their fallopian tubes – often triggered by chlamydia.
‘The overall percentage of women who attend infertility clinics with obesity is certainly greater than the number who have tubal damage due to chlamydia,’ he said.
‘The issue of obesity is of major significance to infertility clinics’.
More than half of all women are classed as overweight, a figure which experts say could rise to 70 per cent within ten years. Obesity levels are also soaring among the young, with 27 per cent of girls and 22 per cent of boys overweight.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is so worried about obesity it has devoted a special issue of its journal BJOG [British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology] to the problem.
Editor Philip Steer, of Imperial College London, said many women and even doctors do not fully understand the impact of weight on reproductive health.
‘Maternal obesity needs to be recognised as a serious and growing health problem,’ he added.
The journal revealed how obesity increases the severity of polycystic ovary syndrome, which can make it hard for a woman to conceive.
Obese women who do conceive are more likely to have pre-eclampsia, suffer a miscarriage or require a caesarean than those of normal weight.
In addition their babies face a greater risk of birth defects and having obesity problems themselves as they grow.
The RCOG said yesterday it is convening an expert group to discuss how best to manage the problem.
Professor Balen, who edited the special edition and is also part of the expert group, said: ‘We need to be tackling the problems of obesity in childhood in order to reverse the trend that is leading to increasing rates of infertility and health risks in pregnancy to both mother and baby’.
This summer the British fertility Society was heavily criticised for suggesting that obese women should not receive IVF treatment on the NHS.
It said they should not be granted funding unless they have made efforts to lose weight.
The society also advised that women classed as severely obese should not get funding at all until they have reduced their weight.
Critics claimed this was ‘unjustified discrimination’.
Last week, a study suggested that women who fail to shed even a little weight gained in pregnancy face a higher risk of birth complications with their next baby”.

In other words, it is precisely the least fertile segment of the population that faces the prospect of being turned away (ostensibly) on grounds of a reduced likelihood of success. If we were considered to have any intrinsic worth this would not be allowed to happen. Instead, our feelings and aspirations are casually and callously brushed aside in a calculation that is entirely blind to the wish to lavish love on a wanted child. The medical establishment has done its level best to undermine our self-confidence, to browbeat us into conformity with the slenderness ideal with its ever-lengthening list of fat-related complaints and conditions (which most of us can recite effortlessly, having been reminded of them by a Greek chorus of friends and relatives, exasperation quivering in their voices as they bewail our impending doom in the guise of caring as well as by the media and the diet vultures circling relentlessly above). Our presumed ignorance and bloody-mindedness have kept us from shedding the pounds. Ostracism and ridicule have not eradicated us. Now the social deviance (literally) embodied in fatness is being classified as a genetic defect.

Consider the following report by Jonathan Thompson and Renee Knight (The Independent on Sunday, 5th November 2006), Eggs for sale, The booming business of sharing your fertility: “Victoria describes herself as ‘fun loving, generous and considerate’. The 29-year-old blonde is ‘naturally slim with good bone structure’, and an accomplished ballet dancer.
Danielle, 26, has wavy chestnut-coloured hair and blue eyes. A teacher by profession, she is ‘tall, athletic and outgoing’, and also a part-time model.
These are not adverts on internet dating sites. Victoria and Danielle are just two of a rapidly growing number of young British women rushing to cash in on the latest way to make money: the egg donation business.
The sale of eggs is illegal in this country, but in America, the industry is worth an estimated $4.5bn (£2.4bn). Donors with the right physical, personal and intellectual attributes can attract fees of up to $35,000 for their eggs, with some in the industry claiming that as much as $50,000 has changed hands. Prices are rising, too: in New York, average eggs are fetching $8,000. About 15 years ago, the comparable figure was closer to $1,000”.

What I find offensive here is not the sale of ova, but the stress on appearance with the implicit suggestion that intelligence and creativity are still unimportant attributes for a woman (presumably residing exclusively in the thrashing-tailed sperm) and, more particularly, that slimness is the would-be donors’ greatest asset, their strongest selling point.

Of course, unadulterated snobbery is also a factor. We can’t have the lower orders turning their much-reviled fecundity to pecuniary advantage, now, can we?: “‘In Britain, we have a culture of altruistic donation,’ said John Paul Maytum, a spokesman for the HFEA [Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority]. ‘There is always a concern when you start paying large amounts of money for eggs, because it will change people’s motives for wanting to donate. If payment is attracting people desperate for money, it also raises questions about the quality of the eggs’” [according to this stunningly elitist logic the inferiority of the poor sullies their very genes, any well-meaning initiatives to improve their wretched lot are a complete waste of time and effort as fecklessness, indolence and underachievement are transmitted from one generation of wasters to the next; no talent can ever reside in such tainted matter, there is no point in wasting opportunity on scum, their plight is deserved, their natural inheritance].

The short insert demonstrated most clearly just how unwanted we are (along the lines of no one in their right minds would want a fat child, especially not if they are shelling out good money for a designer baby), We need to check your weight first: “Eggdonor.com is one of a number of US websites advertising eggs for sale to infertile couples, including eggs from British women. Prices can reach up to $35,000 for donors with desirable physical characteristics, good medical histories and proven academic records. Prospective buyers are shown recent pictures of the donors, as well as images of them as babies and adolescents. They also analyse everything from their height and weight to details of their grandparents”.

I am no peddler of simplistic conspiracy theories to the effect that the accumulation of fat is set to be deliberately and maliciously eliminated from the gene pool (even if it were possible to engineer out such a deeply ingrained trait to which we owe our survival as a species), but we are treated as pariahs in the reproduction stakes as it is (to be flippant for a second, if the chances of conceiving indeed drop in proportion to padded curvaceousness then give me the cream bun and fish supper method any day rather than the noxious chemical preparations we are encouraged to swallow without a second thought) – we might know we are sexy as we slip into our glad rags and more so than the gaunt clothes horses with their dangling arms and washboard ribs, but who lets us be? Our voluptuousness was once revered and worshipped. These days the Venus of Willendorf provokes shudders of revulsion. We are not heading for genocide, but are sliding into even less tolerance in a context that bristles with hostility as it is. Where finger-wagging prejudice is able to set the public policy agenda limiting our access to IVF, more aggressive interventionist steps could follow.

Perhaps we will be segregated from the “normals” or forcibly enrolled in fat camps on starvation programmes. The barbed words of one colleague still ring in my ears over a decade after they first tore into me. I issued the customary protestations about having normal blood pressure and low cholesterol (both of which still hold true) and that I was perfectly comfortable with my size. Her retort: “Yes, but we have to look at you”. The powers that be are contemplating the removal of “yob neighbours”, those who have attracted persistent complaints concerning anti-social behaviour into “sin bins”. The qualm-free sacrifice of the human rights of “underclass” families not prepared to buckle down and accept their lowly station through gritted teeth for the sake of upholding the rights to a quiet life on the part of the rest, a cheap solution compared with tackling poverty, chronic inequality, deprivation and the absence of genuine opportunities and prospects that lie at the root of such sullen and futile rebellion (we can’t alienate the middle-classes by putting up the council tax yet again, after all). Once the principle of ghetto-creation for the undesirables has gained acceptance, the definition of undesirable can be expanded at will. “But they are so gross, so ugly with their bulging bellies. They spill over the arm rests on the plane, they glisten with sweat whenever the sun so much as peeps out from behind the clouds, I can’t bear the sight of them, besides, they lower the tone of the neighbourhood and bring down the property value, couldn’t you just get rid of them?” Fat catchers patrolling the streets to round up those who have not yet been relocated and have broken the curfew (daylight hours, when our allegedly lumbering gait might cause distress, “Pass me the smelling salts, Archibald, I’ve just spotted a slob!”). Perhaps in the end the diet industry will save us. After all, if skinniness were the norm outside of glamorous celebrity enclaves where would its profits come from? Fattening us up again?

Mind you, we are slowly but surely gaining the upper hand in terms of sheer numbers (not that I am naïve enough to think that being in the majority counts for much, as indicated by the frustrations of womanhood in a world where maleness is still the default option with all the privileges such an exalted, power-saturated state of being brings in its wake), as Sarah Boseley (The Guardian, 11th October 2006) shows in her Fears for the future as figures reveal Britons are the fattest people in Europe: “Britons are the fattest men and women of Europe, beating Slovakia and Greece by a small margin and with every likelihood that the next generation will hang on to the title, if current trends continue.
Being overweight or obese is now the norm in the UK, with figures released by the government yesterday showing that two-thirds of men and almost 60% of women are unhealthily heavy. We are also passing on the problem to our children: if nothing changes, nearly a third of boys and girls under 11 will be overweight or obese by 2010”.

She continues: “The figures from the OECD, comparing the UK with 21 other European countries, emerged in a government document detailing the state of the nation’s health, what has been achieved, and targets for the future.
Offsetting such success stories as the drop in cancer and heart disease deaths are the worrying upward trends in obesity and diabetes, mental ill-health and alcohol-related disease.
Caroline Flint, the public health minister, said that the UK led Europe in obesity for a combination of reasons, some of which were cultural and associated with shopping and family habits.
‘It has built up over time,’ she said. ‘In the last 10 years or so, things seem to have got worse. It is partly what we eat but also what we do in terms of physical activity. It is complex. It is part of the way we live our lives and we have to think of 21st-century solutions’.
The government has set itself the target of halting the year on year rise in obesity among children under 11 by 2010. But it does not set a similar target for stopping the weight gain in adults, aiming instead to encourage people to ‘want to change their lifestyles and take responsibility for their health’.
Ms Flint said it was not part of her job to tell people what to do.
Instead, the government is looking towards incentives, such as a voucher scheme offering money off fruit and vegetables being tried out in Cornwall, and more subliminal approaches.
Next spring it will launch an obesity ‘social marketing strategy’, based on the most effective ways of targeting messages to particular groups.
The result of one such piece of research was anti-smoking adverts warning young people that the cigarette habit would leave them looking wrinkled and damage their sex drive.
She expressed hopes that supermarkets would help the crusade, showing parents how to prepare exotic fruits and vegetables in-store and allowing children to try them: ‘Parents are worrying about buying food in case the children aren’t going to like it. We have to be better at listening to people rather than assuming we know what they need’”.

What bemuses me about the idea of squandering money on an awareness-raising deterrent campaign is the underlying assumption that we are not being chivvied, bullied and bombarded from all sides with messages about jeopardising our well-being for the sake of the transitory melting sensation of chocolate on the tongue as it is. Only a thin person in a cushioned environment without a single fat acquaintance (who has been called names throughout childhood and whose hard-won, minimal confidence has been punctured repeatedly in adulthood by casual remarks) could imagine that an extra portion of moral blackmail might sway the recalcitrant pie-guzzler into casting those crusts aside. Here sheer, mind-boggling ignorance combines with prejudice to dream up a plan that will only increase our humiliation, pain, suffering, anxiety and self-recriminating guilt whilst further exonerating those who derive their kicks from picking on us by pretending that fat is a lifestyle pathology, the physical manifestation of a moral flaw (lack of willpower and discipline), heaping all the blame on the individual and blithely glossing over every other contributory factor (I do not subscribe to the fat spells misery and disaster ideology).

Martin Hickman highlighted the schizophrenic attitude of the British when it comes to eating in ‘Crazy’ relationship with food is killing us, says FSA (The Independent, 11th October 2006): “British people eat the worst food in Europe, the head of a Government watchdog warns today.
(…) Dame Deirdre Hutton, chairman of the Food Standards Agency, placed the UK at the bottom of European countries on nutrition and warned that all parts of society were eating badly.
She said a ‘troubled’ relationship with food caused mass obesity in the general population and made young girls consider going on diets. ‘It’s crazy,’ she said.
Yesterday the Government revealed Britain to be the fattest nation in Europe, with two-thirds of men and 60 per cent of women overweight or obese. Ministers said obesity would be the priority in public health and promised to launch a new strategy next year.
In an interview marking her first year in office, Dame Deirdre – who is locked in a battle with the food industry over processed food labelling – said: ‘I think the evidence to me suggests that the UK has really quite poor nutritional status.
‘And although it is particularly prevalent in the lower socio-economic groups, actually the higher socio-economic groups cannot kid themselves it is the only place where it happens.
‘So it is a broad society problem and the interesting thing is you can look at children as young as six or seven and see that they have a very strange relationship with food’.
The multinational food giants and Britain’s biggest supermarket, Tesco, are boycotting the FSA’s ‘traffic light’ labelling scheme in favour of daily percentages for salt, fat and sugar, even though independent surveys suggest the agency’s system is the easiest to understand.
‘The most obvious symptom of our nutritional status is obesity,’ explained Dame Deirdre.
‘It’s not the only thing – there are equal problems of under nourishment in some areas – but the most obvious problem is obesity coupled with things like high salt in the diet. And the rate of increase appears to be exponential – rather like it is in the US.
‘Although other countries in Europe are catching us up or at least showing a trend growing the same way, we nonetheless remain right at the bottom in terms of poor nutrition and obesity’.
She said the country’s difficult relationship with food extended to children.
‘You have got really young girls worried about being overweight – children as young as seven saying they want to put themselves on a diet. It’s crazy’.
Campaigners estimate that bad diet kills as many as 60,000 Britons each year – not far off the 80,000 deaths from cancer and 15 times the number killed on the roads.
Launching the Government’s Health Profile of England yesterday, Caroline Flint, the Public health Minister, said: ‘The rapid increase in adult and child obesity over the past decade is storing up very serious health problems for the future’. Although surveys in the past year suggest that Britons are improving their diet, the last official research in 2001 found that most people eat 2.8 of the recommended five daily portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day.
Only half the households surveyed by the FSA in 2005 were cooking with raw ingredients every day. About six million people never or almost never cook fresh food”.

The leader in the same edition, A problem consuming Britain attempts to stir us out of our presumed complacency: “National self-image can be a deceptive thing. Economists tell us that Britain is in a healthy state compared with the rest of Europe. And we are used to hearing about the vibrancy of our cultural life. Yet when it comes to our physical health, the official data released yesterday shows that Britain is actually in a rather poor condition. As the head of the Food Standards Agency points out, we are now the sick man of Europe”.

The article comes full circle by citing the cost argument: “The Prime Minister was right yesterday to stress the importance of establishing the principle of ‘preventive’ health care here if we are to see any improvement. We cannot continue to regard the NHS as a ‘national illness service’ [what the bloody hell is it for, then, if not to treat the sick??]. The Department of Health predicts that 13 million people in England will be obese by 2010. With obesity-related illnesses already costing the nation some £3.5bn a year, this could eventually bankrupt the NHS. The success of the Cuban health service [which may work wonders, yet operates within an authoritarian society, which our Labour masters eye with evident envy, the more dictatorial aspects of which they attempt to emulate wherever possible] shows that when doctors focus not just on a patient’s ailments, but on their general lifestyle, the results can be astonishing.
But the real test for the Government lies in whether it can persuade Britons to eat more healthily. There has been some success. The quality of school meals has shown an improvement after the introduction of new guidelines. But the objectives laid out in the Government’s health White Paper of two years ago look distant. Many deprived areas are still fresh-food deserts. And the Government’s proposed ‘traffic-light’ system for food labelling has been rejected by the food industry.
The Government cannot force people to eat more healthily, but it can do a lot more to encourage it. And a good deal more than our national self-image is riding on the success of such efforts”.

That the stakes are indeed high is made clear by the Daily Mail in Epidemic of obesity ‘could ruin economy’ (10th November 2006, unattributed): “The obesity crisis sweeping Britain could damage the economy, researchers warn.
They say Britain became one of the most powerful countries in the world because of the health of its citizens.
But this could all be changed if talented professionals die early or retire because of sickness [once again a giveaway; only when fat threatens the “contributory classes” as opposed to the “scrounger classes” does it become a cause for concern worthy of pumping research funding into].
Professor Martin McKee said: ‘The Treasury has identified the cost of obesity to the NHS as a major problem but our research shows how much healthy people contribute to the health of the economy.
‘They remain in the workforce longer and are more productive while they are at work [note how other forms of moral pollution cluster around the “original sin” of fatness with overweight workers automatically branded as less productive, presumably due to the related evil of laziness].
‘This is vital as the overall age of the population rises and people are encouraged to retire later.
‘It is a waste of money investing in training people if they die at 35 [an unsubstantiated and wildly exaggerated figure surely, especially since another investigation into life expectancy that recently hit the headlines put Glasgow at the top of the early mortality league table with a life expectancy of 66 for men, putting the male residents of the city on a par with Albanians] or retire in their 50s because of ill health’.
The team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine, examined the link between health and wealth in rich countries, and found healthier people have higher earnings”.

This compounds the impression that we fat are not just punishing ourselves and ruining our own lives, but acting selfishly, nay, sociopathically by wrecking our nation’s prosperity: “About 30 per cent of financial growth in the United Kingdom between 1790 and 1980 can be attributed to better health and dietary intake.
Professor McKee said: ‘The overwhelming conclusion is that good health has benefits beyond the individual.
‘The true purpose of economic activity is to maximise social welfare and not simply to produce more goods and services.
‘Since better health is an important component of social welfare, its value ought to be included in measures of economic progress.
‘This has been done successfully in the United States. Similar moves in Europe could provide a new perspective on the investments made through their welfare states’”.

Shyama Perera in Thin people call fat people bad. So melt me down and save everyone a fortune (The Independent, 10th September 2006) assesses the psychological impact of the fat-disparagement bonanza: “Current policy initiatives to objectivise the fat are doing well. Despite my own gargantuan proportions I find myself tutting over every instance of muffin top among the young, and mature women with heavier thighs than Cherie Blair are immediately assigned a contempt rating.
My girlfriends report that they too have joined the witch-hunt – if only to offset their own lifelong anxieties about size by legitimately pointing the finger at someone who’s even bigger.
Where in the past it was unacceptable to pick on fat kids [an amnesty I ever noticed], the socially dysfunctional, or redundant mining communities fuelling sedentary lives with burgers and fries, one can now vilify them with the establishment’s seal of approval”.

She veers uneasily between orthodoxy and sympathy throughout: “How ironic that revulsion at a burqa and the doctrine it represents is outlawed in this country, but revulsion at the meaning inherent in a waist measurement is positively encouraged. Fattie-baiting is spreading across health departments like the Toronto Blessing. Fat people cost you money – fat people threaten your health.
On that basis, it is now acceptable to refuse them operations, IVF and any manner of medical condition they are deemed to have contributed to by dint of greed. Tonsillitis, Mr Jones? Too much passing traffic, that’s your problem.
Are these health policies new? No, they’re not. Doctors routinely refuse treatment where it compromises them, endangers the patient, or has low success rates within a particular demographic, whatever that demographic may be.
As for assertions about cost, the British Association for Parental and Enteral Nutrition reported last December that malnutrition costs the NHS £7.3bn a year. That’s twice the bill for obesity. If we then place obesity in context alongside vices of choice – binge drinking, drug addiction, smoking, keep fit (sic), and unprotected sex – the figures are even less scary.
Does that mean obesity’s OK? Of course it isn’t! It’s obvious even to a fool that excess weight puts the organs and joints under serious pressure, jeopardising the likelihood of a long and healthy life. It’s vital, then, that we’re given models for healthy and moderate eating.
The issue is this: the fat are being turned into crass objects of ridicule when they are an inevitable by-product of massive social and industrial change.
In the past 40 years, England has evolved from an active, manufacturing society to being computerised, service-led, and sedentary. Women have abandoned the kitchen and joined men in commuter hell. We work the longest hours in Europe. It’s a different way of being. While we’re acclimatising, there isn’t always space for menu-planning and elective exercise. It’s quicker and easier to buy Big Macs or to order a takeaway than it is to go to Asda, transport food home, and cook from scratch.
Meanwhile our children are locked away for fear of stranger danger. Football is banned in the street. Youth clubs have closed. Superstores have replaced playing fields. Inevitably, MySpace, MSN and PlayStations have taken over as leisure activities. We are a society in the throes of a major cultural revolution.
Within that setting, our behaviours may not be wise, but neither are they unreasonable. That’s why righteous protestations and pontifications that find fat people wanting will not only fail, but they will also backfire on those who moot them.
Finger pointing doesn’t work. Painting ‘Burgers Kill’ on fast-food boxes, or ‘Eating Chocolate Could Seriously Damage Your Health’ on every bar of Green & Blacks, will serve only to highlight human weakness, not to lessen it. Alongside those pariahs huddled in doorways over fags, a toke, or a bottle of meths, will we now find the overweight sharing pie and chips?
So why, when 47 per cent of women are a size 16 and over, and one in three men will be clinically obese by 2010, are health chiefs being pejorative instead of seeking solutions that appeal?
Firstly, the fat are an easy target within an cash-strapped NHS struggling to offer even basic healthcare. Secondly, drawing attention to people on the basis of size draws attention away from differences in race or religion: it’s a fairer form of discrimination. The obese have become a useful totem of societal ills – they take up too much room; they’re badly dressed; they shine on hot days and they’re ugly.
This is dangerous ground. Obesity is a general problem. Even posh mums are pushed for solutions when it comes to the frappucino generation – we can all think of examples. I wonder how they feel, being told that they’re a drain on society and bound to die blind of diabetes. It’s not the greatest call to arms. And it’s why health chiefs should think very carefully about the way they’re conducting current campaigns. By alienating the young, they risk doing more harm than good.
The Jamie Oliver approach of getting stuck in at the deep end is a positive one – leading by example and through celebration. His condemnation of lunchbox junk is expressed as caring, not as ridicule. ‘My dream is for our children to be able to cook their children a lovely roast,’ he says.
Our children may have as little time and inclination to cook as their parents, but Oliver’s approach is better than the fast food and M&S cook-chill example shown to my generation.
In the meantime, we have crossed a policy line that makes both fat and thin uncomfortable. Condemnatory pronouncements smack of fascism. Thin people good, fat people bad. Melt them down and save a fortune.
It’s not a new idea of course. The system already exists, administered by Bupa. It is everything Labour hates.
If I were a Tory I’d say this to voters: a teacher aged 50 needs a £6,000 hip replacement. She’s turned down because she’s too fat. On the same day, a new immigrant with HIV signs up for a lifetime of anti-viral drugs costing six figures. Both knowingly risked their health. Both are needy. Only one has put time and money into this community. We’d treat both, because they’re equal in our eyes. Labour didn’t.
Labour heartlands tend to be heavy on the heavy, as the survey on Britain’s fattest towns revealed. If the Government isn’t careful, it may not end up with fat bellies, but there’ll be a few fat lips”.

Her conclusion is just: we must mobilise our political weight before we are ground into total capitulation beneath the twin millstones of disapproval and shame, apologising for the crime of our existence, agreeing with our detractors as they herd us into the operating theatres for lipo-sculpting, excising our bounteousness like a cancer.

Interloper

2006-11-24T12:51:00.000+01:00

Peas float in the pot, the submerged rice clinging to the enamel betraying its presence through the sour smell of fermentation, like the contents of a pumped stomach after a night of who-cares-about-the-morning-let’s-have-another recklessness. Plate stacked precariously upon plate patiently awaiting the loving ministrations of the cleaning lady’s rubber-gloved hands, the cleansing baptismal dunk in suds perfumed with grapefruit and mint extract to emerge gleaming, reborn. The coffee elbows aside rival fragrances like an unapologetic queue jumper in the daily croissant scrum at the bar (the commuters arriving in a surge from the train, conveyed by the escalator to the third floor where the sub-contracted security guards prowl, scanning their badges, which must be visible at all times on pain of a ticking off and possible ejection).

It has been an exceptionally mild November, yet my body instinctively hunches to conserve heat, the memory of the last few weeks haunting its extremities. The boiler had obligingly spluttered back into life only to clog up almost immediately in a massive infarct worthy of the archetypal estate dweller for which our largest city is so famed (whose life expectancy is curtailed by poverty to a mere 66 years, on a par with Albania and over a decade lower than the span granted to the gin-swilling London sophisticates whose optimism is no doubt buoyed by the knowledge that their stone walls increase in value faster than convolvulus tendrils grow). Earlier in the week the repairman had arrived so late that we had already given up on him and sought refuge in a nearby restaurant, leaving us with the prospect of a weekend of shivering with guests due for dinner that evening. In desperation the Hungarian purchased a plug-in radiator complete with oil (theoretically to reduce electricity consumption), which did have the merit of banishing the chill to the extent that our every breath ceased manifesting like a ghostly presence. As soon as he turned it on full at my insistence, however, we were plunged into total darkness. G located the torch and we removed a sample fuse from the box for him to present to a salesman at the sprawling DIY warehouse behind our hedge. It transpired, however, that they no longer stocked such old-fashioned articles and the little shop that had so faithfully provided us with replacements had long since gone out of business. The upstairs lighting therefore had to be sacrificed as did the radiator’s albeit feeble output so that the paprika chicken dish and home-made galuska could be duly presented to LR and her most unpriestly Patrick. We lit every candle along the window sill and let down the shutters in hope of warmth. To little avail.

Our predicament greatly amused my brother, who cheerfully dispensed advice: “Old bits of carpet are great, but only the Hessian-backed ones, cos the foam ones burn like shite”. He regaled me with recollections from his single days when taking out the rubbish was fraught with peril (you had to lay the bags down carefully in the pile at the stairway entrance to avoid needlestick injury and possible deadly infection). Jeans, especially the black canvas ones, were also an ideal fuel: “They were a real bargain – they cost me a fiver, I wore them for three years and then they kept me cosy”. Now that he lives in relative luxury in his council house with double glazing and central heating the glow of nostalgia suffuses the memories of greater deprivation.

I have always shunned artifice, eschewing the creams and concoctions with their extortionate price tags and false promises of mystical regeneration, of repairing the “damage” wrought by time’s relentless passage, harbouring a condescending scorn for those weak enough to succumb to the pressures of male disapproval, vanity and the spend, spend, spend Diktat of consumerism. I have never regarded myself as a sexual being, nor have I constructed my persona around my appearance, take it or leave it my guiding principle (the magnificent Jean, member of the Deer Tribe and frequenter of sweat lodges once advised me to think of my cunt as a precious jewel, the most desirable ruby in the world, that all men craved, but which I must guard jealously). For twenty-one years I had not been to the hairdresser’s. My tresses of uneven length straggled down to the middle of my back in all their silver-laced, exuberant anarchy, but I allowed myself to be cajoled into compliance with the assurance that there would be months for it to grow back again should I shudder at the results. So I took the Metro to the genteel suburb at the end of the line to the salon (“artisan coiffeur” no less) Espace Florilège where each member of staff was a walking advertisement for the skills of the proprietress. I donned a long-sleeved black gown and tried not to wince as Madame stood behind my shoulders poised with her implements, snip, snip, snipping and gathering my fallen locks to be preserved for posterity in an envelope. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she cooed encouragingly, “We are in the business of making our clients more beautiful, not ugly”. As her assistant massaged the white paste Madame had carefully mixed into my scalp, I tried to dismiss the warnings I had read in various articles about bowel cancer being triggered by dyes and thought instead of my last trip with my Mother back home for a “page boy” cut, the radio blaring in the background and the old biddies slurping tea and chatting above the din of the dryers, girls young enough to be their great granddaughters sweeping the grey curls over the linoleum to the bins.

I surrendered to Madame’s reassurances of professionalism and inwardly smiled at the sight of myself in grotesquely large pink curlers once the nostril-prickling ammonia colouring agent had been rinsed away. ES hovered in the doorway and was informed that I would be another half an hour or so. I was left to observe this most feminine of environments with the intrigued yet benevolent curiosity of the anthropologist subjected to an unfamiliar ritual in exotic surroundings lacking the cultural wherewithal to participate like a native.

Eventually I was expected to comment on the outcome. Their trepidation was greater than mine when I offered a few feeble remarks that fell considerably short of the lavish praise they had grown accustomed to from other customers wont to gush at the transformation. My hair was now the dark brown of fallen chestnuts amongst the fiery autumn drifts. To my relief it did not look like it had come out of a bottle (even Madame’s helpers were impressed by the natural effect she had achieved) and its sheen was pleasing. Two thirds of it had been discarded yet it appeared thicker and more opulent. Perhaps the visit would not be my last after all.

Mine would not be the only transition. My suspicions had been aroused by the news that my Father was about to purchase a new carpet (no amount of stubborn assiduity or chemical intervention could efface the lingering stain left by my Mother’s seeping legs as she slowly expired) and a leather suite even before the telephone’s shrill summons with his bald announcement. I contacted my brother to garner his initial reactions. Rationally, we are both aware that to wish solitude and celibacy on him is the height of selfishness, yet for him to marry a woman he met in the flesh for the first time a mere week ago seems not only surreal (age has not blunted his impulsiveness) but a complete mockery of the fifty-one years of fidelity and apparent devotion that bound him to that beautiful and long-suffering woman of whose infinitely generous and forgiving love we have all been robbed. We agreed that neither of us would object in the slightest to an affair or a looser partnership conducted anywhere but in the home we shared. I knew what he meant when he complained, the concentrated bitterness in his voice more eloquent even than the words themselves, that when he walks through the back door and is confronted by a chair once again positioned where she used to sit, he will feel sick to the stomach.

Able to sniff disapproval at a hundred yards, my brother is sceptical of the future of the family. He reported that her Alsatian had “had an accident” over the back seat of the car without so much as a shrug from my Father, whereas “If one of my bairns were so much as tae drop a crisp on the floor he would throw a fit”. During the strained fifteen-minute drop-in my Father feigned normality (the product of his generation and of loyal adherence to the tradition of Scottish masculinity in which he was immersed, he never was any good at expressing his feelings, a mistake I was determined never to make with my son), glossing over her presence as if it were nothing unusual. He keeps forgetting her name and even my brother felt a twinge of pity on noticing her wince at being referred to as “thingummyjig” (our theory being that my Father keeps catching himself about to call her “Mary”).

Living in the splendid isolation of exile, I have as good as severed my ties by default (although I am occasionally assailed by a pang of longing at all the joys and sorrows I have missed). Now I am tormented by the prospect of never being at ease in the house in which I grew up even should I succeed in stifling the hostility and resentment that well up inside me. If I can abandon my own flesh and blood, how can he imagine that I could ever make room for “new brothers and sisters”? I want nothing to do with them. They are and will forever remain strangers to me. Once she has gone I will have no reason to tolerate them or even maintain the thinnest veneer of politeness. For me it has always been all or nothing. No compromises (even here not beyond the absolute bare minimum to avoid hurting him), only the pure, unyielding, ferocious consistency that has permitted me not only to survive but to surpass.

1956: Prelude

2006-10-22T15:07:00.000+02:00

“‘I can’t write more,’ I said. ‘I’m not a British secret agent, and I don’t see at all on what basis you are keeping me here against my will’.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘so that’s your line? You think that we arrest innocent people?’
‘Hm, yes, I think so’.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘’for us, an arrest is proof of guilt, because we don’t arrest innocent people. Innocent people in Hungary are quite safe and can go about their business, and those who are arrested are arrested on the basis of mature consideration and are certainly guilty. Sit down and write some more’. With that he left the room again”.
Edith Bone, Seven Years Solitary, Bruno Cassierer, Oxford, 1966, p63

In tracing the origins of the spontaneous outpouring of popular resentment and frustration engendered by a brutal dictatorship, which manifested itself in the Hungarian Revolution I have decided to concentrate on reproducing the personal testimony of three individuals who fell foul of the regime for varying reasons, Edith Bone, György Pálóczi-Horváth and Béla Ispánki. Two were convinced Communists, one a Catholic priest, but together their experiences were typical enough to summarise eloquently the wrongs committed against the nation as a whole.

Edith Bone was born in Budapest in 1889. She studied medicine (with interruptions) initially in Budapest (from 1908), continuing in Paris, where she was seduced by the country’s language and literature before moving to Berne in an effort to escape the distractions and focus on microbiology. When the First World War broke out she returned to Budapest, securing a job in a military hospital before she was fully qualified due to the chronic shortage of trained physicians. In 1919 she was sent to Russia as part of a Hungarian Red Cross delegation. They were arrested as a reprisal for the arrest of their Russian counterparts visiting Hungary. Three weeks later news reached the captives that the Hungarian Government had stood down and voluntarily handed over power to a Communist-Socialist coalition. She decided to head for the Finnish border via Petrograd where she was invited to become editor of the English edition of the Communist International monthly. She joined the Party, was sent on a mission to Vienna in 1923 and decided to abandon medicine and earn a living as a translator. Having travelled extensively in Europe she settled in England a decade later. When she was invited to make a trip to Hungary in 1949 by a Hungarian publisher to translate a scientific book from English to Hungarian she was a member of the British Communist Party as well as an unpaid special correspondent of the Daily Worker (the paper gave her “credentials and its blessing”, op. cit., p37).

Her verdict on the Hungarian leaders was scathing: “Indeed the men in power had changed a great deal. They were beggars on horseback now. To wield power wisely is a very difficult thing; it is learned in a hard school, such as the one the Russian revolutionaries of the early days went through; but such schooling was entirely lacking in these Hungarian upstarts, who had not achieved power with the aid of a people which supported them, but had had it put into their hands by a foreign conqueror of their country. They knew perfectly well that the vast majority of the Hungarian nation regarded them as traitors, as lackeys of a foreign invader, and they resented this truth in their ignoble fashion” (pp46-7).

As for Rákosi, her contempt knew no bounds: “I knew that Rákosi probably detested me just as much as I detested him. I made no secret of my not particularly flattering opinion of him. I had known him as errand-boy to Béla Kun and to Zinoviev, who of course by this time could not be mentioned. Then I had known him as errand-boy to Stalin. When, after Stalin’s death, there was nobody to whom he could play this role, Rákosi was very quickly eclipsed. He was essentially an errand-boy and also a professional sitter-on-the-fence with an exceptionally good flair for jumping off it into the garden which showed the handsomer herbaceous border. And I was, of course, nauseated by the ‘cult of personality’, as it is now called, as it applied to Rákosi. After all, Stalin, although we may think him a monster, was a monster on a very large scale. He may have been a very evil man, but he had stature, whereas Rákosi’s sole claim to leadership was the fact that he had been imprisoned for sixteen years. Well, I do not think that imprisonment for sixteen years in itself qualifies you for leadership. After all, Rákosi did not spend sixteen years in prison because he wanted to. He was there because he could not help himself. It was very stupid and ill-advised of him to have his portraits hung everywhere, because physically he was an exceptionally unprepossessing person, and if he had been wise he would have insisted that no portraits of him be shown anywhere. He is – or was – an ugly little man, much too fat, with no neck at all, his chin almost between his shoulders, a completely bald head and an utterly commonplace face. Such small semi-deformed men could be seen any day in any street in any Hungarian city” (pp49-50).

Two of the leading intellectuals of the Rákosi era, Tamás Aczél and Tibor Méray (whom Bone describes as one of the chief “head-stuffers”, or propagandists on behalf of the regime) in their brilliant insider’s account of the cognitive warping process under Communism The Revolt of the Mind (London, Thames and Hudson, 1960), recall how Rákosi’s image was ubiquitous in spite of his constituting such unpromising raw material and how Stalin’s cult of personality was slavishly imitated, with endless paeans of praise for the “Wise Leader”: “Nobody could tell exactly how many Rákosi portraits were in circulation in Hungary at a given time. Were there six hundred or three thousand or a million and a half? All that we knew for certain was that there was not an office, or a schoolroom, or a shop or shop window, or a railway waiting room, or small inn, or coffeehouse without a portrait on the wall. Neither was there a local Party office, nor a trade union centre, nor an editorial room, nor a factory workshop or gate, nor dressing room, nor sports field, nor hospital room, nor ship’s cabin, nor health service consulting room, nor tractor station, nor cinema, nor cloakroom, nor open-air theatre, nor supermarket, nor garage, nor museum in Hungary without a portrait. In the room of a true Communist, or in the room of a clerk suspected of being politically unreliable, there were usually two portraits rather than one: a large photograph on the wall and a small picture on the desk.
These photographs, usually with some slogan or other bearing Rákosi’s signature beneath, were of three or four varieties. One showed only the head, in all its baldness and roundness and enlarged to giant proportions. Another, approximately six to ten years old, was a bust of the man, with a Party emblem in his buttonhole. The third, which was a little less common, portrayed Rákosi from top to toe, and in this pose he held a little girl on his arm. The most ubiquitous photograph, however, showed the ‘people’s wise father’ in the middle of a wheat field, holding a couple of ripe stalks in his hand, his infallible eyes scrutinising the quality of the expected harvest.
This picture – so the faithful thought – expressed with the utmost concentration and perfection all the benevolence that radiated from Mátyás Rákosi toward the people, whether the people desired his benevolence or not. All these qualities were evident: the serenity emanating from the man standing in the middle of the wheat field; the strength and tenderness with which he grasped the tough, yet fragile stalks; the serenity promising a secure future, the solicitude and responsibility for the new bread, the new future; the goodness of heart with which, with the loving eye of the farmer, he scanned the stalks; and the expert knowledge he had of the crop, because it was quite evident in the photograph that, apart from being deeply moved by the stalks of wheat, his quick eye had immediately noticed the quality of it and had calculated the quintals per acre and added up the quintals to get the national average. And beyond all that, this picture summed up in its straightforward symbolism, the important truth that this man had deep roots in the Hungarian soil, as deep as wheat itself, and that this soil fed him and made him strong as steel, so that he was at once son and father of the Hungarian land and the Hungarian village” (pp162-3).

Bone gives a clear insight into the corruptness of the system in her explanation of what was construed as espionage: “Apart from everything else, I did not believe that they would dare to proceed against a British subject without any sort of valid reason. I had been very, very careful in my contacts with Hungarians. But in a country where to ask a man how much he earned and what he could buy for that amount is regarded as espionage, it is almost impossible to refrain from ‘spying’ activities. Later I was reproached with having listened to the conversation of people in restaurants and with having asked people how much they earned and what they could buy for it. It was as clear as day that this was espionage and I was a spy” (p54).

She was about to board a plane back to England when her name was called and she was informed that her visa had expired at midnight. In reality it was due to expire at the end of the day. She was told to go to the Aliens’ Office and have it extended by 48 hours. Her abductors claimed that they had arranged a seat on the plane for her the next day. They offered to drive her there themselves: “I accepted the offer because there was nothing much else I could do, but as soon as I was in the car I realised that this was not a normal lift. Instead of one man sitting in front with the driver, as would have been natural, and one sitting inside with me – the car was not designed to hold three abreast in the back seat – both of them crowded in, one sitting on each side of me. The car drove very fast and the thugs, of course, imagined that I believed that they were taking me to the Aliens’ Office. Indeed I might have thought so while we were still on the outskirts of Budapest, but, although an expatriate, I was born in the place and quite soon realised that we had taken the wrong turning from my point of view, that we were not driving to the Aliens’ Office at all, but towards the headquarters of the secret police in 60 Andrássy Street. There was not much I could do; it was a closed car, so that even if I had tried to shout or had cried for help, it would not have been heard. I had no doubt that the car was bullet-proof and sound-proof. Not until we had turned off Andrássy Street into a side street, a sheet-iron gate had been opened, we had driven inside and the gate had been safely closed again was the car door opened to let us out. But the fiction that this was merely a short delay was still kept up by the secret police agents” (p57).

Her first interrogation proved brief due to her point blank refusal to accept the validity of the trumped-up charges against her: “About five minutes later a rather well-dressed and smooth-mannered, tall, slim young man came and showed me through another door into a little room furnished as an office. He sat down behind the desk, asked me to take the chair placed opposite him, and said, ‘We know, from information received, that you are an agent of the British secret service and that you have been an agent of the British secret service ever since you joined the Communist Party in 1919. Now we want to know who sent you, what were your instructions, what you did to carry out these instructions, and who co-operated with you. And until you tell us this, you will not leave this building’.
I said, ‘In that case I shall probably die here, because I am not an agent of the British secret service, got no instructions and didn’t co-operate with anybody to fulfil such non-existent instructions. Anyway, what is this all about?’
‘Why,’ he replied, ‘I’ve just told you. You are a spy and we’ve got you. I warn you that you had better come clean. And I can also tell you that if you have any sort of idea that you will spin us a yarn and later retract it, I can assure you straight away that that cock won’t fight, not here!’
‘I’ve told you already that I’m not a secret service agent and I can’t tell you anything more,’ I said.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Can you type?’
‘Yes, I can type’.
‘Then sit down at that typewriter and write me an autobiography, a curriculum vitae’. This was, as I learned later, their usual procedure. They did this in order to have some material to go on, because they had no real machinery for any sort of investigation. Their object was merely to get some sort of handle by means of which people could be convicted; whether the material they used was true or not did not concern them in the least. They made their victims write the story of their lives in order to try to catch them out in details. If one did not tell the truth, it was quite easy to forget what one had said or written, and then one might contradict oneself” (pp61-2).

During her brief stint of captivity in the SDD [Államvédelmi Osztály, or State Defence Department, referred to in the other cited texts by the Hungarian abbreviation ÁVO, a carefully chosen euphemism for the secret police] headquarters she displayed the courageous defiance and indignation that later sustained her throughout her years in prison: “I was not left alone for an instant, not even to go alone to the w.c. One of the men always went with me and waited at the open door. I was questioned at intervals during these three days by another man. The first one had been quite a civilised-looking young man. This one, however, was a little dark fellow who may have been clean, but certainly looked very dirty. He tried to frighten me, saying that if I did not come across he would make me crawl on all fours. He also said that they would do things to me which would make me curse the day I was born two thousand times. This made very little impression on me. I did not worry much about threats. Of course, at the end of the second day, not having slept much even during my last night in freedom, I was pretty tired. But I am quite strong physically and could always stand up to fatigue pretty well.
The nasty young man who had threatened me disappeared. I was no longer taken up to the third floor as I had been at the beginning, I was taken instead to the first floor where I was informed that I was very lucky to have been handed over to the counter-intelligence section. Why this should have been a happy development for me I do not know. And here they tried all sorts of things, threats, cajolery, flattery and bribery – one of them even said that I looked very much like his mother and that therefore he wished to help me, and pretended to be very much concerned at my plight. All my luggage was brought into the room in which I was interrogated. No inventory was taken, beyond one of the tiny sum of money which I had on me. My camera, my typewriter and almost everything else that I possessed – I had quite a lot of things with me – were, to put it quite plainly, stolen. I never saw any of them again. And indeed some of the things were taken before my eyes. They said that I would not need them any more, anyway. They behaved like gangsters who had kidnapped a traveller, not like officials of a lawful authority.
At the end of the third day I was finally taken down to a really sinister cellar of theirs and shoved roughly into a cell. This cell was about ten feet long and so narrow that there was scarcely room between the wall and a plank bed to get in edgeways, at least for me, who at fourteen stone five was not exactly a skeleton. The ceiling was so low that I could reach it by stretching up my hand. There was no window, only a ventilating shaft with a cross section about five inches square. The light was on day and night. There was no heating, nothing except a plank bed – none of the usual furniture of a prison cell, no jug, no water, no mug, no mess-tin, no shelf on which to put them, nothing at all but an iron frame with a few planks. It was very cold and I asked for blankets, this elicited the surly answer that I would get blankets all in good time. It was about two hours before I got them. I wrapped myself in them and lay down to sleep. It is not easy to sleep on boards if you are not used to it, but fortunately I am an old camper. I have slept on rocks far harder and far less smooth than a plank bed. So to the great disgust of my jailers I fell asleep immediately. Apparently they had expected me to be horrified at this type of accommodation, but I was far too sleepy and tired to be interested in anything but getting into a bed of whatever sort” (pp64-5).

She was less than impressed by the calibre of her interrogators: “These young men – they were all under thirty – who interrogated me and tried to intimidate, cajole, bribe, browbeat, in short, brainwash me, were my helpers. They were such inferior types, inspiring me with such disgust and contempt, that my scruples about using such weapons I might possess against them totally disappeared. I believe that the success of all police action rests on the fact that the police are usually of a higher type of human being than the malefactors with whom they have to deal. If the malefactor is of a higher type, if say, he has more brains, a better education, a better knowledge of criminology than the policeman who is supposed to catch him, then, I believe, the probability is that the malefactor will escape. Indeed, there is little doubt in my mind that quite a large number of malefactors do escape.
Now, I had two very great advantages in the struggle against my captors. One was the fact that I was completely innocent and it was quite impossible for them to obtain any real evidence of my having committed any crime. Secondly, it could hardly be said either that I was an inferior type or inferior in knowledge, even in knowledge of criminology, to these so-called police officers who really were not police officers at all but chance recruits selected on I do not know what basis, sent to Moscow for a six months’ training course and returned as fully-fledged experts. Their tenure was very insecure; indeed none of those who had dealings with me in 1949 was still in the secret police in 1956, and their chief, Gabriel [Gábor] Péter, had been a prisoner in Budapest Central prison for quite a while when I was transferred there at the end of 1955.
Of criminology, of police procedure, of the psychology and technique of interrogation, they were as ignorant as they were of the facts which they ought to have known if they really wanted to expose an English spy. Their ignorance of all things pertaining to English life was absolutely prodigious. For instance, with an air of trotting out a final poser for me, one of them said, ‘Well, if you are not an English spy, how do you account for having received your passport from the English authorities?’ To these young men born and bred in a police state, it was quite unthinkable that there should exist a country which was not a prison for its citizens and where you could get a passport simply for the asking, unless you happened to be wanted by the police.
I knew all this, of course, and, as I am rather fond of teasing, I said, ‘Well, you know, I had a very powerful patron’. (In Hungary you must have protection and a patron for everything, even perhaps for taking out a season ticket for a public conveyance).
This interested my interrogator very much. ‘Who was it?’
Perhaps he thought I would say Winston Churchill himself, but I said, ‘It was Thomas Cook’. This name is known even in Hungary, as Thomas Cook’s had an office in Budapest. Of course, this again went down on my lengthening record of insolent answers” (pp66-8).

Her resilience in the face of adversity shines through in her description of the ruses and downright brutality employed to extract confessions: “Altogether, of twenty-three men with whom I had to deal – twenty-three secret police officers of commissioned rank who interrogated me at various periods – there were only two whom one could regard as being above the average in intelligence. Four were definitely below even the Hungarian average, and the rest were of average intelligence, that is to say, they would have been good enough drapery salesmen not to make the mistake of measuring off more instead of less in every yard. Their very low quality was a great help to me, because I felt no solidarity, no sense of community with them at all. My change-over from the attitude that I was the victim of an error and that I and my persecutors were in the same camp, to an attitude of uncompromising hostility, was thus greatly facilitated. The men I had to deal with were all young, all a cross between Teddy-boy and spiv. Such were the men into whose hands Rákosi and his henchmen, Gabriel [Gábor] Péter, deposed and imprisoned in 1953, had delivered the lives and the liberty of every Hungarian citizen.
The methods by which they attempted to break down the resistance of their victims was very simple: they deprived them of the possibility of satisfying the basic natural needs of their bodies and then left it to their own bodies to torture them. If you are deprived of proper, wholesome and sufficient food, of air, of light, of warmth, of sleep, then after a certain time your own body revolts. From the torturer’s angle this is a very convenient method, saving much trouble and exertion. From the torturee’s angle…The cold, especially, is extremely unpleasant. After a time the sensations are pretty depressing.
Another little dodge is to mix something with your food which gives you indigestion. There are certain details connected with this into which I would rather not go, they are too obscene and unpleasant even to talk about. There is also a kind of handcuff that they out on you. This is a steel ring, or rather two steel rings, flat and broad, which are put on the wrist and tightened, with the edge and not the flat side towards the hand. There is no chain between the two handcuffs so that the hands are close together and the ring is tightened to such an extent that in a very few minutes the wrist begins to swell. Of course the more the hands and wrists swell, the greater the pressure – and the pain. It is also so placed that the pressure is on the bones of the wrist, which after a time causes periostitis. This is again an easy and convenient means of torture; the torturers need not exert themselves, they just put the handcuff on and leave it on, that is all there is to it. The pain grows worse and worse with time, there is no let-up, no remission.
The victim is often deprived of sleep. On the pretext of searching the cell, the guards come in four or five times a night and drag you off the plank bed. They push the prisoner into a corner face to the wall, while they pretend to ‘search the cell’ – although in these cells there is nothing to search for and no earthly possibility of anything being hidden. The search is simply a pretext to disturb the prisoner’s sleep during the night. Another thing they did to me was to blow in carbon monoxide through the ventilation shaft. They simply backed a lorry against the outer opening of the shaft, revved up the engine and thus blew in the exhaust gases.
Often they had prisoners taken to a room upstairs and left there, sitting on a little stool without a back, for hours and hours on end, a thug with a rifle watching to see that they did not get up and walk about. This was very tiring, for instance, to me, as I was getting on: I was well over sixty at the time. It is difficult to realise, without having tried it, how painful such a simple thing can be. Again it is your body that tortures you with cramps.
A further trick was this: suddenly they let up, put you in a better cell, gave you better food, a better bed, better treatment, left you there for twelve days until they thought you had got used to the better conditions, and then tried to blackmail you by threatening to send you back to the old bad cell. They did this three times to me, but they were unlucky. I had quite made up my mind about the whole business long before.
What I have said about methods refers only to those used towards myself. I want to point out that they were by no means typical; that I have positive knowledge that many others were treated far worse, many done to death in that same cellar”. She attributes her survival to the fact that the British authorities made enquiries about her during her captivity” (pp69-71).

Her captors appealed to her Party loyalty to persuade her to confess to fabricated charges, then when these efforts failed, they resorted to other forms of psychological pressure: “The feeling of hopelessness and helplessness was increased – though only in their intention – by the total disregard of the prisoner’s most elementary rights and by their having made it utterly impossible for him, whether guilty or innocent, to put up any sort of defence. For instance, I was not informed, except in general terms, of the charge against me, which in reality was not a charge at all, but a mere assumption – if that. I had no legal aid of any kind either before or during my so-called trial, which was not a trial at all.
Indeed I was candidly told by the officers of the secret police that I must abandon all hope of bettering my condition unless I did as I was told.
‘Oh, don’t think we don’t understand what you are counting on,’ they said. ‘You think that you are going to have a public trial, and at this public trial you will be able to trot out all sorts of things. What a hope! If there is a trial – and we don’t even know that yet – it will be in camera, and nobody will be present there at all, so you won’t have any chance of making a demonstration, in such cases, even if for some reason there is a trial, it’s a mere formality, the sentence is determined here; it is we who say what it is to be’.
They told me this, of course, in order to induce me to ‘do business’ with them, as they put it in their thieves’ jargon. When I refused again and again, they began to bargain, gradually reducing their requirements. At first, they proposed to have a full-dress public trial with Jupiter lights and microphones. But such ‘show trials’ require the consent and co-operation of the prisoner. They are, in fact, merely amateur theatrical performances, with every word carefully rehearsed in advance. Only very strong pressure can induce a prisoner to accept a part in one of these monstrous farces.
They had no means of exercising strong enough pressure on me. I was in the fortunate position of having only myself to think of; I had no wife and family who could be used as a means of blackmail. So the secret police could do nothing more than threaten my own person, which I did not take very seriously, by now I was pretty sure they would not dare” (pp82-3).

On 1st December 1950, a plain clothes officer ordered her to dress and she was given a pair of stockings. She assumed that she was being transferred to another prison: “We drove into the yard, I was taken through a series of doors, and suddenly I found myself in what was unmistakably a court-room.
I was told to sit down on the so-called ‘bench of the accused’ (which corresponds to the ‘dock’ in English courts). Two guards sat down, one on each side of me. It was only then that I realised that this was to be my trial. I had received no indictment, had had no opportunity of taking any legal advice, no counsel, no possibility of preparing myself in any way, and I did not know what charge I had to answer.
The court-room was large – at least fifty feet long, or even more, and I was at one end of it. Behind me were a few rows of seats for an audience, but there was no one there except a high-ranking secret police officer whom I had seen before, the man in charge of all the secret police prisons, and my two guards – nobody else. As soon as we were seated, a door at the other end of the hall opened, and out came the colonel whom I had seen before as the head of the prosecutor’s office of the Budapest military district; then came three young men of subaltern rank and one civilian wearing a red tie. At the extreme end of the hall furthest from me was a platform, and on the platform was a table with three chairs behind it and on each side of it, to right and to left, two more chairs. The colonel seated himself on one, the man in civvies on the other, I have never learned his identity, but I believe he was the representative of the Communist party.
The three young men who had come in together sat down on the chairs behind the table, and the one in the middle, who played the part of the judge, took out a paper and began to read it, or rather to mumble something very rapidly under his breath. I could not hear or understand a single word, being about fifty feet away, my hearing had also been somewhat impaired by the damp and cold to which I had been exposed for more than a year.
‘I can’t hear what you are reading!’ I protested.
At that the public-prosecutor jumped up with both his fists clenched and yelled at me, ‘Shut your trap or I’ll shut it for you!’ I said no more, and the man up on the platform went on mumbling.
When he stopped I was told to go up to the platform. I did so, and the man who sat in the centre asked me my name. I gave it. He then asked, ‘Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’ – or rather, the equivalent Hungarian formula, which is somewhat different.
I said, ‘Although I don’t know of what I am accused, I am certainly not guilty of any offence whatsoever,’ and went on to say that I would answer no further questions, because I did not consider this a properly constituted court of justice and would not participate in such a travesty of justice. This was a flea-circus, not a court of law.
He said, ‘Very well, go back to your place’. I started back, and on my way, while I was still quite close to the bench, I heard him say, ‘I declare the guilt of the accused person. The Court will now withdraw’. But I had scarcely reached my place fifty feet away, when the five men came back in again, and the same man who had read the paper before began to read something else. Presumably it was the sentence, but I could not hear a word” (pp86-8).

In July 1956 she finally discovered that she had been sent down for 15 years for espionage on behalf of Britain.

Although she acknowledges that the maltreatment to which she was exposed was not as cruel as that suffered by many other inmates, the conditions in which she served her time were nevertheless intolerable: “In any case, I considered it a sufficient atrocity to railroad me to prison practically for life – since at the age of sixty, fifteen years means life – when I had not committed even the vestige of any act that could have justified so much as a ten-shilling fine; and to keep me in solitary confinement in a total isolation far exceeding even the solitary confinement imposed on those who had in fact committed a crime. Even the worst criminals were allowed to write and to receive letters, and, at certain intervals, visitors. But I, who had committed no crime, was for seven years deprived of all contact with the outer world, because merely, having once denied all knowledge of me, they had to, or thought they had to stick to this lie” (pp100-1).

She refused to give in to despair, however: “My first battle with the administration of the prison had to do with my hair. I had no comb and no brush, my hair had grown long in close on two years of captivity and I was allowed neither side-combs, hair-clips, nor so much as a short end of string to tie my hair back, so that it hung into my eyes. I asked for a hair cut and was told that women were not entitled to them as long as they wore long hair. I remonstrated: ‘But I have always worn my hair short,’ to no effect.
I did not argue with the matter, but proceeded to tear off my hair thread by thread, leaving only a stubble of about a hand’s breadth on my head. It took me three weeks to get it done and the result was rather as if rats had gnawed my hair off. I had also cut my fingers on the hair, and small bits of hair had remained in the cuts, causing them to fester, but at least I had short hair again. During the three weeks I put a batch of grey hair in the dustpan every day, which excited comment among the guards.
Six months later I repeated the operation, this time with a better technique, so that I completed it in a fortnight and had no cuts on my fingers.
But when, another six months later, I started to shorten my hair for the third time, the sergeant on duty outside my door came in and said: ‘The governor sends you word not to tear off your hair. The barber will come and cut it for you tomorrow’. Next day the barber turned up and cut my hair, asking how I wished it shaped, and remarking on its strange condition. ‘It looks as if the rats had gnawed if off,’ he said.
‘So they did,’ I told him, not untruthfully, meaning, of course, the rats who had refused me such an elementary necessity” (pp101-2).

When she was eventually permitted access to books again, she devoured anything she could lay her hands on: “While I was ignorant of the recent very considerable political changes, the degeneracy of the Communist Party had stood out all the more clearly. When I read an historical book I noted with disgust the false rewriting of history. Thus, in a long book about Ivan the Terrible, he was made out to have been the most benign and amiable ruler, that he had been insane in his later years was a Western slander, and that he had murdered not only his enemies but his most faithful servants, was glossed over or ascribed to his justified wrath. The parallel to the Stalinian purges was inescapable; so was the fact that the true purpose of such books was to whitewash them.
Another obvious purpose was to deceive the people into thinking that this Soviet world in which they were living was the best of all possible worlds. I had not known of the really absurd claims to priority regarding most of the important inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that had been out forward in quite serious Russian publications, until I read such books in prison.
I had not known, for instance, of the Russian claim that a man called Ivan Polzunov and not James Watt had invented the steam engine. The funny part of this was, of course, that no serious historian of science would ever say that James Watt invented the steam engine. But Watt did invent a double-action steam engine by means of which rotary motion could be produced, and which freed industry from its dependence on running water” (pp149-50).

Tamás Aczél and Tibor Méray corroborate this: “The Russians’ constant, condescending interference rested on the assumption that at home, i.e., in the Soviet Union, everything was perfect or, at least, everything was better than in Hungary. The Russians had been building a socialist state for thirty years, and therefore they knew everything, really everything, better than did the Hungarians or anyone else in the entire world. This outlook – which, in the case of any other people, would simply have been called nationalism – led to tragicomical [sic] extremes, particularly in the scientific and technical fields. The Russians were no longer satisfied with proving that they were more advanced at present than was any other nation; they had to prove that even in the past (i.e., in the times of Tsarist Russia), it was they who had given to humanity its greatest talents and its greatest discoveries. True, Tsarist Russia did have a few outstanding scientists (…) But the Soviet propaganda machine was not so easily satisfied. The Russians suddenly announced that almost all the important discoveries of modern civilisation had been made by Russian scientists. The Western notions regarding the beginnings of the airplane and electricity and the telephone (and, of course, Western notions about such inventors as the Montgolfier brothers and the Wrights and Edison and Marconi) were all the products of loud bourgeois propaganda, if not outright fabrications. The real inventors, who had, of course, appeared long before their Western colleagues, had been nameless Russians, who had remained nameless because the criminal politics of Tsarist Russia had prevented their names from becoming known” (p136).

After cataloguing the Russian achievements in music and dance, they continue: “The trouble was that the Russians considered themselves peerless even in areas where they were not. There is not a single nation in the whole world that can call itself perfect in every field – in industry and agriculture, in statesmanship and commerce, in politics and diplomacy, in music and the fine arts, in films and literature, and in sport and science. The fatal error was that the Soviet leaders declared that their people, their country, and, last but not least, that they themselves were beyond comparison; and they expected everyone to acknowledge their uniqueness. As if it were no longer enough for them that the 1917 Revolution had started a new historical era, they were anxious to prove that there had, before then, been no history at all. Not satisfied with the significant successes of thirty to thirty-five years in industry, in technique and culture, and in warfare, they declared that their achievements were unequalled – that they were, in fact, perfect.
As a result, Soviet forms and Soviet methods were no longer propagated in Hungary, but were instead forced upon practically every manifestation of Hungarian life. A host of Soviet experts beleaguered the ministries, the large industrial plants and offices, the army, the police, and the State Security Organisation. Their will was law, regardless of whether they were better or worse qualified than were the Hungarian experts. But even when they knew more, as was true in certain technical fields or in the field of military affairs, it was clearly offensive and unhealthy that they were trying to reorientate Hungarian life as a whole in order to fit it into a Soviet reality – a reality which differed from it in a multitude of shadings. The fields in which they knew less are hardly worth mentioning. Yet the reorientation extended to these fields also because, although they knew less, they knew, ‘officially speaking’, everything better. They were not hesitant to crush underfoot the most precious symbols of the Hungarian nation. In designing the uniforms for the new Hungarian army, they had to imitate the Soviet uniforms; and the historic Hungarian emblem was taken off to be replaced by a monstrosity, a servile imitation of the Soviet emblem. To be just, it must be admitted that Soviet tyranny was only one of the causes of these changes: the other cause lay in the servility of the Hungarian leaders. But, since even this servility sprang from the knowledge that the Soviet comrades demanded such servility, it is difficult to establish the exact proportions of the responsibility.
Sovietisation extended to every walk of Hungarian life. But let us, for the time being, restrict ourselves to culture. From the elementary school to the university, everything was changed according to the Soviet pattern, including even the system of grading the students. As a remnant of Latin culture, the best mark in Hungary had for several centuries been a ‘1’, and the worst a ‘5’. But this system was now completely disregarded. Now, a ‘5’ was to be the best mark and a ‘1’ the worst, as in the more ‘scientific’ Soviet system! It was an equally old Hungarian tradition that the physicians, the jurists, the economists, and the secondary school teachers received at their graduation the title of ‘doctor’. This title was now done away with, and, instead, the scientific grades of ‘docent’, ‘candidate’, etc., were introduced, exactly as in the great exemplary nation, the Soviet Union. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which was more than 150 years old, was reorganised on the pattern of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The publishers and theatres were given a ‘new façade’ (the old, traditional theatres becoming the ‘Army Theatre’, the ‘Youth Theatre’, etc.) just as they had in Moscow. And the same was true for the press: Pravda, the organ of the Party, had its parallel in Szabad Nép; Trud, the organ of the trade unions, in Népszava; the semi-official Izvestia in Magyar Nemzet. Moscow had one evening paper called Vechernaya Moskva. So Budapest had to have one, too, called Esti Budapest. The Hungarian writers were given a weekly magazine named, in exact translation of Literaturnaya Gazeta, Irodalmi Újság” (pp125-7).

Bone was eventually freed on 1st November 1956.

The second witness is novelist and journalist György Pálóczi-Horváth, author of The Undefeated (Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1959). He was born in Budapest in 1908 as the privileged son of an estate-owning family with a Calvinist background. His mother divorced and remarried to the deputy director of a small bank.

In Budapest in November 1939, Sidney Morrell, the Daily Express correspondent had introduced Pálóczi-Horváth to a friend of his, Basil Davidson, who befriended the Hungarian. In 1940 Davidson tried to set up a Budapest office for the Brita-Nova news agency, which attempted to counterbalance Nazi propaganda. Pálóczi-Horváth helped Davidson to produce anti-Nazi leaflets and joined the Special Operations Executive. In 1942 and 1943 he worked in Cairo and Istanbul before being charged with the task of convincing the Hungarian government to surrender unconditionally to the Allies. When his efforts failed he made his way to London in January 1945.

In February 1947 he was approached by Martin Horváth, editor of the Hungarian party daily and asked if he would like the job of managing editor of a popular front weekly in Budapest. He accepted and returned to the Hungarian capital on 15th May. The following day he went to see the editor-in-chief of Tovább, Géza Losonczy, son of a Calvinist priest and lecturer in French literature.

In the summer of 1947 the Hungarian United Nations Association was formed in Budapest and affiliated to the World Federation of United Nations Associations. Count Mihály Károly would be nominated as president, all four coalition parties were to put forward one vice-president each, Pálóczi-Horváth was to be secretary-general and the deputy secretary-general would be a Social-Democrat. In 1948 the World Federation elected Pálóczi-Horváth to the 8-man executive as the only member from behind the Iron Curtain, to which he attributes his downfall.

In October 1947 the Political Bureau decided to discontinue publication of Tovább, ostensibly for failing to live up to expectations, although this was not reflected by the steadily growing circulation figures. A week later he was summoned into the presence of Rákosi for a private audience and a day or two afterwards, ideologue-in-chief József Révai encouraged him to join the Party. He complied. In 1948 he was made head of the Foreign Language Department of the radio as well as of the Hungarian Broadcasting and News Agency. This honeymoon period lasted until March 1949 when he was demoted to the post of literary director of one of the nationalised publishing houses. He was arrested on 5th September 1949.

He depicts his complete devotion to Communism thus: “Ardent faith, conversion to a cause, or falling in love all produce their own highly charged mental and emotional states and strong defence mechanisms against any sort of internal or external criticism, or any ‘hostile’ phenomena. In those who are possessed by an ideology, this defence mechanism is strengthened by an arsenal of intellectual weapons. Communism produces a complicated sort of controlled schizophrenia with concomitant mental blinkers. Hence my difficulty in giving a true picture of that former self.
The party in those days meant everything to me. When I was arrested and realised that the party had had me arrested, I felt like someone who is kicked in the stomach by his mother. Then after two years in prison, at the end of a long and painful process during most of which I still clung to my faith, I suddenly saw the utter bankruptcy and dishonesty of the ‘cause’. For a long time afterwards I was a ‘former Communist’, like a religious man who turns into a militant atheist” (pp121-2).

His narrative of the years between 1945 and 1947 succinctly encapsulates the softly softly tactics adopted by Rákosi and his underlings in establishing their iron grip on power: “The party bosses very wisely kept a great part of the sacred books from the Hungarian public. The Short History of the Bolshevik Party and many of the most militant and ruthless writings of Lenin and Stalin were not only not published in Hungarian, but were not sold in the bookshops in any other language either. The expression ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was severely forbidden. Those people who used it were denounced as reactionary trouble makers or stick-in-the-mud leftish deviationists. The party line from 1945 till [the] 1947 summer elections was roughly this:
‘Hungary never went through the stage of the liberal revolutions of the last century. Hence, for a long historical period yet to come the party and all progressive elements in Hungary must fulfil the tasks of the liberal revolution. From a semi-feudal state of great estates Hungary has to be transferred into modern parliamentary democracy. The Communist Party must be the dynamo which drives the thorough democratic development and economic rebuilding of the country’.
Only the mines, a part of the heavy industry and the big banks were nationalised. The Communist party leaders announced repeatedly that the Communists would be grateful to those capitalists who helped in the rebuilding of their war-devastated country. Large election posters declared all over the country that the Communist party was defending the private property of small merchants, artisans and peasants. In cultural life the party professed one aim only: to transform Hungary into a truly progressive cultured country.
In this atmosphere the intellectuals and the professional classes were constantly wooed by the Communist leaders. Scores of excellent periodicals made the intellectual scene lively, publishing houses flourished. New schools were founded by the thousand and the ‘people’s Colleges’ movement gave educational chances to the children of the poorest.
Many intellectuals, professional people, industrialists, small capitalists and shopkeepers were taken in by all this. And in a way they were taken in by reality, for land reform was a reality after all. It was a fact that some industrialists and the commercial classes received credit from a state in which the Communists had a decisive voice. The living standard of the people was comparatively high and the intellectuals had a surprising amount of freedom. And none of them ever read the History of the Bolshevik Party, or the other sacred books which pointed the future.
I had read these books, but I believed the party leaders when they continually emphasised to us outer-party members and fellow travellers that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was flexible and that communism in Hungary would be different. I wanted to believe them.
Communist propaganda was crude but effective. With the help of the Soviet Command and their unlimited financial power, the party exploited their successes in rebuilding the war-devastated country. Gerő, the Communist Minister of Transport, was called ‘Gerő, the bridge-builder’. In Budapest, cut in two by the Danube, bridges had the highest importance. And whenever one of them was rebuilt, it was given out that the Communists had rebuilt it. All signs of returning normal life were claimed as Communist attainments. In 1945 and 1946 Hungary was the victim of the greatest inflation in history. When on August 1, 1956, inflation was stopped, four hundred thousand quadrillion pengős, that is, 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengős, were exchanged for one forint, at that time approximately worth sixpence. This too was heralded as a Communist victory and the Communist party boss, Rákosi, was called ‘the father of the forint’.
Although the non-Communist majority in the country knew that the bridges were rebuilt by the workers, mostly Social-Democrats, and that the quick economic recovery helped on by a good harvest stopped inflation, we who only met Communists believed our own propaganda” (pp128-30).

Once they were firmly in the driving seat, Rákosi could afford to be more open, as his boasts of 29th February 1952 attest: “(…) in one of the most cynical speeches of political history, Rákosi told the students of the Supreme Party Academy how his small clique supported by Soviet tanks subjugated the Hungarian people. He admitted that even the majority of the workers was against the Communist party. But by capturing for his party the Home Office, the Security Police and the Supreme Economic Council and using ‘clever’ tactical moves, they misled the workers and crushed the majority parties.
‘In those days,’ Rákosi said, ‘this was called ‘salami tactics’, whereby we sliced reaction off bit by bit…in the Smallholders party. In these unceasing struggles we whittled away the strength of the enemy…In the land reform we applied the tactics of trying to divide the enemy or, if possible, of neutralising him…When we made demands we carefully began little by little, in order to make it more difficult for the enemy to mobilise and concentrate all forces against us. Later we increased the demands and whenever possible used transitory forms’.
[…]
With the famous ‘salami tactics’ he first went into a coalition with the Smallholders, Peasant and Social-Democratic parties to crush the Conservatives, then annihilated the Smallholders party with the help of the remaining two parties. Then he suborned the Peasant party and absorbed the Social-Democrats, killing off or imprisoning their party leadership. Politicians were bribed, blackmailed, driven to exile, imprisoned or sentenced to death” (Pálóczi-Horváth, p246).

At this juncture it is worth mentioning in passing that at the only genuinely free elections after the war held on 4th November 1945, the Communists managed to obtain a feeble 17% of the vote, the same as the Social-Democrat Party (Victor Sebestyen, Twelve Days, Pantheon, New York, 2006, p20). The biggest proportion the Communists ever achieved was at the rigged elections in 1947 with 22%, having boosted their share with the infamous “blue slips”, proxy votes given by absentee voters to Communist activists, who used them to cast several votes (Sebestyen, p26).

Pálóczi-Horváth was ill-prepared for the shock of being taken into custody: “It was nearly midnight when the black car stopped in front of 60 Andrássy Avenue, the headquarters of Security Police. The three SP men in mufti took me to a guard’s room in the basement. A young lieutenant sat at a desk. He looked at me in disgust, got up and tore the party badge from my lapel.
‘Empty your pockets!’
I had to undo and hand over my shoelaces and my necktie. Then an SP guard with a rifle took me to a circular staircase which led to the cellars. The cellar corridors were brightly lit. At twelve-foot intervals stood guards with their rifles glaring at me with what I learned to know as the compulsory SP expression of loathing and hate. The cellar was cold and damp. The air was musty, everything smelt of disinfectant, sweat and a combination of various stenches as yet unknown to me.
At the end of one of the corridors I was thrown into an icy cold cubicle three yards by four. There was a wooden plank for a bed and a bright naked electric bulb which threw a harsh light on the unclean whitewashed walls. In the iron door there was a small rectangular spy-hole which was opened and banged shut every five minutes. I stood in the middle of my cell and shivered, my heart nearly jumping out of my breast, I gulped down the air as if I were suffocating.
I did not understand the reason for the brutal swiftness of my arrest. Whatever suspicions they might have against me, I was evidently under detention for questioning” (p139).

The initial shock took a long time to wear off: “I walked up and down, five short steps to the door, five steps to the wall. Above the three wooden planks there was a tiny window with heavy iron bars. It opened into an air shaft which probably led up to the courtyard. It must be awful in the winter, the cold streaming down on one’s head. From time to time I looked absentmindedly at my non-existent wristwatch, or reached into my pocket for a cigarette. Every five minutes the spy-hole was ripped open, a face appeared with the usual expression of loathing and hate, then it was banged shut again. All through my corridor and in the maze of corridors in this cellar empire spy-holes were banging. Heavy boots clattered on the stone floor. Five steps to the wall, five steps to the door. Above the door the naked electric light glared mercilessly into my eyes. What can they suspect me of? What nonsense is this? And why did they bring me in post-haste at midnight if they do not start questioning me right away? I hope to God I shall get an intelligent SP investigator. It would be awful if I got a cliché-mongering ignoramus. Bang, steps, steps, steps, bang, door, wall, bang, steps, clatter of boots, bang, glaring light. Growing impatience in my body, impatience and alarm.
No, this can’t go on! I must lie down and try to sleep. I am going to need all my strength! I banged on the door. The spy-hole was ripped open at once. A grim face asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘Can I have some blankest?’
‘No!’ Bang.
I was dressed for summer in a light linen jacket and flannel trousers. In the cellar it was cold. I stretched out on the hard planks. I closed my eyes but the lamp glared down on my face. With closed eyes one looked through blood-red light. I turned towards the wall, away from the light. Bang! A face in the spy-hole, a harsh voice: ‘Lie on your back. We must see your face’.
I turned into the required position, putting my hands under my head. Bang! A face in the spy-hole and the same harsh voice: ‘Put your hands palm upwards on the plank. We must see your wrists’.
They took good care that the prisoners should not commit suicide. One of the SP officers told me later, ‘In this building only we do the killing, nobody else’. There was wire netting on the windows to prevent prisoners from hurling themselves to death. After each hearing, when they took us back to the cellar, there was a most thorough search. We had to undress completely and everything was examined for fear we might have stolen some sharp instrument with which to commit suicide. The frequent searches during the winter were further sources of torment” (pp140-1).

The numbness of being completely at the mercy of his tormentors gradually gave way to disillusionment: “During those first sleepless weeks everything was vague and blurred. Even suffering. It was a hideous feeling to be jailed by my own state, to realise that I, a good Communist, was confined in a Communist jail. It was worrying that the Security Police was not the intelligent organisation I imagined. The investigators were brutal and ignorant. And the reactionary talk about torture, which I had never believed for a moment, was true! Everywhere in the building one could hear screams, groaning, whimpering, sudden shrill shouts. At all hours of the day these sounds broke into your cubicle and disturbed your attempt to escape in imagination from all the horrors. There was a girl nearby who started to sob loudly whenever they took her out from her cell to be interrogated. Sometimes I heard her sobbing when they brought her back. I heard her faltering steps, the inarticulate sounds she made as each step hurt her bruised body.
Another torment was the revolting sensation of one’s unclean body. I had the same shirt, light summer jacket and flannel trousers on all the time, for weeks. Up in the interrogator’s room after half an hour I still could smell the prison-cellar stench emanating from my clothes, from my body. They did not shave me and still gave no permission for the weekly hot showers other prisoners had. I felt sticky with dirt all the time” (pp147-8).

Like Bone, he was not bowled over by the intellectual prowess of the interrogators. Having failed to supply the required response to one particular question, he was taken to a room where the walls were painted white and made to stand to attention: “There I stood, my nose an inch from the whitewashed wall. They changed the guards every four hours. The guards had only one duty, to kick me or hit my back with their rifle-butt in case I moved. I stood in that position all evening. About nine PM Tommyrot [his nickname for the interrogator] came in.
‘Where did you meet Professor Szentgyörgyi during the war?’
‘In Istanbul’.
‘All right, that’s OK with me. Then you go on standing’.
After the first twenty-four hours I had to take off my shoes because my feet were enormously swollen. Standing there I learned about the famous ‘cinema’ of prisoners. By the first evening the unevenly whitewashed wall had started to vibrate. The little particles, the slight cracks, the dust on the wall took on various shapes. There were mirages on the wall. My dazzled eyes played tricks on me. Soon I saw snarling, squinting and grinning faces, eyes burning with hatred and loathing. There were hallucinations too. The wall became full of spy-holes and through each a miniature SP thug glared at me. Next dawn I became quite faint. I hoped I should pass out soon. Curiously enough this thought gave me some strength; I was almost relieved. The wall cinema, which till then had been black and white, took on delicate colours. I saw all sorts of pinks, purples and reds. Lovely girls walked away from me with a voluptuous undulating walk. They always disappeared into the infinite and then started to walk away again.
On the second evening Comrade Tommyrot asked his question again. I again answered with Istanbul.
On the third day I fainted twice in the morning. In the afternoon, when the four o’clock guard came in, there was a great commotion outside in the corridors. They had their weekly party meeting in the big auditorium. When the building became quiet again, the guard – a young sandy-haired boy – told me, ‘Sit down now and try to sleep. I’ll wake you up if someone comes’.
I staggered to the chair and slept. It was already dark when he woke me up. There were steps on the stairway.
‘Stand at attention now. And stick to the truth, whatever they do to you!’
It was again nine PM. They took me to Tommyrot’s room. As I staggered in he turned the reflector into my face but did not tell me to sit down. I stood there. Every inch of my body was hurting me, my skin, my bones, my insides. Everything in my body seemed to be terribly heavy. I stood there reeling. Comrade Tommyrot said pompously with a victorious smile:
‘This will teach you, you fascist swine, that it is no use to lie to us. We knew all the time – we have it here in writing – that you met Professor Szentgyörgyi not in Istanbul but in Constantinople’.
There was an explosion of anger in my head. I jumped forward, trying to grab him and shouted:
‘You stupid idiot, if you don’t know that Istanbul and Constantinople are one and the same…’
I went on shouting. In the next second there were two guards in the room. I was manacled hand and feet to a chair. Tommyrot sat in front and spat repeatedly into my face. The spittle was flowing down my face” (pp148-50).

He was forced to confess to the World Federation of United Nations Organisations being an imperialist and spy organisation. According to the fanciful tale dreamed up by the “scriptwriters” the Hungarian UNA had conspired to overthrow the People’s Democracy. John F. Ennals, secretary-general of the WFUNA, had been Pálóczi-Horváth’s spy-master to whom the Hungarian had handed intelligence reports in Budapest daily from 1947 until his arrest. Pálóczi-Horváth had also allegedly succeeded in having Count Károlyi appointed Hungarian ambassador in Paris and of running the Hungarian Foreign Office in the interests of imperialists through György Heltai (op. cit., p170). His was the ninth sub-trial of the Rajk case held on 29th November 1950 (op. cit., pp172-3). He was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour (which turned out to be the relatively cushy number of translating various books and manuals) and confiscation of all his belongings (op. cit., p174).

Part way through his term of imprisonment he was transferred to the SDD Headquarters in Fő Street: “In front of one of the doors we stopped. Pockmark whispered to me: ‘I am putting you into this cell. Forget your old number. Here you will be Number Sixteen. You don’t tell your name to anyone, nor your old number. Am I understood? You are number sixteen and keep your mouth shut!’
He opened the door and whispered, ‘You will find an empty place. There you’ll lie down’.
The large cell was divided by iron bars into a small antechamber with a lavatory and the cell proper. Pockmark unbolted the inner door and motioned me inside. A naked electric bulb showed me a very large room. All around the wall a wooden platform was erected leaving a small well in the middle, and on that platform some twenty people slept. Just under the electric bulb a young man in a railway conductor’s uniform stood at attention and wept. In one of the corners there was an empty place. I climbed up to the platform and lay down.
Pockmark tiptoed to the young railway man and whispered something into his ear, then looked round, locked the inner door and left. The young man wept quietly, swaying on his feet slightly.
I sat up again and looked around. My cellmates were not convicts but ‘news ones’, meaning that they had spent anything from two days to a year or more here, but were not sentenced yet. Most of them slept. On the opposite side a red-faced old man was looking at me, but did not move. When my gaze met that of the weeping young man, he looked at his feet. I looked too. His bare feet were red and enormously swollen.
He whispered something I did not understand. Then he risked a louder sentence.
‘Two weeks…I have been standing every night for two weeks, because I would not confess’.
‘Sit down,’ I said.
‘They beat me if I do’.
‘Risk it,’ I answered and closed my eyes. When I woke up, the red-faced old man was knocking at the iron bars. A guard came in. The old man asked to go to the lavatory. The guard snapped, ‘In the morning’.
The old man whispered to me: ‘I try to hold it back half the night. Now I can’t go on’. He took his boots from under the platform and urinated into them. He placed the boots carefully under the platform and stretched out” (pp186-7).

Beside the actual narrative of prison life, Pálóczi-Horváth’s reflections on the pattern of development of a “working-class cadre”, such as János Kádár, also furnish valuable insights: “The start is quite ordinary. A very young worker of working-class origin is spurred into activity by moral indignation. He joins the small illegal group of Communists who fight against social injustice and for a world of peace and plenty. The fine fervour of feeling which radiates from the small group infects him, inspires him to learn. He has blind faith in the two or three fully fledged Communists he meets. They have quiet assurance, immense knowledge and the power of fanaticism. They can give him the key to the future: that Marxist theory which will make the working-class invincible. He learns ‘Marxist thinking’ before he had had time to learn to think. He enters a world of abstractions when totally ignorant of the world. After very little schooling and still less reading, he reads ‘theory’. He learns about Feudalism and Capitalism and Surplus Value, about Formal and Real Democracy. Later he meets a long series of sublime word-gods like the elusive Negation of Negation, and the Change from Quantity into Quality. He grapples with Dialectical Logic, that wonderful Aladdin’s lamp of the movement, when still unspoiled by the bad bourgeois magic of Formal Logic. He has not yet heard of Plato but his enthusiastic head is filled by the Holy Platonic Ideas of the movement.
He learns party history too. At times there are slight hitches. On his second seminar it turns out that he was under the impression that Opportunist is just a synonym for Social-Democrat. But on the whole his advance is swift and soon he is teaching theory to others.
He leads a puritanical existence. The Hungarian Communists are at that time ‘sectarians’; even according to later official party histories. They are on the whole a sombre, muscle-bound lot. Young girls in the movement are encouraged to conceal as far as possible the fact that they have young, bulging breasts. The comrades are very earnest, very dignified and lead a most frugal life. Their life is under very severe party control. The party watches you all the time. Soon you have your own telescreen in your skull. You reprimand yourself severely on those rare occasions when your thinking strays from the straight and narrow path of the present party line and party mood. In Freudian terminology: you produce your own Superego or Father (or Big Brother). On the uppermost shelf of your brain a tiny security police officer starts watching you” (pp200-1).

Pálóczi-Horváth also had first-hand experience of the mechanisms put in place to maintain Party discipline, such as self-criticism: “The practice of ‘criticism-self-criticism’ in everyday party life is nothing but a miniature confession trial when party members furnish the trumped-up charges against themselves. They get up and take the blame for mistakes committed by the organisation, by the higher-ups, or by the supreme leadership. Self-criticism is satisfying only if one overstates one’s crimes and mistakes. Of course everybody knows perfectly well that the person confessing various mistakes and political deviations has not committed them at all. But without this system the party line cannot be changed all the time. Without this system every party member cannot be constantly at the mercy of the party leadership. And without this, of course, the party leader cannot appear infallible. Every confession of mistakes, every political recantation is a potential confession of guilt in one of the future rigged trials. ‘Self-criticism’ can also lead to arrest any minute. ‘Self-criticism’ – that is, the system of voluntary scapegoats for the mistakes of leadership – is forced on all party members by threats and by the general atmosphere of terrorism. To refuse self-criticism can and will get you in jail.
These are the small rigged trials in the everyday life of the party. The big confession trials, which serve the purpose of periodically getting rid of emerging personalities – and are used at the same time to propagate the new political line of the party – keep up the atmosphere of terrorism so necessary for the Stalinist system. Here party members and top-rankers who are constantly being prepared for their roles by the institution of self-criticism are tortured, cajoled, threatened and tricked into committing moral and physical suicide” (pp206-7).

He paints an accurate picture of what was going on whilst he languished behind bars: “It was already 1952. Outside, in the greater jail called Hungary, the monster period reached its peak. The new batches of convicts arrived with stories which made us less sorry for being in jail. The liquidation of the former middle classes and the ‘rich’ peasants, the kulaks, went on. They were deported by the thousand, week by week. Small-town cobblers who refused to join the shoemakers’ collective, peasants with twenty acres of land who did not join the kolkhozes, former solicitors’ clerks who were denounced as clerico-fascists, the families of former army officers, almost all former landowners, bank employees, noblemen, and so on, were deported at half an hour’s notice. They had to leave their homes with the exception of a single suitcase per person. They were evacuated to small villages and hamlets in Eastern Hungary and were placed under police surveillance. They were forbidden to leave the village hamlet. Most of their money was taken away. If there was need for unskilled labourers in the village, they were lucky; if not they simply starved.
In offices, factories, plants, warehouses, shops, schools, scientific institutions, kolkhozes, governmental and municipal offices – in every place that people worked for a living, and those who did not, were deported – people had a nightmarish existence. The holy trinity of the party secretary of the cell, its cadre-man and the chief of the personnel department (the official representative of the SP) was watching over everybody. They preached vigilance – eternal vigilance for the class enemy and the imperialist spy was ever-present.
As in the Soviet Union and all her other colonies, in Hungary too they had the cadre-file system. There is a ‘cadre-file’ for every citizen which contains his or her detailed autobiography, school record, work record, party record, all information, secret denunciations, ‘character estimates’, and so forth, every bit of malevolent gossip picked up about him or her by SP officers, agents and ‘contacts’ in the various governmental, municipal, and other organisations, every report about him or her by the various party secretaries and ‘people’s instructors’.
Every Communist official must be in contact with the SP. In party headquarters there is a cadre department and there is a Party central Control Committee, both keeping a watchful eye on every party member. In every government department there is likewise a cadre department which watches over the non-party people. Everyone has to fill out questionnaires at least once a year, and at each change of job or promotion has to hand in a detailed autobiography in several copies. All these are kept in the different cadre files but the main file is in the SP centre.
Let us say that My X after finishing his schools is employed in the textile retail shop in the Vth district of Budapest. The cadre department of the Vth district textile retail directorate gets his school files. The cadre official questions him. Being an unimportant employee he has to fill out a questionnaire of only twenty-eight questions, among them all details about possible foreign travels undertaken by him or any of his relatives, and all details of past and present political affiliation of himself and family. This and a detailed autobiography are kept at the directorate, at the trust, at the ministry and at the SP – if he is not a member of the party. If he is, there are files about him in the cell, precinct and district party organisations, and so on.
If he is not a party member, he must join the trade union. The cell organiser there must report about him twice a year. From among the party members – without his official knowledge – a ‘people’s educator’ is appointed to deal with him. This person has occasional conversations with him, tries to collect information from him, from colleagues and reports about his ‘ideological development’ to his superiors. These reports are also kept in the various files about him. All gossip, accusations, mistakes in work or private life are reported” (pp209-11).

As if the constant monitoring and self-scrutiny were not enough: “But daily life in the country was nearly unbearable even for those who thought that they had no reason to fear sudden arrest. If work started in the factory at six in the morning, everyone had to be present twenty minutes earlier, so as not to be late for the Szabad Nép quarter of an hour. During these fifteen minutes someone had to read aloud the leading article of the official party daily, Szabad Nép, the same article which the central broadcasting station read at least twice a day. Naturally everybody had to subscribe to this paper, or to its local equivalent. At times the workers had to come even earlier because of one of the ‘movements’, the aim of which was to prepare everything at the place of work before starting time. This ‘movement’ was, as was the reading of the party daily, strictly voluntary and the workers ‘unanimously demanded’ permission to do it. There was the Kuznietrov movement, in which the workers ‘fought for the care of tools and their repair’; the Korabelnikova movement of doing one day’s work with materials saved during the previous month; the Nazarova movement to keep your place of work clean and healthy; the Kovaliov movement, in which engineers and technicians co-operated for the intensification of labour competitions.
All such movements were launched by very long and most enthusiastic meetings after work. The workers who left home at four thirty in the morning often sat at such meetings till nine or ten at night. There were long speeches. Whenever Stalin’s, Rákosi’s or some other demigod’s name was mentioned, everybody jumped to attention and then the ‘stormy applause’ broke out. This was then transformed into a rhythmic clapping for minutes. No one dared to stop clapping and after two or three minutes the party secretary gave the sign to stop. On the platform facing the audience sat the factory and party leadership. From the platform SP eyes watched the audience. If someone did not make an enthusiastic enough face during the rhythmic clapping, he was a marked man. People acquired the compulsory enthusiasm grimace, and after a time it cost no effort at all. But the drudges of offices, factories and kolkhozes were not very happy when after ten hours’ work and two hours’ voluntary enthusiasm they returned home to find the Marxist-Leninist seminar textbook awaiting them. Next day after work it would be the seminar for hours, then something else.
And for all this people received only ten months’ pay a year. The compulsory peace-loan contribution equalled one month’s wage or salary. People earning more had to ‘loan’ six weeks’ pay or even two months’. Everybody had to subscribe to at least one party newspaper. There were no excuses. If in a family five people were working, five copies had to be subscribed for. Everybody had to belong to a trade union and pay the dues. There were voluntary collections for North Korean or Greek children, for Guatemalan intellectuals or for the oppressed peoples of America. Books had to be bought. If the personnel department chief received an adverse report from the cultural department of the factory about the book-buying record of a worker, he got into trouble. So everybody had to buy at least some of the Marxist-Leninist classics.
In 1950 the piece rate system was introduced in industry, which practice is, according to Marxist analysis, the worst form of capitalist exploitation. This was connected with the norm system. The production norms were raised constantly. Rákosi announced at the same time that ‘we cannot eat up our future’. Hence the prices of food and various consumer goods were raised by governmental decree overnight by fifty to one hundred per cent. The price of butter and lard was trebled. ‘Socialist society is free of the vagaries of the market. Price policy is one of the tools of building socialism’” (pp212-4).

As for the countryside, Aczél and Méray report on Péter Kuczka and Imre Sárkádi’s trip to Szabolcs County reveals that the Government’s stranglehold on everyday activity was even tighter: “He [Kuczka] learned that the fields had been left unploughed because the peasants had felt that there was no sense in ploughing, since they never knew when the fields would be requisitioned for the cooperatives. He learned that many peasants had fled from the soil because it did not give them a livelihood and was, instead, a terrible burden, a worry, an uncertainty, and a frustration. The smallholder was being driven from his land by heavy taxes, by obligatory deliveries, and by regroupings of the farms. But he had not been excused. The obligations had to be fulfilled at any price, and the peasants were threatened by the council chairman. In turn, the council chairman was threatened by the village Party secretary, the village Party secretary by the district Party committee, the district Party committee by the county Party committee, the county Party committee by the emissaries, instructors, and inspectors sent out by Party headquarters, and these by the department heads sitting at headquarters, who were threatened by the Secretariat, which was, in turn, threatened directly by – Mátyás Rákosi.
All the plans had to be fulfilled!
And what a lot of plans there were!
There was a meat-delivery plan, an egg-delivery plan, a fat-delivery plan, a potato delivery plan, and a grain delivery plan. There was a plan for the levying off of oleaginous plants, of flax, and of jute as contracted by various state enterprises, and, whatever happened (be it flood, frost, or drought), the quality prescribed in the contract was ruthlessly extracted from the peasants. It frequently happened that the peasant, who was unable to fulfil his contract, had to sell his own wheat to the state delivery authorities at the official price and to buy flour at three or four times the price on the black market in order to be able to provide his family with bread.
There were rigid plans not only for deliveries, but also for production. The National Planning Bureau made exact estimates as to how much wheat, oats, rye, sunflower seed, and alfalfa had to be produced by each county, each district, each village. It was the task of the council chairman to see to it that the plan be fulfilled in his territory. No matter whether the soil was suited to a particular crop or not, the plan was law, and the farmer who did not fulfil it had to face legal proceedings. The peasant had to produce whether he could or not, and whether he wanted or not. There were areas where the peasants had specialised in one particular farm product for decades, for centuries. With that produce they supplied the entire need of the country and assured large exports, as, for instance, Makó supplied the onions, the Szeged area the sweet red peppers, etc. The plan, however, changed all that. Following the example of the great Soviet Union, cotton was sown in the onion fields, though cotton had never before been produced in Hungary because neither the soil nor the climate were favourable to its growth. In the end, there was neither cotton nor onions. The discouraged peasants shrugged their shoulders. They had foreseen it all.
The plan was the master. The plan was God. Its letter was the law. It spun its thick web over the entire country, smothering incentive, ingenuity, ambition, and initiative. There was not a single province of life which the state did not occupy and strangled with its ruthless fingers. The plan was ‘protected’ by an army of state employees who were hired and paid for that purpose alone” (pp193-5).

As Aczél and Méray so eloquently show, interference went far beyond the merely economic: “There was also another plan, which supplemented the agricultural plans but which was more important than any of them: the plan to intensify the class struggle in the villages.
At the heart of this plan – which showed a complete ignorance of Hungarian conditions and a servile imitation of the Soviet example – stood the fight against the kulak.
The word ‘kulak’ – a Russian word – had hitherto been unknown in Hungary. Now everybody who possessed over twenty or thirty acres of land (depending on the quality of the soil) or who worked his land with hired help, qualified as rich peasant – i.e., a kulak. The kulak, together with his family and his relatives, was a constant target of persecution. He was fair game. His land could be taken from him. He could be chased from his house. He could be spit upon in the street. Furthermore, anyone who had a father or some other relative who was a kulak was branded. A son of a kulak was always open to suspicion. He was not admitted to the university or to any form of higher education. He was not drafted for military service. Instead, he was put into the most humiliating labour battalions. The AVO [State Defence Department] had a wonderful time hunting for kulaks. To beat up or torture a kulak was a revolutionary deed. It was a heroic feat for which one was praised, not punished. The kulak was the villain. He was the cause of all ills. When there was no bread in the towns, official propaganda broadcasted the story that the kulaks were feeding the bread to their pigs. Where there were no kulaks, they had to be created, because the plan prescribed that the class enemy in the villages had to be liquidated. Anyone who offended the Party secretary or the council chairman (perhaps only by arguing with him) knew that his name would be added to the kulak list, even if it had never had enough land to qualify as a kulak. It needed no more than a painful sigh of ‘No rain again. Even God has turned from us’ – and the helpless, unprotected peasant was lost. He was made a kulak.
In the past, the poor of the village had looked with envy, mixed with hatred, upon the well-to-do peasants who gave their children a university education (because there always had been conflicts – though much less violent ones – between the rich and the poor peasants). But now, they began to feel pity for these fellows. Now, the artificially whipped-up class struggle had an opposite effect: it engendered sympathy. The peasants were sorry for the kulaks. And they also feared for themselves. For almost everyone had kulak relatives or acquaintances, or went to school or played with one or the other of the sons of kulaks, and in the course of the years the natural family and emotional relationships of the village, which had been healthy because they were natural, had become unhealthy and dangerous. An atmosphere of terror now smothered the villages. Nobody knew what humiliation was in store for him. There was no protection. There was nobody to turn to. And, once a man was branded with the shameful name, he bore its consequences as long as he lived. The accusation of having been influenced by a kulak could be raised against anyone at any time. The peasant lad whom the Government had sent to Denmark in 1947 for a year to study the cooperatives became suspect when he explained how those cooperatives were organised, even though he did not say they were better than the Hungarian cooperatives. At this point, the AVO [SDD] appeared and began to investigate the affair as a case of ‘incitement against the Soviet Union’. It did not take long before they discovered that the lad was wooing a kulak girl and was, thus, subject to kulak influence. He was arrested. So was the kulak girl. So were both their families. Sometimes, such people were never heard of again. Sometimes, they were released after many months to discover that they had nothing left in the whole world except the clothes they wore on their backs.
The prisons were crowded with kulaks, with ‘kulak hirelings’, with peasants who had failed to deliver on time, and with those who were accused of having incited against the cooperatives. Those who were given prison sentences in 1952-1953 went home and waited. There was simply no place for them in the prisons” (pp198-200).

Aczél and Méray demonstrate how the “kulaks’” culpability was established: “On the walls of the village council houses, there was a ‘guilt board’ with the names of the kulaks. The bearers of those names had to stand on one foot for hours in one or other of the offices, or to crouch on all fours and bark like a dog as a warning to other kulaks who did not fulfil their delivery plan. The same afternoon or evening, the ‘culprit’ was visited by the AVO [SDD]. There was no search warrant. The family was awakened and made to stand in the yard, guarded by a youngster holding a tommy gun while the others searched the house from top to bottom. From one of the haystacks, an old German rifle was fished out. Here was the evidence! The kulak was planning to overthrow the People’s Democracy! The family was deported. The head of the family was brought to trial and either hanged or put away for life for hiding arms.
Two days later, in the garret of another kulak in another village, the AVO [SDD] would ‘find’ the very same German rifle, and a brief news item in the press would then inform the country that another kulak had been sentenced to death for hiding arms” (p200).

Pálóczi-Horváth laments the deleterious effect of the elimination of privacy and the ever-present threat of being shopped to the SDD on the social fabric: “And there were the ‘people’s educators’! They were Communist party members who had to visit Communist and non-Communist homes alike to explain the latest victory of the Communist government. Sunday mornings were often taken up by such calls. People took the visitors into their rooms, properly decorated with the pictures of the great ones. (Because of the possibility of such visits, people could enjoy even in their homes the beauties of Stalin, Rákosi and the other beloved leaders). There you sat, facing the two ‘people’s educators’ who explained ‘what a great blow it was for the imperialists that our government ad introduced the piece-rate system!’ You listened with properly enthusiastic face, repeated some holy sentences from the party daily, and the ceremony was over. Again you had to take part in the ‘parents’ co-operative’ of your children’s school. This enthusiastic co-operative had to prepare the various festivities, discuss the proper Marxist-Leninist education of the children. This was a ‘discussion meeting’. You had to visit many.
You were most enthusiastic; you always voted unanimously; you took part in many voluntary competitions. You were always fighting for something. In your office you decided in rapturous mood to fight for the reduction of electricity consumption, or to make a better use of paper, or something similar. And first of all, you fought for peace. Thirty or forty office drudges or worn-out workers had to gather in an ‘improvised rally’ regularly twice a month to fight for peace, that is to repeat the slogans given out by the party secretary.
People were not safe in the streets either. A worker who was on night shift went to shop during the day. But there were plain clothes SP men and women patrolling the streets, watching shops and department stores. They stopped people and demanded an explanation for not being at work.
If all this got you down and if after receiving your pay you went out to one of the remaining very few restaurants to eat a good meal, you were likely to get into trouble. If you ordered a more expensive meal than usual, perhaps with wine, someone called up the SP and by the time you had forgotten for a short while the wonderful life under your beloved leaders, the SP man was there with the question, ‘How could you afford this, comrade?’
There were houses in which someone denounced the neighbours on the basis of kitchen refuse. It contained for instance chicken bones or too many egg shells. How could they afford it?” (pp214-5).

His recollections of the horrors of the Central Prison [Gyűjtőfogház] make the blood run cold: “And at nights the most horrid concerto conceivable began. For the least little offence, convicts were sentenced to ‘short-iron’ [kurtavas]. This very cruel and dangerous punishment, a relic of the past, was used at times in the Horthy army before the war. But it was forbidden to punish with it people over thirty, and for longer than two hours. A doctor had to be present all the time. In our socialist fatherland men well over sixty were put into ‘short-iron’ for four to six hours.
They manacle one’s right ankle to one’s left wrist and vice versa. Then they fasten one to an iron bar in such a way that one is completely folded up. Elderly people suffer incurable injuries at once. Most people faint instantly. Many get heart attacks. When they are folded like penknives, an SP guard tramples on their back, while another shortens the manacle to make it more painful. After fifteen minutes the whole body, above all the feet and hands, is completely numbed. Even a touch is horribly painful. The SP guards’ duty was to massage the hands and feet periodically till the victim screamed with agony, and fainted again.
Each night on the ground floor five or six or more victims were lined up. We only heard the commands. Then one by one a curious scream. A scream full of surprise. ‘Can things hurt so unbearably?’ Scream, scream, scream, till all the victims were folded up. Then groaning, sobbing – it is difficult to describe what effect the sobbing of a sixty-year-old man has on one’s nerves – all sorts of disturbing sounds. Then silence, long silence. After some twenty minutes, the second movement starts. Piercing cries expressing utter terror and agony. Cries and screams becoming shriller and somehow thinner. By the third movement people listening for the first time would think that a series of specially made sirens emit these inarticulate, piercing sounds. They are no more human, they are produced by the quintessence of pain and they express it well. The victims are in the ultra-agony state, no longer conscious, somewhere on the borderland of death.
And why were you given this punishment? Suppose there was the walk round and round the courtyard. It was winter. From far away a twenty-year-old SP guard approached and you did not take off your cap quickly enough. Next day, if there was a next day, you were slowly recovering from a heart attack, that is if you were an elderly man. Younger people could always take it better” (pp222-3).

Pálóczi-Horváth was released on 13th September 1954.

James Michener, in his masterful piece of reportage The Bridge at Andau, (Secker and Warburg, London, 1957), a distillation of interviews with hundreds of refugees who had crossed the Austrian border whilst they still could, sheds light on the full extent of the atrocities perpetrated in the interrogation cellars. His conversation with an athlete had drawn to a close: “Then, as so often happened, as we were about to part, this clean, happy, wiry champion said almost gaily, now that he had gained freedom and had left the evil behind, ‘But I’m not a cry baby, remember that. When things were worst I always told myself, ‘Well, anyway, you missed Major Meat Ball’’.
‘Who was he?’
‘It was a she’.
‘Major Meat Ball? An AVO?’
‘Of course. It was only the AVO that you remembered’.
‘Where’d you meet Major Meat Ball?’
‘Her name was Piroshka, which is Russian for meat ball [the Hungarian name Piroska literally translates as “Little Red One”, hence in fairy tales Piroska is the equivalent of Little Red Riding Hood and has no connotation of meat ball whatsoever. The Russian word in question is “pirog”. The vague similarity in pronunciation may have led to this confusion]. I met her in the AVO torture cellars at 60 Stalin Street [Andrássy Avenue had been thus rechristened], in Budapest. I can describe her exactly. Anybody who ever saw her could. She was a redhead, plump, about thirty-five years old. She was pockmarked and had fat lips. She was about five feet two and not bad looking except for the pockmarks. Everyone knew she was a horrible sadist.
‘I say I missed her, that means I missed the worst part. But I had enough. She went into the cell next to mine with a bottle and told the man, ‘Urinate in it’. Then she brought it in to me while it was still warm and said, ‘Drink it’.
‘Once she drew a little chalk circle in my cell and told me to walk around it. I did so for eight hours.
‘With women prisoners she was unbearable. She did things to them that even now I can’t describe. But as I said before, I was forever grateful that I missed her. The man in the next cell didn’t. She came in to see him one day wearing only a dress. ‘You must get hungry for a woman,’ she said, nuzzling against him. ‘Well, I get hungry for a man, too. Tonight I’m going to take you up to my quarters’. So that night she took him to her quarters and got undressed. But just then an AVO bust into the room, shouting, ‘You rapist. Messing around with my wife’. This AVO called some other AVO, and they began beating my friend almost to death. They ended by holding him down and ramming a thin, hollow glass tube up his penis. Then they beat him till it broke into a million pieces. That was how Major Meat ball operated’.
Weakly I asked, ‘How do you know?’
The world champion said simply, ‘I had to hold him when he went to the toilet’” (pp138-9).

Béla Ispánki (30th October 1916-9th May 1985) was incarcerated as part of the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty and spent eight years being shunted around from jail to jail before being liberated from Vác Prison when the Revolution broke out. The first extract from his memoirs (Trial of the Century, translated by Chameleon, publication forthcoming) stands as a compelling indictment of the ruthlessness with which the SDD performed its task:

“25th November 1952

It was an elegant bar, with blue and purple neon lights everywhere. On the flat surface of the counter that shone like a blue crystal were tall, slender glasses with Coca-Cola and straws, or tiny glasses with gin or liqueur. The fashionably dressed youngsters dangled their feet from the tall bar stools on which they slouched. The members of the gilded youth leaned back seductively in their chairs around the little tables. They were laughing and chattering: the girls about clothes, artistes and films, the boys about sport, earnings and politics. The fragrance of perfume, the silvery tittering of girls, the fog-like smoke of cigars and cigarettes. At one of the tables two men were sitting, sipping their richly aromatic Italian espressos in silence. The regular rhythm of piano and jazz drums from the jukebox provided a subdued musical accompaniment to the general buzz.
These were the surroundings in which former Hungarian army officer Ferenc Farkas Dorogi consumed his last coffee on free soil. Once he had drained his cup, he got up and headed off into the night towards the Hungarian border. He had the clippers for cutting the barbed wire with him in his pocket. At the frontier he began to crawl cautiously towards the barbed wire obstacles. On the broad strip of earth that had been raked smooth, the stretch of no man’s land, he took care to erase the traces of his footsteps. When he reached the strip of green in the immediate vicinity of the barbed wire obstacles he first of all picked out a path for himself to walk on with an outstretched hand. The tripwire-activated mines, hidden traps and flares likewise set off by concealed tripwires meant death. They had to be avoided.
He fought his way past the double wire fence, fastening the ends of barbed wire he had clipped together again so that the guard patrolling the strip of no man’s land would not notice that he had entered the country. In the meantime he occasionally stopped what he was doing and peered at the watch towers. In one of the tall observation towers the SDD soldier was humming a folk tune to himself. In the other the guard was having a fly smoke. His coarse profile stood out against the darkness when he drew on the cigarette. By the time the searchlights in both towers had been switched on and their beams slowly and systematically scanned the wire barriers he was already laying flat on his stomach between the trees in the woods. He wiped his brow and cautiously lit up his first cigarette on home soil. As he did so, his mind wandered back to the bar in Vienna where everyone else would be slurping their drinks in the blue light without a care in the world.
Ferenc Farkas was a former member of the Friends of the Hungarian Fighters Collective, which had its seat of operations in the West. He had returned home on several occasions and succeeded in putting together a strong resistance cell comprising some 18 individuals, primarily intellectuals. Now too he was on his way to his cell.
This was to be his last trip, however. The SDD caught him. He was whisked off to Military Political Department in the SDD premises on Fő Street in Budapest. This Department was under the command of a lieutenant colonel. It was made up of fourteen cells and a separate washroom so that its inmates would not have the slightest opportunity to communicate with the remaining detainees. The guards were the cream of the torturers.
Every prisoner was initially forced to stand up in a single spot for four to five consecutive days without respite, leaving them completely exhausted. In the basement was a row of booths in which the inmates had to stand facing the wall in the harsh and unremitting glare of a spotlight. They could not see one another. They were frequently deprived of food in an effort to leave them completely debilitated and sapped of strength. A guard strolled up and down the row of booths, kicking and cuffing by way of a reminder any inmate who had been driven by fatigue to fall asleep whilst standing up and whose head was nodding forward. Sometimes an inmate’s heart could not cope with the strain any longer and he would collapse, falling out of the booth backwards. First of all, his captors would start putting the boot in just in case the kicking would act as a stimulant. Then they would pour a few buckets of cold water over him and shake him. As soon as he regained consciousness they would make him resume his position.
Once the softening up procedure had been completed, Farkas’ interrogation began. After five days he was finally allowed to sit down. The accumulated tiredness overwhelmed him. His eyelids drooped and wanted to close every minute and his head kept on nodding forward. This was the juncture at which he had to show the greatest vigilance, however. The interrogators cunningly fired off their pre-prepared questions at lightning speed. The prisoner, who was in a state of nervous exhaustion, could only answer by reflex by this stage and could all too easily let the truth slip.
Ferenc Farkas did not confess to having committed any crime. He was moved to Interrogation Room Number 247 accordingly. This was a special, windowless torture chamber illuminated by blue neon lights. The door was thickly padded. All the modern innovations in torture techniques devised by the Soviets were to be found here. The prisoners simply referred to it as the “Blue Room”.
The prison guards had originally been village lads, the offspring of cotters, illegitimate children or orphans, the local scum. There was also an element of brutal, rustic rawness to their bestiality. The interrogators in the Blue Room were, by contrast, officers. They had turned their backs on their faith, their people and their family traditions. They had been Gestapo informants during the Nazi period, now they were agents of the Russian MVD. In those days they sent their fellow believers to the grave, now they were sending us. The victims had changed, but they had remained the same. Their wavy hair and melodic speech gave them away immediately. They would carry out the sophisticated, slow, sadistic tortures.
The interrogator squeezed Ferenc Farkas’ head into a tyre. His rubber-encased brow was guided to a wooden trough-like contraption down which a hard ball made of bone was rolled at regular intervals. The first few impacts of the bone ball did not hurt too badly, but before long became increasingly unbearable. The interrogator sat as if he were bored out of his brains and played his evil game of billiards on Ferenc Farkas’s forehead. Farkas was fully aware that other people’s lives were at stake. He remained silent.
They tortured him for weeks on end. First of all by using the bone balls, then the “thumbscrew”, with which the victim was stretched out until he was taut and his naked body beaten with rubber truncheons. When that too failed to yield results, they began to beat his testicles. The brave military officer endured this treatment for quite some time without making a sound, but every now and then a terrible howl like that of a wild animal escaped him due to the pain, ringing in his ears. The blood-curdling screams could be heard even through the thick padding of the doors. His fellow-inmates listened mutely in the cells, trying to guess which number in the repertoire was currently being played out. They were all familiar with the “Blue Room’s” secrets. Farkas did not succumb. They could not break him.
A very sympathetic fellow-inmate was installed in his cell. It was Wing Commander Ödön Sugár, Deputy Commander of the Airforce’s Engineering Division. In new cells he would introduce himself as either Ödön Kovács or Ödön Kiss, claiming to be a mechanical engineer, an aircraft builder or sometimes a chemical engineer. He had a winning way about him, and proved to be a convivial cell-mate. At noon and in the evenings he was given particularly good meals, which he explained as being due to his alleged stomach problems and obligingly offered to share his food with his starving comrade. He too went off every day for interrogation, during which he reported on what information he had managed to wheedle out of his cell-mate. Every evening he was led off separately to sign the transcripts that had been drawn up in the morning. Farkas was guarded. Not even the informant succeeded in wringing any compromising facts out of him. After a week or two Sugár was removed from his cell to be replaced by a new companion who introduced himself as Károly Tordai, or Károly Képes or Károly Nagy. He too seemed to be the most affable cell-mate in the world. He betrayed a particularly extensive knowledge of literary matters. He was able to provide colourful descriptions of Salzburg and district and Austrian matters in general. Every morning he did keep-fit exercises. At the end of each session he would perform a peculiar concluding routine: patting the top of his head with one hand and rubbing his stomach with the other. Apparently this was healthy in the extreme. He too enthusiastically trooped off for interrogation where he would submit his reports about Farkas.
Since neither brute force nor the informants’ wiles had led to any substantive result, Farkas was placed on the black coffee regimen. First of all Farkas was offered a cup of black coffee in a friendly manner. He turned it down, suspecting that they wanted to drug him. Then they held him down, prised open his mouth and poured the black coffee down his throat. Within minutes the former military officer was overcome by a sense of relief and a slight wooziness. He became incredibly talkative, chatting merrily to the interrogators sixteen to the dozen. He knew what he was saying, but he had lost the ability to subdue his tongue by willpower. He no longer protested against another dose of black coffee, indeed he even accepted the cigarettes. The slightly bitter taste of that special doped cigarette lingered in his mouth the entire length of the following day.
The SDD got what it wanted. The Mescaline had done its work. The names came to light and the wave of arrests started. On 15th April the ruthless Andó tribunal pronounced its sentence. Six death penalties and long prison stretches for the remainder.
Of those sentenced to death only Ferenc Farkas was actually executed. The rest were granted a reprieve. The total number of years the sixteen accused were sentenced for was 178.
In the Viennese bar, everything was bathed in a blue-purple light. The jukebox was playing trendy American hits. The clientele must have been enjoying them because a young lad was standing at the jukebox feeding it with coins every time the previous record had come to an end. The girls leaned back in their chairs, humming the melodies. One man leaned on his table in silence. He stirred his coffee. He was thinking about where the taciturn stranger who always used to sip his coffee at the same table might be. He had been such a sorrowful individual, always lost in thought. As if his soul had been burdened down by some great regret.
Ferenc Farkas was already mouldering in his unmarked grave in the Rákoskeresztúr cemetery. Three days earlier at the big hanging he had been one of the victims according to the news we had been able to glean. The Viennese man did not know that the SDD in Budapest had a blue room of their own where you could likewise sip a cup of black coffee.
And that as a general rule you only drink such coffee once…”

The second excerpt serves as an illustration of the utter absurdity of the economic policies imposed from above:

“1st December 1955

New patients were admitted to the ward. Tomorrow they would be going under the surgeon’s knife. A man of around 50 with a striking face and greying hair was put in the bed next to mine. He introduced himself as Andor Sztarhony.
When he discovered that I was a political prisoner, his expression clouded over slightly. He asked me about two of his acquaintances, chief technician Gyula Papp and chief engineer Sándor Vida. I could see the sharp pang of anxiety that he would learn something from me that he was terribly afraid of clearly reflected in his eyes. I asked him to divulge a little more about his acquaintances as I didn’t know the prisoners so much by name as by case. Sztarhony related the sad tale of his two colleagues.
The Hungarian People’s Democracy, whilst – for the benefit of the outside world - constantly heaping accusations on the West about how it was preparing for war and whilst putting on airs by repeating Moscow’s slogans to the effect that the countries of the Eastern Block were dedicating all their energies to peaceful construction work, was building one secret munitions factory after another in Upper Hungary all along. Of course once again to fool the outside world all of them were given peaceful names. Thus the innocuous sounding “Jobbágyi Chocolate Factory” in the Mátra mountains to the north of Budapest was actually a secret munitions factory number 7405. This plant, employing 4,500 workers, was located in a coomb outside the village of Jobbágyi, hidden away amongst the trees of the forest. A first-rate concrete road led to it and it was also linked to the railway network. The complex, which consisted of a collection of single storey buildings, was surrounded by a double barbed wire fence complete with watchtowers, SDD sentries and Alsatians. In the factory itself a separate barbed wire fence partitioned off the mechanical works from the chemical works and the administrative premises were likewise fenced off specially from the rest. Inside, the Russian system of secrecy was applied to the letter. Whenever someone entered the factory they had to hand over their identity papers and a written permit to the personnel department representative (the civilian equivalent of the SDD) at the door. From then on, the person’s identity documents would remain in the possession of his escort, who would accompany him in turn to the offices reserved for the armed SDD contingent, then to the factory’s personnel department and finally to the chief engineer. Everywhere he went he would be made to undergo a stringent examination. The chief engineer would then assign new escorts to him, from whom he would not be allowed to part company for the duration. A fresh set of checks would be carried out in every single department of the factory.
Andor Sztarhony, as a dispatcher in one of the Ministry of Light Industry’s departments, had visited 54 different factories where various parts of munitions were manufactured. His task was to carry out technical checks on the metal munitions components. At the beginning of 1953 anti-aircraft shells were being produced in the “Jobbágyi Chocolate Factory”. In the course of his visit to the plant, Sztarhony had ascertained that during the manufacture of the shells the required thickness and composition of the sheet metal was not being used. The prescribed type of sheet metal was of course – as happened all the time in Soviet-style production – not in stock. Nobody dared to stop production, however, since this constituted sabotage in the eyes of the authorities. Sztarhony announced that he would take personal responsibility for stopping production. Chief Technician Gyula Papp, who was in charge of the technical side of the factory’s activities, overruled his decision, saying that he would, on the basis of long experience, assume responsibility for continuing production. At any rate, Sztarhony called two people over to witness the conversation so that he could absolve himself of all responsibility.
Upon his return to Budapest, Sztarhony apprised to his immediate superior, Chief Engineer Sándor Vida, of what had happened in Jobbágyi. The head of department took Gyula Papp’s side. Sztarhony demanded that his boss make this statement in writing, or at least in front of witnesses. The department head was infuriated that his subordinate had the temerity to make such an utterance, but in the end he was forced to agree to it. A few weeks later the army took delivery of over half a million anti-aircraft shells. They didn’t detect any flaws. Chief Engineer Sándor Vida told Sztarhony with a smile: “See, wasn’t all that worrying a waste of time, the army accepted the shells without any difficulties”. Sztarhony did not share his superior’s optimism.
One day the SDD arrested Gyula Papp, Sándor Vida and a few others. A luxury limousine was sent to the Ministry to pick Sztarhony up. He was given a polite reception at SDD headquarters. They told him that they were aware of his role; they had recorded the facts of the case and that all that they asked of him was that if any similar incident were ever to occur that he inform the SDD forthwith. When he arrived back at his office he discovered to his great surprise that he had been appointed as the replacement for the arrested head of department.
His glory did not last long, however. Sztarhony’s first wife noticed that her ex-husband, his second wife and daughter were driving around in a swish car. She found out that her former spouse was now quite the gentleman, a ministerial head of department, no less. She went straight to the police and denounced his criminal past as an international pickpocket, who had done time in numerous jails throughout Europe. The accusations put the authorities in an unpleasant position and Sztarhony was politely granted a “leave of absence” without being given any explanation for this turn of events. Sztarhony started plying his old trade once again, picking pockets on the buses of Budapest with one of his old friends and an attractive blonde. His friend fluted a jeweller’s wallet and jumped off the bus. The owner noticed, called the police and the search began. Sztarhony, who had the wallet on him, kept his cool as he waited his turn to be searched. He hoped to avert arrest by virtue of being a ministerial head of department, but the policeman made no concessions to rank. He was nabbed and sentenced to four years in jail as a relapsed offender.
Sztarhony concluded his story. Once again the urgent flash of concern appeared in his eyes as he wondered what my reply might be. I looked at him and told him in a sad voice that Gyula Papp and Sándor Vida were no longer in the land of the living. Both had been sentenced to death on 10th March 1953. On the night of 20th March they had been made to change clothes in the prison in Markó Street before being taken away. They had probably been hanged the following morning. All that I had heard had been Vida’s despairing cries in his cell of: “I don’t want to die! Don’t send me to the gallows!”
Papp and Vida were two victims of the Soviet style of production. Appropriate raw materials were not available, yet if you did not work you were guilty of sabotage and executed accordingly. If you did work, however, you were equally guilty of sabotage and would likewise be executed for it”.

The final passage reminds us that not all victims possessed the strength of Edith Bone or Ispánki himself:

“28th February 1956

The prison bell rang for reveille at five in the morning. Márianosztra was a penitentiary where inmates were sent to be punished for breach of discipline, which is why we were forced to get up earlier than was the case in other jails. In our dreams we always roamed beyond the prison walls, but the bell would rudely summon us back to reality every morning. We greeted each other with a loud “Good morning” and set about getting dressed with military speed.
Former factor András Mészáros looked at me and quipped with typically wry humour: “We’ve been lumbered with a right one here!”
His statement provoked gales of laughter.
Everyone was thinking of our new cellmate, who had moved in with us the day before.
In our cell we already had one eccentric occupant by the name of József Ágfalvi, a private secretary who was known to everyone in the prison simply as the Indian prince. He was 38 years of age, an emaciated tight-lipped man. He had tried to escape to the West and had written to a friend in Austria in connection with the plan, but his missive had been intercepted and he had been sentenced to 15 years for “disloyalty” (for which read attempted defection). The seven years he had spent in captivity thus far had taken a severe toll on his nerves. All day long he would lie flat on his stomach on the bed without uttering a single word, smiling from time to time as if he had glimpsed something beautiful. Then he would get up and start tap dancing in front of the bed. I have to admit he was a very skilled dancer. At the end of his performance he would break into a smile and bow slightly as if to thank the invisible audience for its applause. He had read an upsetting book about the lives of circus artistes and its influence on him had been so profound that his only wish was to be allowed to step out into the ring of the big top and regale the spectators with his dance routines.
He imagined that he was the son of Lady Astor, the world famous aristocrat and an Indian prince. In order to cheat him out of his massive inheritance, his mother’s enemies had abducted him, swapping him for the offspring of his current “mother”. As a matter of fact he was not supposed to have been born a boy, but an evil spell had been cast on his mother, the genes had been mixed up as a result and he had emerged from the womb as a male. The insipid letter that had served as the excuse for throwing him in jail had been the work of the same group of enemies who had persecuted him throughout his life and represented an attempt on their part to prevent him from bringing the great injustices perpetrated against him to the attention of the public. By way of proof of these assertions he cited the bouts of lucidity within, the moments when you are filled with heavenly bliss and can discern your own fate and that of your nearest and dearest with particular clarity and vividness. On 8th January his mother had come to see him in the framework of the half yearly ten-minute visit from relatives. Ágfalvi had proclaimed to her: “Dear lady, please take note that you are not my mother. Until now you have practiced a perfidious deception against me. But I have seen through all the subterfuges concerning my origins!”
His poor mother had thereby encountered the deranged look on her son’s face and his even more incoherent speech for the first time. She had to be helped out of the room.
In spite of all his eccentricities, Ágfalvi had always been a good cellmate. He was quiet and polite. By now I could even persuade him to wash more frequently during winter. This was his weakest point, after all.
Yesterday, however, he had fallen out with Zsigmond Abaffy over some completely trivial matter. Abaffy had asked the guard to have Ágfalvi removed from the cell. Thus the “Indian prince” had been wrested from us. His successor, Gyula Feigl Fóthy, had arrived in the meantime. He was around 50, nothing but skin and bones, with a sunken face and a long beaked nose. When he walked through the door he reminded me instantly of Raphael’s portrait of Dante Alighieri.
He unpacked his meagre collection of inmate’s bits and bobs, went over to the wall, folded his arms like an Indian fakir and closed his eyes. He stood this way in complete silence for hours on end. I tried to engage him in conversation. I asked after his wife and daughter, but his only reply was to inform me that he did not comment on family matters. All I succeeded in coaxing out of him about his case was that he had been managing director of a mutual aid society and that for purposes of recruiting new members he had drawn up lists of tenants in various blocks of flats in Budapest, an activity which the authorities had regarded as espionage. He kept on and on about an alleged government decree, number 2290, according to which he ought to have been set free ages ago.
The real tragedy only commenced in the evening. Up to then he had stood silently, arms folded, eyelids shut like an allegory of silence in the form of a statue. When the bell signalled lights out, however, he prepared for his nightly repose by embarking on a strange set of rituals. He bent his straw mattress in the middle, so that one half would be vertical, maintaining that he always slept in a sitting position. He turned his shoes so that the soles were pointing upwards to stop them from pattering during the night. He slipped crumpled pieces of paper underneath all four legs of the bunk. He wanted to “insulate” it from “electrical radiation”.
On the hour every hour right through the night he would clamber down from his bed. He would get completely dressed and sit down at the little table. He hoarded breadcrumbs in a white bag, which he would stuff into his mouth, whilst taking great gulps of cold water from his mess tin. He had maybe fifty sheets of cellophane. In each and every one of them he had a few granules of sugar, a minute quantity of jam or a piece of bacon. At every meal he would unwrap one of these rustling packages. It was a dreadful sight to behold as he munched on the contents, the light filtering in through the window falling on his sunken features, his hooked nose and his long, spindly fingers. Since he slept in the bunk above mine there was naturally no question of my being able to snatch a few winks of sleep. He undressed and donned his clobber again, he ate and rustled the cellophane. I watched him for a long time before enquiring as to what he was doing. He replied that he had to eat something every hour or his intestines would dry out.
The others could not sleep at night either. This is why András Mészáros had joked about “having a right one here!”
During the morning wash he spent a great deal of time sprinkling himself with ice cold water. Instead of drying himself with normal fashion, however, he wrapped the towel in such a way that it resembled a propeller and dried himself by revolving it like a fan blade. One of the more maliciously inclined inmates started whistling the air force anthem to accompany the unconventional drying method, from which his new nickname, “Propeller Man” also derived.
It soon emerged that he also found the use of toilet paper unhygienic, indulging in a strange series of ritual ablutions instead. Of course in a confined space such as our cell into which five or six people were crammed and with only two small pails of water at our disposal per day to cover all our requirements (including drinking) this kind of erratic behaviour was not on. Zsigmond Abaffy, the “cell boss”, asked the guard to move “Propeller Man” to the infirmary where he could mix with similar disturbed cases.
The “Propeller Man” silently packed his things, slung his bags and all his worldly goods over his shoulder and moved out to the infirmary. Who knows how many prison cells he had been turfed out of already?
All of this simply because he had written down lists of tenants in rented accommodation in Budapest, something which was equivalent to espionage according to the Soviet world view. The weight of suffering endured in prison had slowly but surely destroyed Gyula Feigl Fóthy. Even now the memory of his sunken features, glittering dark eyes and long hooked nose as he threw his humble inmate’s bundle over his shoulder and marched off towards the asylum haunts me still”.

As to the relevance of the events that unfolded fifty years ago to today, let us not forget that the CIA has gained approval for seven interrogation techniques (see, for example, Ed Pilkington’s article in The Independent, 18th September 2006) in the “war on terror”, thereby rendering itself almost as morally repugnant as the SDD.

Then there is the issue of the relationship between the state and the people, addressed by Henry Porter in his perspicacious We're all suspects now (The Independent, 19th October 2006), which opens with a quote from Vaclav Havel's speech on New Year's Day 1990: "'The previous regime, armed with its arrogance and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, stinking machine whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could do no more but slowly wear itself out, and all the nuts and bolts too'.
That perfectly defines the true tyranny, where the state takes all liberty and bends each individual will to its own purpose. And here is the interesting thing that Havel put his finger on: no matter how brutal or ruthless the regime, the act of depriving people of their freedom starts the stopwatch on that regime's inevitable demise. What he was saying was that in modern times a state can only thrive in the fullest sense when individuals are accorded maximum freedom.
I agree. Individual liberty is not just the precondition for civilisation, not just morally right, not just the only way people can reach their full potential, live responsibly and have fun; it is also a necessity for the health of government. Ten years ago I would have felt silly speaking about liberty and rights in Britain with the very real concern that I have today. But I am worried".

It would indeed be mischievous to overemphasise the parallels between Hungary of the 1950s and Britain of the first decade of the 21st century (in spite of the anguished howls of “nanny state-ism” from the right), yet I share Porter’s unease: "The inescapable fact is that we have a Prime Minister who repeatedly makes the point that civil liberties arguments are not so much wrong as made for another age [my italics]. We have a Government that has ignored the Rule of Law, reduced rights and has steadily moved to increase the centralised power of the state at the expense of the individual.
So I don't feel quite as silly or alarmist as I might.
The relationship between the state and the individual is really at the heart of any discussion about democracy and rights. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it was the state's mission not just to prevent people from expressing themselves, from moving about freely and unobserved, from pursuing their chosen careers and acting upon their religious and personal convictions, but to stop them from thinking freely. It needed to occupy people's thoughts - to take up a kind of permanent residency in the mind of the average citizen".

Porter argues that defusing potential controversy by appealing to reason and at the same time preying on the fears the media has been only too keen to fuel has proven extremely useful to Blair and his allies: "It is perhaps the absence of an obvious confrontation between freedom and tyranny that allows Tony Blair to say that civil liberties arguments are made for another age. I profoundly disagree with this. It is dangerous arrogance to say that the past has nothing to teach us and that all the problems we face now are unique to our time.
During his speech to the Labour Party conference, Tony Blair said: 'I don't want to live in a police state, or a Big Brother society or put any of our essential freedoms in jeopardy. But because our idea of liberty is not keeping pace with change in reality, those freedoms are in jeopardy'.
What in heaven's name did he mean by that? Liberty is liberty. You can't update it. You can't divide it. You are either free, or you're not. A society is either just, or it isn't. People have rights or they don't. The rule of law is upheld, or it isn't.
But Blair believes there is nothing that can't be modernised, updated, pared down or streamlined to keep pace with change. And liberty is no exception to the modernising fury which serves as New Labour's only ideological foundation. What the Prime Minister is saying in this cute little Orwellian paradox is that in the particular circumstances of the war on terror and the rash of crime and anti-social behaviour, we must give up freedom to be free".

Porter’s analysis is eerily reminiscent of Rákosi’s bragging about his salami tactics: "Don't get me wrong, we do not live in either a police state or a Big Brother society - yet. But there is no Englishman alive or dead who has done more to bring them about.
The trouble is that it's happening so very quietly, so very discreetly that few really see it. You have to concentrate very hard to understand what's going on and put the whole picture together because so much has been buried in obscure corners of legislation".

The erosion is so gradual, so incremental that at no point does it elicit the outcry that a more spectacular campaign of curtailment would generate: "There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn't really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else's rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves 'if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear from these laws'. Not true. There is something to fear - because someone else's liberty is also your liberty. When it's removed from them, it's taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn't count.
Cumulatively, these small, barely noticed reductions in our rights add up to the greatest attack on liberty in the last hundred years. No wonder the Prime Minister dismisses traditional civil liberties arguments as being made for another age. With his record he can do nothing else".

For Porter the slow rot is epitomised by the introduction of ID cards: "Most people have very little understanding of what the ID card scheme will actually mean for them. They think that it just involves a little plastic identifier. But it is much more than that. Every adult will be required to provide 49 pieces of information about themselves which will include biometric measurements - probably an iris scan and fingerprinting. If you refuse to submit to what is called, without irony, enrolment, you will face repeated fines of up to £2,500. The Government is deadly serious about this thing because of a simple truth. They want to know pretty much everything there is to know about you.
Personally, I find the idea of having a card repugnant and I cannot believe it will be long before policemen are stopping us on the street and asking us for our papers. But this is by no means the most sinister aspect. Every time your card is swiped when you identify yourself, the National Identity Register will silently make a record of the time and date, your location and the purpose of the ID check. Gradually, a unique picture of your life will be built, to which nearly half-a-million civil servants are apparently going to have access.
But of course you will never be told who is looking at your file, or why. And nor will you be able to find out.
MPs must take responsibility for passing this invasive law but they cannot be blamed for the other half of the Big brother society that is upon us. I refer to the total surveillance of our roads in a linked-up system of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. These cameras cover every motorway, major dual carriageway, town and city centre and will feed information from billions of journeys into one computer, where the data will remain for two years.
The decision to put British motorists under blanket, round-the-clock surveillance was never taken by Parliament. It just happened. As the cost of processing enormous quantities of data came down, the police and Home Office just simply decided to go ahead. Traffic cameras became surveillance cameras. This, I gather, is known as function creep, and, as always, half the pressure comes from technological innovation.
We are about to become the most observed population in the world outside North Korea, and absolutely no work has been done on how this will affect us and what it will do to our society and political institutions.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we’re heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.
Where all this will lead I cannot say, but I do know that it is neither good for us nor for the state. Humans work best when they have the maximum freedom, and so does government. As our Government gains more power in relation to us, confusing itself on the way with the entity and interests of the state, it will become less responsive to our needs and opinions, less transparent and less accountable.
Havel said of the Communist tyranny in that glorious but sombre new year’s day [sic] speech: ‘None of us is just its victim. We are its co-creators’. And I believe we all need now to acknowledge what has happened to British rights and do something about it”.

Perusing the unremitting stream of articles concerning the latest applications, such as the tooth implants invented by a Belgian ostensibly with a view to identifying aviation disaster victims less traumatically (and with greater accuracy) than presenting their charred remains to relatives, or the proposal to electronically tag everyone entering the premises of an airport for the duration of their stay in the building, the taking of DNA samples from children for the purposes of establishing a national data base (which gives a whole new and sinister meaning to the swab taken by the school nurse), the insanity of branding foetuses criminals before they have even emerged from the womb, black boxes in cars designed to track and record our every movement or even the (seemingly) relatively trivial break with tradition of being encouraged to phone the authorities (anonymously) if we spot our neighbours breaking the hosepipe ban, I despair at the complacency with which these outrages are being met. Rákosi could never have dreamed of having such technology put at his disposal. He would have rubbed his hands in glee at the prospect of such a massive enhancement of his power. We need to step back and take inspiration from the bravery of the Freedom Fighters of Budapest.

Carnival of the Feminists 22

2006-09-06T09:22:00.000+02:00

Welcome to the 22nd Carnival of the Feminists!

Without further preliminaries, let me proceed immediately to the first topic:

Feminism and Fat.

Jax, of Making it up tackles the fraught relationship we are encouraged to have with our bodies, which affects both fat and thin alike, in Size, fashion and discrimination. She worries that “somehow it’s not feminist to be happy about being thin” and goes on to recount a recent experience on a skirt-buying expedition with her daughter, which proved to be an eye-opener (and will no doubt strike a chord with many parents): “How do we expect women to grow up valuing all the sizes that we can be, accepting each other for what we are, when it would appear we expect all six-year-olds to be the same size? So we are already telling many of our children that they are too big, too small, too thin or too tall”.

Molly, of Molly Saves the Day in Fat shamers take note rightly draws attention to a phenomenon that is sadly inescapable in the lives of those of us who exceed a culturally-prescribed size norm, that of being showered with unsolicited advice and comments, often from random passers-by: “To me, the worst thing about this ‘I’m just trying to be nice’ fat shaming is that it does seem, generally, to be filled with good intentions. The people engaging in it don’t seem to think about the fact that they wouldn’t be so nosy, or so quick to judge, about almost any other trait – physical, behavioural, or mental. Fat-shaming is so much a part of our culture that even the person being made to feel ashamed or condescended to is supposed to feel grateful, not offended”.

Finally, from Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon, we have Chew on this, Ms Hewitt, which disputes the lazy assumption on the part of sanctimonious politicians that fat is a personal problem (which conveniently absolves them of responsibility for getting to grips with such thorny issues as poverty). On her transition to a healthier diet than the one she was brought up on, she writes: “But what has changed is not fundamentally me, but aspects of my environment. I got the right messages; I was provided with the chance to exercise; I was given the right food supplies that I could afford. None of those things are individual; none of them are broadly available to the British public”.

Before moving on to the second topic, I would like to include three posts on the more general issue of appearance. Margaret Ervin, of Basket of Eggs, recalls her reaction to a remark made by a man on her red hair being set off to perfection by her blue dress in Owning Beauty. Again, she tells of an unwanted appraisal, not from what Bartky refers to (drawing on Foucault) as the “panoptical male connoisseur” who “resides within the consciousness of most women”, but a flesh and blood one, who happened to be walking by: “I told the story of walking down the street and being told to smile, commanded in fact to ‘Smile!’ I talked about how that often happened to me. ‘Smile!’ Why did these men think they had the right to tell me to smile? I had plenty of reasons not to smile. Did they want me to look more decorative? Why were they telling me, a perfect stranger, to please them?”

Ann Bartow, of Feminist Law Professors provides us with a salutary (and tongue-in-cheek) reminder of the pettiness of the fashion industry’s imperative to shift more products off the shelves by fostering a perpetual sense of insecurity in consumers in Your Eyebrows Were Too Thick! Now They Are Too Thin!: “But what if you don’t have the patience to grow out your eyebrows, or they are naturally on the thin side? Must you leave the house in a hat that falls mid-retina to hide this appalling facial deformity? Not necessarily, because luckily, there are plenty of NYT advisers ready to help you solve your horrible eyebrow deficiencies if you have adequate time, motivation and expendable cash”. The ludicrousness of it all reminds me of the charming György Pál (1960) version of The Time Machine, in which the protagonist, George, watches the hems on the shop window mannequin’s dresses rise and fall at incredible speed as the seasons fly by.

Holly, of Self-Portrait as…, deals with the subject of breast implants and male mammary fixation (and the range of women’s responses, from pride in corresponding to the ideal, to shame at not and the cleavage between them – sorry, I couldn’t resist, please forgive me) in Just as God made ME: “One day I listened to Muriel and Jane, a couple of my well-endowed friends, decry a survey they’d just read in some women’s magazine, in which the majority of men questioned said that any woman with a B-cup or smaller should get breast implants – these men felt that way even after being told that implants can harden to the point that they feel like baseballs, making certain kinds of physical contact painful if not impossible”.

Topic Two: Feminism and Faith

Since I issued a personal request for the following submission, it seems only appropriate to mention it first. Hugo Schwyzer of the eponymous blog eloquently and passionately advances his arguments on the compatibility of adherence to religious belief and feminism in Faith and Feminism, whilst urging us to move beyond the cardboard cut-out, cliché-ridden language of suspicion and antagonism: “In a way, evangelical Christians and feminists are both largely defined – at least in the public imagination – by their enemies. It’s very easy to caricature either group. The secular left tends to see all evangelical Christians as intolerant, homophobic, jingoistic Republicans; many on the right tend to see active feminists as shrill, angry, humourless, godless liberals. The public pronouncements of leading figures in both movements are regularly quoted out of context in order to reinforce an image of extremism. And of course, both ‘feminists’ and the ‘religious right’ are regularly invoked as dangerous spectres in fund-raising by both conservatives and progressives” [emphasis in original].

Eteraz in Why Muslim Honour Killings Why writes powerfully, uncompromisingly and poignantly about a phenomenon, which feminists surely must engage with: "Having said all that, it should be absolutely clear that I think the 'honour' that undergirds the murder of women like Ghazala Khan is a bastardisation of honour. In a properly exercised act of honour, the only person who could judge Ghazala's honour was Ghazala herself. Yet, instead, all around the Muslim world (and parts of India and China), we find others (usually men) judging the honour of everyone around them, ascribing what they think is an inadequacy in another, to a loss of their own honour, and then, instead of exacting corrective behaviour upon themselves (as a truly honourable person would do), they exact vengeance from those they find inadequate. It becomes a Darwinian pain cycle with the strongest (men) punishing others (women)".

I would now like to turn to two honest and contemplative posts by Sage of Persephone’s Box. In Those Pagans Were On To Something she meditates on the appeal and relevance of the church (she describes herself as a “recovering Catholic) in spite of some rather obvious deficiencies: “I say I’m recovering from the church because I think it’s poisonous. Christianity is a brilliant philosophy, but I haven’t seen many of Jesus’ ideas implemented at this church. The hierarchical power structure, archaic rules over birth control and divorce, intolerance, and inequitable behaviour towards women are just a few toxins Catholicism leeches out into its prey”. Amen to that, sister!

In the companion piece, Hate the Religion, Not the Religious, she broaches the subject of the relationship between faith and morality (in a manner reminiscent of Richard Dawkins in his documentary The Root of All Evil?): “I actually think that rejecting God can allow for a more sincere morality. We can be good without threat of punishment or loss of rewards. In fact, can we really call someone ‘good’ who only acts kindly in hopes of eternal salvation? I’m much more inspired by those who do what’s right for the sake of what’s right without expectation of fame, fortune, or spiritual longevity” [emphasis in original]

Another superlative post written by a former Catholic appears on Mind the Gap!. In Thoughts on Catholicism and Resistance, Winter acknowledges the role of organised religion in forming her personality and nudging her in the direction of feminist politics. After a careful examination of the ideology (the epitome of the virgin-whore dichotomy), she shows how its messages can be used for practical (and positive) ends in keeping with the believer’s life goals: “Some feminists are not going to like me for saying this, but I am grateful to the church for giving me a much-needed reason to resist when my peers were telling me that I must have sex by the time I was 14. The reason to resist should have come from feminism, but the only feminism that was available to me was the sort that says young women will have sex, therefore the best thing to do is provide plenty of contraception and show them how to get abortions. I wasn’t happy about that either. This is why I think many feminist responses to the Christian abstinence movement are over-simplistic, insofar as they fail to see any attractions within that ideology and view the young women who sign up to it as passive victims of patriarchy” [emphasis in original]

Demonstrating that women are mobilising an active resistance to the Catholic hierarchy, challenging the dead weight of male authority, the Reverend Astrid Joy Storm interviews Jean Marie Marchant, secretly ordained as a priest under a pseudonym. The opening couple of paragraphs certainly grab you by the (metaphorical) short and curlies!

At Culture Kitchen, Lorraine treats us to an incisive, witty and irreverent critique of the church’s impulse to regulate human sexuality, seeking to stifle desires of which it does not approve in Crushing on the King of Kings, inspired by a radio broadcast: “I live out in the country, so ‘Christian stations’ are as frequently encountered as roadkill woodchucks, and usually, I pay them about as much notice. But some woman was talking about her sexual purity, and I couldn’t help it. It just about made me cry. I did not hear the preceding discussion, so I wasn’t sure about what exactly the nature of this woman’s sexual ‘sin’ had been, but I listened in rapt fascination and a sick feeling in my stomach as she recounted how she carried around her ‘brokenness’ for ten years, until the night, in darkness because she didn’t want him to see her face, she confessed her sin to her husband” (I break off the quote here with a suitable cliff-hanger, paragon of wickedness that I am).

Concluding on this theme, breaking ranks at My Left Wing fires a devastating broadside against spiritual authority in The Stained Glass Ceiling: “Spiritual authority is one (man’s) vision imposed on all others, winning pre-eminence through guile, mass mobilisation, and acts of verbal violence. The spiritual authority dictates reality, recording their vision on the world as if people were blank tapes”.

Rainbow

This final section comprises submissions not explicitly related to the announced topics in all their colourful splendour.

Taking marriage as a starting point, Bitch Lab, in Spinster cat ladies aren’t black, provides us with a brilliant illustration of how we are all (and the privileged sociologist is far from immune to the influence of ideology) caught up in a web of social relations where various forms of oppression intersect. For any study to retain credibility, race, class and poverty with all their attendant nuances should never be dwarfed by gender in critical analysis to the extent that they drop out of view: “This isn’t to say that women who aren’t white and middle class don’t think about marriage and weddings, just that the pressure isn’t there in the same ways. And, it’s to say that there are other kinds of pressures which shape the way people decide to live their lives, what opportunities are open and which are closed, what tools of resistance they have at their disposal, what cultures and languages they speak, and even what languages of individualism are encouraged and even available to them”.

At Vee Levene’s Insipid Missives, Vee expertly dissects two articles, exposing their respective subtexts in Porn chic for women and girls. Denouncing the way ruthless marketers sink their claws into tender young (female) flesh, Vee adeptly steers us back into the territory of objectification and sexualisation of pre-pubescent bodies. Taking issue with a glib comment in an interview that, by emulating models through the fashions that they wear, girls are actively articulating "views", Vee questions what these might consist of: "The 'view' of the knowledge that the best a woman can do is be appearance-based and as unnatural as possible, for the purposes of competing with other women and pleasing men? Since when does fashion (especially mainstream fashion) even begin to encompass the range of 'views' and opinions any individual - no matter what age - has? And in a case like this, with marketers insidiously targeting the most impressionable of the population; how can these 'views' be considered anything other than societal influence?"

Verbify at Signifying Nothing gets to grips with a discussion of courtship by Cassandra de Benedetto at Modestly Yours in oh fer christ's sake. The quoted passages make for depressing reading indeed, furnishing proof (if any were needed) that many women prefer submission to male authority (to the extent that they accept the male claim of ownership over their bodies) to the autonomy that feminism offers: "In Cassandra's view (…) a woman is not capable of going through life, of surviving, much less thriving, without a man looking out for her, wiping her nose, holding her hand as she crosses the street, cosigning car loans, calling her boss when he threatens her. To Cassandra, a woman without a man is, well, nonexistent" [emphasis in original]

Melissa, at Mobwhorelog condemns the self-serving nature (especially on the part of parasitical whore-prospectors) and class-based myopia that permeates much of the writing on the sex industry even amongst feminists in What's empowering about whoring (question mark), a challenging, provocative and intelligent piece that challenges complacent assumptions. In Melissa's words: "It is not for our supposed slavery but for our freedom that I am fearful that sex workers will never find the stigma we're stuck with lessening. What the most outspoken of sex workers represent, the very few who can risk being open, is not fucking, but freedom. Not 'freedom of choice', or some abstract 'freedom to come', but freedom to live honourably alongside society. No, not outside society, but right in it - and by contrary rules".

Marcella, at abyss2hope, summarily dismisses the fatuous conclusions drawn from the results of a survey in her succinct, but excellent Feminist Rape Crisis Over?, providing us with a salutary reminder that we cannot repeat the message about male violence often enough. Her own verdict, steeped in irony: "If it weren't for victim-blaming and feminist-bashing, you might not know some people realize that anyone but small children and dead women are raped and that rapists are anybody except gays, illegal aliens, minorities and Muslims".

Antiprincess, at I shame the matriarchy, in a harrowing piece of personal testimony, succeeds admirably in her undertaking to re-connect the often belligerent and impassioned torrent of words that is living feminist debate to the "human experience" of dreadful spousal abuse: "Feminism did not shield me, because the Patriarchy wasn't beating me. A human being was beating me. He was, his fists were, both true and real. He was not a figment of the collective imagination. He was not a concept, a generalized sort of shorthand to symbolize centuries of suffering. He was a fellow human being".

Concentrating on another aspect of women's right to control their own bodies, Roni, at Goddess Musings, judiciously laments the exclusion of teenage girls from prescription-free access to the morning-after pill in Not good news at all, a stirring battle-cry: "So I ask you all to remember the young women who have been left out of this revolution. I know, even getting one condom out of this administration would be a victory, but we cannot give up. We cannot let this partial victory be also a partial victory for all the anti's who want all young women to grow up without access or knowledge to reproductive health services".

Amanda, at Ballastexistenz in Wow. Stuff about the anti-political nature of therapy confirms something I have always suspected (although my own experience of psychologists are utterly trivial in comparison to hers), namely, that in most instances therapy is all about taming and squeezing the recalcitrant client into a pre-determined mould, about forcing you to conform to social definitions of normality, reconciling you to the circumstances, which are causing you acute pain and distress in order to improve your "functionality" as opposed to tackling the root causes (the aforementioned circumstances) themselves. All that therapists teach us is to bottle up/suppress our anger rather than release it more fruitfully. Thus, as Amanda so perceptively explains, therapy is directly inimical to political action, narrowing the focus to the individual, "repairing" a "defect" instead of interrogating the iniquities of an unjust situation. A dazzling assault on the tyranny of experts, the literature cited also makes it a treasure trove for anyone interested in the dangers of avoiding confrontation as well as the corrosive effect therapist-dependence has on genuine human interaction. One brief excerpt ought to suffice to whet the reader's appetite: "Therapism makes it so that friends don't actually have to do things for each other, there are professionals for that. It makes it so that if one person is assisting another person more at any given particular amount of time, this can be considered 'co-dependent' rather than a part of the natural ebb and flow of a relationship. Aside from encouraging selfishness, therapy seems to encourage an incredibly superficial kind of friendship wherein if any problems arise for your friends, you aren't expected to help in dealing with them, you're expected to tell them to go to a professional".

On the literary front, Nina, at Queer Cents, skilfully interviews author Amy Guth about finances, feminism and her debut novel Three Fallen Women in Ten Money Questions for Amy Guth: "I wrote Three Fallen Women at a time when I was seeing a few people around me unable or unwilling to enforce their personal boundaries in various ways. I think most of us learn this lesson through trial and error, sure, but suddenly I was noticing a lot of people who didn't seem to have a grasp in that direction at all. The more I saw this, the more I started noticing things people were enslaved to. Food, pain, drama, clutter, money, misery, people, rotten partners - it was everywhere! So, I ended up writing a lot about the freedom that comes from setting boundaries and practicing self-reliance and ended up doing it through the mouthpiece of these characters".

Sandy, at the imponderabilia of actual life, treats us to a detailed, balanced and thoughtful review of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World by Linda R. Hirshman. The following passage will hopefully give you a flavour of the critique: "Personally, I think that restructuring both the family (dividing household and childcare tasks more evenly) and the workplace (to be more 'family-friendly' is much more radical than Hirschman's suggestions, which leave the corporate underpinnings that devalue the private sphere totally unchanged. In fact, encouraging upper-class parents to employ lower-class women to care for their children and clean their houses strikes me as downright conservative" [emphasis in original]

A tangible and thought-provoking illustration of how women's participation in remunerated employment at the top end is given at the Workplace Prof Blog in New study Stresses Importance of Women in Senior Management Positions to Reduce Gender Gap in Income.

Nursepam, at 21st Century Lesbian Trailer Trash, ponders the implications of Louann Brizendine's book in A Woman's Brain: "There still remains within our culture the dichotomy of The Other. Us and Them. And it is alive and well in the idea of the superiority of the masculine.
This is where the causes of feminism, racism and homophobia converge. As long as we insist on putting our energies into deciding which is better, and then subjugating the group(s) who are Other than ourselves, we take our energies away from saving the planet and the human race as a whole". A resounding endorsement to those sentiments!

Jpfbookworm, at Official Shrub.com, ventures into the realm of etiquette and dining in Sexism on a Plate (Classism, too), assessing a phenomenon I have (thankfully) not yet encountered (it is annoying enough when I eat out with my partner, whom I support financially, and the waiter always brings back the credit card I have deposited on the saucer alongside the cash tip for him to sign the slip before cringing with embarrassment when the Hungarian smiles and passes the pen to me) of menus with a blank space where the prices should be: "Quite obviously the practice of assuming that a man will pay for a woman's meal is a sexist one, whether that assumption takes the form of handing the check to a man, or giving a woman a menu without prices".

In drawing to a close, I would like to strike a more light-hearted note - we have, after all, cogitated on life, the universe and everything to borrow Douglas Adams's phrase. Firstly, from Audrey at Talking Pony we have Sex for Money, which admittedly examines the very serious issue of the options open to "a twentysomething woman with a top-notch degree".

Finally, Madeleine at Mad Kane allows us to take our leave of this edition with a smile on our faces, with her superb and hilarious parody of those quizzes we like to while away an idle minute or two with in Those Unspeakable Meetings.

The next Carnival will be hosted by Lingual X at Lingual Tremors on 20th September.

[Please note that since I am in exile abroad until the end of the week and have no access to a computer, I am leaving it up to my partner the Hungarian to moderate any comments and sort out any problems caused by my technical incompetence, so please bear with me until Friday]

The Fat of the Land: Mind Your Language

2006-09-02T15:40:00.000+02:00

“The question I come back to again and again is ‘WHY DO YOU CARE IF I’M FAT?’ It’s my body. I know full well what I’m doing to it. I’m not blowing secondhand smoke on you. I’m not drunk-driving into you. I’m not taking food out of your mouth. Unless you’re crawling around in my skin, it doesn’t affect you in a direct way”
Wendy Shanker, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life (New York, Bloomsbury, 2004, p35)

A common misapprehension about language is that it is nothing more than a communication tool devised to transmit cold facts and that it has no link with identity. Such a reductivist attitude ignores the emotional content most eloquently captured by poets, whose finely crafted locutions articulate our passion and rage. One of the many pleasures of language is its malleability, its restless innovatory drive as it evolves to reflect technological and other developments. It seizes new concepts, pinning them down in bright splendour like the exotic butterfly collection of the Victorian amateur, lovingly recorded and preserved for the wonder of future generations (for whom the words and phrases will have fallen into disuse in much the same way as many of the rarer species will have been driven to extinction). Language both mirrors and shapes the societies in which we live, subtly channelling our perceptions. It reflects the preoccupations and anxieties of the moment of coinage with a playful inventiveness, drawing on extant concepts in its creative impulse. Dictionaries are the repository of a nation’s wit, fulfilling the function of the glass-topped display cabinet of the enthusiast who carefully categorises and labels his specimens. A report on the latest crop of new entries reveals the extent of our obsession with scrutinising every supposed blemish and defect of those around us (Daily Mail, unattributed, 30th August 2006), Muffin top rolls out for the dictionary: “Once it was simply an anonymous roll of fat.
But that midriff flesh that bulges annoyingly over your waistband has been honoured with its own place in the English language.
‘Muffin top’ is one of 500 new words and phrases in the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary.
The new entries, to be published next month, feature a heavy concentration of body-conscious terms”.

Even age no longer exempts you from the drive to banish any manifestation of time’s unkind passage as another coinage demonstrates: “‘Bingo wing’, a flap of loose skin that hangs from the upper arm, also makes its debut.
The condition is apparently often spotted among bingo enthusiasts of a certain age when they raise their hands at a game.
A ‘munter’ is an unattractive person, especially a woman, while a ‘salad dodger’ is a person with an unhealthy diet”.

Emine Saner also commented on the trend in A word or two on muffin tops (The Guardian, 31st August 2006): “‘Every time we create a new edition we get a snapshot of how the world has changed in the three years since we last did it,’ says Ian Brookes, editor of the Chambers Dictionary. Of the 500 new words that will make it into the dictionary in two weeks’ time, unsurprisingly the majority come from technology (remember when you had never heard of iPods or weblogs?) but a significant number focus on our obsession with physical appearance. ‘It is particularly noticeable,’ says Brookes, ‘because it is not an area where you always expect new words to come from. It certainly reflects out ideals of beauty’”.

As the main burden of maintaining a physique as close to the “perfect” as possible falls upon women, the bulk of the new vocabulary (the distillate of social disapproval) applies to them: “Brookes’ team of lexicographers scour publications looking for repeated examples of new words or phrases. Some magazines have made an art form of circling celebrities’ flaws and coming up with ever more cruel ways of describing them.
The success of the GI diet, followed by Kylie Minogue and Naomi Campbell, ensures an entry for ‘glycaemic index’ (how quickly carbohydrates are broken down into blood sugar). Those who don’t follow diets (‘salad dodgers’) have new words to describe them, none of them flattering. A ‘bingo wing’ is an unattractive wobbling underarm, seen on bingo players as they wave their arms around excitedly. A ‘muffin top’ is the roll of flab that rises, dough-like, from one’s too-tight, too-low waistband. ‘Munter’ is another word, used to describe someone physically unattractive. It is normally a woman – in fact, most of these words are usually used to describe women.
‘This range of words reflects an ideology and there is a need for feminist examination of the relationship between sexist language and ideology,’ says Dr Pia Pichler, a linguist at Goldsmith’s College, London. Men are given ‘metrosexual’ – a heterosexual man who takes time and effort over his appearance – which means he tries to look like David Beckham, and so is hardly a derogatory term”.

These terms were not new, as shown by David Wilkes in (Daily Mail, 16th September 2005), Be honest, does my bouncy castle look big in this?: “Their bodies may not be perfect, but their sense of humour is in great shape.
Women are lightening up about the once-heavy burden of physical deficiency, and have invented a whole new language of self-deprecating code phrases to identify their faults.
‘Cankles’, ‘bee stings’ and ‘saddle bags’ may not appear in your dictionary, but to the body-conscious, but newly carefree female, they are definitive.
Some phrases, such as ‘bingo wings’ (untoned flesh on the upper arms) and ‘love handles’ (flesh on the sides and lower back) had already found their way into common usage.
Others are part of what researchers refer to as a ‘secret language’ among women. Laughing among themselves, it would seem, is fine, but letting men in on the joke is going too far.
By way of translation, ‘cankles’ are thick calves merging into undefined ankles, ‘bee stings’ are small breasts, and ‘saddle bags’ are fatty deposits on the outer thigh.
Particularly unlucky women may also be unhappy about ‘love cushions’, or fatty deposits on the inner thigh. A ‘bouncy castle’ is not a children’s party accessory, but a large, shapeless bottom, while a ‘rubber ring’ is not an inflatable swimming aid but a podgy midriff.
A survey of 1,000 women aged 16 and over conducted for Dove Body Wash found that 71 per cent of women found laughing with friends about their apparent defects helped them cope with their imperfections”.

In a context where women are encouraged to seek fulfilment from forming relationships with men and are expected to compete for scarce resources (affection and admiration from men as a primary component of self-esteem) the use of such “secret language” enables them to bond amongst themselves without inflicting the deep wounds that the meat-market appraisals of the casual male onlooker have the power to do, removing the shame and as much of the stigma as possible within a fat-hating culture. They attempt to acknowledge the rivalry whilst taking the sting out of it, subverting it, even if only momentarily, to promote solidarity and cohesion within the assembled group. The humour is the vehicle by which this effect is achieved, but its undertone is bitter nevertheless. Fat is still the enemy, but is depicted in a less vicious and loathing manner than in the assessments of an anonymous passer-by (the “lard-bucket” category of insult, which nobody likes to apply to themselves, unless they are prone to feelings of guilt after a tub of ice-cream or another similar “excess”). There is almost a hint of affection towards the “afflicted” body part.

This impression is corroborated further on in Wilkes’s piece: “Sociologist and humour expert Professor Christie Davies, who helped with the survey, said: ‘Today’s women are forced to compare themselves with the airbrushed images of magazines and movies so it is not surprising that they pick faults with their appearance.
‘But the comical terms they are using suggest a healthy and honest attitude towards the issue. It’s the female equivalent of bald men getting together and having a laugh about being egg-heads.
‘These phrases seem to have been developed by women and they are different to the kind of insulting words which men might use.
‘In fact, many men we asked did not even know what some of them meant. It’s almost as if it is a kind of private language among women’”.

Other phrases listed by Wilkes include: “spaniel’s ears” for saggy or drooping breasts; “corned beef legs” for mottled or blotchy skin on legs and “Buddha belly” for a protruding, pot-like stomach.

The cover of the August edition of Observer Woman bore the headline Thin! coupled with some statistics concerning the weights of certain celebrities, afforded a comparatively rare (when compared to the screeds of invective penned against the fat, although I admit that gossip or celebrity magazines do not form part of my reading matter) opportunity to examine the type of language deployed against those felt to transgress the norm of avoiding excess by being judged to be too emaciated. Inside, the article proper by Mimi Spencer, The shape we’re in, provides a mildly polemically-tinged but thoughtful exploration of the media’s (more specifically, the glossy press) response to skinniness and the motives behind it: “She’s far too thin. Everybody says so. In those shrunken hot pants and skinny red vest she looked positively ravenous, like an urchin from Oliver Twist – albeit one with this season’s Prada handbag and hair extensions.
But just how skinny is Victoria Beckham? How would it fell if she sat on your lap? Would she be heavier than a kitten? If you hugged her would she break? We do know that she wears jeans with a miniscule 23-inch waist – the size, apparently, of a seven-year-old child (it is also, as it happens, the precise circumference of my head).
VB is not alone, of course, but merely the leading exponent of a new look which has come to dominate our lives (…) [exemplified by] women relatively new on the celebrity radar who skitter across the pages of magazines, coat hangers furnished with tennis-ball boobs and expensive shoes, not a shred of fat to share among them. You might not give a tossed salad how much these bony birds weigh. You might even agree with Kate Hudson (who recently won a libel action against the UK National Enquirer magazine for implying she had an eating disorder) that it is none of our business. But it is. It matters because hyper-thin has somehow become today’s celebrity standard and, as a result – almost without us noticing – the goalposts have moved for us all.
With every image of Nicole Richie’s feeble wrists or Posh Spice’s concave thighs – which seem to shy away from each other as if they’ve never been properly introduced – with every shot, an inch or an ounce is shaved off the notional ideal female form which governs our relationship with our bodies and the rest of the world. Images of Lindsay Lohan’s chest bones, desperately reaching out to greet strangers, or Keira Knightley’s xylophone of vertebrae, countable at 30 paces, have burned themselves into our consciousness so that über-thin no longer looks odd. It no longer shocks. But it does make you look at your own soft, warm body in a hard new light. It’s almost as if, in the course of a generation, we’ve overturned the age-old feminine ideal – maternal, curvaceous, zaftig”.

The constant bombardment with photographs and TV and cinema footage has brainwashed us into accepting the pathological as the sublime, to be envied and emulated: “To achieve this mental switcheroo, something seismic has happened, enough to make a body mass index of 10 (the BMA recommends something in the region of 22) look nearly normal to our rewired brains. When you rub your eyes, though, and snap yourself out of the reverie, you realise that this isn’t glamorous. It’s cadaverously, dangerously thin.
I have seen this kind of thin before. It resided in the endocrinology department at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where a member of my own family was treated for anorexia throughout her teens. Little could I have known that, in the intervening two decades, the morbidly hungry body type I saw there would become celebrated, a glory to which women of all ages aspire.
And they do. We do. If we are truthful, it’s not just anorexics who pedestal the thin; we all do, to one extent or another. After all, the mantra of our age is that thin gets you noticed. It gets you a contract as a TV presenter or a model or a singer in a girl band. Thin fast-tracks you with far more alacrity than a degree in history. More than that, as a society, we tend to cast a forgiving eye upon the very thin, while castigating the repugnantly fat”.

This constitutes a radical caesura with the past: “In this looking-glass world, a 100-pounder is a heavyweight. Size 00 – a logical impossibility when you pause to consider it – is now Hollywood’s dress-size of choice. True perspective can be gained when you consider that the pin-up of the 1890s was Lillian Russell, all 200 pounds of her. We don’t even have to mention Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren – none of whom would get the job today – to know that something’s up.
Studies have shown that, while 25 years ago the average model weighed eight per cent less than the average American woman (and, yes, Twiggy was abnormally petite in her day), today’s model weighs 23 per cent below the national average. This points up the fascinating paradox that, while we are desperate to keep up with our ever-shrinking celebrities, the average woman is actually getting bulkier. We’re round like melons and fat like sausages, despite obsessing about our lardy arses every day. Fat lot of good it does us. While our icons are running the distinct risk of slipping between the cracks in the pavement, we’re turning into bollards. Thirty-eight per cent of British women are now classified as overweight, and one in five is obese. If we resemble anyone, it’s not Posh Spice. It’s Elton John.
As long ago as 2000, the BMA, in its report ‘Eating Disorders, Body Image and the Media’, noted that the extreme thinness of celebrities was ‘both unachievable and biologically inappropriate,’ observing that the gap between the media ideal and the reality appeared to be making eating disorders worse. ‘At present, certain sections of the media provide images of extremely thin or underweight women in contexts which suggest that these weights are healthy or desirable,’ it stated, recommending that normal women in the upper reaches of a healthy weight should be ‘more in evidence on television as role models for young women’. Television producers and those in advertising should review their employment of very thin women, and the Independent Television Commission should review its advertising policy, the report recommended. Six years on, the converse has happened”.

Apart from the occasional bout of cathartic moral self-interrogation on the part of the sleek purveyors of these ethereal, air-brushed angels nothing interrupts the calculated business as usual cynicism: “For years now the dreaded ‘thin issue’ has plagued the fashion press, who stand accused of promoting a singular and unachievable body shape with every androgynous little sparrow to grace their glossy pages. Every now and then, we see a flutter of concern – when Omega pulled its ads from Vogue in a 1997 protest, for instance, or when the industry’s prime movers were called to a meeting at Downing Street in 2000 to grapple with the issue. What tends to emerge after the dust has died down is a whole lot of nothing. There are occasional forays into the fat zone – a 1997 Nick Knight shoot in Vogue called ‘Modern Curves’ featured plus size model Sara Morrison; in the same year, The Body Shop ran a series of ads with the tag line, ‘There are three billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only eight who do’. Set against the vast portfolio of ‘thimages’ which make up the wallpaper of our lives, these trifling efforts have about as much impact as a bubble on the wind”.

One of the merits of Spencer’s argument is that she does not engage in a simplistic and one-sided attribution of blame, but recognises that we are all caught up in the quest for “self-improvement” with our voracious and insatiable appetite for these noxious products that so corrode our confidence: “Following the Downing Street initiative, Premier, a top model agency, argued convincingly that women who bought fashion magazines were as much to blame as the editors and advertisers who used them. ‘It’s a supply-and-demand thing – advertisers, magazines and agencies supply the image that consumers want to see. Statistics show that if you stick a beautiful skinny girl on the cover of a magazine you sell more copies’”.

Although the camera might flatter more bounteous bodies when bared, when enveloped in folds of cloth the lens is less forgiving (at least our eyes have been rigorously and unrelentingly trained to interpret the images thus) and Spencer reminds us of the fashion magazines’ mission statement, shifting expensive glad rags off the racks and raking in advertising revenues in return: “Boom. The bottom line. Clothes. Put bluntly, clothes look better on a slim frame. ‘Being skinny doesn’t mean you’ve automatically got a good body, not at all,’ confides one wafer-thin friend. ‘Thin definitely doesn’t give you good legs, just thinner legs. But it does, by and large, mean you’ll look alright in clothes’.
And don’t we all of us want that? In my experience, there’s a constant jockeying for position on the weight front among women, a competitive, low-grade bitchery (…) which reveres the dropping of a dress size and stigmatises the gaining of a kilo. Of course, if you’re bright and grown-up and plugged into the issues of the day, you tend not to let on that you’re fascinated by other women’s bottoms. But you are. We are. We look. We compare. In our image-saturated, overweight universe, we’re hypercritical of our peers and our paragons. It’s nothing to do with men (…) and everything to do with competition between females.
‘Women are duplicitous on this issue,’ says Leeds Medical School psychologist Dr Andrew Hill. ‘Much of the pressure about appearance and weight is applied by other women. In the face of nutritional abundance, women are showing their status by eating poorly – much as corpulent belly historically indicated status in times of privation. It’s perverse, but a reverse snobbery now informs our relationship with weight; being thin in an overweight society is a sign of control. It takes enormous will to stay thin.
‘Nationally, we are getting fatter by a percentage point each year – so people who are trying to lose weight, which means most of us, are in awe of the high achievers in the field. We’re also intimately involved in celebrity lives in a way we never used to be. We’re encouraged to have an opinion by an invasive media’”.

The very unattainability of the ideal spurs us to ever greater sacrifices or plunges us into a slough of despondency in which we are exasperated by the recalcitrance and intransigence of our corporeal matter, learning to despise our bodies rather than love them for defying our will (in a virulently unforgiving mind-body duality the most severe of the early Christian ascetics would have been proud of): “For all but the very disciplined – or very disturbed – the kind of hyper-thin portrayed by the stars is an impossible goal, which is why so many Western women are in a constant state of food anxiety. Four in 10 of us are on a permanent diet. Ninety-eight per cent of us hate our bodies. We nurse our own little rituals, weight-management tics that were once the preserve of the Hurleys and Paltrows of this world, carefully tailored to suit our needs. We know how much bread we ate for lunch and whether we can, therefore, have half a potato for supper. We’re living under a siege of our own making, bedevilled by a sickening guilt as we lick the last chocolate smear from a Magnum lolly”.

This mentality is encapsulated in an excerpt from my diary, virtually the only mention of the subject in my lengthy chronicle of adolescent Angst, dating all the way back to 31st July 1983 when I was about to turn 18: “Now, I’m not trying to say that I have an image of myself which is totally unrealistic, but in the opposite direction than previously, i.e. I don’t think I’m the most gorgeous female in the universe. I know that I’m too fat to be really even my own image of perfect beauty, but I’m not all that worried. I still want to lose the weight so I can feel at peace with myself in a quiet, modestly self-confident fashion. I’m not out to attract men, , well, I’m only out to attract one man, CD, but now I don’t constantly worry about every millimetre of fat. I’m actually quite happy as I am, but I know I can be EVEN BETTER, so I’m striving to lose the weight, you see! I’ll get dressed, but I can say to myself and believe that it’s not because I’m an ugly, fat slob that CD doesn’t love me”. I do not believe it was a coincidence that I was a member of a fundamentalist sect at the time, a born-again Christian burning with zeal to convert the world. The message could hardly be clearer: accumulating fat disqualifies you as a sexual being.

Spencer intimates that the cultural climate is likely to turn even more harshly against those of us already dismissed as defective because of our weight: “So, why? Why, after emancipation, feminism, after – ha ha – Girl Power – should pouring yourself into a very small frock be such a stellar achievement? Isn’t it embarrassingly shallow and meaningless?
We persist, says Dr Hill, because weight has come to signify all that is desirable, because ‘judgement of character is increasingly based on superficial appearance. We objectify celebrities, inferring all sorts of things from their physical appearance. Image colours everything, simply because, in a world overloaded with information, we cling to what is most obvious: and that’s how things look’.
The recent influx of what Dr Hill calls ‘talentless self-seeking bimbettes’ into the fame game has only concentrated more fully on looks alone; that’s all that remains now that silly old talent appears to have been excised from the equation. In Victoria Beckham’s case, her ‘thimage’ has become a life raft for a sinking career”.

Mel Hudson (The Guardian, 29th August 2006) spoke up in defence of those who have been spared the tongue-lashings traditionally reserved for the fat in Time to put an end to skinny-bashing: “Over the holiday weekend, the report outlining the ‘obesity timebomb’ [sic] has loomed large (sorry) in the headlines, but the week before it was business as usual as regards the routine vilification of thin women. Witness the Grazia scare-piece, ‘Horror of the Size 00 Girls’, which followed a special report (‘Thin!’) in the Observer, both accompanied by the usual snaps of celebrity women deemed to be dangerously influencing young girls by, er, having pictures of themselves in the papers.
I don’t want to come across like someone complaining about being too rich, but here’s the thing – I’m a very thin woman. Naturally, non-anorexically, without dieting, or doing any exercise. Hard for some people to swallow (sorry again), but there it is. It doesn’t make me beautiful – you could take pictures of me, with my big head and supersized hair, looking as weirdly lollipoppy as Posh, and my partner says my hands remind him of a 90-year-old chicken’s feet. But it doesn’t make me ill. Or morally repugnant. And I’m getting heartily (albeit metaphorically) sick of apparent concern over anorexia providing a sneaky excuse for a sneaky bit of thinny-bashing.
My first hint of this trend came at a parents’ do at my son’s school, when a couple of women launched into the following smalltalk: ‘We’re worried about you – you’re too thin’. Instead of expressing a corresponding anxiety over the likely blood-alcohol level of one, and unfortunate resemblance to Barry Took of the other, I proffered my usual apologies:
Me: Oh, I know! I don’t know why, I mean I eat properly and everything.
Them: Really? Three meals a day?
Me: Yes.
Them: And pudding as well?
Me: Absolutely.
Them: Sweets? Fizzy drinks? Crisps and chocolates between meals?
Me: Er…?Next came Arabella Weir, in a TV documentary by Janet Street-Porter earlier this year, comparing ‘stick-women’ with ‘normal women like me’. Honestly! Just because you don’t want to be oppressed by somebody else’s idea of a norm doesn’t mean you have to set up a new norm, based on yourself, which might be equally impossible for other people to conform to.
And the thin-bashing continues with the current ‘size 00’ hysteria. Mimi Spencer’s Observer article quotes Nadine Coyle saying there is nothing she can do about her skinny legs, and generously ripostes: ‘Oh yes there is Nadine! Try chocolate fudge cake. Works for me every time’. [This passage, which I did not reproduce, is in parentheses in the original piece and is included as part of an analysis of a cover story of a magazine aimed at a teenage audience, which lists the exact weights of various celebrity women] In Grazia, the fascinated talk is of the possibility of Posh’s muscles being eaten from within. Woman-on-woman thinny-phobia is rampant: it’s got to the point where I hardly dare go out for fear of being strung up by my own skinny jeans and force-fed the products of other women’s liposuction.
Luckily, with the news of a massive projected increase in (especially female childhood) obesity, the thin panic has temporarily yoyo’d back into its counterpart, the fat panic.
Maybe I can relax for a while”.

I cannot help feeling that Hudson errs on the side of unfairness in her assessment of Spencer’s original, which, in spite of the infusion of humour throughout, is far more serious in intent than the outburst quoted suggests. In order to shore up her contention that a wave of skinny-bashing is currently in vogue, she overlooks the crucial and unpalatable fact that fat-bashing is the ever-present background radiation of our culture. There is no comparison between the sheer volume of pejorative synonyms for the fat and those for the thin (and I am not advocating that we “salad-dodgers” catch up through a concerted linguistic effort, on the contrary, I would welcome it if all such discriminatory words could be gradually eliminated from the language, although I recognise that this is probably Utopian). Moreover, the number of articles consolidating the pervasive fat-hating ideology vastly outstrips those directed against the thin.

Worship of the super-thin affects fat and thin alike, though not equally. It diverts our energies from more worthwhile pursuits and keeps us conveniently divided in mutual suspicion and hostility. I agree that retaliating for the injuries and injustices heaped upon us “fatties” with skinny-bashing is puerile. Yet school playground chants such as “skinny malincky long-legs with big banana feet” do not carry the devastating censure that even the simplest and most unadorned lexical item such as “fat” conveys. I am not condoning skinny-bashing or snap judgements made on the basis of any size or shape. However, skinniness matches the cultural ideal. Fat does not. For this reason alone, skinny-bashing, even at its most gratuitously nasty, can never resonate so hurtfully. Sniping at the skinny usually contains a component of envy, whereas sniping at the fat bolsters a sense of innate superiority (fostered by the culture). Like fatness, skinniness can result from a variety of factors, yet the fat are uniformly assumed (unless we have some medical condition and can wave the doctor’s certificate under the noses of our detractors) to be victims of our own greed and laziness. The courtesy of even remotely entertaining the notion that the fat person does not sit on the sofa in front of the TV set all day cramming in the cream doughnuts is not extended to us. Nobody wants to be like us. Our presence is banished except perhaps in comedy. We are not vaunted as role models, but lumbering warnings, our frames featuring only from behind and only in reports of impending doom and social collapse.

That we are not left in peace, but constantly chivvied to get a grip on ourselves is illustrated by a couple of contributions to the readers’ letter page in the Daily Mail, (10th July 2006), It’s rude to stare: “Society seems to think it is its duty to alert obese people to their weight. Do these ignorant individuals think we don’t own a mirror or a set of scales?
I have been on the receiving end of these insensitive comments for years, even though most of the time I was only a 14 or 16 dress size, which isn’t enormous.
I was deeply hurt by them when I was younger, but now I think these people are only trying to boost their own flagging self-esteem. They need a lesson in manners.
I’ve made myself a T-shirt saying, ‘B[ollocks] to anybody who is offended by my size’.
I am happy in myself and am lucky to have two wonderful children to show for my big belly and bum. So what if I’m large? I’m not harming you, am I? Get a life, people”.

And, from 6th July 2006, Big, fat lie: “Another anorexic complains that ‘fat people aren’t told they’re fat’. I beg to differ.
At the age of 15, I was told I was fat by my grandmother. I weighed 52kg (just over 8st), a healthy weight for my height, but my brothers teased me about it, leaving me resentful and angry.
I began to eat as a form of control. No one was to tell me not to eat.
Throughout my life, I have been told I am fat, overweight or anything else people think they can say to me. People feel they have the right to comment, whether you’re fat or thin.
However, in today’s fashion-conscious climate, people’s concern for those who are ‘too thin’ is tinged with envy, while they show nothing but disgust when they see someone overweight. Anorexia kills – so does obesity”.

Wendy Shanker, in her marvellous antidote to fat-hatred, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, mercilessly exposes the subtext of an example of grooming talk that has recently gained in popularity: “Why don’t people know how to give a compliment? I brace myself for the following example, which I hear with some regularity:
‘You look great. Have you lost weight?’
‘No, I haven’t. But you just made me feel like shit. Congratulations’.
‘Have you lost weight?’ is a slight. It implies that losing weight is what made you look good. It implies that you looked bad before you lost weight and were therefore not deserving of said compliment. It assumes that you are in a constant state of trying to lose weight, which you may not be. We need to disassociate positive compliments with weigh loss” (op. cit., p237).

She goes on to highlight a similar clanger (one of which I have personal experience. I have never worn a dress since): “NEVER EVER ask a woman if she is pregnant. Not until she starts pulling out sonograms and showing you her registry on babiesareus.com should you ever assume that a woman is with child. When you’re not preggers – just a tub of flub – it’s mortifying. After half a dozen embarrassing encounters that began with ‘When are you due?’ I started giving it right back. Now I almost yearn for someone to ask me about my due date. My standard response is as follows:
‘When are you due?’
‘I’m not pregnant. I’m just fat’.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean…uh…’
Let the other person be embarrassed. It’s not your problem.
My body is not your conversation piece. Sometimes when someone invades my body space by saying something rude to me about my weight, I tell them that fat is contagious – that I used to be a lovely slender girl, then I mocked some chubby chick and woke up fat the next day. Like something out of a Stephen King novel. That shuts ‘em up real quick” (op. cit., pp238-9).

Armando Iannucci’s caustically satirical lambasting of flight passengers’ intolerance to would-be fellow-boarders in the wake of the alleged bomb plot (The Observer, 27th August 2006) Come fly with me – unless you’ve eaten all the pies, that is offers a wonderful illustration of fat-denigration: “An eyewitness writes
We were coming back from our holidays in Spain and it was 3am when the flight was scheduled to depart, so we were all pretty tired, but I still had my wits about me. There were these two strange-looking men who came on the flight at the very last minute, and they were both clinically obese. That’s when me and all the other passengers told the cabin crew we weren’t happy and asked for them to be removed. I think we were right. One of them was so fat that he looked like he might explode at any minute.
When we arrived back in Britain, there was stuff in the paper saying we were over-reacting. But I say, what if one of those clinically obese men had sat next to me? His extreme body weight could either have crushed me to death against the side of the plane or, and this is the nightmare scenario, have heaved me at such pressure against the window that it burst open in mid-flight, sucking me out.
Now, some of you might argue, well, that’s OK, because the fat guy would have got sucked out with you and, as you plummeted to the ground, you could manoeuvre him round so that, when you hit the ground, his thick flesh cushioned your fall. But what you guys don’t seem to consider is the possibility he might have tried to do the same, ending up on top of me so that, even if I’d survived the 30,000ft plunge, I would have been crushed to death by a fatso. A lot of them get trained in things like this when they go off to fat camps”.

Contrast these sentiments with the contents of another genuine reader’s letter from the Daily Mail (19th July 2006), Fat’s entertainment?: “If large people want to be fat and happy, that’s fine by me, as long as they don’t do it in space that I’ve paid for.
A performance at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon was completely ruined for me because I was sitting in seats with no dividing armrests.
A hugely obese lady sat on my left and a grossly overweight man sat on my right. They took up all of their own space and they each took up a third of mine. However much I shuffled, they would not budge.
Because of the discomfort, I could not enjoy the play. I couldn’t sleep that night and the next day I could hardly walk because of the pain in my back.
Perhaps I should have asked them to contribute to the cost of my seat”.

Ianucci then regales us with a veritable lexicon of anti-fat terminology: “A fourth eyewitness writes
We saw a fat man come into our bus. A real lardy. We’re talking Mississippi mud pie on legs. A starch storer. A bingey bugger. Arms like Parma hams. Buttocks that waterfalled down the back of his trousers. Tits like ripe mangoes. Flaps of midriff bigger than furniture. A walking eclipse. Enough body fat to power Chad for six years”.
Although I bow to his linguistic prowess, it evinces a little too much relish to be considered as entirely parodic in intent, methinks.

In Fat Politics, Laurie Ann Lepoff confirms the pressures to which the fat are subject: “Even those closest to me, who loved me and thought they were doing so for my own good, tried to shame me into losing weight. It is as if fat women are under an obligation to be ashamed and disgusted with ourselves, to be constantly at war with food, to be always on a diet or promising to start one next week. We are made to feel that we don’t have the right to nurture ourselves, we are embarrassed to be caught eating! Who does she think she is anyway, eating? She’s fat. She should be eating cottage cheese and celery. Is it not our right to eat? Who the hell are you to be even thinking that you know what I should be doing for my own body and mind’s health, that self-deprivation is for my own good?” (in Lisa Schoenfelder and Barb Wieser (eds.), Shadow on a Tightrope, Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, Glasgow, Rotunda Press, 1983, p204).

As Lepoff indicates there is far more to our predicament than being showered with unsolicited advice by strangers: “There is little validation anywhere for our struggle. We are rarely encouraged to love ourselves (even by our ‘liberated’ feminist sisters), to consider ourselves beautiful, to nurture ourselves. We are expected to hate ourselves, deprive ourselves, and consider ourselves ugly. We maintain a shred of dignity by convincing ourselves that we are working on getting thin and that eventually we will be OK (thin). We desperately need each other’s support to feel strong, powerful, beautiful, and – most importantly – angry. Yet we are so accustomed to despising our own bodies that we despise the fat bodies of our sisters. We oppress each other outrageously. We get together and talk about diets. We don’t take our pain seriously. We don’t validate each other’s experience in this bitter, bigoted world. We skim over the agony of our lives under the assumption that everything that happens to us is really our fault and we deserve it for being fat. We don’t stand up against outrageous bigotry because we accept that it is somehow justified” (op. cit., p205).

Hadley Freeman returns to the issue of thinness in itself constituting sufficient grounds for being thrust into the public spotlight in The six-stone cover stars (The Guardian, 31st August 2006), once again highlighting the hypocrisy inherent in gobbling up the accompanying contrived and strategic denunciations of their insubstantialness (both literal and metaphorical): “Golly, look at all the lovely bones! Nicole Richie, Amy Winehouse, Kate Bosworth: it’s hard to open a magazine without their hip bones jamming up your nose.
As happy chance would have it, I have spent enough time around dangerously ill anorexics to be more au fait with the subject that I’d like. Certainly, most of the above celebrities look like they are suffering from what is euphemistically called ‘issues with food’. But things are a little more complex than that.
In the main, these are women who palpably long to be famous. Becoming thin has brought them the front-cover status that previously eluded them.
Before her weight fell below six-and-a-half stone Nicole Richie was known, if at all, as Paris Hilton’s companion on an American reality TV programme. By the time I interviewed her last winter, so frail she could hardly walk across the restaurant, she was followed by four paparazzi. This week she is on the front covers of at least three glossies. Celebrity magazines might cloak themselves in moral rectitude by pointing out the medical risks these women are incurring by not eating, but the fact that they consistently put them on their covers confirms the celebrities’ belief. No longer does one have to get thin when one becomes famous – simply being skinny makes you famous, which is certainly an intriguing message to send out.
For these women, skinniness has brought them the desired fame. In many ways, their reasoning is more logical than that of your garden-variety anorexic because their justification for not eating is undeniably accurate – if they don’t eat they remain cover material. That these women flaunt their skinniness also proves that they are aware of their shape and want to put it on show, whereas one of the defining symptoms of traditional anorexia is hiding the imagined girth beneath loose, disguising clothes.
When Karen Carpenter died from a heart attack brought on by anorexia the shock felt was partly that she had been so ill. Sure, there were the occasional photos of Carpenter clutching her microphone with a bony wrist, but there was nothing like the weekly updates we get today about Richie’s ribs – we simply did not fetishise skinniness back then. Now we love to look at these women, and the reasons are complex and disgusting. There is an undoubted touch of envy at their willpower. In a newspaper column last week, the writer admitted, ‘I’d love to be as skinny as [them]…I can’t pretend I wouldn’t love to control my weight like [celebrities] can’. But there is also relief at seeing how being skinny can go wrong. It’s like watching a school friend get told off for relying too much on the source material when you couldn’t be bothered to write the essay at all.
Last week’s issue of Grazia, a magazine that has made more hay out of skinny celebrities than a racehorse devours in its lifetime, splashed on its cover photo of Richie. Every separate tendon and ligament was visible. This woman is visibly dying in front of us and we are gawpishly standing around like onlookers at a public beheading.
If any of these magazines – or any of us – really cared about Richie et al’s health as much as all the finger-wagging health warnings suggest, then we would leave them alone and stop looking at photos of them altogether. Then these women would no longer be able to cling on to the well-founded belief that their skinniness brings them fame. And think of it this way: if we all resent their willpower so much, coupled with a pious concern for their health, not looking at photos of them at all would be simultaneously the harshest revenge and the kindest solution”.

An article by Kira Cochrane deals with the implications of Kate Hudson’s triumph in a libel suit against the UK edition of National Enquirer, entitled New trend alert: starlets bite back! (The Guardian, 24th July 2006): “And it is a victory that should, in theory, send a massive warning shot across the bows of the celeb press. After all, treating female celebrities’ bodies as public property, to be pored over and scrutinised to an obsessive degree – their weight fluctuations discussed in minute detail, the state of their fake tans, manicures, depilation and hair extensions rigorously unpicked – has become their main stock in trade. If stars can sue them for suggesting that they have an eating disorder, then, boy, are those guys in trouble!
While female stars’ bodies have always attracted attention (I’m sure that the first Hollywood vamp, Theda Bara, for instance, got occasional stick for her unapologetic plumpness), never has there been such open season on these women’s appearances”.

Like Mimi Spencer, Cochrane touches upon the underlying cultural shift: “There was a time when a female star’s biggest worry was that she would be pictured looking a few pounds overweight in, say, the Daily Mail, and systematically eviscerated for being undisciplined and allowing unsightly dimples to besmirch her once-unblemished skin. Now, though, that concern has been joined by the worry that she will be pictured looking a few pounds, or more, underweight, and accused of being ill, stupid, irresponsible, a bad role model and neurotic. Female celebrities have, I guess, a window of about three pounds within which their weight is allowed to fluctuate. Breach that and it’s knives out.
Not that this is how the stories are generally presented. Instead they’re often drenched in faux-concern for the women involved, whether it’s a bikinied Fern Britton (accused last year of risking her life, and therefore her children’s’ future happiness, by being overweight) or a hot-panted Victoria Beckham (also accused of risking her life and again, her children’s’ future happiness, by being underweight). This tone seeks to justify the stories by implying that they are being written out of concern for the celebrity’s health.
Which, of course, is ridiculous.
Because the real reason that women love these pictures is the intense schadenfreude they provoke. This impulse used to be sated by pictures of celebrities-gone-fat, but, as the population at large has got, uh, ever larger, the enjoyment of looking at such photos has been trumped by looking at ‘skinny-pics’. While photographs of fat stars remind us that the cake habit we’re fostering may be a problem, those of women who seem to disappear when side on (accompanied by captions that emphasise how silly/ill/self-obsessed they must be), make that second Crunchie bar of the day slip down all the better. Ha, readers can think, she’s been depriving herself all that time and – instead of having the desired effect of looking hot, hot, hot – everyone thinks she looks like crap!
The problem being that such enjoyment is, inevitably, fleeting. Because what this scrutiny of female celeb bodies actually adds up to is a constant reminder to women that our own looks are a source of scrutiny; that our bodies, too, are public property, to be discussed and criticised by friends and family. And, indeed, that they will often be the main thing that we are judged upon. This last point is rammed home by the current raft of female stars who seem to feature in the British press for no other reason than their weight loss”.

Schadenfreude, basking in the pleasure of witnessing someone else’s misery, is not pretty. It compensates us for our feelings of inadequacy. These celebrity women act as projections of our own longings and discontents; we spit our ire at them before throwing the mags into the recycling bin with barely a thought. The texts with their phantoms and fantasies are an emotional purgative, a temporary release. And, yes, we “fatties”, the reviled pariahs who are never permitted to rest easy in ourselves, to inhabit our bodies with ease, might want to take secret delight in the spectacle of the adored being given a taste of the medicine we are constantly forced to swallow. This is a side-effect of being forever pitted against each other. I do not look down on the slim, though I might feel excluded when they engage in social bonding chat, lamenting moving up from a size 10 to a size 12. I do not ask them to apologise for their shape. All I desire is to be accorded the same respect.

Cochrane pinpoints another unfortunate aspect of the phenomenon: “And the overall effect of these stories is to infantilise women. Their tone carries the suggestion that women need to be told how to take care of themselves and that we can’t make up our own minds about how to treat our bodies. This is emphasised by the fact that celebrities (…) are rarely granted any achievements, history or significance, except as physical beings”.

In her brilliant deconstruction of the contemporary consumerist surroundings in which we live, Sandra Lee Bartky (Femininity and Domination, New York and London, Routledge, 1990) launches a similar critique: “But the extent to which the identification of women with their bodies feeds an essentially infantile narcissism – an attitude of mind in keeping with our forced infantilisation in other areas of life – is, at least for me, an open question. Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best. Our identities can no more be kept separate from the appearance of our bodies than they can be kept separate from the shadow-selves of the female stereotype (…) There is something obsessional in the preoccupation of many women with their bodies, although the magnitude of the obsession will vary somewhat with the presence or absence in a woman’s life of other sources of self-esteem and with her capacity to gain a living independent of her looks. Surrounded on all sides by images of perfect female beauty – for, in modern advertising, the needs of capitalism and the traditional values of patriarchy are happily married – of course we fall short. The narcissism encouraged by our identification with the body is shattered by these images” (p28).

According to Bartky none of us, fat or thin (though again the fat, identified as the negative against which the full glory of the thin becomes apparent, bear the brunt of censure and ridicule) are exempt from the wearying pursuit of “self-improvement”: “It is a fact that women in our society are regarded as having a virtual duty ‘to make the most of what we have’. But the imperative not to neglect our appearance suggests that we can neglect it, that it is within our power to make ourselves look better – not just neater and cleaner, but prettier, and more attractive. What is presupposed by this is that we don’t look good enough already, that attention to the ordinary standards of hygiene would be insufficient, that there is something wrong with us as we are. Here the ‘intimations of inferiority’ are clear: Not only must we continue to produce ourselves as beautiful bodies, but the bodies we have to work with are deficient to begin with. Even within an already inferiorised identity (i.e., the identity of one who is principally and most importantly a body), I turn out once more to be inferior, for the body I am to be, never sufficient unto itself, stands forever in need of plucking or painting, of slimming down or fattening up, of firming or flattening” (op. cit., p29).

Cochrane does not condemn us outright for our all too human frailty: “Of course, people are always going to look at other people; we are always going to compare and contrast ourselves, and that fascination is natural. The sheer intensity and misogyny of the current focus on women’s looks seems corrosive, though. It would be nice to think that Hudson’s libel win might at least stem this trend for a while, but that’s naïve. While pictures of ‘flawed’ celebrities continue to sell gossip mags, the cycle of female schadenfreude and resulting self hatred will keep whirring on. The fact is that in terms of magazine sales (it does, after all, take quite a glut of products to even attempt to live up to the ideal that’s being sold) these photographs really are worth their weight. And whether the celebrities they feature will ever be valued for anything other than their weight seems unlikely”.

Again, the passage above is worth contrasting with Bartky: “Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours a woman’s body takes on as she matures – the fuller breasts and rounder hips – have become distasteful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh and substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilised face must accompany her infantilised body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.
To succeed in the provision of a beautiful or sexy body gains a woman attention and some admiration but little real respect and rarely any social power. A woman’s effort to master feminine body discipline will lack importance just because she does it: Her activity partakes of the general depreciation of everything female. In spite of unrelenting pressure to ‘make the most of what they have’, women are ridiculed and dismissed for the triviality of their interest in such ‘trivial’ things as clothes and make-up. Furthermore, the narrow identification of woman with sexuality and the body in a society that has for centuries displayed profound suspicion toward both does little to raise her status. Even the most adored female bodies complain routinely of their situation in ways that reveal an implicit understanding that there is something demeaning in the kind of attention they receive” (op. cit., p73).

Just how harmful the proffering of skinny celebrities can be is shown by Maxine Frith’s Most women would rather have a small waist than a big brain (The Independent, 9th January, 2006): “The majority of women would prefer to be slimmer than have a higher IQ, instant wealth or a date with the celebrity of their dreams.
Nineteen out of 20 of the female population say that they place a higher priority on having a smaller waist than on their intelligence.
From a wish list that included never having money worries again, dating the A-list star of their choice or a genius-level IQ score, 51 per cent of women still plumped for a slimmer figure, according to a survey at tescodiets.com.
At a time when one in three women is overweight and a further one in five is obese, exerts said that there was still too much pressure on the female population to be slim.
Barbara Wilson, head of nutrition at tescodiets.com, said: ‘Women’s role models tend to be models and actresses, so there is more emphasis than ever placed upon physical perfection.
‘These statistics reveal just how much pressure women feel there is to be slim in today’s society’”.

Frith shed light on the absurdities of enforced adherence to the “battle of the bulge”: “One in three women admitted that they spend more time worrying about their weight than their finances, jobs or families. And while 29 per cent said their biggest dread was going to the dentist and 16 per cent cited looking for a new job, a massive 40 per cent admitted their worst fear was having to try on clothes in a shop’s communal fitting rooms.
One in three had lied to their friends about how much they weigh and one in four had tried to deceive their partner about their size.
Separate research by the magazine Lighter Life has found that nearly half of women give up their diet within just a week of starting it. One in five female dieters admit that they have hidden food and eaten it in secret while pretending to maintain their new regime.
Bar Hewlett, founder of the Lighter Life company, said: ‘Our survey reveals the extent of women’s desperation.
‘There have been women who hide food in the washing machine, under the plastic bag inside a cereal packet and even up their sleeves’”.

The Daily Mail’s take on the story (unattributed, 10th January 2006) added little of substance, but did consult two women on whether the findings possessed any merit: “Two British businesswomen known for their brainpower dismissed the survey findings.
Nicola Horlick, the investment banker named Superwoman for juggling a City career with a large family, was appalled.
‘It has not been my experience that women aspire to minimise their brains,’ she said.
Jacqueline Gold, chief executive of the lingerie chain Ann Summers, was scathing: ‘This survey is dumbing down women,’ she said. ‘But women can afford to have smaller brains as they are so much bigger then men’s anyway’”.

I have to agree with the interviewees. I have never been apologetic about my academic achievements. They have been the standard according to which I have defined myself (which is one of the reasons why I so deeply resent being written off as nothing more than a stupid, indolent “lardball loser” before I have even opened my mouth).

In case it should be forgotten that the fat in our society are under siege (whereas the thin are not), I would just like to draw attention to a depressing recommendation made in the health care sector as catalogued by Julie Wheldon in NHS should deny obese women IVF, say doctors (Daily Mail, 31st August 2006): “Doctors have called for obese women to be denied free IVF treatment on the Health Service.
The British Fertility Society said they should not receive such treatment unless they had already tried to be slim.
Those who were severely obese should be sidelined from IVF until they had actually lost weight.
Yesterday critics branded the idea as ‘unjustified discrimination’ against fat women.
But others welcomed the guidance, pointing out that obesity can harm fertility and increases the risks of pregnancy.
Given the current cash crisis in the NHS, tough decisions had to be made about priorities, they said.
The society’s proposals will be sent to all primary care trusts responsible for paying for NHS fertility treatment, which are currently left to interpret official guidelines on their own”.

This is an assault on our dignity and access to equal treatment masquerading as rationality. Although I am not disputing that there is a potential for the problems the doctors quoted allude to, the likelihood of damage should be assessed on a case by case basis. Applied wholesale and indiscriminately it merely serves to filter out those who cannot afford to pay for IVF themselves (perhaps fat phobia has assumed such epidemic proportions that denying IVF to potential carriers of the fat gene is a means of extirpating undesirables before they are conceived). Being fat does not automatically mean being chronically unfit and suffering from high blood pressure and the host of other conditions trotted out at every available opportunity to deter us from putting on a few pounds: “And those with a body mass index of 36 should be denied IVF until they have lost weight.
To have a BMI of 36, a 5ft4in woman would need to weigh more than 15 stone.
The society also suggested women with a BMI of 30 should embark on a weight loss programme before starting treatment.
Chairman Dr Mark Hamilton said the recommendations were based on safety concerns for mother and baby.
‘If a woman is severely obese then there are real medical issues about the safety of her being pregnant,’ he said.
‘There are hazards for the mother and baby and problems can develop with complications such as miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, high blood pressure and diabetes.
‘If a woman is severely obese it would not be wise for her to get pregnant until she reduced her weight’”.

Wheldon endeavours to present both sides: “Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics said: ‘In the case of obesity it is a known and proven fact that it is difficult to get pregnant when you are overweight.
‘The very logical response to that is ‘lose weight’ and it therefore seems blindly obvious that any suggestions on those lines are in the interests of curing infertility without wasting money. We are talking about limited funding and how it is allocated’.
But Dr Evan Harris, Liberal Democrat member of the Commons science and technology committee, said the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence had already set out guidance on this which did not suggest banning treatment for obese women.
‘This is unjustified discrimination as fat women are being singled out for exclusion from treatment altogether,’ he said.
‘NICE already looked at this in huge detail and concluded such a cut off was not justified’”.

An insert accompanying the article focuses on one particular case: “Debra Howarth, 39, was devastated when told she was too fat for fertility treatment on the NHS.
She admits she was about two stone overweight at the time, with a BMI above 30.
But she felt well and did not have any health problems linked to being overweight.
Luckily Mrs Howarth, an NHS kitchen supervisor from Barnsley, and her husband David won some money and were able to pay for IVF treatment themselves. To their delight she became pregnant first time and is due to give birth in October.
But she is adamant that weight guidelines for NHS fertility treatment are unfair.
‘I have worked all my life and paid my national insurance and never asked for anything. The only thing I wanted in life was a family and because of my weight they said no. I think it is really unfair. It is all wrong’”.

An editorial in The Independent (31st August 2006) A rational approach attempted to deflect criticisms that the proposed restrictions represent overt discrimination: “The very suggestion that obese women could be denied IVF treatment on the NHS has prompted a predictable outcry. The reason is that many detect a whiff of moral censure, just as they did when it was proposed that smokers should not be considered for major heart surgery. Smoking and obesity are fast becoming the behavioural crimes of our age. It is all too tempting for those so afflicted that the health establishment is trying to penalise them still further.
As with smokers and heart operations, however, those who are now objecting to what they see as a new form of discrimination are very much barking up the wrong tree. The latest recommendation comes not from the NHS – which could be accused of looking for new ways of penny-pinching – but from the British Fertility Society. As such, it constitutes the combined wisdom of leading specialists in the field. And their rationale has nothing to do with obesity as such, but with the effect of being overweight on the likely success of treatment.
In an ideal world, the number of IVF clinics would exceed demand. Any woman who had difficulty in conceiving would be referred automatically and granted as many courses of NHS-funded treatment as she chose. But this is not an ideal world. Across the country, the NHS is nowhere near meeting the Government-decreed requirement to provide women with three courses of publicly funded treatment.
The intervention of the BFS is an effort to ensure IVF treatment on the NHS is provided to those most likely to benefit. Its research shows that women who are obese – a condition which it defines quite exactly as having a body mass index of 36 or more – are far less likely to conceive as a result of IVF. The same applies to women who are deemed to be greatly underweight or who are over 40. The BFS suggests these groups of women should also be excluded from free treatment.
The other purpose of its recommendations is to hasten the end of the so-called postcode lottery for IVF, which causes so much justified resentment. In many parts of the country, women who are obese, or even simply overweight, already find it difficult to be accepted for treatment. If there are measurable criteria for granting or denying a woman free treatment in future, this is about as fair as it can get.
Of course, there must be room for specialists to exercise discretion. And, of course, the wealthier will pay for treatment, just as they can at present. But where free treatment is concerned, there is an urgent need for a system, backed by clinical data, that makes the best possible use of public money”.

If this punitive decision had been an isolated manifestation of fat-loathing, I might have been more amenable to the author’s claim. There have already been calls to ration health care by excluding the lower income brackets who happen not to conform with the chart definitions of “normality” (the authoritativeness of which are increasingly disputed by members of the medical profession itself). When taken together with the fat being routinely turned down as candidates for adoption (fitness for parenting being a fundamental criterion of social acceptance) it assumes a more sinister aspect. Make no mistake: we will have to stop accepting the guilt imposed upon us and stand up for our liberties before it is too late.

Carnival of Feminists

2006-08-17T09:40:00.000+02:00

On September 6th I will be hosting the 22nd Carnival of Feminists on the revamped version of Redemption Blues. The call for submissions has been posted there accordingly.

Sticks and Stones

2006-08-10T14:14:00.000+02:00

When faced with the dilemma of how to fill a few column inches, a problem exacerbated by the summer recess triggered absence of local politicians, whose grotesque antics are always good for a juicy scandal or two, less traditional targets might stray into the journalist’s sights. Recently the prospect of a couple of book deals for bloggers on the brink of making the reverse transition to the old medium of print from the new of the computer screen has elicited shudders of unconcealed distaste from the newspaper establishment. The “upstart press” to quote from Trevor Butterworth’s extended piece Time for the last post in the venerable Financial Times magazine, which appeared long before the “silly season” (18th-19th February 2006), “a raffish army of citizen journalists”, were no longer content to poach readers from home, but appeared to be laying siege to the bastions of privilege, thudding at the gates with a battering ram, not quite the done thing.

As befits the institution in whose employ he puts pen to paper (or perhaps, to avail myself of a more contemporary image, fingers to keyboard), Butterworth peppered his article with statistics: “At the close of 2002, there were some 15,000 blogs. By 2005, 56 new blogs were starting every minute”.

In spite of this explosion of popular interest, online expression might have remained on the margins, dismissed as a mere sideshow by the complacent arbiters of what constitutes worthy copy: “Still, blogging would have been little more than a recipe for even more internet tedium if it had not been seized upon in the US as a direct threat to the mainstream media and the conventions by which they control news. And one of the conventions that happened to work in blogging’s favour was the way the media take a new trend and describes it as a revolution”.

According to Butterworth it was in run up to US elections in 2004 that an exposé concerning Bush’s national guard service catapulted blogging into the consciousness of the opinion-formers: “This seemed to prove one of blogging’s biggest selling points – that the collective intelligence of the media’s audience was greater than the collective intelligence of any news programme or newspaper.
It also showed that blogging was irrepressible – that power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society that would have gladdened the heart of the philosopher Karl Popper. And it solidified the belief among conservatives that blogging was a way to take down their longstanding enemies in the once impregnable fortress of the liberal press.
As syndicated radio host and law professor Hugh Hewitt wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard last August, ‘It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information revolution is advancing – or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly”.
We are witnessing ‘the dawn of a blogosphere dominant media,’ announced Michael S. Malone, who has been described as ‘the Boswell of Silicon Valley’. ‘Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news and has created a whole group of major media companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies’”.

Enthusiasm about this new discovery (a scoop is always a feather in a hack’s cap) generated a series of overblown predictions, spouted with the gusting and gutsy hyperbole of the trend-spotter. Butterworth was not so easily seduced by the self-appointed prophets: “But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave ‘new economy’ a few years ago?
Shouldn’t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one – especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?
I suspect so, not least because the ‘dinosaur’ businesses of the old economy have a canny ability to absorb, adapt and evolve”.

To consolidate his depiction of blogging as more sound bite than substance, Butterworth goes on to quotes Choire Sicha, (senior editor at the New York Observer): “The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things – the purview of old media – is arguably more important.
‘As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure,’ he added. ‘But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they’re all excited about the global reach of blogs? Right, tell it to China’”.

Between them, Butterworth and Sicha have touched upon a highly pertinent issue: imbalances in the resources available. Newspapers command the kind of the kind of resources the average blogger, in splendid isolation, cannot even dream of, let alone match. Of course, by this I mean time, staffing and financial clout as well as the sheen of authority that accrues from a painstakingly built up role within wider society and the ability to regulate membership of the profession. Even a semi-promising lead can be followed up by an aspiring youngster keen to make his or her mark without a catastrophic impact on the budget. Newspapers have successfully withstood the onslaught of television because they have recognised their strengths: in depth coverage of events, more penetrating analysis at one remove as opposed to the more superficial running commentary as events unfold from TV correspondents huddling in a bomb crater with their satellite phones, stories that television may have neglected or ignored, human interest tales, interviews, dispatching an intrepid undercover reporter with a hidden camera to pose as a member of the care staff in old folk’s homes and reveal the appalling treatment of the elderly and the like. Newspapers have not cornered the market in intellectual capacity, however, for all their smug self-righteousness. Only the leisured elite with a mission beyond blowing thousands on the latest accessories and gimmicks and sipping cocktails on the decks of their private yachts might aspire to risking life and limb in pursuit of a more authentic glimpse of the suffering engendered by entrenched hatred and conflict. The rest of us are constrained by the dull necessity of keeping up our day jobs. This does not automatically disqualify us from having anything worthwhile to say, however. Only snobbery and the condescension of peering down into the unsavoury depths from an exalted perch would induce the observer to contend otherwise.

Butterworth relentlessly catalogues what he perceives to be the inherent shortcomings of the phenomenon: “(…) another under-acknowledged weakness of the blogger uprising: to make it in blogging seems to mean making it out of blogging”, and, on the subject of context: “Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed societies; but for those in the west trying to blog their way into viable business, the economics are daunting.
The inherent problem with blogging is that your brand resides in individuals. If they are fabulous writers, someone is likely to lure them away to a better salary and the opportunity for more meaningful work; if the writer tires and burns out, the brand may go down in flames with them”.

Firstly, not every blogger is motivated by a lust for fame, nor is it true that every “fabulous writer” will be rewarded, whisked off Cinderella-like in a glittering coach to meet the handsome agent who will transform her dreary existence forever with his glass slipper of redemptive adoration. The sheer proliferation of sites mitigates against discovery.

Secondly, it would be a mistake (albeit one all too commonly made) to equate popularity with quality in any transparent sense. Here the analogy with best-sellers is apt: just because it shifts from the shelves does not make it more valuable to humanity in absolute terms. The sales figures for Kritik der reinen Vernunft might not justify its inclusion in the Top Ten lists (except perhaps of works by German philosophers), but this is surely not the measure of its contribution to human knowledge.

Nor does such a “crude” numbers-based approach dovetail with the founding conceit of the work of art (based largely on scarcity value and the entitlement of a group of consecrated experts, the critics, to pass their verdict on inclusion in the canon) so brilliantly dissected by Pierre Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production: “There is in fact every reason to suppose that the constitution of the aesthetic gaze as a ‘pure’ gaze, capable of considering the work of art in and for itself, i.e. as a ‘finality without an end’, is linked to the institution of the work of art as an object of contemplation, with the creation of private and then public galleries and museums, and the parallel development of a corps of professionals appointed to conserve the work of art, both materially and symbolically. Similarly, the representation of artistic production as a ‘creation’ devoid of any determination or any social function, though asserted from a very early date, achieves its fullest expression in the theories of ‘art for art’s sake’; and, correlatively, in the representation of the legitimate relation to the work of art as an act of ‘re-action’ claiming to replicate the original creation and to focus solely on the work in and for itself, without any reference to anything outside it” (The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1983, p36). Some bloggers will be inspired (and derive solace in the face of their relatively poor visitor stats from the notion of a concomitantly refined and exclusive audience) by such a pretension. Bourdieu beautifully captures the underlying and obscured dynamic as well as the tensions at play: “In other words, the specificity of the literary and artistic field is defined by the fact that the more autonomous it is, i.e. the more completely it fulfils its own logic as a field, the more it tends to suspend or reverse the dominant principle of hierarchisation; but also that, whatever its degree of independence, it continues to be affected by the laws of the field which encompasses it, those of economic and political profit. The more autonomous the field becomes, the more favourable the symbolic power balance is to the most autonomous producers and the more clear-cut is the division between the field of restricted production, in which the producers produce for other producers, and the field of large-scale production [la grande production], which is symbolically excluded and discredited (this symbolically dominant definition is the one that the historians of art and literature unconsciously adopt when they exclude from their object of study writers and artists who produced for the market and have often fallen into oblivion). Because it is a good measure of the degree of autonomy, and therefore of presumed adherence to the disinterested values which constitute the specific law of the field, the degree of public success is no doubt the main differentiating factor. But lack of success is not in itself a sign and guarantee of election and poètes maudits, like ‘successful playwrights’, must take account of a secondary differentiating factor whereby some poètes maudits may also be ‘failed writers’ (even if exclusive reference to the first criterion can help them to avoid realising it), while some box-office successes may be recognised, at least in some sectors of the field, as genuine art.
Thus, at least in the most perfectly autonomous sector of the field of cultural production, where the only audience aimed at is other producers (as with Symbolist poetry), the economy of practices is based, as in a generalised game of ‘loser wins’, on a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies: that of business (it excludes the pursuit of profit and does not guarantee any sort of correspondence between investments and monetary gains), that of power (it condemns honours and temporal greatness), and even that of institutionalised cultural authority (the absence of any academic training or consecration may be considered a virtue)” (op. cit., pp38-9).

If, however, we focus on filthy lucre, Butterworth gives bloggers who might indulge in a reverie of transforming their output into a viable livelihood a cold shower: “After talking to various people in the new media world, it’s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics.
The problem is that few blogs do even that much traffic. According to the monitoring done by thetruthlaidbear.com, only two blogs get more than 1 million visitors a day and the numbers drop quickly after that: the 10th ranked blog for traffic gets around 120,000 visits; the 50th around 28,000; the 100th around 9,700; the 500th only 1,400 and the 1000th under 600. By contrast, the online edition of The New York Times had an average of 1.7 million visitors per weekday last November, according to the Nielsen ratings, and the physical paper a reach of 5 million people per weekday, according to Scarborough research.
That is one reason why advertisers are still sticking with the mainstream media. The other has to do with the very basic selling point of blogging. ‘There is a certain loss of control when it comes to advertising on blogs,’ said Mark Wnek, chairman and chief creative officer of Lowe New York. ‘The connection the most popular citizen journalists cultivate with their devotees is through an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression, and that can be quite uncomfortable territory for a traditional marketeer’”.

It therefore smacks of empty histrionics to invoke an apocalyptic scenario, the terminal decline of the traditional print media triggered by blogging, although, as we shall see, certain moguls, eager to portray themselves as having a nose for innovation, as cool, hip and savvy and anxious to carve a niche for themselves in history as the first to spot the next big thing, might expatiate on the subject.

When assessing the likelihood of blog entries standing the test of time, Butterworth predictably airbrushes out the toll taken by the relentless contractual obligations under which journalists churn out vast screeds: “If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium”. He clarifies his intention as follows: “The point is, any writer of talent needs the time and peace to produce work that has a chance of enduring”.

Whereas I agree that with the exception of a few prodigies the scribblings of a teenager might not yield deep insights into the human condition, that writing style, like good wine, takes time and continual honing to mature he is nevertheless falling prey to a widespread misconception about the nature of blogging. A blog is what its author makes it. There is no commandment stipulating that it must be updated on an hourly or daily basis in order to fit into the category. Many blogs do conform to those parameters, but these are likely to be the most ephemeral, the most vapid, although I would not advance this as an unbending proposition. After all, poets might be seized with a godlike spark of inspiration and within minutes produce a literary masterpiece. There is much wisdom and poignant truth to be gleaned from the seemingly banal, as a brief perusal of Sei Shonagon’s pillow book will reveal. Rapid updates do not constitute an imperative. The flighty and capricious clicker might not make the effort to return if nothing new is forthcoming for a few days or weeks, but frankly the dwindling of their interest is hardly worth worrying about.

He hammers home the accusation in his conclusion: “(…) the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the world-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news”.
David Nicholson reflected the ambivalence and unease provoked by the internet in print media circles in Newspapers need to get a handle on the internet threat (The Independent media weekly, 27th February 2006) summarising the contributions made at a conference in Cambridge held at the Judge Business School Media and Business conference: “Most alarmist and gloomy was Andrew Gowers, until recently editor-in-chief of the Financial Times, who compared print to vinyl records. ‘Ink on dead trees,’ he called it, with the entire industry facing a ‘wrenching change’, unlike any previous upheaval. ‘The digital revolution takes in all income streams,’ he said, dismissing new formats and DVD giveaways as ‘sticking plasters’ on the dying patient.
In the US, households apparently spend 30 per cent of their media time online, whereas advertisers are spending only 8 per cent of their budgets there. Dollars are going to migrate, along with eyeballs, Gowers predicts. Classified ads are just one element: property and job adverts are going ‘helter-skelter’ online, he says. This means that hundreds of millions of pounds, traditionally spent on print, are ‘going to go down the gurgler’. Or down the Googler, perhaps.
Google, of course, presents an altogether more frightening threat than any mere alternative ads sales site, as it can divorce advert searches from any kind of journalistic content, making the print ‘bundle’ of editorial in an advertising context redundant”.

The tenacity of the newspapers was once again the upbeat message designed to reassure those prone to fretting: “Last (…) onto the stage was Independent News and media’s chief executive Ivan Fallon. Fallon played the elder statesman, remembering how (…) the doom-mongers had predicted that radio, then colour TV, would be the death of newspapers. ‘Each time, papers have changed and adapted,’ he said”.

Bloggers do not figure as a threat and, echoing Butterworth’s optimism about the only slightly diminished attractiveness of the traditional media to advertisers, Nicholson forecast a bright future: “Certainly, the financial markets seem not to share the more pessimistic forecasts, still putting high premiums on print publishing businesses, presumably figuring that whatever shifts in technology, distribution and content come along, the incumbents are able to adapt and exploit new opportunities. As for print itself, why would Rupert Murdoch be investing a rumoured £600m in new presses if the world’s biggest media tycoon thought it was a dying industry?”

Ironically, only a couple of weeks later Owen Gibson chronicled a startling volte-face on the part of the ultimate magnate in Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch (The Guardian, 14th March 2006): “Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today’s internet pioneers to explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a ‘second great age of discovery’”.

Bloggers had appeared on Murdoch’s radar: “‘Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry – the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors,’ said Mr. Murdoch (…)
Far from mourning its passing, he evangelised about a digital future that would put that power in the hands of those already launching a blog every second, sharing photos and music online and downloading television programmes on demand. ‘A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it,’ he said”.

Suddenly we were deemed worthy of being taken seriously: “The owner of Fox News added: ‘never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds’”.

Indeed Murdoch’s tough business rhetoric must have sent shivers down the spines of those who had taken their cushy number for granted: “(…) he declared: ‘I believe we are at the dawn of a golden age of information – an empire of new knowledge’.
But he combined his new-found enthusiasm for the digital future with a ‘change or die’ message for the monolithic media empires of the 20th century.
‘Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall,’ he warned. ‘That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet’”.

Not that he foresaw complete obsolescence for his stable of papers or those owned by his competitors: “He had some words of hope for his industry peers buffeted by declining circulations, free titles and the internet. ‘I believe traditional newspapers have many years of life, but, equally, I think in the future that newsprint and ink will be just one of many channels to our readers,’ he said, predicting a future in which ‘media becomes like fast food’ with consumers watching news, sport and film clips as they travel, on mobile phones or handheld wireless devices.
‘Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart,’ he enthused.
Following its chairman’s change of heart, News Corp has splashed out close to $1bn (£578m) on internet investments.
Most tellingly, the company spent $400m on MySpace.com, the social networking phenomenon that has proved hugely popular with 35m regular users on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Murdoch has undergone a Damascene conversion, admitting he hugely underestimated the power of the web. He said last night: ‘It is a creative, destructive technology that is still in its infancy, yet breaking and remaking everything in its path. We are all on a journey, not just the privileged few, and technology will take us to a destination that is defined by the limits of our creativity, our confidence and our courage’”.

Arianna Huffington’s Now the little guy is the true pit bull of journalism (The Guardian, 14th March 2006) cast bloggers in a positive light, arguing that conventional and more innovative formats did not have to engage in mortal combat, but could peacefully cohabit: “I am frequently asked if the rise of the blogosphere is the death knell for Big Media. My answer is that Big Media isn’t dead; it’s critically ill but will actually be saved by the transfusion of passion and immediacy of the blogging revolution. Blogging and the new media are transforming the way news and information are disseminated, as evidenced by the number of traditional media outlets (…) dipping their collective toe into the blog pond.
Blogs are by nature very personal – an intimate, often ferocious expression of the blogger’s passions. You’re much more intimate when you’re writing a blog than when you’re writing a column, let alone a book: the conversational nature of it, the way that it draws people in and includes them in the dialogue. You may set out to write about politics but, in the end, you write about yourself, about the things you care about beyond politics. And this creates a close bond between blogger and audience.
It really does become a conversation. I’ve always enjoyed bringing people together from different parts of my life and facilitating interesting conversations. In the past, these have taken place around dinner tables. Now, via cyberspace, those conversations have gone global. And they are happening in real time”.

The egalitarian aspect exerted a clear appeal: “Blogging has empowered the little guy – levelling the playing field between the media haves and the media have-only-a-laptop-and-an-internet-connection. It’s made the blogosphere an invaluable tool for holding the mainstream media’s feet to the fire”.

Bobbie Johnson reinforced the impression that we were to be allowed in from the cold in Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers (The Guardian, 18th April 2006): “Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a ‘disproportionately large influence’ on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although ‘active’ web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.
More than half the internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23% only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net – through messageboards, websites and blogs – are helping change the national conversation, say researchers”.

Johnson sounded out one of the participants in the project, Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research: “Although unprompted contributors are generally younger and more vocal than the wider online population, they are increasingly important as opinion formers and trend-setters. Mr Smith says businesses, media organisations and advertisers reading blogs should be wary of making assumptions about their wider significance, but that their muscle cannot be ignored.
‘They’re not representative of the larger audience, but what they’re saying does matter,’ he said. ‘It’s a good straw poll – a snapshot of the verbal conversations going on that we can’t measure’.
‘That’s exactly right,’ said Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids, which explores the explosion in web punditry. ‘Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ – the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed’.
There are now more than 35m blogs around the world, according to search engine Technorati. While most bloggers only write for small audiences, they can sometimes achieve wider fame or become the focus of consumer campaigns”.

Johnson closed with an affirmation of bloggers’ clout: “Mr Reynolds admits the idea of small groups being able to pressurise wider decisions is nothing new, but those who ignore online buzz do so at their peril”.

Nothing lasts, particularly not in a setting where restlessness is the driving force, where snuffling about for the sensational can boost profit margins. Not that blogging is an unsullied paradise of blue skies with no clouds on the horizon.

Mary Dejevsky in There’s a good reason why women don’t write blogs. (The Independent, 29th June 2006) speculated on the root causes of why male bloggers vastly outnumber their female counterparts. She began by taking a certain Iain Dale, Tory MP, to task for certain crass and execrable statements on his site: “‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem bloggers,’ he wrote, ‘you won’t find many written by women’. He went on to observe, admitting the sexist stereotype, that women, ‘being much better gossips than men, ought to be ideally suited to the world of blogging’. I curtail his prolixity, but he concludes: ‘There must be some reason why women don’t blog as much as men in the political sector’.
Well, Iain, I venture to correct you on one point. It is not just in the political sector, as you call it, that fewer women blog. Except in areas such as childcare and gynaecology, it is across the board that women bloggers are few and far between. And it does not take a huge [leap] of the imagination to suggest at least two reasons why.
The first is that, for all the efforts to educate men and women equally, to encourage them to compete for honours, even to feminise the education system by introducing coursework, women (still) tend to be more bashful than men about what they think. It is not that, as veteran male gender-warriors might growl, we have much to be bashful about. It’s rather that we tend to be less confident than men that the rest of the world wants the benefit of our opinion.
Men seem to take it for granted not only that they have something to say, but that the rest of us should find it worth hearing – or, in the case of the blogosphere, reading”.

I agree with Dejevsky that the traditional discourse of femininity has actively discouraged women from expressing their opinions forcefully, preferring to confine us to the role of shoulder to cry on, by definition a supporting role, the affirmation we give through empathic listening recognised by Susan Maushart as one element of “wifework”. Stifling our ambition, or for that matter any hope of fulfilling our intellectual and creative potential was the norm. Instead of excellence and achievement we were fobbed off with the consolation prize of drudgery (or stagnant and decorative docility depending on our economic status) in the bosom of the family. Our energies subsumed into our reproductive activity. In the past outspokenness was incompatible with the socially sanctioned demureness that women were encouraged to cultivate, that was posited as our very nature and essence. Accusations of being a “harridan”, a “shrew” or a “scold” served to keep us in line with the weight of disapproval and harsher penalties.

I part company with her over our lack of confidence, although she admits to not buying into her own argument fully: “Our female bashfulness, I submit, may be gradually being drummed out of us by a combination of good teaching, co-ed schools, and the example of opinionated women expressing forthright views in other parts of politics and the media. The second reason why women don’t blog, however, is more serious, because it is more intractable: women simply do not have the time.
Earlier this week, I heard Finland’s minister for foreign trade and development, speaking in London to celebrate the centenary of women’s suffrage in Finland. They were the first women in Europe to gain the vote. And the record of women’s participation in Finnish life is as laudable as one would expect from Scandinavia.
Yet, as Ms Paula Lehtomaki noted, without the diffidence that might attend the same observation in this country, the next frontier had to be the home. Women had come a long way: safeguards against discrimination, for equal pay and opportunities were all in place and largely observed. But the fact was that in joining the workforce on equal terms, women were all too often tied to two jobs: equality, even in enlightened Scandinavia, all too often stops at the front door.
How many homes are there – here, or in high-tech savvy Finland – where the man will think it quite excusable to shuffle in late for dinner because he has been reading or writing his online diary, but would greet with ridicule or fury the prospect of dinner being late (or non-existent) because his partner had been delayed in the blogosphere?
And for dinner, we can substitute baby’s bathtime, the children’s high tea, the regular taxi service families run between sports and after-school clubs, the elderly parents that need looking after. It is this old-fashioned, and persistent, division of responsibilities that frees men to indulge in the time-consuming fashion of the day, and the gadgetry and self-aggrandisement involved in blogging only make it that much more attractive”.

There may well be paragraph after paragraph of legislation on the statute books prohibiting wage discrimination, yet the pay gap yawns ever wider. Dejevsky is right to lament the persistence of leisure and “me time” disparities that deprive many women of the opportunity to develop their own voice in a blog.

By way of a corrective to both Dale and Dejevsky’s contention that few women venture into political blogging, I turn to Kira Cochrane’s The third wave – at a computer near you (The Guardian, 31st March 2006): “(…) there has been an explosion of feminist blogs, including many that have a highly professional edge, and a large, loyal readership. The feminist movement has always produced plenty of meaty writing and lively debate: witness Sylvia Pankhurst’s newspaper, the Woman’s Dreadnought, through the pamphleteering of the 1970s second wave, and the vibrant ’zine culture of the 1990s’ ‘riot grrrl’ movement. Prior to the blogosphere though, distribution remained local for all but a few major publications, such as Spare Rib, Ms, or, latterly, Bust and Bitch magazines.
Now though, the third wave (a movement often dismissed as a myth) has gone online”.

In quantitative terms: “A recent estimate put the number of feminist blogs at 240,000, but, given that this posited the number of ‘active’ worldwide blogs at 4m (some figures out it as high as 27.2m), and the proportion of women who are self-described feminists (a British survey this month produced a figure of 29%) the true figure could be much higher” (and not all women bloggers regard themselves as feminists, which suggests that rather than there being a dearth of women writers in the blogosphere, the real problem is the comparative lack of publicity given to them except where they conform to an easily distinguishable, unchallenging profile as ditzy singletons looking for love in the Bridget Jones mould, or dispense sex tips. How many women academic bloggers are ever included in the occasional review of the delights the blogosphere has to offer? If you cannot be easily pigeonholed you might as well resign yourself to eternal obscurity).

Cochrane too is aware of the limitations arising from blogging being the preserve of those who can afford it, those who have the time and money at their disposal to embrace it as a hobby or something more serious: “But is it all just sound and fury? The blogs reflect second-wave ideas of consciousness raising and the personal as political (many women write about their experiences of rape and sexual assault), but there’s a question mark over how this feeds into grass-roots activism.
Nina Wakeford, a sociologist at the University of Surrey, is cautious about blogging’s influence. ‘I think the way blogs can provoke debate is useful,’ she concedes, ‘but it isn’t clear how much they feed into activism. In the past, there was a clear role for women’s organisations as regards representations to government, but I’m not sure whether women can affect public policy through blogging. Just who are they representing?’
This last question is interesting. As with second-wave feminism, this online movement is open to the accusation that it simply represents privileged white women. ‘Blogging is still somewhat limited, of course,’ says Georgia Gaden, a postgraduate researcher who has studied feminist blogs, ‘because although we take our access for granted, many women, globally, don’t have that luxury’”.

Before proceeding to examine two recent polemics directed against bloggers by well-known columnists, I would like to dwell for a moment on the social make-up of the journalistic profession, with which bloggers are routinely assimilated by the unimaginative (this narrowly conceives of blogging as a news-oriented and news-dependent format). Richard Garner and Ben Russell’s front page headline in The Independent, Stranglehold (15th June 2006) inaugurated the debate: "The private school system still has an extraordinary stranglehold on top jobs in the UK and their grip on the most influential jobs in the land has increased rather than diminished over the past 20 years, a series of reports shows.
The latest research, published today, reveals that the percentage of top positions in the British media going to former private school pupils has risen by more than 10 per cent since 1986. The report on the media follows similar reports on the legal profession and on MPs, which reached similar conclusions.
The research, published by the Sutton Trust education charity, shows that of the leading 100 media opinion-formers, 54 per cent came from private schools, compared with 49 per cent 20 years ago. Thirty-three per cent of the remainder came from selective grammar schools - while only 14 per cent were from comprehensive schools, which cater for 90 per cent of all pupils”.

Labour’s pledge to enhance social mobility was clearly foundering: “What is most alarming for Mr Blair is the feeling among leading professionals that the trend towards more privately educated people getting top jobs is likely to grow. This was especially evident in the media, where senior journalists and broadcasters warned that people from poor homes were unlikely to be able to survive the low pay and job insecurity at the start of a career in the media”.

The statistical evidence was eloquent: “The report shows that only 14 per cent of the leading 100 journalists attended comprehensive schools, 33 per cent were grammar school pupils and 45 per cent had been to Oxford or Cambridge. Oxford predominated, with 37 per cent.
It lists five reasons: the privileged can survive on the low pay and high insecurity of the early years in the profession; they are more able to afford to live in London in the early stages of their careers; they can afford the fees for postgraduate journalism courses; are more likely to have personal and family connections in the trade; and exude more confidence and networking skills. There were similar findings from surveys of barristers and judges (…)”.

Peter Wilby picked up on the theme in All you need to succeed in our meritocracy is privilege (The Guardian, 17th June 2006): "We cannot say we weren't warned. In his dystopian satire The Rise of Meritocracy, published in 1958, Michael Young warned that meritocracy wouldn't lead to equality but to a new, more vicious form of elitism. That is exactly what has happened. Inequalities of wealth and income are as ever, but, more importantly, the new elite makes no apologies for its privileges, including the privilege of ensuring an easy passage through life for its own children.
Journalism, for example, was once one of the most democratic occupations: people started on their local papers at 15 or 16 and rose to top positions in the national press. Now, as research published this week by the Sutton Trust shows, it is among the most elitist. Most leading journalists and news broadcasters went to fee-charging schools. Only a minority went to comprehensives, which have educated 90% of the nation's children for the past 25 years.
This is not surprising, since entry to journalism, now a more powerful and coveted career than it used to be, brings into play the triple advantages of the upper-middle classes. First, you need a degree, preferably from Oxbridge, and the fee-charging schools are factories dedicated to getting the necessary A-levels. Second, you increasingly need family money, to finance you through either a postgraduate diploma or an unpaid internship. Third, you need connections - and preferably a metropolitan base - to help you get a foothold. Only after that does your talent as a journalist come into it”.

Other less immediately apparent factors also had a part to play: “US researchers have found that the average three-year-old born to a professional family has had 700,000 'encouragements' addressed to him or her, against 60,000 for a child born to parents on welfare. No wonder there are few people from deprived backgrounds in journalism, an occupation that requires a large ego and boundless confidence in your own superior wisdom”.

Will Hutton joined the chorus of righteous indignation in The British middle class is operating a closed shop (The Observer, 18th June 2006): “But, as the Sutton Trust report accepts, school and university are necessary preconditions for access to high-status jobs, but alone they are not sufficient. To succeed in the media, you have to have the means to live in expensive London while receiving dirt-poor initial wages; you need connections to get a first job in an industry where entry is notoriously undemocratic; and you need the inner self-confidence and external capacity to present yourself well. The privately educated score better on all counts against their state-school rivals”.

Alongside these barriers, we must go back to Bourdieu for a framework in which to evaluate the spiteful ruminations of Janet Street-Porter (whom I confess to having a lot of sympathy for on other topics): “The struggle in the field of cultural production over the imposition of the legitimate mode of cultural production is inseparable from the struggle within the dominant class (with the opposition between ‘artists’ and ‘bourgeois’) to impose the dominant principle of domination (that is to say – ultimately – the definition of human accomplishment)” (op. cit., p41).

Against this backdrop the condescending connotations of the phrase “citizen journalist” are thrown into high relief (they might be articulate and intelligent, but ultimately they are mere amateurs). It is a matter of full-time journalists in national papers fencing off their territory with barbed words in place of barbed wire. As Bourdieu puts it: “(…) the definition of writer (or artist, etc.) is an issue at stake in struggles in every literary (or artistic, etc.) field. In other words, the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer. The established definition of the writer may be radically transformed by an enlargement of the set of people who have a legitimate voice in literary matters. It follows from this that every survey aimed at establishing the hierarchy of writers predetermines the hierarchy by determining the population deemed worthy of helping to establish it. In short, the fundamental stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy, i.e., inter alia, the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorised to call themselves writers; or, to put it another way, it is the monopoly of the power to consecrate producers or products (we are dealing with a world of belief and the consecrated writer is the one who has the power to consecrate and win assent when he or she consecrates an author or a work – with a preface, a favourable review, a prize, etc.)” (op. cit., p42).

Street-Porter used the vehicle provided by her weekly column to launch a blistering attack on bloggers in Blog off: You don’t want to know what I weight today (do you)? (The Independent on Sunday, 23rd July 2006). It started innocuously enough: “We’ve become a nation of bloggers who spend hours each day tapping out our innermost thoughts and posting them on the internet”.

She soon took the gloves off, however: “I’ll come clean at this point. A year or so ago, I set up a website, janet-streetporter.com, to promote my books and one-woman show – and it’s most definitely NOT interactive. You can log on, have a laugh, sneer at my old publicity photos, read some columns and log off again. I don’t crave a ‘dialogue’ with you, nor am I going to bore you to death by posting what I weight today, who I shouted at on the tube and which ex-boyfriend I dreamed about last night.
The web is fast becoming clogged up with blogs; the verbal diarrhoea of the under-educated and the banal. A report last week claimed that one in four internet users in Britain keeps a diary on their computer, and half of us – about seven million saddos – share this literary dross with other people”.

Nor could she resist taking a swipe at the opposition: “Blogs are for anoraks who couldn’t get published any other way. If I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps, I’d rather ring up a real friend and have a whinge, or go out for a drink with a workmate. And reading about someone’s sex life in all its mind-numbing detail isn’t going to make me feel better about my own. Take a look at The Guardian these days: it’s gone blog crazy. Every other page features blogs on a subject of the day. There are blogs posing as news stories and even serious comment and editorial pieces about the significance of the blog. Of course, it could be to do with the fact that the paper is desperate to promote its website – but, hey, can I ask one salient question? If The Guardian is the home of the blogger, what’s the point of hiring all those expensive writers and columnists to fill it up if bloggers can unleash a torrent of words on every subject from toe nail clippings to Paris Hilton? What happened to intelligent, well researched, cogently argued news reporting and comment? The Guardian seems, in a perverse way, to be saying that amateurs are the future in publishing – and that can’t be good for business”.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown followed in her footsteps in Hounded by assaults from cyberspace (The Independent, 24th July 2006): “The internet has already become a coffee shop for paedophiles and violent fantasists. Most of us don’t think this freedom is a wonderful liberation, not even if it remains in the realms of ideas and unfulfilled hideous desires. Most free countries already have sensible (and minimal) laws to curtail rabid expression. The internet- which opens up the skies of knowledge and exchange – is harder to monitor and even harder to constrain. Attempts to discuss the chaotic fallout are foiled or silenced.
Blogging, the latest trend filling cyberspace, began in 1994 in the US as on-line diaries kept by nerds and mischief-makers who called themselves “escribitionists”. In 2002 came the moment when bloggers became newshounds uncovering stories”.

In all fairness Alibhai-Brown did not adopt the unsophisticated undifferentiated approach favoured by Street-Porter: “Investigative journalists – sadly a disappeared species in the mainstream media – have been replaced by well connected, literate, expert bloggers who expose corruption and the depravities of the powerful. One is a good mate. Much of what he does is in the public interest, some unashamedly is not. As traditional journalism is getting both more brazen and more cautious, important stories disappear in the cracks between the two, to be sniffed out and dug up by bloggers”.

However (and here I concur, particularly as far as her verdict on one particular blogger is concerned, whose sacking recently elicited a wave of sympathy): “But with 35 million bloggers worldwide, there is also a glut of pathetic drivel and idiocy”.

She then catalogues several blog-based attacks to which she has been subjected (and which may well account for her instinctive suspicion of the blogging community) before conceding that the mainstream may not entirely deserve the prestige it luxuriates in (although the implicit plaudit to bloggers is immediately tempered by mention of the less appealing proclivities of some): “Bloggers disseminate stories that are trusted by millions. Newspapers and broadcasters are vastly less respected, although they are carriers of checked facts and considered opinion. As the public gets mistrustful of politicians and the media – with some justification – they can believe conspiracists, mavericks who feed their inclinations to anxiety and disbelief”.

Having openly declared that she hardly ever reads blogs she asks: “Where do blog writers and surfers find the time? When do they do the washing, cooking, eating, talking, cuddling, story reading to kids? Do they never help with school homework, go to the theatre, make love, read books, talk to friends, entertain?
And please don’t tell me this is democratising communication. Mass blogging may indeed be giving access to Everyman, but is he always worth listening to? When one or two bloggers inexplicably find fame, yet another wave joins the industry”.

She draws her deliberations to a close by reiterating the sentiment first uttered by Butterworth: “When there are a billion blogs to surf, who will be reading them? Death through gluttony will surely end the misery. Until the next fad”.

Both Street-Porter and Alibhai-Brown pander to the stereotype of the blogger as a solitary loser loafing around at his keyboard, with no better or more inventive use of his time than risking DVT with his obsessive surfing and inflicting his sub-standard prose on an audience of similarly anonymous and terminally boring introspectives. In retaliating it is preferable not to descend to the vitriolic register, firing off fatuous remarks about buck-teeth, an accident of birth after all, which would also inadvertently prove Street-Porter’s point. “Is that really the best put down they could come up with?” she will shrug nonchalantly (and correctly) at such puerile baiting.

For the likes of JSP, humanity neatly falls into two categories, those basking in the spotlight and those banished to the darkness, the “luvvies” and the “dahlinks” and the great unwashed. The out-crowd must never be admitted to the in-crowd, and JSP is but one of the snarling Rottweilers guarding the door. Her blanket, knee-jerk write off is both overly categorical and hopelessly oversimplified. As her outburst proves, bloggers do not have a monopoly on inanity and ignorance. Nor on being wildly inaccurate, prejudiced and badly researched.

In reality, bloggers can be every bit as trenchant and many have higher academic qualifications than JSP. It is worth reminding her that not everything that makes it into print is high-minded (and how drab, dreary and tedious would absolute uniformity be?) Plenty of dross is published, such as the entire Mills and Boon range, for example, or the tabloids for that matter. In every genre you have to be prepared to trawl your way through vast seas of effluent before you finally dredge up the rare gem, the Sumpfblüte. Publishing has more than its fair share of iniquities, foibles and vagaries. The old school tie, or knowing someone who knows someone loom large in the board rooms as does playing it safe when margins are under pressure. Perusing the wares on display at the average high street bookshop you could be forgiven for believing that for your submission to have the merest sliver of a chance of making it beyond the wastepaper basket you have to be an established celebrity (as the “one-man brand” can boast built-in sales potential).

To what extent do blogs and newspapers actually trespass on each other’s territory? Is the overlap sufficiently great to justify the anxiety that haunts JSP’s venomous outpourings? Blogging may exacerbate a trend begun with TV. In a nutshell, nothing can beat television or the web for instantaneousness. If, as alluded to earlier, the reader craves more substantive analysis they will turn to newspapers or blogs. In other words, on the comment front, blogs do compete and there are good grounds for journalists to fear that the days of taking it easy and living off their reputation. Punters are sick and tired with the media’s ouroboros-like fascination with itself, its endless back-slapping and mutual admiration sessions.

For the blogger the exquisite freedom of it all is heady, addictive, intoxicating. There are no deadlines, no tiresome word limits (although I would be the first to admit that the latter can have benefits in terms of discipline, style and technique, condensing arguments, paring them down to the essence). Blogs can offer immediacy, raw emotion, escapism, entertainment, complete immersion in the consciousness of another, albeit mired in mundanity. They can be innovative and original in a way that risk-averse, profit-dependent, shareholder-serving alternatives cannot be, fearlessly experimenting with concepts. More importantly, they are not perceived as being enslaved by a commercial imperative, nor beholden to the political views of an editor-in-chief. They are less likely to be apprehended as manufactured persona, but conduits for real individuals. All of these together represent a significant part of their appeal. In one sense, both JSP’s diatribe and the prurient fascination with exposing bloggers’ identities evinced by the Daily Wail are a perverse homage to our influence.

Many who venture tentatively into the blogosphere may soon withdraw, dispirited by the experience of disappearing in the crowd. However, blogging is not a transitory phenomenon and newspapers will have to renegotiate their compact with the public if they are to retain their appeal. Blogging is not a whim or a fad. In all its colourful, anarchic splendour it is here to stay.