Temperama

Sunday Service: Survival Stories

For some weeks I've been trying and failing to write a piece for CiF about identity politics and whether they've done all the good they're going to. If and when I get round to it, it will build on this effort I produced in May, but look more closely at minority and marginalised groups. In June I offered a few thoughts on these matters here in relation to comedy gay men, and a few more recently, prompted by a CiF article by Peter Tatchell. Now, more food for thought comes from the always eloquent Gay Erasmus, "20-something in Sydney, Australia", in what turns out to be his final post in that guise. He says he's found that his blog has:

"...increasingly become a personal journal which demonstrates my interest in queer politics, religion, and faith as only one aspect of my life. Family is another important aspect; rethinking my place within my family since my dad died has transformed - and begun to heal - a part of myself that has struggled for expression and understanding in the past couple of years. Friendship is of course another aspect....In addition, the word 'gay', incorporated as it is into my blog title, seems to me now more reductive than representative of my personal identity."

It's a typically thoughtful post, well worth reading in full as is this long London Review of Books article about Darfur by the Africa expert Alex DeWaal. Though published more than two years ago I found it a wise and evocative primer in the history of the region, its tribes, way of life, Britain's role in its past and the influence of environmental disaster on the ongoing, terrible conflict there. Spend some sobering time with it here.

To close, a couple of reminders that it's Christmas, should they be required. The first, I can relate to painfully. Lone mum Petite Anglaise, who's kindly added The Adoption to her sidebar, hopes she has everything in order for her daughter to enjoy the coming festivities, but...

"...somehow, my heart just isn’t in the whole thing. Whatever we do, it feels as though something, or someone is missing. An extra pair of eyes at the grands magasins, an extra pair of hands helping me to drag the tree home from the florists and hang the decorations, another person to help me choose and wrap the gifts."

I was a lone parent for a couple of years and every Christmas I thank my lucky stars those days are gone. Ms Anglaise's full post is here. This year, I've been thankful for something else as well - not being invited to a single media party. What stupider way is there to relate to other people, including those you like? What kind of night out is better guaranteed to end with the feeling you'd have sooner stayed at home? And what holds for the media seems to apply in the world of political researchers too. Thanks to my friend Amy Philip for pointing me to towards the British Bullshit Foundation. Just hope it doesn't thank me by inviting me round to the House for sherry and canapes....

Sunday Service: Christmas, Social Justice & Dr Who

I've just returned from Waterstone's on Islington Green. Entering a bookshop can be a risky business for an author unless his or her ego is in good shape. They contain so many books and unless yours is one of those stacked on a table near the front it's hard to imagine how anyone would ever purchase a copy unless they'd arrived intent on doing so. Still, there were half a dozen copies of The Adoption filed under "H" plus one each of Single Men and Man Alive, so I suppose there must be some sort of demand. Anyway, I emerged having bought the following, listed in the order in which I have now pulled them from their carrier bag: Bait & Switch, by Barbara Ehrenreich; The Master, by Colm Toibin; The Line Of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst; The Road To Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek; The Old Man & The Sea, by Ernest Hemingway; I'm The King Of The Castle, by Susan Hill; The Fall Of Public Man, by Richard Sennett.

What kind of person do these choices make me? And, for that matter, what kind of person do these choices make me?

One: Oliver Burkeman on the non-existent War On Christmas.

Two: Chris Dillow on tensions between social justice and democracy.

Three: Matt Murrell on Dr Who, moral values and TV.

A man of taste and discernment, possibly? Oh, alright then, suit yourselves...

Sunday Service

I was recently told a story by a teacher who works at a non-denominational London primary school (not the one my younger children go to, by the way). It concerned the mothers of two Muslim pupils and the pressures they are placing on the school leadership. Both women are white Britons and converts to their faith, which may help explain the repulsive intolerance they're displaying. Not only are they objecting to Christmas being celebrated in the school they are also taking issue with the provenance of the sweets the children there are sometimes given as rewards. That is because some of those sweets come from Marks & Spencer, and Marks & Spencer is owned by Jews. This, of course, is a story to feed another form of fundamentalism, that of the political hard Right. For these mirror-image ideologues it provides further proof that Islamist militancy is gathering unstoppable force in Britain and doubles as a stick to beat liberals with - look what your multicultural dream has brought us to!

How should liberals and multiculturalists respond? The answer is quite easy. Where that school is concerned, its leadership should draw a very clear line in the sand. If those Muslim mothers don't want their children to have any part in the school's Christmas celebrations so be it. But Christmas should be celebrated anyway, as I hope Ramadan, Diwali and any other religious festival of relevance to the school's intake has recently been celebrated there. As for sweets, school policy should be to buy them all from Marks & Spencer for the time being, just to piss the bigots off. No school should accomodate the religious or racial hatreds of pupils' parents, whatever their targets or its source, not least because to do so offends against the core values of true multiculturalism, which are to improve understanding between different cultural groups, not to reinforce the walls between them.

The other part of the my answer is clear enough too. I am repelled by the present Muslim-bashing climate and nauseated by the government's part in sustaining it. At the same time, I don't deny that too many Muslims in Britain believe too many dangerous and stupid things, or that its present leadership must take some the blame for this. Moreover, just because the editor of Prospect magazine supports the (I think) dubious concept of "progressive nationalism" doesn't mean that John Ware is wrong in exposing the apologism of the Muslim Council of Britain in its pages. But there's something else to remember too: Muslims in Britain vary widely in their attitudes. Rachel North recently drew her readers' attention to this research into British-Pakistani men in Bradford. Many expressed affinity with and affection for their city and for Britain, while their views on controversial Muslim cultural practices were revealingly complex. And let me again draw attention to this study of schoolchildren in Burnley, which showed the Muslim kids to be far more tolerant than their white counterparts. It all adds up to a further good reason for supporting the New Generation Network manifesto on race and faith and for signing up to it here.

Now, bear with me while I descend from my pulpit...

An item I intend adding to my pile of Books I Really Must Get Round To Reading is Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul. Sullivan is, of course, an inspirational blogger and also an engagingly unorthodox conservative thinker: a social as well as an economic liberal and a Catholic too. I'm grateful to Westminster Wisdom for providing a review of his book to keep me going until I get round to reading it myself.

"Central to the book though is a recurrent theme - that of doubt. Sullivan is keen to...distinguish this from relativism or subjectivism...rather his argument is that there are central truths - it's just that they are difficult to perceive and understand...[His] is a perspective that stresses not the goodness of God, but the fallibility of man in understanding that goodness - to that effect Sullivan quotes from Hobbes the argument that God is a word we give to that which we do not understand."

The rest is here. And after you've finished that, join me in catching up with what Sue George has been up to lately.

"It was my birthday on Friday and, as often happens to people with Big Birthdays, I've been thinking about the past and how things have changed in my lifetime. A warning: gross generalisation alert. This is a broad brush look at how I remember things. It is not an Authorised History. Even by me."

It's a good read, though, on the theme of bisexuality. Sue presents it in three parts: the first, then the second, then the third. Can't quarrel with that ordering.

Sunday Service

It may be that the cookery challenge I was preoccupied by last week - remember the pumpkin business? Course you do! - has redefined this regular round-up affair. Lacking the time to surf widely in search of items to highlight I picked out just three, but each was a substantial read. This week I am under no pressure from the vegetable kingdom - tinned sweetcorn is nothing if not obedient - but I do have to drive to Herne Bay this morning, where fourthborn has been weekending with a friend. So here's another trio of items for you to pass more than ten seconds each with.

Hari Kunzru is among other things, a fellow signatory of the NGN manifesto. In response to Gary Younge's criticism of it, he posted a link to an article he wrote for the May 2006 issue of Mute Magazine.

"In Britain, multiculturalism (the make-shift post-imperial doctrine of diversity as the route to equality, of unity through managed disagreement) is under attack, not only from its traditional monocultural opponents, or from the classical liberals who’ve always disliked its whiff of groupthink, but from those who previously supported it most staunchly, the mainstream social democrats now scrambling to abandon it and sit on the high hillock marked shared values."

He goes on to describe what these "shared values" are. They're not the ones we need..

Now, here's Tom Hamilton:

"I am not an English Literature graduate. But I don't go around collaring English Literature graduates and shouting "You're wasting your time! Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Howard's End - they're not true! They're all lies, I tell you! Lies!" That's partly because I am unfailingly polite in all my social interactions. But it's also because assessing the value or otherwise of English literature on the basis of the truth or falsity of fiction would be really weird."

It's a terrific post about theology, what it is and why it's worth studying, and it gives Ayatollah Dawkins a fine old ticking-off along the way.

Lastly, a story by Dick Jones, drama teacher, poet and dad. He was moved to comment on my post about the passing of Robert Altman. My comment on A Grief Observed is simply that it's very good and you should read it. And me? I'm off to the seaside.

Sunday Service (Dinner Included)

For various reasons this is a lighter Sunday Service than in previous weeks. The main one is that I've been so busy writing elsewhere I haven't had time to scour the globe for interesting blogs to direct you to. And while it's true that I could have done a high speed search this morning it would have been at the expense of the youngest of my wife's eight brothers - yes, that's eight brothers - and his wife who are coming to dinner. Among other things I'm serving pumpkin, not because I'm, you know, weird or anything but because Tesco delivered one in error last week and I decided there and then that I would make the big, bulbous, orange bastard earn its keep. Here's the recipe I'm using - don't ever say I never do anything for you.

And now, another example of my good taste and boundless generosity: a link to a typically charming post from Sydney's Gay Erasmus on the occasion of, roughly-speaking, his twenty-first birthday, the first he's celebrated since the death of his father. He went out to eat with his mother and brother. Courses included "a beetroot salad, scallop and black squid ink noodle, leek royale, moroccan lamb, and mousse cake." No pumpkin, then? Oh well, you can't have everything.

My second pick is an essay from the City Journal by Doctor Theodore Dalrymple. Regulars will know of my deep antipathy for the evangelical zeal of evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker. Given that Doc. Dalrymple is best known for his medical columns in the Daily Telegraph, I'm surprised to find myself in such sympathy with his critique of the human naturist new orthodooxy for which Pinker is such a tireless missionary. Why not read it all?

And here's a third and final recommendation. It's from Gracchi a.k.a CiF commenter Disraelian who writes Westminster Wisdom which I am glad to have just added to my roll. Discussing a study by Doris Weichselbaumer of the University of Linz in Austria about discrimination in the workplace, he writes:

"To be honest, I am not competent to assess the methodology of the study. One of the ways of interpreting it might be to say that employers are so blind to the distinctions within sexes that when called to put their money down and employ someone they will rigidly attach sex and gender to each other, no matter what the evidence in front of them."

Competent enough, I'd say. And now my dinner guests are about to arrive. I'll be back later, as long as the pumpkin doesn't get me first.

Sunday Service

+ This week's Toptastic Ten begins right here in Deepest Hackney where Miss Hacksaw anticipates a revival of Jim'll Fix It. She's considering writing in...

"...but in the event of my dream being 'fixed', I am unsure that the results of a letter that starts 'Dear Jim'll, please can you you fix it for me to have lots of hot sex with Kiefer Sutherland' would be suitable for family viewing."

How unsure, exactly?

+ A young person offering Noise & Impertinence says:

"It’s hard to tell what we should learn from the elections of a foreign country. Most obvious is, I suppose, that a shamefully uncritical opposition can make political gain from a war which they supported. I bet David Cameron has been grinning with smug, Etonian glee all week."

Also, he insists, "I'm not a psycho." He could be right.

+ From Tygerland, the case against ID cards in three plain-spoken paragraphs.

+ No problem with some of the fresh Democrat Congressional intake being "neo" or Blue Dogs as far as La Femme Contraire is concerned.

+ Guest posting at Pickled Politics Clairwil writes a powerful essay on the unbearably cruel murder in Glasgow of fifteen year-old Kriss Donald. More by Clairwil here.

+ An Insomniac (called Matt) gets it right about the Dutch government.

+ A Lib Dem councillor and Norfolk Blogger agrees with Jon Cruddas about the BNP - up to a point.

+ Now here's how to start a story:

"I'm a widow. I have been on my own for some years now, during which time I have joined and rejoined every internet dating site there is. Always saying - I shan't bother again - then reading somewhere about someone's success.."

Now read on.

+ And here's how to start a story too:

"I've been asked why I don't write about my love life on my blog. Verily, I get stopped in the queue at the bank, whilst waiting for a bus, even while getting my pedicure and my hair did. The refrain is the same, plaintive one wherever I go: 'Why don't you write about your love life on your blog?' The answer? It's a waste of fucking time. It's also a fucking waste of time. Big difference."

Now read on once more!

+ What else to end with but a beautiful morning?

Bye!

Sunday Service

Decadently late, another diverse bunch of ten.

+ At Cultural Snow Tim Footman has been unpacking Borat, as Hampstead salon chin-strokers would probably put it.

"Whatever [Sacha] Baron Cohen's motives, it's clear that the crucial decision was to invent a character that came from somewhere about which we had no firm ideas; even better, many people had never heard of it. We all know the stereotypes, even if we find them repulsive: Indians move their heads from side to side; Nigerians are fraudsters; Poles can install a power shower in minutes. But Kazakhs? Um...weren't they sworn enemies of Flash Gordon?"

+ Those midterms! Rock 'n' Roll! Whoo! On Thursday, Thomas Paine's Corner announced that It's Always Darkest, Right Before . . . It Goes Completely Black.

"America now grows: paranoid delusions and wishful thinking. These are our national plant and staple crop, respectively."

The plant in question is of the Bush family. Then, on Friday...

+ ...the Rev Ted scandal broke! Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a response from religious Right blogger Ben Witherington. He puts Haggard's "moral slippage" down to the heads of super-ministries being not accountable enough and fostering personality cults among men going through the menopause. Apparently, they need more help from the ladies.

"One of the reasons, though not the only one, for this is that the patriarchal culture of male leadership isolates men from the critique of the opposite sex, and often it is the opposite sex which will first see the early warning signs of sexual trouble."

Could be. And could it also be that we'll be hearing from Mrs Haggard sometime soon? Glory be.

+ Speaking of fundamentalists, Jonathan Derbyshire (who isn't one, by the way) posts his review of the latest book by sociobiology's grandad E.O. Wilson, an appeal for science and religion to make common cause in saving the natural world. Jonathan contrasts Wilson's appraoch with that of Richard Dawkins.

"For Dawkins, it seems that belief in the purposiveness of nature is inseparable from the evils done in the name of religion. Wilson, by contrast, maintains that the metaphysical differences between the scientist and the religious man evaporate at the level of conduct, and that consequently science and religion can work together in order to preserve the 'Creation'."

Dawkins - he's the fundamentalist.

+ Snap response to news that Saddam's going to hang from United Irelander.

+ In Cairo The Big Pharaoh's 23 year-old female cousin asked him to accompany her to a shop in hope of enduring less sexual harrassment. BP writes:

"Forty years ago my mother and her friends used to go shopping in the same street wearing mini skirts and sleeveless shirts and not a single eye fell on them. So what happened to Egypt?"

Read on.

+ More God stuff, anyone? While Alan Johnson's been somersaulting over faith schools John Howard is arranging to have chaplains installed in every school in Australia. Anonymous Lefty lets rip.

+ Specially for Halowe'en Eshuneutics quoted from A Vampiric Tale.

"I dreamt last night that the Prussian surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach had decided that I stuttered because my tongue was too large; and he cut my large organ down to size by snipping of chunks from the tip and the sides. Mother woke me up to tell me that father had been struck down by a speeding car at the roundabout; I went to the mortuary to see him, and they had sewn back his head to the trunk and his eyes were open. I tried to close them but they would not shut, and later we buried him with his eyes still staring upwards."

Crumbs! Educational!

+ Kind Temperama reader Little Bear has introduced me to a blog about her home city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Apparently, it's overrated. Judge for yourself.

+ In this house there is a rule that Christmas must not be mentioned until Bonfire Night is over. Every year this rule is broken by everyone but me. So this year, I'm going to break it too - but only by directing you to Diamond Geezer's fine lament for the now annual corruption of the London Christmas Lights.

HO! HO! HO!

Sunday Service

Another delectable dix.

+ From Single In The City, a blogging romance.

"DG and I had sex for the first time last night. He had invited me over for my first sleep over, exactly a week since our first real date..."

Good comments on this post too.

+ Dave Osler has been sweating on the future of socialism. No, it's not the shortest blog entry in the world...

+...and while he's been writing it there's been some Stumbling & Mumbling about the shortcomings of "strong leadership" solutions to, well, most things excluding Arsenal FC.

+ As well as Procrastination, here's what a young American Muslim called Zack does in his spare time.

+ I've found a new Hackney blogger. He is Father Nicholas Schofield and his blog is called Romany Miscellany. He ruminates on Doctor Ian Paisley - yep, the very same - and the guy who gave New York it's name.

+ It's one of my dear little jokes to call the Daily Mail the Daily Sharia due to its swivel-eyed authoritarianism and its obsessive policing of social boundaries dividing men from women. Tom Hamilton at Let's Be Sensible reveals that the Mail is not the only British national newspaper sharing common ground with fundamentalist Islam.

+ I've been tracking the government's powerful obsession with gathering data about children on the grounds that it will help protect them. Jonathan Calder at Liberal England shows similar urges are at work in it's vetting of the very people who wish to make children's lives better. He writes:

"The involvement of the criminal records system reinforces the prejudice that there must be something odd about an adult who enjoys the company of children. Already the Scouting and Guiding Movement is struggling to find volunteers. To discourage them further at a time when everyone agrees youngsters need more exercise and more socialisation is crazy."

+ No half measures from La Femme Contraire when it comes to drug legalisation. She can't understand why some would stop at cannabis.

+ Jock's Blog is very kind about Tory MP Greg Barker, the one who's left his wife and taken up with a male interior designer.

"It's terribly tragic for everyone concerned when you hear of a real case of shall we say 'sexual confusion' and there is speculation as to whether someone was really hiding his light under a bush, so to speak, all along."

It's the best thing I've read on Barker so far. And finally...

+ Alas, White Pebble's cat Lucy has died. The end of a sad tale, tenderly told.

Temperama - nothing if not eclectic, wouldn't you say?

Sunday Service

This week, a Topical Ten bullet-pointed in no particular order.

+ I've been unable to stomach the McCartney-Mills divorce gore. Political Umpire has found it hard going too, but has a fascinating inside story on details of Mills's claims against her husband that have been leaked to the press.

"Papers filed in divorce proceedings are not public documents, so the press has no right to inspect, let alone reproduce them. To do so is potentially committing contempt of court. Moreover, this particular document was only a draft; it had not even been filed in court. Therefore the legal position is watertight: only the client and her legal advisers have any right whatsoever to see the documents. No one else may do so without the client's permission."

Read on here.

+ Visit Szwagier's Pirate's Lair for all the disrespect about Polish politics you can eat. Plus some silly stuff. Also, he's very tall.

+ Gracchi's Westminster Wisdom is strong on politics and on hobbits too.

+ Question: Who's this?

"I went to the opening of the new David Hockney exhibition at the National Portrait gallery - and met David Hockney. For me - a real highlight. Having been a designer and illustrator for 20 years before politics, and having grown up through the years of Hockney's Bigger Splash and Warhol, looking at the pictures sparked many memories of my youth. Standing in front of one of the swimming pool / naked young man paintings of the Bigger Splash era, one such memory came bounding back across the intervening decades - auditioning for Andy Warhol's play 'Pork' when I was about 18. They phoned to offer me the part of the understudy - but it was just before the summer hols and I was going to Greece with my friends - so I turned it down! The rest, as they say, is history. And then moving along - sure enough - there was a portrait of Warhol."

Answer: It's Lynne Featherstone. More interesting than the average MP.

+ As US policy, tactics, strategy or whatever in Iraq seem about to change, in Adelaide Tim Dunlop charts a shift in the political debate about the issue in Australia.

+ Guess what? This post of mine was visited by a Muslim woman multi-blogger who lives and works as a techie in Seattle. Start here then progress to here. You may learn some stuff you didn't know. It's all fairly anonymous. Is she real?

+ From the above I wandered on to this one, which discusses Islam and gender politics.

+ And speaking of God, Labour blogger Mike Ion asks:

"Is the Left making a mistake when, as it so often does, its fails to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives? Is it time for those who espouse the ‘progressive’ agenda to debate just how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy?"

I think so. And so does he.

+ On a related matter...Faith schools? Pro or con? Tom Freeman sets out a sceptic's position with impressive clarity here.

+ So far, so serious. So click here to see a naked man clutching his private parts. Not that it's a laughing matter, by the way...

Sunday Service

"Dad always cooked on Saturday nights." writes Miss Hacksaw from somewhere in London. "I think it was his way of relaxing after a tedious week spent in a government office dealing with a Home & Away obsessed PA and people like John Redwood." Now read on for penetrating insights into chille con carne, chicken kiev and other cooking smells that remind the author of childhood.

I enjoy domestic blogs, especially when written with warmth and self-effacement. "Feels very silly writing all this knowing that nobody will read it," concludes Lesley Cookman at the end of a post about family business in the Thanet part of Kent. So, Lesley, do you feel more silly or less now you've been proved wrong? I found Lesley by way of the diary of a self-described chick-lit novelist called Kate, who linked to me earlier this week. Kate says she likes my blog but doesn't always agree with it. I'm sure she can be purged of this minor delinquency, though her pen addiction appears more intractable.

"You can always tell a writer is in procrastination mode when s/he begins buying office supplies. Though it is almost justified in the case of the Pilot V-Ball Grip (no, I am not on commission) which virtually writes your stuff for you it's so dreamy."

I'm for the Ball Pentel Fine Point R50 myself. I'll probably write some of my next novel with one, you know, eventually...

The Great Veil Debate continues to rage: it's all over the radio this morning as the Dewsbury industrial tribunal case prompts "New" Labour's Phil Woolas to make another inflamatory intervention. What a relief to find a handful of people who, like me, think such behaviour extraordinarily dimwitted, wrong-headed and counter-productive in terms of nourishing goodwill and a sense of belonging among beseiged Muslim communities. On Comment Is Free, Dave Edgar and Timothy Garten-Ash cut through the right-wing hysterics and "muscular liberal" crap as did Adloyada Judy with this excellent post and La Femme Contraire here.

Good God, is that the time? We've got to shoot off to Edmonton IKEA now to buy stuff to go in fourthborn's newly-decorated new bedroom which she's inheriting from grown-up firstborn. So speaking of new-ness and loveliness - he wrote, contriving hack linking sentence frantically as cries of "hurry up Dave!" come up the stairs - do visit Altrui's blog which apparently is Someone Else's. A fine read and lovely to look at too. How does he do that? Wish I knew.