Maria

Until a couple of weeks ago, I kept my television at the bottom of a cupboard. The idea was to waste no time watching tv when I should be studying. Now I watch the news every morning instead of reading improving literature. And it is starting to drive me up the bloody wall.

Whatever channel is on, it’s always the same set up; an older man and a younger woman tag-team the reporting, switching hyperactively from screens on either side, back to each other, and on to full-screen reports. Which is bearable, if patronising. Whenever the man is talking, the woman looks at him, listens, clearly engaged, nods slightly at the right bits, matches her facial expressions to his speech. It’s almost imperceptible, a simple empathic behaviour most women do when others speak. But every bloody time the woman opens her mouth, the man stares straight ahead, completely ignoring her, and only barely acknowledges her when it’s his turn to cut in.

I know, I know. This is how conversations go, whether in a private or professional settings. I can’t tell how many times I’ve seen women colleagues cut off by men in a group conversation. The men don’t seem to even notice they do it – it’s as if they have a divine right to speak at any moment. Yet when male colleagues are in full flight, we do our ‘active listening’, and send out all those signals which we think are supportive of their right to speak, and they probably think are just weak. Because they sure as hell almost never send them back.

There are several ways to respond to being cut off and talked over. Mostly I ignore it unless he’s a repeat offender. Then, I just keep talking. It makes the point that you were already talking and aren’t about to back out of the conversation. It injects a noise level and tension into the conversation that wasn’t there before and is frankly unpleasant – which is a fair way to spread the pain around, I think. Otherwise, of course, I just turn off the telly.

I am very pleased to be introducing a dear friend, Matthew Bishop, as CT’s guest blogger this week. Matthew is a fellow Fellow of the Twenty First Century Trust (Henry and I are also fellows.). His biog at the Economist tells us that, apart from being ‘Chief Business Writer/American Business Editor’ of that newspaper, Matthew has written several worthy sounding books. I can add to the official blurb that while Matthew was on the Advisors Group of the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005 he met and briefed Angelina Jolie on micro-finance. Rmphf!

Also, and perhaps this is where the professionalism of journalists trumps us amateurs, Matthew is a consummate hack (in a good way). Several years ago, Matthew and I were at an after-dinner speech by a former prime minister of a slightly out of the way country. The PM’s heavies all wore Pele style mullets and insisted that the drink stop pouring during his speech. The speech went on and on. Several people nodded off. I believe Matthew snored, but maybe that’s embroidery on my part. I mostly stared into the middle distance and fretted about the lack of booze. The speech abruptly stopped. Our devilishly handsome chair thanked him and asked desperately for questions. Our minds were blank. The silence was painful. Someone gave Matthew a dig. He spluttered awake, took instant stock, and asked a very clever and well-backgrounded question on the politics of that country. What a pro. While others are asleep with drool on their chins, the hack is awake (just) and parlaying a little knowledge into a lot of kudos. That, I said to myself, is a man born to blog.

Maurice Manning has an excellent piece in today’s Irish Times (pay-walled) marking the 80th birthday of Declan Costello. Costello wrote ‘Towards a Just Society’ in the 1960s. The pamphlet re-defined Irish politics in terms of social justice, energised a new generation of activists, and probably cost Costello a Cabinet position when Fine Gael got back into power in 1973. Some of the ideas of the Just Society – especially its emphasis on direct government intervention in the economy – seem outdated today. But Costello helped to make Fine Gael a Christian democrat party, back when that meant something more than fighting stem cell research and gay marriage.
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There are good reasons why I haven’t bought Wired Magazine in about five years. The whole bleeding edge thing frayed a bit with the dot com crash. And that hyperactive, slightly autistic gadget-boy take on the world (a planet which only spanned the west coast of the US and the high tech bits of Asia) just started to seem ever so recursive. But today, in honour of being on the west coast and much delayed on a flight from L.A back to Europe, I cracked and bought the magazine.

Wired now has fashion tips for how to wear your bluetooth, a rather pointless feature on ‘Earth 2.0’, advertisements for Gilette (because the best a man can get is a whopping five blades), and far more car ads than I remember – most of them for Japanese vehicles that improbably combine performance, high tech fuel efficiency, and the nodding respect of other techies. So ‘Wired Man’ is slightly more environmentally aware than he used to be, but just as insecure and rather implausibly hirsute.
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A recent British expat writes today about life in Belgium; a familiar topic here at CT. But what strikes me is this sentence; “It’s my first proper visit to the “UK” (as expatriates and no-one else calls it) since I moved to Brussels”. Admitedly, ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ is inconcise. The writer evidently calls it ‘Britain’ – something I hardly ever heard, despite living there for three years. I had a non-expat British friend visiting this week, and she only ever called it ‘the UK’. ‘Britain’ sounds like something the Queen would say. It sounds mustily heroic. As in ‘The Battle of’. ‘The UK’ is much more now, much more New Labour, totally Third Way. And not as cringingly embarrassing as Cool Britannia.

Several years ago, I gave a talk to a mixed group of Northern Irish business people (It was on compliance with the E-Commerce Directive; they were rapt.). Half way through, I realised I didn’t know how to refer to, er, ‘the mainland’. But they were a lovely, warm audience and only slightly embarrassed for me, and during the Q&A they gently illustrated the accepted usage. They say ‘GB’ to mean the island of Britain, and ‘NI’ for their own patch. I know they also had an elegantly benign name for the South, I just can’t remember it. Maybe it was ‘the South’.

But the worst, the absolute block your ears, nails on a black board worst is when people say ‘England’ instead of ‘the UK’ or even ‘Britain’. And, sorry, but Americans are the worst offenders. They say things like ‘London, England’ which is of course superfluous because there is only one London. (I say this having spent a weekend in London, Ontario.) We all know London is located in England, but it is the capital of the UK. It’s a really bad habit to keep saying ‘England’ as if it’s interchangeable with ‘Britain’. It’s not. Saying ‘England’ when you mean ‘Britain’ is gauche and annoying and very, very blonde.

There are moments to say ‘England’, but they’re actually quite rare. One of those moments is when England plays in the world cup – it’s the England team, as of course the Scots and Welsh are too rubbish to qualify. But England does not enter the Olympics; Britain does. And England will not decide whether to join the EMU, Britain will. (Arguably.) England has never held the presidency of the EU, or hosted the G8, or invaded a country on its own (at least not in a few hundred years), because it’s not a state. Of course England has a certain status. And there’s that constitutional oddity that has the Welsh and Scots deciding their own issues at their own assemblies, but being able to chip in when Westminster decides purely English questions. But that is no excuse to toss your hair and talk about your summer holidays in ‘England’ where you also took in the Lake District.

An (English) rose by any other name does not smell so sweet.

When I heard Jonathan Edelstein, aka the Head Heeb, had been to Ireland recently and was planning to write something about it, I knew we’d be in for a treat. Today he’s posted a very informative piece on immigration in Ireland. It’s a good overview from someone who has a lot of comparative knowledge about immigration and can place our experience in a wider context. From being a net exporter of people up to 1995, we’ve been an immigration nation since, with 10% of people living in Ireland today born elsewhere. And it’s only getting started.
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Like many others, I’ve spent much of this week thinking about the bombings in London on 7th July last year. I want to mark the day but find it hard to write anything that’s not superfluous or self-regarding. So I invite you to read the thoughts of anonymous blogger Rachel from north London who was caught up in the bombings, and perhaps to consider signing a petition calling for a public inquiry into the bombings and their aftermath.

Well, this will be a short post…

Usually I avoid writing about annoying aspects of Belgian life and its weird mix of individual opportunism and ossified institutional arrangements (what I call ‘the dodgy and the stodgy’). There are endless examples; landlords that leave their non-Belgian tenants without power or water but sic the authorities on them at even the threat of non-payment; the ISP I never received service from which nonetheless billed me for months, ignored registered letters, and only desisted when the very efficient Dutch debt collection company they used reviewed the correspondence and sighed ‘yes, this seems to happen a lot, there’. And then there’s the schizophrenic Belgian tendency to ignore people in distress in public places (ask any ex-pat whose been knocked off their bike, attacked, mugged, or just fallen over in the street) yet go on enormous public protests following murders. And don’t get me started on the bizaare collective amnesia about the Congo.
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It’s not often (well, ever) that I blog about anything directly work related. That’s because I work for an organisation that gets sued every 5 minutes, has a unique (and uniquely exposed) institutional model, deals with complex and controversial issues, and has endless stakeholders from dozens of bloggers to international organisations. That’s all by way of encouraging you to join in the fun!

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Hot off the presses. No idea when I’ll have time to read it, on account of me being so ‘time poor’ that I may as well have a peptic ulcer.

You know when you look at a word, and suddenly it appears to be spelt wrongly? ‘Vendor’ is a classic. Somehow you’ve stepped outside the frame, and the obvious no longer appears right.

I just cast my eyes over a press release from an Irish political party that shall remain nameless, and realised, ‘either this is a poor translation from the Manchurian or I have been abroad for way too long…”
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If there is one firm rule I have in life, it is never to make an important decision in February. (For those in the southern hemisphere, I advise caution in August.) February is the darkest of months, especially in Brussels where we haven’t seen sunshine in 5 months and an outbreak of killer smog is felling 30 people a day, or so they say. In February, the only rational response to circumstances is obviously to chuck in the job and emigrate. Which I’ve done. Twice.

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… and Brussels imposes.

Or not. Ireland – or rather the Irish Dept. of Justice – is threatening to legally contest the traffic data retention directive passed (with disgraceful ease) by the European Parliament (EP) this week. The directive will force internet service providers and telcos to store at their own cost all the traffic data of their users in case it is ever required by government agencies. Using the well-worn ‘national competence’ argument, the Irish government is arguing that the EP had no right to decide about data retention in the first place. The argument runs like this; Ireland should retain its veto in sensitive justice matters, and should not be told what to do by the European Commission and EP. This is a very disingenuous argument on the face of it, and rather perplexing when you dig deeper.
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As the last to write her piece on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (JSAMN), I have the benefit of reading my fellow Timberites’ pieces and developing on some of their themes. Henry points out that JSAMN, which seems to begin as a comedy of manners ultimately becomes something altogether more serious. I agree. I think JSAMN is about the forgetting and remembering of a history that unleashes the downtrodden of the past, freeing them, in E.P. Thompson’s famous phrase “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” John Holbo notes that Susanna Clarke’s Austen-like voice emerges almost unbidden to channel perfectly her own magical reality. I suspect that Clarke’s choice of Regency England as the time and place for a novel about the tension between political and folk memory is no accident.
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