News from Norfolk

For a long time, I had no particular interest in reading about the Second World War.

History, per se, always mattered a lot, which is how I ended up with a doctoral degree from Cambridge University, the odd insight into how the Tudor reformations did or didn’t play out in the flatter parts of west Norfolk, and a lasting aversion to academic infighting.

But because I was born in the mid 1960s, WW2 somehow never registered as ‘history’. Like my parents’ dated taste in music, their books, indeed the blind-spots of their politics, WW2 was simply a generational experience which I could regard with a sort of semi-detached bemusement. It wasn’t my own experience, true, but it never really seemed like ‘history’ either, if only because when I was growing up, every middle-aged person I met spoke of those wartime years with absolute familiarity. ‘The war’, as everyone called it, was both too far and to near to me to come into easy focus. Hence I ignored it.

Of course, like the rest of my generation, both in the USA where I grew up, and in the UK which is now my home, I also grew up in a world where ‘the war’ was omnipresent. Read the rest of this entry »

This article first appeared as a guest post at Mars Hill, Paul Burgin’s excellent blog.

Although I’m British now, I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the American South, and I lived there until I went off to college in 1984.

Raleigh wasn’t a bad place to grow up, at least for someone like me. Still a slightly sleepy, genteel place then, its wide streets shaded by mature trees and, downtown at least, blessed with plenty of handsome antebellum houses, the old-fashioned southern charm was constantly undercut, before it had the chance to grow cloying, by more bracing influences: three first-rate universities all within a short distance of each other, for instance, and the presence of something called the Research Triangle Park, home to forward-looking enterprises such as IBM and various pharmaceutical companies. As a result, the Raleigh of my childhood attracted intelligent, hard-working people not only from around the USA, but also much further afield. My tiny, Episcopal Church-run school placed me side by side with children whose parents had come from Egypt, Iran, Vietnam. Although it was a church school, I grew up with Muslims, Jews, Catholics, protestants of every possible persuasion and even the odd out-and-proud atheist. The universities also ensured that we had more than our fair share of high culture: a very good art museum, as well as concerts and theatre performances from world-famous groups. A thriving farmers’ market co-existed with shops where it was possible to buy Thai shrimp paste.

The reason I am spelling this out is that I don’t want you to get the notion that the Raleigh of the 1970s and early 80s was some sort of redneck backwater wherein good ole boys sat around pickin’ their banjos and swilling moonshine on the front porch all day. In our household, anyway, a recording of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony and a glass of reasonable chablis would have been more like it. And we didn’t even have a proper front porch. Read the rest of this entry »

I have only ever heard one story that makes Theresa May sound like a genuinely good person. The source for it is an old friend from university days. We met through CUCA, the Cambridge University Conservative Association. My friend is still a Tory, whereas I gave up on the party roughly thirty years later during the course of May’s 2016 conference speech — a bumpy journey recalled at some length here.

Anyway, the story involves a visit by my friend to a speaker meeting organised by her local Conservative association. At the time, my friend was trying to balance a career as a corporate lawyer with her demanding role as the mother of an infant and a degree of continued political engagement, and in a slightly desperate moment of multi-tasking, brought her baby along to the meeting with her. In the normal way of these things, as soon as the distinguished guest began speaking, the baby kicked off. My friend tried to calm the baby by breastfeeding him/her, as discreetly as possible. For this, she was rewarded with a range of disapproving looks from the mostly elderly, entirely disapproving audience. In the car-park afterwards, preparing to leave, my friend was feeling as many of us may have felt under similar circumstances — angry, defensive, embarrassed — maybe even a bit tearful. Getting into her car, then, she noticed the speaker hurrying out towards her, apparently anxious for a word. Rather to my friend’s surprise, the speaker could not have been more supportive — praising the qualities of the baby, talking about how hard it must be to balance work and family, unhappy at the audience reaction and passionately defending my friend’s decision to breastfeed in a public place.

The speaker was, of course, Theresa May. I am repeating this story in the interest of scrupulous fairness. Having said that, though, let’s remember that after my thirty years in the party, this is literally the only positive story I have ever heard about Theresa May. The other stories mostly revolve around tone-deafness, rigidity, humourlessness. Often there is a degree of intellectual limitation in the mix as well. Not one of these stories suggests that May got where she is through anything other than a dogged, principle-free, vindictive, deeply joyless strand of personal ambition. Nor do any of them imply that she has much to offer either the Tory party or the United Kingdom.

Thus it is surprising that the Tories somehow ended up with a general election campaign designed to rely primarily on May’s personal appeal coupled with the perceived unattractiveness of her opponents — a campaign contrived without much input from other senior party figures, defensive where not painfully robotic in the face of media interest, producing an appearance of extreme arrogance coupled with reflexive paranoia. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me preface what will necessarily be a personal, subjective yet sustained pre-Brexit lament with a slightly alarming confession.

In 2001, I worked for several months on Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership campaign, and then for a few more months in the Leader’s Office at CCO. As a lifelong Tory who voted ‘Remain’ and who parted company with the party in September 2016, part way through Theresa May’s ‘citizen of the world’ speech, I now heartily regret this brief chapter of my life, realise it constituted monumentally bad judgement on my part, and wish it had never happened. Sorry, everyone.

My reason for reminding the world of this embarrassing interlude, however, has less to do with some random masochistic-exhibitionist personal quirk than it does with insisting on a more general historical point regarding Britain’s rupture with the European Union, which Theresa May has announced that she will trigger tomorrow.

Here it is: in 2001, even a famously Eurosceptic, ‘right wing’ campaign conducted first within the parliamentary Conservative Party, then within its grassroots, did not envision prying the UK out of the EU. It did not envision hard Brexit. In its darkest, weirdest, most extreme moments, it did not even begin to imagine the sort of enormity that Ms May will perpetrate on Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a nice irony — ‘nice’, that is, in the older sense of the word — in the fact that the day of Martin McGuinness’ burial is being marked in London with blue flashing lights, bridges closed off with police tape, helicopters circling low overhead and tributes to a brave police constable, murdered while carrying out his job. At least for people of a certain age, it is these things, more than Tuesday morning’s fulsome farewells to a dead peace-maker, that conjure up the man.

McGuinness’ IRA was responsible for killing far more Londoners, far more police constables, far more UK residents and visitors than Islamist terrorists have ever done. Read the rest of this entry »

Whatever dark hints 2016 may have provided to the contrary, conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong. Having seen James Graham’s This House at the Garrick Theatre last night, I can confirm what more or less every professional or casual critic, UK politics geek, old Labour hack, veteran theatre-goer, friend or sundry acquaintance will already have told you, which is that This House is a hugely compelling, satisfying play, and that James Graham’s is a voice to be welcomed with unalloyed enthusiasm.

This is all the more remarkable when one considers the play’s apparent modesty of aspiration. This House takes place not on the floor of the House of Commons, that great expansive theatre of parliamentary democracy with its larger-than-life characters and set-piece battles, but rather in what it describes as the ‘engine room’ of the House of Commons — the offices of the government and opposition whips, hidden down in the badly-maintained bowels of the building, wherein much of the real business of politics is carried out by figures who, at least as far as the general public is concerned, are all but nameless and faceless. Its timespan stretches from the February 1974 general election to the 1979 vote of no confidence that brought down Jim Callaghan and ushered in the age of Margaret Thatcher. During these not-quite-five years, the Labour Party struggled to govern with an unfeasibly small, fragile, continually embattled majority. How the Labour whips made this happen — and at what cost — is the central focus of This House.

Modesty? Imagine, perhaps, trying to sell to a West End Theatre the idea that procedural wrangles mostly carried out by men in suits in sparsely-furnished basement rooms during the late 1970s are actually really, really interesting. Or to put it another way, think of what might have happened if Shakespeare, having decided for whatever reason to cut from Henry V not only the king himself but also all the higher nobility, made the whole play centre on Pistol, the captains and the Boy, always speaking in prose, with the battles invariably taking place off-stage, hence seen only through their impact on logistics.

This, more or less, is the challenge that Graham has set himself. That he succeeds so brilliantly is surprising enough that, two day later, I can’t entirely resist the temptation to try to pick apart his achievement, and see how he managed to do it. Why does everyone, correctly, love This House so much?

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this slyly surprising play reposes in its manifest, unabashed and deeply unfashionable lack of cynicism.

Read the rest of this entry »

A month into the Trump era, let’s start with the positives, such as they are.

The past month has produced some memorably good photographs. My three favourites are all dinner-table images. Even the amateur ones are good. This photo …

… was taken by a random member of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, using a camera phone, and yet there’s a great deal in it.

For a start, the composition is as strong as seventeenth century Dutch conversation piece. Look how virtually all the figures turn inwards, towards the central incident. Read the rest of this entry »

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

On the late afternoon of Friday, 20 January 2017, I’ll be in Norfolk, in a village perched on the edge of the North Sea. By 16.30 or so I’ll probably be in my comfortably scruffy kitchen, settled down in the armchair next to the old Aga, watching the BBC news on my laptop computer. Outside in the gathering dusk, the pheasants will shout their usual crepuscular warnings at each other, as the sleek fat farm cats make their regular rounds and night tucks itself in around my 500-year old former parsonage, under a waning quarter moon. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well, as our local St. Julian of Norwich put it. And at the same time, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.

This horrifies me. Read the rest of this entry »

I only ever saw Tony Blair twice.

The second time — less interesting, more easily summarised — took place standing next to the push-chair occupied by my long-suffering two-year old son. We were coming home from the sandpit in St James’s Park, and I needed to get back soon for a Cadogan Tate delivery, but it was the day on which Tony Blair, who as prime minister had won four elections and served ten years, was going to the Palace to resign. How often does it happen that one can elect to be present for a (relatively benign) moment of history, just by delaying a journey back from the sandpit? So I stood in a little huddle of press photographers, bemused tourists and politics geeks. In time we were rewarded by the onrush of the sleek black car, the glimpse of a familiar face, our own tiny crumb snatched from beneath the table of world-historical significance. My son doesn’t remember it, of course, but he claims to be glad that he was there.

The first time mattered more.

The date eludes me, but it must have been quite early in Tony Blair’s premiership. But someone could, I suppose, work it out, because it had to have been a year when 11 November fell on a Saturday. I was down in Westminster and, on a whim, went to take part in what was, at the time, a fairly low-key observance at the Cenotaph. Read the rest of this entry »

Far and away the most successful thing in my garden is the deer population.

We have at least two types of deer — sturdy little muntjac, rapacious in their strangely shy, apologetic way, plus a tiny herd of roe deer, whose defence strategy when confronted by a human is to flash a pale bottom  in the hope that this spectacle will somehow be so terrifying as to drive all foes away. I suppose we ought to prefer the roe, as they are natives, but the diminutive exoticism of the muntjac, like labrador retrievers with cloven hooves, is not without appeal.

Whatever anyone may tell you to the contrary, deer are fussy eaters.

Consider the roses. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a question. What’s the flattest county in England?

Norfolk, you might well answer — but you’d be wrong. The answer is, of course, Cambridgeshire.

What’s the second flattest county in England?

Norfolk, you might answer — but again, you’d be wrong. The answer is Lincolnshire, although before 1974, the answer would have been Huntingdonshire — followed by Lincolnshire.

Norfolk, in other words, isn’t as flat as all that. Nor does Norfolk offer much in the way of fens. Fens, in general, are a Cambridgeshire thing. Norfolk does have some fens — but then it also has some coastal cliff formations, at Hunstanton, Sheringham, Cromer and so forth. It has a lot of coastline, but in places it is not particularly close to the sea. It has rivers, obviously, but in recent years, it has had far fewer serious problems with flooding than some counties one might mention. And if there are no mountains in Norfolk, how many English counties can claim anything approaching a mountain? Unless I’m missing something here, post-1974, only Cumbria has mountains — and not many of those, either.

In short, there is nothing particularly astonishing about the altitude of Norfolk relative to the rest of England. Or to put it another way, Norfolk really isn’t very flat, whatever Noel Coward’s not-very-reliable heroine in Private Lives might have claimed to the contrary.

Yet the canard persists. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I did something very stupid, if very human, which I now regret. I posted a photo of some flowers on Twitter.

They were blue, pink and white flowers, growing up a bank, interspersed with cow parsley. The reason I shot the photo, and later posted it, is that I thought the flowers were rather good. They are, in effect, the view from our west-facing bathroom window right now, following on from earlier snowdrops and aconite. The bank, under an old beech tree, tends to be dark. Framed against its grave shade, the flowers looked delicate, cheerful, happy. Surely no one could object to a photo of happy flowers?

Not for the first time, however, I had underestimated Twitter. Within 48 hours, someone I don’t even know — a follower of a follower — launched an attack. How dare I post a photo of non-native bluebells?

For such the flowers were, and indeed are. Well, I knew that our blue, pink and white flowers were Spanish bluebells, not native ones. I’d never claimed anything to the contrary. Soon, however, I was being furnished with links to websites — there are plenty of them out there — decrying Spanish bluebells. Apparently Spanish bluebells, characterised as ‘coarse’ and ‘scentless’, come over here, pollinating our innocent native Hyacinthoides non-scripta, crowding our bluebell woods with horrid half-caste bluebells. Read the rest of this entry »

An old jazz standard — the recording I know attributes it to W. C. Handy — starts with these lines:

Love, oh love, oh loveless love
You’ve set out hearts on goal-less goals,
From milk-less milk, to silk-less silk
We are growing used to soul-less souls.

I’m reminded of this song every time I sense the warm, scentless, practical yet uncharismatic presence of a wood burning stove. Fire-less fires, eh? Where’s the fun in that?

At one level, of course, one can see the point. The arguments in favour of wood burners are well rehearsed to the point of exhaustion by now. The best amongst these is fuel efficiency. Open fires, apparently, send 70 percent of heat up the chimney. Even here, though, the fire-lover in me chips in: ‘Really? Doesn’t that rather depend on the type of fuel and fire, the shape of the fireplace, the presence or absence of an iron fire-back?’ Let us accept the statistic. Where heating and fuel costs are the main points, to the exclusion of anything else, then wood burning stoves make sense.

Infinitely more revealing, however, are the objections based on, if you like, the fire-ness of actual fires. Read the rest of this entry »

The first thing to understand is that the Old Rectory is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a ‘light’ house.

In the beginning one might have blamed the darkness on the Old Rectory’s state of repair. When we first went to look at it, on that blustery spring morning, we were forced to borrow the estate agent’s wind-up torch to get as far as the first leaf-strewn kitchen corridor. The electricity had failed — years ago in the kitchen, perhaps decades before in some of the more far-flung rooms — whilst the water running down walls and standing in dank, black puddles on the floor suggested it might not be back any time soon. Here and there, damp wintry light found its way in through dirty leaded windows in an apologetic way, like a half-hearted tresspasser. It never got very far.

Later on, however, once we had installed all-new electric wiring, cleaned the glass and done much more besides, some of which will be described here, this line of argument was exposed as unsustainable. Read the rest of this entry »

Colour is out of fashion at the moment, as happens from time to time. White is back.

Even people who could not really explain the difference between colour and tone — even people who don’t realise that tone is actually just colour, but thinned down with varying amounts of grey, the variation in the amount being the point — would, at the moment, probably prefer a cool, Gustavian space, full of massive pieces of Edwardian brown furniture arbitrarily slathered in Farrow & Ball All White, to the same space furnished with the un-modernised brown furniture and dressed with deep colours such as emerald, azure or Farrow & Ball’s own Picture Room Red.

Why this is the case is a question for those who enjoying staring thoughtfully into the shifting deep currents of mainstream taste. There have been points — perhaps most recently in the 1980s — when colour ruled. There have also been other points — the 1970s, the 1990s — when cool white interiors, enlivened with the most subtle of tonal interventions — were far more acceptable. Perhaps this iteration suggests that change itself is what we seek, the freshness of transformation and renewal, the occasional decorative climacteric?

For the moment, though, colour is out. Read the rest of this entry »