Oooh, Blogging.

Why am I not writing? Or, specifically, why am I not blogging more? Why not flood these pages with all the little details and incidents of my life?

Well, largely because I don't do very much and my life is currently luxuriously easy and therefore devoid of interest. I can't really bring myself to describe how lovely the weather is or how much improving reading I have undertaken. It is not, I am not, blog-worthy.

But there have been things that I have nearly written. I drafted something about the Chilean Miners' rescue for example, and I was temporarily inspired by the death of Dame Joan Sutherland and by the US school systems' notions of patriotism - but no postings will come, I promise. Why not? Because I dursn't. I have a deep-seated horror at the thought of causing offence and little confidence that a clumsy rant (inevitably directed, largely, at people I love and admire) could be justified.

In an email to a friend recently I was very rude about the extreme right-wing of American politics (the Republican party they're called). "You should blog that," he said. I don't think I could. In private conversation I will often overstep the mark, especially amongst friends. But this is a public forum: I am basically standing in my garden and shouting things at passers-by. In itself, such activity might be enough to alarm those within ear-shot; I'm not going to compound the sin by being interesting.

Obligatory Chilean Miners Post

I was, of course, delighted by the rescue of the Chilean Miners yesterday. I was inspired by the way that different individuals, organisations and governments had focussed their talents, resources and determination in order to accomplish a moving humanitarian mission. It was great, a triumph of engineering and resolve over adversity.

I feel that I have to state this for the record because I might have appeared slightly curmudgeonly yesterday. Whilst I was glad of the rescue I didn't seem to feel quite so emotional as others, but anything less than full-heartedness seemed to be an inappropriate reaction. Partly, I have become cynically dubious of any event which seems to be so perfectly suited to 24-hour rolling news coverage, as this was. Partly, I was wary of the massed collective response: Twitter, Facebook, emails - not to mention Real Life People - everyone seemed to be overcome. I seemed only to be merely happy and this seemed to be deemed an insufficient response.

What was actually happening was a re-enactment of the most profound kind of human drama, perhaps the oldest story, redolent with primal imagery. Descent into and escape from an underworld is a cornerstone of many early myths, some of which date back to the earliest European societies whose rites of passage, like modern shamanic practices, achieved re-birth by ascending from the depths.

In 'A Short History of Myth', Karen Armstrong discusses the role of caves such as Altimira or Lascaux in Paleolithic spirituality.

These grottoes were probably the first temples or cathedrals. There has been a lengthy academic discussion of the meaning of these caves [...] but certainly they set the scene for a profound meeting between men and the godlike, archetypal animals that adorn the cavern walls and ceilings. Pilgrims had to crawl through dank and dangerous underground tunnels [...], burrowing ever more deeply into the heart of darkness until they finally came face to face with the painted beasts. 

Armstrong also emphasises the role such places played in initiation rites.

Initiation ceremonies were central to the religion of the ancient world [...]. Like the journey of the shaman, this is a process of death and rebirth: the boy has to die to childhood and enter the world of adult responsibilities. Initiates are buried in the ground, or in a tomb; they are told they are about to be devoured by a monster, or killed by a spirit. [...] The experience is so intense and traumatic that an initiate is changed forever.

The link with surviving shamanic practices provides this thought (here Armstrong includes a shaman's words quoted from 'The Power of Myth' (New York, 1988) by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers):

Like the dangerous expedition of the hunter, the shaman's quest is a confrontation with death. When he returns to his community his soul is still absent form his body.and has to be retrieved by colleagues who 'take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don't do that to you, you die... you just die and you are dead.'

These brave men have descended into the utter darkness and confronted their mortality. They have passed through death and have risen, miraculously, from their underground tombs. But although reborn, they are not yet fully alive. As they return to the world, it is the job of their families and friends to hold them and to breathe life back into them. Their journey back from death has not yet ended.

Highs and Lows of Chicago

Last weekend we all dashed to Chicago; L was working and the boys and I tagged along because we are now Official Travel Boffins of America or something. When L first suggested the trip I didn't want to bother, frankly. It seemed too soon after our epic road trip for one thing.But I am trying to stop saying 'no' to things out of laziness, and off we went.

The actual flight was ridiculously easy, despite having to get up at 5am. For one thing, I keep forgetting how straightforward domestic flights are here in the USA. For another, suddenly sitting still for two and a half hours en famille is easy-peasy after all the crazy cross-country driving we have done. Almost immediately we were descending into a Great Lakes rain storm and a few minutes after that we were in a taxi ploughing through the downpour to Downtown.

The city is beautiful, naturally: an uproar of towers and skyscrapers from the last 100 years, steel and glass and stone and brick, blending and reflecting off of each other and looming over the broad streets and spacious parks. Through all this weaves the 'L', the elevated railway with its silver rolling stock. It completely covers some streets, making the sidewalk feel like an undercity from a 1930s dystopian version of the future - which it probably is to be fair.

Our time was limited so we tried to cram in as much as we could. On Saturday we did the Art Institute and managed to impress Christopher with some paintings - albeit only because he recognised them from Doctor Who. Still, he got a real frisson out of seeing Van Gough's bedroom and his self-portrait, so well done the BBC. Bless him, he does think Van Gough's first name is 'Mister' though.

On Sunday L had to some actual work so we left her behind and caught the bus to the Museum of Science & Industry. More on that, and the Sears Willis Tower in a minute.

Our flight times on Monday allowed us just enough time to have a stab at the Field Museum, Chicago's answer to the Natural History Museum. Again it was astoundingly good - excellent evolution/life on Earth/dinosaurs exhibition, wonderful recreation of an ancient Egyptian tomb and a great set of rooms on pre-European American civilisations. Then it was back in the taxi, back on the plane, 'oh, we've landed' and then back home for dinner. Bang, job done.

Now rewind to Sunday for the highs and lows.

Lows: Ha ha, I'm so clever. The low point, of course, was going up to the top of the Willis née Sears Tower. The ride in the elevator (24 feet per second, fact fans) was enough to make me giddy all by itself. The views from the top were spectacular, but they had to ruin it all by installing some glass flooring in a bay window so that my boys could stand on it, jump up and down and watch me beg (from a safe distance) them to get off.

Highs: Ha ha ha! Did I mention how clever I am? The high point was to be found down in the bowels of the Museum of Science & Industry where they have the U-505: a 250ft long, 750 tonne German submarine that was captured by the US Navy off the coast of Africa in June 1944. The boys may be able to cope with heights, but they clearly didn't take to the claustrophobia-inducing interior. With the doors shut, the lights dimmed, and the recorded noise of the engines echoing through the hull, our short guided-tour was very atmospheric. In hushed tones the guide describes the location and capture of the sub as if it were happening right now, above us. Chilling.

Unusually, the 54 crew members were captured/rescued after the sub was depth-charged by Hunter-Killer Task Force 22.3. Even more unusually, the Germans failed to scuttle their ship resulting in a great intelligence coup for the Allies. U-505 was disguised and towed to the Bahamas to be pored over by Naval Intelligence; her crew were sent to a POW camp in Louisiana, just for them, where they played baseball and picked cotton for 25 cents a day. At the end of the war they were all offered American citizenship and six of them took it. Meanwhile, the U-505 was scheduled for use as target practice as German military assets were put beyond use. But the captain of the US task force that had captured the sub intervened - he pulled some strings and got it saved, and he was able to donate it to his local museum in his home town of Chicago.

There it sat, on the front lawn, until a purpose-built underground chamber was constructed for it in 2005. It's amazing, straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me. Most beautifully, one of the six Americanised crew members moved to Chicago, just to be close to his old ship. In fact, he became a volunteer at the museum and himself gave tours of the vessel for many years until he died.

Of the 1200 U-boats that survived World War Two, there are only 5 left in the world. And the U-505 is the only one outside Europe.

As you might be able to tell, I was suitably impressed.

Or, to put it another way...

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We can't all be victims, can we?

I do get angry. I try not to, but I am weak and I get very, very cross, especially when people disagree with me. It is a terrible failing, perhaps, but it might seem occasionally that it is born out a very real and sincerely held belief that I am right about everything. I promise that - on some level at least -  I do accept that other people are allowed to disagree with me and that they may even be correct to do so. What actually infuriates me is the possibility that they might be unable to concede the same point to me.

Take, for example, his holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who swept into the United Kingdom this week. Infallibility is in his job description, for Darwin's sake, so it's inevitable that he is going to upset people whilst he's lecturing to them about the evils of their atheism/homosexuality/feminism/AIDS prevention methods. To  make matters worse, his (literally) dogmatic approach to these issues has caused his opponents to adopt similarly uncompromising attitude, with 'militant atheist' Richard Dawkins now leading a cadre of hardline extremists. Both sides are now well dug in to increasingly entrenched positions.

The same thing has been happening politically here in the USA for years, of course, but the divisions have widened dramatically since the election of Barack Obama. Without a Republican president, the right has no responsible authority figure to keep it on the leash and so various unpleasant types like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and the Tea Party movement have seized the opportunity to push their more extreme agenda. Last month Beck led a rally of, possibly, several hundred thousand people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC - ostensibly to reclaim the civil rights movement for white, right-wing Christians.

What disturbs me most is that all sides, in all these conflicts, see themselves as the victims. The leaders, possibly, are overstating the perceived threat posed by their opponents so as to energise their base, but the effect on their supporters is dramatic. Here Tea Partiers are genuinely afraid that the gays and the Muslims and the socialists are coming for them. Liberals feel swamped, scared that the political system is being run by Big Money and Fox News. Muslim American citizens have to put up with the terrifying antics of half-wits like Terry Jones and his mooted Qu'ran burning, whilst the non-Muslims majority is largely horrified by the thought of a mosque at Ground Zero. In the US, atheism is a dirty word whilst in the UK blasphemy is still a criminal offence in Scotland and Northern Ireland. At the same time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Pope does genuinely believe that his religion is under siege by the forces of "aggressive secularism".

I can't say how many of these myriad fears are justified, but it can't be true that all sides are simultaneously so greatly threatened. But this is the nature of the debate: polarising and utterly poisonous.

And I'm guilty of it myself - I read the news I want to read, because it reinforces the positions I've already decided to adopt. I forward on opinions and stories, but I only send them to friends that I know will be predisposed to like them too. And if I do get into a conversation with someone who thinks differently to me, I've already closed my brain down to the possibility that I might be persuaded.

But then, the only other option would be to get very, very angry.

St. David's Day

It turns out I am in an abusive relationship – with Texas. Our new home has showered us with friendship, generosity and hospitality and in return we are flaunting our sense of belonging… to Wales: red rugby shirts are being pressed into service for the national day. It’s a little like moving in with a new girlfriend and then throwing a party for your ex-wife’s birthday. Possibly. And as we are actually English, wilfully commemorating another nation’s holiday might seem like the height of churlishness. But to top it all, we wouldn’t dream of doing anything for St David’s Day if we were in Britain, let alone Wales itself. What’s going on?

Britishness is complicated, but more so for the English than for the other nations. The received wisdom would appear to be that, having had a thousand years or more in which to define themselves as being Not English, the Welsh, Scots and Irish contrived individual cultural identities in the 19th century, a period that saw the invention of, amongst other things, the kilt, and druids. The truth is that it is the English – or rather the Anglo Saxons – which defined themselves as being Not Celtic. The Welsh word ‘Cymry’, which those Celts took to describe themselves in post-Roman Britain, has some link to ‘community’ and means ‘fellow countrymen’. They called us ‘Saesneg’: the Saxons. The English word ‘Welsh’ comes from the Saxon description of the same people: ‘walha’, meaning ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’. The Welsh called themselves ‘Us’. We called them ‘Them’.

A 1,000 year old grudge match.

For some, these lines of demarcation are set in stone. But for us, personally, things have become a little blurred. Growing up in the ‘80s I had no real idea that I was English. As far as I knew, I was British; we were all British and any internal distinctions were negligible. When the rubgy came on, matches against the other Home Nations were just appetisers for the game that really mattered: playing France. It was only when I found myself suddenly living in Wales that I discovered that I was English – because the Welsh told me I was in no uncertain times. Rugby in Wales is a religion – no other sporting team in the world (apart from, possibly, the cricket teams of India and Pakistan) is so fervently and passionately supported. And the game that really matters to them is the match against England. Being English in Wales in February and March is to run the gauntlet, to live inside a crucible of ardent Welshness. Everyone is set against you – your colleagues, neighbours, random little old ladies: they are Cymry and you are not. Even Nature is on their side as the parks and verges explode with daffodils and the fields fill with leeks and lambs.

God help you if they actually win that game of rugby.

It’s fair to say that the thirteen years I spent in Wales reinforced my sense of English identity. But somewhere in the middle of all this our boys were born. You can argue that there’s not a drop of Welsh blood in either of them, but you can’t deny they have a claim on Welshness. They were obviously born in Wales. William (you can tell we thought he was English at the time) was born in Cardiff, but Christopher was born up Caerphilly Mountain which meant we had to drive to Ystrad Mynach to register him. If that doesn’t make you Welsh I don’t know what does. And of course they arrived at the end of February and the beginning of March respectively, just either side of St David’s Day. Critically – and this is the acid test – they qualify to play for Wales.

Undeniably, they have claim on a Welsh heritage even if we, their parents, do not. Whilst we lived there, it was easy enough for the schools to nurture this on our behalf. But now we are in America, there’s a definite sense that it is our job to ensure that they have access to this Welshness if they so wish. Some of my attempts at this have been laughable – does making them watch Ivor the Engine count? – but William got packed off to school in his jersey this morning, just like all the boys (and some of the girls) in Cardiff. It feels odd that it matters and I worry, in case I am actually doing this for my benefit and not his.

Weirdly, because this is also the time of year for Rodeo, Friday was ‘Dress Western’ day at school, which means that all the boys and girls wore they ‘duds’, i.e. dressed as cowboys. In a sense, this is just the Texan version of St David’s Day, and Rodeo is just the equivalent of rugby. Instead of daffodils, we have blue bonnets, or will in a few weeks. But there’s something missing here. Why does the Reliant Stadium full of Texans not feel more like the Millennium Stadium full of Welsh people? The difference, I think, is that to be English here is nothing more than a passing novelty in a nation of people that nearly all started off as something else. And our role in the creation of America is largely meaningless 200 years later on. Whereas in Wales, to be English is to be the thing that they are not, the very opposite of Cymry and our role in shaping and defining Them from the outside is still at the centre of our relationship with each other, after over a thousand years. Strangely, perhaps, I think this makes Wales an easier place to love but, then, we are back to abusive relationships aren't we?

Happy St David's Day to all our Welsh friends and, er, family. You'll be simultaneously appalled and delighted to know that I was cheering you all on against Scotland and France but not, of course, against England - better luck next year!

Time And (my) Relatives’ Dimensions in Space

A French Decimal Clock. I mean, really...

Ooh, the arbitrary nature of how we measure time. My eldest gives a little shout of triumph whenever he notices that the clock on the microwave happens to agree with that on the oven. This occurs more often than he thinks, as they are only out of synch by about twenty seconds, but this is obviously enough of a disparity to irk him. The poor boy has a sensitivity for such things, since even before we moved to America. One October, a couple of years ago, I tried to explain to him about how we were putting the clocks back. Whatever he thought we were doing, the idea terrified him so much that the colour drained from his face and he almost burst into tears. Time to him then was still something immutable and not to be jiggered about with.

But, boy, have we been jiggering about with it. Living six hours around the world is weird, as I have often remarked. Basically, I miss a lot of the cricket, never hear the Today programme and ‘Sailing By’ is now what Radio 4 plays at a quarter to seven to tell me it’s time to have a drink. We jigger about with time when we go home too, like we did this December for my sister’s wedding. The flight there was nothing more than a fractured nap and being in Britain for a week was mildly unsettling as my body clock drifted, failing to grip hold of GMT. Finally the flight back becomes an interminable afternoon of steady sunlight as the day stretches to make up time.

The source of all this confusion is the discrepancy between how we think we measure time, the tinny numbers and numerals on our wrists and screens, and how we instinctively measure it: the length of shadows, a quality of the light, the slow dance of sun and moon. If these sidereal rhythms weren’t already subordinate to our clocks and calendars, then today’s date would have utterly no significance whatsoever. But as it is, we have invented numbers to count the hours and then subdivided and then subdivided, again and again, into hypothetical fractions of seconds. We have named the days and the months and spent generations arguing about them. Perplexed as to why it doesn’t quite work we have to drop in leap days and seconds, all the while doggedly counting the years forwards from something that borders on mythology.

If this sounds like a grump, then I must earnestly say that it isn’t. I find all this fascinating and am delighted that days like this exist. If nothing else, they should make us see that Time, as we understand it in terms of TV schedules and decades, is another lie that we take for granted. Like the roads, like plumbing and wiring, it is another layer of infrastructure that we have invented. And, like all those things, it is delivered locally: 2010 has been going for about eight hours now in the Pacific and it’ll be nearly breakfast time in Britain by the time both hands point to 12 here in Houston.

And what am I going to do if I hear Big Ben at 6pm this evening? However arbitrary these counts and notches are, we submit to them utterly so that even our moods and emotions are manipulated by these imaginary numbers: a new year offers catharsis, a chance to think in longer terms. My status for today was going to be: “Hey you don’t call me at 6pm to wish me a Happy New Year and I won’t call you at 6am, deal?”. But in truth I will be torn – although arbitrary, these temporal divisions hold water because of mutual consensus and the collected belief of one’s friends and family count for a lot. So whilst you are all bonging and clinking and Auld Lang Syning in the UK, I might well be allowing the kids to experience some actual time travel.

Happy New Year!