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Nov 17
2018
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Helen Whitten
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After a week of such turmoil I can think of little to say other than to share with you the poem I wrote about Brexit:
The Brexit Ship by Helen Whitten
Buffeted and adrift on a turbulent sea
the anchor is up, the mooring rope cut.
We slip between waves of deceit,
lurch around rocks,
lost in caverns of denial.
The Brexit ship is stuck in a fog
of conflict and confusion.
No direction has been set,
the navigation charts sunk long ago
in the depths of egotism and back-stabbing,
intransigence on all sides.
Which way now the crew ask
to China, India, New York?
On lands far and wide people wait and watch,
scratch their heads in bewilderment.
The captain’s shoulders shrug in despair
no answer forthcoming,
no-one at the helm,
the boat twists and turns
somewhere out at sea.
Hey ho, and so it goes on and presumably, one day, we shall end up in a place of greater clarity!
Nov 02
2018
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Helen Whitten
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We’ve been surrounded by skeletons, skulls, pumpkins and zombies this week. Hallowe’en has really caught on in a big way in the UK these days and here in Kew we had trick or treaters and small children dressed in all kinds of bloodthirsty outfits knocking on our door. It’s fun and yet far distant from its Christian origins back in 1745 when Hallowe’en stood for Hallowed or Holy Evening, this, in turn, potentially stemming from Aztec, Mexican and Celtic rituals celebrating the dead.
It got me thinking about ancestors and reminded me of taking my granddaughter to see the film Coco last year, a cartoon about a young Mexican boy transported to the Land of the Dead. One scene struck me particularly and this was the suggestion – a surmise obviously – that once there is no one left on earth who remembers you then your soul loses its energy. That certainly made me think how quickly one can be forgotten. I only knew my grandmother and great-grandmother on my mother’s side but beyond that I don’t remember my grandparents at all.
And yet their presence inevitably lives on in my family’s awareness and we are fortunate enough to have a family tree going back to the thirteenth century on my father’s side. But a family tree only gives names and dates and occasionally place names – one learns little about the person themselves.
My mother always said that she didn’t believe in an afterlife or in ghosts and yet I have had experiences where I had a sense of a ghost, or was it a shadow? Once, in the dormitory during my first term at Cranborne Chase, of my great-grandmother sitting on my bed. A quiet shadow, very benign. Another time a strange moment when I was sure the phone went in the middle of the night and my mother’s voice said “hello pets” in the way she always had … and yet she was dead by that time. There have been other moments when I have felt someone tap my shoulder when no one was there and these have left me with a questionmark about the mystery of death and what is beyond.
Earlier this year David and I both read Irvin Yalom’s book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, which we found very thought-provoking. Yalom takes examples of patients who have feared death and explores the subject from many perspectives. A key message for us was the idea that we create ‘ripples’ around us as we go through life. Yalom suggests that we should analyse our behaviour and the ripples we may have made in life up until this point and then consider carefully how we might live the next five or ten years differently to ensure that the ripples we create around us leave as positive a legacy as possible.
It’s a salutary reminder to be as kind and well-behaved as one is able! Reading another excellent book this week – The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman – brought this home to me, as the main character’s husband dies suddenly of a heart attack just after she has been absolutely horrible to him. Ouch. I wouldn’t want that to happen, certainly.
It seems that ancestors have suddenly become even more important as, according to a new book on DNA, Blueprint: How DNA Makes us Who we Are by Robert Plomin, it is actually our DNA that shapes our intelligence, likelihood of success, ability at sports, whether we are kind or nasty, and even whether we enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning or not. So perhaps we should look into the lives of our predecessors and consider what talents or quirks we have inherited and from whom. Food for thought, certainly. So I shall raise a toast to my shadowy ancestors tonight and wonder from whom I inherited my delight in a good glass of wine!
Oct 13
2018
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Helen Whitten
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My new car doesn’t have a CD player. The Peugeot salesman told me it was dead easy – just plug your iPhone into the slot and you have music. But I don’t… because I have never bothered to download music onto my iPhone. When I am travelling on the tube I have watched and overheard the incessant sound of music drumming in other people’s ears but never really felt the urge to listen to music in this way. I have rather enjoyed a little silence. And silence is hard to come by these days.
But in the car I do like to listen to music and just at the moment I can’t because I can’t get the dratted iPhone to transmit anything that I really want. Sporadically I succeed in listening to Spotify but it doesn’t seem to work every time and I end up thoroughly frustrated. In the house we have Alexa and it plays some of the music we want to listen to but again we haven’t mastered the technology enough to get it to play everything we want.
And so both of us look at our CDs and feel nostalgic that they are disappearing. David’s study is full of his old vinyl records and I can understand why. I did sell most of mine, except for my Beatles and Stones collection, of course. And weren’t we told that CDs would last for ever? But they don’t, do they? They jump and get stuck just as the old vinyl did.
And so now everything is streaming and, as I sat in a wonderful concert of Chopin Concertos in the OSM in Montreal last night, I suddenly realised that giving music to a loved one is no longer possible. When my granddaughter started to play the piano I gave her some CDs of beautiful piano music including Beethoven’s Emperor, and my son put them on for her at night to calm her into sleep. But now their house, like the houses of most of our young, is all digital and streamed and clever and so the opportunity for me to gift a CD of music to her now has gone. And I realize that this actually makes me rather sad, and a little discombobulated.
At my school, Cranborne Chase, we were surrounded by music as Harrison Birtwhistle was our Head of Music and although I never played very well I soaked up the wonderful concerts we had every weekend. At home, my parents listened to music often and my father had a varied selection of classical records that he would enjoy playing, introducing us to his favourite movements. My first memories are of the old-style wind-up gramophone – perhaps it was my grandmother’s. Then in came the little Dansette and the stylus that endlessly needed changing. My grandmother played the piano quite well and so at Christmas time we would congregate around her to sing carols and songs, and in times gone by this was the only option for listening to music as there wasn’t a record player or radio let alone a Sonus or Alexa to play constant background music.
But this is perhaps the problem – the “constant background” music that, unless one specifically goes to a concert as we did last night, removes the practice of sitting quietly with other people in the room to really listen to a piece of music. I remember I needed to be reminded of this too, a few years’ ago, when a friend introduced me to Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and, as there were three of us in the room, I continued to chatter away. “Ssssh,” he said. “Just listen.” And so we sat in silence and the music drew us in, in a way it never would have done if we had continued to talk and thereby push it into the background.
How hard, but how magical, that can be – for several of you in a room at home to stop talking, stop reading, and truly listen to a piece of music. I wonder when you last did so?
And how important, I feel, to help our grandchildren learn the beauty of deep listening when they are living in a world where music blares at us in shops, hotels, restaurants and through our habitual practices of listening through headphones on the tube while at the same time downloading texts or emails or reading the news. Dissipated attention becomes the norm. Really hearing the notes becomes infrequent.
Before last night’s concert Kent Nagano, the conductor and Director of Music at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, gave a lecture and told an interesting story of how he and an audience had been deeply moved by the beauty and poignance of a Brahms concert. So when he noticed that it was to be performed on the radio a week later he tuned in, expecting to be transported once more. But only to be disappointed. The music that had moved people to tears in the concert hall had not transferred well to the digital medium and had lost its depth. With this in mind he is experimenting himself with methods to capture the essence of a live piece onto a digital recording without losing the magic.
And so the Chopin Concertos were being recorded live last night which terrified me as I had a cough. But it was sublime and unusually the concert was stopped in the middle of Charles Richard-Hamelin’s performance to retune the piano as one note had gone off tune. We had never seen this happen before and of course to the attuned ear nothing less than perfection will do. And so I suppose my point is how do we attune our ears and the ears of our children and grandchildren to really hear and notice the perfection of a piece, the mood you pick up as you consider what the composer might have been feeling or trying to describe as he or she wrote the music.
In the meantime, when I get back to London, I shall have to brace myself to get up to date and get my car’s music system working. The idea of this challenge fills me with a sense of trepidation and tedium but the goal of having music to listen to as I drive will make sure I bite the bullet and learn how to stream. And I shall also ensure that we make it a habit to go to concerts more often now that we are in Kew. And gradually, as my grandchildren grow up, I shall endeavour to take them to concerts too, so that they can experience the emotions and imagination stirred by really listening to a piece of music. And hope that they share that exquisite experience of being in a huge concert hall where the silence of the audience nonetheless allows one to hear a single exquisite note.
Sep 28
2018
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Helen Whitten
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I rather despair. I long for something silly to listen to or watch but I find that so much of the humour is angry, classist, divisive and crass and so I switch off. I used to enjoy the 6.30 Radio 4 slot but these days the level of humour is so pathetic it just makes me cross. The News Quiz and the Now Show used to make me laugh but they are just rather cruel these days and very ‘lovey’ and full of anti-posh rhetoric. There’s Live at the Apollo if one can be bothered so stay up late enough but quite frankly after a few months it is all so much the same stuff of lavatory jokes, boring stories about children that what Michael McIntyre made amusing all those years ago has been taken to endless levels of repetition.
I just long to laugh more. My childhood memories are of our family sitting round listening to Around the Horne or watching Tony Hancock or Morecambe and Wise and collapsing in laughter to the point that my Dad used to have tears streaming down his cheeks.
There was the gentle comedy of the soaps like I Love Lucy, Dad’s Army, The Good Life, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Til Death us do Part, Terry and June, The Avengers and idiotic humour like the Benny Hill Show, Eric Sykes, Marty Feldman, The Monkees, the Likely Lads, the Liver Birds, the Goodies, The Flintstones. And of course Bertie Wooster and the Doctor at Large or at Sea series. There was the classic Some Mothers Do ‘ave ’em. We had so much choice!
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was one of the most brilliant comedy series of its day and I am not sure that there has been anything quite as witty since. Perhaps The Office made an attempt to be as funny but I don’t think it matched up, in my view.
The original fly-on-the-wall Candid Camera could be brilliant but has been played to death. And It’ll be Alright on the Night similarly ribbed ridiculous moments of theatre and television and made us laugh.
Along came Monty Python’s Flying Circus to take humour into another level of observation and idiocy that was radical and very funny. Kenny Everett, The Young Ones and Dame Edna were equally radical and equally amusing. Ben Elton and Victoria Wood combined pathos and sharp wit together. And I am afraid I loved The Vicar of Dibley.
Political shows like That Was the Week That Was combined politics, satire and humour and was one of the first of its genre. Bird and Fortune and Rory Bremner carried on brilliantly with the satire and impressionist take-off capturing the excesses of our politicians. I want more of it please.
But I think I am becoming increasingly like Victor Meldrew (which again was a wonderfully perceptive and amusing portrayal of a marriage) and finding it hard not to say “I don’t believe it!” whenever I read something in the newspaper or listen to some boring Radio 4 6.30 “comedy” that insults my intelligence.
Now that the Durrells is over I can find nothing gentle to watch, nothing I look forward to much and absolutely nothing that makes me laugh. The Scandi noir phase of tv series has taken us into an altogether darker place and whilst The Bodyguard was gripping and Vanity Fair reasonably good I would love a gentle soap or comedy for the 8 o’clock slot on a Saturday or Sunday.
I long for some of the old-style simple but quick and witty comedy. In search of humour we are taking ourselves off to see The King of Thieves tonight, which sounds a bit like an old-fashioned Ealing comedy with all the oldies like Michael Caine, Michael Gambon, Jim Broadbent and Francesca Annis. I am really hoping that it will be silly but slick enough to make me laugh. If anyone else has found something to watch that fits this bill please please let me know!
Sep 18
2018
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I sometimes think I have woken up in some parallel universe where people’s minds are tuned in to some new radiowave of thought and I have been left behind. Like someone has forgotten to update my software. Did I really hear that:
- The little green man on pedestrian traffic lights, so simple to explain to small children, is being replaced by two circles with arrows, the male symbol and/or the female symbol which is far less clear?
- The Gay Rights organisation Stonewall has suggested that two biological men who choose to identify as women and are attracted to one another can call themselves lesbian?
- The Freemasons, for ever a male-only organisation (thoroughly unfairly in my opinion) will now accept women but only if they started their membership as a man?
- We have an American President who resembles a Court Jester (if only he was!)?
- We might drop out of the EU without a deal?
- A teacher who has decided that Maths makes students too anxious and could potentially be ‘racist’?
- A convicted rapist, still a biological man, who can decide that he wants to ‘identify’ as a woman and gets moved to a woman’s prison where he carries out more sexual assaults?
- There is a movement on both sides of the Atlantic to reverse the abortion laws so hard-won, forgetting how many women have suffered physically, mentally and financially (and actually died from backstreet abortions) while men walk away, oblivious of the high-handed nature with which they rule over women’s bodies and lives citing the law or religion?
- We allow cyclists to cycle on our roads with no accountability, no insurance, no number plate, seemingly no reference to the Highway Code, slamming through red lights at pedestrian crossings and scattering toddlers and the elderly with no redress?
- There are students who can erase the realities of history by tearing down statues and banning books and lectures?
- There have been virtually no prosecutions for Female Genital Mutiliation that have taken place in this country despite many cases being reported?
- By 2035 there will be more Muslim children in this country than Christian?
- People don’t seem to consider, let alone acknowledge, the fact that using the phrase “male, pale and stale” is both racist and genderist abuse?
- The number of referrals for transgender dysphoria has quadrupled in the last five years?
- Apparently I can no longer have a fancy dress theme such as Around the World in 80 Days for my 70th birthday in 2020 because I might offend someone by dressing up in their country’s style?
- Perhaps I can’t even write or use a recipe that comes from another culture as I might be accused of cultural appropriation?
- According to some pearly words of politically correct wisdom I can’t write a novel about a black person because I am a white woman and may therefore misappropriate their culture. So presumably all my future work would have to only include white female characters?
Am I dreaming or just down a rabbit hole? Is it that I have reached the stage of life similar to my parents moaning to me that the Rolling Stones looked hideous and sang dreadful songs? But surely all the above is far more serious than that? Isn’t it?
The trouble is, I find, that if I raise any of these issues in a way that suggests that I am uncomfortable with some of the changes that are occurring I am looked at as if I am some kind of nearly-extinct pariah. It seems to be very difficult to have any balanced discussion or debate with people because we are living in this binary black-and-white world where there doesn’t seem to be a middle way. People just don’t want to hear concerns or questions on these subjects, let along views that differ from their own.
If one suggests that perhaps some of the Muslim population could work harder at integrating with British culture one immediately becomes an Islamophobe. But they don’t want to hear that I would say exactly the same about English people living in France or Spain who don’t bother to integrate by learning the language and insisting on eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
If one dares to suggest that the NHS could benefit from financial and cultural change one is virtually treated as if one had suggested that the poor should be left to die, rather than that we might all benefit from a few efficiencies of expenditure, administration and performance. To speak a word of criticism about the NHS is regarded as some ultimate betrayal of our welfare system, suggesting that I wish to eradicate help for the needy, which I don’t. I just think there are some changes that could be made for the better.
If one suggests that while one voted to Remain one nonetheless feels that the EU should have overhauled its policies long ago one is regarded as potentially an idiot or some Little Englander (actually I am not sure which is worse).
The concept of AND seems to have got lost. And so does any kind of sense of humour, irony or just plain fun.
The EU can be a good way for countries to work together AND require radical review of policies. The Muslim population in Europe can be thoroughly upstanding and good citizens AND possibly need to put some of their own house in order so as to integrate better into European life. The transgender lobby can have an absolute right to change gender AND yet be sensitive to how a young girl might feel if a man identifying as a woman goes into her changing room or toilet. Cecil Rhodes did do some good works AND yet was a man of his time and also acted in ways that would not be acceptable today. One can make a joke about the French, the Irish or the Brits AND still love and respect them. There are bound to be some Remainers who are bigots AND some Brexiteers who are open-minded. And so on. But it’s extraordinarily difficult to say so.
We don’t live in a binary world. None of us is 100% perfect nor 100% evil. For example, the proposal to replace Boer leader Paul Kruger’s statue with a statue of Winnie Mandela is surely an odd one as both of them were flawed human beings. As are we all. Equally no policy is either all good or 100% hopeless. No policy is tested until it is passed, so life is an experiment and that’s where the importance of feedback and review come in, where there is objective analysis and yet also people’s feelings and experiences are heard.
And oh dear, can we really no longer dress up in Mexican or Cossack hats without some virtue-signalling person accusing us of potential offence? We seem to be having an open field day of others criticising the Brits in one way or another and, in our usual way, we self-deprecatingly shrug and take it on the chin. Surely the world is a better place if we can gently rib one another for our various quirks?
But what we must surely be able to do is to challenge actions that seem to have very little common sense and are divisive? I may be old fashioned but are the actions on my list at the beginning of this article not just a little on the mad-side? Or is it just me…?
Sep 10
2018
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We went to visit Bletchley Park [https://bletchleypark.org.uk/] recently and were given an interesting tour of the huts and environment in which the codebreakers lived during World War II. The conditions were tough. The huts were freezing cold in winter, boiling hot in summer. And full of cigarette smoke. The women were mainly young, forced, at a time of their lives when they might expect to be dating and care-free, to concentrate for hours on the information coming in across the airwaves. I felt in awe of them and what they did for us all. Them and the men who fought, of course. But these women kept silent and were not allowed to share their experiences even with their husbands. There was no accolade or acknowledgement for many years of what they did for us. They just quietly left and got on with life.
This made me think about the way women through the ages have just quietly got on with life, and still do, however tough. The mothers in Syria, the Yazidis trying to re-enter life after kidnap ordeals, The Rohingyas, countless women who are subjected to violence and abuse in Africa, India, South America and nearer to home. How they stoically knuckle down to do what they believe will protect themselves and their children. We must not forget them and cannot imagine that any #MeToo or feminist movement that has occurred so far has solved these problems.
These messages were brought home to me also when we went to see the French film Les Guardians, about the women left behind to tend the farms while their men fought during World War I. It was back-breaking work, tilling and gathering the harvest, making ends meet. And it made me think of the women who have done this over the centuries, run farms, castles, palaces while the men went to war or off to Crusade. Their skills unappreciated, often, and unacknowledged. Bringing up the children unobtrusively on their own, while their men rampaged around the countryside or globe at the behest of some monarch, prince or baron. There are few history books documenting their lives or explaining how they kept a country, community and family going in the absence of the menfolk.
Coincidentally I have also just finished the book The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, about the women left behind on their own in France during World War II, one fighting for the Resistance, the other defending her family and friends during the Occupation, finally being drawn to protect Jewish children. These women, like the women in England and elsewhere, were living on bare scraps of food with little heat or protection.
And then reading The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland, a sorry tale of a mother and child violently abused by the father. And the legacy such treatment leaves for all those who experience or witness it. This more relevant as the law is finally to change to allow women who have lived in the home of their abuser to be able to receive compensation for their injuries.
Of course women can abuse and behave badly. This I know. But these recent experiences have really made me think about the twists and turns of history where women have just quietly got on with putting food on a table and nurturing children. Of, sadly, those many places in the world where abuse of women is still an accepted part of the culture and of how those women have a daily struggle to maintain their self-respect while enduring the violent demands of husbands or those around them. And of how, even in our own society, the old assumptions about a woman’s role in life or work is often still stuck in the past, with lower pay and everyday put-downs. And until recently this has been accepted as the norm until we finally woke up to the fact that women deserve better.
And so I write this in gratitude to those women who endured so much hardship in order to give us the benefits of life today here in the UK, Europe and beyond. I hope that I would do the same and have the same resilience, but I don’t know if I could and hope none of us are put in such situations again. But what I do hope is that I leave my grandchildren with some understanding of what their great-grandmothers, great-great grandmothers and ancestors might have done that has given them the life they enjoy today.