Delicious crumbs from the master's table

My nephew Matt, 12 years younger than me, challenged me this week to name my 10 favourite albums of 1974. A good choice for nostalgic wallowing. While he was no doubt listening to Bagpuss and The Clangers, it was a seminal year in my teenage development, largely shaped by The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Matt’s own list of 1987 faves, post-punk and heavily indie-flavoured, contained nothing I ever knowingly heard. While mine for ’74… well, see the inset panel.

It was not in every way a vintage year. Several of my favourite bands – Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Caravan – were between outstanding albums, while what I remember as my favourite album of 1974, Brothers And Sisters by the Allman Brothers Band, turns out to have been released in ’73.

It’s not generally considered to have been a vintage year for Bob Dylan, either. Eight years after the motorcycle accident that ended his most productive and creative spell and a year before his return to form with the magisterial Blood On The Tracks.

Nevertheless, there could be no doubt, either then or now, that my 1974 Top Ten had to include two Dylan LPs. Planet Waves has never had the reputation it deserved, even among Dylan fans. While Before The Flood is not just Dylan’s best live album, it’s the best live album by anyone.

But then, with the exception of the 1980s – music’s dodgiest decade and the era of Dylan’s dreary Christian dirges – there’s hardly been a year in the last 50 when he wouldn’t have been a prime contender for the chart.

And now, at age 72, he’s done it again, releasing my clear favourite album of this year so far.

Mind you, it’s nothing new.

While last year’s Tempest was no better or worse than either fans or detractors might have expected, Another Self Portrait is an instant classic. And it was all recorded in 1970-71.

Basically a bunch of 35 outtakes and alternative versions from the recording sessions that produced the poorly-received albums Self Portrait and New Morning, it’s a better record than either. More coherent than the first Self Portrait (an ironic title, since most of the songs were borrowed from other people), more interesting than New Morning. And in nearly every case the performances are better than on the versions we’ve known all these years.

Dylan’s voice on this collection is as varied as the songs, several of which are drawn from the “traditional” folk canon. Almost throughout he demonstrates that the commonly held view that he can’t sing is way off-target – or was back then.

If only it contained his versions of Otis Redding’s Dock Of The Bay and Donovan’s Universal Soldier, recorded at the same sessions. Those would surely have been fascinating.

This latest addition to the “Official Bootlegs” series, Volume 10, isn’t quite the best Dylan album of the 21^st century. That was Tell Tale Signs, No. 8 in the set, a superb collection of outtakes and “rarities” from 1989 to 2006, released in 2008, that for me belongs in a Top Ten of all his albums.

But this one will keep me engaged until the next “official bootleg” (a contradiction in terms, surely) comes along.

Crumbs from the master's table, perhaps, but still tastier than most artists' best-prepared gourmet meals.

 

******

The morning after the House of Commons passed its most historic vote of modern times, the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown professed himself “ashamed”.
In rejecting a military assault on Syria, Parliament had – according to Ashdown – “greatly diminished” Britain.
“The special relationship with the US is seriously damaged, and Britain is now more isolated,” he claimed. “It was a bad night for the government. I think a bad night for Britain too.”
So that’s what it was all about, then, was it? Britain’s “special relationship” with the mighty US of A.
Which, as we so vividly saw in the Bush-Blair, Iraq-invading years, is the special relationship of a poodle with its redneck owner.
When Ashdown speaks in horrified tones of the “burning children” we see on our TVs he assumes it’s up to Britain to do something about it – as if our imperial past gave us a special role as global cops. As if that was not the role of the United Nations.
And as if there was anything we could do, militarily, other than make matters worse.
Even if it were proven conclusively (which it hasn’t been yet) who the bad guys with the chemicals really are.
So far from being a bad night for Britain, last Thursday’s vote was a rare and unexpected triumph for Parliamentary democracy.
And, I’d suggest – against what seems to be the common view – that it was a good night for the government too.
In asking Parliament’s opinion, and agreeing to abide by its view even against his own, David Cameron didn’t lose status as a leader so much as gain it as a democrat.

Syrian lives... or American money?

Almost the only thing you can say with certainty about what’s going on in Syria is that it is ghastly. A humanitarian crisis on a large and rapidly expanding scale.

It looks like all-out war between the regime of President Assad and a very mixed rebellion whose precise personnel, aims and support are decidedly unclear. Murky.

It’s not just hard to see who the good guys are in this – it’s hard to see that there are any good guys at all. Except, perhaps, that almost-silent majority of the Syrian people who are on neither side but who are, almost inevitably, the real victims.

And should the United States and its line-up of Western cheerleaders launch air attacks “against Assad”, those ordinary people will be the real victims of that too.

One fears for them. And one dreads to think where the conflict might lead, especially with Russia standing out in support of Assad.

Of course, the world’s been used to America and Russia acting out their mutual aggression in the form of proxy wars elsewhere.
The Cold War wasn’t so cold in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Congo, Nicaragua, Afghanistan... And if the Cold War supposedly ended 20-odd years ago, with the fall of Communism, perhaps we are seeing now the onset of Cold War II (or III).
It would have advantages for both the major (off-field) players, in the form of hard cash from weapon sales. Which is the ultimate underlying motive for most modern warfare.
Early reports on last Tuesday night’s devastating attack on Ghouta questioned whether the apparent deaths of 1,300 men, women and children was a hoax. No one seems to believe that any longer. But what really did happen?
William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said this: “The only possible explanation of what we have been able to see is that it was a chemical attack.
“So we believe this is a chemical attack by the Assad regime on a large scale… It was the only plausible explanation for casualties so intense in such a small area.”
Grim indeed. But quite why the use of chemical weapons should be designated as the “red line” beyond which Assad would be the target of world disapproval is not clear.
Killing people with nerve gas is appalling. But is it any more appalling than, say, killing them with Cruise missiles, Colt 45s, Kalashnikov rifles or knives? With medieval siege-engines and broadswords? Or with drones?
Hague went on to describe as “vanishingly small” the odds that the Ghouta massacre had been committed by rebel forces to frame the government.
Really, Mr Hague? Smaller than the odds that Assad would order such a senseless killing – just when Barack Obama had drawn that infamous “red line”?
When investigating any crime, a sensible starting-point is to ask who benefits. It’s pretty clear in this case that it’s not the Assad regime.
The alternative view – that it was the foul work of rebels intent on drawing America into the conflict – was put forward by Russia. Of course. But it has also been very clearly argued in a less obvious quarter.
The online journal Zero Hedge does not exactly represent mainstream American opinion – in fact it tends to be described as “dissident”. But its main focus of interest is the US stock market, its writers are Wall Street insiders and it is one of the most widely-read and influential voices on American financial affairs.
And it predicted a month ago that “something” would happen soon to goad President Obama into going to war in Syria.
Not because it would suit him to do so. But because it would suit the flagging US economy to big up its spending with another good foreign war.
It’s happened before. One of the prime causes of the Second World War was the Great Depression of the 1930s, which started – like the present global recession – in America.
And the ultimate big winner of that war was the USA, which emerged with its economy reinvigorated and flourishing, while devastated Europe set about picking up the pieces.
Obama is said to be “cautious” about going in with all guns blazing. In that, at least, he appears to be saner and humaner than his predecessor in the White House.
Let’s pray he can resist the pressure from the more gung-ho elements in his own administration, the Federal Reserve and allies like Mr Hague.

----

For some reason – does anyone really understand how these things work? – photos of a gargoyle at Paisley Abbey near Glasgow have gone viral on Facebook and Twitter.

Well, it’s a very nice gargoyle, clearing depicting an alien creature very like the one in the movie Alien.
But before you go drawing conclusions about aliens visiting medieval Scotland, let me point out one thing. The abbey itself may be 13^th century, but most of its old gargoyles were replaced by new ones in the early 1990s.
And no one in their right mind, surely, would suggest that mermaids, dragons and unicorns roamed the fields and shores of medieval Norfolk. Yet genuinely medieval carvings of all of those can be found in Norfolk churches.
One wonders, then, what mind the writers Graham Hancock and Erich von Daniken must be in to see ancient Japanese carvings of “men in spacesuits” as “proof” that extra-terrestrial forces visited ancient Japan. Or what possesses the History Channel to undermine its genuine programming by giving airtime to their poppycock.

The spread and spread of palm oil

You can forget the snails and the frogs’ legs, preposterous clichés at best. You can leave the over-rated, over-crusty bread in its bin. And you can set the cheese aside for now – though that’s not at all easy for me to do. If there are two things that should really symbolise French food they are croissants and a particular chocolate spread.

They may not be what you’d expect to find in a fancy restaurant, either side of the Channel, but no breakfast table in a French home or café is properly laid without them.

My teenage daughter doesn’t like either of them, which may be the strangest thing about her. It was her primary source of trepidation when embarking on a recent exchange visit to a French family.

Knowing her fear of croissants, we acquired a jar of Nutella to familiarise her with the flavour before she went. With the result I ended up eating most of the jar myself, rediscovering a taste from my own teen years.

I’m not the total sucker for anything chocolate-flavoured that so many people seem to be, but that dash of hazelnut makes it a lot harder to resist.

As for croissants, I’m not sure how they achieve that distinctive taste and texture – flaky on the outside, stretchy inside – but if you’ve never eaten one in France you won’t know just what I’m talking about. For some reason, anything called croissants served anywhere outside their homeland are simply not the same.

For those of us who care not just about how our food tastes, but where it comes from, there are problems, however.

I was disturbed this week by a revelation from an old friend we stayed with recently in beautiful Burgundy.

“Generally I cook stuff from scratch but I draw the line at croissants,” Cheryl said. “We had a surprise today because we found out there was some palm oil in frozen croissants in our fridge. Looks like I may be making the next croissants myself after all.

“Can I just suggest that you have a look at your processed food and see just what has been put in the stuff you bought.”

Follow that piece of advice and you may find your kitchen cupboards are full of palm oil.

If the ingredients listed on tin or packet include an unspecified “vegetable oil”, chances are it’s palm – if it’s the healthier olive or sunflower oil, it’s likely to say so.

Several companies in France – including supermarket own brands – have taken lately to labelling products proudly as “free of palm oil”. Which tells you how far ahead of us they are in recognising a real issue.

But what’s wrong with palm oil anyway?

According to the World Health Organisation, eating it increases the risk of heart disease. But it’s the effect of it on the health of the planet that really concerns me.

Particularly the rate at which high-yield, industrial-scale plantations are spreading across several parts of the world, notably Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, patches of South America and a large swathe of Africa.

In many places these plantations are taking the place of ancient rainforest, a sterile monoculture displacing what was the most vibrant biodiversity anywhere.

On the grand scale this is bad for the atmosphere, a very likely cause of global warming.

On the local scale, in Borneo and Sumatra, it’s bad for creatures such as the orang-utan, now in danger of extinction.

And if you’ve ever watched Bruce Parry’s excellent series ‘Tribe’ you’ll know how people too are driven off their land by companies chasing the big profits palm oil can bring. Peasant farmers in Colombia, Honduras and Malaysia are among the thousands who have lost their homes and livelihoods.

Earlier this year Nutella, in a bizarre tie-up with WWF (that’s the World Wide Fund for Nature, not the wrestling association), announced that in future all its palm oil would come from “sustainable sources”. So that’s good and green, right?

Wrong.

That word “sustainable” is one of the tricksiest around.

However “sustainable” that oil farm is today, it’s still likely to be on land that was primal forest until yesterday.

It may be capable of sustaining Western food habits, fancy soap products – and our not-as-green-as-they’re-painted “bio-fuels” – but it’s no longer sustaining the plants, people and creatures who used to live there.

 

And justice for all?

WHEN is a cause “just”? It’s a question worth asking because that’s when the USA says it will use drone strikes – missiles fired from unmanned aircraft.

In late July the Americans resumed a campaign of drone attacks in Yemen, a desperately poor and troubled country you might think had enough problems already.
Last week there were eight drone strikes in different parts of that frightened and confused country. Was every death they caused “just”?
Worldwide, there have been American drone attacks on 27 different sites in the past six months.
Was all the fear spread by the overhead buzzing of the remote-control planes “just”?
If this is how America wages the “war on terror”, it seems legitimate to ask which side are the terrorists.

'If they can't afford treatment they don't deserve it'

It was nearly 40 years ago, over college port and toasted crumpets, that I got my deepest insight into the thinking of what is now Britain’s ruling party.

A newly arrived undergraduate, I had been invited by one of my fellow freshers to partake of those refreshments in his rooms.

His suite (or “set” in Cambridge jargon) was as different from my own accommodation as his suave self-confidence was from my long-haired naïvety.

His windows looked out on the historic grandeur of Trinity’s Great Court. My one window was too high to look out of directly but in any case only gave onto a blank wall a few feet away.

My room, tucked under the bend of a staircase and surely once a cupboard – or perhaps servant’s quarters – would almost have fitted in one of his armchairs.

Unlike him, I had only my local authority grant to live on, and that meant the cheapest room in college.
He had been at Eton – I believe he was head boy. Three other Etonians were also among the 18 of us studying English at Trinity in our year.
I was the first pupil from my school to go to any university. I was the only one of the 18 to have come through the state system.
It was, I can only assume, curiosity that prompted his invitation. He’d probably never met a comprehensive-school boy before. I had certainly never met anyone like him, or his room-mate (we’ll get to him later).
The conversation was polite, but I became increasingly incredulous. After all these years I forget most of it, but I know we came to a disagreement about the National Health Service, of which I approved (and still do). He was arguing for its abolition, along with that of all welfare benefits.
“So what you’re saying,” I suggested to him, “is that anyone who can’t afford treatment doesn’t deserve treatment.”
“Precisely,” he said.
So there it is, laid out plain, the core of Conservative philosophy (although at that time he still called himself a Liberal). The pretence, that they care for ordinary people, stripped bare.
Within three years I had my second-class honours degree (he spent a year longer getting his). Within another six, he was editor of The Spectator, while I was still a junior member of a provincial paper’s sports department.
About the time I joined this company as a sub-editor at the Ipswich Evening Star, he was appointed editor of the Daily Telegraph, having already run the Sunday edition for three years.
These days he’s probably better known as Margaret Thatcher’s biographer. And as the man who told a national radio audience on the day of her funeral that those places where she wasn’t popular – basically Scotland, Wales and the north of England – were “relatively less important” than those wealthier, southern parts where she was loved.
If this comparison of Charles Moore’s career with mine sounds like sour grapes, it really isn’t. I wouldn’t trade my life for his – though there have been times, I’ll admit, when I have envied his worldly success.
I recall it here only as an illustration of the way class and privilege continue to pervade our allegedly democratic society.
I don’t believe the differences in our careers have anything to do with ability or hard work – though it may well be that his elbows are sharper than mine (which are, frankly, on the soft side).
The difference is between money and the lack of it. Between my old school and his, which also happens to be that of the mayor of London and 19 British prime ministers, including the present one. Oh, and Oliver Letwin – Moore’s best chum at school, Cambridge and probably still.
That’s the same Letwin who devised the Poll Tax, thereby inadvertently contributing to Thatcher’s downfall. And who is now, as Minister of State for Policy, probably more responsible than anyone else for deciding what the government gets up to next.
Would you trust the NHS – or anything else that really matters – to these people? I wouldn’t.

If it's worth privatising, surely it's worth keeping

DON’T you love travelling by train? There’s a reality to it that no other form of transport can match.

There’s no jet-lag to cope with, none of the culture (and climate) shock that can come with stepping out after even just a few uncomfortable hours in a plane.
And while car travel has its advantages – mostly the freedom to go when and where you want – you can find yourself insulated from the world around you. Closed off in a bubble with no real contact with other people (except to swear at them as they overtake, pull out in front of you or hog the middle lane).
On a train you’re both in the landscape and among the people. Of course it’s much the most environmentally-friendly way of crossing distances you couldn’t easily walk or cycle.
And despite the recent ghastly high-speed crash in France, it’s still the safest way to travel. That’s why we hear about such events – because they’re rare.
I’ve had some fascinating encounters on trains with people I would never otherwise have met. Great journeys across France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania.
And every time it’s been a depressing comedown to return home to this land where the trains are less roomy, less comfortable, less smooth, less reliable. And so much more expensive.
Of course, in Europe the railways mostly continue to be run efficiently as state concerns. A service run by the people for the people.
Here there is little joined-up thinking between companies that compete for temporary contracts to run trains on lines owned and maintained (or not) by another company.
The whole system is geared to short-term profit, not long-term service.
You can’t really blame the companies concerned. With rapid returns required, long-term investment is hardly encouraged.
In this climate it’s heartening to see the rise of a pressure group calling itself Bring Back British Rail. Less so to realise how little chance they have of getting their wish.
On their website they explain: “We are the collective voice of disgruntled rail passengers and disheartened train employees, demanding a re-unified national rail network run for people not profit.
“Founded in 2009, Bring Back British Rail strives to popularise the commonsense idea of re-nationalising the ludicrously over-priced and over-complicated railway system, which the people of Britain have been left with as the result of privatisation in the ’90s.”
How long, I wonder, before we see an equally well-intentioned – and equally failure-doomed – movement to Bring Back Royal Mail?
Even Margaret Thatcher, who sparked the headlong dash to flog off Britain’s assets, baulked at what she called “privatisation of the Queen’s head”.
Not so her 21st-century successors, now intent on hawking off the postal service to the highest bidder.
Which, if experience with water, electricity – and the railways – is anything to go by, will probably end up eventually back in national ownership. It just won’t be this nation that owns it.
What I can’t understand is why, if there’s any company that thinks the Royal Mail is worth having, it isn’t worth keeping.
If it can be run profitably for shareholders, why not for the Treasury?
According to business secretary Vince Cable, “the public will always want to invest in schools and hospitals” ahead of the postal service.
That suggests it’s a drain on resources. If so, who would want to buy it?
If it were run efficiently if could make money to help fund those schools and hospitals. Not to put cash in a few private pockets.

Profit-motive zealots enjoying the dividend of democracy

After 10 unbroken years in the Ipswich Star, my column was cancelled - to be resurrected after a gap of just a few weeks in the Eastern Daily Press. Here is my first piece for the pages of the EDP:

 

 

 

The most depressing thing about the headline was that it probably surprised no one.

“Gove plans to let firms run schools for profit.” Well of course he does.

Just as the government he represents wants to let private firms cash in on the wreckage of what was once the National Health Service.

Just as they want private firms to run prisons for profit – as if incarcerating other human beings for money was in no way morally dubious.

Just as they want the judicial system itself to be run for private profit – as if depriving other human beings of their rights and liberty etc.

In a society less apathetic than ours, any one of the above would have the populace up in arms. Out on the streets protesting as vehemently as those in Istanbul, Athens, Cairo, Rio.

Here, however, a government of extreme reactionaries enjoys one of the prime dividends of a democracy. A compliant population lulled into shoulder-shrugging, do-nothing mode by the comfortable illusion that they have a “say” in what their rulers get up to.

Of course we have nothing of the sort. A minute share in a “choice” once every five years or so between one group or another is all we have. Then trust them to do what they say they will (which they don’t) and take decisions we like (which they won’t).

The bunch we’re currently three years into putting up with weren’t my choice – or the choice of anything like a majority.

In fact, given the unlikely nature of the coalition – it would certainly have seemed unlikely at any time before May 2010 – you could argue that they weren’t anyone’s choice.
Nevertheless they – or at least some of them, Michael Gove included – continue to rule with the zeal of a party of popular acclaim.
Those zealots, and the coalition partners who let them do as they like, make up the most ideologically driven government Britain has had in my lifetime.
And yes, I am including the Thatcher administration in that assessment. In hindsight, hers looks like a government driven more by ego than principle.
It is, I suppose, a matter of opinion whether or not the present government’s eagerness to dismantle the state is a good thing.
In my opinion, the government that came into power at war’s end in 1945, let by Clement Attlee, was by a long, long way the best we have ever had.
Among innumerable other benefits, it brought us the NHS, the welfare state, huge improvements in education and the biggest boom in social housing the country has seen.
All good things that the current government is intent upon destroying the last remnants of. Good things created, let’s not forget, in an era of genuine austerity.
If you share my high opinion of the Attlee government, you should surely also share my dim view of the present incumbents.
Or, I suppose, vice versa.
That I could almost understand – though of course you’d be wrong. It’s the quiet acceptance of iniquity that I find hardest to accept.

 ---

Those who, like me, ride the rails regularly on the Norwich-to-London line have over the past few years had the entertainment of watching the Olympic site at Stratford gradually growing. And then gradually being partly dismantled.

But the slight melancholy that brings on is nothing compared with the shock and disgust I’ve felt when passing through Chelmsford lately.
I happened a while ago to be sitting next to a former Marconi engineer who was bemoaning the derelict state of the factory where he used to work.
The factory, just by the station in the heart of Essex’s county town, was a place of real history. Not just of local, but of national – and international – significance.
The world’s first “wireless” factory, it was the place that gave Chelmsford its claim to be “the birthplace of radio”.
It was here, in June 1920, that Dame Nellie Melba sang two arias that were heard all across Europe and as far away as Newfoundland. The first “light entertainment” radio broadcast.
The start – before TV or the internet – of real-time mass communication.
The buildings, including the white 1930s Marconi House and the art-deco factory, were architecturally splendid too. Classics of their era.
I took my camera on the train last week to capture Marconi House for this page. I was too late. The building was half down, a wrecking-ball embedded in its upper storeys. Nothing now remains but a sad pile of rubble.
And all to make way for a housing estate to be built by a national developer in the same drab style spreading across every town in the land.
Not perhaps quite such a calamity as the levelling last week of a 4,000-year-old pyramid by developers in Peru. But bad enough.

How good is Bale? And how bad is Suarez?

Was there ever any real doubt that Gareth Bale would walk away with every Player of the Season award available to him?

Not since the heyday of Paul Gascoigne have I seen one player so completely dominate so many games in one English football season.

Even while watching him destroy your own team you couldn’t fail to appreciate and applaud the skill, the commitment, the talent and the work to make the talent pay.

Football may be a team game, but Bale is one of those individuals who can surpass that, raising a perhaps moderate team to a much higher level.

Such players – Gascoigne was one, Lionel Messi is the other one currently at peak – can make the professional game look like the games I used to take part in on the school playground. Those games where one kid is just so much better than the rest that he runs the whole show and seems to be having most of the fun.

(For me the greatest enjoyment to be had – and boy did I enjoy it – was in taking the ball off an opponent of that kind. I remember one 15-year-old future professional chasing me round the yard in fury after I denied him a scoring opportunity by ending his show-off run with a well-timed tackle.)

How the powers that be England must gnash their teeth at Bale’s Welshness.
But how relieved the FA must also be that his annus mirabilis has denied the next most plausible contender any chance of the season’s individual gongs.
What an embarrassment it would have been if Luis Suarez had been named Footballer of the Year just days after picking up a 10-game ban for yet another revolting misdemeanour.
Suarez too takes the game into playground territory – in his case that of the pre-school nursery.
Most kids learn at a young age that calling people names isn’t nice, that cheating isn’t acceptable, and that biting people is a definite no-no. Somehow Suarez seems to have missed those lessons.
Still, however juvenile his behaviour may be, is a bite that doesn’t break the skin and leaves no lasting mark really worth special punishment?
Is it really worse than, say, a feet-off-the-ground, studs-first challenge that risks putting someone in hospital? We’ve seen far too many of those go unpunished this season.
The appropriate sanction for Suarez’s latest misdeed would be to make him stand in the corner for the rest of the day. Then off to bed with no supper.

 

**

Labour’s local government spokesman Hilary Benn says politics is about policies, not personalities.

In an ideal world, maybe.
Can anyone, though, help noticing what a sadly disappointing chip off the old block Benn himself (son of Tony) is?
And as a response to UKIP’s alarming successes in last week’s elections, his remark was especially odd.
For what single policy, relevant to local government, could a single UKIP voter point to?
Come to that, could you name a single UKIP politician – other than its leader, Nigel Farage?
How that chinless wonder can win any contest, except perhaps Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year Show, beats me. Yet some people, apparently, find him appealing, even plausible.
That other supposedly lovable buffoon, Boris Johnson, is a clever man who likes to appear stupid. Farage seems to be the exact opposite.
Which doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.
Hitler, Stalin and George W Bush were all once clownish non-entities no one could take seriously.
None of them were notably keen on foreigners either.
 

***

One may not make a summer – but two?

While waiting for my morning train to Ipswich, I watched a pair of swallows very busily repairing an old nest at Woodbridge station.
Were they, I wondered, the same pair I watched gathering insects to feed their young in the same spot last year? Or might one even be one of those infants, whose early training flights I was so fortunate to observe?
Either way, while we’ve been waiting and wondering whether spring – never mind summer – was ever going to arrive, they’ve been making their way home from the heart of Africa. Crossing the vast, barren Sahara while we looked out for the first buds in the hedge.
And here they are, those emblems of summer heat, swooping and twittering while the magnolia and daffodils, those harbingers of spring, are still in full bloom.
 

****

Barbara Kingsolver is a remarkable writer, an outstanding “literary” novelist who also manages to be justly popular.

Her novel The Lacuna – about, among other things, the last days of Leon Trotsky in Mexico – is, I think, one of the great books of recent times.
I’ve now come, a little late (it was a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1999) to The Poisonwood Bible.
The tale of an evangelical baptist, his wife and their four daughters in the Congo is highly recommended to anyone interested in 20^th-century African history, the evils of US foreign policy, the madness of missionaries, or just a rattling good story expertly told.
Among its many sharp observations comes one comment – made by an African-raised boy in mid-1960s America, but just as relevant to the here and now.
Standing wide-eyed in a supermarket aisle, little Pascal asks: “But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn’t really need?”
That’s a good question.