Posting from the free internet at Singapore airport. Why can’t Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle be like this? Everything is clean, easy-to-find, and it all just works! Checking in with BA at Heathrow was its normal bedlam – haven’t they noticed there are never enough staff?

Anyway, please excuse any infelicities in this post – after a 12-hour stopover in the airport hotel I’m not in too bad a condition for the onward leg to Australia in general, except my stomach thinks it is dinner time, even though the sun is just rising over the airport (not that you can see it through the mist) and my head isn’t sure what time it is. Blogger’s slow, so does that mean it is US peak time? (Not sure any more!)

Plane reading was Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver – 900 pages of well-reviewed historical novel seemed about right for 12 hours. It wasn’t quite, however, since it is a bit too slow and discursive for that job, although a fine novel in many respects. I’ll be reading the next two volumes, but at a more leisurely pace.

There are lots of wonderful details. A couple I wrote down:
* Bewilderment, in its ancient and literal sense of being cast away in a trackless wild … (p. 47)

* The origins of the cravat were apparently “Louis XIV’s Croatian mercenaries had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel” (p. 179

* But on p. 649 there are dacoits in India, isn’t this a bit early for the world have made it to Europe?

The main female character Eliza, later “Countess de la Zeur”, is an absolute delight – she spends her youth in an eastern harim, and has the wits and knowledge to prove it, plus a healthy dollop of physical courage. Her sometime companion, a self-declared Vagabond, is also lovely – seemingly heavily based on the picaresque novels of the time.

The tying-togther male, if not central character, is Daniel Waterhouse. I don’t know if he’s historical, I guess so? He’s left at the end having the operation for “the stone” that Pepys had, and we know he survives. But he does seem a bit flat: maybe in the next volume?

For those unaware of the novel is the 1660s to 1680s (although it also ventures into the early 18th century, starting with a Boston (US) witchburning, the significance of which has yet to be established. This book also leaves one of the main characters on a boat pursued by a determined pirate – I don’t mind multi-volume works, but I do think each should stand on its own.

This is a minor quibble, however. I do feel that Quicksilver took me out of 747 cattleclass into another world. It is great on descriptions of cities, and vignete character sketchs. I enjoyed the time with Liebnitz (presented as a rather decent character), Isaac Newton (rather less so) and Robert Hooke (unusually sympathetically treated, although perhaps not if you are a dog-lover).

I wasn’t really in the mood to get heavily into the intellectual history, but there’s plenty there to ponder, and a prodigious amount of research. Tougher editing might have benefitted this book – there is perhaps a 600-pager in it struggling to get out – but it is well worth sticking with the slow patches.

Next, The Da Vinci Code. Everyone I respect has slated it, but for the second-half of a 24-hour journey the intellectual level seems about right, and I do have an alternative if it drives me mad.

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vesuvius, originally uploaded by natalieben.

* Above is Sir William Hamilton’s drawing of an eruption of Vesuvius in the 1760s or 1770s – something to think about next time you are visiting Pompei. It is from a lovely little online exhibition from the University College London special collection. There’s also images from original texts by Copernicus, Gallileo and John Wilkins’ (then anonymous) 1638 conclusion that there was life on other planets.

* Just when you think America is going back to the 19th century, you come across an article like this, about “big business” providing transgender employees with medical expenses and unisex bathrooms.

* Every woman (and man) in journalism should read this piece. And television is just as bad.

* Humans are programmed to co-operate. There’s now evidence to take on the Right’s Hobbesian views. (Via Arts and Letters Daily.

* An argument for racial, but not racist genetics. And some fascinating information about the “Sonic hedgehog” mutation. (Via ditto)

* Islamic women (at least in the West) are making a move to lead prayers, seemingly an extremely radical step. Which reminds me of the brave woman in Bahrain on whom I posted in November. I haven’t been able to find out what happened to her. Anyone know?

*If you fancy dining with a knight and his lady in a medieval castle, the recipes are here, together with a great deal of other fascinating material on medieval life. (Hat-tip to Bibe’s box.)

I’m frantically busy, so what am I doing, taking internet quizzes. (Only while eating breakfast, honest!)

So thanks to Scribbling Woman, I’ve found out via this quiz that my ideal historical job would be to be a Viking warrior. The other suggested alternatives included an “arming squire with its potential to become a knight”, “topman” (sic), “powder monkey”, “Riding officer”, “Petardier’s assistant” or “Guillemot-egg collector”. But Viking sounded best.

I’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a collection of poems inspired by the writer on whom I posted yesterday. I was particularly taken by the piece called “The Immigrants”.

… “I see them coming
up from the hold smelling of vomit,
infested, emaciated, their skins grey
with travel; as they step on shore

the old countries recede, become
perfect, thumbnail castles preserved
like gallstones in a glass bottle, the
towns dwindle upon the hillsides
in a light paperweight-clear.

They carry their carpetbags and trunks
with clothes, dishes, the family pictures;
they think they will make an order
like the old one, sow miniature orchards,
carve children and flocks out of wood

but always they are too poor, the sky
is flat, the green fruit shrivels
in the prairie sun, wood is for burning;
and if they go back, the towns

in time have crumbled, their tongues
stumble among awkward teeth …”

(pp. 32-33)

It struck me that what is different about the immigrant experience in the late 20th and early 21st century, compared to the 19th, is that no one now is heading for the countryside. You get enormous migration within countries from rural to urban areas (but almost never the reverse, except for comfortably-off people “downsizing”, which is not the same thing at all), and when people cross borders they are almost always heading for the capital city of their destination state.

What does this mean? I suspect it makes the whole experience less innocent, more frightening and daunting, for there are all of the social obstacles, as well as the practical ones.

But although today it would be different, I couldn’t help imagine being in those “infested” holds, or trying to smuggle myself into the back of a lorry. It would do us all well to remember that, however unlikely it might seem, one day it could be us.

I’ve been pondering lately how women were, and it seems in some cases still are, taught to be, and rewarded for being, utterly helpless and hapless, as though this were an admirable trait.

The topic came up one night when I had a lot of ironing, which I did while watching a rather inane British commercial television show, Midsomer Murders, set in stereotypical current-day home counties villages in which every male is a solicitor or in the City, or a retired minor TV star, while the women are “homemakers”, spending all that money on huge fancy homes, mostly set around the village green on which cricket is being played.

It is not quality television, but nonetheless one scene really left me fuming. The main detective and his young sidekick are locked in a cellar with a woman of the “homemaker” type. (Her husband has been involved in a scam; she thought there was something wrong, but “thought it better not to ask about it”.) There’s a bit of discussion about whether there’s enough air, will they die etc, then the woman lies down and goes to sleep, leaving it to the men to try to saw their way out through the door.

Now, yes, this is a silly show, but some writer must have thought that this was believable behaviour for this sort of character. (And she wasn’t central to the show so no particular point was being made about her as a character.)

Then I had cause to meet (and I’m anonymising here because I don’t want anyone to be identifiable) a woman who must be in her early 40s, married to a considerably older man in a socially important well-paid job requiring a very high degree of education. Her manner could only be described as fluttery – in the best Victorian form – and when confronted with even a minor problem her reaction was to ask me, who she scarcely knew, to solve what was really quite a personal familial issue. I couldn’t help feeling that if faced with a real crisis her reaction would probably be to faint gracefully.

These incidents coincided with my reading of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), an account by one of the sisters of Agnes Strickland of being a gentlewoman pioneer (and eventually a very poor one) in Canada.

She has to do at times quite rough work, and cope with extremely difficult circumstances, yet she reports, indeed celebrates, her helplessness in many situations.

Fairly early on, Moodie, now probably in her late 20s, reports she “found myself at night in a house entirely alone. [Actually her child is sleeping, but I don’t suppose that counts.]

“Hour after hour wore away, and the crowing of the cocks proclaimed midnight,and yet they came not. [Her husband and their servant] I burnt out all my wood, and I dared not open the door to fetch more. The candle was expiring in the socket, and I had not the courage to go up into the lost and procure another before it went finally out. Cold, heart-weary, and faint, I sat and cried. …” (p. 196)

Later she reports of her fear of walking through the woods alone with her sister, although she admits there is no rational basis for this. “This foolish dread of encountering wild beasts in the woods I never could wholly shake off, even after becoming a constant resident in their gloomy depths … The cracking of an old bough, or the hooting of the owl, was enough to fill me with alarm, and try my strength in a precipitate flight.” (p. 260)

And she never gets over her fear of cattle. After some years in the woods one day she is forced to do the milking, “when a very wild ox we had came running with headlong speed from the wood. All my fears were alive again in a moment. I snatched up the pail and, instead of climbing the fence and getting to the house, I ran with all the speed I could command down the steep hill towards the lake shore; my feet caught in a root of the many stumps in the path, and I fell to the ground, my pail rolling many yards a-head of me.” (p. 370)

Now maybe Moodie was just conforming to Victoria stereotypes of womanhood here, but I don’t think so; the passages just ring too truly. But it does demonstrate what damage learned helplessness can do in making people live a life of fear.

How many women are living this way today? Probably more than I’ve previously imagined, I’ve now concluded.

(Quotes from Virago edition of 1986)