Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Unrealistic expectations

January 1, 2007 – 10:58 pm

I’ve just been booking a planned holiday in Avignon (a week) and Paris (three days on the way home) in February – bound to end up with clashing with something else I’m supposed to be doing, but I’ll never get away if I don’t just do it.

Looking at budget hotel ratings from visitors (yes, I’m a cheapskate, but I won’t pay more than £30 a night for a hotel room if I can possibly avoid it), I can’t help asking what some people expect for their money. I booked a hotel just down from the Moulin Rouge for £28 a night for a single. Some of the commentators thought the rooms were dingy and not as clean as they might be. Well, for the price, what do they expect?!

Yes I’m probably going to freeze in the Luberon in February, but I should get to enjoy the history without being entirely buried under floods of fellow-tourists. That’s the theory, anyway.

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Execution ‘porn’

January 1, 2007 – 7:08 pm

I’m not free to comment on this as I might like, but I can only agree with Sam Leith in the Telegraph that much of the coverage of the death of Saddam has been sickeningly prurient.

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Quite …

December 31, 2006 – 11:39 am

… if not in the manner intended.

Margaret Beckett interviewed in the New Statesman:

She has no illusion as to how Blair will be remembered. “When he goes, people will say that Iraq’s his only legacy, and that it’s a terrible one. I don’t think it’s true at all.” She has settled on a different epitaph. “I don’t believe Iraq is his legacy. I think climate change will be his legacy.“

So as Canary Wharf disappears beneath the Thames, you can thank Tony Blair.

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Matrimonial tangles

December 31, 2006 – 11:28 am

… are nothing new. From Ely in the early 17th century:

A Matthew Maye was presented to the church court

suspected to lyve in fornication in the house of John Lemon with Dorothye Sutton, & he hathe a wief and children in another place, & she hathe a husband & children alsoe in another place as it is reported, & theise woulde marrye togither.

Dorothye said in her defence “yt in ded she was & is married to another husband wch said husband she saythe was married before to another woman, & yt therefore she is not bound to tarrye with him”.

R. Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England, Manchester Uni Press, 1996, p. 162-3

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From the inbox

December 31, 2006 – 11:08 am

A new group blog on Burma, the Burma Review. Apparently the issue might make it to Security Council attention in February or March.

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Beautiful bronzes and a stunning (female) saint

December 30, 2006 – 10:23 pm

Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of the Chola bronzes exhibition at the Royal Academy which I saw this afternoon – absolutely spectacular. I’d say you have to see it if you can. (It continues until Feb. 25.)

And of course it was the image of the female saint, Karaikkal Ammaiyar – not dissimilar in some respects to the memento mori images in Europe of roughly the same time that I found most fascinating, although for sheer artistic perfection you can’t beat the “dancing” Shivas.

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