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Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

A festive luxury – an afternoon with Phyrne Fisher

December 28, 2010 – 10:21 pm

First published on Blogcritics

I don’t know what I’m going to do when Kerry Greenwood stops writing her Phyrne Fisher series – an important part of my festive season tradition, ordering the book from Australia well in advance, then saving it up for a couple of luxury hours, will fall apart.

Luckily, Greenwood’s been writing one a year for a long time now, since starting with Cocaine Blues back in 1989, and her latest, Dead Man’s Chest, lives up to the usual high standard of lively writing, inventive plotting and interesting background research about the odder corners of 1920s Australia through the eyes of a dashing, happily sexual, resolutely single, very rich and enterprisingly adventurous flapper.

This time Phyrne’s on holiday in the resort town of Queenscliff with her faithful maid and two adopted daughters, but of course it turns out, even sooner than might have seemed possible, that she can’t avoid mystery, when the apparently devoted butler/cook couple who are expected to be in the house she’s borrowing, are missing. That’s after she’s done her usual standing up for the underdog in defending a fish-delivery boy from the not-so-tender mercy of some upper-class yobs.

In the typical way of Greenwood’s nattily intricate plotting, this is all interconnected with an epidemic of pigtail-slashing, the bewitching arrival of an early film company, a hidden room full of bones collected by a dubious anthropologist, Bundberg rum smuggling, and a hidden pirate’s treasure.

There’s lots of lingering over lovely meals – provided for the first time by Phyrne’s adopted daughter Ruth, but rather less on wardrobes than usual, given the limitations of seaside attire, the visual pleasures this time coming chiefly from the town’s surprising resident community of surrealists, which Phyrne of course manages to dazzle with the sophistication of her Parisien past.

Suspend disbelief, see if you can find someone to make you a nice jug of cocktails ala Phryne, and you can settle down for a delightful bout of fictional feminine derring-do. Just the thing for the digestion.

(More on my minor intoxication…)

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Why is Britain doing so badly in international education tables?

December 11, 2010 – 12:25 am

Post first published on Blogcritics

There were two reasons why I really had to read Wendy Wallace’s Oranges and Lemons: Life in an Inner City Primary School. The first is that the school whose life it covers, Edith Neville, which serves three to 11-year-olds, is about 50 metres up the road from my home, and many of the children who live around me attend it. The second is that I’m a school governor at a very similar school not far away.

The reason why everyone should read it is to understand the enormous disadvantages many children in Britain today face, and the desperate need for resources (many of which are now at risk of being snatched away, where they currently exist – like Plot 10, the 40-year-old Somers Town institution that provides pre- and after-school care that’s now under threat) to support children and families.

Somers Town was traditionally home to the railway workers who served the trains at St Pancras/King’s Cross and Euston stations, between which it sits. Most of those jobs hae gone now, but it is still a very poor community, probably the last one left in central London, sandwiched between the posh and increasingly institutionalised Bloomsbury to the south, and Camden Town to the north. Most of the housing is council and former council flats, so has to a large degree escaped the gentrification of surrounding areas.

But as author Wendy Wallace explains, anything outside Somers Town is foreign territory for many of the pupils at Edith Neville, whose only excursions outside Somers Town – indeed sometimes outside their own usually small homes – come through the school.

Wallace spent a year at the school, and chooses to focus on a small selections of pupils and staff. They, and their parents, all have their own stories – Najreen, whose mother only speaks Bengali and appears depressed, caring for three small children. One of the success stories – by the end of a year at nursery she’s progressed for almost catatonic silent terror to full interaction with other children and teachers in two languages.
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Britblog Roundup No 288

December 4, 2010 – 11:16 pm

Welcome to this edition of the Roundup (which should have been out last Sunday – apologies) – you can contribute to the next by emailing nominations to britblog AT gmail DOT com.

A big week for the students, and blogging about students. Jim on The Daily (Maybe) did a roundup of coverage, and was there himself, there’s academic solidarity on An Open Letter by a Feminist,
while Harpy Marx is frustrated with Ed Miliband, and Richard Osley has picked out a young leader.

Elsewhere on the political side, Ed Miliband is in trouble again, this time for the promotion of baby formula, Jeff on Better Nation suggests Scotland may need an austerity plan (on which Molly on Gaian Economics has a view.)

The week also saw UN International Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls day.
On Sian and the Crooked Rib, there’s disgust at the reaction of Bristol Council worthies to an exhibition by women survivors of violence.

Elsewhere, The Magistrate comments on a tragic court case, and Charles Crawford has a salutory warning for public speakers.

It’s pleasing that the strength of local (and hyper-local) blogs is growing all of the time, providing a quality of coverage that many local newspapers probably never did, and certainly don’t do now. Diamond Geezer has a warning of Olympic travel difficulties, 853 is wondering who should run Greenwich Park, West Hampstead Life is concerned his locality has missed out on a typeface,

On The F-Word, a powerful demonstration of the power of stereotypes. On Random Acts of Reality, an explanation of why health workers may get sick a lot.

On the arts side, Camden Kiwi has seen A Dog’s Heart.

That’s all for this week – the next host, possibly quite soon! – is The Wardman Wire.

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Women Against the Cuts protest tonight

November 30, 2010 – 11:19 pm

It was seriously cold, it was seriously snowing, and Westminster was swarming with police, but there was a great turnout this evening for the first Women Against the Cuts event (about 150 or so at its peak I’d judge).

I’m afraid this rather blurry photo is all I have as evidence, because although it wasn’t on the schedule I did spend quite a bit of the evening on megaphone duty…

There was a choir (a definitely higher class of protest), although my favourite chants were along the lines of “non-doms are shite”, and was really pleasing that so many of the protester took what I suspect was for many their first turn at a megaphone to deliver a personal message about their anger to the treasury.

For an organisation that only started around six weeks ago it was a magnificant effort – the next organising meeting is on Thursday and after that I’m sure much more will be planned.

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Women Against the Cuts Session at the Coalition of Resistance meeting

November 28, 2010 – 11:14 pm

Went to an excellent session at the Coalition of Resistance national organising meeting yesterday run by Women Against the Cuts, which packed something like 80 women into a very small school classroom, with very small chairs! Among the groups whose members/reps were there were Feminist Fightback, the Older Feminist Network and the Radical Statistics Group. There were also two women who told us how they met at the first-ever Women’s Liberation march in London – the age range was about as wide as it could have been.

The session agreed to call for the addition of the following paragraph to the Conference Declaration:

“Acknowledging that women absorb many of the additional pressures from the cuts, the Coalition will strongly support efforts to defend services particularly used by women, and women-specific services. It will particular acknowledge the difficulties suffered by women from diverse communities, including women with disabilities, women from ethnic minorities, and pensioners.”

The conference committee, however, was faced with (depending on which account you believe, either 14 or 20 amendments), so the huge meeting (fairly enough) – some 1,300 strong – agreed to refer this to the Council elected at the meeting.

The session also called for the Council to be at least 50% female, a call that was acknowledged in the plenary session. The people who put themselves forward were 37% female – and I spoke to the organisers afterwards and strongly urged them to either reopen nominations for women or co-opt women to achieve gender balance – so we’ll see….

I had been asked to propose the motion, so here are some of the key details from the speech I never got to make for that:
* Independent House of Commons Library research has shown that the cuts will hit women twice as hard as men: two-thirds of the direct cuts will be forn by women, £11bn of £16bn.
* Over 65% of public service workers are women, and they make up 75% of local government workers, where the job cuts are likely to fall the hardest
* Benefits make up one-fifth of the average women’s income (one-tenth of the average man’s)
* 1m more women than men claim housing benefit – they make up 60% of the total
* 25% of women in their 50s have caring responsibilities

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