Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Liberty or a really bad cold

September 4, 2008 – 8:07 am

Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of the new play Liberty, which opened last night at the Globe – good fun, if a touch contrived and definitely too long – particularly in this London September. If you’re going, I’d definitely recommend the long-johns.

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The ceiling post

September 1, 2008 – 9:35 pm

In the field of pure coincidence, I’ve been contemplating different ceilings – first the one that collapsed in Strasbourg, bringing a (probably) all-too-brief period of sanity that sees the European Parliament continuing to work in one city. This allowed Chameleon on Redemption Blues to do her usual astonishingly comprehensive job on the Britblog roundup.

Second, a piece from the Sydney Morning Herald about possums has taken me back to my Australian youth, when I had a study with a flat tin roof, underneath a magnificent 120-year-old oak tree (now sadly demolished, with the house, for the construction of half-a-dozen no doubt hideous “villas”).

It teemed with possums, who used to enjoy bouncing back and forth from tree to roof – one cause to which I’d attribute strong nerves (I’m not the sort of person who jumps at sudden noises), and my ability to sleep through pretty much anything.

Yes, that’s a roof not ceiling – the ceiling comes into the story when the possums got inside the roof, and one day when I was sitting in the living room I realised that there was fluid, dripping through the ceiling on to my head…

(And yes, an Australian childhood might also help to explain my strong stomach. Have I told you about the funnel-web spiders that used to enjoy swinging on the back door…?)

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How (a lot of) journalism works

August 31, 2008 – 10:31 pm

This story, from Peter Preston in the Observer, sums it up:

A couple of years ago, the excellent pub in Edgefield, Norfolk, where my sister lives, began very modestly and occasionally swapping customers’ spare fruit and veg for a pint and pickles. This summer, the manager, Cloe Wasey, stuck a note on her menus reminding regulars at The Pigs that ‘we’re still in that (bartering) market’. But then, out of the blue on 13 August, the Metro papers carried a tale about the pub and the credit crunch. Suddenly bartering was the new silly season sensation.
In poured the Times, Mail, Sun, Telegraph et al. In poured BBC and ITV camera crews. Last week, when I dropped in for a drink, Cloe was shepherding an American team from ABC around her crowded bar (she’d had to put Japan and Germany on hold). Enter on cue, one local extra with a scenic forest of rhubarb. Enter second local with trout on a crystal plate. I’ve been on four different TV news shows, he beams.
It’s a game for a laugh and still (just) August. Add a topical ‘credit crunch’ intro and span the globe.

I mentioned this to a former foreign correspondent who was recalling talking to a newsdesk about a major outbreak of fighting in the town where she was the only foreign reporter at the time. The desk said “but there’s nothing on the television…”

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The woman who could soon be running the United States

August 30, 2008 – 10:40 am

Sarah Palin: Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States. In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow. She also visited wounded troops in Germany during that trip.

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How to hoist a Tory on their own petard

August 28, 2008 – 5:45 pm

John Major did a beautiful job with very little help on “Back to Basics” – with the call for “moral probity”.

Now the Tories are calling for “dietary probity” – and Jane Merrick in the Independent suggests they might need to ban the Eton Mess all over Westminster.

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There were female monks in Thailand

August 28, 2008 – 12:06 am

Research has shown that there were female monks in Thailand. It might sound like an arcane point, but in fact it is vitally important, because the claim that there never were is used to deny women the right to full ordination.

The nuns you will see around traditional Thai temples – dressed in white not saffron – are treated as little more than servants, and are not fully ordained. And even more importantly, in popular belief they can’t help their parents to heaven, as male monks do with even a few months in the temple (as most teenage boys do).

And since there’s a traditional that children must “pay back the breast milk”, girls have to do this instead by making money. And the only way that lots of girls have to have at least the possibility of making lots of money is through sex work – sex work that often starts very young, and could never be reasonably said to be a free choice.

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