Philobiblon

You really do have to worry about the Observer, which is sounding more like the Daily Mail every week. It might want to adopt a new slogan – “Women must be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen”.

The splash today is “UK baby shortage will cost £11 billion · Career pressures blamed for shortfall · Early motherhood cuts women’s salaries”. The story itself is not so bad, in fact has some sensible stuff about the need for childcare, flexible working etc, but most people will, of course, only absorb the headline.

It also persists in the “women just stupidly forgot to have children” trope:

“If women had had, by the age of 36-38, the number of children they wanted when they were aged between 21 and 23, the birth rate would be 13 per cent higher, it calculates. Only five per cent said they did not originally want children, yet four times as many were childless by their late thirties.”

Well I wanted many things when I was 21 – although I didn’t want children – and I don’t now want many of the same things. I didn’t want many of the same things when I was 25 or 30. At 21 you are still chiefly the product of your conditioning and upbringing – you are only just starting to grow up and construct yourself as an independent individual.

No doubt many of those women later changed their minds, or decided that while a baby might be nice, it wasn’t their top priority. Also, no doubt, when they asked those early twenties women the question, they were thinking of having a baby as something that would happen in the far distant future – it is not a serious practical prospect.

With, as I’ve reported before, 30 per cent plus of women in Scotland chosing not to have babies, when are the researchers (and the newspaper editors) going to recognise that this is a valid, sensible, entirely normal choice?

Meanwhile, while I think Labour’s focus on “choice” in schools and hospitals is ridiculous – you just want a good local one, I have to strongly disagree with the complaint about “too much choice” in general life. It is the same as information; you just need to turn the statement around. In the past we were information/choice poor – now we are rich.

Of course both personal and societal structures need to adapt, and there’s likely to be some tension in that adjustment, but we don’t want to go back to poverty. Certainly thousands of types of breakfast cereal might be ridiculous, but you can choose to ignore most or all of them, and if enough people do that there will be an immediate corrective effect. We’ve just got to celebrate good ranges of choices (such as whether or not to have babies), and ignore the silly, corporate ones.

But choice is yet to reach Wi-Fi A Times writer has a great idea for small businesses to get ahead of the big boys … And I wonder if local government shouldn’t play a role here too.

The Blair government is hell-bent on introducing more nuclear power, yet it can’t even properly oversee the use of medical radiation (which as a life-saving measure is no doubt necessary).

A LETHAL beam of radiation was emitted from a casket containing highly radioactive waste on a three-and-a-half-hour road journey across England, it was disclosed yesterday.
Thousands of people were put at risk by the “cavalier” attitude of workers for the privatised company in charge of transporting the hospital waste.
Anyone standing one yard from the beam and in its direct path would have felt sick within ten minutes. After two hours they would have been dead.
Only by “pure chance” was no one directly exposed to the high concentration of cobalt-60 gamma rays that streamed from the container because of the failure to install a lead safety plug.

Something of a theme emerging here, given that the government has just privatised the supply of medical oxygen, and that system is also in chaos.

More cheerfully (well unless you were around at the time), it seems T. rex might after all have been the fearsome predator of childish imaginations, rather than the sober scavenger of scientific thought.

“A team of US scientists has produced detailed models of dinosaur brains, from which it concludes, from the shape and size of components of the dinosaur’s brain linked to hearing, balance and the co-ordination of head and eye movement, that its sensory system was clearly that of a predatory rather than scavenging animal.”

Meanwhile in New Zealand schoolchildren found the remains of a giant penguin, which would have stood to look us in the eye. Don’t tell Disney!

The Guardian online editor’s view of the blog.

So what is a blog? Let’s just say it is an opportunity, not a threat.

“Elizabeth Emma Thomas, buried 29th October 1808
The following extraordinary circumstance took place on interment of this person; viz:
On Saturday the 29th of October, the corpse was brought from a house in Charter-house-square, and buried in the Church-yard; on the following Monday A Head Stone was placed over her grave; with the following inscription:

In memory of
Mrs Elizabeth Emma Thomas,
who died the 28th October, 1808,
aged 23 years.
She had no fault, save what travellers give the moon:
The light was lovely, but she died too soon.”

Commonplace enough. But then the locals of the parish of St Mary’s Islington thought there was something odd about the way this had all happened so fast, so eventually – no doubt after much local excitement – an exhumation order was obtained. And when Mrs Thomas’s body was examined, it was found there was a thin wire run through her ribs and into her heart.

Ahh, but then the explanation came. She had been buried fast and it all sorted out because the relatives were off to Paris. The wire had been inserted at their request, because they were worried about the possibility of her being buried alive …

Mmmmmm ….

The History of Islington, John Nelson, 1980, Philip Wilson, fascimile of the first edition of 1811, p. 364.

Isabelle Eberhardt was one of those Victorian-era women who did not so much throw over the traces as fling them to the heavens, then run away laughing. Born in Switzerland, to an eccentric, drunken anarchist father and a inept German mother who had fled to him from her Russian general husband, Isabelle grew up, at least on the account of New Anatomies, the play that has just opened in London, addicted to fantasies of the desert and Islam that had been her childhood refuge.

As a young woman, with both parents dead, she visited, with her staunchly conventional sister Natalie, her beloved brother Antoine in Algiers, where he had run away to the Foreign Legion. There she adopted male dress, the name Si Mahmoud, and took to the desert in the company of members of a Sufi mystic order. Despite her Islamic faith, she also, said one acquaintance, “drank more than a Legionnaire, smoked more kif than a hashish addict, and made love for the love of making love”.

Forced back to Paris, she can only return to the desert as a French spy. But can she be truly free? Somehow you know what the answer is going to be, even if you haven’t cheated by reading the biography first. READ MORE

An interesting study from Science is reported today in the Guardian. A study has found that snap decisions – the sort of thing traditionally called “emotional” and products of “women’s intuition” – are often better than those that involve careful weighing of the facts of a problem, i.e. “rational” decisionmaking.

“Conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products,” wrote Dr Dijksterhuis …
The problem with thinking about things consciously is that you can only focus on a few things at once. In the face of a complex decision this can lead to giving certain factors undue importance. Thinking about something several times is also likely to produce slightly different evaluations, highlighting inconsistencies.”

It makes me think of the real estate theory that people decide within two minutes of reaching the front door whether or not they are going to buy a house – surely this sort of decision. It might not be as silly a method as it sounds.

So perhaps we could all just feel that global warming is happening, and dangerous, and do something about it?
In The Times today:

If mankind does not put its house in order, temperatures could have risen by 15C (27F) by the year 3000 and sea levels by more than 11 metres (36ft), flooding much of London, the team, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says in a report for the Environment Agency. Abrupt changes could make Britain much hotter, or even — such is the uncertainty of the predictions — first colder and then hotter.
This could happen if the North Atlantic current system collapsed, denying Britain the warming effect of the Gulf Stream. Ocean surface temperatures would fall by 3C (5.4F), but as the Arctic sea ice melted, they would rise again by 8C (14.4F) in an abrupt turnabout over a period of no more than about 20 years.

The Australian lower house of parliament has voted overwhelmingly to strip licencing power for an abortion drug from a health minister unable to separate his private religion from his public duty (so overwhelmingly that there wasn’t even a vote – which was a bit of a pity really -it would be nice to have the numbers. The picture of two women parliamentarians, from different parties, celebrating with champagne, is a powerful argument for more women in parliament – when it comes to the crunch they can at least sometimes make a real difference.

Former Victorian premier Joan Kirner said the decision was “almost as important as the right to equal pay”.
“In my generation in the Parliament it was still the blokes making the decisions and mainly doing deals between themselves, as in the Harradine case, rather than involving the people who were most affected by the decision, and that is women. This time it was women leading the debate …”

And a judge has order that anti-Iraq war protesters who painted their message on the Sydney Opera House should get their pot of paint back – it is thought likely headed for a museum. Nice to see history being preserved for posterity.