[This post has probably changed slightly, since the entire contents mysteriously disappeared and I’ve had to copy it from a post of mine on Blogcritics that had similar contents. That has never happened before on Blogger. Curious that it should have been this post … good job I’m not a conspiracy theorist.]

If you’ve ever wondered what causes those “security alerts” on the Tube (well in addition to those cases where someone gets hysterical about a forgotten bag of shopping), read this detailed account of a man who “caused” one, or rather led a police officer, for no discernible reason except, presumably, that he or she didn’t like the look of his face, to initiate one.

He was guilty, he was told, of the following offences:

* I went into the station without looking at the police officers at the entrance or by the gates, i.e. I was ‘avoiding them’
* Two other men entered the station at about the same time as me
* I am wearing a jacket ‘too warm for the season’
* I am carrying a bulky rucksack
* I kept my rucksack with me at all times (I had it on my back)
* I looked at people coming on the platform
* I played with my mobile phone and then took a paper from inside my jacket.

Luckily for this gentleman the government hadn’t yet got its detention provisions through, but even so his life has been turned upside down.

I’ve done every single one of those things, as I bet has every other reader who has ever lived in London. But if a police officer doesn’t like the look on your face, is bored and fancies a bit of excitement, or on some other whim decides to take against you, just imagine being locked up for 90 days while every single aspect of your life was gone through with a fine-toothed comb.

(Link found on both Personal Political and Barista.)

George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, written 1896, has a curiously modern storyline; you could easily imagine a Fathers4Justice Batman figure swooping down on the scene as the three children of the formidable Mrs Lanfrey Clandon start to lay claim to the father whose existence has previously been unmentionable.

In almost two decades of exile she has raised her children to sturdy independence, according to the principles of “20th-century child-rearing” she’s set out in her books. But now back in England, they collide with the old traditions and the tactics the unscrupulous have developed to deal with the “New Woman”.

Peter Hall’s revival at the Garrick (London)- moving from Bath – is emphatically Traditional Theatre. The sets are elaborate, as are the costumes, and lines are delivered not to the other characters, but clearly to the audience, the often ponderous wit sounded out syllable by syllable for effect. The storyline might be entirely modern – progressive woman clashes with regressive, repressive males – but nothing else is.

Yet even in these traditional terms there are problems. Is this a drawing room farce moved to the seaside, or a romantic drama? Neither Shaw nor Hall seems to have been able to decide.

Diana Quick holds the stage as the formidable Mrs Clandon and starts, to my eyes anyway, as a decent, solid figure, easily imagined at a suffragette demonstration – her place in world carved out by her own determined efforts. Yet she becomes a figure of comic uncertainty, as does her daughter Gloria, well played by Nancy Carroll. That the latter should see her life turned around, not by the foppish, entirely comic figure of the hopelessly frivolous dentist, but by lurve, makes little sense, albeit that it is good for plenty of laughs.

Perhaps where this production becomes most unbalanced, however, is in the casting. There’s little impression from the supposedly violent, but now reformed father of the piece – his switches between anger and repentance wholly wooden. The senior male side is entirely carried by Edward Fox, as the waiter who proves the solid good sense of the working class amidst all the middle-class fluttering. Yet the wise retainer is hardly a role to stretch a master, and Fox seems to retain one facial impression, and stance, throughout – his sheer personal charism turning his way an audience made up largely of fans of his own generation.

There’s plenty of entertainment here and, particularly in the second half, when the pace picks up, plenty of laughs. But it is a classy form of fairy floss – pleasant, tasty, but sadly forgetable. And if you think about what’s actually going on, behind the laughs, there’s a sour, misogynist taste at the core of the sugar.

Here’s what The Telegraph thought (if you’re looking for a positive review), and a solid analysis of the play.

Theatre, Theater

Curiously it was only today that off-blog I was talking about women chosing to blog anonymously or pseudonymously, through reasons of fear. (Sometimes related to gender, sometimes to purely professional concerns.)

Then I found that one of my favourite bloggers, Bitch PhD, has been threatened with exposure, legal action and general unpleasantness by an obnoxious commenter. (The issue, perhaps unsurprisingly, seems to have been abortion – something that does seem to get the unbalanced particularly wound up.)

As for me, well I started this blog quasi-anonymously, but very quickly decided here I was, there was no reason to hide. (Although I have, for employment reasons, until now, pulled punches on the odd media issue.) Partly that’s because as a journalist I’m used to having my name attached to sometimes unpopular things (try reporting court in a small Australian country town), and partly because as a feminist I’ve always regarded the best way of facing up to fears is standing up to them and challenging them. (Not that I’m in any way saying that someone who isn’t comfortable with it should do it.)

I’m sure someone determined could go from this blog to track me down personally, not that I could see why they should bother, but even if they did, I’d expect to be able to deal with them just as I’ve dealt with other varieties of unpleasantness over the years.

I’m sure Bitch PhD can stand up for herself – as her logo suggests – but it wouldn’t do any harm to pop over and offer a line of support.

My father has spent most of his life in the building trade, so I was exposed young to its many downsides, as well as the odd upside. (The home-made plum brandy from his Greek brickies was something to taste.)

But mostly it is a harsh, unforgiving, indeed unfair, industry. Huge financial crashes take out not only the big boys, but huge swathes of their sub-contractors underneath them; hideous disabling injuries are caused not just by corporate mismanagement but also a general culture among the workers that rejects safety provisions; often horribly dangerous and polluting materials are used, and abused, with scant attention to the environment or those who will live and work in the structures.

So I was intrigued to hear about a book by John Abrams,The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community and Place, which tells the story of his South Mountain Co. Operating now for 29 years in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, he says that its aim is not so much to make money as to make good things: fine houses, suited to the people who will live in them, constructed from environmentally sound materials, by workers enjoying their work.

One example of an entirely untraditional way of doing business: the company had two relatively poor, single women who wanted it to build houses for them, but no matter how the budget was pared they could not find quite enough money. A deal was eventually struck with another client, a wealthy couple who wanted the South Mountain Co. to build a house designed by someone else, which it doesn’t normally do. So an open, agreed, bargain was struck. The wealthy couple would pay extra, with the money going to supplement the cost of the houses of the poorer women. It is a lovely image of social equity, and a great story.

So too is the account of how the firm gets much of its timber supplies: “Our salvage wood comes from many sources, including wine and beer tanks, pickle and olive barrels, whiskey barrel racks, water towers, dismantled barns and warehouses, logging leftovers, driftwood, river bottoms. The sources of supply provide interesting stories and compelling histories that give the wood a new kind of life. Our clients are taken with these stories; they become part of the soul of the houses.”

The firm is also part-owned by its staff; long-term employees being offered a stake and votes on the board of directors. Abrams describes the way this developed, and how staff came to terms with the sudden new anxieties and challenges or realising the true complexities of the business in which they had a stake. It is an interesting structure:
“The employee-owners are the board of directors of the company and they make all policy decisions. Only employees may serve on the board. Ownership is inextricably tied to employment upon termination of employment or retirement, an owner’s share must be sold back.”

Much of the minutiae of the company’s operation reminds me of some of the better workplaces in which I’ve been employed in the media. Abrams describes a quite formally organised coffee break, where workers from all levels and specialties get together and informally interact:

“It nurtures something nontrivial in our process and business culture. It is an informal declaration of mutuality and shared decision making at our core. It is a place where multiple bottom lines can mingle relax, breathe, and find their own happy medium.”

I know how valuable that can be; at a small paper that I worked on, printers, office staff and journalists were strongly encouraged – read told – to attend morning tea, and while it split into smokers and non-smokers, it did encourage understanding of each others’ problems and skills – helpful when the pressures of producing seven newspapers in five days provoked the odd explosion.

So this is a book that covers, in a gentle, anecdotal way, much of the same ground as the classical business texts of the MAKE YOUR MILLIONS THROUGH SMART MANAGEMENT! style. But as well as being considerably better written, it also offers a different image of business – you might call it the anti-Wal-Mart model.

It is a lovely image – rather close to a Utopian “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” model. It is the ideals of the 1960s working in the realities of the Noughties. And this within the capitalist frenzy of America.

It would be nice to think this is an infinitely replicable model. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure about that. Martha’s Vineyard, with its wealth and social makeup, is hardly your classic American community. Still perhaps any business owner could get some positive ideas of how to make a more humane, productive workplace from it, even one in the hurly-burly of the traditional building trade.

Books, Builders

An interesting post over on Blogcritics about Men Who’ve Had “Too Much Breast Milk” drew me into a comment that turned into a post. DeLilah writes:

Men have been coddled and protected in a skewed effort to protect their manhood and ego. I know countless men who are products of this type of rearing – a rearing where in the majority of cases, the custodial parent, dominant parent or primary disciplinarian in the household was the mother. These were strong, resilient, hard-working mothers – who often times were single-handedly raising multiple children. These mothers subconsciously reared their daughters to be clones of themselves (self-sufficient, hardworking, ambitious and determined) and simultaneously raised their sons to be more reliant and expectant than dependent.

I think she’s right about the condition, wrong about the timing and causes. I don’t think single mothers are a cause; I think this goes back at least to the early post-WWII situation, when early marriage – teens or early 20s – suddenly became the norm. (Historically a very unusual situation.)

So virtual children got married. The women were, however, forced to grow up when they had children (often _very_ soon after the marriage) because caring for babies and small children demands responsibility, attention to the needs of others, self-discipline i.e. being grown up.

The men, however, without this pressure, became “extra children” in the family, never really taking responsibility (except _sometimes_ financial, which may bear no relation to personal responsibility). This was certainly the situation I saw growing up in Australian suburbia in the Seventies – it was a standing, somewhat bitter joke among my mother’s friends that they had an extra child – who took no responsibility for anything, from the trivial e.g. picking up their own dirty socks, to the deeply serious, e.g. co-operating in caring for their children and making personal sacrifices (eg giving up watching a football game for the purpose).

They’d married as emotional or actual teenagers, and they’d never grown past that self-centred condition.

There’s a parallel in this in the extended family structures found particularly on the Sub-Continent – at least that’s the area I know something about. Male children are cossetted and protected, never forced to do chores or make any contribution to the family. Women are brought up to be much tougher, both because they are (sadly) less valued, but also because there is an awareness that when they move to their husband’s family’s house they are going to need emotional toughness, self-discipline and general life skills.

One of the theories of a thesis I wrote about the female prime ministers of South Asia (which I am really, really going to post soon), is that this prepared the women of elite families for the often (very) rough and tumble of politics much better than the men were prepared.

So a tougher upbringing is in many ways an advantage. And I think this is undoubtedly a factor in divorce rates. Women, now increasingly if still inadequately – with other economic choices before them, decide they’d be better off without the extra, unchosen “child”.

I bought my godson a goat for Christmas last year – not to run about his suburban Sydney garden, but to help a family in Africa. I hadn’t realised I was buying that year’s fashionable present, as defined by the Guardian. But having had years of exposure to the aid community, it seemed like a better bet than other forms of charitable giving. But, the Guardian is asking, is it?

Livestock restocking projects have been around since at least the famines of the 1970s and early 80s, and what quickly emerges is that successful schemes are nowhere near as simple as turning up, presenting a grateful family with a frisky goat or two and flying home again. “Two-thirds of the 2.3 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day and most depend on livestock,” says Heffernan, who in the process of cowriting a manual of best practice studied 85 projects and interviewed representatives from more than 30 NGOs involved in restocking. She found that the road to best practice was strewn with the wreckage of misguided and/or badly run projects, but none the less, gifts of goats, cows or chickens “can have a massive positive impact if you get it right”. Getting it right involves detailed, local, committed investment of time and resources and an almost masochistic appetite for a challenge.

This is an excellent, nuanced report that gives a qualified “yes”, and stresses well the difficulties of aid, which almost inevitably brings together, in the giver and the recipient, two utterly different world views, and sets of skills, experiences and motivations. Matching those up – and seeing the gaps and bridging the misunderstandings – requires great skill and sensitivity.

“One woman says later that she’s grateful the goats came because having to feed them three times a day means she spends less time gossiping at the village well, which means she implicates her neighbours in fewer scandals, and her husband beats her less often. Instead they spend their time discussing how to look after goats and what they will do with the money.”

I bet that wasn’t in the charity’s list of aims and objectives for the project.