An article in the Observer wonders where is all the coverage of the Women of the Year awards. (Male) Editors everywhere are scratching their heads trying to find stories that will appeal to women, but these struggle to make much impact at all. Instead we get endless pap about hairstyles (as a friend was complaining last night), and of course make-up, and Kate Moss.

Minette Marrin in The Times has some very sensible things to say about sexual “morality”. Why is it still so hard to say that as long as sex is safe, between consenting adults and doesn’t involve betrayal of someone else, it is absolutely not society’s business to worry about it?

Traditional sexuality morality — meaning sexual restraint, particularly for women — was based on that connection between sex and conception: it evolved to protect paternity and patrimony. Now the connection has all but disappeared, as has patrimony, and the less connection, the less restraint and the more empty the morality.
For this reason Christian moralists and others are doomed to failure with their quixotic hopes of getting people to say no to sex or to save themselves for married monogamy; they might as well try to put a genie back in his lamp. Because higamous, hogamous we are mostly not monogamous, and we no longer have any reproductive reason even to try to pretend that we are.

And trying to do so only does harm, particularly to women, since somehow it always ends up being their fault, I’d add.

As part of the process of revamping my website, I’ve posted two new pieces of my early journalism, covering the social history of southern NSW.

They’re both profiles. One is of Miss Dorothy Ross, AM, for whom the adjective “indomitable” might have been invented. Most famous as the national head of the (Australian) Country Women’s Association (roughly the equivalent of the British Women’s Institute), she so terrified another journalist of my acquaintance that the journalist burst into tears at the thought of having to speak to her. (Although this was the local “Agoniser”, which liked to employ 17-year-olds.)

The other is the only male profile I’ve posted, of Curly Heckendorf, a Burma Railway survivor who came back and almost single-handedly built up his region – and reputedly never spoke about his experiences. This in some ways is the worst piece, in that you can see me struggling to get him to open up, but it has, I think, a certain raw truth about it.

Both are now sadly dead, and I’ve included links to obituaries.

Just trying to buy a couple of domain names for a planned project.

First Mr/Ms Easyspace, you didn’t get my business because I don’t think my marital status is any of your business. (The titles on offer for registration were Mr/Mrs/Miss/Dr. They obviously haven’t emerged from the 1950s!)

Then another mob wanted me to enter all my personal details on a non-secure website, and yet another lot wanted me to register all my details before telling me what they wanted to charge me. Really folks – surely these are business basics.

Anyway, I finally went with 1&1 Internet Lrd, who didn’t commit any of these errors. Now, go on, tell me your horror stories about THEM!

Yours exasperatedly ….

Miss Frances Williams Wynn is getting right into the gossip today, about the Gunnings – poor Irish girls who married remarkably well, becoming respectively the Countess of Coventry and the Duchess of Argyll. (Each of those links will also take you to an image of the “celebrated beauties” of their day.)

There’s also a dastardly male rape plot foiled (not of course that Miss Frances is so explicit – but were she a Victorian I’m sure she wouldn’t even have said this much).

The ends of Constantinople and Venice – this review takes them together, recommends both, then suggests:

Cities are entering a new golden age. Like the great city states of 15th-century Italy, modern cities such as New York and Hong Kong have become dynamos of wealth and creativity, increasingly distinct in tempo and mentality from their surrounding state.

I’d put London in that grouping too. The geographers say that Bangkok is the most extreme “primate” city – drawing in all the wealth and skills from the national hinterland, but London must come close to its rival in that category.

It is an interesting thought that this might be necesssary for a great city – this article suggests Paris and Moscow haven’t managed it, so have been dragged down by their hinterland.

I’d really not care to live anywhere in the UK except in London (well except maybe Oxford and Cambridge, but university towns are a special case). The rest really is a different country.

From the excellent Financial Times weekend magazine (excellent book reviews – often of books not highlighted elsewhere), a balanced outline of the great project of the redevelopment of Stratford in East London as a whole city within a city – something much bigger than just the Olympics. Can the planners finally get it right?

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I know I point to Matthew Parris just about every week, but he so often has worthwhile things to say:

Every age produces its small, sick crop of brutes. Every culture reaps among its harvests the tares of human failure. Every body of human beings has its leg ulcers.
And they need excuses, these pathetic riff-raff. Every blood-lust needs to rationalise. Even the least human among us is human enough to seek reasons for our brutality. There will always be young men whose heads and lives are so comprehensively messed up that they are crazed by the urge to wound, destroy and kill.

He’s referring to the case of the killing of Jody Dobrowski, and homophobia – something being promoted by the Pope. Yet, as he says, the new “religious hatred” law would stop the tackling of the spreading of that very hatred and “justification” for violence.

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In today’s Guardian, Mary Beard produces a satisfying review of the new television series about Rome, a subject sure to fill acres of newsprint, but seldom as well as this:

“There is also, I suspect, a particularly 21st-century imperative behind the rash of recent “Romes”, from Gladiator on. In the world of publicly sanctioned multiculturalism (excellent, in many ways, as that is), popular representations of cultural difference have become increasingly dangerous and heavily policed. All the old ways of celebrating “our” identity against the peculiar habits – often the eating ones – of the outside world now seem a bit risky. …
…that past cannot answer back, has no government machinery on its side (or not usually), and you can do what you like with it. If they were portraying a modern religion, the lurid, blood-soaked representations of Roman paganism in the new Rome would probably end with the director up before the beak on a charge of “incitement to religious hatred”. As it is, it’s only Rome, so it doesn’t count.”

And she points out the uncomfortable fact for directors: “The Roman senate banned the eating of dormice in 115 BC.” (Read the whole review to find out why that matters.)