My Lady of Quality is today reporting on a woman, one of Lucien Bonaparte’s daughters, Charlotte, who is said to have stood up to Napoleon. Miss Williams Wynn says:

Napoleon sent for one of Lucien’s daughters, offering to marry her to the Prince of Spain (Ferdinand), or to the Prince of Wirtemberg (Paul). … When the poor victim arrived at St. Cloud, where the Emperor was, she was immediately presented to him; and as she knelt to pay her obeisance, he said, ‘ Levez-vi princesse.’ [Arise princess]
She had the courage to reply, ‘Non, sire, je ne suis pas princesse; je ne suis que Charlotte Buonaparte: permittez-moi, sire, de retourner mon pere.” [No, I’m not a princess, I’m Charlotte Bonaparte. Allow me, sire, to go back to my father.]
This permission was granted, and intended Queen of Spain (afterwards Princess Gabriella) was, when this story was related, living with her parents at Ludlow.

Charlotte (1795-1865) went on to have an adventurous life, living for three years in New Jersey. (This link includes one of her quite respectable sketches of there, and there are other works here.)

She later lived, it seems, in Belgium, before marrying an Italian and eventually, as Miss Williams Wynn says, ending up a princess anyway. Her second marriage was also in Italy and she was buried there.

You might have noticed that I’ve adjusted posting of the diary to about three times a week. Trying to do it daily was more than I could keep up with, and anyway I think this gives people more time to find – and hopefully respond to – the posts.)

Books, History

British parliamentary democracy is finally working properly again.

MPs have just rejected the proposal for 90 days’ detention without trial by 322 to 291. (They’re now voting on 28 days, which I still think is too much, but is a considerable improvement.)

The current count suggests 41 Labour MPs voted against the government. Sadly not yet the end of Tony Blair, but hopefully the beginning of the end.

UPDATE: The latest figure suggest there were 49 Labour rebels.

MPs then backed by 323 to 290 votes a Labour backbench MP’s motion to extend the detention time limit to 28 days, from the current 14 days.

That’s not a great result, but far, far better than the original.

Why? Well it is possible to imagine your normal life being suddenly stopped for 28 days, but despite the trauma it would be probably be possible to pick up more or less where you left off after that.

But after 90 days, if you were studying you’d have lost a year, if you had a mortgage you’d probably lose your house; your life would be, if not wrecked, then substantially wrenched off track. The government must not be allowed to do that to innocent people if it can’t even come up with a charge to be placed before a court.

90 days, Politics

[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