A book to look out for, The Long March by Sun Shuyun:

The day her period came, a few weeks later, “I felt as if a millstone had been lifted from my neck. I promptly climbed up a mulberry tree and got a wad of leaves. Standing there, I wanted to shout to the world, ‘I’m not pregnant! I’m not pregnant!'” The women, she said, “dreaded pregnancy more than the plague”.
Recalling those times, Wang, now 91, still had a look of pain on her gentle face, when I tracked her down at the start of my journey retracing the Long March. …
Wang saw one woman go into labour while marching, with the baby’s head dangling out. Another had a difficult birth with Chiang’s troops in hot pursuit, and bombs dropping like rain. As if afraid of the violent world, the baby refused to come out. A whole regiment of the rearguard was ordered to put up a fierce fight for more than two hours and lost a dozen men. After all their pain, however, the women were not allowed to keep their babies. It was the rule with the First Army: a crying baby could endanger the troops. The tiny boy whose arrival cost a dozen soldiers’s lives was left on a bed of straw in the abandoned house where he was born.

And if you’re not going to find time to read the book, at least check out the article; it is a wonderful example of oral history.
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Who’d have thought it, Anatole Kaletsky, very well-informed, but right-wing economist, is effectively: advocating a boycott of the supermarkets.

As one of the prosperous burghers of Central London, I sorely miss the freshly baked bread, high-quality charcuterie and organic smoked salmon that used to be available in my local grocer’s and do not appreciate Tesco’s alternative “offer” of a dozen varieties of cheap washing powder, tinned tuna and sliced bread. I therefore yield to no one in my dislike of Tesco’s bullying tactics and its philistinism towards food.

The problem with bad news on climate change is that it just keeps stacking up and up, and the media, inevitably, gets bored with what seems to be “more of the same”. This is probably why the Arctic ice pack story hasn’t got anything like the attention it deserved this week.

Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter…
The greatest fear is that an environmental “positive feedback” has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice….
Although sea levels are not affected by melting sea ice – which floats on the ocean – the Arctic ice cover is thought to be a key moderator of the northern hemisphere’s climate. It helps to stabilise the massive land glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland which have the capacity to raise sea levels dramatically.

If that isn’t scary enough for you, the killer line is on the end of the article – that this outcome is predicted by climate change models, but under those models it was not supposed to happen for “a few decades yet”.

I’ve joined the Green Party, got involved in other small ways with environmental work, with the thought that I was doing my bit to prevent catastrophe after I was dead. After reading and thinking about this story, however, I had a flash of a serious thought, for the first time, whether I should buy 10 acres in some carefully calculated spot (somewhere high up, but not likely to get too hot), build a bloody great wall around it, and learn how to get self-sufficient, fast.

I’ve read a bit around the fall of the Roman Empire. They didn’t believe it could happen either – at least not in their lifetimes.

But hey, I have had one tiny success. I’m often at the British Library, where they supply thick, clear plastic bags for people to carry supplies into the reading rooms, which can be easily checked by staff. Every evening, there are stacks of these scattered around the locker room and cloak room, where readers have dumped them. Many of these same readers come back the next day and pick up a pristine new one, although I’ve found by experience they can easily last for months.

So I left a comment in the appropriate box and yesterday got back an email:

Your suggestion of a notice encouraging readers to re-use their clear plastic bags, when using the Library, is very much appreciated. Your comments have been forwarded to the relevant section requesting a notice be placed in the cloak room. It is hoped that this will soon be in place.

Might have saved about one cube of ice there; a “drop in the ocean” is the phrase that comes to mind.

If, to form a relationship with a play, you demand to be wooed with perfect red roses, entertained by fireworks, and seduced by the image of a perfect life, then The Leningrad Siege is not for you. Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s creation, making its English-language debut at Wilton’s Music Hall, instead sidles up to you, laughs crazily, wobbles, then drifts around in a haze, penetrating yet indeterminate, like an old lady’s lavender water.

Yet if you relax, hold out your hand, and allow yourself to be led into this story of two old ladies living out a confused, often fantastical, “reality” in an old theatre that’s falling apart around them – you’ll find you’re exploring the whole of 20th-century European history from an intelligent, if oddly tilted, perspective.

On one level this is a familiar tale. Natalia (Dierdra Morris) was the ditzy blonde star actress, the mistress of the Great Nestor, the theatre’s director, who died — centre-stage, as he’d lived — in a mysterious fall. (Or at least the women think it was mysterious; they wonder if it was murder.) Priscilla (Rosemary McHale) was the faithful but frustrated wife of the firebrand, who though he was aging had continued to proclaim, with all of the familiar formulae, the cause of the Revolution. READ MORE

… the wealth of information on the web, I mean.
There are now six new survey of London volumes at British History online, covering Westminster, Soho and Mayfair.

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived — this is a mantra that few English school students could have avoided learning at some point. They might have even enjoyed finding out about Henry VIII and the frisson of sex and danger that surrounded him; so different to the monarch they know, in her sensible shoes and frumpy hats.

But it can be a bit hard keeping those Cs and Ks straight, so the writers of Divorced Beheaded Died, which premiered last night at the Jermyn Street Theatre, have kept it simple, only putting the first three on stage. Catherine of Aragon (Melanie Dagg), Anne Boleyn (Stephanie Fastre) and Jane Seymour (Frederica Dunstan) are in some sort of heavenly waiting room; you might call it Limbo, but we never get to that level of theological sophistication.

They are the caricatures you remember from high school history: Catherine’s the solemn, humorless one with a strong foreign (if rather indeterminate) accent; Anne’s all sex and temper; Jane’s all simper and stupidity. They think it is 1536, but suddenly Mary Boleyn — Anne’s sister — joins them in this curious room, and they learn it is 1543.

There’s news to catch up on. So for an hour there’s a potted history lesson, with multiple flashbacks to the earlier years of Henry’s reign. It is more or less a comedy, if of the rather obvious kind, with many of the jokes coming from the use of contemporary slang and putdowns by women in Tudor dress. In such a production “What century are you living in?” is a dead cert for a laugh, but not exactly an original one. READ MORE

Had cause yesterday visit the shiny new University College London, completed less than a year ago, which I look out at from my window every morning,(and have a nice little haematoma in my arm to to prove it). It left me reflecting anew on how really, really poor most architects are, particularly at getting the details right for human and environmental issues. (The weird sickly green colour of the outside of the building is another subject altogether.)

Sure it has a lovely airy atrium – that’s well enough (although the fancy main electronic door was out of order, in a rather permanent-looking way – so you had to push open the heavy side doors. I can’t imagine how little old ladies on sticks manage that, since they are seriously heavy.)

Most of the main out-patient facilities are on the first and second floor, sensibly enough, but when I approached reception I was directed to “lift to the left”. So, wholly unnecessarily, I took one of the large bank of lifts up one floor, with a flood of other people.

As you’d expect in a hospital a good percentage of these were frail aged, in wheelchairs, on crutches etc – people who needed the lift. But a majority of them were like me – people who had no need for lift, whose health would have benefited from the stairs.

Out of curiosity on the way out I went looking for them. It was a serpentine path, through several sets of doors, having to dodge trolleys outside the lifts dedicated to them. And the stairs are already dingy and uninviting. They might as well have a sign on them “Don’t Use Me!” There were no more than half a dozen people on them, all staff.

This is what you call designing to damage the environment and public health. Put the lift beside the stairs – stairs first in most people’s path – and you help both. It isn’t rocket science. (And in buildings that aren’t hospitals, hide the lifts and make the stairs highly prominent.)