Lying quickly and invisibly …
My 19th-century blogger Miss Frances Williams Wynn is today reporting on Jerome, King of Westphalia, who receives a letter of rebuke from his older brother, Napoleon, about the state of his army, but reads it out as though it is praise.
… but it is getting to be a rather large minority. The statistics are a little confused, but a report on one of the Daily Telegraph blogs (and who’d have thought I’d be writing that a year ago?) says “16 million people in Europe’s five biggest countries are regular blog readers. Of those, almost four million have created a blog or posted on one.”
The report also quotes a figure of 10 per cent of Europeans reading blogs. When you think about all of the language issues (are there many blogs in say Latvian? probably not a huge number I’d expect), then that is a huge figure. And 25 per cent of them actually participating is astonishing.
Perhaps it is not such a surprise that the Telegraph’s web front page (a nicely uncluttered design) gives about 10 per cent of the space to its blogs. (For non-UK readers, the Telegraph is traditionally the paper of “disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells”, the small “c” conservative, “Middle England”, change-resistant suburbanites of “a certain age” and above.)
Sometimes you just read something – something practical, potentially lifesaving, and think “everyone should know that”. Here’s today’s such reading:
If a large artery is severed by a stabbing in the groin or upper thigh, the torrent of blood released under pressure will be obvious externally. It is simple to staunch the haemorrhage by applying very firm pressure just above the injury: the victim must first be pulled out flat; then, kneeling on the same side as the injury, the first-aider uses a clenched fist to apply very firm pressure just above the wound and on a line between it and the belly button.
A second fist, applied to the abdomen just below the belly button, pushing the belly wall hard against the spine, can also be used if the bleeding seems unabated. This action compresses the main artery to the lower body and both legs. A tourniquet or bandage cannot achieve sufficient direct pressure to control bleeding from the large artery in the groin.
Should the stab wound be higher in the abdomen, and a vital organ or large artery lacerated, there may be little external bleeding but the life-threatening haemorrhage will continue as the abdo-minal cavity fills with blood. The only thing a first-aider can do is apply the fist pressure as high as possible, just below the breast bone, and trust some control can be achieved until expert help arrives.
The final paragraph sounds a bit ambitious, but the first two perfectly feasible. They would certainly beat standing around wringing your hands.
… trying from memory, or from imaginative reconstruction, to sound like a “Tru-Blu Ozzie” is a bad move. As in the case of Clive James writing on AD Hope in The Times Literary Supplement:
(Used as a noun, the word “rissole†denotes a kind of proto-hamburger, but used as a verb – as in “Strewth, we’ve rissoled the Holden†– the same word means that the machinery has ceased to work.)
It would work really well in comedy, but as literary criticism ’tis a little lacking in verisimilitude.
Far too many writers with hopes of being labelled “literary” believe achieving that status requires them to pile in the adjectives and adverbs, to describe their hero’s every twitch and turn, the leaf of every tree she sits under, the state of every cloud above. Such writers should be sentenced to read Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, the Orange Prize-shortlisted first novel of the Australian Carrie Tiffany.
“Spare”, “sparse”, “laconic” are the adjectives that might be applied to this account of one woman’s life in the Victoria Mallee, a wheat-growing that suffered the same fate as the American dustbowl states. As a veteran of the Australian bush, I can confirm that no form of expression could be more apt; words are mere occasional punctuation of a real bushies’ silence.
Yet sparse doesn’t mean thin; all of Australia’s 20th-century history is here – the struggle to find a workable relationship with an ancient continent, to come to terms with its place in Asia, two world wars, the Depression, stories that are indeed not just Australian, but universal.
Not a good story, but interesting that there seem to have been so many women running farms as they were hit by the rinderpest plague that reached its height in 1745. In Marylebone Park (now Regent’s Park), two widows who ran its farms, Jane Francis on the main farm and Mary Hall on the smaller, both saw their businesses fail as a result, as did many other farmers, despite the government paying 40 shillings compensation for each dead beast.
Anne Berry, who farmed on what is now Portman Square “suffered great losses by the death of cows”. She, like a number of farm labourers, was excused from paying parish rates.
These farms must have been primarily dairies, but the park also had another business, haymaking. A Swedish botanist, Pehr Kalm, reported in 1748 that grassland stretched as far as Hampstead and beyond. The fields were cut and the hay stacked in May, again in July, and then in September if the season was good. He reported that this was all for London’s horse population:
As these is an unknown number of horses kept in the stables, it is not wonderful that hay is very dear there, especially at some times of the year, of which these farmers situated near to London are well able and know how to avail themselves.”
(from Regent’s Park: A Study of the Development of the Area from 1086 to the Present Day by Ann Saunders (Ann Cox-Johnson), David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1969, pp. 51-52)
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