I find the Gaia hypothesis a useful way sometimes to think about ecology, although I usually resist the temptation to anthropomorphise the planet. But it is hard not to think that with days of heavy fog around Heathrow in the run-up to Christmas, the planet is doing its best to defend itself: Stranded passengers turn to rail – maybe next year they’ll just go that way straight off, as they should for short trips within Europe.
There are times when I really love Britain, land of sense and sanity:
The poll also reveals that non-believers outnumber believers in Britain by almost two to one. It paints a picture of a sceptical nation with massive doubts about the effect religion has on society: 82% of those questioned say they see religion as a cause of division and tension between people. Only 16% disagree. The findings are at odds with attempts by some religious leaders to define the country as one made up of many faith communities.
Some of the percentages don’t entirely add up in the answers to different questions, but when you think how fast this secularisation has been, that’s not terribly surprising.
Nicole Cooke, a Briton, is a winner of the Tour de France – but of course that’s the women’s Tour de France, so you can be excused for not having heard of her. And you’re much less likely to see her in the Olympics, since the male cyclists have 11 events, the women seven…
The latest issue of The Historian, the magazine of The Historical Association, has a fascinating article on “child health and school meals: Nottingham 1906-1945”. It is not that the meals themselves are fascinating – “meat, potatoes and pudding” for “dinner” (what I’d call lunch – but then that’s a whole other social history) features with extraordinary prominence (presumably no vegetables).
But the origins of the meal, in the 1906 Education (Provision of Meals) Act are fascinating – despite lots of reports of children being too ill-fed to learn, the state was extremely reluctant to intervene because “this would be interpreted as extending provisions to the poor and would intimate that the state would provide for all their material needs”. So when meals were provided there was much effort to stress that this was purely to aid the children’s education.
The school medical service (founded 1908) found in Nottingham in 1913 (when the town was suffering a particularly bad trade period, conditions that sounds like what we might expect in Africa today “septic condition of the mouth, chronic gastric disturbance, bilious attacks, constipation, everted costal margins [?] and protrubent abdomen”.
And when you look at the typical home diet — breakfast: tea/coffee, bread and lard; dinner bread and lard, sometimes jam pudding; supper bread and lard or jam. On Sunday bacon and tomatoes added at breakfast and meat and potatoes to the midday meal — it isn’t hard to see why.
Issue No 92, Winter 2006, pp. 12-19.
My recent short piece on the the Byzantine composer Kassia has drawn some info on a female composer much closer to our own time, Rebecca Clarke, who still encountered many of the same obstacles of discrimination.
And attempts to recover her story have been hampered – although apparently no longer – by the modern laws of copyright – so crazy that this should persist after a person’s death.
… as recorded by Alexander Ostrovsky in Moscow in 1849 and performed today by the Arcola Theatre.
The censor complained “All the characters in the play – the merchant, his daughter, the lawyer, the clerk and the matchmaker – are first-rate villains. The dialogue is filthy. The entire play is an insult to the Russian merchant class.”
And at its best, a lot of fun.
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