Philobiblon

While you still have the occasional dinosaur judge making stupid comments in rape cases, increasingly in Britain we have cause to thank them for defending civil liberties, and even women’s rights. The latest today is a ruling that parents do not have a “right to know” if their under-16 daughter has an abortion.

Mr Justice Silber ruled that Ms Axon, who has five children – or any other parent – had no right to know unless the child decided otherwise.
He said he would not change the law as Ms Axon’s lawyers had requested. Lawyers for the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, had fought the legal challenge.
The judge added that to force a girl to tell her parents “may lead her to make a decision that she later regrets or seek the assistance of an unofficial abortionist”.

Obviously it is preferable for girls to be supported by their families if they are considering an abortion, but those reluctant to do so may well have VERY good reasons for their choice.
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Then a gimmick, yes, but I’d go to garage with an all female-staff for preference, even though my upbringing means I can talk “mechanic”, even if I’m only talking the talk. (I once had a 45-minute discussion with a mini-cab driver about whether the problems he had with third and fourth gear were the clutch or the gearbox. I then regretted being able to talk the talk.)
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Turning serious again, micro-loan schemes for women have proved enormously popular and effective, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the mother of them all SEWA, has run into political problems in Gujarat. Empowering women, and women from disadvantaged communities, is always likely to stir up those who’d like to keep them poor and vulnerable.
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And I get the impression often from talking to Britons that they think Australia is some sort of natural paradise – well no, the cities are often a traffic-packed hell. The calculation for Sydney:

ROAD transport is costing Sydney $1.4 billion a year in greenhouse gas and other air pollution, with the city’s heavy congestion exacerbating ill health and climate change.
That is the conclusion of a report by the Centre for International Economics, which also found that over the next 15 years the annual cost of greenhouse gas emissions would rise by almost a third, to $187 million.

Another calculation: “commuters are wasting more than three days of their lives every year stuck in traffic”.

Despite all of the hysteria about the “sexualisation of society”, and you wouldn’t think it when you read the Daily Mail, but it seems that in Britain a significant number of teenagers are waiting longer to have sex. Perhaps sex education is working?

The poll reveals that the number of people having sex before 16 years old has fallen from 32 per cent in 2002 to 20 per cent now.
The age at which the typical Briton loses their virginity has increased since they were last asked in 2002, when the figure was 17.13 years. Young women generally have sex younger than their male counterparts – at the age of 17.44 years, compared with 18.06 for men.

And sanity is striking in terms of long-term relationships: “The number of people who believe that monogamy is natural, from 74 per cent to 67, showed that with Britons living longer and healthier lives, the idea of lifetime fidelity is in decline.”

The figures on homosexuality are also interesting, with “those admitting to having had sexual contact with someone of the same sex” rising from 11 per cent to 15. Does that mean more sex, or just more openness? Pretty hard to tell.

There’s more analysis of the survey here.

Although of course some things never change, with the News of the World salivating today over the resignation of the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, after it revealed his relationship with a rent boy. (He is supposed to be, and who knows, maybe even is, “happily married”, with two children.) Now that’s traditional Britishy sexuality …

We’d better watch out, however, since American missionaries will probably be over here soon, trying to reverse the trends, as they are elsewhere.

From Peru to the Philippines to Poland, U.S.-based conservative groups are increasingly engaged in abortion and family-planning debates overseas, emboldened by their ties with the Bush administration and eager to compete with more liberal rivals.
The result is that U.S. advocacy groups are now waging their culture war skirmishes worldwide as they try to influence other countries’ laws and wrangle over how U.S. aid money should be spent.

On a cold January Saturday in London, 140-odd people turned out tonight for a public meeting. The subject: climate change, and specifically Friends of the Earth’s The Big Ask. What struck me was the number of people who said, during the question time and afterwards: “I’ve going just got involved in this.” “I just realised this is really important.”

There were people fitting the usual stereotypes of environmental campaigners in the audience, but there were plenty who didn’t, among whom I’d include myself. It was only on January 1 that I joined the Green Party, and I’ll be heading out tomorrow for my third Sunday of canvassing for it for local government elections coming up in May.

What FoE is asking for is legislation committing the British government to step-by-step, year-by-year reductions in carbon emissions, up to the target of a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. This move apparently has the backing of a majority of MPs, but that in no way, of course, guarantees that it will become law. It has to be their priority, and almost certainly, the government has to be forced to support it.

And at present, the UK is heading in the wrong direction, with emissions rising, and this matters because while the long-term target is needed – and has been calculated on a worldwide basis that should produce only a two-degree rise in worldwide temperatures. This will be hugely damaging but hopefully not totally destructive. However, that is a calculation based on a gradual fall in emissions. A sudden fall in the last decade will result in an overshoot, because – I was told tonight – every molecule of carbon dioxide emitted today will go on heating the world for a century.

Two MPs were present last night – both from the Labour Left and central London, Frank Dobson and Emily Thornberry. Both did the usual political things, shying away from criticising the government and mouthing slogans, although the latter’s “the biggest challenge for our generation is to ensure that is not our generation that kills the planet” certainly got to the heart of the manner.

Frank Dobson sounded as though he thought the government’s energy review was definitely going to come down on the side of nuclear power, and he set out some nice details about the industry propaganda – the “proven technology” the AP1000 reactor did not in fact exist – the proven claim applied only to various bits of which, some being in civilian use, some military. Much was also being made of “passive safety” features – basically it would be supposed to shut itself down if things went horribly wrong – but every system had that, including Chernobyl. Nuclear power was neither a quick, nor a cheap solution, he said, although he wouldn’t altogether rule out the possibility that it might become necessary.

The Green Party is running its own campaign in relations to the energy review. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it earlier this week, but there was also a launch of its campaign for practical steps to green energy. I’m particularly taken with microgeneration schemes – particularly wind and solar. I look around the estate on which I live – flat-roofed buildings, some of them very tall, and wonder how much of its own energy it could actually generate, with a bit of imagination and effort.

I caught the fossil-hunting bug during a visit to Lyme Regis a couple of years ago. My table is now decorated with quite a few ammonites, what might (or might not) be a dinosaur coprolite, and fistfulls of belemnites. (Their fossils are casts of their internal cavity, so the are simply a narrowing rod of stone. I think everyone gets bored with picking them up eventually, they are so plentiful).

But I guess I’ll have to go back now, since a new cliff-slip has exposed what is expected to be a rich new field. Someone in the “how to collect fossils” group I went out with found an icthyosaur vertebrae – now I really would like one of those.

Elsewhere, in the “it was bound to happen” category, Jane Austen is to be repackaged as “chick-lit”; and an American woman soldier’s account of Iraq is also being sold by the sex, although it appears to be about a lot more.

And, surprise, surprise, Western science has found evidence that acupuncture works.

Researchers found that an acupuncture technique using deep needling led to the deactivaton of part of the brain’s limbic system, which helps the body to be conscious of pain.
Neuroscientists believe that the findings show that acupuncture has a measurable effect on the brain and that the study could provide a possible mechanism to explain how acupuncture can relieve pain.
The research was carried out on a set of volunteers by scientists at Hull York Medical School as part of a new BBC TV series called Alternative Medicine: The Evidence, to be broadcast on Tuesday evening on BBC2.

It would be kind of odd if the Chinese had been using it for thousands of years and it didn’t have some effect …

And finally, the only real story in the UK this weekend is the whale in the Thames. Whether it makes it or not (and the radio news is not very positive just now), while some might say this is a disproprotionate response, I still think it is a positive aspect of human nature that such efforts should be made to save another creature, and such interest be shown in those efforts.

There are some moments from Tamasha’s production of A Fine Balance, which has premiered at the Hampstead Theatre, that I will remember for long time. There’s the opening scene, of a legless beggar, who skims around the stage seeking alms amid an imaginary traffic jam, evoked by a soundscape and smellscape that immediately transported me to Calcutta, the site of my first encounter-shock with the sub-continent. Then there’s the stunningly effective puppetry that solves the problem of animal and child characters – the “death” of one animal puppet produces an almost audience-wide audible gasp.

Yet these excellent moments are blended to produce a dull, if worthy, whole. The play is based on the eponymous Booker-shortlisted novel by Rohinton Mistry, one of those classic Indian sprawling epics, in this case exploring the impact of Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Emergency, which imposed martial rule on the world’s “largest democracy”.

The story, by and large, is of the effects on the poor – the slum-dwellers thrown out of their homes and driven into pointless stone-breaking, morale-sapping labour; their employers, only marginally more economically secure, left without workers; the men and women sterilised by force … the novel is a great sweeping tale. The play takes in all of their stories, yet while it leaps from drama to drama, from crisis to crisis, the action on stage is slow, even langorous. This is a neat synopsis of a play, but the heart, the soul, is missing.

Part of the problem is that none of the characters is developed – they are more archetypes than people. I naturally sympathise with Dina Dalal (Sudha Bhuchar). We meet her as a sweat-shop employer, but she gradually emerges as a struggling woman, a widow, determined to maintain her independence in a male-dominated world, if only to remain out of the uncaring clutches of her bullying brother. But she is a stereotype, if an admirable stereotype; we never learn more. What was her relationship with her husband; what gave her the steel to battle on to the bitter end? (The book answers these questions; the drama does not.) READ MORE

… well both new to me anyway.

Winter Evenings, or Lucubrations on Life and Letters, being posted by Radgeek, is what she has labelled a “retroblog”, being the words of the Rev. Vicesimus Knox (1752-1821).

It seems to consist – well has so far anyway – of those literate, neat, what you might call Ciceronian, formal essays, which you seldom see today.

Here, very neatly, is an essay about the appropriate form for an essay:

Every mode of introducing an air of novelty has been tried by the periodical writers. Allegories, Diaries, Eastern Tales, Little Novels, Letters from Correspondents, Humour, Irony, Argument, and Declamation, have been used to vary the form of conveying periodical instruction. These contrivances were successful, till the repetition of the same modes of diversification caused a nausea.

Well worth checking out … and I think the “retroblog” term is also well worth adopting …

Meanwhile today my own retroblogger, Francis Williams Wynn, is reporting on the accounts she heard of the death of the Russian Emperor Paul I (son of Catherine the Great), recollections occasioned by the death of his successor, Alexander I. It was a bloody, chaotic scene:

Paul resisted stoutly, attempted to conceal himself, &c.; and they seem to have hacked him most cruelly. At last Beningsen and Ouwarow took the sash of one of the sentinels on duty and closed the scene by strangling him, but not till he had received some tremendous blows on the head, and not till one of them (Beningsen, I think) had trampled upon him, and had with his sharp spurs inflicted two wounds in his stomach.

Her account seems to be based in part on the accounts of two English governesses at the court, a Mrs Browne and a Miss Kennedy, who had a pretty scary time of it:

Miss Kennedy with her young charge slept in the room immediately over that of the Emperor : she heard the violent uproar (‘ row,’ Lord Dillon called it), trembled, quaked, got the infant out of its own bed into hers, and with him in her arms lay expecting some horrible event. This dreadful interval lasted more than an hour, when Madame de Lieven (the mother of the Prince Lieven who was ambassador in England, and then grande maitresse of the Empress) rushed half dressed into the room, and desired Miss Kennedy to bring the Grand Duke to his mother instantly, if she wished to save his life and her own.

Miss Williams Wynn’s account seems to square broadly with this account of the life of Paul, which says of his death:

On the night of March 12, 1801, Pahlen, Count Bennigsen, and the Zubov brothers Nikolai and Platon entered the Mikhailovski Castle with the assistance of a co-conspirator, an unfaithful aide-de-camp of Paul’s. They found the tsar’s bed empty. The conspirators, who were drunk, found their head of state hiding behind a screen in his chamber. In an alcohol induced frenzy, they proceeded to murder the man to whom they had sworn their loyalty. Thus died Pavl Petrovich Romanov, who left the world in circumstances as lacking in love as his entrance.