Month: September 2024

Tuesday 20 September 2022: The main leader in last Sunday’s Observer concluded with these words: “Following the [queen’s] funeral many people will experience a release, a feeling of sunlight after darkness”.  

While it’s unclear to me how the author of this comment could possibly know that, what can’t be doubted is the huge sense of release I am today experiencing.

For this is the first time since the queen’s death on 8 September I have felt free publicly to comment on the conduct of the ten days of mourning just ended, including the role played generally in the conduct of the country’s affairs by the institution of the royal family that has promoted and organised them.

During the past week and a half, out of respect for the emotions of so many people, I have kept my opinions to myself, excepting on those occasions when I have communicated them in private emails to various friends whose concerns about and criticisms of monarchy I sense to be roughly aligned with my own.

My concerns articulate with an ideological bias: my democratic socialist outlook for society, which has communist aspects, has straightforwardly no place in it for monarchy.

While then I acknowledge fully many people’s deep sense of loss at the death of the queen, recognising that their attachment to her is not merely obsequious, expressing rather an ideal of collective belonging that carries real weight, these are not feelings I either share or want to see and hear assertively broadcast.

Also, while the funeral ceremonies, as far as I can tell from reading relevant accounts (I did not watch the TV broadcast), were unsurpassed in their ruthless organization, and very moving, I felt no impulse to take an interest in them, other than as objects of cultural enquiry.

When they weren’t recalling positively the life of the late queen, they seemed to me to amount largely to a massive celebration of an institution whose legacy and relevance I consider at best anachronistic, at worse a drag on public resources and mature sensibility, not to say a symbol of what is fundamentally wrong with our highly unequal UK society.

One academic commentator described the lying in state and funeral as “technologies for engineering souls”. That’s as maybe. All I can say is that my soul was unaffected by both events, the royalist assumptions of which I found alienating.

Thus I did not shed a single tear yesterday. Not because I am a cynic; but because I felt no emotional attachment to the deceased. She was not “like a mother to me”, or a “role model”, or a “beacon”, to quote the sentiments of particular vox-pop interviewees.

Nor did the structure of feeling orchestrated during the last ten days promote in me a greater sense of patriotism or community, even though I am an English patriot to my core who is 100% committed to the common good.

And I didn’t need the queen’s much-lauded selfless devotion to public service to persuade me that such commitment is virtuous.

My ideological bias, allied to pursuing a career in teaching as a vocation, taught me that a long time ago.

Before that, it was the goodly example of my late father who got the ball rolling. He was an Irishman, by the way, for whom the English crown represented colonial repression not an ideal to be looked up to. As with Dad, the royal family played no part in my moral education and development. If anything, its very existence and conduct fuelled my contrariness.

For much of the mourning period, I therefore felt marginalised, even potentially a victim of harassment. And I also found myself increasingly annoyed by the blanket, cloying, cliché-ridden media coverage of it all. As one correspondent on today’s letters page of the Guardian said: “The suffocation of any public expression of dissent (or simply a different opinion), generally unchallenged by most of the mainstream media, has been deeply disturbing.”  It was like that for me, too.

Another correspondent, very differently inclined, wrote this on the same page: “[The] monarchy defines who we are as a nation, and for that reason it should remain. For those who don’t support it, don’t impose your ideals on the majority who want to retain it.”

Impose? Fat chance of that, surely? Isn’t it more the other way round? And not everyone who is a UK citizen associates Britain’s identity closely with the royal family, if ever they think of such things, which many, I suspect, don’t. People aged over 50 might; but today’s teenagers?; the Scots?; the Welsh? Less than a third of under-30s right across the UK favour monarchy.

But more to the point, the idea of ‘national identity’ is surely too complicated and contested for it to be reduced to the life of any individual or family. Even Nelson Mandela, who undoubtedly ‘fathered’ post-apartheid SA, never used up fully his country’s national identity when he became president of it.

For those of my minority persuasion, it was then deeply worrying that it might be assumed by those in the majority that the royal family’s immense and conspicuous wealth and other unjustifiable inherited privileges qualify it to be any kind of defining characteristic of the UK as a nation. Isn’t ours an age of meritocracy?; aren’t we currently anxious to ‘level up’? What’s the royal family got to do with either? Nothing.

An op-ed writer, previously unknown to me, Moya Lothian-McLean, was thus speaking for me when today she wrote: “If I find myself moved to any particular emotion then it is anger, that enforced mourning will bring further suffering to the already struggling, that dissenting voices are being repressed, that the concept of ‘respect’ is being invoked by so many people and yet afforded to so few.”

Yes, say my critics, but consider less the royal family and more the late queen. To quote a correspondent in the Church Times: what about her “steadfast dedication for 70 years . . . her wisdom and grace, humour and humility . . . her sense of duty and selfless service”?  Doesn’t all of that warrant respect?

Of course it does, providing it is true as stated. Undoubtedly, the late queen did a lot of good things. The Economist’s list published in its most recent edition can’t be gainsaid: “in foreign affairs she communicated clearly her negative attitude to Ian Smith’s racist government in Rhodesia; and her visit to Eire in 2011 had huge political significance. And, domestically, “she went about opening things and meeting people, as visibly as possible . . . endlessly visiting small towns, industrial estates, colleges and relatively minor firms. She sought sincerely to identify with ordinary people”. I don’t doubt any of this for a second.

But there are other stories to tell, which aren’t so flattering. The Labour MP, Clive Lewis, told one of them in a Guardian op-ed last Thursday. Here’s a telling pair of paragraphs from it:

For half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, our common life was destroyed by the privatisation of water, energy, public transport and council housing, by the desecration of our land through fracking and sewage in rivers, and by the despoliation of our common wealth in the selling off of children’s and elderly care homes to private equity groups. This all took place without so much as a royal murmur of disapproval.

Yet, at the same time, the royal family managed to avoid income tax from 1910 to 1994, entirely exempting itself from more than 160 different pieces of legislation for its own economic advantage, such as the waiving of the 40% inheritance tax in the crown estate’s estimated £15.2bn of royal assets.

Some of us think this is wrong, not to mention an outrageous provocation. And we are amazed that the majority don’t think the same, turning a blind eye to what is a right royal selfish pursuit of economic benefit. The late queen was party to all of this, we say, allowing it happily to happen on her watch. Why aren’t you as annoyed as we are?

But maybe this is too crude an analysis. Isn’t it more likely that the general public which attended the state lying-in and who then watched the funeral from the roadside held happily in their imaginations two views that ought not to easily coalesce: a huge distaste for selfish wealth accumulation, on the one hand, and a liking, on the other, for the ideal of monarchy as a stable, calm and reassuring potentiality, providing a dignified presence in an otherwise troubled and uncertain world, offering a symbol of confidence, which can be ‘tried on’, enabling them to face the future less daunted?

It’s not difficult to discover people who think often in this fashion, which one of my email mates perceptively describes as a form of ‘cultural schizophrenia’.

It was evident in the same general public’s response to the Christian messages that held centre-stage during the ten days of mourning – notably crudely communicated notices about literally surviving death and travelling to heaven, there to be in communion with pre-deceased family members.

No one turned a blind eye to any of this stuff, including of course the idea of God, the ultimate mystery.

They comfortably dared the conditionality of the faith being literally paraded before them. They bought fully into its mystical embodiment because they needed to.

People loved the ‘readings’ from the Old Testament, John’s Gospel and Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth which featured in the services held at the Abbey and at Westminster Hall, despite the fact that their theological meaning was mostly lost on them, entirely because they don’t regularly attend church, normally thinking what it has to offer is a load of bunkum.

Their schizophrenia about it all was found emotional helpful: it enabled them simultaneously to go along with the naïve Christian literalism on show with one side of their heads and to reject it as fantasy with the other.

They do this at Christmas time every year, after all. What’s the difference? And it might be true. Best not to over-doubt. Keep the faith as a sort of backstop or safety valve.

For others it constituted a tradition which made sense in the way other traditions do, having the benefit of being believable because it could be defended in a traditional way – by reference to tradition itself. To that extent, it didn’t need to be reasoned over.

The thousands who enthusiastically attended in London didn’t then take it all quite as seriously as many republican critics have assumed, labelling mourners  as reactionary and anti-democratic.

They were neither. Their motivations were as much personally strategic as publicly mournful – “to be part of history in the making”; “to say thanks for a life well lived”. They were not consciously making any political point.

On the other hand, many of them regularly allowed themselves to be recorded saying some very daft things.

It’s one thing not to be well-versed in the arguments in favour of a constitutional monarch, which certainly exist; it’s quite another to mouth banalities like: “I always loved her hats”; “The queen reminded me of my mum”; “She was for everyone”; “She’s all I’ve ever known”.

Priest-broadcaster, Richard Coles, however, rounded on the likes of me for saying as much, tweeting:

So many pro-republican arguments at the moment seem to be framed in a way that assumes those in favour of the monarchy are simpleminded or infantile and need to grow up. This is a mistake, I think (not to mention insulting). Think Bagehot, rather than Paddington.

Yes, let’s “think Bagehot”, Richard. The English Constitution, which he published in 1867, which today is the bible of monarchy, says this about the institution you so easily go along with:

“The masses defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society. A certain state passes before them; a certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed; and they are coerced by it.”

Bagehot here is being totally upfront: the monarchy is a theatrical display of wealth which the general public is expected to pay for and take pleasure in. Applaud; be a patriot; or be a traitor.

While Richard is happy about this prospectus, many of us aren’t. As Fintan O’Toole put it in a recent Irish Times op-ed, “it is not innocent. It solidifies a structure of gross inequality. The queen’s lavish funeral was a display of fabulous wealth in a society that [often] treats the poor with contempt”.

(Thomas Paine’s words, uttered on the occasion of  Queen Antoinette’s death, resonate, don’t they?: “We pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird”.)

Elsewhere, Charlotte Higgins, wrote: “The point of the giant immersive drama into which the UK has been drawn since 8 September is to persuade us to collude in the fantasy that the royals are more than human. That the monarchy itself, and the transference of the crown from mother to son, is legitimate.”

That op-ed of Clive Lewis, which I quoted from earlier, says something similar:

“Why show such deference to an institution that is the very embodiment of the inequalities of wealth and power that permeate our country? The fundamental truth about the monarchy is its role as a national distraction.”

Fintan and Clive aren’t both wrong, are they? If they are, I challenge those who think so to defeat their arguments, offering an answer as well to this rhetorical question asked by another Guardian letter writer: “For all the good things that the queen did for us, did she really help create a ‘modern world’ of justice, fairness and equality?”

Frank Cottrell-Boyce, writing in the same newspaper, thinks she did: “with her died the last Zeitzeuge of a time when humans were determined to build better societies”. Really?

But there are important ‘truths’ to be discerned and learnt from the past ten days.

It’s clear to me that people need to feel part of something more than themselves; that they believe in the idea of community; that they find meaning in the aesthetics of ritual; and that they expect society’s leaders to act with probity and in favour of the common good.

If we are one day to become a republic, or at least consider how we might do monarchy better, ways surely have to be found, in the absence of religious adherence, to meet these reasonable felt needs without recourse to an entitled fabulously wealthy family.

As Clive Lewis says:

Republicans must offer something that goes beyond the material technicalities of politics and governance. Sacrifice and ritual need not be bound up in ermine and gold. We need [a way of being] that demands of people that they themselves act and feel in a way that goes beyond themselves and which is connected with the past and future of our society and community.

And we surely also need to identify and take up a way of thinking about such things that does not over-rely on feelings.

Am I the only one to think that the past ten days has literally been too emotional for words, with not nearly enough measured reflection and authentic contemplation?  As I have written elsewhere about this tendency:

A person’s feelings about anything of consequence, of course, are important. But no less relevant is the need to evaluate what one senses rather than simply to emote what one experiences. In this connection, I sometimes think far too many people have the mistaken view that the high intensity of the feelings they have about something is somehow directly indicative of the seriousness and validity of that experience. Indeed, I also frequently think that many of the feelings experienced in contemporary culture are overly indulgent, manufactured and contrived, lacking authenticity and integrity as a result.

Arguably, the ‘measured reflection’ I write about the need for was not easily possible during a period of national mourning. But in the months ahead, it surely ought to get underway. For the curtain has gone own.

Jonathan Freedland helpfully sets the scene, writing yesterday that “even in families that are not royal, funerals serve as healing events, to be sure. But they can also see the eruption of arguments that have long been postponed. In burying its matriarch, Britain may at last have to confront what has been laid buried for so long”.

10-12 September 2022: For as long as I can remember I have been a keen cyclist, stretching back to my early teens when I first owned a racing bike and joined a cycling club.

Although I fully interrupted being a biker in my 20s and 30s in favour of running, my first and most enduring sporting love has been ‘the bike’.

I say as much in a chapter in my self-published memoir, Keep on the Move, where I describe the sport’s attractions and how I first got into it, listing as well the specific ways I have found it enjoyable (read it HERE).

A later page on this website fills out further details, including showing a few photos of me ‘in action’ on the bike at different times in my life.

I am of course not the first person to write enthusiastically about biking as a sport and recreation.

Bookstores confirm as much. Many of their shelves are well stocked with texts dedicated to different aspects: histories, biographies of famous racers, training guides, route surveys, DIY bike maintenance manuals, and much more.

There are even ‘philosophical’ studies about biking, like Fritz Allhoff’s Cycling Philosophy for Everyone, which has chapters in it titled ‘Bicycling and the Simple Life’ and ‘Taking the Gita for an Awesome Spin’.

And there are one or two famous novels that have cycling at their heart, such as Flann O’Brien’s gloriously weird The Third Policeman, from which I like to quote “how can I convey the completeness of my union with the bike, the sweet responses she gave me at every particle of her frame”.

And then there are the numerous magazines, of which Cycling Weekly is still my most favoured read. Parts of it are quite daft; but the overall impact is reassuring and very pleasing on the eye, especially its reviews of new bikes and the latest kit, including gadgets.

Paul Maunder’s recently published lyrical meditation on what it means to ride a bike – The Wind at My Back – corresponds exactly to my experience, especially when he writes:

Cycling is a sport for romantics. Its legends are created through suffering, and whenever you ride a bike you can understand that suffering. . . . . Over the years we build our own personal cycling mythology, a kind of memory bank containing the images that are important to us – epic rides, races won or lost, roads that have punished us. . . . They come with me on every ride.

If some of that sounds a bit grim, consider too, by contrast, that riding a bike is an effective salve for depression, in part because it releases into the body chemicals known to lift our mood – serotonin, dopamine and endorphins. I have also read a medical journal article that says memory, reasoning and planning are all boosted after just thirty minutes on the bike.

That’s never been my experience. Nor have I wished it to be. Indeed it’s the sheer mindlessness of biking that often causes me to want to do it, entirely because cycling allows me briefly to forget my troubles and busy life as I enjoyably seek the distracting sensation of feeling my body in rhythmical movement, which I allow to take me over.

There’s also of course the aesthetic pleasures that riding lovely routes give. The world really does look differently and better when you’re sat on top of a bike, I find.

I agree 100% with Paul about those important images – memories of rides that positively mattered at the time of completing them, which make one feel psychologically good as they are recalled repeatedly to mind, particularly if they entailed a significant challenge that had to be overcome with beyond the normal effort.

The chapter in Keep on the Move I mentioned earlier is full of such images, particularly epic rides I have ridden over the years, like the famous ‘End to End’ (E2E, Land’s End to John O’Groats), which I rode in just over two weeks eleven years ago, in 2011.

And now I have a new deposit to make in my memory bank of good epic bike rides – the so-called ‘Sea to Sea’ (C2C on the sign posts), which I completed with my son, Jake, and his wife, Amanda, in three days, beginning the day before my 75^th birthday on Saturday 10^th September.

Choosing to complete this iconic ride in just three stages (4 is preferred by the majority) meant that we each felt very tired at the end of each day of it.

One guide book says that 3  days is a “good choice only for sporty, fit cyclists”. It is right, which is why we each put in the miles beforehand to prepare, especially me, riding at least 140 each week for nearly two months, simulating twice biking over 50 in a single session. I also dieted to lose weight. The ride is advertised as a ‘holiday adventure’ in the biking brochures, suggesting it’s a ‘leisure’ experience. It isn’t.

The 143-mile linear ride took us from Whitehaven on England’s west coast, through the northern Lake District, into the north Pennines, and then onwards through Weardale to the River Tyne and on to Tynemouth.

We were in the saddle for nearly 20 hours, thus averaging 7 mph over the whole route. That doesn’t sound very fast; and it isn’t, bearing in mind I normally complete a 20-mile ride in double that speed. But, then, when I ride the country lanes close to my home I am not climbing uphill so much and for so long.

Over the three days of our C2C ride we climbed nearly 12,230 feet. That’s a big number, which included, in addition to many short bitter climbs, two monster leg-shattering ones, each 4 miles long – Whinlatter Pass, 7 miles west of Keswick in the Lake District, which averages 7%; and Hartside Pass, 12 miles west of Penrith in the Pennines, which averages 6%. They both took some getting up, I don’t mind admitting, particularly Hartside, which is regularly used for pro and amateur bike races. It seemed to go on for ever, reminding me of the Le Tour cols I used to ride up and over in my 50s. I found the last half mile especially hard. On the other hand, I have always been impressed how quickly one recovers from such effort, for within 5 minutes of cresting Hartside Mount, where I rested and took in the super views, I was in sufficient good order to carry on. Biking is like that when you’re fit for it.

Climbing up so many feet in just three days made the C2C more of a challenge than the E2E. The total elevation of that last ride is about 14,000 feet, making it counter-intuitively a less demanding prospect than the much shorter C2C, entirely because its climbs are spread over nearly two weeks rather than a few days. By riding West to East, which is the recommended option, we also experienced steeper climbs than if we’d gone East to West.

The reverse side of climbing of course is descending. In biking, the standard rule is: for every up, there is a down.

Some of the downs we rode were exhilarating, particularly the descent after Allenheads in Northumberland: nearly 6 miles of uninterrupted downhill to Rookhope, on a near-perfect surface, averaging -5%, which is where I achieved my top speed for the ride – 37 mph, Jake peaking at 39.

The worst downhill section was the very steep descent to the bleak Pennine settlement of Nenthead. OK, it was only just over a mile long. But safely navigating a bike down a -20% incline, maxing at -25%, took some doing. The rims on my front wheel were scorching hot at the bottom. No wonder this descent is labelled a ‘Bicycle Accident Spot’. My heart was in my mouth as I jarringly made my way down. Jake and Amanda sensibly got off and pushed.

We experienced some spectacular and contrasting scenery – fell tops, forests, green river valleys, bleak exposed moorland – and rode through some lovely villages and market towns – Kirkland, High Lorton, Threkland, Mungrisdale, Troutbeck, Stanhope – following a cleverly conceived route devised by Sustrans, which mostly avoids main roads in favour of minor byways, country lanes and dedicated cycling tracks. We rode straight through Keswick, however, with barely a backward glance, finding it overcrowded with tourists whose preoccupations seemed to be less about enjoying the great outdoors as shopping and eating out.

And the weather held good, with only a small amount of fog out of Allenheads and a brief shower near Consett. Apart from that, we experienced three fine days.

I was pleased to complete this ride for two reasons apart from the actual biking itself.

The first was the opportunity it gave me to spend a lot of quality time with Jake and Amanda, who were perfect companions, both on and off the bike.

Amanda was the less experienced biker in the party, which meant she had to work extra hard on occasion to complete each day’s ride. She faltered not for a single moment, never complaining when the going got hard. She was totally up for it, in other words. And I suspect, because of this, she got more out of the ride than Jake and me combined.

The second was being able to celebrate my 75^th birthday – a milestone in itself – with both of them at the end of Day 2 in the Allenheads Inn.

As I blew out the candles on the cake they had laid on to mark the occasion, I said a silent prayer: “Thank you. Who’d have thought two years ago, when you had a life-threatening heart attack, that you’d be here now, doing this? You’re a most fortunate man.”

PS

There are two published guides to the C2C. I do not recommend the one written by Richard Pearce, The Ultimate C2C Guide (2020). It looks very good on paper with its coloured maps and spiral binding; but its descriptions of the big climbs are thin, even unhelpful; and its survey of the final 20 miles is not easy to follow. Jeremy Evans’s The C2C Cycle Route (2021) is much better, I think. It charts the route using edited extracts from relevant OS maps, which makes cross-referencing easy; its advice is always practical and sensible; and its descriptions of the way forward are uncomplicated. A very good waterproof map of the route based on OS data is produced by Footprint – www.footprintmaps.co.uk

Wednesday 29 June 2022: Here are 9 questions that are currently preoccupying me. Do they concern you as well? Do you have better answers to them than the ones I provide?

1.After Wakefield, is Labour on course to win outright in 2024? I don’t think so. Having canvassed in the town during the bye-election, I found no huge enthusiasm for Starmer’s Labour Party. True, it enjoyed a 12% swing from the Conservatives; but that was on a very low turnout (40%); and the Tories hardly campaigned to hold on to the seat, and many of its supporters didn’t vote. That won’t be the case in 2024.

2.Is Johnson’s premiership doomed? I am certain it isn’t between now and the next GE. He won’t resign because he considers he has a mandate from the majority of his MPs and the electorate to ‘get on with the job’. Indeed, Johnson has convinced himself he has only just got started as PM. I am not even sure I want him to resign, cynically thinking that having him in post between now and 2024 will help the opposition parties to defeat the Tories next time round.

3.Is a form of militant militarism becoming the new ‘normal’? I am beginning to think it is, based on the increased number of existing and retired generals I hear on our media – notably on R4’s Today Programme – talking up vigorously the need to increase significantly defence expenditure when they’re not offering strategic advice about how best to beat back the Russian forces in Ukraine and thwart its further expansion westwards, which they assume will happen if we don’t radically re-arm. Equally, I am astonished how all of them are not subjected to critical questioning by interviewers. I am not a conscientious objector; but I am someone who finds objectionable the assumption that waging war is a sensible way of resolving international disputes. Sometimes it undoubtedly is. But diplomacy always entails fewer fatalities.

4.Exactly what ‘values’ are we defending in our support for Ukraine in its war with Russia? Clearly one value that is being defended is the right of countries to have their borders and sovereignty respected. But to frame our condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a binary clash of rival value systems is surely to absolve ourselves of our own alleged war crimes, committed as recently as this century in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is then to pretend our wars are just and only theirs are evil. And what is so special about those of our values which underpin a mode of economic life which distributes income and wealth so unevenly, leading even to the establishment of a national network of foodbanks? And don’t get me started on our democratic procedures which are often, in practice, very undemocratic.

5.Should Ukraine demonstrate a greater public willingness to agree a peace deal with Russia? I think it should, and with the help of its allies, not least because the world’s attention is already showing signs of fading, and many countries don’t share our negative view of Russia’s actions; and the collateral damage from the conflict, including the very high number of civilian fatalities, needs to be reversed. If and when these negotiations happen, Ukraine I guess has to be armed to the teeth to deter future Russian incursions, an opinion, I recognize, that sits a bit uncomfortably with the point I made earlier about the rise of new forms of militarism. Whatever, it’s surely silly, even irresponsible, bombast to say, as our PM does repeatedly, that the war in Ukraine has to be prosecuted until Russia looses it. That will take a very long time, I am thinking; and it is unlikely, in any event, to happen. Meanwhile, more and more civilian deaths will result.

6.Has the class war ended? I am sure it hasn’t. And I think I know why many on the Right want to persuade us that it has. Social and economic inequality is endlessly reproduced by people who either do well out of it or who are too institutionalised to see what is front of them, and who don’t really care when they do.

7.What’s pushing up inflation? Not public sector worker’s wage demands, I am pretty sure, but rather private sector profits, grounded in making money out of the rest of us who buy its products and services, nearly 90 percent of which over the past few years is accounted for by just 25 companies. After a decade of wage stagnation and a pandemic that pushed millions into poverty, the political Right has some nerve to blame the current cost of living crisis on workers attempting to resist pay cuts and changes to their conditions of employment which they judge will make them worse off.

8.Is China our enemy? It ought not to be, but it is increasingly being constructed as such. Few days pass without a western media source publishing a negative story about China. And the number of books being published, particularly in the USA, that do the same is huge. Currently, the West is adopting a ‘compete, counter and contain’ approach in shaping its foreign policy options. My preference is an ‘engage, but hedge and criticise’ stance. I have written about what this might entail HERE

9.Is Brexit working? It isn’t economically, that’s for sure! And those who argued to the contrary in 2016 need to own this fact more. As for the rest of it, given my long-standing Eurosceptic views, I am less convinced that exiting the EU has caused irreparable damage. I have written about this as well HERE 

Monday 27 June 2022: Although I assume it is not certain that everything is uncertain, I have never, strictly-speaking, been either a fatalist or a teleologist.

Relatedly, while I believe God has a plan for me, indeed for all of humankind, I don’t think for a second it takes the form of a blueprint. It entails rather a calling to think and act within the framework of a virtue ethic which emphasises the primacy of love.

This means I am at best ambivalent about the role played by luck – defined as some force external to human volition – in the ordering of my life, or anyone else’s come to that.

True, unexpected coincidences are a feature of all our lives; but they surely don’t provide evidence that luck exists as a tangible compulsion or constraint. Aren’t such phenomena what we call ‘chance’?

‘Being lucky’ or ‘being unlucky’, it seems to me, are post-event descriptors. One’s luck therefore neither literally holds nor runs out because it is neither tangible nor substantial.

This evening, my latest chess opponent, before we start our game, will shake my hand and wish me “good luck”. This will undoubtedly be a kindly gesture. But it will be one without any actual substance. A bit like saying  “have a nice day”.

So, the recent death, aged just 33, of a Labour comrade of mine  – Hadleigh Roberts – had nothing to do with him having bad luck. It was a cancer that killed him.

Similarly, surviving a heart attack nearly two years ago, while undoubtedly fortunate, had nothing to do with me being lucky. Rather, it had everything to do with me speedily getting the correct treatments on admission to hospital.

It shouldn’t need saying, but Hadleigh’s death and my recovery also weren’t part of God’s plan for each of us. Neither was ‘written in advance’.

The literal non-existence of luck doesn’t however stop us from imagining it can be fostered. Consider the Test Match cricket commentator and former England captain, Michael Atherton. Reflecting on a sudden change in good fortune experienced by an England bowler in a recent international match, he said: “If you keep doing the basics, then eventually your luck will turn”. I don’t think so, Michael. The good fortune you are describing was a happy coincidence of events. Chance, in other words. What if the bowler – still doing the basics – hadn’t taken another wicket? Would that have been bad luck? Surely not. Rather, it would have been a case of the batters being better and the fielding being blameable. Or a change in the weather or state of the wicket?

Or mull over Logan Mountstuart’s philosophy of life. Who? He’s the anti-hero of William Boyd’s picaresque novel, Any Human Heart, whose summary of life’s meaning, as explained to him by his dying father is: “That’s all our lives amount to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula.”

Is it? I am pretty sure it isn’t. Indeed, Logan’s bad life chances, as Boyd describes them, seem to me to have less to do with luck than with him too often making the wrong calls.

Non-fictionally, former PM John Major’s remark today that the 1000s of victims of the contaminated blood scandal in the 70s and 80s were casualties of “incredible bad luck” diverts public attention away from the fact that government at the time made some bad calls too, leading to many unnecessary deaths.

I suppose it’s for this reason that I do not dwell too negatively on my own missed opportunities and errors of judgement, despite regretting them very much, entirely because they have been more than compensated for by the chance of seizing other openings, both personal and professional.

In fact, I am almost embarrassed at how much good fortune I have had, especially with timing – in my career, in my partnering, in my parenting, and in my church going. But, on each occasion, I wasn’t a beneficiary of luck; I was instead someone who acted in ways that brought about a desired result, often with the help of others. Teleology had nothing to do with it.

Attending Mass yesterday, on the Second Sunday After Trinity, caused me to reflect explicitly on this aspect. The Psalm for the service was the sixteenth. It’s one of the Lauds/Prime Psalms, which means in St Benedict’s Psalmody it is sung at or near first light, having a strong tone of grateful thankfulness for the day that is about to begin. It also has an air of confidence about it. Verses 5 and 6 especially struck home: The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup/you hold my lot/The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places/I have a goodly heritage.

I do have a “goodly heritage”, for which I am enormously grateful; and which I try hard never to take for granted.

It is the product of three forces: the supporting love and affection provided by those closest to me, notably Kathryn and Jake and Chloe; the counsel and encouragement of 5 individuals during my career and retirement: Paul King (my favourite grammar school teacher), John Reynolds (my PhD supervisor), Patrick Eavis (my best teaching colleague), Geoff Whitty (my academic boss and mentor at UCL), and Tom Middleton (my most important Christian mentor); and my own efforts to make the most of myself.

Some might say I was lucky my path crossed with that of each of the people, excepting my children, who I have just listed.

I prefer to say I picked them out as individuals from whom I thought I would benefit, and they generously gave me their time and attention, helping to nurture in me that virtue ethic which I mentioned at the start.

It wasn’t then chance that brought us together. It was circumstance that I helped, with them, to create.

Sunday 12 June 2022: Today is Trinity Sunday, one of the most important Feast Days in the Anglican and Catholic liturgical year.

This feast day, as its name indicates, celebrates the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the three Persons of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The New Testament contains no explicit trinitarian doctrine, which means that many Believers struggle to make sense of it.

It was first formulated among the early Fathers of the Church as they attempted to understand the relationship between Jesus and God in their scriptural documents and prior traditions.

For Unbelievers, it’s a doctrine that seems incomprehensible; for Believers like me it is a Mystery – an example of what I have elsewhere described as an attempt to “word the unwordable” (see HERE). It simply isn’t possible to find words adequate sensibly to communicate the idea that God is One, but is experienced as three ‘persons’.

I guess this is why many priests resist giving sermons on the doctrine on Trinity Sunday; and, if they do, often get themselves into all sorts of knots trying.

Mind you, I still recall happily from my youth one such brave effort, resulting in the priest saying something like this: The Trinity is like three musicians playing a trio sonata. Although they play on different instruments, the musical piece created is a wholeness.

More recently, I have found helpful the words of my favourite theologian, Rowan Williams, on the topic, though you surely must first be members of the Faithful to begin to grasp their relevance. Unbelievers, I suspect, must find them unfathomable:

We call him the Son of God. But we do not mean by this that God has physically begotten him, or that he is made to be another God alongside the one God. We say rather that the one God is first the source of everything, the life from which everything flows out. Then we say that the one God is also in that flowing out. The life that comes from him is not something different from him. It reflects all that he is. It shows his glory and beauty and communicates them. …… And we say that the one God, who is both source and outward-flowing life, who is both ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, is also active as the power that draws everything back to God, leading and guiding human beings towards the wisdom and goodness of God. This is the power we call ‘Holy Spirit’. So, when we speak of ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, we do not at all mean to say that there are three gods – as if there were three divine people in heaven, like three human people in a room. Certainly, we believe that the three ways in which God eternally exists and acts are distinct – but not in the way that things in the world or even persons in the world are distinct.

Well, there you have it; or you don’t.

Interesting for me is some associated reading I have been doing lately which has relevance to the church’s trinitarian doctrine – Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. The number three, I have discovered, is so much an informing principle of his poem, with trinitarian allusions cropping up everywhere in it, despite Dante’s protestation that the Trinity is ultimately beyond human comprehension. Believers, he says, are therefore required to take it on trust: Mad is he who hopes that our reason can go down the infinite path taken by one substance in three persons. Be content, human kind, with what is (Purgatorio, 3, 34-7).

Elsewhere, Dante spells out his understanding of the doctrine: and I believe in three eternal persons, and I believe them to be one essence, an essence so one and so threefold that it takes ‘are’ and ‘is’ simultaneously (Paradiso, 24, 139-41).

I am rather impressed by Dante’s cleverness here. Saying that in the Trinity the verb to be is used in the plural and the singular at the same time is a smart move, successfully marrying the intellectual and mystical aspects of faith. It also coincides with what is found in the New Testament, as Dante testifies: With this deep mystery divine I’m broaching now, the gospels stamp my mind at many points (Paradiso, 24, 142-44).

I guess it must have also rung true to Dante as he uttered these words in his imagination at the very point at which he ascended into Paradise.

Friday 18 March 2022: Two weeks ago, I met a forgotten friend, Barbara Hepworth, in Wakefield, at an art gallery named after her.

The occasion was seeing a show of her work – Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life – which the gallery’s artistic director and Hepworth specialist, Eleanor Clayton, had curated.

All the gallery’s exhibition spaces were given over to an extensive display of Hepworth’s sculptures: early figurative marble and wood carvings and later textured bronzes and steel constructions, both small and large. On show as well were some of the artist’s geometric sketches and a selection of her less well-known hospital drawings of the late 40s.

While these exhibits only scratched the surface of Hepworth’s huge output, it was more than enough to remind me of why I was so taken up with her work when I first encountered it in my early 20s, coinciding with my first excited acquaintance with the stone abstract carvings of her contemporary, Henry Moore. But why hadn’t I bothered with it much since?

For sure, a few years ago, during a cycling holiday in Cornwall, I briefly visited Hepworth’s last home, now the Trewyn Museum Studio near St Ives, where I walked around its garden-strewn display of standing works; and previously I’d been to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to see her multi-part bronze The Family of Man, completed shortly before her death in 1975. But, other than that, I only rarely consulted Hepworth’s work in my mental catalogue of visual art images.

Moore suffered from similar inattention, making me wonder why I’d mindlessly turned away from his and Hepworth’s abstract sculpture in my middle and later years.

Given my religious and utopian sensibilities, it ought not to have, because Hepworth’s vision in particular overlaps significantly with them.

Her creative philosophy, akin to aspects of my own much minor one, was unfailingly about seeking new ways better to express the experience of the spiritual within the physical, which meant that each sculpture she produced motivated in her the desire immediately to create an improved representation of the same image in her next effort: “There is always some falling short of the image, some imperfection; but one is carried forward to the next creative act by the force of the idea one is trying to express.”

Whatever, I was bowled over by Eleanor Clayton’s show, getting prepared to see it by buying and reading in advance her newly published and well-reviewed biography of Hepworth (CLICK HERE for details). I also caught up with Alan Yentob’s equally impressive Imagine profile of the artist first broadcast by the BBC two years ago.

A huge shock of positive recognition gripped me as I walked round Clayton’s show.

Each of the sculptural forms that impressed me on my first encounter with Hepworth in the late 60s, and that always had a special meaning for her, were on display: “the standing form (which is the translation of my feeling towards the human being standing in landscape); the two or three forms (which is the tender relationship of one living being beside and with another); and the closed form, such as the oval, spherical or pierced form, sometimes incorporating colour (which translates for me the association of meaning of gesture, either in nature or in the human spirit.)”

 A fine example in Clayton’s show of the last of these forms was Configuration (Phira), which Hepworth carved in 1955. This hardwood sculpture reminded me of how much Hepworth enjoyed the process of creating a symbiosis between material and finished form: “the intense pleasure for me is in relating oneself to the ‘life’ in the particular material.”

Its hemi-spherical shape faithfully follows the grain of the wood; while a hole carved into it invites one to look through the object and beyond it, constituting a material metaphor.

It’s also a poignantly optimistic piece. For the occasion of its carving was the premature death of Hepworth’s eldest son, Paul, news of which inaugurated an extended period of depressive grief for the artist.

Phira therapeutically recalls a cradle and a beating heart, while its polished hardwood gives off a warm memorial glow.

I am pleased to know I can continue easily to view Phira because Clayton borrowed it for her show from the City of Leeds Art Gallery where normally it is on permanent display.

Meanwhile, Hepworth’s earlier Three Forms (1939) reflects the relationships between the three babies she had given birth to in 1934, including her maternal loving bond to each of them.

Clayton’s description can’t be improved upon: “Three white marble rounded forms of varying sizes and character are place asymmetrically on a rectangular base of the same material. The base functions as the mother of the group, providing support, unbreakably connected by common physicality.”

Among the many examples of Hepworth’s standing forms on show in Wakefield, one particularly caught my eye – Two Forms with White (1963).

Like Phira, this is a hardwood carving; but, unlike the latter, it stresses the power of the vertical rather than the spherical in the landscape.

Clayton: “The two forms stand upright, Hepworth using the grain of the wood to emphasise their verticality, while incorporating the concavities of the landscape in their scooped, white-painted fronts.”

Holes link both works. In each piece we are encouraged imaginatively to look through and create something new on the other side, or simply to lean in and hope for the best – a piercing aperture, in other words.

As Hepworth said: “so much depends in sculpture on what one wants to see through a hole!”

Elsewhere, she writes: “I am most often aware of those human values which dominate the living structure and meaning of abstract forms. Sculpture is the fusion of these two attitudes. The dominant feeling is always the love of humanity and nature.”

Tuesday 1 March 2022: Earlier today, NATO’s chief, Jens Stoltenberg, called on Russia to end the war in Ukraine and withdraw all its forces, adding that the alliance would not send troops or combat jets to support Kyiv as it does not want to become part of the conflict.

The chances of the former happening sadly are non-existent; the news that the latter won’t be, on the other hand, is reassuring.

For while I am aghast at what Russia’s military is doing in Ukraine, the last thing I want is for the conflict to involve other countries. That could trigger a third world war, implicating nations that possess huge arsenals of nuclear weapons, one of which, Russia, has frighteningly already indicated a readiness offensively to use them.

Such considerations weren’t too evident in the comments made during a pair of interviews conducted last night by Mark Urban, the BBC’s Diplomatic Editor, while anchoring a Ukraine War special edition of Newsnight.

A much-published student of military history, Urban seemed taken-aback by the comments made about the progress of the war by his two studio guests – Inna Draganchuck, a Ukrainian Deputy Minister, and Britain’s General Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of Joint Forces Command, as each talked up the possibility of NATO involvement in the event of heavy Russian artillery bombardment of Ukraine’s major cities.

Sir Richard spoke about “the application of NATO’s military power”; while Draganchuck willed the introduction of a NATO-enforced ‘no fly zone’ over her country.

“But that would mean war with Russia?”, a surprised Urban replied. Neither of his studio guests appeared to notice this rhetorical query. Nor did former Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, interviewed separately later. “Putin is a man that only understands strength”, he sombrely declaimed.

I don’t mind admitting I found it hard to go to sleep after hearing all of that.

Jens Stoltenberg’s assessment surely must prevail, I thought on first waking up this morning; and maybe too, I imagined, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy,  needs to be encouraged to identify a way of speech-making that encourages finding ways to stop the war and not just effectively to prosecute it.

This is a war his country cannot win, which means he surely should be trying to find an off-ramp from the conflict to lessen the loss of life, on both sides.

I am told by some that this last sentiment is a betrayal of Ukraine’s just cause – that I am an appeaser of sorts. Really?

In the absence of direct military aid, it is surely madness to think Ukraine can successful beat back and put to flight a Russian military force that is massively superior to its own, both numerically and technologically.

Undoubtedly, its smaller army and airforce can frustrate Russia’s advance and delay Putin’s cynical victory.

But the loss of civilian lives this will inevitably entail cannot be glossed over. ‘Ought implies can’, don’t my armchair militarist critics know?

And as for me being an appeaser. Give me a break. The British Establishment, for over two decades, while trumpeting and seeking to export ‘western values’, has willingly cosied up to the Russian kleptocrats and, crucially, their money.

All of this is graphically exposed in Catherine Belton’s meticulously researched anatomy of the Putin regime – Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West, which convincingly shows how western governments that like to preach the rule of law and the benefits of free markets have turned a blind eye to the plunder of Russian businesses by the Kremlin and its allies.

Belton’s book outlines how western companies rushed to sign new deals that legitimised the proceeds of these corporate raids, while our banks laundered the Kremlin’s dirty money, allowing it to penetrate the economies of Europe and the US.

What Belton says about the Blair years matches the conduct of each of the governments that followed his: “Tony Blair’s government seemed to have given the order for London to throw open its doors to Russian money, regardless of its provenance.”

The British political and professional class has then shown itself to be especially greedy where Russian money is concerned. It has appeased Putin’s malign activities for years, with many of its elites happily throwing in their lot with him (about this, see this recently published article in Foreign Affairs:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/15/gerhard-schroder-gazprom-russia-tony-blair/).

This doesn’t render misdirected their anger about the conflict Russia has initiated.

But it does cause this sceptic to query their immediate reaction to it, cynically wondering in particular if they will comprehensively make Johnson’s sanctions stick.

After all, they didn’t after 2014, following Putin’s earlier military incursion into Ukraine.

As former Tory Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, writing in the Sunday Observer last weekend, said: “our efforts to root out the corruption and sanction those with links to Putin [since then] have been woefully inadequate.”

I am equally nervous about the West’s ability to help broker and maintain a decent peace once the shooting stops.

While Putin will have to play a role in this process, there is no evidence currently available to suggest he can be trusted, which may mean the West has to bide its time before making hard plans, pending him voluntarily leaving office or being forced to stand down. Some pundits speculate this may be within two years. The West needs to bear this likelihood in mind before rushing to bolster their defence budgets, which Germany is already committed to.

Which leads me to ask if the West can be relied upon to express sufficient understanding, even clemency, in building a new peace, given its arguably insensitive approach to the expansion of NATO following the dissolution of the USSR during the period 1998-91, which Putin has described as provocative and threatening. I am concerned that the West will repeat this error of emphasis, particularly if it shortly fast tracks the applications to join NATO of other nations close  to Russia’s borders.

One doesn’t have to be a Putin apologist to appreciate this point, as David Allen’s letter published in the Guardian the other day explains: “Putin is Russia’s disastrous response to the triumphal advance of NATO and the EU across the old Soviet fiefdoms of eastern Europe. Nelson Mandela, uniquely, understood that it is crucial for victors to be magnanimous, to offer friendship to those they defeated, and thus seek to avoid renewed conflict. We have not learned from him. Putin is a monster. But we, the West, were the midwives at his birth.”

This doesn’t justify Putin militarily invading a neighbouring country, let me be clear.

Rather, it provides important context and background, whose nature needs to be recognised by NATO’s architects in the next phase of their thinking.

Absurd though it is to imagine, they might for example contemplate the outrage that would arise if the PRC built an impressive military alliance implicating Canada and Mexico. Beijing’s argument that such an alliance, like NATO’s, merely serves a defensive purpose would rightly not be found compelling.

These are not irresponsible, wildly Leftist, Stop the War, thoughts of mine, as a few of my critics have irritatingly described them.

On the contrary, they are one side of a complex debate which needs open-mindedly to be entered into rather than peremptorily brushed aside (see, for example, Professor John’s Mearsheimer’s Foreign Affairs article ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis [of 2014] is the West’s Fault’, which he speaks about in this YouTube lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4).

If the West has made mistakes, and Mearsheimer thinks it has, it needs, I am saying, to make sure it does not repeat them.

What worries me at the moment is that the West’s reaction to the conflict is excessively revengeful and insufficiently cultural. That’s understandable; but it’s not a basis for stopping future wars.

Also, if our values are truly under threat, as many of the hawks and retired generals say, it would help if we practiced them a bit more consistently.

One of the Russian bankers interviewed by Belton wasn’t joking when he remarked that “it turned out everything depended on money, and all those values were pure hypocrisy”.

My critics then have rightly challenged me to spell out what I think Britain’s immediate response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should be.

My list of actions includes some don’ts as well as dos:

(1) Take care not to close off too many avenues of diplomatic exchange, although efforts arguably should be made immediately to suspend Russia from being a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Isolating Russia is no bad thing; totally excluding it is.

(2) Convene talks with the leaders of China, India and UAE with the aim of using each as a broker in negotiating a peace deal. China has already declared a willingness to mediate. Britain should encourage it immediately to act upon this good intention.

(3) Tone down the warrior rhetoric. Prioritise instead discourses that emphasise bringing the war to an end rather than encouraging it to continue. Do not then offer verbal sustenance to private citizens who want to join the fighting. Instead, assertively deter such behaviour.

(4) Make clear that Britain would not support any military involvement on the part of NATO, including enforcing a ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine, which President Zelenskiy this afternoon requested. If agreed to, the results of such an action would be uncalculatable and potentially very dangerous for world peace. Zelenskiy should be told bluntly that his request won’t be acceded to and that he should stop making it, for it is irresponsible. He should be cautioned too that the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO after hostilities have ceased may not be in the interests of world peace. Similarly, promptly admitting his country to the EU might also not be a wise move.

(5) Stop sending weapons to help prolong the conflict, particularly in the absence of trainers to teach volunteer territorial defence units how to use them. To do otherwise is also irresponsible.

(6) Totally remove Putin’s influence domestically, financially, and politically from Britain, including all sporting and cultural ties. In particular, immediately freeze all Russian assets held here; cut out commercial contact and dependency on Russians; and require any Russian citizen whose presence is not judged to be conducive to our public interest to leave.

(7) Put in place a comprehensive programme to provide sanctuary to all those displaced by the conflict who choose to come to the UK to escape from it.

(8) Identify a huge sum of public money to aid Ukraine’s efforts to meet the immediate and on-going medical and general humanitarian costs of the conflict.

(9) Prepare now for post-conflict discussions. And don’t just assume these should centre on enlarging the West’s  defence budgets. Deterrence is not the only way to maintain peace. Mutual respect of differences and understanding of their implications should feature as well.

Thursday 27 January 2022: Next Wednesday is an important anniversary for all those, like me, that have a very high regard for James Joyce’s epic, encyclopaedical, satirical, and hard to read work, Ulysses, which Anthony Burgess once evaluated as the greatest novel of the 20th century.

For 2^nd February 2022 is the 100^th birthday of its publication as a complete book, in Paris, coinciding with the author’s fortieth birthday.

Its first appearance also roughly tallies with the emergence of Ireland as an independent free state, which formally came into being a few weeks earlier.

Thus, it appears, the first great modernist novel was published at near the same time as the advent of the first modern European state.

The redemptive glimpses that Ulysses offers of a better of way of living is maybe Joyce’s way of anticipating a utopian future for his homeland.

Of course, while this is most likely accidental, it may not be incidental, not least because Ulysses is written by an Irishman – albeit a self-exiled one – who cleverly, and in exacting detail, over many pages of verbal inventiveness, recreates some of the streetscapes, institutions and unusual characters of Ireland’s colonial capital, Dublin, on a single day at the turn of the 19th century – 16^th June 1904.

Accompanied by Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce takes us on a walking ambit of the city centre, which is helpfully recreated in the form of 8 ‘tours’ in Robert Nicholson’s The Ulysses Guide.

Some of the photographs accompanying this post show me following the various routes he recommends. I wonder if you can work out where I am, and which episodes they apply to. 

BBC Radio 3, I notice, is acknowledging the occasion of the first appearance of Ulysses with a series of five short broadcasts in its Essay slot, beginning on Monday 31 January, while Radio 4 is dedicating Archive on 4 this Saturday to the novel. Nothing on TV, as far as I can tell.

I haven’t decided how I will recognize the anniversary, other than to listen to those programmes, though it’s likely I will do what I always do on ‘Bloomsday’, which is to read an episode from the novel, choosing one that reflects especially well on its central character, Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s masterwork of characterization, who I was so pleased to meet when I first properly read Ulysses, aged 41, in 1988.

The nature of that experience, plus a subsequent one like it, is written about HERE

Both were a huge test of patience and concentration, entailing fathoming out a host of unusual historical and literary allusions, plus getting to grips with scores of puns, jokes and foreign phrases. Thank goodness for Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, is all I can say.

In that earlier appreciation, I quote Joyce’s greatest biographer Richard Ellman’s generous estimate of Bloom: a humble vessel elected to bear and transmit unimpeached the best qualities of the mind.

More recently, the comedian and writer, David Baddiel, in a conversation with Irish Times arts and culture editor Hugh Linehan about his new book, Jews Don’t Count, says much the same, but more, reminding us that Bloom is Jewish. In the novel, he is subjected to regular anti-Semitic prejudice, which he subtly and repeatedly challenges, particularly in the extra-long Cyclops episode: It’s incredible how right Leopold Bloom is [says Baddiel]. In my experience, non-Jews writing about Jews, they just don’t get it right most of the time. To some extent, they just foreground the Jewishness too much. The one time that doesn’t happen is [with Joyce’s] Leopold Bloom. And I literally can’t fault him, in the way he is, the way he thinks. He’s Everyman, yet there is something really Jewish about him, there’s an evanescent quality about him that Joyce absolutely gets.

When, in The Cyclops (Episode 12), Bloom is confronted by the ‘one-eyed’ citizen, a virulent anti-Semitic Irish nationalist, he patiently makes the case for an open, tolerant Irish nationalism – A nation? asks Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place (p.430).

And, when rebuffed and threatened subsequently, Bloom reasonably fights back, saying, Mendelssohn was a Jew, and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a Jew and his father was a Jew. Your God ….Your God was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me (pp. 444-5).

I have written myself into reading The Cyclops episode next Wednesday, don’t you think?

And maybe also the short chapter about it in Daniel Mulhall’s newly published book Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey, in which he writes: Cyclops is crucial in identifying Bloom as an apostle of tolerance and moderation in a world trending towards extremes. To that extent, Bloom challenges the populist mood of our current times.

In his fine book, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, Declan Kiberd is also truly spot on when he writes: here [in this episode] Bloom knows and feels a lot more than anyone else . . . he is the more dignified protagonist . . . his role is not to teach any great truth in words, but simply to embody a better way of being in the world.

I have written as much myself, reflecting similarly on the experience of first meeting Bloom: I became totally absorbed. I began to think Bloom-like thoughts, wishing I was more like him – to love without being possessive; to be generous without being prompted; to be magnanimous without being sycophantic; to be sincere without being bigoted; to be strong without being assertive; to be simultaneously cosmopolitan and supremely local; and to be practically minded as well as intellectually driven.

It’s easy then to appreciate and admire Bloom, whose credo from Cyclops I like to quote:

But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

What? says Alf.

Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred (p.432).

Bloom’s credo here is spoken. But so much of what we know about him is based on his recorded thoughts – those internal monologues that are such a feature of the novel which caution us to reflect on the relationship between our inner and outer lives: where does one begin and the other end? Are they all of a piece? In Ulysses, it’s not clear. But, then, in practice, it often isn’t.

The Irish novelist, Anne Enright, correctly sums up the implications: More than any other book, Ulysses is about what happens in the readers’s head. The style obliges us to choose a meaning, it is designed to make us feel uncertain. This makes it a profoundly democratic work. Ulysses is a living, shifting, deeply humane text that is also very funny, It makes the world bigger.

It is also sometimes said that Ulysses is a novel in which a key theme is the coming into being of the book itself. This is effectively what Stephen Dedalus is tasked with: to write Ulysses. I want you to write something”, Myles Crawford, the editor of the Freeman’s newspaper says to him. “You can do it . . . Put us all into it, damn its soul  (p.171).

In my case, Ulysses is more of a book which brought me into being as a new kind of reader, particularly of fiction. As Joyce’s most recent biographer, Gordon Bowker, says, Stephen’s philosophical meanderings, Bloom’s day-dreaming, and Molly’s nocturnal reveries, demand a new kind of reading, and a new kind of readership”

Bowker here is leaning on Ellman’s earlier observation that Joyce requires that we adapt ourselves in form as well as in content to his new point of view, which is to do with privileging the commonplace, using a rich mix of contrasting prose styles that mimic its interior and exterior dynamics.

And it introduced me to some very amusing quotes, of which this one is my all-time favourite:

I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an un-posted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general post office of human life (p.642).

Only Joyce could have written that, don’t you agree?

Saturday 15 January 2022: Adam Phillips, my favourite Freudian, has an interesting essay in the current edition of LRB (6 January 2022).

Its theme is ‘opting out’, in which Phillips challenges his readers to consider whether there are any pleasures in giving up rather than carrying on: “The question I want to broach is not why do we give up, but why don’t we? What are we doing to ourselves and others, sometimes, by not giving up?”

Phillips, unsurprisingly, draws Freud’s ‘death instinct’ into his queries – “the part of the self that wants to give up, to give up on perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life” which he connects with “a continual debate going on inside us . . . . about whether we really believe that life is worth living, whether life is worth the trouble”.

He writes what I often think – that “it is shocking what people will put up with; it is astounding how few people kill themselves.”

The restorative effects of sleep are also worth considering, Phillips says: “every night we give up: give up consciousness, give up thinking, give up vigilance, give up alertness . . . give up on a waking life.” To that extent, sleep “is [maybe] the clue to an ample sense of the value sometimes of giving up”.

But that is not how we normally think of sleep, is it? Nor does the idea that life is worth living present itself to us as a belief. Rather, as Phillips correctly says, “we are more likely just to go on living as if it is true”.

When we start to doubt its truth, we are thus asking ourselves: what is worth surviving for? And even: what is worth not surviving for?

Me? In the last case, I would consider my life not worth living when it becomes pointless through gross physical and mental disability or ferociously distracting pain, making me an inevitable nuisance not just to myself but to others. That’s the kind of life I’d want to give up, as my living will explains.

What’s worth surviving for, providing I am compos mentis, on the other hand, needs thought.

Freud’s answer is ‘pleasure’; Marx’s ‘social justice’.

Together, do they touch all my bases? Broadly defined, I think they might, providing I am able still to enjoy the former and help to promote the latter.

Friday 14 January 2022: At the start of City of Books, a chapter I wrote in 2017 about the holding power of serious literature (read it HERE), I approvingly quote the English author Geoff Dyer: “certain books are held dear because they are psychic landmarks revealing where and how they helped us come into a better consciousness”. The critic Edward Said has written similarly: “I pick up a book . . . What I find inspires me, or moves me, animates me, gets me excited intellectually.”

This post identifies and comments on three books I first read many years ago that significantly helped me then to come into a better consciousness, and which move and animate me still in my old age.

These books, each of which is short in words, but profound in substance, are classics; and they are related. The first two envisage a better society; the third a more human way of living socially in a small community.

Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, first published in 1888, initially came into my life during the fortnight before I left grammar school in 1966, when, aged 18, I read it as one of several titles recommended as important by my then general studies teacher.

I recall reading my own newly purchased copy in a single afternoon, underlining numerous passages on its pages whose meanings I thought coincided with the socialist ideals I was beginning at that time to ferment in my imagination.

I still have that copy. And I still approve of the highlights I made in it fifty-six years ago.

At one point in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels identify a set of “necessary measures” designed to usurp the “old social order”.

These include: the “abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes”; the introduction of “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax”; the “centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly”; the “bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan”; the “gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population”; and the provision of “free education for all children in public schools”.

I subscribed then to each of these measures; I still do. I also persist in thinking Marx’s analysis of the alienating and inequitable effects of unchecked capitalist growth is fundamentally true, which is why other passages in the Manifesto continue to inspire and tutor my political judgement:

“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”; “we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”; “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation”; “The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition in particular of private bourgeois property . . . which capitalists use to exploit wage labour”; “The written history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”.

I was a Christian socialist before encountering the Manifesto. After reading it, I became a Marxist socialist. I continue to be.

Next up is Thomas More’s Utopia, the first edition of which came out in 1516. The version I own is dated 1965. I first read it in 1986, aged 38.

While there is no evidence to indicate that either Marx or Engels knew of, least of all read, More’s blueprint of the perfect republic, we do know each was impressed by similar visions, though cautious about interpreting them as providing enough impetus for bringing about the sort of social transformation they regarded as a human necessity. Only revolutionary struggle, they both insisted, could achieve that. Good ideas were a necessary condition for radical change; but they could never be sufficient for it.

My initial encounter with More’s little book was provoked by taking part in a bruising debate about the future of comprehensive education held in Oxford in the summer of 1986, to which I made a significant contribution, advocating strongly progressive views which many in the room – mostly headteachers – found objectionable, provoking one of them to say, “you’re nothing but a utopian, a builder of castles in the sky”.

This was meant as an accusing insult, and I took it as such, consequently angrily over-reacting, neglecting to say that my utopianism had a distinguished literary and philosophical pedigree, which More instigated, and from which we can learn a thing or two. I didn’t because I was ignorant of it.

But I did read Utopia soon after to learn what I should have said, and I also drew on it and other relevant literatures subsequently to write Hope and Education, a book about the relevance of the utopian imagination for discussions of educational policy, which was published 17 years later in 2003.

More’s Utopia I learnt in 1986 does not consistently advocate progressive ideals. More is comfortable with slavery, for example.

His utopian ‘method’, on the other hand, which holds up a mocking fantastical mirror exposing the distortions of real-life societies, is cleverly insightful. Reading about it for the first time reminded me of the important role visions should play in practical politics.

It confirmed in my mind the view that ‘being politically realistic’ is an empty slogan in the absence of them. What works is not always what’s best. What’s best should be based on ideals and not just on what is considered feasible.

More’s vision then caused me to be more confident in expressing myself about the form and character of a better society – a socialist society – drawing me into an imaginary perfected world that helped me to think critically about the one I ordinarily exist in and help to recreate.

It inspired and animated my political consciousness, in other words, which means that, to this day, conducting utopian thought experiments continue to be part of my make-up as a political activist. More’s Utopia kick-started this habit.

Meanwhile, Saint Benedict’s Rule, composed in Latin in about 540, which I first came across in my early 30s at a religious retreat in Dorset, and about which I have written elsewhere on this website (see below at ‘Worth Abbey’ and my Church Page), gave me my first significant insights into what might make a balanced and fulfilled personal existence, showing me in particular how the ordinary and the humdrum could become the opportunity to find the presence of God in my own daily life.

I am not saying for a second that I have ever fully responded to the Rule’s call. On the contrary, all manner of factors has sadly got in the way of me achieving that; and its requirements – especially as set down in Chapter 7, which is about the importance of humility and how to achieve it – are deeply challenging, particularly for someone like myself who has often been suspicious of its status as a virtue.

Even so, the journey prescribed by Benedict offered me a directional map which I still take very seriously, though I regularly wish I had attended to his guidance more closely in my middle years, which I am convinced would have been lived better than they were if I had.

Monday 20 December 2021: Sad to report, but it is looking very unlikely, given the rapid spread of omicron, I will be flying to NYC early in the New Year, which among other things means I won’t see face-face, Renée, my granddaughter, now nearly 7 months old. This photograph of her, taken a few days ago, gives a good idea of what I will miss:

My Quote of the Day: “Getting started, keeping going, getting started again – in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourself as well as others.” – Seamus Heaney, Graduation Ceremony, University of North Carolina, May 12, 1996.

Between Monday 13 and Thursday 16 December 2021 I attended a mostly silent and largely solitary retreat at Worth Abbey in West Sussex, a community of Roman Catholic monks who follow the Rule of St Benedict.

It felt on arrival a familiar place, probably because Worth Abbey featured centre-stage in the BBC2 documentary series The Monastery first broadcast in August 2004, which I enjoyed viewing at the time. (It’s still available on YouTube.)

The TV retreatants set out to discover whether the Christian monastic tradition offered insights and values that could accompany them through life in the secular world. Despite initial scepticism on their part about that, several discovered this to be the case.

Me? I didn’t go to Worth Abbey for that purpose, for I have never doubted the value of the religious, Christian-specific, life, either full-time within or part-time without a monastery.

My doubts have always centred instead on my ability, or lack of it, to do adequate justice to my faith – to respond well enough to its call in terms of how I live my life and undertake worship and related devotions.

I have allowed other things to get in the way of adequately living religiously, particularly career, political activism and hobbies; and I have made up excuses, notably intellectual ones, for neglecting the process.

And, like many critics of the Church, I have used its institutional weaknesses, which are undoubtedly numerous, to justify keeping it totally at arm’s length, forgetting that all of the bodies I have otherwise mostly happily associated with, and to which I have regularly given the benefit of the doubt, have their faults too. Don’t get me started on the Labour Party, for example. Or the English school and university sectors.

True, none of these organisations, unlike the Church, has self-consciously tortured or sexually harmed anyone. But, just as Stalin’s Gulags do not define communism, nor does the Spanish Inquisition sum up Christianity. 

My purpose in retreating to Worth was not then to reboot my faith, which has been largely intact since I first embraced a form of it in my early teens, but to refresh it – specifically, to give my reaction to its demands a new lease of life; and to learn better ways of responding in worship, prayer and reading to its devotional requirements.

It’s also fair to say that my retreat was, to quote one of the abbey’s monks, “a good way of getting away from the money-making version of Christmas”.

At Worth I fell in immediately and totally with its Liturgy of the Hours, which meant I spent a lot of time in the Abbey Church, taking part enthusiastically in each of its daily – Psalm-based –  offices (Matins, Lauds, Midday, Vespers and Compline), with Mass in the afternoon and Lectio Divina in the morning.

After two days of this, I felt very much ‘at home’, which is a notion I meditate on a lot in my normal devotions – “He keeps me safe in his shelter” (Psalm, 27,5).

Feeling ‘at home’, of course, is what Benedictine monks strive hard to create in their houses – what they define as ‘stability’.

Following St Benedict’s Rule helps them to achieve it.

If you’re interested to know more about this, see what I’ve written about it on the Church page of this website.

Just scroll down until you reach the section about The Way of St Benedict (it’s after the one on John Henry Newman).

Designed to encourage sound interpersonal and institutional habits – what Rowan Williams calls a “prosaic settledness” – Benedict’s Rule helps to create “heaven in and through the ordinary” (George Herbert).

I also learnt at Worth some new ways of approaching Lectio Divina, a prayerful resource which I have rarely made the most effective use of, entirely because I find it hard to read Scripture without ‘studying’ it. 

Fr Martin referred me to something a favourite theologian of mine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, once wrote about how to read Scripture more openly, without prejudice: “We ponder the text on the strength of the promise that it has something utterly personal to say to us for this day.”

Fr Martin also gave me some very helpful advice about my personal prayer life in general, which I often think is very inadequate, because it lacks sufficient structure and content: “Pray as you can, not as you can’t”.

Lectio Divina caused me to re-read a favourite verse in St Paul’s Letter to the Romans:  “When God speaks, his word calls into existence things that do not exist” (Chapter 4,17).

My recently written essay, ‘On Wording the Unwordable’, I have decided, is a long footnote to this verse. It can be read HERE

On Tuesday I joined in the monks’ celebration of the ministry and poetry of St John of the Cross, recalling this famous line from (I think) his Spiritual Canticle – “Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation.” Very relevant to Lectio Divina, I concluded.

And I learnt more about St Lucy. whose martyrdom was recalled the day before, about whom previously I had known next to nothing, excepting she plays an important role in Dante’s Comedy, in which we are told, among other things, she carries a sleeping Dante to the entrance to purgatory, bearing a light to illuminate the way. Dante’s allusion is well made, it seems to me.

Fr Mark (Barrett), one-time monk at Worth, has written a wonderful set of reflections on the daily office which I re-read during the retreat.

Rightly, his book has been much acclaimed by reviewers, which include non-believers.

I was interested to discover many insights in it which first time round I had not noticed, like for example the link Fr Mark makes between Compline and the end of life.

Sunday 24 October 2021: It’s been nearly four months since I posted anything new on this weblog. That’s quite a time, given my original plan to write new posts regularly and frequently.

What’s happened to make this plan redundant?

A great deal, is the short answer, which added together has caused me to neglect writing posts in favour of doing other stuff, like going away for two fortnight-long bike-riding, church-crawling breaks – one to Sussex (10-24 July), taking in Chichester, Lewes, Worthing and Arundel), the other to Anglesey (1-12 August), visiting Caernarfon, Bangor, Penmon, Portmeirion and Almwch.

Then (daughter) Chloe and her husband, Jonny, with my new, not long born, granddaughter, Renée, all recently arrived from NYC for an extended stay in the UK, visited for a week in September, to be joined for a couple of days by (son) Jake and his wife-to-be, Amanda, coinciding with my 74^th birthday on the 11^th.

My churchmanship has also proved very distracting: mass on 18 Sundays After Trinity to occupy me, plus nine Saints Days, one of which, on the 28^th August, celebrating the life of Augustine, encouraged me to re-read Rowan Williams’s theological study of his work which I liked even more this time round. It’s very good on Augustine’s thinking on language, which is very ‘modern’, suggesting that ‘God talk’ is about ‘wording the unwordlable’.

And other serious books have grabbed my attention, distracting me from writing posts, like Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s unusual year in the life of Dickens (a birthday gift from Jake and Chloe); Frances Wilson’s highly original biography of    D H Lawrence, which initially I found a little too idiosyncratic (her use of Dante seemed unnecessary to me), but grew to like a lot after half-way; Ross King’s very unexpected history The Bookseller of Florence;  Steven Isserlis’s short engaging companion to Bach’s cello suites; Susan Tomes’s sometimes idiosyncratic history of the piano in 100 pieces; Prue Shaw’s eloquent introduction to Dante’s The Divine Comedy; and the second volume of William Feaver’s hugely gossipy biography of Lucian Freud, which I admit to skimming, selectively picking out those topics from its index that especially interested me. But, then, it is a very fat book at over 500 pages.

I have also struggled to get off my desk a new ‘religion’ chapter, which is the 13/14 of my memoir sequel, Memories are Made of This, which I should have finished ages ago, but found myself bogged down with, entirely because its thesis on the role that poetics can play in making religious language meaningful proved too difficult for me straightforwardly to put down on paper, seriously exposing in particular what I didn’t know about the poetry of each of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, which I thought I was very familiar with. However, after initially biting off more than I could chew, I managed, thanks to some extra reading, to get the final sections written. Normally, I can draft over 500 words a day. On this occasion, in the later stages, I was reduced to a fifth of that, with much rewriting. Blood out of a stone stuff, in other words.  If you’re interested, the whole thing can be read HERE.

My political activism has also kept me away from attending to this blog: a new edition of The Green ‘Un, the village newsletter I write, self-publish and distribute was issued a couple of weeks ago (SEE IT HERE); three Parish Council meetings have required my attention; the Council’s latest bulletin was written and delivered; and I helped coordinate an Eco Fair in nearby Wetherby.

The Labour Party? Nothing much on that front, sad to report. But then its shift back to centrist ways is never likely to sit comfortably with my sort of socialist leftism, though I did do some canvassing in July during the Batley and Spen by-election, which was not a good experience, despite the narrow win which resulted, the bad feeling on the doorstep being palpable at times. I was rarely greeted warmly.

More pleasurable distractions included resuming playing competitive chess, though with very indifferent results (my promotion to the ‘B’ team means I must now play against better opponents than I am normally used to, each of whom this season so far has made my life OTB very hard); watching some dramas on the NTatHome website, including a wonderful production of Sophocles’ Antigone; and listening to eight newly acquired CDs of classical piano music – the best of which I have decided is Víkingur Ólafsson’s Mozart & Contemporaries (DG 4860525). To check my positive assessment of it out, sample some of the disc’s tracks here: https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8935791–mozart-contemporaries

I haven’t been to a single live concert of music for over a year now, deciding that I ought not to with the pandemic still raging, until that is I have had my booster jab which will be in a less than a fortnight’s time, on 4 November.

Saturday 3 July 2021: I wonder when you last, indeed if you have ever, had a literary discussion with your dentist?

I had my first one last Monday morning at Leeds Dental Hospital, where I kept an appointment to have a rear tooth extracted, the second in as many weeks.

Arriving in the small windowless operating room, the surgeon – a man in his late 30s – noticed I had a book under my left arm.

“What’s that you’re reading?”

“It’s a biography of the writer, D H Lawrence.”

“The new one, which I have seen good reviews of?”

“No, not Burning Man (by Frances Wilson), but a much earlier one by John Worthen – D H Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider.”

“Is it any good?”

“Yes it is – a gripping, well written, clear-sighted portrait of a writer who I think has been unfairly treated by modern, especially feminist, critics”.

“But he was controversial – a terrible sexist, often a misogynist, sometimes a fascist, and also an uncritical colonialist?”

“Well, that’s a good list of what he’s been accused of. But, I’m not so sure.

Take the sexism charge. I have always thought his two greatest novels – The Rainbow and Women in Love – are about the independence of women.

True, Lawrence argued that women should submit to male leadership; but he wrote fiction after fiction in which they do no such thing.

Also, some of the most important relationships in his life were with women whose judgments he respected enormously – his mother, Lydia; Jessie Chambers, Louie Burrows, Alice Dax and, of course, Frieda Weekley, who he eventually married.”

“I must look at him again. The last time was in my undergraduate years when I read Sons and Lovers and some of his poetry. Is that where I should begin anew now?”

“Why not. But don’t neglect The Rainbow. I remember reading repeatedly its first page when I first encountered it (in 1968), thinking this is super writing.

And don’t ignore either Lawrence’s essays. Geoff Dyer, a huge DHL enthusiast, has pulled together a wonderful collection of them in his book, Life with a Capital L. They are freewheeling and playful; fresh and forceful; ranging over a heap of interesting topics – the arts, songbirds, morality, obscenity, religion.

And his letters! Lawrence was a tremendous and frequent writer of them. James Boulton has condensed into one-volume a marvellous selection of them. Look it up. You won’t be disappointed, I promise.”

“What then do you most like about Lawrence?”

“That’s a hard one. Certainly, I like his absolute effort completely to become identical with his ideas; to make himself a troubled witness to some of our deepest existential dilemmas, in particular about how best to accommodate love in the face of competing forces to it.

Although Lawrence was not always right, he was mostly honest when writing about himself and topics that interested him and in his dealings with others.

He was no prevaricator. He didn’t mess about. He said and wrote what he meant. His letter to Ernest Weekley (dated 8 May 1912), in which he dares to declare love for his wife, Frieda, and his resolve to extract her from their marriage, for instance, is an astonishing example of his capacity for candid directness: “I love your wife and she loves me . . . I feel as if my effort of life was all for her.”

“You may not like where Lawrence puts you; but you know exactly what that place is.

I have always liked that about him. Indeed, it’s also what I like about a lot of people I know well. And it’s how too I have regularly chosen to live my own life.

No wonder then I keep re-reading Lawrence. For I identify so much with him.

My own ‘outsider’ status frequently articulates with his. And, as in his case, I have been wrongly accused of being sexist! But never a colonialist!”

“Biographies? I do wonder about their reliability.”

“I know what you mean, having read a lot of them over the years. All I can say is that there are good ones and there are bad ones, in terms of how they are written and the sources they draw on.

John Worthen’s life of DHL is very authoritative; while Frances Wilson’s highlights individuals that aren’t prioritized by other biographers.

What they share is a desire to rehabilitate Lawrence’s reputation; to restore him to relevance; and to make his earnestness worth attending to.

They each succeed in my opinion. It’s time the ghost of Kate Millett was fully exorcised, for hers is a very selective reading.”

Sunday 20th June 2021: What does the notion ‘post-Covid’ mean? Does it refer to a time when society can resume functioning more or less as it did before the pandemic because the virus is no longer either present or not a serious threat?

Much of Team Johnson’s rhetoric about ‘Freedom Day’, ‘unlocking society’, ‘getting back to normal’ and ‘re-opening the economy’ implies as much.

Relatedly, the successful rollout of the UK’s vaccination programme provides justification for it to think we can get ahead of, even beat, the virus, thus fully breaking the link between infection and hospitalization, including high death rates, and so confidently resume where we left off.

Certainly, some of the most recent data give good grounds for such thinking.

However, there are also other data – admittedly, not many – that indicate the Delta variant is more resistant to Covid vaccines.

Also, as I write this, the R-number for England is dangerously between 1.2 and 1.4, with the number of new infections growing by 3% to 6% a day, suggesting we are in more bother than the PM is willing publicly to admit to.

Indeed, I am more inclined to believe Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser, who recently said that “the virus will be with us forever”. England’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, has said the same, warning that Covid illness and deaths will be with us “for the rest of our lives”. Both are also anxious to point out that this year’s global coronavirus death toll is already higher than that of last year.

They each recognise too that the threat of new variants is a very real one because much of the world is likely to remain unvaccinated for many years to come. Currently, only about 10% of the global population has received at least one dose, and there are some who think many people living in low income countries will never get a single jab.

The just-concluded G7 didn’t impress in this connection. Knowing it needed to commit to distribute 11bn vaccines over the next 12 months, it agreed just 1bn.

Near water-tight border controls would get round the problem of importing unwanted variants. But can anyone seriously envisage this government agreeing to implement them?

I am then more inclined to the view that we should stop giving credibility to Johnson’s promise of a ‘Freedom Day’, taking collectively seriously instead the idea that the new coronavirus is here permanently to stay and that living with it requires us fundamentally to re-think how, in both the short and long term, we live, work and socialize with each other so as to best protect everyone from the threat of the disease.

For starters, there’s an urgent need, I think, to facilitate public agreement about the level and type of risks we are willing to tolerate to end or amend restrictions of association.

This means the government should stop forthwith from allowing public health policy to be overly influenced by the economic needs of the entertainment and hospitality sectors. Some pubs and pizzerias may have to close forever. And some sporting events and concerts may be compelled to take place with continuing limited spectator involvement.

This will undoubtedly foster economic hardship, which government will need financially to remediate. It may also have to put in place a national programme of work re-training for those who lose their jobs because of the pandemic.

Either way, we need urgently to have a public debate about what kind of economy is best suited to an age of pandemic, including a root and branch revaluation of different kinds of work, assessing honestly what is essential and what isn’t.

Behind all of this is what I consider to be the defining ideological question of the new pandemic times we find ourselves in – what size and kind of state is needed to facilitate human flourishing?

In the short term, however, we surely must fully think through, and in public, how best to protect ourselves from getting ill with Covid.

Professor Dame Johnson, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, is surely on to something when she says, “what we want is to do the things that least disrupt our lives and minimise the risk of infection. Good hygiene, remote working, mask wearing, not mixing with people when we have symptoms, cycling rather than taking public transport, avoiding needless flights – all these and more should play a part in the post-lockdown world”. And another part must surely entail implementing a permanent fully-effective, nation-wide test, track and isolate system.

While these are good places to begin, the bigger questions of political economy can’t be avoided, to which can be added concerns about how in future we should conduct trade, use land, interact with wildlife and travel internationally.

So far, it is difficult to detect much of an effort among government and opposition to ask them, least of all a desire to implicate the public in arriving at answers.

Thursday 17 June 2021: I wonder what James Joyce, if he had been alive this week, would have made of the fact that on Tuesday evening billions of dollars were wiped off the market value of Coca-Cola following the one-word long snub a celebrity soccer player, Cristiano Ronaldo, gave to one of its products.

He’d surely have thought, ‘what kind of world economy is that? Seems like “shite and onions” to me’.

By contrast, I’m certain Joyce would have been overjoyed to know that Ulysses, his modernist fictional masterwork, and my DID’s book, is still being read and honored 99 years after its publication in 1922.

For yesterday was Bloomsday, which is the only annual commemoration of a fictional date I know of. Are there any others? Let me know if there are.

The sixteenth of June, the day on which Joyce sets all the action of his epic, is today a major literary event, celebrated all over the world, from Dublin to New York and around and down to Sydney, Australia.

And we may well ask, ‘why is that?’, which is really another way of asking just what is so special about Ulysses that causes so many people to want to live inside it for a day each year, whether by selectively reading some of its pages, listening to actors wrestling with its linguistic challenges, tracing the fictional steps of its protagonists through the actual or imagined neighbourhoods of 1904 Dublin, or even eating fried kidneys for breakfast.

Or what causes me to spend so much time, not just reading and re-reading Ulysses, but additionally buying and consulting numerous academic studies of and reference books about it (like Kieberd’s generous Ulysses and Us; Blamires’ brilliant Bloomsday Book; and Gifford’s addictive Ulysses Annotated), including attending associated seminars and subscribing to a relevant journal?

Predictably, there are many reasons why. These extracts from something else I have written about my experience of reading Ulysses give a sense of what my appreciative enthusiasm is all about:

Of all the many books of fiction I own, Ulysses is the one I would never want to be parted from, for reading it enabled me to contemplate experience and transform it in a very special way, initiating fundamental alterations in how I think and act as a result.

As I read it, I regularly found myself having Bloom-like thoughts, wishing I was more like him: able to love without being possessive; to be generous without being prompted; to be magnanimous without being sycophantic; to be sincere without being bigoted; to be strong without being assertive; to be simultaneously highly cosmopolitan and supremely local; and to be practically-minded as well as intellectually driven.

The novel then is a kind of moral primer, with Bloom as ethics teacher, which explains my definition of it as ‘Biblical fiction’, connecting with the comment made about it by one of its most insightful friends, Declan Kiberd, who writes admiringly of Ulysses as a form of ‘wisdom literature’, teaching us how better to conduct ourselves; giving advice on how to cope with grief; and how to be frank about the prospect of death;”. Ulysses thus puts hard and urgent questions to us. It is all-including.

It’s also fabulously well written. Each of its 18 sections has a unique form and linguistic distinctiveness, which include unpunctuated streams of consciousness, sonic experimentations with words and phrases, and a multitude of parodies. Its legion of historical, religious and musical allusions are also totally alluring. After years of studying them, there are still many that catch me out. How did Joyce know all these things?

And the novel is often very funny and satirically insightful. I dare you not to smile as you read some of these – my favourite – quotes from it:

You can’t bring time back. Like holding water in the hand.

Shite and onions …. life is too short.

Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character.

I’m beholden to you …. May your shadow never grow less.

You know I always had a soft corner for you.

He knows more than you have forgotten.

Death is the highest form of life.

I have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles of a triangle.

We can’t change the country. Let’s then change the subject.

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

If I have a favourite quotation, it is Bloom’s despairing self-disparaging comment in the ‘Circe’ section:

I am exhausted, abandoned, no longer young. I stand, so to speak, with an un-posted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general post office of human life.

Reading Ulysses took me out of my comfort zone as an appreciator of the novel, prompting me to reconstruct what I imagined to be its limits, including that of written language itself, and the risks that can be taken with it.

It reminded me too of the constraints of all particular styles of writing, each having its assumptions and limitations.

Joyce also spurred me on, though not for the first time in my life, to break down language in order to scrutinize its relationship to consciousness and reality.

Many years before I properly read Ulysses, Wittgenstein’s philosophy had taught me about the importance of this. To that extent, both novelist and philosopher, in their very different ways, helped me better to appreciate more profoundly than any other pair of writers before or since the poetics and dignity of everyday living and ordinary language.

So, how this year did I celebrate Bloomsday? I re-read Ulysses’ very enjoyable section 12 (‘Cyclops’).

It’s the one in which Bloom goes into Barney Kiernan’s pub. The Citizen, accompanied by Garryowen, his terrifying pet dog, is holding court.

Afternoon pints freely flow and the talk is full of gossip. Bloom pretends to be oblivious to taunts about his wife and supposed win on the horses. The Citizen, in grandiose one-eyed fashion, rants about Irish nationalism and targets Bloom for being Jewish.

Bloom fights back, declaring “Christ was a Jew!”. Garryowen and a biscuit tin chase him out of the pub and down the street.

If you own like me the Penguin Classics edition of Ulysses you can read the Citizen’s hyperbolic version of nationalism (which is akin to the worse kind of Leaver rhetoric) on pages 425 and 427, the last of which includes a very amusing satire based on the Apostles’ Creed. It’s one of a long series of must-read parodies in this section (thirty of them!), each of which has a one-eyed quality, contrasting with Joyce’s persistent two-eyed view of things, which Bloom embraces and for which he attracts a hostile reaction.

Cyclops also includes that famous put-down quote, “A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place” (p.430); and a very funny satire on the pomposity of titles (p.448).

Monday 7 June 2021: Last Friday, at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City, at near daybreak, just a few minutes short of 5 am, my daughter, Chloe, became a mother.

Weighing in at 7 pounds 13 ounces, her baby, Renée, made Jonny, her husband, a first-time father, simultaneously launching me into grandparenthood.

Nine months ago, I successfully survived a life-threatening heart attack; the same amount of time later, Chloe and Jonny gift me a grandchild, making me both highly delighted and very proud and, God knows, enormously grateful.

The Book of Proverbs says “grandchildren are the crown of the aged”. Approaching my 74th birthday, I can confirm I feel very rounded off. The meaning of Renée – ‘born again’ – is thus very apt.

I will first see and hold Renée in August/September, which is when Chloe and Jonny will next be in the UK.

Meanwhile, I am restricted to photographs and videos, which I am receiving on a daily basis, keeping me well in touch with developments. I like the videos best of all, for they allow me to hear Renée and see her move.