Valediction for my mother

My mother died on 4th February 2018. This is the valediction speech I gave at her funeral.

"How is it possible to summarise in just a few minutes a life of 98 years and what it means?

My mother was born in 1919 in a house long-since demolished, just across the road from this Church. She went to the St James’ primary school a few yards away, and spent the rest of her life in Shirley. She remembered that when she was a child,  Shirley was an attractive village surrounded by woods and meadows full of wild flowers. Water came from a well, and you lit a candle to go to your bedroom at night.

Mom was one of five children, in a family that became increasingly impoverished after the prolonged illness and death of her father when she was still a child. I once asked her for her father’s Christian name, and she said ‘Daddy’, as a child would. The family was held together by her formidable mother, who somehow fed and clothed her children on a widow’s pension of ten shillings a week. Like all her brothers and sisters, Mom left school at 14 to contribute to the family’s income.

At some point in her teenage years, Mom started ‘courting’ (as they said in those days) my father. Unfortunately, marriage was opposed by her mother on the surprising grounds that my father was too short. My mother therefore had to wait until she was 21 to be able to marry without parental consent. The marriage took place in Solihull Registry Office in December 1940, and was immediately followed by the sound of air raid sirens. So my parents first night of marital bliss was spent in an air-raid shelter.

Marriage was followed by wartime factory work, with my mother working on day shifts and my father on nights. This may be one reason why the birth of my brother and me was delayed until after the war. My parents had a happy marriage, in which they seem to have done almost everything together. Mom and Dad were united by their commitment to politics, to cricket, to gardening and to the education of their children. They saw education as the road to a better life for their sons, but also as something worth having for its own sake. Both were essentially self-educated and loved reading.

My mother had a deep love not just for her own husband, children and grandchildren, but also a strong affection for her many nieces and nephews. She enjoyed attending their weddings and celebrations, which she saw as an opportunity to get what she called a ‘new outfit’. She had a love of cooking, which was somewhat handicapped by my father’s refusal to eat any meat other than sausages or indeed any food other than sausages and two veg followed by pudding and custard. My mother provided loving nursing care for my father when he was severely ill towards the end of his life.

My mother was a person of great honesty, to the extent of sometimes being outspoken, and she had enormous optimism, including about her own ability as a driver. This was curtailed somewhat when she drove from a standing start into a shopfront. Fortunately, no-one was hurt and the shop conveniently turned out to be an insurance broker.

She had enormous energy and a love of life. This was despite a failed operation which left her almost blind in the last few years of her life, and the increasing debility to be expected of someone a few years short of a century. Nevertheless, she continued to live in her own home until May of last year.

But when I think of Mom, I smile. I remember not the frail old woman who died last month, nearly blind and struggling to breathe, but instead think of the young vigorous mother I knew as a child, who played with my brother and me with fun and imagination. My mother taught me, by her example, that raising children is the most important thing you do in your life, and that you do so by stimulating their imagination, promoting their desire to learn, and helping them make their own decisions to become thoughtful, caring and independent adults.

I hope that when you think of my mother, you will smile as well".

NOTE: the photograph was taken in 1989 and shows my mother with her five granchildren.

Blog interrupted

Every blogger has fallow periods, usually followed by an apology. My excuse is that I have spent the last few months working on the neighbourhood development plan for my parish and two of the adjoining parishes. But actually, the Plan took over four years, during which I have had to learn what I could about the land-use planning system in England. The resulting Martley, Knightwick and Doddenham Neighbourhood Plan was accepted by a large majority at a referendum on 30 November 2017, and so this episode of my life is over.

But I have also been doing other things. I have written a paper for an academic journal jointly with Maria Lyons, who, like myself, is unattached to any institution. This has been accepted subject to revision. I have also reviewed about half a dozen papers submitted to academic journals, in most cases recommending extensive changes. Otherwise, life has chugged on. I am still Vice Chairman of the Parish Council, attend (and occasionally lead) sessions with the University of the Third Age (U3A), and go on holiday in Spain and Portugal with my wife.

Anyway, I promise that I will once again post blogs regularly.

Sex and alcohol in Elmdon Airport

I had many jobs in my teenage years: all in school and university holidays. Christmas meant working in the Post Office- at first as a sorter, and then delivering letters and parcels. Easter and summer breaks were more diverse. I remember working on a comptometer (a mechanical calculating machine) totting up orders for ice-cream, and packing books in the basement of a public library. The summer job I had before I went to University was as an airport hand (temporary) at Elmdon Airport.

Elmdon Airport followed the custom of the time of being named after the nearest small village rather than the nearest major city (in this case Birmingham). The Airport in 1965 was a tiny affair compared to the present Birmingham International Airport. There was a single airport terminal building constructed in modernist style in 1939. This had an attractive curved frontage and projecting ‘wings’, intended to provide shelter to passengers walking out to the small aeroplanes of the time. As you entered the terminal, there was a row of desks on the left that were staffed by the Airport’s main operator, British European Airways. On the facing wall, there was another row of desks operated by the Airport for other airlines. Passengers checked in their suitcases, which were loaded by hand onto trolleys (no conveyor belts). Passengers then went to a lounge thick with cigarette smoke, and eventually to one of the waiting rooms in an ugly two-storey extension to the main terminal. They were led out to the aeroplane by a member of the airline staff. There were few passengers. No jet planes used Elmdon Airport at that time, and most flights were on Vickers Viscounts and Fokker Friendships. Some old Douglas DC-3 planes were still in operation.

The airport in summer supplemented its full-time airport hands by recruiting a squad of APH(T)s. These were, like myself, all students, and had the job of loading luggage onto trolleys and from them into the aeroplane holds, pushing the stairs to and from the aeroplanes, sweeping-up, and otherwise keeping the airport tidy. We wore shapeless dark blue overalls and a beret. The work was not taxing, but it did involve shifts. I remember cycling from my home in Shirley to the Airport early one bright summer morning, in a world with few cars and lorries. We were managed by a short rather aggressive man called ‘Reg’, with a face like a wrinkled Mr Punch. He came across as a frightening character, who often threatened the permanent airport hands with the sack (‘get your cards’!). However, looking back, I see this as quite theatrical. No-one was sacked, and Reg did not bully the staff, whether permanent or temporary.

At breaktimes, the airport hands would gather in a staff room. This was the only opportunity for the students to meet the permanent members of staff, although the two groups generally did not exchange many ideas. The permanent airport hands were not an inspiring or inspired group of workers. Without Reg to push them along, they would probably have done as little as possible. Their conversation with each other at breaktimes concerned only two topics: alcohol and sex. Both were reported in the same flat affectless way. There was going down to the pub (always called the ‘boozer’), and there was sex with their wife. This was always described as being on the ‘nest’, as in “I had a good time of the nest last night”. And that was it. Looking back, I regret not showing more interest in their lives. I could have asked them about their experiences of National Service, where they went on holiday, and which football team they supported. Instead, I stayed within my small group of fellow-students, who were people of my own age and interests. Shortly after I finished work at the Airport, I went there as a passenger, to fly to Dublin for a holiday. None of the staff recognised me.

How to be a celebrity

Let’s compare two people. The first is Sir Paul Nurse. He is a geneticist who researched the process of cell-division associated with cancer. He has won a Nobel Prize, is President of the Royal Society and Head of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation. Sir Paul is very famous among medical researchers, but is not known to the wider public. He does not appear in gossip columns, has not been on Strictly Come Dancing or similar shows, and does not promote commercial products on television. He is therefore not a celebrity.

The second person is Kate Hopkins. She became famous as a singularly unpleasant contestant on a television programme The Apprentice, but has subsequently taken her unpleasantness to I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Big Brother. Her second marriage was filmed on a television programme, and she has made various guest appearances on television. She writes newspaper columns (in The Sun and now The Mail), which have become famous for their vicious remarks. On drowned migrants, she said: “No, I don't care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in the water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don't care“. Kate Hopkins is a celebrity.

The word ‘celebrity’ is used loosely to designate anyone who is famous. But ths is misleading. There are many famous sportsmen, singers, actors and politicians who seek  publicity to promote their careers but also strive to maintain a private life. Yet because they are famous, they become the focus of public curiosity and adulation, and hence the targets of the stalkers in the mass media, with their long-distance cameras, raids on refuse bins, and offers of cash to former confidantes and lovers. A more appropriate definition of a ‘celebrity’ is therefore someone who, like Kate Hopkins, makes money by achieving fame from a relentless quest for publicity.

How then do you become such a celebrity? The first step is to come to public notice,  through either some positive or negative achievement. From there, it is essential to market in the mass media your personality and intimate revelations about your personal life. This provides an impression of intimacy for the voyeur-public, but, more importantly, can generate income from guest appearances, articles in the press and so on. A measure of your successful attainment of celebrity status is when you become a subject for gossip, revelations, and moralising. This achievement, however, can not be taken for granted, and you will need to constantly generate news through repeated changes of appearance, personal revelations, well-publicised outbreaks of shocking behaviour, or the expression of bizarre opinions. These do not need to be true or authentic: the press are eager for copy and the public believe what they want to believe. Many celebrities seem to be pleasant and charming people, but it is bad behaviour that most attracts attention. Revelations about shocking behaviour range from giving silly names to the celebrity’s children, relationships or disputes with other celebrities, sexual incontinence, and extreme personal extravagance. Weddings are a particularly occasion for the latter because film and photo rights can be sold, and product brands can be advertised. The production of revelations has now become industrialised with the development of social media. It is claimed that a celebrity should aim at a minimum output of six twitter feeds a day, although this work can of course be devolved to agents. Similarly, celebrities will usually employ a ghost writer to pen their ‘autobiography’. These can become almost an annual production - Katie Price produced four in six years. Ghost writers can also be used to generate novels, published in the name of the celebrity.

Changes of appearance can be either in clothes (particularly at red-carpet events), hairstyle or plastic surgery. In the ultra-competitive celebrity marketplace, there is trend towards ever-more extreme modifications. Lady Gaga attracted publicity by wearing a dress made of meat, which clearly exceeded Madonna’s earlier attire of cone-shaped bras. The former ‘glamour model’ Katie Price became famous for plastic surgery to increase her breast size to a grotesque 32FF. She has subsequently had various other operations on her breasts, as well as liposuction on her hips and thighs, fat implanted into her lips to boost her pout, and a nose job. Most female celebrities will at some point appear naked, either in photo-shoots, music videos, vlogs, or sex videos (which they will usually denounce as pirated).

The ultimate achievement of a celebrity career is to become a super-celebrity. The person then becomes a 2D icon, converted from a human being into a brand, which can be exploited to develop new and diverse product-lines such as perfumes or clothes. The super-celebrity career is extremely profitable. Maria Sharapova has endorsed Motorola, Land Rover, Canon, Tag Heuer, Tiffany (her own range of earrings), Nike (her  own collection), Gatorade, Tropicana, Cole Haan (her range of shoes and handbags), Prince and then Head racquets, and Porsche (‘brand ambassador’). She also brands a line of sweets called ‘Sugarpova’, and at one time considered changing her name to help promote it. In 2014, she earned $22 million from endorsements, compared with a measly $2.4 million from winning tennis matches.

It is wrong to see super-celebrities as some kind of capitalist conspiracy to delude the public: celebrities thrive because they meet an urgent popular demand. Super-celebrities provide for many people an idealised version of the self, in image, possessions and behaviour. The stream of news about the celebrity’s supposed ‘private life’ provides a pseudo-intimacy, such that millions of people around the world eagerly follow the most banal information about their deeds. Needless to say, this appearance of intimacy is spurious because celebrities carefully control access, often for their personal protection. A large entourage surrounds each super-celebrity.

The culture of celebrity has significantly changed how people see the world and how they believe they should behave in it. One of the distinctive features of celebrity is the combination of an elevated status and wealth with revelations of a supposedly mundane daily life. This creates an illusion that celebrities are like the rest of us, and therefore that all could become rich and famous instantly, without any special talent or endeavour. Since this is untrue, it also creates a sense of frustration and anger, which can be exploited by a new breed of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump. These pose as defenders of the common man and woman against unspecified ‘elites’, display their vast wealth and behave badly. In so doing, they act as an intermediary for people to project their own resentments and inadequacies on to others. The power this gives can bewilder even the celebrity politician. Donald Trump said “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters”.

Celebrities can of course be brought low. The public can switch their adulation to another person, although why and how this happens is not clear. It may just be that the public gets bored and a more entertaining competitor comes along. The only sure way of maintaining celebrity status in the long term is to die tragically young. The deaths of super-celebrities then become vast public events, in which the immortality and great virtue of the celebrity is asserted. An example is the death of Princess Diana in 1997, in which a million people lined the streets of London in a massive display of collective grief. In the four weeks after her death, the suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17%. In other words, the pull of celebrity was so great that significant numbers of people wished to join her in death.

See also: New gods for old http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/new-gods-for-old.html
               The rise of the celebrity wedding http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/rise-of-celebrity-wedding.html

The secret of referendums

In May 2016, Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP was interviewed by the Daily Mirror two months before the referendum on membership of the European Union (EU). He told them that, as far as he was concerned, a narrow vote to remain in the EU would not be final: “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it.” The actual result of course was the other way round - a 52% victory for the leave campaign. However, Farage, UKIP, and their fellow-travellers in other parties now assert that their narrow victory represents the ‘will of the people’ and oppose a further referendum. Indeed, some claim that people who oppose leaving the EU (and high court judges that decide that changing the laws of the UK requires a Parliamentary vote) are ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people’.

Farage’s comments reveal the basic secret of referendums: a political party only promotes a referendum when they think they can win it. If they succeed (even by a small margin), they declare this to be the final decision of the people. If they lose, they wait a few years until they estimate they have a better chance of success and then demand that a further referendum is needed. This is usually justified by saying that changes in circumstances invalidate the previous ‘will of the people’.

This has already happened in the case of the EU. The first referendum was not the one on 27th June 2016, but the one in June 1975, two years after the UK joined what was then called the ‘European Communities’ (EC). As with the referendum this year, the one in 1975 was the product of political opportunism. The governing party at the time was deeply divided, although the main opposition party was largely united in favour of remaining. A referendum therefore was a device to allow the prime minister of the day to remain in office even though several members of his cabinet publicly disagreed on this -  the most fundamental political issue of the day. The prime minister in 1975 was Harold Wilson and the divided party was the Labour Party. The opposition Conservative Party, then led by Margaret Thatcher, strongly supported remaining in the EC.

The result in 1975 was a vote in favour of remaining in the EC of 67%. This majority was indeed large enough to ‘settle the question’, but only for about 20 years. By the general election of 1997, several candidates stood for the ‘Referendum Party’ formed by, controlled and funded by Sir James Goldsmith. This campaigned for another referendum - a demand eventually adopted by UKIP, which absorbed most of the Referendum Party’s support when it closed after the death of Goldsmith. Opponents of the EU clearly did not feel bound by the decisive vote in the earlier referendum. They did, however, argue that the ‘will of the people’ expressed in 1975 should be overturned because the public had been misled about the true nature of the EU: that they had never been told that it would involve a surrender of sovereignty. I have shown in a previous post that this is untrue, and that the official leaflet sent to every household before the referendum in 1975 explicitly stated that entry into the EC would involve some loss of sovereignty. However, opponents of the EU were correct in thinking that increased immigration from the EU (coupled with a generation of spurious tabloid newspaper reports about EU regulations on straight bananas and the like) would give them a chance of victory.

There is a similar trajectory with the referendum on Scottish independence. In 2014, 55% voted to remain part of the UK, compared with 45% who voted to leave. Despite promises before the referendum that this would be a final decision, the Scottish National Party (SNP) leadership started to call for a second referendum only two years later, immediately after the referendum to leave the EU. This was ostensibly because ‘circumstances have changed’, but really because the SNP had experienced a surge in support at the general election in 2015 and therefore believed that a second referendum would go their way.

The Scottish and EU referendums both illustrate a further secret: that referendums impede effective policy-making. During the EU referendum campaign, the Leave side failed to state what their alternative to the EU would be. Options ranged from those who, like Michael Gove, seem to envisage the future of the UK as a sort of West European version of North Korea - free of all foreign treaties but with nuclear weapons - to those like Boris Johnson, who argued that the UK could somehow miraculously gain all the advantages of being in the EU single market but without incurring any of the costs. This division of opinion has continued in the current government, which has responded by not having any overt strategy for leaving the EU at all (other than repeating the meaningless sentence that ‘Brexit means Brexit’). The pro-independence side in the Scottish referendum campaign in 2014 likewise failed to clarify how an independent Scotland would function. The Scottish National Party based its claim that Scottish public finances would be viable on a price of oil double the current price in world markets, assumed that an independent Scotland could join the sterling area without any cost, and proposed that membership of the EU after independence would somehow occur automatically.

This confusion and vagueness means that people voting in these referendums were not presented with a clear choice between alternatives. Even if they had been, their vote could never represent the ‘will of the people’. This is because there is no way that all 60 million British people can have a single will, fixed for all eternity. Instead, people vote on a particular day for many different reasons. In some cases, this follows careful reflection. But many are instead swayed by scare stories or dubious campaign promises (such as the claims that leaving the EU would release millions of pounds a day for the NHS, or that the country would shortly be invaded by the population of Turkey). Some even vote for no reason at all: ‘that it will stir things up a bit’ (a good argument for jumping off a cliff if you are feeling bored). This all means that the result of a referendum will probably vary from one year (or even one day) to the next.

Arguing that one referendum is the irrevocable ‘will of the people’ is therefore nonsense. It is also a denial of democracy. It is rather like saying that because the Labour Party won a large majority in the 1997 General Election, this represented the ‘will of the people’, and that no further general elections should be held. Democracy means the right of the voters to change their mind, whether it is about the politicians they choose to represent them or the issues they vote on in a referendum.

So the wise thing for politicians to do who oppose leaving the EU is to go along with the pretence of negotiation for a number of months until it becomes apparent, even to the British electorate, that leaving the world’s largest trading area will reduce our standard of living, not significantly reduce immigration and not generate some mythical income for the NHS. Then, the Government can claim that ‘circumstances have changed’ and go for a further referendum that they would hope to win. This is, of course, more or less what the Government is doing at the moment.

Childhood trips to the pictures

When I was young, the cinema was always called ‘the pictures’. My earliest memories of going to the cinema were when I was of primary-school age and went to the Saturday morning shows arranged for children at the local Shirley Odeon. These usually included a short film, a serial and a longer film. The serials were always American and usually ended with a cliffhanger, from which the hero always implausibly escaped at the start of the next week’s episode. The only serial I remember by name was Flash Gordon (spaceships!), but there were several Westerns, which at that time dominated the cinema. There may also have been community singing in between the films.

When I was a little older, I went with my parents to the cinema to see the films for grown-ups. Cinema listings appeared on the lower right-hand side of page two of the Birmingham Evening Mail, and stretched most of the way up the page. But there was anything but choice. All suburban cinemas were owned by two chains. Each suburban cinema in a chain showed exactly the same film in the same week. This meant that if you missed a film in the week it was shown, you had little chance of ever seeing it in a cinema again.

The whole experience of cinema-going then was utterly different from modern multiplexes. In the 1950s, every town and suburb had its own cinema within walking distance. Each cinema had one large screen. People did not just see a main feature, but also a second feature and a newsreel. Customers did not normally file into the cinema at the start of each programme, as at present, but would turn up at any time, including half-way through the main feature. They would then sit through the programme until it came  round to a part of the film they recognized, and they would then leave.

This meant that viewing was frequently disrupted by people arriving, and being directed by an usherette with a torch and then shuffling along the rows of seats in front of you. Elsewhere, people would mutter “This is where we came in” and then leave by shuffling back along the rows of seats. As a result, many people probably experienced a film as a series of scenes and arresting images, rather than as a plot or story. This behaviour began to change after 1960 with the release of the film Psycho, when its director Alfred Hitchcock insisted that customers could not be admitted after the start of the main feature. I certainly remember entering cinemas halfway through a film when I went with my father. The only picture from that time that I recall was a cold-war epic Strategic Air Command (B36 and B47 bombers!), which came out when I was nine. By the time I was 12, I went to see South Pacific at the West End Cinema in Birmingham city centre. My mother was enraptured, but I mainly remember the shots of PBY Catalina aeroplanes.

Another difference from modern cinemas was smoke. Looking around the auditorium when a film was showing, you would see countless lights from cigarettes. Looking up at the beam of light from the projector, you could see an illuminated cloud of cigarette smoke. At your feet was the detritus scattered by smokers: nub-ends, discarded packets, matches and matchboxes. Like all public places at that time, cinemas (and many of the people in them) stank of nicotine. More litter was a result of the inability of some British people to spend more than a couple of their waking hours without eating, combined with an urge to scatter unwanted food and wrappers on the floor. If you were unlucky, the sound of the film would be drowned out by the crunching noise of people eating crisps, the rustling of their food wrappers and their commentary on the film.

The suburban cinema chains began closing in the 1960s, as people chose to stay at home and watch television. Some were converted into bowling alleys and bingo halls, but most (at least in my part of the Birmingham suburbs) were demolished and replaced by supermarkets. The five cinemas that once lined the Stratford Road from the Shirley Odeon to Birmingham city centre are now all long gone. But I encountered cinema-going of a different kind when I went to university in London. The British Film Institute (BFI) had a screen at the Southbank. I could get a student membership and see as many films as I liked. Wednesday afternoons were most convenient because universities reserved that time for sports and so there were no lectures. This was cinema-going at its most civilised: a chance to see classic films from around the world without cigarette smoke, conversation or the noise of people eating.

When I went to Oslo in 1967 as an AIESEC trainee, I discovered that the University student union ran an old cinema in the city centre. This showed several different films a day. Almost all were old films in English with Norwegian subtitles. Many were classic films, and ticket prices were cheap. I think there is still a need for a cinema of this kind, and if there was, I would resume my cinema-going habits.

The politics of nostalgia

Nostalgia is a poison of the mind. All of us like to look back at happy memories. We are helped by photographs, diaries and even blog posts. These happy memories help us through difficult times, even bereavement. We come to forget the suffering and pain experienced by those we have loved, their gradual slide into dementia. Instead, we look back at our happy memories of being in their company, listening to their jokes and sharing their sense of fun.

But nostalgia is different. It is a desire not just to remember the past but to return to it. Some era in the past is imagined as a golden age, when the people of our land were all stronger and prouder, and were untroubled by the complex problems experienced today. The location of this golden age may vary from person to person, but it always involves selective history. Some aspects of the past are selected as symbolising the golden age and thus become objects of nostalgic desire. They may be Imperial weights and measures, double-decker buses with open platforms, blue covers on passports, grammar schools or red phone boxes with heavy doors. I suspect that few of the people who are nostalgic for the 1950s wish to return to maternal and infant mortality rates five times what they are today, a life expectancy ten years less than today, or a country in which most houses lack double-glazing and central heating.
 
The tendency to indulge in nostalgia may increase with age. As we get old, we remember wistfully when we were younger and fitter, slept soundly and woke up full of energy. We may struggle to understand new devices and the terminology associated with them. There is a sense that the world is marching past us while we stumble along. This has implications for politics. An increasing proportion of the electorate is elderly, and older people are more likely than the young to vote. This has led to a culture and politics of nostalgia, intensified by newspapers which depend on an elderly readership. The mean age for readers of the Daily Telegraph is 61 years, and that for the Daily Express is probably even higher. Even the Daily Mail, which targets younger women readers, has a readership with a mean age of 58 years.

The politics of nostalgia consists of evoking symbols of the past, such as grammar schools. No argument or evidence is needed for such policies - the fact that they are a lost part of a golden age is sufficient to convince. The politics of nostalgia can also involve opposition to things that symbolise unwelcome change. The two main targets in the mass media culture of nostalgia are the European Union and the Human Rights Act. There are sound reasons for opposing (and supporting) the European Union, but newspapers instead printed a parade of scare stories of how the EU was prepared to impose straight bananas and decimal egg boxes. These were all intended to show how the everyday and familiar life of old people is threatened by distant agents of change. As with the proposed re-introduction of grammar schools, there was no attempt to rationally discuss evidence or alternatives. This has left us with a government which has no policy for what leaving the EU should involve, or when and how this should take place. Perhaps politics is too important to be left to the elderly.