Huddled round the fire

As I type this post, I am sitting at my desk looking through woodland at the parish church. The trees are bare and patches of frost remain despite the low midday sun of the English winter. In the trees there are clumps of mistletoe and, a little further down the woodland, the nests of a large flock of jackdaws. These circle the village at dawn and dusk, and spend the day foraging in the nearby fields.

The most striking thing to me about this scene is that I am warm. Central heating keeps the temperature of the house at about 19° Celsius. Double-glazing and insulation prevent draughts and reduce heating costs. It was not always so in my life. I belong to probably the last generation in England that learnt to light a coal fire as part of my childhood duties. I remember being taught how to screw up paper (but leave it overlapping so it all caught fire), place fire-lighters, lay a cross pattern of sticks on top, and then a small tower of coal from the bucket. After lighting the fire, it was common to ‘draw’ it with a sheet of newspaper held in place by a poker fixed across the front of the fireplace.

Until this procedure had been completed and the fire had begun, the house was cold - often very cold. We lived in a suburban semi-detached house but, like all our neighbours, our house lacked any double-glazing, insulation or draught-proofing. The fire in the living-room (and occasionally in the front room) was the only source of heat. In winter, our chairs were arranged around it, keeping the front of our bodies warm. We would talk and listen to the radio (television only appeared in our house when I was about eight years old). A journey elsewhere in the house at that time of year was an ordeal. Hot water bottles (actually small rubber bags with a stopper at the top) were used to warm our beds. I remember the sound of a kettle being boiled for the hot water bottles as the signal that bedtime was near.

The house I live in now does not have a fire. Instead of gathering as a family around the fire to talk, our chairs now face the television. It produces a constant rattle of quiz shows with strikingly ill-informed contestants, unconvincing dramas, superficial and sometimes misleading news programmes, and documentaries which are high in scenic content and low on information. I admit to nostalgia for the time we would gather around a fire, toast some pikelets, and talk of the day’s events. I am not, however, nostalgic for the damp, the draughts, and the cold.

See also:
February Fill Dyke
Synthetic nostalgia

Costume nostalgia

On Friday January 4th, my wife and I went to a Viennese New Year concert, three days late and in Malvern rather than Vienna. Nevertheless, this was an excellent event. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was in fine form, and played not just the usual Strauss waltzes and polkas but also music by composers inspired by the Strauss family. These included Lehar’s Gold and Silver Waltz, which was composed in 1902 for a grand ball in Vienna organised by Princess von Metternich-Sándor. As the music played, I closed my eyes and imagined that ball. It would have been held in an ornate baroque palace. The women would have worn long flowing gowns in bright colours, with ostrich feathers in their hair. The men would have worn white ties and tails, although some would have been in the dress military uniforms of the Imperial Army, with golden epaulettes and shiny cavalry boots. I opened my eyes and looked around the audience in Malvern: all wearing the usual drab clothes of the English.

When did we stop wearing brightly-coloured clothes? In the 1960s and 70s, we walked around in bright colours. I once had some purple trousers and a red cheesecloth shirt. Now my wardrobe consists entirely on blues, dark browns and blacks, although I do occasionally wear a red tie. The idea of dressing up for special events is also in decline. Many people now turn up at funerals in their ordinary day clothes - the men without even a black tie. There are some exceptions. Weddings remain an occasion for dressing up, and young women will still spend hours getting ready to go out in the evening. But look at any picture of an African market for a different attitude to everyday clothing. The women have headscarfs and dresses printed in the brightest colours. The men might wear jeans, but they will top this with a red, blue or yellow shirt.

If clothes are a form of self-expression, then the clothes we wear in England express misery and tedium. More joyous self-expression is now vicarious, demonstrated in the popularity of the many ‘costume dramas’ on television and film. Watch an episode of Poirot or Downton Abbey, and you see wealthy people in the 1930s dressing up in their most formal clothes even to eat dinner in their own homes. The various adaptations of Jane Austen novels show women in flowing empire-line dresses, and men in stylish clothes that set off their figures.

Many of these costume dramas were not written as such. Jane Austen wrote books about moral dilemmas among her contemporaries. Although the television adaptations of Agatha Christie’s books are set in 1936 (Poirot) or 1952 (Miss Marple), the original texts were published over several decades and were set in the times they were written. But television producers know that the public are fascinated by the costumes and formal behaviour of an earlier time. Viewers are more interested in looking at the suits and dresses than in who exactly murdered who and why.  

It is possible that this vicarious enjoyment of costume on television is itself a cause of the universal drabness of our clothing. The young man who sits for hours in front of his computer watching pornography but is too timid to ask a woman out; or the person who watches television programmes in which cordon bleu cooks prepare wonderful meals but who then warms up a ready meal for his dinner - these are examples of the vicarious eliminating the actual. It is after all striking that the world of drab clothing began at about the same time that colour television began to dominate our waking hours.

See also:
What old men wear
The land of make believe

The end of the university

My local library in Worcester is now housed in a new building called the ‘Hive’. With its irregular shape and exterior of gold-coloured panels, it could be an example of ‘crapitecture’. But this is not the case: the Hive does not blight any neighbouring buildings, has a clearly-marked entrance, and suits its intended purpose. The purpose is revolutionary. The Hive is the only example in the UK of a combined public and university library. The specific needs of students are met by a university-only short loan collection, and the public are only allowed to borrow one copy at a time of books marked with a blue band as ‘high demand university items’. But otherwise, the two libraries have merged, resulting in a massive expansion in the number of book available to the general public, including a wide range of academic texts. The combination of students and the general public in a single building seems to work, although the new library is much noisier than the old Worcester City Library, as groups of students meet at tables, discuss assignments, eat, and socialise.

The Hive is revolutionary because it is a further step in undermining the higher education cartel operated by the traditional universities. Universities began in the Middle Ages, when books were scarce, few people were literate, and very few indeed had read more than one or two books. It made sense to group scholars around a library and give them protected status within the walls of an institution. With the 20th Century expansion of universities into giant research institutions providing mass higher education, there are far more people within the walls: but the walls still stand.

Four key elements have made universities exclusive: access to traditional printed resources such as academic textbooks; the lectures and seminars provided by university staff; access to on-line material, especially academic journals; and the awarding of qualifications. Libraries like the Hive challenge the first of these elements. The next element to be challenged is the university lecture. In the past two years, several universities have begun delivering MOOCs (massive on-line open courses). Each such course comprises a module of academic lectures on a defined topic made available free-of-charge via the Internet. Students (usually in very large numbers) register with the provider and may receive a certificate of completion after passing an on-line test. Providers of MOOCs make money in the same way as Google: by selling their database of subscribers (with associated personal details) to advertisers. They may also charge for completion certificates. Studying on-line is convenient, particularly for those who work and can only study part-time. But on-line lectures do not provide the opportunity to discuss issues in depth with an expert in the small face-to-face groups that take place (although less frequently than in the past) in universities. Nor do MOOCs or the Hive offer free access to the contents of academic journals. And of course, if you want to get a degree, you need to be a registered student at a recognised university.

Can these elements be developed outside universities? There is of course nothing stopping independent academics setting up seminars for students registered for a particular MOOC. They could charge a small fee/attender, and seminars of this kind  already take place in India. Programmes of MOOCs could be assembled into a programme of study equivalent in length and standard to a university degree and then examined by an independent agency (rather like the way independent agencies set papers for GCSE and A-level examinations).

Opening access to research publications, however, is more of a problem. This is because academic research journals are published by a limited number of very profitable corporations. Academics contribute material for free, review each others’ papers for free, and (in most cases) edit journals with minimal remuneration. The corporations then print some copies, but mainly distribute via password-protected sites on the Internet. These sites include archive material from previous editions of each journal. Universities pay very large sums each year for access to the contents of these journals, which have been  produced by university staff in university time, based on research which has often been funded by public institutions. Some research journals (such as the British Medical Journal or Nature) have large circulations, but most are read by a small number of specialists. This bizarre system therefore restricts public access to research, while also providing a massive public subsidy to a select band of private corporations. Governments are aware of this problem, and open access for research publications will eventually take place after much trial and error.

Once these problems have been overcome, there is an opportunity to provide low-cost higher education which would meet the needs of people who work and need to study part-time, who have limited financial resources, or who wish to avoid the massive costs and debts incurred by attendance at a traditional university. This would be a step beyond the ground-breaking Open University (OU) which was set up in the 1970s. But the history of the OU is a warning. Despite being innovative, convenient and low-cost, the OU did not provide the model for university expansion in the 1980s and after. Instead of creating new distance learning institutions, governments in Britain chose to expand the traditional universities with their full-time three-year degree courses designed for school-leavers. The result was to divert resources from training skills to producing degree certificates. Large areas of our cities have been blighted by student accommodation - multi-occupied second homes, used for only six months each year. This has been a major (but little-commented) factor in generating a housing crisis in the last two decades.

Students’ financial security has also been blighted by the decision to expand traditional university courses rather than open learning. Instead of studying while earning, students each now incur debts of £40,000 or so for fees and maintenance loans. Their three-year degrees often fail to provide them with the skills needed in the workplace, while the reduced number of seminars and small-group teaching sessions in many universities limit the intellectual stimulation that is meant to be the defining experience of higher education. So open access may still be impeded by the dead weight of existing institutions. Let us hope that technological change combined with public demand will create a new type of higher education that will be open to all who wish to study and learn.


See alsohttp://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/guide-to-crapitecture.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-teach-skills.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/is-higher-education-rip-off.html