A short walk in France: best memories

When you are feeling down or just bored, review your best memories - the ones that make you smile with recollection. If you could plot these on a personal timeline, you would find they form clusters - a few days of your life which produced many great memories. One cluster in my life was a week’s walk in South West France along a footpath called the GR6. This took place in - I think - September 1980, when I travelled by train and ferry to Sainte-Foy-la-Grande in the Gironde, and then walked to Les Eyzies-de-Tayac in Périgord. I had a small tent and stayed in campsites and once in a cheap hotel.

This was my first trip to France, and I discovered not just that I could understand French, but also that the French I met in the small towns and villages on the path were friendly, kind and hospitable. The path was easy to follow, and led across a rolling landscape of vineyards, woodlands and riverbanks. The weather was dry and hot.

My best memories of this trip included:

▸    Walking in the crisp early morning through the centre of Paris from the Gare du Nord across the Seine and the Île de la Cité to the Gare d’Orléans. The streets were being watered, the boulangeries were opening and there was a smell of fresh bread and French tobacco. Like so many before me, I fell in love with Paris.

▸    I walked over the open hills near Bergerac to the splendid Chateau of Monbazillac, surrounded by vineyards. I decided to go on a guided tour. For the first time in my life , I tasted the original and greatest of the sweet white wines of France. I sat stunned by the experience. I shall drink Monbazillac again this Christmas.

▸    One evening, I walked into the small village of Lanquais. I went to the café to ask if there was anywhere I could pitch my tent. After some discussion, the locals decided I could camp on the touchline of the rugby pitch and use the club showers and toilet. I pitched my tent, left my backpack in it, and went back to the bar. I bought a meal and a drink and chatted to an old man called Josephe. I bought him a whisky, and he invited me back to his home, which was a room under the town clock. There we shared a meal of pig’s trotters. The next day, I returned to the café for breakfast and set off for the next day’s walk.

▸    One day, I walked through a quiet wood of tall trees. In the middle of the day, I sat down to rest in a clearing. I heard a shrill bird call, and, looking up, saw a snake eagle circling high above me. After my rest, I walked downhill until I came to a chateau, abandoned and shuttered, being reclaimed by the woods.

▸    Another day (or perhaps the same day), I walked into a hamlet of old stone houses, all in the honey colour of this part of Périgord. There was a small café open. I was the only customer. I ordered a glass of red wine, which came with a glass of water. The wine was better than many you find in expensive restaurants in England. I left feeling benign but reinvigorated.

▸    At the end of the walk, I came to the prehistoric caves at Les Eyzies. A very old man showed me round, and was careful to point out the genitalia on each of the stick men drawn on the walls of the cave 16,000 years ago. Some of the local inhabitants still live in caves, in houses built into the rock, facing the wide and beautiful River Vezere. See the photograph above.

In 1984, recently married, my wife and I went back to this Les Eyzies as part of a holiday in the Dordogne. But that is a different cluster of best memories.

French exiles, royal and presidential in Worcestershire

Look up a list of pretenders to the thrones of Europe and you will find that France has three: from the Bourbon; Orleanist; and Bonapartist lines of succession. Each of these royal houses ruled France at different times in the 19th Century. When not in power, the senior members of each house would go into exile, often in England and, in a few cases, in Worcestershire.

The royal exile first to reach our county was Lucien Bonaparte, Prince Français. He was a younger brother of Napoleon and played a key part in the latter’s rise to power. But he lost out in palace intrigue, and was exiled to Italy. In 1809, he decided to flee to the USA, but his ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy. Once in England, Lucien seems to have been treated with great civility, and was allowed to buy a house in Worcestershire, although he was kept under close surveillance and his mail was intercepted. The house, called ‘Thorngrove’, is in a secluded part of Grimley Parish not far from the River Severn, and was built in the 18th Century. It has large landscaped gardens and is Grade 2 listed. Lucien eventually left Thorngrove in 1814, although not before one his sons, Louis Lucien Bonaparte, was born in the house. Thorngrove House is not open to the public, and so, although it is only a few miles from my home, I have never visited it.

After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, France became a republic almost by default. Although monarchists won the elections for the National Assembly, the three competing royal houses could not agree on an acceptable candidate for the throne.

The next royal exile in Worcestershire was the Duc d’Aumale, one of the sons of King Louis-Philippe, who ruled France between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The Duc bought Wood Norton Hall near Evesham in 1872 as a hunting lodge. On his death in 1897, the property passed to Prince Philippe, Duc d’Orleáns, who was the official pretender for the throne on behalf of both the Bourbon and Orleanist royal houses. Philippe rebuilt Wood Norton Hall as a splendid stately home in a wooded setting overlooking the River Avon. The house became an important social centre, with a royal wedding for the Bourbon family in 1907 (the bride was the grandmother of the current King of Spain). Philippe had an active social life too, being cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case and having an affaire with Dame Nellie Melba.

Philippe died in 1926 and the house eventually passed to the BBC for use as an emergency broadcasting centre in the Second World War and in the Cold War (with a nuclear bunker added), a staff training centre, and the location for some early Doctor Who episodes. A few years ago, I had a superb meal at Wood Norton Hall, followed by coffee and petits fours in a dark lounge lit only by an oak fire. The building is now a luxury hotel and worth visiting for its food, its setting and its history.

The next important French exile in Worcestershire was a future president rather than a would-be king or emperor. After the defeat of France in 1940, General de Gaulle created the Free French Army. In 1942, he set up training school for officer cadets in Ribbesford House near the beautiful riverside town of Bewdley. Although not based there, he visited the House and the town before the School closed in 1944 and its newly-trained officers joined in the liberation of France. Half of them were dead before the end of the War.

Ribbesford House probably dates from the 16th Century but has been much enlarged, partially demolished and restored since then. It is not open to the public, but can be seen from the nearby parish church. It is perhaps a little reminiscent of a French country chateau, standing in front of a wooded hill, facing fields leading to a long winding river. The river flows past villages and towns to join the great ocean where all rivers meet. 

Fire my light

Joseph Chamberlain became mayor of Birmingham in 1873, and took urgent action to deal with the City’s shambolic gas and water supply. Two rival gas companies dug up the City’s streets seemingly at random, while the water supply was intermittent, polluted and spread fatal diseases. Under his leadership, the City bought out the private companies and radically improved the service. The profits from the new municipal gas enterprise helped fund schools, libraries, parks, swimming pools, and what would now be called ‘social housing’. This policy was sometimes called ‘municipal socialism’, but Chamberlain was a successful industrialist and certainly did not see his actions as part of a war on capitalism: rather, they were  practical steps to ensure that the City received an efficient set of public services, and that the profits from these enterprises would benefit all its citizens.

In the last thirty years, Chamberlain’s policies have gone into reverse. Public services have been sold off to large international corporations, the whole process being managed by a process of ‘contracting’ that involves millions of pounds of public funding for lawyers, accountancy firms, and management consultants. Utility companies have to be bribed with further tax receipts to provide essential public services: local authorities are being encouraged by government to pay BT to install high-speed broadband in rural areas; while central government will soon commit £100 billion capital expenditure to update the water and electricity networks. Why do the public have to pay? Because long-term investment in infrastructure does not generate the short-term profits needed to maintain corporations’ share prices.

Private contractors for public services are regulated on behalf of the public by a set of QANGOs. These can be active. In the last year, EDF have been fined £4.5 million for mis-selling electricity and gas to vulnerable customers, Npower was fined £2 million for breaching regulations on handling customers’ complaints, while British Gas was fined £1 million for lying about the amount of electricity it generated from renewable sources. Still pending is action over the cartel used by the major gas suppliers to jack up the prices paid by consumers.

The supposed benefit of privatisation is of course that competition generates efficiency and hence low prices. But the British people now pay well above the median pre-tax prices in Europe for gas and electricity, and our rail fares are the highest in Europe. What competition does generate successfully is a multitude of tariffs and fares. Go to a price-comparison website and enter details of your electricity ‘supplier’. Then check the box of your tariff. You will see dozens of choices, some time-limited, some pre-paid, all confusing. This is bewildering because each supplier is selling an identical commodity. Electricity does not vary between EDF, Npower or Eon - no ‘supplier’ has some magic ingredient in their electricity. It all comes through the same supply lines and does exactly the same thing whoever charges you for it. The latest government initiative is to force ‘suppliers’ to place their customers on the cheapest tariff. But this intervention only proves that the whole paraphernalia of market competition, contracts and regulation fails to work for the benefit of the public.

What would Joseph Chamberlain do? He would realise that high power bills cause hardship to many families and impede business success. His initial step would therefore be to set up a corporation to buy electricity from the various generating companies on behalf of the public. This would charge a few simply-understood tariffs, but would use its monopoly purchasing-power to push down prices. In the case of the railways, he would probably take over the companies running main-line services and scrap the whole crazy franchising system that means that one set of companies run the trains, another set own the rolling-stock and another one owns the track.

These are not a particularly radical steps: they are what happens in most of Europe. One of the strange features of the operation of privatised public services in the UK is that most of the private suppliers of public services are foreign-owned, in some cases owned by foreign governments. The power ‘supplier’ EDF is mainly owned by the French government. The German government is the controlling shareholder of DB, which owns Arriva Trains, Chiltern Railways, Cross-Country, Grand Central Railway, Tyne and Wear Metro, and the main UK railfreight company DB Schenker. The prices EDF, DB and similar foreign-owned companies are allowed to charge in their own countries are significantly lower than in the UK, which means that the profits they make in our country cross-subsidise our European neighbours. Next time you catch a train owned by DB or buy fuel from EDF, take pleasure in the fact that part of the inflated prices you pay is helping keep taxes down in Germany and France.

Thanks to The Observer Business Leader for 18th November 2012, page 44. 

See also http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/meet-new-boss-same-as-old-boss.html

Private morality and public morality

A long time ago, on a train to Edinburgh, I was approached by two Mormon missionaries. As usual, these were Americans in business suits, speaking in the friendly outgoing way that is such an attractive part of their culture. They told me that becoming a Mormon would confer many advantages for my career. Mormons, they said, had such a reputation for honesty that Howard Hughes recruited only Mormons to run his business interests in Las Vegas. I pointed out that Howard Hughes was running a vast gambling enterprise in that city, which was also a major centre for (legal) prostitution. The missionaries were used to rejection, but found my point puzzling. They saw no problem in combining morality in their private life with the promotion of mass corruption in business.

I was reminded of this encounter by the recent presidential election in the USA, in which another Mormon (Mitt Romney) managed to combine a strict personal morality with a political campaign that involved a startling sequence of dishonest statements, bewildering changes of opinion on the most fundamental issues, and a set of policies that would drive millions of the poorest people in his country to even greater misery. Like the Mormon missionaries on the train to Edinburgh, he drew a clear distinction between two quite different moral standards: private morality (how we behave with our family and friends) and public morality (how we behave with everyone else).

This distinction is not of course found among Mormons alone, and is much older than the Mormon religion. The idea that we should be compassionate with our families and cruel to others probably dates from the earliest human history: we co-operate with and trust members of our own tribe, but arm ourselves against other tribes. In warfare, honest and peaceful men come together to kill strangers. The justification for distinguishing our private and public moralities is therefore that members of other tribes can not be trusted, and that our relations with them are a matter of actual or potential warfare. It is a simple matter for some people to extend this principle to the operation of politics and economics: whatever moral standards we apply to our family lives, it is assumed that survival in political and business affairs necessitates fraud and double-dealing. 

The trouble with living with this distinction is that it confirms the evils of the world. Advances in human life have come about when people have chosen to apply the ethics of their private morality to public affairs. In his great book Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild gives the example of the English sea captain John Newton. In 1748, he experienced a spiritual conversion (we would say he was ‘born again’), which led him eventually to become ordained in the Church of England and to write several hymns. The most famous of these, Amazing Grace is often mistakenly categorised as a ‘negro spiritual’. This is particularly ironic since Newton made his living by captaining ships bringing slaves from Africa to the North American colonies. Newton was apparently able to reconcile his conversion with an active role in the most brutal and cruel of all trades. Even after leaving the sea in 1754, he continued to invest in the slave trade and said nothing against it for another 34 years.

But during that time, the campaign to abolish the slave trade gathered strength. This was at first led by Quakers, who were joined later by evangelical Christians and political radicals. The campaign at some point must have produced great soul-searching in Newton, and eventually in 1788, by now a prominent Anglican clergyman, he published a forceful pamphlet denouncing the slave trade and describing the horrors he had seen as captain of a slave ship. He later became a star witness before Parliament on behalf of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and lived to see the success of the campaign with the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

So if Newton could eventually apply the principles of his private morality to his public morality and have such a positive influence on mankind, there must surely be hope even for Mitt Romney.

Sailing to Switzerland

On the 23rd August this year, my son Andrew and I sailed to Switzerland. We had not intended to do so. Our original plan for our holiday was to fly to Milan Malpensa, hire a car and drive to Stresa on Lake Maggiore. The next day, we had intended to drive to Locarno or points North, and then spend the next few days in Austria. But on the day before we were due to leave, I realised that I had lost my driving license. Andrew has not yet passed his driving test, and so car hire became impossible. The flights were already booked, and so we decided to backpack. Two trains from Malpensa got us to Stresa, where we stayed two nights. Then we took a steamer up the Lake to arrive at Locarno quayside in the early afternoon. Three nights in Locarno included a trip to the extraordinary castles of Bellinzona, and a train journey along the valley West of the city to the hilltop village of  Intragna. Another train journey took us back to Italy and the town of Como, where we spent one night before returning home.

Travelling by boat and train meant that I had more time to look at the scenery, and note the sharp change crossing the border. Stresa is a beautifully-preserved resort town, with great hotels lining the lake front. The town centre is full of narrow pedestrian streets leading to a town square full of restaurants. Italian restaurants seem incapable of cooking bad meals, and we ate better in Stresa and later in Como than anywhere in Locarno. The enjoyment of food in Switzerland is of course lessened by the price you have to pay for it. When we arrived in Intragna, we found it almost deserted - the only place open was the small Hotel Stazione. We went through to the back and found we were the only customers in a splendid restaurant with a view down the valley to Locarno. Andrew ate Gnocchi and I ate Risotto ai Funghi. Both were the finest we had ever eaten, and we were not put off our food by the constant sound of gunfire. The waiter explained that this was from the firing range used by the Swiss Army on its summer training.

On reflection, it is not so unusual to arrive in Switzerland by steamer. Many years earlier, our family had travelled across Lake Geneva by ferry from Evian-les-Bains in France to Lausanne. That was a happy time too.

Student life long ago: the LSE in the 1960s

I became a university student for the first time in September 1965, when I registered for a B.Sc(Econ) at the London School of Economics. I was, as far as I know, the first member of my family to go to university, at a time when very few school-leavers did so. I was not, however, a school-leaver. My secondary school career had ended in failure when I got only two A levels (in chemistry and maths). I switched to social sciences at Handsworth Technical College across the other side of Birmingham. Freed of the obligation to attend sport, school assemblies, cadet training and other ‘character-building’ nonsense, I was able to get three good A levels in a year. Handsworth Technical College also prepared me for the way in which universities organised their teaching, with lectures and seminars spread through the week, with long gaps for self-directed study.

Universities in those days were small institutions, and undergraduates got the chance to listen to lectures by and discuss their ideas with the most elevated of intellectuals. I remember lectures by Michael Oakeshott, Ralph Miliband (father of the current leader of the Labour Party), William Robson, Geoffrey Sterne and Peter Self. My tutors included Alexander Irvine (later Lord Chancellor), Edward Mishan and William Letwin (father of Oliver). The were many essays to write, but exams only at the end of the first and third years. There was none of the endless grind of modular continuous assessment which students experience these days. The LSE was indeed a wonderful place to learn, and not just about economics and politics.

The LSE was in easy walking distance of everywhere in central London, near an incredible range of cinemas, theatres and galleries. To me, the act of becoming a student in London involved joining the world, and learning about art and culture. I went to the theatre when I could afford it, and the cinema almost every week. I bought a student membership of the British Film Institute, and spent any free afternoons watching classic old films. Saturday evenings were less cultural. These were spent at a dance in one of the colleges of the University in a determined (but usually unsuccessful) attempt to find a woman.

This rich life was possible despite a severe shortage of cash. My grant was £110/term, from which I met all living and travel costs. I visited home every half-term and vacation, and saved money by hitch-hiking. I phoned my parents from a call box every Sunday morning at 11am. My main recreation was walking, and I travelled over large areas of London each Sunday.

Most students in the 1960s lived in halls of residence (which in those days were more like barracks than flats) or lived in ‘digs’ with families who registered with the university to provide bed, breakfast and evening meal for a small group of students. I spent the first year living with two other male students with a family in Streatham. This involved daily commuting by suburban train from Streatham to Blackfriars, and then a walk either along the Embankment or through the Temple to Fleet Street. For someone raised in the dreary suburbs of Birmingham, this was all immensely exciting.

In the second year of my degree, I moved to shared rooms in a house in Lordship Road in Stoke Newington, and then in the third year to rooms in Finsbury Park Road. I had to learn to cook for myself, which I did most evenings and at weekends. However, there were alternatives. LSE students avoided the appalling canteen in the School, and gatecrashed canteens in local businesses. My specialty was the Indian High Commission - a large building just across the Aldwych from the LSE. I would enter by an unmarked back door, which was always opened just after noon. Past the lift shaft and along a corridor, I would join a queue of Indians shuffling forward. Food was served by friendly canteen staff from huge metal pots. I would pay and find a table - often the only person in the entire canteen who didn’t look Indian.

Finsbury Park Road was a tough area at the time I lived there. Three doors up from my house was a brothel, inhabited by haggard women and filthy, neglected children. A car was abandoned outside, and the brothel children reduced it to a wreck in days. Requests to the local council had no effect, and in the end one of the exasperated local residents fire-bombed the car. It was cleared the next day. This was the start of Finsbury Park’s long climb to respectability. Now my son lives in a quiet and pleasant street in another part of Finsbury Park. There are no abandoned cars there any more: indeed, residents and visitors need to pay a fee to the local council to park outside their own houses.

There was no fire-bombing at the LSE, but much talk of revolution. By 1968, my quiet world of study was disrupted by strikes and protests. I personally saw little wrong with the LSE, but the various groups of student ‘agitators’ in the School saw protests about trivial issues like security gates as a kind of small-scale simulation for the imminent British revolution in which they would become its officer class. This desire for power coupled with a strange admiration for violence in other countries was cloaked in an intense and intolerant form of Marxist mumbo-jumbo.

Marxism has now all but disappeared, but the LSE lives on. When I can, I meet with other ageing alumni in the West Midlands. We talk about politics like we did when we were young, and I remember the time when I walked out of the working-class Birmingham suburbs into the world of learning.

See also: http:Surviving school

Rank bad

The London Olympics were a festival for statisticians. As an example, let’s look at the men’s 100 metres. Usain Bolt won this race with a time of 9.63 seconds (a new Olympic record). But all the entrants had very similar times apart from Asafa Powell, who pulled up with a groin injury and completed the race in 11.99 seconds. Leaving him out of the calculations, the difference between Usain Bolt and the last-but-one runner was only 0.35 seconds. This tiny sliver of time is only 3.6% longer than Bolt’s winning time. So a statistical summary of the race (using nonparametric statistics because of the skewed distribution) would say that the median race time was 9.84 seconds, with an interquartile range of  0.76-0.97 seconds. Or, in everyday language, they all (but one) ran very fast and there was little variation in the times they took.

Of course, this misses the point. The 100 metres final is a race, and what matters in a race is the ranking of the runners - who comes first (and to a less degree second and third). But just as it makes no sense to ignore ranking in races, it is equally pointless to analyse all areas of human activity as if they are races. This does not stop people doing it, and rankings are now common not just for things that are simple to measure (such as the time taken to run a race), but also for institutions and the complex range of activities they perform. This means that such rankings have to be derived from multiples of ‘scores’ based on a range of unreliable data about something that can never be reliably measured.

As an example, let’s take university research and teaching. Recent years have seen a growing collection of international ‘league tables’ of universities. These use a wide range of data, including statistics about numbers of staff and students, numbers of publications in academic journals, income from research grants, and rankings by panels of academics. This data is then scored, weighted and combined to produce a combined score which can be ranked. Individual universities can then congratulate themselves that they have ascended from the 79th best university in the world to the 78th best, while those that have descended a place or two can fret, threaten their academic staff and sack their vice chancellor.

Yet higher education systems differ greatly between countries, and universities themselves are usually a diverse ragbag of big and small research groups, teaching teams, departments, and schools. This makes a single league table a dubious affair, even if it is based on reliable data. But that of course is not the case. The university in which I worked (by most standards a well-managed institution) struggled to find out what its academic staff were doing with their time, or the quality of their achievements. In other universities, the data on which international league tables are based may be little more than a work of mystery and imagination.

But the problem lies not so much in the dubious quality of the data, but the very act of ranking. Even when the results are derived from a single survey in one country, the results are often analysed in a misleading way. As an example, look at the National Student Survey in the UK, which is taken very seriously by the UK higher education sector. In its most recent form, this comprises 22 questions about different aspects of the student’s university and course. All ranked on a five-point Likert scale and given a score from ‘definitely agree’ (scored 5) to ‘definitely disagree’ (scored 1). A conventional way of comparing universities and courses would therefore be to take the mean score on each scale, and this is how they are analysed in papers like the Guardian. So, by institution, the results for the overall satisfaction question vary from the maximum of 4.5 (the Open University) to 3.5 (the University of the Arts, London).

This is all seen as being a bit too technical for prospective students, and so the Unistats website reports only the responses to a single statement in the Survey: “Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course”. It then adds together the number of students with scores of 5 (‘definitely agree’) and 4 (‘mostly agree’) to produce the percentage of ‘satisfied’ students. This is quite a common survey procedure (I admit to having done it myself), but it is flawed. Someone who ‘mostly agrees’ may still have important reservations about their course.

If you actually analyse satisfaction scores, you find that the great majority of universities fall within a narrow range, with some outliers. As an example, ‘satisfaction’ among students with degrees in medicine in English universities range from 99% in Oxford to 69% in Manchester. The median satisfaction is 89%, with the interquartile range between 84% and 94%. So half of all medical schools fall within only ten percentage points around the middle of the range. This makes ranking pointless, because a small change in percentage satisfaction from one year to the next could send an individual medical schools several places up the rankings, but would amount to little more than the usual fluctuations common to surveys of this kind.

A far more useful step is to look at the outliers. What is so special about Oxford (99%) and Leeds (97%)? Alternatively, are there problems at Manchester (69%) and Liverpool (70%)? Before we get too excited about the latter two universities, note that they have levels of satisfactions that most politicians and people in the media would only dream about. However, to see if there are particular problems, we need to look in more depth at the full range of results. We could also see if there is anything distinctive in the way they teach. Actually, we do know that both universities have been very committed to problem-based learning (PBL). This is a way of teaching medicine that involves replacing conventional lecture-based teaching by a system whereby small groups of students are set a series of written case descriptions. Students then work as a group to investigate the scientific basis for the presenting problem and the evidence for the most effective treatment.

Research on PBL in medicine is (in common with a lot of research in education) inconclusive. But medical students are very bright and highly-motivated, and would probably triumph if their education amounted to little more than setting them a weekly question to answer and presenting them with a pile of textbooks to read. Come to think of it, this more or less describes how PBL operates.