Living next to savages

My wife and I still live in the first home we moved into after we married, in Autumn 1983. This is in the village of Martley in Worcestershire, and is the third of four bungalows in a short unadopted road with the bungalows on one side of the road facing woodland on the other. At the end of our road, where it joins one of the main roads through the village, is a small green where children can play. In 1983, our neighbours were an elderly single lady on one side, and a pleasant family with two young sons on the other. The family left within a year and the Savages moved in. Mr and Mrs Savage were an elderly couple who had moved to our village after living in Devon. Devon, they told us, was an awful place. There was an erratic water supply, the roads were full of tourists, and the locals were unfriendly. Martley was much better.

It was not long, however, before this positive opinion began to change. The Savages totally opposed the idea that children could play on the small green at the end of the road. The noise of children playing, they said, made their life unbearable. This became a public campaign which involved shouting at children and demanding people sign a petition against their use of the green. Few, however, signed it. Indeed, their only supporters were their other neighbours, also an elderly couple. The lack of support from the rest of the village was a sign to the Savages that its inhabitants did not meet their own high standards. Mrs Savage told me “This village may be full of three and four-bedroom houses, but they are not three and four-bedroom people”. Another time, she complained that the village was little better than a slum. At the time, I was planting flowers in my front garden, under the dappled sunlight coming through the trees. Eventually, the Savages could bear it no longer and left for another village where, they assured me, people were far nicer and where they would be much happier. I thought this unlikely and suspected that their life followed a repeated cycle of optimism, disappointment, anger and evacuation. I therefore felt sorry for them.

I suspect that every village in England has at least one couple like the Savages: incomers who complain about church bells, the sound of cows mooing and sheep bleating, the noise from tractors in fields, and the happy sounds of children playing. This might be a product of the way country life is depicted on television, as an idyllic escape. In fact, one programme at present is called ‘Escape to the Country’. People who have experienced distress in a city may mistakenly come to believe that a village offers a life of absolute quiet, without the need to deal with other people. However, I think a more probable cause in some cases at least is subclinical paranoia. The person experiences noise as a kind of invasion of their identity, which they are unable to control. Children present particular problems for such people because children are spontaneous and joyful.

From my house, I can hear the children when they have their playtime in the village primary school across the fields. I can also hear the church bells on Sundays, at weddings, and when the bellringers practice on Friday evenings. These are all the happiest sounds I know. How sad are people who can not bear them.

Confessions of a parish councillor

It is now well over a year since I became a parish councillor for my small village in Worcestershire. Like most of my colleagues, I was co-opted to fill a vacancy. Most such vacancies arise, I suspect, because new parish councillors find that this unpaid post demands impossibly large amounts of their time. But another factor may be the complexity of the issues facing parish councils, despite their almost total lack of powers. Planning is the most complex of all, not just because planning laws and regulations are difficult to grasp for non-experts, but because the operation of the planning system utterly contradicts the common sense of local people.

The centre-piece of the planning system is the so-called ‘local plan’, prepared by the planning departments of the district council. I use the term ‘so-called’ because local plans are anything but local. In my part of the country, three district councils have prepared a joint ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ (SWDP). This covers an area of 1274 square kilometres and a population of over 286,000. Local plans must conform with the Government’s National Policy Planning Framework and a plethora of other regulations. But most important of all, they are required by law to meet nationally-determined targets for building new houses. These in turn are estimated by the Office of National Statistics from predicted population trends and rates of ‘household formation’.

So the SWDP begins with statements of aspirations which meet current government policies such as energy saving, better waste disposal, and the mysteriously-vague term ‘sustainability’. This is followed by lists of sites judged suitable for ‘development’. These include sites for employment and retail, but most are for new housing estates to be built by one of the big housebuilding companies. In most cases, they will have already purchased and promoted these sites for development. Finally, the SWDP identifies the implications of proposed developments for employment, roads and other local services.

Parish councils do not have the power to vary these ‘local plans’, but they can comment on them as part of a formal process of consultation. The plan is then forwarded to a planning inspector who holds a quasi-judicial hearing to rule on whether the plan is ‘sound’ (ie internally-consistent and in accord with national policies). Developments on individual sites, even if positively-identified in the local plan, still require planning permission from the district council. Once again, parish councils can comment on these before a decision is made. If the district council refuses planning permission, the applicant can appeal to a planning inspector, who will conduct a hearing and then make the final decision.

This system, at first sight, looks rational and fair. But the discussions at parish councils and with its citizens illustrate a real conflict of culture and belief. Parish councillors are usually people who are longstanding residents of their community and know every road, hedge and ditch and (between them) almost every resident in the parish. Parish councillors’ sense of identity is therefore strongly connected to their parish. They are aware of what makes their community distinctive and different from others. In a country parish, they will therefore try to maintain its familiar local features and its rural character while also striving to improve the services available to its residents.

District planning officers have an outlook that is almost the exact opposite of that of parish councillors. Planning officers are professional local government officers who are responsible for ensuring that the local plans they help formulate are in accord with national policies. Many planning officers are transient: they know that promotion will often depend on moving elsewhere - perhaps to the other end of the country. In a rural district, they are responsible for many dispersed communities, and can not hope to have the kind of expert local knowledge possessed by a parish councillor or a local resident. Lacking a long-term commitment to a particular community, they probably regard parish councillors’ passionate defence of their village against development as a self-interested protection of property values. At worst, we are seen as backward peasants standing in the way of ‘progress’.

By contrast, the building corporations speak the planners’ language. Their planning applications meet the complex requirements of national and local planning policy, and are backed up by various specialist reports on drainage, environmental impact, transport impact and so on. These specialist reports are commissioned by the developers from various consultancy agencies who (I suspect) generally support applications by those who pay their fees.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that local plans end up proposing lots of new housing, and that individual planning applications to build new estates and supermarkets are usually passed by district councils and (should there be an appeal) by the planning inspectors. The planning system, in other words, is part of an great unstoppable engine of government which works to make all parts of the country look the same, to empty our high streets, and to destroy what is special and unique about each town and country in England.

The new modern and heritage motorways

A film critic noted many years ago that French films always seemed to include a scene of family meals around a garden table, while British films generally featured trains pulled by steam engines. The love of steam engines is now obsessional for many people. A thousand or so steam engines in Britain operate on about 150 standard gauge and narrow gauge ‘heritage railways’. All are maintained by amateurs, who spend years of their lives restoring and maintaining machinery that is over 50 years old. They would probably regard it as near-sacrilege to refer to a steam engine as a mere ‘machine’. It is a gleaming, living being, hissing and snorting, fed coal and water, and oiled and polished by its devoted attendants.

It was not always so. I remember as a child my excitement when I travelled on my first diesel-powered train. How much more modern than the dirty black tank engines used by British Railways. The modern world we imagined in the 1950s consisted of fast cars and motorways, concrete and glass skyscrapers, television and jet aircraft. Soon, it seemed, we would be able to fly all over the world and even to other planets. To be modern therefore meant scrapping steam engines, trams, and most of our railways altogether, demolishing smoky Victorian buildings, and clearing land in town centres to widen roads and create urban motorways. People would live in high-rise flats surrounded by parkland, and drive their cars to supermarkets. No town was exempt from this vision of modernity. Birmingham City Council demolished the town square (the Bullring) and replaced it by roads with tunnels underneath for people who persisted in walking rather than driving. Edinburgh commissioned Sir Colin Buchanan to design a would-be urban motorway cutting under Calton Hill, by bridge across to the Royal Mile, thereby cutting in half the most historic street in all Scotland. Edinburgh was lucky: no political party had a majority on the City Council and so there was no dynamic leader to enforce this insanity. Birmingham was less fortunate.

Since the 1960s, modernity has changed. It now means pedestrian-only city centres, efficient urban tram systems, old buildings restored and converted for new uses, and open-air cafes selling good coffee and Mediterranean food. The best new buildings either look like restored old ones or are shaped in strange round forms. Anything in fact, to escape from the square concrete blockhouses inflicted by modernist architects of the 1960s. High-rise blocks of flats are being demolished, usually to the cheers of their former residents. Supermarkets still survive, but may soon begin a long decline as people switch to home delivery. Cities compete for funding to build new urban tramways, often using the same routes as the ones torn up over 50 years earlier. Every country in Europe has, or plans to have, high-speed trains linking its major cities.

How far will this new modernity go? Perhaps motorways will one day seem quaint items of nostalgia. Old driving enthusiasts - possibly an elderly Jeremy Clarkson - will drive their ancient Ferraris up and down short stretches of heritage motorway kept in operation by dedicated preservation movements.

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

Can't read, won't read

One morning last week I went to the orthopaedic clinic in Worcester. By the door, in large letters, was a sign. It told patients not to go straight to the desk, but to collect a number from a box below the sign, and sit in the waiting room for their number to be called. This message was repeated on another large sign above the reception desk, which also told patients not to stand near the desk in order to maintain the privacy of individual patients speaking to the receptionist. I collected my number (21) and waited. After five minutes, my number was called. Another man (number 22) hovered round the desk and tried to barge in front of me, but I held my ground. I was registered by the receptionist and waited to see the physiotherapist and consultant.

While I did so, I noticed that half the people entering the clinic failed to pick up a number from the box and had to be told to do so by the receptionist. Some could not even find the box, and had to be guided by other patients. Why this manifest failure to follow a simple instruction? The reason did not seem to be age or infirmity. The great majority of patients in the clinic were young or middle-aged, and this group included almost all those who failed to read the signs. I suspect the main reason was simply functional illiteracy.

By ‘functional illiteracy’, I mean not just the inability to read, but also the unwillingness to do so. Many people are able to read, but find that it requires an unwelcome effort of concentration. When faced by a sign with words (even large ones like those in the clinic), they look the other way. There are many other examples of this. When I go to Foregate Street Railway Station in Worcester, I note the screens that indicate for each train the time, destination and platform (there are only two at this station). Around the window where you buy tickets, there are lists of the next trains to the main destinations. Yet sreveral customers do not read any of this written information and ask at the ticket office.

Many people therefore live in a world where they depend entirely on the spoken word, whether face-to-face, on a mobile phone, or on television. There may be few if any books in their homes, and parents do not try and help their children learn to read. People can lead a satisfactory life with functional illiteracy until they encounter the world of formal bureaucracy, whether public or private. In such cases, there is a wall of mutual incomprehension between an organisation dominated by written rules, job descriptions and standardised forms, and an individual whose understanding of the world is based on the spoken word. People with functional illiteracy faced by an official-looking letter must either show it to someone with greater expertise, or just ignore it. The latter course of action can be catastrophic. When I was a social worker in West Lothian in the 1970s, we were routinely told by the Housing Department of impending evictions (usually for non-payment of rent). This information was usually received on the day of the eviction. We would visit the tenant to see if there were implications for childcare, or if a disabled person was involved. I visited the S Family, and found they were utterly unaware of what was due to happen at 11am that day. I found a series of letters from the Housing Department, unopened and unread, behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Later, Mrs S told me in distress of her life with an abusive husband, a son in prison and an estranged daughter. “Mr Cumella”, she said with feeling, “I feel so thingy”. So functional illiteracy was coupled in her case with a lack of vocabulary to express emotions.

Much of the debate in education about how to improve literacy seems to be about teaching techniques. English spelling does make learning to read a bit more difficult than would be the case in a language like Spanish, in which spelling is phonetic. But literacy levels are high in Japan, where the written language uses three different orthographies. I think the main problem is not teaching technique or the quality of primary school teachers, but the lack of commitment among some parents to education itself and the low expectations they have of their children.

It is not easy to see how we can deal with this problem, but in the meantime we need to help people with functional illiteracy cope better with formal organisations. This means using symbols and colour schemes to supplement written signs. At the Orthopaedic Clinic, this would mean using a sign of a large arrow (in a contrasting colour to the wall) pointing to the box, with a picture of a hand picking a card. The use of symbols of this kind is widely-accepted in services for people with a learning (intellectual) disability: we just need to recognise that there are very many more people who have problems in reading and learning than we have previously estimated.