Living the dream

Dreams are supposed to give you messages about your secret desires and fears. If this is the case, then what I most desire/fear is boredom. My dreams in recent years have become staggeringly dull. The dullest of all was experienced two nights ago. In the dream, I was working in an office. The other people there were friendly but unstimulating. The office-building was a drab three-storey building from the 1950s with long corridors. There must have been a factory behind the office-block because I saw large groups of workingmen arrive and leave through some ornate gates in front of the building. In the dream, I was still living with my parents in Shirley, and I would catch a number 18 bus from a stop on the Stratford Road to get to the office, which seemed to be somewhere in Birmingham. The dream was devoid of any mystery or sense of strangeness, except that the number 18 bus never seemed to arrive, and I was forced to take other buses with unfamiliar routes and destinations.

It is possible, of course, that dreams do not reveal desires or fears, but just re-assemble new and old memories into narrative strings. I did once work in a 1950s office-block in front of a factory during a university vacation in 1967. This was repetitive work using a primitive adding machine called a ‘comptometer’, recording the orders for ice-cream collected by the team of saleswomen in the office who were on the phone all day to various shops. I caught the number 18 bus to work not at that time, but later in my life when I lived and worked in Birmingham. What evoked these memories and connected them to present experience? Perhaps it was the realisation that although my life includes satisfaction and stimulation, it also has its share of tedium.

The ratio of tedium to stimulation has shifted in the last week with the end of my teaching this year for the University of the Third Age (U3A). This involves leading a two-hour session once a fortnight to a group of very bright retired people. Each session deals with a different topic in social sciences, such as religion, learning and skills, crime, and  ageing. I have previously studied only a few of these topics, and so most sessions require a frantic search through the relevant social science writing and recent research to assemble my presentation. This is certainly stimulating mentally, and so are the following discussions. Teaching starts again in January, with a session on happiness. So my dreams should become less mundane next month.

A bar in La Herradura

There came a point in the life of our family when we could afford to go on holiday to a villa with a swimming pool. So in April 1994, we flew to Malaga, picked up a hire-car, and drove to a villa on a hillside overlooking the sea near the village of La Herradura. After a week there, we moved for the second week to a villa in a quiet street near the centre of Nerja. This was a happy time. My children were nine and five years old, and were full of curiosity and excitement. The villas were excellent, and the surrounding area has many fascinating places to visit. My wife and I could lie on our bed in the villa at La Herradura at night, and look out across the sea at the distant flickering lights of fishing boats. We travelled to Frigiliana (a beautiful white village full of flowers), visited  the Alhambra, threw snowballs at each other on the Sierra Nevada, wandered round the old city of Almuñécar, and travelled through the white mountainside villages of Las Alpujarras. We visited the caves of Nerja and strolled along the Balcón de Europa. We ate fresh fish cooked in a small café on the beach.

One day I walked down to the village centre of La Herradura, and went into a local bar for some beer. Sitting against the bar, smoking, was a gloomy-looking Englishman. He told me he was not on holiday, but was a local resident. “I left England because the country’s going to the dogs”, he said. “It’s full of bloody immigrants. They don’t learn our language and don’t learn our ways”. “Do you speak Spanish”, I asked a little later. “No, never bothered”, he replied.

The next week in Nerja, I saw a more impressive example of the English abroad. It was clear that the town had a substantial population from North-West Europe. The British had contributed to the culture of the place in a positive way. There were some pleasant cafes selling salads, tea and cakes, and an English-language bookshop. An English-language  newsletter reported meetings of ramblers (walking in Winter rather than Summer), a local history group and an animal welfare society. The British residents were essentially re-creating the middle-class life of their home country in a foreign land. But their very success in this task may have impeded their participation in the general life of Spanish society. Did the English immigrants to Spain ‘bother’ to learn Spanish? The magazine advertised Spanish classes, but it is hard to become fluent in a second language, particularly when you start learning late in life.

I too was struggling to learn Spanish. On the last week we stayed in Nerja, I saw a big headline in one of the Spanish papers. I translated it to read that Ayrton Senna was dead. ‘That can’t be true’, I thought. 'I must have made a mistake'.

How church buildings learn

From where I am sitting in my house, I can see through the winter trees to our parish church. St. Peter’s Church in Martley was built in the 12th Century, from red sandstone, quarried nearby. The church was extended in phases over the next 200 years, with a fine tower added in the mid-15th Century. The latter contains a ring of six great bells, cast on the site in 1673. It is claimed that these are the oldest complete set of bells in England. At some time after the Reformation, pews and an West gallery were added to the church, but these were removed when the church was restored in 1909. What remains after all these changes is a standard medieval English village church, made of local stone, shaped like a long box with a tower at the West end. From a stroll round the building, between the ancient gravestones, it is easy to see how parts have been added and taken away over the centuries.

The church at present is warm and welcoming. More important than that, it exudes a sense of holiness, accrued from generations who have prayed and voiced the liturgy. Despite the nine centuries of its existence and the many changes in the styles of worship over that time, the parish church serves its purpose well.

Eight miles away, the Church of England is demolishing a much younger building. Holy Trinity and St Matthew’s in Worcester was built in 1965, in what was then a fashionable circular form. Problems accumulated with the building. There were boiler failures, condensation and leaks. The church closed for worship in 2012 after part of the roof collapsed. The Parochial Church Council found that it would have cost half a million pounds to fix the building, and decided on demolition and replacement.

A faulty round church built in the 1960s is a minor example of crapitecture, but it also illustrates the wisdom of Stewart Brand, set out in his great book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built . Brand proposed that buildings should be made from low-cost, standard designs that people are familiar with, and which can easily be modified. People are then able to gradually change their buildings to meet their changing needs. Martley parish church is an example of a simple design (a stone box with a wooden roof) that was a widely-understood standard design for a small church in the Middle Ages. Bits were added over the centuries. If Martley had grown into a town instead of remaining a village, aisles would have been added and the roof raised. Perhaps the nave would have been lengthened. All of this would have been carried out by skilled stonemasons who occasionally experimented, but usually employed tried-and-tested methods.

Brand contrasted his preferred approach with that used in much of architecture today. The modernist idea that ‘form follows function’ (ie buildings should be designed according to how they should be used) is wrong because the functions of all buildings change (often before construction is completed). Designing a building for a specific set of functions can thus impede necessary adaptation. The use of exciting new materials and techniques may win architectural prizes, but it makes the building an experiment in which its occupants become the guinea-pigs. The round drum-like building of Holy Trinity and St Matthew’s was designed for a specific purpose and could not easily be adapted. It used new techniques which failed to keep the building dry. Let us hope those who design its replacement learn from church buildings which have stood for 900 years.

See also: A guide to crapitecture

Xenophobia against who?

Xenophobia occurs in all societies. There are always those among us who hate and fear people they see as fundamentally different. They may do so because they or their family have suffered at the hands of people similar to those they dislike. But xenophobia is usually an expression of a person’s inner anger, directed outward to a group of people they regard as an acceptable target. There are many candidates for being a target-group: people from different religions, people with a different appearance, people with a different sexual orientation, and of course foreigners. The selection of targets for xenophobia depends on local circumstances, or, more specifically, the availability of people to hate. An unscrupulous leader can then build a following by legitimising the  persecution of this target-group. This gives his followers a shared sense of purpose, relieving them of the sense of guilt they might otherwise experience when they express hatred and act cruelly. Attacks on targets can even have a joyful quality. Philip Dray’s research into the lynching of Afro-Americans in the Southern USA (published as At the Hands of Persons Unknown) shows how ‘Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers. [White] Men brought their wives and children to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic.’ The souvenirs in some cases were body parts from the lynched man.

Joyous horror of this kind arises when there are available targets who, in the opinion of the dominant group, need to be kept in their place. Lynching was celebrated by the white population in the Southern USA because it confirmed their sense of superiority and hence their very identity. In other circumstances, xenophobia can instead be associated with a sense of inferiority to the target population. This seems a characteristic of some anti-Semitism, which involves a strange combination of fear of the different religious practices of Jews (including the invented blood libel) and suspicion of the distinctive dress of Orthodox Jews, but also a resentment at the astonishing success of Jewish people in many walks of life.

Inferiority may also arise because of a fear that a person’s culture and way of life is threatened by a dominant neighbour. The English are, for the Scots, the most available and conspicuous group of different people. They not only dominate the island and the state, but are present everywhere in Scotland and every night on television. Scottish xenophobia takes the form of sullen resentment (shown in the way many Scots support any football team playing against England) combined with a strident assertion of the distinctive nature of the Scottish people. SNP politicians may attack the ‘Westminster system’, but their followers know this a polite code for getting at the English.

English xenophobia, on the other hand, rarely involves a dislike of the Scots. Instead, African-Caribbean and Muslim populations provide a more identifiable set of targets, and fringe political parties like the BNP and the EDL aim to mobilise hostility against these groups. However, the most successful political party in England to use xenophobia is UKIP. This has a formal policy of opposing UK membership of the European Union, but its basic appeal is a dislike of all foreigners, irrespective of race. Indeed, the European Union is regarded by UKIP as the supreme committee of foreigners, eclipsing in their mind all the other international organisations like the UN, NATO, the OECD, the World Trade Organisation and so on. The European Union is therefore seen as being responsible for all the unsettling changes in the lives of many older people, from decimal currency to mosques in our cities. The leader of UKIP has even said that he feels uneasy hearing foreign voices on underground trains. Well I was a student in London in 1965 and I remember lots of foreign voices then, even before we entered what was then referred to as the ‘Common Market’.

A key part of being a xenophobe is a sense of betrayal - in particular the belief that our people have failed because our leaders have betrayed us. Hitler (and many others on the right-wing in the Weimar Republic) argued that the German Army had lost the First World War because it had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by a conspiracy of communists and democratic politicians, secretly orchestrated by the Jews. UKIP and many Conservative politicians claim that Britain only voted to remain a member of the forerunner of the EU in the 1975 Referendum because the politicians of the time told them that they were only being asked to support a trading alliance. This is about as true as Hitler’s ‘stabbed in the back’ argument. The official leaflet issued by the Government before the Referendum discusses the need for the UK to be part of a wider alliance:

    “... in the modern world even the Super Powers like America and Russia do not have complete freedom of action. Medium-sized nations like Britain are more and more subject to economic and political forces we cannot control on our own. A striking recent example of the impact of such forces is the way the Arab oil-producing nations brought about an energy and financial crisis not only in Britain but throughout a great part of the world. Since we cannot go it alone in the modern world, Britain has for years been a member of international groupings like the United Nations, NATO and the International Monetary Fund. Membership of such groupings imposes both rights and duties, but has not deprived us of our national identity, or changed our way of life. Membership of the Common Market also imposes new rights and duties on Britain, but does not deprive us of our national identity. To say that membership could force Britain to eat Euro-bread or drink Euro-beer is nonsense.”

At that time, the ‘Yes’ vote for remaining in the Common Market was supported by most of the Labour Party, all the Liberal Party and almost all the Conservative Party. But there was a vigorous ‘No’ campaign led by sections of the Labour Party, a few Conservatives and the Scottish National Party. This argued strongly that the Common Market meant a loss of British sovereignty. This view was countered by the Yes campaign, which said that policy in the Common Market was decided by the national governments acting together, and that in a community of only nine members, Britain could veto any measure with which it did not agree.

At the time, this was true, but the European enterprise has changed greatly since 1975, partly because of British pressure. The UK Government, then as now, regarded the European Union as primarily a trading organisation, regulating a large free market in goods, capital and labour. Inter-European trade was impeded before 1987 by border controls and petty regulations in each individual country designed to protect their local industries from the products of other member-states. The Thatcher Government supported what was essentially a new treaty called the ‘Single European Act’ which was aimed at overcoming these obstacles. This brought in qualified majority voting (voting weighted in favour of the larger countries) to speed up the process of standardising product regulation. Customs post came down, and steps were taken to facilitate the free movement of labour.

It is ironic that it has been this very drive to create a more effective single market that has caused most political opposition. The European Union remains an astonishingly powerless organisation, nowhere near the ‘superstate’ of right-wing mythology. It has no armed forces, police force or inspectorate. It relies totally on its member states to enforce (with varying degrees of thoroughness) its regulations. The various crises on its borders, in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, show it to be ineffectual in foreign policy. But the single market has meant that every regulation, even those passed unanimously by its member states, can be presented by the opponents of the EU as a ‘dictat from the bureaucrats of Brussels’.

But the greatest political opposition to the EU is a result of the free movement of labour, which followed the Single European Act. This coincided with a massive expansion of the European Community from a club of a few prosperous Western European nations to an association of almost all European states West of Ukraine. Before the banking collapse of 2008 and the subsequent Greek debt crisis, there was a rough balance in the number of British citizens leaving this country to work and live in the rest of the EU, and the number of citizens from the rest of the EU coming to these shores. But massive unemployment in Southern Europe in the last five years has resulted in a rising number of people seeking work in the UK, coming mainly from Spain, Portugal and Italy. At present, the excess of people arriving over people leaving is about 200,000/year. This sounds a lot, but the UK population is now over 64 million, so net migration amounts to an increase in population of a third of one percent/year. At present, there are 2.34 million people from the rest of the EU living in the UK, compared with about 1.8 million British citizens living in the rest of the EU.

Of course, immigration is never spread evenly over a country. Huge international cities like London have always attracted diverse populations, but smaller communities can be profoundly affected by a rapid increase in strangers from other countries. This can, at least for a time, cause fear and concern about greater competition for jobs and houses and even for sexual partners. Xenophobic politicians can use this fear to build support. So we now get tirades in the press about foreigners who are supposed to be taking our jobs while mysteriously also living in idleness on our welfare benefits. UKIP leaders suggest that foreigners may also be disease-ridden, bringing HIV and now Ebola Virus to this land. These unpleasant claims are rarely challenged by our cowardly Government, which appeases UKIP and thereby continues to strengthen it.

Those of us who are not xenophobic do not hate and fear people because they are different. Instead, we find that people from different lands come with new ideas and experiences, and can therefore be stimulating company. They also bring their own tastes in food, which over time has greatly improved our own once-deficient cuisine. We do not automatically fear change, but believe that it may bring welcome improvements in our life. We think that the diversity of nationalities and cultures in our largest cities is far more exciting than the dreary grey places remembered from childhood. We do not talk of the past as being ‘in my day’, but believe we live in the present, whatever our age.

Of course, I am biased. Like many English people, I am the descendent of an immigrant. Two of my cousins have retired to live in other countries of the EU and, thanks to EU regulations, are eligible for local health services. My son completed a masters programme at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and paid the same (very low) fees as a local student. The EU has given us the chance to cross borders with ease to work, retire, trade and study. This is unsettling for those who prefer the idea that the world is divided into distinct and totally-separate nations, each restricted to own piece of territory, each a prison of the mind.

In Coromandel

The Coromandel is a long peninsula in the North Island of New Zealand, named after a ship named after a coast in India. The ship was built in 1798 in Calcutta for the East India Company and named the ‘Cuvera’. She was bought by the Royal Navy in 1804 and converted into a warship as HMS Malabar. After action in the West Indies, she was converted two years later into an armed storeship. In 1815, she was re-named as HMS Coromandel, and was fitted out to transport convicts to Australia. To make this voyage less costly to the Exchequer, she was refitted again to enable her to carry a return cargo - in this case, timber from the tall straight kauri trees of New Zealand. In 1820, HMS Coromandel called at a small harbour on the North Island to load lumber, and gave its name to the harbour, the small town that developed around it and eventually the entire peninsula.

My wife and I visited Coromandel in 2010, as part of a family holiday. We drove from Rotorua, up the coast of the Bay of Plenty, and then across to Coromandel town by the unsurfaced (and rather exciting) 309 Road through the deepest wooded hills. We stayed in the Gold Miner’s Cottage on a hillside overlooking the vast Hauraki Gulf. The cottage had a secret: behind the sofa was a door, which opened into the old goldmine. A short way along, there were glow-worms.

Goldminers in the Coromandel have now been replaced by artists and people seeking an ‘alternative’ lifestyle. One such incomer in 1973 was an Englishman, Barry Brickell. He set up a pottery collective North of the Town, but found that he needed to fetch clay and timber (for fuel) from up the hill. The answer was to build a 15-inch gauge railway. This was slowly expanded over the next quarter of a century to become a public attraction. Now called the ‘Driving Creek Railway’, it zig-zags up the steep slope, through tunnels and over bridges through kauri plantations. The line ends high above the pottery at an large octagonal wooden building with vast wide views over the tops of trees and across the Gulf. More than 30,000 people visit the Railway each year, showing the enduring attraction of scenic railways - even ones built in the recent past. It is bizarre that New Zealand, like Great Britain, destroyed many of its scenic railway lines because they were  not profitable. Perhaps it was just that the wrong people were running them.

There are many other things to see in the Coromandel, and details are at this website:
http://www.coromandelfun.co.nz/

Some reasons people do stupid things

Network Rail has issued the video above, which shows the stupid things people do at railway level crossings: people who ignore flashing red lights, loud sirens and descending gates (or descended gates) and still cross the railway line. All the people in the video escaped death, but only just. In fact, level crossings are still the main location for fatalities on the British railway system. In 2013/4, there were eight deaths on level crossings, none of which were found to be ‘industry-caused’ according to the subsequent enquiries. There are many other kinds of hazardous stupidity on daily view in our city streets: cyclists on busy roads who wear earphones and are thereby unable to hear traffic behind them; people who start walking across a road junction just as the lights change; people who walk out into the road looking at their mobile phone and not at the traffic; and people who drive their car while on their mobile phone or even while reading a map.

There are many explanations for stupidity of this kind. One is alcohol, which magically robs us of the burden of thought. Drunks have been seen sitting on the railway tracks in the town of Poole, where there is a level crossing between the high street and the shopping centre. A second explanation is that some people (especially young men) enjoy the sensation of danger, while at the same time believe themselves to be immortal. A third explanation is the simple failure to appreciate danger. For instance, children may not understand why it is important to wear a seatbelt until they see a re-enactment of an accident. Many adults too respond more to visual than written information, and hence may not appreciate that their behaviour is dangerous until they experience its consequences, personally or vicariously.

But I think that the main reason people behave stupidly is because of they way in which they process information. More specifically, many people typically to respond to only one stimulus at a time. So the people who crosses the road even though the pedestrian light is on red do so because they have glanced ahead and seen stationary cars in front of them. They then react to that information and walk, ignoring other contrary information (such as the red light). At level crossings, the one dominating piece of information is a clear road ahead, which eliminates awareness of the red flashing lights and the descending gates. Mobile phones are an extreme example of a dominating piece of information because they emit an alarm signal (their ringtone). When hearing this, people are tempted to suspend all practical activity, such as driving a car in busy traffic or even speaking to another person in front of them.

For some people, the dominating piece of information is not what they see in the road or the level crossing, but what other people are doing. This means that they cross the road despite the warning signs because they see other people doing it. Indeed, some people live their entire lives as an act of imitation. This can be a successful life-plan, for people who are wrong with the crowd are usually more popular than those who are right by themselves. But crowds can err, can panic, can even carry out acts of violence and cruelty. Saying “I did it because everyone else did” is no defence in law. Nor will it protect you from getting run over by a train.

See also: Not staying focussed

The secret geography of childhood

All children have a personal geography, of places they know well and regard as their own familiar territory. There are the usual roads, streets and fields, but also special hiding-places, places for exploration and places with their own names, unknown to adults.

It is strange to visit these places as an adult and realise how small the houses are and how compact are what once seemed limitless fields and woods. But for me, the biggest difference between my childhood memories and the world I now see is not size, but the absence of children playing in the roads. I attended Haslucks Green Primary School in Shirley, a suburb of Birmingham. My family lived in Stroud Road, one of several long straight roads of semi-detached houses, each with front and back gardens. There were no garages attached to the houses because, when they were built, few people owned cars. Instead, there was an unpaved access drive leading along the rear of the properties, and some families had built small garages at the end of their back gardens.

Stroud Road and the surrounding estate in the 1950s was astonishingly free of cars. I could look down the road from my front gate, and could see no parked cars, let alone moving ones. The lack of traffic also applied to what are now busy main roads. On the way back from primary school one dinnertime, I walked along Haslucks Green Road. One boy at school was notoriously naughty (we would probably now regard him as having a ‘challenging behaviour’), and one day sat in the middle of this road. “Come back”, we shouted at him, “a car might come”. No traffic meant safe places to play, and I spent a lot of my childhood in the street outside my home, among large groups of local children. There was a craze at one time for trolleys, and my father made one for me from pram wheels and planks. It could be steered with strings attached to the movable front axle. There was of course no brake. It was possible to lie head-first on the trolley and speed down the middle of Stroud Road.

Sometimes, a small group of boys would head off on an expedition, usually visiting the long stretches of waste ground that lay between the back gardens of neighbouring roads. These could be accessed by numerous small alleys: old rights-of-way across what had once been farmland. A longer expedition was to the River Cole, which was then a brook between open fields. We would fish for sticklebacks and eels. Even further was the Aqueduct. This is a vast brick construction which carries the Stratford-upon-Avon canal over both a road and the River Cole. We could get to the top of the Aqueduct via some gravel yards, or along the tow-path. This was all amazingly dangerous. There were no guard rails or fences on the top of the Aqueduct, and the canal was at that time semi-derelict.

How has modern traffic affected children’s personal geography? In the village in which I now live, children still seem to wander around the streets and nearby fields. But it is possible that they do so less often in the Stroud Roads of today. It has become less safe for children to cross main roads, and children (and even adults) are increasingly seen as ‘vulnerable’, in need of permanent oversight. So some parents drive their children even quite short distances to school, thereby increasing the danger on the roads and the risk of child obesity. It is also possible that children may be less eager than in the past to explore their neighbourhood in each others’ company. Homes are now full of personal entertainment. Children need no longer stare out of the windows with frustration on rainy days, but can instead look at the little flashing screens of their toys. Parents may also prefer to see their children in front of a computer screen than exploring their locality or noisily playing football in the park. Parents too play with their toys. I often see parents walking with their children, not talking to them but instead giving all their attention to their mobile phone. In this new world of electronic toys, children may lose the social skills they would otherwise have learnt in play - more will be diagnosed as having an ‘autistic spectrum disorder’. Indeed, this has already happened.