From so simple a beginning

Next year, as you may know, is both the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. To celebrate, the Natural History Museum recently opened an exhibition on Darwin, which has travelled to London from the American Museum of Natural History.

The exhibition has three parts. The first is devoted to Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. Most of this room is full of specimens of the plants and animals he saw on his travels. This meant a lot of dead stuffed animals, which aren't my favourite thing to look at. But there were also a live green iguana and ornate horned frog, which seemed unfazed by the visitors peering into their enclosures. I was most impressed, though, by the display of dried plant specimens collected by Darwin himself.

In cases along one wall were letters and other documents relating to Darwin's voyage. I was quite surprised that the museum glossed over the reason he was on the Beagle in the first place -- I thought the story was well-known by now, but the boards merely said he went along as "a naturalist." True, but he wasn't the official naturalist. That was Robert McKormick, who, in accordance with naval tradition, was also the ship's surgeon (think Stephen Maturin).

The real reason Darwin was asked along was to serve as company for the ship's captain, Robert Fitzroy. Fitzroy's family had a history of mental illness and suicide. The class divisions of the time meant that a captain could not socialise with those lower down the chain of command, and Fitzroy feared that enforced solitude over a long voyage would drive him mad. He needed someone of respectable social standing to share his meals with, and the young doctor's son seemed an ideal choice. (Ironically, in later life Fitzroy, a devout Biblical literalist, became consumed by guilt over the results of Darwin's voyage with him. Fixated on the idea, he sank into depression and cut his throat.)

I believe it was Stephen Jay Gould who first made this story famous, in his wonderful essay "Darwin's Sea Change" (collected in Ever Since Darwin), which goes on to reflect on the importance of social class in the history of science. Peter Nichols has also written a book about Fitzroy, Evolution's Captain, which I haven't read.

The Beagle portion of the exhibition could have used more direct quotations from Voyage of the Beagle, a really marvellous book that makes fascinating reading quite aside from its scientific importance. Many of the explanatory boards throughout the exhibition had a clunky tone and were too obviously written for an American audience (using "England" as if it were synonymous with "Britain," for example). For some reason the designers also chose to highlight key phrases in the text, as if they wanted to make sure everyone got the point.

The second part of the exhibition was devoted to Darwin's life at his home in Downe. I found a lot of charming objects here, such as Darwin's list of the pros and cons of getting married ("Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa"), a discarded page from the manuscript of Origin of Species that he gave to his son to draw a picture on, and an envelope containing hairs from his beard. The final portion explored the theory of evolution itself, and it was here that the exhibition's American-ness came through the most: there were video montages of scientists explaining that "theory" doesn't simply mean "guess" and why intelligent design isn't a scientific methodology, and one exhibit showed the warning label that schools in Cobb County, Georgia, were required to put on their biology textbooks until this was ruled to be unconstitutional in 2005.

Besides this, however, the museum had an impressive range of fossils illustrating the mechanisms of evolution, with emphasis on Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's theory of punctuated equilibrium. (I found myself a little sad, by the way, that Gould had not lived to see this exhibition -- I'm sure he would have been very involved in commemorating the anniversary.) And the exhibition closed with the final words of Origin of Species, which I have always loved:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. ... There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Happy Thursday!

More than any other American holiday, Thanksgiving has fallen by the wayside since I moved to Britain. For the first few years I was here I tried to have a traditional dinner with in-laws and friends, but it was difficult to arrange in the middle of the working week and at a time when many people were already absorbed in Christmas preparations. Then I stopped eating meat, which made the dinner itself a problem -- it's hard to try a new riff on tradition when most people around you don't know what the old tradition was.

I have to confess, too, that it was never a holiday that meant much to me personally. Perhaps that's to do with its origins: invented in its modern form by the editor of a women's magazine and given a backstory based on an absurdly skewed view of history. I can recall being taught in primary school, in the early 1980s, that it commemorated a gathering of the saintly Pilgrims and the "good Indians," as opposed to the "bad Indians" who put up a fight when Europeans took their land. I certainly hope we were the last generation of children to be taught that.

(Incidentally, there's a strange belief among some British Catholics that Thanksgiving evolved out of the feast of Christ the King. No truth to that at all, so far as I know.)

But I mustn't be too curmudgeonly. Chris took the trouble, unbidden, to find a recipe for sweet potato and blue cheese risotto that will make a perfect dinner for tonight. I'm very grateful for him, and for family and friends, and for everyone who's kind enough to keep reading and commenting on this blog. Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Clever Monkeys

I don't often mention programmes I see on the BBC iPlayer, since they can't be watched outside Britain and thus exclude many of my readers. However, last night's Natural World programme, Clever Monkeys (not Cheeky Monkey, as the iPlayer caption says) was shown on PBS at roughly the same time, and I believe viewers in America should be able to watch it via the website (unfortunately, I don't know if it will be shown elsewhere in the world). This is an excellent documentary about monkey intelligence and social life, narrated (though not made) by Sir David Attenborough. While the script tends to belabour its main point (that monkeys' intelligence is very similar to humans'), its film of various types of monkeys in the wild makes fascinating viewing.

I was especially impressed by the scenes of toque macaques in Sri Lanka as they harvested water lilies, and by the exploration of sexual politics in a community of Ethiopian geladas. Also of interest were the scenes of capuchin monkeys in South America. These are the same species that we worked with at the Monkey Sanctuary, and seeing their complex behaviour in the wild drove home how cruel it is to keep them as pets -- and what a challenge the sanctuary staff face in trying to recreate a natural existence for them. As I watched the capuchins cracking open clam shells, I remembered seeing one of the sanctuary's monkeys learning to do the same thing with a snail shell after a lifetime in solitary confinement.

As a bonus, the programme also has baby monkeys galore.

Update: It appears the American version isn't narrated by Sir David, but by F. Murray Abraham (who he?). I don't know why networks in America assume viewers will be scared off by a British accent.

That's not my name. Well, it is, but ...

I'm off sick from work today, and have stayed in bed except for a foray to the doctor's surgery in the icy wind to get some antibiotics. I mention that mainly to fish for sympathy, but also because the label on the medicine (addressed to "Mrs Laura Brown") brings up one of my linguistic prejudices.

Some folks grind their teeth when they see signs saying "Ten Items or Less"; I do it when people use "Mrs" with my first name. At some point in my dimly remembered history, I read that the title "Mrs" means "wife of," and this information has stuck with me even as more useful lessons have been forgotten. Thus, I think it's fine to be called "Mrs Brown," fine to be called "Mrs Christopher Brown" (well, not fine since this isn't 1962, but not incorrect), but never, never "Mrs Laura Brown."

It doesn't matter that Judith Martin and I are the only two people left on earth who remember this. It doesn't matter that in all other circumstances I will go to bat against prescriptivism and for the evolution of language. It doesn't even matter that the rule I learned all those years ago may not actually be right. It has become lodged in my mind and that is that.

For this reason, I generally prefer to use "Ms." Most people who are on a formal enough basis with me to use a courtesy title don't need to know whether I'm married, anyway. "Ms" does present problems of its own, though. People easily transmute it into "Miss", which, I'm sorry, really is incorrect. I remember, too, during a period of unemployment a few years ago, applying for a job as a classroom assistant at a Catholic girls' school. The headmistress, after quizzing me about why I didn't have children, looked at the title I'd filled in on the application form and shook her head with a faint smile. "We believe in teaching Catholic values to our girls by example," she said, "so we require that all female staff be called either Mrs or Miss." I wonder what she would have thought when I got a letter addressed to "Ms Laura Brown" from the cardinal's office a couple of years later.

I suppose this is one thing men don't have to contend with -- that and the strangeness of changing one's name to begin with. Although when I married I was pleased to acquire a surname that everyone could spell and pronounce, it did feel bizarre to discard the name I'd used for a lifetime. Today when I have to deal with those documents that are still in my maiden name, it feels like revisiting a different lifetime.

The only man I know who's adopted a new name is my brother-in-law, who changed by deed poll to the name he used for his musical career. (You may remember his feelgood hit from the summer of 2000, "All Melody Maker Readers Are Pointless Little Shits." Mere months later, Melody Maker folded. And they say music has no power any more.) As far as I know, he hasn't experienced any discomfiture from the change except when his grandparents write cheques in his old name at Christmas.

Lyrics quiz update

For those who enjoyed my lyrics quiz, I've put together a YouTube playlist with all the songs quoted.

(I was going to say that some of the other lyrics might not be safe for work, but if work lets you sit around watching music videos then heaven knows what else they're willing to tolerate. Also, for the track I was most concerned about, I was only able to find an amateur video of a live performance where you can barely hear the words anyway.)

Edit: Speaking of pop music, Chris has updated his blog (and high time too!) with a review of "Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song)" by Otis Redding. Check it out!

Blackbirds

Perhaps the only thing I miss about our old flat is seeing birds every morning on the flat roof outside its kitchen. Fortunately, the kitchen window in this flat looks out onto the neighbours' garden. It isn't particularly managed for wildlife -- we mainly see grey squirrels and pigeons -- but recently I was pleased to discover that at least two blackbirds live there as well. European blackbirds keep a low profile in autumn, and I miss seeing them when I'm out walking, so I'm very pleased to find some so close to home.

We see the female most often. Female blackbirds aren't nearly as distinctive looking as males -- they're greyish-brown, and this one has a slight reddish tinge on her breast -- so I had to study her for quite a while before I figured out what she was. I'm glad about this, because it made me pay a lot more attention to the bird's shape than I would have otherwise. I realised they're much larger birds than I had thought, for example. She typically emerges from beneath the hedge and starts looking for food by picking up bits of leaf litter and throwing them briskly over her shoulder. (Blackbirds also find insects by scratching at the earth with their feet like chickens -- the only thrushes to do so.)

For a while I thought the female was on her own, but then we began seeing a male in the garden occasionally. Today, the female was searching through the leaves when the male popped out of the hedge and started chasing her around the garden (she didn't seem keen). This went on until a second male swooped down from a tree and the female flew off to join him. Blackbirds are very territorial, so one of the males must have been an intruder, but I don't know which.

This means in a couple of months the male(s) should be singing outside our window -- and, even better, in spring there may be a nest for us to watch.

I'd like to read a good life history of the blackbird, along the lines of David Lack's The Life of the Robin. Does anyone know if such a book exists?

And now for some levity

During dull moments at work I've found myself compiling a list of pop lyrics that make me laugh, but that aren't actually from comedy songs. (I also excluded lyrics that I laugh at because they're so awful.) It may show how many dull moments I have that I actually managed to refine this into a top 10.

I've decided to list my choices without song titles or artists for the benefit of fellow anoraks who want to see how many they know (yes, I am aware that Google renders this pointless).

10. The trainer of insects is crouched on his knees
    And frantically looking for runaway fleas.
    


9. Well, I don't know how many pounds make up a ton
   Of all the Nobel Prizes that I've never won.



8. She'll grab your Sandra Bullocks and slowly raise her knee. (This one may not really count, depending on how you look at it.)
   


7. I was so touched, I was moved to kick the crutches from my crippled friend.
   She was not impressed because I cured her on the Sabbath. I went to confess,
   And when she saw the funny side, we introduced my child bride to whisky and gin.



6. Think I'm going down to the well tonight
   And I'm gonna drink till I get my fill,
   And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it,
   But I probably will.
   



5. I thought you were perfect, but that racist joke just made it all bittersweet.
   Won't you slap me around and make my lips a bit swollen so we can spend a day off work?
   



4. In a couple of days they come and take me away, but the press let the story leak,
   And when the radical priest come and get me released we was all on the cover of Newsweek.
   



3. Once upon a time at home I sat beside the telephone waiting for someone to pull me through.
   When at last it didn't ring I knew it wasn't you.
   



2. Presuming that all things are equal,
   Who'd want to be men of the people
   When there's people like you?
   

And finally, the lyrics guaranteed to crack me up every time:

1. He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys,
   Said, "I've got no further use for these,
   I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
   Swooping down from heaven to carry me home."

I know. I'm a terrible person.

I'm not outraged enough

I'd like to take this opportunity to make my position clear: Killing children is very, very, very wrong. I hope none of you doubted I believed this. But the ongoing public reaction to the Baby P case makes me wonder if I'm doing enough to prove it.

There are several things that bother me about this case, beginning with the name. When living children are the victims of crime, their names are understandably withheld to protect their privacy. But it's extremely unusual for this courtesy to be extended to the dead, especially when it means also protecting the identity of two of the killers. From what I gather, the child's name has been withheld because he has siblings and half-siblings who might be compromised -- although I would have hoped that these kids would be adopted by other families and given a chance at a normal life under a new surname.

The anonymity has been a gift to the media, because it means they can heighten the pathos of the story by repeatedly referring to the victim as "Baby." (I'm reminded of how the tabloids redubbed James Bulger "Jamie," a nickname that was never used during his short life.) In an even more bizarre decision, while the child's name has not been released, a photograph of him has, so that the image of a wide-eyed blond toddler now accompanies every report.

All this, I admit, falls within my blind spot. I have very little sentimentality about children, possibly because I learned during my own childhood what vicious little monsters they can be. While I was sickened by the reports of Baby P's death, I wasn't any more sickened than I would have been by the torture and murder of an adult. So rather than heightening my sorrow, the photograph and the repeated use of "Baby" strike me as cynical manipulation, a sort of maudlin pornography.

Speaking of pornography, that word has justly been used to describe the media's graphic recounting of the child's horrible injuries. Shortly after the trial ended, I unwittingly opened one of London's free newspapers and was confronted with lingering descriptions of his torture, photographs of his bloodstained pyjamas, a computerised model of his corpse showing the location of his wounds. I closed the newspaper and felt ill for the rest of the afternoon. Janice Turner has pointed out in an excellent piece for The Times that, while it was necessary for the jury to understand exactly what the child suffered, the general public have no legitimate interest in this whatsoever. Yet many people seem to be drinking in every detail, using each freshly revealed horror to stoke the deep personal fury we're apparently all supposed to feel.

Apparently, I'm supposed to be consumed by hatred for the people who did this. I'm supposed to want to torture them in the way they tortured their baby, to call for hanging to be brought back for this special case, to cheer if I hear of them being assaulted in prison. But I don't hate them -- I don't feel anything towards them -- and I don't want to do any of those things. I don't see what it would accomplish except to add to the sum total of hatred and violence in the world. The world does not strike me as being in need of this.

The moral panic over Baby P immediately follows the panic over Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. Obviously the Baby P case involves far more serious events, but I would argue that the Radio 2 debacle was actually a more appropriate topic for such intensive coverage. It involved issues -- such as the responsibilities of broadcasters and limits on the acceptable behaviour of performers -- that could profitably be debated by the public.

In the Baby P case, there is nothing to debate. Nobody is defending the torture and murder of children. The people who did it have already been dealt with, as they should have been, by the police and the courts. The uselessness of Haringey Council and their charming and PR-savvy head of child protection services ("The truth is that you cannot stop people who are determined to kill children") is more obviously of public interest, especially since it's not been that long since they were last the subject of an inquiry. But few people really have enough knowledge to suggest how the problems might be solved, and the media coverage hasn't done much to enlighten us.

I don't think this outcry is about compassion for the child. It's about something much nastier than that. When I heard the leader of Haringey Council issuing his much-demanded apology on the radio this morning, it didn't sound like a victory for caring; it reminded me of the forced confessions read out during Soviet show trials. I do wonder if any of the people expressing their outrage over the killing were among the crowd who urged a teenage boy to jump to his death in Derby; or if they support the policies on "bogus asylum seekers" that keep children in the Yarl's Wood detention centre; or if, when Baby P was alive, they would have thought of him as council-estate scum who existed to leach money from their paycheques.

At Mass on Sunday, when we said the bidding prayers for the recently dead, the first name on the list was "Baby P." My immediate thoughts -- forgive me -- were 1) "Someone's been reading the Daily Mail" and 2) "He doesn't belong on the recently dead list, it's been over a year." Of course, it's not a bad idea to pray for him; not a bad idea to pray for anyone. But surely there are people far closer to home who could use our prayers and support and are not getting them. Surely it would be better to help people using our own judgment and sense of compassion than to join in this hysterical whipped-up grief over someone we never knew and a situation we can do nothing about. I seem to remember that the outrage of the crowd did not have a very happy result in the Gospels.

I can't decide if I'm brilliant or pathetic

Unless you're as big a comic-strip geek as I am, you probably have no idea how it feels to casually check your e-mail and see the subject line "Stephan Pastis added you as a friend on Facebook." (You know, the Stephan Pastis. Why are you still looking at me like that?) My delight was only slightly undercut by Chris saying, "Is he desperate or something?" Actually, I assume he added me because I'd previously become a fan of Pearls Before Swine. Still, makes a change from getting sent imaginary puppies and "hilarious" video clips.

I was already in a good mood because on my way home from work, I found an old record cabinet that someone had left out for the binmen. I managed to drag it up the stairs, and we now have all our vinyl records out of cardboard boxes for the first time in years, as well as a good deal more floor space.

Later on I'm going to make some spicy vegetable couscous and listen online to Radio 3's Lunchtime Concert, which I didn't hear at lunchtime because I was at work. I don't know how I keep up with this frenetic pace sometimes.

The same old Babylon

From its Akkadian name, mushhushshu ("furious snake") I assume the dragon portrayed in relief on the walls of ancient Babylon's Processional Way was supposed to be terrifying. I must admit, though, that to me it looked cute and comical, like a goofy pet that might have bounded around the royal household. Apparently I'm not the only one to have thought that, because in the shop for its current exhibition on Babylon, the British Museum sells a toy version:



I'm afraid this actually turned out to be the highlight of an exhibition I had been looking forward to for some time. The Babylon exhibition has been travelling to museums around the world, with each city getting a slightly different collection of artifacts. London seems to have got a particularly poor selection from other museums -- aside from the processional reliefs, they mainly have plain cuneiform tablets and cylinders that were never going to draw the crowds in -- and it turns out that much of the British Museum's own Mesopotamian collection, which I've often enjoyed wandering through, is Akkadian and Assyrian rather than Babylonian.

The museum has tried to make up for this by proclaiming that its exhibition will compare the mythical Babylon that has inspired "artists, writers, poets, philosophers and film makers" with the real Babylon that has emerged from archaeological excavations. They've done this by borrowing loads of paintings and manuscripts depicting Babylon from other museums around London and hanging them among the artifacts. Unfortunately, no sooner have they sternly told us that some artistic portrayal of Babylon isn't historically accurate than they have to admit that the artist wasn't trying to be accurate: almost without exception, artists who have portrayed Babylon have been interested in its power as a symbol and its relevance to their own time. William Blake may not have known that it was Nabonidus, not Nebuchadnezzar, who went mad and crawled around in the wilderness, but he almost certainly would not have cared.

By the last room, when we encountered displays of record sleeves by Boney M and David Gray and a drawing of the Babel Fish from A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you could smell the desperation. To make matters worse, a potentially fascinating topic was shoehorned in at the very end: the role the idea of Babylon has played in the development of modern Iraq. Saddam Hussein's attempts to co-opt the imagery of Babylon could have made for a far more absorbing exhibition than the one we'd just seen, but we got only a brief film on the subject.

Our trip to the museum was not wasted, however, since afterwards we found an interesting little free exhibition on two cultures from the eastern Himalayas, the Monpa and the Apatani. And in the Japanese galleries, where prints are exhibited on a long-term temporary basis, there's currently a collection of Hiroshige landscapes curated by Julian Opie. Opie's greatest achievement as an artist is probably a Blur album cover, but he's made a very good decision in displaying minimal information alongside the prints -- just the titles and dates. Often when the label contains a lot of information, it's tempting to spend as much time reading it as actually looking at the picture. Hiroshige's prints speak for themselves; we really wouldn't gain much from being told, for example, where in Japan a particular scene was.

We also wanted to see the museum's new gallery of clocks and watches. It took ages to find it, because it isn't shown on any of the maps yet, and we ended up getting lost in a part of the museum I didn't even know existed (containing European decorative art, like an outpost of the V&A). Since we were due to meet a friend elsewhere, when we finally found the clocks we ended up going through the gallery backwards and in an awful rush. But I was interested to see a display of alarm clocks through the ages that included a Teasmade - an alarm clock that automatically brews a cup of tea just before the alarm goes off. These were pretty common in Britain in the 1960s and '70s, but for some reason have since vanished. The first I heard of them was in a passage from W.G. Sebald's novel The Emigrants that was quoted in Harper's magazine a few months ago, and I'd never seen one before. I wonder what happened to them?

Some true love turned and not a false turned true

For our class play in fifth grade (ages 10-11) we were given the choice of performing A Midsummer Night's Dream or Macbeth. Our teacher, Mrs Zizzo, read out the plot summaries (with, I have to say, a certain bias in her delivery!) and Macbeth won almost unanimously -- far darker, gorier and all-round cooler than that baby stuff about fairies. (I played one of the two weird sisters, as the third one had the flu on the day of the performance. Although we got special permission from the principal for Lady Macbeth to say "Out, damned spot," the actress refused to say it because her mother would be in the audience. The children's script we used did cut out Malcolm's threat to deflower all the virgins in Scotland, as well as Lady Macbeth's claim that she would dash her suckling child's brains out if Macbeth demanded it.)

My classmates weren't alone in considering A Midsummer Night's Dream a babyish play. Critics from Samuel Pepys ("the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life") to George Orwell have thought it among Shakespeare's least substantial or interesting works. However, René Girard -- in his book A Theatre of Envy, which I'm reading at the moment -- takes a different view.

Girard's own theories, as you may know, are based upon the concept of "mimetic desire" -- the idea that we come to desire what we see other people desiring, and only feel that our own desires have value if we believe other people desire the same thing. Mimetic desire promotes harmony as long as it is possible for everyone to possess the thing that is desired. However, when two or more people desire something (or someone) that only one of them can have, the result is conflict and violence -- which is itself contagious.

Girard believes that many of the world's great writers have understood this and illustrated the phenomenon in their work. While I tend to be suspicious of people who come up with a theory and then seek to demonstrate that great minds have agreed with them all along, I have to say that a Girardian reading makes sense for many of the plays. It also lends extra depth to the seemingly frivolous comedy of the Dream -- so much so that Girard declares it "Shakespeare's first mature masterpiece, a veritable explosion of genius."

Dismissing the explanation of misdirected fairy dust as a crowd-pleasing ruse, Girard sees the characters' falling in and out of love as the result of "an entangled web of mimetic interaction." Because Helena desired Demetrius, Hermia also did, and succeeded in taking him away from her friend. Once she had him, she no longer wanted him ("When mimetic desire is thwarted, it intensifies and, when it succeeds, it withers away") and turned her attention to Lysander. Demetrius remains in love with Hermia because Lysander took her from him, but when Lysander gets bored with Hermia and falls in love with Helena instead, so does Demetrius. In truth, Girard tells us, "All four lovers worship the same erotic absolute, the same ideal image of seduction that each girl and boy appears to embody in the eyes of the others."

I found this observation particularly striking:

The tradition of external obstacles and nonmimetic tyrants is the comic tradition par excellence. Today it is more powerful than ever; it is the ideology of psychoanalysis, of our "counterculture," of all sorts of "liberations," of the entire youth cult. It takes itself more seriously than ever. We must all pretend to believe that "youth" is somehow persecuted. Each generation proclaims this message as something brand-new that has never been formulated before. Ever since the Greeks, the theater has been an important vehicle of this ideology, but Shakespeare is an outstanding exception. His attitude is so unusual that it is ignored rather than acknowledged. We do not realize how revolutionary A Midsummer Night's Dream really is. ...

The only obstacles in the path of the lovers are the lovers themselves, the mimetic rivals. They are stronger, younger and fiercer than any father can ever be. They are passionately eager to cause trouble, which is not the case, as a rule, with fathers.

A Midsummer Night's Dream represents the first example of a truly Shakespearean type of comedy that makes fun of desire itself, denouncing its perpetual lie about being the victim of some kind of repression .... The public's prejudices are so entrenched, however, that all it takes to accredit the myth of a conventional Midsummer Night's Dream is to plant the old scarecrows at the entrance of the comedy. Four centuries later they still dominate the interpretation of a play that has strictly nothing to do with them.

Girard will explore the precise and complex mimetic relationships between the characters in the next few chapters. The play in fact takes up more room in his book than any other, while Macbeth gets hardly a mention. If Mrs Zizzo had been a Girardian scholar, I suppose our fifth-grade production might have been quite different.

Last kind words blues

I try not to write about it too often, to avoid boring my readers and/or attracting the wrong sort of interest, but for much of my life I've suffered from intermittent depression and anxiety. Recently I had a particularly bad few days. I won't drone on about the details; Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed it more succinctly than I could. I mention it because of something that happened during that time. After a run-in with an abrasive co-worker, I requested a private meeting with our team supervisor* and promptly broke down. Our supervisor, a good-natured and considerate man, looked shocked and said, "I had no idea you were so unhappy."

This was unsettling to me at the time, as I had assumed that I carried signals of my condition around like a leper's bell, and that if people didn't mention it it was because they didn't want to (or, as I thought at the time, because I wasn't worthy of the attention). It is even more unsettling to me now, because I wonder how many people there are around me who may be in need of concern or a kind word, but whom I fail to notice.

I suppose the truth is that most of us need these things, but I (and I think I'm fairly typical in this respect) tend to be embarrassed about imposing myself on others if they haven't specifically asked for my attention or help. Also, even when someone clearly is in distress, suffering from some tragedy or illness, I think we tend to feel that anything we can say or do will be too feeble to have much effect. And yet I know how much a well-timed kind word has meant to me at such times. And I can remember occasions when I sent someone a note or did a small favour, feeling ashamed that this was all I could offer, only to have them tell me later how clearly they remembered it and how much it had helped. I think we humans sometimes forget what our more "primitive" relatives know very well: that caring social contact is a necessity at least as important as, and sometimes more important than, our material needs.

Enough of my rambling. Let's get to the point. Amnesty International has begun its yearly Greetings Card Campaign, which is an opportunity for all of us to send some words of comfort and support to prisoners of conscience and other victims of persecution throughout the world. I once resisted taking part in this for the reasons described above. What good could a few words on a card do against the imprisonment, torture and isolation imposed by the state?

It's only since I became involved that I have learned just how great a difference it can make. Again and again, former prisoners have stated that these messages from strangers in another country were the only thing that gave them hope. Early this year, I was surprised to receive a postcard from a Turkish prisoner I'd written to. He was writing to every person individually to express his gratitude. More recently, I read of a former prisoner, the subject of a campaign several decades ago, who was visiting Britain so that he could thank the people who had written to him in person.

I'd encourage everyone to send a card or two to the people highlighted in this campaign (visit the Amnesty site for your country to see how it works in your area.) It wil mean a lot more than you might think.

*This is not either of the bosses I have referred to in previous posts, but yet another of the many layers of management we have above us. I once read a memoir by someone who used to work for our company and left to become a Jesuit. He said he was glad to get away from the weird rituals, clannish atmosphere and byzantine structures of authority.

The Coast is Always Changing

For some reason, with certain artists last.fm* keeps playing me a particular track over and over. One of these is Maxïmo Park's The Coast is Always Changing, which went straight in at number 63 in November 2004. (It might be a good idea to minimize the window and just listen to the song before watching the video, or looking at the band at all, really.) Consequently, I've been paying attention to a song I never thought much about before, and it's turned out to be quite rewarding.

The song is a tableau, expressed in a few terse lines, of two people -- the narrator and the one he loves -- sitting on a train bound for the seashore. All we know about the beloved is that she (or, indeed, possibly he) has left their hometown to live in London, is back for a brief visit, and may or may not be aware of the narrator's feelings. There are some abortive attempts at communication in the bridge ("Every sentence has its cost ... you react to my riposte"); then, as the song seems to be reaching an emotional climax, the couple's focus switches abruptly to the coast, which is "always changing." It's the laziest of clichés to say a Northern band evokes the cold and damp of its native climate, but on this track it's true: one can see the rocky coastline, the grey sky, the waves that erode and reshape the land.

A wistful keyboard part wends its way under the other instruments for much of the song, coming to the fore only at the end of the bridge, while the melodic guitar line** is jarred to pieces after each verse. Both musically and lyrically, the record perfectly creates a sense of frustrated tenderness.

All in all, not a bad three minutes, and I'm grateful to the repetitive programming of last.fm for causing me to hear it in greater depth. Although that dodgy live version of "Jumping Jack Flash" it keeps playing is harder to forgive.

*If you're on it, you can totally be my friend. I could use some new stations to listen to.

**As an American listener of a certain age, I am required to say this guitar riff reminds me of early R.E.M. I'm very sorry.

Remembrance Day

This morning we listened to the Ceremony of Remembrance from the Cenotaph. While official ceremonies aren't as important as they once were in Britain, this is one that remains powerful -- and surprisingly effective on the radio, despite having been designed largely as a visual spectacle.

This time last year we were visiting the U.S., where the same day is, of course, celebrated as Veterans' Day. (On a side note, the noun "veteran" is very seldom heard in British English: "ex-serviceman" or "-woman" is the usual term.) It's understandable that there would be a difference in tone between a holiday intended to remember the dead and one intended to honour the living. (I suppose the permanent inclusion of Veterans' Day in the American calendar is both realistic and depressing, presupposing as it does that there will always be war veterans to honour.)

But all the same, I found myself missing the dignified celebrations that I knew were taking place back in the UK. Where the British observances are quiet, reflective and perhaps tinged with collective shame for humanity, the atmosphere in America felt like a patriotic pep rally. We went to the Catholic church that still, somehow, hangs on in Philippi, and sat through a gung-ho homily about the greatness of America and the rightness (always) of its cause. Although Chris was sat next to me in the tiny congregation, the priest didn't acknowledge that his country, or any other, also had troops serving alongside the Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan, or that they had had any stake in the events of November 1918. Afterward, the people huddled together in the expanse of pews were urged to pray for protection "from those who would do us violence." I would have thought that our more pressing task would be to pray for deliverance from the violence within ourselves.

(I believe it was on the following Sunday that this same priest read out a poem containing some obscene blasphemy about the Mother of Christ wielding a sword and leading an army as it went out to carve up the enemies of Christendom. I think it was written by G.K. Chesterton, or one of that crowd who sought to make Christianity something a gentleman could expound upon in his study after a roast dinner.)

Every year in Britain, from the last weeks of October until the actual Armistice Day on Nov. 11, street vendors sell paper poppies in support of the Royal British Legion. Wherever you go you can see people wearing the poppies on their coats or shirts (they are de rigueur for politicians and newsreaders). The poppy has been a symbol of mourning for the war dead, and particularly for the dead of World War I, since the publication of John McCrae's poem In Flanders' Fields. The other important commemoration is the two-minute silence that is held across the country at 11 am. Although this officially takes place on Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to Armistice Day, many people observe a second silence on the 11th itself. This does make more of an impression, as entire shops and offices fall silent.

As it happens, today is also the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which is being commemorated with a concert at Berlin's empty Tempelhof airport.

What it's all about

Two members of our team at work, including me, are "mandated" to write letters. That is, our employer trusts us to compose letters and send them out without bringing the company into disrepute. The other three are not "mandated" and must therefore have their letters checked by a "mandated" colleague before sending them.

I can remember that in school they made us practice letter-writing by writing to Santa Claus, the president, our favourite authors, etc., but maybe British schools don't do that or maybe it just doesn't stick, because my colleagues really do seem daunted by the task. You can see their faces fall when they realise a letter is required, and more often than not they produce a block of random sentences that they hand over with an apologetic look.

In theory, they're supposed to give the letters to me to check when I have time, and I'm supposed to hand them back with my corrections later. But because I find the whole thing extremely embarrassing, I invariably end up grabbing the letter from them straightaway and babbling frantically while scribbling half-remembered symbols from my abortive career as a sub-editor:

"Well, now, this is fine! You've put all the points we want to make in here. But just one thing -- since these sentences relate to the same idea, I think I'd put them all into one paragraph so the customer can read everything we have to say on that topic at once. Then we can start a new paragraph here, where we start talking about a different subject. This customer might not know the jargon as well as we do, so maybe instead of using an abbreviation here we should spell the term out. And you know how people usually hear what they want to hear -- I'm worried they could misinterpret this sentence with the way we've phrased it. Hmmm ... oh, I know! Why don't we try this wording instead; then it will be a bit clearer and there will be less room for misunderstanding. Oh, and we need a full stop at the end of this sentence."

And so forth, while my other "mandated" colleague across the desk rolls her eyes, and my victim (so it seems to me) wants desperately to get back to her seat.

This ritual seemed merely one in a series of everyday awkwardnesses until yesterday afternoon, when a very quiet woman on the team sent me an e-mail. (She did this even though she sits right next to me, but that's just the sort of office we work in.)

"Thanks for helping me with my letters," she wrote. "Now I understand what it's all about."

I was so touched, I almost said something out loud.

The other pork-barrel politics

Sifting through the coverage of America's elections, I was pleased to learn that voters in California had passed Proposition 2, which prohibits keeping farm animals in cages too small for them to move freely. This should put an end to battery cages, veal and pig crates on farms in the state (although they remain common elsewhere in the U.S.).

Obviously, as a vegetarian, I tend to share Ben of Suicide Food's opinion on this subject. Back when I was an omnivore, I used to buy meat with labels that extolled the producers' concern for animal welfare: "Our pigs spend their lives in family groups, with high-quality feed and unlimited freedom to roam in sunlit fields," and so forth. I went veggie partly because I could never resist adding: "... and then, we kill them."

On a related topic, a post by George Morison at Walls of Byzantium alerted me to the shocking mudslinging that had gone on during Montana's gubernatorial race. It seems that one candidate was accused by his opponents of being -- brace yourselves -- a vegetarian. Needless to say, he immediately issued a strenuous denial. Reports do not indicate whether he then tore into a still-bloody T-bone steak in front of the television cameras, but I like to think he did.

By coincidence, a few days before this scandal broke, Chris and I had been discussing whether a vegetarian could ever have a chance of getting elected President. He or she would certainly have an image problem to overcome, since many Americans still think of vegetarianism as the hallmark of East Coast elitists or West Coast hippies. But I was more concerned about practical problems on the campaign trail. As you know if you've paid any attention to American elections, at each stop during their campaign presidential candidates are expected to gorge themselves on the local delicacy. And if you look at America's local delicacies -- from Philadelphia cheesesteak to Kentucky burgoo to West Virginia's own pepperoni roll -- it's clear that they don't tend to be based around plant proteins. Would Americans vote for a candidate who refused to break lard-soaked bread with the common folk? I suspect not.

In Britain, I don't think a vegetarian would have the same difficulty becoming Prime Minister. This is partly because, thanks to the way parliamentary elections work, party leaders don't go traipsing up and down the country unless things look very close or very desperate. It's also because British cuisine doesn't really have many regional delicacies, with a few obvious exceptions like Cornish pasties and haggis (and you can get vegetarian haggis these days, in a convenient tin, even). I do have a book called Good Things in England that gives recipes for lots of local specialities, from Lancashire fig pie to Norwich roast cygnets -- but that was published in 1932 in an attempt to stop such dishes from dying out, which appears to have failed.*

Perhaps a more important reason, though, is that in Britain the head of government is not also the head of state, and is thus not expected to open a patriotic gullet to all the bounty of the land's fields and slaughterhouses. It may be that the American president will always have to eat anything that Americans eat. But I think I'll keep working on a vegetarian pepperoni roll, just in case.

*This book also contains my favourite recipe instruction of all time: "Peel the onions and throw them immediately into boiling water to remove the objectionable odour and taste."

The mimick of a politician

As political affairs are the highest and most extensive of temporal concerns, the mimick of a politician is more busy and important than any other trifler. Monsieur le Noir, a man who, without property or importance in any corner of the earth, has, in the present confusion of the world, declared himself a steady adherent to the French, is made miserable by a wind that keeps back the packet-boat, and still more miserable by every account of a Malouin privateer caught in his cruise; he knows well that nothing can be done or said by him which can produce any effect but that of laughter, that he can neither hasten nor retard good or evil, that his joys and sorrows have scarcely any partakers; yet such is his zeal, and such his curiosity, that he would run barefooted to Gravesend, for the sake of knowing first that the English had lost a tender, and would ride out to meet every mail from the continent, if he might be permitted to open it.

-- Samuel Johnson, The Idler

When I read this passage a few years ago, I was embarrassed to recognise myself and many of my friends and relatives. Substitute our chosen candidate, opinion polls and primaries for the French, privateers and tenders, and you had the exact picture of our behaviour during an election.

Having realised the ridiculousness of hanging on to every moment of the campaign, as if I could somehow influence it just by paying attention, I found myself deliberately tuning out for much of this race. After making my own decision, I didn't follow events any further, and was happy to wait to hear the results on the radio this morning.

I was able to make that decision a lot earlier than I'd expected. My preferred candidate, Bill Richardson, dropped out even before I got to vote in the primary, and I expected to have some serious thinking to do during the general election. If the contest had come down to Clinton vs. McCain, I was fully prepared to break the habit of a lifetime and vote Republican. Even when Obama won the nomination, my choice was not automatic. Both candidates were principled men, and McCain had gone against his party on many of the issues where I found their policies most objectionable.

But then McCain, in an apparent attempt to attract the right wing of his party, turned his back on many of the principles I had admired him for. So much so, in fact, that when The Economist endorsed Obama last week, it said the best argument for voting for McCain was to assume that he didn't really believe what he was saying on the campaign trail. Even if I'd been willing to take that gamble, his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate made it impossible for me even to contemplate voting for him. While President-elect Obama has a great deal to prove, I feel that his election is the best outcome America could have hoped for.

I'll also break with what seems to have become conventional wisdom and say that, actually, Obama's victory is worth celebrating "just because he's black." For a country with a profoundly racist history like America's, the importance of what happened yesterday is hard to understate. And I hope those leftists in Europe who choose to believe that America is still a profoundly racist and undemocratic country will now find themselves choking on their words.

Already I've been impressed by the excitement of my British colleagues on hearing the news -- I certainly saw nothing like it after the previous two elections. In both the media and in everyday life, I'm hearing more and more people speak of America with admiration rather than with disdain. If Obama can make being an American abroad a bit less uncomfortable than it has been for the past eight years, that in itself will be a great achievement.

I hate people when they're not polite

I'd like to know where I can get one of those licences to be rude. Maybe you know the lucky holder of one of these. You can usually find one or two in the typical office, neighbourhood or extended family. They're the ones who, by reputation, tell it like it is and don't suffer fools gladly. They can cruelly mock those around them, insult people to their faces, scream and swear over minor annoyances, and still expect to be fully excused afterwards: "That's just her way," "His bark is worse than his bite" or even "That's part of her charm."

I suspect that if I engaged in this sort of behaviour, people would not view it so indulgently. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe nobody would care. But whenever I try speaking to people that way, I can feel my face going red. I don't think I sound endearing, I think I sound like a jerk. Perhaps I need to practice more before qualifying for a licence of my own.

In the meantime, having been reduced to tears by one of these forthright mavericks this afternoon, I've been treasuring a story they tell about the late Humphrey Lyttelton. A listener swaggered up to him after a concert and intoned:

"Mr Lyttelton, I'm a blunt man. I don't stand on ceremony and I speak my mind."

"Me too," said Humph. "Piss off."

Lapwings by moonlight

Recently I've been reading The Lapwing, a Poyser monograph by Michael Shrubb. As you might expect, it's not edge-of-your-seat material, with lots of tables and statistics. But it does give an interesting picture of these beautiful birds, which are among my favourites to watch as they graze on the marsh at the London Wetland Centre.

The statistics also tell a sad story. There was a time when most people in Britain didn't have to go to nature reserves to see lapwings. Once one of the UK's most common farmland birds, they have declined drastically in the past few decades due to changes in agriculture. When ploughing was done with horses, farmers used to stop and move lapwing nests out of harm's way (since they are well-liked birds that eat slugs and other pests), but modern machinery destroys everything in its path. Field drainage has deprived chicks of drinking water. Spring tillage, which provides the birds with their favourite nesting habitat, has declined. Where it still exists, the way cereal crops are managed later in the year -- with increased use of fertilisers and herbicides -- means that the same field that seemed so desirable to the lapwings in spring becomes completely unsuitable at a critical time for rearing chicks. In fact, Shrubb says that much British farmland today is "a serious ecological trap" for lapwings and other plovers.

I fear the situation has probably got worse in the short time since Shrubb's book was published, with the European Union's abolition of mandatory set-aside (which required farmers receiving the EU's generous subsidies to reserve part of their land for wildlife). But there is hope: since 2005 the RSPB has been running Operation Lapwing, which helps farmers manage their land in ways that encourage the birds to breed.

A more cheerful part of the book discusses the lapwing's nocturnal feeding habits. It wasn't known until recently that they actually eat more at night than during the day and organise their feeding by the phase of the moon. The description of a flock of lapwings gathering in the moonlight, meandering along a field and scanning the ground with each step, sounds charming to watch. I hope I'll see it for myself one day.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Last night Chris and I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum. The competition has gone back to its normal name after being known as Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year last year. Shell's sponsorship caused great outcry, including an alternative photography exhibition held on the pavement outside the museum, which showed the devastation the company has wrought on many of the world's wildernesses. This year Shell's name and logo appear nowhere in the promotional materials, so I assume they've dropped their sponsorship.

Another striking feature of this year's competition was the Eric Hosking Award, given to a portfolio of six pictures by a photographer between the ages of 18 and 26. The striking thing about it was that it wasn't awarded. Mind you, for as long as I can remember the prize has been scooped up by the Hungarian photographer Bence Máté, so maybe he's turned 27 and they haven't found anyone to fill his shoes. (Or maybe he just had an off year; he's usually all over the competition, but this year he had a solitary Highly Commended picture of a black grouse displaying at dawn.)

The overall winner was Steve Winter's portrait of an Indian snow leopard, and I can certainly see why: the composition is perfect, the atmosphere of a mountain snowstorm is nicely captured and the expression on the leopard's face is priceless. My only reservation is that, if you want to get technical about it, Winter didn't take this picture. The leopard did. Winter set up a camera trap with a motion sensor and went to bed. I don't mean to make light of the work he did -- he had to choose where to put the camera and which settings to use -- but is this really the same as snapping the picture yourself? Maybe some photographers out there can tell me.

Although mammals were the subjects of both the overall winners (15-year-old Catriona Parfitt won Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year for her picture of a giraffe being harassed by a lion while a row of oryxes looked on), birds seemed to dominate the rest of the competition. Whooper swans, with their lively expressions and raucous social life, were chosen as subjects by several photographers -- I especially like Yongkang Zhu's picture of one swan taking off in the snow while its companions look on. But it was also a good year for the less charismatic vultures and gulls. I was impressed by Martin Gregus's entry in the 11-14 years category, which gives an unusually graceful view of a herring gull.

I found myself most drawn to the photographs that gave an almost abstract view of natural scenes. Arthur Morris's photograph of a group of sandpipers sleeping with their heads under their wings looked at first like pure texture. Darran Leal's picture from the rainforest of north Queensland, showing a raindrop suspended from a leaf and reflecting other leaves, was both a beautiful composition in itself and a moving symbol of the rainforest's regeneration following its destruction by a cyclone.

But my overall favourite was from the black and white category: Carlos Virgili's portrait of a "football jellyfish" (Rhizostoma octopus). It would not have occurred to me to photograph a jellyfish in black and white, but this approach made me see its structure and texture in a whole new way. I could have looked at it all evening.