Swans' nest update

Last week I learned from the London Wetland Centre's Twitter that all three of the eggs in the mute swan nest by Sir Peter Scott's statue had hatched successfully. We looked everywhere for the cygnets today, but they were nowhere to be seen. So here's a picture of the remains of the nest:



As you can see, a mallard pair had moved into the territory for a nap. A lot of the birds were sleeping in the afternoon sun. I thought Chris got a rather nice shot of a couple of male mallards elsewhere in the reserve:



We were actually at the centre for a presentation by Sir Peter's better-known organisation, WWF, on their work in Borneo and Mexico. The main thing I took away from this was the need to get supermarkets to commit themselves to using sustainable palm oil. Well, that and a free cuddly polar bear.

Anyway, this meeting of WWT and WWF, and this glorious late-spring day, give me an excuse to quote from Sir Peter's autobiography. Gazing out at the nature in his garden, he wrote:

I am more than ever convinced that I am the luckiest man I know. I say this not with smugness or self-satisfaction but because I can think of nothing sadder than to live a happy life without recognising it. Maybe I am an ostrich with my head in the sand. Maybe fate or my own or other men's folly has all kinds of disasters in store for me, but they cannot take away these exciting and happy years. Not to acknowledge such good fortune would be inexcusable.

My first election, and other snoozes

It wasn't long after becoming a British citizen that I received the polling card for my first election in the UK. Unfortunately, the European parliamentary elections next Thursday don't promise to be a momentous occasion. To quote the BBC's Q & A page:

What difference will the election make to the rest of the world?

Not a huge amount.

The main significance of this election is that everyone expects voters to use it to vent their disgust over the parliamentary expenses scandal. Since MPs from all the major parties have been guilty of abuses, it seems likely that small parties and independent candidates will benefit. I find this worrying when I look at the list of candidates for London, which includes the fascist British National Party; the Socialist Labour Party, led by the Stalin-loving Arthur Scargill; and some outfit called NO2EU (call me an elitist, but I'm not sure I can trust a party whose name is written in text-speak).

Personally, I was unsure who to vote for and was contemplating the Greens until I realised I recognised the name of one of the incumbent candidates. I've corresponded with Charles Tannock before, at the time of the 2004 Ukrainian election (and yes, he did e-mail me back personally). He's taken a keen interest in human rights in the former Soviet Union and in what the EU can do to influence these neighbours. Surely the criterion by which EU politicians should be judged is their knowledge of and involvement in European issues.

Yes, this means that my first vote in Britain will be cast for ... gasp ... the Tories. I can hear my left-wing friends calling for tougher immigration restrictions now.

Rhesus? They're monkeys, aren't they?

I went to give blood yesterday and, as usual, ended up wondering whether doctors in former centuries weren't on to something when they recommended bloodletting as a cure for certain ailments. Not that it helps with any real disease, of course, but I've noticed that if I've been feeling anxious, depressed or generally worn out, donating does make me feel lighter both physically and mentally.

Giving blood also provides a cheap boost to the ego because of the staff's habit of complimenting donors on things over which they have no control -- the colour of their blood (darker is better, apparently), or the speed at which it flows. In one way it seems ridiculous even to take notice of such things, but at the tea table afterward I frequently hear people telling their friends about their high haemoglobin count or "generous veins", almost with pride of achievement.

When I first donated a few years ago, I'd recently gone through a series of hospital tests in which I had vials of my blood drawn, then listened to stern doctors telling me the various ways in which it didn't measure up. So when the nurse at the donation session beamed at me and said, "That's lovely -- your blood is very high in iron", I felt a ludicrous sense of triumph: Ha! Take that!

Oddly, one of the attendants yesterday asked me (based on my accent) whether I was Irish. A couple of other people over here have thought that, though no one's actually mistaken me for a native Brit. Ironically, I am one of the very few white Americans who claim no Irish heritage whatsoever.

No, you do not need the kiss of life

For the past six years, I've served as a designated first aider at work. During that time, I've been called upon to perform genuine first aid exactly twice: once when a colleague fell on the stairs and sprained her ankle, and once when another had an epileptic seizure.

However, I get approached several times a week about other matters. Most common are the women who ask for plasters to cover the places where their high heels have rubbed their feet raw. There's also a steady supply of people who, not realising that "first aid" can be crudely defined as "keeping someone alive until the professionals get there", ask me for advice on all kinds of medical matters: the cause of their upset stomach, the best treatment for their headache, and, once: "If I take my shirt off, can you tell me if this rash on my chest is rubella or not?"

My least favourite, though, are the malingerers I have to deal with every few months. These people (for some reason always male, and always working in the company's most soul-deadening call centre jobs) usually do have something wrong with them: a cold, a sports injury from the previous weekend, or, most recently, a speck of dust in their eye. However, they make a fuss out of all proportion to the actual problem -- sometimes actually crying out in pain -- until, following the company's policy, I have to escort them to the urgent care clinic of the local hospital. There, of course, the doctors find nothing seriously wrong and they are generally back at work after a day off or less.

I'm not sure why these people do it. Maybe they don't get ill very often and feel genuinely frightened when they do. Maybe they're desperate to get away from their work but can only persuade their bosses to let them go off sick if they seem to be near death. Maybe they just want some attention. Whatever it is, it means that I spend more time than I would like in the hospital waiting room, trying not to breathe more than necessary and re-reading the "A-Z of Childhood Tuberculosis" poster ("Zero action is not an option when it comes to defeating TB").

My certification has to be renewed every three years, which is done by taking a two-day refresher course from the Red Cross. This year, however, our Health and Safety department phoned to say they had forgotten to book me on a course before my certification ran out. This means I'm not officially qualified to do first aid between now and July, when I have to go and take the five-day beginners' course again.

Yesterday I looked up from my work to see a colleague standing piteously by my desk, cradling his left hand in his right.

"I can't move my hand", he said. "I hurt it the other day when I was playing rugby, and now it's all swollen and --"

"Sorry. My certification ran out. And it's not something a first aider can deal with anyway. You need to phone your GP."

He went away sulkily. Later in the day I saw him in our break room typing away on Facebook (with both hands). Clearly, my healing powers have not deserted me.

Revelations from the Stasi

I seem to have a case of writer's block at the moment, but I did want to draw your attention to a startling story in yesterday's New York Times. It seems the Stasi's archives have revealed that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the West German policeman who shot demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 and provided the catalyst for the left-wing student movement of 1968, was working at the time as a spy for East Germany. As the Times puts it: "It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer."

While there's no evidence that Kurras was acting on the Stasi's orders when he shot Ohnesorg, the revelation of his true allegiance has caused a crisis of conscience among Germany's former "revolutionaries" (though Chris wonders whether some of them are more dismayed to think that they'd been doing the DDR's work or that they'd failed). The naivety of the Western left during this period never ceases to amaze me.

With the Russian government attempting to rehabilitate the image of the Soviet Union and persecuting scholars who study its abuses, I imagine that the DDR's archives will be the main source of new revelations about the Eastern Bloc for a while yet.

Failure and the ladybird

By every standard I was ever taught to apply to my life, I'm a failure. I'm not famous. I'm not a genius. I've never really used my education or any of the talents I've been said to possess. I work in a middle-class cubicle job of the type I was taught to despise. I can't have children. I'm not rich. I'm not beautiful. I'm not popular (I am socially inept). I will never be a saint. When I die I will be swallowed up by the universe and forgotten.

This all sounds self-pitying. Most of the time I'm not sorry. I can accept all of the above as unemotional fact. Only occasionally does something happen that opens the old wounds -- when someone, trying to decide if I'm worthy of their attention, presses me: "But what do you do?" Or when someone more gifted and accomplished than I am complains about being a "nobody", and I think: If they're nobody, then what does that make me?

I remember the last time I felt this way. I went for a long walk and saw a ladybird on a plant in someone's garden. I put my finger on the leaf where it was and it obligingly climbed onto my hand. I watched it for a while as it calmly explored the terrain of my skin, then touched the leaf again and it returned to the plant.

Feeling the happiness and love that this small insect inspired in me, I suddenly thought that the two of us had something in common. We were both here for a short time to share in the experience of this vast, complex, terrifying and beautiful world. It occurred to me that the only thing I or anyone could hope to do was to make the most of what the world had to offer, and to try, as far as possible, to bring happiness to other creatures. Maybe it's only if I fail to do this that I can truly be called a failure.

Coots grooming

At St James's Park yesterday I saw two coots grooming each other. Each in turn stood with its head bowed until its companion pecked at the feathers on its neck, presumably removing parasites. I hadn't known that they did that.





We saw plenty of ducklings too, and Chris took some pictures:





This little group of goslings were right in between a Canada goose and a pair of Egyptian geese, so I don't know which they belonged to. They already knew how to graze on the grass.



(We also saw a gull disembowelling and eating a dead pigeon, but by then we had no more room on the camera, for which you may be grateful.)

A well-mullèd question

When I moved to the UK, I found it fairly easy to adopt the local form of English. I moved my floor numbering down by one, turned Tylenol into paracetamol, and shortened the a in pasta without even a twinge.

Two stumbling blocks, however, have remained. The first is the name for the item of furniture with drawers where people keep their clothes. I did realise early on that the American word dresser isn't used in the UK, but for some reason my brain refuses to remember the British phrase chest of drawers when I need it. This means conversations like this are commonly heard in our household:

"Have you seen my green shirt?"*

"I put it in the -- the --"

"Which drawer?"

The other oddity also emerged during a sartorial conversation. I was talking to Chris about a striped jumper when I saw a mixture of puzzlement and amusement on his face. "I never heard anyone pronounce that word that way before", he said.

I pronounce striped with two syllables -- stripèd -- and always have, and up until that moment had kind of assumed everyone did. But it seems nobody in the UK does. I had a wild hope of finding kindred spirits among Scots speakers (stripit?), but every Scottish person I have heard say the word has pronounced it with one syllable too.

Well, I thought, it must be a difference between American and British speakers. But then one day I heard an American say striped on the radio, and there it was again: just the one syllable. The same thing has happened several times since, and I've had to admit defeat. Personally, I find that strip'd sticks in my throat, so I've switched to saying stripy instead.

I guess at least some people back in Barbour County must have said stripèd, or I would have been laughed out of town for saying it myself. But was it peculiar to my little pocket of the Appalachians, or to my family, or maybe even just to me? I'd be interested to know how you pronounce the word (and where you originally come from).

* This exchange is given an added dimension by the fact that Chris has colour blindness and his green shirt is, therefore, actually his blue shirt.

It's not me! I don't even live in Chicago!

The Chicago Opera Theater is asking the public to vote (for $1 a pop) on which work it ought to perform for its 2011 season. That in itself isn't too surprising -- these days, opera companies need to find ever more novel ways to attract people's interest and raise money. What is surprising is that the opera in the lead so far is Shostakovich's Moscow, Cheryomushki, which is beating out even Mozart's crowd-pleasing Magic Flute.

As I've said before, Cheryomushki is enjoyable but hardly one of Shosty's masterpieces. And a recent production by Opera North in Britain got lukewarm reviews. But I'm still pleased that the music-lovers of Chicago are going for an unconventional choice. Of course, since you can vote as many times as you're willing to pay a dollar, we can't rule out the possibility that a small group of well-heeled Shostakovich fans are trying to do for his operetta what MTV Europe voters did for Rick Astley.

Unknown patient

(Since I don't have a scanner, if I want to write about a picture I can't find online, I have to take a photo of the book where I found it. I'll leave it to you to decide whether this is worth the trouble.)

During a break between Sebald books, I'm reading the catalogue of the exhibition about art and madness in Vienna that I saw a couple of weeks ago. The book goes into more detail about the practice of photographing asylum patients in the nude in order to study (as a psychiatrist of the time put it) the physical "stigmata" of mental illness.

The picture at left is one example. While my attempt to capture it wasn't brilliant, it hasn't suffered as much as you think: the original image is pretty ghostly. The limbs on the left side of this man's body are withered or underdeveloped, but it took me a little while to realise that. At first I couldn't tell whether his left leg was shorter than the other or he had just lifted it nervously off the floor, and I can make out almost no detail in the upper left corner of his body, which seems to melt away into the light.

What strikes me most is the expression on his face. You see the same look in all of these patient photographs: lost, bewildered, sometimes affronted by the camera but without the power to do anything about it. It makes me wonder what they said to this man to make him pose for the photo; whether they gave him a choice about taking his clothes off; whether he ever knew what his picture would be used for, or that it would be remembered long after everything else about him, even his name, had been forgotten.

Egon Schiele, in his self-portraits, and Oskar Kokoschka and Gustav Jagerspracher, in their portraits of the bohemians and socialites of the day, borrowed the imagery of diseased and twisted bodies that they found in clinical photographs. But they never copied the facial expressions. Their subjects may grimace to menace the viewer, they may widen their eyes and clutch their foreheads in overcaffeinated hysteria, but they are always ultimately in control.

Austerlitz: The last word

I finished reading Austerlitz yesterday. I'm slightly embarrassed that it took me this long to read (I started properly on Good Friday), but I don't regret it. There were times when I had to do something else when I'd rather have been reading, but it also wasn't a book that I wanted to rush through. It didn't end the way I expected (not that I knew what I expected), but Sebald brought his narrative full circle beautifully, so that it took me a while to realise what was happening.

I've written about this novel several times before (see here, here, here and here), but just wanted to say once more how much it had affected me. It's one of the few times I have finished a book knowing that the way I read everything else in future would be changed.

As it happens, the other day I got a small bonus from work, which the company likes to give in the form of shop vouchers rather than actual money. I decided to use it to get another book by Sebald, and at Nick*'s suggestion, I ordered The Rings of Saturn. It hasn't arrived yet; I feel like I should read something by another author in the meantime, but it's hard to know what.

* Who should update his blog.

Is it still slacktivism if you pay for it?

A curious leaflet arrived with my copy of the Amnesty magazine yesterday: an advert for a service called Appeals Worldwide.

For those who don't know, the heart of Amnesty's activity for nearly 50 years has been letter-writing campaigns by its members on behalf of torture victims and prisoners of conscience throughout the world. Appeals Worldwide seems to have been set up for people who care about human rights, but not enough to actually sit down and write a letter themselves. For a fee, they'll write your letters for you:

The letters are based on the "Real Lives - Worldwide Appeals", usually found towards the back of Amnesty magazine and/or on the AIUK web site. They can either be Model letters (suggested texts only which you transcribe yourself) or Prepared letters (ready to send). Addressed airmail envelopes are available as an option, but ONLY with Prepared (ready-printed) letters. We aim to send you three letters per month - subject to availability of cases.

On the front of the leaflet, "Dr Dorothy Rowe" (who she?) boasts that she gets to be "effortlessly virtuous" by having the service write letters for her and signing her name at the bottom. Inside is a large quotation from Edmund Burke (which Burke didn't really say, but never mind): "For the triumph of evil it is only necessary that good men do nothing." For the defeat of evil, presumably, it is necessary that good men pay someone else £33 a year to do something for them. There are also several glowing testimonials from former political prisoners, though I must point out that strictly speaking these are testimonials in praise of Amnesty, not of Appeals Worldwide. The order form, however, is careful to ensure that you make your cheque out to the right organisation.

This all must be legitimate, or Amnesty wouldn't include the advert with their magazine, but I can't help asking: What is going through the heads of people who use this service? What was going through the heads of the people who set up this service? Surely I can't be the only one who wonders.

(If you feel like actually making an effort to support Amnesty -- who do excellent work -- check out their Actions page here.)

... and if you have to, use soya products

Today marks the start of National Vegetarian Week*, when we veggies are enjoined to spread the word among our carnivorous friends and family. I have to say it's not an idea that particularly appeals to me. I'm not the evangelistic type. In fact, lately I doubt whether it's truly possible for one person to convert another at all -- at most, you can help to introduce them to an idea that was right for them anyway. I don't want to bore you with the reasons why I went vegetarian, because if you wanted to know you would've asked, and I don't want to imply that I think meat-eaters are bad people, because I don't.

What I can get passionate about, though, is telling people that it's possible to make delicious meals without meat. So I'll tell you all about my bizarre craving for tempeh. Lately this fermented soyabean cake is the only thing I can think of when I get really hungry.** Unfortunately, it isn't nearly as easy to buy as its cousin, tofu. The only place I've found it is the health-food store at the other end of Harrow, which sells frozen blocks imported from the U.S. for nearly £10 a kilo, and even so sometimes I find they've run out. The situation is so dire that I've been tempted by the thought of making my own -- which, as this website tells me, is a simple process requiring only a grain mill, tempeh starter (available by mail order), 42-66 hours of time and (in cool climates) an incubator.

Perhaps tempeh's unpopularity in this country has something to do with its appearance. It looks like a block of beans held together with filaments and covered with patches of black and white mould. That's because that is basically what it is. It's made by combining whole soyabeans with the spores of a harmless fungus (Rhizopus oligosporus) and leaving them to sit until they solidify.

But think of how grossed out you first were when you heard how blue cheese was made, or when your science teacher told you mushrooms were a fungus. The taste of tempeh is enough to overcome any squeamishness over its origins. It's nutty and slightly tangy, with a mealy texture that makes it a good substitute for minced meat. It comes from Indonesia, where it's often served with a sauce made from chillies, lemon juice and galangal, or spiced and fried in crisp pieces as a snack; it also works well when vegetarianising recipes that call for strong-tasting meat or fish, like pork or tuna. Vegan With a Vengeance has a recipe for tempeh "bacon" that calls for marinating thin slices of it and then frying them like rashers. I haven't tried this, partly because I haven't had much luck getting large pieces of it to hold together. It always breaks up into smaller chunks, but as Chris's mum always says, "It's only going to get more broken where it's going."

Fortunately, there was enough in the store last time I went for Chris to cook some later this week (in a recipe from Wok Every Day that originally called for tuna, cooked with new potatoes), so I can hold off buying that incubator for a while.

* This site apparently got hacked or something earlier today, but it seems to be OK now.
** And no, I'm not pregnant.

That's longer than a presidency

Today Chris and I have been married for nine years. My unmarried friends tell me that's a very long time, but I have to say it doesn't seem so long to me.

Chris would never forgive me if I got too soppy here, so I'll just mention that this week he made his regular historic-chart review on uk.music.charts about the top 40 from the week of our wedding. Which was very sweet of him, but ... oh my, I don't think we'll be listening to those songs to bring back memories any time soon. As a sort of antidote, I've compiled a last.fm playlist of songs from our actual wedding. It turns out last.fm's playlists don't actually work all that well, but with the PRS still blocking music videos on the British version of YouTube, this was the best I could do.

It would actually be more accurate to call the list "songs that were played at our wedding, or that I think might have been, or that seem like they should have been". In common with many wives I've talked to, I find that much of the day itself is now a blur. Sort of makes you wonder why people fuss so much over the preparations. But never mind. I remember him.

Stick a Pitchfork in it

You may recall that a few weeks ago, The Times claimed a major scoop with its story "Prisoner in arts programme did something nasty before going to prison". Yesterday's paper had a follow-up:

A notorious child sex murderer has had his minimum jail sentence cut by two years ...

Goodness! So, as The Times predicted, has the Royal Festival Hall's fondness for paper dolls allowed the release of a cold-blooded killer?

Erm, not quite:

... after using his time behind bars to become one of the world’s few translators of music into Braille.

... [The Court Appeal judges] said: “He has sought to address the reasons behind the commission of these offences. He has achieved a high standard of education, to degree level. In 20 years in custody he has never been placed on report.

They added: “He has made himself a specialist in the transcription of printed music into Braille, thus using the opportunities he has taken to educate himself in prison to the benefit of others. This is an intensely specialised skill and his work is used throughout this country and internationally with the support of the RNIB.”

Funny, The Times forgot to mention that when they were trying to stir up a furore over the Festival Hall sculpture. They do make a final attempt to portray their muckraking as crusading public-interest journalism:

Colin Pitchfork provoked outrage when The Times disclosed he was the anonymous prisoner behind a paper sculpture of an orchestra bought and displayed by the Royal Festival Hall.

But the fact that this latest story is a single thin column buried deep in the paper edition suggests that they know they've lost. Even Libby Purves seems to have found something better to do.

David Byrne in London

I stupidly dithered over whether it was worth paying at least £35 a ticket to see David Byrne at the Royal Festival Hall last month until his shows had both sold out. (I think being a classical music fan may have spoiled me: we paid less than a third of that to see Murray Perahia last year, though admittedly Perahia didn't do "Once in a Lifetime".) But I'll still get a chance to see some of Byrne's work in London this summer when his installation Playing the Building comes to the Roundhouse. As Byrne's website explains:

Playing the Building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

Meanwhile, the current instalment of 6 Music's Music Week features a typically nervous-sounding Byrne being interviewed about his musical "firsts" (you'll have to skip through some rubbish about Amy Winehouse to get to it). The interview takes a remarkably lame format, with the presenter going doggedly through his set list of questions ("What was the first record you heard? ... First time you played live? ..." etc.) and not exploring any side avenues opened up by Byrne's answers.

Nonetheless, I learned a couple of interesting things about "Psycho Killer", Talking Heads' first chart single. Byrne said he considered it to be the first song he had ever successfully written, with his previous efforts not being good enough to consider (I'd just assumed he would have been at it for some time before reaching the charts). And secondly, he said he had written it purely as an exercise, to prove that he could write a song, and that it hadn't come from the heart the way his subsequent work had. Because of the persona he tends to project, I'd always thought of the song as a sincere reflection of his feelings of alienation. However, if it was written as an exercise then that helps explain why the original acoustic version with cello (which appeared on the B-side of the single) is so different from the final version.

Elsewhere in the interview, I thought Byrne made a good point when he said that Brian Eno "warmed up" electronic music, which too often sounds cold and soulless.

This is what happens when you don't have a television

A few years ago an octogenarian priest told me he knew why young people today were so promiscuous. I have to confess I was braced for the usual rant about contraception, rock music and models showing too much leg on magazine covers. But what he said surprised me and made me think. He said that the human heart is capable of many kinds of love, but that our culture had become emotionally impoverished so that we had trouble thinking of any kind of love besides sexual love. "So when two people are fond of each other", he concluded, "they assume there's nothing to do except jump into bed."

I thought of the old priest's words again recently when Chris told me he had seen an album on 7digital called Dare to Love: Songs of Unconditional Love for Couples. The idea behind this contemporary-Christian compilation seems to be to provide couples with love songs that will not inflame unholy passions.

I can tell you right now that this is not going to work. First of all, young people in love are more easily inflamed than most, and secondly, one must bear in mind Tom Lehrer's words: "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd." Remembering Fr Peter's remarks, I suggested that if Christians wanted to fight the tide of filth in popular music, it might be more interesting and constructive for them to compile an album of songs celebrating types of love other than romantic love.

In our household, a comment like that is a cue to start compiling a tracklist. We decided early on to limit our choices to songs about love between humans. Including songs about God's love for man or vice versa would take us too far afield in terms of genre. We also excluded songs about love between parents and children because of the sheer amount of treacle that would introduce. Chris felt we should eliminate vague paeans to "love" in general: that meant leaving out "All You Need Is Love", which I didn't particularly care about, but also the Housemartins' "Caravan of Love", which I was very sorry to let go of.

Maybe we were tired from all that quibbling over the rules, but in the end the list we came up with was disappointingly short:

• "Jonathan David" by Belle & Sebastian
  
• "Do You Remember Walter?" by the Kinks (maybe a bit bittersweet, but still)
  
• "Well It's True That We Love One Another" by the White Stripes
  
• "The Only Living Boy in New York" by Simon & Garfunkel (I was rather pleased with myself for coming up with this, but Chris had his doubts)
  
• "You Are Still My Brother" by Spearmint
  
• "Caravan of Love" by the Housemartins (this is my blog)
  
• "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers
  

(No, I did not forget "You've Got a Friend". I hate that song. No matter who's singing it, I can't hear it without thinking of that dreadful nasal voice. It sends shivers up my spine.)

I know there must be loads more that my brain is stupidly refusing to remember, so if you can help me out please do so in the comments.

I've got three passports, a couple of visas ...

... well, two passports and no visa, actually.

It seems my interview Friday was satisfactory, because my brand new UK/EU passport was waiting for me when I got home yesterday. The pages for visa stamps are printed with British birds -- raptors on the left-hand pages and waders on the right. How cute is that?

It happens that my taking UK citizenship has coincided with an odd incident at work. About six years ago, my employer -- a wholly British company -- was taken over by a big American multinational, which has gradually assimilated the business into its corporate culture. Recently the head office back in the U.S. decided that all American citizens working for the company -- regardless of whether they were working in America or abroad, and regardless of whether they were bound by an American employment contract -- would have to sign an agreement stating that they would settle any disputes with the company through independent arbitration rather than taking them to court.

When I got the e-mail telling me I would have to sign, I replied and said that I was now a British citizen and would rely on my legal right to refer any disputes to the UK's Employment Tribunal Service. In return I got a message from the head counsel's office saying that the agreement still applied to me if I could be considered a U.S. citizen as well as the citizen of another country.

Which, technically, I can. Losing American citizenship is a bit like committing a mortal sin in post-Vatican II theology: You really have to work at it. The U.S. considers taking citizenship in another country to be a "potentially expatriating act", along with things like serving in a foreign military or another country's government. However, if a consular official learns that an American has committed such an act, the procedure is for them to ask, "Did you intend to renounce your U.S. citizenship when you did that?" If you say "no", they take your word for it. If you say "yes", they make you complete a "questionnaire" (the State Department's website doesn't elaborate on this, but I imagine it as containing questions like, "Are you sure?" and "You know Bush isn't president any more, right?"). Even then, they can refuse to revoke your citizenship if they think that you somehow don't understand the full implications of what you're doing. If you're really determined, you can go to your nearest consulate and ask to sign a formal statement of renunciation, but there too they may find some reason to argue that you don't really mean it.

Anyway, it didn't seem worth it to do all of that just to stop being hassled by my employer, so I asked my local HR representative for advice. After a few days of checking it out with various experts (which she told me was one of the more unusual things she's had to do lately), she came back with an answer: My contract was regulated by British law, not American law, and the agreement was not legally enforceable in the UK. I should ignore the request to sign it.

I thought that was that, but now I've started getting nasty automated e-mails again, warning of dire consequences if I don't sign the agreement by 1 July. I know head office likes to think of itself as more powerful than any force in the world except Warren Buffet, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have the power to subvert the laws of a foreign country. It may be time to call in higher authorities to explain this to them ....

Celebration of the Cock Festival in the Ricefields near Asakusa

Hiroshige, Celebration of the Cock Festival in the Ricefields near Asakusa:



I see this Hiroshige print every day -- it's on the cover of a notebook someone gave me a few years ago -- but it was only yesterday that I really noticed the stenciled birds under the windowsill. They're flying downwards from the blue wall toward the green floor, an amusing counterpoint to the flock ascending from the fields outside.

This picture seems to be most commonly known as Cat Looking at Fields at Asakusa, but the title I've used for this post is, I believe, Hiroshige's original name. The festivallers are those tiny stick figures off in the dusky blue fields. The print belongs to Hiroshige's famous series 100 Views of Edo -- that's Mount Fuji in the background. In my opinion, knowing the original title adds to the humour of the picture: the great festival, the sacred mountain are all made subordinate to the cat surveying his domain. He reminds me of the hero of Soseki Natsume's I Am a Cat, watching the humans around him with a mixture of amusement and contempt.

O res mirabilis

At Mass yesterday evening, three boys under Communion age sat behind me.

Boy #1: "You know what, that bread must taste like God."
Boy #2: "No, it doesn't."
#1: "Uh huh! It's Jesus's body, so it must taste like God."
#3: "My sister said it tastes like nothing."
#2: "My dad says that when we take Holy Communion we'll get to drink the wine."
#1: "My dad's taking us to WWE Live. He got the tickets yesterday."

Potto news

Yesterday I had to go to Elephant & Castle -- an area of London that, sadly, does not fulfil the promise of its name -- for my passport interview. Afterward, to cheer ourselves up*, we decided to pay a visit to the pottos at London Zoo. As we descended into the nocturnal section, I remembered the opening pages of Austerlitz, where the nameless narrator goes to the "Nocturama" in Antwerp Zoo:

It was some time before my eyes became used to its artificial dusk, and I could make out the different animals living their sombrous lives behind the glass by the light of a pale moon. I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting back and forth over the greyish-yellow sandy ground, or disappearing into a bamboo thicket. The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.

(This is one of only two passages I have read so far where the narrator discusses his own experiences at any length; in the second, he describes suffering from an eye condition that causes a gradual dimming of his vision.)

My pottos (as I think of them) have those huge and inquiring eyes, but, thank heaven, they don't appear sad and lost like Sebald's raccoon. There always seem to be at least two of them together, clambering along the branches side by side, twining together for mutual grooming, or just sitting next to one another. Social grooming is so important to them that parts of their bodies have evolved for it: elongated grooming claws on the second toes of their hind feet, and a row of teeth (known to zoologists as the toothcomb) adapted for raking through fur.

In the 1950s and 1960s Ursula Cowgill, a biologist at Yale, looked after a group of pottos that had been brought to her from West Africa and published some of the first observations of their behaviour. When a potto fell ill, she found that the others would spend time sitting beside it. Later, one potto was removed for veterinary treatment and died. The surviving animals kept a portion of food aside for their absent companion for some time after that, even though the total amount of food they got was less than before.

After seeing the pottos, we went outside and watched one of the baby meerkats as it rushed chattering first to one parent and then another, watching them dig and then scraping at the sand with its tiny paws. Later on we saw two young black and white colobus monkeys wrestling with each other and taking it in turns to swing from the tasseled tail of one of the adults, who seemed resigned to the situation.

* Not that the interview itself went badly. I think they were satisfied that I wasn't trying to steal my own identity.

Stover family update

Last week, I mentioned that my friend Russell and his family were trying to raise money to help pay for his brother's lung transplant (this in the richest country in the world). I just wanted to let people know that they've now set up a site to take online donations, here.

Best of all, Elvis Costello didn't turn up

We somehow ended up with front-row seats for the Brodsky Quartet's concert last night at Cadogan Hall. I could hear the first violinist, Daniel Rowland -- the one who reminded me of a more erect Thom Yorke -- gasping as he played. He was directly in my line of vision too, so I could watch as he grimaced and twisted his face, mouthed words I couldn't identify, and shot looks -- perhaps conspiratorial, perhaps pleading -- at his fellow musicians, who staidly went on with their fiddling. Whilst playing he constantly swayed from side to side or rose up on the tips of his toes (I could hear his soles hitting the stage again), and once he seemed to try to duck under his music stand. When his instrument wasn't required, he paced in a little circle, or drew his violin close to his body and caressed it. I liked him straightaway.

... Oh yeah, the music. I must admit I was so absorbed in watching Rowland that part of the first piece -- Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C minor -- slipped by without my noticing. But once I'd got myself to pay attention, it was clear that the quartet brought a real intensity to a composer whose works are too often used as pretty background music.

Next was Mendelssohn's lovely little Fugue in E Flat, composed while he was a student. Then, without a break for applause, the quartet went straight into Beethoven's String Quartet no. 16 in F major.

Now, I must confess to having once been extremely unfair to Beethoven. He is the classical composer people have heard of if they've only heard of one. He's the one whose works -- or single movements from them, more likely -- unfailingly appear on compilation CDs or telephone hold music, the quintessential choice of people who don't really care about classical music but just want to look "cultured". And all that caused me to turn up my nose at him for a long time.

Thanks to this snobbishness, I had somehow never before heard this stunning quartet, which conveys wrenching emotional turmoil followed by genuine redemption. At one point Chris shifted uncomfortably in his seat and I realised that I'd been pressing my cheek against his shoulder, leaning forward in total absorption.

(And George, if you're reading, another astonishing thing occurred during this piece: People in the audience coughed whenever they needed to. There was no outburst of hacking between movements. I'd never heard anything like it in all my years of concert-going in London.)

After the interval came the two pieces that had sold the concert to me, and also the only two on the programme I knew well: Shostakovich's Elegy and Polka for string quartet. I was most familiar with the Emerson Quartet's recording of these. It probably isn't completely effective to compare a recording with a live performance, but I felt that the Emersons' version of the Elegy brought out sweeter tones in the piece than the Brodskys'; the Brodsky Quartet actually played at a slower tempo, but somehow made the piece sound stormier. It was during the Elegy that I stopped seeing Rowland's movements and facial expressions as an oddity superimposed onto the music; knowing the piece so well myself, I understood exactly the feelings he was expressing. After the concert, violist Paul Cassidy told the audience how the quartet had played this piece for Shostakovich's widow, Irina.

Where the Emerson Quartet had played the Polka with a light touch, the Brodskys emphasised the lumbering quality of its humour, making it sound like a clown with large shoes. I think I slightly prefer the Emersons' version.

The final piece on the programme was Borodin's String Quartet no. 2 in D major, a warm and joyous composition written as a love letter to his wife in the 20th year of their marriage. The quartet were called back for an encore, which to my delight turned out to be more Shostakovich: two of his piano preludes (nos. 15 and 17) transcribed for strings by Cassidy.

All in all, an extremely enjoyable concert; I'm thinking of going to see them again when they next play the Hall in July.

The media and the flu

In a way, I owe my existence to the Spanish flu of 1918-20. My great-grandfather (an immigrant from Poland) and my great-grandmother (from a village that was then in Ukraine, but is now also in Poland) met in hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, after both had lost their first spouses to the epidemic. Either they were a comfort to each other or they were keen to establish a new household for their respective small children, because they married soon after and produced my paternal grandmother in 1921.

Ever since I can remember, people have been watching out for the next big flu pandemic. It doesn't look like swine flu is going to be it, but the reaction to it makes me wonder how we will handle the pandemic when it does come. Although we have the furthest-reaching, fastest and most sophisticated media and communications systems in history, they seem to have been used not to spread information about the disease, but to stir up blind panic. So ineffective has communication been, in fact, that the British government has resorted to the rather old-fashioned method of sending a paper leaflet to every household in the country. (Although Chris points out that they may have done this in the hope that the electronic media would cover it and, in the process, report on the content of the leaflets.)

My employer's intranet recently published an article about swine flu and allowed employees to leave comments. I was surprised at the number of commenters -- educated professionals in America and Europe -- who hadn't known you couldn't get the flu from eating pork. (There was also the aviation engineer who thought the virus had been deliberately manufactured by the CDC, but let's not talk about that.) Meanwhile, I still see plenty of people coughing and sneezing in public without covering their mouths.

Maybe it's an ironic side effect of living in the healthiest age in history, protected by vaccines and antibiotics, that we no longer know how to cope with diseases that don't respond to such methods. Back in the days when epidemics and quarantines were commonplace, I imagine the public were in some ways better prepared to respond to a flu outbreak.

Woodlice

Several weeks ago, while putting my toast crusts out the window for the birds, I saw a wet-looking patch on the outer windowsill. On closer inspection this proved to be writhing with dozens of little gelatinous worm-like creatures. They were well outside the house, so I left them alone to see what they would grow into.

It turns out they're woodlice -- also known as pillbugs, sowbugs, roly-polies, or any of dozens of other names, depending on where you grew up. They look like tiny versions of the adults now, though there is also a full-grown one that seems to be around a lot -- do the parents take care of their young? I don't know. They seem to be living quite peacefully there, as the starlings and crows that come to eat the bread appear not to be interested in them. They never go more than a few inches away from the window, and they never try to come inside when it's open. I always wonder how creatures like that know where their home is.

These little crustaceans have been around for 50 million years or so. They don't hurt people or buildings, though they occasionally come into houses if conditions are right. When we lived in our horrible old mildewed flat we had them living around the kitchen sink, which was slightly disconcerting but not dangerous. Fortunately, our current building doesn't seem to be as attractive to invertebrates, probably because it isn't rotting at the seams. One thing I like about living in Britain is the relative lack of obnoxious insects and other creatures that invade people's homes. I can remember years during my childhood in America when we couldn't leave any food uncovered because it would shortly be swarming with ants.

I don't mind woodlice, though, and some people go further, even keeping them as pets. There's a charming web site maintained by one enthusiast here.

Art and mental illness

The Wellcome Collection -- London's free museum of medicine, which deserves to be better known -- currently has two small exhibitions devoted to the intersection of mental illness and art. Madness and Modernity focuses on the scene in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. This exhibition begins with a model and video installation of Vienna's Narrenturm (Tower of Fools), built in 1784, where inmates (one can hardly call them patients) were chained to the walls and slept on straw. As modern ideas of psychiatry were developed, such institutions were replaced with comparatively more humane hospitals such as the Lower Austrian Provincial Institution at Steinhof. These not only served as asylums for the mad (who continued to be feared and ostracised by society), but also provided sanatorium treatment for people suffering from fashionable nervous afflictions such as neurasthenia and hypochondria. They were designed and furnished by the leading artists and architects of the day -- the stark Art Deco furnishings of the Purkersdorf Sanatorium looked cold and comfortless to me, but must have been reassuring in their popularity at the time.

Of course anyone who thinks of psychiatry in early 20th-century Vienna thinks of Freud, but his theories had not yet become dominant at the time covered by the exhibition. Most scientists still believed that the source of mental illness could be found in bodily abnormalities. Physical deformities were painstakingly recorded in the belief that they lay along the same spectrum as mental disturbances. The exhibition included wax models of the heads of two brothers with microcephaly, and a selection of Jean-Martin Charcot's photographs of patients with gigantism and macrodactyly. These were displayed alongside portraits by Egon Schiele (whose works were shown mainly in reproduction, for some reason) and Oskar Kokoschka to show how portrayals of twisted and misshapen bodies had influenced the work of the Expressionists. (I had seen Schiele's work many times before, but had never found anything to think about him except that nobody else depicted pubic hair in quite the way he did. I suppose at least now I'll have something more intelligent to say if he comes up in conversation.)

But it was the final room I found most interesting. This displayed art by two patients in the Viennese institutions. As the curators cuttingly remarked:

Other artists in this exhibition, despite their eagerness to present themselves as outsiders, enjoyed a critical and commercial market for their work. These two artists were genuinely isolated within the self-contained world of the institution.

One piece was a large newspaper collage assembled by a woman known as "Frau St." who was diagnosed with "dementia praecox" (the old term for schizophrenia); nothing else is known about her, not even her full name. I spent a long time looking at the tiny expressive faces she had drawn in the blank spaces of one section, and the quilt-like floral patterns in another.

The rest of the room was given over to watercolours by Josef Karl Rädler, a porcelain painter who spent the last quarter-century of his life in institutions. There he painted over 400 portraits of himself and his fellow patients, usually accompanied by long inscriptions:

“Mauer-Öhling lump of earth - world - university!... Poor - Mentally stunted - Half- or Wholly Imbecilic people are what I see here. But all in all good sorts, they stand around me as I paint... I myself see this home as a church - these poor souls as living saints!!!... JK Rädler senior, court painter to six states, to many farmsteads, now painter of fools! Price 300 crowns - true art and useful art should, must, be worth it!”

The reverse side of each picture was painted as well. Sometimes these consisted of blocks of text that reminded me of illuminated manuscripts or Arabic inscriptions. (According to the exhibition's catalogue, the writings are "sometimes legible, sometimes not. Often they take the form of a description, poem, essay, stream of consciousness, or extended wordplay.") Other times the reverse showed scenes of the hospital gardens, filled with the birds that occur everywhere in Rädler's work. After Rädler's death in 1917, his paintings were forgotten until the 1960s, when they were discovered on the hospital's rubbish heap. Today they provide us with one of the few instances of the mentally ill of this period speaking for themselves.

The second exhibition, which I found much less interesting, was Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings. Baker, a female performance artist, suffered a mental breakdown in 1997; her symptoms continued for 11 years, exacerbated by various personal calamities. During this time she made daily cartoon-like drawings showing her state of mind. Some of the early drawings, with their exaggerated images of self-harm, were genuinely painful to look at. But I felt that the pictures soon took on a stagey, premeditated quality, as if Baker had decided to make her illness into yet another performance piece. That may have been useful to her recovery, but I personally found it off-putting, and the self-serving artist's commentary didn't help.

Little boxes

Yesterday Radio 4's Archive on 4 programme was devoted to Pete Seeger on the eve of his 90th birthday. It was an interesting show, though I was disappointed that they apparently didn't mention Seeger threatening to cut Bob Dylan's electric guitar cable with an axe at the Newport Folk Festival (unless I was out of the room at the time).

There's no denying Seeger's musical importance, but I find his political history rather puzzling, combining great bravery in the face of Joe McCarthy's thugs with great naivety about Stalin and the Soviet Union. At least he did later have the grace to admit that he was mistaken about the second point.

Another, possibly related, type of simplistic thinking was illustrated late in the programme when the presenter played Seeger's live recording of Malvina Reynolds' song "Little Boxes". There aren't many songs that bother me more than this one.* It seems to be the archetype of every pop song mocking the bourgeois, conformist values of the suburbs. (My favourite example is probably the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday", which makes fun of mainstream middle-class folks just like ... well ... everyone who ever bought the Monkees' records or watched their TV show. But "Pleasant Valley Sunday", unlike "Little Boxes", redeems itself somewhat by being musically quite good.)

It's certainly possible to write good songs that are critical of suburban life. XTC's "Respectable Street", for example, works by drawing a witty contrast between the residents' concern with appearances and their behaviour when no one is watching. The Kinks' "Well Respected Man" is a fairly nuanced portrait of a specific character "doing the best things so conservatively", and is also balanced in Ray Davies' oeuvre by more sympathetic portrayals of middle-class English life. But all too often, these songs say nothing beyond, "Look at these little conformist robots! Aren't you glad we're not like that?" And as the audience's laughter on "Little Boxes" suggests, a certain type of listener eats this up.

I wonder if those who write and perform these songs realise just how conformist and clichéd they are themselves. It takes a lot more vision and talent to write about middle-class suburbanites as if they were complex, valuable human beings like everyone else.

By coincidence, a couple of weeks ago I was reading an article in Harper's about John Cheever (not available online, unfortunately) that discussed how frequently his stories of suburban America have been misinterpreted. The problem is that when people read a story set in suburbia, they assume the author's intent is to mock the characters and their values. But Cheever's point is often more subtle than that: His stories are not intended to make fun of conformity but to express the agony of not being able to fit in. I don't think I've read any of Cheever's work except "The Enormous Radio", so I can't say whether this is right, but I thought it was a point worth considering.

* When doing some research for this post I was pleased to find that Tom Lehrer agrees with me, calling it "the most sanctimonious song ever written".

Waterfowl at Kew Gardens

Today the lake at Kew was filled with baby coots. Every time a parent dived for food, the chicks gathered excitedly around the ripples, beeping away in the hope of being the one to be fed. As usual with this species, though, the parents generally shared the morsels with one particular chick:



The fate of the others may be less kind. When there isn't enough food to go around, it's common for coots to starve or even drown one or more of their offspring.

The adult coots seemed to be in a particularly nasty mood, chasing away any other birds that got too close to their territory. Three female teal (I think -- possibly not European ones) were evicted from the water this way; afterward, they strolled on the grass in a murmuring group, pausing occasionally to preen themselves.









Nearby was another of the Gardens' exotic ornamental birds, a shy male American wood duck.



A pair of Canada geese were happily bathing, plunging their necks under the surface and letting the water cascade down their backs, then honking loudly with satisfaction.



Although they didn't get close enough for me to photograph, a family of little yellowy greylag goslings were watching their parents do the same thing; after a few minutes one or two of them began to try it for themselves.

Later on I saw a bird I remembered from previous visits, the male Egyptian goose with one foot. He was grazing intently, using his stump as effectively as the web on his other leg, and his mate was by his side as usual.





The Gardens were very busy on this bank holiday weekend. We had to queue for a long time to get in, with the small boy in front of us squalling in my ear while his siblings begged their parents to open their picnic basket. But Kew Gardens is so vast that the crowds soon dissipate. We headed for the wooded area around Queen Charlotte's cottage, where relatively few tourists and kids venture, and spent a long time walking through seas of bluebells, forget-me-nots, buttercups, red campion and wild garlic.

If that's true, I'm a Chinaman

I'm not sure why I keep writing about minor details in Austerlitz instead of the greater themes of the book. A combination of laziness and timidity, I guess.

Anyway, yesterday while reading Austerlitz's account of his trip to Marienbad in 1972, I was struck by this sentence (which in no way contains the point of the passage): "Once we went to a concert at the Gogol Theatre, where a Russian pianist called Bloch played the Papillons and Kinderszenen to an audience of half a dozen."

My first thought was that "Bloch" might be a stand-in for my old friend Sviatoslav Richter, but I have the impression that Sebald doesn't normally disguise famous figures. So after some intensive research (read: a couple of minutes of Googling), I decided he was probably referring to Boris Bloch. 1972 would have been pretty early in Bloch's career, and he's actually Ukrainian -- but then, so was Richter, by some definitions anyway. He has a multilingual official site here, but it's a design nightmare. He seems to be better known in Germany than in the English-speaking world (as evidenced by the fact that he has a German Wikipedia article but not an English one), but is apparently good enough to have been ripped off by Joyce Hatto.

Thinking about Russian/Ukrainian pianists with German names reminded me of Richter's account of his first meeting with Herbert von Karajan. "Ich bin Deutscher", he said to him, to which Karajan replied, "Also, ich bin Chineser". What a delightful man.