A few years after the Second World War, Miss Jane Marple went to stay at Bertram’s Hotel in London. Settling into a leather armchair, she enjoyed a perfect afternoon tea. The crumpets were crisp and brown without, soft and chewy within, as crumpets so rarely manage to be. The scones foamed in the mouth, while avoiding any bitter aftertaste of soda. Bishops and country squires, up in town on business, exchanged murmured comment among the quiet rustle of newspapers. The chief waiter knew everyone, and how they liked their tea. Cocooned from cataclysmic events, nothing had changed here. Surely anything real would change? There was something exaggerated, ossified. Miss Marple smelt a rat.
In Agatha Christie’s novel At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), what had been a comfortable staging post for the shabby genteel before the War is transformed after the War into a stage act. Most of its aging, fixed-income clientele are unaware that there are other rooms and other people, backstage, who are using the hotel as a cover. Behind the scenes, in the areas where the guests don’t go, the struggle for money rattles on, intense, unbounded, unexamined….
Carcassonne, board game by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede (2000)
Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs (1984)
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver (1974)
My grandfather rarely made requests. He avoided dirtying his shoes, his tweed trousers were immaculately pressed by his wife without him having to ask, and he read the newspaper every day. But it was at his request that we had wound round and round French hillsides, with their attendant car sickness, and now sat, cooped up in the old Ford Cortina, on a bend in a road, listening to the creak of the windscreen wipers and staring out at a world of rain. Down there, distant, and intermittent between the slashing of the wipers, materialised out of the mist slate-grey conical roofs, the party hats of towers. My mother and grandfather got out into the rain so as to swap places, so that he could sit in front and get a better view, such as it was, while Granny squawked ‘George! Your raincoat!’
Sitting for a change in the front seat, amidst the fumes of petrol and sick, my grandfather gazed down at the gear stick and began to recite poetry in a husky sigh. I don’t know what the verses were. I only know they ended, ‘Carcassonne!’
Grandpa might have been reciting Mary Sherwood’s translation of Gustave Nadaud’s poem about a hardworking peasant farmer who wished to see those towers before he died:
“How old I am! I’m eighty years! I’ve worked both hard and long;
Yet patient as my life has been, One dearest sight I have not seen,
— It almost seems a wrong.
A dream I had when life was new; Alas, our dreams! they come not true;
I thought to see fair Carcassonne,– That lovely city,–Carcassonne!
“One sees it dimly from the height Beyond the mountains blue,
Fain would I walk five weary leagues,– I do not mind the road’s fatigues,
— Through morn and evening’s dew;
But bitter frost would fall at night; And on the grapes,–that yellow blight!
I could not go to Carcassonne, I never went to Carcassonne.
In 1972, eight years earlier than our family holiday, Italo Calvino published his Invisible Cities. Among his bejewelled collection is the city of Irene:
Travelers on the plateau, shepherds shifting their flocks, bird-catchers watching their nets, hermits gathering greens: all look down and speak of Irene. At times the wind brings a music of bass drums and trumpets, the bang of firecrackers in the light-display of festival…. Those who look down from the heights conjecture about what is happening in the city; they wonder if it would be pleasant or unpleasant to be in Irene that evening. Not that they have any intention of going there (in any case the roads winding down to the valley are bad)…. It is of slight importance: if you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes….
Irene, by Johanathan Pellitteri, 2015, concrete, tar paper, aluminium
Calvino’s cities materialise out of aspects of the human mind: desire, memory, exchange and language. His cities are magnetic, fascinating, entrapping. This strikes me as a continental sensibility. In so much of our history here in England, the inhabitants of London and other cities seem to have been holding their noses and their breath, enduring till they could get enough money together to be catapulted back out into the land, plant gold into roses and potatoes, cosy cottages and country seats.
But then an ambitious farmer or country gent, ogling the neighbours, gets to dreaming of gold, and is sucked back into the vortex of the city. Another poem about Carcassonne seems to see urban battlements rising up from roots in rural hard work, rivalry and ambition. Perhaps it was this poem that Grandpa recited in the Ford Cortina with the rain drumming:
My Towers
Across the fields, at dawn
Roy Perkins’ silos shine
Like gleaming towers of Carcassonne.
A ray of morning sun
strikes up across the new ploughed ground
And turns my towers to gold.
Oh shining towers of Carcassonne!
(J Raleigh Nelson from ‘Sketches from Sunny Pastures’)
It is the money-making aspect of cities that plays out in Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s boardgame Carcassonne (2000). In fact, so powerful are cities at making money in this game that a farmer has only to lie down in his field beside one and he wins his player points! (The dream of every farmer in the Green Belt, if only their land could be awarded planning permission…..)
I’ve been enjoying the Christmas gift of Carcassonne. It works as a game for two or more, so I can play it with my 9 year old. It has that pleasing combination of a little strategy, a little luck and visual patterns, as you gradually build up a generic map of mediaeval Europe, with fortified towns, monasteries, roads, bridges and the odd vegetable garden. You can make money in the countryside if you are a highwayman, or an abbot, but, contrary to what the poetry of the time might have suggested, knights and farmers only really make money when they’re involved in completing a city.
I feel that the inventor of this game must have read Jane Jacobs’ Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Polymath and campaigner for urban neighbourhoods in New York and Toronto, Jacobs wrote this convincing and still under-used guide to economic health in 1984, just twelve years after Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Jacobs similarly takes the breath away with her gung-ho approach to urbanisation. According to Cities and the Wealth of Nations, pretty much all economic life is created by one city sparking life into another. The countryside is abject poverty and dearth of imagination. If they had imagination there, they would be a city. Agriculture is healthy and diverse when it is near a city. She cites urban conurbations as far-flung as Tokyo and Toronto to support her thesis.
The whole of Western Europe’s economic development in the previous millennium is down to the fact, says Jacob, that a few enterprising salt peddlers in the marshes of the Veneto began trading with Constantinople, just in time, before the economic fire in that ex-imperial city had finally burnt itself out. Those marginalised people, pushed off the good agricultural land, created Venice, and Venice created Europe.
For Jacobs, Armageddon is the gradual dying off of cities, which she pictures like lights going out one by one:
Suppose, hypothetically, that the world were to behave like a single sluggish empire in decline. Such a thing could happen, if cities in too many places stagnated simultaneously or in quick succession… If global city stagnation ever does occur, it will inexorably cause economic life everywhere to stagnate and deteriorate, and there will be no way out: no existing vigorous cities to intervene, no young cities arising while they still have opportunity to do so. If that were to happen, we may be sure that as the practice of developing city economies vanished, the memory of how the thing is done would vanish too, and after that, belief that it could be done by perfectly ordinary people would no longer be credited… Indeed, it is not credited in much of the world even today. Isolated hamlets, bypassed countries like Ethiopia, would become the norm. Everywhere, all would become morosos, those without hope. We all have our nightmares about the future of economic life; that one is mine. (P.134)
Jacobs points out that Ethiopia BC and Europe in the early centuries AD had prosperous cities, but later lost the markets and forgot the skills. It can happen. (Author Philip Reeves solves this problem in his futuristic trilogy Mortal Engines by putting cities onto wheels. They then set about hunting each other….)
How do we know if a city is healthy or declining? Jacobs says it’s all down to ‘import replacement’. In fact import replacement is such a key driver for her I’m wondering why it isn’t in the A-level Economics syllabus. Economists, she would argue, have become all about measuring activity but not about discerning its origins.
Healthy, growing cities find ways to replace what they are importing. They make goods for themselves that previously they imported, leading to new and different imports and the ability to export goods on to other cities, who, if healthy, will then start the same process. In the course of manufacturing goods that were previously imported, cities develop myriad small businesses and myriad skills, which then combine and re-combine to make other products, hitherto unknown.
If cities do not manage to replace their imports, they are doomed. Perhaps in this context we can contrast Liverpool and Glasgow with Birmingham and Manchester. The former acted as gateways for commodities but did not add value and have since declined catastrophically from their nineteenth century glory while Birmingham and Manchester show more flexibility and inter-relate with larger hinterlands.
To aid ailing cities with hand-outs, such as the centrally funded micro finance included in the current government’s Levelling Up agenda, is, says Jacobs, to engage in ‘transactions of decline’. These transactions may be necessary politically, to hold countries together, but they do not turn around a regional economy. She draws on copious evidence at city, region and nation levels to show that aid does not work as an economic tool – which is not in any way to disparage its other aims, of relieving suffering or keeping the peace.
Either you make your own fortune or you don’t have a fortune. That is how it is. (Or is this the old Protestant work ethic talking?)
But certain circumstances make it easier for cities to flourish. One key factor is self determination. If cities can govern themselves, set their own taxes, strike their own currencies, put up and take down their own protective customs barriers, then they can respond more flexibly to the economic circumstances around them. Examples of this sort of success are Singapore today, HongKong in recent times, Trieste and Rijeka, when they were free cities of the Austro-Hapsburg Empire and, Italian city states in the Renaissance, the Hanseatic League in the Middle Ages, and so on.
The central tenet of the book is that nation states are not economies. Cities are economies. States therefore usually contain several economies but, within a nation state, most cities begin to die off in favour of just one. This is partly because the country’s exchange rate comes increasingly to reflect the trade of the most powerful city. Looking at the UK, our interest rates remain a little high in order to keep the pound strong which benefits the City of London but not manufacturing.
Jacobs’ title, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, is of course a deliberate reference to Adam Smith of Edinburgh’s influential work on how trade can create win-win relationships. Smith’s treatise, The Wealth of Nations, is right about trade, says Jacobs, but wrong in seeing nations as economic units. In attempting to measure and influence so-called ‘national economies’, politicians and academics are fighting a chimera.
Jacobs’ work can be useful to Smith’s countrymen, as she favours devolution and self determination. The UK government’s Levelling Up agenda errs in seeing central government as part of the solution: it is more likely part of the problem. Allowing city councils to set their own council tax and business rates and to develop the economy of city and hinterland in their own ways is what will work.
Jacobs recommends ‘Drift’, letting things happen rather than over-planning. Her final chapter on the subject of ‘Drift’ emphasises the role of playfulness, invention and serendipity. Gunpowder was invented by the Chinese for firework displays. The first railway was an amusement ride in London. Oil wells were originally drilled for lamp oil. Later electricity was invented and found a new use for all that oil. Linked to this idea is the attention economy, and the trend of the last few decades where city economies have developed through links with their universities. Examples: Cambridge, Leeds, possibly Sheffield. And then there are cities that live on, purely because they so besot our fancy. Las Vegas, Venice, Carcassonne.
The forces that Jacobs notices can be well illustrated in Carcassonne which, from Roman times if not before, was an important fortified town positioned on trade routes that linked the Mediterranean with the Atlantic seaboard. It flourished right through the Middle Ages as a trading post and scene of religious strife before France was united into one nation. It then had a life as a fortified border town, until the French border was pushed further south. It continued to be successful at manufacturing woollen cloth, selling to the Ottoman empire, but its fortunes failed at the end of the eighteenth century when that trade with Turkey collapsed. It became just a local county town and only poor citizens remained living within its splendid walls. However, in the nineteenth century, the Parisian architect Viollet-le-Duc, in love with romantic notions of the Middle Ages, recreated the city as a gothic dream to inspire the yearnings of tourists and poets; thus restoring property prices within the city walls.
There remains an element of uncontrollable and unknowable mystery within even our economic life, no matter how hard we labour and how carefully we count our coins. The world’s real cities, our economic drivers, are not so far in nature from Calvino’s imagined ones, however fantastical they may appear at first reading. Calvino’s Argia is entirely below ground, Thekla is in a constant state of construction, driven by a fear of destruction; Esmeralda is a city of routes, feet pattering along canals and balconies or swallows swooping through the air; Raissa is two cities, a wholly happy one and an utterly grieving one, intertwined; Eudoxia is a mess and yet there is a map on a carpet which can guide you, although the map is tidy and the city is messy. Perinthia was designed to be entirely propitious following the guidance of the best astronomers and has produced nothing but deformity among the inhabitants, posing the question whether deformity was what the stars intended… And somewhere in the collection is a city suspended from columns by webs – but I can no longer find it.
These cities are described by the Venetian trader Marco Polo to the conqueror Kubla Khan, so that he can know the jewels of his vast empire. But the two men have no language in common. Polo must convey all this complexity through gestures, which trigger what the emperor already knows in his heart about his territories, or about human life. Later they let chess pieces stand for the different factors that can go to make a city, and they play the game together. Every pattern on the board stands for a city that exists, or has existed, or could exist.
Who will win the game? The warrior or the merchant?
There is an excellent museum at Narberth in Pembrokeshire, converted from a bonded warehouse, where Scottish whisky was once kept behind bars in vats and doled out in small quantities once a week to the mutual profit of Westminster and James Williams Ltd. Now, above a café and two bookshops, children can bounce over the floorboards trying out trades such as saddlery and cobbling; or they can drink in the atmosphere of the mythic early mediaeval Wales of the Mabinogian in which Narberth was a prince’s court.
The name ‘Narberth’, which means in Welsh ‘up against a hedge’, doesn’t hold out much promise of a prosperous future. Yet Narberth in its hey-day, in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, had thirty pubs, and a wealth of tradesmen competing to serve all the needs of town and country. The town stood on the ‘Landsker line’, the boundary between the Welsh-speaking people of northern Pembrokeshire and the ‘English beyond Wales’, who had settled the south coast from Norman times if not even earlier. The linguistic line remained stable over some hundreds of years. For brief periods the English would sally north of the line, hungry for more farmland, only to find the uplands too wet and unrewarding, so that the Welsh regained them as their rivals retreated to more comfortable lives.
Genetic studies have found that these ‘English’ are very similar to the inhabitants of south-west England, and genetically distinct from people living just north of the Landsker line, indicating little cross-marrying between the linguistic regions. Evidently chatting up was counted an important part of the process. The divide was reflected in life at Narberth, where you could find a Welsh side of the street and an English side, each with its complement of shops and services.
If that makes Narberth sound provincial, it wasn’t. Situated just off the A40, which was one of the stage coach and mail coach routes from London to the Welsh coast and Ireland beyond, it benefited from a steady stream of visitors – and of course from imports such as the Williams whisky.
White self-loathing and black self-pity: these seem to be the only two options in radical politics these days. On one side stand white liberals, white radical students, white writers, beating themselves up over their skin colour and the ‘privilege’ it apparently grants them. ‘Our whiteness is… the colour of shame’, as the playwright Eve Ensler says. And on the other side stand black activists: Feral street thugs, black Oxford thinkers, black writers, presenting themselves as the damaged goods of history, beat up by tragic past events, and traumatised by ‘white privilege’, and in urgent need of recognition of their pain. What both sides share in common is a depressing, fatalistic attachment to racial thinking, to the racial imagination, and a commitment to the therapeutic project of expelling inner demons (whites) or demanding validation of one’s suffering (blacks).
One of the most oft-repeated shibboleths of identity politics is that it is about challenging preconceptions and stereotypes. Yet the very act of focusing primarily on one’s skin colour, swerving sadly away from the three C’s. class, clan and culture, sex and gender biases, {as if nothing else about that individual matters} is troubling. This is navel-gazing at its most nauseous.
Radicals once rejected the category of race; now. they give it credence, give it succour, embrace it, and expand it and do a war dance. The new racialism, this ghoulish grief fest, this ghastly ‘danse macabre’, between white self-loathing and black self-pity, is best embodied in the Anti-Racist protests we have seen the last 12 months. ——–
The nationalists are waving their flags. They want it to be forbidden for anyone to show a Europe flag. People whose work we rely on are losing their rights. They will be beaten up and told to go home. Then someone will suggest that to avoid being beaten up those with residency should wear some kind of sign….
My students are suffering racist comments weekly, even in Cambridge. One young woman pushed one of my students into the street and shouted, ‘Asian bitch!’ Another, in Ely, was told, ‘Go home to your own country!’
Our leader tried to circumvent parliament. Now he is going to broadcast himself direct to the nation, no longer bothering with the BBC.
Brexit needed to be fought against because of the attitudes and forces behind it. The liberals have been confused. They like democracy, they care about a host of issues all at once like climate change, zero hours contracts. Better off liberals feel sorry for people on low incomes and understand why they may want to vent. They have been intimidated by being called ‘remoaners’. They want to be positive and practical. Hitler was popular and supported by the poor. He still needed to be opposed.
The rise and rise of the right will not stop until it is opposed. It will find more and more to do, it is like a fire that has to keep being fed. It needs the next fight. What and who will it be?
When Leo sits down with his Toy Story jigsaw puzzles a cold hand grips my heart. Sunday evening, I want to feel cosy, and he brings out those garish, creepy figures.
But there’s no escape. ‘Come, Mummy,’ says my two and a half year old, extending the beckoning hand that can’t be refused.
Added to the first horror of sorting out four jisaws that have been jumbled together, I then have to pore over every limb of these gruesome zombie like objects: the corpse with the drooping eyelid (Leo calls it ‘baby’); the giant locust crossed with the Incredible Hulk (Leo calls it ‘green man with yellow pants’); the sickly pink fluffy monster (‘teddy bear’ to Leo), the leathery octopus, the eight-eyed monster…. I want to hide these four jigsaws (once we start we have to do them all) in a cupboard, but his favourite babysitter gave them to him for Christmas, so it wouldn’t be diplomatic.
I wonder if this is how Ukippers feel about the European Union: weird alien creatures they don’t want to understand. And I sympathise.
But I have to learn from Leo who assumes that everything around him is animate, and in some way connected to the world he already knows, and so he can relate to anything. The doll is a baby, the eight-eyed monster is a different kind of frog.
Maybe even Farage is just a different kind of frog.
Maybe we can relate to the Other without losing ourselves.
September 2002. Disillusioned with protesting against the ‘war on terror’, Katie went on a 13-day pilgrimage in Northern Spain.
Day 1: Invasion
On the railway platform at Bayonne we were all waiting in our different ways for the train that would take us to St. Jean Pied de Port (‘St John at the foot of the pass’) and the start of the pilgrimage route. One man was smoking a pipe and his wife, a cigarette. They wore chic red rain gear. I wondered how they would make it, with smokers’ lungs, over the Port de Cize, the mountain pass that had brought the Romans and Napoleon into Spain, and now pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago.
We strung ourselves out along the platform. We were all clearly walkers, with our backpacks and boots. We couldn’t hide from each other that we were all starting off on the same rather zany commitment of time and energy: a pilgrimage. Even today, even when lots of the walkers on the route are atheists or agnostics, it isn’t quite like just setting off on a hike. The modern tradition of the route says it will change you, it will give you some kind of experience of truth or happiness or peace. Paolo Coelho and Shirley MacLaine are but two of the more famous writers who have talked of mystic experiences on the way to Compostela. And that made us all a little sheepish standing there, made it difficult to strike up a conversation, as if we were all sitting in a therapist’s waiting room.
Our train crawled into the station. It hadn’t been painted for years. It made me think of the Harry Potter train, taking us into the time-warp of walking, into a world where the rules are different. Very soon the land began to rise around us as the train rattled on, winding tighter and tighter into the Pyrenees. Grassy banks sloped up at forty-five degree angles from our window, waving bunches of trees at the top. A light misty rain blurred the distances.
Opposite me in my compartment sat a young Englishman, just out of his teens. He was well built, with close-cropped hair. I could tell he was English because, apart from pale skin and shyness, he was studying a copy of the bright green laminated guidebook produced by The Confraternity of Saint James, a British outfit headquartered in Lambeth.
Chugging round tight valleys in the Pyrenees, I wondered if the young man opposite me had met the same lady in mauve that I had met in the Confraternity’s Lambeth office. He certainly had great respect for the guide, which he was poring over. Would he like a conversation or would he think talking to fellow English spoilt the atmosphere?
The ticket inspector entered our compartment. This created more awkwardness: the embarrassment of making those strange French sounds in front of a fellow Englishman. So we both of us confined ourselves to the relatively uncontroversial ‘Merci’, with just a glimmer of the vomit sound of the French ‘r’. The inspector didn’t bother looking us in the face, but examined our tickets disapprovingly from above a bulbous nose.
Having survived that incident together, we started to exchange bits of our lives. Alec was at ‘uni’ and seemed anxious. He only had enough money for two weeks’ walking and he wanted to get as far as Burgos, 257km according to the guidebook. I would never be able to walk that fast. Ah youth and maleness!
‘And what made you decide to do it?’ I asked.
‘Character building. That sort of thing.’ He was looking down. ‘I want to test myself. My Dad was in the army.’ So that explained the haircut. ‘He’s always told us that it’s important to have challenges in your life.’ Pause. ‘How about you?’
There I was, a recent peace demonstrator, walking against war, and in the very first moments of my pilgrimage I’m alone in a compartment with a soldier’s son. What magnetic material had they planted in those laminated bright green booklets to bring unlikely people together?
Faced with the politeness and forthright decency of this young man, my anti war arguments dissolved on my tongue. ‘I just wanted some time to reflect,’ I said, ‘Deserter!’ ringing in my ears.
I moved the conversation on to discussing the two routes over the Pyrennees into Spain: Napoleon’s conquering one over the mountain and Charlemagne’s path of retreat down in the valley. To my surprise, Alec agreed with me that the lower route would be enough of a personal challenge for the first day. Neither of us had done any training before we left, he because he was working day and night and I because I hadn’t managed to get organised.
But when we reached the tourist office in St. Jean, which was flooded out with pilgrims of all nationalities, their pilgrim staffs rolling over the floor and the shiny new rucksacks obstructing all passage, we were commanded to take the upper path, the ‘Route Napoleon’. The woman behind the desk raised an eyebrow and completely failed to comprehend when we suggested we might follow the modern lorry driver’s route. Brushing aside our qualms she told us to stay the first night at a hamlet called Huntto and attack the pass tomorrow. She pointed out the way on her map and showed us where, tomorrow, halfway along, there was a water fountain and shops. This I translated for my friend.
Alec was keen to get to a supermarket and stock up on provisions. I on the other hand was dreaming of a sit-down lunch with meat and potatoes. He was a little hesitant to abandon me in Saint Jean but I reassured him, so he shook hands with me and strode off. Over the next days of the walk I soon lost touch with him, polite and upright as he was. He rose each day with the earliest and launched off into the pre-dawn, swinging a plain baguette. I’m sure he reached Burgos and will do well.
In contrasting style I lingered in the mediaeval fortified town of St. Jean, eating a pricey meal of a whole duck with chips. It was late and I was the last person lunching, upstairs over a bar, with red and white checked paper tablecloths for company.
The town’s chief business seemed to be starting pilgrims on their journey. There was an entire market for pilgrims’ staffs. I wanted one of these, as I had read that they were a deterrent to dogs. I chose one with a spike. This was a bad mistake. The shock and ring of that spike on dry roads was to persecute me up and down dale for two weeks. But I clung to the thing in the hope that it would scare off territorial beasts who might waylay me at the gates of far-flung farms.
Before leaving St Jean, I climbed one of the stone staircases up onto the massive walls. Hills stretched away in all directions, blue and mushy with mist.
I had decided to dedicate each day of my walk to an aspect of the ‘war on terror’. I was hoping to find insights as I walked.
The theme I had picked for today, September 5th, was the plight of the Iraqis. Troops were already massing in the Gulf before I set off.
From my position on the fortifications, I gazed down on terracotta roofs, which the rain had stained dark red. Each had its own sliver of garden running towards the wall, dripping and shiny with the recent showers. Some were striped with different shades of green, the foliage of tomatoes, marrows, beans. Others had grown wild, but even those showed some sign of human providence – a walnut tree or an apple tree, a little easy nourishment in these pockets of land.
I could not think about a dry place. I could not think about suffering and fear. I could not think about hunger and the worry of parents. I could not both be here and somewhere else. How strange it was to be attacking a country so far away, none of whose people I had ever met, let alone hated. Here was full of enjoyment and there not. I chose here. I chose with an uneasy feeling of guilt.
So it was with a heavy heart and confusion, together with my usual expectant fear of dogs, that I crossed the river over the mediaeval bridge and followed signs for Huntto….
Our dear old local UKIP candidate John Stocker is still talking about Common Sense with every breath, just as he was in 2010.
‘The Gentleman Businessman’ by Asbjorn Gundersen in Adventures in Tory Land http://amzn.to/1GpXY1F
I have to admit I use it myself quite a lot, usually snootily (shame) about parents who ‘have no common sense’. Why don’t they use some common sense? etc.
But I mean something different from John Stocker. I mean, ‘It didn’t work last time so why are they doing it again?’ ‘So and so NEVER does X, so why do they keep banking on their kid doing something he/she never does actually do?’
Yes I know I’m being obnoxious but at least I’m rational. When I talk about common sense, I’m talking about using past evidence as a guide to one’s plans, one’s ‘policies’. I’m asking for evidence-based policy.
But Stocker means something else. Common sense for Stocker means taking his daily life as a paradigm, and assuming that his personal experiences in his life will be a good guide for an entire nation’s policies. This is not evidence-based, because he doesn’t present evidence that a nation is the same as a household – the same as his household.
Nations are more complicated than households – which are complicated enough! I want policies based on what nations and governments have done and experienced, not on what J Stocker has done, even though I know he has lived an interesting and varied life. So I’m afraid there have to be some experts in there, such as economists, preferably arguing with each other, and public health researchers, dare I say it a sociologist or two….
Thomas Paine’s pamphlet ‘Common Sense’ 1775 advocating American independence
Adventures in Tory Land: Democracy in Middle England, tales of the canvassing trail, is available as an ebook and paperback through Amazon and in Waterstones St Albans. Yours for £2. For a laugh, click here! http://amzn.to/1GpXY1F
On the railway platform at Bayonne we were all waiting in our different ways for the train that would take us to St. Jean Pied de Port (‘St John at the foot of the pass’) and the start of the pilgrimage route. One man was smoking a pipe and his wife, a cigarette. They wore chic red rain gear. I wondered how they would make it, with smokers’ lungs, over the Port de Cize, the mountain pass that had brought the Romans and Napoleon into Spain, and now pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago.
Adventures in Tory Land - Blog 