"Funnily Enough" - Sophie Neville

The thread that took me to this book is quite long and thin. I love the "Swallows and Amazons" books, which led to me discovering as a grown-up Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint's Trunk by Christina Hardyment, and also the film of "Swallows and Amazons". Then I wanted to know what the young Actors in "Swallows and Amazons" did next, and that took me to Sophie Neville's website, where I discovered that there was a book!

Neville has written about a year of her life when, after establishing herself in a career working for the BBC, she found herself suffering from Post-Viral Fatigue / M.E. It's not a book to read if you are looking for great drama, but it is full of perceptive and humorous accounts of gentle (and occasionally not-so-gentle!) domestic life observed by someone who was forced at times to be little more than an observer. Along the way, we also see her wrestling to find any effective treatment, and also trying to understand how to reconcile her Christian faith with the frustrations of her illness. There's also lots of information about otters (! - how's that for a teaser?).

If your life has been affected by M.E., or you want to understand what it's like for somebody, then this is an excellent book. But more than that, if you are interested in a picture of the regular comings and goings of a normal family, then you'll find "Funnily Enough" a delight to read.

"Swallows and Amazons"

We went to see Swallows and Amazons, the stage version, at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury this week. The Marlowe has apparently been relatively recently refurbished, and is lovely, within easy walking distance of large numbers of car parks (though without its own dedicated parking, I believe), and Canterbury itself feels like a very safe place to be in the evening - a less busy version of York.

As a book, Swallows and Amazons presents itself as being quite "realist" - it's a story of children camping on an island in a lake in the Lake District, and not a lot happens. The people on the children's literature course that I was studying (EA300) who were reading the book for the first time often found it remarkably dull - which was quite shocking to me, to whom the whole series meant a huge amount when I was growing up. So it seems quite incongruous for the play to be presented as it was. For a start, it is a musical - a format which structurally cements a relationship with fantasy (how many people do you know that burst into a lyrically relevant new song to accompany significant events?). And then it has adults acting as the children. And then, rather than trying to use props and sets to realistically portray the events, it merely symbolises them. The picture above (from here) shows the Walker children sailing the boat Swallow. Roger (the ship's boy) is holding the front of the boat; Susan holds up the sail and John holds the back of it. The water is represented by other people in blue coats holding the blue and white ribbons.

This is all ingenious, and in fact demonstrates how powerful the imagination of the audience is. And this is significant because, as we discovered when studying the book, Swallows and Amazons is all about imagination. The children's imaginative play (the Amazons, Nancy and Peggy Blacketts' self-identity as pirates; the Swallows imagination of themselves as a naval commander, a homemaker or Robinson Crusoe) is the real heart of the story. In Peter Pan, James Barrie reluctantly accepts that children have to grow out of their imaginative world if they are to grow up. In Swallows and Amazons, the effect of the children's imaginative play is actually to transform the adult world - Uncle Jim/Captain Flint's book is saved from burglars, and he recovers his soul.

The play is thoroughly engaging. I got a little teary when I realised how it was evoking the story for me, early on. Towards the end, the cast venture more into the audience, and involves them directly with the battle on the houseboat and at the end, during the closing song, models of Swallow and Amazon are passed around the audience. I don't go to the theatre enough, and I love it when I do go, but I've not seen a play which is so capable of showing children the imaginative power of theatre, and indeed the power of imagination. This deserves great praise.

Reflections on "A Week in December"

Literature

I've only read one other book by Faulks - not Birdsong, unusually, but Human Traces. That book was remarkable, as a work of historical fiction, as well as the articulation of quite complex ideas. This had elements in common with it. Faulks continues to explore the idea of the voices that humans hear in their heads, this phenomenon which sets us aside from other creatures, now in a present-day context. There were also an abundance of intertextual references. The framework of preparations for a dinner party reminded me of Mrs Dalloway, there were references that I guess were fairly deliberate to Brave New World, and I suspect (though I haven't read it) that The Bonfire of the Vanities was thrown in there as well.

Faulks writes within the book: "Culturally, it had remained impossible for a realistic British novelist to transcend Leicester or Stoke; the place names alone seemed to laugh at the idea." This is, I guess, a postmodern touch (forgive my artlessness, I'm really not fluent in literature yet). Other significant playing was with the character of the narcissistic, bitter critic, R. Tranter, obsessed with wanting to find fame and yet not celebrity by any means. But unusually for a realist book, it seems that most characters found some redemption, even including Tranter.

Banking

What literary interest can there be in finance? Why should I care about it? Does it really tell us anything important about the human condition? Of course - it shapes our world. On the basis of The Devil's Casino, and All the Devils are Here, I'd say that Faulks has done a good job of trying to comprehend and then explain what exactly happened - better than the job done in these journalistic accounts, and without breaking the narrative! He highlights the underlying moral vacuum, but where I think Faulks goes wrong is in making his character John Veals, the hugely successful fund manager, so thoroughly unsympathetic. One thing which emerges from the journalists' analysis of the events is that people are people. You can't really have sympathy for the devil - but most times, it seems, he is actually in disguise. Had the banking industry said, "We are going to invent financial instruments that will bring down the economy of the Western world and bankrupt nations," of course everybody would have been appalled. But they didn't: they just promised to look after our savings and our pensions, and provide us with money for houses and the things we wanted.

The exit of the UK from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism should have been a wake-up call - or maybe by then it was already too late. Financial organisations made a killing betting against the wealth of a nation. The "market" by now no longer bore any resemblance to the place to which a farmer would take a cow to sell. It was a ravening beast, capable of devouring anything it felt like, including whole countries. Margaret Thatcher said, "You can't buck the market," apparently a statement of her philosophy, but in truth signifying the capitulation of Western political power to a more powerful force.

Islam

It's a brave author who goes into print discussing the Muslim religion, following the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Faulks has nonetheless done so. He accepts that mainstream Islam, as a religion, provides comfort, structure and identity. But he argues that its roots, like all such religious grounded in revelation, look more like the product of psychosis than something which transcends humanity. Gabriel, the unsuccessful barrister, compares the words of the Koran with those of his schizophrenic brother's delusions.

Unlike with finance, in the context of religion, Faulks' "devils" are in disguise. The driving force for fanaticism isn't the ranting of imams, but calm, gently-spoken and apparently normal people. Hassan, the young Muslim, finds himself in a group planning an appalling atrocity with the word jihad barely mentioned.

It's a stern portrait of the religion. Christians should take little comfort, however. In this "state of the nation" novel, the fact that Faulks has nothing of significance to say about Christianity constitutes a sterner rebuke.

Mugging grannies

Now here's interesting ....

A lot of fuss has been made about the "granny tax" that the government has "imposed" in this budget. The Mirror went as far as to describe it as a mugging. (See here if you can bring yourself to visit their website.)

I certainly have issues with some aspects of the budget, but this, as it happens, is not one of them. The Financial Times has pointed out (free registration required) how relatively well-off the retired population are, certainly compared to the younger generation, and the Institute of Fiscal Studies points out that this "mugging" represents a loss of income of about one quarter of one percent in 2014. 50% of pensioners (the poor grannies that you have in mind, perhaps) don't actually pay income tax at all. The new process for increasing state pension guarantees that its value will increase at least as fast as inflation in future. And the "perfidious coalition partners", the Liberals, are seeking to secure a standard basic pension of £140 per person.

Furthermore, the way in which the government is approaching this - freezing the allowance available to pensioners whilst increasing the general allowance - can hardly be considered that painful; it's not as though extra money is being taken away. The previous Labour government froze the allowance for everybody - by this token, it could be accused of mugging the whole population. Of course, this doesn't make for quite the dramatic imagery evoked by talking about mugging grannies ....

For a more balanced perspective, see the BBC's Nick Robinson's comment here.

Ryanair advertising strategy

From the BBC.

Ryanair advert campaign on Thomas Cook banned by ASA 

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Notice a theme here? Does it actually matter what you put in adverts, as long as it's noticed?

Reflecting on "The Abolition of Man", by C.S.Lewis

[The schoolboy] is encouraged to reject the lure of the 'Western Ocean' on the very dangerous ground that in so doing he will prove himself a knowing fellow who can't be bubbled out of his cash. [His teachers], while teaching him nothing about letters, have cut out his soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful and humane.

Is it surprising that Philip Pullman should have come up with the idea of intercision in Northern Lights and yet be so opposed to C.S.Lewis? My hunch is that when Pullman thought about Christianity, he assumed it was no more than the experiences he had rejected. Any more than passing interest in Lewis (or, for that matter, the Bible) would have revealed that there was more to it than that.

Why I don't support the public sector strikes

My first "proper" job (not counting the year I spent waiting to do what I wanted to do) had a final salary pension scheme. The retirement date when I joined was 60 - it had relatively recently been increased from 55. This is in a career in which a fair number of people end up having to stop on medical grounds before retirement date.

Around 10 years into this job, the final salary pension scheme was closed for new joiners. It was in a state of substantial actuarial deficit - meaning that the total amount of money that was held by the scheme, coupled with slow growth anticipated, could not meet the financial demands anticipated. The company put more money into it, but they also said that employees had to either increase their contribution to obtain the benefit to which they had previously entitled to, or accept a reduced benefit. It goes without saying that there was no "state" or "taxpayer" to cover any deficit, despite the fact that part of the reason for the deficit was because of a certain chancellor changing the rules to take money out of pension schemes.

Five years ago, I changed to a job in the same sector, but with a different employer. I was able to freeze my final salary pension with the first employer. The new one had a money-purchase scheme, but the retirement date was now 65.

So, over the course of just over 20 years, remaining in the same sector, I have gone from a final salary pension to a money-purchase pension, and my retirement date has got 10 years later.

No-one wants to see other people having to work longer or getting smaller benefits. But neither is it reasonable to assume that because you are a public sector employee, you should be entitled to have a pension that is subsidised with taxpayer's (my) money that is better than any I can hope to have. It used to be the case that such perks could be justified because the terms and conditions of public sector employees were generally worse than those in the private sector - but that's not the case any more. (Here's a report about the relationship between public and private sector pay.)

The public sector strikes aren't to do with economic reality: they are politically opportunistic attempts to chuck stones at the coalition government. There is no political party that would be prepared to back away from reform, and I suspect that the Labour party are secretly relieved that they aren't the party that has had to take the bull by the horns and risk alienating their union supporters. Whilst of course nobody would disagree with the idea of nurses and teachers being able to stop work before they are too old to do their jobs effectively, I suspect it's also the case that few people employed by the private sector are prepared to accept tax rises to allow the public sector privileges that are long gone from the private sector. 

Foreign exchange - what happened next

To continue the story I started in the post below .... I noticed that the foreign exchange at Marks and Spencers also did a very good rate - in fact, over the counter, within two tenths of a cent of the same rate that I could get online at the post office. So I went there.

They didn't charge commission. However ... they said that if I withdrew money using a Barclays debit card (debit card!!) then Barclays would charge commission. I have to say that this baffled me - since when have a bank charged for using a debit card for making a cash withdrawal?!

However, I went to a cashpoint, withdrew (free) £300, went back to Marks and Spencers, and exchanged it for dollars.

Had I bought dollars at the airport, £300 would have bought me around $425. A week or so later, at Marks and Spencers, about £299 bought me $455. The exchange rate had changed in that time, and this accounts for around half the difference.

It's also worth noting that if you order money in advance to collect from the airport, the exchange rates are far less punitive.

Currency exchange - what is good value?

I'd always assumed that the cost of buying and selling currency was "much of a muchness" for your average person (ie. someone who is trying to get money for a holiday, rather than someone who is trading currency as a means of making a profit). Specifically, I thought that since I work at the airport and the exchange bureaux there did "a little bit more" for people who work there, I was getting a fairly good deal.

I was intending to buy some US dollars for a holiday. It's some way ahead, but the exchange rate is quite good, so I thought I'd do it now. There was a little queue for the first office, and whilst I was standing there, I clocked their exchange rate. The published rate in the newspaper was around $1.55 to the pound; I'd been watching it. But they offered to sell dollars at $1.40ish to the pound and buy at $1.74.

That was a pretty huge margin, I thought - almost 10%. So I thought I'd wait, and investigate other possibilities. The same day, the bank were offering $1.45 and the Post Office $1.49! To get some idea of how much difference this makes, if you are buying £500 worth of dollars for a holiday, you would get an extra $45 if you went to the Post Office. It's not the case that commission eats this difference up; in each case, the transaction would have been commission-free. I didn't look on that day at the rate I could get from a travel agent.

I then looked back at what we had paid for expenditure on credit cards. Payments made on credit cards last February, when the exchange rate had been around $1.61, had included a commission charge of around 2.7%. That meant that the equivalent exchange rate for purchases with a credit card had been at around $1.56 - comparable to the rate from the Post Office. I also looked at a transaction where I had drawn money out on a credit card abroad. The same commission charge is applied - about 2.7% - and there is an additional £2.50 charge for withdrawing money, but if you take a significant amount of money out in one go, this would be very cost effective. Bear in mind that the balance for cash transactions on credit cards may incur a higher interest rate, if you don't repay the whole amount every month. The commission rate for a debit card looked as though it was slightly higher, but the handling charge was lower.

So in conclusion ...

The best place to buy foreign money to take abroad with you seems to be the Post Office. But paying for things on credit cards when you're there or even withdrawing cash from an ATM using a credit card (in as large dollops as you can) will also get you a very competitive exchange rate.

Malinowski

... developed the concept of the 'context of situation', that is, that language is only really comprehensible if we take into account the whole context in which it occurs; the interlinking between the language that is used and the setting in which it is used.

Which about wraps it up for deconstruction.

More university fee stuff

Here's a very helpful article from Money Saving Expert about how the new student loan setup will work.

In related news, Open University have just announced a major increase in fees. At the moment, you get "points" for completing OU modules - a typical course is worth 60 points, and 120 points constitutes an undergraduate year. At the moment, a 60 point course costs around £700. This will increase in September 2012 to £2500. It will be possible to obtain student loans towards the cost of tuition.

In effect, OU is moving further in the direction of being a mainstream university: it will no longer be realistic for most people to dabble in OU studies; they'll have to decide whether or not to commit to them in a more formal way. It will be one of the most versatile and best value ways of getting a degree, but this is a big cultural change.

Transitional arrangements will exist for people who are already studying. If you want to take advantage of fees based on the current structure for courses starting after 1 September 2012, you must have completed a module which began between 1 September 2010 and 31 August 2011 or be studying a module that starts between 1 September 2011 and 31 August 2012.

"One in a million is not a fluke ..."

An interesting article on the BBC. It says that a five-sigma level of certainty is the accepted level in particle physics to claim a "discovery". Sigma here is standard deviation:

The number of sigmas (or standard deviations) is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect.

To tag "five sigma" as certainty means that a one in a million occurrence is counted as not happening just by chance.

It would be interesting to see how that relates to the Universal Probability Bound (see where else I have discussed this here) or, for that matter, Behe'sEdge of Evolution(if at all).

Harry Potter 7b

A few random thoughts - hopefully without too many spoilers ....

Watching the film really did feel like the end of an era. Harry Potter, films and books, has been part of my life for a decade, and whilst Pottermore will doubtless offer interesting and enjoyable material, the narrative circle is now complete. Along the way, I've been introduced passim to Joseph Campbell, Jungian archetypes and radical feminism, so my intellectual life is richer. Whilst Grint, Watson and Radcliffe may not be the greatest actors in the world, they have come to strongly shape the characters; the repertoire of British actors who have played supporting roles in the series have been excellent; and the achievement that is represented by holding the eight films together without destroying anybody's lives is substantial!

In many ways, I thought the film actually worked better than the book. There were certain things that were quite hard to follow in the book, which were made clearer in the film. Whether having read the book was required to follow the film, I'm not sure. There were also some deviations from the narrative sequence in the book. For example, some key sequences - the final showdown, and the death of the snake, amongst others - were presented in a way which made better narrative sense. These also made for better cinema. The increasing connection between Harry and Voldemort as the film went on was also brought out very well.

The fact that this film is largely action-driven for me highlights how character-driven is part 1. There was no shortage of action in it, but Harry, Ron and Hermione were allowed to develop through the film. Perhaps as a consequence, with the exception of the exposition at the start of film 2, it felt like a bit of a rush - one got the feeling that anything not directly related to the action was a kind of quick "Oh, we ought to show this about that character here ...."

The remaining Harry Potter event will be the release of the DVD, I guess. My daughter is already talking about a back-to-back showing. I'm not sure that I could cope with 20 hours, but I'd certainly like to watch the whole of "Deathly Hallows" in one go.

The Olympic ticket bid

We didn't get any tickets either, having applied "within our means". Apparently, only 1 in 7 people didn't get anything. For myself, I think I know as many people who did as who didn't - though that may reflect the fact that most people I know would have been pitching for the cheaper tickets.

With hindsight, we can see that the system favoured those people who ignored the advice and applied "without the means" - there is no real penalty for this anyway, since anything you can't afford you can almost certainly pass on later on - and also those people of "great means". Not really a "people's games", then .... That does seem somewhat unfair - certainly the corporate sponsors want to make their bit, but a large chunk of the cost of the games (and all of the disruption) is borne not by the sponsors but by the people.

It is possible to imagine ways of improving the system, again with hindsight. It makes the process of applying more complicated - but to be honest, the system was pretty complicated anyway. People could rank the sessions they were bidding for in order of preference. First preferences are processed first, randomly. Those people who are successful with a bid have their subsequent preferences dealt with after those who are unsuccessful. That would almost certainly ensure a larger number of people actually get tickets.

But it doesn't make much difference now. We, like lots of other people, will just have to try and take our chances in the next lottery round.