The Chariot of Artemis

Physically I landed back on earth more than twenty-four hours ago but my head is still the sky! (So what’s new?!) I really am lost for words, no matter how obvious and clichéd that sounds. To say that it was everything that I hoped for would be a gross understatement. I’ve seen Kent and Sussex from the air many times on the approach to Heathrow, but never like this; never have those towns, those farms, those spires, those blue remembered hills looked so beautiful. The little plane was beautiful, too, the little Cessna, the chariot of Artemis.

My pilot instructor was so good, proficient, calm, reassuring...and cute! I was nervous to begin with, particularly just before I took the controls, a point when my heart was like some crazy bird trying to escape from the prison of my ribs! But no sooner did I have the power; no sooner was I in control than it all went. It was just so smooth, much smoother than the first time I took control of a car. Prior to this I kept a close watch on my instructor’s movements, careful, no sudden jerks, just steady and light.

Afterwards I was told that I had done extraordinarily well, that I was a ‘natural.’ I honestly don’t think this was a sales pitch because the future lessons have all been paid for! I’m going to go on to the end. I’ll need another forty-four hours before I can apply for my PPL – private pilot’s licence. Once I’ve started something I don’t finish until I have reached my desire.

I’ve discovered a new passion, and when I discover a passion it really as if nobody has ever been there before me. In that respect I’m pretty much like dear old Toad of Toad Hall.

Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today--in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped--always somebody else's horizon! O bliss!

What about every other Bloody Day?

Lord Saville’s inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland is scheduled for publication tomorrow, the fruits of a promise made twelve years ago by Tony Blair to ensure that the likes of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness signed up to the Good Friday agreement. Indications are that this exercise in gesture politics has cost close on £200million, and for what? To turn British soldiers into possible scapegoats, at least according to advanced reports that I have read.

After all this time, effort and expense we are no closer to the truth of what really happened on that day in January thirty-eight years ago, as Douglas Murray says in this week’s Spectator. In no way do I wish to minimise the tragedy but any objective assessment would have to conclude that the innocent victims were caught in crossfire; that they were effectively used as a shield by the IRA, which has never admitted any responsibility for its actions.

There is unlikely to be any closure here, just deeper and deeper wounds. The whole inquiry, it seems to me, was little better than an act of appeasement, one that may very well open up the prospect of criminal proceedings against former soldiers of the Parachute Regiment. I’m sure all serving soldiers will be mindful of the precedent being set here.

There are indeed times when the dead are best left to bury the dead, times when a tragic past is best forgotten. Otherwise all sorts of additional issues might be raised, old ghosts released from the grave. Now we have former terrorists in government in Northern Ireland; now we have convicted IRA killers set free. How will it sit with the British people, Murray asks, if British soldiers are sent to prison against that background? Perhaps they will remember the words of a former commander of 1 Para;

I have to ask what about Bloody Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and every other day of the week? What about Bloody Omagh? What about Bloody Warrenpoint, Enniskillen, Hyde Park, or Bloody Aldershot and Brighton – bloody everything the IRA have ever touched.

Justice, it would appear, is a one-way street. It seems such an obvious point to conclude on but sometimes the price of peace is just too outrageously high.

A Past Buried in Sex

I happened to mention in a discussion recently that the first time that I ever saw a hard core porn movie was on mainstream Spanish TV in the Hostal de los Reyes Catolicos in Santiago de la Compostela in north-west Spain.

There is a special irony in this, for though it is now a luxury hotel, or paradour, to use the Spanish expression, it was founded in 1499 on the orders of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs recalled in the name. Its purpose was to serve as a hostel and a hospital for pilgrims who had completed the journey to visit the shrine of Saint James in the town’s cathedral. So, a place created by the most Catholic of monarchs for this most Christian of reasons was hosting the most profane of entertainments!

I was nineteen years old. I had come to Spain with a group of close friends from my old school to walk the more interesting parts of the Camino, an adventure I blogged about in May of last year (I was a Pilgrim; yes, I was). Once in Santiago we had decided to relax for a day or two before returning to England, staying in Los Reyes Catolicos, a beautiful building and a splendid hotel.

What about the porno, you ask? We had been out late. I was sharing with one of the girls. We were just a bit tipsy. Before going to bed we did a spot of channel surfing, to see what Spanish TV had on offer. Let me stress that it was TV and not the hotel’s movie channel, though that would have been bad enough. We couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing, for what we were seeing was – how can I say this without sounding vulgar? - lodsacock! The whole thing was just too, too funny and my friend and I were overcome with waves of hysterical laughter.

The humour soon passed, though, as the repetitive, urgent inning and outing, upping and downing began to get boring. There was some Spanish dialogue but, quite frankly, I rather suspect that words are quite superfluous in this particular medium. What then struck me was the ugliness of the whole thing, unlovely, unromantic, even, oddly enough, passionless. It made sex look like some awful and tiresome chore. I suppose that might have been in consequence of the ‘acting’; that the people involved were engaged bodily but not spiritually or emotionally. Besides the whole thing was not even about pleasure; so far as I can see it was about degradation, the degradation of the women involved. We switched off after about half an hour, the mood of elation gone.

I’ve not got a lot of experience of hardcore pornography, but I don’t think the kind of thing we saw on terrestrial TV in Spain would be allowed in the England, even on specialist, subscription only channels. There may be other countries in Europe that allow this as a sign of the more relaxed attitudes towards sexual matters on the Continent; I simply don’t know. But it’s worth reflecting on the Spanish case in particular. There is a danger of over-intellectualising the matter – after all it may just be a question of ratings – but I rather suspect sex here, explicit sex in a popular medium, is as much about politics as anything else. More specifically, it’s a reaction against a highly conservative past.

It’s as well to remember that Spain was a dictatorship until the death of General Franco in 1975. Francoism was not fascism, as many people suppose: it was, rather, a reaction against the modern world. Franco’s victory in the Civil War had the effect of preserving Spain in a kind of limbo. It was to remain in a reactionary Catholic past for over thirty years while the rest of Europe moved in to a different world. In catching up it had to run twice as fast. Modern Spain came not to praise Caesar; it came to bury him. It buried him in excess.

Ana on Wings

This coming weekend will be a really important one for me. On Saturday afternoon I will have my first flying lesson. I'm so excited...and so nervous. I've been obsessing with flying ever since I watched Amelia earlier this year, the movie with Hillary Swank which tells of the life of Amelia Earhart, the American flyer who disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances over seventy years ago. A remarkable woman, the substance of legends, who should have gone from this earth in the way that she did; young, wonderful, full of energy, full of everything that makes life a battle worth fighting. As I take those controls for the first time it will be her that I think of; not a feminist, not an ideologue, just a woman, just one of the most remarkable people who have ever lived, one who proved that we can achieve anything if we set our minds to it. Nothing truly is impossible. Anyway, think of me; for like Icarus Ana will have wings. :-)

I should add a big hug to mummy and daddy for puting up with my nagging for weeks on end, and for paying for the lessons!

Killing Hitler

Last month at a conference in Moscow General Anatoly Kulikov, formerly Russian Interior Minister under Boris Yeltsin, said that Stalin called off two assassination attempts against Hitler, one in 1943 and another in a more advanced state of preparation in 1944, for fear that his successors would conclude a separate peace with the Western Allies. He continued by saying that in pursuing the war to the very end Stalin intended to destroy Germany as a future threat as well as gaining more influence in Eastern Europe.

It’s an intriguing claim but as yet no documentary evidence has been produced, though the general has said that the details will be forthcoming in a new book about Russia and the Second World War. Kulikov says that in preparation for the second plan the intended assassin had even infiltrated Hitler’s immediate entourage, before the mission was aborted.

We now seem to be entering the realms of the fantastic. Security around Hitler was severe. For a stranger to get anywhere within striking distance does not seem at all likely. The evidence, once produced, will have to be very strong indeed. Writing in The Telegraph Guy Walters has already dismissed Kulikov’s claim, in the continuing absence of proof, as ‘junk history.’ I suppose the general might just be trying to talk up the book to be published by the Club of Military Leaders, which he heads, but he is going to look rather foolish if this grand claim does not stand up to scrutiny.

Of course there is another possibility, that the general is reminding a Russian audience of the suspicions and fears once entertained towards the West, the Casablanca declaration that the Germans had to surrender unconditionally notwithstanding. It’s certainly true that if the attempt by sections of the German military to assassinate Hitler in July of 1944 had been successful any new government would have made an early approach to Britain and America. There were already tensions within the Alliance which might conceivably have resulted in a separate peace. The truth is that Germany had to be defeated and seen to have been defeated. Against this background cloak-and-dagger assassination schemes were quite irrelevant. Stalin would have understood that.

Sympathy for the Boer

The Second Boer War elicited a lot of sympathy for the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the two beleaguered republics, and a lot of hostility to Britain across the world. Opposition began at home. The Irish Nationalists were vociferous opponents, which comes, I suppose, as no great surprise. Michael Davitt, the founder of the Irish National Land League, resigned his parliamentary seat at Westminster in protest. He subsequently tried to interest the European powers in the fate of the Boers, writing an apologia, condemning the British for arming “African savages” against two “Christian states”. Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein, used the occasion of the war in an attempt to focus hostility towards continuing British rule in Ireland.

Kier Hardie, leader of the British Labour Party, absolved the Boers of all blame for the war-and ignored their treatment of black Africans-because they were a "virtuous, republican and pastoral people, with all of the fine qualities that pertain to that way of life." J. A. Hobson, John Burns and Edward Carpenter, left-wing and radical, all combined to describe the war as the work of “Cosmopolitan-Jewish manipulators” living in Cape Colony.

Beyond British shores, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, and himself no stranger to the attractions of imperialism, expressed some sympathy for the Boers, with whom he shared a Dutch ancestry, though he believed that their downfall was part of an Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny, just as was the downfall of the Spanish Empire in 1898. His distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took a quite different view, presiding over the Harvard Committee for Boer Relief. Sun Yat-Sen, Chinese revolutionary and political leader, was encouraged by the example of Boer resistance, seeing it as a blow against all forms of imperialism.

British conduct during the war, especially the setting up of concentration camps, was the source of much international hostility, though most remained blind to Boer atrocities against black people. Close on 3000 volunteers served with the Boer Republics, which included a Scandinavian Corps, almost wiped out at the Battle of Magersfontein. In the various Boer commandos it was possible to find Germans, Russians, Italians, Irish, French and Americans. The Germans included Count Harra von Zeppelin, at the one extreme, to Fritz Brall, the anarchist, at the other. In the Hollander Corps was to be found Cornelius van Gogh, brother of Vincent, the painter, and Theo the art dealer, who committed suicide after being captured by the British. The Russian Corp, mostly ambulance drivers and scouts, numbered among them Prince Bagration of Tiflis, a Cossack hetman, and Alexander Guchkov, later to serve for a time as Minister of War in the Russian Provisional Government, established after the Revolution of February 1917. The French included Prince Louis d'Orleans et Braganze, cousin of the Orleanist pretender. He was joined by Count de Villebois-Mareuil, one of the founders of Action Francaise.

Naturally enough, the Boers attracted a lot of support in the Netherlands, their ancestral home, with Queen Wilhelmina going so far as to send a warship to bring Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal, to Europe, where he was well-received, both in Paris and the Hague. Streets were named after him in the Netherlands and Belgium, and a statue erected in his honour in Dresden. German approval of the exiled president was to continue for some time, and the Nazi film industry was later to pay its own tribute in Ohm Krüger, made in 1940. Widespread as it was, pro-Boer sentiment caused no government to bring pressure on the British, and had no affect whatsoever on the outcome of the war.

The Live Life Show

In my English Lit. class at school one of the most enjoyable papers I ever wrote was on dystopias. I had by that time already discovered George Orwell so Nineteen-Eighty Four was an obvious point of departure. From there its was on to novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a book that overwhelmed me with its brilliance, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, G K Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill and Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit.

But the other girls in my group were reading the same books so I thought I'd cast the net just a little wider. And that's how I discovered The Year of the Sex Olympics, a play by Nigel Kneale and first broadcast on BBC television in 1968. I was immediately captivated by this depiction of a future in which a debased underclass are kept amused by reality TV shows and pornography, ever more sensational in content, like the Sex Olympics. The elite were always looking for new ideas and are encouraged when the masses, ever more lethargic, ever more difficult to please, are engaged and amused by death and suffering.

Reality TV at the time was non-existent, so the play could be considered as a brilliant anticipation of times to come, of our times, a time when television shows are becoming ever more wretchedly debased in their pursuit of ratings. But I suspect that the author, who had previously adapted Nineteen-Eighty Four for television, was also looking back to the public executions of the past, which used to draw massive crowds, people taking a vicarious delight in death. The premise was based, if you like, in the vilest dimensions of human nature.

The theme had a particular resonance for me because of the popularity of Channel Four's Big Brother reality show, drawing on Orwell, though in such a way that I feel sure would have nauseated him. I confess I was seduced by this show to begin with, seduced by characters like 'Nasty Nick' (Sorry; I was in my teens!). But with each successive series my contempt for the parade of mediocrities that were selected to appear began to grow. I have to say this, even at the risk of sounding snobbish, but I began to think of them as the worst forms of low-life imaginable, 'oiks' and 'pig people', as we used to say at school.

The worst of all was the celebrity versions. There was one with George Galloway, then an MP, doing an impression of a cat and another of him dressed in a tight-fitting leotard, with, not to be coy on the point, his testicles on clear display. To see this revolting old man, one whom I despised for his politics, prancing around like this was just too, too awful, hugely funny and utterly ridiculous at one and the same time. I haven't watched the show since.

I almost never watch TV now; I have far more important things to do. It's not just that. The fact is that the mixture of reality TV, celebrity chefs, talent contests and the rest of the sad and unimaginative rubbish is simply unwatchable. It's garbage best left to the proles, people whose surplus energy is sucked up by a manipulating and cynical elite. Meanwhile I shall return always to the Live Life Show. :-)