my little golden girl
Well, we now have the date for the op and it is really upon us — Feb 11th. We had been told that we would be in a process that would probably end up with a mid March date for the op but there’s a slot and we fit. Emotionally it is an odd one because if it all turns out OK, you want it to happen as soon as possible and get it out of the way but if it doesn’t, you want to wait for as long as possible. Put it off. Keep her as she is. Because she is on absolutely flying form and it feels so unappealing to jeopardise this.
Boro has been away for a couple of weeks and as she predicted, it has allowed AJ to embed the learning that they have been doing together. I had AJ on my knee a lot this weekend and her balance is massively improved, so that she really can sit unassisted for a few moments. She is also far more communicative. Fo puts this down to spending time with Cedar, our rent-a-dog, AJ spends a lot of time keeping Cedar up to date on events. They certainly seem to understand each other even though AJ is babbling and Cedar is deaf.
We’re all glad to have Boro back with us. Happily for Otto she had a story to tell of getting lost in the forests of Transylvania and coming across bear footprints just as the night fell. Having an au-pair who gets into scrapes with bears while snowboarding in the forests so Transylvania on her holidays is obviously amongst the cooler things in his short little life.
While on the Boro subject and strictly only for language acquisition geeks:
Boro, “We found this thing, you know, a bit like a horsebox, L…, L…, L…”
Us, “A lorry?”
“yes, that’s it. A lorry.”
It’s only by hanging out with us that you would learn the word for “horsebox” before you learnt “lorry”. She is also very familiar with terms such as “dilly-dally” and “dawdle”, that’s from hanging out with Otto.
London friends alert: so we are going to be in London 10-23 Feb and very much up for entertainment and lodgings round and about Russell Square. Week 2, planning to have Otto with us over half term to get to know the city.
The Rant
Between updates on AJ’s health woes, pictures of my gorgeous family and general tales of the Baxters, I have peppered this blog with the odd political rant. I am an opinionated old git and so I enjoy using this platform to get things that have been troubling me off my chest. I haven’t had one for a while and so I feel the time has come. As ever, please note that reading this is entirely optional, so if you think the Guardian is akin to the Socialist Worker, are uber-patriotic or Michael Gove (UK Education Secretary – Conservative), please STOP READING NOW.
…Gove’s a git… OK just checking.
Well this is all about the current debate on how we should be remembering the First World War (WWI) in this, the centenary year of its outbreak. What is for sure, is that we will be remembering it, again and again with blanket media coverage and that is right, it was the historical event that shaped the 21st Century but how should we remember it? We have now reached the point where there is no one left alive who actually fought in the conflict and very few, who were old enough to have been alive while it raged. Our memories are now filtered through books, films, TV programmes and crucially the teacher who educate us and are educating our children.
This memory has become a politicised debate as Gove argues that the memory of WWI has been tainted by the left and we have forgotten the heroism of the soldiers, the basic decency of the Generals faced by a terrible situation and the difficult decisions politicians had to take. His theory is that there is a narrative arc from Oh What a Lovely War to Blackadder, presented by the arty-farty establishment that undermines what was an example of what puts the “Great” into Great Britain. It should be noted that the massed ranks of historians, including his Labour opposite number, who is a historian, disagree.
The BBC kicked off its programming on Monday night with the first of a four-part series presented by Jeremy Paxman. For those of you who don’t know him, Paxman is best known for being an especially combative interviewer of politicians with a well-known sneer and an apparent disdain for his interviewees.
Given his disdain for politicians, it was somewhat surprising that Paxman seemed to have swallowed the Gove line. I was very keen to watch this programme as I had heard him being interviewed about it on a history podcast and I wanted to see how what he said translated into the documentary itself. Because I had disagreed with a whole lot of what he said and it didn’t disappoint – I also disagreed with most of the thrust of the programme.
I’ll be paraphrasing and quoting out of context hugely here but given that Paxman is the target, I won’t lose too much sleep. Both Paxman and Gove seem to have a particular beef with Blackadder. For those of you who have not had the joy of watching the fourth season of Blackadder, the set up is that the main character, Blackadder, is a Captain who is utterly cynical about the whole war and shares his trench with an idiotic, upper-class Lieutenant who thinks it all a great adventure. The leader is the pompous General Melchit, who cheerfully sends thousands to their deaths with absolutely no regard for their lives.
Both Paxman and Gove see this portrayal as part of the liberal left agend,a starting in the 1960s, to promote the idea that the tommies were lions led by donkeys. But this is to ignore that the donkeys/lions idea came from Alan Clark, Conservative MP for Kensington and Chelsea. If you really want to read the inspiration for General Melchit, read this poem by Siegfried Sassoon, enthusiastic volunteer in 1914, written in 1918.
The General
‘GOOD-MORNING; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
. . . .But he did for them both by his plan of attack
That doesn’t sound to me that this was a stereotype entirely dreamt up in the post-1960s liberation.
So anyway, back to Paxman, if we must. He speaks of a spirit of shared endeavour that we have lost since the advent of the individualistic, hedonistic 1960s. He thinks that we have lost the idea of sacrifice and we cannot speak of it without coupling it with the word “pointless”.
So let’s think about this spirit of shared endeavour and this idea of sacrifice. I would say that this is the same spirit and idea that in your enemy you would call “bloodlust” or “fanaticism”. It really is worth trying to think the way other people think and to try to look beyond our worldview. Our current enemy number one, the jihadist, doesn’t think of himself as a fanatic, he thinks he is doing the only sensible thing, by laying his life on the line, by sacrificing himself for what he holds dear. These were the same sentiments promoted by the British recruitment propaganda.
Paxman shows us a popular politician who toured the country whipping up crowds to volunteer and revels in the story of the Hearts team that volunteered, promoting a rash of their supporters to volunteer alongside. Given what we know was the end result of the war, is this kind of spirit something that we want to fete? Is this an idea that we want to promote in our children?
I was going to just use the last line from the Wilfred Owen poem below, but somehow that would be not right, because as a whole it is the best refutation of the whole Gove concept that we should somehow teach our children that there is somehow something worthwhile in sacrificing your life for your country.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
(Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori = it is sweet and right to die for your country)
I think that we should not forget what we are remembering this year. We are remembering the very beginning of the 1914-1945 period that included not only the two World Wars but also the Spanish Civil War, the Rape of Nanking, the Winter War between Finland and the USSR and the aerial chemical bombing of Iraq by Britain (oh yes, we invented it!), the Holocaust. Is there any bit of this that we want to pass on to our children as in some way a model?
There were some social advancements, such as the franchise for women that were undoubtedly accelerated by the war but I’d imagine that only the most strident of feminist would say that the death of ten million men was a price worth paying for votes for women. We could have got there by other means.
Paxman touches on one of these social advancements when he casts his supremely humorous ironic glance on the fact that Sikh soldiers were treated by white nurses in the Indian-inspired Brighton Pavilion. He doesn’t stop to ask what the bloody hell Sikhs were doing fighting for the freedom of Belgium as part of a convoluted web of alliances to defend the British Empire. And we should be clear about that, we did not go to war to defend the freedom of Belgium in the same way was we did not go to war in WWII to defend the freedom of Poland, we went to the war for the same reason as we have been to war in Europe for hundreds of years: Britain will not allow one force to dominate Europe and restrict our trade.
So finally back to history, we really should not forget and we should treasure what we have. I was born and have spread into middle age with only the shadow of nuclear Armageddon and inter-faith war hanging over me. I, myself, have never had to get out of my sofa to defend my hearth. The year we really should be celebrating is 1915, which represents sixty years of European peace punctuated only by the odd Balkan genocide, but they would spoil the party, wouldn’t they? This is absolutely unique and something that we should consider before we all vote UKIP in the next Euro elections and beyond. Sixty years in history is really a very short time. We waited for one hundred years between the Napoleonic wars and WWI, before we embarked on another European war, and it was another hundred years before that that brought to a conclusion the War of Spanish Successsion, is that the time-span we need to forget the folly of war? Because if so, we are just hitting a critical period and we should be very careful to remember. This article by Franz-Walter Steinmeier, a German minister is worth a read:
1914
Misliterature 