A visit to Sheffield

Me and my friend

What a happy 24 hours! I caught a train and went straight to the stage door of the Crucible. And there after forty five years was my university friend, famous, bringing enjoyment to so many people including me. Miriam* had invited me see her in Me and My Girl in which she plays the Duchess and to have lunch. It seemed to me that she'd not changed in all this time, but then perhaps that's because she's hardly ever been out of public sight. I'm accustomed to her face as she's not to mine, yet we slipped into conversation as easy as it had always been with her when we were at university. "As I was saying..." when a near lifetime intervened. In the evening I sat in the stalls and was as happy watching the musical as at the party after carnival last February in Ano Korakiana. Me and My Girl is a tale that works in England especially; class divisions surmounted by love, a high point being the end of the first act when toffs, at first aghast, then hesitantly enthused, are drawn into the Lambeth Walk. Of course I knew the tune - everyone does - but I'd never seen it in its original setting, a musical which played from 1937-1942 (the year I was born) - bearer of the most resonant of class mixing narratives - including ours. My programme reminded me

...that it was seen three times by the King, George VI, and its tunes went round the world...Me and My Girl is about the clash between culture and class, love versus duty and of course, being true to one's roots, as well as having catchy tunes. At the heart of it is the song and dance number which Lupino Lane -  music hall character over a century, archetypal cockney costermonger - created, entitled The Lambeth Walk. The dance acts as a social mixer...becoming so popular in Berlin that a leading member of the Nazi Party apparently denounced it as 'Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping'.

I remembered a film clip I'd seen years ago referred to in my programme. In 1942 Charles Ridley of our Ministry of Information, purloined extracts from Leni Riefenstahl's grandiose celebration of Nazism and edited her ridiculous and hideous pictures of goose stepping stormtroopers so that they seemed to taking two steps forward, one step back, three steps forward, to the, by then, famous tune from Me and My Girl - rather good propaganda, especially as The Lambeth Walk was already popular in Germany, though officially condemned.

In the Crucible the audience was enraptured - prolonged clapping, cheers and whistling, as the number ended - and then after a crafty pause - was encored into our applause. There were other famous tunes - The sun has got his hat on, Leaning on a lamppost; lots in between; the cast working brilliantly together; entertaining us with songs, dances and jokes - verbal and visual - to an ever-enthusiastic audience. It was silly, sweet, innocent and good, and people, including me, had a happy evening.

After the show Miriam and I had a light supper, shared memories and promised to stay in touch. On Saturday morning, still in Sheffield, I strolled the town, chilly and windy; enjoyed a favourite treat, a tray of chips in curry sauce eaten outside the chippy. As time for my train approached I wheeled my bicycle down High Street. There was a demo outside Barclays, chanting against bonus payments for their rogue CEO with handheld posters - 'Rage Against the Bankers'. Further down the street, just opposite Boots, I was drawn to a violinist playing beautifully to the street. I listened, pretending it was age and the chill wind that made my eyes water so, until she gathered her things, including a deserved pile of small change and immeasurable pleasure. I felt light headed and light footed as I headed gently down to the railway station.
*Miriam's captured - in so far as that's possible - rather well in this extract from an Australian blog commenting on her performances there a few years back. I notice that her brave - far braver given her standing and the fact of being Jewish - stand against the expropriation of Palestinian land for Jewish-only communities. The idea of Miriam having to defend herself against even the imputation of anti-semitism (a vice deserving the seventh circle of hell) is a sign of the knot apologists for Israel's present actions have tied themselves in trying to fend off those who oppose her policies in Gaza. It's like accusing me of paedophilia for loving Richard and Amy.
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Monday I cycled into campus to sit in on a talk by my colleague Tony Bovaird on trends in co-production - ideas about public service provision drawing on the work of Elinor Ostrom on the government of common pool resources. The day was arranged for members of the Japan Local Government Centre on a two day visit from London. Tony made a point of signalling a greater sense among people in business that were things the public sector can do better, and a greater recognition within the public sector that there are things business can do better, and that if both long opposing sides could work together....he gave Emma Harrison's A4e as an example of public-private mutuality, pointing out that Harrison was child of a piratical capitalist that had cut swathes through the UK steel industry.

Prof Tony Bovaird at Priorsfield

...and here's LGIU's briefing on the Localism Bill.
In Ano Korakiana's there a meeting on Tuesday evening to discuss the future of education in Greece, Corfu and the village with implications for the future of the village's kindergarten and primary school, hardly fifty yards from our house on Democracy Street.

Σύσκεψη πραγματοποιήθηκε σήμερα το απόγευμα στα γραφεία της Δημοτικής Κοινότητας Άνω Κορακιάνας, με πρωτοβουλία του Τοπικού Συμβουλίου και τη συμμετοχή του Διοικητικού Συμβουλίου του Συλλόγου Γονέων του Δημοτικού Σχολείου και του Νηπιαγωγείου του χωριού και κατοίκων. Η συζήτηση αφορούσε το Δημοτικό Σχολείο και τις προοπτικές του στο προσεχές μέλλον. Σύμφωνα με τις δηλώσεις του Αντιπροέδρου και των μελών του, το Τοπικό Συμβούλιο εγκαινιάζει έτσι, ένα νέο τρόπο «ανοικτής» λειτουργίας, προσέγγισης και συνεργασίας με τους κατοίκους. 

There was a meeting on 15 January at the offices of Ano Korakiana's local council of the school parent's association and other residents to discuss prospects for the school. The vice president and council colleagues supported a new way of  'open' operation, involving collaboration with residents.(Excuse my translation)

I am so aware of the vital role of a school in the sustainability of a village and before that the importance of young families being able to afford to live in the village when house prices have become so high because people like us buy homes there.

30 January 2011 - apprehensions about the future of the school in Ano Korakiana

The school in 1939 with 130 pupils

Getting ready for Australia

Scrutiny seminar for New Forest District Council

It was a super course; Mark confident and articulate with explanation and animation; Janine making flip chart notes summarising discussions; members enthusiastic; scrutiny chairs present of course but also the Leader and several cabinet portfolio holders keen to discuss ways they could work in concert, interdependently – each entity - scrutiny and executive – understanding each other’s functions, not glossing over the necessary tensions defined by their separate roles  in the working of the council. Excellent evaluations. 
Afterwards Mark gave me a lift to Brockenhurst where I had two hours to kill. Browsed in a bookshop and bought a book I’d not heard of – An Island in Time: the Biography of a Village by Geert Mack; about the Frisian village of Jorwert (pop 330 and falling) in the northern Netherlands. ..the biography of a village during the 'silent revolution that swept through Europe between 1945 and 1995'. Without being sentimental about the hardness of pre-industrialised agriculture he documents:

...the turning point at which for the first time in history there were more people living in towns than in the country…an historical volte face comparable to the abandonment of nomadic hunting and gathering in favour of the static farmer’s life…the consequences of this great migration, for those who have eyes to see it… farmers and their children who have been cast adrift… in the churches of Warsaw, in the grey tower blocks of Bilbao, in the refugee city of Sarajevo, in the doorways of drab Amsterdam suburbs, the cigarette vendors on Istanbul’s Galata bridge…millions of poor factory girls in China…derelict farmsteads in Ireland and Southern Europe…dried up communal washing facilities in French villages…farmhouse conversions on the outskirts of London…overgrown terraces on the slopes of the Pyrenees, the empty and impoverished villages in Poland and Portugal

I bought fish and chips in Brockenhurst; took them to the station waiting room. Engrossed in the pleasures of eating and reading I missed my train to Birmingham. I was helpfully guided to another, which with a change at Winchester would get me home before midnight. I’d bought a dedicated ticket for the 1900 service yet both train managers used their discretion and spared me the extra fare due. “No problem, mate” I felt inordinately grateful wondering if I’ve become nicer or people more decent. 
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Meantime I’ve been running over the itinerary of our coming journey to Australia and New Zealand, working through a travel agent in Bendigo, to visit Melbourne, Brisbane, Mackay, Launceston in Tasmania and Dunedin and Wellington in New Zealand. It’s my third visit working first with John Martin, and on my own in New Zealand. Lin, coming too, is excited at going again to the other side of the world, yet balks at the prospect of surrendering to my diary; taking a time-limited walkabout in a new city; meeting up at a necessary time; dashing off again first thing. In forty years we’ve steered off‘togetherness’, enjoying the possibilities that arise from sharing spaces, houses and beds. I console myself that over five weeks the tighter schedule will last hardly ten days and that just perhaps, weather, food and company will compensate for having to be ‘Simon’s wife’…but I understand her feelings too well.  

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Miriam copied me this;
Has to be done!
Love, MM

Miriam with Sara at a tented community south of Hebron

"...the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust..."

Map from Martin Gilbert's The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy Collins:London 1986

I read from the Commons debate on Gaza on Thursday. Sir Gerald Kaufman (Member of Parliament for Manchester Gorton):

I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine. I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me. I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence. My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians—the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that “500 of them were militants.” That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants. The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews. Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed. The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said: “You make peace by talking to your enemies.” However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel. It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.

Letter to Sir Gerald Kaufman MP, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA. Sat 17 January 2009:

Dear Sir Gerald. My political opinion and actions are nearly irrelevant - except to me. I'm now 66. Ever since I learned about the Shoah - as a 10-year-old stumbling upon a book with black and white photos of scenes - obscenes - I steadily congealed, then froze into a position as immovable as an insect in amber - not only revulsion at what happened, but at the relentless convergence of banalities, incivilities, myopia and minor moral failures that converged to help bring about such monstrous things. I don't experience this as guilt - though I could be defined as a gentile - but as something more implacable, disconnected from identity, making me psychologically incapable of distinguishing between anti-semitism - to me, an evil far greater than any other for its demonstrable consequences - and opposition to the policies of the government of Israel. I can deplore but I've been morally stupefied by the imprint of certain images seen in childhood. If mere images, and as I grew up, texts, can have such effect, I can only try to imagine the influence of more direct experience. No-one reproaches me, since my opinion is of such minimal importance and because they're nice to me or trapped in parallel fixative. Your speech in the Commons on Thursday moved me - in both senses of that word - helping me to see through the moral fog in which I've existed for so long, but it would a great reproach to me if anyone thought that I was persuaded by you rather than by my own conscience. Yours sincerely, Simon Baddeley

 [Back to the future 22 March 2009: Evidence to which I've opened my mind in recent weeks 'Burning Conscience: Israeli Soldiers Speak out' - a Youtube clip from 2006 - two good men - Avichai Sharon and Noam Chayut, veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces and members of Breaking the Silence Israeli soldiers speak out about recent war crimes in Gaza Breaking the Silence (Hebrew) Breaking the Silence (English) and some analysis of Israel's 'worst enemies - Liberal Jews' Piece on UK government 'backtracking' on preventing war crimes charges against members of the IDF visiting the UK]

[Back to the future - 25 Feb 2010 Listen to the heroes of Israel - the moral courage of Israeli dissidents - Rami Elhanan]
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23 October 2010: Only this week have I heard of my friend Miriam Margoyles' support for the ENOUGH - a coalition made up of more than 50 organisations including Pax Christi, War on War, Quaker Peace & Social Witness, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Interpal, Medical Aid for Palestine and a number of Trade Unions seeking an end to the Israei occupation of Palestine:

[30/3/18 Notes on how to criticise Israel without being anti-semitic]