How Regularly Must It Happen Before We Bother to Prepare Properly?

The uselessness of the English (particularly the southern English) when it comes to coping with snow is notorious. Passengers sit kicking their heels in airports around the world, because at Heathrow or Luton we can’t get the snow off the runways. Here, this morning, hundreds of schools are closed, forcing parents to stay at home even if their workplaces are open.

We don’t have the right tyres on our cars, and when we can’t drive any further we abandon them leaving an obstruction for those coming behind. We don’t bother to clear the snow in front of our houses, thus ensuring pedestrians compress it into something akin to a skating rink. A lot of us don’t even own snow shovels or a bag of grit.

There’s something infantilizing about all this and the media play along with it, playing videos of children throwing snowballs. It feels like we’re not living in a serious country. Not in a place where people believe in the value of work. It can get intensely annoying.

However consider this. The amount of time (and enthusiasm) anyone spends preparing for something to happen is a based on a judgement as to how likely it is to happen.

I remember once in Budapest speaking to a couple of Americans in a bar and they cheerfully admitted that though they were working there on long term contracts they had decided not to learn any Hungarian. The relatively small number of people in the world who speak that language meant that the effort of learning it was not justified.

In the same way, here in England we could work hard, both individually and at a government level, preparing for snow and ice. The Germans have all kinds of laws about this, and all around the year, even in 30^○ summer heat, you can see notices stating who’s responsible for the 'Winter Duty' of clearing the snow away. 

But that kind of rigid discipline is not the English way.

This six inch snowfall only happens every four years or more. (In fact it’s seven years since I’ve seen snow like this outside my window.) It’s an intense nuisance that we’re so little prepared. But, our climate is intensely unpredictable and not preparing is a judgement we make, about the best use of our limited time and resources.

So next time I am cursing the general uselessness of the authorities, I will try and calmly tell myself that this is a judgement we’ve made. And remind myself that, in any decision making, probability and pragmatism should not be neglected. 

HISTORY IS KING

I first read this at 15 and then again in early adulthood and now in middle age once again. It's lifechanging. The moment you finish it you want to inhabit its world - or at least try and write your own story set in that world. There are brilliant descriptions of settings, movement, light and weather. Seton is immensely generous to minor characters, giving them headspace in the story in a way remniscient of Dickens. The first third of the book, Katherine alone making her way in the world, and then married but abandoned to the mad inhabitants of Kettlethorpe, is Gothic. The final third, her spiritual redemption, has tremendous emotional heft and is incredibly moving. I didn't quite cry this time but I have in the past. The middle part (if I was to find a fault) somewhat sags, as the chronicle-sourced narrative of Kings and Great Men takes centre stage. John of Gaunt is a variable character, and somewhat annoying with his self-obsessed fears. Until he mellows in maturity, there is little evidence of his attractiveness apart from his wealth and power. However this is a crucial feature of the book - she's the centre of it, not him or anyone else. Katherine with her beauty and humour and calmness, her vibrant interior life, is a leading lady like few others. And the trouble is, you can look in vain for anyone else like her in the rest of Anya Seton. Years ago I hopefully bought all her other books, but none of them comes close to KATHERINE. This book has launched many historical novelists. There is something about knowing that the world we live in - the ground we walk on, the light and the sky and water - was once inhabited by people whose lives were immeasurably more judgemental, violent and dramtic. The drama of history survives through old beams and old stones and old landscapes as a kind of stage set to drama. Years ago I made a pilgrimage to Lincoln Cathedral and Kettlethorpe in the hope of discovering those textures. Not much is left, but there is something. The rest is inside my head....

 Gateway at Kettlethorpe Manor, the only part surviving from Katherine's time.

The Big Cover Up

Bruce Robinson's 'They All Love Jack' is, I'm tempted to say, the only Jack the Ripper book you need to read, but it won't do if you don't know the basis chronology of events. There again, nearly everyone does know them by now. Robinson's text is encyclopaedic, his thesis closely argued and proved very convincingly through immense attention to detail, including accounts of many murders ignored by other writers and careful analysis of the many Ripper letters. Whether or not you subscribe to Robinson's rather baroque full theory - there is no mystery, just a cover-up; the Ripper was Michael Maybrick, a senior freemason who left masonic symbols at the sites of his killings, framed his own brother (via 'The Diary of Jack the Ripper') whom he then poisoned, and was assured of his own freedom through the vulnerability of the masonic establishment - it does seem unarguable that there was a cover-up at some level. I enjoyed his argument that the police and judiciary were hopelessly compromised by their loyalty to a Masonic establishment that went from the Prince of Wales downwards. As you might expect from the man behind 'Withnail', the book is written in an enjoyably irreverent style (like Orwell at his most polemical), and extremely readable:
'The English Establishment had a full-blown psychopath still active in their midst - but no problem, they could cope with the odd dead kid or two, even more with the odd dead whore. Their only problem was that if he got caught they all got caught, all the way up to the Grant Glutton. How could this profilgate prance around in his pinafore when he shared one with Jack the Ripper?' Excellent stuff. The only fault with the book is its structure -some 150 pages towards the end are devoted to the death of James Maybrick and the horrendously unfair trial of his widow Florence. Whilst this is undeniably gripping reading - a Stalinist show trial comes to mind - it could almost have been a separate book in its own right (I knew nothing about the case, though I had read about the comparable Charles Bravo case; his widow was also a Florence.)
It's a hefty book, but you'll read it fast, specially if you have any interest in how history can be re-written to suit the Establishment. He is enjoyably cynical about the cult of 'Ripperology' and quite rightly questions the veneration with which even modern authors treat the pronouncements of such as Donald Swanson and Melville McNaghten. I can't help wondering if, given there was coverup, the truth is simpler. What about Thomas Cutbush? After all, he was a Superintendent's nephew, but he did not have any complex psychological motivation beyond being a psychopath and loner.

Tomorrow’s Unknown

I’ve noticed that Procrastination happens much more with something interesting but hedged around with uncertainty, than it does with something boring but definite. This is my own experience but it’s borne out by my coaching clients. Ambiguity and uncertainty are the things we dread, it seems to me, more than boredom or even pain.

When we see the prospect of a change, even an exciting change, with part of our minds we feel an urge to settle back into the comfort of our present routine. You might complain about your bed, but bed is never so comfortable as when the alarm clock is ringing.

One effect of this is a tendency to debate the true underlying rightness of the change. Is it really right for me?  Call it overthinking, call it shyness, call it perhaps (in the words of an old song) Courting Too Slow. And so we are s    l    o    w in taking that first step.

It might be a job application or a holiday or even reaching out to a new networking contact. Ambiguity is the toughest thing. Remaining poised at the start, looking at ambiguity from outside, can have a deep allure. If you have not decided on one destination, you have not closed off the other ones.

But thought won’t solve that. You can only address it by plunging in. Feel the pain and do it anyway. Remember, the search for clear mental patterns, everything fitting into place, is almost always futile. We humans are usually far more effective at than action than thought.

There, I’ve written it now. All I need to do is put up on the web. Maybe tomorrow…

Trying to live in the NOW (but this is the 10th day of Christmas)

We are just emerging from the most time-obsessed part of the year, when, our buttons pushed by community expectations, we bring complex event management into our homes just because of a calendar date. I favour the old style of twelve days of feasting, and it's something many of us could keep up, in terms of time off from work, but that event management imperative pushes the leave we take earlier, well before the time-honoured 'first day.' In the old pre-industrial days if there was one key date in the feast it was probably its climax, Twelfth Night. And this year, being a Friday, it might feel something like it once again.