Weblog

As any fule no, a blog is a weblog, and it started out by being a list of sites visited. As an antidote to Blytonia, here are some of the more interesting items I've come across in the past few days.

Jim Murdoch ponders the dearth of modern nursery rhymes.

Lorna Watts is refused the loan of scissors by a north London librarian: They are sharp, you might stab me.

Anton Vowl suggests what Gordon Brown should have answered to that question from Andrew Marr.

Belle Waring has an impassioned post on Crooked Timber about sexual harassment in the academy, with a sideswipe at "look but don't touch" Kealey from Buckingham. Mary Beard isn't so bothered. Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal? (Or as contemporary? I'm inclined to add.) Yes, it may have been satire, but it's pretty lame satire.

In a post entitled Because Men are Stupid and Shallow, That's Why, Jeff Fecke demonstrates that some men are capable of seeing the person beyond the breasts. He challenges the Canadian Rethink Breast Cancer campaign (aimed at raising men's awareness by concentrating on breasts):

the thing about breasts that I generally like the most is that they’re usually attached to living, breathing women, and I like women, because, you know, they’re people. Many of them are people I like, and consider friends. All of them are worth far more than the breasts attached to them; that should go without saying.

Ben Goldacre considers the AIDS-denialist film House of Numbers, which was shown at Cambridge Film Festival and (temporarily) hoodwinked rationalist sceptic Caspar Melville. Goldacre starts a lively discussion about how to deal with moonbats - exposure, ridicule, debate? Or by ignoring them? (There's no widely accepted noun for that, but ignoral might suit.) This comment in particular struck me:

The best advice my late Dad ever gave me was; “Never argue with an idiot, because people watching lose track of which is which”. The older I get, the more I appreciate his words. Several times a week, I’m given cause to think of them.

Teach the debate is what creationists say.

Jack of Kent argues why English libel law is a danger and makes a proposal for reform.

Shuggy has a go at performative theists aiming for the class prize.

no man ever forsook his father, mother, brother, sister, son or daughter and took up his cross in order to support the nuclear family, preserve the work ethic, reduce crime in the neighbourhood or foster charitable giving as an important ingredient in civil society.

Terry Glavin doesn't know how to handle the human tide, except that the handling should be humane. Who could disagree?

Right, I'm off to Oxford now for the launch of See How I Land.

Antidote

[Emily asks: Did you enjoy the Blytons? Yes, like a drug. When I wasn’t reading them I’d be trying to work out how I could get away in secret for my next fix. It was the summer holiday, and my mother thought I should be out of doors. Normally I needed no encouragement, so she must have worked out that something was amiss. Inevitably, she discovered me in the act.]



- Said, said, said, said, said! My mother jabs her finger down the page. It’s so boring! She looks exasperated.
- But it’s not boring! It’s very exciting! I want to know what happens next.
- Said Julian, said Dick, said George. Didn't you notice? Proper reading is when you read the words.
She’s right. Why hadn’t I noticed?
- Look at this. She produces another red-covered book, the same size as Five Go to Smuggler's Top. My spirits lift for a moment, then I see the title: Just William. Richmal? Why do these writers all have funny names? The pictures aren’t as good as Eileen Soper’s. The boy doesn't look much older than me. He’s very scruffy. There isn’t anyone who looks as sensible as Julian. At least there’s a dog, but he’s not powerful like Timmy. I don’t think these children will be able to deal with grownup situations like smugglers and spies. But the print is small, which suggests it's for older children. It is confusing. I look again at the boy with his cap askew and his socks around his ankles. His face is grinning and dirty.
- That boy doesn’t look very reliable.
- He's got more life in his little finger than all this lot together.
I stare at his little finger, which is just a blur.
- I think you'll enjoy his company. But you can’t have it yet. Finish that Famous Five and come and tell me all about it. Then we’ll see.

* * *

My mother is right of course. She is always right. There is an art to writing that doesn’t draw attention to itself. But now she’s pointed it out, I can’t help noticing the saids, and that’s done for it.

William hardly ever just “says” anything. He’s forever exclaiming, proclaiming, conjecturing, expostulating, reasoning, arguing, protesting and even ejaculating. (Ah that will get me some Google traffic. But those were the days when social intercourse was polite.) I get the impression of a boy with a very mobile face.

Sometimes I need to ask the meaning of a word, and the tubby, child-sized COD has become a dear friend. But that's another story.

Issues

Gmail is temporarily unable to access your Contacts. You may experience issues while this persists.

Issues? The mind boggles.

Of course I know what they mean, but it's the first time I've seen this used formally and it piqued my interest.

Here's dictionary.com:

1. the act of sending out or putting forth; promulgation; distribution: the issue of food and blankets to flood victims.
2. something that is printed or published and distributed, esp. a given number of a periodical: Have you seen the latest issue of the magazine?
3. something that is sent out or put forth in any form.
4. a quantity of something that is officially offered for sale or put into circulation at one time: a new issue of commemorative stamps; a new bond issue.
5. a point in question or a matter that is in dispute, as between contending parties in an action at law.
6. a point, matter, or dispute, the decision of which is of special or public importance: the political issues.
7. a point the decision of which determines a matter: The real issue in the strike was the right to bargain collectively.
8. a point at which a matter is ready for decision: to bring a case to an issue.
9. something proceeding from any source, as a product, effect, result, or consequence: His words were the issue of an intelligent man.
10. the ultimate result, event, or outcome of a proceeding, affair, etc.: the issue of a contest.
11. a distribution of food rations, clothing, equipment, or ammunition to a number of officers or enlisted soldiers, or to a military unit.
12. offspring; progeny: to die without issue.
13. a going, coming, passing, or flowing out: free issue and entry.
14. a place or means of egress; outlet or exit.
15. something that comes out, as an outflowing stream.
16. Pathology. a. a discharge of blood, pus, or the like.
b. an incision, ulcer, or the like, emitting such a discharge.
17. issues, English Law. the profits from land or other property.
18. the printing of copies of a work from the original setting of type with some slight changes: the third issue of the poem.
19. Obsolete. a proceeding or action.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

Nope, None of those. On the contrary.

Then some similar definitions from another source including additionally:

Informal A personal problem or emotional disorder: The teacher discussed the child's issues with his parents.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Not that either. I try to keep sane when the computer plays up.

Further down the page:

Slang dictionary

n.
problem. (In colloquial use, issue has virtually replaced the word problem. It is even heard in a few idioms such as Do you have an issue with that?) : I had an issue with my car this morning. It wouldn't start. , You are late again! Do you have an issue with our office hours?
Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition.
Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill

The car thing.
What's the problem with problem? Anway, why didn't Gmail just stop after the first sentence? I get the impression that "problem" isn't a sufficiently empathetic word for their purposes as they want to convey the nuance that We know that when things go wrong people get upset. I hope I'm wrong. It's infantilising. Not everyone gets upset, and it's something we all try to grow out of. If they wanted to convey a warm fuzzy Googly feeling, an apology might have done the trick.

Torch under bedclothes

By balancing the stool on the chair, I can just reach the top of the wardrobe. I know it’s silly and dangerous, but I’m sensible and a good climber. I’ll get into trouble if anyone catches me.

It’ll be worth it.

Up there under the ceiling is a cardboard box full of books the new vet carried into our kitchen when he arrived for supper yesterday, announcing: Anne would like these. Out of politeness he’s allowed to show what’s in there: a glimpse of maroon, occasionally light blue bare boards, dust jackets long gone: a dozen fat volumes – twenty perhaps. All the same size, the same but different. A collection! On the bottom right hand corner is impressed an almost illegible signature, which seems to say Cuid Blyton. Cuid is a funny name, I think, but the titles are irresistible: Five on a Treasure Island, Five Go to Smugglers’ Top. For me! All night, and all the next day, unread adventures torment me: Five Go to Mystery Moor, Five Go Off to Camp, Five Go to Billycock Hill.

My mother deems them “unsuitable”. You can read them when you’re old enough, she says.

It’s not fair. She knows I am a good reader. The headmaster calls us in for reading tests. He says, I don’t know why I bother with you and Christine Simpson, I only call you in to cheer myself up. He puts his arm round me in a fatherly way. I have a reading age of fourteen.

It is only years later that I realise my mother meant when you’re old enough to recognise them for the trash they are.

Meanwhile, here I am, tiptoe on the stool balanced on the chair, stretching for the forbidden books in the cardboard box just too high for me to reach. I try jumping. The stool rocks alarmingly. Only by tugging and tearing a corner of the cardboard can I get a hold on one. It’s alright, no one will look on top of the wardrobe until Christmas time, by when I’ll be old enough to say I was much younger when I committed the crime. They might even think the box was torn already. So I dip in and grab a book.

Five On a Treasure Island. The vet is a methodical man. It’s the first in the series.

How different from the home life of an ordinary person

For reasons we won't go into, this morning I found myself listening to William Shawcross being interviewed by Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour about his new biography of the late Queen Mother. What an extraordinary piece of radio. The Royal Family is an anachronism, useful as trade ambassadors and tourist attraction. And - in principle anyway - it is a good thing for the Prime Minister to have someone to defer to. (Imagine Blair as head of state. Or Cameron for that matter.) But, while Murray has no time for this gilded, profligate life and sense of entitlement, Shawcross adores his subject. I'm on Murray's side in this. Yet through Shawcross's passion one can also glimpse Murray from his point of view: shrewish, petty, practically philistine. But she keeps her cool.

After the abdication, the war, Diana, the alleged colostomy - the fun starts at around 11 minutes in:

JM: One of the other things she was criticised for was her profligate lifestyle, and she seems to have almost gaily announced that she might go bankrupt. Why did she live in such splendour?
WS: Because she enjoyed it. Because she grew up to that. She was one of the last of generations of people, of aristocrats, who weren't ashamed of their birth and the concept of noblesse oblige, she wasn't ashamed of giving employment to lots of people and having a jolly good life. And she enjoyed it, she could afford it, and she certainly lived better than you and I do. And why not?
JM: Could she afford it?
WS: She gave a huge amount of pleasure -
JM: She did have an overdraft
WS: Of course. Have you never had an overdraft?
JM: (Pause) I'm not the Queen Mum.
WS: I've had overdrafts. I couldn't live without an overdraft. (laughs) Always begging the bank manager not to come down too heavy on me
JM: But she had thirty three staff and she had -
WS: (interrupting) Why do you go on about this?
JM: - she had - Because it's fascinating -
WS: It's so silly, Jenni, this is an incredibly important woman, who epitomised this country through the whole of the second world war. She held the country together after the abdication, she created - she enabled her husband who was a hesitant, but adorable man, whom she was devoted to, she enabled him to take over the throne in very difficult circumstances, when a lot of people thought the monarchy was finished in 1936. She personified and symbolised this country. Churchill won the war for us but she and the King sustained the British people through six years of terror and horror, and that's what matters, and you go on about her staff. It's pathetic actually,
JM: - it -
WS: that doesn't really matter, I'm really surprised at you.
JM: - if she -
WS: You're one of the, you're the Queen Mother of Broadcasting and all you can think about is her staff and her illnesses. (fiercely) It's very very funny -
JM: I think people would be fascinated if they thought I had my menus hand-written in French every night, don't you?
WS: No - I well, they might well be fascinated if you do but why shouldn't she?
JM: You met her didn't you -
WS: Yes
JM: - on a couple of occasions and you clearly adored her.
WS: Yes I do adore her! And everyone adored her! Her staff stayed with her for thirty years. Nobody wanted to leave her. One of her pages who'd been with her for twenty five, twenty six years, um, on her hundredth birthday, he was very very ill, he stayed with her till her hundredth birthday so he could take her her morning coffee but went into hospital and died two days later. He kept himself going for her, just to be there for her hundredth birthday. And I hope this is what this book puts over, that she was a woman who was much loved, not just by the millions of people who didn't know her, but even more importantly by the people who worked for her, who knew her well, and I think that's - well, I mean - that's a celebration, something to be celebrated, and I was jolly lucky to be able to have this treasure trove of all her letters of a hundred years.

(Etc.)


...an incredibly important woman... What?
Do listen again before it disappears.

That story of the servant disturbs me. What was his name? Was his loyalty, sense of duty, misplaced? You'd think a sensitive employer would have had him off to the doctor sharpish, but people are not easily or kindly separated from their objects of veneration. He might have been cruelly disappointed if denied the opportunity to serve. Perhaps HMQM was working on that assumption.

By the way, Shawcross and Pan MacMillan are getting a lot of mileage on the BBC today. Nice publicity if you can get it.

William Shawcross is 63.

Councillors pointing at things

Cllr Neil Williams draws attention to a road defect

Glum Councillors:

This blog will doggedly collate images of councillors looking glum whilst pointing at holes in the road, wearing hard hats or presenting oversized cheques. Lets celebrate the work of our local elected representatives! Tweet suggestions to @glumcouncillors

Via.

It's easy to mock. I blame the photographers. Or perhaps the editors. The posed photograph of someone looking glum while pointing at a pothole is a staple of local newspapers. Which come to think of it are under threat not just from the internet, but allegedly from what Roy Greenslade calls the "local Pravdas" produced by, erm, councils. The councils' glossy, clourful, fun-packed magazines are a fast breeding species, full of jolly news of filled potholes, pie-charts, bin collection dates, keep-fit classes and tips on healthy eating. Greenslade may have a point, though it reminds me uncomfortably of the point James Murdoch was making about the BBC. You know, where he was saying that free content on the BBC website was unfair competition for newspapers.

I admit it. It's partly my fault. I rarely buy a local paper.

I didn't go to the pub much either, and look what's happening to them.


[Crap Photo Editions: No Smoking]

Abducted. Abused. Raped. Survived

The header is a quote from The Observer. It should make headlines when a girl minding her own business going to school is snatched away to spend her life with a stranger, and forced to bear him children. But it's not the story everyone's talking about, and it's more common than you might think.

Each year there may be as many as 4000 cases of forced marriage involving British residents.

At least there's a law against it here now, though some claim it doesn't go far enough.

The problem is far wider than forced marriage - as if that weren't bad enough - and it's global.

Violence against women and girls is a human rights scandal; from the bedroom to the battlefield, from the schoolyard to the work place, women and girls are at risk from rape and other forms of sexual violence.

The response of governments to rape and other forms of sexual violence is still inadequate.
Amnesty International

And a better than average CiF, from Victoria Brittain, here.

Amnesty International. Here's the link.

Look like if the words are bleeding

Photo and artwork: Theodore Diran Lyons III

A US college art teacher makes an art installation of his students' abandoned essays - which he marked but they never bothered to pick up - to illustrate his thesis that too many people are admitted to higher education without adequate literacy skills. For the purposes of the display he anonymises and red-pens the uncollected essays to highlight the errors.

Commenters are outraged that he has appropriated students' work, that he is not showing proper respect to his students, that he is not teaching writing in an effective way, that he is misdefining "mistakes" as illiteracy, and that in concentrating on the medium rather than the message he is focusing on an irrelevant skill. He engages his critics with surprising stamina.

The USA is not alone in having a problem with poor language skills. According to The National Literacy Trust, "one in six people in the UK struggle to read and write." Hmm. They don't give a source for that figure. "Dismal", says the chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Here in the UK Lyons would be similarly criticised for using students' work like this. But it doesn't make the problem go away.

Via.

At home with the box

Hebridean Thumbnail 1

fo cheò

islands buried in the sky’s white sands

Andrew Philip

(fo cheò: 'mist-covered')

Today I'm delighted to welcome my first ever virtual guest, Andrew Philip. I bought his collection The Ambulance Box back in May when Salt launched their Just One Book Campaign. It's an impressive first collection, assured and purposeful. Nothing idles; the language sings, as alive as his curiosity about the world. His training as a linguist shines through in the precision of his words and his scrupulous awareness of the contingency of everything. This is a book full of questioning, with no easy answers. The salves in the Ambulance Box are astringent.

Note: Andrew Philip was born in Aberdeen in 1975 and grew up near Falkirk. He lived in Berlin for a short spell in the 1990s before studying linguistics at Edinburgh University. He has published two poetry pamphlets with HappenStance Press —Tonguefire (2005, sold out) and Andrew Philip: A Sampler (2008) — and was chosen as a Scottish Poetry Library “New Voice” in 2006.

The Ambulance Box is his first book of poems. It is dedicated to Aidan Michael Philip, the poet's son and first-born child, who died shortly after birth in 2005.

Andrew blogs at Tonguefire. You will find links there to many of his poems and essays, and a Scots glossary.

Since June, Andrew has been on a demanding virtual tour explaining himself to other bloggers. I add to their number with some nerdy questions of my own.



Welcome, Andy, and congratulations to you and Judith on the arrival of Cerys Ilona!

Q When I read the first poem in The Ambulance Box, I thought "here's a man who knows what he's doing!" and was immediately hooked. But as a writer myself, I know it probably took some courage to open with a one-liner. Is there a story behind that?

AP The first poem in a book is obviously an important one, and I spent ages agonising over which was the right piece to place first. I wasn’t happy that any of the poems of more normal length worked as openers and I wanted to thread the Hebridean Thumbnails — the one-line poems in the book — through the collection, using them to link what felt like different sections, so I bit the bullet and put one of them first. I was pleased with the way it worked so I’m delighted it hooked you. I suspect some people will love that approach and others not, but I think it invites readers into the more contemplative aspects of the book from the word go.

Q You have mentioned working with Rob Mackenzie to hone each other's collection before submission. You have quite different styles, and have each produced sharp and distinctive collections. Would your collection have been very different without these exchanges? How do you rate mentoring, workshops and colleagues in your development?

AP It wouldn’t have been so tight at the submission stage, that’s for sure. Rob’s comments were particularly useful in helping me to decide what poems to leave out. There were also a couple he gave me the confidence to include. For example, I felt that “Berlin/Berlin/Berlin” was a strong piece but was uncertain about how well it would come across to most readers. Slightly to my surprise and much to my delight, Rob rated it as one of the best, so I kept it in.

Creative friendships and relationships like that are surely important to all artists. I’m not a member of any formal, regular writing workshop or writer’s group, so such relationships are particularly important to me. I send poems for comment to people I trust and I’ve learnt a lot that way. In the end, you have to trust your own judgment, but a good critical reading by a fellow poet can help to identify strengths or problems you knew were there but couldn’t quite see. In fact, that person needn’t necessarily be a poet; my wife is generally my first reader and often makes astute comments even though she reads very little poetry. You need people around you who will tell you when they think you’re writing rubbish, even if you don’t always agree!

Although I’ve not been in any formal mentoring scheme for my writing, I’ve benefitted enormously from the advice and encouragement of the poet Michael Symmons Roberts. The fact that someone of his stature would take my work seriously was an enormous boost, especially in the early days of constant magazine rejections. But I might never have come across him had it not been for Roddy Lumsden, who encouraged me when I was a student. I happened to be at Edinburgh University at a good time: Matthew Hollis, Sinéad Wilson and Andrew Neilson were active in student poetry at that point, and Roddy took an active interest in our work.

Q You use a lot of formal devices in your work. Is constraint an ignition, or is it a brake?

AP A good constraint is probably both. Even if it isn’t part of the initial impetus for a poem, it can ignite further lines and images at the same time as helping to shape the material. After all, constraint is an integral part of all art, no matter how free. Even aleatoric art involves constraints of some kind.

Q So how does a poem start?

AP Generally with a word, a phrase or an image. Sometimes a formal device suggests itself and then sparks the words and images, but I can’t get down to work without a linguistic hook of some kind.

Q And how do you finish? How do you know when you've finished?

AP That is a trickier question altogether! There’s no easy answer. It’s intuition as much as anything, and one you have to develop. I suppose that, at some point, the impetus leaves the poem and you have to give it up. I sometimes change my mind about whether certain poems are finished, but I’m unlikely to do an Auden and make significant revisions to poems that have already been collected.

Q Some of your poems are in Scots and some in English. Are you a different person in each case, and are you addressing a different audience?

AP It may be that slightly different aspects of me come out in Scots and in English, as is the case in speaking any two languages, but I think I’m largely the same person. I don’t think of myself as addressing a different audience so much as addressing parts of my audience differently. For instance, what really determines how much readers enjoy “The Meisure o a Nation” is how much they get the references that make up the poem’s equations, not the density of the Scots.

Q As a non-Scot, I don't feel shut out from these, though I do feel a guest in foreign territory, without recourse to my usual conventions. So they are disarming in a way that an English poem wouldn't be. Is that a conscious strategy?

AP That’s interesting. I wouldn’t say it was a conscious strategy, but it’s a useful effect. It’s more that I’m inviting non-Scots readers into the language and all my reasons for using it, which I’ve discussed to some extent in previous stops on this tour. In using Scots, English and Gaelic, I aim to be linguistically inclusive and I hope that the reader feels that spirit of inclusion.

Q Salt produce beautiful books. (I would say that wouldn't I, but even on an objective test they are outstanding.) How do you see poetry publishing developing, and are new media a threat, or a promise of a much wider audience?

AP The ease with which writers can now make their work available globally, including through video and audio, is surely a great boost to their efforts to build an audience. Blogging has certainly helped me to widen my audience geographically, but I’m not sure whether it’s had an effect demographically.

If there’s a threat from the new media, it’s the expectation of free content that is associated with their use. How writers manage that without it destroying the meagre income from their work, I’m not sure.

I’m not convinced that e-books will ever replace the hard copy entirely, but they could open up interesting new avenues for enriching the audience’s experience of the poetry. If poetry e-books with embedded or linked audio and/or video became commonplace, that might be very healthy for the art. Perhaps Bloodaxe are already on the way there by bundling DVDs in with their In Person anthology and the new edition of Bunting’s Briggflatts.

Q Well, the free content on the Salt site certainly persuaded me to get this book! So what are you working on right now?

AP I’m always reticent about talking too much about unfinished work in case it robs me of the drive to carry out the ideas. However, I feel like I’ve begun to hit my stride again with a sequence after a rocky patch for new work and am getting excited about what might come of it.

Q What are you reading right now?

AP Mainly Yang Lian’s Concentric Circles and Ray Givans’s Tolstoy in Love. Ray is a long-standing friend and I read with Lian in London at the end of June.

In prose, I’m reading Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, which is a translation of Julian’s writings by John Skinner. It’s one of those books that have sat on my shelf for ages until what seemed the right time.

Andrew, thank you very much for answering so generously. It's been a privilege having you here. Good luck with your new work - I am very keen to see what you do next.

* * * * * * *

Catch up with Andrew's Cyclone tour - highly recommended.

The Ambulance Box: available from Salt at a 33% discount during August - see below. (Sample poems and podcasts downloadable free.)


A message from Chris at Salt Publishing:

The Just One Book campaign continues with a further sensational August deal.

In order to keep Salt on track through the wet British summer, we're offering you another special deal throughout August. All Salt books are available from us at 33% discount yet again. That's a third off all Salt titles, and free shipping on orders with a cover price of over £30 or $30. Offer ends 31 August 2009.

Simply enter the coupon code HU693FB2 when in the store to benefit.

As before, all we ask is two things—

1. Buy one book. Or perhaps another one ... go on.
2. Pass it on. Share this offer with everyone who loves gorgeous books and likes a bargain (whilst saving independent literature).

http://www.saltpublishing.com

You are everything you feel beside the river

Diamond Geezer ponders fishing:

I was out walking beside a particularly long lake at the weekend [...] and I noticed a heck of a lot of people out fishing. Every few yards another chair, another rod and another sprawled-out display of angling paraphernalia. And I thought two things. Why do people fish? And why are they all male?

I can't speak generally for anyone, but here's one woman's take.

I used to muck about in rivers and streams when I was a pre-teen, back in the days when children were out unsupervised all day (and no doubt some of them drowned, though I never heard of any). I learned to catch fish with bare hands, which for child's play is an amazingly satisfying skill. First you have to find your fish - camouflaged, shy, alert - wait for it, your hands already underwater so there is no splash. To lose yourself knee-deep in a stream pitting your wits against a wild creature in its own element is worth all the aching hands, wet wellingtons, muddy coat and the scolding when you get home. You learn to watch the fish very carefully, and learn patience and disappointment. And you distinguish species, "which are easiest and valueless to catch." Some people go into Big Chief I-Spy twitcher mode, but I knew we didn't have all those fish in our streams, so I didn't.

When I started getting pocket money and an even greater sense of self-importance I could do some proper fishing - bought a second-hand rod and a rubbishy reel. That's where the trouble starts. If you are going to be serious about fishing, you need fishing tackle. It gets expensive, nerdy and competitive, and I couldn't be bothered with all that. And you do it in proper places like the Brick Pits, where you have to stand on the bank because it's far too deep to wade in. There are rules for grown-up fishing - things like pitches and licences, which spoil the Rousseauian fun. And there seemed something faintly cheating about bait, and cruel about hooks. I was never persuaded that fish don't feel pain.

Anyway, I needed money to raid the junk shop every Saturday for second hand books.

Much later I had a boyfriend who was a keen fly fisherman. So I tried my hand too, and seemed to have a beginner's knack for casting. We fished chalk streams in Hampshire and Wales, Highland rivers, wildernesses. There's a fair bit of skill to it, and you can eat some at least of what you catch. Hot-smoking a trout you've just caught by the side of the loch where you just caught it satisfies something pretty primitive. But fly fishing is expensive, and some of the people who do it can be snobbish. (I wouldn't have minded going fishing with Ted Hughes though.)

I married someone opposed to blood sports.

Incidentally, I picked up a book on freshwater fish the other day and was shocked to see how many fish I guddled thoughtlessly out of the Waring and the Bain are now rare or endangered.

But to go back to DG's question: Why do people fish?

O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Fly ? a Trout ! that is more sharp-sighted than any Hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled Merlin is bold ? and yet, I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow, for a friend's breakfast: doubt not therefore, Sir, but that angling is an art, and an worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice: but he that hopes to be a good angler, must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practiced it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.
Izaak Walton

And why are they all male?
I don't know. It sounds as if DG was witnessing a fishing match. That never appealed to me. The regimentation and competitiveness seems more about the technical side of things, rather as motor racing is more about the cars and driving them than about getting to a destination or even the journey. (You will find more women rally-driving than on the racing circuits.)

Angling may be said to be so like the Mathematicks, that it can never be fully learnt; at least not so fully, but that there will still be more new experiments left for the trial of other men that succeed us.
Izaak Walton

What I liked about fishing was being out of doors, hunting, that sense of being wild.

But the men with all their state-of-the-art tackle and half-dozen rods side by side on their rod rests (and what is it about rod rests? and bite buzzers? How disconnected is that?) do care about fish, in their own way. Here is (or was) Benson.

Biographical fog

At a poetry workshop recently someone brought in a powerful piece of work I wish I could post here. It's not linear let alone narrative, mixing apparently random snatches of sharply sensory observation while it plays with voice and register, including a couple of innocent-seeming lines of tabloid-speak. For any smell or texture it evokes, each reader will have different personal associations. The cumulative effect is disturbing, suggestive of abuse, and I'd say among other things it explores the perspective of time and how that can transfer power from abuser to victim. The effect on the reader is to feel voyeur, complicit, accused.

Then our paid-up member of the awkward squad asked a taboo question: What made you write this? The poem made her feel very uncomfortable, manipulated, she said. She felt as though she were being exploited through sympathy to read something she would rather not. But if she knew that the poem came from personal experience rather than a gratuitous attempt to be sensational, she said, she'd feel less antagonised.

It was an uncomfortable moment. The general rule in our workshop is that the writer doesn't say anything until the crit is over, and anyway this sort of question is off-limits, but the questioner felt that this was an important factor in the analysis. The writer said with dignity that they'd rather just talk about the poem. The questioner wasn't very happy about this, or about the direction our discussion took.

Some of us spoke up for the poem to be taken on its own terms. If the poem were in a magazine, the reader could choose to stop reading as soon as she felt uncomfortable. (Anyway, since when has it been the job of poetry to let people feel comfortable?) In the workshop, she could excuse herself at any time. While it's perfectly OK, helpful even, for a workshop member to explain why they find a particular poem in bad taste, or even offensive, or why for them it misses its mark - it's not on to complain that the poem shouldn't have been written. It's one thing to suggest that a poem strikes the reader as second hand, or manipulative, or any other sort of fault, but quite another to question the bona fides of the poet. That's too personal.

So we got that sorted. In the end.
Sort of.

It leaves me with the perennial puzzle of biographical fog. Time and again I've come across poems in workshops and elsewhere read and misread and excused in the light of biographical knowledge: Oh, this must be about his divorce, or, it can't mean that because he's never had children/been to China. No, it's all about the words. Just read the words.

Well, one learns to be disciplined in reading. Je est un autre. We all know that. We aren't misled by the first person. Poets are fiction writers. To go to a poem in search of biographical truth is to make a category error. Poets will write what they are interested in. Notoriously, they adapt reality to their own ends. The poem has rights of its own, irrespective of any mere biographical happenstance. Yet poetry gets stuck with this authenticity rap more than any other genre. Readers don't quiz PD James about how many murders she's committed.

My introduction to formal criticism at school, years ago now, was I A Richards's Practical Criticism. Aeons ago, and it was ancient even then. His aim was to get students to read closely, just the words on the page, without knowing who'd written them or when. So much can be learned from the text alone. My teachers were disdainful of the baggage of biography, which was only so much tittle-tattle. But there's no escaping it, is there? Close reading is the beginning of reading, not the end. Borges had fun with the idea in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Menard rewrote Don Quixote word for word, in the same words, and the critic finds his version "much richer in allusion than Cervantes's 'original' work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602."

Quite so. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Or, consider these thought experiments:

Brian Turner (real name Briony) has never been in the Army, but writes copy for mail order catalogues.
Sharon Olds is the nom de plume of Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity.
Wilfred Owen stayed at home, pruning his roses. He died in obscurity in a retirement home in 1984.

(Heck, if people can believe they faked the moon landing, they can believe anything.) The power of the writing makes the suggestions bizarre, but can we separate it from what we know of these poets' lives? Would we read the poems differently? Can we avoid asking why someone would write such poems? I've seen a reviewer describe those who write in the first person about second-hand tragedy as "the cockroaches of poetry". He didn't mean to liken them to archy but was suggesting that they hitch a ride on undeserved sympathy.

Heaney has an essay in Preoccupations (which I can't lay my hands on for the moment) where he describes urging his students to overcome their feelings of delicacy to crit Dulce Et Decorum Est. His students are reading the witness and, he suggests, prepared to let poetry off the hook. Does Owen overplay his hand? Is "coughing like hags", or "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin" over-writing? Pressing buttons of sentimentality?

(It's tempting to sidetrack into the huge territory of war poetry and whether the poetry lies in the pity as Owen contentiously claimed, or whether it's more accurately the reader's sympathy that lies there. But this post, which is only a knee-jerk stab in the fog, would never get written.)

There is a suggestion that we tend to cut a bit of slack for the witness. A reader who finds she's been cutting slack for an impostor can feel cheated. On the one hand, if the poetry really is in the pity, the work has borne false witness. People who have been relying on whatever truth it purports to deliver feel cheated to discover it's just been pandering to the usual prejudices. Hence the common rage at debunked misery memoirs, marketed as autobiography. On the other is the argument that this can't apply to poetry; if the writing holds us, why should we mind that it isn't true?

Which brings me back to the workshop. The flip side of the coin is the workshop session that ignores, through professional detachment, the person who wrote the poem. If someone writes about despair, or dying, or a sick partner, is this something we should follow up on a personal level after the workshop? I recall reading a letter in The Rialto a while back where a poet complained of what she called insensitivity - her fellow workshoppers gave her a crit on the poem, but ignored the suffering human being who'd written it. I'm not so sure. It depends on the workshop, and the poet, their relationship with fellow members, and their general powers of ordinary communication. Workshops aren't therapy sessions. The poet who expects that is making a category error similar to the reader who expects biographical accuracy. Shouldn't we treat poems as separate entities, and poets as grown-ups who can ask us directly in conversation outside the workshop if they need to offload grief? In fact, isn't the poem sometimes precisely such a formal distancing mechanism for the poet?

And if so, where does that leave poems? Adrian Mitchell once said that he wrote poems because there were some things he could not say directly to the people he cared about.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below - above, the vaulted sky.

John Clare

Palin Shatnerized

(Yes, that's a zee because they are both American.)



Hat tip to the ever-resourceful AKMuckraker.

Andrew Philip

I'll be interviewing fellow Salt poet Andrew Philip here on 5 August, as a coda to the Cyclone tour for his new collection The Ambulance Box.

The Ambulance Box is a timely reminder of the range and power of the lyric – from philosophical exploration to tender and intimate elegies. This is a powerful debut, and Andrew Philip's is a significant new voice.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Purity patrol update

I was so incensed by the behaviour of security guards aired on last Sunday's Broadcasting House that I went onto the BH website and filled in a comments form with some intemperate language, demanding to know the exact location of the petty tyranny that seeks to suppress midriffs and buttcracks, so I could deny the proprietors the dubious benefit of my custom.

I forgot about my outburst. Several people had pretty well convinced me that I'd been a victim of a classic BH wind-up, but I still nursed a sense of grievance that these public places are being privatised by prudes and worse.

But this morning, lo! There was a message in my intray from the great Paddy O'Connell himself. After thanking me for writing, he tells me

the pathway in question was on the South Bank of the Thames, leading from the London Eye to the road to Waterloo Station. It runs perpendicular to the river.

I wonder if I should go back there and see what happens.

Fantastic! (My original message was attached. I'm rather ashamed of it. The word "Taliban" was used. Dear me.) I'm impressed and very pleased that Paddy O'Connell replied. It is a serious issue.

Meanwhile, I've been doing a bit of research, and arguing with friends. I have had difficulty in convincing some people that there is any real difference between a nightclub and the South Bank when it comes to the legitimacy of enforcing standards of dress and behaviour from visitors.

I've have been meaning to post a measured analysis of the issues of public space/private ownership, taking in reviews of books and articles that cover the issue. That will take some time. The privately owned public space concept is complex and evolving. The law can't keep up with the models, let alone how people's behaviour adapts. I haven't even read Anna Minton's book yet.

[edit...] Here are some links to get you thinking.

Liberty discusses private ownership of "public space" in relation to the right to protest, in a submission to JCHR (see esp p 5 et seq)

Cities for sale
The enclosure of urban space (extract from Paul Kingsnorth's Real England: The Battle Against the Bland) from The Guardian

Urban public space is at the heart of city and town life. It is the essence of public freedom: a place to rally, to protest, to sit and contemplate, to smoke or talk or watch the stars. No matter what happens in the shops and cafes, the offices and houses, the existence of public space means there is always somewhere to go to express yourself or simply to escape.

Chris Webster: Property rights, public space and urban design (pdf)

Policing the retail public - keeping out the "less well-heeled"? Guardian article

Shopping Malls: The New Village Green by Robin Fox

Private Policing: A View from the Mall
Abstract of an article by Alison Wakefield that sounds interesting but is v expensive to download. If anyone has more information about it, I'd be most grateful.

Police Partnership at Cribbs Causeway (pdf)

Ecotowns given the go-ahead

Update

And no, I have been assured that the Broadcasting House recording was most certainly not a wind-up:

If you could have seen the look on the face of the female security guard you would know that she was very serious indeed.

She looked as if she had been suddenly struck by a very old kipper, just above the top lip, and she kept summoning assistance on her lapel radio.

Can't have people telling the truth about things like this, can we?

Set list

Toddington Poetry Society are a lovely bunch of people to read to, engaged and responsive. Thank you for asking me.

There's a vogue for recording set lists, so this is what I read last night:

To Paint a Bird (Jacques Prévert, trans AB) - on account of its being 14 July
Holdall (Aircrew)
Yellow Sun, Green Grass
Revesby
The Boasts of Jim McKay
Small Arms
Russkis
Downstairs
Nav Rad
Co-ordinates
The Men from Praga
Britannia
Chamber of Horrors £2 Extra
Chattel

All but the Prévert come from The Men from Praga. The Prévert translation is available on Frank Parker's site here, and the first five TMFP poems are downloadable from the Salt site (pdf file). Nav Rad was featured on small change, and Britannia on peony moon. The title poem is on poetry pf. That still leaves plenty of other poems to read in the book.

At the organisers' prior request for "background" to poems I interspersed plenty of what Bernard O'Donoghue deprecatingly calls "gab". The audience needs a breather between poems, they said, anxiously. Well, of course - and I wondered whose poetry blitzing they'd suffered in the past before it dawned on me that they were probably worried I'd try a one-woman Joy of Six blast. What J6 are doing is something different altogether: the philosophy behind that merits a separate post some time. In the more conventional poetry reading, it's important to give the poem a bit of aural space, but without betraying it. When Bernard does it, it's an artform in itself. It was while listening to him, years ago now, that it dawned on me how good it was not to keep hearing that phrase "this next poem". I've never heard it on his lips, and resolved forthwith to try to banish it from my own.

At the other extreme was a nervous poet I heard at Aldeburgh a few years ago. Much praised and garlanded, she'd flown half way round the world to read at the festival, but some freak of nerves had caused her to write out all her intros and ad libs and read from them as if they were poems themselves. It was horribly embarrassing.

Purity patrol

If you're down on the South Bank showing flesh, a man in a uniform can tell you to pull your jeans up, and if you don't like it he can summon up reinforcements to run you off the premises. Did you know they were "premises"? Neither did I.

I don't normally listen to Broadcasting House, but caught the tail end this morning. The fascists are out in force.

Listen again (for seven days only):
The bit I'm interested in concerns the discussion of public space at the end of the programme. It segues from discussion of the 4th plinth, which starts at around 52.30. Anna Minton (who's just written Ground Control) discusses public space and private ownership, starting at 54.30 minutes, and the clip ends with security guards hassling the interviewer away from the "private" area on the South Bank, after a guard has just asked a girl to pull her jeans up as she was showing a gap... The girl was sitting with her family - it's not as if she was cavorting around drunk with her trousers round her ankles. The goons want the interviewer to stop recording.

We've had it already with hoodies banned from Bluewater, which I thought was was just a weird fascistic aberration, all of a piece with that dystopia. But when you start getting blokes in uniform telling girls to cover themselves on the South Bank, for heaven's sake, I feel a sense of indignation. Who is making these rules, and with what authority? Should people with no mandate other than someone else's money dictate how we conduct ourselves in public?

The Royal enclosure at Ascot, Glyndebourne, the Ritz - most people wouldn't even dream of going there in the first place, so any who choose to can take the dress code deal. This is on an altogether different scale, so the principle is different too. The South Bank looks like a public space. We all feel as if we're entitled to be there. We may not all care to see a butt crack when someone sits down wearing hipsters (I'm assuming that's what the little hitler was complaining about) but I certainly don't want to see people stopped from showing it, especially when they're sitting down with their parents minding their own business.

This is only a symptom of a deeper malaise. As the Guardian headline has it, they sold our streets and nobody noticed.

Don't bury your bras

Textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. About 74 per cent of the two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester, viscose and acrylic blends. Where is Steptoe when you need him?



Another charity bag flopped through our letterbox this week. Unless they are collecting stuff to sell in their charity shops, it's best regarded merely as a way of clearing out clutter if you can't be bothered to go down to Oxfam with your old duds. Or preferably as a binliner. If you read the small print you may spot that the collector for the Lithuanian breast screening project with its pink ribbon isn't a charity at all, although their website seeks to reassure people "that their clothing donations will only be used to fund worthwhile, bona fide charities" - in Lithuania. Even if this week's bag is supporting a pukka UK registered charity, you may find that they get very little out of it.

This one, for example, is in aid of Childline, an organisation that has helped thousands of children with no-one else to turn to. The bag gives details of the charity, with their helpline prominently displayed and the charity registration numbers as required, and the details of the company which actually operates the collection on their behalf. Childline will get £50 per tonne. A tonne is an awful lot of "clean, good quality clothing... and bric a brac". Cambridge Oxfam might well charge £10-£15 for a dress, more for a designer label. See also the Salvation Army value guide. Unsorted mixed used clothing is being sought by a merchant in Bedfordshire this week at 50p/kilo (ie, £500 per tonne). And old bras can fetch up to £2,500 a tonne.*

As far as I know, Childline doesn't operate any charity shops, so this kerbside collection partnership with a commercial organisation is a low-admin method of raising funds that wouldn't otherwise come their way. But you'd be making better use of your resources to give the clothes direct to a charity shop and make a donation to Childline. You can afford to be generous. 50p would be twice what your 5kg bag of castoffs would earn in this particular charity bag scheme with its promised rate of £50 per tonne.

Charitybags campaigns for greater transparency in the field. Their website is a trove of information.

We estimate that around £20 million income is lost by genuine charities each year because of misleading, bogus and poor-value "charitable" house-to-house collections of clothing etc in the UK. Many of these collections are illegal.

You need a local authority licence to collect door to door for charity, even just clothes and bric a brac. Some charities (eg Age Concern, Oxfam, Red Cross, RNLI etc.) have a national exemption, but they are supposed to inform the local authority when they are collecting in their area. Some may have a local exemption granted by the police. If you want to hold a jumble sale for your scout troop and collect door to door for it, this is the route you'd take.

Of course, jumble sales and charity shops fulfil a social need for the purchaser as well as providing income for the charity in question. And a low-guilt solution to the overloaded wardrobe.

But where there's muck there's brass. Second hand clothes from Britain end up on markets in Lithuania and Belarus, and much further afield. According to UN Chronicle,

An estimated 40 to 75 per cent of used clothing donated to charitable organizations end up not in the hands of the needy in the West but in busy markets across the developing regions, such as in sub-Saharan Africa.

It's not the end purchasers I have a problem with (and they are probably being ripped off) but the dodgy operators.

At least with Steptoe, you knew who was going to benefit.

Whatever you do, don't let it go to landfill. (A very old paper, but the principles still apply.)

*On African markets. Apparently Africa lacks an inexpensive, good-quality bra manufacturing industry. (Check the link - it's a fascinating insight into what happens to old clothes.)

Norwich North

I don't know what to make of this. Craig Murray claims he's being gagged. He's standing in the Norwich North by-election, due in two weeks' time. There are eleven other candidates, with the Tories favourite to win. Last I heard, Ladbrokes were quoting him at 25/1, ahead of the Lib Dems (33/1) and the BNP (200/1), UKIP and sundry others.

He's had grief (which he blames on the Ministry of Justice) from the Post Office over getting his electoral address out; the BBC is refusing to give him any coverage; "and, despite numerous representations from within their own union, the Universities and Colleges Union have still banned me from this evenings candidates' education debate, despite the fact that I am the Rector of a Univeristy and a great deal more interesting on the subject than the rest of the candidates put together."

Craig Murray, one of the Indy's Alternative National Treasures*, is the ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan, the man who blew the whistle on the UK's complicity in obtaining "evidence" through torture. In this respect he is on the side of the angels. He was hounded out of office for his pains. All sorts of mud was chucked at him, and then he was ignored, except by the (occasionally rather strange) people that haunt his comments box. By his own admission he's clearly not the most compliant of employees, and his behaviour in - ah - certain matters has been less than saintly. That sets him apart from other pols then, eh?

He is standing on an anti-sleaze platform.** Whatever mud's actually stuck to him from the past, none of it's sleaze-coloured.

Minority candidates usually get a bum deal from the media, unless they are deemed to be newsworthy in their own right. Think how the media have salivated over BNP - and I wonder how many votes BNP would get if they didn't. I'd have thought Murray's colourful past and ability to insert himself in the governmental nasal orifice would make good copy, but the BBC doesn't see it that way:

[in]response to the many complaints about their decision to exclude me from all election coverage. They have started to send out standard replies saying:
one of the key factors they look for is "evidence of past and/or current electoral support" in that electoral area.
Note the BBC's own quotation marks within that quote. They have tacked on "In that area" to their formal criterion.

When the BBC banned me from all coverage at the last General Election when I stood in Blackburn against Jack Straw, who is blocking my electoral address now, the BBC explained it was because I had no "evidence of past and/or current electoral support".

I gained 5% in that election - which is a lot better than the 3% the Greens got in the same election in Norwich North. That 5% may have been modest, but it does meet the BBC's criterion. So the BBC have now moved the goalposts to exclude me, by adding a brand new stipulation "in that area" to their criterion, so the electoral support in Blackburn does not count - despite the fact I might reasonably expect to do a lot better in my own county.

As for the bureaucracy, the whole system is geared up to deal with major parties. So the apparent gagging of Dr Murray isn't necessarily evidence of bad faith conspiring to put the kibosh on his campaign, more likely a convergence of inertia, incuriosity and incompetence. Nevertheless, it is all a bit odd.

I don't know if I'd be voting for him myself if I were in Norwich North. You have to question the common sense of someone who imagines that voters will bother to look at an election address on DVD. But whatever your political stripe, if his allegations here have any real substance it's a cause for concern. The three major parties have an entrenched right to airtime whatever their chances of success, while BNP is becoming a creature of the media, interviewed and analysed wherever they go.


*The Independent says:

Craig Murray Former ambassador

Britain is a better place now that Craig Murray has returned. As ambassador to Uzbekistan, Murray witnessed the UK's changing attitude to torture, and rather than keep it under his hat, came back and revealed all. He had his own problems, what with the drinking and leaving his wife for a dancer. But after a breakdown, he has bounced back to become a fully fledged member of the awkward squad. The Foreign Office may have disowned him, but we welcome him with open arms.

**The Put an Honest Man in Parliament party isn't quite as sexist as it sounds. He had to form it urgently as it was the only way he could get the slogan on the ballot paper.

Do you like to Kipple?

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But - we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring summer in!
And we bring you news by word of mouth -
Good news for cattle and corn -
Now is the Sun come up from the South,
With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

The nights are starting to draw in.

Deji

What would you do if you were a political refugee and discovered that the country you thought was safe was anything but - in fact habitually refused asylum to people from your country then rounded up the unsuccessful applicants into camps before shipping them off back home as fast as it could? Would you trust them to deal with your case fairly, or would you weigh your chances and keep your head down, hoping to get by with help from friends, hoping even for an amnesty?

I know what I would do. And that's what Deji did too. I first came across Deji as a participant in the Exiled Writers project at Oxford Brookes University. He was a popular member of the group. The anthology we all contributed to is due to be published later this year, and there will be a reading from it tomorrow night in Oxford, as part of Refugee Week. Someone else will have to read Deji's poem though, because he was arrested in April and has been held in Oakington since.

In the Looking-glass Home Office world, failing to claim asylum on entry is evidence not of fear of the certainty of being sent back, but of lack of good cause to be here in the first place. He's from Nigeria. The Home Office almost always sends back Nigerian refugees whether they're fleeing political or religious persecution, gangsters, or FGM, even if they can prove those threats are real. You can read the Home Office briefing note on Nigeria here (pdf file). Deji's fear of persecution is real. For failing to toe the party line he has narrowly avoided an assassination attempt; his mother and small son have been kidnapped in an attempt to coerce him. A brother who tried to help him had his flat ransacked. Deji has been vocally critical of the ruling PDP, and they have agents everywhere, determined to stamp out opposition, utterly ruthless.

He is due to be deported tomorrow evening. Campaigners are trying to arrange a Judicial Review; meanwhile you can help by appealing to the Home Secretary to halt the deportation, and to the CEO of Virgin Atlantic appealing to them not to participate in the forcible removal. It will only take a moment. The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns features Deji's case on its homepage today, with links to model letters specific to Deji's case, and the addresses to send them. Do it now.

Update
Sad to report that Deji was deported on Thursday. Right until the last minute his solicitor was prepared to go to the High Court with an application for JR, but the critical proof didn't arrive in time from the Nigerian solicitor. It appears that pressure had been put on him not to expedite Deji's claim. Now who could have done that?

At least Deji managed to get away from the airport. There is a lot more to say about all this.