Learn some maths

One of the downsides to the credit crunch is the sheer number of people who now have an opinion on what the economy needs despite knowing nothing about economics nor, in many cases, having any understanding of basic building blocks of finance.

I've ranted about idiots (specifically Billy Bragg) talking about debt earlier (see footnote), and while Bragg-bashing is fun for everyone concerned, he is not the only one. Listening to Any answers - I know, it's a bad idea - I heard, again, the tiresome line that the banks were to blame and people used to be allowed only a multiple of three for their mortgage.

Every time I hear another moron repeat this asinine statement, I want to tattoo 'interest rates' on the inside of the eyelids. The triple multiples was current when my parents first bought a house in the 70s, and when they bought their current one in the 80s, but then so were double digit inflation and correspondingly high interest rates. Now, the base rate is 4.5; in 1975 it was 11, in 1985 it was 12.

Now, at the risk of being patronising, if you apply those rates to a mortgage taken out at the different periods (a formula here), you get radically different numbers. Let's assume market rates a generous 1 percentage point about base and you get figures for annual repayments of £7,455, £11,874, and £12,750 respectively for now, commensurate with a 4-5 multiple of salary for the same monthly outlay.

Einstein called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world - it would be good if people ever bothered to do the calculation.

*By the way, this achievement is Tory one which Major, Clarke and Eddie George can take much credit (helped by benign global conditions). Labour complained and said that reducing inflation wasn't worth short term job losses. Don't ever let them pretend otherwise - Tessa Jowell once tried to do that to me when I lived in her constituency, but then she has never been good with numbers.

Live from the BL

At last, the BL has finally stopped charging for internet access and allows me to access it for free. I'm sure the Bodleian had this some time ago, though I'm not sure it's wireless.

It will allow me to work here and access work email etc. as well as stop me bothering people for the rugby or cricket scores while pretending to work on doctoral matters. I'm not sure it's an unmixed blessing though, it does mean there are even more distractions than there used to be, this blog among them.

UPDATE: It does appear however that the BL haven't been spending enough time at doing at their actual job. Both my orders were wrong today and having re-ordered them, they failed to arrive before the arbitrary cut off for delivry of half an hour before actual closure. I was (am) not happy.

Hurrah for Alan Bennett

I hear on Today that Alan Bennett's papers are being lodged in Oxford with the Bodleian, rather than shipped off to the States for a shedload of cash.

I'm with this lot who thinks this happens too much. I'm pretty relaxed from a cultural perspective. There is broad cultural continuity between us and the US, and any country with the Elgin Marbles cannot complain too much about these things - a narrow definition of national elements serves no-one well. However, the acquisition of most major archives by US institutions undermines the reputation and support for serious research in the UK, and that can only be a bad thing for our universities.

Hurrah for Alan.

It's the way they think we care

I'm probably not supposed to like this, but the news that atheists are going to advertise on buses strikes me as brilliant. Following friends on facebook, it appears they are going to raise a fortune, suggesting they might be able to do this all year. Good for them - should be fun, much better than those amateurish Jesus posters and the tedious ones for 'philosophy' lessons on the tube.

But, though it will be fun, I cannot see what it's going to achieve. The Christian ones are bad enough, but they are at least pointing people to scripture which is vaguely interesting. This is just going to be funny. Maybe we should be funny too (I've long argued that God has a sense of humour), but this isn't going to make people think, it will make clever people laugh at other people (mostly stupid ones). And while I'm all for that, I'm not sure it gets you the moral high ground.

I am however annoyed that Dawkins has started using the word anathema - that's our word. Perhaps if we stopped pretending we can prove God's existence, he could not use nice religious words.

Baptism

I went to a Christening on Sunday, at St Michael's, Cornhill, allowing me to see one of our more notorious priests in action. More importantly, although I've seen a lot of Christenings in recent years, this was the first for ages done outside of the normal Sunday service. it threw up a number of issues for me:

• I had forgotten how short baptism is. As I said, I haven't been to a standalone Christening for years, not since the last round of family ones, and I didn't make all of those. We're were done inside 15 minutes, and, while it was perfectly nice to see, it felt odd going in and out so rapidly.
• I felt the lack of a congregation. Inevitably, the small set of us there were all family and friends, not parishioners. It makes the welcome very different to a congregation-led one. And I think I prefer the latter.
• I wasn't entirely sure what it was for? I later chatted to another friend who was godfather, but didn't stand in the church because he was uncomfortable about saying 'I renounce Satan.' I'm not then sure why he is godfather.
• It reminds me of the strength of the social element of the CofE. Even though I don't think the parents really believed very hard, they still wanted their baby baptised.

It's that last that I was most surprised by. I had roughly assumed that my friends pretty much divided into people who went to church semi-regularly and those who thought it was all nonsense. The former would baptise, the latter wouldn't. But I have a feeling that hard edge is very much a function of youth, and I can look forward to the occasion when previously irreligious couples starting frequenting church when pregnant, only to ramp it once more when the children get to school age.

Now, we can easily make too much of an issue about this - godparents have always been a bit random; religiosity has never been a major part of church for some people. But, though it was a nice little service, I cannot help feeling that it's not quite right for churches to let people get away with this. I have long advocated higher charges for non-Christians at church weddings; and I feel that it should insist if you want the second sacrament, you have to sit through the first.

It plays into a general view in my mind of what baptism is and what it is for. My own views on which are complicated, and also the scene of a hard fought compromise between A & I over how we tackle the God issue with them so I might do them later. For now though, I think I'll limit myself to going on record as saying when it happens for mine, it will be during the service. It's supposed to be (at least partly) an initiation into the wider church; done on a standalone basis, it looks a bit like a naming ceremony for your friends, and that's slightly odd, though there are worse problems. I will withhold the anathema.

Rubbish ends

We went to see I've loved you so long last night, which - and I'm not a big film man - was very good. Or rather, it would have been very good if they hadn't stuffed up the ending. Having done all the hard work around the characters, the director decided to waste it. If you watch it, it's best to just ignore the last scene, though the rot does start before then.


It's part of a greater problem, that besets a number of books as well as films, of not paying enough attention to structure. The best work is balanced and pays attention to the structure. And there are a lot of ways to get it wrong. I read Nudge the other day, and it struggled to fill out the book, and just meandered through the second half (really second two thirds) without adding much to the admittedly good start. Often you just get bad endings. Captain Corelli's mandolin's is terrible, the endless iteration at the end of Lord of the Rings boring and the 'analysis' essay at the end of War and Peace pretentious and disjointed. See also bad editing, which I am convinced is behind the growth in long books, though its roots are old - volumes five and six of Proust suffer just as much a Harry Potter from this. But it can be done very well indeed. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a classic short book, but length can be just as well done - the first three volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall are magisterially structured as well as written, the pace and the rhythms cover a complex world and long timespan effortlessly.

I spent my entire academic career at university being told to structure arguments and making sure I ended with a flourish. I doubt I was the only one, but it is striking how often this lesson is ignored: organise the material, make sure the ending is worth having, and don't overrun.

I won't either.

The problem of presentation

When I was at Ofcom, I remember telling one of the junior members of our team (who is paranoid about identity thievery, so I won't mention his name), that his work was fine, but ugly, so could he change it so that it was easier to read. He was appalled - as if such a trivial matter could be so important.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, when I went to a workshop on prosopography (if you need to look it up, here). It was an excellent day, with some really good thoughts for me to take away, but I was struck by the variability of the presentations. Everyone in the room was clever, everyone was probably pretty eloquent (given most had written long, well-structured PhDs), yet most presentations were either mediocre, or good extemporisations. In fact, most of the best academic presentations (be they lectures or papers) have been of this type. The best was by a chap called Richard Price, who opening his talk with, 'I reread my paper on the train this morning and decided it was too boring to read out' and then proceeded to give an accurate and witty account of the Council of Chalcedon without notes - glorious.

But this was a workshop to compare methods and such extemporisations don't work quite so well. What does work well are slides. And almost everyone used them, mostly badly. There was one exception, Stephen Baxter gave well run though and clear summary of the work he'd been doing on Anglo - Saxons. I looked him up: he used to be a management consultant.

I do slides a lot; I was rubbish at them to begin with - it's a different skill to essays and papers, but it's not that hard: they need to be short, clear and allow you to talk to them, not read them out. I doubt historians are taught how to do this (I wasn't), but - on the evidence of this - God they need to be. A shame too, because it made it harder to understand what were fascinating issues and less appreciative of what was excellent work.

Who will rid me of this turbulant priest?

Sometimes it's just deeply embarrassing to be a Christian, especially an Anglican. Largely because all we tend to talk about is homosexuality at the moment. The latest injudicious comment, from Peter Mullen, that 'homosexuals should have their backsides tattooed with the slogan: "Sodomy can seriously damage your health".' is - to say the least unfortunate. And does rather reinforce the view that we are incapable of communicating with the world around us.

Agreeing with the modern world isn't really necessary in the Christian - cue long digression of eternitym, but it would help if our priests had some regard for communicating with it. There's lots already been said on how unchristian his comments were, but I'm not sure what that means in this context, though it was childish and a bit nasty. More importantly, it was the rant of a public figure who either had no concern for his institution or seems to have realised what he was doing.

That said, I've always found Mullen a bit shrill, even on debates we agree on (he's sound on BCP). But I think what is so depressing about this is the failing on his own standards. An advocate of the enduring value and richness of the prayer book tradition, who for decades has thundered forth at the poverty of language and crassness of tone of the the modern liturgy (all of which is true) should do better. What would Cranmer make of a 'satirical' comment on sodomy on a blog? (which I might add you cannot now read).

Offensive I can live with; Paul was offensive, but not crass, stupid and self-destructive. Time for retirement I think.

Anathema indeed.

Bibliography, September 2008

Books bought / recieved (20)

J. Barnes, Cross Channel
S. Brook, The Double Eagle
A. Camus, Les Justes
J.M. Coetzee, Youth
R. Delderfield, A horseman came riding by
M. Drabble, Jerusalem the Golden
J. Fowles, Daniel Martin
G. Greene, The Entertainers
M. Hamid, The relectant fundamentalist
T. Heyendahl, The Ra expeditions
C. James, The Remake
D. Lessing, The fifth child
D. Lodge, Changing places
M. McBride, The fall
G. Robb, the Discovery of France
R. Tremain, Restoration
B. Unsworth, After Hannibal
J. Vance, Tales of the dying earth
A. Weisman, The world without us
Malcolm X, The autobiography of Malcolm X

Books read (16)

J. Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
J. Berendt, City of falling angels
J. Goodwin, The Snake Stone
T. Heyendahl, The Kon-Tiki Expedition
D. Hughes, The Imperial German Dinner Service
R.P. Jhabvala, Esmond in India
N. Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
C.S. Lewis, Till we have faces
M. McBride, The fall
A. Powell, A Question of Upbringing
J.D. Salinger, Franny & Zooey
B. Scovell, Dickie: A tribute to Harold Bird
C. Stewart, The Almond Blossom appreciation society
C. S. Saunders, Hawkwood
A. Weisman, The world without us
B. Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

I'm rattling along at the moment. The commute into White City has really driven up my book consumption (this is the only upside of working in White City). And I'm approaching the fabled 150 p.a. mark. Unfortunately, a lot of what I am getting through is rubbish.

Actually nothing was terrible, just a bit disposable. Even The Kon-Tiki Expedition was imperfect. It lacked tension, though clearly fascinating and an astonishing expedition. I read earlier this year that it's wrong, Sykes in The Seven daughters of Eve argues that genetic records show the islanders are descended from Asians, not Americans, but even that doesn't prove no journey of this kind took place. The best things I read all month were Berendt's two books. Midnight... was probably the best , with an excellent account of what's clearly a fascinating town. My desire to go to the American South intensifies; Angels was intoxicating and thrilling, but did have a the advantage of the Venetian setting. Both were great.


In terms of fiction, I've commented on Powell already, but it was a good start to the Powellathon. I remain unsure about Zorba the Greek, basically I think because I just don't agree with the central premise and so I found the narrator quite irritating. Not as irritating as Salinger, but that's no surprise. Jhabvala and Unsworth were good though, with the former the best of the fiction crowd. I'm growing to like her work very much. And Sacred Hunger a sound neglected Booker winner, but not stunning - it lost its way a little towards the end, but was compelling in its well researched detail on the slave trade. The Fall, which I read on the last day of the month because I mislaid my copy of Nudge (on which more next month), was truly terrible.

Putting my money where my mouth is

Like most people of my age, I suspect I am entering a phase of life where a number of institutions in my past begin to try to extract maximum amounts of money from me.

Last night, college rang and I caved in. Actually, it was the third time they had rung and I could no longer claim that I was busy as I had done the last time. But it had given me time to think; and I had decided to give them some money.

In essence, my logic went like this:

• I believe in elite universities. It is paramount that we have academic centres of excellence. This is hardly controversial - ask and Frenchman or American
• I think Oxford should be one of them. Actually, I think this is really important. Oxford has a certain charm and refusal to take it all too seriously which I welcome. It's a useful corrective t0 the tedious seriousness which characterises working life
• I believe, again quite strongly, that private funding should be a part of the solution. Now isn't the time to detail my thoughts on university policy (there are many)
• I approve of philanthropy. I give.
• I owe a great deal to Oxford, both for the obvious career benefits it gave me, but also the enjoyment and the friends I made

So, actually the resistance to handing over cash is irrational. The only rational objections remaining were either financial (which doesn't stack up. I have the money - it comes out of my tithe) and the feeling there are more deserving causes. Clearly this last is powerful, starving children in Africa &c. &c. But I think we have to move past that, otherwise nothing would be donated to anything other than development charities. They are both important.

As a final aside, in the cold light of day, I feel slightly cowardly in that I did specify that it should be spent on student support. This is obviously an accounting fiction and Christ Church will just rebalance the books accordingly, but it made me feel better. If I had really had the courage of my convictions, I would have given it to them to spend at their discretion. Maybe next time.