Everything louder than everything else

I'm in the middle of a glut of cultural activity at the moment, as a coincidence of tickets etc seem to have come in at the same time. Last night I went out to see The Dog Roses play in Kennington, which was great fun. It's times like this when you realise that you are blessed in London with an abundance of cultural activities - I've just booked Richard Thompson in Feb to complete the picture.

However, at the risk of sounding old before my time, they were loud, though by no means as loud as other bands I have seen. They were playing in a pretty small room and they weren't very far away so I feel they could have turned it down a little. Their interval act, a man who has been listening to a lot of Dylan (not that that's a bad thing), managed to easily fill the room without any amplification. Now, clearly they are meant to be louder, but do we really the fiddle to amplified to such a degree.

Of course, this is not a new development, and the loudness war (I'm delighted that this is its name) has been knocking around for a while and has been bemoaned by many. I notice it more now that I have an iPod, when the contrast between old and new recordings is striking. It's also pretty much impossible to listen to some tracks on a busy train as they are simply too quiet, though these are mostly spoken word or the like.

However, it's a little hypocritical for any of us - as consumers of amplified music - to really complain about this development, when the real gripe remains with classical aficionados. Amplification robbed a massed orchestra of the title of being the loudest music act one could seem and now, a handful of boys with electronics can outdo a large collection of classical instruments. (I always this record was held by the Who, but apparently no longer). However, I do think it has got worse and shops and pubs have become complicit in robbing spaces of quiet.

So, consistency forbids the anathema, but I still wish people would just turn the music down a little.

Another child gone

I nearly expired from ranting this morning. multimedia technology enabled me to simultaneously read an infuriating work email at the same time as listen to this story on the radio. So angry was I with both of these that I exploded into a coughing fit that took some minutes to subside, and hurt.

At the time, work irritated me most, but during the commute the schooling story just depressed me. Here is Radio 4's summary:

A mother is refusing to send her daughter to school because it will not let her wear earrings. Eight-year-old Alisha Dixon has not attended school for nearly a month.

It's a fair summary, but it doesn't convey the problem once the mother started talking - the interview was just bleak listening. The school is probably being inflexible and a little bit overly draconian on uniform - I neither like nor defend uniform policy in general. However, as soon as the mother started you realised it doomed. Having revealed that she pierced the girl's ears at four initially, she argued that once she had done them again at eight, she wasn't letting them be done again. She ended up saying 'I went to the papers because no-one was listening to me.' It had clearly never occured to her that four year olds, and probably eight year olds simply shouldn't have pierced ears, and people ignored her because this just isn't important.

However, this isn't really the point. What is central to this is her assumption that her view is so important that the school should abandon their policy (albeit one I also don't agree with) and - most importantly - such trivia are more important than her daughter's education. And you know - right there - that's a another child gone - education of so little consequence in the family that it would be a miracle if she comes out engaged and given the tools for a future career. People witter on about academic routes not being best for everyone, but it's pretty much a disaster if they don't even get to find out.

I'm sure the mother has nothing but her daughter's best interests at heart and it's this that makes it so depressing. She sounded caring, and interested in her daughter, but there was obviously no-one to tell her to grow up, stop wasting time, take the earrings out and send her back. Society isn't great to those without opportunities, but there are times when people really don't help themselves.

In the name of God, go!

One of the reasons the raid by police in the Commons is so sensitive is because of the regicide, to whom this quotation is ascribed, when he purged the parliament. However, it has become a more general purpose call to urge individuals to obey a moral imperative, it was used to Chamberlain, and appears to get routinely rolled out in US politics.


Hence, I'm not going to feel too bad about using it for England's cricketers, though I'm not calling for any of our players to be fired (at least not for non-cricketing reasons, any side under pressure would always be better for losing Ian Bell)

They need to go back to India, and they have to do it at as close to full strength as possible. Some of them will be worried, especially those with young children, and that's not helped by the inevitable exaggeration by distance and ignorance. Nonetheless, they all have duty to go. When violent loonies attack in otherwise safe areas, people shouldn't back out and they shouldn't back down. Partly because those places tend to get safer through the swarming number of troops, but mostly because that's yielding.

Now, private citizens can do as they please (though I think Indian flights must be supercheap now), but these young men get paid lot of money and given adulation for playing a game for their country. And that means they have to go. It's especially important because it's cricket, India's sport, and a game that has higher standards than others. Precautions can be taken (it's probably sensible to move the Mumbai test) but if we want to make any claim for our ties to India, we need to go and send the message that we don't run scared just because it's in a foreign country, with brown people in.

The Americans bottled coming here in 2001 for the Golf - they were wrong, and we pilloried them for it. But broadly we haven't been the victim of many cancellations despite years of IRA murders. And I'm grateful, but now it's our turn. Instead we are to be treated to over ten days of shilly-shallying while they decide - would that we had a modern Keith Miller to remind them of real pressure. He would have gone.

Cromwell's quote in full. The ECB and the England management should listen, whether here or in Abu Dhabi:


You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart I say and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Bibliography, November 2008

Bought / recieved (17)
R. Benaud, My spin on cricket
M. Bywater, Big Babies
W. Goldman, The princess Bride
N. Gordimer, Writing and being
S. Jordison, The joy of Sects
D. Lessing, Shikastra
S. Leys, The wreck of the Batavia
D. Lodge, Small World
A. Powell, The Valley of Bones
A. Powell, The Soldier's Art
A. Powell, The Military philosophers
A. Powell, Books do furnish a room
A. Powell, Temporary Kings
A. Powell, Hearing secret harmonies
C. Rossant, Return to Paris
J. Tiptree, Her smoke rose up together
S.J. Taylor, The reluctant Press Lord

Books read
I. Asimov, Foundation
S. Brook, The double eagle
A. Cobban, A history of modern France, vol. 2.1799-1871
T. Heyendahl, The Ra expeditions
D. Lessing, Shikastra
D. Lodge, Small World
A. Powell, The Acceptance world
I. Szerb, The Pendragon legend
M. Tully, India in slow motion

I'm really failing in my ability to make inroads into the unread pile, but it is worth noting that nine of them were Powell, and they were due to be bough in the next six months anyway.

BOTM was The Pendragon legend, which was lent to me by a friend of Anna's who, gloriously, is more anal than me about books and inscribes in them his name and date of acquisition. Anyway, it's very easy to read, rolls along excitingly, and really shows up all the more modern (it was written in the 1930s) grail and secret history novels.

Let's not piss about

The arrest of Damian Green is outrageous. I never advocate the reining in of policemen by elected officals, but it might be time for some guidelines. This just should not happen. The government is either lying or had buggered up its chain of communication (I suspect the latter) and needs to fix it. At least there has been outrage across the spectrum.

However, can we get some proportion. It's important not to start banging on about Zimbabwe at this time, as it makes you look silly.

Doesn't make it OK though - 'not as bad a Mugabe' isn't a defence.

At the margin

Last weekend, Martin Johnson said that 'International rugby is all about fine margins' after our depressing loss to South Africa. He is of course right: though there were times when the gap looked a little bigger than that, the reality is that minor changes appear large when played the game is played at that level - small differences matter.

This is hardly news to any economist. The reason demand curves look like they do is because marginal changes to feed through to behaviour overall even if they individually appear to be negligible. Of course this is slightly counterintuitive because no one wants to admit that they might be influenced by 1 or 2% at the margin, but at some point price changes mean behaviour changes, so that margin works somewhere. You would have thought from the coverage of the various economic discussion that people had fogotten this essential fact. Labour has long been guilty of this - I remember Adair Turner's Just Capital which claimed that the difference in incentives didn't change at low increases in income tax - rubbish - and a general heavy handedness on economic policy. Now we're at too: John Redwood may have a point about income tax being a better cut than VAT, but not that 2.5% doesn't matter when goods have been reduced by 10-20% so it won't matter.

I'm not a professional economist; I haven't done this formally for over 10 years, and then hardly to a high level, but I know that we need to stop pretending that the only change that counts is a big bang. Small percentages always matter.

Anthony Stewart Head

A quick hurrah for Anthony Stewart Head, famous now for Little Britain, but initially for coffee adverts that I never saw, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I watched endlessly.

It was my sister's birthday yesterday, and having time to kill before lunch with my parents, she (who has also watched Buffy endlessly) bought a Buffy book to read. At lunch (at which I was not there - the perils of working in White City), they spotted the actor in question and my father made the slightly trepidatious approach. I'm reliably informed he was lovely, came over, wished my sister happy birthday, signed the book (with some astonishment that someone would accidentally have it on them), and made a point of coming over again when he left to repeat his best wishes for the day.

He's not stratospherically famous but must get this quite a bit, so I think all credit must be given to him for being lovely about it all.

Such stories should be told.