A whiter shade of pale

My period of silence since the last post has been in exciting times - US elections, all manner of children trouble, G20 fixing the credit crisis and even a priest punch-up in the holy sepulchre. This is not that uncommon, but it has meant I have had to explain multiple times what the difference is between the Armenian and Greek Orthodox churches (it's Chalcedon, though Wikipedia is out of its depth here).


However, my time has been focused on none of these, but instead on redecorating our flat - more properly, getting other people to do it. My contribution has been limited to choosing paint colours (with spousal supervision). I have learnt:

a) white - terrifyingly - comes in more varieties than I had thought possible
b) when Anna says that our woodwork should be painted white, she doesn't actually mean white, she means off-white, but doesn't say so.
c) handymen are actually as bad as they are portrayed by Flanders and Swann (in lego here)


There's a broader point about the problems of too much choice in some areas and not enough knowledge or skill in others, but I cannot be bothered to make it. I just want my house back in time to host dinner on Wednesday (at the moment, all the common rooms are uninhabitable and the others full of the books I've taken out of the common rooms.

Oh, and the white I chose was this one.

On the bandwagon

I wasn't on the Obama bandwagon early. I'm still not really on it. His foreign policy in particular makes me very jittery: his naive assumption that Iraq can be fixed by 'forg[ing] a new coalition ... one that includes all of Iraq's neighbors.' I just don't think he understands the complexity of the Iranian relationship for example. And getting it wrong and pulling out is worse than getting it wrong and staying in (going in is a different matter). Elsewhere, I think he's too young and he is going to struggle with the almost Messianic expectations in an acute economic downturn.

Nonetheless, the alternative is worse. McCain, though clearly a bona fide all American hero (and I get irritated when his opponents challenge this), is out of his depth on the economics and I cannot abide her.*

So tonight, I'm with the left at a party hoping for an Obama victory and trying to avoid contact with my more right wing American friends. Last time I was up till 4; the time before 7. I'm really hoping this gets done and dusted early - the up all night bandwagon isn't one I fancy jumping with.

* In general, I've never really quite got the orientation right on US politics. I'm a centre-right man and though logically I know this makes me a Democrat, I still instinctively feel Republican - it's tribal thing. So, it's always disappointing when they turn out to be rubbish, even though there is no reason for me to feel this.

Abomination

News that councils have begun to ban Latinisms truly deserves the anathema. I wouldn't go as far as Mary Beard here who describes it as ethnic cleansing, but I'm not far off.


There is a long involved explanation for why it is terrible, but essentially it suggests that people should be assumed to be morons, incapable of looking anything up or reading about anything they don't encounter elsewhere. Now, a lot of people are morons who are incapable of doing any of the above, but we let them vote and pretend their opinions matter, so tough. We can't have it both ways.

In addition, latin really shouldn't get banned just because we have refused to give state school children access to the intellectual heritage of the West. Pick on something else.

Bibliography, October 2008

Books bought (7)
B. Bryson, Life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid
F. Stark, Ionia
M. Tully, India in slow motion
A. Powell, At Lady Molly's
A. Powell, Casanova's Chinese restaurant
A. Powell, The kindly ones
Wisden, Cricketers' Almanack 2006


Books read (12)
P. Auster, New York Trilogy
M. Beloff, An Historian in the 20th Century
S. Foehr, Waking up in Nashville
P. Glazebrook, Journey to Kars
Q. Hogg, The left was never right
A. Kenny, A path from Rome
D. Lodge, Changing places
J. Major, More than a game: the story of cricket's early years
A. Powell, A buyer's market
G. Robb, The discovery of France
R. Thaler and C.R. Sunstein, Nudge
M. Younus, Banker to the poor


These little bibliographic excursions are running the risk of getting overlong. I'm just going to highlight a book of the month now and then comment on a couple of others briefly. This time, it's been a pretty high quality month actually, though I didn't really understand Auster and Nudge was overlong.

The best though was Robb - stunningly good and an original piece of work. He takes as his subject the local, regional France of the Early modern era and charts its emergence as an at least partially united country over the nineteenth century, driven in large part by technology - obviously the railway, but also critically the bicycle. It's a fascinating glimpse into a recent, yet compellingly alien, past of isolated villages, and a France that clashes with all our conceptions of a centralised monarchy. Required reading for Francophiles - I'm buying it for my dad.

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.