Norman Geras’s piece on the rights and wrongs of Israel’s military action in Lebanon and elsewhere is hard to fault, while his conclusion that much criticism of Israel reveals pre-existing hostility towards that nation and its people, demands exploration. Norm even provides a useful checklist by which we can tell if a critic of Israel is acting in good faith.

But Norm doesn’t explain from where such prejudice arises. Many will assume anti-Semitism or a belief that the state of Israel is illegitimate. But that lazy thinking is unlikely to win anybody over and is hard to substantiate when so many have called for an immediate ceasefire.

Many critics feel genuinely disappointed by Israel, in way that they could never be disappointed by Hezbollah. Israel is the only open, democratic, secular (despite its origins) state in the Middle East. And it’s stable too. There’s an expectation that it will uphold these values, even in the face of grave provocation. Today’s Israel is comparatively strong and strength brings temptations to be resisted and responsibilities to live up to. It’s right to be shocked and distressed when Israel bombs a UN position.

Inspired by the values of the Iranian revolution, Hezbollah rejects liberal democratic values. And only last night BBC2’s Execution of a teenage girl (on which I blogged sometime ago) revealed how this value system’s extreme misogyny endorses the most barbaric practices.

When both sides are accused of war crimes, Hezbollah meets our expectations. Israel disappoints.

Israel is expected to demonstrate that its values – our values – are not only superior to those held by its enemies in theory, but also in practice. Israel must not fail on this score. If its critics are ever able to legitimately claim that both sides are as bad as each other, we will have lost our reason to call Israel a friend.

2 graffiti, scrawl more »

I’ve always wondered where larger ladies with a fondness for Chav pink got their clothes and sort of suspected it was somewhere like Ethel Austin (which, up until its recent makeover, I always thought was a charity shop). The supermarkets entering the clothes market has been a good thing. They’ve driven prices right down. But I think we can all agree that George at Asda’s lost its way and Tesco’s Florence + Fred is only okay. Up until this season, Sainsbury’s TU was what supermarket clothes should be all about: reasonably priced basics that don’t look cheap.

Sainsbury’s TU is still okay if you’re a bloke looking for a T-shirt, but the ladies section’s not only gone a bit chav, it’s been supersized. Katharine was after a pair of summer shorts, but you need a very, very large bum indeed to fill a Sainsbury’s TU size 10. On the plus side, if you’re a size 16 lady who’d like to be a size 10, get yourself down to Sainsbury’s and kid yourself.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

26 graffiti, scrawl more »

My old school only forced the occasional religious assembly upon us, but when they did it was done big style. It was said that the old woodwork teacher, Lionel Thomas, who shouted a lot while tolerating vicious bullying, was well into the laying on of hands. When pupils (sat quietly at the back) didn’t bow their heads in prayer he physically forced them into position while ranting that their actions denied him his right to worship and would condemn their schoolmates to eternal damnation. So that over 16s can now walk out of such rituals is very good news. And it’s thanks, in part, to an out of control faith school: St. Luke’s College, Sidcup.

Support for faith schools is a most bizarre and confused government policy, with no real effort made to argue a supporting case. Faith schools do have a reputation for being better (my parents tried to get my sister into one, but even though she sang in the church choir, the vicar vetoed the application) and, to be fair, at least one study has suggested faith schools get better GCSE results (‘The differential is not enormous,’ says the author). But is this small difference really the product of faith?

Deprived areas with failing schools up for conversion, tend to suffer parents who take little interest in their children’s education. Many kids arrive at school totally unprepared. Rather than hypothesise that faith is the magic ingredient, might it be that a parent who takes an interest in where their child goes to school is more likely to take a continued interest in their education? Might this higher level of parental interest account for faith schools’ slightly improved results?

More seriously, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) acknowledges concerns that faith schools deepen segregation, but fails to put the opposite view. In fact, the briefing to the education profession seems to argue that faith schools aren’t really that faithful, so not to worry. They have to admit pupils of other faiths and none if they have spare places and the DfES has a few carefully selected anecdotes where faith schools have admitted lots of others. (But hasn’t the eighty per cent Muslim Church of England school lost its faith?)

Other anecdotes tell another story. There’s the famous creationist school. And now a brand new faith school, St. Luke’s College, Sidcup, has fallen flat on its face. No inclusive admissions policy here, just kids wandering around playing fields with statues of the Virgin Mary and listening to evangelists when they should be in lessons.
UPDATE: A couple of years after this was written, St. Lukes failed and merged with a neighbouring school.

Scrawl graffiti over this »

The trailer for Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe makes it look just another cynical TV review show padding out the digital schedules. And maybe it is. But I love it.

What made last night’s Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe so good to a nerd like me was the homage to Mike Leigh’s Naked. Mike Leigh received an honorary degree from Salford University the day I got my real degree. We were told he was being honoured for doing ‘Mike Leigh’s thing’. Mike Leigh’s thing was referred to several times during the introduction, so even the parents were tittering. His acceptance speech was rubbish: ‘I used to visit the cinema on such-and-such-street, or was it on so-and-so street?’

Anyway. A couple of years later, Naked, one of the greatest films ever made, hit the big screen. In this nihilistic feast, unfeasibly well read and articulate working class drop-out Johnny (David Thewlis) runs away from Manchester, where he’s due a right good kicking, to London. Here he looks up his ex and pisses on her (and everybody else he meets) chips. The film score sounds a bit Michael Nyman, but not so overbearing (a good film score should support the action on screen, barely noticed by the viewer; something Nyman has yet to master).

It’s Andrew Dickson’s score that accompanies Johnny as he limps off into the gutter (he gets that kicking anyway), from where Charlie Brooker is ranting (in the style of Johnny): ‘Balls to aspiration, it’s a tosser’s mirage. Far better to just sit here and sneer at the lot of it, isn’t it, eh?’

Scrawl graffiti over this »

Having been kicked out of the house by the plumbers (new boiler), it was disappointing to find Diamond Dogs still sweeping outside. I thought 9.15 was late breakfast. It’s all variations on a theme, but checking out alternatives — Australian, builders, big, small — was hard work.

Anyway. The Chorlton Eatery is next to what the Manchester Evening News has named the country’s worst designed bus stop (the one that juts into Barlow Moor Road at Chorlton Cross). I was served a very well presented Big Vegetarian Breakfast, greatly enhanced by including waffles and hash browns (if you like one you’ll like the other, so why don’t we see this combination more often?).

The only problem (and it’s the same wherever you go in Chorlton) is small, noisy, out of control children, crying out for a good slap. The natural sugars in their pure fruit smoothies are clearly just as evil as the refined stuff that fuels Fanta.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

2 graffiti, scrawl more »

The sound of the steel band drifting across Chorlton Park from the eponymous school is just right for today. ‘Call NHS Direct,’ say the weather people, but still the old folk wear heavy coats as we head towards 35 degrees (mid-90s in their money: perhaps that’s the problem, ‘only 35, better wrap up’).

Anyway. Thank goodness for the European Union and the hard working Poles who do such a good job of cleaning our cars and whose Barbakan Delicatessen bakes such wonderful cakes et cetera.

Without the Poles we’d be toasting Warburtons, a bread so packed with preservatives the butter melts and dribbles away. And I’d have to entrust the car to an indigenous Salford scally who’d most likely drive it out to some wasteland and burn it.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

Scrawl graffiti over this »

I’ve never been into researching family history (I’ve not even met my father) or really understood those that do. We’re all products of the times in which we live and while we inherit a position in society at birth, many of us don’t have to go far back to realise we have little in common with our ancestors.

But still, it’s big business. And the internet is accelerating the pace at which we can conduct genealogical research and trace our family histories. Leader of the pack appears to be Ancestry.co.uk. We tried them out because following her mother’s death, Katharine wanted to find out more about her father’s side of the family. He died when she was six and she’d never been able to discuss him with her mother.

She doesn’t need to trace her family history very far on her mother’s side to lose touch. While Katharine was a single child, her mother was one of twelve and fled the poverty rural of Northern Ireland for England. It’s unlikely that Katharine and her grandmother would have much to talk about. And that’s the problem with genealogy: it creates a false sense of identity.

That doesn’t mean people’s genealogy isn’t important to them. Take David Baddiel, whose Who do you think you are? documentary is up for a repeat. He’s dramatised the life of his maternal grandparents in a novel, The Secret Purposes, charting an escape from Nazi persecution. He’s a family history to be proud of and has encouraged his genealogy to define him in adult life (he discovered all this fairly late). In contrast, somewhere there’s a photo of my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, in a Nazi uniform. That’s not something I dwell upon.

Anyway. I’m in a minority as Ancestry.co.uk reckon 75 per cent of people are into genealogy, family trees, tracing family history and all that. If you’re a genealogist anxious to trace your family history, understand your ancestry and build a family tree, you need an extensive archive (census, civil, ecclesiastical and immigration records, just for starters). And that’s what Ancestry.co.uk offer for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Ancestry.co.uk boast the largest collection of UK family history records online, with more than 300 million records. That’s the most complete census collection available (1851-1901), birth, marriage and death indexes from 1837 to the present day and parish and probate records dating back to the 1500s.

Scrawl graffiti over this »

The other side to the old people in macs for the last heatwave is this guy. He’s a tourist in denial spotted at the bar of the Clacham Inn, Drymen, Scotland.

Sadly, it has not been shorts weather, but worse than that, he’s wearing some mustard sandals-cum-flip-flops.
Addendum: We left a rainy Loch Lomond (14 degrees, my shorts with shop label still attached) to find our neighbours sunbathing (25 degrees). Yes it rains in Manchester, but those who complain have clearly never visited Scotland (or Wales).
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

Scrawl graffiti over this »

Tonight we dine at the oldest registered pub in Scotland: the Clachan Inn, Drymen, established 1734. I’m sure others dispute that claim, but you can see how this was once somebody’s front room.

It makes for a cosy, highly recommended drinking hole. The beer is all keg, but Scotland hasn’t got much of a real ale tradition anyway and they do have Budvar, real Czech Budweiser, on tap.

I expect the food to be similar to the Clachan Inn’s rivals. That is, good quality, well presented dishes drawing on local produce. While you eat well in these parts, there isn’t a great deal of variety and bar menus don’t differ greatly from restaurants. There is certainly room for an imaginative young chef to come in and shake things up.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

Scrawl graffiti over this »

Everyone laughs at this funny little statue of Mel Gibson, sorry, William Wallace, at the foot of the Wallace Monument, Stirling. Even the Americans. It is a very silly statue, not just because Wallace has been given Gibson’s face. He’s pulling a funny expression, has ‘braveheart’ on his shield and someone’s head at his feet.

This is all a very great shame because the Victorians clearly knew how to build a monument. Stirling’s William Wallace Monument is far more impressive than its castle. It truly captures the essence of Scotland’s national pride. Not only does it attempt to exhaust the visitor with 246 steep and narrow steps to a humbling view of the country, it educates on the way up. So we learn about William Wallace, of course, but also of a great many more Scottish heroes and of all that the world has to thank Scotland for.
This posted via mobile via Flickr and so not so closely proofread. Click the pic to see it large (there’s an ‘all-sizes’ tab for really large).

1 graffito, scrawl more »