Longrider

Via Rachel, I came across the unfortunate story of Natalie who has been misrepresented by the Daily Mail. Natalie is, unsurprisingly, angry and upset by this. The journalist engaged in a ten minute phone interview and then went to press.

On April 30th just after 3.30pm, I snatched up my phone and bit the bullet. I called up the journalist that had ‘interviewed’ me (I say this loosely) and expressed my upset at her not actually stating that she was interviewing me and my concern that I would be included in a feature about revenge, which is not what I, or this blog are about. I told her quite shrilly (I was stressed for fecks sake) that I did NOT want to open the paper and see something like “Blogger gets revenge on ex with her blog!” or some other pathetic headline.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. Why am I not surprised by this? Newspapers want to sell copy and, frankly, bad news or news about people behaving badly tends to sell rather better than “blogger writes about self help for women”. E-venge is sooo much more sexy. So, e-venge it was. Natalie also tells us that there were 26 inaccuracies in the article. Again, I am not surprised. If my railway career taught me anything it is that journalists are incapable of accurate, factual reporting. They either get it wrong through sheer ignorance or twist it to make the story appear more salacious than it really is. I lose count of the times following the Paddington crash when a journalist would spout utter bollocks about signal sighting like they knew anything about the subject.

I also recall a colleague who fell victim to having her words “twisted by knaves to make traps for fools”; in her case, it was the Sun. She was angry and devastated to find herself splashed across its wretched pages. It took a long time for her to get over the sense of anger and betrayal.

As a signalling manager, it was my responsibility to attend incidents. Journalists have a habit of turning up at incidents looking for a juicy story, and an unguarded comment could lead to a damaging headline. Therefore, we were under strict instructions not to talk to the press unless we were media trained. More recently, I was contacted by Channel 4 following one of my articles about the legality of dress codes in the workplace; in particular, about men with long hair. She wanted me to appear on a reality TV show; The Salon as they were planning a feature on men with long hair. She was disappointed and bemused when I flatly refused. I did so for exactly the same reason that my Railtrack employers insisted that I did not speak to the press when attending incidents; an unguarded comment can be taken out of context and twisted out of its original meaning and used against the utterer. I would have no editorial control, therefore, I would have no control over how I would appear on the finished piece. It would have been easy to make me look foolish with subtle editing. No, thankyou, very much.

For much of his life, Freddie Mercury refused to talk to newspapers. His line was simple enough; they are going to make it up anyway, so they don’t need help from me. It was a stance he maintained until a day or so before his death. It is a wise stance and one worth emulating.

It’s a bit late for Natalie, but for any other bloggers out there, I have one important piece of advice; take a deep breath and pause if you are asked for an interview. Ask yourself if you really want to do this. I know it is flattering and you are looking at your fifteen minutes of fame, but they are not thinking of you, they are thinking of their copy, of selling newspapers. You are just a means to that end; a pawn in their game. Is that fifteen minutes of fame worth a damaged reputation and the heartache that goes with it? If you take one piece of advice away from this site, then take this; never, ever, talk to the press. Oh, and don’t buy the Daily Mail, but that’s a given, isn’t it?

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Footnote: Natalie has complained to the Press Complaints Commission, but she is also trying to get this story on as many blogs as possible to set the story straight. This is my contribution.

Via The Englishman; this comment from Rachel Johnson in the Times:

I don’t get blogging. It’s not only that I’m reluctant to write for nothing.

Mm. I write occasionally for money – for a bike magazine. Then, I expect a decent rate for my words. I write here for nothing because I like writing and it gives me the impetus to hone my skills. If you enjoy writing, the being paid is largely by the by – writing doesn’t make us rich; or at least that is the case for most of us. We do it because we enjoy it, just as others enjoy watching sport, flying kites and building model railways. It’s a hobby. We don’t need a deep reason for doing it, we just do. No one expects you to understand or “get it”.

There are all those people who ask, “Do you blog?” at parties (our own sad neutered version of the “Do you swing?” question), and who warble about “wikis” and “web presence”.

Rachel must move in strange circles. No one has asked me if I blog, let alone swing. Perhaps I don’t go the the right parties. Any chance of an invite next time?

Still, a few weeks ago I started to write one. It’s very easy - even a middle-aged woman can do it. I wrote about what I was making for supper that night. And food shopping in the Portobello market. Then I checked to see the global response to my debut. Nothing. On my next five posts? Zero comments.

She really doesn’t get it, does she? I was rattling away at the keyboard for months before my first comment and even now, several posts can pass without any interaction from others. It doesn’t undermine the activity though. Ultimately, I am writing for me, because I want to, because, hopefully, my craft will improve. Comments are nice – unless they are trolls – but not essential.

Then I really pulled out the stops. I wrote about how my husband shouted, “Free Konnie Huq!”, and I gave an eyewitness account of how a former Blue Peter presenter, that is, a celebrity, was actually touched by a civilian. And after all that unpaid work, was the web on fire? Once again – nul comments.

Perhaps no one is interested? Frankly, the Olympics and everything to do with them are a dull, tedious and mind-numbingly banal waste of time. Perhaps I am not alone in that assessment. I don’t even know who Konnie Huq is (let alone care) – well, I didn’t. I do now (know, not care – I still don’t give a toss). I’m not sure that I feel enlightened by the knowledge, though. Why, therefore, should I be bothered if Konnie Huq is touched by a grubby little prole? You people are so far up your own arses you could lick your tonsils.

I don’t get it. There are the blogs that work – such as Judith O’Reilly’s brilliant blog turned book Wife in the North, or the riveting Petite Anglaise, or our own Alpha Mummy (on Times Online; a treat) – where you sense that the authors are releasing themselves with feeling into the ether. This is because blogging is about regularity, I presume. You have to post every day. You have to be totally committed.

Er, regularity helps – people will be looking for fresh material – but, and if Rachel doesn’t get this point, she is in the wrong job; you have to write something that is fresh and interesting. And, importantly, you have to build a body of work so that the search engines start to pick it up and so that people drop by and start linking. Then, when you’ve been at it a few months, people will look upon you as someone they want to visit on a regular basis and engage in conversation. A bit like real life, I suppose. It doesn’t just happen, you have to put in a bit of effort.

In California people have started to blog themselves to death and The New York Times is reporting stress, sleep disturbance and exhaustion among the “blogging community”.

More fool them.

Well, there is no danger of me having a coronary at my laptop triggered by exhaustion and anxiety about page hit rates. It’s quick and easy to start a blog, as I’ve discovered. It’s even quicker and easier to stop.

That, m’dear, is because you never really started, did you? Once more we have a professional journo making asinine comments on a subject on which they are staggeringly ignorant. No change there, then.

Someone doesn’t like Shakespeare.

I have tried, so help me God, to fight through the sheer opacity of Shakespeare’s language to establish what in Heaven’s name is going on in his damned plays. I think basic plot awareness matters. It brings an entry-level appreciation from which, apparently, bliss follows. But my hopes of keeping up have always been dashed within a scene or two by simple confusion, curdling via frustration, shame and boredom to cold anger by the blessed final curtain.

Ouch! However, Giles’ inability to keep up is nothing to do with Shakespeare. While the observation that the bard was a jobbing writer may have some merit:

He filched most of his stories from the ancients and English history. That took care of content. As for form, he was a dedicated follower of fashion. Everything from the five-act structure of King Lear to the soporific dum-de-dum-de-dum of its monologues was borrowed. With so many of a writer’s decisions made for him, it would have been bizarre indeed if he hadn’t turned a florid phrase or two.

…turning a florid phrase or two requires talent. The ability to play with language and to turn it on its head is not something that happens by chance, nor is it something that a jobbing writer will churn out on a regular basis. Shakespeare loved the pun – a cheap form of wit – but his puns were witty and his use of language clever. Giles might have a point if his critique was half as clever as that of a jobbing writer. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It is nothing more than a whiny whinge.

I leave it to Mark of Smithfield who comments on Giles’ histrionic piece to underline the point:

Wow… someone sounds bitter and angry. Who knew that being too thick to understand Shakespeare could cause such frustration?

Thank goodness for “I’m a Celebrity” and the like - something you can understand.

Well, quite.

Update: Tweaked in response to Patrick’s comment.

As someone who talks to others about communication, and as someone who takes my own use of language and communication so seriously, I really should have known better.

This little spat was all because of:

…I accidentally cut-and-pasted your URL instead of the one I intended.

There’s a moral in there somewhere…

Apparently schools aren’t doing poetry properly these days. Presumably this fits in with the decline in English language generally…

Classic poems are in danger of disappearing from the classroom as poorly trained teachers rely on “lightweight” verse, the education watchdog warn today.

Primary schools increasingly concentrate on nonsense and humorous poems or those that are easy for children to imitate, says Ofsted.

In a report, inspectors warn that “too few” poems are “genuinely challenging” as teachers shun the classics and those from other cultures.

I attended primary school in the late sixties. While there, I was force fed a diet of Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Browning, Blake, Shelley and John Masefield. Initially, I was reluctant, but my teachers recognised in me something that I did not; a latent love of verse. Sea Fever remains an eternal favourite even today.

So, if Ofsted’s report is right, it’s a crying shame.

Via Neil, who still does not understand liberty, this from Conor Gearty:

The argument for compulsory DNA testing of the entire population and all visitors to the UK, so eloquently put by Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, has provoked another bout of anxious navel gazing by civil libertarians. Sedley is no reactionary but rather one of Britain’s most progressive judges, a man with an impeccable record of legal activism. If even this kind of person is now joining the Reids, Howards and the rest on the authoritarian side, does this mean Britain’s much-battered freedom has at last lurched into terminal decline? Is the police state that so many have warned about for so long finally on its way?

Frankly, there is much to be concerned about in Sedley’s pronouncement; he is effectively urging that because some people have been unfairly treated by the state, we should all suffer. This is wholly unacceptable. There is no justification for a whole population DNA database. That he is joining the Reids of this world is not a good omen by any means.

Fortunately the position is rather more complicated than this.

Indeed, no one (apart, possibly, from Neil) is claiming otherwise.

Just as the right is given to moral panics (teddy boys, hippies, hoodies)

Only if you waste your time reading the Daily Mail. The rest of us have no such qualms. This is gross generalisation and pure nonsense.

so the left regularly succumbs to freedom frenzies.

Er, no… it is elements of the left who are the ones attempting to crank down on our freedoms.

(*Note: I generally avoid using terms such as “left” and “right” as they are meaningless. However, Gearty uses these labels so I am responding in kind to maintain consistency.)

Each generation of committed civil libertarians has been convinced it is sure to be the last. Every home secretary is always the worst ever - until the next one comes along.

Ah, yes, the type of sweeping generalist twattery that would make Neil proud. Wholehearted horse-shit. No wonder Neil wanted me to read this piece of utter clusterfuck.

We can start by being more careful about language. The term civil liberties is confusing in that it includes both a commitment to the liberty of the individual and to political freedom, but these are not the same. The first is a liberal idea, rooted in that old English notion of the individual being above and beyond the state and with a natural right not to be interfered with by it.

I agree about the use of language and, too, that there are two issues here. Individual liberty though is tied in with the idea of political freedom. Without the former, the latter would be somewhat undermined. While I have always accepted a need for a state, I also want that state to leave me alone to manage my life as I see fit. It is not the place of Westminster or the town hall to micro-manage my life for me. It is not their place to modify my behaviour so that I buy products of which they approve – and if they think I am going to buy the truly awful Prius they can think again; I would sooner poke both eyes out than buy one and they are not by any stretch of the imagination “environmentally friendly” unless you are truly divorced from reality. Anyway, I digress.

Supporters of this idea are the people who break CCTV cameras and are affronted by being asked to stop smoking in public places. This kind of libertarianism is often quite reactionary and in its absolute form it is always being overridden - and rightly overridden - by government in the name of the public good.

It is not reactionary. I thought we were being careful about language here? Ah, but of course, one must demonise one’s opponents mustn’t one? While breaking CCTV cameras is quite rightly against the law as it is causing damage to property, their very existence, spying on our every move – all too frequently unnecessarily – is indeed an affront and objection is perfectly reasonable. So, too is the expectation that one can smoke in a public place. I don’t smoke and don’t like smoking, but have never been forced to put up with it and expect smokers to ask if I mind before they light up, which they invariably do. I don’t mind at all. Government constantly overriding these freedoms is not right and it is not for the public good. Control freaks are never satisfied, they never go away. Every nibble at liberty is followed by another. The list that Gearty quotes earlier in his article is a long way distant from the level of control government now seeks to impose upon us.

This perspective is better viewed as a presumption in favour of freedom, a reminder to us all that we need to be clear that there is, to use the language of human rights, a pressing social need for our interventions and that the exact extent of the damage we do to personal freedom has to be warranted by the goal we are seeking to achieve.

This, of course, is the common law principle of not causing our neighbours harm. We have gone way beyond this principle with the interventions now occurring. What we have now is managerialists seeking to manage every aspect of our lives and to mould us so that we think, speak and do what our masters expect of us – we must, for example, kneel at the alter of anthropogenic global warming – to do otherwise, to question to object is heresy and we become labelled “deniers” – there, language again.

Advances in technology are always throwing up fresh opportunities for public good via new invasions of this kind of liberty. Sedley’s proposals fit within this tradition: they deserve to be debated and not dismissed out of hand as heretical.

Ah, yes, the old technology makes it so bollocks. It was bollocks when I heard Neil spouting it, it is bollocks now that Sedley and Gearty are spouting it. Saying it over and over doesn’t make it so. Dismissed out of hand is exactly what it deserves.

Political freedom is different and should be much less easily susceptible to democratic override.

Civil Contingencies Act then? Prevention of Terrorism Act? I could go on…

The deployment of terrorism and public order law to control, sometimes to curb completely, political speech and public demonstrations is a serious matter. It is clear that, from this civil libertarian perspective, there are aspects of the Blair-Brown legislative record on these matters that give rise to legitimate concern.

You don’t say?

But critics need also to acknowledge the broader context. We are getting a lot of controlling legislation, it is true, but this does not mean past generations were much freer: in earlier days the local militia just shot you. Whatever might be said about this or that individual clause, much of today’s legislation - some of it mandated by human rights law, paradoxically - represents civil libertarian progress, a move out of, rather than into, a police state.

So, because past generations were less free, losing some of our liberty is okay? Bollocks! What we are concerned about is losing liberties we already have; liberties that those previous generations got themselves shot trying to gain in the first instance.

This really is the utmost twattery. Okay, I’ve simply run out of steam. This is typical of the nonsense so beloved of Neil Harding – am I surprised that he attempted to use it to justify his moronic defence of arrant control freakery? Not really. Still, it wasted half an hour of my life. It is probably worth pointing out that being a professor in something doesn’t make you right. Nor does it confer common sense. But then, this is the Guardian, so what did I expect?

Liberty: freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.

It is not a difficult concept to grasp.

*edited for clarity.

Hergé’s Tintin has incurred the wrath of the commission for racial equality.

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) is calling on high street books to pull a Tintin adventure from its shelves over claims it is racist.

Given that Hergé wrote the story in the nineteen-thirties, a somewhat outdated approach to racial equality is hardly surprising. You will find other authors guilty of similar offences – read Merchant of Venice lately? So, yes, a book written in the thirties portraying inhabitants of the Congo in a less than flattering light is something I would expect. Like Shakespeare, Kipling and other authors of previous eras, I read their work in the context of the time that they were written and accept that they were people of their time with all the hang-ups and prejudices that went with those times. Not the CRE, though:

Complaints about Tintin and the Congo have led to Borders and Waterstones moving it to their adult section.

Frankly, those complaints should have been met with a polite “we will take your comments on board, sir” and then promptly ignored.

A spokeswoman said the book contained “words of hideous racial prejudice, where the ’savage natives’ look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles”.

Well, yes. Hergé was a man of his time and at that time, white Europeans tended to have a racist approach to ex-colonials. That’s history, we cannot change it. What we can do is look at the literature of the time and remind ourselves how attitudes have changed. Of course, if we ban books, we cannot make that comparison, can we?

Borders said they are committed to let their “customers make the choice”.

Absolutely. Civilised societies do not ban books – or they damn well shouldn’t no matter how prejudicial the contents. It is up to the reader to make a conclusion – not the CRE.

The CRE spokewoman said: “How and why do Borders think that it’s okay to peddle such racist material?”

Because of the comments above for a start – and, not least, because it is none of the CRE’s business what Borders choose to stock on their shelves. Or do we not live in a civilised liberal democracy?

“It’s high time that they reconsidered their decision and removed this from their shelves,” she added.

No. No. No. A thousand times; no. Book banning is for totalitarian dictatorships. You might not like the contents of this book. You might cringe at the way that black people are portrayed; but you must do so while recognising the context and times in which it was written. Be appalled at the attitudes of our recent forefathers by all means, but do not ban books. Ever.

The book’s publishers Egmont said the book comes with a warning that it features “bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period - an interpretation some readers may find offensive”.

An eminently fair approach.

Indeed, I almost feel inclined to nip out and buy a copy.