Robert Sharp

“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!” wrote Noel Coward. I think he missed a trick: there was no corollary ditty, about mad Scotsmen going out in the rain.

Many of my recollections of peace and contentment take place in the rain. Playing cards under a canvas canopy of an eight-man Stormhaven tent on a scout-camp; Sitting at an old desk and writing a diary during the afternoon storms in Zimbabwe; Leaning against the door-frame of a rural Brazilian villa, watching clouds sweep through the valley. Sure, rain prevents you from stepping out into the street, but it also protects you. It creates a barrier you can hide behind. It isolates you like an incoming tide. It enforces privacy. Sometimes there’s nothing better to be stranded indoors by the rain. Open the window and listen to it fall.

Although, if you’re caught out in the rain, you might as well pull a Gene Kelly, and stay out. There’s a serenity to that too. A favourite quote:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

A great deal of this stoicism was displayed at the weekend, at the Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo event at the Royal Botantic Gardens Edinburgh. The sky was not kind, and we were rained upon from start to finish. However, I had the sense that sheer bloody-mindedness would prevail amongst both performers and performance-goers, and that nothing would be postponed because of the weather.

And so we persisted, but some things are obviously odd when performed in the rain. No sane person would wander out and do Tai Chi in a cold, damp park, and I felt sorry for those giving a demonstration of the art, who did their best to ignore the rain. It must be extra difficult when people with brollys are stomping past. I think this point is true of the dance pieces too – the audience were probably not as relaxed as they could have been. And if you are distracted during a performance, it precludes the possibility of giving yourself over to the dance, incapable of submitting to the pure movement.

However, I think the traditional Chinese music gained something through being played in the storm. The hum of the rain was like a backing track, which bedded very well underneath the stringed notes.

Susie Brown’s installation Natural Progression, persists until 29th June. It consists of a set of painted bamboo sticks set into the ground, forming a fence-like barrier which slithers accross the lawn. Like an organic Fred Sandback installation, it delineates the open space and makes you think twice about crossing the imaginary boundaries it seems to define. It therefore takes a little courage to engage with the piece, which you can do by blowing across the tops of the bamboo to ‘play’ their notes.

Back in the RBGE glasshouse life was much drier, although the towering, anorexic palm trees occasionally drip onto you. FOUND and the Shanghai Jazz Project teamed up to give a performance. The glasshouse, with its collision of nature and human technology, is precisely the sort of odd venue I expect from FOUND. I’ve seen them in Warehouses and Chinese Kitchens, and they’ve played in portacabins before too.

FOUND are known throughout Scotland for their love of sampling stuff, mixing and remixing what they collect into their music. For this performance, we heard them sample an old 1930s Jazz recording, supplied by the Shanghai Jazz Project. We heard the familiar hiss and crackle of the old recording, and I remember thinking that this was not unlike the patter of the rain ouside.

Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo was the brainchild of Kimho Ip. Over at the project’s website, there’s an interesting podcast discussion with Stephen Blackmore, Regius Keeper, about the twin pleasures of nature and music, and their importance in the increasingly frenetic modern world.

We discussed ‘bloodlines‘ earlier this week. Here is Presidential hopeful, Senator Barack Obama:

The mixing of races, and the making families with people from elsewhere, from other cultures: It is at this level, I think, that multiculturalism works best. Noting the differences, noting the similarities… and enjoying the fact of both.

More on multiculturalism within a person, here. David is interesting too.

An interesting post on the Daily Dish about miscegenation:

For older people, and people who live in areas that have long been predominantly white, the miscegenation issue is the last bastion of knee-jerk racial identity. And whites are not alone in this. Every well-defined racial and cultural group has this taboo actively at play, even today, regardless of political bent.
…
[When] a young West Virginian hankers for someone a bit more “full-blooded” than Obama, they are using code-words for the ultimate threatening “other”, the other that sneaks into your home and screws your daughter and destroys your bloodline.

The idea that there is any value in a pure ‘blood-line’ in has to be one of the most evil concepts invented by man. As Hanif Kureishi reminds us, “purity is incestuous”. Worrying about your ‘blood-line’ is against nature.

A classic multiculturalism scare story without substance, now honed to a fine art. This time, Ben Elton is the stooge:

Ben Elton has said the BBC is too “scared” to broadcast jokes about Muslims for fear of provoking radical Islamists… [he] added that the broadcaster would “let vicar gags pass but would not let imam gags pass”.

I’ve dealt with the difference between vicar gags and imam gags before (though I can’t seem to find the appropriate comment at the moment). Vicars are inherently more funny, especially to the British mind-set which sees more humour in taking the piss out of the familiar, than the exotic.

The other strand to the story is the second-guessing among well-meaning yet ultimately clueless decision makers. The story here is not “muslims can’t take a joke” or even “BBC thinks muslims can’t take a joke” but the ridiculous third degree of separation: “Ben Elton thinks that the BBC thinks that muslims can’t take a joke.” Is this what passes for discourse now?

As an aside to all this, may actually be the case that taking the piss out of minority religions could actually signify integration an acceptance, rather than intolerance.

Another day, another clash of cultures story. This time, some Jewish school-girls have refused to answer questions in an English exam on Shakespeare because he was apparently anti-semitic. Seth Freedman makes some comments at Comment is Free. By his analysis, since the head teacher (a Rabbi at an Orthodox School) is condoning the girls’ boycott, its a slippery slope into all kinds of intolerance.

However, as with other examples of multicultural friction, liberal democracy looks robust, and does not seem to be at all threatened. No concessions whatsoever were made to the girls’ religious beliefs, and they failed their exams accordingly.

On a separate note, the boycott itself is surely silly and counter-productive. In a similar manner, one might refuse to study the Declaration of Independence on the basis that its authors were a bunch of slave owners. Regardless of whether Shakespeare was an anti-semite or not (and, given his portrayal of Shylock, he probably was), the man has had such a huge impact on the English language that to ignore him is hugely disadvantageous from an intellectual point of view. Critically analysing a text with reference to an artist’s life an opinions is a crucial tool, which these pupils are denying themselves. Likewise, critically analysing an artists output with regards to their times is important too. Was Shakespeare any more or less anti-semitic than his contemporaries, say? How do the views of the playwright compare to the views of the rest of his society? What role does the character of Shylock play in the history of Judaism? I fear that the quest of these girls to maintain some kind of intellectual purity might result in intellectual ignorance. And that outcome will not help them, their community, or their beliefs.

The NHS will no longer employ doctors from overseas. Too many British doctors have been trained, which has lead to a high demand for places.

Since the NHS has been sustained for so long by migrant workers, clearly there are moral debates to be had: Do we owe anything to overseas doctors who have worked here before? There are also administrative issues too: Where does this leave the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme? However, there are also second order issues, the problems we may not feel for a generation to come.

It is often said that the UK, above other countries, enjoys a good reputation around the world. We are said to enjoy “good links” with other countries, especially the Commonwealth, made up for the most part of former colonies. We know that these good links are embodied not just in formal institutions, aid, and preferential trade agreements, but on the personal level too. Our large immigrant population, with family back in India or South Africa or wherever, form a multitude of individual ties which together forge a strong, enmeshed bond between to countries. We have an army of millions of people around the world, who have worked in the UK at some point in our lives. They are a million secret agents, sleeper cells in their own communities, who will stand up and defend our interests and our reputation when required. This latest decision by the Home Office is the first step in the disbanding of that multicultural regiment, and it will hurt us in the long run. It is another steo away from an open, Internationalist approach that has stood is in such good stead for so long. Let us hope these measures are not extended to other professions too.

Its been a while since a good multicultural conundrum came along to bother us. For a while, I thought that the issue of the mosque in Oxford that wants to broadcast its call to prayer might be one such issue, but while reading a couple of articles in order to write a blog, I came across this quote from the Telegraph:

“We want to fix a loudspeaker to our minaret to broadcast our call to prayer. We would like to have three two-minute calls a day, but if that is not accepted then we would like to have it at least on Fridays.

“In Islamic counties the call is loud so people are reminded to come to prayer. We do not need the volume to be loud, that can be adjusted because our members have a time-table for the prayers. But we want to have the call in some form because it is our tradition.”

Now this doesn’t look like a culture clash to me, so much as groups engaging in a dialogue with a local authority, just as they should in a liberal democracy. It is being portrayed as an example of the Muslim community making unreasonable demands, when in fact it is merely a polite request, and a modest one at that. Its obvious that the Friday broadcast will be approved, and tolerated, and finally accepted as part of the city, just like football stadiums, nightclubs, and cathedral bells.

Some, such as Daniel Finkelstein in the Times today, complain that this particular addition to Oxford’s sound-scape amounts to an erosion of British, Christian culture. Yet I do not see the validity in this argument. First, we know that culture is a nebulous term and cannot be protected in the way Finkelstein suggests. Adding a new tradition for Oxford does not dilute or those already in existence – it is not as if noise is regulated by a carbon-like trading scheme. Nor is it the case, as Finkelstein seems to suggest, that the existence of a call to prayer will somehow undermine Anglicanism. Religions are not chain pubs trying to out-do one another with larger and brighter advertisements of cheap beer. The call to prayer will not tempt customers aways from the church down the road (and in any case, the wine they serve in the mosque is horrible).

If anything, a new sound in the mix causes us to notice and appreciate the others already there. In this sense, the muzezzin’s call is a piece of genuine Eastern spice.

Second, if anywhere in the country should have a Call to Prayer, its Oxford. The city of dreaming spires is well known for its theological heritage, from medieval times up to the present day. It has been a centre for the study of Islam, the Orient, and Arabic for centuries.

To my mind, only thing offensive about the Call to Prayer is the often poor quality loudspeakers through which it is piped. This is not an offence to culture, but to the good taste for which we British are so well known. Oxford City Council should ensure that funds are available for a decent sound-system, which can do justice to the full-flavoured tones of the vocallist. Either that, or some kind of scholarship so that young men and women can train to sing the call unamplified, like opera singers, choirboys, and (so long as we are talking traditions, here) town criers.

(Cross posted at the Liberal Conspiracy)

A long extract from his book in the Independent:

Not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike.

I don’t mean to exaggerate here, to suggest that the pollsters are wrong and that our differences – racial, religious, regional, or economic – are somehow trivial. … It is to insist that across Illinois, and across America, a constant cross-pollination is occurring, a not entirely orderly but generally peaceful collision among people and cultures. Identities are scrambling, and then cohering in new ways. Beliefs keep slipping through the noose of predictability. Facile expectations and simple explanations are being constantly upended. Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discover that most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows. Most Republican strongholds are 40 per cent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.

I see that an Alaskan lady named Marie Smith Jones has passed away. As the last speaker of the Eyak language, an entire way of thinking dies with her. (h/t Mark G)

A couple of competing quotes come to mind. From GK Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill:

“The Señor will forgive me,” said the President. “May I ask the Señor how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?”

“I never catch a wild horse,” replied Barker, with dignity.

“Precisely,” said the other; “and there ends your absorption of the talents….
In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses–by lassooing the fore feet–which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.”

Versus this one, from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

I doubt very much that my inital thought, that the Eyaks of Alaska are some kind of Eskimo (or Esquimaux, as Chesterton has it), is correct. Nevertheless, their Northerly homeland does remind me of the story about how Eskimo’s have forty words for snow (or is it fifty? Or a hundred?) What special, specific thoughts and words have we lost now that Mrs Smith Jones has passed away? Matthew Parris, writing in the Spectator last week, says “I know exactly what I mean. I just can’t think of the word for it” referring to those Meaning of Liff or Meaning of Tingo type words that should exist, but do not. How many words, phrases and thoughts could the Eyak have taught him?

The Telegraph headline blares: Three little pigs ‘could offend builders, Muslims’

Yet another example of our country being hijacked by minority sensibilities? Of course not. Perhaps just another example of a government agency lacking either common sense, or perhaps the confidence to apply it? I fear this may be a media storm in a tea-cup.

This time, the defendant is Becta, the education and technology agency, who have refused to give a BETT prize to a piece of digital artwork featuring the Three Little Pigs. Shoo FLy, the snubbed agency, claim that the feedback form from Becta stated that “judges would not recommend this product to the Muslim community in particular” and that they are the victim of political correctness gone mad. Meanwhile, the judges claim that the product failed to impress on a number of criteria.

I think Becta have a point. Political correctness irritates people the most when they are required to change something already in cultural existence (the Telegraph mentions “Baa baa rainbow sheep” as an example). But the Shoo Fly story was a new creation. If their brief is to create something inclusive accross all communities, then pigs probably aren’t appropriate.

Either way, it is only in the final paragraph of the article that we discover that the pigs aren’t so problematic after all. “we are not offended by that at all” says the MCB. This quote seems to have been missed by many readers of The Daily Telegraph, who complain of yet more kowtowing to minorities.

I am sadly confident that this story will join the canon of PC myths, alongside Winterval and the Royal Bank of Scotland Piggy Banks, which ‘prove’ that we are being overrun by barbarians. In fact, when British cultural practices and values come up against minority sensibilities, they usually win out.