Category Archives: Writing

Arresting Beauty, by Heather Cooper

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Heather Cooper’s excellent historical novel invites the reader into maverick, pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s Isle of Wight home, and into the lives of illustrious artists like the neighbouring Tennyson, through the eyes of Mary Ryan – a beggar girl scooped up by Cameron from the streets of Putney. Mary progresses from parlourmaid to photographer’s model to gallery assistant, but even if she can walk the downs and talk poetry with the Poet Laureate, she can’t shake off her humble origins. Or can she?

Cooper’s intelligent prose matches her bright, plucky, unpretentious heroine, Mary Ryan, who finds herself serving in the household of Julia Margaret Cameron. Here she meets the great and the good – Tennyson, Browning et al – and becomes a model for her mistress’s stylised, allegorical photography.

‘I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.’

Julia Margaret Cameron

Cooper, like her character, respects society’s luminaries rather than idolizing them, preferring to focus on Mary’s private ambitions for self-improvement and security in a world where women, especially those ‘in service’, are unlikely to achieve either. This is a ‘below stairs’ book, not a celebration of the literati. The narrative is beguilingly simple, making Mary’s rapid social progression pleasingly credible, and always engaging. The reader yearns for Mary’s success, and with some nods to Austen along the way, Cooper delivers.

For anyone who knows and loves the Isle of Wight, there had to be a right way to tell the story of life in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Dimbola Lodge, and Tennyson’s Farringford, and Cooper has found it. ARRESTING BEAUTY is a gem.

Published 30 September 2023, Beachy Books.
www.beachybooks.com

Article: I Was At School With Steve Bray

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I was at junior school with Steve Bray. Steve was smart but rebellious. He looked at the rest of us like we were dunces when our teacher asked if anyone knew what the ‘DC’ in Washington, DC stood for. Someone said ‘Democratic County’ and Steve shook his head in despair. Steve’s brother was a certified genius and had been helicoptered off the Isle of Wight to a scholarship at some glamorous school for geniuses on the mainland. Steve probably had identical smarts, but less good fortune.

Steve was the bane of our authoritarian teachers’ lives. When we were very little, they taught us how the Romans brought civilisation to Britain. Steve threw up his hand and said, ‘Do you call strapping a man to a boulder and then rolling that boulder down a hill civilised? Because I don’t.’ This didn’t go down well.

Aged about nine, Steve’s IQ was assessed at over 156 on the Wechsler scale. He was extremely widely read, and knew more about most things than most teachers. When he challenged them, it was hard for them to admit error, and they needed to ‘win’, to save face and keep order. Their arguments boiled down to ‘because I’m the adult here’. He would counter with the question, ‘How does being born at an earlier date than me make you right?’

Steve was an atheist and didn’t want to attend school ceremonies at the nearby church. The school insisted it was an integral part of our community life. At Harvest Festival, with donated food bedecking the long tables, and parents in best bib, the chaplain talked about sacrifice being at the heart of Christianity, with the symbol representing Christ’s sacrifice at the centre of it. Steve put up his hand: ‘I think you’ll find the cross predated Christianity, and was in fact a pagan symbol adopted by the Church.’ Steve was barred from attending school church services after that.

For all his brashness, Steve was an astute reader of people. One of our teachers used to devise spelling tests notionally for the whole class, but which in fact were targetted at me. I was a good speller, and he wanted to catch me out. I expect I enjoyed this attention, but Steve suggested that the guy had a prurient interest in me. (His words were blunter than that, but I’ll spare you.) I think I knew deep down he was right, and possibly Steve alerted me to, and saved me from, potential trouble there.

Steve refused to follow the rules and wear his cap en route to school, and the sadist in charge of discipline made it his business to call Steve into the tuck shop, where he kept his bittersweet lair, and beat Steve hard with a shoe. Steve was tough, but the beatings were tougher. I’ll never forget his broken face, thick with tears as he left the tuck shop after a particularly severe thrashing, clutching his rear. His bravado was gone, replaced by the shock of pain, shame and raw fear.

But bravado was Steve’s fallback. He used to encourage me to play truant, and once the sadist came by in his car – surely not by chance – and wound down his window to ask if we were, as we had informed the school, unwell. I hung back, frozen in fear. But Steve took a drag on a cigarette and leaned into the sadist’s window, and blew the smoke into his face. ‘Very,’ he said. I couldn’t believe the daring.

We lost touch when I left that horrible school, but I gather Steve was expelled soon after.

I met him again at college, where he had morphed into a mouthy socialist worker. He riled our teachers with brilliance of mind, rigidity of argument and incapacity to conform. He talked openly in class about his reliance on cannabis, and did precisely no work. He was cleverer by miles than me, and knew more about politics and philosophy than I will ever know, so, arguably, precisely no work was the amount he needed to do. He was perhaps not the greatest of abluters, and his sweet, defiant, gifted maladorousness went with him when he was ‘sent down’ after a couple or three terms.

Another Steve Bray – and by now you may be suspecting, correctly, that these Steve Brays are not the one who was arrested yesterday in Westminster under the new ‘noisy protest’ law, and are creative amalgams of individuals I have known – was a gifted university philosopher. A maths prodigy plucked from poverty and sent to Oxford at 16, he was the sharpest mind I’ve known to date, and a brilliant, empowering and illuminating teacher. His colleagues more or less hated his guts. His unwashed and unkempt presentation, his verboten cigarettes in the hallowed halls, his popularity with enthralled students. And above all, his incessant challenge. Like new-Bray-on-the-block, Mick Lynch, he would gladly, and firmly, fix a fellow don with a hard stare and state, ‘You Are Wrong. That Is A Lie.’ He demolished arguments with a devastating flick of the intellectual wrist, and left distraught scholars lost in the ruins of their painstakingly-built theses. He was never given tenure.

I’m guessing at your school, or your college, or your place of work, or in your family – somewhere in your story, there is a Steve Bray. Someone who tells it how it is. Someone with a good brain who can’t be quiet, can’t be polite, can’t help standing up to authority.

In my experience, the Steve Brays of this world speak for those of us who are too shy, too conformist, too cautious, too careful to pipe up. In doing so, they put their heads above a dangerous parapet. We all know – and even THEY know – that it is only a matter of time before the powerful take them down. Even when they are right – especially when they are right – they threaten order. They cannot be tolerated. If existing rules cannot be brought to bear against them, new ones will be cooked up to do the job.

The rest of us hang back, keeping our distance, not wanting to go down with them. We tell ourselves there are better ways to make the points they are making. More nuanced ways. More polite ways. More constructive ways. We tell ourselves, perhaps, that some systems are better reformed from the inside, justifying our conformity. We tell ourselves that, in the end, these guys are society’s losers, and it’s a shame, but their way is not the right way.

I have also met the real Steve Bray. The “Stop Brexit” Steve Bray. But I can’t say I know much about his story. I don’t know if he’s unusually clever, like the others I’ve known, or was beaten at home, like one I’ve known, or a little bit ‘on the spectrum’, like the ones I’ve known. I don’t even know if he’s a good bloke, decent though he seemed when we chatted. Like all the Brays I’ve met and you’ve met, I highly doubt he is a messiah, and I’d be surprised if he wasn’t a very naughty boy.

But I do know this. He speaks the truth. If “Stop Brexit” Steve had been wrong, and Brexit had turned out to be all sunlit uplands and Britannia ruling the waves, he’d be a forgotten irrelevance by now. ‘That bloke with the hat,’ we’d say. ‘The one with the megaphone. What was his name?’

But he wasn’t wrong. Brexit has demonstrably torpedoed our economy, our unity and our international standing. It has damaged us below the waterline, and he was right to warn us. Ain’t no megaphone loud enough to get that existential message across.

Is he wrong now on corruption inside government? Hardly. From a ‘system’ in which the Prime Minister polices himself, to the wholesale dispensing of public funds to friends, family, donors and client media, the corruption charge appears all too real.

To this corrupt regime – to this Vote Leave regime – Bray isn’t just a pain in the arse armed with a megaphone; he’s a pain in the arse armed with the truth.

So, like all the Brays I’ve met and you’ve met, they will stop him. Make no mistake, he will lose. They will take him into their tuck shop and whoop his ass. The question for the rest of us is are there really politer, more constructive, more effective ways to speak truth to this particular brand of corrupt, dishonest and self-policing power? Or to put it another way, when he eventually exits the tuck shop a broken man, will we, who did not stand with him, be able to meet his gaze?

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21 Things About Dad

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To celebrate his 100th birthday, I decided to write 21 things about Dad, sharing a little of his story.

It’s a mega-thread!

There may be only 21 things, but they take 91 tweets to tell!

It’s an easy read though, promise. A few smiles and maybe a couple of tears along the way.

Click on the tweet below to read it on twitter. Twitter is more ‘alive’ but also you’ll need to click ‘read replies’ every now and then to get the whole thing.

OR scroll down to the PDF reader underneath, zoom in a little, and enjoy.

xx

21 Things About Dad

And here’s the postcript, tweet 91.

Article: The attack on the BBC

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Thank you to the Independent for encouraging me to write this article.

In case it goes offline, the original text is below.

My Dad, Edward, is 100 years old. He started paying the BBC licence fee in circa 1945, when he was demobbed from the Royal Army Medical Corps. Now, after this government stopped funding the exemption for over-75s, he is paying it once again. And what he probably doesn’t realise, is that he’s in a war again, too.

The war this time is a culture war. We know, of course, that it has been reignited this weekend as part of “Operation Save Big Dog” to try to distract critics of Boris Johnson’s shameful Downing Street tenure on the one hand, and to throw juicy bones to the Tory right on the other.

This culture war strategy is nothing new. While we react to its agenda-setting horrific pronouncements, this government has been quietly pushing through legislation of which the public is substantially unaware – the Policing Bill, the NHS & Care Bill, the Elections Bill, to name just a few. Our democracy and rights are under coordinated – and largely unnoticed – attack. Such are the benefits to dishonest autocrats of stoking culture wars.

So let’s be clear. We are only talking about BBC funding today because the liar in Downing Street is on the ropes. I am only writing this article, and you are only reading it, because this is what he wants us to do. If that is a sobering thought, we can at least console ourselves with the thought that we are sober, which, evidently, is more than can reliably be said for our boozed-up overlords in No 10.

But make no mistake. The attack on the BBC may be part of a culture war, and it may be part of Operation Save Big Dog (or is that Big Dong? No-one is sure), but it is still an all-out attack.

And, as attacks go, it is cunning and low. The Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries, tweeted, “This licence fee announcement will be the last. The days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors, are over.”

Since people like my Dad are only having to resume paying the licence fee because this government refused to pay for their exemption, it is breathtakingly rich of Dorries to present herself as their champion. If any elderly folk are threatened with prison, that will be a direct result of her government’s mean-spirited choice.

This government has no regard for the elderly. We saw how they treated them in the pandemic, with their so-called “protective ring” and their encouragement of Do Not Resuscitate arrangements. We see how they treat them now, leaving them at the mercy of the energy market, equipped only with the lowest state pension of any wealthy economy. For many elderly folk, the box in the corner – and that mostly means the BBC – is a very significant comfort. Now the government wants, effectively, to switch it off.

If the professed care for the elderly is patently disingenuous, what of the criticism that the licence fee is “regressive”? Clearly, insofar as the price stays the same regardless of a person’s income, it is regressive. But then so is the price of a pint of milk; so is the price of a loaf of bread; so is the price of a newspaper. They are all easier on the pockets of the rich than they are on the poor. They’re all regressive.

Yet you won’t hear many tender-hearted Tories saying the price of milk is regressive. It would be meaningless. The price of milk is just the price of milk.

What’s critical is whether the pint of milk is fairly priced. It’s 55p these days, by the way. A second class stamp will set you back 66p. The price of the entire BBC TV, radio and online output is 44p per day.

You can call that regressive; I call it great value.

Branding the licence fee “regressive” is clever propaganda in the culture war, because it makes it sound officially, intellectually, particularly unfair. And it deploys the very language that defenders of the poor use when they complain about things like VAT hikes. If taxes must be raised, most of us prefer the “progressive” variety – those which reflect income. Using the language of compassion to outmanoeuvre and confuse opposition is a particular skill of contemporary Conservatism, and it predates Johnson. Cameron and Osborne were masters of it.

It’s a form of gaslighting really, and, like all gaslighting, it requires continual effort on the part of the victim to keep a clear head. In this case, clear-headedness means understanding the big picture – which, today, is the cynical effort to keep Big Dong standing, if you’ll pardon the grotesque imagery.

Clear-headedness means understanding that the attack on the BBC’s funding model using faux compassion and the language of progressives is entirely dishonest. This government’s record, when it comes to the treatment of the poor and the elderly, speaks for its unconscionable self.

Clear-headedness means understanding that a government with much to hide will always detest being held to account by journalists serving the public interest, and therefore will do all it can to infiltrate and undermine a public service broadcaster like the BBC. The interests of the people, particularly the vulnerable, are best served by well-resourced, independent public service journalism; cutting off the BBC’s legs only allows the ill-intentioned to run amok.

At 100 and still chipping in, my Dad has probably paid more BBC licence fees than pretty much anyone alive in the UK. After all those years of contributions, I reckon it’s his BBC. Johnson’s desperate, dishonest cultural vandals must not be allowed to take it away. Big Dong must not be saved at the expense of the BBC; instead, his demise should mark the start of the long road to restoring decency in this country – and, with it, the return of the exemption for the over-75s. Meanwhile, if the Tories are genuinely concerned about the licence fee being regressive, perhaps they would support the rich paying more?