I Don't Quite Get It

Going through old photographs, I found this from the Times of April 2020. It seems there was a time, not long ago at all, when even professional journalists could not tell the difference between Hungary and Ukraine.

This only intensified my confusion about what we are doing in Ukraine. 

While it is clear Putin is a thug and a monster and Ukraine has been attacked without having done anything that could be interpreted as aggressive provocation, what I don't understand is why this conflict is being treated so differently to the conflicts in other countries where in recent decades equally unfair attacks have been made - and in some cases the aggressor has been Putin, just like now. 

Somehow, the whole of the West has been whipped up into wild outrage by this particular war, as opposed to all the many cruel unfair wars in the world that we usually turn a blind eye to - in fact, simultaneous with expressing our horror at what is happening in Ukraine, we are turning the blindest of blind eyes to poor old Armenia, under regular and unjustified attack from Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, in fact, at least, according to Ursula von der Leyen, is a reliable and trustworthy partner, not like brutal Russia at all (except it is). 

So why here, why now, do we suddenly find our (selective) moral compass? And most especially, why here? I mean, when Boris Johnson wrote in his usual bombastic way, "What conceivable grounds can there be for delay" in providing more assistance and weaponry for the Ukrainians to fight back against Russia, was I the only one to think, "Er, mate, the fact that you are taking on a madman with a vast nuclear arsenal who, if driven too hard, might decide to use those weapons, because he is cruel, blood thirsty and completely mad and if we leave him nothing to lose who knows what will happen."

Am I a dreadful appeaser? Or is there something to be said for noting that Hitler did not have nuclear weapons and Putin does, and therefore the situation between Russia and Ukraine might deserve a slightly more delicate strategy than simply going in hard, hard, hard?

The Ukrainians are in the right, no doubt about it, but so many others are - and have been - in similar skirmishes. Why have we all suddenly found our morality for this war but no others? And, having found our compass, are we sure the best solution to what is a horrific problem is to goad the bear?

I sound pusillanimous. I am. But I am also suspicious, simply because our response to what is happening in Ukraine strikes me as very much the exception to the rule, and I would like to know why that is.

And somehow I don't feel tremendously encouraged by the news that there has just been a purge of very senior people in the Ukrainian government who were corrupt - not because the purge isn't good news but because the news only came yesterday, suggesting to me that we have all been going round thinking this is a fight between good and bad, when actually it's a fight between not that great and terrible, in terms of the leaders. 

Would the purge have happened, I wonder, if the Ukrainian leadership hadn't been forced into it by us, its new allies? Who are we dealing with really - not the civilians but those who run things in the Ukrainian government? If Ukraine wins and the immediate aftermath is not that we are all drenched in radioactive fallout, will the corrupt individuals purged yesterday come sliding back and resume their business? Are we being encouraged into a huge and endless war because of some other agenda, or is it just that Ukrainian civilians are more attractive to us than those in the Caucasus or Armenia? Is Putin really a threat to the entire free world or is he just an elderly thuggish Russian with stupid dreams that he cannot actually sustain or even fulfil? 

Icky Fingers

When I was five or six my brother and I were very interested in the weekly Top Ten countdown on the radio. I can still remember our bafflement and disgust as week after week for almost two months Frank Ifield yodelling a song called "I Remember You" remained stuck at No. 1. What could it mean? Who were the people who could bear to listen to this appalling noise?

My memory has it that we wanted Ferry Cross the Mersey to knock off Frank Ifield - but it turns out it came out years later. If it wasn't that, perhaps it was The House of the Rising Sun. But, no: that too came years afterwards. So it must have been the Beatles with Love Me Do that we were barracking for.  I didn't think I liked that song much, but it seems that long ago a three-foot two version of myself cared about it very, very much.

In connection with our Top Ten mania, on Saturday mornings my brother and I used to go with our friends from nextdoor, Charlie and David, to the Chelsea Record Shop, on the Kings Road, almost next to the Chelsea Town Hall. Charlie and David had more pocket money than us (and television, and free access to sweets, such astonishing riches), and they would buy singles. I did not have enough money for singles - at least not genuine ones. However, there was a product that I could afford - a record that came out every week with the top ten songs on it, but all sung by people who, despite their best efforts, did not sound quite like the real thing.

There is nothing in my life that has been a bigger waste of money than those imitation hit records. I succumbed to the temptation of buying them three times, before realising they were just completely no good. Actually, I think I realised they were no good right from the first time I bought one - but the next couple of times I was genuinely interested to try to work out what it was that made them inferior. They were so very nearly like the originals. No one sang off tune. They had the lyrics and the tempo perfect, their singers had similar voices to those of the singers they were imitating. But they mysteriously failed - entirely - every time.

I remembered those records when someone showed me some of the photographs of non-existent people that artificial intelligence is beginning to produce. Here are a couple of examples:

They look remarkably good, at first glance. But look a little more closer - just like those fake top ten records, there is something not quite right about these fake people. It's their hands. What on earth is going on with their hands?

I find it reassuring actually. As someone on Twitter said:

Someone replied with this account of robots pitted against US Marines that was also quite cheering.

On the other hand, (ho ho), if Dora Carrington's portrait of Lytton Strachey is accurate, perhaps AI photograph generators have simply had Strachey-related data fed into their programming:

Only time will tell: will robots gain the upper hand (ho ho ho ho) or are their barriers we cannot get over? I grew up in an age when we were led to believe that humans could solve everything, but it's been 50 years and there still seems no solution to the problem of storing energy for any length of time in batteries. Either robots and artificial intelligence, as human-made phenomena, will reach certain limits and go no further, or they will go beyond those limits, not thanks to human efforts but surpassing them. I pray that the first option will prevail,  that robots and AI will reach the limits that we are capable of and go no further and that human life will meander on in its messy, muddled, mostly five-fingered way.

Ps: coincidentally (or because AI is already infinitely better than I'd imagined) straight after writing this, two articles on the subject of AI turned up in the ever flowing stream that is Twitter. Here is one. And here is the other. 

The Slow Lane

 On the subject of supermarket automation, this is cheering, if true:

Luddites Unite

 "Them robots innit, coming over here taking our jobs", I think now, whenever I go into a supermarket and see the self-checkouts they are putting in everywhere - although when I very first saw them, when living in London, I thought their cry of "Unexpected item in the bagging area" might one day be appropriated for the title of a chick lit novel about a girl who gets pregnant by mistake. 

So far I think nobody else has thought that and acted upon it. Or, more likely, many others have, but they have recognised that it is a very stupid idea. 

In Hungary, I don't think the supermarket robots speak anyway, those that are here, that is - thus far, Hungarian self-checkout machines are relatively few and far between, I'm glad to say. 

As far as I know, they exist mainly in one of the two chains of supermarkets with yellow and blue signs - Aldi or Lidl, (I've chosen not to waste my limited mental capacity distinguishing between the two). Incidentally, in whichever of those two supermarkets it is where they haven't invested heavily in robots, all "store announcements" are made first in Hungarian and then again in the pre-recorded voice of an Australian woman, which I find appealing. Any other Australians in Hungary may be interested, if they are feeling mildly homesick.

In short, I recognise the convenience of self-checkouts (although an alternative would be employing far more people so that all checkout desks are filled) and therefore I do use them, but I rather wish I wasn't given the opportunity to make this anti-social choice. Taking away jobs is bad enough, but taking away the minor interchanges of daily life is worse. 

A way to defeat the new wave of supermarket robots did occur to me yesterday when I saw one elderly woman use a self-checkout so farcically incompetently that she needed a member of the shop's staff to scan every single one of her bits of shopping. Watching her, I realised that, if all customers had the courage and intent, we could together perform equal incompetence, so that more and more staff members would be needed to help us. Eventually managers everywhere would be forced to recognise that it would actually be a much better idea to employ people. 

I won't bet on that though, because as this small item shows, the business of replacing humans with non-humans has been with us for a very long time.

I Support Internet Archive

I found Internet Archive during the months when we couldn't go to shops or travel. The very first books I read there were fiction set in the time of the Spanish flu. One was Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Porter. Another was They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (about whom Edward Mendelson is fascinating in another book you can find on Internet Archive; I suspect he puts a similar argument here). 

I loved both of these books. Given that our "pandemic" didn't turn out to be a true pandemic of the Spanish flu variety, I wonder whether works of such poignance will be inspired by people's experience of this more recent iteration. I expect that as time goes by and the consequences of the panicked public policy we were persuaded to accept become more terrible, we may see an increasing anger emerging in people's recollection of what happened. 

Anyway, I think Internet Archive is a wonderful thing and the attacks being made upon it by publishers are misguided and selfish. So often it is impossible to find older books anywhere but in the Archive's collection. The Archive is doing a huge service, preserving so much that publishers cannot be bothered to keep available.

And it is not only books. Today I found this fascinating bit of footage in which you can see Ferenc Nagy being interviewed in the calm manner of a former era. 

For those who may not know, Ferenc Nagy was democratically elected Prime Minister of Hungary until Mátyás Rákosi's Communist Party, aided by Soviet soldiers, kidnapped his party's General Secretary & deported him to the Soviet Union and then kidnapped Nagy's own son, only returning him when Nagy agreed to resign from office. 

Once they'd achieved that, the Communist Party seized power in Hungary, despite having won only 22 per cent of the vote at free elections. 

"I do not believe coexistence is possible between ideologies. Communism is an imperialistic ideology" Nagy states in the Internet Archive footage. Sadly, Communism is also a very insidious ideology, and if you look carefully enough you will see that it is the force behind many of today's problems. Along with the thing it claims to be the cure for - human greed.

Food in Fiction - an occasional series

 I am reading Incline Our Hearts by AN Wilson. It is the first in a series, and thus far it has been pretty much a mirror of his more recent memoir, Confessions, which I enjoyed, but which I'm not completely sure I want to read again as fiction. 

Not that it is quite that simple - but very nearly.

Anyway, in the novel there is a description of a lunch that the narrator enjoys as a young man in  a house in Brittany. It does sound rather wonderful, (although I might have cut the naked mermaid bit, had I been in charge):

"Even by her own impeccable standards this was a series of dishes done to such perfection that one was half aware, even while eating it, that the memory of the meal would remain for ever. Almost all experience is instantaneously forgettable. Most of what we do remember is only fixed in our minds by chance. For another person to place something in our consciousness deliberately, so that we never forget it, that is art... The meal began with a spinach soufflé, which was like a thing of nature, a puffy light green crust sprouting from its bowl like a bush coming to leaf. And then there was raie au beurre noire, the freshest strands of succulent skate as white as snow amid the black butter and the little, dark green capers: once again, one felt that the food was for the first time in its natural habitat: a naked mermaid was suggested, sitting in seaweed. And then there were pieces of roast beef, pink and tender served with pommes dauphinoise. And then there were haricots verts from the garden, served separately when we had all finished our meat. And then there was a fresh, very oily, green salad with which to eat the Camembert. And then, to crown it all, omelettes soufflés aux liqueurs, frothing, bubbling in their great buttery pans as Therese and Barbara ran in, squealing with the excitement of this success, for sweet omelettes never looked lighter or smelt more spirituous than these."

Too Much Too Fast

Another year almost over. I am so grateful for all it has brought with it. 

Most important of all for me, a grand daughter arrived in early June. We treasure her more than we could have possibly imagined. As a woman at a supermarket checkout remarked, looking at the tiny girl, then aged four months, "Children are the joy of the world." Certainly for our family.

Almost equally thrillingly, in February I became a Catholic, thanks to the kindness of Father Benedict Kiely, who risks life and limb to travel to dangerous places to support persecuted Christians and whose charity - https://nasarean.org - is well worth supporting, and of Father Eddy Tomlinson, in whose church I was received. 

The church is St Anselm's Pembury and it is part of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. The place is a wonder. From the outside, it appears to be a 1970s community hall, without any adornment or beauty, apart from the vegetation that grows around it. Inside, it is a sumptuous space, furnished entirely from the things thrown out by others, including pews commissioned for the Anglican Church of St Mary and St Nicholas in Littlemore by Saint John Henry Newman when he was still an Anglican priest. Those now running things at Littlemore had decided to modernise and replace the pews with chairs and were therefore throwing away the 19th century pews: 

(That last is from the Twitter feed of Father Eddy Tomlinson - I have not yet investigated but I think he also has a regular podcast)

 One thing I particularly love about being a Catholic is the obligation to go to mass on Sunday, no matter where you are. This obligation has taken me into all sorts of different churches as this year has been overflowing with travel, and I love the new angle going to church gives you on different places. 

Most recently while in Fremantle, Perth, I attended mass at this church:

While waiting for the service to begin, I noticed in the notes at the end of the order of service that there was to be a Christmas party for the congregation after mass. On the way in, I had admired the  spacious priest's house next-door to the church and had even gone so far as to take a picture of it:

It therefore amused me to read that the party was not to be accommodated anywhere within that building or even in the shade of its verandahs, but in the presbytery carport. "How modern", as my dear departed Aunt Prudence might have said.

On the way back from the church, I was struck by this scene, which had a faint look of War of the Worlds. 

Barely visible on the left is a rather nice old railway station that the Fremantle authorities seem keen to disguise behind billboards and buses:

This remained one of the great mysteries that I did not solve in 2022 - why did the Western world so definitely and firmly turn against beauty, from the 20th century on? Someone suggested to me the other day that it was the Frankfurt school and their Marxist inclinations that were to blame, but, if so, how did they become so influential? Since the theory first appeared, Marxism does seem to be at the root of so many disasters. If the book Francis Wheen wrote about Marx is to be believed, the creator of the influential M theory was a really nasty piece of work.

Is it thanks to Marxism that craftsmanship is no longer considered worth paying for, so that things provided for public use, like this water trough and fountain in Fremantle, are no longer made with any thought given to ensuring a pleasing appearance? It is as if decorativeness has become a cardinal sin:

As for modern sculpture, don't get me started. All I can say is that John Curtin did not deserve to be portrayed via this appalling effigy, also in Fremantle:

The human is not designed to change time zones radically and, having been barred from making the journey to Australia for a long time, (during the coronavirus health restrictions), I got out of practice. All the same, the journeys had to be done. As always, when over that side of the world I felt wonder at the light and space and emptiness that is a kind of freedom, but I missed the challenge of foreign languages and the beauty of ancient buildings. On the other hand, there was the sea:

Once I would have been amused by the very Australian way in which Coronavirus tests, officially known as "rapid antigen tests", have been shortened to be referred to fondly as "RATs":

However, I've lost my sense of humour a bit as Australia's policies on coronavirus, and the attitude of most of the people I am fond of there, were more extreme than I thought necessary - and I think offering free RATs is a pretty good way of keeping the panic stoked and going, by suggesting it might be necessary to test and test and test and ... You get the idea.

On this last trip, I was heading to the Eastern states where my mother celebrated her 97th birthday. I am not normally a baker but I thought the occasion deserved an effort so I made her a cake. In the process, I gained new respect for even the worst contestants on the UK's bake-off television competition. Needless to say, my mother, being so old, could hardly eat any of my cake, particularly as it was the kind that seems light and airy when you get it straight from the oven but by the time it has cooled and sat in the fridge overnight, becomes rather toward the solid end of the spectrum:

I have neglected this blog for too long and there is so much more to report from this last year, but time and the patience of anyone who might read this is surely running out. Right at the start of the year, we spent a few days in Venice, en route to England, then, on the return journey, a night in an impossible to remember the name of Basque place where, we later discovered, Carl Habsburg lived for some time, two nights in Concarneau and the same in Menton, all new territory for us, all places I planned to blog about but didn't. On another trip back to England we went via Baden Baden, also new to us, also unblogged despite good intentions. Additionally, while waiting for the grand daughter we got to know Bristol and its environs, including making a visit to Glastonbury, (the town, rather than the festival.) Alas, again, many photographs were taken but no blog written.

Instead of blogging, while bouncing back and forth between Bristol and Budapest, with side trips to Australia, I mainly read lots of books. Those I remember especially fondly include -

1. from contemporary fiction: Cressida Connolly's Bad Relations and Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These;

2. from serendipity, (that is, found on one of Budapest's book stalls or in a 20p box on Bristol's Gloucester Road):

Julian Fellowes' Past Imperfect, Kent Haruf's Plainsong, the Patrick Melrose series and, by far the best and most surprising find of all, The Leaves of Southwell by Niklaus Pevsner.

In the new year, I may try to write about that last one at least.  I am hoping 2023 will be at least as joyous but not quite as distracting as 2022, so that I have some time to revive blog writing as a habit.

 
Meanwhile, I am trying not to regret not buying this painting, which, because it was expensive I thought I'd think about while away in Australia. I did think about it and when I returned two weeks later I went round to the shop where I'd seen it and discovered it had already been sold:

I was dithering about whether the figure on the right was a bit kitsch. I still think she is, but the light and shadow and the way the windows to the left are painted make the whole thing work for me. I thought it would look wonderful on a big wall in my kitchen and bring sunlight into the room in the depths of winter. Presumably it is doing that for someone else, somewhere. I hope they really love it. 

Goodbye, 2022 and hello 2023. Happy New Year to all.