A Lost World

I always looked forward with great anticipation to reading the latest novel by Michael Crichton, the author, filmmaker and man of outstanding intellect, who died recently. His widely read books have been translated into thirty-six languages to date.
In my view Michael Crichton had ideal qualifications and a rare talent (honed by hard work and combined with considerable research) for stretching technological possibilities to their not-quite-illogical limit and exploring the consequences as things went wrong when the futuristic technology was combined with a range of questionable human motivations. Alas there will be no more Crichton tales - they are lost to the world. But I shall certainly enjoy re-reading many of my particular favourite novels including Jurassic Park, Timeline, Airframe, Prey and the successor to Jurassic Park, The Lost World. However, and notwithstanding the official website’s commentary, I intend to pass on a revisit to the one ‘out of sync’ Crichton work, State of Fear.
Michael Crichton’s style of writing was sometimes assailed by literary critics for supposedly shallow drawing of characters and the limited description of relationships amongst them. To the extent that this was an opinion held to any significant extent, from my point of view it was (a) a positive asset and (b) the criticism completely misses the point.
Crichton had all the requisite abilities. He also had so many imaginative ideas to develop and events to work through to instructive and sobering consequences that cluttering the work up with tiresome portraits of fictitious personalities (no doubt required to be flawed and frequently horizontal) redundant dialogue and interminable interactions would have been a drag on the flow of the exhilarating plot and the rapid tempo narrative. If sophisticated interpersonal relationships are what you simply must insist on regardless of plot or setting - and there is nothing wrong with that - then stick with Jane Austen, but please don’t require all writers or readers to have their preferences cast in the same mould. That and the awkward fact that most of the critics could hardly put Crichton’s books down.
Michael Crichton’s work was written in the unaffected manner and exemplary straightforward English that is called for by his subject matter. And this he did exceptionally well. In my view Michael Crichton should be ranked with H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and their triumphs of concept; The First Men in the Moon, The Time Machine, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea - to which I would add Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. In my opinion, Jurassic Park was a masterpiece of this genre and the Steven Spielberg’s film broke new technical ground and was well done despite unnecessary tamperings with the script and two of the characters.
My personal favourite novel however, remains Timeline - although I accept that in this matter I will probably put myself in a minority amongst Crichton connoisseurs. However, the film did not, to say the least, do justice to the book. A time-travel theme is inherently fascinating but is extremely difficult to pull off plausibly with the intractable problem of contradiction avoidance not to mention the travel mechanism involved. In this latter respect he came up with the most creative and original account although somewhat contradicting his chaos related arguments of Jurassic Park in the former respect.
Millions of people right across the globe will miss Michael Crichton’s highly distinctive contributions to imaginative, science related, fiction - a lost world of the future - but, without doubt, many millions more will certainly discover them in the years to come. Michael Crichton's work will stand the test of time.
You can visit the official Michael Crichton website on the Internet at: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/

Season's Greetings

Woolies - is it any Wonder?

Woolworths have been a significant part of English high streets for almost a century and the demise of the stores is a sad and significant event too. Significant that is in both economic and psychological terms. With 807 stores, most towns of any size had one and they were part of the retail landscape. But no more. Although some of the stores have been sold and will be occupied by other companies and at the time of writing there is still a small chance that 125 or so may be rescued, the bulk are gone for good and the jobs that went with them.
They will be missed, particularly by those who recall them from their heyday. We grew up with them. They made sixpence pocket money go a long way! (That’s 2.5p in the dull and diminishing currency we have today). Their exterior image changed - not for the better in my view over the decades and it has been particularly sad to see the state of their shops in the morbid scramble for suspected if not actual bargains in recent days. Solihull Woolworths closes on December 27th and Birmingham expires on January 6th.
Some years ago Woolworth’s became part of another group here and were done no favours from that deal although others profited. The money mercenaries who have got their hands on so many of our assets these days care nothing for household names. The original Woolworths in the United States was founded by Frank Winfield Woolworth in 1879. You may rember the store's 'Winfield' own brand (I recall in particular the Winfield cheaper substitute for Brylcreem!). In the United States, F.W. Woolworth was closed in 2001 and, as we have so often to say nowadays, it ‘re-invented’ itself as the not-so-inspiringly entitled Foot Locker Inc. If you are in New York, one place to go to see is the lovely Art-Deco Woolworth building (the exterior only - for some reason visitors not allowed even into the lobby) in lower Manhattan. It is a reminder of more inspiring times and architecture.
As suggested, the reasons for Woolworths’ demise are not solely due to the recession, but the recession - soon to be depression - has played its withering part. There has been much comment recently about what the depression signifies. There are many columnists defending capitalism in the predominantly right of centre press (no surprise as the owners of the press are seeking profits themselves) and one or two who say that the case is proven for a much larger and permanent role for the state. Both are wrong in my view and both miss the key point. The Church of England in its comments has been nearer the truth. And of course it is not a choice between extremes - our society is a mixed economy as it has been since the workhouses closed.
I take the view that there is and always has been an important role for the public sector in strategic areas such as fuel, transport and water. The only ‘crisis of capitalism’ is in fact the ethical vacuum in which it has been allowed to operate - an ‘anything goes’ variant of the system that built up western economies is now what is dragging them down. The contemptuous exploitation of people by value-free businesses, especially in the financial sector, has done immense damage. The leaders of these outfits need moral re-education - they clearly had deficient upbringing. Rather than re-education, let’s call it training - they foist enough of this stuff on their employees. ‘Introduction to Values for Bankers’, ‘Rudiments of Prudence’, ‘Basic Social Responsibility’, ‘Essential Valuing of People and Country as well as Profit’ and ‘Home Truths about Globalisation’ would be good courses for starters - along with a compulsory practical element on living on the minimum wage.
Without this ‘cultural revolution’ of our own, I fear that efforts to teach financial skills in schools will in practice be made to fail by the profiteers who change the system and/or the way that they take advantage of it. Incidentally I recently saw a report on such courses in schools and had to point out that the word ‘saving’ was not used at any point. I fear that unless there is a thorough and lasting moral re-education of boardrooms, the same crisis affecting both the financial sector and the real economy - with retailing an early victim - will happen again in less than twenty years. I can’t say that I’m any too optimistic about this though. Meanwhile let's hope that the list of retailers following Woolworths into administration does not grow ever longer.

All Just One Big Lie

These were the words attributed to Bernard Madoff the Wall Street trader who has been charged with investment fraud that would set a new world record. The Ponzi (pyramid type) scheme that he has apparently admitted running and the thirty three billion pounds it is said to have lost would indeed be a monstrous lie, but it is by no means the only big lie that is lying around.
I’m not just talking about rising corporate fraud or incompetent, greedy and boastful bankers and fancy financiers taking easy cuts, pushing loans on people who could not afford them, extorting savers, deluding investors and treating ordinary people as so much bonus fodder. For instance there are also the lies that England was well placed to withstand a recession (few countries are worse placed as is now all too apparent) and the associated deception that a post-industrial ‘creative’ economy is the modern way to high living standards and that financial services (services to what by the way?) are a most important part of a modern growth economy (what was it that was supposed to be growing all these years?). There were also the deceivers in the form of regulators who did not regulate, auditors who did not audit, rating agencies who ratted rather than rated, financial advisers who gave false advice and the masquerade of fund ‘managers’ who showed all the diligence of dilettantes.
I also refer to the super-lie that Globalisation - the surrender of self-sufficiency and self-respect in equal measure - Is Good For You. Even a Toucan shouldn’t believe that! Giving in to globalisation is the real surrender of national sovereignty - Europe is a sideshow in comparison. We are still told that the big G is something wonderful that should be ‘embraced’. The only embracing that has been done is by the boardroom pillagers hugging their boom-time profits from exporting English jobs to the Far East and those of our politicians who outsmart themselves with desiccated theories from the ‘miserable science’ about everything except the real economy. Globalisation has to be dealt with like a flu pandemic - avoid it if you can and try to change the ways of life and values (if lack of loyalty can be seen as a value) that give rise to it.
No one else believes that it’s good to embrace the evisceration of industry - certainly our colleagues on the continent do not - nor do an increasing number of Americans. I was not the only one saying a decade or more ago that when the tide turned for the USA, as turn it would with the gutting of their own industries especially in the mid-west, and they stopped being apparent winners in the game of globalisation they would start to whistle a different tune. And they’re quite right to do this. The January package by the Obama administration with a big emphasis on public works and measures to restore industry will be revealing in this regard. I hope that our national leaders will already be dancing to a similar tune of our own but I fear that, especially in the shape of Mr Mandelson, they may not.
However, the Government, after years - decades in fact - of economic make-believe, have not made too bad a start. There was no choice but to bail out the bankers and avoid compounding the damage they had already done and we certainly need Keynesian action. But in my view that latter needs to be much more direct in terms of public works and infrastructure projects. Tax cuts leak away into frivolous spend on imports from which free riders such as Germany and China will benefit more than ourselves.
For example, this country should have begun work on an electricity generating Severn barrage twenty five years ago at the time of the eighties de-industrialisation when the temporary oil revenues were building up. There was no need to privatise water - as a nation we could have invested in that too. Not to mention power generation and fuel storage nor the railways and the nonsense of rail privatisation instead of rail investment. These are some of the worst examples of the release and squandering of national equity to use a re-mortgaging metaphor.
Interest rate cuts have limited if any impact. They hit savers immediately (for more on this see my website at http://www.michaelwilkes.mycouncillor.org.uk/ ) and are only partly passed on (in some cases loan charges went up) to borrowers. The economic effect can even be perverse. In Japan in the 90s as interest rates were cut people took out fewer loans and saved harder to make up the lost income - but then the Japanese can be more traditional which is reflected in the fact that the Yen is rising and the pound falling. How we have lost our way!
One absolute certainty is that reducing planned government expenditure or cutting further still in the teeth of a major recession would be breathtaking stupidity. Nevertheless the Conservative opposition here now seem tied to this in so far as their latest policies are clear at all. The great depression lasted as long as it did due to siren voices like these. Roosevelt in the US favoured public works and could have done even more. It was not the approach of war that pulled their economy out of the doldrums but the centrally directed increase in manufactures (albeit of armaments) that was associated with it. The recovery would have been the same from making ploughshares. We can certainly argue on the form that the Keynesian methods should take (the mix of public works and tax cuts) but not on their necessity. Cure-by-cuts is as rational a remedy for recession as the application of leaches was for fever.
However, there will be no miracles. We first avoid making things worse by dealing with the bankers and their ill-begotten financial brethren and apply Keynesian methods to take the bottom off the depression and build for recovery and the future. This does not mean that there’s no price to be paid for the froth, falseness and folly of the last decade, we just get the bill on easier and less destructive terms with a bit more time to adjust.
But in the longer term we must as a nation as well as individuals make a big adjustment and return to being self-sufficers in more things - particularly industry and agriculture. Fields (with English people working in them) as well as factories should be part of our plans for the future. We must provide for moral re-education so that our economy can be trusted to build for the future and on behalf of the whole nation. Before this there must be hands on regulation with teeth. Light regulation only works in the context of a moral society. Saving must be encouraged and savers supported (no contradiction with what is needed for recovery here if the saving takes the place of spending on imports).
Above all, we must rebuild our industry and if that means restoring, preserving and, yes, protecting what we have left then so be it. We are advised that we mustn’t do this sort of thing (as if other countries haven’t been cheating for years). Why are our leaders so gullible? But what would you think of advice that said don’t protect your house and possessions because burglary is an important part of a modern economy and it doesn’t really matter who owns what? For burglary read globalisation and the loyalty-free libertarian profiteering (sometimes known as ‘free’ trade) and the destruction of industrial employment and the environmental degradation overseas and dereliction at home that is part and parcel of it. This is the greatest lie we face today against which even the ‘one big lie’ attributed to Mr Madoff seems but a peccadillo.

Beowulf, Birmingham and Tolkien

Beowulf is an Old English epic poem written by an unknown author probably between AD500 and AD700. It was a folk story that would have been passed on by storytellers for decades before being written down. Although written in Old English (Anglo-Saxon), the action takes place in Denmark and the hero, Beowulf, is Swedish. The audience could well have been Anglo-Saxon settlers from Denmark who arrived in England during the Dark Ages. ‘Dark Ages’ is in my opinion a rather misleading name referring to the lack of written material from the period that makes life inconvenient for historians rather than a dearth of culture, craftsmanship or courage. The picture shows a manuscript first page.
Beowulf is part myth and part fact - many of the battles mentioned were real. The modern equivalent would be ‘faction’. It is a story of heroism against dark forces. It follows Beowulf’s life and his transition from young, bold, warrior to wise but ageing King. The hero's name loosely translates from ‘Beo’ for bee and ‘wulf’ for hunter. Bears hunt bees and the name, therefore, becomes ‘bee-hunter’ and so ‘bear’.
World-renowned author J.R.R. Tolkien spent his childhood in Birmingham in the midmost part of England. Many of the landscapes and peoples of Middle-earth were drawn from his experience in and around Birmingham. ‘Middle-earth’ (here we use Tolkien’s preferred spelling with a hyphen and lower-case ‘e’) means the world that lies between heaven and hell, i.e. the world of mortals.
Tolkien’s love of Anglo-Saxon started at King Edward’s School in the centre of Birmingham. Reading Beowulf in Modern English and then in the original, he grew fond of the story and its language, realising that its dialect resembled that of his mother’s West Midland ancestors. Indeed it is possible that the sound of voices from Birmingham (which means ‘home of the people of Beorma’) and the Black Country (the adjacent formerly highly industrialised part of the English West Midlands) may be an echo of the sound of Mercian Anglo-Saxon. Our picture shows commemorative ironwork in Birmingham.
Tolkien liked stories about dragons. Beowulf battles against two monsters and a dragon. The tale in the poem of the theft of a golden cup from the dragon re-surfaces in The Hobbit, as does the description of the Golden Hall in The Two Towers. Notwithstanding difficulties with the dates, it may be that the description of Hrothgar’s hall in Beowulf relates to the hall of Offa, King of Mercia (which kingdom included the whole of central England as shown in the map) in the 8th century. Offa’s hall was in Tamworth, a few miles from Birmingham.
Tolkien made a translation of Beowulf, and manuscripts of the translation were located a few years ago. Extracts suggest a more poetic rendering of the epic than those that are available to us now. Regrettably however the whole translation has so far not been published.
As a young man in Sweden, the land of the Geats, Beowulf is a great warrior whose personality and characteristics include great courage, strength and the essential heroic qualities of loyalty, courtesy and pride. Having become a hero in his own land, Beowulf hears about the terrible creature Grendel who is ravaging the mead-hall of King Hrothgar in Denmark. He sets off with a loyal band of warriors to rid Hrothgar's court of this menace. Defeating Grendel, he then has to fight Grendel's mother who seeks vengeance for the death of her son. Beowulf is successful and, greatly respected and richly rewarded, he returns to his own country where he becomes a much-loved ruler keeping the peace and governing wisely.
However, as the poem shows, heroic lives have doom waiting in the wings. Fifty years later the land is being devastated by a dragon angry at the theft of a gold cup from its lair. Beowulf defeats the dragon but in so doing is mortally wounded. His death is followed by years of chaos, and the poem reflects on differences between the responsibilities of a young warrior and a ruler who leaves his people without a successor.

An enactment of extracts from Beowulf, dramatised by Hall Green’s Vivienne Wilkes was presented by Shire productions at Birmingham’s Middle Earth weekend in May 2008.