you're gonna burn, you're gonna burn....

I noticed, about halfway round my run this evening and some nine days after Bonfire Night, that the big charity bonfire in Wilford was finally out. It was still burning when I ran past yesterday evening, and if they hadn't clearly raked it over at some point today, then I'm sure it would still have been smouldering away merrily tonight.

Nine days is quite a long time for any fire to be burning, I would say, but if you factor in the fact that it has been hooning it down pretty solidly every day since the bonfire was lit, then you'll agree that this was quite a big bloody fire. It's so big, in fact, that the organisers of the event apparently have to get a structural engineer to put it all together. It's literally the size of a large house, and this year, they had to build it twice when some of the local youth thought it might be amusing to set the pile alight a week before bonfire night.

Tsk.

That pile of ashes was still smouldering sadly as the organisers somehow managed to conjure up another massive pile of wood alongside so that the show could go on.

Not that I've given this much thought, but a bonfire of that size must burn pretty hot, right? Wouldn't that make it a really good place to get rid of a body? If you could get it into the woodpile somehow, surely it would then burn so hot that nothing would remain? And even if someone did see a man-shaped silhouette in the flames, given that it's traditional to burn effigies at this time of the year, wouldn't they just mistake it for another Guy?

Just as a point of interest and as a terrible history bore, I feel I should point out that Guy Fawkes wasn't burned at all.... he was actually sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, but was so weak from his torture that he never made it past the hanging bit, sensibly deciding to jump from the gallows, breaking his neck. Spoilsport.



It seems to me something of an overreaction that he is still such a reviled figure in this country some 400 years after the Gunpowder Plot.... perhaps he'd seen the register of Parliamentary expenses and they were afraid he'd publish?

Isn't it time we got over it?

If we must burn effigies of a catholic in a massive bonfire every year, might I humbly suggest we move on to Tony Blair?

the righteous and the wicked....

There's a bit in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" where Captain Black runs something he calls the "Glorious Loyalty Oath Campaign", where everyone in the squadron finds themselves forced to sign oaths pledging their loyalty in order to get absolutely anything or everything:

"Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that "The Star-Spangled Banner," one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again"

Of course, anyone refusing to sign one of these oaths is immediately branded as somehow being disloyal to their country, to their flag and to their cause:

"Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that people who really did owe allegiance to their country would be proud to pledge it as often as he forced them to."

Captain Black's rival, Major Major, is actively prevented from signing any of these oaths, even if he wanted to:

"What makes you so sure Major Major is a Communist?"

"You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you? And you don't see him signing any of our loyalty oaths."

"You aren't letting him sign any."

"Of course not," Captain Black explained. "That would defeat the whole purpose of our crusade".

Thus does Joseph Heller neatly skewer empty patriotism.

I was reminded of this when reading about the Daily Mail's latest campaign to try and get every Premier League football club to display a poppy on their matchday shirts during November.



As a result of their bullying, there are now only three of the twenty clubs holding out: Liverpool, Manchester United and Bolton Wanderers. As a spokesman for Manchester Utd not unreasonably said:

"We don’t think it’s particularly necessary. We sell poppies around the ground and all our officials wear them and we work with Armed Forces charities in a lot of other ways throughout the year."

Not good enough, apparently, and the Mail is continuing to try to bully them into changing their minds. Obviously, their readers are full of considered opinions on the subject. Here's lazzruss:

"Yes Yes Yes!!! It is beyond my capacity to put into words how this 'government' has ruined our once Great Britain by sytematically [sic] attacking our spiritual and historical heritage and culture and we have had enough! Banning poppies is the final insult to our nation as this shows a complete disregard and contempt for our Glorious Dead who gave everything including their very lives for the sake of the future of our Nation and every football team owes them their success and privileges - to display a simple poppy proudly on their shirts should be a moral imperative for anyone who loves our Country and what we (not the inept and shameful Labour Government) stand for."

Let's leave aside the fact that the majority of the players in the Premier League aren't even English, eh? Why let that get in the way of a good rant about WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY?

Um, perhaps it's a statement of the obvious, but if you try to force people to wear a poppy, aren't you restricting our freedom to choose not to wear one? Isn't that the same freedom that "our Glorious Dead' fought for? Like it or not, that's the same freedom that allows a student to get so paralytically drunk that he urinated on a war memorial in Sheffield. Not very nice, for sure, but surely more a story about binge drinking than it is about any calculated disrespect for the dead, whatever the Daily Mail try to make of the story (flogging too good for him, naturally).

This "Poppy fascism" seems to be everywhere at the moment. Apparently the BBC are under pressure because the dancers on "Strictly..." weren't wearing poppies last week. All of the judges were, but none of the dancers. Not good enough, apparently, as everyone on the X-Factor was wearing one.... The BBC initially (and not very bravely) hid behind "Health & Safety issues" as the reason why the dancers weren't wearing poppies, but have now apparently changed their minds in the face of all this public outrage.

Where does this oneupmanship and assumed moral authority stop? Why are we only displaying our poppies for a couple of weeks of November? Does that mean we're being disrespectful and unpatriotic for the other 50 weeks of the year? Should we all be dyeing our hair red and tattooing poppies onto our cheeks so we can be displaying our gratitude and support for the sacrifices made on our behalf every single day of the year?

Of course, you can trust the good old Guardian for an alternative view, and Marina Hyde today has a good rant about this "phony poppy apoplexy":

"So on Saturday, know that every late challenge, every sending-off, will be in the memory of those who fell in battle. Then accept the fact that media campaigns to foreground the poppies that are not being worn, as opposed to the ones that are, serve not as a memorial to the sacrifices made on our behalf, but as a reminder of our hard-wired one‑upmanship and infinite capacity to find ways to divide ourselves."

The commentators are even more strident:

"Forced wearing of the poppy to commemorate a fight against tyranny? Britain seems to get sillier and sillier, and more and more irrelevant every week."

One takes the trouble to remind everyone of the Daily Mail's support of the Nazis in the 1930s, when they praised Oswald Mosley ("Hurrah for the Blackshirts") for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine", and the proprietor of the paper, the Viscount Rothermere, visited and corresponded with Hitler, culminating, on 1 October 1938, when Rothermere sent Hitler a telegram in support of Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland, and expressing the hope that 'Adolf the Great' would become a popular figure in Britain.

They don't talk about that so much, do they? Why am I now uncomfortably reminded of people being forced to wear pink triangles and yellow stars?

It seems that the spirit of Captain Black is alive and well and still busily hunting out people who won't sign his loyalty oaths.

"You never heard him denying it until we began accusing him, did you?"

Is that the Daily Mail's motto?

red running over white....

Something like 10m soldiers, and who knows how many civilians, were killed in the First World War. It was supposed to be the 'War to End All Wars', something so terrible, so utterly awful that it could surely never be repeated. It wasn't, of course, and a barely more than two decades later, the world was again inflamed in war, and a total of something like 70m people died in an even more destructive and all consuming conflict. Even that wasn't the end, and mankind has been trying to settle its differences by force pretty much continually ever since, just as it had been in all the centuries before.

The Royal British Legion was founded in 1921 to provide financial, social and emotional support to ex-servicemen and their families. Almost from the very beginning, their emblem was the red poppy: this fragile, resilient flower was one of the first plants to return to the shell-blasted fields of Flanders between the trenches; it was a symbol of renewed hope, whilst the colour red somehow symbolised all of the blood spilled on those fields. In the run up to Remembrance Sunday on 11th November each year, millions and millions of paper poppies are sold to raise money for the British Legion and also to symbolise all those people whose lives have been affected by war.

I don't hold with the concept of a 'just' war. I know that plenty of people will disagree with that, but I just don't want to believe that anything can be worth all that death and suffering. But opposition to war does not have to mean opposition to the people fighting those wars, and I find this time of year extremely moving, and I will wear my poppy as my own personal mark of respect.

You might remember the newsreader, Jon Snow, getting caught up in a storm a couple of years ago when he refused to wear a poppy on air and criticised what he called "poppy fascism" (it wasn't just poppies - Snow refuses to wear any other charitable emblem whilst on air). His refusal was seen, in some quarters, as disrespectful. John Humphrys was reported as saying:

"The reason I wear the poppy is because I want to pay tribute, it is a mark of respect for those men who gave their lives so that I can live the way I do today - to protect my freedom. And if there is anybody in this country who does not feel that gratitude then I think they should feel vaguely ashamed of themselves."

Hmm. For me, this is problematic. I absolutely and categorically want to pay tribute and show my respect for people who gave their lives in war.... but what about all the poor sods on the other side who were wounded or killed? What about them? How much of a say did they have in the war they were fighting? Do their relatives suffer their loss less? As well as respect, does the red poppy have other connotations of Allied soldiers figthing a just war? The Irish certainly seem to think so, and the poppy is widely worn by Unionists as a symbol of the involvement of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and as such is rejected by more nationalist political parties. But if I want to pay tribute, what choice do I have?

Well, as it happens, there is a choice: you can wear a white poppy . The white poppy is meant to symbolise peace, and aparently has a history stretching back to 1933.

Here's the blurb on the website:

"The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers. Our work, primarily educational, draws attention to many of our social values and habits which make continuing violence a likely outcome. From economic reliance on arms sales (Britain is the world's second largest arms exporter) to maintaining manifestly useless nuclear weapons Britain contributes significantly to international instability. The outcome of the recent military adventures highlights their ineffectiveness in today's complex world. Now 90 years after the end of the ‘war to end all wars’ we still have a long way to go to put an end to a social institution, which in the last decade alone killed over 10 million children."

I like the idea that the white poppy is intended to represent all people on all sides whose lives have been affected by war, and to symbolise the desire to settle our differences without recourse to armed conflict..... but people being people, of course, we just end up arguing about the colour of poppy that we chose to wear to remember those killed and wounded in war.....

After some thought, I've decided that I'm going to wear both: I'm going to wear a white poppy to symbolise my opposition to war and my respect for all victims of war, but I'm also going to wear a red poppy because I want to contribute directly to the Royal British Legion funds that are used to support the victims of war and their families (the money raised by the white poppies goes towards peace campaigning, which is good, but not exactly the same thing). A compromise, perhaps, but it's my own personal statement of remembrance and hope for the future.

Ultimately, I don't think it matters whether you wear a white poppy, a red poppy or no poppy at all. The important thing, surely, is to honour the memory of the dead and to help the living. In a year that saw the death of Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War, we've finally lost that immediate, human link with the 'war to end all wars' that ended more 91 years ago. We do try to remember, especially at this time of year, but with wars being fought all over the world today, we do also seem to be very forgetful.

---

Flanders Fields by John MacRae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

(He was doing so well right up to the last verse....)

...Oh, and yes, I am aware that the white poppy is sometimes held up by religious types as a more "christian" colour to wear than the red. Well, like I say, I know why I'm wearing it.

---

The top news story when I woke up this morning was the five soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Their deaths are tragic, no doubt, but am I alone in finding it slightly strange that the death of some soldiers fighting in a war so newsworthy? Apparently we've become so used to our troops being blown up by bombs that it's mildly unusual to have some killed by bullets. There's also a vague suggestion that the Taliban were somehow not playing fair by infiltrating the Afghan police and then ambushing our troops. Um.... did the Taliban sign up to some sort of code of conduct for warfare that I'm not aware of, or are they desperately fighting a struggle for their own survival against people they undoubtedly see as foreign invaders? I'm sorry these guys have died, just as I'm sorry when anyone dies, but since when did we think there were rules to war?

Wear a red poppy this month, by all means, but surely we can find a better way to settle our differences than by killing each other?

...not until the next time

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War. At 04:45 on that morning seventy years ago, German tanks, infantry and cavalry penetrated Polish territory on several fronts with five armies and a total of something like 1.5 million troops. Soon after that, German planes bombarded Polish cities. The Germans made swift progress in penetrating the heavily outnumbered defences, attacking the cities of Katowice, Krakow, Tczew and Tunel with incendiary bombs. Air raids on Warsaw began at 0900. The first shots of the war were fired, and England and France declared war on Germany two days later.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel led the commemorations:

"I remember the 6 million Jews and all others who suffered, who died a terrible death in German concentration and extermination camps. I remember the many millions of people who had to lose their lives in their fight and in the resistance against Germany. I remember all those, those innocents who suffered, who died from hunger, cold and disease, from the violence of war and its consequences; I remember the 60 million people who lost their lives through this war that Germany started. There are no words to adequately describe the suffering of this war and the Holocaust. I bow to the victims"

As an historian, I flinch slightly at the idea that Germany was absolutely and solely responsible for the war. Yes, clearly they fired the first shots, but it's simplistic to suggest that it was this naked act of aggression that triggered the conflagration. It's as simplistic, in fact, as suggesting that it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that started the First World War. What cannot and should not be denied, however, is the shocking impact that the war had on so many lives: on every side.

Some of the language we use on these occasions unsettles me though. Here's Obama:

"On behalf of the American people, I wish to join the voices commemorating this anniversary today, and express admiration and gratitude to those who stood on the side of freedom and hope, giving an example of spiritual superiority over tyranny".

On the face of it, I suppose that sounds okay, but it's a prime example of history being written by the winners. Of course, when he says "the side of freedom and hope", he really means "on America's side". "Spiritual superiority"? Really? Are we so sure of that? Did the winning side kill sufficiently fewer innocent people to feel able to assume the moral high ground in the matter? Are we really confident that we did absolutely everything we did to rid the world of Nazism from the first moment we heard rumour of the deathcamps? Really?

Actually, that's another comfort we like to take, isn't it? That Hitler was a uniquely evil man in history and that we can hold him and the Nazi party entirely responsible for the war and attendant atrocities. Angela Merkel is acknowledging this in her speech above: the only way that Germany has been allowed to play a part in the world is if they openly and frequently speak of the remorse and guilt they must always bear for the war (did we learn nothing from the War Guilt Clause?). But you can't pin everything on the Nazis, can you? Who were the Nazis, after all, but people like me and you? We don't much like to think about the bureacratisation of evil; the way that ordinary people wore uniforms, stamped identity cards and processed people onto the trains that took them to their deaths. When people say that something like the rise of National Socialism can never happen again, or that it could never happen here, I don't believe them. If time and circumstances are right, it absolutely could happen again; it could happen anywhere. It might already have started.

I went to watch"Inglourious Basterds" on Sunday night. It's had some terrible reviews but, for what it's worth, I thought it was pretty good, with Tarantino belying his reputation and deftly producing a work of some power and, more surprisingly, subtlety. I thought Christoph Waltz was especially good as SS Colonel Hans Landa, giving us a glimpse at how "evil" can just as easily be contained in the body of a mild-seeming man with a silly pipe as it can in that of a frothing dictator with a toothbrush moustache.

As I left the cinema, talking these and other things over with my companions, we stepped out into the street. It was now after 11pm on a Sunday night, but as it was a Bank Holiday weekend, so Broad Street was still busy. My attention was soon grabbed by the sight of a gang of drunken men walking down the middle of the street, each one with both arms raised to the sky and fists clenched. As they walked, clearing their way through the busy street, they were screaming as loudly as they could in celebration of Nottingham Forest's 3-2 win over local rivals Derby County, some 36 hours before. Even amongst the usual detritus clogging the streets of an average English city centre at closing time, they were an intimidating presence. The cause is very different, of course, but I couldn't help but mark the similarities between this kind of tribalism and the kind harnessed by the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany. You only have to look back to the West Ham v Millwall game the week before to how football tribalism can sometimes lead to violence. Forget the game, these people have chosen to define themselves by the club they support, and this then defines their relationship with other people, especially people who support other clubs. Not so very different to the Brown Shirts.

We are right to mark this anniversary, and right to remember the deaths and sacrifices of so many people in the Second World War. Of course we are. If we are to truly learn the lessons we can draw from the Second World War, though, then perhaps we need to stop pretending that Hitler and the Nazis were anything other than just human beings like you and like me, or that something like that could never happen again or was somehow unique to Germany. Look around you: you can see it everywhere.

and I'm living for history....

Unnoticed by everyone - including me - this blog turned 5 last week. That first, tentative entry was made on Tuesday 2nd March 2004, and far from being a stunning introduction of my explosive manifesto to the online world, it didn't even have a title. It's not a very interesting post, and I wasn't going to to write posts on an anything like regular basis for another few months yet.... but it was a momentous monent for me in the sense that it was the start of something that has subsequently seen me produce something like 1,417 posts in 1,825 days and signalled the disappearance of the first of God-knows how many hours into the blogosphere. A journey of several hundred thousand words begins with that first post.

I do claim in that first entry that blogging was something that I'd "sort of been thinking about...for ages", but I certainly can't remember now whatever it was that drove me to start or why I chose to use Blogger instead of WordPress or LiveJournal or any of the many other available alternatives. It all too clearly wasn't inspiration. In all honesty, I probably wasn't thinking much at all as I selected a username in haste that I have been stuck with ever since, chose a template that I subsequently haven't bothered to change, and began to write those trivial twitterings about doing the ironing and other nothings.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

And I wonder where my life has gone.

SwissToni: mildly embarrassed purveyor of mundanity online since March 2004.

---

Other things that happened on this momentous day in history:

> John Kerry wins the Super Tuesday primaries in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island and caucus in Minnesota, effectively clinching the nomination.

> The Palestinian Authority's prisoners' affairs ministry states in its monthly statistical report that the number of Palestinian prisoners has risen to around 7,500. Of those 336 are children, 75 female and 943 in need of medical treatment. Of the 166 prisoners who died, 41% died as a result of medical negligence, while 18% died as a result of torture

> NASA announces that Mars rover Opportunity landed in an area where "liquid water once drenched the surface".

> Oregon prepares to begin solemnizing same-sex marriages, after its attorney issues a legal opinion deeming such marriages lawful.

> Bernard Ebbers, ex-CEO of Worldcom, is indicted on three counts of conspiracy for his alleged role in that company's $11 billion accounting scandal in 2002.

> Iraq gets a Bill of Rights, including guarantees of freedom of religion and press, in the form of the Law of Administering the Iraqi State for the Transitional Period

> The European Union imposes additional 5% tariffs on a wide range of goods imported from the United States, such as honey, paper, and nuclear reactors.

> The European Space Agency's Rosetta space probe is successfully launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket on a mission to investigate the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

... oh, so maybe I was the big news story of the day then?

just around the corner in the english civil war....

Today marks the 360th anniversary of the execution of Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Charles reigned from 27th March 1625 until 30th January 1649, when he was beheaded on the orders of Parliament after being found guilty of high treason and "other high crimes". He wore two shirts that day, lest the cold weather make it look as though he was shivering from fear, and he was beheaded by a single-stroke from the executioner. As his head left his shoulders, an audible gasp was heard from the assembled crowd, and there was a rush as they tried to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of a divinely annointed monarch.

Given that the monarchy was restored in 1660 and we still have a royal family firmly in place today, we tend to forget how enormous a moment in history this was. The American Declaration of Independence was more than a 100 years later and the French Revolution was still 140 years away on the day when the English Parliament cast aside their king and set up a Republic. Both those other revolutions were massively influenced by these events in England, which were entirely without precedent. Of course, Kings had been removed in the past, and Parliament itself had been used by various usurpers in English history to legitimise the deposition of a legitimate monarch and their own succession -- Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI were all removed with some form of Parliamentary consent. This was different though. In each of those other examples, the deposed king had been replaced by another king with at least some figleaf of justification for their right to the throne. Charles I was removed by a Parliament who had no intention of putting another monarch on the throne or doing anything other than ruling the country for themselves. We are not traditionally seen as a nation of rebels and anarchists, yet we overthrew our monarchy long before it became fashionable. The fact that this Republic did not ultimately endure should not lessen the magnitude those events more than three centuries ago.

These were very confusing times, and it's always dangerous to wonder how things might have turned out if things had been only a little different, but for me it's still irresistible to think how different our history might have been if we'd never put the monarchy back in place in 1660 and had instead remained a republic for the last 360 years. It's pointless to speculate, of course, but imagine how different a place the world might have been. Would Britain have still ruled the waves and built a massive worldwide empire? Would there have even been an American Revolution at all? What would all those people selling postcards of Princess Diana to tourists be doing now instead?

Nevermind the speculation, the fact remains that England executed its king on this day 360 years ago. I know I'm a history bore, but I will certainly be spending a couple of minutes today thinking about those momentous events all that time ago.

You knew there was an English Civil War, right?

--

[as a point of interest, I wrote this post at the beginning of January and filed it away for publication at a time when I would be away skiing. That's pretty sad, right?]

insufficient funds....

There is, it seems, some debate about the origin of the term "Pound" as used to describe the currency used by Great Britain. Some people think that it dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, when a silver coin called a sterling was produced by King Offa of Mercia, and 240 of these coins weighed exactly one pound. Other people reckon that it's a Norman term dating to around 1300 and used to refer to a small silver penny. What seems to be undisputed is the fact that the Pound Sterling is the world's oldest currency still in use today, and this fact appears to be the source of great pride for many Britons. Well, you can understand it, can't you? Your currency is an extension of your nationality; it represents you. When the pound is strong, we feel a sense of great pride. We may have an industrial base the size of a small vole, and 85% of all manufactured goods in this country are probably made elsewhere, but one unit of our currency is likely worth about ten of yours. Ha! Take that Johnny Foreigner. One-Nil to us. We like to go abroad and to feel that we're getting a good deal because the Pound is strong. In November this year, the Pound hit a 26 year high at a little over $2.11 to the £. We rejoiced. We marvelled at how much more bang we would have for our buck. We care not a jot that this same exchange rate makes Britain an unfeasibly expensive destination for many tourists and that our industry is seriously disadvantaged by these prices. Why should we care? We get cheaper jeans and cameras and stuff.

Of course, now the economy has collapsed, the boot is on the other foot: the Pound is now worth something like 1.1 Euros - which means that the exchange rate being offered to travellers (after commission and so on) saw a British Pound as actually being worth less than a Euro. Cue national despair. Oh, what is to become of us? Our currency is baseless and our sense of national self-worth is disappearing down the toilet. There's even been some crazy talk that we may find ourselves forced to actually join the Euro zone, which would mean throwing away thousands and thousands of years of our history and cultural heritage. Worse still: it would mean throwing our lot in with the French.

Is it just me, or does anyone else not actually give a damn what our national currency is? I don't derive any great sense of inner wellbeing from our coinage, and I certainly don't feel that my self-worth is bound up in having a picture of the Queen's head on my banknotes. I don't have strong feelings either way about how the Pound is performing against other national currencies. These things tend to fluctuate, and although it may notionally be more expensive now to buy a drink in New York than it was in November, it also costs me more to have a drink in London than it does in Nottingham, and we use the same tender.

What's the big deal?

As a historian, I can sort of understand the attraction of the heritage behind the Pound.... but then, that's really only a name, isn't it? Surely there's no one who seriously believes that the Pound we use now has any more than a notional link with the one used in Anglo-Saxon times? The name has remained with us, but over the years, the currency has been systematically debased, changed many times (including the move away from coins that actually contained precious metals and into paper promissory notes), locked into the gold standard, tied to a fixed exchange rate with the dollar, released from the gold standard, decimalised, tracked the deutsche mark, locked into the ERM, kicked out of the ERM and now floating freely against other currencies in the world. Would it really make all that much difference if we gave it all up and went with the Euro? Would the world really be that much worse a place if we woke up to find the Pound gone? Would our morale as a nation plummet?

No, it wouldn't. Of course it wouldn't. As soon as the Euro became legal tender in this country, you can bet that there would be a rush to get hold of it, and the Pound would become a thing of the past even before it was formally phased out. That's what happened here with decimalisation in 1971, and that's what happened in the other countries in the Euro Zone, so why would we think we would be any different now? Would we object to the throwing away of thousands of years of history and make a principled stand? No. Why would you bother?

So why make such a fuss about it now? The Pound Sterling is a symbol of the British currency. The value of the Pound is determined by the perceived strength or weakness of our economy relative to others. That is all. It is weak now because our economy is relatively weak. It does not say anything much else about us as a nation. Worry about the state of the economy, if you like, but the state of the currency? Nah. You may be valued by it, and your net worth may be measured in it, but why would you want to derive your sense of self-worth from the symbol of a currency?

That said, I'm not an economist, so perhaps I'm missing something?

fox in the snow....

On the way into work this morning, I drove behind a car with a couple of bumper-stickers. The first was entirely text-based and said:

"You keep your bullshit in Westminster
....and we'll keep ours in the countryside"

I assumed this was something produced by the Countryside Alliance and was intended to be a statement about how the urban metropolitan elite based in parliament was passing legislation on the countryside, most notably by banning hunting with hounds - issues that the knew nothing about and had no business meddling with. Do you see what they did there? they've made a humorous comparison between the "bullshit" spoken by the members of Parliament in Westminster with the actual bullshit produced out of the back end of a male cow. Now, the last time I looked, the whole point of a parliamentary democracy was that every constituency, including those in rural areas, returned a candidate to Westminster with a mandate to represent them. I was not aware that the countryside, or any other part of the nation, was somehow beyond the reach of our law making body. Perhaps that's all the proof you need that I'm irredeemably urban.

There was another sticker too. This one was more subtle. On the left hand side, it featured a picture of a woman on horseback wearing a bright red coat - the garb of someone about to go and kill a fox with dogs. The text underneath said "Now you hate her". On the right hand side there was a picture of someone - presumably the same person - dressed as a nurse. The caption underneath read "Now you don't".

Ah, so what you're saying is that the same people who go out and kill foxes might also hold down highly respected jobs in society. Excuse me for being dim, but what the fuck does that prove? Harold Shipman was a well-respected family doctor, and he's still estimated to have killed 250 people (and no foxes). The fact that he had a respectable job doesn't somehow mitigate the fact that he was a serial killer, does it?

The sticker went on to say that 59% of the population was in favour of fox-hunting. Really? Even if that's true and not some hopelessly optimistic made up statistic, what exactly does that prove? Parliament - the people who we elected to represent us - voted to ban it, and so it is against the law to do it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the law is just or correct, but it is still the law. Protest by all means, as that too is your democratic right, but frankly if you want to persuade me that it's a good idea, then you're going to have to come up with some better arguments. Me, I think it's cruel and unnecessary, and I happen to believe that the ban is no more an infringement of your civil liberties than the law that stops me giving you a slap for being such a blood-thirsty idiot. Actually, I'm genuinely curious about when we decided that our civil liberties were frozen in stone and thus have a sense of when they are being infringed. We don't have a written constitution like the USA, so there's not really any one document that we can refer to as our basic rights as citizens of this country. So how do we actually know when our civil liberties are being infringed? Perhaps some peasants had bumper stickers on their handcarts protesting about Magna Carta? Maybe some of the nobility rode around on Parliament Green waving placards protesting about the parliamentary deposition of Richard II?*

Fox hunting has been banned in most of the UK since 2005, so this is old news really, but what was it Oscar Wilde said? Fox hunting is "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."

Still true, apparently.

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* I actually wrote a dissertation on the depositions of Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI as part of my Masters degree. In the main, this told the story of the rise of Parliament (as increasingly this was the body used by the usurpers to legitimise their own reigns, thus inadvertently increasing parliament's power as they reigned only through Parliamentary consent). The dissertation also touched upon how there was an intangible, but still very real sense of "kingship" - something that every king was measured against. There is a fair amount of evidence that even the lowliest citizen in Medieval England had a feeling for whether or not they were being governed justly, and usurpations were only tolerated when there was a sense that the king being deposed had failed to live up to this unwritten ideal. I also learnt some fascinating things about how the bodies of deposed kings were usually buried on the quiet and away from London, but that the sons of the usurpers, as the first act of their reigns almost always disinterred the bodies and gave them a proper burial in Westminster Abbey... and they did this because the ceremonial funeral of the old king before the coronation of the new king was a key part of the symbolic transfer of this mystical "kingship" from the old king to the new king.... a tacit acceptance that in spite of Parliamentary assent, the usurpers were never quite legitimate in the eyes of the general population. Written constitutions? Who needs them when you've got a history like that, eh?

and we're spinning with the stars above...

This ain't a scene.....The Crusaders: the original emo army.

I watched "The Kingdom of Heaven" on the telly last night, and although I didn't think it was really all that good, it made me feel slightly nostalgic for a couple of reasons. Although this was, strictly speaking, a little outside the dates of my area of expertise in the later middle ages, I got quite a kick from watching a dramatic retelling of some of the most momentous events in the early medieval period. You know, seeing knights running around and that kind of thing. Of course, like any serious historian, I'm not really a fan of historical reconstructions per-se, and I imagine that Ridley Scott himself would be amongst the first to tell you that this film isn't exactly the most accurate representation of the events around the siege of Jerusalem, but I did enjoy that sense of escapism back into a time where people's values and priorities were so different to the ones that we know today.

Yes, of course the film uses the historical setting to convey an oh-so-subtle and topical message about the futility and stupidity of waging a war over religion, and how Islam and Christianity aren't really so very different after all and why can't we all just get along.... but I liked being allowed to imagine myself for a couple of hours in a world where religion really was important in almost everyone's life, from most exalted king to lowliest peasant - so important, in fact, that they were prepared to leave everything behind and go to war in a desert, thousands of miles from home. Of course, the kings and nobles involved in this were probably also driven by other, more earthly motives, but piety would undoubtedly have been present even there, and don't forget that the First Crusade to the Holy Land - the "People's Crusade" - was made up mainly of peasants, women and children, and not the well-drilled Christian soldiers of popular legend.

I’m not religious at all, and I’m well aware of the balance sheet of atrocities that have been committed in the name of various Gods over the centuries. Even so, I am fascinated and sometimes moved by the sheer scale of this devotion. I am consistently awed by religious monumental architecture – cathedrals, mosques, temples and the like. I don’t believe in their Gods, but I still find the buildings themselves to possess an undeniable aura of calm and reverence. A big, Hollwood blockbuster like "Kingdom of Heaven" may not be the best place to seek an accurate reconstruction of events, but it was enough to prickle the historian lying dormant within me and to get me thinking about the original participants on both sides and to wonder about their motivations for spilling blood over Jerusalem.

The other reason that the film made me feel slightly nostalgic was because of the setting. At one point when our hero Balian is standing atop the battlements at Jerusalem and scanning the horizon, we get a clear view on the horizon of a line of snow-capped mountains. Now, I'm not an expert on the geography of the Holy Land, but it seemed fairly unlikely to me that this was a view you would normally expect to see from Jerusalem.... but it most certainly was a view of the High Atlas mountains in Morocco from just north of the Sahara desert. I know this because it is a view that I myself saw in early 2001 when we were travelling from Marrakesh through to Zagora before the start of our trek in the desert. It is a very barren landscape with a startling contrast provided by the Draa Valley, where the desert is cut by a river with a strip of vibrant green foliage for about 100 yards on either side. This is the site of the town of Ouarzazate, which is home to the film studios where Hollywood film most of their desert scenes: Lawrence of Arabia, The Jewel of the Nile, The Mummy, Gladiator, and ....of course... The Kingdom of Heaven. Now that was a fantastic holiday and Morrocco is a beautiful country with wonderfully friendly people. I'm sure Israel is a beautiful country with much to recommend it too, not least Jerusalem itself, but I'm equally sure that it's not somewhere that I want to be visiting in the near future. This is in part due to the instability in the region, partly due to the difficulty having an Israeli stamp in your passport can give you in visiting some arab countries... but mainly it's because I'm pretty certain that I don't want to be giving the Israeli state the kind of validation that spending my tourist dollars might give them.

Mind you, with that kind of thinking, I should probably be boycotting Britain too.

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Incidentally, the Pollstar is travelling around the Middle East as we speak, and having passed through Turkey and Syria is just making his way into Jordan and, being an Indiana Jones geek (like all right thinking people), is getting very excited about seeing Petra.....