What love means

Thirty years ago, the historian Theodore Zeldin wrote this about love:

‘No one knows quite what love means, no two people have experienced it in quite the same way … Love cannot be counted or measured, but it has to be incorporated into explanations of behaviour and events. One way to elucidate its content is to break it up into the elements of which it may be composed, and to use these as tools for an individual kind of historical exploration. Thus attractiveness is one of those elements. It is possible to rearrange the facts of history so as to make it a central criterion. People can be divided not only into rich and poor, capitalists and workers, lords and commons, but also into those who are attractive and those who are not, for reasons which need not always be associated with material possessions, or social status. The attractive are a class also. Attractiveness is a source both of power and of disadvantages. It can be a snare, an easy label that damns the person to whom it is applied; it is manipulated by unwritten laws; it has its own literature, its manuals on how to make friends and influence people; it has its own aesthetics and ethics; it is as unstable a source of prestige as politics or money; the criteria by which it is judged change drastically with age … Love has its own tyrants, conquests, battles and alliances. It could provide a thread for linking the history of conflict in the past quite as well as the history of war.’

Zeldin’s quote came to mind after I spent an enjoyable day recently at the Great Diary Project, the archive of private citizens’ diaries held at the Bishopsgate Library near Liverpool Street Station (thanks to Luke Parks for helping me find everything I wanted). It seems obvious when you think about it, but many of the diarists, particularly the young ones, are far less concerned about politics, society or the state of the economy than with the progress of their own love lives.

One teenage girl diarist, writing from a private school in Cumbria in the early 1950s, fills her Letts day-a-page desk diaries with lipstick kisses and news of her latest crushes, and has a list of boys’ names at the back against headings like ‘love, hate, passion, friendship, courtship, flintship, marriage’ – a sort of 1950s version of ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’.

Meanwhile, an Oxford undergraduate writes this in his diary of 31 December 1954: ‘S. and I went to New Forest players’ dance. It was quite a good one, and we enjoyed it (at Grand Marine). Afterwards, however, S. wanted me to make love to her - and then we had to have another long chat about things - she has fallen in love w. me, which is rather unfortunate. However, she is realistic & wants to maintain friendship.’

On 29 November 1955 he writes: ‘Rang A. this evening and had a long talk. She sounds so lovely - I am determined to marry her if I possibly can.’ Things then seem to go a bit awry. ‘In rather a temper I penned her an angry note,’ he writes of A. on 6 December 1955. And then on 31 December: ‘A. met me. A meal, then we sat and chatted till a.m. I feel she is a bit restrained about something.’ Fortunately, all is well. The next diary in the archive from the same diarist is inscribed ‘given by darling A.’ – and it’s a two-year diary, so she’s obviously planning to stick around. Phew. Poor S., though.

Nature abhors a vacuum

On his morning walk from High Holborn to Fleet Street in 1947, in the rubble stretching from Farringdon Road to Fetter Lane, the young journalist Kenneth Allsop spotted a pair of kestrels - ‘like a lean pair of Che Guevara’s jungle guerrillas prowling through Harrods’, he wrote later. In 1949 he published Adventure Lit their Star (1949), a fictionalised piece of nature writing based on his own experiences as a wounded RAF pilot watching the previously rare little ringed plover in the gravel pits and sewage farms near Staines, Middlesex. Allsop was a pioneer in the new field of of urban ecology.

At the end of the 1960s Allsop, by then a star writer and TV presenter on the BBC show Tonight, wrote an article for the Sunday Times about wildlife thriving in the last remaining bombsites and scrubland in the centre of London. Allsop’s theme was the usefulness of the human-made landscape as a makeshift natural habitat. ‘How willing nature is to forgive the insults of man,’ he wrote, noting the absence of snobbishness with which kestrels nested on both the Savoy hotel and the Poplar gasometers. ‘How magnanimously she responds and pumps back life, like blood into dead tissue, once the environment is cleansed.’ At the height of his TV fame, in the mid-1960s, Allsop had moved from London to an old millhouse near Powerstock, Dorset where he wrote a regular column for the Daily Mail about his life there, collected as In the Country (1972). This part of the world was more remote than it is now:

‘BBC2 cannot penetrate our valley fastness. Colour has never been glimpsed. BBC1 comes in blurrily through a blizzard of static. On our regional commercial station we see, scratchily, ads for car marts far down the coast and scenes shot in smart candle-lit restaurants frequented by the beau monde of Plymouth. French programmes jabber dominantly on our screen, and there are occult images which are said to float in from Madrid. I am thinking of demanding my licence fee back from the government and declaring a TV UDI.’

Allsop’s style - describing a badger’s bottom as ‘waggling like an old boy in baggy trousers’, a starling as ‘a winged hippy with self-grown furbelows’, greenhouses as ‘bottling summer like Schiaparelli does scent’ and rats as scrabbling through his compost heap ‘like bargain hunters at a rummage stall’ – was unashamedly anthropocentric and uninfected by the quaintness or purple prose that afflicted much country writing before him. Allsop also made a BBC documentary, The Wildlife of New York, complete with stick insects crawling up Harley Davidsons and cockroaches congregating in the wiring behind telephone receivers. ‘Nature cannot abide a vacuum,’ he wrote in In the Country. ‘With an exactitude far more intricate and discriminating than our wonder dating-service computers … every niche is filled.’

Given the wonderful aliveness of the book, it is hard to believe that Allsop ended his own life a year after it was published.

You can watch Richard Mabey talking about Allsop here:

http://vimeo.com/53737548

Birds who play by the rules

Our department is moving to a new building soon and the thing I will miss most is watching the birds on the lawn and its surrounding shrubbery from my office window. I wrote about them here:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2011/08/off-piste-the-birdman-of-academia/.

But the sound I will miss most is the herring gulls; I fear, although we are only moving a quarter of a mile away, our new location will be too far from the river Mersey for them. In his classic 1953 work, The Herring Gull’s World, the ethologist Niko Tinbergen wrote, ‘The voice of the herring gull is wonderfully melodious.’ I’m not sure I agree, but it is certainly characterful, and evocative of all our seaside summers past. Another fan of Larus argentatus is the Aberdeen resident Esther Woolfson, who writes about them in her new book, Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. ‘Visible, audible, omnipresent, drifting endlessly in the sky above us, L. argentatus is another of the “urban exploiters” who seem numerous, safe in their very existence, but who aren’t,’ she writes. ‘Monogamous, capable of mutual recognition, of respecting their neighbours, living amicably with their partners, gulls are faithful to their homes, practise “site fidelity” and return to the same nest sites annually.’ In other words, gulls would be a far better symbol of uxuriousness than those supposed models of amorous fidelity, the doves, who are actually quite tarty.

In fact, if they were human, herring gulls would be model citizens in Cameron’s Britain. For they are the hardworking families, the strivers not the skivers, the birds who play by the rules and want to get on. Except, of course, when they swoop down and steal from your bag of chips with their beaks, as they have been known to do. Then they are part of our something for nothing culture.

Do not go to the ant

More on bugs. One of the best pieces about insects I’ve read is the ‘Contemplation upon Ants’ from John Stewart Collis’s wonderful The Worm Forgives the Plough (written during the war but not published until 1973), inspired by ploughing a field with a large number of ant-hills:

‘When I did pause, sometimes, to consider what I was doing on that field I could not fail to feel the enormity of my act. The shining blade crashed down through the centre of a city built up with skill and labour; the inhabitants were thrown into confusion; then another flash and crash of the blade, and another, till bits of the home were flying through the air … My power of destruction over this ant-world was really prodigious, as if a giant with legs the height of Snowdon and arms as long as the Sussex Downs were to throw London away in an hour or so.’

There then follows a little essay on the parallels that have been made between ants and men – their rigid hierarchies, waging of wars, keeping of slaves etc. - which concludes that these parallels are not, in fact, that useful:

‘Consciousness is the miracle of man. That is his whole significance, and the meaning of his imperfection, and his promise. Because it has broken in, because he does not possess it, then it will evolve in him as it has already done, it will go on evolving; this burden of apartness and semi-understanding which he often feels too heavy to bear, will be lifted; he will attain a higher state of consciousness and enter again into the unity that he has lost. He should not turn to the animals for directions. He should not go to the ant. He should fix his gaze steadily upon this human gift that makes him unique, and see in it, and the evolution of it, the key to all his set-backs and the meaning of all his suffering.’

But my favourite insect-contemplation piece is probably Virginia Woolf’s ‘The death of the moth’. One day in 1941, while she was reading in her study, Woolf spotted a moth fluttering frantically against a window pane, putting its body and soul into the effort and eventually dying of exhaustion. ‘Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body,’ she wrote. ‘It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life, and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life … One's sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely.’

Woolf’s essay is a lovely meditation on the fragility of existence and the way that life counts for nothing but itself. But I have always wondered why she didn’t just open the window and let the moth out.

A timeless love story

I wrote this for Saturday's Guardian:

“I like insects for their stupidity,” wrote the American author Annie Dillard in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. “I hope we seem as endearingly stupid to God – bumbling down into lamps, running half-wit across the floor, banging for days at the hinge of an open door.” Even those of us who like insects, such as Dillard and myself, have to admit they don’t do themselves any favours. They are, with a few exceptions, irrefutably ugly and they do seem pretty stupid - or perhaps it is just that, since they live out their lives in near silence, they never make the point of their bumbling behaviour clear to us.

A new series of events at London’s Wellcome Collection, titled “Who’s the Pest?”, aims to make us look anew at these disparaged but actually quite indispensable creatures, who pollinate our flowers, turn waste matter into fertile soil and, if we could just get over a bit of cultural conditioning that makes the thought of eating them revolting, are the most reliable and sustainable protein source on the planet. The Welcome Collection’s programme of events includes “a gastronomic evening of insect appreciation” at which insect canapés will be served. The whole series aims to explore the “entwined, co-dependent and timeless love story between humans and insects”.

Love story may be pushing it a bit. In human imaginings, insects have mainly been used as a metaphor for futility and insignificance. “God in his wisdom invented the fly,” wrote Ogden Nash, “and then forgot to tell us why.” The insects of the Australian jungle on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, eaten in bushtucker trials or dumped en masse on ex-soap stars and celebrity chefs, suffer an extreme version of this centuries-long condescension and revulsion.

It is true we have always reserved a grudging respect for the Hymenoptera, the insects like bees and ants that build elaborate nests and form social groups. Ever since Plato, who admired the way ants could lead such complex social existences without need of the philosophical meaning-making that he considered a condition of human life, we have been fascinated by the tiny, self-contained universes these insects create. Virgil looked inside a beehive and saw a little model of Roman society, “the marvellous spectacle of a tiny world and great-hearted leaders”. But this respect for the efficient hierarchies of ants and bees has usually been accompanied by a feeling that there is something alien and soulless about their overly structured lives. “Still we live meanly, like ants,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. “Our life is frittered away by detail.”

There are, however, signs that we are learning to pay more attention to insects, as more of us recognise that without them, the world’s ecosystems would collapse. This growing awareness is partly thanks to the charity Buglife, which has just begun a project to create “living roofs”, transforming the tops of urban buildings into wildflower meadows to provide havens for insects. A recent series on BBC4, Alien Nation, was devoted entirely to the insect world. It included a jaw-dropping programme, Planet Ant, which recreated a million-strong colony of leafcutter ants at the Glasgow Science Centre, in specially designed tunnels that allowed cameras to see inside. Within weeks, the colony had built a whole working metropolis, with everything from ant crèches to ant graveyards. Ants do not live quite as meanly as Thoreau thought. The study of the application of ant behaviour to human society – so-called ant-colony optimisation – is a growing field, used to work out things like traffic flow, the efficient delivery of goods and the positioning of emergency exits in buildings.

We are starting to realise that insects are pivotal to our lives, not something to be noticed only irritatedly as we squirt them with fly spray or swot them away. Our ignorance and dismissal of them is part of the universal human urge to step over the things commonest and closest to us, to ignore the unglamorous and ubiquitous in favour of the rare and beautiful. It says more about us than it does about them.

Deadlines whooshing by

Many of our students’ assignments are now submitted online: the deadline is usually 11.59pm on the final day of submission. If you’re a tutor, you can go on to our ‘virtual learning environment’ and track the timing of these submissions. It’s an interesting read for an anthropologist of everyday life: mass behaviour made visible. There is always a small straggle of people who submit well before the deadline. Then the mass submission gradually picks up speed and strength on the final day, like a Tsunami wave, until critical mass is finally achieved around 11pm – although the number of students submitting around 11.59pm is, you may or may not be astonished to learn, still quite large. Nothing wrong with that: they still made the deadline and are only demonstrating that universal human trait, known as ‘leaving things to the last minute’, probably first exhibited by that hunter-gathering alpha male who was given a strict deadline of sundown to come back to the cave with something to eat.

‘I love deadlines,’ said the famously procrastinating author Douglas Adams. ‘I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.’ Most people need some kind of deadline to concentrate the mind. For the writers on the 1960s satirical TV show That Was the Week, That Was, it was the ticking meter of a taxi cab outside the door. ‘Willis [Hall] and I tended to write our TW3 sketch at the last minute on Friday morning, when the BBC would send round a taxi to whisk it over to Lime Grove for the cast to learn and rehearse for the following evening,’ recalled the late Keith Waterhouse. ‘Sometimes, if inspiration faltered, we would hear the cab meter remorselessly ticking away in the street below even as we wrestled with the final lines. The fashion at the time for sketches without blackout punchlines was put down to the influence of Beyond the Fringe; I am inclined to think it was often more to do with the impatient presence of a cab at the door.’

I have never missed a deadline in my life. It is part of my suffocating eagerness to please. The trouble is, there is always another deadline to replace the one you just made. Sometimes my life feels like one long essay crisis. The modern, managerialist university has no memory: the deadline you just made is replaced by another set of hurdles to leap over. I guess this is how capitalism works: slash and burn, endless, limitless growth. Everyone in universities is now worrying about the looming deadline for the REF [the Research Excellence Framework]. But that will come and go, to be replaced by Year Zero and another set of deadlines. No doubt I will meet all of those as well - like the good, well-behaved, docile little boy that I am.

An address to politicians

I found this ‘address to politicians’ in the third issue of the underground magazine, Oz, dated May 1967:

‘First to you who are currently successful: you who made it mouthing phony, ill-written, unutterably boring, lying, arse-licking speeches. Lend an unctuous ear – it may prove expedient.

And you out of office need not look so pious. Sincerity, sensitivity or honesty did not cost you election. Had you possessed any of these qualities you would never have stood. Only the scum of a society could bother to fashion a career so ruthlessly opportunist, so intellectually parasitic, so spiritually unrewarding.

Platitudes. This indignation doesn’t bruise your egotism, this rage prompts no self-assessment, nor costs you votes. Philosophers, poets, authors, dramatists, artists and tele-pundits have interminably exposed the vileness of your methods, the sordidness of your ambitions. The masses, whom you despise, hold your profession beneath contempt.

And still you survive.

You think that Parliament is the greatest institution in the world. Parliament! Parliament: bloated with fat, pompous, dying alcoholics who babble on with: here, here, honourable member, procedural motions, precious amendments, last ditch filibustering … Parliament: the gulch parting promise from achievement.’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Consider what value, what meaning is enclosed even in the smallest of our daily habits, in the hundred possessions which even the poorest beggar owns: a handkerchief, an old letter, the photo of a cherished person. These things are part of us, almost like limbs of our body; nor is it conceivable that we can be deprived of them in our world, for we immediately find others to substitute the old ones, other objects which are ours in their personification and evocation of our memories.’ – Primo Levi, If This Is A Man

Figures shimmering with vitality

My favourite television viewer discovered in the course of writing Armchair Nation was George Mackay Brown, the reclusive Orcadian poet and writer who rarely left the islands (or, in fact, his Stromness council flat, except to go to the pub). When Orkney finally got television from the Meldrum transmitter through a sea of static in the mid-1950s, he railed against it as a dark avatar of all that was corrupt about the modern world, but he gradually relented, acquiring a rented black and white ‘stone age’ set, then a colour one, and finally – in the 1970s and 1980s – becoming a virtual addict. He often used his weekly column in the Orcadian newpaper to talk about the programmes he had seen.

Watching Scotland disintegrate in the 1978 world cup in front of a colour TV, he wondered: ‘Is there something strange and perverse in the Scottish character that allows the brimming cup to fall and shatter on a stone?’ He became a fan of the snooker, and marvelled at how a new pair of glasses had transformed watching the sport: ‘Figures shimmering with vitality, with intent vibrant faces, were striking balls of amazing solidity and vivid colours’. He also grew to like the daily quiz show Countdown: ‘Letters is my trade, and so I ought to be good at the word-making, but my mind goes numb and after a few seconds I give up … strangely enough, I can do the numbers better.’

He never missed the science programmes on BBC2. After one Horizon programme, Hello, Universe!, broadcast in March 1981, he wrote this:

‘An astonishing thing transpired. Even supposing our message got through to a very distant planet, its journey there would take 40,000 years. The planet’s reply would take a further 40,000 years. At the end of that time we of 1981 would long have been kirkyard dust, and the earth itself perhaps a cinder … Sitting lonely, late at night, in a council house in Orkney – as one shuts off the TV and, beyond the window, the innumerable star-systems wheel – one realises that one is not lonely at all. However isolated, in a croft above the seashore or on a hillside, we are involved with homo sapiens, we live on a teeming ant-hill of a planet, between skulls and seeds.’ 

Brown’s newspaper column had such a distinctive voice – a mixture of lyricism, naivety, misanthropy and good-heartedness – that when I finally reached the end of them (the last appeared just a few weeks before his death in April 1996) it felt like saying goodbye to a friend.

Those impurities we call meaning

When I am marking students’ essays, one of the commonest things I write in the margin is ‘not a sentence’ – which of course is also not a sentence.

I love sentences. ‘And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax,’ writes Anthony Burgess in his novel Enderby Outside, ‘and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.’ Sentences are ways of shaping and reshaping the world, creating little universes of sense and meaningfulness. A sentence is a beautifully logical system of relationships in which, as Stanley Fish writes in his book How to Write a Sentence, ‘no word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure’.

In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard tells a story about a fellow writer who taught creative writing at the same American college as her. She was asked by a student if she thought he could be a writer. Well, she replied, do you like sentences? Dillard says that she understood immediately what that meant (I’m not sure whether the student did): he was being told that ‘if he liked sentences he could begin’. She recalls a similar conversation with a friend who is a painter: ‘I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I like the smell of paint.”’ Sentences, in other words, are the raw material of writing – and if you don’t have a feel for them, you’re like a painter who can’t stand the smell of paint.

One of the problems I have with the managerialist language that has pervaded public institutions, including universities, over the last few years is that it is surely responsible for some of the ugliest sentences to have been crafted since the Phoenicians came up with that bright idea called the alphabet about 3000 years ago. These sentences seem to assume that writing is easy and straightforward – that just by welding together a few abstract nouns, passive constructions and verbless participles you are communicating with another human being. I would be tempted to say that this is what the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski called ‘phatic communication’ – communication just for the sake of it, with no meaningful content. But that’s being too kind. Really it is anti-communication, a combination of PR, bullshit and arse-covering that exhibits a profound mistrust of language and, by extension, social life.

Please don’t tell me that none of this matters and that worrying about the position of words in a sentence is just being picky. Who was it who said that all poets are pedants in disguise – or was it that all pedants are poets in disguise? To paraphrase Kenneth Tynan after he saw Look Back in Anger for the first time, I’m not sure I could love anyone who didn’t love sentences.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Management of what? Management for what? Management. Management. Management. The word sticks in one’s interface. Please excuse me if I dare to laugh, but I know that each age, even each decade, has its little cant word coiled up inside real discourse like a tiny grub in the middle of an apple.’ – Dennis Potter

Boneheaded about bone conduction

Graham Kemp writes with a correction to ‘The sound of my own voice’, my post of 25 February: ‘It’s true that bone conduction makes your own voice sound deeper than you sound to others (or to yourself in a recording), but putting your fingers in your ears blocks air conduction, and so makes your voice sound even deeper.’

Of course, you could always stick with my initial explanation – I did get a B in my Biology O Level, after all (I think). But since Graham is Professor of Musculoskeletal Biology at the University of Liverpool, I think I might go with him. In any case, a few seconds’ self-experiment is enough to prove him right.

I have been boneheaded about bone conduction. Mea maxima culpa.

The old heart stamping in its stall

I’m working in the university library at the moment. Libraries are no longer cathedrals of silence and so the soundtrack to my work is students talking to each other on their phones. I don't mind any more and have got used to the noise, mostly filtering it out along with the PA announcements and that buzzing-bee sound emanating from headphones. But ohmigod: if Richard Dawkins could hear how much young people say ‘ohmigod’, I think he would give up trying to convert us all into rational humanists. The conversations are sometimes fraught: fallings out, insecurities, anxieties, broken hearts and other mind-forg’d manacles. He said, she said. I guess it could all be filed under what the poet C.K. Williams called ‘the old heart stamping in its stall’. A seat of learning, with all the outward signs of institutional respectability – computer screens, bookcases, photocopiers, quiet study spaces – is also a repository of invisible, unfulfilled desires. Where do all these desires go? Maybe they are like radio waves, and when they are spent on this earth they travel at the speed of light to other galaxies to perplex extraterrestrials on temperate planets. More likely they are useless and go nowhere, like a horse stamping in its stall.

‘My daughter lives in a girls’ web of thrills and tensions invisible to me,’ writes Kathleen Jamie in her book Sightlines. ‘She frets about who said what to whom, and who sent what text; sometimes whole days are spent in fallings out and makings up and social anxiety. I wan’t to say it doesn’t matter. “It does matter!” says my daughter, and she’s right.’

Yes she is. I wish I could say to them it gets easier, but we just carry on like this till we drop, caught in this web of thrills and tensions, caring too much about what other people said or didn’t say. Although most of us would rather not talk about this on a phone in the library.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Every living creature exists by a routine of some kind; the small rituals of that routine are the landmarks, the boundaries of security, the reassuring walls that exclude a horror vacui; thus, in our own species, after some tempest of the spirit in which the landmarks seem to have been swept away, a man will reach out tentatively in mental darkness to feel the walls, to assure himself that they will stand where they stood - a necessary gesture, for the walls are of his own building, without universal reality, and what man makes he may destroy.’ - Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water

One kind of loneliness

Aeon magazine, a new e-magazine that publishes a substantial essay by a different author each day, is well worth a read. I particularly liked this essay by Olivia Laing on loneliness:

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/olivia-laing-me-lonely-in-manhattan/

 

Some deluded people turn to writing as a cure for loneliness, which, as this quote from Rebecca Solnit suggests, is a bit like banging your head repeatedly against a brick wall to cure a headache:

‘Writing is lonely. It’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who, even if they do read you, will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen still long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears – if anyone hears you in the first place … Writing is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler.’ - Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004), pp. 64-5

There’s a book of short stories by Richard Yates whose title I have always loved for its alliterative loveliness and its strange precision: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. But actually, I am with Laing. There is really only one kind of loneliness, the one that is 'like being hungry ... in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full' and that is 'like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired'.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Nothing can match the loneliness of a pianist in a large hotel. All around him is just a hum of cocktails and small talk; he is more alone with his melody than he would be on an island. Yet at a particular moment, he stops and people applaud. You are doubly astonished: there was an end to this music then, and people were listening? He was playing something and he was not playing in vain? He seems stupefied himself. But he well knows, in the secret depths of his soul, that this applause only breaks out because his music has fallen silent, a silence these wild things notice in much the same way they notice the sugar melting in their glasses. So, like the bald prima donna, he quickly starts up with a new tune.’ - Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories (1990), p. 223

Observing the 1980s

I did this for yesterday's Guardian:

In her new memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, the pop musician Tracey Thorn bristles at how the decade in which she first became famous is lazily remembered. “Scenes which I never witnessed in my life - yuppies chugging champagne in City wine bars, toffs dancing in puffball skirts to Duran Duran – have now become the universal TV shorthand used to locate and define the era,” she complains. Thorn’s book is in part an alternative history of the 1980s: one populated by political rallies, “Meat Is Murder” and “Dig Deep for the Miners” badges, benefit gigs and literate musicians with an Indie DIY aesthetic like herself worrying perpetually about not “selling out”.

A new, publicly available digital archive just released by the University of Sussex, Observing the 1980s, aims to give substance to this subterranean history and helps to free the decade from the simplifications of popular memory. Among other resources, it brings together contributions by the volunteers who wrote about their daily lives for the Mass Observation Archive in that decade. The attitudes of these writers seem more passionate and polarised than we are used to today. “The Tories will get in again and if we were ten years younger we would emigrate,”writes one Mass Observer on the eve of the 1987 election. “The appeal to greed and self-interest, which characterises the approach of the Tories, is disgusting bordering on the evil,” declares another.

The archive also includes a selection of 1980s ephemera, mostly radical pamphlets about travellers’ rights, the Poll Tax or the “assault on the unions” created, in the days before desktop publishing, with typewriters and Letraset. They are a reminder that much of the radicalism of the 1960s survived into the 1980s, alongside a brief flowering of countercultural creativity and political activism among students (in the last age of full maintenance grants) and the growing ranks of unemployed people.

Here, in place of yuppyish hedonism, we find a moral and political earnestness that is alternately funny and touching. In 1987, for instance, the alternative newspaper the Brighton Voice gave a platform to a “men’s anti-sexist group” with a strict code of behaviour aimed at not intimidating women in public, including“wear bright clothing so you can be easily seen – do not creep around in silent footwear” and “carry a paper or magazine on public transport so you have somewhere to put your eyes”.

Thorn recalls her own fixation on remaining politically “authentic” with a mixture of fondness and bafflement. When asked by the teen pop magazine Smash Hits in 1985 about the last book she had read, she told them: The British in Northern Ireland: The Case for Withdrawal. When, she wonders, did this ideological intensity disappear and everything had to be seen instead through an “ironic tinge”?

There are whole books still to be written about this collective mental shift. But Lucy Robinson, one of the historians involved in the Observing the 1980s project, hints at one reason when she points out that this was the last decade before the internet. The Google search gave us a way in which we could skate over the surface of cultural and political life, slickly knowing a little about a lot of things. Perhaps it also gave people an internal edit button as they feared guileless or undeveloped ideas could be shot down quickly by internet flaming. Nowadays, an unusual book choice for a teen magazine might be ridiculed in an avalanche of Twitter retweets.

We like to give decades a uniform character as they retreat into history, safely burying the past by turning it into retro kitsch. The Observing the 1980s project is valuable because it does not treat the decade like this, as a story we already know the ending to. Instead it becomes an era of still-to-be-decided tensions and possibilities - one in which people sincerely people that David Steel might be prime minister (“my pin-up!” says one Mass Observer), that Margaret Thatcher might lose an election, or that the neo-liberal economic revolution might still be reversed. How I miss that sense of earnestness – and I mean that without a trace of irony.

The sound of my own voice

If you would like to listen to the inaugural professorial lecture I delivered on 6 February, ‘A Short History of Everyday Life’, there is a link to the podcast here:

http://itunesu.ljmu.ac.uk/professorial/joe_moran.mp3 

I’m afraid you’ll have to conjure up my Powerpoint slides out of your vivid imaginations. I’ve been told that my lame jokes are met with the sound of tumbleweed, and not the polite laughter I remember. I maintain that this is because the mic didn’t pick up the audience, but I suppose that’s what they all say.

Not that I will be listening myself, because among other things I cannot stand to listen to my own voice – a common experience, of course. ‘Preserved on tape one’s voice is an ambivalently narcissistic object,’ writes Susan Sontag in her essay ‘The aesthetics of silence’. ‘Its rhythms, intonation and frequencies are material evidence of part of the self become not-self, disconcertingly familiar and alien … Unmoored form the body, speech deteriorates. It becomes false, inane, ignoble, weightless.’

One of the reasons our recorded voices sound so odd to us is that we hear ourselves speak through the bones of our skull rather than through the air as other people hear us, which makes our voices sound deeper. (Stick your fingers in your ears to cut off this bone conduction and your voice always sounds higher.) ‘We scarcely remember when we could not speak; we are scarcely conscious of how we speak,’ wrote Hilda Matheson in her 1933 book, Broadcasting. ‘Confront any man or woman with an audible record of his speech, and his feelings will vary from rage and incredulity to shame and embarrassment.’ According to Simon Elmes in his new book Hello Again: Nine Decades of Radio Voices, an early broadcaster told his listeners: ‘I must apologise for my voice. Since my last talk I've had the somewhat alarming experience of hearing my own voice on the Blattnerphone [an early recording device]. I was frankly horrified. It struck me as being almost the most unpleasant voice I'd ever heard.’

The poor sod. I know how he feels.

Be yourself

‘When Lady Gaga performed in The X Factor in 2009 wearing a tight, reflective leather cat costume and dancing inside a giant ten-foot bathtub, she was briefly interviewed afterwards and asked what advice she had for the contestants. “Be yourself,” she answered, without a moment’s hesitation or a flicker of irony.’

 

- Tracey Thorn, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star, p. 231.

Alternative inventory

Two women from Estates knocked on my office door the other day and asked me politely if they could carry out an inventory of my room. We are moving to another building soon so every moveable and reusable object must be accounted for and ticked off. As they recited the different moving parts of the office to each other (‘two operators’ chairs, two beech bookcases, two filing cabinets, one hatstand, one anglepoise lamp …’), I wondered what an alternative inventory, full of the past life of my office, might look like:

1. A pebble from Brighton beach which I picked up on my last day there before I came to Liverpool.
2. Bits of foam on the floor which have escaped from my office chair, which has been sat on so much that the seat cushion is almost a block of wood.
3. A drawer full of no-longer-sticky blu tack and broken rubber bands.
4. A million thoughts that came to nothing.
5. The echoing sound of furious typing and then the backspace tentatively deleting what I’ve typed.
6. A door worn down to its hinges by ten thousand knocks.
7. Ghosts of students past, laughing, sometimes crying, asking for their essay back.
8. An air of quiet disappointment.
9. One middle-aged academic. Some signs of wear.

I think that’s everything.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The mucilage of daily life that cements our genuine moments of being … accumulating at the side of the story but not claiming any importance for itself’ - Carol Shields, Unless

The light is back

‘Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky. Today, a Sunday, is such a day, though the trees are still stark and without leaves; the grasses are dry and winter-beaten.

The sun is still low in the sky, even at noon, hanging over the hills southwest. Its light spills out of the southwest, the same direction as the wind: both sunlight and wind arrive together out of the same airt, an invasion of light and air out of a sky of quickly moving clouds, working together as a swift team.’

 

- Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines (London: Sort Of Books, 2012), p. 91.

A warm fog of acceptable feeling

A thought for Valentine’s Day …

‘That’s how sentimentality works, replacing particularity with a warm fog of acceptable feeling, the difficult exact stuff of individual character with the vagueness of convention. Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling, “universal” certainty of platitude …

The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger. At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world – our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other – how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children and of animals, soppy representations of love - they are fuelled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt – these images do not honour the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace … in this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable.’

Mark Doty, Dog Years (London: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 13-15.

Are you all sitting comfity-bold?

When Kingsley Amis taught at University College, Swansea in the 1950s, the college principal, J.S. Fulton, was such a stickler for academic protocol that he once objected to a professor and a lecturer appearing together on the same radio programme. This, he said, was like mixing officers and men.

One of the more positive aspects of what A.H. Halsey called ‘the Decline of Donnish Dominion’ is that those days are gone, thank god. But the word ‘professor’ still has an odd purchase in the cultural imagination. These thoughts are occasioned by having to do my inaugural professorial lecture last week: an odd, nineteenth century ritual which has somehow survived into the 21st century.

The first professor I knew about was Professor Yaffle, the woodpecker in the stop-frame animation series Bagpuss. Oliver Postgate modelled him on two figures he knew in his childhood: his uncle, the historian G.D.H. Cole and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. His reedy voice and condescendingly benign manner made him a professor out of central casting. I have never met a professor remotely like him.

There was a time when, presumably because the title still had a lot of cachet before donnish dominion declined, there were lots of fake professors. There was the comedian ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards, who went round in a gown and mortar board; Max Wall’s character Professor Wallofski, who is said to have influenced John Cleese’s Minister for Silly Walks; and Professor Léon Cortez, a cockney comedian who translated the works of Shakespeare into rhyming slang.

But my favourite was Professor Stanley Unwin, who (like a few other professors before and since), employed a language that bore a tantalisingly close relationship to English. When his children were young, he began inventing special ‘fairly stories’ for them at bedtime. ‘Are you all sitting comfity-bold, two-square on your botties?’ he would ask them. ‘Then I'll begin. Once a-ponny tight-o . . .’ He would then launch into a well-known story, liberally festooned with gibberish but always somehow recognisable: ‘Goldyloppers trittly-how in the early mordy, and she falloped down the steps. Oh unfortunate for the cracking of the eggers and the sheebs and buttery fullfalollop and graze the knee-clappers. So she had a vaslubrious, rub it on and a quick healy huff and that was that.’ Professor Unwin could try his hand at most genres, including sports commentating: ‘There’s a great gathering round one goal mode as the net is folloped flat: what a clean groyle there as they kicking it on the bocus and the mable … all these people doing a very fine suffery in the cause of sport.’

I am tempted to say that Professor Unwin made a great deal more sense than some actual professors I have known. But I won’t, because one of the things I have come to hate is the low-level, low-intensity hostility to academic life in public discourse over the last few decades. Nowadays ‘professor’ is often employed with a sneer to point to the supposed disconnection of academics from the ‘real’ world. And the only extant fake professor I can think of is the rap artist Professor Green, although I can’t claim to be familiar with his work.

Anyway, everyone was so nice after my lecture that I decided this nineteenth-century ritual wasn’t quite so odd after all. Which just goes to show that I really don’t know what I think about anything. But then that’s only to be expected, when I am now officially an absent-minded professor.

Welsh words for rain

bwrw – to rain

glawio – raining
dafnu – spotting
pigo – spotting
glaw mân – drizzle
gwlithlaw – drizzle
brasfrwrw – big spaced drops
sgrympian – short sharp shower
cawodi – showering
arllwys – pouring
tollti – pouring
dymchwel – pulling down
brylymu – pouring very quickly
llifo – flooding
towlud – throwing
taflu – throwing
hegar law – fierce rain
lluwchlaw – sheets of rain
chwipio bwrw – whiplash rain
pistyllio – fountain rain
piso – pissing down
curlaw – beating rain
tywallt – absolutely bucketing
stido – thrashing down
tresio – maximum intensity
Mae hi’n brwr hen wragedd a ffyn – It’s raining old women and sticks

From Sue Clifford and Angela King (ed.), Local Distinctiveness: Place, Particularity and Identity (London: Common Ground, 1993), p. 19.

Nothing much happened today

Michael Powell of Chetham’s Library in Manchester kindly wrote to tell me about the diaries they have recently acquired of the landowning Leech family of Manchester and Ashton-under-Lyne. This collection of over 200 diaries starts with Thomas Leech (1790-1863) who used diary-keeping as a way of teaching his children about family history, and ends with Pauline Leech, who died in 1994. Her more than 50 diaries begin in 1929 and include some about her time at Bletchley Park in the war (although they don’t mention codebreaking, which you weren’t even allowed to write about in a diary).

There are a couple of websites devoted to the Leech diaries:

http://www.chethams.org.uk/leech/leech_main.html
http://www.leechdiaries.com

One of the Leech diaries, supposedly kept by ‘Miss Hermione Humber’, was actually written between 1927 and 1935 by Ernest Leech. The Hermione Humber was his car and in the diary he made a complete record of all the journeys the family made in it, including speedometer readings, petrol station stops, minor bumps, services and repairs. ‘One of the things I like about diaries is the way that the writers feel the need to report boredom or ennui,’ Michael writes. ‘Looking through the Leech collection I would guess that the single most common entry is “Nothing much happened today”.’

That’s still more loquacious than the entry in Louis XVI’s diary for 14 July 1789, which comprises one word: ‘Rien’.

I think my favourite diarist at the moment is Walter Musto, who lived in East Moseley, Surrey and was a civil servant in the General Stores Department of the Crown Agents for the Colonies at Millbank. He kept a diary during the war which was published a few years ago under the title The War and Uncle Walter. Here is an example of his style, which one might call Pooterish if that were not too ungenerous a word for someone so generous in his interests:

‘Noses are queer things … Again this morning, in the train from Vauxhall, a whole row of noses obtruded themselves upon my attention. Anatomically the same, they offer the same infinite variety of form as do feet, ears, even potatoes. Without a good supply of noses, the handkerchief industry must perish – Manchester and Belfast would be on half-time. The beauty business would go into mourning, distillers would languish and barley-growing cease. Vineyards would no longer inspire the muse. Without a natural support for spectacles, the manufacturers would cease to exist.’

My Disappointments Diary

I don’t normally do gift ideas on this blog but I was really pleased that Asbury and Asbury sent me a Disappointments Diary for 2013:

http://www.asburyandasbury.com/shop/dd2013.html

It’s a proper, working diary but with disappointing proverbs on each page (When one door closes another one opens in your face, If at first you don’t succeed I won’t be surprised, The early worm gets caught by the bird, Forewarned is anxious and fearful, A friend is just a stranger you haven’t fallen out with), notable deaths, and space at the back for a ‘Laughable To Do List’, ‘Notes towards a dull novel’, ‘Pointless doodles’, etc.

It’s witty in a really elegant way.

A rescue corner for the human spirit

I wrote this for the Guardian on New Year's Eve:

“We were kept awake last night by New Year Bells,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary for 1 January 1915, with the First World War five months old. “At first I thought they were ringing for a victory.” There is something oddly affecting about historical diary entries for the first day of January, so full of hope for a year that has long since vanished into the past, and often beginning the diary-keeping habit itself - for this was Woolf’s first entry in a diary she kept for another 26 years. In an age when social networking sites host perpetual updates on the mundane details of our lives, this unbending commitment to private writing feels heroic.

Now there is an archive to house these messages in a bottle from the past. The Great Diary Project, recently installed at the Bishopsgate Institute in the City of London, comprises Irving Finkel’s private collection of about 1500 diaries and is inviting members of the public to augment the archive by depositing their own or their relatives’ diaries in it. A curator in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, Finkel see diaries as a “rescue corner for the human spirit” and believes that their seemingly banal subject matter will be transformed by time into significance, just as the cuneiform written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia is now charged with meaning.

Finkel’s conjuring up of a future historian who might find momentousness in today’s banal entries about “changing the tax disc or mending the fence” is part of a growing awareness of the private diary as vivid historical evidence, also apparent in the work of authors such as David Kynaston, Juliet Gardiner and Virginia Nicholson. Anthologies of diaries, particularly focusing on the Second World War and the era of post-war austerity, have proliferated in recent years. Many have titles- London Was Ours, We Are At War, Our Hidden Lives, We Shall Never Surrender, Our Longest Days – which suggest that these private thoughts have somehow become repositories of our collective memory.

But to write a diary for any extended period is an exceptional and eccentric act. If historians wanted to relate a truly representative history through diaries, they would have to include the vast, forgotten majority that do not see January out. It would be an eternal winter in this alternative history, populated by a tribe of initially loquacious people who suddenly become monosyllabic and then lapse irrevocably into silence.

While I find diaries fascinating, it isn’t for what they might tell us about our national story. It is for their strangeness, the way they go off at weird, unexpected tangents that pull you up short. On 1 January 1939, an obscure civil servant called Walter Musto began keeping a diary by recording that he had slipped off his nightshirt and stood naked in his Surrey back garden, “rubbing my body and limbs until I am aglow in the cold, sweet air”. In the diary he wrote for the next 6 years, Hitler gets barely a mention. Diaries are ruled by fleeting frustrations and passing piques. “The only papers were evening ones!”complained Kenneth Williams on 1 January 1974. “It is little short of scandalous.” The diarist’s default mode is bathos. “As I reluctantly swung out of bed I noticed my feet,” wrote Alec Guinness on the first day of 1995, “never something on which I like to dwell.”

Private diaries tell us that history is made up of billions of separate consciousnesses, all swayed by their moods, caprices and animal instincts from one day to the next, and ultimately impenetrable to other human beings. My only sustained effort at the genre manages to stutter on until Tuesday 25 April before ending abruptly with the single, gnomic utterance: “Watched Goober and the Ghost Chasers and made a different tent.” God knows what historians of the future will make of that. But I am happy to bequeath my Paddington Bear Diary for 1978 to the Great Diary Project, just in case.

A wager on the future

Glancing anxiously over my shoulder at the last few years and wondering where they went, I realise this blog is stuttering (with more long silences than in previous years) towards its fourth Christmas. I’m writing this in the deserted main office of the building where I’ve worked for years. This is our last year in the building, which, even though we are only moving down the road, is making me feel a little bit like John Clare in ‘The Flitting’: ‘the summer like a stranger comes / … the sun een seems to lose its way / Nor knows the quarter it is in’. I am, as usual, the last person left sitting in the building except for a few people coming in briefly to pick up their Christmas essays to mark. There is an empty tin of Quality Street on the office desktop with just a few wrappers inside. There are slithers of tinsel wrapped round PC monitors, with no one now to enjoy them before Christmas except me and the screensavers. There is an unopened bottle of Jacob’s Creek and a half empty carton of apple juice, the leavings of an office drinks party last night. The last post lies unsorted, wrapped in a rubber band, including what look like Christmas cards that will not now arrive in pigeonholes until January. Only the remnants of other lives remain.

I don't know who, if anyone reads, this blog, and in a way it doesn’t matter. ‘Before becoming a text, the private diary is a practice,’ writes the French theorist of diarists, Philippe Lejeune. ‘The text itself is a mere by-product, a residue. Keeping a journal is first and foremost a way of life, whose result is often obscure ... it is a wager on the future ... we are writing a text whose ultimate logic escapes us; we agree to collaborate with an unpredictable and uncontrollable future.’ For Lejeune, the diary ‘protects us from the idea of the end’, being one of those illusions ‘that gives us the courage, day after day, to live out the rest of our lives’. I always liked the idea of the Mass Observation diarists posting their entries from around the country to the MO offices – first, to Grote's Buildings, Blackheath, SE 3, and then to 21 Bloomsbury Street, London, WCI – never to see them ever again. In a way, they were posting their diary entries into the future and an unknown reader, like writing a message in a bottle and throwing it not into an actual ocean but an ocean of time. In the absence of much feedback, I think of this blog as a bit like that: I am posting it into the future just to see what happens. But if anyone does happen to be reading it now, I wish you a merry Christmas and bid farewell to 2012 with a couple of snowy poems:

‘Morning at last: there in the snow’

Morning at last: there in the snow
Your small blunt footprints come and go.
Night has left no more to show,

Not the candle, half-drunk wine,
Or touching joy; only this sign
Of your life walking into mine.

But when they vanish with the rain
What morning woke to will remain,
Whether as happiness or pain.

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow

When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,

Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Philip Larkin

A light without shadow

This programme about the golden age of TV wrestling, on this week, was a bit of a Proustian madeleine for me:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p96ly/Timeshift_Series_12_When_Wrestling_was_Golden_Grapples_Grunts_and_Grannies/

The wrestling always reminded me of Hans Christian Anderson’s fable ‘The Emperor’s new clothes’. Who was going to be the little boy who pointed out the obvious: that the whole thing was a gigantic sham?

Official confirmation came in 1980 when, in response to complaints from some viewers about the violence of the bouts, Mary Warnock and other members of the complaints review board of the Independent Broadcasting Authority sat down to watch World of Sport for several weeks. They found no case for stopping the wrestling on the grounds of violence because, they said, it was largely faked. The bouts were not viewed primarily for the violence and in any case, they noted drily, this did not seem to cause any lasting damage to the participants.

Of course, people did not want to know, and didn’t care whether or not it was authentic. As Roland Barthes wrote in a famous essay, wrestling was ruled by an ‘immanent justice. The baser the action of the “bastard”, the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return … A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve … At such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself … what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art.’

Most hated of all by the viewers were not the ‘bastard’ wrestlers like Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus or Adrian Street (who dressed like a glamrock star and camped about the ring, straightening his tights and pouting his lips between grapples) but the World of Sport presenter, Dickie Davies, who appeared whenever a bout was late or a match had to be interrupted to go to the football scores. He received regular angry mail from viewers for whom the 4-5pm slot was sacrosanct. Perhaps they had guessed correctly that Davies loathed the wrestling, except when he found it unintentionally hilarious.

‘I must admit, I’m not the greatest wrestling fan there is,’ he told the Daily Mirror in 1969, ‘but there are times when I watch someone like Les Kellett and tears stream down my face. He gives me more amusement than anybody else. It’s like watching Charlie Drake.’

A certain hold on sausage and haddock

I've been reading lots of diaries lately, for something I'm working on. 'And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner,' Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on Sunday 8 March 1941. 'Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.' It turns out (though I didn't know this) that this paean to everdayness is quite a famous line: it found its way into Ned Sherrin's Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and another anthology called Great British Wit. Odd, because it isn't really funny at all. Just before it, Woolf wrote, 'I will go down with my colours flying.' 20 days later, she found a big stone to put in her pocket and weigh her down, and then slipped into the fast-running River Ouse to drown herself.

But the sausage and haddock line does point to what's often interesting about diary entries: the nearest thing to being post-it notes to the self, they go off at strange tangents and can be gnomic and surreal in their meanings. Woolf wrote her diary very quickly straight after tea, when she she wasn't too tired – 'fast impressionism done from an armchair with a dip-pen'. She saw diary-writing as a runaway carriage 'jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles' but took comfort from the fact that 'this diary writing does not count as writing' because 'if I stopped and took through, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidently [sic - Woolf was a terrible speller] several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap'. When she got behind in her diary, she fretted that the people she had met and the events she had attended had 'gone down the sink to oblivion'.

I found this strange echo in Sylvia Plath's diary for 25 February 1957:

'And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper's (no less! and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock and sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow … her suicide, I felt I was reduplicating in that black summer of 1953. Only I couldn't drown. I suppose I'll always be over - vulnerable, slightly paranoid. But I'm also so damn healthy and resilient.'

Woolf only wrote one more diary entry after the sausage and haddock one. The last line of it reads: 'L is doing the rhododendrons...'