What To Do?

When things are cheap in the shops it generally means that someone- somewhere down the line- is being ripped off. A cheap tee shirt almost certainly comes from a sweat shop, a cheap chicken from a factory farm. I was reading about the Peruvian fishmeal industry last night and it's nasty, nasty nasty. Millions of tonnes of small fish are scooped out of the sea to make fishmeal to feed chickens to feed people in the West- and not only are local people being deprived of a nutritious food source, but the food chain in the sea is being disrupted- affecting supplies of larger fish- and the waste product- a fatty, oily slurry, is being pumped back into the sea where it kills everything it touches.

Make things right, farm things right- and it costs money. You have to be rich to afford things that have been made by a craftsman, or meat that's been raised ethically. When poor people demand a share of the fruits of capitalism it's always going to be at a cost to people who are even poorer- not to mention animals and the environment.  I don't have an answer- apart from the blindingly obvious one which most of us either ignore or laugh off.  Yes, we should all become Buddhists or Shakers or Tolstoyans and go and live in communes and whittle our own furniture and lovingly rear our own hens, but we're not going to, are we?

Tony Benn RIP

I don't know what Tony Benn ever actually did- apart from write diaries- but his making of himself into an icon of the left was almost certainly more significant than anything he achieved in office. Ah that puff-puff-puffing of the pipe; ah, that fraternal mug of tea! If we lefties wanted to feel good about ourselves- as the party that was meant to represent us slid into compromise and worse- we had only to think of Tony and his un-spat-upon-ideals and the air cleared and the people's flag was still fluttering above the barricades.  To adapt a line of Yeats, "What will we do for diehard reds, now good old Tone is dead?"

First Bob Crow, now Tony Benn. An era in British politics- a not inglorious era- has come to an end.

Arthur And George: Julian Barnes

A true story and a very good one. Barnes has novelized it to the extent of inventing conversations, thoughts and feelings but I don't think there's a person in it who didn't actually exist.

In certain respects truth does turn out to be stranger than fiction. No novelist could have created a character as heterogeneous as Arthur Conan Doyle. People in fiction have to be consistent to be believable, they need to hang together and be typical- to an extent- of their age and class and gender. But Doyle is all over the place; Irish by ancestry, Scots by birth,  English by choice, a doctor, a novelist, a sportsman, a campaigner for justice, a spiritualist- a man of large appetites and emotions but rigorously chivalric in his dealings with women: really, you couldn't make him up.