Caledonian Dreaming?

My readers know that I like a good dissection – I like to see a country stripped of its pretensions.

A book called "Caledonian Dreaming" about the various myths with which the country sustains itself is as good as it gets in that respect…The author, one Gerry Hassan, is one of the few Scots who doesn’t seem to mind being called an intellectual. In fact, just as Bulgaria only seems to have one intellectual (Ivan Krastev) so Scotland has Gerry. The book doesn’t really seem to take a position on the burning issue – although I understand he is a “for” rather than “agin”. He certainly doesn’t mince his words -

 ‘Scotland is not a fully-fledged political democracy. It has never had a democratic moment which has brought its elites to account, defined public institutions and seen the people as a historic collective agency of change.’

For many in the Yes campaign, it is the dysfunctional nature of British democracy and politics, and in particular the democratic deficit (whereby Scotland, more definitely on the left, is currently, and seems likely to be increasingly governed by parties it did not elect) which is the driver for independence.

 In my 20s, I was angry about that power structure which, of course, was evident in the shipbuilding town I grew up in. I read avidly the early New Left Books – such as “Conviction” and critical material about “exclusion” which was coming from the Community Development Programme of the 1970s. I did my own bit about encouraging community activism – and actually wrote a small book in the late 1970s with a title “The Search for Democracy” which has echoes with Hassan’s sub-title - “the quest for a different Scotland”.

Although I voted (ultimately) in 1979 “for” a Scottish Parliament, I did write (in my contribution to the famous Red Paper on Scotland) that the discussion of the time was a “distraction” from more important issues. The caution of my Labour colleagues on the local and then Regional Councils I served for 22 years until 1990 was evident – their subservience, with honourable exceptions, to the power of their professional advisers transparent….

Hassan is ruthless in his critique….

‘despite all its radical and outsider roots, Labour was never a party of democratisation of British institutions but rather of using them for progressive ends.The central instrument of change in this was the British state, which was seen as neutral and benign.’
But only one pillar of state is elected, the House of Commons. The unelected House of Lords (the largest upper house anywhere in the world), the monarchy, the proliferation of quangos and public bodies, the outsourced state and its “myriad contractors”, the City of London, the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories - many of them major tax havens - the security state of NATO, Trident and the military-industrial UK/US alliance, engaging in mass citizen surveillance, “all unelected, all democratically unaccountable, have served to entrench a version of the UK centred on power, privilege and money’

Hassan is keen on the stories we tell about ourselves – and warns about falling into the trap of believing all of our own stories or myths- and he identifies several such myths  which Scots propogate–

·         of egalitarianism
·         of educational opportunity
·         of holding power to account
·         of social democracy
·         of open Scotland.

Much of "Caledonian Dreaming" is a deconstruction of these myths.

•  We are only slightly less unequal than England in wealth and have the worst health inequalities than Europe, and though egalitarianism is a deeply embedded ideal, this has never been translated into any programme or political will for the redistribution of power and wealth.
•  Educational inequalities similarly abound, with huge social exclusion of the poorest at every level, even in some of our most cherished institutions.
•  And though change may have begun with the advent of the Scottish Parliament, we are still largely deferential to those in power in the public sector, the professions, in business and in land ownership, there has been a marked lack of political will to challenge these vested interests and powerful voices.
•  As for our social democratic credentials, they have primarily been exercised by the middle classes for the middle classes, in a country ‘distorted by seismic inequalities, poverty and exclusion’, in areas for which the blame cannot be simply laid at Westminster’s door. Hassan suggests that Scotland’s social democracy “has offered a legitimising political story of the middle classes to validate their position in the system, and that Labour, the SNP and ‘civic Scotland’ have all played a contributory role in maintaining this”.

At the moment, I would fault only one thing – that he does not sufficiently recognize the efforts of those who struggled in the 1970s to develop, in his words, “a different Scotland”. He is (probably justly) caustic in his dismissal of the fashion in the 1970s for “community education” – but might have mentioned those like Ken Alexander and Geoff Shaw who dared to speak (and act) for a different Scotland. 

Or perhaps he dismisses them as “the great and good”? I met a lot of leftists who took such a dismissive view – and took exception to it. The usual divisive story – “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. Even Lesley Riddoch, in her celebration of community activism, fails to mention the pioneers of community business in Strathclyde in the 1980s…. talk about being whitewashed out of history……

Scenarios after an independent Scotland?

We’ve hit the hundred-day mark before the Scottish referendum – so I need to discipline myself and get back to that theme. An article in today’s Open Democracy – Should Scotland vote for what is best for Scotland? has helped me steel my resolve.

 First off, let me say that I’m one of 750,000 Scots living out of Scotland who will not be entitled to vote – and I resent that. Indeed I’m “scunnered” to use a good Scots word. I lived in the country for 48 years; contributed a lot; and yet I'm being allowed to vote. ....

The author of today’s Open Democracy has a name “Kieran Oberman” which sounds as if he is one of the 366,000 expats living in Scotland who will be entitled to vote and wrote a good piece about all this last December - but his article today is one of the few which tries to take the debate outside  the rather narrow confines into which it has been so far restricted eg

If Scottish independence generates a rightward shift in UK politics, then this will affect the rest of world to the extent that UK foreign policy affects the rest of the world. Again, the right should welcome the shift, but the left should be troubled. A UK without Scotland might be even more likely to support US-led wars, even more reluctant to take action on climate change, even more restrictive of immigration, even more hostile to EU efforts on consumer and worker rights, even more eager to back neo-liberal economic policies overseas.

It's fairly obvious that a vote in Scotland for Independence on September 18^th would be a pretty fatal blow to the chances of Labour ever winning another election in what we now call “rUK” – the remainder of the UK. A block of 50 odd Scottish Labour votes has been a reassuring boost for Labour leaders for the past few decades (although the Scottish nationalists could bite quite strongly into that in any 2105 General Election). That would confirm the neo-liberal grip on rUK – indeed many would argue that New Labour has never– even after Bliar – made any attempt to shake free from that grip….

That is indeed one of the arguments of those who have, with some reluctance, recently joined the “yes” argument – and who, with others, look to the “Nordic” neighbours for a social democratic vision….

But even if we accept the idea that an independent Scotland would be some kind of Scandinavian-style social democracy (writes Oberman), the role-model argument seems far-fetched. After all, if the rest of the world wanted a Scandinavian role model to inspire it, it already has one: Scandinavia. What need has it of a Scottish imitation? Moreover, no one should underestimate the capacity of large countries to ignore the affairs of smaller neighbours. The UK’s ignorance of the politics in the Republic of Ireland is rivalled only by the US’s ignorance of Canada.

I’m reading Scottish intellectual Gerry Hassan’s “Caledonia Dreaming” whose main themes are sketched by the author in this advance summary in the Scottish Review of Books and he is also a bit dismissive of the Nordic option which does, however, attract my support - as well as that of journalists such as Lesley Riddoch 

But emotional attraction is not enough! The Nordic Option (we used to call it Sandinavian!) is one which – as Hassan rightly emphasized – took almost a century to develop. In the meantime, with the best of intentions, an independent Scotland would be competing with an England even more disposed to compete “in a race to the bottom” on corporate and income tax. What then for our much-vaunted social democratic model?  

Nick's Noises

The last post mentioned Nick Hunt’s book recounting his retracing the footsteps – 78 years on - of the famous traveller Paddy Leigh-Fermour. Of course, as the final part of the trilogy had not appeared in 2011/12 when he was doing his walk, he had to guess the path to take after he crossed the Danube into Bulgaria at Vidin. 

He guessed wrongly and failed to identify one of Paddy’s typical deviations (I prefer “tergiversations”) up, after Sofia, to Veliko Tarnovo and Russe - to Bucharest before he resumed his journey, back from Russe to Varna and the Black Sea. There’s a nice Q and A with Hunt here 

I mentioned the blogs he had occasionally posted during his walk – and came across this soundtrack he had made of some of the sounds he encountered.....

My initial feeling was that the rustling grass, gurgling and flowing water sounds and (too many) Germanic and Austrian pub voices were a wee bit pretentious but but it did grow on me as I listened to (variously) church bells, bird songs, pig grunts, lamb bleats, cock crows and, eventually, at 12 mins, Slovak voices (more strident than I remember); then dog barks, religious chants (nationality unclear); what variously sounded like Hungarian “son-et-lumiere”, bad sexual congress and military horse drill; soft Slavic melodies, bird songs and waterfalls; an urgent call to prayer; and the slow burn of a fire.

At 19.20 mins in, we reached a generous stretch of Romanian gypsy music and at 20.20 the sound of tolling church bells; murmuring voices, barks and cicadas….a trotting horse; strange bell sounds; bird chirping; gurgling of a brook; crackling of a fire/typing (?); a church service; an untuned piano; dripping of water; at 26 mins hysterical (Bulgarian?) laughter; cacophonous car klaxons celebrating a wedding; cicadas; bagpipe music, singing and drunken laughing; a snatch of what is more clearly Bulgarian songs; bells; running water; the swell of what is clearly the Black Sea; more bagpipe music; treading of water; at 34.00 transatlantic English pop in a resort; determined steps; the roll of waves, steps in shingle; an autobahn; and finally, at 37.00 the Turkish muezzin chants. More follows……

All of this sounds like a more prosaic version of one of Paddy’s famous lists…………..

Let the trumpet sound!

My guide/anthology on Romania is now ready – number four on my website - its called “Mapping Romania – notes from an unfinished journey” and can actually be accessed directly on the link embedded in the title

As far as I’m aware, it’s a unique guide and not only for Romania! I’m actually not aware of any other E-book which tries to penetrate a country’s soul (as it were) by giving such immediate access (through hyperlinks – 400 of them) to books, blogs, paintings, music, photographs, for example.

Not that I’m an expert on E-books – in fact, truth be told, I;ve never even looked at one!! Up until now I thought they were just (rather bad) substitutes for the real thing – but I can now see their potential…

To complete the guide in time for my daughter’s arrival I had to leave unread about 30 books which had arrived since I started the work some 4 weeks ago. One of the first I picked up at the weekend was Paddy Leigh-Fermour’s The Broken Road - the last part of the famous trilogy of a walk through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria in the early 1930s which was, however, transcribed into two books in the 1970s and 1980s and finished posthumously just a year or so ago. I had waited for the paperback version to be published and eagerly picked it up from Bucharest's English Bookshop in April.

Yesterday I reached his chapter on Bucharest – so moving to see the city and some of the characters he bumps into painted in such a vivid manner 80 years later – but as fresh as he had just written it (which in a sense he had!). By coincidence, the New York Review of Books arrived in my (electronic) mail this very morning and with an article assessing Paddy’s writings as a whole and posing the question whether he is our greatest travel writer.

Overnight I had realised that I had forgotten to put Nick Hunt’s occasional blogposts during his journey following in Paddy’s footprints  into the list of “goodies” which I had given recently as a “taster” for the guide. 

I have noticed, however, that this hyperlink does not appear to be working in the pdf file. My apologies – I clearly need to check them all – and put a final version online – in a few weeks!

In the meantime Nick Hunt’s After the Woods and Water blogposts can be read here. Obviously someone who is walking several thousand kilometres is not hugging a laptop with him but, somehow, he was able to post a few thoughts. Only one, however, in Romania - and that in the Retezat mountain peaks

The German connection

Almost a month ago I had been so impressed by the opening story of a book devoted to stories of Anglo-German friendships and loves that I used it in a post I called “remembering”. With all the work I’ve been doing on the little guide to Romania, it’s only now that I’ve finished what tuned out to be a fascinating book with the intriguing title - Noble Endeavours – the Life of Two Countries, England and Germany, in Many Stories by Miranda Seymour whose blog also gives background on some of their characters as well as explaining what brought her to write the book. 

I’ve reached the stage of my life when stories about individuals have become more important to me than narratives about historical events. Perhaps the book’s author focuses a tad much for contemporary tastes on the higher social echelons, but the stories she tells of Germans in England and Angles in Germany are nonetheless important – particularly with the appearance of German emigres after the abortive 1848 revolutions. But the most shocking stories appear at the end of the book when it reaches the 1930s and recounts how various Germans and Angles reacted to Hitler. For once the former are the goodies and the latter the baddies – with the various warnings being actively sidelined by the Foreign Office  – including those of British spies with excellent connections

And I was delighted to see Tisa Schulenburg appear in the story. Somewhere in Germany, in 1990, I happened to wander in from the street to an exhibition of wonderful sketches of coalminers. They turned out to be Durham miners in the 1930s and executed by "Tisa" Schulenburg - a very graceful lady in her 80s who was kind enough to chat with me and (a few weeks later) send me reproductions of her work and a couple of her books. I knew nothing about her and discovered her full story only later - as I recounted in a blogpost

"Tisa" Schulenburg's life was by any standard remarkable. Having grown up among the Prussian nobility and witnessed the trauma of Germany's defeat in the Great War, she frequented the salons of Weimar Berlin, shocked her family by marrying a Jewish divorce in the 1930s, fled Nazi Germany for England, worked as an artist with the Durham coal miners, and spent her later years in a convent in the Ruhr.Her experience of the darker moments of the 20th century was reflected in her sculpture and drawing, in which the subject of human suffering and hardship was a constant theme - whether in the form of Nazi terror or the back-breaking grind of manual labour at the coal face.

 When she heard that I was a politician from Strathclyde Region - with its mining traditions in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire - she presented me with a signed portfolio of her 1930s drawings of the NE English miners and their families (some embedded in text) for onward donation to the Scottish miners.She died more than a decade later at the age of 97 – having lived the most amazing life……

I have copies of them - from which these are selections

The two books she sent are the small "Meine Dunklen Brueder" - which recounts her stay in the North-East villages and contains many of the sketches; and the more substantial "Ich Hab's Gewagt - Bildhauerin und Ordensfrau - ein unkonventionelles Leben" - her autobiography which she has signed in large, clear script, with an address sticker for the St Ursula Convent in Dorsten where she was then living.

I prize the books - and will now work my way through her autobiography.....I notice that the second book had run into 8 editions by the time she sent it to me – with the last imprint being in 1990.

A special salad

At last summer is here in the mountains – for the first time at the end of last week I was able to leave the back and front doors of the upper floor wide open to allow the air to flood the house; and to bathe on the outside terrace which so quickly becomes so hot - with the wooden timbers reflecting back…

Today was the first day I didn’t even need to put the small radiators on for even a few minutes to take the chill off at 06.00….

With all the recent dampness, the grass has been growing high and the sound of sharpening scythes will soon be added to those of the cicadas; the starlings/thrushes which are whirling around in interesting clouds at ground level; and the wooden clappers which precede the village church bells here…. I took my scythe down to old Viciu last week and he just laughed at me because more rain is expected and the cut grass would therefore not be able to dry properly for the cattle…..

I’m glad to contribute in my own small way to the renewal of the earth by the scything I commission at the back of our plot which extends up to the border; and also by allowing the neighbours to graze their cattle there when they want.

Have just finished preparing one of my glorious Balkan salads – based on a shopska but with some delicacies added. So here’s my special and unique salad -

To the radish, cucumber, red onion, spring garlic, tomatoes, olives, egg and lettuce I add a few sprinkles of apple/honey vinegar, pumpkin oil and a touch of lemon juice plus well-toasted bread whose crusts I have scraped with heads of garlic and finish it off with shredded village cheese (ideally from the goats on the ridge)! Balsamic vinegar is too strong!

A taster

I promised a few days ago to extract some tantalising goodies from the 130 pages and 400 hyperlinks which make up my little guide to Romania. It will be online in a few days – my daughter’s pending arrival being a useful deadline to force me to stop adding new discoveries eg the writing of Panait Istrati  whom the French traveler Dominique Fernandez enthuses about in his The Romanian Rhapsody; an overlooked corner of Europe;  (2000) - a delightful mix of passionate text and evocative black and white photographs by F Ferranti.

Fernandez (now all of 90 I think)  made four visits to Romania in the early-mid 1990s and a typical section at the start contrasts the images the west has of the country with its beauty and then says

“And the moral force of the people, their endurance, their courage and good heart, which fifty years of tyranny have not brought down, where books are still prized as much as food and medicine, where you will find more passion for matters that relate to the soul, more true culture , more intellectual curiosity than in the West where everything is easy and everything is commercial”

In the subsequent 20 years the changes have, sadly, not all been for the better – which is why almost half of those polled express nostalgia for the communist period.

So, as a curtain-raiser to next week’s full-scale production, I offer first two introductory freebies-

•       “A Cultural Journey” with stunning photographs of Romanian monuments and useful material on prominent Romanians
•         Romania, Bucharest and Beyond – City Compass 2013 a well-produced and useful booklet (of more than 200 pages) for those visiting the country.

 Three celebrations of photography

•        The Color of Hay by Katherine McLaughlin (2003) is a photographic account of a two-year stay in the Maramures area
•       Transylvania  by writer Bronwen Riley and photographer Dan Dinescu 2007).
•       Photo archives from the first half of the 20th century - Costica Acsinte Archive 

 A flavour of local writing – both Romanian and foreign – in

•        BucharestTales (2011) It contains both poems and prose - all of which can be viewed at the hyperlink in the title with the additional bonus of photographs adorning every page!
•        Corridors of Mirrors: The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British and .Romanian Fiction by Pia Brinziu (2000) 

 Two blogposts about Romanian music with great hyperlinks – the first on the classical greats  the second on folk music

These excerpts from The Mountains of Romania give a good sense of the area – the Piatra Craiaului is a dramatic range which I view from my rear terrace.

Two of Lucian Boia (Romania’s greatest contemporary historian)’s key books can be read in full and in English online –

·      Romania; borderland of Europe (2001); and

·      History and myth in Romanian Consciousness (published in Romanian in 2001)

And a powerful record of life in Romania is The Eighties in Bucharest published by Martor

And if you really must visit cities (rather than villages) and don’t know which (apart from Brasov) then have a look at these mini-guides   

That’s just the hors d’oeuvre – now the meal starts!!

On not getting under the skin

I find it odd that so few writers or academics seem to have asked the question which has been bothering me this last year – how does one get to know a country or get under its skin

I have fairly wide interests, skim the book reviews, follow the serendipidous leads while surfing the net – so might reasonably be regarded as well-read and not boxed in by over-specialisation. I am therefore reasonably confident when I say that I have not heard many people raising this question.

I can’t be the lack of writers with experience of living in several countries - look at the scale in the 1920s and 1930s of migration of the most talented Russian, central European and German writers – whether to other European countries or North America. If ever there was a period when you could expect interest in exploring the multiple dimensions of a nation’s soul, that was surely it. But how many real studies of this sort have been attempted? Of the depth, for example, of de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”?. And remember, of course, that that book was the result of a visit of only some 9 months – not the work of an émigré.

Writers like Joseph Roth, Arthur Koestler and Czeslaw Milosz had intensive experience of various countries in their adult life but I don’t know of any works from them which deal with this question.

Perhaps it requires a butterfly mind like mine to be interested…..in exploring, for example, the 16 or 17 different ways there seem to be of “getting to know a country”. Perhaps indeed only outsiders (such as ex-pats) who don’t get sucked into the life of a country have and retain the distance which is perhaps needed for the search? Recent times have seen the development of a large cadre of travel writers - but how many of them can seriously be said to have tried to get under the skin of a country?

And, of course, we often remark on the difficulty of knowing even our most intimate of friends – so how is it possible to do justice to the complexity of a country – with its variety of regions, classes, generations?

Clearly some have tried. – for example Germany; unravelling an enigma which is one of the Interact Series of books from Barnes and Noble devoted to cultural analysis.

But while I find the book interesting for its take on cultural patterns (eg communications) and how they underpin post-war German commercial practices, in no real sense does the book try to understand Germany and its cultural features. 

I thought Dinner with Persephone; travels in Greece by poet Patricia Storace was quite brilliant in capturing Greek mores and thought processes but – and here’s the rub – who am I to judge the veracity of the portrayal? If there are few who can do justice to a country, there are even fewer who can assess fairly how well it has been done. 

I have just received a copy of Jose Saramagos 1979 Journey to Portugal which, as you would expect from a Nobel [prize-winner, seem beautifully written. But it appears that most of the book focuses on churches! 

I am left with Theodor Zeldin's The French as the only book I can immediately think of which gets seriously under the skin of a nation.....

I will continue this search......