moral choices

Since I arrived in the mountains on Thursday afternoon, my nose has been stuck in 3 of the 17 or so new books which were waiting for me. The first a political blockbuster about the last half of New Labour rule in the UK which has gripped me for reasons well captured in these quotations from 3 reviews -

The End of the Party is a civil-war epic, at the close of which the house is on fire, the crops are laid waste, and the cast of characters is either dead or dispersed. The fratricidal conflict described here is between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their respective armies of followers and, for as long as these two are both centre stage and slugging it out (ie, for approximately 450 pages), Rawnsley’s narrative has a theme and a drive that give it a compulsive readability (Robert Harris)

But it is only through appreciating the sheer perversity of his decision needlessly to write what Rawnsley calls "an emotional blank cheque" to two very different men – Gordon Brown and George W Bush – that you begin to realise how dramatically skewed his period as prime minister became. In both cases, he made bargains that turned out entirely in the other man's favour. In trying to explain his disastrous inability to confront Bush, a man possessed, as Rawnsley says, with considerable "peasant cunning", it has always been the conventional wisdom to say that Blair was a sort of head prefect with a fatal weakness for sucking up to headmasterly power. For that reason, it is said, he ignored Bill Clinton's stark warning "He's using you". But in these pages it is not so much power as mere activity which drives Blair. What on earth are we to make of a man who, on the day he left No 10, had already inked in 500 appointments for his first 12 months out of office? What are we to make of a government which came up with 3,600 new criminal offences in 10 years?
Any psychiatrist who began to question the behaviour of a leader permanently surrounded by half-eaten bananas would already have noted that images of insanity haunt the whole volume. Blair's closest confidant, Alastair Campbell, was a manic depressive who bears out Booth Tarkington's observation that arrogant people are the most over-sensitive. At one point, Campbell admits to liking nobody in the world but his partner and his children. Brown's corresponding best friends were significantly known as Mad Dog McBride and Shriti the Shriek. Most interestingly, Blair kept quiet about his private beliefs because he worried that voters might think of him as a "nutter" who communed with "the man upstairs". His principal reason for leaving No 10, after his suicidal refusal to call for a ceasefire during the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006, appears to have been his fear of being taken out through the door as unhinged as Margaret Thatcher. "I don't want to leave like her."

Chris Patten cuts through the infighting to pose the basic question about the achievements of the 13 years of New Labour rule -
So here we are. What has it all been about? A devolved administration in Edinburgh, half of one in Cardiff, a hard-won settlement in Belfast, no advance in Brussels, a splurge of public spending, a mountain of debt, Brown's very own "boom and bust", the stuttering beginnings of reform to our education system, the mother and father of all scandals in the mother of parliaments. But there has not been what Tony Judt recently called for, a redefinition of social democracy, an end to economism, the restoration of values to political debate. All that we got was the Third Way, described by Judt as "opportunism with a human face".
For more reviews of the book see the omnivore book review site -
The second book Three Cups of tea - one man's mission to propote peace one school at a time could not be a greater contrast. The story of how a young and peniless American climber repayed a debt to people in a remote Pakistan village.
A vivid account of what one determined person can achieve.

The third book is Jonathan Watt's When a billion Chinese jump - how China will save mankind - or destroy it.

water shortages

Yesterday was my birthday – celebrated with (a) a couple of hours pleasant browsing in the downtown Carturesti bookshop I’ve blogged about before (where I picked up some CDs and volume 7 of the collected works of my favourite central European poet – Marin Sorescu) and (b) having a late lunch with Daniela at a new place just round the corner from the flat.
The heat on the plains and overdeveloped seasides here in Romania and Bulgaria got me thinking about water scarcity and policy (35 is forecast for today). I come across a reference to Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers run dry and know that there is currently a debate in Scotland about the privatisation of water. Scotland has so far steadfastly resisted this policy to which England (and much of central Europe) fell prey in the 1990s. In the late 1980s I was fortunate enough to be part of a small European network led by Riccardo Petrella – then an EC official but who has since become an anti-globalisation activist. I remember him raising the subject of water with me 20 years ago – and in 2006 he apparently published a book about the dangers of the commodification of water. If ever there was an example of a resource which must remain a public utility, this is it. Instead, bodies like the World Bank and WTB have bypassed national parliaments and conspired to force countries to privatise water – with devastating results.
An interesting resource on this subject can be found on a website I found immediately I used google search on water privatisation (as distinct from yahoo whose early pages are very poor on the subject. The site is an impressive personal endeavour on a range of issues - global issues
The Scottish Government should not just be issuing reassuring noises about keeping the resource in public hands – but leading a global campaign for a change to WTB rules and the removal of water from global commercial companies. On a more personal note, the local municipality at last installed a water meter in the mountain house a month ago and have built an additional pump facility in the village - it will be interesting to see how that affects the water supply which was reduced to a trickle last summer because of the scale of building nearby (but not in our village). One of my other reads at the Black Sea was Garton Ash's latest collection of essays - one of which rang bells with me. One of the pieces was on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. He disputed the common perception (about class influences on the slow reaction time) - and argued instead that its main lesson was how quickly our veneer of civilisation slips when basic facilities are removed.

One of the appalling things for me in my visit to Beijing was the massive scale of the construction which was continuing there and in cities generally - and the evil way municipal officials were dispossessing people of their property to join in the rush to richness (collective and personal). Der Spiegel carries today stories both about this - and a warning that the bubble in the Chinese property market is about to burst (in Beijing people are borrowing 20 times their income to buy)

An interesting discussion is also underway in Britain about inequality . I'll come back to that soon.

patrimony in Bulgaria and Romania

One of my links is with Valentin Mandache's website which is a glorious one-man campaign celebrating and trying to protect Romanian's architectural heritage. A recent posting was of the typical fate of a 100 year old paddle steamer - sold for 7,000 euros to a local butcher and mafia company rather than be restored by public authorities (ideally using local labour and helping retain traditional skills) and made accessible to the public as happens in Scotland and most European countries.

Bulgaria has a better understanding of its architectural heritage - with at least 6 specially protected villages. And I have to pay tribute to some of the Brits whose individual restoration of buidlings has also helped (Brits are not interested in the Romanian housing market).
But even the Bulgarians are in danger of undervaluing their painting heritage. One of my dream projects is to help edit a proper book in English which would make the Bulgarian painters of the twentieth century better known to the English speaking world. Thanks to my various friends in the Sofia art galleries, I’m now able to reel off enough names on visits to new galleries to make people’s jaws drop – and I do have examples of well-known painters such as Zhekov, Vassilev and Mechkuevska . However, going by the paintings available on the websites of Victoria gallery and Domino Gallery, I know only about ten per cent of those who worked then.
I thought I was on to something when I encountered the latter since it is entitled Bulgarian Art Galleries – but discovered that only 2 galleries are subscribed (Shumen and Tyrgoviste) although the site does give about 100 of Mario Zhekov’s paintings as against Victoria’s 41. I remember the delight of the Smolyan Art Gallery in the Rhodope mountains – and yet, 2 years ago, they didn’t have enough money for proper maintenance of the paintings let alone for setting up a website or printing a proper catalogue or postcards. I offered to help set up a website or produce a gallery - but their budgetary system couldn't apparently cope with such a donation! Our visit to Varna's art gallery on Saturday was disappointing - with none of their 20th century work on display. Instead there was a special tribute to one of their local artists - Alexander Kaprichev - who suffered from depression and died all too early in 2008.
In Brussels recently, I found an interesting booklet (in French) on modern Bulgarian art - produced by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture in 1947. And I did notice that Ruhmen had quite a formidable collection of art books in his langauge - including a superb one on the painters from who were born in Stara Zagora (including Mario Zhekov). Next visit I should spend some time with such books!
The painting above is by Denyo Chokanov (1901-1982)a couple of whose paintings I am very happy to have in my collection

a powerful autobiography

One of the Sofia Booktrader books I had casually picked up was Amos Oz's - A Tale of Love and Darkness - which turned out to be an autobiography and a really stunning one. All I knew about this Israeli writer was that he has played an important reconciliation role with Palestinians. The annals of a website Complete Review gave me these paras
Oz grew up in an incredibly bookish household, with two very bookish parents, and this reading-passion grabbed hold of him as well (and wouldn't let him go, no matter how hard he tried). The focus of the book is his childhood, leading up to the decisive moment in his life, when his mother committed suicide, Amos not yet even a teenager. That it happened is revealed early on, and mentioned repeatedly, but for most of the long book Oz only takes jabs at it: it's only at the very end that he can describe in any detail what happened.
The suicide led also to his break with his father, as Oz moved to a kibbutz (and changed his name; he was born Amos Klausner), while his father soon remarried. There's some description of Oz kibbutz years, but it is the earlier years that Oz sees as the formative ones.
Books were a central feature in the Klausner household, and Amos' early ambition was not to become a writer but rather a book: books, he saw, seemed to stand a much better chance of survival than people. Taking to reading early on, books always played a central role in Amos' life. Already as a six year-old, it was a great day for him when his father set aside some bookshelf space for his books:
"It was an initiation rite, a coming of age.: anyone whose books are standing upright is no longer a child, he is a man".
Amos' childhood is typical of the hyper-literate: an only child, with no real friends, stuck in a gloomy urban setting with few opportunities for playing outside the home, -- and parents who constantly lost themselves in books as well (and who "had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century") -- so:
What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.
There's lots of talking around him, but often little listening -- as well as many secrets. Amos' parents switch languages when there are things they don't want him to understand, and there is a good deal that passes in silence too. The significance of Amos' mother's suicide is truly made clear when he admits:
"From the day of my mother's death to the day of my father's death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she had never lived. As if her life was just a censured page torn from a Soviet encyclopedia".
This memoir rectifies that situation somewhat, a coming to terms by Oz with his parents. Loving but difficult, they gave him a great deal -- but also both let him down, his mother by her illness and suicide, his father by having the affair that he saw as contributing to his mother's problem, and by failing to be able to communicate and explain so much to his son, despite being such a word-person..
His father was a polyglot scholar, but one who never achieved true academic success, his career complicated and overshadowed by a famous and important uncle. Amos seemed clearly destined to follow on this bookish path, but his adolescent rebellion was an attempt to go in a different direction. As he learned immediately, it wasn't that easy:
"I had tried to turn my back once and for all on the world of scholarship and debate from which I had come, and I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire"
It turned out that even the kibbutz was filled with those who read a great deal and constantly debated and even wrote. And true to his roots, Oz couldn't let be either, inevitably becoming if not a scholar at least a writer.
A Tale of Love and Darkness ambles along, wordy -- but necessarily so, gaining from its easy pace and bulk. Oz circles around topics, gets apparently sidetracked in detailed descriptions of small (and large) events, slowly opens up in a very introspective work that also tries to constantly relate to the world around him. From small memories -- the feel of a pebble in his mouth -- to his meetings with the famous (Agnon, Ben-Gurion), it's a mix of the everyday and the extraordinary. That constant shadow of all the dead relatives, and the lost world the generations before him had left behind, and the contrast to the new, often ugly world being shaped around him as he grew up is well presented
This book mourns the death of the socialist-Zionist dream of a just society and a strange new nationalism, predicated on research universities and string quartets, on comparative literature and experimental agriculture, that turned instead into an acid reflux of checkpoints, demolitions, transit camps, penal colonies and strategic hamlets.
And yet, determined to remember every minute leading up to his mother's suicide, he also sees through a child's eye the prelude to statehood in a Promised Land: the gabby idealisms, vatic visions and rich, combustible mix of poet-worker-revolutionaries, vegetarian world reformers, pioneer readers of Marx, Freud and Jabotinsky, nihilists, Yemenites, Frenchified Levantines and Kurds; the dusty cypresses, pale geraniums and pickled gherkins; the lace curtains, boiled fish, Lysol and paraffin; the youth movements, curfews and Stern Gang; the scorpions, witches and snails, Shakespeare and Chopin, the blunt razor blades, cheap sardines, smelly cigarettes, barbed wire and snipers; leopards in a garden on a Sabbath afternoon and mosques turning gold when the sun sets.


His language (and the translation by Nicholas de Lange) evokes the smells and characters so powerfully. This is a book to savour slowly - and to comeback to again and again. And, already, I have ordered some of his novels.

2 weeks in Bulgaria

Arrived back in Bucharest Saturday night after a pleasant day visiting Varna whose vast gardens right next both to its centre and the sea offers great opportunities for walking, cycling and swimming to its residents.
The 10 days at Syvlie’s flat at Manaster, Svety Vlas in the southern part of the Black Sea was very enjoyable and relaxing – the flat was cool, very well-appointed with a superb vista of the sea and Nessbr. The complex had a garden and pool which benefitted from a light cooling breeze and the beach was only 3 minutes walk.
The area of Sunny Beach which Svety Vlas adjoins is a bit underwhelming – tackiness of the highest degree. It suffers now from over-development – we had three nights without electricity and vast unfinished blocks stride up the hillside. The Manaster complex was the first on site and is the jewel of the areae - very up-market and adjoining a marina with sleek, glossy and improbably shaped power boats awaiting their mutri mafia owners.
Our first port of call on Sunday 18 July had been Sofia – where we arrived in early afternoon, visited the city art gallery and then discovered that the National Art Gallery across the road had just opened an exhibition of Nikola Tanev’s paintings! So we arrived at Sylvie’s house in a very good mood – and were treated to a great meal. Monday was wandering around old haunts eg the great music shop off Hristov Botev, but discovering that three of the galleries were no more; and Neron closed for some repairs – but Vihra still there at Astry Gallery with a welcome drink and chat. In the evening we had the great pleasure of dinner with Mirela and Dobre at the Architect’s Club.
Tuesday was the day of serious painting visits and purchases – with a visit first to Victoria Gallery and then to one of my favourites at the square near the University library where I bought a Saby Ivanov and a painting which reminded me of Dobre Dobrov by one Veneta Atanossova (who painted pre-war). And at my other favourite gallery - Neron - I bought at last a Stoian Vassilev (along with a charming small one of VK by one Maria Francova). The owner – Ruhmen Manov – presented us with a book he had put together of Kyundstil in the period 1878-1940. This is one of the towns (just west of Sofia near the borders with Serbia and Macedonia) I had momentarily contemplated buying a house a couple of years ago - and Ruhmen's well selected and annotated collection of old postcards gives an excellent sense of its travails and development.
Finally a visit to another gallery friend - Yassen Gallev of Konus Gallery in Khan Asparuh St - to whom I showed my purchases. He focuses on more modern work - but did once give me a helpful list of artists of my favoured period and showed me paintings by one of the great seascape artists, Boris Stefchev one of whose paintings is shown above.

onward march of banks

This will be the last blog for a week or so - since we are off to Bulgaria without the laptop.
I leave with one question - what exactly is the explanation for the continued surge of bank outlets in Romanian towns when the rest of the economy is going to the dogs? I noticed yesterday in my vain search for CD discs (for back up for the new laptop)in the centre of city quite a few shop closure (including the electronics shop I had expected to find my discs in)- and their replacement in a couple of cases by bank branches. Given the damage banks have done to us all, you would have thought it would be the banks which would be disappearing. But no - they seem exempt from the normal laws (inasmuch as there are any) of economics. I assume part of the explanation is the extensive loans they have made eg for cars and houses - and the profits they make from the misery of ordinary people who can no longer afford (if ever they could) the repayments. I don't know what repossession rates are like here - but surely banks suffer too from the declining house prices?
The establishment of responsible banks should be top priority for government - ie the encouragement of old-fashioned bank behaviour. The requirement to publish simple information on their loan policy, loans and profits is a simple starting point - let alone the encouragement of a new legal structure which would return banks to a mutual/community basis. More journalists should cover banking.

death and life

A suicide of a 43 year-old Romanian modern folk singer at 02.00 on 14 July has dominated the television and newspapers here. Madalina Manole enjoyed great success in the 1990s but her popularity lessened after 2003 – coincidentally after the breakup of her first marriage with an older composer. On the face of it, she seemed in recent years fulfilled - with a new husband, a one-year old son and a new villa - but she had lost her public following. She was working on a new album - but she apparently attempted suicide in June. This time, her birthday, she was successful. The brash Romanian media have been quick to supply the other technical details. Her appeal (via text message at 23.00) to her husband to return home; his arrival at 06.00 to find her dead body; use of an incredibly strong Serbian pesticide. She was a Cancer – apparently in such strong need of love.
Thursday’s TV and papers were full of more details. Evening TV was devoted to various studio discussions with friends and colleagues; and replays of her singing. Dispensation was received from the Orthodox Church for some measure of church input to yesterday’s funeral (although not access to the church) in Ploiesti, her native city, which was attended by thousands as she lay in state in an open coffin in an open square in temperatures of 30 plus.
The suicide of Germany’s goalkeeper last autumn seems to have been the catalyst for a long pent-up discussion about depression in that country - although it did not apparently last all that long. The same seems to be happening here.
Anxieties are now being expressed herein Romania about copy-cat suicides. Romania is not a happy country – you can see it in the faces let alone in the road rage I spoke about recently. And no systems are in place to help those in anguish. Even if there were, it is doubtful whether they would be used. The only saving grace is the open discussion which Romania’s open American-style media is happy to encourage.

No society seems able to establish the environment to help the increasing numbers who feel anguish, despair and hopelessness. Clearly statistics are unreliable – problems of shame and reporting - but it seems reasonable to postulate that in any single year at least one third of the citizens of EU countries experience a depressive phase lasting a few months. Tony Blair’s bruiser – Alaister Campbell – came out a few years ago as a manic-depressive and now heads up a voluntary organization to help such people. My sister committed suicide - she left a note in her car at the side of Loch Lomond and her body was never discovered. Noone had been aware of her condition. It emerged afterwards that she had shared her feelings with the GP who had told her to pull hewrself together.
In the mid 1980s I suffered for 3 consecutive Scottish winters from SADness – sensory affective deprivation. In other words the gloom of northern winter conditions was probably the catalyst which kicked me into a loss of self-confidence - after too much energy expended the rest of the year in a regional political career which had no future. It was just like a hibernation – I avoided company and felt useless. I went to a therapist who seemed to specialize in dealing with miserable politicians. I didn’t find this helpful – nor the medication I accepted for a few weeks. My judgement is that I emerged from each phase mainly by forcing myself to get back into routines with people – although my body’s natural rhythms were probably the main factor.
One thing I would say is that, having suffered and overcome, I became a stronger person – appreciating more the joys which life offers. And I am clear that more recognition of the commonality of this condition is necessary to help people understand that they are not alone with their feelings of despair. We all imagine that noone else has ever suffered from these thoughts of uselessness. In those days it was difficult to find material about the condition. Probably the most useful thing I did was to try to identify the catalyst which had pushed me over the edge - and then to try to find the behaviour which could reverse the process.