No, not the country, which seems fine, but the Attorney General of the same name. As the saga of her employment of a housekeeper whose visa had expired unfolded, I fell to muttering about there being one law for politicians and one for the rest of us. As indeed did most of the country. But Michael White, the Guardian‘s Political Editor, has an interesting take on it in this morning’s paper.
As I noted here the other day, of the two couples in this tale, three of the four people – Scotland, her barrister husband and Tapui’s British solicitor husband – are all lawyers who ought to have been more careful to secure her residential status, a relatively easy thing to do for someone with a British spouse.
So only the non-lawyer in the case has lost her job. But should Scotland, who helped pass the relevant legislation as a Home Office minister and is the cabinet’s legal adviser, lose hers, too?
Phone-ins and chatrooms have been crowded since this morning’s announcement of the administrative (not criminal) penalty, with people complaining that it’s one law for the rich, another for the poor. Is that true in this case? I doubt it.
The laws against employing illegal immigrants are designed to deter people who do it systemically – either in business or their own homes – to gain cheap, malleable workers who can’t complain much.
I don’t think that motive will have applied to either party here, do you?
So what it’s really about is whipping up negative feeling about immigrants, legal or not, and the jobs they do in our economy, often because we won’t do them ourselves (or at least not for the money on offer).
“If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity or subservience to dictatorship.”
I’ve been reading Robert Skidelsky’s new book on Keynes, which is absorbing and well-written. I never accepted (as most of the neo-con economists did) that Keynes had been overtaken by history, as it were and Skidelsky backs that up by picking out three Big Ideas from Keynes which, he thinks, have an enduring resonance. They are:
1. The future is unknowable, so economic storms, especially those originating in the financial system, are not just external shocks which impinge on smoothly operating markets, but part of the normal working of the market system. (This is something an engineer would know intuitively, so it’s always been a source of amazement to me that economists and investors seem unaware of it. Market capitalism is an intrinsically unstable system.)
2. Economies wounded by these ‘shocks’ can, if left to themselves, stay in a depressed condition for a long time. (As the Japanese know to their cost.)
3. A moral critique of societies which worship the pursuit of money and efficiency above all other objects of human striving. I thought of this while passing the Cambridge Arts Theatre, which Keynes was instrumental in founding. In a way, it’s the most profound of his ideas, and the one most flagrantly ignored in the last two or three decades.
Skidelsky has a lovely Coda in his Preface in which he writes:
“Once I started writing this book, on 1 January 2009, I stopped reading the newspapers on a daily basis to avoid filling up my mind with ‘noise’. Any coherence my argument may have stems from this act of self-denial.”
No wonder I am sometimes incoherent. I read too many papers.
It’s been one of those perfect September days — sunny and warm and incredibly peaceful. Late in the afternoon my daughter and I went out into the local hedgerows to pick blackberries for supper. It’s one of the loveliest pleasures of this time of year — getting one’s hands sticky with berry juice; deciding which ones to eat and which to bring home; wondering about the injustice of the law which determines that the best, juiciest blackberries are always out of reach.
The crop this year has been simply wonderful. In the end, we had to tear ourselves away — otherwise there would be no crumble for supper. But in the 20 minutes or so we were out we picked two punnets’-worth. Effortlessly.
The (apple & blackberry) crumble’s in the oven as I write. Mmmm…..
LATER: Lovely email from a reader:
Reminds me that today, September 21st is St Matthew’s day. My mother used to tell me that on the next day, Sept 22nd, the Devil casts his hoof over the blackberries, and from that date onwards the blackberries became more and more insipid.
In another container there was a work of art consisting of a video, repeated over and over, showing a man — not in peak physical condition, I might add — rollerblading around a vast empty space, stark naked. I’m proud to say I betrayed no emotion while viewing this work, although my daughter, who is 3, said, quite loudly: “You can see his tushy! Yuck!”
She is young, and has no art training.
Anyway, in the corner of one container there was a ratty old collapsed armchair — worn, dirty, leaking stuffing, possibly housing active vermin colonies. I asked the gallery person if the chair was art, and she said yes, it was a work titled “Chair.” I asked her what role the artist had played in creating “Chair.” She said: “He found it.”
“Chair” is for sale. The price is $2,800. Really. I looked up “Chair” on a Serious Art Internet site, artcritical.com, which said: “The chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.”
See, I missed that altogether, about the desuetude and the apotheosis. I thought it was just a crappy old junk chair some guy took off a trash pile and was now trying to sell for 2,800 clams.
“So, let me get this straight. Bush inherited a $7 Trillion surplus, turned it into a deficit by funding an illegal war, fought by murderous private contractors, but Obama is the bad guy because he wants healthcare the entire rest of the developed world has had since the early 1950s?”
This is the bust of Charles Darwin that used to be in Down House, his home in Kent. (It’s now in Cambridge University Library).
I prefer the profile view, though, because it brings out his essential gentleness as a person (which is most in evident in his anguish over the death of his daughter Annie — and which is a central theme in the recently-released feature film Creation).
We went to see Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron’s film about two women obsessed with French cuisine. It’s based on a true story about Julie Powell (played by a waiflike Amy Adams), a lost young wife living in Queens in 2002 who fastens on Julia Child’s famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as a way of giving purpose to her life. She decides that she will cook every recipe in the book (all 524 of them) in a single year — and write a blog about the experience.
Ephron’s screenplay weaves the lives of the two women — who never meet — into a charming tale. Julia Child is played by Meryl Streep in a performance that initially seems so over the top that one is reminded of the Monty Python portrayal of Mrs Jean-Paul Sartre. David Denby put it nicely in his New Yorkerreview: “Like a tall ship at full sail, she leans, tilts, and billows. Odd explosions of air—whoops, exclamations—come hurtling through the passageways. She runs out of breath, and then settles, mysteriously, like an old Bible that italicizes ordinary words, on a single syllable.” The effect is slightly off-putting at first, but it’s such a focussed performance that eventually one begins to wonder: maybe Child really was like this. After all, Streep is a great actress and she must know what she’s doing. Besides, the real-life Child was a very large woman (six foot two in height and with a presence to match). So I suspended disbelief and resolved to check it further when I got home.
At the artistic heart of the film is a conjecture: that cooking can change your life. Julia Child was the wife of Paul Child, a civilised and urbane minor US diplomat (played by Stanley Tucci) who is posted to Paris in 1948, just as Senator Joe McCarthy is beginning to stoke anti-Communist hysteria back home. She loved Paris and French food, but was lost for something to do (the couple had no children) and so eventually fastened on the idea of enrolling at the Le Cordon Bleu cookery school. After many twists and turns (nicely portrayed in the film and including Paul’s skirmish with McCarthyism) she wound up writing the book that introduced the American thinking classes to the glories of French cuisine. In a way, she was the Americans’ answer to Elizabeth David — except that Child was less fastidious as a person and took to TV like Fanny Craddock (and became just as famous). But, overall, it was an obsession with the details of haute cuisine that gave meaning to her life.
Half a century later, Julie Powell is drifting through life in New York. Married to a civilised, urbane magazine editor (nicely played by Chris Messina), she works by day in the office of a government organisation set up to deal with relatives of the victims of 9/11. The only thing she really seems to enjoy doing in cooking. She wants to be a writer (even wrote “half a novel” once) but is getting nowhere. Eventually she finds that one of her ghastly, power-dressing contemporaries has started a blog about her personal life which is going to be turned into a TV mini-series, and has the thought: I could write a blog too! But about what?
And therein hangs the tale. Julie starts a blog (using the old Userland software which powered Salon blogs and that I used to use before I switched to WordPress). Initially, nobody notices it (she’s a long way down the long tail), but eventually it gets some traction and one day the New York Times discovers it and — Hey Presto! — Julie’s on her way to fame and a book deal — and personal salvation. It isn’t all plain sailing, of course: she has reverses and crises (just as Child had) on the way; and even if she hadn’t, the dramatic demands of a screenplay would have necessitated them. But the story ends, satisfyingly, with the realisation that both women Came Through. And left the world a better place. And so we walked out into the twilight with the warm glow that comes from realising that Boeuf Bourgignon can change your life. (Which in my case, incidentally, it did. But that’s another story.)
But back to my original discombobulating concern: was Streep taking us for a ride? In the old days, we’d have no way of checking. Now, though, we have YouTube. So here’s a link to the trailer for the film. And here is the real Child on how to make an omelette:
And my conclusion? Streep did over-egg the pudding a bit. Or, as the French would say, un peu. Put it down to artistic licence; after all, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggheads.
FOOTNOTE: Julia Child’s recipe for Boeuf Bourgignon (pdf) available from here. I’m afraid I disagree with her about the bacon rinds. Otherwise she’s spot on.
The new one has a 6.2 litre V8 (the original had an inline six-cylinder engine). Yours for £275,000. Don’t know what the emission figures are, but you can guess they aren’t exactly planet-friendly.
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on Keynes, which is absorbing and well-written. I never accepted (as most of the neo-con economists did) that Keynes had been overtaken by history, as it were and Skidelsky backs that up by picking out three Big Ideas from Keynes which, he thinks, have an enduring resonance. They are:
