Bright sparks in a tough old world

Our lemon tree has been even more active than usual this year  Most of the lemons have now been turned into limoncello!!

My attention has been taken these past few weeks by two stories all over the press.  In France, but well reported by the Guardian too, the horrifying story of Gisèle Pelicot, drugged and raped without her knowledge by over 70 men - her home was in a village not 100 km from here.   She is our age and had thought she was in a contented family life.  Meanwhhile the abusive activities of the British police continue to fill the news columns as stories of undercover policemen getting into long-term relationships with women on the flimsy pretext of monitoring their political activism.  The psychological trauma they experienced and experience still is related in a gripping and disturbing book Deep deception by 5 of the women who were entrapped and traumatised by the men's lies, sanctioned by the state.  I first read of this in the 1990s and it is still rumbling on, with officiamdom squirming to get off the hook

It has been hard to keep a light tone in the face of  gloomy things like these and the Trump election.

We have enjoyed re-watching the BBC production of Jane Austen's Persuasion and then continuing to re-read and re-watch other Jane Austen, notably our umpteenth return to Pride & Prejudice - have read every work of the book for the first time , and noted how film lakers transform the statey 18th crentury prose into modern tv; and I have been trying to read Hilary Mantel's fictional take  on the French Revolution.  She is a marvellous writer  but iin the face of a horrendously confusing history she can only really convey confusion - slow work.  

Some bark from a tree we recently had cut down - wonderful patterns from creatures  inside

As I write Notre Dame is opening its doors.  We watched a splendid documentary on French tv about the restoration and the 2,000 odd craftspeople who made it happen, and I think we might be tempted to go and see in the coming year - almost unheard of that a whole restoration project should reveal a huge 'new' building all at once.  We still have to look at the recording of the opening ceremony and there is a, early music show on BBC Radio 3 today too.

I've also read Polly Toynbee's good family memoir An uneasy inheritance, a book of two halves - the family beginning is quite engrossing, the modern take on her life and  concerns now, also  interesting but the two parts hang rather uneasily together.  However, I will finish with a paragraph from that part, which echos my experience during my working life of a high point in the early years of the current century.  She writes:

"Toynbee Hall these days has thrown off these upper class do-gooding connotations. In my own time, I was at Toynbee Hall on the morning of Tony Blair’s extraordinary visit, when he addressed the packed lecture hall to make the seminal social policy speech of his prime ministership, on 18 March 1999. To listen to his remarkable Beveridge lecture, he had summoned a hall full of poverty experts, economists and academics, along with social affairs journalists such as myself, to astound us with an unexpected commitment to abolish all child poverty by 2020. Abolish it! Jaws dropped, everyone in the room was amazed and partly disbelieving: did he understand what that would take, the enormous heavy lifting in redistribution and the colossal long term social programmes? 

He did, as did Gordon Brown, and they have never had enough credit for how far they reached their goal before being ousted. By Labour’s departure in 2010 they had reached a third of that target, not only taking a million children out of poverty, with many more lifted up closer to the poverty line, but they had also set up a network of 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres, and a host of good anti-poverty programmes drawn up by eighteen different social exclusion task forces defining every cause and remedy. But all that they achieved was swept away within a month with David Cameron and George Osborne’s first austerity budget in 2010. Had Labour stayed in power, that 2020 pledge might, just, have been realized. There could have been no better memorial to Toynbee Hall’s history or to my great-great-uncle Arnold, after whose social reforming endeavour Toynbee Hall was founded."

Sadly UK children's policy and support for children have gone backwards since 2010.  My resolution for 2025 is to find out more about French policy and practice.

A very happy Christmas and new year to everyone.