Daffodils at Greenwich

After the depressing musings of my last post, here's something cheerier:

Crossing a line

"State Britain contains images of human suffering which some visitors may find disturbing."
[notice at Mark Wallinger's exhibition State Britain at Tate Britain]

When I was eleven years old my father took me to Greenwich where I was able to stand astride the Meridian line, one foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and one foot in the Western. Today, at Mark Wallinger's show at Tate Britain, I thought of that childhood moment, as I stood with one foot on each side of a line Wallinger has marked on the gallery floor. That line marks the boundary of the "vicinity of Parliament", the zone within one kilometre of Parliament Square, within which spontaneous demonstrations are banned by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Under this act one person has been convicted for reading out at the Cenotaph the names of British soldiers who have died in Iraq, another charged for carrying a placard in Whitehall reading "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" (the quote is from Blair, but the Blair who wrote under the name George Orwell, not, obviously, our present leader). A friend of mine has been arrested for merely sitting down in Parliament Square.

When I visited Greenwich as an eleven-year-old with my father, we British were proud of our freedom. Politicians on all sides compared our freedoms with the constraints faced by citizens of the Soviet Union, under constant state surveillance. Today British citizens are subject to the most intense surveillance in the world, and the government’s plans for identity cards will take that to a level the Soviet secret police could only have dreamt of. All in the interest of defending freedom and countering terrorism, of course. So we have to use the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act against a peaceful elderly lady who sits down in Parliament Square, or the Terrorism Act against an octogenarian whose offence is to shout "rubbish" during a politician's speech.

How did we cross this line?

Wallinger has reproduced the demonstration mounted by Brian Haw in Parliament Square from 2001. It is, as the warning notices say, shocking in its portrayal of the suffering being endured by so many in Iraq, about which there is nothing further I can say.

Thank you, Radio 3

What better way to be roused from sleep than by Joyce de Donato singing Copland's setting of Emily Dickinson's "Nature the Gentlest Mother is"?

Memory

On my way to a conference I pass a young man with a golf bag over his shoulder, and unexpectedly there comes to mind the excitement I felt as a teenager setting off to play a round: the potential for delight and disappointment, the uncertainty as to whether this might at last be the day when I played well. And the memory of the walk past the clubhouse, from the eighth tee to the ninth green, and the taste of the cheap ice-cream we'd buy, came back to me astonishingly vivid.

Daffodils in Greenwich Park

Insomnia reading

By my bed is a book of Borges' selected poems, which is giving me great pleasure (thanks, H, for introducing me to Borges's poetry). And a couple of nights ago, suffering insomnia and with spirits lowered because of a mild cold, I open it at the following, which does wonders for my mood:

There is a line by Verlaine that I will not remember again.
There is a street nearby that is off limits to my feet.
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.
There is a door I have closed until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I'm looking at them now) are some I will never open.
This summer I will be fifty years old.
Death is using me up, relentlessly.

[Borges attributes this to Julio Platero Haedo, Inscriptions (Montevideo, 1923), not that I believe him.]