Saturday morning musings

One thing that V discourages me from doing is wandering around outside the front gate with a mug of hot coffee in my hand, as this is exactly the kind of behaviour she has come to expect from her brothers. We don't so much live in a neighbourhood as a gene pool.

R, the low-flyer of the family, has taken to dressing as if he's retired early to Biarritz. One would almost expect him to shout out "hang ten" one morning when we pass on the banqueta...except that he hasn't spoken to either of us for nearly a decade.

It was worth getting up early — not for Aston Villa v Wolves — but for the diaphanous start to the morning, which has since tended towards the hazy. No free copy of the Prensa Libre though today. (One of the week's great mysteries were the newspapers shoved under our garage door for three days in succession. Our anonymous donor could not have been the usual delivery man as he passes by later on.)

Now that it's the weekend I'm finding the spare moments to peruse the Readers' Opinions pages, and have noted the sudden upsurge in complaints about the PNC. That Mixco mordida hotspot is certainly heating up in the familiar fashion in the lead up to Semana Santa. It must be a little off-putting for the brave contributors to this part of the Prensa to have to include along with their stories, a full set of personal info, details of their private email address, a current signature and a photocopy of their cédula!

I made the mistake of watching a bit of Fantasy Homes By the Sea on BBC Entertainment. If not actually the worst channel in SKY's selection, it must be close to it. Only the very stinkiest of Beeb's programmes seem to make the cut. The Graham Norton Show, with special guest....Patsy Kensit. I'm not sure that many Brits now know or care who she is ...or was. When you compare the fine quality stuff available via iPlayer (or even EZTV.IT) its frankly embarrassing that license payers are shovelling this parochial shit at the Central Americans.

Fantasy Homes...leaves an agridulce aftertaste. On the one hand there's the pleasing knowledge that these smug 50-something couples have seen a third of the value knocked off these sodden seaside pads since the series was made. On the other hand they belong to the very generation which takes greatest responsibility for the mess, having re-engineered Britain's economy (and society) to fit their fantasy lifestyles, thereby throwing almost every other demographic into the deepest of debt. No wonder they suspect that they might need all the extra bedrooms, because those children who previously left home will all soon be returning for good.

Another depressing statistic surged out of the Prensa this morning as I browsed it. (Maybe Wednesday's copy.) The total death toll from the Haiti earthquake now stands at 222,570. This is very close to half of the UK's total death toll, military and civilian, from WWII: 449,800. (The USA lost 418,500.)

Comparing casualty stats can be (perhaps deceptively) insightful. For example, 600,000 died during the American Civil War, 300-500,000 in the Spanish Civil War. It comes as a surprise (for me at least) to discover that upwards of 800,000 perished as a result of the supposedly less modern conflicts we refer to as The English Civil War. By far the greatest number of these fatalities occured however in Ireland, which experienced a Black Death-equivalent population loss of 41%, thanks largely to the activities of Cromwell's 'Godly' hosts.

The 'English Civil War' was undoubtedly very violent however, taking proportionately more British lives than the First World War. (In England there was a 3.7% loss of population, while Scotland suffered a loss of 6%.) 1 in 4 Englishmen served in the armies of either side, which essentially means that more or less every able-bodied man of the time took up arms. Soft-tipped lead bullets were widely used, resulting in horrific wounds. It's a wonder that little more than a century later Edmund Burke could point the finger at the French and describe their way of going about regime change as distinctly un-British!

Anyway, I have resolved to make a proper study of this period and the ideas that set off this conflict across the British Isles as it has always fascinated me. Burke's ideas seem to reflect the collective amnesia that my compatriots suffer from when it comes to the day we decapitated our King. We got our revolution in early, when political and religious radicalism were still rather confusingly intertwined, and so we tend to dismiss it. But those later upheavals in America and then France might never have happened in the same way without it. And what if Charles had won? An empire helmed by an absolutist might have made the modern world a rather different place.

From a young age most English boys know which side they would have picked, and I have always been a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead. Even with a mature appreciation of just how provocative and idiotic Charles's policies were (there are few other revolutions so clearly the work of a single man), the monarchy as an institution represents a large part of the continuity of England's contribution to consensual government. And the Puritans have likeability issues.

And there's always something so gloriously, tenaciously wrongheaded about the losing side in these civil wars, which is why I can also briefly set aside the prickly political-economic issues, and state my sneaking admiration for the Confederate forces of the Old South and the anarchist factory-workers of Catalunya.

Back to Guatemala. I suppose the local highlight this weekend will be the San Barcholo procession. The whole area has been filling up with fustilarians since mid-afternoon yesterday. The carpets are worth getting up early for, especially those in the narrow streets of San Luquitas.

Elsewhere the main event will be the mega-concert tomorrow evening at the Mateo Flores, featuring J-Lo, her Skeletor-lookalike bloke Marc Anthony, Tito el Bambino, Carlos Baute & Marta Sanchez, Pitbull, Paulina Rubio, Viento en Contra, Hombres G, and local favourites Malacates Trebol Shop. Cheapest tickets are Q500 for a space on the not-so-hallowed turf.

The Seven Ages of Britain

Watch out Simon Schama and Andrew Mars, another BBC stalwart is after a piece of your vanity history programme action!

We're four ages into David Dimbleby's (public) schoolboy history of the British Isles, and so far I can't remember him having mentioned Scotland once.

The concept is simple: Tell the story of English (er British) history by visiting the key national treasures which can be plotted against a narrative familiar to readers of 1066 And All That.

This way people who had big jewels (such as Alfred the Great and Francis Drake) or big gaffs (Romans, Henry VIII) can come to the forefront and all those toiling plebs can be discounted. Indeed, the revolting peasants didn't even merit a mention during Dimbleby's extended paean to the magnificent lifestyle of Richard II. (That's his Queen's crown being contemplated in the pic above.)



In this week's episode we were astounded to see Dimbleby finally donning a pair of protective gloves before handling a volume in the Pepys Library. Up until then he's apparently had no qualms about whipping through the pages of priceless manuscripts with uncovered mitts, poking his ballpoint at delicate Sutton Hoo trinkets, or stomping all over Roman mosaic flooring.

All in all, the best thing currently on the EBC...er, the BBC.

TV Viewing Diary: The History of Christianity (2)

Diarmaid MacCulloch turned his back on the rising sun for part two, following the history of the 'Imperial' Christianity through the great schism of 1054 with Constantinople and then on up to the Reformation, his pet subject.

"I don't believe Peter was ever Bishop in Rome," he deliberated, quite early on.

Scholars are apparently still uncertain why Paul, who seemed to make the bigger effort to extend the Word to gentiles, was downgraded relative to Simon Peter once Christianity became the state religion in Rome. Perhaps it was simply that Greek pun — "upon this rock" — put into Jesus' mouth that earned Peter a basilica downtown, while Paul's church and final resting place was stuck outside the city walls.

The Abbot of said church was admirably frank in expressing a hope that the legacy of 'his' saint should achieve greater influence in modern Catholicism, and observing that if Paul not Peter had become the gatekeeper, the church would have had a much less centralised look about it today.

MacCulloch himself betrays a slight Anglican bias on these matters. For he categorically blames St Augustine of Hippo for all of western Christianity's sexual complexes (and specifically of course the doctrine of original sin) whilst failing to note that it was Paul who was the monster misogynist.

In the Dark Ages old controversies still complicated the religious scene — such as the Arianism espoused by the Goths. So the papacy made the decision to outflank this encroaching heresy by converting the Anglo-Saxons in the late sixth century and establishing a particularly loyal bond between these gauche northerners and the Bishop of Rome.

For his services Augustine , the leading Benedictine missionary in England and special papal envoy, was presented with the See of Canterbury and a pallium, which still features in the Anglican Archbishop's coat of arms a half a millennium after the English Reformation.

With no Emperor in Rome at this time, the Italian aristocracy entered the priesthood in droves (The Catholic Bishop's get-up today reflects the secular garb of Rome's fufurufos at this time.) and local secular power was increasingly concentrated in the person of the Pope.

The Papacy was helped first by the eradication of three out of four rival patriarchs (Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem) by Jihad and by the forged Imperial decree known as The Donation of Constantine (not in fact mentioned on the programme) which supposedly transfered control of the western half of the empire to the Pope in the absence of any other capo in the region.

On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III felt secure enough to share some of this ascendency by crowning the biggest barbarian then knocking around — Charlemagne — as the first 'Holy Roman Emperor.'

But a Papacy controlled by wealthy Roman toffs was hardly a model Christian institution. A zeal for change soon arrived in the person of the brutish reformer Gregory VII, whose main achievements might be said to have been:

1) Getting himself embroiled in a war with the very institution that Leo III had created, which destablised Europe (and Germany in particular) for centuries and perhaps could be said to have ultimately resulted in two World Wars thanks to Rome's continued efforts to stifle German nationalism and centralised leadership from this point onwards. (MacCulloch didn't actually say this though!)

2) Getting rid of married priests, largely in order to counteract the laws of inheritance that prevailed amongst the aristocracy and thereby establish the Pope's unchallenged authority in the selection process for the key ecclesiastical posts. (Up until this point only 'regular clergy' i.e. monks and nuns were expected to be celibate.)

3) Getting the ideological wheels moving which would lead to exciting new doctrines on the remission of sin, which would pave the way for the Crusades and the sale of indulgences which would in turn eventually culminate in the Reformation and part four (?) of this very interesting programme.

Part 3 meanwhile will cover the 'Orthodox' church. Gregory had been helped by the actions of his predecessor Leo IX who had got shot of Constantinople and both its Emperor and its Patriarch, the last serious rivals to the Pope's claim to head up "all Christendom". This was achieved by sending Rome's least tactful legate Humbert for a crucial meeting with Patriarch Michael in 1054 which concluded with a frenzy of mutual excommunications.

TV Viewing Diary: The History of Christianity (1)

Presented by Oxford University's muy simpatico Professor of the History of the Church, Diarmaid MacCulloch, this new BBC series has set about tracking each of the key moments which have given the Christian faith the structures we see today.

This is not a history of theology, he informed us at the start, but a history of the church — a rather convenient excuse for not addressing controversies with contemporary resonance such as the historical origins of the Gospels — and yet he was quickly tackling the doctrinal scrap surrounding the teachings of Arius which led to the Council of Nicea in 325 and the imperially-imposed compromise we now know as the Holy Trinity.

Further dissention within the early church was largely condensed by MacCulloch. In a Constantinople restaurant he mixed water with oil and water with wine in order to explain the respective positions of Archbishop Nestorius and Pope Cyril of Alexandria on the manner in which the human and divine were combined in Jesus. Nestorius was exiled and then partially rehabilitated at the Council of Chalcedon. (He was also condemned for insisting that the Virgin should be described as the Mother of Christ not the Mother of God.)

Yet the first really significant bifurcation occurred when some early missionaries took the eastern road out of Jersualem, whilst others headed west into the empire which in 70AD had sacked the Temple and generally trashed the city, thereby uprooting Christianity from its origins as a Jewish sect.

Eastern Christianity was never to have a Constantine moment, was never to acquire the friends in high places enjoyed by its western equivalent. Still, MacCulloch makes his way to China, finding there an east-facing Buddhist pagoda (pictured), once a seventh century Christian mission, and learns that under the Tang Dynasty Christianity was known as 'the religion of light'. Its adherents were predominantly merchants, and so lacked the characteristic arms-bearing attitude of the Latin church.

Many eastern Christians remained pre-Chalcedon in outlook, rejecting the fudge imposed by the Byzantine emperor. The Church of the East, based for 1500 years (up to 2003!) in Baghdad, was one of these, and its members played a significant role in the translation of ancient Greek texts by the Abbasids.

The Syriac Orthodox church based in Damascus has a liturgy which is rich in symbolic gesture. A priest explained to the intrepid historian that unlike western theology, which has always been 'rational' and philosophical, the Syriac faith (encapsulated and transmitted in a near-relative of Aramaic) could have been knocked up by a poet.

Today Christianity is perceived as an integral part of the 'western' cultural offering, but these ancient eastern offshoots suggest that things could easily have been different, MacCulloch concluded. He even located a friendly Islamic scholar in Damascus willing to admit that the Muslim practice of praying from a prostrated five-times a day was borrowed from the ways of early christians in the east.

Bankocracy

"For the free-marketers, the idea of endless bail-outs was just so obscene that the temptation to walk the walk of market discipline would somewhere, sometime, have proved too great to resist. Lehman did not create the reality of Too Big to Fail, it merely exposed it to general view. There was a brief moment when the general horror at the new state of affairs seemed likely to lead to change; but as stock markets and liquidity have recovered, that moment is receding, and we seem to be settling back into the status quo ante, with a few cosmetic changes about bonuses. It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can’t do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn’t capitalism: that, remember, is all about ‘creative destruction’, and the freedom to fail. That’s exactly what we don’t have. The most accurate term would probably be ‘bankocracy’."

Fascinating LRB review by John Lanchester of two insider accounts of Lehman Bro's failure last year, of which this is the conclusion. Once TBTF had manifested itself in public in September 2008, it became clear that our economic system had mutated into something beyond the current theoretical underpinnings. Perhaps it needs a new name, Lanchester asks.

Bloody Mary

This morning I read Hilary Mantel's review of Eammon Duffy's Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor.

Whilst generations of English historians have concurred that Mary and her bishops were deluded reactionaries fighting inevitable intellectual change, Duffy insists that traditional faith was resilient at this time and that the Queen and Archbishop Pole demonstrated that a conserted campaign of state terrorism really can set back an idea that could otherwise consider that its time has come.

There were 284 executions, a very public "theatre of cruelty, with both sides performing for each other and for any uncommitted onlooker." The number of protestants prepared to bear witness and burn might ultimately have been small, Mantel agrees, but the genie of free thought was certainly out of the bottle:

"An Essex servant girl, Elizabeth Folkes, aged 20, was asked what she understood about the nature of the Eucharist. Did she believe in a ‘substantial and real presence’ in the host? She answered: ‘It was a substantial lye, and a reall lye.’ She had been questioned once and let go, she had been given her chance, and so although the judge wept when he sentenced her, she was burned with five other humble people outside the town walls of Colchester. Rawlins White was burned; he was an illiterate Cardiff fisherman. William Hunter was 19 years old, a silk-weaver’s apprentice; a priest sneered at him: ‘It is a merye worlde when such as thou arte shall teache us what is the truth.’ Thomas Tomkins, a weaver, was burned after Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had forcibly shaved off his long evangelist’s beard ‘so he wold loke like a catholike’ even if he wasn’t one, and had held his hand in a candle flame to give him a foretaste of what was in store for him if he failed to recant."

If you recanted, you still burned, but only up to the point of your earthly death, or so the Bishops believed. Clergymen wandered amongst the crowd gathered for the executions, ready to provide ad hoc spiritual commentary, while informants noted down the names of anyone showing undue compassion for the heretics on the barbecue.

History Gobbet

At the start of the Second Triumvirate Octavian, Mark Anthony (...and Lepidus) needed to raise money quickly, so they came up with the plan of 'prescribing' 2500 of their political enemies, a process which involved both execution and a seizure of funds.

Unfortunately this brutal coup flooded the market with expensive villas, crashing it badly and leaving the Triumvirs with a collection of rather toxic-looking assets. In the end they had to resort to stealing from the Vestal Virgins and then, the even more unthinkable, taxing the up to then fiscally-exempt citizens of Italy.

I told you so...

Says Professor Niall Ferguson.  

His new book The Ascent of Money was plugged by Ed Vaizey (OP) recently on BBC Parliament's BookTalk and I'm definitely tempted to get hold of a copy later in the year. 

I only caught two episodes of the accompanying Channel 4 series which appeared to have been hastily re-edited after the events of the late Autumn on Wall Street. 

Ferguson is famously a counter-factual historian - building his analysis of major world upheavals from what-if scenarios, such as the notion that Europe might have done a lot better for itself if Britain and Germany had avoided such a head-on conflict in 1914. 

The marriage of economic convenience between Britain's empire (then rather nicely plugged into China) and German manufacturing was the pinnacle of the first great era of globalisation and it all fell apart when some Balkan loon whacked Archduke Ferdinand. 

Now we have Chimerica, explained Ferguson in Part 6 - a system whereby China saves using US Dollar Treasury Bonds which keeps itc currency weak and its products cheap for American consumers, who meanwhile have (or had) access to one of the largest sources of easy credit in economic history. 

In Part 4 Prof. Ferguson had been not so much counterfactual as not-all-the-factual, something I was taught very early on at Cambridge was the greatest sin a historian could commit. An episode that would supposedly explain why insurance doesn't really work in truly exceptional moments of crisis and disaster went off on an extended ideological gripe about welfare spending. 

Ferguson rather too blithely permitted the 'Chicago Boys' their moral compromise with Pinochet's murderous regime in Chile, failing to point out that a) the Friedmanites' policy's led to the biggest banking clusterfuck since, well, now...and b) that it was the series of consecutive socialist administrations that have followed the reintroduction of democracy in Chile which have really consolidated the 'economic miracle' there. 

It was Professor G.R. Elton who greeted the '86 intake of historians at Cambridge with a valedictory speech detailing his long fight against ideologues in the faculty. Historians' job was not to generate new theory through a selective gathering of the facts, but rather to make sure that theories developed elsewhere were exposed to the maximum number of historical facts in order that complex, muddled reality would always triumph over simplistic models (such as Marxism, his own great bugbear!). 

Ferguson himself concluded his series with the suggestion that the 'Quants' - those fiendishly clever mathematical types dedicated to predicting future market movements  - are prone to basing their prognostications on their own, inevitably limited, experience of the past.  As a result many were chewing on roast black swan this Christmas...

TV Viewing Diary - Carluccio and The Leopard

A genre-bending documentary from Beeb 4 in which wheezy culinary entrepreneur Antonio Carluccio travels to Sicilly in order to uncover the background to Il Gattopardo, perhaps Italy's greatest modern novel.

In between preparing some of the examples of cucina baronale which crop up at key moments in the book (none especially apetising to either of us, I have to say), Carluccio amusingly uses various varieties of biscuit to visualise 19th century Italian history (Bourbons, Garibaldis, Savoyardi etc.) and relates the rather sad biography of late-developing author Lampedusa himself, who died from lung cancer just after receiving a second, devastating reggie letter, and was never to see his great work published, or indeed flying off Palermo bookshelves.

Bots #2 (More Kentish lawgiving)

Hlothhære and Eadric's (673-686) code provides early evidence of the need for something akin to the Bluewater shopping centre on the Kentish border, as Dark Age shopping in Greater London(-wic) seems to have required filling your ox-cart full of "true men" (metrosexuals not being permissable) to act as human receipts:

"If any Kentish-man buy a chattel in Lundenwic, let him then have two or three true men to witness, or the king's wic-reeve. If it be afterwards claimed of the man in Kent, let him then vouch the man who sold it to him to warranty, in the wic at the king's hall, if he know him, and can bring him to the warranty; if he can not do that, let him prove at the altar, with one of his witnesses or with the king's wic-reeve, that he bought the chattel openly in the wic, with his own property, and then let him be paid its worth; but if he can not prove that by lawful averment, let him give it up, and let the owner take possession of it. "

There must have been a queue at every altar in Kent of ceorlish men attempting to attest to all kinds of things. Consequently, Wihtræd (690-725) proclaimed: "Let the word of a bishop and of the king be, without an oath, incontrovertible." Blair could use a similar piece of legislation today.

Bots #1 (Aethelbert of Kent)

My present immersement in Albania's Kanun has rekindled my interest in the codification of the blood-feud and other aspects of Anglo-Saxon good manners. Take the laws of Aethelbert, King of Kent (560-616), which set out clear penalties for humping female members of the royal household:

If a man lie with the King's maiden, let him pay a bot [compensation] of fifty shillings. If she be a grinding slave [?!], let him pay a bot of twenty-five shillings. The third class, twelve shillings."

The mid-section of Aethelbert's code deals with the prices to be paid for inflicting various wounds. A struck-off ear cost 12s, a merely pierced one 3s, though if it were also mutilated the perpetrator would have to cough up 6s.

"Let him who breaks the chin-bone pay for it with twenty shillings...for every nail, a shilling..."

The premium-end of GBH was covered by clause 64: "If anyone destroy (another's) organ of generation, let him pay with three leud-geld; if he pierce it through, let him make a bot with six shillings; if it be pierced within, let him make a bot with six shillings."

Three leud-gelds were in effect 3 x the wergeld for ordinary manslaughter, a clear deterrent against low-blows!