I Feel The Earth Move

Old joke time. Did you hear about the gas explosion in (insert name of rubbish town here)? It caused a million pounds worth of improvements.

That joke came to mind while watching the footage of the Haiti earthquake. Because, well, the place looked like an earthquake had just hit it before the earthquake hit. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world (more-or-less the poorest outside Africa) and has little hope of improvement without outside intervention; even before the disaster, it was reliant on foreign aid. I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, where it’s used as a case study of a society in irreversible decline; this is down to a combination of things, including weak government, over-population, deforestation, and lukewarm relations with its slightly-more-prosperous neighbour, the Dominican Republic; where the Dominican Republic has protected forest (which in turn means the rainfall is captured as groundwater before collecting into rivers, meaning much of the country’s power is hydroelectric), Haiti has subsistence farming and what remaining forests there are being chopped down for charcoal. Haiti is what happens when a country is asset-stripped and there is nothing left.

You might think I’m being a bit hard on the country. After all, not only are they one of the poorest countries in the world, they’ve just had an earthquake and on top of that Simon Cowell has organised a charity single on their behalf. Haven’t they suffered enough?

But my point is this. I’m not knocking the motives behind the fundraising effort, it’s admirable and selfless and without an ounce of cynicism. It’s just that this is a great opportunity to do more, to really change Haiti’s fortunes, for something good to come out of the disaster and put the whole country on the path to recovery.

But the problem is, it never quite works out like that. Despite all the fundraising and good intentions over the past two decades, Ethiopia remains one of the very poorest countries in the world, due largely to its population growth outstripping its resources (the poorest counties tend to have the highest population growth rates, which is what keeps them poor – it’s Malthus in action). Where will Haiti be in five years time? It’s great that people care when an earthquake hits, but will they still care next year, when the next disaster is making headlines? The poverty of Haiti, and other countries, is treated like a fact of life; somebody else’s problem, a problem too big to be solved, and however sympathetic we may be, there’s the nagging doubt that it’s a problem which is partially self-inflicted.

You can only do so much, but in order to make a difference, you need to do so much more; the introduction of democracy is a step in the right direction, but not a panacea, as you also need cultural changes, the most important of all being sexual equality, as the best way to control a country’s population is to stop treating half its population as baby-making machines.

Anyway, waffling on. Don’t know what my point is. Probably something about how charity solves nothing because it’s all about people giving ‘the least they can afford’ when what you need is the government making sure people give the most they can afford (and voters supporting governments that increase foreign aid, such as the current Labour administration, which has doubled it, and led the campaign to cancel the debts of the poorest nations – doing far more good, and making far more of a difference, than any feelgood TV telethon or charity record).

Quiet Life

Ooh, I haven’t posted a blog for ages. I am abject and contrite, faithful reader. But I’ve been busy, writing words which people will pay me for, and at the end of the day I find I’ve run out of things to say and my fingers are all tired from typing.

And on top of that, it’s been cold, and apart from work, not a lot to say. Yesterday the Mrs and I visit the British Museum. Having read up a bit on African history, I was wondering what relics they had from the empires of Mali and Ethiopia – two of the most successful empires in the history of the planet – but it turned out all they had a couple of masks. But they had some bronze bits and bobs from the Empire of Benin which were marvellous. And which clearly demonstrate that what I was taught at school – that in Africa everyone was living in the jungle and hitting each other with sticks until the Europeans turned up – was a load of nonsense. They had empires, they had cities, they had bronze bits and bobs while we were all still hitting each other with sticks.

After that we went to a Privet Function. I had a privet function once, it was late, I needed to go desperately urgently, there was a hedge nearby. I think, if anything, the Privet Function demonstrates the limitations of the spellchecker. Though as it was followed by an Appology for the Inconveineance so I’m not sure Mr Clippy was firing on all cylinders.

Telly-wise, currently watching ‘Big Bang Theory’ – excellent episode this week – ‘Pop Star To Opera Star’ – really enjoying it, and getting quite indignant when they sing a song which isn’t proper opera – and ‘How I Met Your Mother’. The episode this week, ‘Drumroll Please’, was one of the most perfectly-written, beautiful episodes of a sitcom I’ve ever seen. Seek it out if you’ve not already seen it. It’s like an American version of ‘Coupling’, but really funny, so completely unlike the American version of ‘Coupling’.

Started going for jogs again. Bloody hell it’s cold out there. Can barely see where I’m going what with my breath condensating all over the place. It’s so cold that when I get home I have to count my nipples to check I haven’t lost one on the way.

Discovered a fantastic new band called Dragonette. They’re like Little Boots but even better. Can’t understand why they’re not more well-known. Oh well, they can be my secret. The words ‘kiss of death’ spring effortlessly to mind.

Oh, finished reading John O’Farrell’s An Utterly Exasperated History Of Modern Britain, which was lots of fun, particularly on what really happened during the 1970s compared to it’s portrayal in TV clip shows. Occasionally John’s relentless search for the ‘gag’ becomes a little wearisome – though there’s a sequence in his The Best A Man Can Get about the correct way to make a cup of tea which made me laugh my head of insanely in Gatwick airport, drawing the attention of passers-by – and I think he’s completely wrong about the Iraq War.

Speaking of which, watched a bit of young Tony Blairs on the telly on Friday. Reading Nick ‘Chairman Of The Young Conservative’ Robinson’s blog on the BBC site you’d think that Tony turned up trembling with fear and stammering in terror and desperately hoping no-one would notice the spreading dampness at the front of his trousers. When actually he came across as confident, self-assured, thoughtful, statesmanlike and absolutely bone-dry in the underwear department. Why aren’t you still Prime Minister, Tony? I’ve stuck some thoughts I wrote last year in a gap in last year’s blog.

So, yes, not a lot going on, and I think this blog’s probably going to be weekly, or very occasional, from now on.

Get A Grip On Yourself

Just finished Ben Elton’s latest novel, Meltdown.

It can be hard work being a Ben Elton fan. After all, this is a guy who started out ranting about the evils of Mrs Thatch and ended up compering the Queen’s birthday concert; the guy who wrote angry plays about the evils of capitalism and then wrote musicals for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Rod Stewart; the guy who wrote The Young Ones and The Man From Auntie and progressed to Maybe Baby and Get A Grip; the guy who never shows his teeth when he smiles so everybody accuses him of being smug.

But it’s not the peer pressure that’s so much the problem. It’s two other things. Firstly, the wide variability in the quality of his work. I mean, up there (I’m indicating about head level) you have The Young Ones, Blackadder, The Thin Blue Line (“oh, you’re so mean”), Gasping, Popcorn, High Society... and then about here (I’m indicating about waist level) you have his Queen rock panto, and his previous novel, Blind Faith, and then about there (I’m indicating ground level) you have the unmitigated stinkers like Chart Throb and Blessed. And then about here (I’m shrugging as though to indicate I’ve forgotten) you have Blast From The Past and Past Mortem.

The other problem is the amount of material he recycles. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t follow his work so closely, but it can feel a little like one is being ripped off when the same gag turns up in a stand-up show, a musical, a novel, a sitcom and a TV show... there was a period when everything Ben wrote had to include a shoehorned spiel on how large chocolate bars and fizzy drinks are getting at the cinema, or how you can’t get normal toothbrushes these days, or how a woman has waxed her bits so smooth they could be laminated.

Oh, that’s the third problem. The obsession with female genitalia.

(If there’s a fourth problem – it’s the fact that the solutions to his whodunits are so bloody obvious he might as well not bother. I remember working out who the murderer was in Dead Famous from reading the cover inlay)

To begin with the negatives, Meltdown does feature the usual Ben Elton flaws. Whole chunks of the novel are reworkings of the ‘isn’t it hard bringing up kids, you never get any sleep’ stuff which left so many of us stony-faced in his mercifully-forgotten sitcom Blessed (which was later used by Armanda Ianucci as an example of why some types of sitcom don’t work if they’re not filmed in front of a studio audience). I also could have done without the ‘humorous’ digressions into leaky nipples and stretch marks – Ben, get a grip!

But the big surprise with this novel, and the great thing about it, is that Ben has found something he cares about again and has got a bit of moral fire in his word processor, not seen since High Society (probably his best novel). I mean, The First Casualty was pretty good, while Chart Throb was pretty abysmal (and recycled the twist of Silly Cow) and Blind Faith, although including lots of good stuff about moral relativism in a world of the vacuous, was basically a rewrite of Fahrenheit 451 by someone who hadn’t read Fahrenheit 451 with leftover nuggets from We Will Rock You thrown in.

With Meltdown, though, Ben has found a strong subject – the credit crunch, and politics in general over the last few years, taking in the futile hypocrisy of Live 8 (which gets quite a kicking), the cash-for-peerages thing and the MPs-expenses thing. It’s a great idea, and (unlike with Chart Throb) he’s found a good way into the story; a group of university friends who made good while the going was good, who each made a Faustian pact with the gods of mammon and then got bitten on the arse when push came to crunch. You have the property speculator, the architect of silly phallic skyscrapers, the New Labour MP...

Oh, and that’s the other surprise – Ben has remembered how to be left-wing again! I mean, all the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic with their own voices, but (I hope) there’s a bit of the author’s voice coming through in the condemnation of ludicrously high salaries for people who work in the public sector, the virtues of state education, and in particular both the compromised morals of a Labour government that gets into bed with the financial services industry, and the sheer momentumlessness of a government that hasn’t done a great deal to be proud of since banning fox-hunting ten years ago (where the only Big Idea they have left is to ban smoking).

My one suggestion would have been that the character who is killed in a road accident should have been swerving to avoid a fox. That would have been a lovely little extra irony.