Human Sympathy

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If the story of some 70 people dying an agonising death in a lorry in Austria after, no doubt, risking life and limb to escape some brutal war, does not move people, god knows what would.

For a while now my best beloved has been collecting facts on immigrants and refugees – and no they are not the same despite the best efforts of some to conflate the issues.

I want to get something as cogent as the Daily Mail but from the other side. I am sure it is out there, but I haven’t laid my hands on it yet.

I want something that I could take to the pub and silence the voices that say, ‘Yes, I know, those poor people. But we are a small and overcrowded island and really we just can’t take any more.’

I haven’t got that killer piece in my hand, so I will just carry on with what I have got.

Here are just a few facts that might come in handy tomorrow night in the pub.

At the end of 2014 there were 19.5 million refugees worldwide.

Some 42,500 people a day left their homes and their usual lives to try and get to a place of safety.

Not only would the journey be dangerous but it is important to think about what it would be like for us if we had to leave our homes and set out to try and find a place of safety. Just what would you carry across a dessert or sea? Probably nothing. That means leaving all your life behind.

Some 86 per cent of those people ended up in developing countries. Not rich countries, developing countries.

There are 1.3 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. It has a population of just over 4 million.

Germany is taking tens of thousands and Angela Merkel has stood up to extreme right-wingers and said that it is the duty of her country to help.

And, do you know what, hundreds of ordinary German people are coming out to help and I am pretty sure the same would be true here.

Meanwhile, the UK government said there would be a ‘modest expansion’ in the number of Syrian refugees accepted into the UK, and a figure of 500 by the end of 2017 was cited.

Last year we took 187 people.

The government says they would rather put money into the region – and in fairness some £400m has been sent to aid refugees in countries like Jordan and Lebanon.

But I think the problem is that we have allowed a conflation of the issues around immigration and refugees.

There are issues around immigration and yes, there does need to be a re-think on how immigration works – maybe.

(However, we know that the NHS would collapse without immigration. See Jamie Oliver on C4 news saying all his businesses would close without immigrant workers. Ask any fruit farmer about finding pickers from say Liverpool or London.)

We need Cameron to have the leadership and guts to distinguish between the issues of immigration by people who want a bit better standard of living, and those who are fleeing persecution & war.

He needs to say that we, as a nation, cannot stand by and let desperate people die in Mediterranean.

He needs to say that we will be an integral part of a European response to the biggest refugee crisis since WWII.

And that involves more than sending dogs and razor wire to Calais.

(According to local sources, there were some 5,000 people in Calais trying to get into the UK in July. I am sure that the argument will be that if we let in those 5,000, another 10,00 would be hard on their heels. But 5,000 people is hardly a swarm.)

He needs to look his eurosceptic back-benchers straight in the eye and tell them to wind their necks in and search around in their copious pockets to find some human sympathy for people who have nothing, and need our help.

I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Medals II

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For anyone who read the previous piece about the cap badge, here is a quick update.

I wrote up the badge’s regimental history and also some blurb to go with the rifle medal and the WRVS medal and decided to put them at the centre of a display of military history books. (Always a good seller in our shop  –  I may have mentioned we are knee deep in retired naval officers.)

I happened to be on the till that afternoon and so could see that the medals in the window had lots of people stopping to look and read. So, I gave myself a small pat on the back and tried not to look too delighted.

Then a woman came in and bought a card and, as she left she stopped to look at the medals, and then came back in.

It turned out her uncle had been in the Rifles regiment but only at the end of WWI. He had been in the Salvation Army so, though not a full conscientious objector, had been a cook behind the lines – and driven an ambulance I think.

But as the war drew to a close and every man was said to be needed at the front, he was given a gun, no training and sent out.

He was killed a week before the armistice.

This woman’s daughter had researched a whole lot of stuff about him and the war and had collected some memorabilia, but had never had a cap badge – now she has.

PS. The rifle medal sold too but I have no idea who to, and why anyone would want it.

It left the military history display lacking a certain something, so yesterday we changed it to a table full of crafts and hobbies books – who would have thought one shop needed four books on origami?

Leaving Brussels

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The other day when I was in the cellar, I came across a lamp base with a red sticker on it.

It brought back the memories of leaving Brussels so I will now share with you what I wrote then and why the red sticker bought back memories….

We are leaving and that means ‘sorting out’ the largest house I am ever going to live in – from extensive and ‘stuff’ -filled basements and yes, we have them in the plural, to guest rooms in the attics.

We both had August off to do this but then I got a batch of work which meant hours on the computer and phone. That, as anyone self-employed will know, means that you spend your time in your ‘office’ thinking about the packing up and the time packing up thinking about who you need to phone.

Nick, like many men has a clear focus of what this sorting out involves.

I am tornado-ing through the house, throwing things out, giving things away, generally trying to reduce our belongings so that when we eventually have somewhere to permanent to live we won’t be deluged with stuff that makes you think, ‘ What on earth possessed me to think I would ever want to see this again?’

Meanwhile, Nick has sorted his ‘papers’, talked about putting all our many books into boxes in alphabetical order and polished his silver photo frames. (It was me of course, who rang the removal company and got them to deliver the boxes and so far, they are still flat packed. My suspicion is that our books may not be in perfect order when we unpack them.)

Yes of course, I am being a bit unfair.

One of the problems is that we are leaving said (huge) house, going to stay in a rented (very small) cottage for three months and then moving to a yet-be-found ( no doubt tiny because of the rental costs) apartment in Paris.

So, we have to guess what will need to come out of storage in Antwerp and be delivered to Paris and what should be left for a couple of years – maybe longer, maybe shorter, who knows. And delivered God knows where and to what.

I have devised a colour-coding system but I am always better at the bright idea than the follow through so I can see blues being confused with reds and sent with yellows to where only whites really should have gone.

The optimist in me says it will be a) fine by moving day b) I will get nice surprises when finally, some years hence all is delivered c) life is too short to worry about this stuff d) I have to maintain at least the semblance of an organised, efficient type so it will do.

The pessimist is in the corner wailing and renting (unpacked) garments and reaching for a large glass of wine.

Oxfam Medals

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As every second household in Petersfield and the surrounding area seems to have spent the summer clearing their bookshelves, we have had an avalanche (or tsunami depending on your preference for natural disaster metaphors) of books into the shop.

Needless to say they were not all of the highest quality so a lot, a very lot, of sacks have been filled and stay piled up in the back room until the strong young man comes to collect them on a Friday.

But enough of all that – I certainly have had recently.

Donated last week were a couple of medals, one a Women’s Voluntary Service medal from the second world war and, another which says it was presented by the Society of Miniature Rifle Clubs ( a very small clubhouse or a very small gun – who knows?)

And we had a tin cap-badge which had ‘Peninsular’ on it and we thought was from the Peninsular War.

The best beloved did a bit of research into the cap badge and found that the regimental museum was in Winchester – a hop and skip away.

On Saturday we decided in a rather spur of the moment, raffish way, to go to this museum and see what we could find out about the badge.

It is a very nice museum – given that it is all about war – and there is an amazing model of the Battle of Waterloo, but also had on its premises, the curator – which was a real bonus.

So we got to find out that it was not a cap badge from the Peninsular War but a later one and worth not much at all – we hadn’t had big hopes on that score so not a disappointment.

And now we have its history, I am planning to have a display of military history books with the medals and their backgrounds on the shop table.

So, are we Oxfam volunteers so easily delighted.

(Should you be interested in the Rifle medal here is what I found out http://www.rifleman.org.uk/Society_of_Miniature_Rifle_Clubs.htm)

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Bring on Autumn

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I am quite looking forward to Autumn.
I do realise that for most people the idea of the nights drawing in and the weather turning worse does not put a spring in their step – if you will excuse the awful play on words. (It has been a while since I put fingers and brain to keyboard.)
But Autumn and Winter are the seasons I most look forward to.
Now I am a fully-fledged Sussex housewife, I have been keeping a beady eye on the elderberries (ready to be transformed into elderberry vinegar which is surprisingly nice) and the blackberries, and the rejuvenated crabapple tree.
My best beloved keeps talking about ‘nature’s bounty’ but then he is not the one to haul out the jamming pan from the depths of the cellar and make time to make preserves.
Though I have to say, upfront, this is not why I look forward to Autumn.
(Actually all that preserve-making always reminds me this is not the way I foresaw myself using my allotted span.)
I look forward to polo-neck jumpers, going out with a rucksack to gather kindling, seeing the log store full, and, oh yes, oh yes, putting the Aga back on.
Occasional storms that mean power cuts and filling the kitchen with candles, our amazing Rowan tree which every year turns from being a bit of boring number all through Spring and Summer, into a blaze of red berries for ages and encourages the thrushes back.
Snow, of course, is a bonus and one we haven’t had much of for a while but I can live in hope.
I do realise that this is all romantic rubbish and most of the time it is a slog to walk the dog in the mud and rain, there is a point when just because it is going dark at four does not mean it is time to start cooking supper, the grey days are relentless by February and very depressing.
And when we did have snow, I loved it for two or three days of only being able to walk to the village and then I was bored and very pleased to be eventually able to drive to the giddy delights of Petersfield.
But still I look forward to it. And there is still the bottle of Lebanese red wine bought from the very nice Lebanese man who gets it from his family’s Lebanese vineyard (are you sure you understand that this is special Lebanese wine?), which we have been keeping for a couple of years for that night when it is ideally cold and wintry, probably with a snow storm raging , a delicious meal of some sort which I have concocted and am secretly very impressed with and even best beloved says is a great accompaniment to the wine, the log burner going full blast, the dog asleep on her rug, maybe a few candles…..

(I have, in all honesty, to say you might just as well catch us having a bottle of cheap white from Lidl and a risotto and an episode of Lewis, but a girl can dream.)

Seizing Today

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Last night, we went to the pub as is usual on a Friday.

(I realise this might not be the most riveting intro to a blog but if you can bear with me, it might just get a bit better as the paragraphs go on – or at least I might get to the point.)

Anyway, Nick had just got home from being away for a bit just as I was going out of the door to walk down to the local hostelry with my female neighbours and our dogs. Women and dogs walk, men take the cars.

So, we had a nice time, sat outside, dogs running about – our dog has a habit of networking the whole pub garden, offering her business cards to anyone and everyone and offering herself up for adoption, but we get her back in the end.

So, we women later gently weaved home across the fields with the dogs, and some god was in some sort of heaven and all was well. ( Yes, the men went home in the car.)

Then, at home, Nick and I got talking – was we hadn’t had time to catch up – and opened a bottle of wine. Now, it was nice to talk about what he had told the House of Lords committee etc  (as well as the meltdown in the Oxfam shop caused by the introduction of a new till) but it would probably have been better to do it with a cup of tea – but then that is not us.

Suffice it to say, that by the end of the evening we had decided to write a paper together on the comparisons between current Chinese foreign policy and the Mongol empire of the 1200s.

No, of course we won’t. Despite the fact that I love Mongol history and he is really interested in what the Chinese are up to, we could never write a paper together – divorce would be the easy option.

But, to get nearer to the point. We woke up with a hangover, I went to Oxfam and did some stuff and then we went to meet some old friends of his for lunch – well, getting eventually to the point….

So, hangovers akimbo, we went to meet them in a pub halfway between where they live and where we live.

I had organised it in a moment of realising that you don’t have infinite time to catch up with friends, you think you do, but one day you find out you haven’t.

(It happened to me – I had this brilliant, amazing friend and even though she was geographically just over the hill, I didn’t see enough of her  – and now she is gone.)

So, we seized the day and spent it having lunch in a country pub, chatting swapping notes on charity shop shopping, ebay bargains, whether the state has any right to snoop, what to do when you are not working, guns in America, how much we use sailing phrases in everyday language, family news…..

And do you know what? that is enough seizing the day for me.

I am not going to leap out of planes, camp in the Sahara, learn to speak Chinese, run a marathon – all good things, but not for me. I am happy seizing a day with lovely people and a lazy lunch – nothing could be better.

A brief un-banal moment

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There are times when writing banal stuff about an easy life seems not quite to the point.

This week an agreement (of sorts) has been made with the Greeks – and you should listen to Tim Hartford’s More or Less Greece Special on Radio 4 for good stuff about the numbers and allegations. I have to say I feel for the Greek people but definitely not their political class – and if I was Lithuanian or Irish, I would not be that sympathetic to their current government. And I am not. I agree with Guy Verhofstadt and you can see a great video of his arguments on Facebook.

And then, there is an agreement with the Iranians – which will please the Israeli young woman and Iranian young man in my group of international PhDs last week (they were wary of swapping email addresses in case their governments found out) – and which pleases any right minded thinking person, so that won’t apply to the US Congress or Israeli government.

Meanwhile, our government plans to make any trade union member opt in to paying a levy to the Labour Party but does not feel the need to make every shareholder or staff member vote as to whether their big boss should donate to the Tories.

And in a continuing saga of misery, more than three million Syrian refugees are in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq – I understand by February this year we had taken 187. Another six million are internally displaced which is a nice way of saying they are not in any sense at home and safe.

So, I just wanted you to know that even here in Deepest Sussex, we do get the news and we do care about it.

But, as any reader will have gathered by now, we don’t talk about it much.

If you feel that banal stuff about an easy life should not be on the same page as serious issues, don’t worry you can stop here.

I am hoping that you are doing great stuff with refugees or politics and have better things to do, and there is a lot of me that wishes I was too – but I am not, so back to banal.

But for those of us in Deepest Sussex who are not doing anything amazingly useful with our lives, three issues this week – a new laptop, some alarming dog-sitting and the new computer till at Oxfam – you get the point.

So, anyone who has not got better things to do can read on for the next blog in which all will be revealed.

Knee-Deep in PhDs

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I have a week every year when I am knee-seep in PhD students – and it is this week.

They are bright, funny, insecure, knowledgeable, starting out, shy, too loud and all the rest of it – and our job (us tutors at their summer school) is to give them some stuff which might help them get through the arduous business of finishing a PhD and then a few bits and pieces of advice to help them join the rest of us in the big wide world.

Last night some of the group of PhDs decided it would be ideal to sit on the benches outside my bedroom window and get to know each other by chatting, laughing, singing and having a few heated discussions about, among other things, whether war is inevitable and what it means to be racist.

This took from about midnight to about 3am.

In my role as tutor, I was tempted to open the window and say, ‘ OK, let’s just pause for a moment.

‘Its brilliant you care to have such a discussion and the topics are really important – though the rendition of the Canadian national anthem was really not a high point – but here are a few things I need to say to you.

‘You (I would be pointing to the young man with the loudest voice,) need to hone your listening skills and perhaps have a pause before you say instantly what you are thinking.

‘You (pointing to another young man,) need to find another way of saying what you have just been repeating several times.

‘And you, young women, are not getting a hearing. I am guessing that because you are not being listened to, you have decided to leave that discussion and talk amongst yourselves – but that won’t work when you all need to pull together as a team and achieve the tasks we have set you.

‘Now, think on, as my grandmother would have said, and you had better think on in your own beds, you have a busy day tomorrow.’

(The last bit would have been less tutor and more, grousy middle-aged woman mode.)

Of course I didn’t.

But as I was wide awake at 2 am and had finished my current book, I did search of my bedroom for a feedback form for the venue.

(I am a fan of filling in questionnaires and feedback – if anyone asks my opinion, in any format, I have no trouble at all in giving it to them.)

Anyway, I thought I would mention that if you, as conference venue, have a wine list at the bar you should have more than one white wine from the list of five, available to drink.

And if your customer then opts for a rose wine instead, you really should charge the price on the wine list.

I was told that the prices had all gone up but they hadn’t got round to changing the price list – I don’t think that is how it should work!

I might have mentioned one or two other ‘areas for improvement’ seeing as they had asked for my feedback and I am in tutor-speak mode, but of course they hadn’t.

To be fair, I would also have said that the food is fine and the staff are very helpful and friendly.

This has been a short break in my day and now I need to go back and improve my knowledge of the energy sector – and yes indeed, that can be very interesting.

A shed in the hedge

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We have a splendid view from our back gate – all across fields to The Downs, down a field with sheep in it, and up another field to two lovely oak trees.

You can see some of this from the house – not least since Nick cut a semi-circle out of the back hedge so we can see the two landmark trees from the kitchen. (They are the trees you can see on the heading of this site – lovely aren’t they?)

Well, we decided – after a few episodes of George Clark’s Amazing Spaces – to try and build a shed on a platform in the hedge, backing against the large cherry tree.

We wanted space for a desk – something like Dylan Thomas’s writing shed in Laugharne, and you can see that we have been working on this idea for some time – and a fold out bed so we can put up a couple more people now and then.

And to sit there and enjoy the lovely view of an evening.

We, for our (relatively rich) sins, live in a conservation area in a national park, and the village is nothing if not clear about what it approves of and what it doesn’t when it comes to any development.

(I could tell you a long story about the house being built behind the green boards for about two years but it would get very tedious.)

Anyway, it being a small world, we knew someone who could ask informally of the council whether we needed planning permission.

I had previously looked at the planning portal for Chichester and it is a site designed by planning experts for planning experts and not for ‘civillians.’

(And if you search for Chichester planning portal and you see the reassuringly named site: Simple Search Chichester District Council, and if you click on that and see Planning – Simple Search and then see Guidance – you might think you were in with a chance. But click on that and you will get the message, Page Not Found. Now you know you are in trouble.)

We just wanted someone to say if it is such and such size, above such and such height, within such and such distance of the house, yes you need planning permission.

Or indeed, whatever you are thinking of building apart from a hedgehog abode under a hedge, you need planning permission.

This is an extract from the advice we have been given:

If the property benefits from permitted development rights the proposal is determined against Schedule 2 Part 1 Class E of The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) Order 2015 (please see page 22 of the attachment). This shows the range of development permitted and the additional restrictions that apply to Article 2(3) land (conservation areas, areas of outstanding natural beauty, national parks, world heritage sites).

In other circumstances, I might be rather pleased that our little corner of deepest Sussex ranks along with a World Heritage Site, but this is not time to take such crumbs of comfort.

The form we have to fill in to find out if we need planning permission is nine pages long.

This is not a rant to claim the need to relax planning laws.

Neither is it a rant about the conservativism of planning around here – nothing if it’s not built to look like it was there when Jane Austen came trailing through.

Nor I am I about to get on to the issue of the cottage over the road where they got planning permission for an extension and have (hopefully in the in the process of re-building) reduced the cottage to one end wall – the Ypres in 1918 look.

No, it is a rant about un-friendly local authority and government websites.

I do realise they have may lawyers leaning over their necks whilst they are designing them, but really.

Seize The Day

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We were given a poignant reminder this week of the need to seize the day, make the most of your time, do interesting things and stop faffing about in general.

And though faffing about is pleasant – we do a lot of it, so we should know – it is all too easy to see days and even weeks slip past with not much new stuff happening.

The man of the house saves the world by giving all sorts of leaders the benefit of his wisdom whether they want it or not, and I do Oxfam bookshop things.

But, I thought, this weekend we will go somewhere and do something.

Unaccustomed as we are at doing this, and being a woman who feels the wisdom of crowds is always a good thing, I took the issue to the pub crowd. (Well, when I say crowd there were eight of us, and three dogs who didn’t play much part in the discussion.)

(It was very nice to sit around in the pub garden and drink wine, eat chips and generally enjoy the Friday evening.)

Now, one of the benefits of being us is that we can do things in the week and out of school holidays but being a woman of instant enthusiasms and no power to defer any gratification, I said we had to do something tomorrow – Saturday.

Our friends reminded us that the plans we had to go to Romsey – never been there, sounds interesting, indeed go to anywhere which involved the A27 (a lot of Sussex), was bad news on a nice June Saturday.

Likewise, a long deferred plan to go to the V&A as I haven’t been there in a while, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

I was up at 5am, listening to the ever amazing dawn chorus in our garden – if I knew how to embed a sound clip in this blog, I would let you hear it – and I found that in the Test Valley there are guided tours around the place where they make Bombay Sapphire gin and apparently it is really interesting.

The man, woken up at 6am with the exciting news that he could go to a gin distillery that morning, was less enthusiastic.

Not that he balks at a nice G&T but thinking about it at 6am didn’t seem to work.

OK, I said, we can go to the craft and design fair at West Dean and in a desperate bid to avoid anything so horrendous as shopping, he declared he wanted to go for a long walk and a pub lunch.

(Though we are knee-deep in nice country pubs round here, we never do that.)

So, I said yes and then we set off – after a quick trip into the local auction house to see what was available to re-upholster but that is another story.

The man planned a walk which involved a nice route through the quiet country lanes to car park from which you could climb up a part of the South Downs, do a circular round and then head back down for lunch in a nearby pub.

Not exactly seizing the day in terms of planning to sell up and drive to Katmandu or give up a nice life in deepest Sussex to teach English in rural Chad, or even go to New York for the weekend, but still…

Remember the quiet, lovely Sussex lanes? Well in about six miles of such lanes we met say 25 on-coming cars, each requiring a stop and back up – not least because our car is nowhere near as nice as all those on-coming 4x4s or Audis or BMWs and therefore had to tug its forelock and throw itself into the ditch.

Several miles of this was really quite wearing and we ended up rather snappish towards the on-coming vehicles. We thought there must have been something going on to cause that much traffic but we had no idea what.

That was until we got to the main road and set off to the car park.

There were all these people around and as I turned right into what turned out to be a farm track rather than the entrance to the car park, we realised we had joined the South Downs Marathon.

I had to drive up this track to find somewhere to turn round. I crept up it. I was not going to bully someone who was running 26 miles up hill and down dale into moving over for my (not even posh) car.

Then I had to turn round and drive back, and I am pretty sure that if the people who were having to get to the side of the track had the energy to waste on irritation, they would have been pretty irritated.

The man was meanwhile scanning the map looking for an alternative and he found one, so we drove on and parked in a nice local village and set off on what he said would be a shorter walk but there was a pub so we could still do what we had planned.

About 100 metres from the car, we hit a field full of large and interested looking bullocks.

Call me a wimp, but I was not walking through that field with a dog.

Back we went, and he found another (yet another,) walk and we drove a bit and parked and set off.

Levin Down it is called, should you want to go there, and it was managed by Sussex Wildlife Trust and was lovely with all sorts of wildflowers.

All going well and dog was bounding about, until we got to the point where there was yet another field of bullocks.

Admittedly, they looked placid enough but I am not that easily convinced.

So we undid the two rusty gates to allow us to walk the other side of the barbed wire crested fence and hoped we could re-join the path later on.

Actually, the path sign said we should be on that side of the fence but the farmer had other ideas.

At the end of the field, there were the signs that other people had been facing the same dilemma as us and had made (who knows how successfully) efforts to get over the barbed wire and head on.

The man and dog were more gung ho than me.

We went back.

So, we went to the local pub and had a reasonably nice lunch, came home and I did the ironing and the man mowed the lawn.

We didn’t so much seize the day as limply shook its hand, but it is a start.