In class this morning we were looking at how our carbon footprint can be reduced. The British 10:10 campaign can be found here. Since you are a person rather than a business or a school, by clicking the bright pink ‘PEOPLE’ tab at the top of the page, you will find the ten ideas that you can start putting into practice straight away. There are different versions for schools, businesses and organisations. Then the article I read about cows being responsible for 18% of something or other was referring to greenhouse gases in general, and not CO2 in particular. Their contribution to warming the planet comes through the emission of methane, although the production process of the fertilizers necessary for intensive meat production, plus refrigeration and transport are also culprits when it comes to carbon emissions. You can read the article here.

For Wednesday courses in Meerbusch:I did actually use the film of Beatrix Potter’s life last year in other courses, so by searching a little in the category coursework (tab at the bottom of the right hand column) you might find a Beatrix Potter post. Or to make life much easier I can just give you a link to my own blog post here. Why not.

And here’s Peter unfortunately caught by the brass buttons on his little blue coat.

Yesterday and today courses looked at some urban matters. One text was taken from the New Yorker; you can find the original, along with lovely pictures of urban gardens here. And lots more examples of rooftop gardens here. Another text was taken from the Guardian newspaper, you can find it here. And then there was one, which, admittedly didn’t have a lot of mileage in it, about London: there’s a news item that’s similar here.

By the way, the world population living in cities is growing at a terrific rate: according to this article in the Los Angeles Times, 2007 marks the year when more than half the world population is urban rather than rural. The exploding population of mega-cities means that there are huge areas of slums where the poor live in plastic covered hovels – a desperate underclass living in conditions reminiscent of Dickens’ London, with diseases such as cholera and typhoid.

I suppose the concept of fair play is one of those old-fashioned virtues (often associated with the Brits I believe) that we have to do without in this commercial age. After all the fuss in Ireland about Thierry Henry’s hand touching the ball that went into the net and cost Ireland the qualification for the World Cup, was it? Something important anyway. So, whatever, there was a similar incident at the weekend here in Germany I believe -oh, and then there’s always the latest scandal around deliberately throwing matches for the betting mafia – not that I’m particularly interested in footie, but then I heard Clive James speaking on the radio yesterday, making two good points that I’ve often wondered about myself:

• In many other sports, if a player accidentally contravenes the rules, or benefits from a lucky fluke, he puts his hand up and admits it. Tennis players whose ball hits the top of the net and then dribbles over onto the other side apologize, you even see players over-rule contentious line decisions in their opponent’s favour, and as Mr James points out, snooker players whose sleeve brushes a ball immediately cede the table even if neither the ref nor their opponent has seen what happened.
• Refs cannot be everywhere and see everything, so why doesn’t football introduce video evidence? It’s used in other sports, it does hold things up very slightly I’ll admit, but then so do the protests from the players who feel hard done by. Then the fans also feel hard done by, and that’s never a pretty sight.

The transcript of Clive James’ talk can be found here.

Another re-read. Another worthwhile re-read. I really only meant to look at it again because I’m discussing Kehlmann’s Ruhm, and wanted to check how Mitchell had put his novel of separate stories together, in comparison with Kehlmann. And once again, having started there was no way I was going to put it down; and once again the futuristic section in the middle slowed me right down.

Mitchell starts with the journal of a 19th century lawyer aboard a ship in the South Pacific, moves forward in time to letters from a young Brit who finds work as amanuensis to an ageing composer in Belgium between the two wars, then a thriller style tale set in California in the Seventies, a first person narrative of a vanity publisher who suddenly and fatefully lands a bestseller, an interview with a freed replicant slave in the near future and then a central piece where civilisation as we know it has come to an end. Then the second half of the first six tales is narrated in reverse order so that the end is the journal of the lawyer. The central section is exhausting as Mitchell has invented a dialect that is not easy to read, but nevertheless I’m deeply impressed by Mitchell’s ventriloquism, how he manages to create very different, utterly convincing voices and how he creates the suspense that pushes the narrative forward even though the breaks between the separate stories might bring you up short. I also have great respect for the device of each narrative appearing in the next one, which gives a stringency and structure to the whole, and provides a reward for reading the tales in the order they are printed. These are all elements that are missing from Kehlmann’s ‘novel in nine stories’: the arc and running structural thread is just not there, and a few repeated motifs don’t turn it into a novel.

This morning Radio 4’s Today programme ran an item on a drug that treats liver cancer which has been rejected for general free use on the NHS because it is simply too expensive. The body that makes these decisions in Britain is the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, otherwise known as NICE. But what is ‘too expensive’? Apparently the threshold that NICE usually recommends is around 20,000 to 30,000 pounds per year. This particular product, Nexavar, would cost around 52,000 per year. (Add on ten per cent for Euros).

I have to say, this is the kind of extremely tough decision that has to be made if a government is serious about capping health costs. Health care is a bottomless pit, you could throw money into it forever and there would still be more wanted. The only way to control the money flow is to scrutinise treatments and decide when the benefits they bring do not justify the cost. Peter Johnson from Cancer UK argues that this decision does Britain “huge damage on the worldwide stage to be not able to deliver what is regarded internationally as the absolute standard of care”. Surely the community that has to pay health costs through payroll and other taxes shouldn’t be expected to finance treatment in order to boost Britain’s standing in the world?

It may seem very harsh, indeed it is very harsh, and  if someone close to me was ill with liver cancer I’m sure I would feel quite differently. But from the coldly impersonal point of view, the effect of this decision seems to be of huge benefit to more than the individual  patient who might have received treatment: what happens now is that the the drug maker is  under pressure to renegotiate  the price they want to charge. Oddly, Bayer offered every fourth pack for free: not a BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free – very popular form of special offer in British supermarkets) but a BOTOF – Buy Three ..  – well, you get the picture. The Wall Street Journal explains in this article on NICE’s decision that Bayer thus avoids lowering the price, which might give other countries ideas.

What I do find heartening about this is the open and civilised, entirely non-hysterical, debate. In the interview Mr Johnson talks of the damage done through loss of faith or confidence in the health service, that patients’ perception is that the very best possible treatment is not available. Speaking as a healthy tax payer, I would be inordinately reassured to know that my money is being spent thoughtfully and effectively. And here in Germany all I tend to see are the marble palaces that the health insurance companies build for themselves and the statistics that tell me that Germans are absolute world champions in going to the doctor, with an average of eighteen visits a year, a figure that I find quite fantastic!  I live with someone who hasn’t managed to clock up eighteen visits to the doctor in the whole of his life – and I don’t mean the cat.  Somehow I can’t escape the impression that there is still an awful lot of waste in the system.

You can hear the short item on Radio 4 here.

The Paris Review Interviews: v. 1 by Philip Gourevitch

Interviews with writers such as Truman Capote, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut and many many more.
As this is not a novel it is perhaps not necessary to start at the beginning and read through to the end, but I did so nevertheless, utterly enthralled by the intimate view of the writing process. What most writers have in common: they are usually readers too, they seem often to know the beginning of a story and the end, and have to wrestle with the middle, and most of them seem to need a routine, structure and discipline.
However what is remarkable is the individuality of the process and attitude to what they are doing, some taking it so so seriously, others astonished at being taken seriously. I found the section on Robert Gottlieb particularly informative for the insight it gives you into the publishing business, and I think my very favourite writer was Kurt Vonnegut: he was so down to earth, so not full of s**t, so moving and so so funny: not his favourite jokes, which were execrable, but his idea to reverse the lack of dependable readers: “I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.” That made me hoot with laughter!

Just very quickly, more later (perhaps): here is the link to the rather long, but incredibly informative article from the New Yorker which goes into how various health care systems, like Topsy, just growed, and how Obama has to take it from here, because you can’t shut down a health system and re-boot it, you have to work with what’s already there.

Growed like Topsy, by the way is from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Topsy is a young slave girl who is asked if she knows who made her. She professes ignorance not only of a God, but even of a mother. “I s’pect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.” The phrase now means unplanned growth, ‘natural’ growth.

Over the last two weeks we’ve looked at the controversial decision to allow the BNP leader Nick Griffin to appear on the BBC Question Time programme. You can see an extract from the programme here. It is only six minutes of a one hour broadcast, but it should give a flavour of the sort of reception that Mr.Griffin got. And indeed, it seems that he was not happy himself about his performance, and has complained to the BBC, saying that it wasn’t an audience he faced, but a “lynch mob”.  Aw, poor fing. My heart bleeds for him.

There was a question about who is on the board of control that checks on the BBC and makes sure that it is fulfilling its charter of public service. The body that does this is called the BBC Trust, and you can find its homepage here. You can click through the sections About the Trust, Who We Are and then look at biographies of the trustees, if you’re interested. Women seem to be well represented, and also ethnic minorities, but they do all seem to be worthy members of the establishment, rather than your ornary Joe Bloggs.

As I said at one point, I think we should all be grateful for public service, non-commercial broadcasting. Think how much worse the world would be if we had nothing but commercial TV and radio. I’d be happy to subscribe to a kind of pay TV system, where I only got the programmes that I really wanted, and was willing to pay for. It wouldn’t cost me much! At the moment we pay a flat rate for the cable service, and it provides me with hours and hours of sound and moving pictures that do not interest me in the least. But then we live in a flat rate world, nothing is done for those people who are selective and would prefer quality to quantity. I still don’t understand why our phone bill should be lower when we pay a flat rate rather than paying call by call even though we hardly ever phone anyone. (I hate the phone, and my husband isn’t much better). We used to have the tariff that gave you the lowest basic rate and the highest rate per call, and we still seldom paid more for the phone calls than one or two Euros.  Nevertheless, a flat rate for people who phone till they drop, is cheaper! Why can’t they do something for the people who don’t use the system?

….. of the broken hearted? Who had love that’s now departed. And that is the theme of A.L. Kennedy’s latest collection of short stories. Bleak, perhaps. But then you don’t read A.L. Kennedy unless you can take her unflinching, precise, unsettling, razor sharp dissection of the pain that makes us human. This is not the sort of writing to sink into like a comfy old sofa, it is more like skeetering across ice, never quite knowing when you’ll be plunged into the freezing abyss below, it’s writing that leaves you faintly breathless and wondrous at what words on a printed page can do, and faintly exhilerated when there’s a sudden swoop of humour amongst the dark. Incomparable.

This was an ideal companion to Tim Parks’ Medici Money: Parks is good at explaining the workings of fifteenth century banking, but Hibbert is better at bringing the people to life. His approach is traditional: the biographies of the powerful, the concerns of those who have the say and little concern for lesser mortals. It’s lively and readable, takes the story right through to the Grand Dukes of the seventeenth century and is excellent on the shifting of loyalties and European coalitions. There are footnotes that indicate where the numerous works of art commissioned by the Medicis can be found, but the relationship between Medici wealth and art is not the main focus of this work. But extremely useful as  preparation for any time spent in Florence.