Pride and Prejudice

The Langsett family had Radio 4's Pride and Prejudice adaptation on, on the way to the seaside a few weeks back. I was being a bit grumpy about it, but in all honesty I love Pride and Prejudice as much as everyone else does, and it was a genuine pleasure to have another version of it to enjoy. Particularly as I could do so even though I was in the fast lane on the A64 at the time. Also, it reminded me pleasantly about my Christmas time Austen overdose. Let me explain...

The Langsett spent three exceptionally happy evenings over the Christmas period experimenting with my new Martini fixation, surrounded by mince pie crumbs and most importantly, watching the superb Death Comes To Pemberley on the Beeb. I had unknowingly been setting myself up for this thrilling and totally unexpected three day Austen themed treat for months, starting in the autumn when Mrs Langsett met Jo Baker, the author of Longbourn, at a bookshop signing evening. It's been a few years since I last read any Austen books, so I steamed through this lovingly crafted retelling of Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective.

Then, I looked around for some more slightly oblique ways of enjoying Austen, and -courtesy of the surprisingly large band of Spanish Colin Firth fans willing to take the time to post chunks of it on Youtube - managed to watch the whole of the Beeb's 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The picture quality was awful, but of course it didn't matter a bit - I could still hear the words, and they were brilliant. I loved it all, but there were a few bits that I particularly enjoyed. If you can spare me a minute, I'll just mention one:

That's Lizzie of course, taking a turn about the garden with her fantastically caddish and rascally brother in law who, in spite of having been lately discovered living in sin in London, is still having a go at spinning the hard luck story that Darcy deprived him of a living as a clergyman.

Lizzie responds by deftly warning Wickham off, suggesting Darcy's younger sister will turn out well as she is "...over the most trying age." She's referring to Wickham having tried to talk Georgiana into eloping, and also to how young her own sister - Wickham's wife - is. But that's not quite enough to get Wickham back in line, so she gives him both barrels, conversationally speaking: letting him say how much he wanted to be a clergyman and then setting out what actually happened. And then, while Wickham is still flapping about and wondering what has just happened, sweetly extending her hand for him to kiss and popping inside.

There is a real beauty to the way in which the two characters interact. Wickham, unable to stop himself from lying in order to make himself look wholesome, and Elizabeth meeting his behaviour with an incremental, exquisitely measured reveal: she knows it all, and he can't pull the wool over her eyes any longer. It's a tiny, brief scene, but the emotional payback that comes from reading or watching it is enormous. That's something to do, I think, with how measured and intelligent Elizabeth's response is. The fact that it's a private exchange between the two of them is important too. It's a reminder that no audience is required for the nature of a relationship to completely change.

The best thing of all though is that this is pretty much how it happens in the book. Two hundred years ago, Austen put together this beautiful little scene. There is no exposition, so you can just get on with enjoying these two characters jump off the page - or screen.

The Right Honourable member for Tatton

I was probably never going to like George Osborne that much. I'm from the North and I'm a bit leftie. Osborne, as you probably know, swims every morning in a Scrooge McDuck style money bin before spending half an hour thinking up ways to further impoverish the already impoverished.  There are, weirdly, some areas of overlap in the Langsett - Osborne personal Venn diagram - same university and degree - but I think that's where the similarities stop, thank God. For Osborne has always seemed to be the worst kind of Tory, combining an unfeasible number of characteristics that have generally been viewed as bad news for centuries. For example; the economy's picked up a bit of late. Boethius would have regarded this as the wheel turning. Personally, I like the idea of millions of people's collective attempts to make things better bearing fruit. George Osborne, on the other hand - well, let's see what he thinks:

"By avoiding quick fixes and easy options, we're delivering economic security for the hard working people of this country."

In other words, he thinks that he sorted the economy out. Let's expand on that a bit more. He thinks that the fact that people suffered as a result of his inaction is evidence that he can use to back up the assertion that he sorted the economy out. He thinks that the fact that the the recovery is the slowest in a hundred years is also evidence that he can use to back up his assertion that he sorted the economy out. The truth is that you or I probably had more to do with the economic recovery than Osborne did. You might have worked harder, for less money, in order to keep the customers you have. Maybe you spent what money you had where you thought it might do the most good. Perhaps you invested in your business to preserve capability for the day when the economy started to come good. These are all things that Osborne could have done too, but chose not to.

Last week, Osborne was giving his views on reforming the EU - suggesting that Europe was falling behind Asian economies like India and China, and that only the Tories could reform the EU and save it from economic irrelevancy.

"We knew that there was a competitveness problem in Europe before the crisis...The hard truth is that if we want to maintain our way of life in Europe, we've got to be more competitive. And that's going to require some tough steps: living within our means, making our labour markets competitive, expanding free trade."

Being honest, this stuff sends a shiver of utter terror down my spine. It marks Osborne out as one of a tiny band of people whose job is secure enough to think that letting the waves of globalisation wash over us will be in some way a heartening, manly experience that enriches us all. I hope I am not fooling myself when I say that people from my bit of the UK generally have a different perspective. Successive waves of glaobalisation have stripped whole industries from the North, wasting expertise and skill along the way. Assuming Osborne is correct to suggest that the EU is on a course which will make the welfare state unaffordable. Is he really suggesting that it might be possible to create a level playing field by stripping away employment rights?

Let's think about what China is for a moment: a country with more or less unlimited natural and intellectual resources. A country which has welded the personal repression of the worst Communist regimes to economic freedom for corporate bodies. There is no scenario in which tinkering with European labour laws will do anything other than gratify Osborne's own instinct to make life worse for anyone poorer than he is.

Chinese labour laws on the other hand, are a different matter. The UK government is falling over itself to create trade links with China at the moment. Wouldn't it be worth including a delegation from the TUC on the next UK trade mission? Because the challenge here is to help China become an industrialised nation without doing unacceptable damage to the fabric of states that have already undergone that process. And the key to that is surely to raise the expectations of people in China, rather than ruining those of people here.

Spitfire

I have been very much enjoying Jeffrey Quill's book "Spitfire" for the last week or so.

On the face of it, it's his autobiography, telling the story of his career as a test pilot and its intersection with the second world war. But its also the story if his relationship with the Spitfire. Without being overly sentimental or deliberately anthropomorphising the aircraft, it is a character in his story that is every bit as important as he is. The relationship has characteristics of marriage and parenthood: on the one hand, he's aware of the outstanding characteristics that the aircraft was created with, but on the other hand it was his job to bring the Spitfire on, to develop and look after it, making sure that it stayed at the cutting edge for as long as possible.

Shall we have a look at what Jeffrey's job was like?

OK then. Here you go:

http://youtu.be/RW2_xrMsYTM

That's a little bit of Leslie Howard's 1942 film, "The First of the Few", which tells the story of the Spitfire's birth and of its designer, R.J. Mitchell. And how good is the music? It's William Walton's Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. Sid Cole, supervising editor of "The First of the Few" told this lovely story about the writing of the piece: "Leslie Howard, for some reason, could not be at the running of the film for Walton so he told me very elaborately what he wanted from the music. So after we had the viewing I went up to Walton and repeated what Leslie had said as accurately as I could. Walton listened very carefully and said 'Oh I see, Leslie wants a lot of notes', and he went away and wrote The Spitfire Fugue". 

As an aside, the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue is an example of my huge weakness for Displays of Extreme Competency. I love watching scenes of tremendous activity, where everyone involved knows his or her role inside out and is working away with incredible speed and precision. On the other hand, when I'm in similar situations myself, I wear a permanent frown and my mind's eye is completely filled with images of threads unravelling, trains derailling and buildings toppling over. For example: I was out doing some Christmas shopping. Because I am a chap, the date on which the Christmas shopping was taking place was 21st December, and I had concerns about the success of the endeavour. "I'll have a bit of music." I thought, pushing random buttons on the radio in my small black Volkswagen. The Spitfire Prelude and Fugue came on. Immediately, my heart lifted, and I skillfully guided the VW towards the shops with a renewed sense of purpose. When I came home, I thought I'd done a cracking job; but a sober assessment of my haul by Mrs Langsett revealed that I had, in fact, just confused the incredibly potent impression of Extreme Competency that this brilliant piece of music conjures up, with the real thing. Anyway, back to the film clip...

That's David Niven of course, turning his "off"s into "Orrrrf"s - but he's playing a character based partly on Jeffrey Quill. And the pilot flying the Spitfire? Well, that really is Jeffrey Quill, taking a break from his day job as test pilot to help turn the Spitfire into myth.

There is a lot that I love about "Spitfire". I particularly enjoyed remembering - as I have done every so often while I've been reading it - that it was Jeffrey Quill's job to get up, go out and do this stuff; that a large and well organised company was prepared to pay him a decent wage to go howling around in aeroplanes. I'm writing this on Monday evening, and I think I'll finish be including an account of one of Mr Quill's Mondays in 1937. It's quite long, but stick with it, because there is probably no better description of how to handle difficult situations at work:

" I had established a routine with the Wellesley flight test schedule. When I had completed the level speed run at 12,000 ft I closed the throttle and pulled the nose up and wound the trimmer back, allowing the aircraft to climb upwards, decelerating towards the stall. I took my hands off the controls and wrote the figures from the level speed run on my knee pad. I then waited until the aircraft stalled completely, still hands off, and wrote down the indicated stalling speed... All the massive amount of testing I had done on the prototype's handling at the stall and in stalled manoeuvres had given me the utmost confidence in the Wellesley's ladylike behaviour. Perhaps I was overconfident, for while the aircraft was wallowing about at 12,000 ft and I was scribbling on my knee pad, waiting for the nose to drop and pick up speed, she suddenly lurched into a right hand spin. I was taken completely by surprise for the Wellesley had never shown the slightest tendency to do this before. I immediately took recovery action but it was to no avail. In the course of the first turn and a half the nose was well down and then suddenly it reared up and the spin became very flat, slow and stately. There was no response to normal recovery action and I tried to think of all the other things I should try. I started by trying full power and all that did was to flatten the spin still further, and speed it up, so I took the power off again. Then I tried lowering the wheel hoping that would affect the centre of gravity in some magical way, and then tried rocking the elevator throughout its full range, and finally lowering the flaps. I then remembered that in such circumstances it was quite common for pilots to try all sorts of recovery actions but never give any of them enough time to work before trying something else so I looked over the side to see how much height I still had and started trying things all over again in an agonisingly slow and deliberate manner, ordering myself to keep calm and not to panic.

The Wellesley treated everything I did with a scornful disdain and continued solemnly spinning, down and down. Somewhere around 3,000 ft I decided I would have to go... I opened the canopy and crouched on the seat, grasping the windscreen. The cockpit of the Wellesley was forward of the wing and I looked at the big metal bladed propeller windmilling round very close in front of me. In theory when I let go I should go out backwards ad sideways but I was forward of the centre of gravity and had a nasty feeling that I was going to go forwards through that slicing propeller. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I cut the ignition switches and hoped for the best. I went over the port side, hit my head on some object unknown - perhaps the tail wheel assembly - delayed a little bit and pulled the rip cord...I immediately heard a strange swooshing noise as the Wellesley spun down past me, much too close for comfort...

I was then able to watch the Wellesley from above as it descended to the ground. We were in an area of New Malden and there were built up areas interspersed with areas of open country. It was about 7pm on a fine summer's evening. I became very anxious about the Wellesley crashing in a built-up area and causing loss of life, but I could not tell when it was going to hit. Then it stopped abruptly and disintegrated. It had hit a house but, thank God, there was no explosion or fire. Then, apparently several seconds later, I heard the dull 'crump' of the impact. I could hear every sound coming from the ground as I floated silently downwards on that balmy summer's evening - dogs barking, the traffic moving along the Kingston bypass an then gradually the build-up of the municipal 'flap' caused by this large aircraft crashing in a suburban street. A maroon went off in the fire station quickly followed by the clanging of the fire engine's bell. I looked down and spotted the fire engine trying to get to the scene of the crash and taking a number of wrong turnings on the way and I considered shouting some directions to it from on high.. Then suddenly I was getting close and I could see roughly where I was likely to land; there were houses and gardens and trees and every garden seemed to have a large and uninviting glass greenhouse. I descended into the base of a small fir tree which broke my fall and so it was a comfortable landing...A small knot of people came running up, having invaded the large and pleasant garden in which I had landed, It was the property of a Major Petrie who turned out to be a member of the Brooklands Flying Club. He, his wife and some friends were drinking an evening cocktail when through the window they saw a strange band of people running up the drive, heads directed skywards. They came out int time to see me being helped out of the bottom of the fir tree and disentangled from the parachute. Within a surprisingly short time I had a large whiskey in my hand and was on the telephone to the police and received the blessed news that no one had been injured in the crash."

Happy Monday!

You may enjoy this...

Have a read though this  perfect short story, written by acerbic genius New Yorker Rebecca Schiff, a woman whose fire escape I am proud to have briefly sat on. No really! It was one of those ornate cast iron things...

Pennine Autumn

Do you like paragliders? Do you like majestic Pennine scenery? Do you like surprising juxtapositions of the two? Well, here at The Langsett we've got a bit of a treat for you...

That's Rushup Edge above, and Castleton below. The hill in the foregournd is Mam Tor, making up for its fairly modest height by still being satisfyingly more massive than everything around it. I loved the way that it was still a bright, sunny afternoon on top of the hill, while in Castleton, it was dusk already.

Various members of The Langsett's family met on Mam Tor on Saturday. My eldest daughter Kate was particularly chuffed with her burgeoning mountaineering skills. "Daddy, I'm on top of the world!" she informed me from on top of the trig point on the summit. Powerful updraughts were sweeping up the northern slope from Edale, which I guess accounts for the sky full or paragliders.

I sometimes reflect on the misery inherent on living in London. There's the whole Boris Johnson situation, and those funny trains that go under the ground of course. But more importantly,there's the one hundred and sixty five miles separating you from all this stuff.

Coke and co-operatives

"Rather than the typical make up of company executives and non-executives directors, the Co-Op's board included a plasterer, a nurse and a horticulturist..." This line is from the Financial Times, but I've heard a lot of variations on it over the past few days. The FT's article doesn't explicitly say why having a plasterer on the board of the Co-Operative Group might be a problem, but I'm going to stick my neck out a bit and suggest that the implication is that the people the FT's referring to above have no business being on the board and that their presence there directly led both to the Co-Op Bank's financial trouble and also the hiring of the Reverend Paul Flowers. I'm going to stick my neck out a bit more and say that there's a further implication that Reverend Flower's presence on the board during the bank's financial issues and the reports of him buying illegal drugs tell you all you need to know about the man and the bank - that one explains the other; that the bank's failure to make enough money is worthy of moral condemnation, but that it is made even more worthy of condemnation by Reverend Flower's alleged brush with drugs. In short, the FT is saying that the Co-Op was always going to come off the rails if it let a bunch of comedy northerners and a drug abusing methodist minster run the show.

What the FT - and everyone else who casually trots out this line and conflates Reverend Flower's personal crisis with the Co-Op Bank's financial crisis - has forgotten is that four years ago, a whole shitload of banks with a whole shitload of guys on their boards with hundreds of years of banking experience between them managed to fuck themslves and very nearly everything else up. The fucking up of things that they accomplished was, if you remember, astonishingly comprehensive, and I thought we'd all kind of agreed that part of the problem was too much expertise on the part of the banks. Essentially shitty loans were parcelled up so as to look like good investments, by very clever people who'd forgotten all of their social and moral obligations and remembered only the obligation to make money. In 2008, I had a not particularly good seat in a very peripheral arena in which a tiny part of the financial crisis was played out. Even from where I was sitting, it was possible to see wealthy, financially literate blokes in good suits with nice cars being incredibly stupid with theirs and other people's money.  Some of them are still arguing over the repsonsibility they should bear for the decisions they took. So until someone can show me in a calm and carefully explained way how the plasterer, the nurse and the horticulturalist have done any worse than these guys, I would rather the Co-Op didn't change a thing about the way it does business.

The Co-Op's actual board of directors are here. The Group's interim financial results are here.

Berlin

Along with The Langsett (Sr) and my brother, I've just got back from three days in Berlin. Easyjet took us there, and treated us to a low banking turn over the lakes and woods to the east of the city, sun sparkling on the water and sailing boats bobbing in the bays,  as we flew into Schonefeld airport on a crisp autumn morning. I love this city, for a hundred different reasons. For instance; I was there for my stag do a few years ago. We stayed in a hostel on Simon Dach Strasse in what used to be East Berlin. I basically spent the whole weekend in a state of extreme euphoria because of the proximity of reasonably priced accommodation, excellent beer and hearty food, all linked to the centre of town by a public transport system of such sublime perfection that it could even be trusted to transport a group of drunken Englishmen from Freidrichstrasse to our hostel at god knows what time in the morning without losing any of us.

What I really love about Berlin though is its surprising combination of two characteristics: honesty and hopefulness. It's a city whose history is always on display. If you walk into town from Alexanderplatz, you'll pass buildings like the Berliner Dom and notice that the wall facing you looks like it has been caught in a terrible storm. Whereas the stone on the western side of the building might be crisp and  square cut, the stone on the eastern side is chipped, scored and pockmarked -almost worn away, as you would expect cliffs that have been battered by the sea to be. The reason of course, is that the East is the direction that the Red Army came from in 1945. The damage to the stone was caused by their shells, bullets and rockets. Just seeing the dramatic difference in the amount of explosives that the Germans and Russians were throwing at each other tells you a lot, in a very visceral way, about how the battle ended and what it must have been like to live through.

Right across the road from the Berliner Dom is a small thicket of tower cranes and a single section of balustraded stone wall.

This is the site where  the East German parliament building used to stand, housing not just the legislative chamber but also - in a cheery demonstration of the DDR's unease with its own grumpy nature - thirteen restaurants and a bowling alley. After a very public discussion about what on earth should be done with the building, the government took the decision to rebuild the Stadtschloss - the City Palace - that used to stand on the site: . I don't think there is exactly a plan as to what the rebuilt Stadtschloss will be used for, or even whether it will be a full steam ahead replica or not. But I liked the fact that the discussion about what happened on the site happened in public and took years. And I also like the fact that here, right next to the pin in the map that marks the very centre of Europe's largest economy and its most successful exporting nation, a decision has been taken which probably makes no financial sense. Standing across the road and watching the cranes working for a few minutes, you start to wonder whether financial sense might be overrated.

You wouldn't blame Berlin and Berliners if they felt traumatised by the last hundred years or so of history, and the rollercoaster ride from youngest European capital, to battleground, to walled front line of the Cold War. But it doesn't feel like that at all. Berlin feels incredibly at ease with itself. A few examples: Half an hour after that photograph was taken, we were right in the middle of the rush hour, on the U-Bahn, riding back to the Kurfurstendamm where we were staying. This is just not something you'd do in London or probably even in Manchester. You would let the convulsive indigestion of evening rush hour strike the city and fade away again before you tried using public transport. Berlin was fine though. Busy, but still usable - even for tourists who didn't know their way around. The Langsett (Sr.) projected an air of serene calm as the bright yellow subway train barged its way across town.

Berlin is beautiful too. Not in the way that central Paris is, where more or less every decision taken in the last thousand years has resulted in a small improvement on what was there before, until there is such an accretion of improvements that the city is as close to aesthetic perfection as any large city can hope to come. But it is a very humane, liveable city. Many of the decisions taken about the way that the city has developed have been taken with care and thoughtfulness. On our second day, we caught the S-Bahn to Anhalter Bahnhof. The underground station is huge, built to handle thousands of passengers every day. It's on a comparable scale to, say, Kings Cross Underground station. But when you walk up the steps from the station, you emerge in the middle of a park.

There was a station here once of course: a huge one, covering hundreds of acres of central Berlin. Badly damaged in the second world war, Anhalter Bahnhof was demolished in 1960. Now, there is this very beautiful park, smelling of autumn leaves and horse chestnuts when we were there. At the front is the heroic carriage porch of the railway station, hinting at how enormous the station itself must once have been.

I don't know anything about the decision making process that led to the park being created instead of the memory of the station being erased and the land being developed instead. But the decision was the right one. And that's the other wonderful thing about Berlin. It's a tangible demonstration of the fact that people can make good choices and stick to them, even if the circumstances are difficult. When the wall came down, Berliners need not have decided to knit their city back together again. But they did, and for twenty years now they have used that impulse to improve the city. Anyone living somewhere that faces difficult questions about its future might look at Berlin and feel hopeful.