Passacaglia and Fugue

Last night I went to Reading Film Theatre to see The Aftermath. The overall atmosphere is melancholic; the story takes place in Hamburg, in the winter of 1945-46; the Germans are still digging out human remains from the city ruins left over from the fire-bombing of 1943. Colonel Morgan, a British officer managing reconstruction, has decided to ask his wife to join him. As a British officer he has requisitioned an impressive and undamaged house, but he also wishes the German occupants - a widower architect and his teenage daughter - to stay in the house rather than join a camp. This provides an obvious source of friction and events develop, in various ways.

Overall, the sense I had of the film is that it's about damaged people who have suffered unbearable losses, and explores the ways and risks of repairing that damage. It's clear from the outset that the colonel has seen the reality of war, and feels that it is now his duty to treat the defeated Germans with respect and humanity, unless and until proven otherwise. His wife initially displays overt hostility to them, but learns that the loss of her son in a bombing raid can be matched to losses on the other side, including Herr Lubert's wife. It is not clearly explained how Herr Lubert avoided military service; this, possibly, poses an explanation of sorts in the delay of processing his de-Nazification papers. His daughter mixes with an insurgent group, possibly based on the Werwolf and its imitators. Of course, she has known nothing but Nazi propaganda all her life. Other British military personnel convey the more conventional, tasteless, uncultured attitude of victors: "we won, you lost, get over it" more or less sums it up. By the end of the film, there may have been some healing, but there is also further loss. I felt some suspension of belief was required for the wider plot, but human nature is often unpredictable and drawn to unlikely scenarios, and it certainly felt quite authentic in much of its portrayal of the period.

Book Review: The Tunnel Through Time - A New Route for an Old London Journey, by Gillian Tindall
This book themed around the Elizabeth Line, which of course should have been open for several months by now, but currently isn't expected to open until 2020. It's a history of some districts of London, focused on the route mostly from Tyburn to Stepney, and mostly focused on the medieval period through to the nineteenth century. As such it's a bit disappointing, because it chops off both ends of the line; even Paddington barely gets a mention, never mind Slough, Maidenhead or Reading, and the routes out to Shenfield and Abbey Wood are largely omitted too. But what remains is interesting, describing the once genteel area of Stepney and Mile End; the more colourful history of the St Giles area; the trials and tribulations of Railway Mania, failing for some time to penetrate into the City itself, until Fenchurch Street station arrived, promptly followed by Liverpool Street. There were great plans for a terminus in the Farringdon area, and the station will become an increasingly important hub as the interchange between the Elizabeth Line and Thameslink, as well as the Underground. In more recent times, the dubious charting of "progress" is recorded, with shady deals and plans justified in the name of slum and/or bomb site clearances giving rise to developments such as Centre Point. The book weaves erratically, taking neither a geographical nor a chronological path; although there are a handful of illustrations, there are also some tantalising references to old maps which sadly are not reproduced in the book.

Book Review: Half In, Half Out - Prime Ministers on Europe, edited by Andrew Adonis
I picked this up in the work book sale last year, and it seemed about time to read it, before it is too late. It's a collection of essays by various authors, one on each post-war British Prime Minister from Churchill to May. As such it sometimes suffers from a lack of a coherent point of view, and has some repetition across chapters, but on the whole that doesn't detract much from the book.

Churchill is a logical starting point, although one might debate whether he counts as the "first" post-war Prime Minister. Unfortunately this proves to be a slightly wobbly start, as much of the chapter is written in a counterfactual style, suggesting Churchill won the 1945 general election. Given the state of knowledge of some of our elected representatives, this perhaps needs to be made clearer. In the climate of fake news, it could also have done to clarify the background around some misquotes to strengthen its evidence for Churchill's post-war position on Europe.

My overall impression from the book is that Britain has had four post-war pro-Europe Prime Ministers, out of fourteen: Churchill, Macmillan, Heath and Blair. Attlee and Eden are the most obvious Eurosceptics, both seemingly out of a fondness for Britain's imperial past, an attitude that unhelpfully persists to this day. Wilson, it appears, was downright opportunistic, opposing and supporting as it suited him for domestic politics; but the prevailing position has been acquiescence, with most ultimately trying to make Europe work better for Britain, and in general, constructively with their EU counterparts. Adonis' own essay on Tony Blair poses the interesting what-if? of how things would have been different had Blair taken the UK into the Euro and stayed out of Iraq, partly a butterfly effect from 9/11 and Blair's own thrall to George W Bush, but also partly a legacy from Labour maintaining stronger links with the US Democrats than with the various Social Democratic parties in European countries. It was a critical timidity on Blair's part, failing to recognise that there was a window of opportunity to join the leading members of the EU that would pass, instead following Britain's policy of letting others take the lead in the hope of joining them later, if successful. Another decision, plainly flawed with hindsight though probably made with good intention, was to depart from the policy chosen by other states to constrain migration from Eastern European following the accession of those states in 2004. Ivan Rogers chooses to focus on technicalities in his essay on David Cameron, which results in a rather anaemic product of civil service neutrality. Neither Brown nor May come away with good marks; both failed to understand the European mindset and process (in May's case, not helped by the self-inflicted action of purging almost anyone in the previous regime who knew about Europe). It seems unwise to rule out any possible outcomes, but the balance of probability right now seems to be that things won't go well.

It's been a while since anything at Reading Film Theatre caught my eye; last night, after dealing with the aftermath of an afternoon snowfall on my car at the station car park, I headed in to see First Man. It was billed as a biopic of Neil Armstrong, but really, whilst he is the central character, there's more to it than that. The film opens with one of Armstrong's NASA X-15 flights, in which he barely controls the aircraft at the edge of space, bouncing around the top of the atmosphere. But the action returns firmly to earth with his family life, and the death of his daughter; seeing the opportunity for a fresh start, he applies to join NASA's Gemini project.

There's a slight air of disbelief as the USSR beats them to one milestone after another in the early years of the space race, but Armstrong and the other recruits plough on with the training program, wondering who will get to do what, and whether they'll get to the ultimate prize. Armstrong's flight, Gemini 8, suffers a critical malfunction after successfully completing its docking test; later, the crew of Apollo 1 die in the spacecraft as a result of a fire during testing, and Armstrong is injured when he ejects from a test lunar lander vehicle. All of this weighs heavily on his family, but he remains dedicated to the mission. Both sides of this aspect of the film seemed a bit wooden, as though unconvincingly trying to make a point about his domestic life. There's also a rising background through this period of political questioning NASA's funding (which has continued to be an ongoing sore over the decades), and also of anti-space program protests (which look like a mixture of civil rights, anti-war and anti-austerity protests) which question the program's value.

Of necessity there's a fair bit of fast-forward in the film, so we jump to the successful Apollo 10 mission and finally, Apollo 11. I was impressed by the effects used to show weightlessness; on a lighter note, also by the importance of having a large allen key or socket to open and close the doors. You don't see that in Star Trek.

Book Review: The Red Atlas- How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World, by John Davies and Alexander J Kent
This was always going to be something of an odd book, I suppose. The story starts around the time of the Second World War, but Stalin's instruction to Soviet cartographers was comprehensive, the whole world to be mapped to the same standards and levels of detail. And so the bureaucracy set to work, continuing through the rest of the lifetime of the Soviet Union and beyond, with variable strength of purpose. The book includes some examples from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, but the focus is on the mapping of the West, particularly cities in the UK and USA. It's interesting to note that the Soviets didn't trust maps such as the Ordnance Survey, because they assumed they would be as misleading as any publicly available maps in the USSR. (I like to think most people in the UK would assume, give or take obsolescence and a handful of national security redactions, Ordnance Survey maps are fairly accurate). Yet often the Soviet versions clearly did draw from foreign sources, with matching spot heights converted from feet to metres. Often they go beyond, distinguishing high- and low-rise buildings, the nature of factories and offices, additional details on roads and railways - information that must have been gathered by on-the-ground personnel (including detail on AWE Burghfield omitted from the local OS map). The book's writing style is rather academic and perhaps sterile, focusing on these details and various error cases, where aerial photographs may have been misinterpreted, but not really analysing the reasoning behind the maps or the use to which they may have been put. The accompanying website has a collection of maps available for online viewing.

Book Review: Europe's Last Chance - Why the European States Must Form a More Perfect Union, by Guy Verhofstadt
It's always a bonus to discover something in the work book sale that I know is already on my to-read list. I was interested in what the author would have to say, though I have disdain for the hyperbole in the title. Most of his argument is for a more federal Europe; in that I broadly agree with him. Fortunately, it seems the French rather than the British are to blame, at least in the first instance, for their blocking in 1954 of the treaty establishing a common defence community. Verhofstadt argues this treaty would have allowed for a kind of United States of Europe, but also would have led to the development of associate status outside the core, which might have suited the UK better. But it wasn't to be, because one national government wasn't prepared to pool sovereignty, and this has happened over and over again in the intervening years, making the European project weak and less effective than it could have been. He chronicles weakness in the areas of foreign and defence policy, in the Middle East and Russia, the rise of authoritarian parties and governments, and indifferent economic progress. Whilst I broadly agree with him, I don't always find his arguments particularly convincing and I doubt they will shift anyone's position. In the chapter on how a lack of a digital single market disadvantages Europe, his choice of Airbnb and Uber as example success stories seems dubious - both companies have had a rather mixed reception and created their own set of issues. The book feels as if it is written for an American audience, and repeatedly sings the praises of both the development and structure of the constitution of the USA - which may be a fair theoretical perspective, but its implementation and practice over recent decades has hardly been exemplary. The prospect of Grexit is assigned far more writing than Brexit, which may be partly a sign of the period in which the book was prepared and written, but is also perhaps indicative of the disinterest in mainland Europe of this all-consuming issue in the UK.

Book Review: The End of British Party Politics?, by Roger Awan-Scully
I picked this up in the most recent work book sale; it seemed like physical click-bait. The author's thesis is derived from the 2015 and 2017 General Election results, in which different parties came top in each of the four nations of the UK. But first, there's some history: the formalisation of Conservative and Liberal parties in the nineteenth century, with the latter being increasingly replaced by Labour since World War I. In the post-World War II world, through to the 1960s, the UK had essentially a two-party system (with the caveat that political parties have always been a thing apart in Northern Ireland, and with the slowly growing SNP eventually emerging in Scotland). The slow Liberal recovery (which can substantially be attributed to Jeremy Thorpe) and the rise of the SNP and Plaid Cymru reached a peak in the first decade of the new millennium; since then, of course, the Lib Dems have crashed, the SNP have triumphed in Scotland, and Plaid have mostly held their own.

Without getting into too much detail, there is still useful information in the book: for example, the data show that class doesn't determine party allegiance (which makes you wonder what on earth Labour are up to), but education level is a significant indicator (graduates being disproportionately left leaning). Devolution and indifferent leadership in the two main UK parties has led to party leaders in Scotland and Wales experimenting with putting clear blue/red water between their own national party and the UK umbrella (the Welsh Tories are an exception, notes the author, and have not achieved the success of their Scottish counterparts). The DUP have a vision of the UK that isn't shared by anyone else in numbers; and England, with slightly more than 80% of MPs, will effectively choose which party should form a government. The increasing differentiation between the nations manifests itself in a variety of "dog-whistle" ways, and the collapse of the political centre probably has the same root cause. The author isn't in the business of discussing much whether any of this is a good thing, or what should be done about it, but instead concludes by revisiting history, highlighting that the United Kingdom is a relatively recent and possibly transient political phenomenon.

Book Review: Don't Let My Past Be Your Future, by Harry Leslie Smith
I'd already added this to my to-read list when it turned up in the work book sale. I was curious, though I'd been warned that if you're a regular reader of his writing in The Guardian you may find there's only a single theme that gets repeated ad infinitum.

That flaw is, to some extent, true. It often reads as though everything can be blamed on the austerity of British governments in the 1920s and 1930s, which just seems to lack imagination. Smith's childhood was not short on tragedy, losing a sibling to tuberculosis, watching a parental relationship fall apart due ultimately to workplace injury, and frequently moving on in order to avoid landlords and bailiffs. In some ways this might have been a better book if Smith stuck solely to the facts, because he tells his harrowing early life story well and it is a story worth hearing, but he can't resist returning to a one-dimensional layer of cause and effect. I'm not disputing that government policy bears some responsibility, but there is an over-emphasis on that single cause, because it fits Smith's agenda to complain about austerity today, which again may be causing much damage, but is not the sole driver of everything.

Smith lauds Corbyn on several occasions in the book. Smith is also vehemently anti-Brexit. Curiously these two positions never seem to be in conflict, which seems stereotypical and for me poses challenges of credibility.

Book Review: The Gastronomical Me, by M F K Fisher
This was a random selection from the work book sale; I had never heard of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher before. First published in 1943, this is generically though not strictly autobiographical in nature, and covers about the first half of her life. There are early reminiscences about food preparation at home, and at boarding school in California, before further study in Chicago, and then marriage and travel with her first husband to Europe (mostly France, but also Switzerland and Italy). The European section is the bulk and highlight of the book; this is travel writing, and it's food writing, but it's really people writing, about the characters and situations she encounters. To some extent it reads uncomfortably today, as she plainly had a privileged upbringing and is frequently quite snobbish, but it seems to be done unconsciously and without ill intent; and it's not as if the French academic colleagues of her husband considered her a few steps down from their social level, either. The story becomes darker as her husband falls ill, she begins an affair, and Europe descends towards war; in the golden age of ocean liners she documents the attitudes of ocean-crossing Germans in particular in the 1930s, and there is some reportage about an escaped prisoner on a train in Italy that would be harrowing (it clearly disturbed Fisher at the time) were it not for the foreknowledge that much worse was to come. The last section, following the death of her husband, describes a trip to Mexico in 1941; it doesn't connect so well with the rest of the book, but it's obviously describing changed circumstances.

After looking through the guidebooks, we decided we couldn't fit all three Baltic states into a single holiday, so we opted for a trip to Rīga and Tallin. The logistics were straightforward but not trivial, and we ended up with flights to/from Gatwick instead of our more usual Heathrow.

Fri 8th: We get up at ridiculous-o'clock. Fortunately the roads are running smoothly and the directions to Purple Parking are clear, and we get there by 7am. Check-in/bag-drop with Air Baltic is straightforward, as we can use the business queue (a quirk of having the temerity to pre-purchase hold baggage). Normally I don't pay much attention to the aircraft itself, but I do notice the Bombardier CS300 seems particularly new and shiny, and the airline magazine informs me it is also significantly more fuel-efficient. However, it does seem unusually warm, unlike most aircraft which seem somewhat over-chilled. The flight is smooth and on-time, and although there are at least two stag parties on board it's an orderly affair. Transfer by bus into central Rīga works as advertised and it's a short walk to the hotel. We take a walk around the town, taking in the Alexander Nevsky orthodox cathedral, the Art Nouveau district, parks, squares, and the old Zeppelin hangars which now form the central markets, which are closed by the time we get there.

Sat 9th: Overnight, the power has blipped at least three times, and each time it comes back on, all lights in the room come on, which is irritating to say the least. But after a decent breakfast we're off to the Art Nouveau museum and the cathedral. In the afternoon we visit the House of the Black Heads - a guildhall whose name derives from St Mauritius, though the house is a complete post-WW2 (and indeed, post-Soviet) reconstruction.

Sun 10th: We take in the Rīga Bourse art museum, and later the Latvian National Museum of Art (which turns out to be free on that day) and the Metzendorff House.

Mon 11th: We have a short morning to fill, so we visit the Synagogue (again, largely reconstructed) and the interior of the central market, before catching our bus to Tallinn. It's a four-hour trip (with a short pause in Pärnu) and the Latvian A1 isn't the best of roads - a single carriageway, though it's so straight it could have been built by the Romans. The transfer between Tallinn International Bus Station and the hotel is the one bit of the trip I hadn't researched properly, and we muddle around without actually paying for the tram ride, because it seems everything is electronic and online. (Fortunately, we don't claim back the outstanding balance on the card we buy for the rest of the holiday, so my conscience is clear). We wander around in the late afternoon and early evening in part of the Old Town. It's obviously picturesque, though I have a sense the tourism element is hammed up and over-done, with medieval-themed restaurants all around the town square.

Tues 12th: It's raining - the one bad weather day in our holiday - so, having sorted out a public transport card (which it seems must be paid for by card, not cash) we head off to the Kadriorg district and the Kumu art museum. By the afternoon the clouds have cleared and it's dry to walk across to the Kadriorg palace. We also see Peter the Great's house and the Russalka memorial.

Wed 13th: We find we are waking up very early, due to the long hours of daylight, and the absence of any climate control in the hotel room, so before museums open we check out the ferry terminal, which is a 10-minute walk from the hotel, before booking ferry tickets for a trip to Helsinki later in the week. Back in the Old Town we take in the Kiek in de Kök Museum and Bastion Tunnels. An afternoon walk around the west side of the Old Town walls seems much quieter than the centre.

Thurs 14th: Out to the Kalamaja district and the Seaplane Museum. The Suur Tõll icebreaker is particularly interesting. Like all museums of this type, it is plagued by small people, but for the most part we avoid them.

Fri 15th: Another early start. We looked at the times and decided the 07:00 ferry to Helsinki was the one to catch. Check-in and boarding is straightforward, and we've booked breakfast on board. We get a good view of the archipelago and Suomenlinna fort as we approach Helsinki. Once we've disembarked it's about half an hour walk into the city centre, where we visit the cathedral, the impressive University Library, the Railway Station, and other attractions.

Most of the afternoon is taken up in the Ateneum and National Museum. The return ferry departs at 20:30 and we've booked the all-you-can-eat buffet, which turns out also to be all-you-can-drink, but the wine isn't so good that you want more than a couple of glasses anyway.

Sat 16th: It turns out we misread the opening times of the architecture museum, so our morning is filled by the Estonian History Museum at the Great Guild Hall instead. This proves to be more interesting and less interactive than the guide book had suggested.

We're very early at Tallinn airport, but it was always going to be a difficult day to fill; it gives us time to stock up on essentials such as canned bear meat, elk salami, and lingonberry jam. The return flight is smooth and we're home at a reasonable hour.