Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

The rooftops of  Manchester , Valette When her mother brought Carmen to Manchester in September she packed a suitcase containing everything she might need. However, in contrast to the other girls in residential halls, Carmen didn't bring much. Other mothers piled their cars high with spatulas and teddy bears.  'Why have you so few things?' Carmen's neighbours asked her when they visited her room. To make up for this, when I went to Manchester to visit her, I brought Carmen: a ship-to-ship, butane-powered foghorn (and warned her not to use it near a naked flame); a red kitchen timer with a silver dial to help her manage time (softly ticking, and with a short, pleasant ring); a large non-stick kitchen knife with holes punched along its blade and a round tip; 50 blue-ink ball point pens (in five colours); plastic folders. multicoloured Post-it notes; flourescent sticky-backed blazes; a smoke alarm and, finally, glasses to allow her to see who was sneaking up behind....

Don’t argue with Arthur, your geologist great grandfather. Africa was  really  alongside America. Believe in the best bits Of British boys and girls and brothers Don’t try to change your children’s class and culture And confine them to a country. I'm Still dazed that, Dad, the free thinking socialist, died; Still amazed that Mom, Eve, was someone for everyone. She gave us love and set an example. I eat enough and provide English education here. Now they are far away, but my family is established. Some of us even found France again, Carmen was in Paris, But we have no French friends. And who gave God back to the Germans? Who gave them good government? This was not the experience of Granny and Grandpa in the 30s. No God, no good government then. The Halls were always half hard-heads and half home-help And they always had one foot in human history. Isidor, standing on the Sarajevo steps in 1914, I would have liked to have meet...

 Be against forced marriage not immigrants.   Human sacrifice, forced marriage and clitorectomy; unacceptable in Surbiton. If an Aztec, an Ancient Roman or a member of the Golden Horde was transported in time to Britain circa 2011-2, he might want to continue practicing his beliefs, however, and rightly so, there would be limits.  It might be a little difficult for him at first, but it would be easier for his children. Fights to the death, human sacrifice, pillage, murder, clitorectomies, forced marriages and explosive martyrdom are definitely 'no nos' in the UK. Early this year I had an 17 year old student who confided in me that her mother and father wanted her to marry her cousin, her mother's brother. The girl didn't want to, whereupon the mother took away her phone and computer. She told me that she was afraid she might get up one day and be told she would be on a flight out to Sri Lanka - suffering extraordinary rendition. On the walls of the college...

Fuchsia, editorial writer at the Guardian I remember reading the Whole Earth Catalogue and the writing of feminists in the 70s, as a teen, and loving the idea of a building not as a penis, but a vulva. A scallop shell, a Nautilus following the Fibonacci sequence. Of course it was Theano who discovered the golden mean, more beautiful, even, than Pythagoras's' floating triangles. A valley not a mountain. If the Pharaohs had been women, would they have built inverted pyramids ? Catal Hayuk and Minos were rather feminine towns. You passed from one hole into another, one house layered onto another; labyrinths. Perhaps a labyrinth can be more impressive than a skyscraper. A labyrinth is complex enough to get lost in, but a tall building is stupidly linear even when it leans. You go up. You go down. A monkey climbing up a ladder. After all, humanity came from the caves, the most feminine dwellings of all.   Fuchsia's is an editorial in praise of flawed capitalism. T...

At a boarding school in the North East of England, three boys of ordinary charm, formed a cabal at the centre of a class and successfully invoked the powers of a ragamuffin demon who was fond of tearing people. The music teacher did his best to exorcise it. He tried playing Beethoven’s 9th loudly to the boys in class. He tried trust exercises. He stood up in every Quaker school meeting murmuring imprecations and spells. But nothing helped. The art teacher asked the children to draw a beautiful country scene, but one of the boys, seeing the demon, drew the hidden landscape of its home instead: a red sun in a dirty sky; the moon too close; a tall metal mast curving upwards, standing on a promontory by an evaporated sea; the sea bed stretching into the distance. The art teacher, puzzled announced:   'I would have like to have given this more marks, however, I can't.  This is a pebble on the shore. Melancholia is a film embedded with ...

The Achilles Heel of the Tories is their unfairness. The Tory Party is Hobbsian; elitist and hierarchical by nature, based partly on the tradition of a managed democracy. When people vote for the Tories they vote for the status quo, which they see as British, for little Britain, not Great Britain. They vote for exclusion not inclusion. Historically speaking the Labour Party is a democratic bubbling up of people demanding rights and equality not the party of top down control at all, despite its attempts at social engineering. To a Democrat and a Socialist every voting soul has the same value as every other, we are all the prodigal sons and daughters of social democracy. Rather than believing in a natural British, organically grown, Duchy Original traditional establishment, Democratic Socialists hold faith with a properly functioning representative democracy and the ideal of a fair society. The Tories will lose votes over time. Young people of voting age live in constant, an...

Oh! The Places You’ll Go! Congratulations! Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away! You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go. You’ll look up and down streets. Look’em over with care. About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street. And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air. Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you. And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too. Oh! The Places You’ll Go! You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! Y...

 Current avatar; banned by the Guardian Comment is Free mafiosi One of my Avatars - I have many - was FreshOrangeJuice . It has just been banned from the Guardian comment pages. Big deal. Or BFD at they say. Now what is interesting is to understand exactly what gets you banned from the comment pages of the 'Voice of Liberalism'. This should be understood in context. I am generally supportive of Polly Toynbee's writing, I have corresponded with her. However, I am not welcome on the Guardian comment pages and when they discover I am behind an Avatar they do ban me. The points I was making on this thread were not really about Toynbee, they were about the lost soul of the Labour Party and the support of the Guardian for Ed Miliband. Polly was my foil. Moreover, it is only for arguments sake that I describe the party of Wilson and Callaghan as a 'socialist party'. Truth be told it was merely a social democratic party. It was Polly Toynbee's party, but it sho...

Bryan G. Dear Phil, Thanks for the article and I’m sorry to have taken so long to get back to you. As I read it I heard my own voice echoing the same or similar arguments some years ago when I wrote a series of articles on political, economic and ethical issues for a European journal. The points you make about rights having their complement in responsibilities is a point that needs to made with increasing emphasis. In his famous book, The World we have Lost, a book about the early modern period in English history, Peter Laslet describes how employers in the sixteenth century employed apprentices in just the way you suggest: they accepted all of their broader responsibilities. In effect, the apprentice would become a full member of the family, not just a ‘hand’, to use that most revealing of all metaphors that arose in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. They accepted that when they employed someone they were employing the complete person, not just one aspect of his comp...