A glossy magazine insert in my daily newspaper had a revealing graphic about high speed trains in various countries. The speeds are shown in the obsolete US notation, MPH, rather than KPH, but make the point regardless. The slowest are the Belgian and Italian high speed trains; they reach 190 MPH; the Eurostar (London-Paris via the Channel Tunnel) hits 200 MPH on the sturdy French tracks, noticeably less as it crosses Kent and descends below the English Channel. In France, TGVs travel at 240 MPH. Japanese Shinkansen ("Bullet") trains and the German Transrapid reach 275 MPH. The fastest are the new Chinese high speed trains, which use an innovative propulsion system I learnt about in First Year University physics in 1944; they average just over 300 MPH but theoretically could travel at twice that speed. I've traveled on all except the Chinese high speed trains. They are all very comfortable and most are quiet. The Eurostar scores highest in my experience for comfort and quiet - and serves gourmet meals and very good wines. The Shinkansen can be noisy, but it has an unblemished safety record, no accidents in over 40 years. Indeed, all these high speed trains have excellent safety records, except the Eurostar and the newest entry in the field, the Chinese trains, each of which has had one or two crashes, though none with major loss of life or even injuries.
London to Paris, Geneva to Paris in 3 hours! With trains this fast, there's no contest with air travel: add check-in time and planes in line for an hour or more waiting to take off, and it's time-saving as well as much less stressful to take the train. If you've a mind to, you can get a lot of work done on one of these train journeys.
Intercity trains in Canada aren't included in the graphic. It's embarrassing to reflect how far behind Canada has fallen. Ottawa-Toronto "express" trains go as fast as they can on dubiously secure rail-beds with the antiquated diesel engines that pull them. For several brief periods they achieve 100 MPH, but the average speed is below 75 MPH. There are many level crossings as well as unreliable rails and rolling stock, and most trains make several stops. The Ottawa-Toronto trip typically takes 5 hours for a journey that a TGV or Shinkansen could make in well under 2 hours.
In the early 1970s there was talk about modernizing train service in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, with a diversion through Ottawa. There's been occasional desultory talk about modernizing train services ever since. Lately there have been subversive murmurs about contracting out to China the work of strengthening the rail-bed, constructing under-passes and bridges to eliminate the level crossings for many of which current trains must slow down, perhaps even allowing China to supply rolling stock. It won't happen in my lifetime. Perhaps my grandchildren will live long enough to travel by train from Ottawa to Toronto in less than 2 hours, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
A Life Like Other People's
In 1961-62, Wendy and I and the two toddlers we had in those days had to survive for a year in London on a stipend meant for a single man without dependents. We rented a furnished part-house in Finsbury Park, 30 Newington Green, from a biochemist at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, who had a sabbatical year in USA. Most days I walked several miles to my office in the Social Medicine Research Unit behind the London Hospital Medical College on Whitechapel Road. Wendy made our financial survival possible by feeding us very well at rock bottom prices, walking two miles each way to Ridley Road street market, pushing David in the stroller, with Rebecca walking beside her. Usually Rebecca's little legs couldn't manage the walk home as well, so Wendy came back from the market balancing both kids on top of the spuds, sprouts, carrots and cheapest cuts of meat in the stroller. It was the nearest we came to living in real poverty. It was a wonderfully happy year, in some ways the best year we ever had, the year in which we discovered all the things you can do in London without having to spend a lot of money, or indeed, any money at all.
We were too poor to take in the rich theatrical offerings available in the West End of London. My father took us to a vaudeville show once. And I took Wendy to see Beyond the Fringe as a special treat for her birthday. We saw it with the original cast and the original skits. It was one of the best things we ever saw on stage. The cast, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett, were four youngsters, fresh out of Oxford, on the threshhold of outstanding, brilliant careers.
Alan Bennett - quiet, lethally witty, a penetrating social critic - was the most thoughtful of the four. He went on to achieve fame as a playwright and man of letters, best known for his TV plays Talking Heads, and for the west end success of his stage play that became an even more successful movie, The Madness of King George.
Recently I've been reading his memoir, A Life Like Other People's. I knew that he, like Peter Cook, came from a working class family in the north of England - his accent reveals this, mellowed though it is by his years at Oxford. I knew nothing about his family or about the circumstances in which he grew up. His quietly understated account of working class family life in the aftermath of the great depression of the 1930s and during the 1939-45 world war describes his mother's recurrent bouts of severe depression, the shadowy family history of suicide, and the emotional ups and downs of his two aunts. One aunt joined the WAAFs and went to exotic foreign parts - India, the Far East - while the other stayed on in a department store. Both had emotional and marital troubles. The story reads to me like a family with the heritable condition, bipolar disorder. It describes also how such families made their way in the world, living hand to mouth, making their own entertainment, finding happiness in simple pleasures. His unhappy Mam laments that theirs is not a life like other people's, but I think Alan Bennett describes a family life very much like that of tens of thousands of other people in England at that time. He is a master of the English language, and this little book, like everything of his that I've read, provides genuine aesthetic pleasure from the prose alone. I picked it up for a dollar in a jumble sale. It's a keeper, that will go into the set of book shelves where I keep my most precious books.
We were too poor to take in the rich theatrical offerings available in the West End of London. My father took us to a vaudeville show once. And I took Wendy to see Beyond the Fringe as a special treat for her birthday. We saw it with the original cast and the original skits. It was one of the best things we ever saw on stage. The cast, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett, were four youngsters, fresh out of Oxford, on the threshhold of outstanding, brilliant careers.
Alan Bennett - quiet, lethally witty, a penetrating social critic - was the most thoughtful of the four. He went on to achieve fame as a playwright and man of letters, best known for his TV plays Talking Heads, and for the west end success of his stage play that became an even more successful movie, The Madness of King George.
Recently I've been reading his memoir, A Life Like Other People's. I knew that he, like Peter Cook, came from a working class family in the north of England - his accent reveals this, mellowed though it is by his years at Oxford. I knew nothing about his family or about the circumstances in which he grew up. His quietly understated account of working class family life in the aftermath of the great depression of the 1930s and during the 1939-45 world war describes his mother's recurrent bouts of severe depression, the shadowy family history of suicide, and the emotional ups and downs of his two aunts. One aunt joined the WAAFs and went to exotic foreign parts - India, the Far East - while the other stayed on in a department store. Both had emotional and marital troubles. The story reads to me like a family with the heritable condition, bipolar disorder. It describes also how such families made their way in the world, living hand to mouth, making their own entertainment, finding happiness in simple pleasures. His unhappy Mam laments that theirs is not a life like other people's, but I think Alan Bennett describes a family life very much like that of tens of thousands of other people in England at that time. He is a master of the English language, and this little book, like everything of his that I've read, provides genuine aesthetic pleasure from the prose alone. I picked it up for a dollar in a jumble sale. It's a keeper, that will go into the set of book shelves where I keep my most precious books.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Alone in the Classroom
I haven't counted heads but I have a strong impression that among talented, successful fiction writers, women outnumber men by a considerable margin - at any rate in Canada. I think it's because empathy is an important quality for a writer to possess, and women tend to have a higher quotient of empathy than men do. I'm not a slow reader, quite the reverse in fact, but I read haphazardly and without reference to best seller lists. Thus I caught up with Alone in the Classroom, Elizabeth Hay's best seller from a few years ago, only last week. It's a story in which her empathy for her characters comes through loud and clear. I've read her previous novels, greatly enjoyed her Giller prize-winning Late Nights on Air. I think this is a better book, a complex story that extends over three or more generations and manages to present three dimensional views of several people whose lives and loves are intertwined. Good and great story-tellers must have several qualities. They must be able to tell a story: narrative skills are important. They must be able to create characters, preferably well-rounded, believable people. They must be able to develop tension, conflict, challenge and response, crisis and resolution, so readers will ask "Then what happened?" -- and will eagerly read on to find the answer. Another quality creative writers require is empathy, the ability to see the world through another person's eyes, and to present that other perspective with credibility and compassion. In much great literature and in most good fiction, this is the most important quality of all. It is a quality Elizabeth Hay possesses in abundance, perhaps particularly in presenting her female characters, although she does pretty well with the two most prominent men in this book too. When I finished Alone in the Classroom, I knew the free-spirited Connie, the twisted, driven Parley, dyslexic, talented philanderer Michael, and half a dozen others with whom their lives collide. I've known real people like each of them. I'm less confident that I can identify among my friendship network a real person who resembles the sometime first-person narrator Anne, perhaps because she is too self effacing. Her personality is clear enough, her appearance less so. The physical appearance, clothing styles, mannerisms, as well as the personalities of the other principal characters are sketched so convincingly I would recognize them if I saw them in my neighbourhood supermarket. Probably every reader of this blog has already read Alone in the Classroom. If there are any who haven't, try it. You'll like it.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
What is this age we live in?
This is the age of hate and paranoia. Astute (cynical?) political leaders know that nothing binds a nation's people together as firmly as an easily identifiable hate figure. In the early 1930s when I was about 8, I began to read newspapers and listen to the radio. Benito Mussolini, leader of Italy's fascists, attracted our loathing because he was bombing and strafing Abyssinians armed with muskets and spears. The communist ideology made manifest by Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union and by some Australian trade union leaders was the object of paranoid hatred propagated in many print media and the radio stations they sponsored. A curious child increasingly aware of the world around me, I wondered why we should fear and hate a political philosophy that had many features resembling the teachings of Jesus as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. As I went through puberty and my early teens, my country which was Australia in those days, went to war against Germany, Italy and Japan; we were part of the Free World, in contrast to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. It was easy to see and hear for ourselves if we understood German as I did - I was learning it at school - that Hitler was a very evil man. The USSR was evil too, or its leader Stalin was. He had show trials that led to execution of the intelligentsia, and brutally invaded Finland. Then a problem arose: in 1941 Soviet Russia was invaded by Nazi Germany and overnight became our second-best friend, surpassed only by Great Britain. That didn't last long though. By the late 1940s, many on the extreme right, my father among them, were asserting that we should nuke the Soviet Union before they too, like USA, got the atom bomb. Germany split asunder into good (democratic) West Germany and bad (communist) East Germany. All the countries of eastern Europe and the Baltic states were satellites of the USSR. They were bad. My passport wasn't valid for travel to any of those bad countries.
Meanwhile, bewildering political changes swept over former colonial empires. French Indo-China became Vietnam, the Dutch East Indies became Indonesia, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Portuguese East Africa became Mozambique, Belgian Congo became the Central African Republic, French Equatorial Africa fragmented into a dozen countries. Some of the leaders of these former colonies were on our side, therefore good, others weren't, therefore they were bad. Most were and are ruled by violent, bloody dictators, good friends if they grant us mining rights, our evil enemies if they don't. In Latin America, national boundaries remained intact but many countries that had been docile client states of the USA began to assert their autonomy and several had revolutions and civil wars. In Colombia the war between the government and the left wing FARC has been smouldering for 50 years. Some leaders were bad, some not, depending mostly on mining rights and whether they had democratic elections (no matter how dodgy the election may have been). Cuba was a special case. Cuba sloughed off a repulsive criminal dictator, Battista, and for a few weeks the new leader, Fidel Castro, young, handsome, bearded, speaking quaint English that made much sense, was our hero, got a ticker-tape parade in New York. Then he said some things that were labeled communist (or maybe socialist - it's a long time ago, and I forget). So overnight he became bad, and remained bad ever after. In Chile, the bloody military coup that ousted Salvadore Allende was a CIA operation that almost everyone in my personal and professional networks perceived as a profoundly evil example of American imperial excess - the worst until G W Bush's invasion of Iraq, which is having unintended consequences that seem likely to be with us for many years, perhaps until my grandchildren are my age.
In the Far East (Australia's near north) China, which had been our ally in the 1939-45 world war became the People's Republic of China and our enemy. When the PRC flexed its muscles a little bit, very nasty wars broke out in the PRC's neighbouring states, Korea and Vietnam. The Korean war began in 1950 and never ended, or at any rate there's never been a peace treaty. North Korea is the baddest of the bad, the worst of the Evil Empire, and acts accordingly. The war in Vietnam was unequivocally a war of liberation in which the people of Vietnam sought freedom and autonomy from French colonial oppressors. In one of the great political tragedies of my lifetime, American administrations saw Vietnam as another 'domino' that would fall into the evil hands of the leaders of the PRC unless they intervened. They expended untold blood - mostly Vietnamese blood - and American treasure in ultimately futile attempts to keep Vietnam within the orbit of what they chose to call the Free World. Future historians may identify the Vietnam war as the turning point that marked the end of American global hegemony.
Iran, formerly Persia, was our friend when ruled by the benevolent Shah (our leaders said he was benevolent and of course they were honest men). The Shah aspired to have atom bombs, had a large army and air force, and had secret police who pulled out schoolboys' fingernails - one little schoolboy grew up to become a student of mine in Edinburgh 10 years later. When he was 9 or 10, his fingernails had been pulled out by the Shah's police in front of his father, using needle-nosed pliers, in an attempt to persuade his father to confess to subversion of the Shah's regime. His deformed fingers never fully recovered. Then the Shah was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was bad. His revolutionary guards were more brutal, more malevolent, than the Shah's secret police. My Iranian friends tell me many are the same people, even wear the same uniforms. My Iranian friends, almost all academics, despair of seeing changes for the better in their lifetimes. Iran is the living residue of one of the oldest organized civil societies in the world. It is sad, indeed tragic, that it is the target of bitter and perhaps paranoid hatred of the Israeli government. As for the Israelis, they seek to maintain a Jewish state in the implacably hostile Middle East. I have lost count of the number of wars they have fought against their neighbours, especially the unfortunate Palestinians. With American support, they have won all these wars. So far. They have nuclear weapons, and no doubt others as terrible. I think it is unlikely that they will go on winning these wars forever in the future. A few of my Israeli friends share my doubts and have left Israel to live in more tranquil countries. The closest I've come to the perpetual hostilities in the Middle East was during a visit to Beirut in 1998. The Lebanese civil war had ended but the scars remained everywhere in central Beirut, for example the top floors of the tower of the Holiday Inn, blackened, burnt out, destroyed by artillery and rocket propelled grenades. At night when the traffic noise quietened, I could hear distant artillery and small arms fire along the line of demarcation between the Israeli Defence Force and the Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon; this was a constant background noise throughout the weeks I spent in Beirut. My Lebanese colleagues told me they barely recalled a time when distant (and sometimes very close) gunfire could not be heard. No one can honestly say who is good and who is bad in this cauldron of ancient hatreds.
This is a haphazard partial summary based on memories that are bound to be selective. I do my best to stay abreast of these changing political alliances although some make me recall a song about the Vicar of Bray (dating from Restoration England) that a possibly subversive school teacher taught my Grade 3 or 4 class when I was 8 or 9 years old. The Vicar of Bray might be a useful role model for us all in these turbulent times.
Meanwhile, bewildering political changes swept over former colonial empires. French Indo-China became Vietnam, the Dutch East Indies became Indonesia, Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Portuguese East Africa became Mozambique, Belgian Congo became the Central African Republic, French Equatorial Africa fragmented into a dozen countries. Some of the leaders of these former colonies were on our side, therefore good, others weren't, therefore they were bad. Most were and are ruled by violent, bloody dictators, good friends if they grant us mining rights, our evil enemies if they don't. In Latin America, national boundaries remained intact but many countries that had been docile client states of the USA began to assert their autonomy and several had revolutions and civil wars. In Colombia the war between the government and the left wing FARC has been smouldering for 50 years. Some leaders were bad, some not, depending mostly on mining rights and whether they had democratic elections (no matter how dodgy the election may have been). Cuba was a special case. Cuba sloughed off a repulsive criminal dictator, Battista, and for a few weeks the new leader, Fidel Castro, young, handsome, bearded, speaking quaint English that made much sense, was our hero, got a ticker-tape parade in New York. Then he said some things that were labeled communist (or maybe socialist - it's a long time ago, and I forget). So overnight he became bad, and remained bad ever after. In Chile, the bloody military coup that ousted Salvadore Allende was a CIA operation that almost everyone in my personal and professional networks perceived as a profoundly evil example of American imperial excess - the worst until G W Bush's invasion of Iraq, which is having unintended consequences that seem likely to be with us for many years, perhaps until my grandchildren are my age.
In the Far East (Australia's near north) China, which had been our ally in the 1939-45 world war became the People's Republic of China and our enemy. When the PRC flexed its muscles a little bit, very nasty wars broke out in the PRC's neighbouring states, Korea and Vietnam. The Korean war began in 1950 and never ended, or at any rate there's never been a peace treaty. North Korea is the baddest of the bad, the worst of the Evil Empire, and acts accordingly. The war in Vietnam was unequivocally a war of liberation in which the people of Vietnam sought freedom and autonomy from French colonial oppressors. In one of the great political tragedies of my lifetime, American administrations saw Vietnam as another 'domino' that would fall into the evil hands of the leaders of the PRC unless they intervened. They expended untold blood - mostly Vietnamese blood - and American treasure in ultimately futile attempts to keep Vietnam within the orbit of what they chose to call the Free World. Future historians may identify the Vietnam war as the turning point that marked the end of American global hegemony.
Iran, formerly Persia, was our friend when ruled by the benevolent Shah (our leaders said he was benevolent and of course they were honest men). The Shah aspired to have atom bombs, had a large army and air force, and had secret police who pulled out schoolboys' fingernails - one little schoolboy grew up to become a student of mine in Edinburgh 10 years later. When he was 9 or 10, his fingernails had been pulled out by the Shah's police in front of his father, using needle-nosed pliers, in an attempt to persuade his father to confess to subversion of the Shah's regime. His deformed fingers never fully recovered. Then the Shah was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was bad. His revolutionary guards were more brutal, more malevolent, than the Shah's secret police. My Iranian friends tell me many are the same people, even wear the same uniforms. My Iranian friends, almost all academics, despair of seeing changes for the better in their lifetimes. Iran is the living residue of one of the oldest organized civil societies in the world. It is sad, indeed tragic, that it is the target of bitter and perhaps paranoid hatred of the Israeli government. As for the Israelis, they seek to maintain a Jewish state in the implacably hostile Middle East. I have lost count of the number of wars they have fought against their neighbours, especially the unfortunate Palestinians. With American support, they have won all these wars. So far. They have nuclear weapons, and no doubt others as terrible. I think it is unlikely that they will go on winning these wars forever in the future. A few of my Israeli friends share my doubts and have left Israel to live in more tranquil countries. The closest I've come to the perpetual hostilities in the Middle East was during a visit to Beirut in 1998. The Lebanese civil war had ended but the scars remained everywhere in central Beirut, for example the top floors of the tower of the Holiday Inn, blackened, burnt out, destroyed by artillery and rocket propelled grenades. At night when the traffic noise quietened, I could hear distant artillery and small arms fire along the line of demarcation between the Israeli Defence Force and the Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon; this was a constant background noise throughout the weeks I spent in Beirut. My Lebanese colleagues told me they barely recalled a time when distant (and sometimes very close) gunfire could not be heard. No one can honestly say who is good and who is bad in this cauldron of ancient hatreds.
This is a haphazard partial summary based on memories that are bound to be selective. I do my best to stay abreast of these changing political alliances although some make me recall a song about the Vicar of Bray (dating from Restoration England) that a possibly subversive school teacher taught my Grade 3 or 4 class when I was 8 or 9 years old. The Vicar of Bray might be a useful role model for us all in these turbulent times.
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