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‘How are we ? after 30 years of being warned about impending disaster ? still working at a level at which an 11mm tweak to a cardboard tube can be lauded as any kind of triumph?’

Do you know that “Did I miss a memo?” feeling? You know, the one when someone says something so stupid or self-evidently untrue that you look up and down and round, open-mouthed, before mentally giving up and assuming that you must have missed a vital step in proceedings somehow. I get it about a thousand times a day, but never more strongly than when a new corporate green initiative is trumpeted.

Sainsbury’s, for example, recently announced it was reducing the size of its loo rolls’ inner tubes. Less cardboard, you see, and fewer lorries transporting smaller packages means fewer carbon emissions polluting the atmosphere. Praise for the company’s ecological awareness duly flooded in.

I’m sorry, did I miss a memo? Specifically, did I miss a memo saying, “Great news just in, world population! We have made such brilliant, unexpected and entirely unpublicised leaps in combating global warming, reversing the rising tides and inventing perfect, totally harmless substitutes for irreplaceable resources that all we’ve got left to do is a quick nip-and-tuck on loo rolls. The rainforest is saved! All known species have unendangered themselves! China’s agreed to knock all that economic superpower stuff on the head and go back to subsistence-level farming, while the Americans have agreed that it’ll be nothing but tofu burgers from sea to shining sea from now on. And everyone has agreed to stop, literally and metaphorically, fracking about. Hurrah!”

My point is: how are we ? after 30 years of being warned about impending disaster ? still working at a level at which an 11mm tweak to a cardboard tube can be lauded as any kind of triumph?

I haven’t used an aerosol of any kind since 1985 when I first heard about CFCs (remember them?) leading to holes in the ozone layer, more UV rays and polar icecaps melting and ? in what I appreciated even then as a notable irony ? washing away the parched corpses strewn across a baking land. It spooked me then, and now ? as I watch actual film footage of actual polar bears stranded on disintegrating ice floes on warming waters, turning the nightmare into literal, visible fact ? it terrifies me.

Why does it not, seemingly, terrify the powers that be? While we all do our piddling, insignificant, individual bit, they do nothing. Nothing compared with what they could be doing, nothing compared with what they should be doing.

We should ? as we stare down the barrel of a catastrophic two-degree and more likely we-need-a-new-word-for-catastrophic four-degree rise in worldwide temperatures ? be at this level: unquestioned rule by green despots charged with saving this planet from becoming a spinning ball of dust. Carbon rationing. National service for all, laying the ground- and pipework for a national water grid (through which shall be pumped H2O laced with iron, to replace the meat we can no longer have, and contraception to stop the children we can no longer support). Coupon books issued at birth for all other goods, worked out according to a highly detailed but essentially simple equation that boils down to this: finite resources left divided by number of people left over number of years remaining species would like to live.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/18/lucy-mangan-saving-world-toilet-rolls

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Continent-wide spending cuts are not about to be overturned in favour of a raft of policies designed to encourage growth ? sadly

Thanks must go to the gods of metaphor, for it was presumably they who sent the lightning that forced François Hollande’s plane to turn back mid-journey to Berlin on Tuesday afternoon. This being rain-sodden reality rather than heightened drama, the French president had better luck on a second flight to meet chancellor Angela Merkel ? but even so, you couldn’t have asked for a more perfect omen. Because there are those who view any mission to save the euro as cursed. Plenty more see policymaking in the crisis-hit eurozone as a lot of Sturm with a hefty dollop of Drang. And then there are the more excitable European politicians who would describe the fate of the single currency as hanging on a war of ideas: between left and right, between austerity and growth, and between the newly elected, idealistic Mr Hollande and battle-hardened German pragmatist Mrs Merkel. Stormy indeed.

If only things were so stark. Certainly, a shift of emphasis and policy is discernible, both in terms of the people making decisions and the economic and political backdrop they are now working against. But the continent-wide spending cuts are not about to be overturned in favour of a raft of policies designed to encourage growth ? sadly. Nor, unfortunately, are stricken southern members of the euro about to receive the relief they need from the wrong-headed austerity programmes they have been forced to follow with such disastrous economic and social effect.

Plainly, the economic policies followed by eurozone ministers and officials are not working. First, their governments had the option in the summer of 2010 to go for sustained and substantial fiscal stimulus; they didn’t take it. The result was underlined, with the eurozone just avoiding its own double-dip recession ? and that too largely because of strong growth for German exports. The domestic economy of the single-currency area remains in dire shape, with Spain and Italy both shrinking and France flatlining. Second, when it comes to warding off financial contagion, the euro club has finally cobbled together a firewall of pledged money, to be called upon if another nation ended up in serious trouble. The trouble is, Spain and Italy are already in financial turmoil ? with their banks in desperate need of extra cash and their governments struggling to raise funds from markets ? and yet very few analysts or financiers have much faith in the firewall. Finally, for the nations already forced on to financial life support, Brussels (with the IMF) prescribed a combination of drastic cuts, radical changes to welfare systems and labour laws, and a fire sale of public assets. In Greece, the guinea pig for all this, the result has been to seal a national economic depression, coupled with widespread unrest and violence ? and to destroy support for the political mainstream. A failure on all counts.

So there is plenty of reason to hope that Mr Hollande has some substance behind his stirring rhetoric about the need for growth. The French president can point to the fall of 10 euro-area administrations since 2008, sky-high unemployment and even to Mrs Merkel’s own poor showing in this weekend’s elections in North Rhine-Westphalia. Yet his policies so far amount to slowing down the pace at which France reduces its (relatively small) budget deficit, and taxing wealth in order to create more jobs. At an international level, he wants to adulterate the pure austerity his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, agreed with Mrs Merkel. But this is merely to slow progress towards the cliff edge, when what is needed is a U-turn. What the continent really needs to go for is an outright fiscal stimulus, of the kind even Mrs Merkel agreed to in 2009 (which gave German carmakers such a shot in the arm). In the crisis zones of Greece, Portugal and Ireland, the eurozone needs to impose a sharp reduction in the value of public debt. Preceding that, the euro club should set up an emergency pool to forcibly recapitalise banks, in return for European public equity stakes. Drastic? Yes. But the euro area’s existential crisis will not be alleviated by rhetoric, however cheering.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/15/euro-thunder-lightning-editorial

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Facebook’s share structure wouldn’t happen in the UK. The principle of ‘equal votes for equal economic risk’ is an unwritten rule of corporate governance here

“Direct empowerment of people” and “more accountability for officials” are two of the virtues Facebook says its service promotes. It is referring in its IPO prospectus to the interaction between citizens and governments, which is just as well since most shareholders in Facebook will travel in a third-class carriage. The first-class lounge is reserved for Mark Zuckerberg alone.

The founder, chairman and chief executive is keeping control via a dual voting structure that gives each ‘B’ share held by insiders such as himself 10 times the voting power of the ordinary ‘A’ shares. In addition, Zuckerberg also has arrangements with fellow ‘B’ holders so that he ends up with total voting power of 59%. Outsiders don’t even get to choose how they would manage without Zuckerberg; the boss has the right to nominate a successor in the event that he dies in harness.

It wouldn’t happen in the UK. The principle of “equal votes for equal economic risk” is an unwritten rule of corporate governance that no grown-up quoted company has dared to defy for a couple of decades. The last hold-outs surrendered for a variety of reasons – from quarrels among third-generations family members to a basic inability to raise equity capital from outside investors on attractive terms.

Zuckerberg has no such worries. Facebook doesn’t need cash for investment and the voting arrangement clearly hasn’t affected demand for stock. Maybe there are arguments in favour. Aren’t the most successful technology firms, like Google, controlled by the founder or founders? Haven’t Facebook’s original backers become rich by giving Zuckerberg the freedom to pursue his vision? Don’t you mess with that formula at your peril? And it’s not as if there could be a punch-up over dividend distributions – there won’t be a dividend any time soon.

All the same, there could be trouble ahead. Zuckerberg’s letter to potential investors is mostly about why the company’s “social mission” is important. In the end, though, it’s the commercial mission of milking the base of 900 million users for advertising and other revenues that will determine whether the $104bn (£65bn) valuation is justified.

As matters stand today, it’s possible (just) to believe the twin missions complement each other. But what if events don’t run so swimmingly? Will Zuckerberg choose to operate a vulgar advertising medium or be a heroic pursuer of a more open and connected society? OK, the choice may never be so stark. But there could be tension over strategy and, judged by his public statements, it’s impossible to tell which shade of grey Zuckerberg would prefer. Don’t forget, he is rich enough not to worry about the odd billion being removed from his personal wealth.

But those buying Facebook shares for profit, one assumes, would be less relaxed. Surely they would applaud more commercialism if it makes the share price go up. Well, nobody’s forcing them to buy stock, it might be said, and Zuckerberg’s complete control of Facebook is not being disguised.

True enough. But, viewed from London, it is quite amazing that dual voting arrangements survive in the US. The UK does not have technology successes of the size of Google or Facebook to shout about, but equal votes for equal economic risk still sounds an excellent principle. In economic terms, Zuckerberg has 28%. He should not have complete control. Facebook may be the future but, in governance terms, it’s a trip back in time.

Source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/media/rss/~3/SPL4sBv11sQ/facebook-voting-structure-could-lose-friends

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A study of the British empire’s spies

“If knowledge is power,” wrote a military analyst in 1880, “ignorance is weakness.” That was Britain’s trouble for much of the 19th century. Every schoolboy knows ? or used to, when history consisted mainly of boring kings and battles ? that when the British army invaded the Crimea in 1854 it didn’t even have any maps of the place. The Crimean war, of course, was almost a disaster from Britain’s point of view. It was to remedy this that, in the middle of it, a new agency was set up that later became the Intelligence Department (ID) of the War Office. From mapping, it branched out into other kinds of intelligence gathering in countries where Britain might have to fight in the future.

William Beaver tells its story well, from documentary sources that have been largely overlooked in the past. I’m afraid I didn’t find it quite the “rollicking good read” that his publisher ? a new one, and perhaps for that reason over-prone to puffery ? promises, though that may be because I’m less easily rollicked than most. But it is interesting enough, and does much to restore the “missing dimension” that secret service historians are always talking about, to Britain’s military-imperial history between 1855 and the creation of her modern intelligence agencies in the early 1900s.

Today the ID would appear to fill an obvious need. Yet it struggled to gain acceptance for most of its existence. Some of this was due to the reactionism of the old guard, coupled with anti-intellectualism ? it was enough to nickname the ID a “department of thought” to discredit it ? and straightforward class and racial prejudice directed at some of its leading lights.

Henry Brackenbury, for example, one of the ID’s greatest directors, was looked on by Lord Wolseley as “not quite a gentleman”; “he has Greek blood in him and consequently does not know what real loyalty to any man, except to himself, can possibly mean.” Beaver also likes to heap blame on Gladstone, for being careless of the true interests of the empire. (In fact more empire was accrued under Gladstone than under any of his predecessors.)

Beyond all this, however, there were supposed to be moral objections to secret intelligence work. It was “murky” and “un-English”. Even mapping other people’s countries without permission was seen as bad manners ? and possibly provocative. Spying was worse. “Spies,” wrote one soldier, “have a dangerous task, and not an honourable one,” which is why it was difficult to persuade honourable officers to undertake the work. Some did manage to retain their self-respect as “honest gentlemen” while “instigating and committing the most atrocious crimes”, as one director, Major-General Sir John Ardagh, claimed later; but it was clearly an uncomfortable fit.

In view of all this, Beaver’s repeated claim that the ID consistently attracted the most “gifted” and “brilliant” officers to its ranks may seem surprising. (That was certainly not true, later on, of MI5.) So is the description of it in the flyer for the book as “an extremely sophisticated secret intelligence service”, which looks like another publisher’s puff. It clearly did some good things. The account here of how its agents discounted Russia’s designs in central Asia by getting hold of her military’s forward requisitions for flour strikes me as quite clever. (The army would need bread to be able to advance.) In regard to Russia generally, in fact, the ID performed a vital service by pouring cold water on the paranoid fear of a Russian invasion of India across Afghanistan that afflicted both the old buffers at Horse Guards (their HQ) and the Indian government’s own intelligence agency. This should be a prime duty of any good intelligence department: not only to warn, but also to reassure and restrain. In eastern Africa during the “scramble” the ID’s intelligence appears to have been good, and, Beaver claims, crucial to the British government’s whole strategy there, of safeguarding the Nile’s headwaters.

But doubts must remain. There’s an awful lot missing from this account: much on intelligence gathering outside the Near East, Central Asia and East Africa, for example, if there was any; and the failures one suspects there must have been. (Modern MI6 and GCHQ are known to have had plenty.) When Britain went to war with the South African Republics in 1899 it was a bit like the Crimea all over again, with a lack of strategic maps, and Boer intelligence far superior to Britain’s. Beaver shows that the fault for this lay largely with the generals, who returned ID briefings unopened on the grounds that, as General Buller put it, “he knew as much about South Africa as there was to know”; but it would be good to be told exactly how accurate these briefings were, early on, when it mattered. There are other telling signs. What was it that caused Disraeli to splutter in 1876 that the Intelligence Department ought to “change its name” to “the department of Ignorance”? And what exactly was the skulduggery that the ID was said to have got up to?

There is also the question of how beneficial even the ID’s successes can be said to have been, viewed in a broader historical perspective. Beaver tends to accept its own assessment of its ultimate objectives, which were to safeguard and extend what he regards as “the foremost empire the world has ever seen”. It is probably relevant in this connection to mention that Beaver is himself a “decorated intelligence officer”, and still connected with the army as a chaplain.

This may have restricted his view. Otherwise he might have allowed himself to speculate about how much greater a service the ID could have performed had it looked further ahead, at the huge and disruptive medium- and long-term repercussions that its favourite “Nilotic strategy” was likely to have on Britain’s power and prestige, wider European diplomacy, and, of course, the lives of Egyptians and Africans. But that kind of prescience is probably too much to expect of most military men, then or now, however “gifted”.

? The fifth edition of Bernard Porter’s history of British imperialism, The Lion’s Share, will be published by Pearson on 7 June.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/18/under-every-leaf-william-beaver-review

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The festival has been set up to celebrate the authors and independent businesses that are thriving

An innovative literary festival is taking place in north Manchester that aims to challenge the skewing of cultural events south of the city.

The inaugural Prestwich Book Festival began this week and continues into next month. It celebrates the authors who live in or have connections with the area ? novelists Alexandra Singer, Emma Jane Unsworth, Sherry Ashworth and Gill James, writers Kate Feld, Benjamin Judge, Claire Massey, Sarah Clare Conlon and Aaron Gow are also taking part.

Performance poet Longfella, also known as Tony Walsh, will perform Vocabaret with poet Jo Bell at the Church Inn on 14 June. Both poets have been poets-in-residence at the Glastonbury festival.

Alexandra Singer’s debut novel, Tea at the Grand Tazi, was published to critical acclaim earlier this year. On 31 May, she will host a literary evening at Time for Tea with homemade cakes and hot drinks.

Emma Jane Unsworth will take part in two sold-out readings at the celebrated restaurant Aumbry, which will re-create the dishes from her first novel, Hungry, The Stars And Everything, published last year.

On the evening of Wednesday 23 May, Sherry Ashworth and Gill James read from their latest work for young adults and answer questions at a free event at Prestwich Library.

The festival’s organiser, Ebba Brooks, tells me that Prestwich, like other areas, has suffered in recent years and has been very much overshadowed by south Manchester.

“Recently there’s been a new feeling in Prestwich that a lot is happening,” she says. A lot of enthusiastic small businesses have got involved with the festival.

“We wanted to do readings in other places, not just draughty community halls. The idea of the festival came to me last summer when I started realising that there were a lot of local authors.”

On 7 June, a creative writing workshop led by Brooks takes place at Ellie Magpie ? a craft, haberdashery and home decoration shop. Tickets must be booked in advance, with further details on the festival site.

For more on the genesis of the Prestwich literary festival, read this excellent blog post here.

Brooks speaks of the pride in the neighbourhood “in the face of a dilapidated high street and dog poo strewn pavements.” As a book lover, she always wanted a literary festival on her doorstep “so I thought I’d better make it happen.”

Brooks is hopeful it will become an annual event. It is anticipated that next year’s festival will include a story writing competition for young people and performance poetry.

She wants the 2013 event to also celebrate the Jewish community in Prestwich and to be a celebration of Jewish authors.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/may/18/north-manchester-book-festival

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Chelsea’s veteran midfielder holds Bayern Munich in high regard but believes his team can prosper in the Allianz Arena, he tells Barney Ronay

Over the past few days citizens of that stretch of Chelsea land that runs between King’s Road and the manicured country retreat of Stoke D’Abernon could have been forgiven for imagining a faint rumbling noise in the air.

If there has been a mild sense of preliminary clanking, this is perhaps simply the sound of Chelsea’s old guard nudging the throttle and thrumming though the gears en route to Bavaria and what will probably be the final appearance on such a stage of the greatest and most stubbornly indissoluble team in the club’s history.

This is a group of players assembled with the Champions League in mind. Frank Lampard’s arrival predates that of Roman Abramovich by two years but Lampard’s club career has still been largely defined by the oligarch’s grand Euro-centred project. Not without success, too: Lampard has perhaps been the most faithful of Chelsea’s senior players to the diktats of the grand European design. If Didier Drogba enters Saturday’s final at the Allianz Arena with a sense of incompleteness ? red cards against Manchester United, Barcelona and Internazionale all dovetailed with decisive defeat ? Lampard has often been last man standing when Chelsea needed him most, excelling even in late-stage defeat. He scored against Monaco in the 2004 semi-final. He scored in the elimination of Barcelona the next year and again at the Camp Nou as Chelsea went out in 2006. In the 2008 final in Moscow he scored an equaliser and converted his penalty in the shootout but still fell narrowly short.

Aged 33, Lampard is now facing a grand-stage swansong in a competition that has often seen the best of him. “For Chelsea it would be the greatest achievement for sure,” Lampard says. “It would be a huge achievement. But I think every step has been a huge achievement ? the Barcelona game and the turnaround from Napoli. It would certainly be Chelsea’s best ever feat.”

For Lampard, defeat of Bayern Munich would also crown a career measured out in victory podiums that would include every A-list club trophy. “If we don’t win it, I’d have no regrets looking back. I’m very pleased and proud of the career I’ve had here. I’ve been very lucky to be at a great club and win a lot of things. But in terms of the full set on the table, it would be; you can’t hide away from that.”

Have the near misses preyed on his mind ahead of Saturday’s final? “A little bit. I think about all my successes and failures and sometimes the failures stick in your head as much as the wins. But you do move on. I’ve got nice memories of Moscow ? obviously not the ending but the occasion itself.

“Every year we get asked the same questions: ‘Is this the year, how inspired are you by the failures of years before?’ And every year we have failed, because we haven’t done it. We are one step closer to making it.”

English footballers are often accused of a kind of gilded insularity, of failing to see beyond the walls of their own self-propelling Premier League. Not so Lampard, who is able to offer his own forensic analysis of the challenge in central midfield on Saturday. “I watched [Bayern] play against Borussia Dortmund. [Luiz] Gustavo can’t play but in [Toni] Kroos and [Bastian] Schweinsteiger they have two fantastic midfield players. I can’t speak highly enough of them. Kroos has come on and really impressed me. And then [Thomas] Müller played behind the front man, so it depends on whether they want to be more attacking or they want to get someone in to hold. Either way it’s going to be a battleground because they are very strong in there.”

Blessed with a less experienced cartel of grizzled old hands there might have been a temptation for Chelsea’s intensity levels to drop after the defeat of Barcelona in the semi-finals, or at least to harbour expectations of a slightly less frazzling experience in the Allianz Arena.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Lampard says. “We’ve enjoyed the feeling of beating the best because Barcelona certainly are the best team, or they have certainly been the best for a long time. But we’re clever enough to know that if you lose the final people soon forget the semis and the quarters.”

Plus, of course, England’s sixth-best team this season must confront not only the Bundesliga runners-up but an enduring inferiority complex in knockout football, borne of successive defeats on penalties at national level, and shadowed by German football’s current buoyancy.

“I have huge respect for [German footballers],” Lampard says. “I grew up being frustrated by them as an England fan. You know how tough they are in certain situations. I worked with Michael Ballack closely and he was one of those players who you could probably take the wrong way in the beginning; but he was so determined, confident and wanted to win. I think that’s just a trait. The German teams I have played against all seem to have that individually.”

For Lampard this season has also been a test of mental fortitude, most notably in the seasonal low point of sitting on the bench watching Chelsea lose 3-1 in Napoli shortly before the invigorating departure of André Villas-Boas. Those dark days have been followed by a resurgence so extraordinary Lampard could yet see the bleakest moment of his Chelsea career followed by a career high three months later.

“It was tough when I wasn’t in the team and frustrating individually. I sat back at times and got the hump indoors, but I tried to carry on working hard and in the end it has turned around personally, but not quite to the full extent yet. If we win the final then I can probably answer that better.”

It is a prospect that will also dictate the tone of Chelsea’s summer. Even crouched beneath the footballing alp of Champions League success, the immediate future must be considered and defeat would mean Chelsea are excluded from the competition for the first time in the Abramovich era.

“It’s in the back of our minds,” Lampard admits. It seems likely Saturday night in Munich will bring either a late-blooming high, or usher in the kind of summer revamp that may finally uproot once and for all that clanking old guard.

Source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/football/rss/~3/UQ6YSUVGy1w/frank-lampard-chelsea-champions-league

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Prime minister launches Can Parent initiative to offer guidance and says he will push for childcare tax breaks

Parenting classes should be taken as seriously as driving lessons, David Cameron will declare as he announces measures to help the “nation-builders” raising Britain’s next generation.

The prime minister, whose Can Parent initiative is allowing parents to fund classes through £100 vouchers handed out at Boots in some areas, said his plans represented the “sensible state” rather than the nanny state. The parenting classes in 10 two-hour sessions will offer advice on nutrition, behaviour and development.

Cameron made it clear on Thursday that he would like to introduce tax breaks for childcare. He reportedly told a Manchester businesswoman after making a speech in the city that he was “hugely attracted to the idea of making childcare tax allowable”.

The prime minister will launch a strong defence of parenting classes. “It’s ludicrous that we should expect people to train for hours to drive a car or use a computer but, when it comes to looking after a baby, we tell people to just get on with it,” he will say.

Cameron, whose late son Ivan was severely paralysed, admits he would have appreciated guidance: “I would have loved more guidance when my children were babies. We’ve all been there when it’s the middle of the night, your child won’t stop crying and you don’t know what to do

“Parents are nation-builders. It’s through love and sheer hard work that we raise the next generation with the right values. That’s why this government is doing everything possible to support parents. This is not the nanny state ? it’s the sensible state.

“To those who say that government should forget about parenting and families and focus on the big, gritty issues, I’d say these are the big, gritty issues. Families don’t just shape us as individuals, they make a stronger society. That’s why supporting families is right at the top of our agenda ? and I’m going to make sure it stays that way.”

Parenting classes will take place as pilot schemes, backed by a new website, in Middlesbrough, Camden in north London and in High Peak, Derbyshire. A relationship support service will be piloted in York, Leeds, north Essex and in some London boroughs from July for all expectant parents and those with children up to the age of two.

The idea, drawn up by the prime minister’s departing policy guru Steve Hilton, is one response to the riots of last summer.

Frank Field, Labour’s former welfare minister, previously proposed parenting classes in a report for Cameron in December 2010. Field said they should be routinely offered to new parents. They “should be seen as something normal to do, rather than remedial, or something only for low income families”.

Field wrote: “Poor parenting exists across the income distribution, but tends to have less of an impact on better-off children where other factors provide greater protection against poor outcomes.”

He said that children’s centres and home visitors should encourage parents to attend classes “as a matter of course”. Health visitors should offer “to sign them up as a matter of routine, initially targeting this on those most likely to benefit”.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/may/18/parenting-lessons-not-nanny-state-david-cameron

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From the cauldron that houses the Olympic flame to the ‘new Routemaster’ London bus, Thomas Heatherwick’s innovative designs are more visible than ever

Thomas Heatherwick is well aware of the place the inventor occupies in the popular imagination. “There’s Willy Wonka,” he says. “And Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. And the word ‘mad’ is also often attached to the word ‘inventor.’” He pauses. “But the things that capture people’s imagination in arts or architecture or fashion are the most inventive things. The best entrepreneurs have invented new ideas for business. And for me, the art of something is very often in its invention.”

Heatherwick is more properly a designer than an inventor, but in the way he has put together the studio he has run for the last 18 years, where he has attempted to combine as many creative disciplines as possible, there is a least a hint of the spirit of invention. Engineers, architects, product designers, landscape designers, sculptors, photographers, stage designers and urban planners all work together.

Visiting his King’s Cross premises, prosaically tucked behind a Travelodge, is to encounter part hi-tech research lab, part art school campus and part, well, Wonka chocolate factory or Caractacus Potts workshop. Walking through it you weave between assemblages of twisted and shaped metal, wood, plastic and glass as well as a succession of intriguing models in various states of completion depicting putative pieces of furniture, bridges and even whole districts of Chinese cities.

The sense of creative inclusiveness is something that Heatherwick has sought since his time as a student at the Royal Academy. A 42-year-old who is infectiously evangelical about his work, he still remembers his frustration at encountering “sliced-up ghettos of thought” ? sculpture, architecture, fashion, embroidery, metalwork, product and furniture design all in separate departments ? “which I don’t believe are absolute. It’s just the way we categorise things and the way we chose to educate people.”

As he says in the introduction to Making, a lavish new book about his practice, published by Thames & Hudson to coincide with a retrospective exhibition of his work opening at the V&A, “I wanted to consider all design in three dimensions, not as multidisciplinary design, but as a single discipline: three dimensional design.” The fulfilment of Heatherwick’s grand, cross-pollinating ambitions has been appropriately abundant and varied. As a student he met Terence Conran, who became something of a mentor and later described Heatherwick as “the Leonardo da Vinci of our times”. Conran saw a Heatherwick plan for a gazebo made of two, 6m high curved stacks of birch plywood, and made its construction possible by inviting Heatherwick to work at his country home.

For the 1997 London fashion week, he was asked to dress the Harvey Nichols window display. The result was a vast, insect-like ribbon of illuminated wood that snaked in between the store and the street, smashing through all 12 windows. In 2000 came a bag for French luxury goods company Longchamp, made almost entirely out of a zipper that enabled it to double in size. In 2005 he completed a futuristic, shell-like East Beach Café at Littlehampton ? no small venture, as the tiny kiosk it replaced sold “£100,000 worth of extruded ice-cream every year”. His UK pavilion for the 2007 World Expo in Shanghai was the size of a small tower block and covered inside and out in silvery hair (60,000 25-foot-long acrylic rods). His studio designed the recently re-imagined London bus, and it will be a Heatherwick cauldron that houses the London Olympic flame.

While most people barely think about the design of the objects around them, for Heatherwick there was from the beginning a strongly programmed idea that things were for the making. His mother was an enameller and jeweller whose workshop was in the family home (“the route to my parents’ bedroom was past her enamelling powders and kilns”). His father was a musician and Royal Marine boxer with a fascination for futuristic housing prototypes. A grandmother started the Marks & Spencer textile studio before becoming a pioneer in the field of art therapy (“the idea that the visual world had an effect on people’s well-being was in there somewhere”). And a grandfather whose family had founded Jaeger and who also wrote about design for the 1951 Festival of Britain was obsessed with Victorian engineers. “The influences on me do rather add up,” he concedes.

As a child he would go to what was then called the Eastway cycle track in the Lea Valley ? now the site of the Olympic velodrome ? to watch “human-powered vehicle racing”. “It felt very Victorian in that people would come along with adapted devices in various stages of invention. There were bikes that you steered by leaning, and you’d see a guy disappear round a corner and then hobble back into view a few moments later covered in grazes. Someone else put on a fairing in an attempt to beat a world record. It was another example of people having ideas and putting them into practice.” The first time Heatherwick was paid for a project he spent his earnings on a recumbent bicycle similar to those he had seen at Eastway. He still rides it today, and bemoans the misapplication of racing geometry to modern recreational bikes, explaining how he wants both efficiency and ease of viewing position.

As to how he finds design solutions, he says the process is almost the opposite of having a “Eureka” moment. “It is more like solving a crime. The answer is there, and your job is to find it. So we go off and do bits of research that essentially eliminate suspects from the enquiry. And then you follow up leads and gradually narrow down the potential solutions. Ultimately what you’re left with is the answer. Even if you’d thought of it at the beginning of the process, you could never know it was right until the end.”

Not that his career has been all plain sailing. His commission for a commemorative sculpture for the 2002 Commonwealth games in Manchester, B of the Bang (representing the moment sprinter Linford Christie said he tried to get out of his blocks on hearing the starting pistol) was a 56m, 180-tonne structure featuring a starburst of 180 metal spikes. Repeated technical and safety concerns eventually led to its dismantling at significant financial cost to the studio.

Heatherwick points to a reluctance, especially in the UK, to get the best out of design thinking. “There seems to be a linear way of looking at things in Britain. If I showed them the UK Expo pavilion they would say, ‘hmmm, nice, but we don’t need a hairy town hall or a hairy apartment building’, rather than seeing that that was a specific response to an aspect of the brief and looking at the underlying thinking. It’s a perception that people have a style and it is all about the application of that style. Elsewhere in the world people saw what was achieved with one brief and wondered how we would respond to another.”

Heatherwick’s current big projects overseas include apartment buildings in Malaysia where, at the instigation of the city mayor who offered more floor space if the project benefited the whole city, they are “essentially creating a piece of rainforest, to convert the site from the perception of 90% building with a few trees round the edge, to 90% rainforest”. There is an even larger project to develop a half-kilometre block of Shanghai that will house the main arts district as well industrial buildings, high density housing, a park, shopping and office space.

He says that, generally, the bolder the ideas, the more enthusiastic people become. “When I initially proposed the Harvey Nichols project I was told that the head of building services would never allow it. No one had woven one object through the entire building. But he was actually excited to be offered something so different. People often complain that planners stop them from doing radical things. That’s not my experience at all and I think people use planners as an excuse. Planners, in general, do want something special to happen.”

His most notable recent UK projects have been a bio-mass power station on Teesside ? currently on hold waiting for a decision as to future government energy policy ? and the new London bus. He says buses have been subject to an “absurd number of regulatory changes over the years and there hasn’t been design thinking to balance them. We don’t want to reject any of the health and safety initiatives, but we did need to recalibrate the design in light of them so that we prioritise quality of experience and also give some dignity to the experience of travelling on a bus. It sounds pompous, but that is the way that people get around.”

He complains about how hand poles had become nuclear warning yellow (“they need a contrast level, but don’t need the maximum contrast level you could humanly achieve”); about the strip lighting (“that’s what a battery chicken farm has ? kinder lighting makes people feel that little bit better about themselves”); and individual bucket seats with built in crevices for accumulating crisp packets. “Travelling round London in a chic convertible sports car is actually the worst way to see the city. The best is from the upstairs of a bus, which is not only very democratic, it meditatively frees you from your normal existence. You get the bigger view.”

All this forms part of a wider interest in what he calls “public-ness. The idea of when you do, and don’t, expect something to be special. When you go into an art gallery you pretty much say: hit me with something meaningful. But a power station? Probably not, even though this one will be in the heart of a community and provide something as important as hot water.”

On the panel of a design prize last year, Heatherwick was instrumental in giving a special award to hair stylist Vidal Sassoon, who died this month. “He brought modernism to hair in an area of design that revolutionised women’s lives. He gave a speech about how he had known some of the figures from Bauhaus, and how architecture had influenced what he’d done. Where artistic inventiveness crops up is a moving target. There are times when that area has been painting, but it moves to many other places that need pushing forward at any point in time.”

Heatherwick has used the process of putting together the new book and exhibition to attempt to track that movement of inventiveness in his own work. “I started keeping a journal because of the shock at how quickly the past evaporates behind you like a vapour trail. The book and the V&A show have given us a chance to reflect. And while there is a risk of becoming sick of yourself when you look back at what you’ve done, trying to distil it will be very useful to us in the future. Although Making is a very big book, we haven’t actually built that many things. We want this process of looking back to act as inspiration for making more. It’s quite a moment. We can not only say ‘this is what we’ve done’, more importantly we can also ask: ‘what’s next?’”

? Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary is at the V&A from 31 May to 30 September.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/18/thomas-heatherwick-da-vinci-design

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Nato’s murderous occupation will feel the strength of American and Afghan solidarity in Chicago this weekend

Thousands of protesters are expected to descend on Chicago this weekend for Nato’s annual summit where Afghanistan will be top of the agenda. It promises to be one of the most important anti-war demonstrations of our generation. I will be unable to travel to attend, but from here in Kabul I can tell you that the whole country will be watching Chicago this weekend.

The protesters remind us that the US government is not representative of the US people. It’s encouraging to see so many willing to take action and stand up against this unjust, disastrous war.

Recently Barack Obama travelled to Kabul to meet Afghanistan’s so-called president, Hamid Karzai. Both leaders used this meeting to pretend that they are ending this war when they are really trying to prolong it. Obama knows that the American people are turning against the war, and both men also know that the Afghan people are against not only the war, but the continued occupation of their country. Both claim that the war will end in 2014, while saying simultaneously that American troops will remain in some capacity until 2024. As 2024 nears they will probably say they mean to remain in Afghanistan until 2034.

The reality is that the US and its Nato allies plan to dominate Afghanistan and the larger region militarily for the next generation. Their reasoning is geostrategic: to control our energy and mineral resources, and maintain military superiority over China and other competitors.

No one can believe leaders like Obama who say they are working for peace even as they continue the bombings, night raids and drone attacks that kill civilians every week ? sometimes every day ? in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

This weekend’s protests will likely face repression. Police in Chicago have reportedly spent $1m on riot-control equipment ahead of the summit. But it’s vital that people take to the streets to raise their voices. Here in Afghanistan, peace and women’s rights activists risk their lives to hold protests against both the occupation and the fundamentalist warlords.

President Obama lived in Chicago for many years; it is practically his hometown. Mine is in Afghanistan’s remote Farah province, where I was elected as an MP in 2005, at the age of 26. Because I spoke out and denounced the occupation, the warlords and the Taliban, I faced threats and assassination attempts ? and was kicked out of parliament in 2007.

Because I was banished, I was unable to stand in parliament and condemn a Nato bombing in May 2009 that killed about 150 people in Farah. Most of the victims of this massacre were women and children. I would like to ask Obama and his wife, Michelle, how they would feel if their own daughters were killed in this senseless and brutal manner?

Because this is the reality of the war in Afghanistan. This is the reality of what Nato does all around the world, and if Nato is allowed to stay and continue the war in Afghanistan, it will be emboldened to wage more wars against more people ? in the Middle East, in Africa and beyond.

We have many problems in Afghanistan ? fundamentalism, warlords, the Taliban ? but we will have a better chance to solve them if we have our self-determination, our freedom, our independence. Nato’s bombs will never deliver democracy and justice to Afghanistan or any other country.

The voices of protest in the streets of Chicago will be seen and heard in Kabul, and in Farah, and eventually in every corner of Afghanistan. As we say here, the truth is like the sun: when it comes out, nothing can block it.

I’m sorry I cannot be in Chicago this weekend physically. But I, along with millions of other Afghans, will be there in heart and in spirit, standing in solidarity with the demand that Nato withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

? Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/16/afghanistan-chicago-resistance-nato

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On Monday, flash-fiction specialist David Gaffney revealed the secrets of writing in the form. Scores of readers had a go. To mark National Flash Fiction Day, he looks at four of the best

After my article on how to write flash fiction was published on the blog on Monday, I was delighted to see people posting examples of their own micro-fiction. I read a few and was amazed at the variety of themes, styles and approaches people employed to create these little chunks of prose.

One story caught my eye right away. It began: “The wards are full of four smells”; I was smitten. Four smells. Can you smell four different smells at the same time? Do four smells mixed together become, as with blending colours, a new smell? Or do they stay separate? What were the four different smells, and how would the writer distinguish between them? Were the four smells going to be the main characters in the piece? This story gripped me utterly with just seven words. Yet, when I read the piece again, I found I had misread the line. It actually read: “The wards are full of foul smells.” I was suddenly less interested. That’s how these very short pieces can work and not work. They need to grab you and squeeze you and never let you go.

Here are four I picked out after a quick look through.

A Signature Design by beedubblyer

They sold handbags, elegant confections that cost more than Marla’s rent. Management forbade them from quoting prices verbally ? the sound alone could make buyers relent. Anyone heard to mention the lack of price tags was ushered to Tourists’ Corner, an alcove strewn with last season’s remnants.

When business was slow, Marla would tuck her long hair behind one ear, bend to bag level, and test the leather straps between her teeth. She couldn’t say why. If clients asked what the indentations were, she’d reply in a frosty tone otherwise reserved for Tourists. It’s a signature design.

? From a flash fiction series, Ninety-Six Girls

I like the idea of the teeth marks on the bags straps. It’s like, sometimes you just have to bite something to really understand it. In the case of this story, I would leave out the last few words about signature design and leave the ending as something weird that no one would understand. That way, a story can stay in your head forever. Why did the woman in the bag shop bite all the straps?

The Fine Art of Falling Through Clouds by dmcsween

You think about falling from an airplane. The jet banks. Your head against the plastic window, leaning against the turn trying to level yourself. If the window was open you’d be leaning out of it. Into whateversphere. 

But this time he’d really gone and done it. Was he blind with fear. Instead of seeing black, pure white. An instant later he realised that he was in a cloud.   

A pilot, amazingly calm in that way pilots are. In-flight emergency. It’s never happened to him before. It’s not going to cost him his life.

Don’t waste precious moments doing the math. Grasp a pen to write something on your forearm ? a name. Time enough for that. Rushing air aspirates ink into your face then scalp and flapping hair. It smells like kindergarten. And you’ve become an amateur in the fine art of falling through clouds.

I liked the feeling of falling in this dreamlike story, and I liked the urge to write something on his arm as he fell, as if he had become his own personal format on which he would express his final message.

The Butcher Boy by graceandreacchi

The butcher boy has small, delicate hands, they wield a cleaver with wonderful speed and dexterity. Just watch him get to work. First he strips me naked, then gently lowers me onto the cold slab of white marble. I lie down without a murmur, I lie down like a lamb, strictly for the purposes of demonstration, you understand. With a few easy strokes he separates the upper and lower limbs from the body, stacks them neatly to one side. With an elegant chop he cleaves the head from the neck, takes it up gently and places it upright at the head of the counter. From this vantage point I now have a much better view of the action. I see he has laid aside the cleaver and now has a knife in his hand. It darts in and out, in and out of the soft red and white body. Neat incisions expose the brightly gleaming purple organs yellow sheen of fat a bone or two. The butcher boy reaches into the open chest cavity and removes the heart, which, curiously, continues to beat. (Please remember this is only a demonstration.) He removes the lungs and liver. Now he flips me over and with two masterstrokes lightly separates the crumpled wings from the back. The wings are black in colour and very soft to the touch, he holds them for a moment, stroking them between thumb and forefinger. The butcher boy has enormous sad eyes but I can’t tell you what he is thinking. No animals were hurt.

I’m not sure what’s going on in this one, but I liked the idea that someone was enjoying being stripped naked, laid on a slab, and chopped up. It’s someone paying you some attention, after all, isn’t it?

Gary Neville Starts Asking Questions by ennuisea

Gary Neville has just finished reading the Communist Manifesto. He’s now read it seven times over the last 10 years. It’s his favourite book. He goes out. He starts asking questions. He goes to his local supermarket and wonders about all the prices. Why is a tin of baked beans cheaper than a bag of beans of the same weight? He gets his friends from TalkSport to organise a Gary Neville investigation with representatives from the supermarket.

The branch manager and several staff members are confused when Gary Neville turns up wearing a construction worker’s hard hat. But filming begins and the reps take him through the aisles. What are the crisp packets made of? Do the lights affect the vegetables’ shelf life? What’s under the floor? How many people can fit in here? After each response from the branch manager Gary Neville’s right hand rises to his chin and he says: “Interesting”.

Newspapers catch wind of Gary Neville’s investigation and are somewhat amused and perplexed. He gives interviews to the Sun and Daily Mirror. To these interviews he wears a lab coat and safety goggles. He has come prepared with pie charts and graphs that comprise his research. He is ready. But he is not taken seriously. They giggle and are embarrassed. They think him mad.

In the weeks that followed, there were several sightings of Gary Neville. One man in Dorking said he saw Gary Neville pushing a plastic bag full of potatoes on a swing in a local park. Another claimed to have seen him dressed as a boy scout munching carrots while conducting an animated conversation about the economy with a self-service machine in Tesco, New Malden. A member of staff at a KFC branch in Bogna Regis says that Gary Neville came in singing Material Girl by Madonna, holding a leek as a microphone. When asked for his order, he stopped singing, dropped the vegetable and tried to do a robot dance, which wasn’t very good, then put his hands under his armpits and did a chicken impression all the way out the door and down the street.

A week after this last sighting, Gary Neville shot himself in his head. And lying now in his hospital bed, it is hard to tell if he’s alive or if he is dead.

I like this one because it’s very funny and we are immediately drawn in ? the idea of celebrities behaving oddly in the normal world is intriguing. Celebrities are our avant garde; they go ahead of us and try things out in public so we can all see what might happen if we did it. A celebrity can become shorthand for a character type, a kind of everyman. So in very short fiction, using a celebrity can be a very quick way to get across an intense idea of character, soul, history and potential in just a few words. Get them right, and these celebrity characters speak volumes just by walking into the room. From their shoes alone, you can know who they are and what they think about the Kindle or city mayors, reduced-fat sausages or the concept of love at first sight.

It’s not easy cramming condensed, powerful meaning into a few words. But song writers do it all the time. Look at Wichita Lineman. And consider this line from a song by Blue Boy: “Remember me? I’m the one who’s got your baby’s eyes.” Think about how much meaning there is in that single phrase. And then consider that it’s another misheard line, so I’m back to where I started.

Finally, here’s a comment I found on YouTube while checking the lyrics above. It made me wonder; is this a short-short story?

How do you raise your kids in the ghetto? Feed one, don’t have another. Or have some that are really good at nicking stuff and not getting caught. Me and my two brothers weren’t, all us done time. Thanks Mum, I’m the eldest ? should’ve drown the other two in bucket. Come to think of it we didn’t even live in a ghetto, we’re just idiots.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/16/flash-of-inspiration-micro-fiction

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