Notebook
One of the representative figures of our age is the highly intelligent and skilled 'expert' who Is a moral and political half-wit ; his invariable, Plaintive cry is, 'If only I had, known : " Only I'd known that the bomb would be used I wouldn't have designed it.' The latest ex ample comes over highrise blocks of council flats. The chairman of the housing management committee of t he G LC has announced his discovery that tower blocks are unfit for People, especially children, to live in. That is a conclusion an intelligent ten-year°, ld could have come to at any time over the last two decades, the period when the conventional wisdoin of planners, bureaucrats, architects and social engineers had it that tower blocks were in every possible way the answer to housing problems. Since the experts have been so regularly wrong in the Past it seems at least possible that they will be Proved wrong again. Just as Mr Judge described u the 'biggest blunder' in postwar railway we learn that 2,500 miles of such „ track as remains in this country are threatened. How long will it be before some clever, important high official admits that th e,destruction of the railways was a particularly ghastly
blunder ?
It was a nice coincidence that had Mr Judge speaking on the day of the 'topping out of new the n... National Westminster Bank build-kg In the City. The Nat West building—or t !ue Seifert Memorial, as I like to anticipate— !s the tallest building in the country. From its sum . mlt seven counties can be seen (so, Presumably and alas, it can be seen from seven counties). How long will it stand ? A ,ev" Years back someone suggested that no built buildings over ten storeys should be built and that those standing should be f„raduallY demolished. The reaction of lead'18 architects was most satisfying: a number ,..v1,113. le to the papers in terms of outrage
■ vnieb
would have seemed intemperate if the saggestion had been to hang a large part of the Population. There can be few gaps of in ct °InPrehension as wide as that between cone.11113°rarY architects and the rest of us: they sMPIY have no idea how much they are hated. Any architect writing to protest might care to Preface his reply with a list of ten Shown buildings in London which can be flown with pride to visitors.
CommAntong the horror stories put out about the ijri Market were rumours that various i English (or British) delicacies would be f-nned: kippers and marmalade, it was said , ell under different bruxellois proscriptions; ..and, even worse, English beer would disappear as our traditional hops were replaced by unisex or hermaphrodite or homosexual
hops (I forget). I am still prepared to believe these stories, but I cannot pretend to deplore the European Commission's threat to 'ice cream.' Most of the stuff sold by that name should have been banished tong since under the Trade Descriptions Act, if not sterner legislation. It is a significant reflection on British governing attitudes that there are far greater difficulties put in the way of those wishing to sell drink than to sell food. It can be very hard to get a licence to open a bottle of beer or whisky (which do nothing but good in reasonable doses) but easy to open a 'restaurant' selling foodstuffs bearing no relation to their name, if they are not actually poisonous.
Curiouser and curiouser: two items in the Guardian caught my eye last week. In a lighthearted article on the hundredth issue of the New Left Review, Richard Gott talks of the NLR's continued existence 'in a country where intellectual endeavour is still bedevilled by pragmatism and empiricism the voice of Galileo echoing without resonance in the land of the flat-earthers.' Something wrong there. Isn't the voice of Galileo precisely the voice of pragmatism and empiricism? The logic of Mr Gott's description is that the neo-semiMarxists of the NLR are flat-earthers, not, one suspects, quite what he had in mind. The next day a Guardian leader fretted about the possible takeover of constituency Labour Parties by 'a relatively small group of politically motivated men and women.'
Sir Harold's catchy phrase has been used in puzzling contexts, but never as puzzling as this. Where should one expect to find politically motivated men if not as active members of a political party ? The National Union of Journalists recently conducted a petty campaign of industrial action (which ended in farcical defeat) against the BBC. Theca use of contention was the use of a greengrocer as a part-time football commentator on local radio. The best arguments for a closed shop in journalism are not very plausible; they break down completely if they lead to a position where only 'journalists' can write or broadcast. Logically that would mean not only that coalminers could not write in the New Statesman but that a Chichele Professor could not review a history book. Still, the hard-line NUJ argument has recently received powerful impetus with the start of a column on music in the Daily Express. In the words of a colleague, 'It is, as you would expect, utterly commonplace.' There are professional journalists better qualified to write about music than its author, Mr Edward Heath, and it is not easy to see what the justification is for hiring him. Perhaps his column will dwindle away anyway : it was billed as 'weekly' to begin with but when, the following week, it did not appear, the Express said that there had been a misunderstanding about its regularity.
After last week's ultra-authentic performance of the St John Passion which others enjoyed more than I did, we discussed the new craze for 'authenticity' in the performance of baroque music. I delicately expressed my preference for woodwinds that play in tune and said that I saw no particular virtue in playing Bach with chamber-musical groups. Someone said, 'I suppose you want to hear 1-faydn quartets played by string orchestras,' which shut me up for a moment. But that is not a reasonable comparison. The analogy for playing Haydn with three dozen strings would be to have Shakespeare's sonnets recited by speaking choruses (and why not in either case? except that they are both pretty bloody silly ideas). The analogy with the new style in Bach performance would be to say that as women's roles in Shakespeare's day were taken by boys in travesty, no actress should ever appear on the Shakespearian stage, which would be a very silly idea indeed.
The newly formed Danish Cabinet includes one fascinating portfolio, that of the Minister for the Church and Greenland. Interested to know how long this office had been in existence I turned to one of my most valued reference books, the Almanach de Gotha for 1877. The section on Denmark produced nothing of interest, but there was a delightful discovery under Austria-Hungary. I knew that the British consul in Trieste a hundred years ago had been Richard Burton, but not that the Governor of Upper Austria had been Baron Widenfeld (sic, no doubt a misprint). The British section is full of yet more premonitions, with the House of Commons debating royal finances and seeking vainly for a solution to the Irish troubles. A hundred years is a short time in politics.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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