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The Thinking Allowed Newsletter: Merry humbug

Post categories: Thinking Allowed, newsletter

Laurie Taylor 14:21, Wednesday, 21 December 2011

Ed's note: Thinking Allowed is on at 4pm Wednesday 21 December and is available shortly afterwards on the website and as a podcast - PM.

Child and mother meeting Father Christmas

My father hated Christmas and all its trimmings. He detested the infantilism it imposed upon otherwise sensible people: the silly songs and daft customs, the hypocritical exchange of good wishes, the giving and receiving of unwanted and ill-chosen presents.

I can still remember going home to Liverpool in the late 1970s. For some reason or other I'd decided that year to do my very best to overcome my father's traditional aversion to the season by choosing very expensive and very appropriate gifts.

When I arrived at the front door I was so laden with parcels that I had to ask my new wife to ring the bell. From the time it took for there to be any response and then from the long moments of waiting while bolts were withdrawn and latches undone, I guessed it was my father who'd been dispatched from the kitchen to greet us.

As the unlocking continued I gave my new wife a big re-assuring smile. She'd been warned about my father's seasonal churlishness but I still worried that she'd not quite grasped the depth of his distaste.

The door finally opened and revealed dad in his dressing gown. Hadn't he known that we were coming? Didn't he realise that we'd driven the best part of two hundred miles from London that morning? Why hadn't he made at least some sort of effort?

But there was worse to come. Without saying a word he looked down at the parcels we were carrying, at the carefully chosen, beautifully wrapped and perfectly labelled presents that my wife and I held in our hands.

Not one of these niceties, these careful acts of discrimination, impinged upon my father. With his gaze still fixed firmly on our handfuls of gifts, he nodded his head sorrowfully and said "You know, Laurence. You really shouldn't have bothered with all this muck."

I suspect that dad would have been rather pleased with our Christmas edition of Thinking Allowed. We have nothing whatsoever on the anthropology or sociology of mince pies or mistletoe or mumming. Instead we have a serious sit-up straight, put-down-those crackers discussion about two therapeutic ideologies - the anti-institutional psychiatric movement associated with R D Laing and the psychoanalytic movement founded by Sigmund Freud. How do we account for the dramatic rise and fall of the former and the extraordinary endurance of the latter.

That's all at four o'clock today or on our podcast.

One last thing. Because I share my late father's lack of religious belief, I can feel pretty certain that he's not now looking down upon me as I wish all my newsletter readers a very happy Christmas.

Laurie Taylor presents Thinking Allowed

You can listen to this episode of Thinking Allowed on the Radio 4 website, subscribe or download the podcast.
Sign up for Laurie's Thinking Allowed newsletter.
You can find out more about the programme's new partnership with The Open University and related features by going to their website.
The picture is from the BBC's archives. The original caption info reads: "Shipmates Ashore: Toys for Children of Merchant Navy Men From Nigerian Listeners 20/12/1944 © BBC Picture shows child and mother meeting Father Christmas. Several crates of toys made by the craftsmen of Iket Ekpene, Nigeria, and paid for by the Chiefs and people were sent at Christmas to Doris Hare, hostess of the BBC programme for the Merchant Navy Shipmates Ashore. London's share of the toys were distributed to orphans of British Merchant Navymen at a party at the Merchant Navy Club which was recorded."

Women and homelessness: Radio 4 St Martin-in-the-Fields Christmas Appeal

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Post categories: Christmas, R4XmasAppeal, Radio 4, Radio 4 Appeal, St Martin's, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Woman's Hour, Xmas

Anna McNamee 11:06, Wednesday, 21 December 2011

The morning after I had visited The Connection at St Martins, I woke up at 5 am and wasn't able to fall back asleep. It was dark and cold - the timer on the central heating not yet having kicked in - and outside icy raindrops were pinging off the bedroom window. I pulled the duvet up to my chin and remembered Jo who had told me it's early winter mornings that are the hardest when you are sleeping rough.

By that time of the morning, Jo told me, no matter how many layers you've wrapped yourself in, the cold of the pavement has seeped in, through your flesh and into your bones. If you wake up too early, and can't fall back asleep - before the day centre, the underground, libraries or anywhere else that might provide shelter is open - then you're stuck: cold and shivering.

If you've got enough money you might go and get a coffee and sit in McDonalds for a little while, she said. But you have to leave after half an hour which is hardly long enough to chase the chill from your feet or hands.

Tom slept rough for two years before recently having found accommodation. Women joke, she said, about how the female body isn't made for sleeping on hard flat surfaces. Men are made "straight up and and down", perfectly adapted for lying on concrete. Women have too many curves to get comfortable and end up getting horrendous backache.

Early winter mornings, I was told, are even worse than the nights, when passers-by give you a kick, just for the heck of it. Which is most nights, Sarah told me. But not as often as some lairy idiot sees fit to yell insults at you because maybe you haven't had the chance to wash recently and, maybe, you're looking a bit rough.

But not as bad, the women say, as those many nights when, despite your best efforts to hide your gender, you're subject to unwanted sexual attention. All the women have experience of that and know of others who have been sexually assaulted or raped. Because, let's face it, Sarah says, when you're a woman living on the streets it's not just the cold you're vulnerable to.

I didn't expect any of the women I interviewed for Woman's Hour in connection with the Radio 4 Appeal to tell me that rough sleeping or being homeless was "easy".

What did surprise me was how, at certain times in their life, sleeping on the street - even with the cold, the discomfort, the abuse and the constant fear of violence - was still preferable to the "home" situation they had left behind. Whether it was a violent partner, mental illness, a bereavement or some kind of other family breakdown; whether they had been evicted, abused or fighting alcohol or drug dependency issues, the homeless situation these women found themselves in was, often, the only option they felt they had.

What I learned from Jo, Tom and Sarah was that the reasons a woman becomes and sometimes continues to be homeless can be very complex. And that those reasons are always, like the women themselves, very individual.

There is no such thing as a "typical" homeless person.

And ultimately, lying there in my warm bed, snug and dry at five o'clock in the morning, it's hard not to feel how fortunate I have been that I have not faced the same challenges or hurdles they have, because the truth is, it could have been me. Given the wrong combination of circumstances, it could be any of us.

Anna McNamee is a reporter on Radio 4's Woman's Hour and a presenter on the BBC World Service arts programme, The Strand.

Anna's report on women and homelessness is on Woman's Hour on Thursday 22 December.
Details of how to donate online or by post to the Radio 4 Christmas Appeal are here.

The Life of Vaclav Havel

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Post categories: Gillian Reynolds

Paul Murphy 12:25, Tuesday, 20 December 2011

In today's Telegraph the radio critic Gillian Reynolds wrote about The Life of Vaclav Havel which was broadcast on Sunday evening following the news of the death of the Czech playwright and politician earlier that day:

"Born into a professional Czech family, persecuted because of it, the experience developed in him (Havel) a sense of the absurdity of the world, a love of logically constructed arguments to support nonsense, exactly the qualities that made his plays so potent. I remember hearing his The Memorandum on Radio 3, way back in the days when the whole Communist bloc seemed frozen and far away.
Its translation into English was a BBC commission and a far-sighted one, the blackest of bureaucracies rendered farcical for a worldwide audience. It made Czech life instantly familiar, grim but graspable, scary but absurd. ...BBC radio continued to broadcast Havel's plays, from when they had to be smuggled out right up to the one that was about a man who unexpectedly becomes his country's president, as Havel did. The plays will live long after their political history has become footnotes."

Paul Murphy is the editor of the Radio 4 blog.

You can hear The Life of Vaclav Havel on the Radio 4 website for the next five days or download the programme to keep from the Profile podcast.
This week's Radio 3 Arts and Ideas podcast is a special edition devoted to archive material, reviews and interviews about Vaclav Havel and the journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens who died last week.
There are plans to broadcast a selection of the plays of Vaclav Havel on BBC Radio in the New Year.

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