Saturday, October 13, 2007
Nirpal Dhaliwal - Watch Part Sixteen - So it's come to this?
Parts One to Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen, Part Fifteen.
So, I've just watched the last episode of The Sopranos (I'm way behind on all my telly watching) and I'm in a bad mood, but also in the mood for a bit of self-deception and mistaken beliefs as to what makes someone a man in this modern age. But, sadly, there's not much to see there either. Liz'n'Nirps seem to be keeping largely schtum on their private lives and each other, turning out articles on current affairs or fashion. If the terms of the divorce include agreements not to refer to one another in print then we might be facing a sudden blackout on this column too.
There's not much to say on the state of Nirpal in September. Mostly articles about culture, one slamming Boris Johnson as a racist rather than a cheerful eccentric, but there is this on the 7th:
What divorce and Keira told me about England ; For one writer it took the new film of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement to reveal the deeper truth behind English reserve
Evening Standard (London); Sep 7, 2007;
RARELY have I seen a film that's so good it made me rethink my life. But watching Atonement, the film of Ian McEwan's novel, did exactly that. It is a great film about Englishness, that made me reflect on my relationships with the English and made me wonder whether I can truly be one of them.
I've tended to regard English reserve and understatement as a cold and aloof pose of superiority that implied a lack of human concern. Watching James McAvoy play Atonement's hero, Robbie Turner, I saw how this reserve is cultural and, in fact, a language of its own, full of emotional intensity and texture, that when expressed is all the more telling for having leaked through the cracks of self- control.
Readers of the novel will already know the plot but there is a real treat in store at the cinema if, like me, you come to it new. A victim of injustice, prised apart from the woman he loves, Robbie forced lumps into my throat as he stifled tears and measured his temper. His restraint displayed more rage, longing and despair than any character I can remember. He showed that the English are a people seething with passion but who express it in a way that others barely perceive.
Born in England, I am English. But I was raised by Indians in a neighbourhood where most of the people I knew were immigrants or their children. My education in English mores and mannerisms came mostly from TV and schoolteachers. Though I have native English friends and married an English woman, it is only now that I realise how I've misread them.
I was raised around tactile people whose emotional lives were writ large on their faces, who didn't consider, let alone censor their feelings before shooting their mouths off. In McEwan's novel, the only moment in which a character gives full vent to her emotions is when Robbie's working-class mother shrieks and thrashes the police car that is taking away her son for a crime he didn't commit: an exceptional expression of elemental feelings that cannot be withheld.
Re-reading that passage I smiled, remembering how it only took the discovery of a packet of cigarettes under my bed to send my mum into a similar fit. Anyone who thinks that Bollywood films are unfeasibly melodramatic doesn't know Indians and certainly not Punjabis.
My grandparents' generation of Punjabi Sikhs were earthy, peasant stock, and my parents inherited their operatic emotionality. Feelings ran riot in my family: laughter and raging arguments rang through the house in vast and equal measures. I'd be screamed at for minor misbehaviour, but also cuddled, petted and physically cherished. To this day, I hug and kiss my parents and siblings on saying hello and goodbye. My personality contains many ancestral traits, though now expressed in a cockney accent: I am gobby, sentimental, habitually foul-mouthed, and effusive.
For those from more expressive cultures, the English can seem like they exist behind a pane of glass impossible to grasp and connect with. My first real immersion in English life was at university, where I often felt alone and isolated. But much of it was due to my inability to appreciate the warmth that was extended to me, articulated in a muted form that was wholly foreign.
On first meeting, Indians will ask one another intimate questions about their family and marital status, their parents' occupations, and their own hopes and ambitions. The English, however, tiptoe into their relationships, and the seemingly anodyne conversations I heard the other students have about the weather, their schools and pets were in fact a subtle creation of rapport and a gauging of mutual compatibility that assessed social background and values. It was a code I couldn't read.
I regarded it as empty, platitudinous chitchat, and subsequently overlooked many people's good-natured efforts to befriend me.
The only other Asian on my degree course had been to public school. In my company he would be openly warm and expressive, but in a group he'd become restrained and impersonal, while I remained as fulsome as ever.
I thought he did this because he was embarrassed by me and wanted to disassociate himself; but he was simply engaging with the English in their language and making them at ease. My own tempestuous nature and instinctive over-familiarity often unsettled them.
They found it overbearing and intrusive, and I would regard their recoiling from my manner as a personal rejection.
My misunderstanding of Englishness even contributed to the failure of my marriage. I resented my wife for what I saw as detachment and indifference, when her concern was constantly expressed in words and gestures that were below my emotional radar.
For instance, when a close friend of mine died, I was bitter at the lack of emotion she displayed at the funeral. My friend had been black, as were most of the other mourners, and people I hardly knew took me in their arms and comforted me, while my wife stood aside seeming impassive. But she was the daughter of a former army captain, raised to display emotion with discrimination and formality. While I begrudged the absence of a hug from her, I had overlooked the enormous sentiment she had expressed by taking time and exercising her taste to select a beautiful wreath. It was a cultural symbol that had been lost on me.
My marriage failed my decree nisi has just come through and I'd thought I'd be making flippant jokes this week about how my divorce had marked another day of Indian independence.
But having seen Atonement, I have instead contemplated the theme of Englishness and how I've often woefully misjudged it.
I also know it is a subject that I am only just beginning to grasp. Now in my thirties, having experienced some of life's major issues love, death, divorce I've finally acquired the sobriety and evenness to appreciate the understated nuances of the English culture that, until now, have been almost invisible to me.
The essence of the English exists in their silences, in how they load quiet actions with extraordinary content.
McEwan captures this beautifully in a passage in which Robbie briefly meets Cecilia the love of his life after being separated for years. Unable to speak, he takes her hand just before parting. "The gesture had to carry all that had not been said," writes McEwan, "and she answered it with pressure from her own hand." The English are hard on themselves for not making more of an effort to understand other cultures; but it should also be stated just how poorly others understand them.
Meanwhile, Liz Jones writes:
MUST they subsidise motherhood as if it were dormant farmland?
The Mail on Sunday (London); Sep 16, 2007;
WHAT a strange week. First the Government pledges 120 for pregnant women to encourage them to eat more fruit and veg.
Next thing you know, David Cameron distances himself from a Tory Policy Group environmental report, which controversially suggests a ban on free supermarket car parks, saying his priority is to ensure families can still make ends meet.
I can keep quiet no longer.
I am going to say the unsayable.
There is no point fiddling while Rome (or London or Beijing) burns fossil fuels by suggesting we all boil less water in our kettles and switch off our plasma screens at source.
The only way to be really green is not to have children.
Of course, this is a terribly non- PC thing to bring up. Mothers are the last sacred cows in our society, untouchable, beyond reproach. When I was the editor of a woman's magazine, my then fashion director told me she was off on her second maternity leave in two years, to which I responded: 'Oh, that's annoying.' From the looks on the faces of the assembled (female) staff, you'd have thought I'd made a racist remark.
No one is allowed to complain when they are left to pick up the slack as every mum in the office hares out of the door at six on the dot, millions of plastic carrier bags in tow, hell-bent on creating a nappy mountain. No one is allowed to yawn while a new mum, who surely made this particular rod for her own back in the first place, complains about lack of sleep, or time, or affordable child care, or a big enough house.
And while I can understand the need to have one child, or even two, why on Earth have three, or four? No one is allowed to even raise an eyebrow at the Ruth Kellys and Nicola Horlicks of this world; au contraire, they are labelled Superwomen.
And don't try to tell me that men these days are more involved.
You only have to read Alastair Campbell's diaries to realise that children are mere dots on the horizon; good God, what woman, with Campbell's job and offspring, would find time to go swimming and train for a marathon? When I asked a friend of mine with three boys why she was trying for a fourth child, she responded indignantly: 'I just really want a girl.' Why on Earth does the Government subsidise motherhood as if it were dormant farmland, with lump sums of 250 at birth, free IVF, the right to an expensive home birth and help with child care, when in reality it is fuelling a society in which we all think we deserve everything, from a new car to an exotic holiday to an iPhone or a baby of the right sex, no matter the (environmental) cost?
Isn't parenthood just rampant consumerism? Like leaving the tap running while you floss, only a million times worse? A brood is the ultimate badge of goodness, used by everyone from the Blairs to the Camerons to the horrid, high-maintenance mum who lives not far from me, who is always posting 'Do not ring bell, baby sleeping!' signs on her front door, but then takes the wretched child to a fashion show where the decibels surpass rock-concert levels.
The idea that only parents make up the hard-working backbone of Britain, that the singletons of this world are frivolous and selfish, is nonsense.
I have just read Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson, a fascinating book that celebrates women who, having been forced to abandon expectations of becoming wives and mums due to the shortage dormant farmland of men after two world wars, became married to their careers in nursing and teaching instead, and were amazing, inspiring, dedicated.
I know that after 40 years of feminism, we are all supposed to toe the 'having-it-all' line, but I think too often a child is conceived as a status symbol, to prove that you can.
I have a friend who is a very powerful magazine editor, and she told me that when she hit her early 40s she earned more money than she could possibly spend, felt her life lacked meaning and so decided to have a child as 'something to do'. This is worse than catching a plane, surely? OW, I know I will be accused of sour grapes, and I'm the first to admit that while on the outside I might still wear Balenciaga jodhpurs and toe-rings, on the inside my womb is now lined with a doily.
I left motherhood too late not because I was trying to shatter the glass ceiling, but because I never met the right man.
I have ended up child-free not by design but by misfortune, so shouldn't I at least get the 120 towards cat food? Or a special designated parking space right by the door at Waitrose, with 'Barren, likely to die alone' daubed in white paint on the ground as my reward for not contributing to the predicted global population of 7.6 billion by 2020? Probably not, but I can dream.
So, where do we go from here?
So, I've just watched the last episode of The Sopranos (I'm way behind on all my telly watching) and I'm in a bad mood, but also in the mood for a bit of self-deception and mistaken beliefs as to what makes someone a man in this modern age. But, sadly, there's not much to see there either. Liz'n'Nirps seem to be keeping largely schtum on their private lives and each other, turning out articles on current affairs or fashion. If the terms of the divorce include agreements not to refer to one another in print then we might be facing a sudden blackout on this column too.
There's not much to say on the state of Nirpal in September. Mostly articles about culture, one slamming Boris Johnson as a racist rather than a cheerful eccentric, but there is this on the 7th:
What divorce and Keira told me about England ; For one writer it took the new film of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement to reveal the deeper truth behind English reserve
Evening Standard (London); Sep 7, 2007;
RARELY have I seen a film that's so good it made me rethink my life. But watching Atonement, the film of Ian McEwan's novel, did exactly that. It is a great film about Englishness, that made me reflect on my relationships with the English and made me wonder whether I can truly be one of them.
I've tended to regard English reserve and understatement as a cold and aloof pose of superiority that implied a lack of human concern. Watching James McAvoy play Atonement's hero, Robbie Turner, I saw how this reserve is cultural and, in fact, a language of its own, full of emotional intensity and texture, that when expressed is all the more telling for having leaked through the cracks of self- control.
Readers of the novel will already know the plot but there is a real treat in store at the cinema if, like me, you come to it new. A victim of injustice, prised apart from the woman he loves, Robbie forced lumps into my throat as he stifled tears and measured his temper. His restraint displayed more rage, longing and despair than any character I can remember. He showed that the English are a people seething with passion but who express it in a way that others barely perceive.
Born in England, I am English. But I was raised by Indians in a neighbourhood where most of the people I knew were immigrants or their children. My education in English mores and mannerisms came mostly from TV and schoolteachers. Though I have native English friends and married an English woman, it is only now that I realise how I've misread them.
I was raised around tactile people whose emotional lives were writ large on their faces, who didn't consider, let alone censor their feelings before shooting their mouths off. In McEwan's novel, the only moment in which a character gives full vent to her emotions is when Robbie's working-class mother shrieks and thrashes the police car that is taking away her son for a crime he didn't commit: an exceptional expression of elemental feelings that cannot be withheld.
Re-reading that passage I smiled, remembering how it only took the discovery of a packet of cigarettes under my bed to send my mum into a similar fit. Anyone who thinks that Bollywood films are unfeasibly melodramatic doesn't know Indians and certainly not Punjabis.
My grandparents' generation of Punjabi Sikhs were earthy, peasant stock, and my parents inherited their operatic emotionality. Feelings ran riot in my family: laughter and raging arguments rang through the house in vast and equal measures. I'd be screamed at for minor misbehaviour, but also cuddled, petted and physically cherished. To this day, I hug and kiss my parents and siblings on saying hello and goodbye. My personality contains many ancestral traits, though now expressed in a cockney accent: I am gobby, sentimental, habitually foul-mouthed, and effusive.
For those from more expressive cultures, the English can seem like they exist behind a pane of glass impossible to grasp and connect with. My first real immersion in English life was at university, where I often felt alone and isolated. But much of it was due to my inability to appreciate the warmth that was extended to me, articulated in a muted form that was wholly foreign.
On first meeting, Indians will ask one another intimate questions about their family and marital status, their parents' occupations, and their own hopes and ambitions. The English, however, tiptoe into their relationships, and the seemingly anodyne conversations I heard the other students have about the weather, their schools and pets were in fact a subtle creation of rapport and a gauging of mutual compatibility that assessed social background and values. It was a code I couldn't read.
I regarded it as empty, platitudinous chitchat, and subsequently overlooked many people's good-natured efforts to befriend me.
The only other Asian on my degree course had been to public school. In my company he would be openly warm and expressive, but in a group he'd become restrained and impersonal, while I remained as fulsome as ever.
I thought he did this because he was embarrassed by me and wanted to disassociate himself; but he was simply engaging with the English in their language and making them at ease. My own tempestuous nature and instinctive over-familiarity often unsettled them.
They found it overbearing and intrusive, and I would regard their recoiling from my manner as a personal rejection.
My misunderstanding of Englishness even contributed to the failure of my marriage. I resented my wife for what I saw as detachment and indifference, when her concern was constantly expressed in words and gestures that were below my emotional radar.
For instance, when a close friend of mine died, I was bitter at the lack of emotion she displayed at the funeral. My friend had been black, as were most of the other mourners, and people I hardly knew took me in their arms and comforted me, while my wife stood aside seeming impassive. But she was the daughter of a former army captain, raised to display emotion with discrimination and formality. While I begrudged the absence of a hug from her, I had overlooked the enormous sentiment she had expressed by taking time and exercising her taste to select a beautiful wreath. It was a cultural symbol that had been lost on me.
My marriage failed my decree nisi has just come through and I'd thought I'd be making flippant jokes this week about how my divorce had marked another day of Indian independence.
But having seen Atonement, I have instead contemplated the theme of Englishness and how I've often woefully misjudged it.
I also know it is a subject that I am only just beginning to grasp. Now in my thirties, having experienced some of life's major issues love, death, divorce I've finally acquired the sobriety and evenness to appreciate the understated nuances of the English culture that, until now, have been almost invisible to me.
The essence of the English exists in their silences, in how they load quiet actions with extraordinary content.
McEwan captures this beautifully in a passage in which Robbie briefly meets Cecilia the love of his life after being separated for years. Unable to speak, he takes her hand just before parting. "The gesture had to carry all that had not been said," writes McEwan, "and she answered it with pressure from her own hand." The English are hard on themselves for not making more of an effort to understand other cultures; but it should also be stated just how poorly others understand them.
Meanwhile, Liz Jones writes:
MUST they subsidise motherhood as if it were dormant farmland?
The Mail on Sunday (London); Sep 16, 2007;
WHAT a strange week. First the Government pledges 120 for pregnant women to encourage them to eat more fruit and veg.
Next thing you know, David Cameron distances himself from a Tory Policy Group environmental report, which controversially suggests a ban on free supermarket car parks, saying his priority is to ensure families can still make ends meet.
I can keep quiet no longer.
I am going to say the unsayable.
There is no point fiddling while Rome (or London or Beijing) burns fossil fuels by suggesting we all boil less water in our kettles and switch off our plasma screens at source.
The only way to be really green is not to have children.
Of course, this is a terribly non- PC thing to bring up. Mothers are the last sacred cows in our society, untouchable, beyond reproach. When I was the editor of a woman's magazine, my then fashion director told me she was off on her second maternity leave in two years, to which I responded: 'Oh, that's annoying.' From the looks on the faces of the assembled (female) staff, you'd have thought I'd made a racist remark.
No one is allowed to complain when they are left to pick up the slack as every mum in the office hares out of the door at six on the dot, millions of plastic carrier bags in tow, hell-bent on creating a nappy mountain. No one is allowed to yawn while a new mum, who surely made this particular rod for her own back in the first place, complains about lack of sleep, or time, or affordable child care, or a big enough house.
And while I can understand the need to have one child, or even two, why on Earth have three, or four? No one is allowed to even raise an eyebrow at the Ruth Kellys and Nicola Horlicks of this world; au contraire, they are labelled Superwomen.
And don't try to tell me that men these days are more involved.
You only have to read Alastair Campbell's diaries to realise that children are mere dots on the horizon; good God, what woman, with Campbell's job and offspring, would find time to go swimming and train for a marathon? When I asked a friend of mine with three boys why she was trying for a fourth child, she responded indignantly: 'I just really want a girl.' Why on Earth does the Government subsidise motherhood as if it were dormant farmland, with lump sums of 250 at birth, free IVF, the right to an expensive home birth and help with child care, when in reality it is fuelling a society in which we all think we deserve everything, from a new car to an exotic holiday to an iPhone or a baby of the right sex, no matter the (environmental) cost?
Isn't parenthood just rampant consumerism? Like leaving the tap running while you floss, only a million times worse? A brood is the ultimate badge of goodness, used by everyone from the Blairs to the Camerons to the horrid, high-maintenance mum who lives not far from me, who is always posting 'Do not ring bell, baby sleeping!' signs on her front door, but then takes the wretched child to a fashion show where the decibels surpass rock-concert levels.
The idea that only parents make up the hard-working backbone of Britain, that the singletons of this world are frivolous and selfish, is nonsense.
I have just read Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson, a fascinating book that celebrates women who, having been forced to abandon expectations of becoming wives and mums due to the shortage dormant farmland of men after two world wars, became married to their careers in nursing and teaching instead, and were amazing, inspiring, dedicated.
I know that after 40 years of feminism, we are all supposed to toe the 'having-it-all' line, but I think too often a child is conceived as a status symbol, to prove that you can.
I have a friend who is a very powerful magazine editor, and she told me that when she hit her early 40s she earned more money than she could possibly spend, felt her life lacked meaning and so decided to have a child as 'something to do'. This is worse than catching a plane, surely? OW, I know I will be accused of sour grapes, and I'm the first to admit that while on the outside I might still wear Balenciaga jodhpurs and toe-rings, on the inside my womb is now lined with a doily.
I left motherhood too late not because I was trying to shatter the glass ceiling, but because I never met the right man.
I have ended up child-free not by design but by misfortune, so shouldn't I at least get the 120 towards cat food? Or a special designated parking space right by the door at Waitrose, with 'Barren, likely to die alone' daubed in white paint on the ground as my reward for not contributing to the predicted global population of 7.6 billion by 2020? Probably not, but I can dream.
So, where do we go from here?
Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal
