January 2006

Happy New Year!

I love a new year because it feels like a new start. I love birthdays for the same reason. So that allows 2 new starts a year, which is maybe a bit trying if your birthday is in December of January. On the other hand, if you make a mistake, you can rub it out and start again quickly.

Am I giving anything up? Well not really, I’ll give up drink and meat for Lent – these religious festivals are so useful – bur meantime I’ll cut back on the wine a bit, because I need my liver to last another 46 years.

I never drink in the day, and only with food in the evening, but I think a couple of days off a week would be good for me, and I am going to try one of those days as a fast day, just to see what it feels like. An Indian friend of mine swears by it, though she points out that it is also a day designed to be quieter than normal, which makes it almost impossible for Westerners, who do everything in our power to be as noisy and busy as possible all of the time.

I heard on the radio that liver disease in Britain in now higher than anywhere in Europe – mainly because we are uncivilised idiots who binge-drink, and drink without eating. Nevertheless we are also asking our livers to live much longer, as well as to cope with more, so I think this moment of being half way through my life is a good time to make a deal with my internal organs.

I hope you were given some good books over the holidays. My two favourites were: POSTWAR, a history of Europe since the Second World War, by Tony Judt. This is a very useful tool for understanding that state of things over the last 50 years, and an insight into our changing relationship with the USA. The world we live in is so dense and complex, that it seems to me essential to have a real grasp of facts, and not to base any of our opinions on soundbites or TV documentaries. The more we know, the more we can make up our own minds, rather than spouting fashionable rubbish.

This is especially true of the conflict in Iraq, and I urge everyone to read my other favourite, Robert Fisk’s wonderful 1000 page deconstruction of what is happening there. Fisk has lived in Beirut for 30 years, and reported directly from the front line. His columns in The Independent, (UK newspaper, for those of you living elsewhere), have been anti-war from the start, and he has been the bravest of journalists, risking his life, and facing endless criticism from armchair warmongers – the ones who think it’s fine to blast the hell of a country, as long as you and your own family doesn’t have to suffer the consequences.
The War For Civilisation begins with an interview Fisk had in Afghanistan, with Bin Laden. It makes for chilling and fascinating reading.

My view remains as it has always been; that war is a failure. There are no ‘just wars’, and no ‘justified wars’. Bush and Blair failed the Iraqi people and they have failed their own people.

We enter 2006 with mounting global problems. It is up to all of us to think straight and to think steadily. There is always a different way of doing business.

Which brings me back to the humble business of the shop. VERDE’S is doing well, selling unspeakable amounts of chocolate, and serving lovely coffee to the footsore and weary of East London. Good lines are sausages and pasta, not so good lines are organic fruit and veg, which as you can imagine is a bit upsetting, for me, the organic veg queen, who has been eating the stuff since the days when you had to arrange to call a hippy in a phone box, and get a sack of filthy vegetables dumped on your doorstep in the dead of night.

The British are no longer a nation of greengrocers. We believe that veg comes ready-chopped and washed in plastic bags. Persuading people to pay a fair price for good food is very difficult. Food is meant to be almost free. In fact, food should still be costing a significant part of most people’s budget. Why? Because good food is essential, not just for our own wellbeing, long life and health, but also for the sustainable farming practises good food entails. The planet isn’t here to bale us out, and I still don’t understand why a chicken should be cheaper than a cinema ticket.

We will go on fighting our corner but it isn’t easy.

And before anybody starts emailing me about ‘the poor’, please remember that the poor suffer most of all from so called ‘cheap’ food, which leaves them overweight and undernourished. I can feed six people organically for £6 – less than the price of a Macdonald’s each.

Oh God, I’ve used inverted commas. Things must be bad.

What good news about Ali Smith winning the Whitbread for her marvellous book, The Accidental. She is my friend, and that makes me extra pleased – but what makes me bottom-line pleased is that she is a real writer with ambitions for language and ambitions for the form. People have criticised the book for not having enough warm characters, or genuine storyline, but hey, Modernism happened, it’s no good pretending it didn’t. The characters are there, the story is there, it just isn’t served up like printed television.

I am sure you will enjoy it.

Funny how people can put up with any amount of difficulty if we’re talking science or history or politics, but call it fiction and it’s got to be simple and cuddly.

I am so glad of my G4 laptop while I am travelling; not because I can work, but because it keeps my knees warm when I am wearing a skirt.

And yes, I did get an OBE in the New Year’s Honours List. And yes, of course I am accepting it. In Britain, you have to accept these things before you are given them, so as not to embarrass the Queen. So it’s done, and I am pleased. And no, it won’t stop me criticising the Government.

Or the Pope

Or George Bush

It says on the bottom – Services to literature – which is a good thing to serve, and servants we all are – politicians, popes, writers, Best not to forget that, I think.