If only I could take pre-emptive action against a few politicians

Radio National this morning covered the pointless “debate” between Labor and Liberal parties on the “doctrine” of pre-emptive self-defence. On examination, both parties are only a whisker apart (a distance that becomes chasm-like after spin).

Okay, so Labor says it would not take action inside our neighbours’ borders without consultation and invitation – and that to adopt a policy of pre-emptive strikes is destabilising and sets us against neighbours like Indonesia who don’t like the idea, and whose co-operation is needed to fight terrorism.

Fine. But are the Liberals actually backing pre-emption?

Well, no. Or only in such limited circumstances as to make it unlikely ever to happen.

Downer says that Australia would never act uninvited inside the territory of regional partners with a viable counter-terrorism infrastructure, and pre-emption would only ever really be considered in failed states, unable or unwilling, to stamp out terrorist bases.

Politically, not unreasonable. But hardly consistent with Downer’s claim the Labour policy leaves Latham unable to state categorically he would do everything necessary under any circumstances to protect Australia. After all, the Liberals policy leaves them far from free-handed.

When a radio journalist asked about the terror camps the Phillipines government has been unable to suppress Downer managed to pshaw and claim there was no link between any such small, remaining bases and plots targeting Australia. He suggested it was inconceivable an Australian government would do nothing if it was aware of an imminent attack being planned from such a base.

So, suddenly the Liberal policy is consult and proceed only when invited in the case of all but failed states, where we would only proceed when faced with imminent attack?

If this is right, it is (somewhat reassuringly) not a doctrine of pre-emption at all. It is the nineteenth century doctrine of anticipatory self-defence which claims a right to take necessary and proportionate action in self-defence when there is the danger of an imminent attack.

The only problem with anticipation is that is conflicts with anything but the most strained reading of Article 51 of the UN Charter, reserving the right of self-defence to situations where there has been a prior armed attack or Security Council resolution. (Some English-speaking academics claim that anticipation is available under the Charter, but a lot of English-speakers and almost every nation in the world disagrees with them.)

At least - though in my view illegal - a doctrine of anticipation articulates a concept of last resort action to forestall an attack and curbs its exercise with criteria that have some meaning in military law.

What is really needed is substantive debate about regional arrangements capable of looking after security issues in our collective backyard.

But that kind of detail isn’t going to sell to the voter only interested in a Tom Clancy level of foreign policy analysis. Meanwhile the term “pre-emption” just makes us sound like a Pacific-region Deputy of Bush’s Texas Ranger foreign policy.

“Somersault”: brilliant or banal?

I went to see “Somersault”, debut feature film of Australian Cate Shortland and an official selection at Cannes, with a group of friends.

Basically, it’s the story of sixteen-year old Heidi (Abbie Cornish) a curious girl, struggling to feel comfortable in a grown-up body and – disastrously wrong-headedly - trying to reach out to others for closeness principally through sex.

After being caught coming onto her mother’s boyfriend, mostly to see if she can, she flees Canberra to Jindabyne and begins a relationship with Joe (Sam Worthington), a local grazier’s son and tries to fit into the local community.

The reactions were mixed, especially among the women: a number found it “random”, or a coming of age story that simply lurched from sex-scene to sex-scene or loaded with banal, unbelievable dialogue. This seems to reflect some viewer reactions elsewhere.

I guess this highlighted for me two love it or hate it aspects of the film: the editing (does rapid cutting from close-up detail to hand held conventional shots evoke life’s everyday impressions or sensations, or is it just kinda irritating?) and the script (do characters struggling with their inarticulacy seem more innocent and vulnerable or just tedious?).

For me, it worked. “Coming of age drama” is a pernicious label, and “Somersault” is more than that. Cornish (a twenty-something actress) manages to evoke a compelling fragility in Heidi, an adolescent mixture of reticence and boldness that is not courage so much as curiosity and a complete lack of boundaries. This makes the sex in the film neither gritty nor titillating, so much as heart-wrenchingly flinch-worthy. It makes every rejection Heidi encounters, and every act of kindness she meets too, painfully immediate.

The cinematography is often eye-poppingly good, and the use of over-bleached colours and hand-held camera work is refreshingly understated and not deliberately arty. The film progresses in a series of crystalline images, haunting everyday impressions of Canberra and Jindabyne in a familiar, biting winter. The sound design is also remarkably understated.

The dialogue was forgiveable in its capturing the emotional naïveté of adolescents who think they understand sex, but have no experience of relationships.

Overall, though, it’s just so refreshing to see cinema about places you think of as home. And if it gets a UK release, I can drag friends to it and say, “See, Australia really does get cold!” (It was also kinda strange to see someone I went to school with in an excellent cameo as a stoner rich-kid from Sydney.)

Holiday reading round-up rodeo

Twenty word reviews (and star ratings out of 5) for the finest holiday reading a man could beg, borrow or buy second hand from friends, European hostel bookshelves or English village bookstores.

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition – Imagine a new form of cinema. Fragments of some melancholy dream posted on-line. Would you seek out their creator? (****)

Ian Rankin, Hyde & Seek – Edinburgh’s Inspector Rebus is the only one concerned over a junkie’s death. Literary crime drama examining human nature’s darker corners. (***)

Michael Innes, Death at the President’s Lodgings – a 1930s locked-drawing room whodunit, set in an Oxbridge college, where paranoiac academic antagonism turns out to be the butler. (** ½)

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections – on each re-reading the children who are so desperate to escape their parents seem more a complex amalgam of them. (*****)

Jack Kerouac, On the Road – the original literary road movie follows Dean Moriarty, First Saint of bop, beat and madness, into the post-war American night. (*** ½)

Robert Graves, I, Claudius – Roman Empire seeks CEO, madness no obstacle, being murdered by your grandmother a potential downside. Longevity goes to the underestimated. (****)

Stephen Fry, Paperweight – the comic shorter writings of a terribly funny comic, particularly wonderful are the assembled radio ravings of Professor Donald Trefussis. (****)

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises – unsympathetic (but charismatic) characters inhabit taught, beautiful sentences under the Spanish sun, while self-destructing through apathy and alcohol. Good fishing. (****)

Humour for the legally inclined and unsound of mind

I recently found at Running with Lawyers some great, real life “things not to say to the judge”:

Your Honor, if I have to call you Your Honor then you have to call me 'El Capitan'

rates as one of the saner (and still G-rated) comments.

And this little story at Craigslist (found via gulfstream) is painfully funny, definately stupid and could easily have ended in a product liability claim.

(And for the extraordinarily juvenile, this is no way to meet a girl or treat a lady. Even accidentally.)

Substantive blogging will resume shortly.

A little too eager? The Bush family, a Nazi banker and the military-industrial complex

SBS recently aired a two-part documentary, “The World According to Bush”. In the second instalment, two points were put forward that I thought particularly disturbing.

(1) Dubyah’s grand-father, Prescott Bush, was alleged to have been a Nazi banker and to have profited from the use of forced concentration camp labour from Auschwitz in a factory he owned nearby; and

(2) A private holding company worth US$3.5 billion, the Carlyle group, is largely staffed and owned by ex-Republican presidential advisors, and ex-CIA and Pentagon officials. It owns a number of corporations (including European companies) with large US Government defence contracts. Its advisory board includes Bush snr, and its investors include the Bin Laden family.

The first claim is dismissed with the least research.

Prescott Bush was an investment banker – his bank had dealings with a number of German clients. One was Fritz Thyssen, an early backer of the Nazi party, but also one of the first to jump ship – leaving Germany in 1939. In a book “I Paid Hitler Thyssen confessed his role in financing the Nazis and denounced the Führer”.

Thyssen had a bank in the US - UBC – with 4,000 issued shares. Prescott Bush owned one. Bush and his other banking colleagues later told regulators that they sat on the UBC board only as an unpaid courtesy to a foreign client.

Holding interests in German companies was not illegal in the US until the passage of the 1942 Trading with the Enemy Act – at which point Bush’s UBC share was confiscated (he was later compensated $US 1.5 million).

Not very damning.

(The only thing I have not tracked down is whether when Thyssen left Germany in ’39 his interest in the UBC bank was nationalised. If that did happen, and his interest in the bank was a controlling one, then arguably Prescott Bush’s UBC client in ’39-’42 might have been the Nazi state. However, I have to stress that’s merely a possible line of inquiry suggested by the remark at Straight Dope that Hitler confiscated Thyssen’s fortune in ’39.)

Straight Dope deals convincingly with the slave labour charge: “Another company in which Prescott and his associates had a stake was the Silesian-American Corporation (SAC), which owned several industrial concerns in Poland … SAC plants in Poland were taken over by the German government after the Nazi invasion of 1939, and the Auschwitz prison camp wasn't established until 1940. No one can seriously claim that Prescott Bush managed camp inmates in any of those plants.”

That is, SAC had been expropriated and was out of Bush’s hands at the time.

The only exaggerated point about the Carlyle group, however, is the extent of its connections to the Bin Ladens: members of the wealthy Saudi family had US$2 million in it (a drop in the $3.5 billion bucket) for 6 years, and Carlyle ended the relationship after September 11, 2001. (Michael Moore describes the Bin Ladens as "significant" Carlyle investors in "Farenheit 9/11" - but while $2 million is a lot, it's clearly not huge on either the Carlyle or Saudi scale of wealth.)

Worthy of far more investigation (see the excellent Guardian article) is the close kitchen-sink cabinet relationship between Carlyle and the Bush administration, and the potential conflict of interest some of Carlyle’s members have in serving as informal advisors to the White House in a time of conflict while profiting hugely from defence contracts.

“The World According to Bush” unfortunately gave equal prominence to this genuine scandal, and ill-researched and largely ludicrous allegations – allowing some to brand the whole as lies that taxpayers should not be subsidising.

Public education

My frustration with election coverage reduced to “two sandwiches and two milkshakes” tax cuts and interest rates, coupled with the recent interest in Shane Maloney’s 2001 speech to Scotch College students has got me thinking about public education.

While education and health remain key issues in any election, the acceptable range of debate on the two topics has diverged.

While we basically now accept that (1) the public health care system is overloaded and (2) it’s a legitimate government strategy to encourage those who can afford to pay for health insurance to do so, it would be politically foolhardy to suggest that those who can afford to pay for their children’s education should be given similar tax incentives.

Obviously, education has an effect on social mobility and future earnings in a way health care does not. Further, public education clearly has a role in socialisation. It seems (at least on first glance) that private faith-based schools are less likely to place children in an environment where they encounter practitioners of other religions. This would seem a bad thing for tolerance. Similarly, it would seem intuitively a bad thing in terms of curbing sexist attitudes if adolescent males are quarantined from the rest of society in single-sex high schools (however superficially appealing the idea of quarantining males aged 13 – 18 might be).

So, public funding of private education is bad, right? It inherently diverts money from public education – robbing the poor to teach the rich?

Well, not necessarily, as: (1) withdrawing such funding entirely could overburden the public system; and (2) the bulk of government subsidies to the private sector are not going to the Scotch Colleges.

The minimum level of funding given per student to a private school by the Federal Government is 13.7% of the cost of providing education to a state school student (Average Government School Recurrent Cost – AGSRC). The maximum is 70%. The rate for a school is determined by reference the government’s Socio Economic Status (SES) index measure of a community’s ability to support a school.

The numerous private Catholic schools are the most interesting interesting case. Generally, they offer the lowest-fee form of private education, and under a bloc deal with the Federal Government get a flat rate of 56.2% of AGSCR regardless of SES assessment. According to the Senate Report on School funding, such schools accounted for 20% of total school enrolments in 2003, and two-thirds of enrolments in the non-government sector.

What would happen if all government funding were removed?

While Scotch College might be able to absorb the loss of 13.7% AGSCR per student in fee rises, lower-fee Catholic schools might well shut up shop if the alternative were a 78% fee increase.

The result would be an increase in the cost to taxpayers of education. In effect, these lower-fee schools are stretching the community education dollar by making 1.8 education places in the total system for each one student who leaves public education for a Catholic school. If all their students migrated back suddenly to the public sector there would simply not be enough funding to accommodate them and maintain present standards within present budgets.

In exactly the same way as health care, the public education budget has come to rely on private fee-paying.

Thus, anyone who is politically serious about the laudable democratic aim of having all children in high-quality public education is going to have some trouble coming up with the money when even the party of (allegedly) social investment is flat out flogging a tax cut.

Presently, some public funding of private schools is inevitable. The debate should really be about the terms on which that is going to occur and whether the Howard government has moved funding towards the top-end private schools at the expense of other schools.

After a year away …

On arrival in the UK, the coins seemed a ridiculous collection of little sizes and shapes. Now, $2 coins seem tiny and a handful of 20 and 50 cent pieces weigh far too much.

Initially UK banknotes seemed quaintly huge and papery, now our highly advanced plastic money looks even more like something produced for a game of Monopoly.

It took a long time to get used to the damp-cold of South East England, now the incredibly dry and still cold of a Canberra winter is positively shocking.

After the light, riverbed melody of (relentlessly polite) “Southerner” UK English, the full-bodied raucous-vowelled warble of Australian English sounds as welcome and familiar as magpie song.

After a year of saying, “oh, yes - that sounds lovely, thanks” it’s quite refreshing to be able to answer a polite invitation with a drawled “yeah, OK then” without being seen as faintly rude.

After several years away now, Canberra seems to have grown a crop of swanky cocktail driven watering holes.

Arriving jet-lagged and proceeding almost directly to a cocktail-themed house party provided a strangely cosy feeling: dancing in a parquet-floored sunroom with a crowd of lawyers, consultants, political staffers, arts administrators, public servants, and graduate students it felt remarkably like any one of the parties from my last years at uni. A real Canberra homecoming.

Please, just give me something to vote for …

Today I did my civic duty, stopped by the post office and finally filled in a long overdue change of electoral address form. This should switch me from being enrolled in a safe inner-city Labor seat to a safe rural Liberal seat. Oh, hurrah.

To pin my colours to the mast, I am definitely voting against the current government – but I am sceptical that the Labor party is offering me much to vote for.

Despite talk of a “values” agenda and the already rather shop-worn sounding metaphor of a “ladder of opportunity”, the election turf appears to have been carved out: interest rates, taxes, security and “trust” versus “truth”.

Interest rates are basically a distraction. While government policy and performance certainly influence interest rates, the majority of determining factors are in the hands of the global economy. At best, Australian governments can make things no worse than they have to be.

There has been some interesting and nuanced coverage of the “truth”/”trust” issue at Troppo Armadillo and Ambit Gambit. The essential suggestion being that the electorate (outside of “elites”) cares little about truth, as “all politicians lie”.

Also, let’s face it, the word “lie” is devalued verbal currency in politics as both sides – for cheap advantage – are willing to ignore the difference between wilful distortion, inadvertant ommision or just changing your mind over time.

“Trust”, however, emphasises what is done over what is said: and on things like refugee issues Howard has implemented policies, which while heartlessly draconian, are popular. (Thus making the children overboard scandal a potential non-issue as far as the talkback-radio constituency is concerned.)

The reasons to vote against the Howard government, from the perspective of a left-of-centre lawyer, are obvious and legion. The basic contempt for the rule of law. The attempt to place executive decision making in refugee and migration matters beyond judicial review. The chronically mean-spirited and profligate expenditure on phalanxes of QCs to defend every stolen generation case. Joining a flagrantly illegal war.

This is before we even get to its profound cognitive dissonance on refugee policy, children overboard or WMD in Iraq: if the facts don’t fit a preconceived view of policy and reality, they will be reinterpreted until they do.

The Labor “Machinery of Government” paper contains some worthwhile measures (follow the links to download), but I am yet to be convinced it represents any sea-change in the conduct of politics. At the end of the day the value of a ministerial code depends on the quality of the front bench. On a few other recent issues, it seems disappointingly thin. The promise that personal ministerial staff could be allowed to appear before Senate committees - but only where the responsible minister is unable to answer for them - seems a much smaller change than some have claimed. The talk of restoring the independence of the public service seems to be canvassed only in a terribly general passage on Ministerial Office/Departmental relations.

Thank god for proportional representation in the Senate and the minor parties. At least my upper-house vote needn’t be either squandered on a major party or risk counting for nothing.

Adventures in Budapest: The mind-boggling stupidity of tourists, part 27

Right, back in Australia for some R&R (the story of making a 36 hour Cambridge-Canberra trip before going directly to a cocktail party armed with two litres of duty free can be saved for another occasion).

Anyway, the last port of call in Europe was Budapest, where armed with enough Hungarian to say “thanks” and a weekly public transport pass, I decided it would be fairly easy to get the metro and then the bus to the airport at the end of my trip.

Which it was. Emerging at the metro terminal and following the bus symbols towards the bus station, I passed a very obvious ticket booth. I queued patiently, presented my weekly pass and said: “airport?”

The ticket seller nodded her head gravely, and I took it I was fine to get on the bus without another ticket.

“Köszönöm”, I said.

I went to the stop with the red plane painted on the sign and got on the bus.

Simple, you might think. A matter of the smallest exercise of observational powers and common sense.

Apparently not.

The funky thing about Budapest ticket inspectors is that they are in plain clothes, other than huge red arm bands, which they get out and drape around their wrists.

Second last stop before the airport a lady boarded and whipped out her red band. My weekly travel card passed muster. Then she hit the English and the French dude next to me.

When both their ethnicity and lack of Hungarian became apparent she passed each a card in their respective language, explaining, I imagine, that - Sir or Monsieur - you're busted.

The fine is approximately 10 times the price of a valid ticket.

The Frenchman clucked and tutted and “Mais non”-ed in the hope that a display of Gallic incredulity might defeat steely Magyar determination.

The Englishman took an equally stereotypical approach.

“You can’t do this,” he said loudly and slowly in English. “There needs to be a sign. There wasn’t a sign anywhere. It’s not fair. You have to warn people. No, sorry, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

As someone who speaks English and (some) French, I chose to bite my tongue, because all I would have had to say was: “Buddy, even if they’re obliged to put up a sign stating something as blindingly obvious as ‘riding without a valid ticket is a criminal offence and will incur a fine – just as it does everywhere else in the world’, they’re not obliged to post it in English.”

Or: “Dude, if you can’t understand her, what makes you think she’s suddenly going to sprout the power to speak English? And more to the point, if you don’t speak Hungarian, how do you know there wasn’t a frikken sign?”

Sheesh.

Impressions of six cities (in no order at all)

Edinburgh - a dizzy Gothic confection, the result of a child taking its box of Escher gothic-city bits and upending them on a lumpy duvet.

Barcelona - a patchwork of relaxed, breezy neighbourhoods exhaling art and cultivated living, stiched together by cathedrals and Modernista marvels.

Florence - cicada tick heat and dust on grey-leaved trees puts you in mind of "Stealing Beauty".

Prague - a fairy tale of orange rooftops and winding ways, a paradise of cheap local food and beer, but almost overwhelmed by cloying tourism.

Milan - the moped-terror memory of reeling among smart set and student grunge clinging to a former flatmate gritting my teeth to stop from wailing like the girlfriend neither of us had.

Budapest - still seems a town for the locals, despite a littering of signs in cheerful Hunglish. Communism's tread seems to have left lighter prints here, and I've been blessed with fabulous interesting travel-friends and cheap traditional bath-houses/spas.

In less than a week, home to Australia for a month ...

The rock and roll lifestyle

I have officially been of no fixed abode or employment status for seven weeks now. On the road with naught but an overstuffed backpack, a variety of minor and malodorous foot complaints the reading public should not be troubled with, far too many second-hand paperbacks (I have trouble releasing them back into the wilderness) and – for three weeks – my parents.

That last, I admit, sounds a fair bit like cheating. Especially when they’re paying for the cot-bed your occupying in the corner of their B&B room. I did mix it up in those three weeks, though: the occasional sojourn in a hostel, then repairing to a restaurant with actual tablecloths for a meal with the parents. An odd admixture, but decidedly pleasant.

Now I’m cast back on my own resources, en route to Budapest, and stopping over in Cambridge once more. Friends with actual spare beds (I am a poor couch-crasher) being in unaccustomedly short supply I’ve booked myself into a “guest room” at college. A guest room is in fact an undergraduate’s room, sans undergraduate.

It’s nice to see how the first-years live: up three flights of stairs, sharing a bathroom and toilet on a corridor, with limited heating and ancient (utterly un-double glazed) windows overlooking Front Court. It’s very pretty, though, having a view out towards the spires of Kings chapel.

So, what have I been doing, then in these weeks where all I’ve done is submit Naylor from the road?

Well, I’ve seen a fair few heritage properties, a nearby favourite being Charles II’s weekender Audley End.

I met my mum’s thoroughly wonderful exchange teaching friend and her twenty-something sons and daughter, and son’s girlfriend.

I visited York, which is just damn pretty – even if calling a Cathedral “Yorkminster” sounds a bit unoriginal coming hot on the heels of “Yorkshire”.

I was rained on, quite a bit, in the Lakes District – and was (for a devotee of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats et al) far more captured by the life and times of John Ruskin, a progressive social thinker whose prodigious writings span an anarchic and sprawling terrain of subjects than the scenery (when visible).

Dove cottage was remarkable for the fact that it predated, by two hundred years, the Wordsworths’ occupation and many of the original floors and walls remained. (Beatrix Potter’s house was also cute.)

In Scotland, I looked at the mountainous folds of Glencoe and felt a very small and brief lived thing of no particular importance whatever.

I looked on bemused, as my mother attempted to swat a fine mist of Scottish midges into submission with her foam neckbrace; while I repeatedly and infallibly triggered the rental car’s alarm by opening a passenger door before the engine was started.

I made it to bits of the Edinburgh fringe festival, and took the chance to swill a little gin and ate a little pasta with blogger extraordinaire (and charming real-space person) Shauna. Next time though, it will be bangers and mash, damn those Edinburgh festival tourists swarming the city (oh, hang on a minute … )

PS All this and new "Naylor's Canberra" too!

Who is this Elliot guy, anyway?

Right, for anyone stopping by for the first time, recent posts must be kinda wierd. Yes, this is normally a legal commentary/diary/a funny thing happened to me in Hogwarts kind of a site.

However, for a little over a year, I've been completing a crime novel by installment at a sister site, "Naylor's Canberra", at a rate of about 1,000 words per bite-size installment. Some bits are more polished than others. The first episode is over here.

The story so far? Elliot Naylor, a law graduate, has been refused admission to legal practice for reasons to do with a fatal car accident, and works an under-employed part-time law librarian. A former girlfriend of his is missing, Marina - a highflying political staffer to Milton Dawes, Minister for Justice and Customs. Her father, David Carmichael, a prominent local barrister, hires Elliot to find her before he has to report it to the police in an attempt to keep it quiet and close to the family and avoid scandal.

It seems easy enough, until Elliot begins to dig into David's shady business dealings and close ties to the Minister. Further, Elliot is the first to discover the dead body of someone connected to Marina and, while having an alibi, is the only obvious suspect in the murder inquiry.

On top of that, he decides to investigate the background of one Jeremy Ryder, who has business ties to David Carmichael as well as Canberra's legalised prostitution and pornography industries. Marina and Jenny were both involved in a Ministerial task force investigating sexual slavery - is Ryder somehow connected to the disappearance of one and the murder of the other?

Elliot recieves a good deal of practical and emotional assistance from his flatmate Eva, and his (rather new) girlfriend Danielle. This still does not stop him doing things that are just plain stupid.

Visiting one of Ryder's brothels, Elliot recieves a beating from which he is still suffering. Indeed, his symptoms appear to be getting worse rather than better.

Recently, he has learnt something quite surprising (but definately foreshadowed, I promise) about one of Marina's flatmates' involvement with the murder victim.

He has now also finally heard back on an important piece of research he entrusted to his grandfather regarding Milton Dawes' mother, who lives at the same retirement community as Mr Naylor senior. Read on ...

Naylor from the road 2

There's more new material at Naylor's Canberra and it's another plot bombshell for Elliot ...

New Naylor: posting from the road

I apologise to readers of Naylor's Canberra for how long it's taking me to get new material up. I blame travel. The present installment is composed direct-to-blog, and is not necessarily complete. I'll try and add to it from the road.

Rest assured, I now very nearly have a complete plan that will get me through to an ending.

A Monday evening PS: I've added to the Naylor post, the new material starts at the line in bold text.

Road trip

Like Lyn, I am about to head off on holiday with my parents. Three weeks: Cambridge, Lakes District, Edinburgh. I’m to meet them in a nearby village and drive the family into Cambridge in the rental car.

Driving, in Cambridge. The idea weirds me out. I’ve only ever cycled here, and have not been behind a steering wheel in ten months.

Anyway, time for some pet peeves and lessons learned in my continuing spate of tourism:

Peeves

(1) The self-narrating American. (S)he says: “Will you look at that bridge!” Doug thinks: It’s over a hundred metres long, nearly a millennium old, made of rock and right in frikken front of me. Where the Hell else would I be looking?
 
(2) European school-children on supervised holidays. Massed adolescence is not any better when it is French, German or Italian. Though watching them for’n kids trying to steer punts is terribly amusing, provided you’re on a bridge, not the water.

(3) People who, despite Ryan Air’s policy of boarding people in orderly batches of 30 by ticket numbers (after old people and those with children), still mill about in an absolute crush at the boarding gate.

(4) Those chronically unable to enjoy their holiday: “… and she looked at me like I was mad when I asked if we could sit together, just because we weren’t animals and didn’t barge our way to the front.” Doug thinks: It’s not allocated seating. Is spending a one-hour flight not grafted to your beloved’s side going to kill you?

Or: “You said outside TWO free drinks on this tour, I’d like my mineral water as well as my coffee, please.” Doug: Lady, the man is sorting out drinks for two dozen people here, I have every confidence he’ll come back with your precious second beverage.

Lessons

(1) When backpacking, carrying your own towel is always a plus. Douglas Adams really knew what he was on about.

(2) The world is a desperately small place. (Witness my bumping into college buddies in Barcelona, and meeting a girl at the hostel who knew someone I’d worked with on the phone fundraising campaign).

(3) Carrying a litre of water, camera and notebook at all times is seldom a wasted effort.

(4) The dumb hat, stupid shorts and ratty old sneakers packed for emergencies will almost always turn into necessities.

It’s nice to feel wanted
 
I always feel turning down a job interview is somehow close to suicidal, yet I’ve been doing a bit of it recently.
 
As a result of a mad spate of applying for advertised jobs before news about PhD funding came through, I made interview with a federal government department and my undergraduate university (the ANU). I also had a tentative e-mail from an outfit I'd seriously like to work for in response to an unsolicited CV and cover letter.
 
And I’ve bitten the bullet, been honest, and said I’m not available.
 
My only twinge on this point is - the wheels of Cambridge bureaucracy grinding slower than the mills of god - I’ve not yet had 100% iron-clad acceptance for the PhD place. I have the money and the marks, which is all I need to be confirmed, but I don’t have a letter yet saying “Yup, you’re officially good to go.”
 
That may not arrive until September, and this is nothing unusual.
 
(Bizarrely, what is holding things up is that the Board of Graduate Studies does not, a month after graduation, have official notice of my marks in the LLM. I guess this is their busiest time of year, and I suspect the hold-up is at the law faculty’s end … )
 
I suspect the sensible thing to do would have been to do the interviews or ask to be kept in consideration, but in at least one case this would involve setting up a videoconference and preparing a seminar in the middle of my travel plans.

Also, I think, better to preserve a reputation for being scrupulously up front with people you may want to approach for work in a few years’ time. 
  
Still, being presented with other (possible) options always injects a little niggling doubt into your plans, doesn’t it?

... Nah. I'm a born academic, this is so what I'm meant to be doing.
 
Back in Cambridge at present, and also realising anew that I have a social life here. Within hours of returning from Prague I bumped into half a dozen people and pretty much had my free nights before the parents arrive booked up.

 All round, it’s nice to feel wanted.

Keys and Porters 2
 
So I’m presently in the midst of a four-day stint of life admin between bouts of travel.
 
Today I was repacking some of my belongings into cardboard boxes in the storage room I’m using at college – and recalled the disaster I had three weeks ago moving my stuff into it.
 
I’ve partially afforded my recent travel by letting my room go over the summer, but this has meant storing my things. Had I been at the main graduate accommodation complex, this would have just meant schlepping everything down to the storeroom.
 
But I was at a college satellite property. (“Satellite” in the sense of being closer to the centre of town than, say, the moon.) I was damned if I was going to haul dozens of little boxes a one-hour return trip by bike up to the main grad site.
 
So I swung access to a basically disused (over summer anyway) bit of office space in college and took several big-ish boxes in by taxi, signed out the one key for the office in question at the Porter’s Lodge, took my first box up a flight of stairs, deposited it and the key on the office floor and left, the door slamming.
 
With. The. Only. Key. Inside.
 
There was no other key. Many, many people who have had the use of this room over time have dissipated all spare keys.
 
I did the only thing you can do in such a situation. I went for a Porter.
 
The Porter on duty was a big, solid chap with a strong, creased face. Had I been told he’d been hand-carved from something ancient and probably oaken, it would have come as no surprise.
 
He followed me into a courtyard and looked up at the half-open office window.
 
 “Oh, for a ladder,” he said, phlegmatically.
 
As it was a weekend, the maintenance department had left all their ladders locked up. We did find an old wooden ladder at the back of the carpenters’ store, in a pile of scrap wood.
 
“I’ll get it,” I said. “As it was me that locked the keys in, I should go up.”
 
We trudged back, leaned the ladder up the wall where it stopped two feet below the little mediaeval looking window, all small glass panes set in iron, half-ajar.
 
“Too short,” was the Porter’s assessment. “How do you feel about going up?”
 
“That last two feet makes me nervous,” I replied, wondering if we could stand the ladder on a nearby bench.
 
“Hold this a moment,” said the Porter, putting a foot on a rung.
 
I grabbed it, presuming he was testing it for strength. Suddenly, he was at the top, with his head in the open half of the window.
 
“I can see the key,” he said. “If nothing else, I can see the key. Hold on a second.”
 
He got his fingers inside the frame, then one shoe on the sandstone window ledge, and then he had one black-trousered leg inside the window.
 
I am tall, but slightly built. I was confident I could have gotten through the small opening the window offered. A man a head taller and built like something recently detached from a cliff face I worried about.
 
He was poised, half-in and half-out, suspended by little but his fingers. “God, I’m going to kill a Porter,” I though, envisaging him falling head-first onto the flagstones.
 
Then with a twist and a duck he was in. Minutes later he was standing in the courtyard, dust all over one knee, handing me the key.
 
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve trees this height at home. Up and down ladders all the time.”

Photos from Barcelona
 
Are now up over here. Florence and Prague may take a little longer.
 
Is anyone else now viewing the text on this site in a really, really narrow collumn.
 
It's peeving me ...
 
 

Prague: getting the "Kafka" into "Kafka-esque" 
 
Prague did not start so well. My hostel, on first encounter, had an institutional grimness defying the more immediate forms of description. At check in there was a computer and bank-card payment facilities, but everything important was done on loose paper and in large, dog eared ledgers with grid paper.
 
The buildings are clean to a lawyer's scruple, lino-floored and were repainted cream and brown in recent decade. I would like to say the effect is "post-Soviet", but the prefix would be misleading.
 
My room, booked as a single, is a twin. One bed mattress is three large lounge cushions pushed together, the other (I discovered on my second night) is foam, but all of one piece. The bedding consists of a translucent polyester bottom sheet that almost covers the "mattress", pillows offering no actual resistence to a head placed on them, and a duvet in several shades of pastel hideousness.
 
The towel provided is of the type I normally prefix with the word "tea". Very glad to have travelled with my own full-grown towel in the backpack. The toilet on my landing has a window opening onto a space within the walls facing another window for what might once have been another WC, but which is now full of snaking wires. (Very "The Matrix"). On inspection, the space between the walls is a five floor drop into darkness at one end, and open to the sky at the other.
 
That said, it is cheap and relatively central. (Even if I was informed with bland, bored pragmatism on my first morning that "breakfast included" only referred to groups.)
 
Prague itself is beautiful, and the food and beer is amazingly cheap. It's proved very easy to meet English-speaking travellers, especially through the plentiful walking tours. That said, six days on the ground may have been excessive. After three days of heavy walking, the sudden return to seasonably warm weather today has made me very sleepy. Sent most of the day napping or reading the international edition of the Guardian in the gorgeous parks surrounding the 1:5 scale replica of the Eiffel tower that overlooks the city.
 
Can't decide between going home and changing for a jazz club this evening, or just wandering back to the film festival at Sharpshooter Island and watching Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" over a beer. Should go and check out the rather ghoulish-sounding ossuary (chapel made of human bones) in a nearby town tomorrow, but the busses on a Sunday will be difficult and infrequent (it's closed Monday and I'm gone before it opens Tuesday).
 
Can also see why some are already claiming tourism has ruined Prague: depressingly large strips of poor-quality souvenir shops everywhere.
 
Still, love the Jewish Quarter and Paris Street. There is an amusing metronome on top of one hill where a 30 metre statue of Stalin once stood. Michael Jackson then put a 30 metre statue of himself up there before one of his concerts, and booked out the hotel facing the hill from across the river. Hysterical. Now the metronome symbolises the ebb and flow of history here at the crossroads of Europe. Apparently, during the EU referendum, it's long red pointer swung between signs reading "yes" and "no".

Hola from Barcelona

Tip for novice players no. 57: when the locals are sharing flourescent drinks approximately the colour of toxic waste in the Simpsons from huge glass steins with straws in them, take seriously the waiter's expression of surprise when you and your hostel drinking buddies order one a piece.

I have not had such a messy night in some time.

Fortunately, this was Saturday night and I hit Barcelona Tuesday, thus having covered most of my sight-seeing before writing off a day to a hangover.

I thought I had given my heart to Florence, but hussy that I am I find myself spuring Firenze's delights for Barcelona. This is simply an amazing town.

I am in love with the Gothic Quarter and the turn-of-the-century Modernista architecture in surrounding districts. Gauidi's La Pedrera apartment block and Sagrada Familia cathedral are works of genius and well worth the price of admission. I also adore Barcelona Catherdral and the iron-railing enclosed garden of palm trees and white geese in the centre of its cloisters.

I also like the wonderfully open, fun, friendly, casual style of the place - and eating three course Catalan cuisine in the El Raval or La Ribera districts on an 8 euro fixed-price lunch (drinks and service included).

It´s also festival season and there's plenty of free stuff on in the evening. Friday I went to see some amazing contemporary dance in the square between Modern Art Museum and Contemporary Culture Centre (itself an architectural wonderland - three 18th century facades reflected in a huge fourth wall of glass).

Last night I went with some Americans to see the fountains and light show at Montjuic park before heading off for a fabled bar that served shots from a menu of nearly 100 mixed drinks at 1.50 euro a shot.

Things got kinda messy as we had no idea what was in anything we were ordering. This lead to the lapse of judgement involved in ordering the uber-drinks.

Which lead to me declaring I was "just fine" to get the night bus back to the hostel in the rain without a jacket or umbrella.

I do not think I have thrown up as often, or as spectacularly, in some time. Indeed, I´ve not thrown up through excessive drinking since 1999. The wonderful thing about being extraordinarily intoxicated in a foreign city in torrential rain is the complete lack of shame one feels at the rather efficient option of, when the bus pulls up for a stop that is not yours, leaning out and emptying the contents of one´s gullet into the gutter.

I was, needless to say, a tad fragile this morning. (Should not have started my breakfast with a peach, should have skipped straight to the dry bread which I held down rather nicely thank you).

As Waugh put it: "Please believe it was not the quantity, or the quality, but rather the mixture."

What´s been your biggest night on the town lately?

Milano, Milano

Given the serious damage Milan in a sales season can do to one's wealth I have probably gotten off light. Around 90 euro has netted me two jazz CDs (Brad Mehldau, Cassandra Wilson), some linen pants in a kind of denim blue with a thin brown double pin stripe and a white business shirt with a pattern of fine blue stripes.

I have also risked life and limb, getting used to being zipped around Milan on the back of S's scooter. We could, apparently, have taken a car had he not left his wallet at the metal detector at Stansted airport last week.

His parents have been absolutely lovely to me. Though I might rupture something from the sheer volume and variety of light summer foods and cold pasta that have been pressed upon me.

Basically, it's been a day and a half of taking it easy and ambling around in the heat. We were turned away from the Cathedral interior on the grounds we were wearing shorts and I was happy enough to skip any cultural dimension after the overload in Florence.

Our cultural high point was sipping white martinis on the pavement seating of a bar in a not terribly fashionable lane (eating free prosciutto, melon, artichoke heart salad, white cheese and tomato) talking about common friends and uncertain futures as the orange trams rattled by.

If S lands a job here while he takes a year out to apply to Columbia for a PhD, I will have to come back often. Especially now S has mentioned those fatal words in suit shopping: "outlet store".

Tomorrow I am going back to Firenze to finish off a few sights and to pick up that brown oily-calfskin leather jacket, even though it will blow a 150 euro hole in my budget, I just want it in ways verging on the idolatrous. Still, at the price it would be wasteful not to buy it.

I expect the train trip will advance me a further three hours through what will be my fourth reading of Jonathon Franzen's "The Corrections" - I don't think a book has ever given me so much pleasure on re-reading. I devour the words.

Thinking of that, in a room of a Fireze museum where the American women did indeed come and go, talking of Michelangelo, I heard the following conversation regarding a fresco:

"Mommy, why is the devil eating that man?"

"The pictures are about the seven sins, darling. That man is being punished for gluttony."

"What's gluttony?"

"Well, honey, it used to be a sin to eat too much ..."

Used to be. Glad to know that the statute of limitations applying to the word of the Eternal has run on that one - at least as regards first world consumerism.

Wrapping up in Florence

Milan tomorrow, where I stay with S, the Italian sociologist. (For those with shopping questions, see the comments to the last entry.)

The Campaggio Michelangelo has been great. Very camping ground atmosphere, but 15 to 30 minutes by bus from the station or from Santa Croce. Met a good gang on the first night, but they have all now left. The bar terrace is lively, and the view out to the Duomo spectacular (the camp ground is on the same hill, and is level with the Michelangelo lookout/piazza).

I've done the predictable things, but my favourite site has to be San Miniato al Monte, a monastery church built by benedictines. Spectacular views, fabulous Romanate 11th century interior. Incredibly peaceful, being slightly off the tourist path.

In other news, at the Palazzo Vecchio I attached myself to an Australian Bar Association conference tour group and almost slipped for free into a (second) look around the Uffizzi ...

Not dead, just in Florence

Everyone who told me nearly a year ago I needed more than two days in Florence was entirely right.

My opening bid of four days may have to be upped: this place is unfairly burdened with history and art. Yes, it is worth climbing 347 steps to the top of the Duomo and it is worth paying 9.50 euro to see the original of Michaelangelos David (excuse the typos, I cant find the apostrophe key in Italy).

David, despite the "life" size copies littered all over Florence, still hits youl ike a hammer blow when you round the corner in the Accademia. Even better, the hall leading up to it is lined with the "prisoners" - Michelangelos unfinished, partly "uncovered" sculptures. Davids expression is just so richly ambiguous; is it the eerie calm of a man about to enter comabat against impossible odds, or a restrained and serious appreciation of his victory (or humility at the role of divine intevention/inspiration)? His expression is profoundly human, and yet touched with an alien nobility.

In other news, it is hot here. Damn hot. So much for my fears that it might be too cool in the evenings in a two man tent.

I also teamed up with a random buch of English speakers for nights one and two here, all but me were American. The oddest moment was undoubtedly drinking with Americans, in a Florentine Scottish-themed pub, being served by a Spanish waitress.

Graduation day Doug 

Graduation day (Part I)

I am now a graduate of Cambridge University. Wow, that is an odd sentence to write, though for “odd” value it pales in comparison to the day itself.

You graduate not by course, but by college. An “admission to degrees” day is one of a college’s flag-days, so you get to come into college seeing the old heraldry a flutter. Indeed, you’ll see a number of colleges flying their colours, as ceremonies run through back to back.

The ceremony begins with a procession from your college to the Senate House (a short walk in our case). You have to march up in graduation order, so in our case it was proceeded by much milling about aimlessly in Front Court, complaining about the cold and the wind and desperately hoping the rain would hold off.

“It’s all fine,” I muttered, “so long as there isn’t a lightning strike.”

Eventually porters and the charmingly dishevelled Praelector (a Classics don with a rumpled blue suit, black gown and mortarboard) lined us up in rows of four in the correct order (by degree, then alphabetically). Being a “law college”, the LLMs were first. I was in the front row, second from the right.

We were given the briefest of pep talks on the ceremony, and then we were off – marching up Senate House passage, the Praelector waving tourists and town citizens out of the way.

As we turned the corner to the formal entrance to the Senate, university constables in tailcoats and top hats pulled back the heavy iron-railing gates to let us pass. Inside the seats were filling up with relatives and guests. We were held in our little rows of four to wait.

I felt strangely elated. The guy to my right, was going first, was nervous about getting the procedure wrong.

“Look at us in the front row,” I said, “not a UK national among us.”

We were a Swiss, an Aussie and two French-Canadians.

“Not much better in the row behind,” he answered.

There was a sudden silence as a man and woman with tall, elaborate silver maces entered, followed by the college Master in a huge woollen scarlet PhD robe and hat (the Santa suit, I’ve heard it called). As he passed the representatives of the university, they doffed their mortar boards.

The Master took up a position on the low stage.

Before anyone spoke, they doffed their mortarboards. After a commencing passage in Latin, everyone was reminded (in English) to switch off mobile phones and not to take photos.

The Master was enthroned (in a small, fairly comfy looking chair) with a cushion in front of him. More hat doffing and Latin.

“Trinity Hall!”

The Praelector gestured for us to follow him, and we first four strode lockstep over black and white tiles. Halt, his hand gestured.

He spread the fingers of his right hand. Each of us took one. He introduced us to the Master - in Latin - as persons of learning and (more dubiously) virtue. Our names were then called. (Thankfully, in English).

On being called, you walked forward, knelt before the Master, assumed an attitude of prayer, and looked him in the eye. The Master clasped your hands in his, pronounced Latin over you and removed his hands. You stood, bowed, took a step back, and proceeded out a side door where someone put a degree certificate into your hand, clad in a little plastic sleeve.

On the steps out into the Passage, the college tutors were meant to assemble to congratulate graduates. We were out so fast the law tutors hadn’t yet arrived, though some tutors were in place.

We milled about on the senate lawns, ordered photos, got degrees on-the-spot framed and remembered to return our fetching salmon-pink rental hoods. We were Cambridge graduates.

Time for drinks and dinner.

The President’s right to order torture

Politicisation of the public service is a bit of a theme in the blogosphere – but this takes the cake. The New York Times reports that a 2002 memorandum prepared by a government lawyer concluded “that the president's power to use torture to extract information from suspected terrorists is almost unlimited”.

The author was Jay S. Bybee, then the head of Office of Legal Counsel to the Attorney General:

The Office of Legal Counsel "is informally called the attorney general's lawyer," said Douglas W. Kmiec, who ran the office in the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush. "We used to call it the conscience of the Justice Department."

The Bybee memo basically defines torture, under US federal law, very narrowly and requires intent to cause permanent disabling injury, major organ failure or death (along with actually inflicting such injuries) for the crime to be committed. The memo apparently does not consider the much wider Convention Against Torture (CAT) definition relevant, even as a guide to interpretation of the domestic law’s wording. (It is normally accepted that domestic law should be interpreted consistently with international law wherever possible, even where international law has no directly enforceable status in “internal” law.) Article I of the CAT defines torture as:

“…any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession … when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

The memo went straight to White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who commissioned it, and it apparently (though it strains credulity) never reached President Bush or the Attorney General.

Gonzales is the lawyer whose view that the Geneva Conventions relating to prisoner of war status (GPW) do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay detainees, in a clash of memos, prevailed over Colin Powell’s view that they should.

The second Gonzales GPW memo can be found here. One of its reasons for denying GPW status is that it substantially reduces the risk of prosecution under domestic law of any Bush administration official for the war crime of mistreating POWs.

Incidentally, the co-author of the Bybee torture memo was Professor Jonathon Yoo, now a lecturer international law at the University of California in Berkeley, and an advocate of pre-emptive self-defence in his writings for the American Journal of International Law.

The Clinton head of the Office of Legal Counsel had this to say:

"What's depressing about the memo is not that parts of it appear to be wrong," Mr. Dellinger said. "What's depressing is that it's such a one-sided advocacy document."

This is entirely true. In law there is always a counter-argument, it’s seldom a game of absolute truth. That said, part of the profession must be rigorous analysis of all arguments, an analysis which should not be guided by a view as to the desirable policy outcomes. Indeed, a lawyer who fails to assess all arguments in a balanced way and provides merely instrumentalist advice is arguably in breach of their professional obligations as they may not explain all legal risks properly to their client.

Rather depressingly, this whole affair though seems rather more symptomatic of a culture in western democracy where the “frank and fearless” advice of the public service has been replaced with pressure to simply tell politicians what they want to hear and nothing else.

As for Bybee? He’s apparently a mild and pleasant character in person, and was appointed as a Federal Judge sitting in Las Vegas.

Being a good corporate global citizen

I am not anti-globalisation, or anti-corporations.

The market is a powerful tool for development, provided it is properly regulated. Otherwise, it will simply do what it does best: concentrate wealth in the hands of those who already have it. It does tend to have the incidental benefit of raising absolute standards of living (a good thing), but will often reinforce relative gaps in wealth.

This is exactly what has happened in global markets since 1945. Average developing-world standards of living have risen, but so has the relative North-South gap. Globalisation, unsurprisingly, favours the strong.

Superficially, at least, it is thus a good thing that the UN is launching (a second) corporate social responsibility compact – a set of voluntary core principles which corporations are encouraged to sign up to, including corporate partnership ventures, including MNCs helping to foster local eco-friendly businesses. It’s fine to acknowledge that to achieve real change governments will have to work increasingly with business.

The worrying aspect is the continuing, behind-closed-doors integration of the trans-national commercial classes with the trans-national diplomatic classes and their combined culture of secrecy or, more politely, “confidentiality”.

In focussing on “partnership” the UN is being constructive, but risks allowing MNCs to trade on the UN’s prestige. I would feel far more comfortable with a transparent certification process, a prestige-based UN stamp of approval on these partnership projects, which could be withdrawn if they fail.

If one thinks of the successes of Fair Trade certified products, this might harness some of the power of consumer pressure and give the UN a little more arms-length distance from these projects.

There is already a worrying democratic deficit in the conduct of international affairs which diplomats and businessmen tend, naturally enough, to be blind to. If you’re used to brokering bilateral deals (be they a corporate merger or a cease-fire agreement) confidentiality is the name of the game.

However, in the exercise of public power on the international stage and multilateral projects that affect the lives of millions of real people, it’s hardly an acceptable way of doing business.

What’s worse is this is the way things are already done. Dozens of inter-government technical and standards-setting bodies are staffed by “industry representatives” not government officials and have often succeeded in universalising proprietary technologies as the relevant international standard.

Such an approach just doesn’t square with the calls from within the UN for civil society to play a more active role in international affairs.

Too many hours at the bar to be posting now

The fact that I have even found the keyboard seems an achievement. Call it a delayed reaction to the good PhD news. (Thanks all for the supportive comments and old-friend e-mails, it means a lot to me, honest.)

So yeah, today. Today was archive fun with the grad students committee VP and Mr Producer. Strange as it may sound, the Middle Combination Room (Grad Students Lounge) is an entirely separate space from the MCR Office, a small room off B staircase where few committee members dare tread. The VP as a committed medieval historian thought we should make the world a better place through effective finding.

Over the course of the day I helped dispose of decade-old lost property, managed some sage nodding, some removal of broken glass (don’t ask) and collated and printed an academic year’s worth of minutes by me and those brave enough to fill in on the weeks I couldn’t take it anymore.

Then I went and bought us sandwiches.

Then I went to have a medical for my new scholarship organisation to prove that I was physically fit to travel to, reside in, and conduct graduate study in Cambridge.

Yes, the Alanis-irony of the moment (and the 38 pound 50 fee) was not wasted on me.

Then another evening as a tele-fund raiser. Including the surreal experience of calling a head-master who was using the same firm of tele-fundraisers to provide infrastructure and training for his fund-raising campaign. A more profound moment of post-modern reflexivity I’m not sure I could have encountered outside of being an actor in “Being John Malcovich”.

Anyway, one of the experiences of the evening was drinking with Mr Producer, a second-generation Iranian immigrant from the People’s Independent Sunshine Republic of California.

It is a continual source of wonder that the most erudite, Wildean wit I have met in Cambridge is a US national (even if the world suspects his passport of being a fake because the page numbers are not in proper sequence).

When we realised a bottle of the house-white at the college bar would cost less split two ways than a pint (the first two times I typed that it came out “punt”) we basically went crazy.

Would that I had stopped there. Or that I had not had a gin and tonic within work hours with the director of development.

Um … where was this going? Oh, I forget. Merry Christmas one and all!

Once more unto the boxes

For what seems the millionth damn time I am stuffing the material ephemera of my life (aka “possessions”) into cardboard boxes taken from the local supermarket.

As I have complained before this is a process that has taken me from: Curtin (Canberra), to Coogee and eventually Balmain via a house-sit in Drummoyne (Sydney), Northcote and then Brunswick East (Melbourne), then back home to the parents’ place outside Canberra before coming to Cambridge – where a tenacious cardboard box with strong homing instincts did manage to track me down eventually.

I have been reappraising the contents of that solitary box, kindly packed by the parents in the present process of packing up my room. It did arrive with my suit, which has been useful for all manner of less-than-black-tie occasions. It also contained an extra towel, two bathmats, two Floriade tea-towels and – a little mysteriously – two bright yellow cloth napkins.

In fairness, I had had some towel-related problems on arrival (see the old October 2 “Keys and Porters” tale of woe); but I have never quite found a need for two cloth napkins. However, I may yet wind up inviting some charming person with an obsession with bright primary colours to an intimate candle-lit dinner, in which case I’m set.

The next question is where to store my four or five boxes of possession while I roam Europe, the UK and Australia over the Summer. I’m giving up my present room to save on rent, but other flatmates will be here through to October – so I’m strongly thinking about just stashing most of my stuff in the cupboard under the stairs and leaving my laptop with some PhD friends at their flat.

If, on my return in September, I have a new address, the stats since 1999 will break down as follows:

Number of addresses in the Canberra region – 2;
Number of addresses in Sydney – 4 (2 in Coogee alone);
Number of addresses in Melbourne – 2; and
UK addresses – 2.

It’s enough to make a man want to own property.

Coming soon: tales of a tele-fundraiser, the long wash-up of May Week madness and my initiation into a week-and-a-half old secret society.

Three year tour of duty

Marks are up. I got the First, I have the funding.

Looks like I’m here for another three years.

... Stunned only gets us into the territory.

Doom doom doom - go home now!

Law results are published at the Senate House tomorrow. Apparently some dude comes out onto a balcony, reads them out, then tosses a set of papers down to the ground where they are scooped up and posted on boards.

I am not entirely sold on this myth of how things happen.

I do know that results could be posted at any point between 9 am and 4 pm. (Apparently the faculty chair has hinted that it will be earlier rather than later, and I know the examination committee convened at 9 am Thursday to finalise results.)

I also know for a fact that the results are posted by name and division (first, two one, two two, third, fail). Everyone knows what you got. The slim saving grace is the results within divisions are published alphabetically, not by rank order.

You have to go to your college Director of Studies (or "doss" in the slang) to find out where you finished within your division.

Serious nerves about the whole process, especially as the ordinary requirement to stay on for the PhD is a first.

In other news, in my first two hours "live" as a telephone fund raiser I netted my college 1,600 pounds over three years. God bless the occasional generous law firm partner who's at home to take the call. (She even complimented me on my charm.)

May week, the best thing about June

Okay, I’m calling half time and taking a breather.

The birth of summer and the death of exams produces a hectic social round in Cambridge called “May Week”, occurring – naturally enough – in June.

May Week kicks off with the Garden Parties of Suicide Sunday: typically hosted by clubs and societies and featuring copious quantities of alcohol and finger food. These first of these starts at 10 am and they run staggered through the day, allowing people to get utterly slaughtered.

Hence, “suicide Sunday”.

Drinking or Boat (ie rowing) Club garden parties often have a dress code, so it’s not uncommon to see a lot of fairly rah-rah looking young Englishmen staggering about in fawn pants, club tie and blue blazers. (Or tie, blazer, shorts and sandals.)

As Sunday was closing night for “Golden Ass”, I kept it fairly restrained with two glasses of Pimms at the Amateur Dramatic Club garden party in the Bursar’s Garden at Corpus Christi (a bewildering maze of ‘courts’ – I stumbled across a full-period-costume rehearsal of “The Merchant of Venice” before I found drinks, and discovered half its cast had been in “Albert’s Bridge” with me).

Rather legendarily, our leading man arrived for the final night’s call 40 minutes late and still inebriated, but was word-perfect throughout the production.

Even if the producer did have to fish him out of the shrubbery before he went on.

It was a great closing night, and I felt I gave my best performances in each of my variety of small parts. However, for the second night running a “wardrobe malfunction” resulted in my taffeta dress bursting a shoulder strap and the audience receiving a flash of man-nipple.

The cast went to dinner afterwards (mmm … bento) and the cast party ran until 6.45 am Monday morning (full cooked breakfast served shortly after dawn), by which time some of the cast had been swimming in the Jesus Green pool.

After the daring pool-raid one friend of the production re-entered the cast party at the director’s flat by the window. A moderately impressive act, given she lives on the first floor (ie the one above ground level).

A refreshing one-hour nap later and I was pitching up with Mr Producer to telephone fund-raising training at college from 10 – 4, prior to our being callers in our college’s alumni appeal later this week.

After that I had time to go home, get into suit and tie and cycle to Wolfson to help judge a debating final for their intensive management-skills course and attend formal hall and make polite dinner conversation until around 10 in the evening.

(I was coherent enough on the clash between creating new vertical structures of international law and horizontally coordinating existing national systems for an academic working on issues in European police integration to demand my email and provide me with his card.)

I collapsed around 10.30, while braver soles participated in the “punt jam” on the river to watch the Trinity College May Ball fireworks.

Yesterday was another day of 10 – 4 training, a Marlowe Society Garden Party (Pimms, scones and jam, strawberries and cream served on the Pembroke Library Lawn) and then the St John’s College May Ball.

At over 100 pounds for an impossible-to-get-anyway non-dining ticket I was expecting a good time – and got it in spades. Along with Trinity College, St John’s is usually one of the “big two” balls and apparently makes the Newsweek top-ten world parties fairly often. Not hard to see why.

As ticket holders you queue at least an hour to get in, ID is checked, as is the UV stamp on your printed ticket. Once security-braceleted you enter the “reception area” (champagne and strawberries) through the amazing St John’s chapel. Beyond that?

Fireworks, a fun-fair and night punting on the riverbanks. A main event tent and three or four other music, cabaret and dance venues. A masseuse I never bothered queuing for. Basically unlimited food and drink. Punts full of ice, vodka drinks and Jamaican beer. The fairy-tale confection of John’s architecture lit up purple and white.

Highlights included old-fashioned “boat swings” at the fair, a Charleston lesson (there was a 1920s theme) and attending part of the Scissor Sisters set at the main event tent: not quite my thing, but they had an amazing stage presence, and it was worth it to see a rocking crowd entirely in black tie and evening gowns. (As was the student security staff, distinguishable only by a coloured sash across their dress-shirt, which amused the musos no end.)

Left a bit after 5, simply not having the stamina to make it through to the 6 am "survivors" group photo.

I could write a lot more, but I have to rest up for the Trinity Hall event this evening (not a ball per se, more a four-venue music extravaganza, but still enjoying a reputation as one of the May Week events) and the Darwin Ball (a graduate college) on Friday. Not certain who’s playing at Trinity Hall, precise details of bands and acts are usually kept under wraps. (That the Scissor Sisters were playing was something you only discovered upon being issued with your ball program.)

I start phone-campaign work Thursday, law marks are out Friday morning, and I leave on my travels on the 29th.

No wonder I feel busy.

The Bear of Death, unexpectedly pursued 

It’ll be alright on the night (Peter Oswald’s “The Golden Ass”)

After four months in rehearsal, you’d think a play would have a fairly smooth set of dress rehearsals. But with a cast of twenty-something, several score of freshly-made costumes, and only having access to our outdoors venue (a college garden) two days in advance of the play – and being told we could not make noise until the day of the first performance – there was plenty of scope for scares.

Especially given my propensity for forgetting half my lines in Act Two (strange the psychological difference actually having to deliver the lines in a taffeta ball-gown made to my ability to remember them).

We finished the dress rehearsal an hour before we let the audience in, and were still finding scenes we could not get through without corpsing (actors laughing at each other on stage) or things that needed to be re-staged for props to work.

And then suddenly, there they were.

The audience, on their picnic blankets. But from the opening cabaret number, they were entirely on board. There was the odd moment when an item of costume went missing and someone had to grab whatever was to hand, I inserted an extra line in a speech, slightly throwing someone else’s cue, but it all went off brilliantly.

Even the lines I deliver in the ball-gown before waltzing backwards with someone in a wedding dress.

Which was the perfect reason to be drinking until three in the director’s flat on the opening night. One shudders to think what the closing night party will be like – especially given that I and the producer have to go to telephone fundraising training the next day (possibly straight from a cooked breakfast at the director’s).

After a little rain this morning, the sun is out. I hope that holds for tonight’s show.

Rough as guts, but finally up

I apologise that it's been a month (blame exams), but new installment Naylor's Canberra is finally up.

For those unfamiliar with the concept once a week (in theory) I publish 1,000 words of a crime novel in draft that starts over here.

Elliot Naylor, a semi-employed law librarian, refused admission as a solicitor following a culpable driving charge, has been hired to find his ex-girlfriend Marina by her father (David Carmichael, a prominent barrister).

Marina works for the Minister for Justice and Customs, a high-profile crusader against the trafficking of women into Australia for sexual slavery. Her father is keen to avoid any embarassment to himself or the Minister, and hope Elliot can find her quickly and quietly.

Elliot's research suggests more is at stake. Carmichael seems to have lied to his wife and daughter about his dealings with a corrupt local businessman (Bob Mitchell). Carmichael, Mitchell and a third man, Ryder, are involved in a property development of dubious environmental impact.

Elliot suspects Marina of absconding with documents. Meanwhile, he discovers the death of Marina's colleague Jenny and Ryder's connections to pornography and prostitution.

A naive attempt to ascertain whether Carmichael was a known face at one of Ryder's brothels earned him bruised ribs (and possibly worse). Frighteningly, the flat next door to Elliot's - mistaken for his - has been trashed.

It is possible the Minister is influencing the police investigation into both Marina's disappearance and Jenny's murder, and that a leak from his office is somehow responsible for Jenny's death.

Leads on Marina's whereabout remaining scant, Elliot (with new girlfriend Danielle and flatmate Eva) returns to Marina's house to interview her flatmate Ted. He suspects Ted of having slept with Marina recently, despite both of them sharing a roof with Trish, Ted's girlfriend.

With that recap in mind, read on ...

A personal boast (or, “First lines”)

The play opens next week. After rehearsals today we went for drinks, then to “Gala Bingo, Cambridge” (a blog in itself) and then wound up back at the director’s to play “Ex Libris”.

“Ex Libris” is a game where you’re given the title of a novel, a summary of its plot and the name (and dates of birth and death) of the author and then have to write a plausible first line to the novel.

Then you vote on the most convincing opening line submitted (and get double points if you pick the real one). I won the game on the strength of my proposed opening line for Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” (which snagged six votes).

My thinking went like this: British modernist/surrealist, known for long, tortuous gothic passages of description, a man who will set the scene for pages before introducing action.

My first line: “On the north wall of the hall hung a helmet rusted scarlet and dun, presiding over cobwebs and abandoned silence.”

Peake’s Line: “Titus was seven.”

I refused to vote for Peake’s line on the basis that he would never have written a sentence that short …

I also came up, during rehearsal, with a fairly melodramatic opening line for what could be the third Naylor novel, if I ever get that far:

“The English Spring had unfurled around us, but for the body in herringbone tweed nudging against our prow it would have been a fine morning for punting: horse-chestnut blossoms standing like candles against the leaves, gently stirring wires of willow falling in cages across the sluggish green water, the college backs along the Cam stained bloody with poppies”.

There will be more Naylor soon, for its few (and deeply appreciated) readers.

A plague of angels best avoided

Please, please, please do not waste your life on “Angels in America” on the ABC next week. It will bring you no rewards, no profundity, it may even trash your opinion of the excellent HBO (“The Sopranos”, “Six Feet Under” and “Sex and the City”).

Emma Thompson should be amazing as the archangel with personal oversight of the American dream, but she’s just kinda shouty. Which sums up the package: so self-consciously over-the-top it hurts.

It should be so much better. With its themes of AIDS, gay identity/solidarity, religion and corruption it could be “Six Feet Under” as a contemporary Biblical allegory. The concept of a HIV positive gay man in New York as the Lord’s prophet is brilliant.

A shame the dialogue is so melodramatic you spend the entire experience flinching.

The best line is: “Her? She’s my ex-lover’s new boyfriend’s Mormon mother.”

Thomson (as a hospital nurse with a Brooklyn accent): “Even for New York in the 1980s, that’s weird.”

Despite the huge billing given Thompson (frankly, disappointing), Al Pacino and Meryl Streep the production stands or falls on the performances of Patrick Wilson (a right wing Mormon judicial associate who drafted critical anti-gay rights judgements who’s in the process of coming out of the closet), Justin Kirk (drag queen and prophet) and Ben Shenkman (fairly unlikeable character who runs out on dying lover and spends a lot of time whining about how awful he is for doing so). And they don’t have it, at least not with the lines they’ve been given.

But maybe the unconvincing over-emoting (you can almost here the director yelling “Don’t hold back, emote some more – except you Meryl, just try and look stunned and vacant darling, there’s a dear”) has to do with the script's origins on Broadway where it was originally entitled: “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”.

I suspect Alan Ball should have been hauled in to handle the TV movie adaptation.

High points? Pacino as a compellingly corrupt lawyer – not that we’ve seen him in that role before – delivers brilliantly the exchange: “I may have sex with men, but I’m not a homosexual, homosexuals are powerless. I pick up that phone and dial sixteen digits, you know who I got on the line?”

“The President.”

“Better, his wife.”

But these moments do not relieve an otherwise unengaging failure of a production with special effects that don’t live up to the average episode of Buffy (you can almost see the wires holding Thompson up).

Okay, it’s amusing to have a travel agent hiding in your fridge.

Still, shame on The Age for just recycling The Washington Post’s delusional ramblings.

Only in Cambridge ...

Could it be said that on the one day I was drinking since noon (LLM farewell drinks at the faculty) and wound up crashing a Law Lord's garden party before going punting.

I can now honestly say I have been off ferretting for a lost croquet ball in Lord Mustill's undergrowth.

I am also in the peculiar position of still not having a confirmed PhD place, but having both funding and someone who is not yet my supervisor advising me to change my topic.

(It seems that Big Names are muscling in on the ole WMD proliferation territory and there may be nothing original left to say in 3 years. Am not yet convinced personally, but will need to do some reading over summer.

It also turns out my LLM dissertation supervisor was on the committee that put my name forward to the scholarship organisation that accepted me. It's who you know, kids ... )

It's a little scary two weeks ahead of results to have people treating me like a sure thing.

A new set of photos are up 

Soon, but not now ...

Went to see an astonishing play in London on Tuesday. (God bless ten pound tickets.) Will need to write soon, reflecting on Shakespeare and the ideas of law, justice, tyranny and abuse of public power.

Listened to jazz (Miles Davis, "Kind of Blue") discreetly on the iPod while visiting these old friends I'd not seen since 1998 in the US, where I had to chase them down across Washington DC, Chicago and New York. Convenient to be able to catch up with them in one place.

My punting is improving.

I had recent good fortune announced to a college bar after closing-time by a friend from Queensland.

Faintly heartbreaking farwell drinks with Professor Allott at "The Lawyer" yesterday. We gave him a globe and I was asked to "say a few words". He described us (essentially a collection of Australians plus a South African, a New Zealander and a Jordanian), kindly, as the most memorable History and Theory class he taught. It was a privelege to be in his last class, and possibly the last History and Theory class ever as no-one is taking over the subject after his retirement.

(PS surely this is too ridiculous for words: outrage over "Play School" featuring a story about Brenna and her two mums going to the amusement park?)

Playing devil’s advocate

There’s something in the air again about the academic and young professional “brain drain” and the “unpatriotic” expat intelligentsia. Beth’s had some great posts on the debate, and I basically agree with everything Beth’s had to say.

But the more I think about it, as young professional expat hopefully about to start a PhD in the UK, the more I think the debate risks being fundamentally misconceived and – in a word – parochial.

First off, from where I sit, I do not see people leaving Australia forever. Sure, some do. More, I suspect, gain skills and experience overseas and return with them to Australia – surely a plus.

I also don’t understand why we now have a reverse cultural cringe about expat intellectuals and feel compelled to denigrate any efforts by the likes of Greer, Hughes or Carey to contribute to Australian debates as “out of touch” or as having let the side down by working overseas (especially when like most people working in foreign countries, they probably repatriate a chunk of their income).

Okay, a blogosphere example. Beth, Lyn and I all went to uni and lived most/all of our childhoods or high-school days in the Canberra region. I am now in the UK, Beth is in Melbourne (as I was happily for some time), Lyn is in Sydney.

Is moving inter-state a betrayal of “local” roots in Canberra? No-one would make that argument. But the nation is a “natural” community, isn’t it?

I seriously hope not. The vibrancy of Australian culture comes in large part from a rich migrant tradition. We embrace multiculturalism (and skilled migration) but still see “leaving” as some sort of personal failing. Again, there could be a parochialism at the root of this: “Well, of course people want to come here, but why would they want to leave?”

Also the debate is essentialist. It treats people as having only their national identity and ignores other aspects of the importance of location: moving to a city (wherever in the world) and falling in love with it, or someone in it, or simply reaching a point in your career where (in the small-to-mid sized Australian market) there is nowhere left to go but overseas.

We also undervalue these people as ambassadors for the vibrancy of Australian business, culture and academia.

The real question is not why do people leave, the real question is whether they return – and whether we are doing enough to attract movement in the other direction. Where are the voices we have lured to Australia to enrich our debates, and if there aren’t any, what are we doing wrong?

If Melbourne is the best city in the world for expats to live in, where are the professionals and intelligentsia we’ve lured from overseas? I suspect they’re already there, though we could do more to pull them in – starting with ditching the chip on our shoulder.

(PS The comments on this post have moved over here. My apologies.)

A place called home

Last week Beth wrote on the Australian intelligentsia and those who’ve left home to pursue careers overseas, especially in the 1970s. I found this post quite provocative, not least through being mentioned by name as part of the large Australian professional diaspora. Another reason was that I had something kind of extraordinary happen on Saturday.

I stumbled in from a day’s play rehearsal, punting and drinking to find a letter from this organisation waiting for me. I’ve been offered three years PhD funding. It's an incredibly generous offer.

I have to stress that my Masters marks are not out and the Law School has not accepted me yet (significant unhatched chickens) – but funding is usually the hard bit, so it looks like I have the option of staying on 3 years for my doctorate.

And I’ll take it.

But why? Couldn’t I do a PhD at home?

I’d love to do a PhD in Melbourne, I love the city and it has some great international law research centres. So why will I stay on in the UK if I’m given a chance?

I’ve been unpacking my responses cautiously. The prospect of four years in a foreign country (even speaking the language) scares me. I am a long way from old friends (with a few noble exceptions) and family. If I went home to corporate law or government service I’d be earning and could get a foot on the property ladder. As it is, I may return at 31, broke and with four degrees in tow.

Why stay then?

The biggest draw-card is, to be entirely frank, something my Australian undergraduate supervisor (now head of a major UK law school) said to me over lunch recently: “It’s sad, and it shouldn’t be the case, but you’ll find having a Masters from Cambridge opens doors for you nothing else would.”

The same goes for a PhD. If I want to go into the underpaid, Alice-in-Wonderland world of academic teaching and research (which I do) a PhD is more-or-less vital, and doing a PhD here is potentially career-making.

Is that a sell-out? Well, no. As I commented at Beth’s site – I don’t think the present Australian young-professional-expat community sees itself as turning its back on home, and it comes abroad with a fairly assertive national identity.

In my field, international law, it is hard to imagine being taken seriously If you had not spent some time studying overseas. Further, being based at a European institution, you get to see guest-lecturers and speakers who just don’t get to Australia.

Personally, I also distrust the “easy” option – the thing I would find easiest to do. And, in the lead-up to exams, I would have liked nothing more than to just pack up and come home for good. (As I still intend to do eventually.)

As a small, proud country do we risk missing something? Surely we should be over by now thinking that leaving home is an act of betrayal (not that Beth’s post in anyway suggested this). It’s just as bad as treating those who “made it” overseas as inherently superior (though in some industries, there may only be so far you can go in Australia given our limited population).

Where does the individual fit in this debate? Is Peter Carey less Australian for writing novels with inherently Australian concerns, but while he is living in New York? Or is it the case that “exile” is sometimes the thing that reveals our national identity to us? (It's easy to think of a long list of historical celebrities who did their best work in exile: Ovid, Locke, Grotius, Einstein, Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron, etc.)

I find it amazing how fiercely (almost pardoically) Australian the Australians abroad can become, and anytime I go drinking with Queenslanders, I’m no exception …

(PS due to the joys of technology half the comments on this post are over here.)