Author: Mark Hannam

Playing Monopoly as a child, I soon learned that being sent to jail was disadvantageous early in the game, since it prevented me from landing on unowned sites and taking the opportunity to buy them and build up my property empire.  By contrast, spending time in jail was highly advantageous later in the game since it offered me a safe-haven from where I could avoid the risk of landing on property sites – heavily developed with houses or hotels – owned by my competitors.  Being in jail, from time to time, was just part of playing the game, there was no shame involved.

Later in life, I learned about people who had gone to jail for reasons of principle.  Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for his opposition to the Apartheid regime, more than half of which were spent on Robben Island where he was forced to undertake hard labour in a quarry, and where he was allowed one visit – for thirty minutes – per year.  Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an open letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, which became a key document of the American Civil Rights movement.   Mohandas Gandhi, one of King’s role models, had been a regular guest of British jails in South Africa and India, deliberately breaking unjust laws and accepting imprisonment as the consequence, to draw attention to the iniquities of colonial rule.  In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, from whose writings Gandhi would draw inspiration, spent a night in Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes, which he feared would help to fund the American war against Mexico, to which he strongly objected.  If we assume that the laws are just and that the courts follow due process, then imprisonment is badge of shame, but there are occasions when the laws are not just and the legal processes are faulty, and in these cases, I came to understand, being sent to jail might be considered a badge of honour. 

Continue reading “Go to jail”

Not far from where I live in London there is a small museum dedicated to modern Italian art.  It was founded to display the collection of Erik and Salome Estorick, who lived in England for some years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from where they travelled regularly to Italy to meet with artists and buy paintings and drawings.  In the museum’s permanent collection there are several works by Giorgio Morandi, the greatest European still-life painter of the twentieth century and, whenever I visit the museum, I like to spend some time in the room where his work is on display.  His etchings achieve a wonderful sense of depth by means of simple variations in the density of the lines, while in his paintings, with their narrow range of creamy blues, greys, and whites, he generates a curious combination of calmness and vitality. 

The English term “still-life” refers to paintings that portray neither the human figure nor the landscape, but everyday household objects: vases, glasses, and pots in Morandi’s work; other painters have included cutlery, bowls, dishes, flowers, fish, vegetables, fruit, musical instruments, pens, ink, manuscripts, and books. Still-life painting draws attention to the technical skill of the artist – the ability to represent light and shadow on a wide variety of shapes and surfaces – while also drawing attention to everyday objects to which we often pay little heed.  One of the best books of art criticism that describes the history and characteristics of the genre, by Norman Bryson, is called Looking at the Overlooked, which nicely captures the sense that these paintings are designed to remind us of what is familiar but routinely neglected.  Sometimes these artworks include hourglasses or clocks, to signal to the viewer the importance of the passage of time, and in other cases they include human skulls, to signal that life is finite.   The French name for the genre, nature morte, translates literally as “dead nature”, which make this point rather more bluntly than its euphemistic English equivalent: inert matter might sometimes be overlooked in its stillness, but organic matter is always in transit from birth to death.

Continue reading “Selfie”

I started to write this text on Bloomsday, famously the calendar day on which James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses is set.   Joyce borrowed the title and structure of his book from Homer, although Odysseus (to give him his original Greek name) took ten years to travel from Illium to Ithaca after spending ten years fighting at the siege of Troy, whereas Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin for fewer than twenty hours.  Joyce is said to have chosen to set his story on 16^th June 1904 because that was the day of his first romantic outing with Nora Barnacle, whom he later married, although it is not clear to me whether this act of homage was to celebrate her loyalty to him, as Penelope to Odysseus, or her disloyalty, as Molly to Leopold.   

I have been re-reading Ulysses at a leisurely pace, enjoying its jokes, provocations, and digressions, alongside its description of the many ways in which we are prone to self-deception but also capable of moments of self-enlightenment, and for its sympathetic reminder that during the journey of life youthful ambition often develops into mature disappointment.  Along with several other lengthy novels published in the 1920s and ‘30s – Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities – Joyce’s work invites a slow pace, allowing the reader to savour the complex meanderings of plot and explorations of character.   For all my enjoyment of his work, I had not been planning to write about Joyce in this text, the theme of which is our sense of a persistent identity through the passage of time.  Then, a day or two ago, I came across this incident in Ulysses, which acted as a catalyst for my thoughts.

Continue reading “Backwards and forwards”

It is reported that Harold Macmillan, heir to a successful publishing company, claimed that one of the pleasures of becoming British Prime Minister was that he had more time to read novels.  That was almost sixty-five years ago, and it is not a statement one could imagine a contemporary Western political leader making.  For one reason, modern politicians like to present themselves as ordinary people, just like the voters whom they represent, and since they assume that most voters do not read books they likewise pretend not to.  Instead, they allow themselves to be filmed playing golf, watching football, and taking their kids to the cinema, to celebrate their normality, to reaffirm their averageness.  The second reason is that they think they are much too busy, rushing from one meeting to another, speed-reading briefing documents and policy papers, talking with special advisors and party operatives, worrying about the daily news cycle, and the changing trends in the polling data that they collect incessantly.  The closest they might come to admitting to opening a real book, as opposed to a policy file, is when they publicise their annual summer holiday reading list, which will tend to be a small number of fashionable non-fiction titles, thereby trying to connect themselves to certain popular concerns of the day. 

Reading for pleasure is considered a luxury, or worse an indulgence that the modern politician can and should do without.  This is especially true of the reading of fiction – or “story books” – which is assumed to be appropriate only for children and those adults with surplus time on their hands, such as pensioners or academics.  By contrast, those who carry the burden of responsibility of government – in “the real world” – consider themselves too busy to be bothered with make believe.

Continue reading “The spectre of good literature”

A good friend told me this story, knowing I would find it funny. 

Some time ago, his family had guests staying with them for the weekend.  On the Saturday evening, my friend prepared a meal with a variety of dishes, mostly drawn from the Chinese cookery tradition.  They all ate and drank well, and they talked until the early hours of Sunday morning before going to bed.  When my friend woke up the next day and headed down to the kitchen to make coffee, he discovered one of the guests busy at work cleaning up the kitchen.  All the plates, the cutlery, and the glasses had been washed and dried, and were stacked neatly on the table.   On the draining board were clean pans and lids.  The guest was standing at the sink, working away with a wire scouring brush, on my friend’s oldest and most prized wok. 

“Nearly finished,” said the guest with a smile, “it takes a lot of work to get these really clean.”  He lifted the steel wok out of the water to reveal that the near spotless metal was as smooth and bright as when it had first been bought.  My friend forced a smile, nodded, and then retreated upstairs to his bed, speechless.  Ten years of cooking – ten years of sizzling hot oil, infused with ginger, garlic, chilli, black beans, spices, sauces, and marinades – ten years of working at the stove, carefully building up the patina on the surface of the wok, ten years of culinary labour, all obliterated by ten minutes of over-zealous uneducated cleaning.  Disaster!  

Continue reading “Seasoned and sharpened”