SYNTAGMA

Syntagma returns next Saturday

John Evans — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:28:06 +0000

We will be picking up where we left off next Saturday the 4th of September.

In the meantime, I’m still writing in Devon & Cornwall Online.

For a taster, just click on the logo above.

John Evans

Break for August

John Evans — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:17:08 +0000

Syntagma is off on its August break.

We will return in September with all the usual stuff, plus some new columns, including Poppycock Watch — a frequent activity here but now bundled under its own header.

Watch out!

Enjoy the rest of the summer.

Saturday Ramble: Is there a perfect place to live?

John Evans — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:28:30 +0000

I’ve been totting up all the places in Britain I’ve resided in. The list does not include holidays or short stays, only genuine residency. I’m staggered.

Here they are: London, Edinburgh, Farnham (Surrey), Oxford, Melton Mowbray (Leics), Bournemouth, Poole (Dorset), Exeter, Cambridge, Canterbury, Cardiff, Swansea, Borth (Mid-Wales), Penzance and Cheltenham. I may well have missed out one or two.

This does not include foreign climes: Spain (Benalmadena and Estepona), Paris, Perth (Australia), Kaiserslautern (Germany) and a myriad of short stays here and there. I could claim to be an expert in answering the question in the title of this piece.

What makes someone extend their gap year for the rest of their life? Restlessness, perhaps? Inability to settle in one spot? That’s not true, since I’ve been over a decade in my current city in Devon.

It’s a mystery, especially as I’ve known for a long time that most locations have their faults and are much the same once you are familiar with them. Your own viewpoint is always present wherever you go. If you allow it, it will flatten all differences and enhance dullness.

One spot will always stand out though.

For me, Devon is the pitch-perfect place to be, across a wide range of variables. It has everything. Solitude, crowds if you want them, sensible cities, intriguing towns and chocolate box villages, beaches to north and south, and the greatest moor of them all — Dartmoor. Not to mention cream teas and great fish. It never fails to amaze or surprise.

It’s also relatively peaceful by today’s standards, and is thankfully insulated from most of the big political questions of the day. Even union leaders are more benign in Devon than elsewhere.

The big society is a reality here. Take a look at Northlew on Dartmoor, the tiny village that set up its own wireless broadband service, undercutting BT and all other providers feeding off the internet backbone. Devonians are nothing if not enterprising. They have to be. Big Society writ large.

While Cornwall can at times seem like the Wild West, Devon is for ever civilized and tidy. It’s the perfect county for a writer, even better for a contemplative, superb for a conservationist.

This is not a hagiography, nor a billet-doux to a patch of red soil. It is nothing but the unadulterated truth.

The Royal Mail, it is said, intends to abolish counties for delivery purposes. Those upcountry folk just don’t get it, do they?

John Evans

DIARY: Mental health, Dennis Wheatley, Johnevans.co, Annoyment, Muddled Europe, Pics of the Week

John Evans — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:35:42 +0000

How I dislike the phrase “mental health”. In its benign form it has a pastel, slightly perfumed air about it — something and nothing, as we say. Add the word “problem” and it becomes a spitting mass of contradictions and false positives.

Thanks to new American proposals, “psychosis” is set to become the badge of choice for mental health problems and perceived deviations from “normal” behaviour.

I once wrote an article on the mystical experiences of a few famed saints of the Church. “Hmm,” said an expert, “it’s probably bi-polar disorder.”

Nothing is allowed to exist beyond the current orthodoxy.

Descartes’s I think, therefore I am is a genuine symptom of psychosis because it locks us into random processes of brain activity. This extreme narrowing of experience is a prison cell for the mind, a place where the rest of existence is “other” and therefore threatening. It is characteristic of bullies, dictators, and authoritarians (who think they are always right) and scientism, which restricts all experience to pathways defined by blind intellect.

Only the narrow-minded could classify most human behaviour as illness.

We British should stop listening to American and European narrowlogues and revisit our famed tolerance of quirk, difference and benign oddity. That’s what made our predecessors such good inventors — and among the freest people on earth.

Apart from Boris, where have all the English eccentrics gone?

* * * * *

History teaching is rightly back in the educational spotlight under the new Coalition Government. Schools’ chief Michael Gove is determined to bring back rigorous teaching standards, including a detailed treatment of narrative history.

Pupils need to be able to position themselves in time and space. History gives them temporal awareness of their place in the scheme of things. Labour neglected the subject, appearing to believe that historical accuracy would turn students into Tories. They were probably right.

In my school, I was regarded as a whizz on the French Revolution. I was able to field questions that even the history master couldn’t answer in detail. What was my secret?

I hadn’t then read Edmund Burke’s famous work on the subject, nor yet Carlyle’s. Even Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities was a pleasure for the future.

The source of my devilish knowledge were the novels of Dennis Wheatley, who also wrote extensively on occultism. Anyone who has read the swashbuckling tales of one Roger Brooke, a fictional Englishman who spent the entire period in revolutionary France, will have a sound grasp of that important slice of French, and British, history.

I was lucky to live close to one of the last of the private libraries. It kept every book it had ever possessed, so was a treasure store of old fiction. I lapped it up in huge gulps.

My main point is that fiction can be an effective way of introducing youngsters to historical narrative. I happen to know that Michael Gove is a fan of Dennis Wheatley — who incidentally worked with Winston Churchill during the war.

Might we soon see the old boy back in favour in English classrooms?

* * * * *

Ever since I set up this website, Syntagma, along with Syntagma Media in 2005, I’ve regretted having to use syntagmamedia.com instead of a plain syntagma domain.

All things come to him who waits. The new .co domain suffix, which arrived on July 20, presents a clean sheet for those of us with impure business domain names.

As well as nabbing johnevans.co (a triumph, I assure you), I’ve managed to secure syntagma.co. The “co” signifies “company”, so is a dignified top-level alternative to .com, and is not local like .co.uk.

The present Syntagma site will remain on syntagmamedia.com for familiarity’s sake.

That vanity of vanities, a website in one’s own name, in this case John Evans (dot co) now exists: John Evans’s personal website.

I may yet regret this.

* * * * *

Annoyment of the Week

I haven’t really been annoyed by anything this week. A Conservative Government, albeit a tad diluted, is a serene experience for most of us.

Even Dave’s brutalist approach to diplomacy gives a front-foot feel to the new politics.

Does it get any better than this? When a chap can’t get steamed up about politics, might he be tired of life?

Now I’m starting to talk myself into artificial annoyments. I shall desist and bid you all peace and goodwill.

* * * * *

Germanic sense is beginning to overcome French pursuit of glory.

Wilhelm Nolling, one of five German professors challenging the legality of the European Union’s response to the financial and economic crises, is predicting social unrest.

“A transfer union [money flowing from rich countries to poorer ones] will destroy the social peace in Europe”, he said. “We need to form a new heart of the euro: France, Germany, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands. All the other states should be given their freedom back. That would give them a real opportunity to increase their competitiveness through currency devaluations.”

Just two years ago such sentiments were unthinkable. Now they are commonplace.

The shine has come off the EU and the eurozone. How soon before this absurd political confection is holed beneath the waterline?

* * * * *

Pics of the Week

The pictures show the Cathedral Green in Exeter 10 days apart. The first was shot on the 12th of July, the other on the 22nd.

What a difference a splash of rain makes.

John Evans

Saturday Ramble: Cuts? No problem — outsource them

John Evans — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:16:10 +0000

Big Society Watch

“Would you mind outsourcing the sauce, please?”

Two stories caught my eye this week, both involved outsourcing work from public employees to the private sector. Each saved a ton of money and returned better services and efficiency. As examples of what can be done by the Coalition Government, and local authorities, they take some beating.

The Government-run Teachers’ Pensions Agency previously employed 430 civil servants. Under their watch, it would take up to two weeks to answer queries from teachers.

Now the ubiquitous outsourcing company, Capita, has been brought in to run the agency in Darlington. They have fewer than 200 people on the job and queries are answered in two minutes. The Treasury is said to be pocketing savings of up to 40%.

Just how many other public offices across the land could benefit from a similar transfer of power? I suspect there are thousands. The two-minute query brings to mind the Herculean effort it takes to get information from Gordon Brown’s botched amalgam of Revenue and Customs. In this one department, mistakes alone cost the nation billions of pounds a year.

The second example, is in the U.S. State of California, where the small Hispanic town of Maywood was facing bankruptcy. The 26-year-old mayor took the drastic action of sacking every public employee in the administration.

Policing was outsourced to nearby Los Angeles PD, which provides a much more professional service, according to locals. Other important services are now being handled by the county, again with greater efficiency. The move has saved 20% of the budget. Forty percent of the redundant staff have been employed by a nearby town that handles much of the work.

As ever, it’s the little things that people notice. One said, “It’s the small stuff — graffiti is cleaned away faster, broken lights fixed, even the street crossing guards outside the schools seem more alert.”

I’ll bet even the grass gets cut too — Exeter take note.

It’s early days, and the world is watching Maywood, Calif., but these are exciting times for those of us who have laboured under “not fit for purpose” public services for too long.

John Evans