RosieBell

A Stir in the Suburbs

A question – does pro-Palestinian activism make people barmy or are barmy people attracted to pro-Palestinian activism?

Here’s a case. I live on the western side of Edinburgh, in a suburb called Roseburn, and I follow the Friends of Roseburn Park Facebook page. A post caught my eye. It was advertising a "Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism" event in London.

That’s a change from bulb-planting and mural painting.

I guessed this was Pete Gregson – who Shiraz Socialist has covered here and Tendance Coatesy here. Expelled from the Labour Party, expelled from the GMB for anti-semitism, fired from the Council, a 24/7 activist.

Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism (LAZIR) was summed up here:- 

A new campaign group, “Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism”, or LAZIR, has been set up to support Jeremy Corbyn and campaign for the International Definition of Antisemitism to be dropped and for the Jewish Labour Movement to be thrown out of the Labour Party. The group’s logo is a laser beam smashing the logo of a Jewish Labour group.

The founder appears to be Pete Gregson, who was reportedly expelled by the GMB Union after he claimed that Israel was a “racist endeavour” that “exaggerates” the Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million Jews “for political ends.” According to a post on his Facebook page, Labour Against the Witch Hunt, are seeking to expel him from their group. If he is expelled, Mr Gregson has vowed to hold a launch event for LAZIR outside Labour Headquarters in London.

Interestingly, this is the second time that Labour Against the Witch Hunt has split, the first time being when Gerry Downing was expelled and founded Labour Against the Witch Hunt Within Labour Against the Witch Hunt, both of which met at opposite sides of the same pub at the same time. Mr Downing, who was himself expelled from the Labour Party due to his views on the Holocaust, now appears to be advising Mr Gregson on policy for LAZIR.

Other Friends of Roseburn Park thought the post on Facebook inappropriate and one commented:-

The Friends of Roseburn Park SCIO is a Charity who’s sole purposes are “The provision of recreational facilities, or the organisation of recreational activities, with the object of improving the conditions of life for the persons for whom the facilities or activities are primarily intended". Political statements of any kind have no place here and admin should immediately remove this post in my opinion.

The post was taken down. Gregson is a Friend of Roseburn Park and in fact does some useful work like finding grants for a new play park and a carved seat – as an ex-shop steward he does know how to pull the levers, as I have found with my own special focus of interest.

A word picture. On the western side of Edinburgh is Murrayfield, a leafy conservation area of handsome townhouses and villas, climbing up Corstorphine Hill, above the Water of Leith. On the flat floodplain below are Roseburn and Saughtonhall, not so grand nor so leafy, but pleasant enough. Roseburn is the shopping area. It’s prettily situated by the river, has an eighteenth century bridge and some attractive buildings, and would be totally delightful if not cut through by the A8, the main road from Edinburgh to Glasgow, so it thunders with traffic and wafts with fumes all along the section called Roseburn Terrace.

Visualisation of Roseburn Terrace with cycle route

On this arterial route, Edinburgh Council proposed a cycle way at the end of 2014. I was thrilled by this; many of the residents were not, and I began to attend the Murrayfield Community Council where I observed the Edinburgh high bourgeoisie acting like Celtic supporters after a trouncing by Rangers at the thought of (a) losing a parking place; (b) being swarmed by bicycles; (c) having money being wasted on an unused cycle route. The cycling and planning officers who have had to deal with constant baying and table thumping have remained amazingly civil and patient throughout.

There were years of consultations, opposition, further consultations and furious public meetings. Pete Gregson emerged as the chief organiser, whipping up the traders and getting the local media on the case (he is very good at raising the media) showing pictures of traders with folded rejecting arms and posters of Save our Community. Eventually the route did get through the Council’s Transport and Environment Committee and now there is only a Scottish Government hearing to come. Work should begin at the end of the year.

Gregson though has not been defeated. He produced leaflets of a post-apocalyptic Roseburn with boarded up shops, while he led his dwindling band of traders to call for compensation.

He then found a new front for attack. A local resident, a retiree from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, concluded that the cycle route will push the traffic further to the north side of Roseburn Terrace, and with the air movement, will raise the levels of NO2. Gregson duly produced leaflets of people in gas masks. The last two Murrayfield CC meetings have been filled with a sudden outrage that car pollution is responsible for asthma, dementia, and early deaths. (When I get time I’ll check through the Murrayfield CC minutes to see if the air quality on Roseburn Terrace has ever been an issue of any concern before a cycle route was mooted.)

As well as putting in a cycle route and more pedestrian crossings, the Council is also doing some place-making and general refurbishment. The information boards for a consultation were put on the historic bridge. The night before the officers held a drop-in event these boards were spray-painted quite carefully so the bridge itself was not hurt, and Gregson’s posters stuck over them. At the next Community Council meeting a Police Sergeant gave us a lecture on the selfishness and anti-democratic nature of such an act, and indeed vandalism and anti-social behaviour are usually exclaimed over at community council meetings. Gregson changed the subject to the theft of his bicycle.

Vandalised information boards on Old Colt Bridge

At this meeting, which was a few days ago (14 May) Gregson said he would be holding a demo about the cycle route causing a rise in pollution levels when the Transport and Environment Committee (TEC) met on the Thursday. Someone in the community council stressed very firmly that this was not officially from the Murrayfield CC, but through another one of his organisations, the Roseburn Vision Group.

So on the day of the TEC meeting at the City Chambers, there was a demo of 3 people –Gregson and 2 local traders, one in a gas mask, the other holding a poster saying Save Baby Finn.

Baby Finn? Well, Ruth Davidson, MSP for this constituency and the Scottish Conservative leader, has her HQ on the north side of Roseburn Terrace. She has a new baby called Finn. Gregson handed out the following press release:-

Edinburgh Council plans to asphyxiate Ruth Davidson’s Baby

Evidence has come to light to suggests Council mandarins seek to prevent the rise of the Conservatives in Scotland by suffocating them at source.

Their scheme requires increasing the levels of nitrogen dioxide at Ruth’s Edinburgh Constituency office on the south side of Roseburn Terrace to deadly levels. They know that Ruth, like most modern mums, will probably take her baby to work if she can. But pollution levels at Ruth’s office are already at their legal max of 40 ug/m3 for toxic nitrogen dioxide and are set to shoot up to around 60/ugm3 if Council plans to pollute Roseburn come to fruition.

I suppose this is supposed to be satirical. I can’t think of any other explanation except that it is the wildest conspiracy theorising.

Gregson was allowed his ten minutes at the TEC meeting. He made a rambling speech, referring to him being sacked by the Council, and repeated the accusation that the Council is trying to suffocate baby Conservatives. Cllr Lesley Macinnes, the Transport and Environment Convener, told him off, saying his press release was “utterly shameful” (applause from the Committee). Gregson shouted, “Let Baby Finn live.” The Committee adjourned and found the standing order which allowed them to tell Gregson to exit. Gregson tried to sit in the public benches, then left waving a gas mask. About 20 minutes later a security guard came in saying he had been listening outside. He was banned from the building. The police were called but were not needed.

As I said, Gregson is very good at getting media attention and this was splashed everywhere. Google it if you will under Pete Gregson Ruth Davidson. His being sacked from the Council (which is thought to be one reason for his unrelenting campaign against a cycle route) was noted, as was his being expelled from the GMB.

He did take exception to being called an anti-cycling campaigner and has now got the media outlets to change this to a “pro-cycling campaigner”. That is, at anti-cycle route demos he wears an ancient cycling helmet while standing on the pavement waving a placard or shouting through a megaphone, and he proposes the worst kind of convoluted back routes with the prefix of Speaking as a Cyclist.

I know these are the days of self-identity, but if you identify as something e.g. a Russian, if no Russian thinks you are Russian you are unlikely to be one. Spiked identifies as being on the left, no leftist agrees. Any Edinburgh cycling campaigner would see Gregson as a vexatious force against decent cycle provision, who is paying off his grudge against the Council by fanning anxiety among the traders and rage from the nimbies who cherish their parking places as their only children

You can see him on the webcast of the meeting at around 1:20.

Highly conservative Murrayfield coming under the influence of an ex-shop steward anti Zionist is certainly full of comedy.

And the question still remains – does anti-Zionist obsession turn people into loons, or are loons attracted to anti-Zionism?

You should see her at home

Nicola Sturgeon is the teenager who is a stroppy pain at home and perfectly well-behaved away. Her parents are half-annoyed and half-pleased when they are told what a delightful girl Nicola is, so well-presented, quick witted and bright, when they suffer from her moods and refusal to take responsibility.

London Liberal: Isn’t Nicola an amazing girl. So grown up, so mature, has her head screwed on.

Edinburgh: She’s not like that at home. For her, it’s Gimme gimme independence and or else. And if anything goes wrong, whose fault is it? Any criticism? “YOU’RE DOING DOWN SCOTLAND!”

Nicola in Holyrood: Poverty and food banks are an outrage, and all the fault of Westminster’s austerity.

Edinburgh: But what about your own powers? Are you using them all?

Nicola: Just give me what I want, and THEN you will see how brilliantly I’ll do it.

Nicola’s Natty Gang: Gie us aindyref2, gie us indyref 2.

Nicola: I wull, I wull, a few weeks time there will be a definite statement on the next indyref.

Nicola’s Natty Gang: Come on, Sturgeonator, gie us oor indyref! Gie us oor indy ref!

Edinburgh: Now Nicola, how’s those jobs you said you would do about health and education?  Last time I looked at them they were in a terrible state.

Nicola: It's wis nae me. It because we don't have independence. STOP DOING DOWN SCOTLAND.

Nicola’s Natty Gang: What about that indyref Nicola. Come on the Sturgeonator, you’re the leader of the pack.

Sturgeon: Not just yet. Wait a bit, I’ll give you definite news. You'll be the first to know.

Naughty Natty Gang: BUT YOU SAID THAT LAST MONTH. AND THE MONTH BEFORE LAST.

Edinburgh (voice raised): Have you done your currency homework yet Nicola? You’ve come up with five different answers.


London Liberal: Oh, she’s such a bonnie wee lassie, is that what you say, that Nicola of yours? So grown up, so mature, so realistic. Why can’t she come and live with us?

Edinburgh: Haaaaaaaaa! I’m telling you…….

(That's her telt.)

Edinburgh: India, if you’re still keen, we’ll put her on the next train to Kings Cross.

English historian: Noooooooooooooo

(Disclaimer: This is not ALL of Edinburgh speaking. But the SNP is always claiming to be Scotland so I can claim to be Edinburgh).

Last loneliest loveliest lacerated

I have been mourning that my beautiful, laid-back homeland should be so violated. We expect physical earthquakes, like the one that knocked down Christchurch back in 2011 and killed 185 people. We don’t expect to be shaken to pieces by terrorism. The last terrorist attack was back in 1985, when a couple of French agents blew up the Rainbow Warrior, with one casualty. 

The country is trusting and easy-going and feels itself immune from invasion and terrorism, which is why the perp chose it. If he could strike New Zealand the massacre would get world coverage, as it did, and no country feel itself to be safe.

There is a redneck tendency in Christchurch but I am uncertain if it takes an organised form, and it is not known if he had helpers. It is also not yet known what kind of failure there was of surveillance and policing of a political movement that meets on-line instead of in cellars. He seems to have acted like Anders Breivik, as a lone show-off pretending to be a warrior for western civilisation. Why don't these guys listen to Mozart or visit cathedralsto celebrate this western civilisation?

I’ve read the statement by the alleged perpetrator. It’s standard fascism - ethnic cleansing with a whiff of master race, the re-creating of family life to bring up the birth rate, despising our society’s soft liberalism and hedonism, and love, over-powering love for violence and warriordom. There’s also a touch of eco-fascism. Mosely is cited, as is Breivik.

It’s hellishly cheeky for an Australian in New Zealand to complain of cultural and population take overs, which were inflicted on the indigenous populations of both countries, and where that colonisation is still a live issue.

David Toube of Quilliam, and once of this site, has an excellent piece of analysis on Radio Scotland.

He outlines the following:-

1. The influence of Camus’ Great Replacement (see here for more detail) a theory that the European capitalists are conspiring to replace the white population. This is similar to the motivation behind the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, where Jews were blamed for bringing in non-white people.
2. The vision of the perp as a soldier in the 1000 year battle against Muslim invaders (he aspires for Istanbul to be restored to Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia to be turned back into a church though he has no belief in Christianity.) This battle runs up to the Bosnian conflict, with Serbian nationalists co-opted as allies.
3. The far right symbolism which shows he is an ethno-nationalist rather than a cultural nationalist. He uses the black sun symbol as per Himmler as well as Odin’s cross and other neo-Nazi slogans. Do these people actually believe in Valhalla as ISIS believe in martyrs and 72 virgins?
4. Like ISIS this kind of ideology works as inspiration for self-motivated atrocities rather than organisations of cells and members. This makes it difficult for would-be perpetrators to be tracked down.
5. He uses the language of the meme outrage LULZ culture, and its revolting look-at-me, how-far-will-I go nihilism. There are in-jokes for the 8chan audience (Bellingcat analysis here and article by Ben Sixsmith here).

Jason Burke has a piece on the similarity between the far right and Islamist extremists:-

Though there are substantial differences, rightwing and Islamist extremism, and extremists, share a great deal. The basic mechanics of the process of radicalisation – by peers, through the internet or otherwise – are very similar. As is the way both forms of violent activism are on the fringe of a much broader movement, much of which has bled into the mainstream in different parts of the world. There are no “lone wolves”, at least not in the sense of a solitary actor without links, whether virtual or real, to others.

“This is not New Zealand,” said the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who has acquitted herself well in an unprecedented situation for New Zealand leaders. It is now. Sadly, our modest kiwi exceptionalism has died. 

(An Australian Facebook friend pointed out that like Breivik the perp chose a country that wouldn't torture him to death.  Despising liberal civilised countries for being soft, he chooses one that will be soft on him.)

Update:-

I have just had an email from a family member who lives in Wellington. She says:-

“A big state of shock, with vigils being held all around the country including one in Wellington last night which had to be moved from the Civic Centre as so many people turned up - over 11,000 people at the Basin Reserve. There is another gathering in Wellington on Thursday and many of the smaller communities are holding vigils or remembrance events as well. I think the thing that we all echo is “this is not New Zealand”. It has had a colossal effect on everyone and there is a real sense of deep sadness, but also an outpouring of support for our Muslim community, the families, and the people of Christchurch. I haven’t spoken to anyone yet who didn’t have tears when they saw or heard what had unfolded.”

The perp’s intention was to cause a civil war between Muslim immigrants and refugees, and the native population. He hasn’t succeeded so far in New Zealand.

What you deserve

An article by Alastair Dalton, the Scotsman’s transport correspondent, has caused Edinburgh’s cyclists to grind their gears. Dalton is usually a reasonable chap whose preferred method of urban travel is cycling. He now writes about the bad blood between the two tribes – cyclists and motorists (of course many people are both) when they share the same space:-

For some drivers, seeing cyclists running red lights, riding on pavements and not having lights sparks fury. But some cyclists retort that not only are some motorists guilty of similar offences, the potential impact of them doing the same is much greater.

Just because some drivers break laws does not mean it’s ok for cyclists to do so too, believing that for them there are unlikely to be any consequences.

The roads are an unequal place, errant drivers are far more likely to kill or injure cyclists than vice versa, and the focus should be on educating them to give cyclists more respect.

In my opinion - and some riders will vehemently disagree - the way to do that is for cyclists to be beyond reproach themselves. The inconvenient truth is that cyclists need drivers to change their ways more than vice versa.

Being put in danger by a driver fuming at the bad behaviour of a cyclist who is not you is of course highly unjust, even if it’s psychologically true. Also, does that work for other road users? Pedestrians, eyes on smart phones, walk into the road – does that mean Pedestrian Smart Phone puts Hobbling Old Lady, who is a little slow on a pedestrian crossing, at greater risk from a cross driver?

Bad cycling annoys me as well, partly because it is bad, and dangerous, and sometimes scary. And yes, because it gives us all a bad name. But it’s infuriating to think that way. Making comparisons with minorities/women who have to be twice as good to succeed is bleh for urban cyclists who are mostly from a socially privileged group. But in those terms, it is the driver who is seen as the norm, the judge, the one who sets the standards, the cyclist the deviant.

Drivers do get angry with other drivers texting, passing too close, tail gating, not indicating and otherwise driving badly and dangerously. However they never think “this reflects on my class/group” because they don’t think of themselves as a class/group except when their privileges are threatened. Then they get as furious as a grandee in the early twentieth century having his income tax increased and death duties slapped on his stately home. That’s when a driver suddenly become the hard-pressed motorist, unreasonably discriminated against. It’s the howl of the unthinkingly privileged.

Some cyclists behaving badly is often used as an excuse for not spending money on providing infrastructure for them. As often said, no other transport group is required to behave itself before being provided for. Air fuel duty is not increased because of drunken idiots on aeroplanes and public transport isn’t cut with the idea of this being one in the eye for louts and thugs on buses.

Cyclists have miniscule amounts spent on their provision. When it comes to transport, they are at the bottom of the pile. In transport terms they are the poor and lowly, and except in the tenets of Christianity, the poor and lowly are not treated with respect. If cyclists were universally well behaved they would get no more money spent on them. They would then be the grateful pauper, who knows his place and who still gets more kicks than ha’pence. If they had good, well-designed infrastructure, and their place in the hierarchy of urban travellers, i.e. below pedestrians but well above cars, they would be treated with the respect that affluence receives. The errant ones among them might even behave better, and their misbehaviour would not be tutted over as an example of the undeservingness of all of their kind.

Boxing Day Murder - to the bitter end

 ABC over and I did stick it out though by the third episode I was twitching. The only part I really enjoyed were the period clothes and the scenes on the railway lines, among sooty viaducts and the black locomotives blowing elegant steam – the railway lines motif in the credits good as well. Also no-one looks as world-weary as Malkovitch – even when he was a young lothario in Liaisons Dangereuse.

Though the fash-badge quotient ended up being low, and there wasn’t a blackshirt march to be seen, I did get awful longueurs. The brisk puzzle of an Agatha Christie dragged out and pointlessly thickened; the soupy glutinous look of the thing; Cust not just being a misery but with perverse sexual pleasures; and the pointless identification of Poirot as a priest rather than a policeman – why? He’s not Father Brown or the bloke in Grantchester. Also the stretched out dialogue between murderer and Poirot at the end – the suave cool killer obsessed with his nemesis which was reminiscent of Killing Eve. There’s a reasonable motive for the murderer’s killing spree and it is again, the fear of the mundane in Phelps. Everything fancied up and wedding cake iced over a plain sponge.

The next BBC Christie adaptation is going to be Death Comes as the End. That’s set in ancient Egypt – how is that going to be made about Brexit or the Middle East? However it is being written by Gwyneth Hughes who adapted Vanity Fair, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Happy New Year, mes enfants

The Boxing Day Murder - Further Thoughts

Twitter:-

Tom Holland‏ @holland_tom 20h20 hours ago
Well, I’m afraid #ABCMurders was absolutely ruined for me by the implausible rendering of the Waterloo-Andover line.

Tom Holland‏ @holland_tom 11h11 hours ago
Which is a shame, because otherwise it was creepily good...

Paul Matthews‏ @etzpcm 11h11 hours ago
Replying to @holland_tom
They seemed to travel to Andover via Scotland...

(I don’t know the Waterloo to Andover line, but the lovely steam train did go puff-puff through a forest at one point. Oh, and the opening credits of railway lines are very good.)

This adaptation is a crudely modern sensibility tackling the 1930s. That’s why there are no decent and courageous people, who are always an important part of a Christie novel; that’s why the genteel flirt Betty is made over into a foul-mouthed bitch and hen-party slapper; that’s why the sister Morag is turned from plain-but-striking and clever to a fat aggressive lump. The 30s – the subtleties of a repressed society with its tiny class indicators of language, the behaviour expected from well-brought up young women, the importance of respectability – are beyond the vulgar Gothicism of Phelps.

Poirot has been made solemnly tragic with a traumatic back story instead of comic and absurd. It is one of the motifs of the Poirot stories that the absurd, fussy little man is a mighty fighter for justice and always kind. Kindness, that most important of character traits which takes away the harshness of living, and justice, are missing from the Phelps view of the world.

The Boxing Day Murder - the First Episode

Update:- The diabolical duo, Prichard and Phelps, were shamelessly speaking on the Today programme this morning. Phelps said she had the advantage of not reading Agatha Christie and only having seen a couple of Poirot adaptations, so she had a fresh view. And I have a fresh view of astrophysics as I am totally ignorant of it.

First episode:- Not as furious as I might have been. As The ABC Murders is a thin novel compared to other Christies, I could take this as a series based very loosely on the original. Really, it's a story about the decline of Poirot, and Malkovich could make good fist of him as the sad old refugee from the horrors of the German invasion of Belgium.

Phelps paints heavy always - the light so green and dim it seemed we were in a permanent forest dripping with treacle, the music howled and banged and the atmosphere of a malevolent world included a landlady as creepy and weird as Igor minus the hump and her daughter a pathetic tart (in the book they are kindly and ordinary). Betty is tarted up from silly flirt to cock-teasing bitch - also was "dozy bastard" a common insult in the 1930s? And would the housekeeper employed by the gentry say, "Get off your skinny arse" to a secretary? Gentility and respectability were greatly valued in those times, a covering for normal hatred and malice.

I wonder if that was the first outing of the serial murderer who has become such a staple in crime drama, always murdering in threes or fours? And the type who leaves deliberate clues, so you get death methods reflecting a medieval curse or some such thing. I'll stick with it, as I do like Malkovich and his weary ways. So far Poirot has had his train ticket deliberately dropped by a conductor with a fascist badge, but we haven't had any actual blackshirts kicking up. The action has been shifted from 1935 to (gasp) 1933 so we must get Moseley and his gang. That the landlady has been going to a meeting suggests she will be the house Fash.

@BDSixsmith on Twitter

Writing an adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express for the BBC, except it's called Murder on the Orientalist Express and it's just 90 minutes of Hercule Poirot reading Edward Said aloud.

The Boxing Day Murder

This is the time of year when pundits make predictions. I have one. I am going to be furious on Boxing Day evening. The reason? Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie is showing on BBC1 at 9pm, and I bet it’s going to be a travesty. She has form.

Phelps’ version of Ordeal by Innocence was shown back in April. I have written about the damnable lurid mess that Phelps made of one of Christie’s best novels with its theme of corrosive suspicion and a fifties atmosphere of Sputniks and bubble cars and evacuees grown up. Phelps turned it into a Gothic melodrama, dragged in the Korean War and the atomic bomb, changed interesting female characters into stereotypes of monstrous mother and cleavagey vamp, and added totally extraneous nonsense about establishment cover ups. Worst of all, she got rid of the clever plot twist and changed the identity of the murderer and the motive. How did the Agatha Christie estate let her get away with that?

Well, we have the culprit in the room. “James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and custodian of the author’s estate, said he approved of Phelps’s decision to develop the fascist undertones of the story, that is The ABC Murders.”

There are no fascist undertones. There are no blackshirts nor Moseley nor anything of the sort. There is a little suspicion of foreigners which often appears in Christie’s novels by which the villagers or ignorant townsfolk show their simplicity and the posh people their insularity. Poirot takes advantage of being underestimated as a foreign mountebank or confided in as an outsider who doesn’t count. It’s treated comically down to when Poirot baits the murderer with English insults (I won’t plot spoil). I know that Phelps is going to turn this into torchlight processions and broken windows and shouted insults and abuse. I can tell it by statements like this:-

Sarah Phelps, who wrote the three-part Christmas drama starring John Malkovich, has added historical context to Christie’s original story. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists are on the rise and a poster seen on a wall in the opening scene warns: “We must stem this alien tide.”..

“The language of it is exactly the language of Brexit and Trump. It’s all the same. Economically everything falls apart, with divisions sown and people looking for a scapegoat.

“Having been this celebrated Belgian detective, suddenly, being from another country is not a good thing to be. It taps into now. It’s genuinely chilling how similar it is.”

God, please save us from dramatists who have read a couple of articles about the 1930s on a website somewhere. It was you, James Prichard, you who allowed this.

“Sarah takes small things and expands them, makes them fascinating. I’ve learned a lot about my great-grandmother’s work from Sarah. I now read it differently. She explores the time they are written in,” Prichard said.

She also takes non-existent things and makes them up from whole cloth, with gratuitous shallow references to the time they are written in. Also, John Malkovich.as Poirot.. well wait and see on that. (Seen the trailer! He has a white beard! Poirot dyed his hair and only wore a moustache. Aargh. And I caught a glimpse of a black priest. Aaargh. Aargh. Not in the original of course.)

The ABC Murders is mid-rank Christie. The whole set up is a giant red herring and Cust, the stocking seller from Graham Greeneland, has real pathos. Let’s see what kind of over-garnished, over-stuffed, and over-cooked turkey Phelps turns it into.

To be fair to Phelps her adaptation of And Then There Were None at Christmas 2015 was fine. It’s set on an island, and so it’s more difficult to drag in ill-digested political and social themes. And the plot of 10 victims who are also murderers, being picked off one by one, is just about fool-proof.

Over at the London Review of Books John Lanchester has an article about Christie. Like me, he has read 50 or so of her books, and  re-reads them uninterested in whodunnit but how Christie handles the puzzle. He, a heavyweight intellectual, has to ponder why he likes reading them, and calls them formalist, in that they work within the technical constraints of detective fiction. Because Christie didn’t try to write in the stylistic sense (she said she wished she could write like Muriel Spark, but she couldn’t) her spare writing wears better than other, classier-looking writers of the Golden Age like Margery Allingham and Dorothy L Sayers. Also, she believed that people can do terrible things. Christie places malign acts in ordinary settings and I wish Sarah Phelps would do that, instead of placing malign acts among the already malign.

Lanchester has made one error. The wrongly convicted Jacko Argyle in Ordeal by Innocence was not hanged for murder. He died of pneumonia in prison. Christie’s sense of justice would never have let a wrongly convicted person be executed. She did the same in Five Little Pigs. I read everything by John Lanchester, who is so lucid that I understand banking while I’m reading him. It’s disconcerting to catch him out. The fatal, revealing slip…. Christie had a sense of wickedness but unlike Stephen King say, wickedness is punished and the innocent exonerated. 

Anyway I shall be furious on Boxing Day and the two days after while the episodes of The ABC Murders show. Phelps will have murdered Christie with her great grandson Prichard as her accomplice. Bring out the Adaptation Police for the final arrest. She has provided enough evidence against her to be used in court. She is the Serial Killer.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Sunday Night Ordeal

I have been busy on other things and neglecting this blog. But I do want to write about non-cycling matters and the telly version of Ordeal by Innocence, which was on back in April, and the irritation it caused is still with me, like incurable thrush.

The original book was later period Christie, and at least the adaptors hadn’t parachuted in Miss Marple to do the detecting, as they did in a recent travesty of Endless Night.

Like Endless Night, this novel has a post-war feeling. The grown up children are evacuees adopted by the barren Rachel Argyle and her scholarly husband; there’s a coloured girl, Tina, a librarian who drives a bubble car; Waiting for Godot is on at the local theatre. The cast are quite a remove from the pre-war gang of country house dwellers. The house where it is set is an upper-middle-class house with daily help instead of the 1930s butlers and maids.

Christie’s set up is a grabber. Jacko Argyle has been found guilty of the murder of his mother, Rachel Argyle, and has died in prison. Then his alibi, Dr Calgary, turns up to prove he was innocent. The family are under suspicion and police investigation again, and they start breaking under the strain One more dead body, one wounded body, and voila, the explanation in the library with a couple of marriages at the end.

The red herring is that Rachel Argyle’s damaged children and her own lack of imagination towards them are thought to be the motive behind the murder. The plot twist is that that view is mistaken and the motive is quite simple – money. What did the adaptor (Sarah Phelps) do? Turned Rachel Argyle from a well-meaning if unempathetic woman desperate for children, to a raving Mommie Dearest. Turned Jacko Argyle from a greedy ruthless crook into a damaged case. Turned the kindly husband Leo Argyle into a psychopath. Turned the loving secretary Gwenda into a crude vamp. Turned the motive into reasonable revenge instead of straightforward unscrupulous avarice. Changed the identity of the murderer. Inflicted on the murderer a particularly sadistic punishment. Lost the over-arching theme, that it is the innocent who suffer undeservedly.

In short, turned a clever story in more or less humdrum surroundings into a high-coloured, vulgar, Gothic psychological drama of stock type set in a Scottish castle in a forest. Added a Chief Constable cover up, Dr Calgary turned into a physicist driven mad by the atom bomb and it was yet another piece about a colluding and corrupt establishment. Also the rude brutality by the son-in-law – I don’t think 50s and 60s families of the Argyle class would have been quite so free with the fuck yous at the dinner table. A forced atmosphere of thunder and lightning instead of the drizzling corrosiveness of the original.

One Guardian reader had it well summed up:-

“We do indeed get the “Agatha Christie we deserve” – or rather, we get the TV adaptations we deserve, if by this we mean screenplays that mistake bleakness for profundity and cliche for character – and that reveal an innate misogyny that has little to do with Christie’s often complex, courageous, unexpected female characters.

Take Mrs Argyle. In the book, she’s conflicted, a social reformer (probably a Guardian reader!) whose painful longing for children and blindly possessive attitude to those she adopts is at the heart of the story. But here, she’s a cruel, racist abuser who even in Lucy Mangan’s review pretty much deserves to die. Well hello there, bad (adoptive) mother stereotype! And what about Gwenda, the secretary? In the book she’s a complex, compassionate woman in her late 30s. In the screenplay she’s a walking, or rather tottering, youthful cliche who, with her high heels and low-cut dresses, bitchy remarks and gold-digging instincts, fulfils yet more misogynistic stereotypes.

These representations of women are, like the whole screenplay, far more old-fashioned than Agatha Christie ever was. This kind of writing hides its own dark secrets of misplaced nostalgia and misogyny. Agatha Christie may not be everyone’s favourite. But her varied representations of women have provided me with many more role models than these “dark” TV screenplays.

Emily Richards
Salisbury, Wiltshire

Christie did produce varied women – spinsters with fulfilled lives, a Lesbian menage viewed sympathetically, plucky, heroic girls. As Emily Richards says, it’s infuriating to see her (woman) adaptor fall back onto lazy old-fashioned views of women.

Sofia Previsited

James Lee-Milne on Sofia (1979)

Extremely clean cobbled streets which are hosed at night and even during the day by stalwart women wielding heavy hose-pipes. First thing one sees in early morning is these women sweeping up ends. Heavy fines for throwing litter. The buildings are colour-washed, tawny yellows and orange. We watched the jeunesse doree strolling arm-in-arm in front of the hotel, facing the statue of Alexander II which had been allowed to survive. Bulgarians just as well-dressed as the English plebeian young. City full of parks and gardens, densely tree’d and freshly green. Archaic Roman fragments in the under passes, Roman bas-reliefs. Imagine how they would be vandalised in London.

From Deep Romantic Chasm

I got exactly the same impression – the women sweeping the streets clean, the youth out in the parks and the Roman remains unmolested in the underpasses – to my astonishment and chagrin. I don't know if the police are as heavy as they were during the Communist regime, or whether this is a culture more respectful of its public space than we are.