Shute books are recognisable, and their most striking feature is the width and warmth of his sympathies which are in contrast to his passion for engineering detail. (It is a seeming contrast of course: stresses and numbers are not antithetical to romance.) Often, an unlikely hero – a middle-aged man, older - is stretched well beyond his comfort zone as he becomes involved in an adventure. Often, heroes and heroines are scuppered – but also redeemed - not so much by the depth of their feeling as by their reluctance to press their case noisily. These are novels which resonate by virtue of their mid-20th Century virtues. There is quite often (Requiem For a Wren) an unrequited love, or a love which is almost denied its destiny (A Town Like Alice). The Second World War almost always looms very large, often in fascinating technical detail, often involving ships or planes. The Far East often features (A Town Like Alice), sometimes with an overt spiritual dimension  (The Chequer Board). Shute is thoroughly at home with the transcendental: it is as the very core of a brutal war story (Most Secret).

Shute can sometimes be the tiniest bit clunky (Ruined City). The modern reader under 50 will find much of his tone a matter of curiosity, whilst older readers will hear their parents’ voices echoing as they turn these pages. I am sure, though, that Shute commands attention well beyond being educational or nostalgic.

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I am thinking of the world before Iris Murdoch (my mother’s favourite during the 1950s and 1960s) and Muriel Spark (whose books I loved in the 1970s). Lehmann’s core competition comes from Stella Gibbons, Betty Miller, Jean Rhys,  Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen. Viriginia Wolf ought to be in there, but perhaps the point is that Lehmann and the others are middlebrow and Woolf’s highbrow competition doesn’t count.

I’ve been reading some off-road Stella Gibbons (so, not Cold Comfort Farm) and thrilled to it. In Westwood and Starlight alike she takes us to the heart of aspirational upper working class and lower middle class life in London and in both she dangles upper class – or at any rate affluent – life before the lower orders. The remarkable and very odd thing about Gibbons is her handling of mystery and magic. In Westwood, a house exerts a special hold; in Starlight a fey, almost crazy invalid seems almost to transmit light, or lives bathed it in. So Gibbons is marvellus in exporing the numinous. In both, the theme of a woman’s unrequited love matters a great deal, and it is the cross-threadedness of the thing which matters.

This is the sort of material I seem to like, and I turned to Jean Rhys for the potency of the rage of a spurned woman, and Nancy Mitford for the courage of a kept woman.

All in all, I set myself up to admire Rosamond Lehmann for her portrayal of upper middle class women making modern choices between the wars. In The Weather In the Streets and The Echoing Grove we see muc the same sort of woman and world. Our heroines are bourgeois but with strongly bohemian edges and they both make a bold choice: to love not merely inconveniently (adulterously), but to men who are – as it were – brown furniture and proud of it. So we have clever, free, artistic, popular, poor middle class women having deeply important affairs which turn away from the modern, permissive mores that appear to rule their lives.

The point of Lehmann is not merely the sort of dilemma she maps out, but the quality of the interior lives she gives her heroines and even their men. Her characters are not in a fog; they are not driven by mysterious forces; they do not intellectualise, propagandise or theorise. But neither are they swept along on a tide of subconscious impulse. Their conversation seem to me to leap off the page as real and awkward as those I have heard over decades, and Lehmann’s assumptions and descriptions of their thoughts seem to be on the button. (That last bit is even more difficult than having an ear for people’s speech.)

Lehmann is not alone n being very skilful and instructive. Similar themes and qualities are in Betty Miller’s Farewell Leicester Square, for instance.

I suppose I am an anti-feminist, in the sense that I dislike the the progressive victimhood, the campaigning reformism, of the feminism of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.  So I do wonder whether these women writers provide quite the fodder and ammunition modern feminists would like. Certainly, women in these novels have difficult choices to make: they have to choose between safety and romance, I suppose. Certainly, sexy and desirable men in these novels are relatively unreflective and unresponsive. Certainly, women are more or less in orbit round men. In Lehmann in particular, women sometimes make brave choices and usually have to suffer for it.

But I am not at all sure that Lehmann is trying to make a case that women’s economic dependency is the root of their emotional difficulty with men. I could easily imagine her writing a novel set in the here and now and posing much the same problems, even for a woman enjoying economic parity with her love object.  This more Men are from Mars territory, I suspect.

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It is helpful to say that England in Dickens’s time had the highest real wages ever known by this or most other countries. (It’s a mixed picture as this paper is good at discussing.) Awful things happened, and especially to poor people. Indeed, our own times are a walk in the park compared: but then our own times are pleasanter (at least in material terms) for nearly everyone, nearly all the time, than they have ever been.

It is frankly absurd to say that the material well-being of our times bears comparison with that of Victorian England.

Ian Hislop’s thesis was a muddle. He had the bold premise that Victorian bankers were morally superior to our own. There’s something to be said for the seriousness and moral purpose Victorians showed (and my own interest in a professional renaissance is based on that sort of thought). But he ran out of steam quite quickly: as he pointed out, there were bankruptcies, pure greed, nastiness, and instability in the Victorian financial world, and indeed they had greater and worse consequences than the venalities of some of our own capitalists. Hislop’s ending was about right: we could do with more of the best of the Victorian spirit.

And of course, the big problem of Hislop’s thesis is that the modern affluent pay far, far rates of tax than ever the Victorians gave away in philanthropy. And it is of course a problem of socialism that it makes virtue compulsory and that runs contradictory risks. On the one hand, compulsion robs virtue of its moral quality. On the other, compulsion makes virtue invisible.

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So far as I can see, since the late 2000′s the UK’s GDP has slipped several percent from its historic high. It is now somewhere around its 2005 level, and slightly rising again. If in the decade 2009-2019 it rises back to where it was in 2009 (say), it would only be true that we had lost a decade of growth. But – and surely this means something – at no time in that process were we worse off than we had been in 2005 – and that was an historically affluent year which itself followed many years of amazing trend growth, itself only sometimes interrupted by periods of faltering or sagging growth.

Of course, if the “wealth” we enjoyed in 2005-2009 was largely phoney, immoral, or debt, then in some sense we haven’t lost affleunce as lost the delusion of it.

We are supposed to be enduring a “lost decade” in output and that this is not going to be recoverable. But what does this mean? On the face of it, it is hard to believe we won’t one day produce as much as we did in 2009, or whatever.  We are perhaps supposed to believe that we are losing productive capacity and can’t get it back. Is this anything like the destruction of British factories wrought by Hitler’s bombers, and if so – surely we rebuilt then and could again? Indeed, Germany’s post-war industrial success is sometimes attributed to the fresh start they had as they recovered from the RAF’s depradations.

It is of course peculiar that we have less equality than we are used to (though that picture is quite complicated). It is interesting how hard it is to see solutions to that problem, if it is one.

It is true that the plight of un- and under-employed young people is sad. But I think it may be wrong to think they have lost a decade or are a lost generation. For one thing, they presumably have the means to continue their education, including self-education. Even at a virtual level, they have resources which no previous generation in history can imagine. It won’t be the fault of the capitalist hegemony if this generation fails to produce mountaineers, poets, musicians, linguists, philosophers, mathematicians and even entrepreneurs out of a period of enforced leisure.

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On those lines, we ought to beware any nonsense about “Faustian Pacts” in which it is supposesd that celebrities lose their rights if they ever speak to the media; or invasions of privacy are warranted if the reporting is accurate. A celebrity whose kitchen has once been in OK magazine does not thereafter lose the right to leave her curtains open at night. Part of why Mr Mosley is so important is that his case reminds us that his privacy would have been no less sacrosanct had his sex games involved a Nazi theme.

Mr Mosley is right, too, to insist that the principle of prior notifaction is crucial, and foremost. The problems which flow from prior notification are the ones we have to deal with, not flinch from.

It’s worth saying that my normal response is to be sceptical when people take offence at common abuse and other  nonsense. The “sticks and stones” argument is quite a good one. I have been sentimental about the 18th Century habit of bawdy and scurrilous gossip. Happy days, etc. On reflection, I am not sure they were all that happy, but in any case we are in different territory now.

Indeed, it may be that we need a scrupulously honest professional press now and do so exactly because the gossipy, profane and vicious voices of the masses are out there in hyperspace. The media who are in Leveson’s dock are of interest to his Lordship and the rest of us only because they claim to be decent and honest. We are trying to work out ways of making them be what they claim to be.

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One episode (“The Calorie”, 24 October 2011) I’m thinking of was devoted to the idea of calorie-counting. The show lined up various people who argued that there was no solid connection between a food’s energy content and its being a contributor to obesity. So far so good, one may say. It may be that it’s no good just going by the calorie count on food packaging. (Thought that’s one of the means by which I am discriminating between foods, and it seems to work, more or less.) Along the way, contributors complained about ”processed food”. The show’s sign-off was to the effect that we might overcome any confusion by insisting on ”real food”.

But this is nonsense, surely, and we were in effect reminded of some of the silliness of the idea in an episode of the show (“Future Food”, 14 November 2011) which looked at a subset of the foodie movement:  “food futurists” are deliberately messing with our ideas about the stuff. They were toointeresting for the Food Prgramme to ignore, but they were mostly off-message.

Some of my irritation with the the FP caliphate is that they are sure that words like “slow”, peasant, natural, old-fashioned, revivalist, heritage, artisinal, organic, free-range, or co-operative are good. I don’t share that, but I get it.

More particularly and seriously I can’t see that anyone would be wise to construct a diet which avoided processing. Even leaving aside the fact that to do so would eliminate cooking, one has to reckon with getting rid of bread, cheese, pasta and butter. All are processed, and all are variously good or bad for slimmers or gourmands, according to circumstance. Of course, most restaurant food is the ultimate in processing, but somehow escapes censure.

But I can’t see that an all-in-one TV dinner, for instance, or a military rations pack, or a Complan drink, must be assumed to be lesser – or unreal – food merely because they are extremely processed.  Ready-meals can be formulated so as to be healthy, tasty, and indeed artisinal, by turns.

Wherein does “real” food consist? One might go for provenance, animal welfare, conservation values, dietary merit, culinary diligence or talent. I see that ideas of authenticity and naturalness will sometimes come into play, for some people. But we have to remember, for instance, it might well be the case that the “unnatural” pig farming of the UK may have much higher welfare standards than the more “natural” farming of a peasant. And someone might well choose to source their food from intensive horticultural firms rather than free-range or organic beef herds.

The point is that there is no such thing as “real” food.

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But it made me uncomfortable only because I am not sure it is proper to let Ricky Gervais pull my chain.

I like politically incorrect comedy only when it is really offensive. Gervais says, I think, that his work is kind, intelligent and PC: it challenges our inner racism, sexism, sizism or whatever. I am happy to have these challenged, but I don’t want them toyed with.  I don’t want to be told in an ambivalent way that if I am somehow the right sort person – in the right sort of know – I have licence from Gervais to laugh at his material because it is only offensive to those who are not in the gnostic secret.

I don’t think one can be faux-unPC; or joke-unPC, or safely unPC. It should be a dangerous business or nothing.

In short, midget comedy ought to outrage all right-minded people. If it did, it might be funny. Its being a guilty pleasure is just what some comedy has to be.

Larry David is better at this: Curb Your Enthusiasm is about a man who is not exactly bad, but he rattles with prejudices and has that dash of Tourettes that ensures the worst of him is always on display. As noted here, The Guard was also good: here was a man who just couldn’t stand political correctness: it offended him. He had the balls to put himself on the line for this peculiar bit of prejudice, which amounted almost to principle.

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The question was: will it be possible for someone to be a full citizen without digital access?

The subsidiary questions revolved around what happens if the answer is No (which I assume people will mostly think).

In particular: Would the state be obliged to provide or mandate access if the market or philanthropy didn’t?

Here’s my attempt at unpicking some of the issues:

(1) How similar are the access problems posed by poverty and disability?

In this context illiteracy is rather similar to blindness: both pose access problems. So it makes sense to note that the disabled are often poor and the poor are often disabled.

(2) Does it help to think of deserving and undeserving poverty and disability?

Society might see illiteracy as a life choice by the idle underclass. But society might equally think that it would pay to use every resource (and perhaps especially digital access) to remedy a socially-damaging concomitant of poverty. A cousin of that thought arises when we think of the obligations of society toward those disabled who volunteer for extreme risk in, say, their sports or by pursuing adventure in the military.

(3) One good analogy is with other services. Is digital access to be considered as the Royal Mail; an energy utility; the BBC; schooling; roads infrastructure? Cautiously, I suppose that it ought not to be like a one-price universal service; we want people to pay for the service if possible; we ought to avoid a universal licence fee; we ought to worry about the deficiencies of a free-at-the-point of use compulsory service; if the state provides infrastructure, that doesn’t mean people have a free right to to use it.

(4) We need to consider the way the culture is being replicated behind paywalls (the Inland Revenue and the latest blockbuster and opera and book and live event are all likewise available in analogue and digital form). This is hugely liberating. What providers can charge for, they can also discount or donate or be paid to distribute.

(5) Early conclusions

Digital access is a good thing and the poorest need it most.
3G dongles and elementary tablets are cheap as chips.
Digital paywalls make it easy to give poor people cheap access.
Digital services can communicate easily with disabled people.
The state has a right to use digital communication only.

The right-wing trick is to square these circles with as little state involvement as possible.

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I was a little uncertain that I’d enjoy the Burra show in Chichester. I am not good at surrealism, for a start; nor amazingly fond of the timid walks on the wild side made by self-conscious artists. I had hardly considered the Sussex landscape works.

The Pallant show knocks seven bells out of such wary complacency. The several rooms are filled with wonders, and each is needed to house the sheer range of works in which on the one hand one marvels at a person as good at cafes as moorlands and on the other at Burra’s consistency in eye. Nothing is without his characteristic taste for the bizarre; and nothing, either, without a strong, representational honesty. There’s always a great seriousness, too: his grotesques are more Francis Bacon than Beryl Cook.

I beg doubters to go.   Why not make it a thorough Sussex pilgrimage? The train-ride from Victoria to Chichester is one of the country’s best. It gives one (around Petworth) a glimpse of the landscape which made the county ideal  for Burra and Eric Ravillious alike. To pass the time, one could do far worse than read R C Sherriff’s A Fortnight in September (about south Londoners on holiday in Bognor).  After the Pallant, the Nag’s Head carvery is a five minute walk, if that, and a real treat (beef served in a lovely room with marvellous garden photographs which might have come from Country Life in the 1970s).

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