The obsession with one particular version of slavery

Why are today's young scholars so obsessed with the supposed wickedness of the European people trade while apparently indifferent to the Roman slave economy, or for that matter the Arab one?

So said Max Hastings in a review of Tom Holland's book The Lives of The Caesars.

The only issue I'd take with that comment is the word "supposed" as there was undoubtedly wickedness.

But I'd go further. The nation that initiated the end of the transatlantic slave trade seems to be castigated more than any. How come?

I can't help thinking there's a simple answer. Those young scholars are suffused with guilt (rarely a helpful emotion, I find).  And so they jump on a bandwagon for reparations etc, being pushed by - guess who? Those who will benefit.

I've often been heard to say that my ancestors do not appear to have directly benefited from the slave trade. Oh, sure, they'll have possibly gained some indirect benefit through the wealth brought into the UK, though I'd estimate it as tiny.

Indeed, look further and I daresay that my ancestors (and yours) were victims too, of feudal system, serfdom etc. Moreover, if you look around the world and through history, enslavement of conquered nations and the less powerful was pretty much the norm. Rome wasn't built in a day - or without slaves.

It is impossible to right all past wrongs. Picking an aribitrary set of such wrongs, or an arbitrary cut off in how far one goes back, has no justification. I would argue that we should not go back beyond the lifetime of anyone's parents, as proving cause and consequence is otherwise problematic. 

Times have changed and, for the most improved at least in what we sometimes call the "free world". Most of the descendents of African slaves living in countries like the USA and UK are arguably better off than if their ancestors had not been taken (or sold by other Africans most likely). I realise that would probably a grossly offensive argument to those descendents of slaves (and those young scholars).

But does it make it any less true?

And, since outside of the "free world" slavery in various forms still persists around the world to this day, aren't there better and more important targets to focus on?

The Max Hastings book review appeared in the Sunday Times some time ago.

This one's for the birds

The transition from spring to summer is not without it's downsides, I've found.

One of my favourite periods of the year is when the male blackbirds are in full song, singing their hearts out in their attempt to attract a mate. It's fascinating that they tend to take it in turns to deliver their performances. They don't try to drown each other out, but wait for a nearby bird to finish, then do the equivalent of "that's nothing, get this!" A bit like two or three guitarists jousting, taking turns to play a solo. Each blackbird has a song that, while recognisably characteristic of the species, is unique to the individual bird, often with a very characteristic ending. Which helps us identify individual birds by their song, especially given they tend to return to the same place to breed each year.

At our last house we had one such bird whose song was highly specific and recognisable as it ended with a flourish that sounded just like our telephone ringing. Indeed the first time we heard it we thought it was the phone. Sitting on the decking at the back of our garden, which was on quite a steep hill so the deck was well up towards roof level, we heard this chap for several years in a row, singing from one of the nearby rooftops. It was a sad spring when he didn't return.

In the early spring I was gardening, which often attracts birds that come very close looking for insects and worms that have been disturbed, when I heard a curious song that sounded a bit like a blackbird. Actually it sounded very like a blackbird but the song was curiously truncated, coming to a rather sudden and abrupt end, without a flourish. (Blackbirds do go on a bit). That's odd I thought. Then I spotted the bird, quite close to me on the ground. It was definitely a blackbird. It was a male, the males being black and the females looking exactly the same but brown. The females do sing, despite what many (but not all) of the authoritative texts say, though not as ostentatiously as the males. I've seen one doing it, so close that there could be no mistake.

But this one was definitely black, so male. It looked a bit on the small side and a bit skinny. So I'm guessing it was a young male. I was watching and listening to an adolescent male just starting out and developing his song. You'll need to make it a bit longer and showier if you want to find a mate, chum, the girls will just giggle at that!

That wonderful period when the blackbirds are in full song has now long passed, to be replaced by the squawks of the seagulls. We sleep in our loft conversion bedroom with its windows in the sloping roof. We sometimes call them "veluxes" even though they are a competitor brand, because people understand that as an almost generic term. The windows are locked slightly open at night for most of the year, apart from deep winter. Locked so they don't suddently blow off their hinges in the strong coastal winds we often experience.

This arrangement, with our house up a hillside, has implications. Birds, usually noisy seagulls but sometimes boringly repetitive collared doves*, like sitting right on top of the gable end that is only a few feet away from the open windows at the foot of our bed. But also, because the house is built half way up an untamed Welsh hillside, our open window is at just the height that the seagulls fly while looping around doing circuits above the houses below us.

All of which makes for a noisy time at 4 and 5 am from May onwards until the various mating seasons end the nights start getting shorter.

I find it heartwarming when I wake up in the bright early light of May to hear a male blackbird in full song and drift off back to sleep feeling that all is well with the world. I feel a very different emotion if I'm woken by a seagull squawking on the gable roof.

Some folk seem to find seagulls attractive. I've not got a problem with them in their natural habitat, on the cliffs of places like the nearby Great Orme. The problem is they are scavengers and attracted to the food that people throw away, leave unattended or are just in the act of eating. I'm far from the only one to have lost an ice cream on Llandudno pier to a gull - they sneak up behind you with surprising stealth for such a large creature, knock it out of your hand then swoop around to pick it up (not in my case, I made sure neither of us got the ice cream!) A friend of Mrs H's recently had a sandwich she was eating snatched from her hand on the golf course. That one also came up from behind her. You need to stand back to something like a wall, or have a lookout. Some folk refer to pigeons as flying rats. Seagulls are more like flying foxes: bigger and much more cunning.

You do see foolish tourists feeding the gulls. Presumably they like them - don't they realise that it only encourages them? We've even seen people feeding the gulls while sitting right by a sign telling them not to do so. The tourists also seem to have huge affection for the famous Llandudno goats - which I like, when they stay on the Orme. When we are walking around the Orme, or indeed at some times of year in Llandudno town centre, I'm not fond of wading through piles of goat poo. So I wasn't surprised the other year when cuddly toy goats became a big thing to sell to tourists here. But this year the cuddly toy they seem to want to acquire out of those grab machines is a seagull with a chip in its beak:

Call me a grumpy old sod (fair cop, I am one) but I don't find that at all endearing. But the bigger problem is seagulls make a godawful racket. We have, however, come to recognise some of the characteristic calls they make, besides the straight forward squawk. 

When an old building a mile or so a way was knocked down to make way for our local Lidl (oh great joy, he said sarcastically, being left completely cold by the oddity that is the "middle of Lidl") the large number of displaced birds that used to nest there had to find new locations, many of them on the roofs of the houses we overlook. A near neighbour's dormer roof has become what we call a "seagull mating station". It's probably the same birds that return there each year to make a mess and a lot of noise on our friend's roof. It's very specific, always the one one on the right as we look at the two dormers on the back of his house.

A male homo sapiens probably shouldn't throw this particular stone into this particular glasshouse, but a male seagull takes quite a while to perform and makes a lot of stupid sounds while doing so. There is a difference though: the male seagull can go again (and again and again) much more quickly.  "Oh, get on with it" Mrs H has been heard to say as the repetitive "birdsong" goes on and on.

I was, however, a bit more amused when I found I could identify variants of the normal seagull cry.

The period when seagull chicks have hatched and are leaving the nest can be quite trying. Before flying they walk around a lot. Presumably they flutter, or more likely do an ungainly flapping tumble, to first get to the ground but then they stand a lot and walk around now and then. Building strength I suppose, before attempting flight. Sometimes you see a parent with them but often not right by them, more likely keeping an eye on them. At that time of year the parent birds sit on vantage points, like the end of our gable roof, periodically making a sound that sounds quite like "quack, quack, quack, quack". Always three or four times and at a tiny fraction of the volume of their standard shriek. I'm guessing this is seagull speak for "I'm here, where are you?" I think I've heard a chick call back in similar vein but generally they just stand there before going for a bit of a plod.

It's not great if you get a seagull chick walking around your garden as the parents are quite likely to swoop aggressively down at you if you venture anywhere near. We found this out a few years ago when a planned barbecue with our son's family nearly had to be abondoned because of a chick we'd seen in the garden. Every time I stepped out of the kitchen patio door I'd hear an agitated version of the seagull cry and had to dodge what felt like a Stuka dive bomber swooping down and over my head. A golf umbrella and a tennis racquet proved useful in defence. The golf umbrella as an "iron dome" shield of course. The racquet was deployed like someone doing a tennis serve while leaping in the air, as the equivalent of anti-aircraft fire as the seagull swooped past. I knew I couldn't possibly hit the bird of course but it was getting sufficiently close to me (and my racquet to it) that it started keeping a bit higher above me. I'm doubtful about unpredictable behaviour as a touchstone of international statesmanship but making the birds think you're crazy does seem to make them steer a bit more clear of you. Eventually a tense cease fire was enacted when the chick, which had been hiding behind some shrubs, walked round to the other side of the house, probably muttering the kind of thing that kids say about their parents.

The "attack" cry is very like a standard seagull cry but sharper and more urgent, so ever since then I've been been alert to the sound of a seagull cry as it takes off from the taller house next door. A standard cry and it's wheeling away over the houses below. Anything that sounds sharper makes me glance up in case the bird is swooping down towards me, in case it thinks the gardener with his hosepipe is hunting their chick.

But this year I heard another variant of the standard seagull cry and with some urgency  and wondered what was going on. The chicks as they are first flying make heavy work of it, flapping away in a slightly unco-ordinated manner, much like a novice human swimmer. I looked up and saw just that but very close behind and adult bird squawking repeatedly and with urgency compared with the rather languid if noisy standard call. Ah, I thought, a parent saying the seagull equivalent of "keep going, don't stop" just as dads do when teaching a child to ride a bike when they are just getting going. This wasn't gentle parenting: the larger bird kept surging near the chick, which flapped ever harder and dodged around a bit. It certainly kept the chick flapping.

I found the seagull flying lesson endearing. Until I heard exactly the same cry breaking through my slumber early the next morning as parent and chick flew laps around the rooftops below our open bedroom window, with the parent making a noise that I could now recognise.

So in addition to the mating season, we have the flying lesson season to contend with.

So it's time for a bit of nudge theory to be deployed in this avian - human stand off to encourage our flying foxes to choose another vantage point than the end of my gable end roof to survey the neighbourhood. The hosepipe, with it's high powered jet setting, gets used during the daytime to move the bird that likes to sit on the gable roof. But what to do at 5am? This modest anti-aircraft gun is now loaded and standing by:

The water pistol only just has the required range so I might have to upgrade the air defences with the equivalent of a Patriot missile: one of those super soakers the boys used to have such fun with in their youth.

Just to reassure you I realise that, though a grown and rather ageing man, I'm trying to understand birdspeak (if not being away with them, or the fairies) while waging a mini-war I can't possibly win.

But I remember what my then teenage son said to me after I'd lured a Labour canvasser into thinking I was sympathetic by saying I was concerned about education and health before giving him a huge piece of my mind. This was back in 2005 and my most caustic remarks were aimed at Gordon Brown, I recall. "I don't know why I do these things" I said to my son afterwards. "My paint brush has started drying out". "Yes, dad, but it had to be done!" was the reply.

Maybe we should get an aircon unit so we can close the windows? No, not going there, unjustifiable use of energy. The battle goes on!

* bird species in which all the individuals sing what appears to be exactly the same simple and boring song remind me of those occasions when one group of football fans chant to another group "you've only got one song!"