I've done some weird and wonderful things in my time, but I have to say jury service at the Old Bailey was up there with the best of them.  

Hundreds of jurors arrive every Monday morning at the Old Bailey, looking confused, having been plucked from their busy lives and placed in a new environment where for two weeks or more they will be responsible in deciding the fate of complete strangers along with eleven other randomly-picked complete strangers. The jurors' canteen area is too small for hundreds of people, the windows don't open, the air smells of fish and after a swift briefing, names are called in shoals to go off and be sworn onto a trial. 

                                                  

By the time you get called, if you are called (and some do go home after a few long days of waiting around without serving) you bundle in a lift silently with a load of other people who are just as apprehensive as you are, to go down to a court. Once you enter the silent and serious courtroom, some names from the random bunch you're standing with are picked, some are not, and if you're called, you go and take a seat. There is no pre-trial warm-up, no discussion, no hint at the way the law works, no explanation as to how the trial will progress or recommendations or suggestions to take notes or you'll be stuffed later on - no trial guidelines at all. The charges are read out, you gulp in your jurors' chair (if you have a trial like we had) wishing you could leave with the people who weren't called, and once you affirm or swear in, you sit down, still smelling of the street outside, still immersed in the details of your life, and the trial begins, wham. 


                                   

Last night I went to Pushkin House, a centre for Russian Cultural Studies in Bloomsbury Square, to a meeting of The Pushkin Club. Set up in 1953 for emigres and lovers of Russian literature, the meetings have been hosted by a number of eminent speakers, poets and writers over the years. I hasten to add that I'm not a frequenter of either The Pushkin Club or Pushkin House, but was there to hear the poet Yvonne Green's interpretations of Semyon Izraelevich Lipkin's poetry, and Robert Chandler read from the 20th Century's greatest unknown Russian novelist and poet, Andrei Platonov. Chandler's excellent translations brought Vasily Grossman to Western audiences and he is now retranslating Platonov's, "Happy Moscow," (Harvill, 2001).

Pushkin House is currently showing an exhibition of iconic art, so after I climbed the cantilevered stone staircase, I entered the reading room, plush with gilt and red velvet chairs, where number of iconic paintings of gold-winged angels and curcifixed martyrs surrounded by pious maidens were on display, setting a pre-revolutionary scene for our journey into Russia's literary past. The nice man at reception told me later that traditionally the Church sanctions all iconic paintings and no one is allowed to paint them without permission, implying the paintings on display - one wall of which, incredibly, were done by children aged between 9 and 14 - were not exactly approved of. No one complained when the exhibition opened, he added, but he seemed a little miffed by it himself. I loved the idea of paintings of angels and religious piousness being illicit and controversial - it seems so implausible.

Robert opened the evening by introducing Yvonne Green who read from her collection, "The Assay" (Smith/Doorstop 2010), her forthcoming novella; "The Old Ladies Club" about a woman who dreams of retiring from her husband, family and job with her best friend; and from her new collection, "After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin" (Smith Doorstop 2011) which won a Poetry Book Society's (PBS) Recommended Translation Award.

The PBS has just lost its Arts Council Grant and Yvonne articulated the importance of their work to both poets and readers in this country. I have no idea what the future is for literature and the arts but it worries me: in schools the sciences are pushed so much more than literature and increasing numbers of children are moving away from studying English in favour of sciences and social sciences; the programmes on physics on TV have started a wave of applicants for physics degrees, and the technological advances of modern life are so fast-moving, lucrative and impressive, it's no wonder students are more interested in studying gaming than studying literature and poetry. With funding cuts to the arts, who knows what will be in a generation's time. I pondered this as I drank wine with Elaine Feinstein, Eva Hoffman, Emeritus Professor Valentina Polukhina, the poet Eve Grubin and the venerable children's soccer coach, Brian Green, among others. 

Robert then read  from Platonov, whose humour and unique perspectives clearly influenced the work of his friend Grossman. Men eat meat and grow fur was a sentiment expressed at the end of the reading, where in ruined Moscow, butchers and hairdressers had sprung up but places of culture were absent. Sitting there reflecting on how little Russian literature I'd read and how much I'd like to change that, I realised that with funding being effectively eradicated and interest in the arts waning, London, sadly, doesn't seem far behind.

“Blogs are vile. Blogs are terrible. Blogs will be the death of us all."

Howard Jacobson at ‘The Last Word’, Jewish Book Week, Sunday March 6^th 2011.

 

                                               


Sunday night marked the end of Jewish Book Week, and having a Jewish Booker Prize winner is a coup best saved for the finale. ‘The Last Word’ differed from the Nicole Krauss evening on Tuesday: the latter was strictly book centred. The author talked about her inspiration, her writing processes, the characters and why they had to be as they were, her aims, the changes in her life over the course of writing the book and the reason for the title. Great House requires both the characters and the readers to close off the outside world and dive into the confessions of the soul and that, too, was the essence of the talk. In the darkness of the auditorium, the audience closed off the outside world and delved into the book’s soul, and the author’s soul. One audience member dared to ask what it was like living with another successful author (Jonathan Safran Foer) but Krauss is famously guarded about discussing her husband. She and Naomi Alderman veered the conversation politely but firmly back to the novel, as though real life constituted a sordid digression from the fundamentals of fiction.


On Sunday night, the fictional mechanics of ‘The Finkler Question’ were not under scrutiny. There is community-wide pride and delight that a Jewish author won the highest prize for a novel that his mother told him wouldn’t win because it was ‘too Jewish’. But the novel casts a spotlight on the politics, effects and experiences of Anglo Jewry and the anti-Semitism that Jacobson says Jews themselves are best at, so it made sense that the essence of last night’s talk wasn’t a closing off but an opening out.
 

Questions naturally arose from the themes of book: are modern British Jews still outsiders? How do we react to this week’s Amalekian comments from Galliano and Assange? Or to the Iranians seeing Zion in the Olympic logo; Carol Churchill’s plays or programmes like The Promise? How do we stand up to unacceptable things?
 

Jonathan Freedland is exceptionally qualified to host a talk like this: he’s informed, articulate and level headed. I was living in Jerusalem, working for a news agency and writing a blog for The Independent when the Gaza war broke out and I have every respect for Freedland because it’s not easy being a journalist when you can neither champion nor condemn what ‘your lot’ are doing but feel acutely pressured from both sides to do so. 
 
 

                        


The regrettable aftertaste in my mouth as the event and the week drew to a close was that there are Jews who, according to a lady in the audience, are ‘ashamed of being Jews’. I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Lady, you have no idea what you have in your hands.’ But I didn’t. Because I don’t know what context she meant it in, and because war and politics have a way of making beautiful legacies ugly and dignified people feel uncomfortable. She has every right to feel what she feels, but it was still a sour tang I drove home with after such a sweet Booker-flavoured achievement.
 

The best thing to do in hostile circumstances, I’ve always maintained, is to shut the rest of the world out and dive somewhere nicer, and this would be a flawless solution but for the niggling fact that once we close the book we have to face life. We live here; our children go to schools, take buses home and study in universities rife with hostility. Israel and Middle Eastern politics is right there all the time. To oversimplify it, Krauss-like seclusion lies on one side; Freedland-like world management on the other, and both need to be addressed. ‘Phillip Roth is comfortable in his culture,’ Howard Jacobson said on Sunday,’ but we have a slightly different relationship to British culture.’ He stressed his Englishness: ‘I’m a defender of the English language! I go out like Don Quixote!’, and I think therein lies the answer. Sword aloft, Quixote-like (but preferably less farcically) we have to defend our right to exist, our right to be treated with respect and our right to feel how we feel. And when politics and people get ugly, we have to defend our right to shut the world out and lose ourselves in the good book that's calling from the coffee table.

You have to understand: Van Morrison’s music has touched my soul since I was a teenager; my dad introduced me after I moved from Rapper’s Delight towards Bob Dylan at sixteen, and we played Van all night every night in the restaurant I managed in Chelsea after I graduated. I play his music when I am high, low, crushed and driving. I want Astral Weeks and Sweet Thing played at my funeral because they are the songs of my life. The entire tour seemed to consist of a gig on Saturday 23^rd in Scotland and one Sunday 24^th in London. My birthday.


I had to go.
 

I clicked on ticket site after ticket site: all sold out. It was the night before the gig, of course they were. Some canny entrepreneur on eBay was selling two tickets for £600. At 1.35am Saturday night, I realised I’d missed possibly the last golden opportunity to see the man himself in concert.


Just before I gave up and went to bed devastated, I Googled the Royal Albert Hall site, just to check. The problem with life is that once we have responsibilities, we are surrounded by weight and seriousness and somehow spontaneity and magic seem ingredients of halcyon days of yore. But spontaneity and magic were two of my birthday presents this year: I was amazed to see there were three seats still on sale, and wondering how on earth I’d find a babysitter and if it was actually any fun to go to a gig alone, I bought myself a birthday present.

 

    Dr Abigail Wood: Ethnomusicologist

Where are we?

In the Old City of Jerusalem. The ancient, narrow alleyways leading from the Jaffa Gate are cool and quiet. The muezzin start the call to prayer as Arab merchants sweep their shop floors with scratchy brooms ahead of the day’s trading. The cobblestone steps are slippery from centuries of being walked on, and further down, under the arch, past the armed soldiers, the air is thick with Turkish coffee and bread in the oven of a tiny bakery. Beyond that is the plaza of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and here, a British woman is following a street procession, holding a recording device. Meet Dr Abigail Wood. She has been recording sounds in the Old City for the past year as part of her work. Your profession, Dr Wood? “I am an ethnomusicologist.”

What’s that?

The dictionary definition of ethnomusicology is “the scientific study of music, especially traditional or non-Western music as an aspect of culture”. All ethnomusicologists study music, but in the words of Dr Wood, “ethnomusicology is an exciting meeting place between anthropology, musicology, cultural studies and other approaches to the humanities”.

What made you want to do this for a living?

“After learning about traditional Bolivian music as part of my BA in music, I walked into my lecturer’s office and announced, ‘I want to be an ethnomusicologist!’ He replied ”That’s not a career!” I’m now on my second university lectureship, so he has since taken back the comment.”

But what do you actually do on a daily basis?

“I’m a Joe Loss Lecturer in Jewish Music at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Studying the sounds of the Old City is a pilot project in my sabbatical year, funded by paid research leave and a small research grant from the British Academy. The aim is to discover and record a sensory city.”

Why?

1) “Sounds give a new perspective. We often think about a city via maps or postcard views, but what would happen if you listen to, rather than look at the city? My project began from casual observations about the use of spaces in Jerusalem. I sat somewhere and saw, in succession, groups of Armenian priests, Western tourists, Palestinian shopkeepers and ultraorthodox Jews occupying the same space, each making different sounds, which in turn changed the character of the space and influenced the interactions of others. I noted that despite the line on the map dividing the Haram as-Sharif (Temple Mount) and the Western Wall plaza, you could still hear the muezzin at the Western wall, just as you could hear church bells in shops, pilgrims on market streets and so on." 

 

In his Eight Chapters, written as an introduction to The Ethics of the Fathers, the outstanding twelfth century Torah scholar, philosopher and physician Moses Maimonides states that just as the body can become diseased, so can the soul, and for those with unhealthy souls, there are likewise specific cures. He suggests those of unhealthy spirit should seek a wise ruler, namely a Jewish scholar who understands the depth of the human condition and the Jewish laws that, if adhered to, will restore the soul to its perfect condition. The wise man will thus prescribe precisely what will restore balance, and in case he can’t, Maimonides has specified most of these guidelines in his works. But also, Maimonides writes in part 5, one with melancholy should, ‘make it cease by listening to songs and various melodies, by walking in gardens and fine buildings, by sitting before beautiful forms, and by things like this which delight the soul…’


The Hampton Court Flower Show was not around in the twelfth century but had it been, it may well have been recommended as a tonic. It was my first experience of a flower show and I only went because it was a birthday present to my mother. I was surprised by it, though, and not just because it covered a sizeable expanse of land and had much more going on in it than I’d imagined. I jostled through the crowds, just about glimpsing through sun-pink arms and crooning heads the stunning, varied show gardens, the arrays and displays of colour, texture, thorn and bloom, the tools, trolleys, garden furniture and summer houses in African or Asian designs for sale, all of which I’d have happily bought had they not been way above my non-existent garden budget, along with the leaping ceramic frogs, giant stone snails and the services of the garden designers skilled at making a piece of land look like corners of paradise. Unsurprisingly, it made my paltry attempt at a garden seem direly disappointing when I got home.


                                         

                                     

The oddest thing was, one stepped out of London – multi-cultural London with its sari-ed Asians, hijabed Muslims, black-hatted Jews and colourful, Africans; its Eastern Europeans, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Jamaicans and so on – into Ye Olde Englande. At least racially. Ninety per cent, more even, of the attendees, of which there were many thousands on the Thursday I went and no doubt more over the weekend, were white, and another ninety per cent of them, I’m guessing, were over fifty, and that's being generous. It was so disproportionately represented demographically that it was astonishing. I walked around wondering if gardening is a culturally exclusive pastime, whether, as Malcolm Gladwell says in The Tipping Point, the gardening idea spread like a social epidemic across the home counties but hadn’t reached the inner-cities, or whether it was just a question of time and funds and that in ten years time the representation would be more balanced. Gardening is a presently a retired, white-person's pastime.


                               
                                                             

The newly refurbished Israel Museum is equally a wonderful dose of soul medicine. Like most of Israel, the entire project seems to be funded by donations from wealthy Jews abroad. I don't know how many millions were spent on the new museum, and I don't know what was exhibited before and what was new, but not knowing is a good thing sometimes. Unlike lots of people I spoke to afterwards, I hadn't read about the refurbishments in the paper or seen shots on TV, so I had no idea what to expect and walked through the doors open to everything, with no preconceptions or expectations, and was amazed. The modern art section is impressive, not that the kids let me look at much of it; there are hanouka menorahs and other antique pieces of silverware from Syria, Russia, Italy, Afghanistan, Poland, Germany; there are bridal dresses and artefacts from communites all over the world from many centuries of Avodat Ha Shem; entire sixteenth and seventeenth century handpainted and hand-carved synagogues that have been transported from Horb in Bavaria, Cochin in India, Suriname (synagogues in Suriname?!) into the museum, and the depth and breadth and history of what has been salvaged - not from the entire history of the Jewish people, but merely from the last five hundred years or so - is so incredible and humbling, it instills a feeling that combines insignificant smallness in the vast and incredible history of this religion and culture, with undeniable pride and honour to be a part of it, still alive and kicking, here today. 



                                                      


It's well worth a visit. I didn't even make it to the Shine of the Book this time, and that place is amazing. But one thing is certain: if I ever have money to donate one fine day, you can be sure there'll be a wing of an Israeli university library full of intruiging books bearing a plaque with my name on fixed to the wall, or a selection of beautiful artworks in a museum, or maybe, even better, a glorious garden outside, full of flowers, with poems attached to the backs of the benches for those in need of a little spiritual medicine. A place to catch some repose, feel uplifted and become healthier of soul, as the good doctor prescribed. Failing that, visiting these places is high up there on my own little list of remedies.