Free news

Two news items caught my eye in the free Standard last week.

First we had the Olympic stadium in east London. It seems that it cost £400m to build then £300m to convert to dual use, with one use being the West Ham football club. With the club being given a lease for which they pay £2.5m a year for 99 years - about a third of what it costs to move the seats around start and end of each football season. Which looks like a rather poor return on this bit of public investment. So much for all the talk by the people promoting Olympic London about getting splendid returns out of all the billions spent on the event after the event. Why is that that important cities, which one might think did not get to be important by being stupid, clamour to be allowed to pour money down this particular plug hole? Alternatively, one should take free news with a pinch of salt.

Second we had a lady with an African name from north London moaning about white male dominance of the English Literature syllabus at Cambridge. First thought was whatever happened to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and Aphra Benn, none of whom qualify as white males? Second thought was whatever would all those chaps like Tolkien beavering away on ancient Icelandic texts, have made of demands to spend quality time with writers from the Dark Continent? Third and more considered thought was that the idea of being a member of a university - that is to say staff rather than student - was that one worked on what interested one. So if it was sagas, so be it. And if you were a student you selected your university according to the interests of the people teaching at them. If you don't like sagas, don't go to Oxford.

Against that we have the idea of a standard qualification in English Literature. If a university advertises a degree with that name they have to conform to the standard laid down by OffLit, a fine new quango chaired expensively and jointly by Germaine Greer and Mary Beard. Such a standard might well reflect the needs of society as a whole and include lots of writers from the Dark Continent. Maybe even the banana republics of Central America. Maybe even lady writers.

So how do we get to a sensible compromise between these competing pressures? Too far in the direction of standards and no-one will want to teach in universities. Too far in the direction of sagas and no-one will want to learn in them. Perhaps we should ask J. W. Rees-Mogg M.P., R.C. etc, whether market forces are up to the job in this particular case? Bearing in mind that he is a historian by training and may not be too hot on market forces.

PS: we learned at Blandford Forum that Tolkien did some of his First World War time with the Signals Corps (or some precursor thereof). A factlet weakly confirmed by Wikipedia. Milne - the Winnie the Pooh man - was another such. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/royal-corps-of-signals.html.