In Memoriam: The Somme.

Most British people alive today, including many from the former colonies, will be remembering the battle of the Somme this week. Almost all of us have lost family members. Two of my grandfather's elder brothers died in the Great War, as did my grandmother's father. I can walk half a kilometer to the War Memorial in our town centre and point out our family names to my daughter; further afield, there are memorials in Flanders and north-eastern France bearing those young men's names. "A generation died", I say glibly, not really knowing what that means.

When my daughter asks real questions, I let (and sometimes oblige) her to watch the BBC coverage, and I read the Great War poets to her. She likes Owen because I do, I know, because I read his poems differently than Brooke, for instance, or Sassoon. It doesn't matter, this is only retrospective aestheticism on my part. Often I think Brookes idealistic "If I should die, think only this of me" is as true to the spirit of those far off days as Owen and his Anthem.

Pace, though, tonight; peace to all those who died, those who had the misfortune of surviving, to the women who waited alone, and even to the leaders who led so disastrously. We should celebrate the sacrfices and forgive the stupidities; they're both equally human, and until we change what we are we should pay due tribute to those who've died for what we were, and still sadly seem to be.

Appealing Ideas #5: The Things We Tell Our Kids

My daughter Gareth (names have been changed to protect the innocent) is now five, and recently started "big school". Nursery wasn't so bad in the parental fib department, because most pre-schoolers tend to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, not to mention whatever Disney's latest film might be. Not believing in these ancient and hallowed traditions is considered odd, in fact, and such questions as "What does the Tooth Fairy do with them then?" are generally ruthlessly quashed. But now that she's older, some other accidental fibs which seemed like a good idea at the time are coming to light and making her regard me with a jaundiced eye. Here are some of them.

Radiator Trolls. For those of you without combination boilers and nice warm appartments (so that's 4/5 of the world, then), radiators often make strange and unexpected gurgling noises. Well, mine do, anyway. A long time ago, when my girl was all wide-eyed and innocent, she asked me what made those noises and I invented the Radiator Trolls. These are (obviously) Trolls which live in Radiators. Please don't get confused, I don't mean cutesy Trollz which sit on office desks and have UberPunk hairstyles, I mean the hairy skinny shaggy bloodstained type who live under bridges and eat billygoats, gruff or not. Anyway, Radiator Trolls were all the rage for quite a while, a missing slipper or pencil or ironing board (I'm an untidy person) had been "taken by the Radiator Trolls, Mama!". Once my daughter arrived at school she discovered that the RT's were FIBS, and her opinion of me dropped accordingly. Interestingly, when I'm searching madly for my keys in the morning before leaving the house, she'll often say "Maybe the RT's have taken them, Mama!" in a voice positively dripping with irony.

England In The World Cup (Semi-Finals) Act, 1987, Section 2 Paragraph 9 I was mildly surprised that she went for this one, since the words "section 2 paragraph 9" are regulars in my conversation whenever I want to talk about some ditzy piece of beaurocracy, but there you go. She's only a bambina. According to the above-mentioned piece of fantasy legislation, then, if England reach the semi-finals of the World Cup (that's football, not soccer), one adult member of every household is obliged to sit in front of the telly with a beer in one hand swearing at the referee, whether they know anything about football or not. So I explained to her that, since my boyfriend (names have been changed to protect the embarrassed) Mitzy is at the moment working in Denmark, I have to do it for him. This is even better when it's conducted in a place of public entertainment, for instance my mum's pub, where fat wheezy smoky old blokes who would have a coronary just walking the length of the pitch shout at skilled, dedicated athletes playing their gnadgers off. If England are playing, I tell my daughter, then it's permissible to yell "Orright, go-orn'nen!!! My Grandmuvver could do be'er than that! In 'er coffin!", and that the less you actually know the better. My boyfriend Mitzy has taught her some useful phrases too; she's now inclined to pick up her lime-and-soda and stare thoughtfully at the icecubes whilst opining; "Beckham's free kick? It was unstoppable, mate, unstoppable!"

Ossils I'm particulary pleased with this one, because it was totally spur of the moment and justs get better and better. The root of all this is Mitzy, who's an engineer and thus owns things like oscilloscopes. An oscilloscope, at least, which he brought round to do obscure engineer-type things to my video (or DVD, or computer, or maybe hat), and which immediately fascinated Gareth. It (the oscilloscope) has a kind of probe attachement, and you can vary the frequencies (or whatever, I was reading a book during this bit) by twiddling knobs, and generally it's all very fascinating and scientific, which appears to be right up Gareth's street. Mitzy left it with us when he went away, and we've had endless fun since. The crack is, the existence of the Ossil. There are good and bad Ossils (or positive and negative, perchance) and an oscilloscope either rounds them all up (bad) and puts them in a bag or gives them a little extra electrical charge (good) and sends them on their way. Gareth trolled around the appartment for days testing different objects for Ossils. She tells me that there are loads in my computer, hardly any in cheese, and "funny Ossils" in magnets. Humans are also crawling with them, it transpires; I'm considering reporting it to the local Pest Control.

Compensation Culture

This allegedly-American syndrome is much in the public arena at the moment (I say "allegedly" because I rather think that the human desire for compensation for real or imagined wrongs goes back to Gilgamesh), especially in the often very different treatment meted out to victims of crime and victims of "miscarriages of justice".

I'd like to state unequivocally that I believe that victims of judicial balls-ups who spend time in prison for crimes of which they are later found innocent do indeed deserve a great deal of "compensation" for their suffering. Whoever you take for an example, be it Angela Cannings, the Birmingham Six or the Guantanamo Three, what you have in essence is private individuals (often without the means to procure adequate representation - or in the case of Guantanamo any representation at all) who have been pitted against the Juggernaut might of the State Judicial apparatus and who have been chewed up and swallowed in the process. There was a great wave of public sympathy when Cannings was realeased, as indeed there should be; not only did this poor woman lose her children, but was then (unthinkably to her or her family, no doubt) was tried and convicted for their murder. I wonder how many of the sympathetic public really understood how prison life must have been for Cannings.

I have had experience of prison, unlike many people who've nonetheless written at length about this. In the women's prison (not in England) where I had the pleasure of passing two and a half months, there was a Fletch-like attitude that prison was an occupational hazard for the most part. The women who were there for providing false alibis or not testifying against friends or lovers were admired as much as anything, the thieves were fatalistic, the prostitutes and drug-users were accepted. The only loner in our small wing was a woman who (and I never was sure of the truth, so I won't go into too much depth) was accused of having turned a blind eye to the molestation of her daughter. None of us knew the truth, the woman hadn't yet been tried so no salacious details had been turned over to the press, yet this woman was so shunned that none of us theives, whores, murderesses etc., would so much as sit next to her at Mass. So I can reflect and sympathise more than most Angela Cannings' experience of prison life; I find it hard to imagine that that part of her ordeal will ever really fade.

The victim of crime, on the other hand (and I've been there a few times as well), have run up against the anti-social/criminal behaviour of an individual or individuals. We all accept (well, apart from fundamentalists of course, who are inclined to drag Satan into the equation) that humans are - well, human - and that the "human condition" includes cads, rotters, politicians and other stupid and immoral people. It's far easier to live with the idea that one's the victim of what is essentially a coincidence (if I hadn't decided to go to Clignancourt and get ratassed, for instance, I wouldn't have had my passport and money stolen by a drunk guy with a knife) than to come to terms with one's innocence being crushed in the gears of the Machine. Plus a wrongly-convicted individual has none of the resources, emotional and financial, available to the victims of ordinary crime.

Certainly this isn't true of all "victims" of crime, but the majority will have friends and family and even complete strangers, the media for example, prepared to offer support and sympathy. In the case of the media this can amount to large cheques for "exclusive" rights, which can in turn pay for a lot of therapy. All of us are "on their side", and rightly so. A wrongly-condemned "criminal", however, has no such support. Those few people who still believe in their innocence, if there is anyone at all, face long and costly appeals to present new evidence or obtain a retrial. I sometimes wonder at the devotion and tenacity of the campaigners for such unpopular causes as, for instance, Ms Canning must have appeared after Sir Roy Meadows gave his damning statistical testimony. A woman convicted of killing three of her babies is not someone most of us would feel naturally inclined to sympathise with; a mother who has lost three babies and then been handed the guilt and wrongfully imprisoned for their murder is a woman who has suffered far more than most of us could, or should (in a properly ordered world), be able to imagine.

So yes, I think we owe Ms Canning a bit more than an apology. Whether society "owes" compensation to victims of individual crimes is a slightly different question, I think. If we admit that the criminal actions of individuals are ultimately the result of the failings of our society as a whole, then yes, we do. We therefore also owe it to all citizens to tackle those problems of our society which give rise to social disenfranchisement and, ultimately, crime. But criminal law isn't based on that; we emphasise the choice of an individual to go commit a crime. We do accept extenuating circumstances to a certain extent, which is right I believe, but we should also bear in mind that a lot of us (if not most of us) have had less-than-perfect lives and we don't all go around stealing iPods at knifepoint or raping pensioners. None of us, being human, can possibly expect other humans to be perfect, but we can at least expect our state apparatus to make amends when it goes so disastrously wrong.