Extraordinary ordinary

Yesterday afternoon, we visited the Cheltenham Art Gallery, which has some fine Chinese work in its permanent collection, though not often on show. It has been dusted down to accompany a new travelling exhibition, just opened. "Ahead of the Curve" is the somewhat opaque title of what is a fine assemblage of contemporary objects from China. It was not something I thought would be of much interest to me when it was advertised, but in fact, as my photograph shows, there is much to catch the eye: Wan Liya calls his beautifully crafted porcelain copies of everyday containers "Birds Twitter and Fragrance of Flowers". Many of the artists studied at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute: it hosts some 1,700 students of ceramics at any one time.

Later in the afternoon, we had tickets for a poetry recital. Once again, they were intended for Agnes, but she was in Bristol. The poets were Michael Symmons Roberts and Rowan Williams.  I found the work of the former infinitely more accessible than the latter's: obviously such a nice and good man, but "never knowingly understood" seems to hit the mark for his poems as well as his sermons.

Roberts not only read well, but gave us short glosses which illuminated his thought. A poem about a photo booth was prefaced by his describing it as a secular confessional where you are confronted with yourself.

Asked about the influences upon their work, Roberts referenced Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman's Dream Songs, Donne and Edward Thomas; while from Rowan Williams came the names of Auden, Dylan Thomas, Eliot, "early to middle Geoffrey Hill", Browning and David Jones.

Festival finale

Ten days is ample for a literature festival, it seems to me, before fatigue sets in. The last event I went to was this morning's "Translating China": my photograph shows (from left) writer Anne Witchard, one of the "Misty Poets", Yang Lian, and Xinran, author of "The Good Women of China", translated into 37 languages. I took it at the very end of the session, while Yang Lian's publisher was reading a translation of a piece from "The Third Shore", after the poet had read it in the original.

Hearing a poem in Chinese brought home the immense gulf there exists between our cultures, so much of which is down to language. Xinran expressed one difference succinctly: "Chinese people," she said, "first understand, then think. In the West, though, you think first, then understand."

Translation arose as a side issue earlier in the Festival, in the two (of several) sessions about Proust which I attended. He disapproved violently, we were told by the excellent Cynthia Gamble, of the translation of the title of his great work as Remembrance of things past. Neville Jason was on hand to read from the novel, and - at the second session - from various rather fascinating letters. His voice can be heard for 140 hours if you listen non-stop to the Naxos recording.

The audio publisher, Nicholas Soames (this one thinner than the MP) spoke of involuntary memory as a means of overcoming the tyranny of time. From The Captive, he quoted the passage following Bergotte's death, "They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection." And from the last page of Swann's Way, "Remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment."

I have struggled through to half way into volume two, and am inclined to think now of the reviewer who described a book - not Proust - as "one of those works which, once you put it down, you just can't pick it up again."

Impressed

This month Gloucestershire is hosting an international printmaking festival across no less than 26 venues. I have just been along to the Parabola Arts Centre, where "Impress '13" exhibits work under the title of "The Silk Road".

The show is dominated by the work of a Chinese artist from Yunnan province, He Kun who was there this evening. His huge, colourful "reduction" prints (immensely detailed) are made by cutting into a wooden block. Ink is then rolled across the surface: those areas not cut away retain the ink and mark the paper when run through the press. More of the surface is cut away as another layer is added - and so on, using the same block: a total of 20 different colours were used in the work on display! Every sheet of paper in the edition has to be printed stage-by-stage.

He Kun's work highlights the way the industrial, urban way of life is encroaching upon rural and culturally traditional China: his motivation is the protection of the government-designated "new rural areas" from careless development.

"Mao's last dancer"

I took this photograph from the train when we were in China in 2002. The journeys we then made came vividly back to mind this evening, as we watched our Film Society's latest offering, "Mao's last dancer". That true-to-life film's scenes of its hero's childhood in rural China contrasted dramatically with the footage shot in Houston and Washington, where the eponymous dancer, Li Cunxin ended up as a ballet star. An extraordinary story! And told with great sensitivity to both sides of the political struggle which ensued when Li's visa ran out.

Never enough handkerchiefs for this one's audience, I'd say.

The Piano Tuner

Peter Newham has been tuning our piano ever since we acquired it - is that nearly 30 years ago? Before then even, I had encountered him when he and his wife first came to live here, wanting legal advice. "You are the first person in Cheltenham I met," he told me this morning. Like Somerset Maugham and W.H. Auden, he has one of those faces, which portrays character with no prospect of masking it. It's as if the sensitivity of his ear has transferred itself, Dorian Gray-like, to his visage.

Peter has strong views on planning. "Why can't our planners go and look at the Plaza Major in Salamanca before deciding on a glass and steel look for the new square in North Place?" To my enquiry, whether he's a member of our Civic Society, however, he replies, as I anticipated, "I'm not a joiner."

Our old upright is in the dining-room, the walls of which are now covered with Tetbury Festival photographs: he has stories, of course, about many of the musicians featured in them. But also he is the first person to liken my Douro Valley railway shot to something out of an old movie, and wants to hear the story behind my Gersois tobacco pickers tableau. "The trouble with both my pianos [he has made two] and your photographs, Martin, is that, inexplicably, nobody wants to buy them."

I enquire after his tricky back: he illustrates his clean bill of health since his last visit here with tales of riding horses in Szechuan amongst Buddhist Tibetan nomads and Muslim Hui Chinese.

An hour with Peter does the soul good.

Is aid to Africa redundant?

This was the question for discussion at a seminar I attended In London last Thursday evening. It was the fifth event of its type put on by my old college (University College, Oxford) for its alumni and friends, and - having been to a previous one - very worthwhile I judge them.

This year the panellists - seen here with the Master of Univ., introducing them - were an Old Member (Tim Evans, currently at the Word Health Organisation); Ngaire Woods, a current Fellow, and Director of the Global Economic Governance Programme at Univ.; Dr. Dima Noggo Sarbo, a former member of the Ethiopian Government and currently on the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Programme, and Dr. Kevin Watkins, a Univ. Research Fellow, and former head of research at Oxfam.

With the aid of some sharp quesions put by well-informed members of the assembly, a number of issues were teased out, some of which I hadn't previously considered very fully. The extent to which military aid tends to accompany development aid, in order to prop up repressive regimes; and the extent to which African governments are beholden to aid donors, at the expense of being accountable to their own repressed people. And is it possible to suggest African aid is redundant (because "unsucessful"), when UN targets of aid as a percentage of GDP are more or less uniformly ignored (save by the Scandanavian countries)? How, again, do you compare a trillion dollars of aid over 60 years, with a hundred trillion over 12 months - the amount provided for economic stimulus? Perhaps it's arguable, said Dr. Evans, that nowhere other than Africa are so many lives saved at the expense of so few dollars.

On the other hand, we heard, far too much aid goes to pay for European - as opposed to African - experts on consultancies. (This came up too the following evening, when Lady Greenstock appealed on behalf of Women for Women at a fundraising concert we attended in Perivale: W4W, working in Nigeria, Sudan, Rwanda and the DRC, employ only local advocates. And we have since heard news of Caroline's brave Goddaughter Harriet, who is with MSF in the DRC, again alongside primarily local aid workers.)

Someone at the Univ. seminar described China as the elephant in the room - but at least it was (eventually) discussed. The real elephant in the room - given the speed at which parts of Africa is developing - is surely carbon, which didn't rate a mention all evening. Depressing, that.

Clean coal?

I took this photograph standing at the window of a Chinese train: we were visiting Agnes during her gap year. I don't know if the smoke is belching from a power station or - more probably perhaps - from a factory. But it was a common sight then, six years ago.

What reminded me of it was a talk I heard this lunchtime by Dr. Andrew Minchener of the IEA's Clean Coal Centre. Most of Andrew's work is in mainland Europe and China, but he lives near Gloucester, and the Gloucestershire Churches Environmental Justice Network was astute in nabbing him to speak.

We heard some horrifying energy use forecasts: that worldwide coal requirements would increase by 50% before 2030; and that energy-related CO2 emissions could increase by 60%. But we also heard positive news about the development of carbon capture technology, albeit at a steep price: the scrubbing is expensive because new plant is required; because any viable CO2 storage space may be a long way away - horizontally and vertically, and because the energy loss in turning coal into electricity having captured the carbon is considerable - meaning that we need to transport and then burn more coal to produce the same amount of energy. And our existing power stations are mainly old and unsuitable for retrofitting.

But with 50% of our present energy use coal-based, we cannot leave it out of the equation. So, we need government investment and regulatory pressure, at both national and European level, to clean up the technology, and quickly. Andrew said the most advanced countries at the moment in the necessary technology were America and China! A sobering talk.

"The world must be peopled!" said Benedick

It's a while since I heard Jonathon Porritt give a lecture of his own (as opposed to interviewing someone): I had forgotten what a devastating speaker he is when he's on top of his subject, as he was last night speaking on the theme "Too many people" at the Cheltenham Science Festival. He held a very large audience in the palm of his hand.

The message he brought was extremely simple: "Save the world! Have fewer children." The Italians had got the idea, he said: their population growth rate was the lowest in the world, indicating that "for them it seems that using a condom is a better guide to life than Papal infallibility." Benedick - yes; but Benedict - no.

Indeed, for a Catholic this was not a comfortable hour's entertainment. Jonathon was asked how the UN could be made more effective: "It has to act by consensus," he pointed out. "The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 was paralysed by the Vatican - a UN member - intervening to oppose artificial family planning." The loudest applause of the evening was for Jonathon condemning the Catholic Church's adherence to the teaching of Humanae Vitae as "immoral".

And yet. "Aren't you depressed at the lack of signs of progress?" asked a questioner. No, came Jonathon's response, because of all the spritual resources that remain untapped. (Here was evidence for Gordon Lynch's analysis, that I mentioned on Thursday.)

A final question was lobbed in. Jonathon had been praising the Chinese for having prevented 400m people from being born through their one-child policy. "Did the end justify the means in China?" a woman asked - the only woman to get a look in. A long pause. "On balance, no," came the eventual reply.

Isn't this the crux of the issue? Do wrong means ever justify good ends? We have since last year a beautiful granddaughter, born after very much soul-searching: how impoverished would our family life be without her! Not to speak of that child's mother, our only daughter - the fourth of our children, born after Caroline's doctor had warned her to have no more.

Burne-Jones' image of the Christ-child in Birmingham's St Philip's Cathedral misleadingly shows a white baby. Had the "necessary" funding for family planning - advocated by Jonathon - been available within the third world community into which Jesus was born, my question is: "Would he have been?"