Sproggis - a further argument for nature vs nurture

I have in the past seen fit to blog on the subject of Margaret Mead, Samoa and the standard social science model; and how it held nurture to trump nature in the formation of character.

Looking back, I was predisposed to be sceptical because of a boy whom we shall call Sproggis (not his real name for reasons which will soon become apparent), who was with me through primary and comprehensive schools from the ages of 10-16.

Sproggis was from a street which we shall call Carlsberg Avenue (not its real name). Being from Carslberg Avenue carried an instant air of "bein' 'ard" around our parts. This was because our local council, for reasons best known to themselves, put all the council house rent defaulters into Carlsberg Avenue. This meant that over time the entire road filled with the kind of people who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show - dads absent, unknown or in prison; divorced mothers with kids by several different fathers, alcoholics, drug abusers, the long-term unemployed. It was a street down which nicely-brought up kids from up the hill (like me) Did Not Walk, for fear of being ambushed for fun and left tied to several different lampposts. At once.

Sproggis put the fear of God into the other inhabitants of Carlsberg Avenue from the age of seven. He was not large and imposing - most large imposing people I know are actually softies inside. Sproggis was a skinny, rat-faced ginger with scarily light blue eyes, which had no hint of human softness to them. Regarding his face was like staring into twin pools of smoking bleach, and was unadvisable at the best of times anyway for fear of getting a "What are YOU looking at?" beating.

By the age of 10, we all knew to treat him with circumspection. Sometimes he would be friendly, and you would enjoy those times like a brief interval of sunshine between thunderstorms. Inevitably, something would set him off; and senseless violence and the infliction of pain would follow.

Sproggis was not stupid - his intelligence frequently manifested itself in acts of devious larceny requiring considerable forethought and planning. The problem was that he was utterly without empathy. I still believe that he was - and is - a genuine psychopath. No morals, no remorse, no feelings for the pain inflicted on others. And recall that this was all apparent by the age of ten.

If you had come into our classroom in the third year of junior school (that's year 5 in new money) and said "Now then kids - which child in this class will be convicted of murder before their 25th birthday?" There would have been but the briefest of intervals before we all swivelled round and pointed our jam-smeared digits in Sproggis's direction.

A brief interval of hope appeared when he became quite a proficient break-dancer in his late teens; I remember reading in the local free paper that a judge had let him off a shoplifting charge because he was trying to turn his life around.

The judge's confidence was misplaced. Not long after he was arrested for burglary - carried out to feed what by then was a serious heroin habit. While in prison, he murdered his cellmate, and act that was covered for a day or so by the national press. I've always wondered how you could possibly come up with a plausible alibi, having been locked in a cell with one other person, who is then found brutally murdered the next morning. But then, this is psychopath territory - "he annoyed me so I killed him".

Bizarrely, he was released after serving 10 years or thereabouts. Still on heroin, he turned up at Carlsberg Avenue to call on his ex-girlfriend. His ex-girlfriend's mother answered the door, and refused to let him in. Upon which he beat her (the mother) so severely she ended up in hospital and will carry scars for the rest of her life.

As I write, he is back in prison.

Now the point of all this is not to impress you with what a hard school I went to (it wasn't that bad; Sproggis was a glaring exception to the general rule), but to point out that by the age of 10 we, his classmates, had already worked out what a professor of sociology would presumably deny - it was in his nature to be bad. Nurture didn't come into it.

Had they but taken our advice, he would have been preemptively locked up, saving at least one life and a whole lot of pain and anguish. Discuss.

Understanding international relations through British comedy. 1 - North Korea

Lou and Andy from 'Little Britain' explain Beijing-Pyongyang relations:

Lou (dressed as Hu Jintao): Now you've got a bit of money to spend from all that dog fur you sold to the Russians to make furry hats.
Andy (who does bear more than a passing resemblance to Kim Jong-il but with lanker hair: Yeah I know.
Lou: So what would you like to spend it on?
Andy: Nuclears.
Lou: Are you sure?
Andy: Yeah.
Lou: Why don't you spend it on economic development? You like economic development.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: So what will you spend it on?
Andy: Nuclears.
Lou: But you always say that nuclear ambitions are the mark of the imperialist warmaniac bent on oppressing the world's progressive people and stifling the desire of all compatriots for peaceful reunification.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: And besides, if you have nuclears again the IAEA inspectors will want to inspect them and will call for UN sanctions if you defy the ban, and that's a right kerfuffle.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: And nobody will give you any food aid for your birthday.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: And you like food aid.
Andy: Yeah I know.
Lou: You're absolutely sure you can do without food aid and will have the nuclears instead?
Andy: Yeah.
Lou: So what are you going to spend it on?
Andy: Nuclears.
Lou: Well if you say so.
Andy: [Leaps out of wheelchair while Lou's back is turned and starts enriching uranium]
Lou: So what do you want for your birthday?
Andy: Food aid.

I was outside this hotel in Catalunya at 4 am when the police arrived...

This title is entirely true, yet curiously may need some background explanation:

We have an old friend called Henry, with whom we occasionally keep in touch. Henry recently e-mailed me to announce that he was getting married, and invited us to his wedding. We agreed to go to - as we thought - Spain for this happy event, so we said yes, booked a hotel room, tickets with RyanAir (air transport's equivalent of really bad beer - you hate it but you keep going back for more), packed black tie/ evening dress as per the dress code and so on.

On or shortly after arrival we were disabused of several things - we were not in Spain, we were in Catalunya*, a totally different country which has never had anything to do with Spain, good Lord no! Whatever gave you that impression? Also, Henry was marrying into a seriously wealthy aristocratic family who know how to throw a serious party, and are also full-on Catalan independence supporters (the bride wore a separatist flag at one point. Over her wedding dress, I hasten to add).

Young Guthlac, meanwhile, discovered a previously unsuspected taste for being picked up and cuddled by glamorously dressed Catalan ladies, and at his age (16 months) was easily able to achieve this end by holding his arms out, adopting a cute expression and saying "Ek?" to them.

At 3am we decided to leave, as Guthlac's dancing and flirting were starting to show signs of tiredness. I duly returned to our table, scooped up a dinner jacket that looked plausibly like mine and joined my family in a taxi back to the hotel. On arriving there, I removed the dinner jacket and suddenly realised that various items were missing from my pockets. And that the sleeves were too long. And that it was a different style from mine.

Although it is undoubtedly an advantage of male evening dress that it's all pretty much the same and therefore doesn't require a new outfit to be bought for each event you go to, and that you don't lose any time or suffer any stress working out what to wear, it does leave open the possibility that you pick up the wrong jacket, especially when stuffed with 26 courses of food (yes, twenty-six, 22 of which were tapas-style appetisers) and addled with a selection of outstandingly good wines.

I staggered downstairs and asked the charming and suitably unflappable lady on night duty at the reception desk if such a thing as a taxi was available at this time of night. It was, but I had to wait a while. I opted to go out into the fresh air, where the receptionist joined me for her smoke break and a chat.

At which point, as per the title of this post, a police car pulled up to find me hanging around at 4am outside a hotel with a lady other than my wife in what, strictly speaking, was a stolen jacket.

"This can mean one of two things" the receptionist remarked. "Trouble, or coffee."

The cops sauntered over in the "I have all the time in world" manner common to cops the world over. As in the collapsing Uzbek lamppost incident, one could instinctively understand the entire conversation which transpired:
"Good evening officer. I trust all is well."
"Oh yes, just doing our rounds to check..."
[Expectant pause]
"Would you like a coffee?"
"Ooh - it hadn't occurred to us that you might have some coffee again this morning as on every other morning for the past year, but now you come to mention it that would be very nice!"

*Previously known to me only from George Orwell's book about his experiences importing French cheese to Barcelona, as detailed in his book "A Fromage to Catalonia".

"Daddy - why are there no pop songs about fossils?"

A good and compelling question, I trust you'll agree, and one that Djangolina asked me the other day.

In an attempt to fill this void, I composed for her the following lyric, to be sing to the tune (if that's the word I'm looking for) of Miss Dynamite's eponymous theme-song:

When you're digging through the strata underneath your house
And you come across a fossil like a three-part woodlouse
Don't think it's a dead-end with no eyesight -
It had eyes made from rods of calcite
It's Miss Trilobite-ee-ee
She's found in rocks paleozoic - what a stoic!
It's Miss Trilobite-ee-ee
Don't ever think that she's demented - she's just segmented

When you're strolling along on a Dorset beach
And you're looking for a fossil that's within your reach
Just look around your feet, and there without fail
You'll see a fossil that looks somewhat like a snail
It's Miss Ammonite-ee-ee
She's found throughout the rocks Jurassic - zone-fossil classic
Miss Ammonite-ee-ee
A kind of Nautilus that's early - her shelll is curly

If you're digging through chalk you may just see the glint
Of a finger-shaped fossil like a lipstick made of flint
You may throw it aside, but just think what you did -
You've thrown out the arse of a squid
It's Miss Belemnite-ee-ee
She's found throughout the rocks cretaceous - she's silicaceous
It's Miss Belemnite-ee-ee
It's just her tail that turns quite stony - she wasn't bony.

[Pause]

Djangolina: OK Daddy, now I understand.
Me (proudly): About zone fossils?
Djangolina: No, about why nobody writes songs about them. That was rubbish.

Colonel of the month - March

Turning from the upright, Boy's-Own-Paper derring-do of the Campbells and Hayes-Newingtons for a while, we take time to explore the dark side of the colonial colonel this month, through the personage of the thrilling yet disturbing Richard Meinertzhagen.

I first encountered Meinertzhagen in an entertaining passage in Bill Bryson's excellent book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything', detailing the consternation at the Natural History Museum when they opened the crates of bird specimens left to them by Meinertzhagen and discovered the museum's own labels on most of the contents. This, Bryson notes "explained his habit of wearing a large overcoat even in warm weather".

I have also come across quotes from him in various accounts of the campaign in East Africa in WWI, throughout which he appears to have sat on a deckchair behind the lines smoking a pipe and criticising his superiors - a dream job for most of us, I suspect.

There is an outstanding Wikipedia biography, from which the following quotes come:

Colonel Richard Henry Meinertzhagen CBE DSO (March 3, 1878 - June 17, 1967) was a British soldier, intelligence officer, ornithologist and expert on bird lice. He was influential in life and had a legendary reputation for his exploits around the world. Studies on his work on birds and historic notes after his death however raised serious questions on his integrity and have made him a controversial character.

In East Africa in 1905, he crushed a major revolt by killing the Orkoiyot (spiritual leader) who led it. He collected some of the tribal artefacts after this revolt. Some of these artefacts, including a walking stick and baton belonging to the Nandi tribal leader Koitalel arap Samoei, were returned to Kenya in 2006.

His unpublished diaries hint at a successful rescue attempt of one of the Russian Grand Duchesses, possibly Tatiana

Tom Segev considers that Meinertzhagen was "at once a great antisemite and a great Zionist". He justifies this analysis by this excerpt from Meinertzhagen's Middle East Diary : "I am imbued with antisemitic feelings. It was indeed an accursed day that allowed Jews and not Christians to introduce to the world the principles of Zionism and that allowed Jewish brains and Jewish money to carry them out, almost unhelped by Christians save a handful of enthusiasts in England".

He was a prolific diarist and published four books based on his diaries, which make fascinating and often insightful reading. However, his Middle East Diary (1959) contains dozens of entries that are probably fictional, including those on T. E. Lawrence and on Hitler. Meinertzhagen's claimed to have mocked Hitler by giving a Heil Meinertzhagen salute in response to those given by the men around Hitler. He also claimed to have carried a loaded gun in his coat pocket at a meeting with Hitler and von Ribbentrop in July 1939 and was "seriously troubled" about not shooting when he had the chance, adding "If this war breaks out, as I feel sure it will, then I shall feel very much to blame for not killing these two." Lockman in his book shows that Meinertzhagen later falsified his entries on T. E. Lawrence. The original diaries kept in the Rhodes House Library contain differences in the paper used for certain entries as well as in the typewriter ribbon used, and there are oddities in the page numbering.

"Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain..."
– T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926

Note the equating of the beating to death of unarmed POWs with "an unscrupulous jest".

While in India he killed one of his personal assistants in a fit of rage and had the local police officer cover it up as a death due to plague...

Gavin Maxwell wrote about how his parents would scare him and other children to behave themselves when Meinertzhagen visited with "...remember...he has killed people with his bare hands..."

Meinertzhagen's second wife, the ornithologist Anne Constance Jackson, died in 1928 at age 40 in a remote Scottish village in an incident that was ruled a shooting accident. The official finding was that she accidentally shot herself in the head with a revolver during target practice alone with Richard.

That has to be the most magnificently colonelesque inquest verdict ever...

One song in the style of another - 5

It's so obvious when you think about it - Messiaen's magnificent Turangalila symphony played Hank Marvin-style on an electric guitar with a tremolo arm.

Embedding is unfortunately disabled on these videos, you'll have to follow the links. Sorry...

The Romance of the Stage

In a response to Mrs Pouncer's moving musings on stage curtains and ancestors, I commented that my own parents' relationship had blossomed when my father lit my mother in sundry productions; and Mrs P asked me to expand on the tale.

Bear in mind that I have the fragmentary evidence of my parents and my grandmother for this version, since for obvious reasons I wasn't there other than as a twinkle in someone's eye.

My parents had known each other in some degree at their mixed grammar school - of which my mother was head girl - and there may even have been some romantic attachment (my father on one occasion wistfully alluded to the long grass behind the tennis courts, upon which my mother silenced him with A Look That Could Kill). Anyway, they then went their separate ways - my father to do a degree in electrical engineering and then get hoiked off to do national service in the merchant navy, my mother to drama school (Rose Bruford's) in London and then to teacher training in English and Drama in Birmingham. She was strikingly good-looking, I may as well point out at this stage: dark and petite, in a sort of vaguely Audrey Hepburn-ish way.

Years went by; at length my father returned from the sea, but according to his version of the tale still carrying a torch for my mother, but having long lost contact with her.

And then one evening his mother was reading a local paper bearing a review of an amateur production of something or other in which she played the female lead (as she usually did). "Do you remember that Janet ------?" she said, reading out my mother's maiden name (which, along with my bank account number and sort code, I have no intention of publishing on the Internet). He did, and hope rose within him at the apparent revelation that she was not yet married.

Being also eligible for membership of that dramatic society (old pupils of the aforementioned mixed grammar school), he contacted them to enquire whether they needed a lighting man, casually dropping the fact that he was now an electrical engineering graduate. Unsurprisingly, they said yes - setting him up neatly for a studiedly nonchalant reunion with him leaning suavely over the lighting gantry.

I have difficulty reconciling the romantic hero of the tale with the father I know, love and frequently take cover from during incidents of DIY. My mental picture of him always involves him dropping bags of spanners on her head or similar, but clearly that can't have been the case. Imagining one's own parents as carefree young lovers is always difficult.

But anyway, something clearly blossomed because he asked her out, then asked her to meet his parents (on which evening his father - also an electical engineer - received an emergency callout from a local coalmine and insisted my father accompany him down the pit, leaving my mother and paternal grandmother awkwardly alone).

All being well, we shall be joining them next year to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.