Samizdata

“Mary Berry’s family is flogging my mum’s old home for £800,000 – but they can’t sell our memories”

Outrageous! Relatives of a famous person are crassly selling the house where Rebecca Hardy’s grandparents once lived! In the 1950s. OK, Ms Hardy herself never lived in this house, or even entered it. But she has often looked at it. Although her grandparents did not formally own the house as such, as it came with her grandfather’s job as a minister of the local chapel, I think that qualifies as a sort of spiritual ownership, don’t you?

To be fair Rebecca Hardy almost certainly did not write that subhead herself. On the other hand the unknown subeditor has caught rather well the spirit of a woman awakening to political consciousness that hers are a people dispossessed:

When I was 18, I spent one summer working as a chambermaid in the nearby Gara Rock hotel, and I can remember how even back in the late 80s people complained about what was happening in Salcombe. I remember the hotel occupants too, in their boating shoes and Breton tops, and how I served them cream teas and eavesdropped on their conversations as they muttered about the costs of mooring their yachts. “Well, we’ve bloody well worked for it,” one particularly well-dressed lady said. As if no one else had.

For all her hands calloused from teenage waitressing and more recently being “a freelance journalist and author who writes mostly about food, health and wellbeing”, Ms Hardy’s tone reminds me irresistibly of an exiled Russian aristocrat circa 1980 wistfully unfolding the yellowed title deeds of the family estates confiscated by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Except that the Berry relatives did not actually storm the front doors as the elder Hardys fled down a secret tunnel. It was more that they bought the house from someone else who bought it from someone else who bought it from the chapel. Anyway, what with them being related to a person on TV, the bastards, and house prices having gone up something shocking there was definitely some oppression going on there somewhere.

When I read ‘studies’ like this one, I just marvel at what loaded assumption they must be using.

The Boston Consulting Group has just released its assessment on sustainable economic development, which gives each country in Europe a figure (it calls it a “growth-to-wellbeing coefficient”) based on how much residents feel the benefits of an expanding economy. The better it is at converting growth into wellbeing, the higher the number.

At the very top of the list is Poland with a coefficient of 1.55, with many of the other Eastern European countries dominating the top of the list, such as Croatia, Bosnia, Albania and Ukraine. Germany comes in fifth place with a coefficient of 1.34.

I wonder if they check their assumptions by taking a random sample of one hundred random people in (say) Birmingham and Tirana, or Lyon and Odessa and offering them the opportunity to swap places? What do you think the result of that might be, eh?

… so here is a cautionary tale. Continuing the topic of interspecies communication, when you see a monkey just sitting there minding his own damn business (note there are two people quite calmly sitting next to him), it is most unwise to get in his face and then impolitely flip him off.