Auden's Clerk

Aneirin off to Aberystwyth

2010-09-20T15:11:00.002+01:00

Reading in Wales Online that the Book of Aneirin is finally going to the National Library of Wales. The oldest continuous Welsh poem has been a treasure of the Cardiff Library since 1896 and has been the subject of much bitter debate in Wales as scholars and librarians have argued about where it should rightly be held. The old Cardiff Free Library in Trinity Street had a magnificent collection of Welsh manuscripts, archives and early printed books which was once freely available to scholars.

The relocations of the library since 1988 have seen the gradual restriction of access to the special collections and the local politicians have been eyeing up the auction value of the manuscripts and printed books for some time. So...Aneirin if off to NLW. I hope the rest follow soon. And the books.

My first task every morning nearly forty years ago was to open the strongroom at the Library and check that the Llyfr Aneirin was in its case. The Library was then an odd place full of very odd characters: the deaf ex-merchant seaman, the neo-Nazis, several very eccentric Welsh academics. All this for another day.

I'm glad MS Cardiff 1 is going west but can't help thinking that NLW's good fortune is a sad reflection on the city.

More on Auden's clerk

2010-09-04T22:29:00.002+01:00

Whenever I read the The Fall of Rome, I'm struck by how contemporary it sounds and how applicable it always seems to what's going on in the world. I've also been thinking about Auden's "unimportant clerk" and wonder whether he or she (could it have been a she?) had any colleagues who shared a common dislike for the work? What could the function of the "pink official form" have possibly been? Expense accounting? Visa approval? Overtime claim? Grant application? Tax rebate? Was it carbonated? Did the clerk get into trouble for this minor act of rebellion; this disregard for government property spurred on by a raw need for the expression of self: I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK? Was he or she hauled up before HR and given a verbal warning? It might have happened before so the disciplinary meeting would then have been attended by a senior manager or Director.

All too familiar. Outside the borders give way and avian flu arrives.

Google, waterspouts and Aberfan

2009-11-24T15:57:00.000Z

Down in Cardiff last week, I went to visit my uncle who lives on the coast a few miles west of the city. We were talking about how people find information today and, inevitably, the topic of Google came up. My uncle, now long retired, was a journalist working for a Cardiff news agency and, for many years, on The South Wales Echo where he was News Editor.

He was describing how he did most of his work by phone or in interviews and suddenly launched into a story about how on 21 October 1966 (a Friday morning) he was sitting at home and starting to write a short piece about waterspouts. There had been a rumour that a waterspout was imminent in the Bristol Channel and that this might pose some danger to shipping. “What did I know about waterspouts?” he said to me. The story continued. A phone call to the museum in Cardiff got him connected to the Keeper of Geology who referred him to an academic colleague in the Geography Department at the University. My uncle’s call to the University was answered and a very helpful and detailed account of waterspouts (origins, frequency in the channel, impact etc.) was forthcoming. My uncle took down the details in his notebook and, after two final calls to the harbour master at Barry and the coastguard station, he rang the newsroom to dictate his copy.

No one picked up the phone. No one answered his second or third calls. Newsrooms functioned on phone calls so, after a fourth call remained unanswered, my uncle got in his car and drove to the office. The few people there were in shock. News had come in that a tip of coal waste had slid onto the village of Aberfan and had buried the village school. My uncle got back in his car and drove north. He spent a week living in his car in Aberfan, filing copy by phone wherever he could find a phone box, and came back to the newsroom on the following Saturday. An old colleague found him staring at his desk, muttering incoherently, and took him home.

The Aberfan Disaster and the enquiry which followed made a huge impact in Wales and across the country. The National Coal Board was clearly to blame for ignoring warnings and evidence about the danger of the tip. No individual was prosecuted. Nor did the waterspout materialise (for that’s where I started) and no shipping was endangered. Weeks later, my uncle looked for his shorthand notes about the waterspout but never found them.

http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/home.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp63jXgVH0o

History in a skip

2009-08-16T17:32:00.002+01:00

A neighbour, who must be nudging 90, stopped me in the street yesterday to show me a collection of photos he apparently retrieved from a skip. Obviously once part of a family album from the 1930s, there were some great pictures of airplanes at Croydon Airfield and lots of scenes from around Italy featuring a man and a woman on what seemed to be their honeymoon. Having shown me these, he produced a final set with a flourish that showed the same man and woman cavorting naked in their hotel! My neighbour went off chuckling to himself.

Were they found in a skip? Were the man and the women members of his family?

Work at work and work at home

2009-06-07T12:19:00.002+01:00

The brooding presence of Son Number One gazing balefully at his chemistry book and, supposedly, revising makes home feel like work. If most corporate work is futile, what does this say about education?

Shall I let him go off rockclimbing with his mates this afternoon or insist on more hours of drudgery?

Theorising about work is so much easier than sorting out life outside.

Burst working

2009-04-20T14:07:00.003+01:00

Saturday means the weekend Guardian and Oliver Burkeman's This column will change your life. Discussing habits and habituation, Burkeman describes "burst working", a "smaller-scale kind of routinised disuption" intended to help habitual procrastinators (getting close to home, now).

Intrigued, I followed the topic up and found this overview piece from acidlabs based on Anne Zelenka's article in web worker daily. This reframes burst working in a different but no less interesting context from the habits Burkeman discusses. So, to a busy worker operating in a scientific management paradigm, burst working definitely seems like not-working and so misses the point that burst workers are engaging with the positive opportunities and advantages offered by the whole range of Web 2.0 tools. No more email slavery, choose and use your tools!

J.G. Ballard died yesterday

2009-04-20T12:33:00.002+01:00

Walking down the river path in Weybridge, you can look over to Shepperton where Ballard lived for many years. Lovely old church and square by the river and then a more modern high street leading up to the station. It's a long way from literary London but perilously close to the landscape around Heathrow that Ballard made his own in novels from Crash onwards: abandoned farmland; lorry parks; the A30; business parks and cars everywhere you look; the M25 a never ending rumble in the background.

Requiescat.

Sparrows in the garden

2009-03-30T13:25:00.002+01:00

We've let the hedge down one side of the garden grow for the last couple of years. It's a tangle of shrubs and small trees. The reward for this gardening amnesty is that we have sparrows and blackbirds nesting. Recently, I heard a radio piece examining the disappearance of the sparrow from many urban parks and gardens. The experts were far from unanimous about the cause but the removal of habitats through excessive clearing and tidying was clearly part of the picture.

So in gardens, so at work, we over tidy at our peril. Clean desk, clear desk, paperless, digital; where's the space for some healthy mess?

On wearing a suit again

2009-03-19T23:20:00.002Z

Pens fell to the floor this morning when I wore a suit to work. It felt different and I spent much of the day waiting for the old corporate habits to creep in. A bit more bluster; a little more assertion; back straighter. I saw some clients this afternoon and not one commented. I hung up the suit tonight and it may stay in the wardrobe for a while. Until next time.

2009-02-25T23:01:00.000Z

When I first wrote about the nature of organisational life in 2003, I was consumed with the sense that I would survive as an insider only by taking on the stance of an outsider. The phrase I used then was "guerrilla action”. I had developed skills in stealthy subversion; I had and still can be Auden’s clerk. It was noticed from time to time. While managing the work of many people over several countries, I was accused of being a solo player by my manager. I know that I have not wanted to participate at times and have often steamed and boiled in turmoil over the iniquities of being in the organisation and undergoing its petty regimen. Well, that’s not going to disappear altogether. But, I realise that this is my issue. I don’t believe there is such a thing as an organisation that does this to me. The organisation is the people and the network of social relationships that exist together in the world. What I feel and say about the way things get done in organisations is down to me. As Block and Koestenbaum rightly say “Human motivation is an individual decision, not an environmental consequence.”