DIARY
ANNA FORD I'm fed up with all the 'things' that clutter up the house after Christmas, and I can't close the attic door against the avalanche of debris. Winter draws one's attention to clutter because of its proximity, and I'm itching for a good spring-clean and space. I've lived in the London Borough of Houn- slow for many years and have witnessed the council's burgeoning green policies. So I'm thinking of introducing them to the Ger- man practice of Spenmull. Roughly trans- lated Spanniill means larger-than-average rubbish. You put everything you no longer want, however unwieldy — wardrobes, tables, sofas, mattresses, baskets, old cook- ers, any relations who forgot to go home at New Year — out on the pavement in front of your house. It's a sort of therapeutic domestic bulimia. The house is stuffed up and you spew it all out. In Bonn this won- derful event happens four times a year and is a great social occasion. On the first night everyone walks around the outdoor junk- shop their neighbourhood has become, deciding what they'll come back for. You make new friends by asking casual passers- by to help you carry your trophies home. In the meantime you hope the things you've left outside your house will have been cart- ed off. Anything still there after a couple of days is taken away by the council. Friends of mine have almost completely furnished their large house in Bonn from Sparmull and are starting on a flat in Berlin. Houn- slow is a conscientious borough which might be persuaded to let the homeless and poor have first pick. I'll ring them immediately.
Reading about Arthur Scargill's plans for the new Socialist Labour Party this week reminded me that years ago the late Victor Rothschild asked if I knew Arthur well enough to invite him to supper. I'd recently spoken to a Yorkshire miners' summer school and been taken down a mine as Arthur's guest, so I approached him. After an initial 'Who is he and what's he want?' he accepted.
The four of us, Victor, Arthur, Mark (Boxer) and I, ate in the kitchen of the con- verted flower shop on the Goldhawk Road where I lived. Mark, with his keen caricatur- ist's eye, knew he was in for a good evening. Victor could be extremely intimidating and enjoyed putting people on the spot with very bold questions. But on this occasion I don't think I've ever seen him kinder or more benign. His interest was held and he hardly said a word. The floor was Arthur's and he kept us entertained with a stream of funny stories which he acted out standing up. Supper progressed slowly. Later, he told how he'd tried to join the Labour Party as a youth and had been put off because no one ever replied to his letters. So he tried the Communists and within hours a comrade was on his doorstep ready to take him to a meeting. He said he only left the Commu- nist Party because they wrote Stalin out of the history books.
For a long time he's been one of the Aunt Sallys of political life, easy to carica- ture and for the upper classes to mock. He's been hated by the establishment and many in the Labour Party alike. But there's one way in which he deserves admiration, and that is for the many lonely battles he fought as a young man for miners' health No, I'm sorry, he's busy at the moment.' and safety. He was more often than not at odds with the management and always with those who preferred just to look the other way. He put up with being sent to Coventry and campaigned successfully against the deadly practice of 'roof-bolting' in the col- lieries — a process by which screws were put in the roof to hold it up as the seam was dug out, instead of protecting the tunnel with strong arched girders. The practice is now creeping back again.
Most of the men in my maternal grandfa- ther's family worked in or down the Lan- cashire mines and there wasn't a scrap of sentimentality about their views of coalmin- ing. It was hard, dirty and dangerous work that no one in their senses wanted their sons to do. It was the Arthur Scargills gritty, opinionated, difficult men — who took on the system and helped lengthen already short lives and make intolerable conditions marginally better. I don't think he'll get many votes but he's done more than some to better the lot of others.
The performance I saw last week of Le Cirque du Soleil at the Albert Hall made me think about running away to become a trapeze artist. Several of us are in the same frame of mind — working women and mothers all. Tired of self-discipline, our constricting working clobber, good time- keeping and utter dependability, we've decided we want time off for years of exem- plary behaviour. This circus company from Montreal, mysterious and androgynous, threw such a spell over the audience that families making their way out into the dark seemed transfixed by a dream. The per- formers — more like spirits from a grotesque underworld emerging from the depths beneath their musicians' bandstand — utter a strange, piping, bird language. They're skivvied and bullied along by clas- sic characters straight out of the commedia dell'arte of 16th-century Italy. They per- form to perfection, with bodies that seem filleted of all save a few bones, acts that mesmerise in their defiance of the laws of gravity. High from a rig in the roof, four perfect bodies plummet backwards, on ropes of elastic. They fall in a breathtaking sweep from trapezes so far away you can barely see them in the dome.
For us about to join the troupe, a simple start may be the best. I hear there's a circus school in Camden. Should we take digs, start speaking only Russian and attend every class? A night class once a week would take so long and seems too tame. But in middle-age an exciting change will suit us all. All we'll need is some self- discipline, constricting working-clobber, good time-keeping and utter dependability. I can't wait.
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