Interval

I'm not done with Hall of Mirrors yet - far from it. Just taking a little break for a couple of other things floating around in my head.

The word "curfew": I went out for a short run this morning and was listening to Journal en Francais Facile on my iPod (the iPod clip I've had for a few years, which deserves a mention of its own this week: on Friday morning after heavy rain I was cycling to work and accidentally knocked it from my bag strap and right into the middle of what seemed to the only standing puddle in the vicinity. I turned it off, dried it, took it home later and put it in rice for a night- and I'm delighted to report that it still works.). The "Word of the Week", which they have on every Saturday edition, was couvre-feu - to do with the couvre-feu having been lifted in a part of Turkey. Couvre-feu: covering the fires, putting the lights out. For the rest of my run I struggled to remember the word in English, with the sense that it had to be related - but that sense that it was related also helped to hide the word from me, I think. I came up with "curfew" finally when I got home - closely related, indeed. It's funny to have known this weird word (a word I would have learned much later than curlew) for years without ever having looked up where it came from.

Jeremy Corbyn: Happy to see the news this morning of his election to the leadership of the Labour Party. It's not that I know much about him - I've been following this leadership contest only vaguely and distantly, mainly wondering why it was going on so long (because I never read enough to know when it was supposed to end). However, from the little I did see, Corbyn managed to come across as a real human being with driving principles and beliefs - someone quite unlike the media-savvy unmemorable centrists who seem to dominate all parties now. I think he's what people need - a breath of fresh air, someone to make people feel involved. A lot has been made of the support of young people, but I'm sure that there are plenty of people of my age who have similar feelings about this - people who voted for Tony Blair in 1997 and were caught up in the excitement when he won, and then suffered the disappointment of finding that under his leadership the Labour Party blurred into the edges of the Conservative Party and that nothing at all was going to change for the better.

The edition of the Journal I was listening to this morning reported Corbyn's victory as something to give hope to the left wing across Europe - interesting to think of it as having that possible significance beyond the U.K. when it seemed to me so specific to our own political situation. I was taken aback to read an article in the New York Times about it, though, which stated: "[Corbyn's] success underlines the extent to which European political structures have been destabilized by the aftershocks of the financial crisis in 2008, with voters increasingly attracted away from the political center ground, either to the socialist left or the nationalist right." This isn't how I see it at all. I don't see this as a left-wing correlative to the increasing support for the nationalist right - this isn't the Socialist Worker's Party we're talking about here. I suppose from the American point of view someone like Corbyn must seem extreme, but from a U.K. point of view I can't see this as a "destabilization" of political structures at all - just a re-opening of a political field that had narrowed down unhealthily. Another New York Times article talked about Corbyn as being unelectable. Electable or not - and I have no idea which it is - I can't see that this is all that matters.