A Question of Trust

Against a backdrop of accusations of self-promotion, J K Rowling has made a statement that she is “very angry” at her lawyers after the disclosure of her authorship of The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Gilbraith.

She has every right to be. This was a gross breach of confidentiality.  Just as there are no degrees of pregnancy, either you are or you are not, so there are no degrees of confidentiality. The law firm involved issued the following statement:

We, Russells Solicitors, apologise unreservedly for the disclosure caused by one of our partners, Chris Gossage, in revealing to his wife's best friend, Judith Callegari, during a private conversation that the true identity of Robert Galbraith was in fact JK Rowling. Whilst accepting his own culpability, the disclosure was made in confidence to someone he trusted implicitly.

Chris Gossage knows better than to do this. He knows that he shouldn’t tell his wife, let alone his wife’s best friend. He knows that he shouldn’t even tell his cat (if he has one) on the off-chance that it should suddenly become articulate and acquire a Twitter account. He should never have entrusted someone else with a secret he was incapable of keeping himself.

Everyone in a law firm from the lowliest employee up has the concept of confidentiality drilled into them constantly.  Working in a lowly position in a law firm, I have seen people being escorted off the premises through the rear exit down the rickety fire escape never to be seen again for less high-profile breaches.

By attempting to excuse his own behaviour by stating “Whilst accepting [my] own culpability,[…]” and then blaming someone else, Chris Gossage is adopting what I shall call, for reasons of topicality and exactitude, the Charles Saatchi Defence. Quite why either of these men think that they can get away with saying “Yeah, I know I did it but…” is beyond me and would be beyond the credulity of a magistrate or a judge were the person saying it an “oik”.

More than anything, my sympathy lies with J K Rowling for the abrupt end to her  anonymity in this matter and her enjoyment of the unbiased critical reviews of her work. This is sad indeed.

…and Helen Mirren too!

 

I had a really good day on Sunday. The main reason was a totally splendid time at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park tweetup in celebration of @little_mavis and @wombat37’s wedding anniversary.  I got to see people I had met before, and some people I have tweeted with but never met before, and some people I didn’t know from Adam but was very pleased to meet, nonetheless.  Here I am especially thinking of @vanishedhippo’s parents-in-law.

The secondary reason was that I serendipitously discovered that “The Audience” was playing at the Wakefield Cineworld as an encore performance i.e. not broadcast live but a live recording.  It meant leaving the tweetup early but really, could you blame me?

I am a great admirer of Helen Mirren; I could sit watching her watching paint dry.  To see her in a London production would ordinarily be beyond my reach.  Or if not quite beyond my reach, then at least a little difficult and costly.  Instead of which thanks to ntlive.com I had, due to the filmed quality of the performance, a better seat than I would ever have been able to afford for myself for a tenner. That’s £10. 10 GBP. 10 Pound Sterling.

I think this is a marvellous thing.  Of course, it’s not the same as theatre.  (There are no exorbitantly-priced interval drinks for a start.)  It doesn’t smell the same as theatre. (I’ve yet to go to a theatre that sells popcorn.)  

But…I am planning on seeing Macbeth, Othello and Coriolanus in the same way.  Why would any sane person not?

“Not waving but drowning”

or How I Accidentally Left Twitter

I have started a lot of texts and emails recently with the words “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch” or the much, much worse “I’m sorry I have been avoiding contact with you”.
I am not proud of myself.

Twitter was always for me the antidote to something, whether that something can be diagnosed as loneliness, shyness or just general social ineptitude. Were the world to operate with its proper proportions Twitter should always have been the place of last resort, after real friends and acquaintances.  The trouble was when it became the place of first resort for me.  It was easier when waking in the middle of the night to find someone to tweet with than it was to face why it was I was waking in the middle of the night.

And then there was the over-sharing. You know it’s bad when kindly souls ask whether you should really be telling such things to virtual (in every sense of the word) strangers. I am grateful to them.

In danger of having a very public meltdown, I suspended my twitter account for the allowed 30 days.  After 30 days I went back in and backed-up my tweets on the basis that they are the closest thing to a journal I have had for the last few years and I didn’t want to lose that.  I then suspended my account for another 30 days, or so I thought.

Long story short: after 30 days I tried to log back in to reactivate my account and it had gone. Taking this as a “sign” I took the time to try to get my head in order.

This is a short explanation for the people asking where I’ve been.  It is also my opportunity to say thank you to the people who have kept faith with me by extending their friendship into real life, or by playing Words with Friends with me.  The latter is an underestimated way of keeping if not a whole foot in the virtual world, then at least a little toe.

That is all. Thank you.






From the poem by Stevie Smith.

Motherhood in Afghanistan

I am as shocked as anyone at the report of the killing of Afghan civilians by a US soldier. What also shocked me, as a woman, though was this detail of the event as reported by the New York Times.

“[The man] struggled in an interview to come to terms with the loss of his wife, four daughters between the ages of 2 and 6, four sons between 8 and 12, and two other relatives.”

Eight children between the ages of 2 and 12. EIGHT!  

I know I am coming at this from the viewpoint of a European mother-of-two but look at the statistics according to Save the Children reported in April 2011 by the BBC.

“Afghanistan has one of the highest infant mortality rates, with 52 in every 1,000 births ending in death.

“The report said Afghan women faced a one in 11 risk of dying from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. One in five children dies before the age of five.”
 
Seven days ago we learned of Hamid Karzai's endorsement of a code of conduct which would further reduce the freedom of women in Afghanistan.  It is becoming increasingly likely that a “stable” regime in Afghanistan will only be achieved at the expense of Afghan women.  

On the very same day NATO published a news item on their website entitled Women's rights: making progress in Afghanistan to which one can only reply “yeah right”.

There is nothing you can do

When I did employment advice training with the CAB many years ago we were told by the trainer that employment law could be summarised thus:

The employer can do what they like, when they like, to whom they like.

In practice, back at the Bureau, when employees came for advice about seeking redress for unfair dismissal we had to tell the majority that there was nothing they could do. Unless they had worked for an employer for two or more years then there was quite literally no recourse for them in law. There were not many people walking through the doors of the CAB who could not be helped in some way. That almost all the people we could not help were people dealing with employment problems did not sit easily with me then and still doesn’t today. 

Since that time the law was changed so that the qualifying period was reduced to one year.  The current Tory-led government is changing the law again so that the qualifying period will be yet again be two years and, moreover, there will be for the first time a cost in making a claim to an Employment Tribunal. The rhetoric surrounding this is all about how this will help to boost the economy, how the business sector is hamstrung because of the onerous burden placed upon them by not being able to dismiss employees at will.

George Osborne said at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2011: "We respect the right of those who spent their whole lives building up a business, not to see that achievement destroyed by a vexatious appeal to an employment tribunal. So we are now going to make it much less risky for businesses to hire people.”

This only really works if all small business owners are exemplary employers, the very definition of probity, and their workforce is nothing but a pool of potential troublemakers.  There is a definite Victorian era whiff to the fear surrounding workers having rights. Perish the thought!  Whatever next? Equal pay for women? Equal access to education and healthcare?

General secretary of the Unite union, Len McCluskey said: "'[Osborne] is a chancellor who wants to make it easier to hire and fire at will while making it harder for workers to challenge bad bosses.”

When George Osborne et al argue that the impact of public sector job losses will be softened by the growth of the private sector we should all feel afraid of the erosion of workers’ rights. I would suggest a unionised public sector is a far safer environment for a worker to be in than a small, unaccountable, private sector firm where health and safety laws are ignored and bad employment practice is rife with business owners encouraged by the actions of the government of the day to consider this to be bureaucratic nonsense strangling growth with red tape.

There are few enough employment rights without taking away those from the most vulnerable. It is disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that in an employer/employee relationship there isn’t just one party with the power, and it isn’t the employee.