The Lighthouse

A watch on events

Rose Galt

When I was in my sixth-year at school and conscious of the loftiness of that position, I was frequently brought down to earth by one of my teachers saying 'The trouble with you lot is you think you're the centre of the universe, when, of course, I am'. A few days spent abroad, away from the UK media, is a salutary reminder that the centre of the world is constantly shifting. Reliant on BBC World News and CNN while in Budapest, I found that, while it was relatively easy to follow the hurricanes battering the Caribbean, it was nearly impossible to discover the result of the Scotland-Macedonia football match. Since a fairly large contingent of the Tartan Army had shared our flight to Budapest, we were perhaps more interested than usual. The other side of the shift in perspective from the national norm of our media was that other worldwide events such as the flooding in India did receive the attention they deserved.

What remained at the top of the news was the selection of the gun-totin' evangelical Sarah Palin as John McCain's Republican running-mate for the November elections. Although beyond belief, some elements of the American press are heralding this development as a triumph of feminism. It is even insultingly and patronisingly suggested that the women who supported Clinton will shift their allegiance to Palin, presumably on the grounds that they are anatomically similar. Leaving her ignorance of both current affairs and the policies of her beloved president to one side, this is the woman who sought to sack employees in her state who disagreed with her; who asked the local librarian how to ban books; who is being investigated by state authorities for abuses of her position as Governor; and who believes that the only acceptable form of sex education for America's schools is the preaching of abstinence. Forgive me if I don't join the chorus of adulation.

The spectre of Enoch Powell-type anti-immigration hysteria hit the headlines, particularly those of the Daily Mail. Immigration Watch with the support of people I thought might have known better were predicting a dire future if steps were not taken to stop the hordes, etc. The Mail, it turns out, has had to publish an apology regarding the negative nature of its Polish stories following a complaint from the Poles' national association. One of its stories involved a reporter visiting a new Polish deli in Southampton and writing 'that she felt like an alien in her own land'. What kind of constipated sensibility could genuinely experience that reaction to the cornucopia of exotic foods which any ethnic delicatessen offers? One can only hope that she was merely doing the bidding of her editor. As a corrective I read two books which sensitively and compassionately looked at the experience of emigration. Rose Tremain's 'The Road Home' was short-listed for last year's Orange prize and Linda Grant's 'The Clothes on their Backs' is up for the Booker. Good on them both.

I just have to mention the Hadron Collider. Like most people without doctorates in quantum mechanics, I have been struggling to understand even a scintilla of what CERN is up to. But what excited me beyond measure was that real science – evidence-based, empirical science – was on the front page. In a world that seems to be increasingly dominated by
fake -ologies and -isms and where the lifestyle coach is queen, it was a delight to hear these sixth-year kids on the radio enthusing about physics. Maybe, despite Sarah Palin et al, there is hope for the Enlightenment after all.