On love and marriage and global issues!

This morning I listened to Naomi Klein on Desert Island Discs. Some of her music choices, but not all by any means, were protest songs of one kind or another, including Manu Chao’s “Desaparecido”, which I used to use when teaching the topic of immigration as part of the A-level Spanish course. A little trip down memory lane. Another of her choices was a Blondie song, “One way or another”, because before she became a social activist, writer and film maker, Naomi Klein just wanted to be a teenager and specifically to be Blondie, if at all possible! We have all had such ambitions at some time.

At one point Kirsty asked if we are not in fact living better, longer than ever before. Maybe in western society, although this is no longer exactly so for the working class, replied Naomi Klein, but certainly not in all parts of the world. And then a little later, I read yet another article about climate change ruining the fertile soil in places like Mozambique and Malawi and families not being able to feed all their children. One solution they find is to take their adolescent daughters out of school and marry them off. That way the family has one less mouth to feed. The daughter becomes the responsibility of her husband.

 One girl had wanted to be a midwife but was married instead at 13. She gave birth to a son a year later. Because they could not afford to go to a hospital with an incubator the baby died. Here’s a link to the whole article.  The girls are not always, or indeed often, resentful. 17 year old Majuma, married at 15,now the mother of a little daughter, says, “I don’t blame anyone. The weather just changed.” Such is the modern world.


Later still in the morning I heard someone in the food programme talking about how she had given up being a chef because the stress was making her depressed and she discovered that her emotion was being transferred from her, via the dishes she cooked, to the people who ate them. Just as I was being reminded of that very book, she mentioned Tita from Laura Esquivel’s “Como agua para chocolate” (“Like water for chocolate”). Because family tradition says the youngest daughter in the family may not marry but must stay at hime to look after the ageing parents, Tita cannot marry the man she loves. He marries her older sister: the next best thing as it kind of gets him close to Tita. (Really? do we think even he believes that?) As Tita stirs the cake mix that eventually becomes her sister’s wedding cake, she is unbearably sad and may even shed a few tears into the mixture. When the wedding guests taste the cake, they are all overwhelmed by the sensation of having lost the love of their life and leave the party to weep uncontrollably.

Every chapter in the book ends with a recipe. The cookery message is that you should always cook with love. If you live on pre-packaged sandwiches and ready meals, I wonder if your prime emotion in life is that you have a routine task that you need to finish as soon as possible. Unless, of course, all the sandwich- and ready meals-makers really enjoy their work and transmit joy to those who consume them!

And finally, for today anyway, I heard a little bit of a history programme about women involved in the Temperance movement in the United States at the end of the 19th century. What struck me was how this was an early example of the power of mass media. A group of women in one town were campaigning, marching and singing songs (Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine), praying in the streets in an attempt to stop men from drinking to excess. There it might have ended but because of the new spread of national newspapers, within six months it had become a national movement.

Nowadays it would have gone viral on social media within hours but that was perhaps one aspect of the start of the whole mass media junket.