This week I finally got to see Jerusalem. It was just as good as everyone says, possibly better. This is probably about the third or fourth time I have seen Mark Rylance on stage, I have already learned to expect great things: his Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron did not disappoint. From the moment he hobbled out of his caravan, upended himself over a water trough like a gymnast on the bar, and gulped down a mixture of raw egg, milk and vodka, I was hooked. I think the whole audience was.

But this particular performance immediately reminded me of another I was recently similarly impressed by: Michael Sheen’s Hamlet, currently at the Young Vic and, in fact, directed by the same person, Ian Rickson. In that case, the realisation that it was going to be a brilliant production happened more slowly, when, about ten minutes in, it dawned on me that, in spite of the archaic language, I for once entirely understood what was happening, and Hamlet’s predicament. Further, Sheen is the first actor, in the first production, that has actually made me feel the heart of the play, the heartbreak at the centre of it.

Beyond the fact that both of these actors are so good it is almost exhilarating to watch them for a couple of hours, there are some other odd similarities between these two tales, so far apart in time and context.

In both cases the protagonists are men driven by their own internal moral compass, and the tension, and narrative, comes from this being fundamentally at odds with their context. They are both characters that hover on the edge of accepted notions of sanity. Perhaps they themselves don’t have a clear view of their psychological state. Both plays indulge in references to the paranormal, without it ever being quite clear whether this is a fiction of the protagonist’s unbalanced brain, or true magic.

But insane or not, they create interest because their very nature questions the accepted wisdom around them. One of Jerusalem’s central points is to defend a kind of natural order and balance, that might at first glance look like chaos, as opposed to the true idiocy inherent in excessive bureaucracy. We easily identify with Rooster over the local council.

These are individuals alone in a hostile world, local princes whose land is invaded and sovereignty questioned. And both are tragically victorious in defeat. The only possible outcome of such a standoff is carnage – but it is a carnage they knowingly invite, on principle.

They are not easy parts, and the sense of the play depends on the ability of the central actor. This is surely why Hamlet is a classic and Jerusalem sure to be one. If Hamlet and Rooster can’t be made to seem warm, human, charismatic – funny – then the play makes no emotional sense. Hamlet is just a whiny, paranoid, cowardly, mummy’s boy; Rooster is just an offensive, idiotic drunk. Luckily Sheen and Rylance have no problem conveying the brilliance of the mind that is permanently on the edge; the nobility of the man desperately trying to remain true to himself; and the deep sense of humanity that drives both plays. In their hands, Hamlet and Rooster’s struggles are admirable rather than baffling.

I loved both these plays for reassuring me – and sometimes it feels easy to forget – that brilliant doesn’t have to mean obscure; high culture can be accessible, relevant, and funny. The Morris-dancing scene in Jerusalem was genuinely hilarious. Hamlet’s stroppy showdown with his mother reminded us of what he is really, when it comes down to it, upset about. And although emphatically not what they were originally written to do, there is an element in both of them of critiquing the ridiculousness of the global institutions of the 21^st century. They do a good job in reminding us that the powers that be don’t have all the answers, and anyway some things cannot be explained, nor should they be.

We will never know whether Hamlet really was mad. It is ok not to decide whether Rooster’s bacchanalian drumbeat summoned the giants footsteps or the rumbling of JCBs. At a time when it is publicly unacceptable to be uncertain about anything (how often do we hear politicians say ‘I am very clear that…’?), such antiheroes offer a more captivating, and human, alternative.

In a pub in the Cotswolds is a pair of stuffed owls in a glass case. They are quite kindly looking, soft and white with calm stares. Considering their age it’s remarkable that their feathers look so fresh. They have lasted much better than the dried flowers and grasses that surround them in their case. They have outlived many owners.

I like visiting this pub. When I was small it was for the rope swing and the dark canal that runs alongside it – sunken, overgrown and gloomy. Now it is for the food and the open fires. And the owls. Whenever we visit I have to say hello to the owls. I feel I should, being one of a handful of people who know a reasonable amount of their history.

They began (as they ended) life at some point in the mid 19^th century, at which time they were in the possession of a wealthy middle class family from Barnet. It wouldn’t have been unusual for a Victorian living room to be adorned with such things. Stuffed animals were quite the rage, all part of that characteristic fascination with human superiority and the expanding domain of knowledge. And dead things.

The grounds of this house were tended by one of a long line of gardening men, whose father and father’s fathers had similarly worked the leafy gardens of the burgeoning upper middle classes around North London. Eventually, the owls were gifted to this gardener, Henry Lansbury, and his wife, Emily, who was in service in the same house. Perhaps they had long been coveted by one or the other – a favourite feature in a daily routine of dusting, or cooking, or sweeping grates. Perhaps they were a birthday present, or a thank you for years of service. Perhaps they were one of a number of hand-me-downs. For the recipients, living in relative poverty compared to their employers, they would likely have been one of the grander objects in their possession, out of scale with the tiny terraced house they occupied.

Eventually the owls passed into the hands of this couple’s middle child, Alfred, and were installed in a similarly cramped Victorian terrace, dark with pipe smoke and stuffed with ornaments. Visitors, if they weren’t billeted next door at Mrs Parker’s, were sent to a draughty guest room with a chest-high brass bed and a nightstand with a drawer full of old spectacles. All was presided over with Victorian frugality by the hulking, crotchety figure of Alf and his tiny wife Mabel.

In the clearing of the house after Alfred died, the owls skipped a generation, passing to the daughter of one of Alf’s nephews. She requested them, and another Victorian curiosity, a matchstick model of a huge dark mansion, also in an impressive glass case, as a memento of this gothic household she had known as a child, a time capsule from another age. Her dimly recollected story is that the owls were shot by a nightwatchman keeping an eye on a cemetery. I did not know that owls liked to hang around in pairs. Nor that they were a particular menace to graveyards. For these reasons I partly suspect this tale was one concocted by Uncle Alf to scare wide-eyed little girls.

So at the age of about 100, the owls left Barnet for the first time, and for a while decorated a bedroom in Glasgow, before moving back down South with her, to a flat in Cirencester. The caged mansion did not fare so well, the victim of a sleepwalking accident that shattered its case.

After a few years, oddly out of kilter in a newbuild flat decked out by Ikea, or perhaps just tiring of their macabre stares, Uncle Alf’s great-niece sold them to a collector of stuffed animals, something of a local eccentric. This man also ran a country pub, festooned with bric-a-brac, old signs, curios, and part of his collection of stuffed animals. The owls were warmly welcomed to a new home. The collector has since departed, but the pub thrives, as do the owls, above a fireplace in a poky little back room, watching countless diners tuck into gastrofare.

It occurred to me, looking at them this time, at the randomness of the things that remain. What happened to all the other prized items of that Victorian household? It seems unlikely that these owls are the sole legacy of that family, or what they would want to be remembered by. They may not have cared for them at all, which would have made it easier to give them away to a gardener. But how often that objects are the only tantalising clues that remain about people long gone, leaving us to guess at the rest.

And, in some ways, how remarkable that they have survived given that the craze for preserved dead animals as interior design was a relatively brief one. Although they have not survived with their original meaning intact: this has shifted as the owls passed through time and owners. From one of presumably a number of possessions intended to indicate wealth and status, to a family heirloom valued mainly as an aide-memoire, to a vintage curiosity, provenance largely forgotten. If objects like this could store up their histories and retell them, what a fascinating source of social history they would be.

Also passed on from that first household was an oriental vase. This has not been relegated to an eccentric pub, but remains a domestic ornament, on a bookshelf, surrounded by family snapshots. Both were heirlooms of similar origin, but one is no longer as acceptable adorning a living room wall. Vases endure. The poor owls have been cast out. So if you are ever visiting the Tunnel House Inn, pop into the back parlour and say hello to the Lansbury owls.

The sight of the above had us doubled over with laughter last week.

This was the delightful moment when a loaded-down and battered little car, piloted by a couple of appropriately shabby-chic designer-makers, puttered falteringly onto the Parliamentary estate to install an exhibition.

The content of said exhibition is examples of work by researchers from the Royal College of Art, all of whom are pursuing and developing new ways of recycling to generate useful materials. Their raw products include orange peel, pineapple fibre, fish scales, expanded polystyrene, and plastics of varying sorts. This work represents an important lesson about where innovation happens: these are artists as much as they are scientists and inventors. We need art schools as much as we do science labs. (Actually we need both, working together.) Coca-Cola, our obliging sponsor who also featured in the show, seemed as excited about getting to meet some new ideas courtesy of these students as they did about showing off their sustainable coke bottle in Parliament. And at a time when certain protesters not too far afield are generating publicity for disrupting church and city, this lot are making their political point about the excesses of capitalism by coming up with some genuinely useful suggestions and presenting them beautifully.

The exhibition design, owing to the provenance of its curators (congratulations to the lovely Naomi Turner for playing an absolute blinder), has the feel of a student crit, considerably more eye-catching than the usual dry fare of corporate pull-up banners and flat-screen TVs. In fact the acres of chipboard, far from looking out of place, complement the yellow stonework backdrop nicely.

Installed on Friday, launched last night, the opening was an unmitigated success, admittedly partly because of the plentiful flow of cheap white (and Coca-Cola of course), but also because it brought a group of people other than the usual be-suited suspects into Parliament. The mix of MPs, students, designers, start-up manufacturers, curators, sustainability experts and academics made for some unusual conversations. For an institution where the very act of saying something in a particular place is endowed with weighty significance, the act of these conversations happening between these people in this place, was a lovely and positive disruption of the norm. The design lot, as I affectionately term them, with their bright ideas and boundless energy, don’t get invited in nearly often enough. Not surprising since the place is dominated by economists, lawyers and historians who understandably have little to no idea they exist. They should pay more attention though – these people are inventing the future. The point of the APDIG is to facilitate more of the same of this kind of thing.

So whilst you might think the above looks like a picture of a red car in front of an old building, what it represents to me is a rather lovely sort of coup. Bloody cheers.

Credit to Oscar Wanless for the priceless photo and Thomas in the Park for most of the intellectual content herein, which I suspect I have stolen from his Masters thesis.

There are some proper pictures of the actual exhibition here.

As part of an ongoing quest to discover whether it is possible to talk about a specifically British visual culture, or visual language, my first foray into the London Design Festival was structured around home-grown work. The below is series of notes and observations rather than a well-constructed argument. Feel free to disagree.

My itinerary went like this:

- This Way Up from the British Council. Fifteen years of architecture, design and fashion leftovers from exhibitions that have toured the world. Featuring ‘The 21^st Century Dandy’, a collection referencing the 19^th century style-maker Beau Brummel, mannequins papered by scraps of the FT, a bookstore, a team of upcyclers, and Tom Dixon’s black lights. In an enterprising little twist, and as part of a ruse to clear out some of the British Council’s cupboards, many of the pieces are up for silent auction.

- Imagined Cities at the Department of Coffee and Social Affairs. I used to live round the corner from Leather Lane, and had this café been there at the time I would have spent a lot of pennies on coffee. The interior is beautifully stripped back to bare brick walls, and for LDF they are hung with fantastical architectural drawings collected by Dainow & Dainow. All produced by British architectural students, the designs – motivated by real challenges – present imaginary ways of making urban living work.

- Alan Fletcher at the Aram Store. Fletcher, a highly influential graphic designer and ‘a visual jackdaw’, amassed an archive of incidental curiousities and meaningful coincidences over his lifetime, which are brought together in his compendium, The Art of Looking Sideways. One could spend an entire day lost in this book, with page after page of visual double entendres, riddles, pearls of wisdom and literary excerpts. His polymath mind seemed to see connections everywhere, and delighted in pointing them out to others.

- British-Ish at the V&A. One of the best things about the LDF being based at the V&A is the opportunity to discover different parts of the museum. For this installation, contemporary student work from University of the Arts London – fashion, ceramics, graphics, film, jewellery – is spliced into the British Galleries on the top floor. Furniture knitted out of wire thread sits alongside originals from the 1851 Great Exhibition. Pieces reference our colonial past – the  set of metal and paper lanterns that blend the structures of ship’s lantern and Chinese paper lantern; the beginnings of rampant consumerism – a printable paper suit; and concern for the natural world – a new beehive design.

- The Brutal Simplicity of Thought in the Sackler Centre.  A series of visual puns by M&C Saatchi (an oil drum stencilled with the words ‘Why do all roads lead to Baghdad?’), and musings on the difficulty of communicating simply.

- Few and Far on the Brompton Road. Priscilla Carluccio’s emporium of exquisitely crafted products presents an exhibition of timber furniture from Pinch Design. Precisely detailed, quirky, and reassuringly expensive.

- Flock on North Terrace. Successfully inhabiting a bit of in-between space behind the Brompton Road, this collection by female designers is edgy and thoughtful, a series of symbolic and performative pieces, commenting on domestic life, dual nationalities, and fetishes.

These are some of the themes I noticed.

- I have a suspicion that British visual culture is not primarily visual at all, in the sense of being particularly concerned about formal qualities or the golden ratio, and the design work I saw reflected this trait. Nothing is blue for the sake of being blue. Everything is referential. Most work is primarily driven by some kind of intellectual idea, or historical reference point, or cultural ambiguity.

- Multi-culturalism is totally embedded, synthesising and regurgitating multiple influences and reference points. But not in an overt way, almost unselfconscious, as a given.

- Subversion is prevalent. In a very British, understated way, there is rarely out-and-out protest, but there is a challenge in everything, often done with humour.

- Related to this, words and language underpin everything. The history of artistic achievement in this country is dominated by forms based on language and literature. It is no coincidence that the English vocabulary is the largest of the European languages. We may not have the architectural richness of Rome, but we have great texture in our sentences. Design work often refers back to the world of words and ideas, narratives and puns, histories and biographies. The cover of Alan Fletcher’s book is decorated with text.

- There is an obsession with advanced craft. British designers are increasingly experimenting with, and mastering, highly articulated processes that require a fusing of technical and digital expertise with creative direction. Precise results, pointed uses.

- Meaning is everywhere. Beauty is not necessarily a relevant word. Some of the pieces are visually pleasing – calming to the eye. But mostly they are not. Mostly they are provoking rather than soothing.

- In an interesting parallel, I think many of these phenomena are visible across the city. London’s development has rarely been driven by formal aesthetic considerations. Beauty has never been mission critical. The remnants of different communities are superimposed on each other. We have a skyscraper named after a burger garnish. Architectural precocity sits alongside disregarded space. Financial gain trumps beauty time and again.

So there you are: difficult, subversive, literary, funny, intellectual, experimental, and occasionally, when it is relevant, pretty.

I was really quite excited about going to see the V&A’s ‘Power of Making’. I rushed down to the opening after a work event and just made the last half hour, peeking over the shoulders of champagne-swilling guests to read the exhibit labels. But as beautiful, varied – and often odd – as some of the objects were, I left feeling something was missing.

When I was little, and still when I was not so little, we used to go almost every year to the Cotswold Wildlife Park. Most people probably haven’t been to, nor heard of, the Cotswold Wildlife Park; but it was a permanent fixture of my childhood, equivalent in my head from a very early age with the word ‘zoo’.

Above and beyond the awesome big cat section, the toy train (just like being on safari I thought), the adventure playground and the vast, peacock-strewn lawns of a very elegant private house where we always had our picnic, my favourite feature of the Cotswold Wildlife Park was the glassmith.

If you went into the bat house and up some very unlikely looking stairs, at the top you would find a small workshop. Shelves of tiny crystal animals filled the walls, and in one corner the man himself – a magician as far as I was concerned – sat all day, conjuring tiny fragile figures out of glowing molten glass. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched someone blowing glass, but it is mesmerising: the array of tiny tools, the changing colours as the glass cools, the unlikely shapes that all of a sudden, with a flick of the wrist, become something recognisable. My favourite trick was the chain of elephants, in descending size like Russian dolls, looped together trunk to tail. It wasn’t often that I came away without clutching some tiny glass creature – a hedgehog, a hippo – all wrapped up in tissue paper. But as pretty as the figures were, the thing that caught my attention was always the wondrous process of making.

‘To make’ is a verb. The Power of Making show is a room full of nouns. And some of them are so intricate, bizarre, or baffling to look at, it is unfortunately hard to imagine how they were made. Perhaps this is only a problem for me: other visitors might be just as content to see the finished product as the half-finished form emerging under the maker’s hands. But the show’s blurb does say the intention is to ‘encourage visitors to consider the process of making, not just the results’. Admittedly there are a few films of makers doing their thing; there was a silversmith present at the opening, etching away at a knife handle; there is a programme of demonstrations and a weekly ‘tinker space’; the exhibition guide contains a ‘glossary of techniques and processes’. But this is all a side-show to the main attraction. The only thing that unites this eclectic collection of objects is that they were crafted by unbelievably skilled, probably very patient people, and the people are by and large missing.

I have to admit I’m not sure how you would achieve the desired effect of showcasing ‘making’ rather than ‘made objects’, without simply setting up a load of craftsmen in a room to tinker away – which is not very original and perhaps not even appropriate for a setting like the V&A, a collection of collections. But I do think, in spite of the evident care and expertise with which the show has been curated and designed (it all looks beautiful), they have missed a trick. The fascination of the Cotswold Wildlife Park glassmith eluded me.

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For some other opinions on the Power of Making, read Alastair Sooke here, Marina Vaizey here, and some pretty pictures on the Dezeen blog here.

Power of Making is the second exhibition in the V&A/Crafts Council partnership.
6 September 2011 – 2 January 2012 in the Porter Gallery

Slutwalk is rearing its unfortunately-named head again, with more protests planned in the coming weeks. Whilst I would like to preface everything I am about to say by wholeheartedly agreeing with the statement that no-one ‘invites’ rape – it’s actually an oxymoron if you think about it – I have nevertheless been following this ‘movement’ with a deep sense of unease. I can’t help but feel this is a massive own goal for the girls.

To recap briefly, the theory the protest walks are meant to embody is that women should not have to accept as a given that dressing in a certain way (‘sluttily’) means some people will draw certain conclusions (they are ‘sluts’) and be more inclined to sexually assault them. The praxis is to dress sluttily, en masse, to prove that they can do it with no reference to the male gaze – to ‘reclaim’ the style for themselves.

First of all, I would question the honesty of the assertion that dressing sluttily makes any sense without reference to those for whose benefit it was ultimately invented. The adornment of the body has always been about sending out signals as to the identity of the wearer. To deny that is – as a now very unpopular Canadian Police Officer pointed out – naïve.

Secondly, I don’t understand why any woman would seriously want to ‘own’ that mode of dress – uncomfortable, chilly, and designed-by-men as it is.

Thirdly, how is this a wise strategy? What argument are they going to win? Will this actually deliver reduced instances of sexual assault? Somehow I just can’t see any rapist-in-waiting watching a slutwalk and thinking, ‘on the other hand, maybe I won’t.’ It all has the distinct feeling of having metamorphosed into an excuse for millions of women to revel in a slightly risqué activity, and assert their right – never really in question in the western world – to parade around wearing whatever they want.

But leaps-of-logic and poor strategising aside, ultimately, the most damage Slutwalk will do is to reduce feminism in popular/ media discourse to a discussion about the right to dress provocatively and not be raped. And once again, and which is only ever to the detriment of the feminist stance (shouting slogans is a crap way to win an argument) the tone is angry, defiant, and a bit whiny. How many men are on board with this, for the right reason? Tone is so important, and slutwalk is such an ugly word, and concept. No matter what the manifesto says, the shorthand is neither aspirational nor inspirational, and an unhelpful hyphen to feminism.

For a perhaps surprising moment of a woman beautifully expressing herself, witness Beyonce’s recent Glastonbury triumph. Leonine and athletic, she was pitch perfect and absolutely charmed the 180,000-strong crowd. Not because she was wearing what would quite accurately be described as a highly provocative outfit, but because she was a consummate professional, really mind-blowingly good, clearly happy in herself and delighted to be there, and genuinely doing it for the girls (rare in the male-dominated medium of pop). Although jumping around in tiny pants, the word slut didn’t come to mind: she was amazonian and golden. Watching her dance provokes the same kind of dumbfounded reaction as Jacko or Timberlake at their best. And transcending all of that hard-won skill was buckets of personality and talent. It was heartening to see and a refreshing moment for feminism. It’s not about what you look like, it’s about what you say and do.

Although the seeming popularity of Slutwalk should tell us that something – and perhaps not what is ostensibly being protested about – is amiss; by drawing our attention back to the clothes and the body, the movement does feminism a disservice. For the sake of progress, less stomping around in bras please, and more just carrying on with what most of us hopefully do anyway in our daily lives: set some kind of meaningful and helpful example to remind the world that female bodies have minds too.

It is curious how a man who basically just makes phones and computers has risen to god-like status amongst a certain group of people.

This was the heretical content of the thought that popped into my head during the morning session of last week’s ‘Design Summit’ whilst listening to Apple’s (design guru) Jonathan Ive.

The guy turned up with more security than the PM, the interview wasn’t allowed to be broadcast, he deflected more questions than he answered and gave few secrets away. And yet – or perhaps therefore – an audience of hundreds of really-quite-successful-in-their-own-right designers and chief execs were rapt. He has achieved such cult status he can even get away with spelling his name (‘Jony’) a silly way.

Of course, to summarise Apple’s achievement as ‘making slightly prettier phones and computers than the next company’ is to trivialise it. Hundreds of business analysts must have spent countless hours trying to dissect Apple’s alchemy. Making sleek white computers is the tip of the iceberg. As this Economist article suggests, Apple’s hitherto successful business model is based on the consummate execution of an idea rather than a particular technological platform – that of repackaging the technology of the moment in an altogether more desirable form and selling it at a premium price; of understanding exactly how people want to get their information and communicate with each other; and of making the whole process intuitive. Technology for all us people who really don’t care that much about technology. By doing so they have created entirely new markets, new paradigms of how we interact with the technology that facilitates our lives.

For all these reasons the design community loves Ive, but also because he has incontrovertibly demonstrated the value that design can add to a business’s bottom line. In a world where few people really understand how design works, it’s an example they can all point to and justify their contribution. (One does wonder though why there aren’t more Apples, if it’s such a foolproof recipe.)

Hence his wheeling out in front of Government Ministers at the Design Council’s summit. The design community is on a mission to prove its economic importance to government. And by the evidence of last week, they are getting there.

But this is all a bit sad. Rather than representing some kind of coup for the design industry, what it demonstrates is that the management or our physical and constructed world (‘Design’) has – like everything else – become a slave to the rule of the economic imperative. And, weirdly, at a time when we’re just beginning to recognise that being beholden to commercial motives might not a happy world make.

No matter how much we love our Macbook, having it doesn’t make red wine taste any better or change the way we fall in love. It hasn’t fixed the NHS or gender equality. It doesn’t teach us to appreciate our grandparents before its too late, or help us spend five minutes actually listening to our friends. It can’t replace the delight of sitting in an english garden on a sunny day. So congratulations to ‘Jony’, who has, admittedly, changed the world, but it would be nice to occasionally see a bit of perspective about the value of that change.

The Crafts Council’s parliamentary reception yesterday afternoon featured a late but inspired appearance from Skills Minister John Hayes.

The Tory MP (declared personal hero William Morris) seems to have an impressive grasp of the complex argument that craft, creativity and making is fundamental to the human condition, that few other politicians share. He said that ‘the work of the hands, and the body’, was just as, if not more, ‘likely to lead to the sublime as the pursuit of academia’.

His references – Ruskin, Morris, Keats, Lord Shaftesbury – suggest a depth of reading only undertaken by the genuinely interested. He acknowledged the errors of governing with a policy system that only recognises as valid evidence economic arguments, rather than such abstract but important concepts as the pursuit of truth and beauty. (Yes, he actually said this.)

In policy terms, this conviction has led to his championing of an unprecedented commitment to increasing apprenticeships, to reinstating the guild system – to reinforcing the dignity of the non-academic.

So far so good, what a great champion for skills. But when the Department for Business are making such progressive statements, the question on everyone’s lips, the elephant in the room, is what on earth is the Department for Education up to? The two Whitehall departments say they are talking to each other, but in actual fact their policies or, dare one say it, ideologies, appear to be widely divergent. A casualty of Cameron’s hands-off approach when headstrong Ministers develop policies in line with personal convictions, perhaps?

The renewed focus at the Department for Education on numeracy and literacy is clearly important, but also a classic politicians’ answer: if British children are crap at English and maths (as OECD stats suggest), it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s because they are not being taught for enough hours or tested rigorously and frequently enough. This is a rumination for another day, but the relevance here is that the worrying over numeracy and literacy will make a casualty of some other skills, squeezed out of the compartmentalised timetable.

Why, if craft, designing, making, inventing, manufacturing, is so important to the country and the economy (as the closing lines of Chancellor Osborne’s budget speech declared) is the Department for Education instituting a mainstream educational system that sidelines craft, design & technology, and art?

These activities shouldn’t only be available to those with a ‘practical’ tendency, as Hayes seemed to be suggesting (and in fact they are probably just as important for pushing the bookishly clever out of their comfort zone.)

They are not niche subjects. And they are not non-academic.

If we want to build a creative knowledge economy full of entrepreneurs, high-tech manufacturers, agents of innovation and ambitious start-ups, we need individuals well-versed in the literary greats who can manage the financial side of a business – but who also manifest exemplary creative thinking skills.

Finally: beyond the cold hard implications for UK GDP, denying children the opportunity to learn how to express themselves creatively is basically inhumane – and won’t drive up educational outcomes in other areas.

Also known as ‘The Bill Prohibiting Facial Dissimulation in a Public Place’, when I first heard that France was toying with the idea of ‘banning burqas’, my immediate reaction was unqualified alarm: surely the last thing the world needs at this moment is for supposedly civilised, liberal countries to start making inflammatory laws that criminalise Muslims.

There are so many things to say about this occurrence it is difficult to know where to start. Yes, it’s politically motivated and fundamentally stupid: a simplistic response to a highly complex situation. It is a single incident which is the crysallisation of a number of trends and forces, interesting for what it reveals about ‘the French’ and their national identity: in crisis perhaps? This Economist article suggests a deep level of national malaise and malcontent – albeit somewhat unwarranted.

I have discussed it with many people and have so far resisted commenting in writing, but I am afraid I have been provoked, by none other than Tim Lovejoy of Something For The Weekend fame, and a horrendous exchange with co-presenter Louise Redknapp, in which he implied (and was sadly proven more or less correct) that she was mainly only capable of wearing high heeled shoes and discussing her haircut.

This sort of run-of-the-mill, casually sexist commentary sits very ill with the holier-than-thou attitude that seems to be adopted over here when discussing the concept of women being required by their faith to cover their faces.

Firstly – particularly as this is a debate that happens in pubs and workplaces as well as newspaper columns – whatever people say about their motivations for ‘not liking it’, however far the enlightened men of Britain claim it’s concern for the oppressed women underneath, I find it hard to believe anti-niqab/ burqa sentiment is ever totally free of good old ‘fear of the alien culture’.

Secondly, on the question of practices that suppress women, we needn’t be so superior. Yes, I am eternally grateful for the advances that have been made in gender equality, and from which I can only have benefited, but those advances shouldn’t blind us to the fact that we are still guilty in ‘the west’ of constructing barriers around women’s identities. They are just socio-psychological rather than big black pieces of material, and therefore much harder to pin down and challenge.

If you want examples: How often do you see a man in an advert for fabric detergent or air freshener? Why does the word ‘beauty’ have a feminine connotation? What is the ratio of men to women on the R4 Today programme? Why is it ‘boy meets girl’ and not the other way around?

It is unfortunate for the niqab that it is such a clear visual sign, and therefore targetable in the gender debate. Indeed the whole matter of visuality is interesting here: if the niqab hampers women by rendering them invisible, without identity, Western women have been equally constrained by the fact that they have been treated as such explicitly visual objects. What does it do to your personality if, at heart, you suspect that what you look like is more important than what you think or say?

In 1905, an Austrian intellectual, Rosa Mayreder, who was writing very much against the prevailing opinions of her time, suggested that ‘the highest triumph of civilisation’ is the ‘unhampered self-predestination of the individual’.  Over 100 years later I’m not sure, even in Britain, if we are there yet. ‘Self-determination’, in one’s life and opinions, is available and deemed appropriate for men far more often than for women. And both sexes are complicit in perpetuating this status quo.

If there are any lessons to be learned from Something For The Weekend (beyond the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow, published cookery book notwithstanding, doesn’t apparently know her way around a kitchen), it is that we are just as blind to the limiting effects of some of our embedded cultural assumptions about gender, as women who wear the niqab might be to theirs.

Over the Easter holiday the Bailey family tested the AV system. We were trying to pick a film to watch on Easter Sunday. We all duly voted in order of preference, and the winner was Greenberg, an indie film starring Ben Stiller as a repressed and grumpy recluse.

In actual fact, for reasons of internal Bailey family politics, we decided not to watch it, and instead put on the film that was everyone’s second choice, Tamara Drewe (featuring the rather lovely Gemma Arterton, above), and watched Greenberg the next night.

Both films were rubbish.

Tamara Drewe, in spite of the fact that it stars Dominic Cooper, and much to Mama Bailey’s disappointment, was nothing like Mamma Mia. The description of ‘laugh out loud funny’ was misleading. And, unfortunately for Papa Bailey, Greenberg was really nothing like Meet the Parents.

I’m not sure of the real political relevance of this anecdote, beyond the obvious fact that no voting system is perfect and there are always too many unknowns and unforeseeables to be sure of making the perfect choice.

To use my colleague Thom’s argument against him, yes, whether its AV or FPTP, they are both crap systems – but AV is marginally fairer, and if we don’t get it, that will be the whole question of electoral reform kicked into the long grass for a very long time. Which will be shame.

If you think British politics is fine and dandy just as it is, then vote no. But if you’re feeling at all disillusioned, you might as well vote yes, as it won’t make it any worse and might just make it a little bit better.