hurry! just eleven days left!

I read it on normblog and I'm spreading the word. My old friend Dina Rabinovitch's fund for a new cancer trials unit at Mt Vernon is going to expire on January 8th, and it is just over £5,000 short of her target amount of £100,000.

You think a cancer trials unit doesn't sound very groundbreaking or exciting or as important as research? Read this. (I can't find it but I'm sure I remember reading a very evocative paragraph about people driving up and down the motorway to different appointments, and how that depends on having a car or even someone to take you there, and how it forces people to make bad choices...)

It would be great to make the target. Dina died a couple of months ago, after campaigning tirelessly to raise this money through the final stages of a terrible three-year-long illness. She wrote a book. She wrote a blog. She went on radio and gave talks and did meetings. Most people don't manage all that when they're well, let alone when they're a dying mother of four kids. All you have to do is click this link and give a few pounds, remembering to include gift aid if you're a UK taxpayer. I would just love it if Dina's fund managed to hit her target. What a start to the New Year. Come on, guys.

all hallow's eve

Happy Halloween. Today is John Keats' birthday, but because of what is happening right now I can't do him justice. Sorry.

Here is the last poem Keats wrote. It wasn't October, it was February. I can't help thinking of him lying in his sickbed in Rome, knowing he was dying, giving in to the famous despair of his last weeks; it is very uncomfortable thinking right now, but here's his poem.

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

More later.

Dina

I've just learned that my old friend Dina Rabinovitch, one of the most inspiring and fun, and incidentally most practical, people I've ever met, whose youngest daughter was little with mine, and who helped me through the worst time in my life when my marriage was breaking up and I was fighting for my children, and who has spent three years writing and campaigning about breast cancer - who kept writing and speaking and campaigning even after she was too sick to do it, and who did more even sick than most people ever do - died last night.

It's a shock. How can it be a shock?

I only had an email from her the other day.

Please go to her website. Buy her book. And read it: it's a good read. Give money to help build a new cancer trials unit at Mount Vernon. Read more about Dina in today's Guardian. Read her last column for the Guardian, published only a week or so ago.

And if you're reading this and you knew her, let's take this time to remember her before she knew she would ever have this relationship with this awful disease. I remember her young and hopeful, and so pretty, writing wonderful short stories. She had the most beautiful, clear voice, I loved listening in our writing workshop when she read her things out. I remember when she met Anthony, and telling wonderful stories about her life, always telling the stories - "listen, this happened to me," and it always went, unspoken: "so it's happened to other people too." (Except maybe not the story about how she met the love of her life - that's unusual.) Raising her children. Laughing. Shopping for shoes.

I remember once, I'd read in the paper a study that said hair dye could cause bladder cancer, & I was flipping out a little bit, saying maybe I should stop colouring my hair, what would happen over a lifetime of getting your roots done, etc etc. Dina told me not to worry about it, just keep dying my hair. She quipped - and it wasn't even really a quip because she meant it - "What do they expect us to do? Go grey??"

We laughed. That little remark made me laugh for years after, it was so funny.

Until. See, how little did we know.

But I still think she would say we should get our roots done. You can't not live - and that's what she was saying, and what she always said, and what she did.

I'm so sad. And I'm so happy I knew her.

guidelines for a Buddhist mother

Dina Rabinovitch in today's Guardian, on how it feels to be a mother and have cancer:

"'Just take each day as it comes,' the doctors say. In our fortysomething world, with kids who need packed lunches and walking to school (on days when I may not be able to get out of bed, my husband might have an 8am meeting, and all the older children have morning exams), not to mention the not yet extinct notion of a career, what exactly does that instruction mean, I ponder? Because, honestly, what works as a guideline for a Buddhist monk doesn't make tuna sandwiches on days when you can't face food."

This is vintage Dina. I remember when she was writing about the family courts, about the judges who thought they knew enough to set out the shapes of other people's lives - for example, the lives of working mothers. What she wrote then felt exactly like my experience, and even like the conversations we had on the subject - with the sole proviso that I felt she was being too reasonable! Well, reasonable still, she is still writing about how things really are, in a world of daily feelings and practicalities.

Her fundraising is also about practicalities: money for a very practical, very tangible new cancer trials unit at Mount Vernon.

Click here, go and give some money - and if you're a UK taxpayer you can give even more through Gift Aid.

And buy her book! (Buy it here, or - if you want more fun than that - from the lingerie section of M&S!) It is, if it ever could be, written on such a subject, a delight. It's a delight because of the company of the heroine. Go on.

one easy lesson

Recently there has been a very small storm in a very small teacup about the UCU's boycott of Israeli academics - and also, in Baroque Mansions, an even smaller one about the tiny print at the very bottom of an email about the AGM of MY union, the NUJ - so much for impartiality, boys! - saying that the NUJ supported a boycott of Israel.

This has, following an uprising of NUJ members which alas I had nothing to do with - I've been so out of it - been rescinded. (Thank God, because it was cracked.) There was even a blog! Who knew! It was written by BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, who in his final post gives an admirable account of just why the boycott idea was so cracked. (If you weren't sure.)

The papers say anti-semitism is on the increase. Anecdotally, anti-semitism is on the increase. Most of my friends on the left are so rabidly anti-Israeli that it makes me very uncomfortable, and I'm not even Jewish (though, as the joke goes, I pass).

Anyway, Dina Rabinovitch has a couple of humdingers of examples on her blog, fresh from the streets of Hendon (where, by the way, she is also on a quest for a really good blow-dry, a project we here at Baroque can only support).

She also has a link to a video of her husband, Anthony Julius, describing the "new anti-semitism" and why we find it hard to recognise, acknowledge properly, or deal with. Of course he says "we" and he means Jews, but I think "we" is everybody. One of the most prominent lawyers in the land, he is no slouch at putting together a position, and this little ten-minute video outlines brilliantly a particular way in which anti-semitism creeps in under the door, as it were. Watch it below and ask yourself a few questions.



By the way, I think the ideas Anthony raises, if applied to the position Muslims find themselves in today, might equally well apply. The truth is that we are in a rationalising age, where all sorts of polemics are being used to give intellectual support to all sorts of irrational prejudices and fears. This speech gives the beginnings of a cogent analysis of part of this tendency.

The speech was made at a meeting in Euston last week, run by Engage. To see the other speakers click here.

obligatory blog-birthday blogging blig

Dear readers of Baroque in Hackney,

Thank you all very much for participating in making this past year as much fun (ahem!) as it has been. (Seriously: I've spent a lot of time lying on the sofa in this past year, and often blogging about it has been the most fun I've had. I know that sounds utterly pathetic.) I was shamed by a friend into starting this blog. She persuaded me that simply anyone who's anyone has a blog, and you're totally nowheresville if you haven't got one. And I had just been made redundant, and was pretty wiped out* so was determined to rest on my laurels for a few months, so there was absolutely no excuse not to. I mean, it's not like I was busy.

It was a question of Profile. My friend said a blog would be worth it, but time-consuming. I think it's probably been even more time-consuming - read all-consuming - than she meant! (It turns out she has five blogs, and one of them is about home-schooling, which tells you what else she's doing. Superhuman or what. Maybe my blog is as time-consuming as all her five put together. Like kids. Of which she also, come to think of it, has five.)

My profile has been raised, too! Some of you may remember the glorious first weekend of April, when Baroque got quoted in the Saturday Guardian! Now there was a day. It was my historic Jane Austen post, Becoming Jane Winslet. (Soft-focus gaze across massive expanse of rolling English lawns)
Now, to reward, celebrate, and generally mark the passage into Year Two I have spent much of today fussing about with my sidebar. See how nice it is?

I've sorted the links into categories, because frankly it was confusing even me; I've wanted to do this for months, but couldn't be arsed. I've also pruned the links and added new ones. These decisions were based on the following combined factors: what I really read, what I think is really good, who I'm friends with, who has stopped posting their blog, and whim. Amnesia may also have played a part, if there's anything obvious not on there.

And I've added a sidebar widget linking to Dina Rabinovitch's blog, Take Off Your Running Shoes. This is because Dina is 37% of the way through a major fund-raising campaign to raise money for a cancer trials unit at Mount Vernon Cancer Hospital, and I would like to think the people who read my blog would go over there and contribute to the fund. Her blog is a compulsive read, in any case, like the book (and like her Guardian columns): she writes about what it's like, day-to-day, to have cancer; her kids and her husband; food; the throes of getting her first book published; clothes; and, of course, the fund-raising campaign itself.

We all know how wonderful the internet is: it brings people together, and I'm no exception. I love that I've 'met' so many people through this lark. Unlike the people who have 'blogmeets' I haven't met any of you in person - it's a different scene, I guess - except of course for those of you I already knew. But in its first year Baroque in Hackney has definitely come to occupy a particular niche. People tell me they love reading about poetry here (thanks!), and I have some great correspondences; there's also a thriving network of Hackney bloggers I'm very happy to be part of.

And I did have one funny experience. When I went back to the hospital after my cholecystitis to see if I was okay for going back to work, the doctor said, "and what do you do?"

I said, "I'm a writer and editor in the not-for-profit sector," and she said: "and are you a blogger?"

"What?" I said.

"Are you Baroque in Hackney?"

With that, here's to Year Two of Baroque in Hackney (touch wood). I thank all of you for your time, your attention, your wit, your emails, and often your kindness.

love,

Ms Baroque


* Of course it turns out to have been gall stones all along. Who knew!

take off your party dress

My lovely old friend Dina's book has arrived in the post, finally published - in the end, after weeks of waiting, I had to get it off Amazon because I couldn't get to the shop this week, could I? It's called Take Off Your Party Dress, and it's about her breast cancer.

It's hardly the book we imagined she'd write when we met all those years ago* in a writing workshop, or indeed in all the years that followed, but when I opened it today to have a quick look I ended up sitting on the edge of the sofa reading and reading and reading. It has all the qualities her short stories used to have** - it's immediate, firmly rooted in real life, very vivid and human and funny, and it's beautifully written. But unfortunately (and unthinkably), in this case, it's all true.

Dina's writing a blog called Take Off your Running Shoes, raising money for a cancer research unit. Always pragmatic,*** she wants to raise the money without running a marathon, which I think is eminently reasonable! Go check it out and put some in the pot so she can put her feet up. Or do something else.

* I think it's 12 years!
** and indeed her journalism does. Except of course, like the book, the journalism is also true.
*** and with even more children than Ms B...