I was listening to a radio programme this morning (no point linking to it as it won't stay up for long) about whether anyone these days actually writes with pen/pencil/biro/magic marker on paper any more. A poet, a novelist, a philosopher (Generosity or What?), an (ancient) editor turned writer all discursed...most interestingly about whether word processing and the internet had killed off handwriting and whether this was a good/bad/indifferent thing. Thing? Not sure. Never mind. 

Things (hm) occurred to me as they talked: how my own handwriting is fast (very useful) but so bad I frequently cannot read it back (less useful), and certainly almost nobody else can. How my older sister had wonderful handwriting (how come?). How the only time I resort to writing by hand is for shopping lists, notes to my house mate, scribbles in my notebook for novels etc (illegible so...), scrawls on a calendar.

I no longer write letters by hand. If I am posting one rather than emailing it (even, I am embarrassed to say a letter of condolence) I will type it on my PC and begin by apologising for this and resorting to the awfulness of my handwriting as the excuse. One of the contributors to the radio programme referred to letters of condolence. She said she composed hers on her PC then copied them carefully by hand. I blushed to myself (if that is possible), abashed. It had never occurred to me to do that. But I'm not convinced trying it would be any better: writing slowly doesn't seem to make enough difference.

They wondered whether writing or typing affect what is expressed. And in fact this is something I once wrote a piece about, Tools of the Trade, although the prompt there was voice recognition. Are we more ourselves, inadvertently when we write or when we type? Does it depend on which of now several generations we belong to? 

What wasn't discussed, and I wish someone would, is whether neurologically there is a difference. Could people be wired up so that an imager like an MRI scanner could detect which parts of the brain clunk into action depending on the instrument in/to/under hand?

James Bond is 50. The films, I mean. And that opening theme which everyone recognises instantly. Everyone. Surely?

But did you know that it started out as a tune for sitar, to be part of a musical based on V.S.Naipaul's 'A House for Mr Biswas'? I think that's hilarious. Read all about it! 

There's this strange thing that pops up online whenever, or shortly after, I happen to say anything critical of Israel. 

Here's a bit of background. In 2000 I went with a BBC colleague to make a series of radio documentaries about refugees around the world. One programme was set in Iran which - lest you think otherwise - at that time was HOSTING more refugees than any other country, not in tents and without help from the rest of the world. We (my colleague was a woman) both had to wear hejab. Hot and bothersome, and decidedly unflattering - as a BBC photo of the two us taken at the time revealed.

My first online Israel-sceptical comments prompted an organisation calling itself The Jewish S.H.I.T. List to take that BBC pic and airbrush my colleague out. This left me, singular and awkward, ready to be paired by the SHIT list with a picture of Marty Feldman looking particularly bug-eyed. This is about as intelligent as the website gets in its arguments. Ever since, whenever I happen to mention Israel, up pops the comparison on Google or wherever, like an allergic reaction to my remarks.

You wonder (or I do) how many people are sitting about in various places with nothing better to do than monitor all online observations for Israel-adverse comments in order to respond with yah-boo sucks! 

If you go to a matinee at, say, the National Theatre in London, or the Royal Court, the audience will be partly very young (school trips) and partly (largely) white-haired. How do I know this? Well, guess.

The white-haired ones go in the afternoons because they (we) get good discounts on seats, which by New York standards, for example, are cheap anyway. Yet our government - I should say more fairly, our governments, as the current one isn't the only sinner - believes that public subsidy in the theatre is a waste of money, and that success will put bums on seats and dosh in the company bank account which can then finance new productions. 

Really? Some time ago I was in the National Theatre for the first night of what turned out to be a not very good new play. I won't say which it was as that's not my point. Well, yes it is, in fact, but I'll get to that. Sitting in front of me was a short row of elderly Americans all leafing through glossy corporate-looking folders. To myself I deemed these 'party packs.' To myself I characterised the white-haired Americans as tourists with an itinerary: it's Thursday so it must be London. (You see, I can be as prone to the snide stereotype as anyone.)

I couldn't resist. I leaned forward and asked them why they had the 'party packs'. Well, they said. We are New Yorkers who are fund-raisers for the National Theatre.

Wait a minute, I said. You mean, you are raising funds for the British National Theatre? Why, in Heavens name?

Because, they replied (note how I have them speaking in unison), it's only because you guys subsidise your theatres that your companies risk trying new work. And then we in New York get to to see the touring company when the production comes over to us, bringing plays that no company in the US would ever try putting on. So we're kinda saying thank you. So when we come over, we get free tickets to first nights - and 'party packs.'

I was duly gobsmacked. And grateful. And then sorry that the play they saw that night turned out to be a dud. But that is in the nature of subsidised theatre. You have to be allowed to fail.

I’ve just read a longish piece about Anatole Broyard (b.1920 in New Orleans: black parents, light-skinned boy with an early literary bent). Broyard was into modernism, even as a kid – the many levels of Kafka and Woolf etc. He decided to flee his black background and ‘pass’ for white, which he could – and did, because he wanted to be a writer, not a black writer. Alas for Broyard, brilliant and influential critic and reviewer that he was, he never did become the novelist he hoped to be because it turned out that rejecting his identity blocked his writing.

Suppose you’re Jewish, and you want to criticise Israel: you can’t. Not without being accused of treachery, or of being a self-hating Jew. Suppose you’re not Jewish and want to criticise Israel: you can’t do that either, because then you are an anti-Semite. In each case, your identity, or the one that is ascribed to you becomes, in the eyes of others, in this case Israelis, the apparent motive for your criticism. There is apparently no such thing as identity-free criticism.

Just this week in New York ads have gone up in the subway system saying: In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad. These ads are being paid for by the ‘American Freedom Defense Initiative’, whoever they are or it is, and in July a Federal Court Judge concluded that the New York transport system, the MTA, had to carry the ads under a Freedom of Speech ruling.  (Yesterday the MTA decided this was all too much and added the rather limp disclaimer: This is a paid advertisement sponsored by [Sponsor]. The display of this advertisement does not imply MTA’s endorsement of any views expressed.)  My immediate reaction was to wonder if that Federal Judge was Jewish, and to assume that the sponsoring AFDI must be too. I could be wrong. But as you see, here I am, slipping into the identity trap as well.

Some people have identity thrust upon them – Bosnians in the 1990s had not been aware of being particularly Bosnian, and certainly not especially Muslim, until Serbian nationalists decided to vilify them as ‘Turks’ and tried to kick them out or kill them off. But then later, as refugees in the UK, for example, some of them were criticised by certain Muslim groups here for not being Muslim enough.

Other people cleave to an identity, which might be, but isn’t necessarily, a Muslim one. Perhaps it’s the way things are reported but the impression I get is that it’s mostly when something has annoyed or offended them that they bang on about their identity. But of course that would make sense: if you feel secure; if you are a member of the dominant group in the land where you live, or a citizen of country that feels it is riding high in the world you might not feel the need to assert the importance of your identity because its value is taken for granted.

And what about the English? Not so very long ago the English blithely conflated Britishness with Englishness, effortless superiority preventing them from noticing that the Scots, Welsh and Irish might have a different take on the matter. The English didn’t worry about identity. They were English, after all! But now. Oh, now. How things have changed. Partly because of the EU, and partly because of looming Scottish independence, it has suddenly struck the English that they haven’t been nurturing their identity, and might not even have one. The minority nations (Scots, Welsh, Irish) had of course been assiduously burnishing theirs in an aggrieved sort of way for decades. As you would, if you were a minority.

I’m going to get personal here. If somebody asks me, ‘Are you English?’ I quickly say no. Why do I say this? I was born in London and grew up here. Yet my parents were both European refugees, and although I am very glad I live here (even gladder that English is my native tongue – my, what a wonderful language!), I would never say I am English. British, yes. But English? I suspect this is pretentious. Oh, come off it, people must think, even if they are too polite to say. You’re not that young, you’ve never really lived anywhere else. You’re English! Yet, if I were black and said I was English, I bet those same people might say, yes, ok. But where are you really from?

Meanwhile we’re supposed to subscribe to the notion that we all have multiple identities: shot-putter, mother, sister, Londoner – and only incidentally Protestant/Muslim/Jew/Buddhist/black/English/American or whatever. Don’t you believe it!