Loose and Tight models of Sustainability

For some sustainability optimists, the simultaneous crises of climate change and peak oil (to which we must now add the economic slump and debt crisis) is also a great opportunity. The need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and to live within our planet's needs is, they hope, a wake-up call for our civilisation, and the chance to move towards a different way of living.

This new way would be based on a deliberate, conscious decision to reduce the complexity and inter-dependence of our civilisation. It would involve re-localisation, a reduction in consumption of many unnecessary goods and services, a degree of de-industrialisation and re-engagement with more fundamental aspects of life such as food growing. We'd have less stuff, and our 'standard of living' as measured by conventional indices like GDP would reduce, but our quality of life would improve.

This kind of vision is sometimes accompanied with an evocation of the wartime spirit, with fond memories of digging for victory. The Slow Food movement, and even more the Transition Towns movement, are good examples of this kind of thinking. In essence, this view says Loose rather than Tight is the key to resilience, which in turn is the key to sustainability.

But there is another vision of a low-carbon, more sustainable society, which is more or less the polar opposite – even though it is also a plan for sustainability. It argues that we need less Loose – that Tight, and efficiency, are the only route to a sustainable society.

Here, sustainability depends on more technology and more centralisation to deliver efficiency gains; it's these that make it possible to reduce energy consumption and emissions without reducing the quality of life. So energy efficiency based on “smart grids” that link generation more closely to consumption – real-time monitoring of your electricity meter is a must. High-tech communications equipment in our homes substituting for travel – both for work and for leisure. We'd be less likely to have our cars, and we'd be more urbanised and densely packed, not less – especially since high-energy modes of transport would be less affordable.

This second vision is the one implicit in some of the plans for a sustainable future drawn up by business, by the big consulting firms and the technology industries, like the “SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age” drawn up by the “Global e-sustainability Initiative”and The Climate Group.

Most of the time there is little contact between the two different visions. For the most part, the Green movement simply pretends that the high-technology model of sustainability doesn't exist; there are a few exceptions. Simon Fairlie at least confronts the issue head-on in his revisit to 'Can Britian Feed Itself?', in which he attributed to James Lovelock a plan whereby “a third of the land is given over to wilderness, and a third to agribusiness, while the majority of the population is crammed into the remaining third and fed on junk food”.

Mainly, though, Greens prefer to think that when business talks about the transition to a low-carbon economy as an opportunity, they are only interested in a bit of greenwash and marketing spin, and to sell us more stuff with a green label on it. And of course, business doesn't think much about the Loose model either – except to caricature anyone who has doubts about the possibility of growth without end as a know-nothing who wants to return us to the Middle Ages if not to the Stone Age.

As a Green, my heart, and my sympathies, are with the proponents of Loose, but increasingly my head is with a version of Tight. A more sustainable society will de-centralise some things, but it almost certainly will need to centralise others. It's fun to play around with local currencies, but funding social services and health requires a proper tax system. The Transition Town vision of re-localisation is great for Totnes and Lewes, but we need a different vision for the great urban conurbations that have arisen because of the existence of a global economy and don't make sense without it – this is true not only of the City of London, but also for Haringey and Brixton.

Those who invoke the wartime spirit tend to forget that 'dig for victory' was part of a bigger picture that included rationing and the massive bureaucracy that went with it. Running an integrated transport system will need lots of real-time information processing about the whereabouts of vehicles and passengers.

Personal carbon quotas will require massive databases and data collection systems; Enforcing rationing and preventing 'off-ration' carbon consumption will require an extension of state surveillance and powers; anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't thought much about the huge infrastructure that organised crime has built up around the transhipment of narcotic drugs, a commodity with much more minority appeal than energy.

It seems unlikely that carbon rationing will be based on little paper books and cardboard coupons; I am not at all sure that we can simultaneously oppose ID cards on civil liberties grounds while calling for the introduction of any kind of carbon rationing or quotas, and perhaps it's time to stop automatically resisting any initiative like this. Otherwise, we end up sounding like the nutters who oppose speed cameras on civil liberties grounds.

And the later we leave preparing for transition, the bigger the shock is going to be. When the lights start to go out and the food stops arriving in the supermarkets, many people will be grateful for the smack of firm government, and not too fussed about who gets hurt or what gets taken away in the process.

What's important, then, is not to reject Tight versions of sustainability out of hand, but to start a proper political engagement with them. Who is going to be in control? What safeguards will there be on surveillance? Who decides what the ration allocations are going to be? It's fun to brew our own beer and grow our own vegetables, and it helps to rebuild communities and help think about priorities. But it's no substitute for a proper plan to save civilisation that starts from where we are now, not where we'd like to be.

The sad death of Michael Jackson

The only comment I've found worth reading was this one by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian - about the false dream of celebrity.

My first reaction on hearing of the death of MJ was one of sadness - yet another case of someone who seemed to have it all but found no happiness as a result. One day on and I'm already fed up with all the coverage.

Is this what they really meant?

From the website of the Edwardian Radisson Hotel at Heathrow:

"We believe in doing business with a clear conscience, so we're careful not to waste either your time or our resources in planning an environmentally responsible conference, meeting or event."

Delightfully honest.

Whoopee! Ubuntu now talks to my video camera!

And all thanks to this guy who posted a fix that worked!

Kastner on TV

A couple of weeks ago I watched the Storyville programme about Kastner (entitled “The Jew who talked to the Nazis”), and it stirred me up a lot. Few people who read the broadsheet newspapers (or the Jewish Chronicle) can have missed the row over Joe Allen’s play “Perdition” a few years ago; so the suggestion that some Zionists were involved in some dealings with the Nazis is not exactly news. And though everyone who writes about this feels compelled to act as if they are personally revealing something that has long been hidden, in fact there is a long and detailed account of Kastner and others’ roles in Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial.

For years the subject was also used as a stick by the Zionist right to beat Labour Zionists – as represented, for example, in Ben Hecht’s book “Perfidy”; more recently Lenni Brenner has written several books which meticulously document the involvements of the Zionist Right (especially Lehi) with attempts to do a deal with the Nazis. Proper historians, including Jewish and Zionists ones, know all about what happened, and the indignation of the Jewish community about the Allen play was either fake or ignorant. There is a debate to be had about how we should interpret and even judge these episodes, and what we can learn from the; but it shouldn’t be based on denial of the facts.

Nevertheless, the Storyville film not only told the story rather well, but did manage to tell me a lot that I didn’t know. I knew that Kastner had been assassinated after a Pyrhrric victory in his libel action, but had always assumed it was the work of crazed individual. The film not only show that the assassin had been part of an underground rightwing group (which had also attempted to blow up the Soviet embassy in Israel) but also that the group had been penetrated by the Shin Bet, and that there seems good reason to suspect that the Israeli authorities knew about the planned assassination but chose not to prevent it.

Why? Perhaps because Kastner had been giving witness statements on behalf of Nazis at their trials after the war – and that he had been doing this so that they would reveal the whereabouts of money looted from holocaust victims. The money was then transferred to the Israeli state, though not to descendants of the victims or other survivors. Evidence of Kastner’s statements for the various Nazis had emerged at the libel trial and had very much influenced the judge’s attitude towards him, yet Kastner had not given an explanation as to why he appeared to be helping these odious men when there were no longer any Jews to save. The film suggests that the assassins were allowed to go ahead with their plans because Kastner knew too much; it also shows that the murderers served relatively short sentences. Curiously, the actual assassin, who is still alive and was interviewed for the film, is one of the most sympathetic characters in it.

Also interesting in the film is the close collaboration between Uri Avnery and the right-wing lawyer (a Herut leader) for the defendant in the libel trial. We’re used to seeing Avnery as a peacenik, but his political career is much more chequered than that. He started out on the right, and obviously maintained links there in the muck-raking days of Haolam Hazeh.

The film also shows the way that the Jews rescued by Kastner were made to feel like they were the wrong sort of survivor. I suspect many survivors in Israel felt like that. The fact that the Kastner episode happened in Hungary, and that at least some Zionists seem to have had scant regard for the assimilated Hungarian Jews, may also have played a part.

Zionism and the holocaust again

I've written before about the moral sadism implicit in the accusation that Zionists (or Israelis) are the new Nazis. The flip side of this must also be acknowledged; there are lots of Jews and Israelis who really do say that because of the holocaust no-one can criticise Israel, or that Israelis don't need to listen to anyone that does.

Writing in the latest issue of Standpoint, a magazine produced by the right wing Social Affairs Unit, Howard Jacobson says "...those who want to speak in those terms accuse the Jews of employing the Holocaust for pity. I don't know a single Jew who does that..."

Funnily enough, the day before I received an email from a nice Israeli friend, who seems to have civilised opinions, with a link to what she described as a 'terrific video'. I clicked through to the video, and it turns out to be series of images of anti-semitism with a backing track of someone reading a diatribe by "Rabbi" Meir Kahane. The message is that we don't have to care what anyone thinks about us, because they've always hated us anyway.

The vileness of this argument takes some beating; it is precisely a claim that anti-semitism gives Jews a 'get out of jail free' card that means they can do whatever they like to anyone and everyone. This is the most flagrant exploitation of the holocaust for political purposes. How can Howard Jacobson (or anyone else) get all huffy when accusations are leveled against Israel but look the other way when this sort of thing goes on?

More to the point, how can apparently nice Israelis think that this sort of thing is acceptable to send out as a contribution to understanding? Or complain about how cruel Hamas was, to force them to such terrible things in Gaza against their own better judgement? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a different moral universe here.

Powerline ethernet...

...is wonderful! It just works! Why have I waited so long? Why have I spent hours sodding about with WiFi?

Museum of Agriculture and Food

Yesterday I went to the Science Museum - in the first place to see the 'Japan Car' exhibition and then since I was there, to take in the 'Wallace and Gromit' exhibition. I like Nick Park's animations and was hoping that there would be some mock-ups of Wallace's daft inventions. In fact the exhibition was terrible - not much in it at all, apart from a few of the little rooms from the films. The 'Japan Car' exhibition was not much better; considering it was subtitled "Design for the Crowded Planet" it didn't have much by way of interesting innovation about sustainable transport - just some cars, really, which I suppose should not have been a surprise. Apart from the fact that some of them were small, one was fuel cell and one was electric, not much to detain me.

So having schlepped across London, I thought I'd at least take in the Agriculture gallery. I am reading the Fontana Economic History of Europe, and am in the middle of the brilliant chapter about technology. Although it's very well written it has no diagrams, so I don't really appreciate some of the points it makes about ploughshares, mouldboards, and whipple shafts. I rather hoped that the Science Museum gallery would help.

But it was a real disappointment. None of the exhibits look like they have been touched since the 1950s. There are some shabby dioramas of tractors and harrows, with yellowing caption boards. There are a few little models of tractors and 'native' ploughs, though not much by way of explanation. And the overall story, in so far as there is one, is about the 'agricultural revolution' of the eighteenth century in England, and then the advent of diesel and petrol tractors in the twentieth century. Nothing about the neolithic revolution, irrigation and hydraulic civilisations, or medieval agriculture.

So why isn't there a decent museum of agriculture and food? There's enough to put in it, and it's clear that people are interested in that sort of thing right now - look at the food programmes on telly, the Victorian Farm programme, the interest in home growing. And until there is one, perhaps it would be worth starting a virtual museum of agriculture?

Grump about the Cardinal

The radio news kept repeating the 'story' that Cardinal Cormac McWhatshisface is going to give a lecture in which he will warn about the increasing hostility faced by 'the church' -- though he's kinda vague on what church, or what hostility. He is apparently going to talk about the threat this poses to freedom of religion. Forgive me, but when did the Catholic Church start supporting the freedom of religion? When did it become a Good Thing for them? When it did, was their any acknowledgment that this was a change in the official position, and any apology for previous endorsement of the opposite view.

I must have missed that bit...obviously it's happened after they stopped burning heretics and making non-attendance in church a crime. Or maybe it's only a good thing in certain places, where catholicism is not the established religion. I think we should be told.

Oyfn Pripitchik and Lark Rise to CandlefordP

No-one seems to have noticed that the theme music for the BBC series "Lark Rise to Candleford" bears an uncanny similarity to the Yiddish song "Oyfn Pripitchik". Is this just a co-incidence? I think we should be told. Without meaning to cast aspersions, is there scope for composers to plunder the storehouse of klezmer tunes -- as long as no-one recognises them?

It's made more amusing by the fact that "Lark Rise" is so very English.

Gollywogs and Jewish dolls

As the Carol Thatcher row got started, and the predictable right-wing response about how this was yet another case of "political correctness gone mad" began to gather steam, I reflected on how the mainstream commentariat would react to anti-semitic caricatures turned into dolls. After all, post-holocaust, anti-semitism is supposed to be even more taboo than anti-black racism. I remembered hearing someone - (Howard Jacobson, in the "Roots Schmoots", maybe?) mention that such dolls actually did exist and were sold in Poland. So I thought I'd look for a picture of them, post it, and see if it shamed any defenders of the Gollywog. (I found these Jewish dolls, delightfully depicted with their money bags and boxes).

My mistake was to search for "Jewish Puppet" rather than "Jewish Doll". I was unprepared for the volume and rancour of the images and words that this search uncovered. There's a little bit of me that thinks that we Jews sometimes make too much fuss about contemporary anti-semitism, because in my liberal professional life I rarely encounter it. But my "Jewish Puppet" search revealed to me the extent to which the Jewish conspiracy theory is alive and well on the web. Try it yourself.

It also made me think about the limits of liberal anti-racism, which focuses on terms like discrimination and prejudice. Gollywogs physically embody a racist caricature. The toy and the depiction mean that white people don't meet real black people in an unmediated way -- they bring to the meeting all sorts of ideas and reactions derived from the caricature.

But the stereotype of the Jew is not for the most part about 'prejudice'. The content of anti-semitism is not about beards or long noses, it's about the idea that Jews are clever, powerful and greedy for more power. That's why 'discrimination' seems like an appropriate response to the 'gollywog-like' black people, but genocide is the appropriate response to conspiratorial world-dominating Jews.

Can CIOs count carbon?

No, they can't. This piece by Fujitsu says that they don't realise they shouldn't count emissions by organisations to which they have outsourced their operation. It says that they are 'erring on the side of caution...rather than risk understating the environmental impact.'

I'm more worried that they just simply don't get it at all.

Eco-Team

Had the very first meeting of our neighborhood Eco-Team group - part of an initiative by the charity Global Action Plan, in conjunction with the Sustainable Haringey Network. Actually was a pre-meeting, because it was just to arrange dates. Was quick but pleasant - hope all the subsequent meetings are as easy and nice as this!

More climate change scenarios

A Guardian article from Vicky Pope, head of climate change at the Hadley Centre. Technically much more proficient than my humble effort - but primarily about how bad the climate change itself turns out to be, with not much consideration about impact on economy and society. But very good, of course.

What does not kill me makes me stronger

Everyone has a worst nightmare - not something they worry about, but a real nightmare that they have from time to time. Mine used to be the exam dream - you know, you have to retake all your old exams again, and you can't find a pen, and...

A few years ago I stopped having that one, and started having the conference presentation nightmare. You are at a conference and suddenly you are called on to speak, and you have done no preparation at all. I probably have this one because no matter how much I prepare for presentations, I always feel like I haven't done enough.

Last week, at the Sustain IT conference, this actually happened to me. The organisers had contacted me after hearing me in an analysts' round table, and asked me to speak. I'd refused - I followed the subject more as an enthusiastic amateur than as part of my professional analyst responsibilities. They prevailed on me to speak on a panel, and I agreed.

When the agenda arrived I was still down for a forty minute presentation, which by now was on a specific subject -- green procurement principles -- that I definitely knew nothing about. I complained, they apologised and said it would be fixed.

Three days before the conference they were chasing me for 'my slides'. I explained what we'd agreed, and it seemed to go away.

Perhaps foolishly, I turned up at the conference. My name was still on the agenda against the 'green procurement' topic. I spoke to the organiser, who yet again said that this was a mistake that would be explained, and that I would just be on a panel. Fortunately I no longer believed him, and started making a few notes on a scrap of paper. Fortunately, because at 2.40pm, exactly to time as presented on the agenda, the chairman called me to the lectern.

I was no longer utterly unprepared, but as near as made almost no difference. I had no slides, and my notes consisted of a single piece of A5 with four bullet points on it. Considering this, it didn't go to badly. I spoke for twenty minutes, got a few laughs in the right places, and got a decent round of applause at the end. A couple of people from the audience later congratulated me on how crisp and succinct the presentation was.

Perhaps I won't have the nightmare any more. As Nietzsche says (I think), "What does not kill me makes me stronger."

Horrible or what?

A giant rubbish dump of 100 million tons of crap in the Pacific. What have we done?

And more horror here.

Work-Life issues

An interesting spin on this issue - who owns your address book? I read this article in Fortune (not part of my regular reading) a while back (while at MWC, actually) but just re-read it and thought it deserved being blogged.

Nokia Tablet - finally having fun with it!

I've finally started to have fun with my Nokia 770. It's languished in the cupboard for ages. My son was going on a ski-ing trip and wanted to take something with to watch videos on the train down to the Alps. His idea was to take our ageing steam-powered laptop, which weighs about half a ton even without the coal - and whose battery failed years ago, so that it only works when connected to a power supply.

I wondered whether we could play videos on the 770. It only had a 64MB memory card in it, so I ordered a 2MB one from Amazon. The 770 kept claiming that the card was corrupt, even though it was fresh out of the packet. A little web searching (well, it's not as if I've still got the manual, is it?) and I found that the little bugger doesn't support cards bigger than 1MB. Back to Amazon, and I bought a 1GB card - cost 1p, but postage £3.92 - why doesn't Amazon wise up to this sort of thing?

Anyway, the 770 liked the 1GB card, but it didn't like any of the .avi files that I copied on to it. More searching found the media converter that some wonderful Finn had knocked up on his kitchen table. Installed that, and found that it didn't run. I needed some new bit of Java that somehow I'd managed to live without for years. Installed the new bit of Java.

Hooray! Can now convert files, and copy them to the 770. Whole films fit comfortably on the 1GB card, and the sound and picture quality is amazing. In honour of Finnish ingenuity, I made the first film I put on to it Aki Kaurismäki's "Leningrad Cowboys Go America". I am looking forward to taking the 770 traveling with me.

Sadly, all this took too long for son to take 770 on his trip. Still, he'll be happy once he recovers from the dislocated shoulder.

Speech for the Red Herring Bart Mitzvah on 18th November 2007

Friends, comrades, relatives:

In my memory, the rabbi always began his sermon with the words “this week's sedrah comes from...”. This was a signal for everyone to make themselves comforable and prepare for a little rest. So snuggle down.

Our Torah reading today comes from the portion Va-Yetse – 'and he left'. The chapterisation and verse division that we Jews borrowed from the Christians makes this Genesis chapter 28 verses 10-22. The bit that the kids read covers the very important story of Jacob's ladder, where the patriarch who is going to become the ancestor of all Israelites and therefore all Jews, sleeps in the open with a stone for a pillow. There he has a dream in which he sees a ladder going between heaven and earth, and angels ascending and descending.

This really short passage is so full of symbolism and associations that it's almost embarrassing. For kabbalists, the ladder represents the relationship between higher and lower worlds – because they see the material world that we experience as being only one of many different realms. For those of a more fundamentalist inclination, the story indicates the future location of the holy temple, and of Jerusalem – although there is nothing in the story that says so, they interpret the place where it happens as being Mount Moriah, and therefore confirming the centrality of Jerusalem in Jewish worship. For nationalists, verse 13 assigns the land to Jacob and his offspring, and verse 14 confirms the descendants of Jacob as having a special status among all the families of the earth.

Christians interpret the portion as presaging the future coming of Jesus as a bridge between God and man. Even the Scottish Nationalists get a look in, because the stone that Jacob used for a pillow is said to be the Stone of Scone, on which Kings of Scotland were crowned – and which was subsequently looted by the English and carried off to Westminster Abbey.

Very clever rabbis have spent a great deal of time examining the words of the text, finding many levels of meaning, fleshing out the details, and explaining some of the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies. Why do the angels need a ladder – what happened to their wings? How big was the ladder – how many rungs, and how wide were they? How come when God tells Jacob that he will protect him wherever he goes, Jacob is still frightened about something only a few chapters on? The interpretations go on for many pages, and it all makes me very proud to be a secularist.

But secularists don't have to be dreary. We can enjoy rituals, and ceremonies, and symbolism too. The ladder seems to me to be a great symbol for a Coming of Age rite of passage – an event that marks a tranistion from one status into another. Many societies and civilisations have them, and they seem to me to be an entirely good thing.

One of the things we do in our secular cheder is to look at Jewish customs and traditions as something that is evolving rather than static. Nowhere is this more evident than the custom of the big barmitzvah. By now everybody really does know the joke about the elephant safari bar mitzvah, but the big bar mitzvah, as we know it, isn’t a timeless tradition at all. It’s only about fifty years old. Older men here will perhaps remember a small celebration at their own house, with a few bits of plaive cake, some bridge rolls, and some tiny glasses of cherry brandy.

Even the religious bar mitzvah ceremony isn’t all that old – perhaps a few hundred years. Once upon a time the big coming of age event for boys was around five years old, when the child was taken from its mother and given to the Rabbi to be educated. This was a public ceremony, which included the child being carried through the streets, and involved special foods, including food like eggs and cakes on which the verses of the Torah were actually written (and by the way, this led to some very interesting discussions between rabbis as to whether it was permissible to excrete holy words).

It’s only from the fifteenth century onwards that Jewish children were seen as taking on the rights and responsibilities of adulthood at thirteen. The ceremony of the bar mitzvah, to mark the Jewish boy as having attained the age at which he could be counted in a minyan and called to the reading of the law, dates from this time. The big party, the catered meal, and so on didn't come for another four hundred years, and most of that was made up by the caterers.

Well, that’s the end of the history lesson. The point of it is really that social institutions, and especially religious traditions, like the bar mitzvah, are made up by people like us. We’ve got just as much right to make up our own way of doing things as did the rabbis in medieval Germany. What is, is the product of a process of change, and can be changed.

We have chosen to call this ceremony a Bart mitzvah, after the celebrated character from popular culture, Bart Simpson. It's fun to say that in an appropriately rabbinical voice, and if I was really doing this right I am sure I could come up with some really great numerological allusions about the letters of Bart's name. In fact, Bart presents many theological problems, not least the fact that his voice is actually provided by a woman, so that if the character were to begin to sing orthodox Jewish men would have to quickly switch off – because it's forbidden to listen to a woman singing. Once again, reading that it's hard not to feel a burst of pride at being a secularist.

But there is also a wonderful web page called 'The Simpsons Talmud', which presents the episode featuring Rabbi Hyman Krustovskyand his son Herschel Pinkus Yerucham Krustofski (or Krusty the Clown, as he is perhaps better known) as if it were a Talmudic anecdote. It's possible to appreciate this on many levels. The content of the interpretation, which like the Simpsons episode itself treats the issue of parental estrangement from a son with great insight and warmth. The style of the web page really does present itself as it were a page from the Talmud. And the ability to enjoy the joke seems to me to be a vindication of what we are trying to do here – to appreciate the Jewish heritage not in opposition to living in the modern world, but as a way of getting more out of it. The Simpsons Talmud, and Woody Allen, and lots of other things are funnier if you understand the nuances of Jewish culture. Relating to the Holocaust, and other holocausts, and the experiences of refugees, is different if we recognise the relationships of those stories to our own personal stories.

In our group we have tried to cover all this stuff in one way or another. We began, more than three years ago, with the words “Once there was a rabbi, a man of distinction, who lived in the land of Uz.” This is the beginning of the story “The Rabbi who was turned into a werewolf”. We've spent a while wandering in some of the back lanes of Jewish culture and folklore. We spent a long time in the company of the wise men of Chelm. We studied the stories of the Bible, with the help of beanie babies, an assortment of funny voices, and a really lurid comic-book style version provided by some American bible society.

Somewhere along the way, we invented Jewish Top Trumps, merrily infringing copyright as we went. We made cards for important Jewish heroes and leaders – like Emma Goldmann, Rabbi Akiva, and Amy Winehouse. We made cards for fictional characters with some claim to be Jewish, too, like Tevye the Milkman, Krusty the Clown, and Moses and Jesus too. As of today, there are some new top trumps in the pack, because we've made some for all the graduating students – have a look at the version on the laptop over there.

We've learned some bits of Yiddish, including a great number of words for the male anatomy – why are there so many? We've learned, more or less, to read Hebrew, or at least to recognise some of the letters.

We've watched some good films, and some really bad ones – I'm still not sure why it turned out that our version of The Ten Commandments had subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese. We've even made a film, which you will get to see in a few minutes.

We've done a bit of cooking, a tiny bit of singing, and the occasional craft activity – we made clay dreidels, and we used up the clay to make idols like Abraham's dad used to do for a living. We studied interior decorating, Solomonic style. We've tried to make sure that it was never like school, and I think we've mainly succeeded – although there were a few dodgy moments when we slogged through the background history to Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I'll lay odds that no-one remembers very much of that.

And we've had good fun, most of the time. I'm going to miss it, and all the students, terribly. The class is going to continue, with some of the students who aren't graduating yet, and perhaps some new ones. It'll be different – not better, or worse, but different for sure.

Now one of the things about this sort of sermon is that it's really hard to end. Perhaps that's why they go on for so long. When I was young, the rabbi used to finish up by presenting the barmitzvah boy with a present from the congregation – usually the book 'The Torah is Our Guide'. I still have mine, and have kept it as fresh and new as the day it was given to me. Well, if the trick worked for him, it might work for me, so I'd like to end the sermon by presenting the students with a specially chosen book. I'd like to, but those mamsers at Amazon have let me down, so instead I will present them all with a picture of the front cover – alongside their graduation certificates, of course. So it gives me great pleasure to present you all with this picture of the front cover of “Yiddish with Dick and Jane”, and may the book when it actually arrives give you many minutes of pleasure.

How mobility helps maintain work-life balance

I write about enterprise mobility for a living. One of the oft-cited benefits is that it helps workers to maintain a proper work-life balance. This claim is more commonly made on the left-hand side of the Atlantic than on the right-hand side. Over here, there is at least some recognition that knowing when and whether to turn the Blackberry off, or stop doing the emails on the laptop, is an issue. In North America, it seems much more common to assume that being able to do work outside of normal working hours, away from the workplace, is somehow more 'balanced'.

This piece from AP doesn't claim that it's illustrating a more balanced life, though it does suggest that the impetus for taking laptops on holiday so as to continue working is coming from employees, not from employers. It's hard not to despair reading this sort of thing - another example of computers making people easier to use.