Last night, MPs voted down amendments to the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill seeking to reduce legal access to abortion to the first 24, 22, 20, 16 or even 12 weeks of pregnancy. In line with the scientific evidence on the subject (as picked over by the Select Committee on Science and Technology in their report of October 2007), the Commons decided that there was no case for changing the current 24 week limit. The evidence on foetal development and viability presents no case for changing the laws on abortion, and MPs voted accordingly. Continue reading
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
Posted in May 2008 …
Snap
Kate at Needled published a thoughtful post about the reinvention of remnants and oddments as jewellery: by turning the recovered scraps of things and people into new objects to wear about our bodies, we both transform them into new objects and keep the ghosts of their old forms about us. A picture, a button, a miniature portrait – all these things can be “a tiny detail that, because it is broken from its context, can now be looked at, scrutinised, properly treasured.”
Kate compares mourning jewellery of the nineteenth-century with the found-object aesthetic. The idea of loss and partial recovery followed by reinvention is constantly replayed and reconsidered in Victorian writers’ responses to bereavement. (Thomas Hardy used an epigraph from Virgil at the head of his Poems of 1912-3, the sequence marking the death of his wife Emma: veteris vestigia flamae – ashes of an old fire, sparks from an old flame.) Continue reading
Still learning
I wrote a review of Alasdair Gray’s Old Men In Love for the Oxonian Review of Books. As far as I’m concerned, Gray is one of the best writers at work today – constantly inventive, furiously intelligent, shockingly compassionate, and very funny indeed – so the publication of this piece made me happy as anything. To find out what I think of dirty novels by aging writers, and why this book is better than that sounds, click here.
