Emma Hartley

Tuesday

Emma Hartley

We haven’t had a pan-European war for 70 years. Why is that?

From our UK edition

The EU referendum makes me suspect that the grownups don't know what they're doing. I can see how we got to this point but it seems absurd that something so fundamental should be up - not just  for debate but possibly even - for reversal. It is doubly absurd because David Cameron has said that he will be campaigning - as you would expect of a conservative - for the status quo. So why are you doing this? I mouth at the television, wishing heartily that he would fight his internal party battles on his own time. Bewilderment is, it seems to me, one of the main forces behind this referendum. Some - many - people are bewildered by the EU. Getting your head around it is hard because the organisation is unique: there are no good metaphors for it.

Friday

Emma Hartley

One Great Thing gets embarrassing for the Yes campaign in Scotland

From our UK edition

Big Country's song ‘One Great Thing’ is an anthem for the Scottish Yes campaign: it was soaring in the background during an item recorded at a ‘Yes’ rally on the Today programme the other day. And since Big Country's bagpipe-sounding guitars were one of the joys of my adolescence and I've been partial to a check shirt ever since, my heart soared along with it. ‘Yes,’ said Jim Lafferty from the Yes campaign's communications office, appropriately enough, when I rang to ask how it had come about. ‘It was suggested by Jim Downie and Will Atkinson of the creative team.’ I understood that they had not, however, spoken to the band, having gone straight through to the record company about the rights.

Thursday

Emma Hartley

Meet Fraser Neill, the Scots folk musician behind Eurovision’s Emmelie de Forest

From our UK edition

To be a folk music fan in Britain today is to be jangling the keys to a cultural palace. For a variety of reasons, we seem to have produced the most brilliant young musicians in decades — but the rest of the world has always seemed rather more excited about the fact than we are. We have started to export musicians, from Spain to Novia Scotia, who go on to musical achievements that are seldom recognised, let alone celebrated, back home. Of the ten million Brits who tuned into the Eurovision song contest, not many would have guessed that the Danish winner was yet another young protégée of a British folk musician. Until a few months ago Emmelié Charlotte-Victoria de Forest was as unknown to Denmark as she was to the rest of the continent.

Tuesday

Emma Hartley

Why the Huhne/Pryce case makes singleness all the more attractive

From our UK edition

Watching the shipwreck of the Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce court case has made me feel guiltily relieved that, at the age of 42, I haven't yet married. The operatic scale of the disaster makes it appear emblematic of all the other couples who make each other unhappy all the time in smaller, less dramatic ways. That two people can bind themselves together for life, raise five children together and yet remain so emotionally unintelligent about each other and the world in which they live says several things to me. It makes me think that they may have got married for the wrong reasons, most likely because they were young and ambitious and, in conventional terms, marriage makes you appear more successful.

Wednesday

Emma Hartley

BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards: bottom of the class

From our UK edition

You would think that asking for and receiving the names of the judges of a set of BBC awards would be a straightforward matter. The corporation’s own awards guidelines, available on its website, demand transparency. So it was surprising that when I asked who chose the winners of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, thinking I’d write about them in my music blog, The Glamour Cave, I was told it was a secret. It was a more unpleasant surprise that a follow-up Freedom of Information request was denied on the grounds that the award ceremony, in the view of the BBC’s FoI department, was protected as 'journalism'. If an awards ceremony qualified as journalism, I was left wondering, then what could they possibly consider my blog to be? Did I want to know?