Chaos is expensive: endless sending around of bulky papers phone calls chasing lost documents setting
Chaos is expensive: endless sending around of bulky papers, phone calls, chasing lost documents, setting up this and closing that, dealing between the DoH, the Foreign Office (embassies in the sending countries), the Home Office (immigration), local government and/or adoption agencies here; keeping all those records in all those different areas ... and much more besides.Would it not be better to set up a one-stop shop: one set of regulations, one central authority, responsible and accountable and open to the public, able to inform people, train social workers, and govern the behaviour of a variety of specialist overseas adoption agencies? Those agencies, which could be established with seed-cash and become reliant on their own fundraising, would, as they do in other "receiving" countries, organise the actual adoption of a child from beginning to end. Then neither the child nor the prospective parents would have to flail around in a bureaucratic and legal morass that leaves them vulnerable to shoddy advice and practice both here and abroad.And I would have fewer calls from people driven crazy by the current nightmare It's not that I resent the time - far, far from it. It's just that they and the children they want would be so much better served by a decent, positive, flexible system.
The Conservatives promised one but signally failed to deliver.The writer is director of The Adoption Forum.. The appropriate word to characterize the acquisition of contemporary literary archives by American research libraries is hardly "scandal" ("The scandal of Britain's lost literary archives", 8 December). If indeed it were a scandal, you're rather late in reporting it. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has been acquiring, cataloguing and preserving the literary archives of British writers for over 40 years; George Bernard Shaw, D H Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf are a few of nearly 100 modern British writers whose papers are held at the Center. There is abundant evidence that worldwide use of these materials has enhanced scholarly as well as general interest in the works of these writers.
British authors of major biographies ofWaugh (two), Greene, Lawrence (five), Scott, Bowen, Shaw, Lytton Strachey and two dozen more have used the archives at the Center. Nearly half of the annual research fellowships ($2,000 to $6,000) awarded by the Center have been to scholars from the UK to pursue the study of our literary holdings. Surely as we continue to shrink the Atlantic Ocean by both transportation and cyberspace, there should be some recognition that scholarship in our common language is a mutual enterprise.Thomas F StaleyHarry Ransom Humanities Research CenterThe University of Texasat Austin. BRILLIANT! Michael Bywater, you articulated some of the fears and prejudices felt by all ordinary, decent men every time they stare into their shaving mirrors (Review, 8 December). Science may be shrinking God's Universe, but for us, born into a world where the only choice is between Portillo's lips, Blair's teeth, Redwood's eye and Cash's shirts, it is clear that He/She still has an Infinity of gleeful and malicious good humour Peter Williams Hereford. In his review of Britten's War Requiem, Michael White refers to "the schoolboy clumsiness of Wilfred Owen's poetry" ("Twenty years on, Britten's still great", Real Life, 8 December).
Likethousands of others, I had been under the illusion that Owen was the greatest war poet in the language and had written some of the most sensitive, moving and technically accomplished verse ever composed on the subject. It had been my understanding that Britten chose Owen's poems because he believed they were the most accurate reflection of the sensitivities and experiences of those who fought in the First World War. Owen's poetry reveals modern warfare as horrific, exploitative and hypocritical. Those are things worth knowing, and worth ensuring that each new generation learns - preferably from reading poems rather than from dying on battlefields. Owen's, to my mind, are of far more value than the slick posturing of certain music critics.Andrew MatthewsReading, Berkshire. Attracted by the photos illustrating Thomas Pakenham's "A farewell to oaks?" (Review, 8 December), I soon felt uneasy over the sentiments expressed. This arose not from the imagined threat to the "English oak" by upstart European acorns but from the idea that oaks grown in English soil are physically superior, while their size and strength endow them with a moral excellence that precludes European specimens. Such virtues, according to Pakenham, were identified by John Bull 200 years ago in Englishman and English oak alike.
But they were also found at that time in the heart of Europe. The early German Romantics, in a fragmented country, searched for evidence of the national soul. They found it in natural forms and in particular in the oak tree. The English should welcome acorns from Europe; they may inject us with new sap. Susan D VeitchAlnwick, Northumberland. Tim Hilton's review of Howard Hodgkin's exhibition at the Hayward, "A world of his own" (Review, 8 December), mentions the artist's decision to take all the partitions away from the lower galleries, and thus throws light on why the paintings, except for the In Memory of Max Gordon section, have been hung too closely Presumably, there was less wall space available to Hodgkin.
