Jura

Jura is an island of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, with a population of 196 at the time of the 2011 census. As you might expect, it has a distillery, producing Isle of Jura single malt whisky. I'm not a whisky aficionado by any means and no doubt could not distinguish between this estimable product and the cheapest blend available on Lidl's shelves, but it's a consistent Scottish meme and we must allow them it.

On 23 August 1994 the band KLF filmed themselves burning £1 million in banknotes on Jura. KLF were also known as the Timelords and had a number 1 single called Doctorin' the Tardis in 1988. Here they are:

Another example of the BBC's insidious influence on British culture, KLF must have looked back on this and thought "this is so embarrassing we have to make a bonfire of everything we earned from this"; hence the 1994 incident.

At the other end of the culture scale, George Orwell wrote 1984 on Jura. You might have thought that KLF would reference that in their exhibitionist exploit, perhaps a two minutes of hate directed towards...money?

If you can bear it, listen to the first minute of an interview with band founders Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty about the burning:

Most likely they were ignorant of the connection between Orwell and Jura, as was I until I read another of Jenny Diski's essays Don't Think About It. Given that these essays originally appeared in the London Review of Books, it's not surprising that many of them are biography reviews and a favourite technique which Diski uses is compare and contrast, reviewing two different biographies of a subject in parallel. In this case Michael  Sheldon's biography of George Orwell and Hilary Spurling's of his widow Sonia.

George and Sonia were married for just three months, the last of George's life. It was a marriage of convenience. George knew he was dying from tuberculosis and wanted someone with literary editing experience, and whom he trusted implicitly, to manage his legacy. Sonia's end of the bargain was to manage his literary estate to her financial advantage. Thus Sonia became a controversial figure: Sheldon's view of her is unsympathetic whilst that of Spurling, a friend of Sonia's, is to largely exonerate her behaviour and rapaciousness on the grounds of having, for instance, a drunken - possibly psychopathic - stepfather.

It's an interesting technique and answers my question from an earlier blog post: what is an essay? Compare and contrast is a classic staple of English literature examinations, the student invited to write an essay using the technique. Now I know. And Diski is a master (I use that word in a non gender specific way, people, don't complain!) of it. A pleasure to read.