The Cultural Omnivore // Pamela Dow
002: Dispatches from the deeply mysterious, deeply chic heart of British public life
The Cultural Omnivore is a new series that kicked off just last week.
We ask the same set of Qs to the most interesting people we know. To find out where their attention went this week - high, low, old, new.
Because this year we all want to think more weirdly…outside of our filter bubbles + out from under the algorithm.
This week, a window into a different world…
This week’s guest is Pamela Dow, the woman with one of the most interesting jobs…and most formidable intellects…and most enviable wardrobes…in Britain.
She’s reading with us here for ages, but I met her years ago when she took me behind the curtain with her inside Britain’s corridors of power, hiring me to into her Whitehall strategy team whose job it was to advise elected ministers in British central government.
(She sent me to meetings at No. 10, to meetings with Jude Law, to meetings at the building site that became London’s Olympic stadium…I mean it was non-stop canon events).
Today Pamela leads Civic Future, a forward-thinking non-party-political org tasked with building our country’s future state leaders. The ones who will get us out of this hot mess. In its own words, the org is here to re-energise public life by attracting more high calibre people.
If you’re not familiar with Pamela’s world - like I wasn’t until she let me in - pls summon the darkly witty and well-dressed thinking women of Black Doves and The Night Manager. Not Slow Horses. OK but yes a little bit The Thick Of It.
Ok on with the show!
/// THE CULTURAL OMNIVORE: 002 ///
Who are you, where are you, and what do you spend your days doing?
I’m Pamela. A Scottish, East Riding raised, North East Londoner with an increasing fondness for Suffolk’s River Deben.
I’ve had a long career in and around government, and with Munira Mirza founded Civic Future in 2022, to improve the talent pool for British public life.
Now I get to spend every day with Britain’s brightest and best, who are frustrated by the State of Things but utterly committed to understanding, solving, growing, and leading our way out of it.
:: THIS WEEK I’VE NOTICED…
I’ve been following the - global, thanks to President Trump - debate about how safe London is or isn’t.
Tom Chivers, as always [Beth butting in to recommend his recent book Everything Is Predictable], explained the data brilliantly in a piece he wrote this week called ‘London has not Fallen’, but also acknowledges that unreported crime, and degradation of public space, influences perceptions.
I still love London and I cycle about quite happily, never worrying too much about getting robbed or stabbed.
But I notice the new tent town in the Monument underpass, the unpoliced shoplifting, and the unbearable growth of the sweet and souvenir shop fronts for organised crime.
I cycle about quite happily, never worrying too much
about getting robbed or stabbed.
Changing channel…over New Year I discovered Dryden’s poem, Annus Mirabilis.
It was written in 1667, the year after the Great Fire of London, and the verses on London rising like a phoenix are rousing.
And reassuring, given we know what was to come, in the Glorious Revolution, and buildings and parks that we still have and love now.
Me-thinks already, from this Chymick flame,
I see a City of more precious mold:
Rich as the Town which gives the Indies name,
With Silver pav’d, and all divine with Gold.
Already, labouring with a mighty fate,
She shakes the Rubbish from her mounting Brow,
And seems to have renew’d her Charters date,
Which Heav’n will to the death of time allow.
More great than human, now, and more August,
Now deified she from her Fires does rise:
Her widening Streets on new Foundations trust,
And, opening, into larger parts she flies.
(One of the many great things about Civic Future is the number of fascinating, clever, people I can talk to on any day. I sent one of them that poem and he sent me back a passage from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, about fire, which is also think is a good one for our times:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.
There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”)
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN READING…
For a few years now I keep being drawn to, or sent to, in a cosmic treasure hunt, things connecting the history of climbing, and Romanticism, and Nationalism.
This week’s was Auden and Isherwood‘s Ascent of F6 a short and brilliant play which really needs a revival. It’s also the first outing for Auden’s famous funeral poem, Stop all the Clocks, but here it’s satire, mocking national mourning.
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN WEARING…
Vestiaire knows I have a crush on Yellowstone’s Beth Dutton, so keeps showing me irresistible denim: fringed Galliano pinafore, weather-inappropriate mac. But I’ve been enjoying Belstaff buckle collars too. The overall effect might be a bit Montana Militia, to be honest.
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO…
Polica. My husband and I used to love them and then they disappeared for a long time, and now they’ve got a new album out. I still like Give You The Ghost best I think.
:: THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN WATCHING…
January comfort-watching - the 1984 BBC version of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. I always forget how scary it is, and how sacred.
PD
…Thank you, Pamela (you are not inferno and we are here for the Montana Militia).
And thank you for reading.
Please message me or respond to this email with your suggestions for future Cultural Omnivores. Thanks to all who have already.
Beth
ICYMI - this week’s other Pattern Recognition post…