St Lawrence

Yesterday to the Wigmore Hall to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet play Haydn Op. 71 No. 2 and Beethoven Op. 59 No. 3. Very good they were too, playing with engaging verve, even if the first violin did sometimes look as if he thought the rest of the quartet only existed to provide his entries and a bit of background. He also wore a tie with a rather seventies air about it, for which he looked a little young.

The quartet is also one of the few where first and second violin take turn and turn about, a proceeding which some believe is all wrong with some people being born first violinists and some people being born second violinists. I don't think I would go any further than it all depends.

My mother being Canadian, I did once sail up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, where, amongst other things, we were taken to see the St. Lawrence Seaway, which I recall at that time to be a rather new and impressive feat of engineering.

Home to dig further into the same issue of the NYRB noticed yesterday, to read all about the great lead scandal. I learn that lead in domestic paint was known to be a serious hazard as long ago as the 1920's, at which time most proper countries in Europe (the UK not being among those mentioned - while Tunisia of all places is) made the sale of the stuff illegal, but in the land of the free, sale was not made illegal until the late 70's.

It seems that the lead industry in the US fought a strong campaign to keep the health, safety and other busy people at bay, perhaps teaching the tobacco people a thing or two along the way. While according to the reviewer in the NYRB, only a small exposure to lead paint as a child is needed to cause a significant fall in IQ, and given the widespread use of lead paint until quite recently, the overall effect was probably significantly lower average IQ across the country than there should be. More dumb people than there should be. With the average disguising the fact that most of the offending paint is in what are now slums and most of the people who live in them are black. The Black Panthers knew all about it back in the sixties, but their approach to this particular problem did not, sadly for their children, result in effective action.

Not to mention all the other evil things that exposure to lead paint can do, some of them fatal.

Numbers are said to be large, with 30 million houses still having some lead paint in them, often on windows, presumably expensive to strip or replace, more so than other parts of a house. According to the reviewer, the large costs of doing something about all these houses would easily be recovered by the health gains accruing. The sort of big infrastructure project ($33 billion's worth) which might help a struggling economy along - but she holds out little hope of action any time soon.