HITTING THE HEADLINES

#35

   Here in The Bus Lane we enjoy a good headline. Best of all is a fresh headline reminding us of a previous classic. Imagine our anticipation when Cameron used the dreaded veto – DAVE BLOCKS MERKOZY DEAL. Then came news that Tracey Emin had been appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy – NOW IT’S PROF BONKERS. We would have struggled to overcome our natural indifference to both these events if it wasn’t for the prospect they offered of pithily sardonic headlines to come. Otherwise, what the hell has either got to do with us?

   Users of The Bus Lane are unlikely to be consulted by anyone at any time about developments in the EU, the whys and wherefores of protecting The City as a centre for financial chicanery and who’s in or out as Top Gun at the RA. If we couldn’t name the previous incumbent, why would it matter to us if said unknown Prof was succeeded by Tracey Emin? That said, we welcomed Tracey’s elevation with the pant-wetting hilarity we thought it was intended to provoke. But no – apparently they weren’t joking. It’s “Prof Tracey” for real! Our fault – we obviously hadn’t “updated” our understanding of the meaning of the words “Professor” and “Drawing”.  Even before we could reach down our copy of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’[1], the reliably predictable Nicholas Serota confirmed “I think it’s a great appointment.” Phew, so that’s alright then.

   And those classic headlines from days gone by? Well, Cameron’s petulant “Non!” reminded most commentators of the mythical “FOG IN CHANNEL – CONTINENT ISOLATED” banner. Many believe this once appeared in The Times [or some similar organ] on various dates in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Sadly, our huge backroom staff of geriatric interns and newly-redundant elves have been unable to verify that it ever appeared in print. Wonderfully revealing though the sentiments behind it may be; the headline itself remains entirely apocryphal.

   Not so for Tracey: “FAN HITS THE SHEETS” really did appear in The Sun (yuk – spit) back in 1999 when ‘Brit Art’ was at its height. Two uncouth youths had bounced up and down on “My Bed”. You’ll know the piece: an unmade bed littered with the intimate detritus of Tracey’s private life. Fortunately, “My Bed” remained as much a work of art after being used as a trampoline as it had ever been before.

   Cameron’s use of the EU veto was obviously completely daft – no argument there - but he is to be congratulated for the thoroughly seasonal make-over he has given to the turkeys of the Lib-Dem party. Having spent the last year slowly plucking all the feathers from their futile, flightless, wings he now has them trussed, bound, basted and properly stuffed in time for Christmas.

   Do doubts linger elsewhere beyond The Bus Lane about Emin’s Professorship? Were other candidates considered, we wonder, but passed over? Clearly, the Academy regards Tracey Emin as the finest exponent of the art of drawing currently available to teach their postgraduate students. The painter Anthony Green (RA) has asserted: “She draws at the speed of thought…” And looking at some of her drawings you can almost believe that – even if, sadly, the seminal ‘thought’ seems not to have stayed around for long enough to be much considered. When we draw ‘at the speed of thought’ in The Bus Lane we call it a doodle.

   Having seen her recent retrospective at the Hayward gallery, one critic enquired disingenuously, “When will Tracey ever overcome her chronic shyness?”  The confessional nature of her art is so limiting. Down here in The Bus Lane, we have long been bored by the narrow range of her work. Everything she does is about herself and, frankly, she is not all that interesting. Her art is, however, strangely attuned to the voyeuristic excesses of the contemporary obsession with “celebrities”[2]. What was once private is now not simply made public. Worse, it is driven through a picaresque life cycle. A brief infancy of frantic encouragement builds to synthetic adulation. The most trivial details of the subject’s life of bling and glitz are grotesquely publicised. And then descends the claw-hammer of tabloid retribution. Every aspect of the celeb’s scabrous life, appearance and personality is liable to be suddenly and cruelly mocked, trashed and shredded in the interests of gormless entertainment and tabloid sales figures.

   Tracey is only one of several artists whose work dwells alongside the public laundry run by the gossip columns and ‘reality’ TV. Her art exemplifies one of the meanings of solipsism. In what may be an extreme form of scepticism, she seems to deny the possibility of any knowledge other than her own existence. Her life-story remains the subject on which she is undoubtedly the world’s greatest living expert. As a Professor of Emin she has no equal, but what else – apart from confessional subject-matter and quick-as-a-flash, scratchy, line drawings – will now inform her teaching?

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[1] Kejserens nye Klæder. Hans Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, 1837

[2] Recommended reading: Fashion & Celebrity Culture. Pamela Church Gibson (Berg 2011)

Signs of The Times #1 - The New Technocracy

#34

   From time to time, we in the Bus Lane invite other distinguished flâneurs to proffer a frisson of additional enlightenment to our reader. In view of the fashion across Europe for technocrats to step up and take the reins from flailing politicians, we turn this week to a celebrated local technocrat, Sir Nigel Molesworth DVD, Aegrotat Professor of Cerulean Cogitation & Urbane Sprawl at the University of Tooting.

   Last Tuesday morning (or was it Thursday?) we found Sir Nigel paddling with a group of captive gerunds and a bi-polar rhomboid in the shallow end of the Think-Tank at St Custard’s. After a brief altercation, he reluctantly agreed to submit the following end-of-the-pier-reviewed paper in exchange for the usual liquid lunch.

Whizz for Newtrinos: where Eisenstein may have gon a bit wrong

By Prof. (hem hem) n molesworth[1].

Sir Albert Eisenstein was well braney but like my unfortunate encomiast peason he woz eezly distraktid by gurls eg marylin munrow. Sometimes he make films when he shud have been doing prep. I partikly like the one where lots of tutors in armur are having a big battle and go falling thru the ice. It wasn’t so terrible, not like the one about ivan novello. Or there was anuther called Battleship Ptolemy where a tini tot in a pram go beyonce beyonce beyonce down the odessa steppes (boo hoo) and soldjers is shootin at matron so it was not that bad after orl. (It make me shudder sa molesworth 2).

Well, i arsk you, is it any wonder the rusians ended up with a starling as there dictator?

But I digress. Wot realy matters is that brian epstein workt out his grate THEORY of RELATIVITY which make sense of life, the universe and everythink. Yeah, yeah, yeah! And wot is that grate theory to us, pray, prof nigel (hem hem) I here you arsk? Aktualy, no one realy kno. Dr Fotherington-tomas sa it is all about everything being related to everythink else. But I sa that is hippy crap and he is utterly wet and a weed. Someone shud tuough him up. Peason sa relativity is about us all being kith and kin. Kith my arth sa molesworth 2.

I diskard them bothe.

I sa that wot Rickstein realy mean is that energy is the same as everythink else timesed by itself. Witch as any fule kno mean you have to go v fast if u want to travel in time and never be late ever agane. And you get v tyred as a result. John steinbeck sa that no one can go as fast as lite for very long coz everythink gets v heavy. Chiz chiz. Even yore arms and legs.

Which bring me to newtrinos. Roger sam hammerstein tell you that this is Latin for newts. Now everyone kno that fastest thing in universe is speed at which Grabber and his chums at BOSS[2] can trouser a cash bonus. Next fastest thing is lite.

So why are so many brane-boxes getting so xcited about newtrinos? I here you arsk. Let prof nigel (hem hem) explane in simple terms. Listen carefly, I only sa this once.

Well first a load of newts was fired by the mighty death-ray blaster from swizerland to italy thru miles of solid rock and some swot sa they arrive sooner than little miss sunshine was xpecting. This is so obviously wrong I hesitate to go on but it seem I must. One reason is that all newts look the same espeshly when they are all skwashed and bashed up. So who kno if the ones turning up in italy are the same as the ones shot from Genevieve? Second reason is that lite cant travel thru solid rock as any clot shud kno – otherwise it wud not be so dark inside caves wud it? So of coarse the newts get there first if they go in a strate line and the lite have to go up hill and down dale. And anuther reason is dead obvious if you just look at the mapp. Going from swizerland to italy is down hill all the way. They shud next try firing the newts upwards from italy. Then they wud see that I wos right in the end.

Enuf said.

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Professor Molesworth’s latest book All There is to Kno About Space (Six pages, lavishly illustrated) is available from Pukonboox.com for a measly 4.5 trillion of yore earth £££s

Next Week: Signs of The Times #2 – the New Buffoonery by Jeremy Clarkson

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[1] nigel molesworth appear curtsy of Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle. See also www.stcustards.free-online.co.uk

[2] B.O.S.S. = Bank of Swizzes & Swindles

In the vicinity of clouds

#33

   The Greeks have a word for what is happening, hundreds of words in fact. To them we are indebted for Tragedy, Anxiety, Democracy, Ethics, Idiocy, Comedy, Agony, Abyss, Apology, Asylum, Dilemma, Monopoly, Xenophobia, Piracy, Police, …in fact a whole plethora – there, that’s another one. All of the above might usefully be applied to an analysis (Greek) of the chaos (tick √) besetting the European (√) economy (√) and politics (√). Commentators everywhere are busy describing the Euro (√) Crisis (√) using words liberated (no, sorry – that’s Latin) from the Greeks… Payment to Athens of some long-overdue royalties on this extensive vocabulary would surely offer an original and lasting solution to the problem of Hellenic debt.

   This week, the circus (Greek) has decamped (whoops, that’s French) to Rome, ultimate source of the remainder of the English language except for the Nordic/Anglo-Saxon bits (mainly to do with boating, building and farming) and the ones that Shakespeare just made-up when it suited him (e.g. barefaced, critical, monumental, castigate, countless and obscene). Come to think of it, you could try arranging those examples into a fairly pithy (Anglo-Saxon) sentence summarising the failures of the recent G20 summit (Shakespeare) in Cannes.

   Joking apart, the European cabal (Hebrew) of the global banking oligopoly (Greek) is hitting the buffers because somebody somewhere suddenly decreed levels of sovereign debt to be un-sustainable (Saxon prefix added to a Latin word). The heavy burden of government debt in the USA, Britain, Ireland and across Southern Europe is the result of trying to stave-off the inevitable for a period of thirty years. Sooner or later, the de-regulation of rapacious asset-strippers begun by Reagan and Thatcher was bound to end in tears. Their so-called Big Bang (Norse) united the investment bankers of the world in a grand endeavour to sucker Governments, home-buyers and pension funds into the greatest Ponzi scheme (American!) of all time. And a generation of politicians gleefully played along; happy to use the time-honoured principle of ‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’. How else did they think it could end but in the present slow-motion, multi-national train-wreck?

   So, what is to be done? I don’t hear any of you asking me. The advice of Her Majesty’s Government is that we all hide behind the sofa for a year or two. But The Bus Lane can now exclusively reveal that desperate Eurocrats are turning to the rightfully long-neglected economic theories of the undistinguished Italian academic, Professor Goccia Dalle-Nubi. From the serenity of his ivory-clad tower in the Faculty di Follia at the factitious Università di Pazzesche, the Professor has consistently advanced his Theory of Ambiguità Creativa, which may loosely be translated as ‘creative ambiguity’. Financed by grants from Sorpresa Inc and his godfather’s fabled Sicilian bank Inatteso S.A., Dalle-Nubi has obsessively researched his data and marshalled his evidence ever since his premature release from a secure psychiatric facility in 1979.

   In its simplest form, Dalle-Nubi’s contention is that, when viewed historically, the most successful technique for stimulating economic growth has been to persuade governments to follow policies that are, quite simply and unashamedly, utterly unexpected. The first inkling we had that ‘creative ambiguity’ was once again loose in the world came when George Papandreou announced that Greece would hold a referendum on the bail-out deal. Sarkozy and Merkel were predictably horrified (not being in the habit of consulting their populations on matters European). They demanded to know where the idea had come from and the fingers all pointed at Dalle-Nubi.

   With increasing confidence, his growing army of supporters around the world – the soi disant ‘Communité des Nubiles’ – proclaim that ‘creative ambiguity’ has been the missing link – some would even say ‘the God Particle’ – of the global economic system down all the years since Keynes first published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money back in 1936. Seventy-five years on, and despite (or - possibly – because of) the continuing ‘heads-in-the-sand’ attitude of the World Bank and the IMF, leading hedge-funds and bankers are spearheading a desperate campaign to prevent the Eurocrats and their political puppets from putting Dalle-Nubi’s theory at the epicentre of all future policy deliberations. Why are the money-men so afraid? Because the only thing ‘creative ambiguity’ has going for it is that it brings total uncertainty to the markets; thus – and at long last – giving the speculators a genuine run for their money. Outside the Bourse, the Nubiles can be heard chanting Victor Hugo’s maxim, “No one can resist an idea whose time has come.”

“Tant pis,” grumble the insider traders.

   Weeks ago, the markets discounted all the predictable moves. Now they are confronted by the impossibility of guessing what the hell happens next. Rumours abound that China might embark on its own version of ‘creative ambiguity’ if growth falls below 10%. The ‘utterly unexpected’ in China would most likely take the form of inviting Kim Jong Il to judge the Grand Final of the Politburo’s annual Strictly Elvis competition. (You heard it here first). Were that to happen, Germany would have little alternative but to counter with something even more devastatingly unexpected. This could involve either reverting to the currency of the Weimar Republic or invading Greece, (or possibly, both). Who can say? That’s the whole point!

   Now is the moment for George Osborne to either adopt the F Plan or at least come up with an utterly unexpected reason for not doing so. Just pointing out that Ed Balls is an annoying twat (Anglo-Saxon) will no longer suffice (Latin) as an economic policy (Greek).

In Memoriam

Susan Elizabeth Parr : 14 February 1946 – 22 October 2011

   When our sister, Susan Armstrong, married Harvey Parr at Northwood Church in the summer of 1968, they promised to love and cherish each other until they were parted by death. Never was such a promise more completely honoured. Throughout the eight long years of Sue’s brave battle against cancer, Harvey was by her side at every step: every hospital visit, every consultation, every bout of therapy, every blood-test and transfusion.

   He shared her joy at every success and relief at every remission. He helped her find the strength to carry on past every setback. When the end approached, Harvey was equal to the final challenge. He was a tower of strength for the whole family. He literally moved heaven and earth to enable Sue to spend her last days in peace, and without pain, in her own bedroom, in her own home and with her family around her. No one could have done more for Sue and we all stand in awe of his loving care, devotion and compassion.

   Together, Sue and Harvey built their careers and their delightful family home, shared all their sorrows and joys for forty three years of marriage, raised their two sons and, just one short year ago, celebrated the birth of Theo – their first grandchild. With Sue’s departure, little Theo has lost his paternal grandmother, Ben & Tim have lost their mother, Carol and I have lost our big sister and Harvey has lost his soul-mate. The waves of grief spread outwards to all her family and friends and they do not diminish as they travel. She was greatly loved and is greatly missed.

   When Sue and Carol and I were children ourselves, styles of parenting were rather different from what is considered normal today. When we transgressed, our parents left us in no doubt as to our deficiencies. If we did something right, they tended to confirm that this was no more than was expected. The effect of this upbringing was to make Sue into a perfectionist. But the only person of whom she ever demanded perfection was herself.

   She worked tirelessly at her profession as a Physiotherapist, as a wife, and mother and ultimately as the doyenne of our extended family. Of all the critics I have ever encountered, none could stop me in my tracks so completely as Sue, when she would look me in the eye, shake her head and say quietly;

“Oh…David…”

   My younger sister, Carol, joined Harvey in devotedly nursing Sue through her last days. And when the three of us were together at Sue’s bedside my thoughts sometimes drifted back to the days in the early 1960s when Harvey, Susan, Carol and I had all been pupils at Ashlyns School, in Berkhamstead. In those far off days - now forever sunlit in my memory - the words of the King James Bible washed over us every day in assembly or in the school Chapel.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;

thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

They said it was the Psalm of David. I always liked that one and I rely on it coming back to me at times like this.

   While Sue lay dying, I was already searching high and low for some words from the great canon of English literature appropriate to our feelings for her. When Harvey told me that Sue had chosen a woodland burial, in the countryside she always knew and loved - the peaceful woods and fields which were the last scenery she saw from her bedroom window – my attention kept returning to a few lines from a sentimental poem I had been required to learn for English homework, one evening in the long ago at Ashlyns. 

   They were written by the Edwardian poet Rupert Brooke who, like Sue, was given time to contemplate the approach of death. Our farewell to Sue is offered in these lines:

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace,

Under an English heaven.

Think of A Really Big Number…

# 31

No, bigger than that. Bigger still. Think money. Then double it. Well done, and there you have it: £2,700,000 (£2.7 million) the average annual “earnings” of a senior executive in a FTSE 100 Company. That didn’t hurt (much) did it? Now divide this figure by 219 and you get £12,328 (keep up at the back!). That’s what you’d earn in a year working 40 hours per week for 52 weeks at the minimum wage.

219? Well 219:1, actually – now there’s a ratio that might tell you something about the causes of social unrest. Of course, not everyone’s on the minimum wage. Currently, 8.1% of the working population are unemployed. In reality that means 2.57 million people. And what’s their income likely to be? Let’s see, the maxima for weekly, contribution-based, payments of Job-Seeker’s Allowance are £67.50 if you are over 25, £53.45 if you are aged 16-24 years. In other words, a FTSE 100 boss takes out an annual income that is greater by a multiple of 971 than that of any one of our younger, jobless, hooded-folk. For grotesque inequality on a comparable scale I can’t think of any more recent parallel than the Ancien Regime in France on the brink of the revolution in 1789. And we all know where that led…a frenzy of knitting at the base of La Guillotine, was it not?

Here in the Bus Lane we’re beginning to wonder if these inequalities aren’t wrong by a factor of about 10. Perhaps the annual earnings of the people at the top of the company shouldn’t be much more than twenty (not 200) times greater than the earnings of those at the bottom of the heap. This is not to say that no one can earn £2.7 million in a single year – but if they do, then the lowest paid employee in their organisation needs to be on a salary of £135,000. Fair do’s?

People talk of the “million pound bonus culture” in the City of London. The claim is that top executives are paid a “relatively low basic salary” which can be boosted by “performance-related bonuses” to take them up to the magical figure of £2.7 million.  On closer examination, the “basic” salary turns out to be around £1 million for starters, with the second or third million arriving in the form of bonuses.

Most of the people we encounter in the Bus Lane buy lottery tickets in pursuit of that elusive first £1 million. Yet most of the FTSE 100 top execs will tell you that they need to be paid “competitive” salaries + bonuses to prevent them going abroad… It would surely have benefited our economy greatly if some of our ‘top’ bankers and speculators had pissed-off abroad rather sooner.

Somewhere in our society there is a strange divide between the habitually lowly paid and the imperatively highly paid. Counter-intuitively, the line seems correlated with the degree to which a person enjoys their job. Perversely, it seems that the people with the best, most interesting jobs get paid most, while the people with the most tedious jobs get paid least.

The explanation is simple. If people doing boring, repetitive or physically strenuous jobs find they can make enough to live on by working four days a week then they’ll throw a sickie for the fifth day. Wouldn’t you? By contrast, people who enjoy their jobs and derive great satisfaction from their work, will probably work many hours of overtime for little or no extra pay.

In truth, the working population divides into those who enjoy their work and those who don’t. Those who enjoy it would probably still turn up every day if you halved their salaries. Those who resent their every working hour will only keep clocking-on until they’ve made enough to see them through to next week. For this reason alone, there’s something wrong if the people with the best jobs (the most interesting, varied, exciting, satisfying etc) get paid 200 times more than the people with the dullest jobs. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

And then there’s one more divide. It’s similar but not identical. That’s the divide between the people (aka “the super-rich”) who claim they need to be paid at least £1 million p.a. to get them out of bed and the rest who would never get out of bed if they had their £1 million. And which am I? Give me my million pounds and you’ll find out soon enough.

Who knows what about anything?

# 30

   If you haven’t yet seen ‘Tinker, Tailor …’[1] it can only be because you’re waiting for me to give it the Bus Lane Seal of Approval. Consider it done… there, I’ve stamped it: “APPROVED” – just don’t ask me to summarise the plot for you. I was doing quite well, following the ins and outs, until Trigger[2] turned up to assist George Smiley with his enquiries. Seems that Trigger[3] was working for MI5 all along… maybe that medal they gave him wasn’t just for looking after his brush so diligently after all[4]. In a week when media nitwits are nattering about Strictly Come X Factor it was just such a pleasure and a relief to experience entertainment made with such intelligence. It is not the film of the book[5]; it stands apart, a piece of work in its own right. And so it should, with John le Carré listed as one of its Executive Producers. (You probably knew that le Carré is French for ‘the square’ – I confess, I didn’t).

   If anything ‘Tinker, Tailor…’ is a film about looking. Smiley is both watchful and reticent. Nothing is ever perfectly clear, the focus keeps slipping. Everywhere there is mistrust and ambiguity. Early in the story, Smiley visits his optician and emerges with new spectacles – bi-focals with noticeably larger lenses. The colours are all muted, mainly shades of brown and grey and, because it’s the seventies, many scenes take place in a haze of cigarette smoke. The re-creation of time and place is perfect; from the ill-fitting, tweedy, three-piece suits to the self-adjusting suspension on Peter Guillam’s[6] Citroen DS. Scenes are often visited through windows, giving scope for reflections and the possibility of the watcher also being watched. At The Circus, people ascend and descend in a goods lift which displays a warning against losing one’s head. Within the maze of offices and archives, a ‘dumb-waiter’ ferries files mysteriously from floor to floor…but for whose benefit? Across the office, there is always someone listening on headphones. Are they listening to you, or to a phone-tap or to some previous conversation?

   I didn’t notice a name-check in the credits for a ‘focus-puller’ so perhaps it’s either (or both) of the Editor (Dino Jonsäter) and the Cinematographer (Hoyte Van Hoytema) who was responsible for the masterly changes in focus within takes, enabling attention to switch from the foreground to the distance and back. This technique practically reaches orgasm in the airfield scene where Smiley stands on a runway and reduces Toby Esterhase[7] to tears while a twin-engine plane comes menacingly in to land behind them. I don’t know what the safety margins were when they filmed that, but I hope it wasn’t all done afterwards by Framestore.

   Reviewers describe the movie as having ‘no moral certainty’, and they’re absolutely right. I don’t just mean Kathy Burke’s hilarious observation that the middle-aged inhabitants of The Circus were all seriously “under-fucked”. The wayward Ricki Tarr[8] is the perfect antithesis to the shallow certainty and one-dimensional idiocy of James Bond. Where 007 was all sophistication, sophistry and improbable violence, Ricki is scruffy, unlucky and real. When did we ever see James Bond call ‘M’ from a red telephone box with prostitutes’ calling cards on the window?

   Smiley believes Karla is flawed by fanaticism, Karla knows that George is flawed by his love for the faithless Anne. And he’s still got the inscribed cigarette lighter to prove it. The look of speechless desolation on Percy Alleline’s[9] face after the traitor has been exposed (along with his treasured Project Witchcraft) has to be seen to be believed. And The Mole? Of course it was aarrggghh[10] all along. Think Kim Philby.

  

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[1] ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ Dir. Tomas Alfredson

[2] Yes, Trigger – the road sweeper from Only Fools & Horses.

[3] In ‘Tinker, Tailor..’ Roger Lloyd Pack plays Mendel, late of MI5.

[4] Google ‘Trigger’ – there’s a clip from the relevant episode on U-Tube

[5] Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, 1974

[6] Benedict Cumberbatch

[7] David Dencik

[8] Tom Hardy

[9] Toby Jones

[10] Alright, it was Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) of course, Anne’s erstwhile lover to Smiley’s enduring distress.

Enjoy Until . . .

# 29

   Governments around the world have had a variety of concerns on their bureaucratic minds this week. Several, I hear, are running campaigns to discourage ‘celebratory gunfire’; fortunately not something frequently encountered in England. The dangers of firing Kalashnikovs into the air, Libyan-style, should be evident to anyone capable of releasing the safety catch. Gravity insists that what goes up must surely come back down. It’s not rocket science – or rather it is, but only at the most elementary level. A spent bullet, having reached the apogee of its trajectory, begins to descend from somewhere high in the sky. Returning to earth, it will achieve a terminal velocity of around 91 metres per second. (That’s close to 300 feet/sec before VAT). And terminal it most probably would be if it were to land on some unfortunate’s head.

So please, chaps, let’s go easy on those triggers.

   Meanwhile, here in the UK, it seems that research has shown the citizens to be easily confused and our government – unreliably watchful on our behalf – now wants to save us from getting baffled by ‘Use By’, ‘Sell By’, ‘Best Before’ and ‘Display Until’ date-stamps on packaged food. I wonder which of these we are thought incapable of understanding? They all seem to have quite plain and reasonably specific meanings. ‘Sell By’ and ‘Display Until’ are obviously stock-control parameters. Admittedly, ‘Best Before’ is slightly vague but the meaning of ‘Use By’ is pretty clear and it is possibly almost as effective as the traditional scratch and sniff techniques on which we previously relied. In these litigious times, we must not forget that the ‘Use By’ date is cited to protect the manufacturer rather than the consumer. With only a minor revision it would read ‘Sue By’ – so let’s have no more confusion in that regard.

   The predilection for date-stamping things is now extending away from food into areas where it is needed even less. You could apply ‘Tolerate Until’ to priests, politicians and all manner of similar irritants. I bought a bouquet of flowers in Sainsbury’s the other day and only later did I notice that the wrapper bore the dictum ‘Enjoy Until…’ Cut any flowers and their inevitable decay is accelerated, but the manner and visibility of the transitions from bud to full bloom and ultimately to withered stem reveals their essence, their poetry, indeed their ‘poiesis’. Do we really need to be told when to stop enjoying this process of revelation? And even if that were the case, how might we arrest our enjoyment on the date prescribed by Mr Sainsbury? Should we perhaps poke our own eyes out? And how does he decide the date of ‘Until’? Is it ‘until tomorrow’, ‘until the twelfth of never ’ or ‘until hell freezes over’?

Where is Auden when you need him? Imagine if Wistan had suffered the patronising indignity of finding an ‘Enjoy Until …’ date, rubber-stamped on his cut flowers. Rest assured, he’d have given them an Until for their money:

“…Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:

‘O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day….”

The lines quoted above are from ‘As I walked Out One Evening’ by W. H. Auden and there is more besides if you didn’t already know of it.  During an evening stroll, Auden’s narrator hears two other voices declaim on conflicts between Life and Time. Auden’s habitual stoicism restores a measure of calm in the final stanza, without resort to celebratory gunfire:

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

And the deep river ran on.

Read or re-read all fifteen stanzas and see if that doesn’t take the mind off gunfire, shopping and date-stamps for a while.

A feral over class?

# 28

   Someone has got some explaining to do; or at least some serious thinking as a prelude to offering a more convincing explanation. It’s just too easy – let alone wrong and gormless - to blame the riots and ‘our broken society’ solely on something they are calling ‘the feral under-class’. If there is an under class and their behaviour is indeed feral – presumably using feral as an adjective meaning untamed (cf feral cats) and uncultivated (cf wild flowers) – our starting point has to be that they did not make (or even ‘un-make’) themselves that way. The existence of consistent and enduring social relationships is a pre-condition for the process known as ‘socialisation’ to take place. It was ‘socialisation’ during our childhoods that prevented the rest of us from growing up ‘feral’. No recognisable social structure, no family life to speak of = no socialisation. Who was the British Prime Minister who said (Clue: in 1987) that there was no such thing as society? And then proceeded to do her (Clue) level best to smash any worthwhile social framework that did not conform to her own stridently petty bourgeois (Clue) mentality and her obsession with the private-self?

   It’s not as if we weren’t warned; as if no one saw what was coming. Alan Bennett was only one among many. In his play Forty Years On (first staged at the Apollo Theatre, London, in 1968) the Headmaster laments,

“We have become a battery people, a people of under-privileged hearts fed on pap in darkness, bred out of all taste and season to savour the shoddy splendours of the new civility.”

More than forty years have passed since Forty Years On and the comparison with battery chickens remains horribly accurate.

   Gradually during my lifetime the values I learned at school concerning mutuality and interdependence have been overwhelmed by notions of individuality and the accompanying imperative to seek immediate gratification. Qualities of loyalty, trust, self-discipline and commitment have all been shot to pieces or at best gone missing in action. The simplest adjective we have to describe the sociological concept of ‘the unrestrained self’ is selfish. At the end of his book The Corrosion of Character (1998), Richard Sennett wrote that a regime “which provides human beings no deeper reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.”

   And staying with Richard Sennett; his masterly 1977 work The Fall of Public Man describes how, in the nineteenth century, wealth gave individuals commanding access to the public realm. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, wealth was increasingly being used to ensure protection from the public realm. With the post-war settlement here in Britain, there came the universal franchise, nationalised industries, state education, extensive public housing, the NHS and the rest of the Welfare State. In response to all this socialism, wealth immediately sought access to tax-consultants, holding companies, private trusts, off-shore bank accounts, private education, gated communities and private medicine. And the new morality that accompanied these new uses for wealth was the morality of the private self. It became a morality unrestrained by worries about neighbours, communities and the public good. It was a morality of individual greed which to any reasonable observer might seem to be no morality at all – to be borderline feral in fact.

   To date (September 2011), about 1,300 people have been before the magistrates on charges arising from the riots across England this summer. By comparison, only a handful of parliamentarians were taken to court in the wake of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal. The number facing charges was but a fraction of the more than 300 MPs and peers slapped on the wrists and allowed to pay back sums they had fiddled on their expenses. To the best of my knowledge, not one single banker or city-trader has been prosecuted in the British courts for the scandalous breaches of trust, the years of professional negligence, the total disregard for the public interest and the widespread dereliction of due diligence that preceded the financial collapse of 2007/8. Dodgy and immoral though the activities Sir Fred Goodwin and his ilk may have been, they apparently weren’t illegal and therefore can’t be prosecuted. Which is hardly surprising when you consider that it’s others of his ilk in parliament, in the law courts and at the Bank of England who make the laws and regulations in the first place.

   Deep down inside, banking depends on a confidence trick. It lends out money which isn’t really there. Thus, when the sub-prime shit finally hit the speculative fan, excremental bad-debt rained down on all the economies of the western world. Governments obediently pumped public money into the failing banks. It was the tax-payers who had to put all their futures in hock to bail-out the delinquents. Suddenly it was okay for private debt to become public debt. Five minutes later the same bankers were telling us that we were living beyond our means and had allowed sovereign debt to spiral out of control. Excuse me? Wasn’t it the bankers who’d been living beyond everyone’s means? No, apparently not, and so we now endure an indefinite period of austerity until the perpetrators decide the public deficit is under control. That’s surely some catch, that Catch-22!

   In recent blogs I have banged-on at length about the unethical behaviour of politicians, lawyers, journalists and newspaper proprietors. These are the very people who are now telling us that the rioters came from a generation who hadn’t been brought-up to know the difference between right and wrong. Oh yes? And James Murdoch, how sure are we that he knows the difference between right and wrong? Personally, I blame the parents – especially the absent father…the broken home…

   Now is the time to pre-fix a few professionals and corporations with the ‘f’ word; a time to talk of feral capitalists, feral bankers, feral lawyers, feral journalists, feral spin-doctors and feral politicians. A whole feral over class in fact.

Aerodrome, Aerodrome, wherefore art thou Aerodromeo?

# 27

Among many unnecessary things to have come to my attention during the past week, the decision of Collins to drop the word ‘Aerodrome’ from the next edition of their dictionary is the one I have found the most inimical and asinine. Apparently, in the opinion of some chinless researcher, the word has become obsolete. It will doubtless soon be followed into outer darkness by the words ‘Publisher’ and ‘Dictionary’.

Whether the plonkers at Collins get it or not, an aerodrome is a very special kind of place fully deserving a noun with a complex set of meanings and associations. Even at its simplest, an aerodrome is more than merely an ‘airfield’ and both are different in scale and purpose from an ‘airport’. Gatwick and Stansted are airports. Biggin Hill is an aerodrome.   An aerodrome has to be, primarily, a large expanse of short grass, with or without a permanent runway. It should have at least one hangar and preferably be surrounded by a hedge. From a distance, a faded orange windsock signals its presence. Ideally, the windsock is the first thing you see from a country lane until you get close enough to glimpse the movement of propeller-driven aeroplanes through gaps in the hedgerow. If you are lucky, a Tiger Moth or a Dragon Rapide will be taxiing close by and the hedge will sway and heave dramatically in the prop-wash as the pilot turns into the wind and revs for take-off. At twilight, grey wraiths wheel ghostly flying machines bearing names like Hawker, Avro, Supermarine, Fairey and Sopwith out from the shadows and prepare them for flight. If the sun’s going down and the cloud base is getting lower by the minute and you’re looking for a place to land your Auster Aiglet or DH Chipmunk by visual flight rules, using only a compass and manual controls then - whether Mr Collins likes it or not - what you’re looking for is an aerodrome.

The word comes, of course, from the Greek. Aeros  (air) and dromos, meaning a course for running races. It is a descendant of Hippodrome: hippos meaning horse combined with dromos - again. The French word is aérodrome and when you consider that the old Royal Flying Corps was operating on the Western Front when the RAF was formed in 1918, it clearly made sense to bring the word home. Even today, flights by British and French military aircraft over Libya are still termed sorties by both airforces, (from the French sortir – to go out).

The impending loss of ‘aerodrome’ is another depressing reminder of how impoverished the general public’s experience of flying has become. When did travel by aeroplane cease to be exciting, something to anticipate, to relish and enjoy? When did it crumple into the drab, dull, manipulated push and shove offered by Rien Air and Cheasy Jet?

There was a time – okay in my boyhood, long ago in the 1950s - when the prospect of flying caused genuine excitement. A thrill so great I sometimes had to run outside and stare up at the sky. The excitement was hardly lessened even if it was someone else who would actually be getting on the aeroplane. I can still recall a day when my family took Nana – my mother’s mother - to what was then London’s only airport at Heathrow. I was nine or maybe just ten years old. I was up at dawn, studying the high pink clouds, watching them float across the blue dome of the heavens like turreted castles and islands waiting to be explored. Flying promised to be the adventure that took you over the silver rim of a child’s horizon. The sky that morning looked ready for flight; Nana, regrettably, didn’t. Born in eighteen-eighty something, she was going to visit her sisters in Philadelphia. She had been there twice before, both times by sea. All the way to the airport she insisted that she didn’t hold with aviation; “If the Good Lord wanted us to fly, He’d have given us wings…” What a waste, I thought, letting her anywhere near an aeroplane.

For transatlantic flyers, Heathrow in those days consisted of a row of single-storey pre-fabricated huts, abandoned by the air-force at the end of the war. Inside these, I remember armchairs like those in our living room at home, cast-iron radiators and floors of scuffed brown linoleum. The few airlines on offer were represented by single desks, each displaying a small flag or a model aeroplane and a telephone. I coveted the models but would have settled for a flag. It was here that tickets were cursorily checked before passengers’ suitcases were carried - by hand - out through a single door at the back. And what a sight waited out there. Through the domestic scale, metal-framed, windows I glimpsed the slim elegance of a Lockheed Super-Constellation, beyond that a sturdy Douglas DC7 and taxiing in the far distance, the generous, gleaming, silver hull of an improbably large Boeing Stratocruiser. As it moved along, the Boeing dwarfed a line of Douglas DC3 Dakotas – or “tail-draggers” as they were being called because they lacked the nose wheel of more modern, post-war, designs. Mind you, there was one spectacularly daft effort – the early versions of the De Havilland Heron – which had a modern nose-wheel, but one which couldn’t retract. You could always identify a Heron – it droned across the sky appearing to have a drip of snot perpetually hanging from its nose.

In the far off ‘50s at Heathrow North, ‘Security’ and ‘Passport Control’ were at the far end of the hut where a man in uniform waited beside one of those waist-high rope barriers you still see sometimes in banks and post offices. Here, passengers said their goodbyes to the relatives who had accompanied them in droves. The experience of flying was such a novelty that everyone wanted to be in on it, even if all they could hope to do was just to wave and sniff, taking in the glamour and excitement of it all. Eyes were dabbed with handkerchiefs (no tissues in those days) and then we relatives obediently stood aside. The man unclipped the hook at the end of the rope and beckoned the anointed traveller through. No questions, no searches, they just had to be clutching a passport and a ticket. 

Afterwards, everyone left behind stood on the grass outside the huts and watched through the wire fence as friends or loved ones were guided in a wandering crocodile across the tarmac to the mobile stairway which would lead them up, up and away into the cabin of their airliner.

My first chance to fly across the North Atlantic came sooner than I’d dared to hope. In the summer of 1960 I flew with my sister Sue to visit our parents in Washington DC which, in those days, didn’t even have an international airport. Eero Saarinen’s graceful terminal building for the new John Foster Dulles airport was then only at the design stage. So we flew to Baltimore instead. The airline had to be BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation; also known, fondly, as ‘Better On A Camel’). Our plane was a De Havilland Comet. The 4b version was newly into service by then and was still proudly the world’s first commercial jet-powered airliner. In England, the Boeing 707 was still only an approaching rumour.

Our little Comet probably carried about fifty or sixty passengers. Its successor, the 707, carried at least twice that number and became the definitive symbol of 1960s jet-set style and glamour. The gangway descending from a Boeing forms the essential backdrop to so many photos of Frank Sinatra, Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren…and eventually, The Beatles. Nowadays, lurking paparazzi snap celebrities in some generic VIP lounge or clock them strutting self-importantly past the throng of plebs filling the airport concourse. The actual aeroplane is no longer the all-important confirmation of their celebrity status because the airliner has lost its glamour. How do you get excited about an Airbus? It’s a flying tube. Getting on an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 737-800 at Gatwick has about the same allure as taking the Northern Line from Tooting Bec on a wet Monday.

All those years ago, on that forever shining summer morning, our tiny Comet fled west from Heathrow but at first only as far as Shannon on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. There, it took on board as much fuel as it could carry, metaphorically drew a few deep breaths, ignited its four Rolls-Royce Avon gas turbines, and roared into the sky. We climbed steadily away from the rocky coast, out over the estuary and the steel-grey ocean, up through the clouds until everything below us was white and everything above was blue. Only the tapering sweep of our wings remained reassuringly silver.

At Gander in Newfoundland, with the tanks drained of all but the maker’s name, we skimmed in low across the endless pines and landed gratefully to refuel. There followed a leisurely progress down the East Coast to Idlewild (now JFK) outside New York. Next, a stumpy-winged Lockheed Electra whined into the air and flew us down to Baltimore via – for some unaccountable reason – Wilmington in Delaware. But I didn’t care; flying was magnificent and the more take-offs and landings that were on offer, the happier I would be.

Those scruffy pre-fab huts at Heathrow North, the nationalised BOAC and its fleet of blue, white and silver Comets and Bristol Britannias all belonged to the post-war years of government-sponsored ‘Civil Aviation’. Now of course, in these modern, privatised and de-regulated, times the word civil (which does at least imply a semblance of courtesy) no longer applies as any sort of prefix to commercial aviation. The travelling public have become just so many credit cards waiting to be rinsed. Passengers are quantities to be searched, scanned, monitored, categorised and processed by airlines and airports. ‘Extra Charges’ pop-up here, there and everywhere so that operators can recover the margins given away to set the initial bait of low cost fares. Modern airports seem designed to sort, muster and control travellers as if they were tins of beans on conveyor-belts in a supermarket warehouse. Ideally, they’d like to palletise each plane-load of travellers, throw a net tightly over the lot, and load us via the cargo-hatches using a gigantic fork-lift.

Airports seem wilfully designed to deny travellers any view of even parked aircraft, let alone the runways. You might just see the nose cone and cockpit windows of your waiting Airbus shortly before you are expelled down some featureless tube straight into the aircraft’s cabin.

When and where did it all go wrong? Was it just me getting older that took the fun, the thrill and even the sense of anticipation out of flying? Only Peter Pan can fly forever with a child’s imagination, but am I wrong to want air travel to be more sensational than a journey into London on the 159 bus? We can’t just blame the impoverished experience on the advent of low-cost carriers. I flew to New York on Freddie Laker’s DC-10 Sky-Train in the early eighties and that wasn’t so grim. And the staff weren’t all entirely indifferent or plainly bored out of their skulls.

Airports seem to be run on the principle that security is only tight when it causes as much inconvenience as possible to as many people as possible. As a strategy to protect the public it is both blunt and gormless. The searches, the x-ray scanning of bags and making everyone remove their trouser belts and shoes and earrings…what does that do?  Are we so witless that we cannot look along a line of two hundred passengers waiting for a holiday flight to the Algarve and point to the six who it might be wise to search? Why are we searching the other 194 and making grannies remove their shoes and young mothers hold up their baby’s bottle in a transparent plastic bag? If they only searched three in every hundred passengers they might at least search them properly. Instead, they search everyone equally badly. Grannies and granddads from Romford heading for Marbella with the grandchildren, are they likely to want to blow up the plane? I don’t think so – they wouldn’t threaten anyone, except maybe on a Saturday night down at the Dog & Bucket when they’ve had a few and West Ham have lost at home…again.

Every airport concourse should display a banner quoting the line Berthold Brecht gave to Arturo Ui; ‘We only want what’s best for you, and we know best what’s best for you.’ Manage your expectations downwards; forget all about comfort or excitement. Shut your mouth, close your eyes and open your wallet. From the moment you arrive at the departure airport to the moment you leave your destination airport you can forget all about comfort, enjoyment and dignity. They have all gone and will never return. Accept that you will wait endlessly in line for no apparent reason, or else be left fretting on uncomfortable chairs in overcrowded waiting areas. You can’t call them lounges (no ‘comfort’, remember?) and they are dominated by unnecessary ‘shopping opportunities’ – as if you aren’t already hauling enough crap to last the fortnight.

When your flight lights-up “Boarding” on the departures screen you begin the long trudge to an always distant gate. Accept that your plane will never go from any of the first 20 empty gates past which you have to trundle before finding the one allotted to you. Turn off your mind and accept tedium – the cabin-crew and ground staff of your airline already have, it’s the only way they can get through their working shift. They will herd you like cattle at the boarding gate, slowly checking your boarding passes and passports. When they are feeling particularly bored or grumpy they will pick on passengers at random and make them try to fit their hand luggage into the prescribed iron cage. If your bag fails to fit without a struggle expect to be publicly humiliated and charged an extra thirty or forty quid per bag. Cough up and in return you get to wait at the other end of the flight for your bag to be off-loaded (hopefully) and dumped onto a carousel – unless it’s now en route to Yokohama by mistake. Oh joy!

There follows another long wait which remains forever unexplained. Then you queue again to have those same boarding passes and passports checked. This is in case you have changed your identity or destination since they were last checked – at the other end of the same room. Stay calm and shuffle down the airless, sloping, tube which connects to the aircraft’s cabin. Here, the flight crew await. Just a glance at their poor skin conditions and podgy figures will shoot-down any lingering confidence you had in this ‘no frills’ airline. Before you can be seated, your paperwork is checked again. This is a precaution lest your DNA has reconfigured itself in the sloping tube and you have become someone else.

Finally, reluctantly, you turn and face the long, wide, low-ceilinged, cabin. No matter how far forward you thought you were in the queue, the plane is always already crowded. How did all these burly buggers get here first? You may well ask. They don’t waste time allocating seats anymore; apparently random seating is not much more time-consuming than any other method of filling the plane. Give up. “Sit down and belt up,” is the next instruction, followed by the improbable pantomime of the safety announcement – including totally not-reassuring details about lifejackets and oxygen masks. “…and follow the illuminated dots on the floor to the exits – which on this A320 Airbus are located here and here…” (Watch where she’s waving her arms, you idiots). The best you can hope for is that this grotty tube will get you to your destination without requiring additional oxygen, bracing yourself in the crash position or having to swim for it.

Between them, the security people, the airport managers, RienAir and CheasyJet have successfully kicked the proverbial out of any sense of adventure, romance or even enjoyment that once belonged to air travel. They advertise themselves as ‘No Frills’ and the experience they offer certainly delivers on that. And, sadly, there are now No Thrills either.