June 6th … D- day.

The re-opening of the western front in 1944 is usually seen in the West as the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. 24 000 soldiers from the United States, Britain and Canada struggled up the beaches of Normandy making the way for 140 000 more to land behind them; or were dropped behind the Atlantic Wall by parachute or glider to claw out a beachhead against ferocious Axis resistance from 50 000 soldiers – many of them conscripts from eastern Europe -that left 10 000 allied and 4- 9 000 German causalities by the end of the first day – just under half of them dead.

The first 25 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” is a sickening vision of what this must have been like; and anyone tempted to spin this horror into cheap and easy glories to batten on, to stand on platforms taking salutes while dreaming of golf courses and real estate developments, or demean these men’s suffering into unearned patriotic bragging – “two World Wars and one World Cup, doo dah, doo dah” – should be forced to watch this sequence and imagine themselves in it.

This was a huge struggle. By the end of July,  1 332 000 allied troops in Normandy were pushing 380 000 Germans back towards Paris. Casualties at this stage were around 120 000 on each side. Large cemeteries had to be built to hold and commemorate them.

This much – in outline at least – we remember. There have been commemorations on the 50th, 60th and now the 75th anniversaries. There have been feature films. Google this and you will see “7 must see D Day films” – so there must be quite a few more that are “maybe see”. Those of us of a certain age will have seen “The Longest Day” almost as many times as “The Great Escape” and have memorised catch phrases from it – “the trouble with being one of the few is that you keep getting fewer”…”The Luftwaffe has had its moment” etc etc. We are not likely to forget.

But forgetfulness can sometimes be less significant than the things we are blind to in the first place. The British version of World War 2 puts us in the centre of things, much like maps here centre on the Greenwich meridian. The Eastern Front barely features in the collective world view here – in which “plucky little Britain” “stood up to Hitler” with a bit of help from the Yanks. The Russians barely feature at all, though, if pushed, some people could reference Stalingrad – the crushing defeat in 1942 that lost the German Army 17 divisions and its delusions of invincibility – as quite important.

There are no English language feature films about Operation Bagration.  Most people here will never have heard of it unless they are military history buffs. This leads to – or grows from – an insular way of looking at the world that can further lead to serious self important mistakes when making judgments about it – in the same way that absorbing the proportions of Mercator’s projection maps makes appreciating the real and relative size of places almost impossible.

Between 23 June and 19 August 1944, an offensive by 1 670 000 Soviet troops killed or captured almost all of the half a million experienced German soldiers of Army Group Centre in what is now Belorussia. The scale of this is almost unimaginable. Army Group Centre was a quarter of the entire Wehrmacht on the eastern front. They suffered 400 000 casualties out of an initial force of 450 000.  20 Divisions were destroyed. Three quarters of the corps or divisional commanders were killed or captured. Prisoners taken in just one sector north of Minsk were paraded through Moscow 20 abreast and took an hour and a half to pass.

Red army losses were 180 000 killed and another 590 000 wounded.

So, if watching the coverage of today’s commemoration, cast your eyes and thoughts eastward as well, lest the things we are used to remembering block our minds from the things we need to know about.

The trench like strips dug out by Brent council to sew the seeds for its wildflower bee corridor jogged my memory to an actual trench that was dug in the playing field opposite where I grew up.

Thurrock council got round to filling it in during the early 1960s. Until them it had been a set of undulations at the top of the slope that we used to run up and down and in and out of. Quite fun. It was a little way away from a terrifying piece of play equipment that was like a battering ran slung with chains onto a framework like an enormous swing that bigger kids would shove wildly backwards and forwards and tell dark tales of getting enough momentum to make it loop the loop. Luckily, no one was killed.

The trench had been there since 1938. During the Munich crisis everyone was expecting war to be imminent. The Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica the previous year during the Spanish Civil War was newly scorched into people’s anxieties through newsreels at the cinema. People would often go to the pictures several times a week and there were several cinemas – including the mighty “State” on George Street, with seating for 2 200 people a time. There was room for another 800 at the Empire just round the corner in the High Street and another 1 500 at the Regent on New Road. People experienced the shock of this news together, socially – not just in family groups in front of the telly as they might have done later, or individually through their mobile phone as they would now. Word got around. Directly. Everyone believed that “the bomber will always get through”.

In the absence of the plans or capacity to issue air raid shelters that were in place by the following year, the local council dug trenches in parks for people to shelter in. Local World War 1 veterans like my grandfather – who knew how to dig a trench from bitter experience – went with their garden spades to help out.

On first hearing about this – and not knowing that it was an air raid precaution – I had assumed that the trench had been dug as a military gesture. It was at the top of a slope up to our estate’s western horizon on Wallace Road – which was sufficiently close to keep sunsets cosily domestic enough not to be a place you’d want to ride off into – and therefore perfect for the Home Guard to put flanking fire into the side of any Wehrmacht division foolish enough to venture up Hathaway Road in search of Fish and Chips at the Modern.

The mystery of the topsoil trenches in the local park is solved. Brent council has dug hundreds of long wavy strips like them across parks from one end of the borough to the other; and planted wild flower seeds to provide a bee corridor. With the terrifying decline in insect populations globally – and the sight of people in China already having to pollinate trees by hand – this is a very timely initiative. Parts of local parks were already left to “meadow” last year – making them somehow gentler, more relaxed places – as well as encouraging insect life. This is a very limited form of re-wilding – and we won’t be getting wild boar any time soon – but looking across the park now is more like being in the countryside than an over clipped, tame city space; and all the more therapeutic for that. Now that London is the world’s first National Park City and aiming for 50% green space by 2050 – even as the population goes up to nine million – we will need more and more of this.

On the high counter in the window at Nandos, three ambulance workers with thousand yard stares, sit in a line munching wraps.

Outside Kingsbury Fruit and Veg, a doppelganger of Ghandi, sitting on a bollard feeding birds.

A Buddhist priest in crimson robes carries his shopping to the bus stop, staring at the world though aviator shades, next to serious young Romanians in their Sunday best carrying heavy black bibles.

After watching and accompanying the last student climate strike demo up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square- recognising the superfluousness of my presence as an aging observer and needing the loo and a bit of mental decompression – I drop into the National Gallery.

Unwilling to disrespect it by just using it as a toilet stop – I decide that every time I go in I will take a longer look than usual at a couple of pictures and really think about them.

With no method or focus I wander through galleries full of vast swirling renaissance canvasses, epic classical dramas in operatic glowing oils that can merge into an acid trip of gloriousness if you keep your eyes unfocused. A trip in the key of baroque.

One gallery is bare. No paintings, no people. Dusty, echoey space with nothing to look at. Just deep green wallpaper, rather faded and dog eared in places – not renovated for years, tired and well used like everything else in the public realm; disguised when in use by all the heritage that obscures it.

Scorn, by Veronese catches my eye. Part of a series of four paintings called Allegories of Love, painted in the 1570’s. A semi naked man – wrapped in a shiny pink cloth that coils around his body like a snake; suggesting movement and sensuality while carefully covering his genitals – lays prostrate on the steps of a temple; while, standing above him, Cupid wallops him with his bow. Cupid looks determined and righteous. Above and behind Cupid on the temple wall is a faded and broken gargoyle of Pan – god of excess in all things – staring away into the distance with sightless stone eyes, as if he can’t bear to watch. He is the colour of ash. Next to the man’s outstretched beseeching hand – and  on a falling right to left diagonal line from Pan at the top right, through Cupid in the centre – are two women at the bottom left. The one closest to the man – and staring at him as if she would be fancy him if Cupid wasn’t beating him up – has her breasts bared as a symbol of temptation herself. Her companion – taking her by the hand and leading her away from temptation – is wearing a veil; and looking back through and beyond Cupid – presumably to something heavenly going on inside her own head.

The notes in the Gallery talk about the possible torments of feelings that are scorned, love that is unrequited. They do not refer to the historical context – that the 1570’s were the eighth decade into the first pandemic of syphilis. That the greyness of Pan and the whiplash blows of Cupid’s bow could symbolise the diseased consequences of sexual athletics, and the divided response of the women the conflict between desire and fear. The bare breasted woman looks torn between attraction and disgust. Her chaste companion looks as though she is averting her eyes because because she knows she needs to.

The ambiguity of this overtly moral painting may have only been possible because Veronese lived and worked in commercial, republican Venice, rather than straight laced Imperial Spain or any part of the Holy Roman Empire. “We painters take the same liberties as poets or mad men” was his rather brave response to the local branch of the Inquisition – when they pulled him in for questioning after he’d put jokes into a painting of the Last Supper. Laughter, it would seem,  implicitly being the work of the devil. He avoided punishment by changing the title to “The Feast in the House of Levi”. which is one way to do it. The expectations of the Spanish Inquisition may well not have allowed him to get away with that.

You can see the painting and a short version of the gallery notes here.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/paolo-veronese-scorn

The Portrait of a young Woman by Bordone is from a little earlier in the century and could probably be sub titled “He’s behind you.”. A very peevish and frightened looking young woman with a pursed mouth and flushed cheeks, dressed in shimmering pink silk, holds something mysterious in her right hand while glancing anxiously to her left. The unseen object she is holding is on the end of a chain that wraps around her waist and dangles in front of it. Is it a key, a note, a love philter?

Most of the background is a gloomy, heavy columned chamber, but in the top left of the painting, in the same direction as her look but unseen by it, is a picture within the picture. Out of a window, a perilous looking stair case with no banisters or balustrades – looking like one of Escher’s labyrinths – is topped by a gallery. Standing at the top in the distance is a man who looks as though he has suddenly frozen, after spying the young woman from behind. This is painted small and hazy, but there is a disturbing sense of menace about it. Is he a stalker, a forbidden lover, a spy for her family? She seems aware that someone is behind her but not sure who or where.

National Gallery notes here.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/paris-bordone-portrait-of-a-young-woman

On Whitehall during the last student climate strike – a thousand or two students full of life streaming North past Downing Street and the Cenotaph, all the monumental memorials to futile conflicts, beyond the Ministries and the overbearing equestrian statutes of long forgotten chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, chanting for their future – demonstrating in more ways than one that the old emperors have no clothes.

Alongside them – seemingly from a different universe – a few old men carrying Union Jacks, drifting in the opposite direction down to Parliament Square to call for a Brexit back to  world in which all problems can be solved by closing the borders.

Three of them are also off duty football fans. One with a Chelsea shirt and matching smirk, loudly broadcasting his internal monologue with the self referential swagger of an invading army. No one likes it? He don’t care.

“Bunch of Corbyn supporters. He’s a wanker!” I look him in the eye and give him one of the old fashioned looks that my family has cultivated for generations and saves up for moments such as this.

He looks nonplussed for a moment. Looks back at me slightly astonished.

“Corbyn supporter?” (as if he’d never met a real one)

“Ye -ah” Holding his gaze and saying it as though we’re far more normal than he thinks we are.

Turns to one of his mates – still astonished. “Corbyn supporter!”

Both of them turn to look at me. I look back, smiling benignly. The second, equally astonished _ “Corbyn supporter?!”

“Yeah. Gives us hope.”

They are swallowed up – still looking puzzled – by the oncoming wave of tourists – who are doggedly seeking out the sights of our museum of a society (perhaps not realising that they have just walked past a living example of them).

Last Sunday, in a bitterly cold easterly wind, the neighbour opposite stands on the pavement, staring into the open bonnet of his car. On either side, a furrow browed trio of minders gather and stare with him. Middle aged, Balkan, hunched against the wind, drawing edgily on cigarettes – as people do when there’s an unresolved task at hand – their faces lined by life and wreathed in smoke, drinking glass mugs of strong black coffee – the ghost of the Ottoman Empire in a cup. Wandering to and fro a little.

In front of them, he who knows stands in front of the car with his head bowed in concentration – and perhaps prayer – his hands moving delicately across spark plugs, valves, fluttering over nuts as though casting benediction or feeling an aura, carefully tightening this or that, screws twiddled tighter or looser. No surgeon could show more care. An oily rag is wiped lovingly, almost caressingly here and there; soothing fluids are drained from sumps or poured gently into thirsty orifices.

The minders watch, make suggestions.

Mobile phones are consulted. Fingers point and tap. Heads nod and shake. Bending seriously to get at the innards, a part is transplanted. Hands rub together. Other hands take the pulse.

Liverpool feels like the capital city of a fallen empire. The Vienna of the North West, with its massive, magnificent Georgian buildings, the vast rotting sandstone railway cuttings, streets studded with aggressively martial and regal statues.  Except that the class who shaped all these out of the profits from the slave trade are long gone; leaving the city to be inherited by the people who did the work to build it in the image of their oppressors – strolling, pattering through its broad streets and scuzzy market stalls, singing Beatles covers and Country in the pubs and grills. In one steak bar, two fellers well into their seventies belted out “Please, please me” and partied like it was 1963; notwithstanding that today Gerry and the Pacemakers has a different meaning.

The Docks are now full of museums, restaurants, boutiques and conference centres; the city centre presided over by the Mekon like structure of the Radio Tower. The wide, hazy, stinking sweep of the Mersey empty of shipping.

Outside St Georges Hall hangs a huge banner showing the faces of all the people killed at Hillsborough. “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Beneath it, a gay couple kiss on the steps, while equestrian statues of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria look the other way. At the end of the colonnade, a young woman poses for a fashion shoot – the photographer holding his tripod off the ground for a better shot. In front, a brooding statue of Benjamin Disraeli glares down in apparent discomfort at a small field of floral tributes – constantly refreshed. Disraeli’s is the only statue that is not adorned with a gull. Perhaps its the ferocity of his expression that scares them off. Even the Duke of Wellington, high up on a column well above the rooftops, and Mr Gladstone in the park, buttressed at his feet by mighty angels holding great tomes of learning and faith, are constantly adorned with a white bird keeping an eye on things and somehow saving them from terminal pomposity. I think they do it on a rota.

Liverpool was a Conservative dominated City from the eighteenth century right up to the middle of the twentieth, but they lost control of the council for the last time in 1972, their last Councillor in 1987 and got just over 4% of the vote in the 2012 mayoral election.

In the entrance to Lime Street Station stands a life size bronze statue of Ken Dodd – comedian and tax dodger – with an anodyne toothy grin and tickling stick. Rendering a floaty ludicrous object like a tickling stick in a material as epic and solid as bronze has sufficient heroic absurdity that the gulls don’t bother to sit on his head. In 1979 I saw the real Dodd working the streets on behalf of the Conservative Party in the Edge Hill by- election and trying hard to be tattyfilarious. The tickling stick – which he deployed on a group of elderly women as though he were dusting them – was blue. He was game. Fifty years of working crowds made this automatic. They giggled a bit – seemingly out of politeness. His minders, two central office heavies with slicked over hair and well tailored camel hair jackets – held fixed smirks that could not disguise their discomfort at their surroundings and the people in them.

The Conservatives garnered less than 2000 votes. Whether the blue tickling stick did them any good has never been analysed.

Approaching Sainsbury’s at a jog last Sunday morning – passing on the way the house with eight solar panels and four air conditioning units cancelling each other out, and the discarded fridge wearing a toilet seat like a hat – and there was a small group of people dressed in green giving out leaflets. Hoping they were environmental activists I made eye contact before realising that they were Christian evangelists.

These are becoming increasingly frequent outside supermarkets and tube stations as the social crisis deepens. Depending on their given path to salvation they sometimes stand mutely awaiting lost souls seeking guidance – or they go out of their way to hassle possible converts with a leaflet, or an opening conversational gambit, whether they feel lost or not. They are a far more present feature of our streets than political parties are and generally argue with fixed smiles from within a labyrinth of arguments that can only be convincing if you accept their faith before you start.

I’m usually polite and don’t start a discussion, but having approached these people assuming they were something they were not, it would have seemed rude not to engage

Trying to have a discussion on what I hoped might be common ground about the world as it is, I asked one of them – with all due respect that they were not Church of England – for his view of the service in Westminster Cathedral to commemorate 50 years of the submarine nuclear “deterrent”. The long tradition of the C of E blessing battleships now at the level of sprinkling Holy Water over weapons capable of incinerating entire cities and killing everyone who lives in them. Blessed are the peacemakers? What would Jesus do? What hymns do you sing at a service like that? All things bright and beautiful? What prayer? “…Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”? What lesson? “Turn the other cheek?”

He hadn’t heard about it, but quickly interpreted it as further evidence of the “end of days”. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Book of Revelations can see why any apocalyptic period in human history could be seen in this light. For someone who believes in the literal truth of the Bible, this becomes an imperative , so real life crises – like the climate emergency that everyone should be putting energy into stopping – becomes reduced to nothing more than raw material for a view of the world that welcomes it as evidence of the upcoming rapture.

This provides the delusion of salvation for those who believe hard enough. This is an emotional imperative. Faith based on feeling. The problem is that if that faith is based on fear, any amount of trouble can result from it. Questions that are difficult to answer are simply put in a box marked “intellectualising”; because no one likes a smart arse, experts are not to be trusted, and questioning a faith is the road to breakdown if it is the rock on which your mental equilibrium is built; the port in the storm of uncertain times.

It is also, of course, deeply factional.

Each evangelical sect believes that it has The Answer, usually in the form of seeing The Bible as the “Word of God” and therefore “The Truth”. As any text is subject to interpretation – as they put it in Life of Brian ; “How shall we fuck off, oh Lord?” – each sect holds onto its own reading as the one true way and condemns all the others – with a sad shake of the head and sometimes an unmistakable glint of smugness while contemplating all that hellfire for those that are not saved- as lost sheep that have gone astray.

The next time I have this discussion I will try out a joke that was told to me by a Catholic friend when we were teenagers and see if they laugh in self recognition – as laughter often gets through where reasoned argument doesn’t.

Man dies and goes to Heaven.

He gets shown around by St Peter – clouds, harps, heavenly choir…all the drill.

After a while St Peter asks him if he has any questions.

He looks all around and says – “Yes, that thing.”

He points to a wall that stretches as far as they eye can see, up and down, and from one horizon to the other.

“What’s behind THAT?”

St Peter says “Oh! That’s the Catholics. They think they are the only ones here.”