About twenty years ago, in quieter less delirious times, we were visiting Harper’s ferry in West Virginia and took part in a history walk. The town was full of tour guides dressed in period costume and uniforms and talking in character. A soldier in union blue told us that the town was under military occupation, full of Confederate sympathisers, and under continual threat from Confederate raiders like John Singleton Mosby; and he was keeping a close eye on the market stall in front of him to keep control of smuggling.

A lively young woman in a bonnet, who’d told us the story of John Brown’s raid and attempted slave rebellion in 1859 – in which Brown’s aim to seize the arsenal in the town, then march south along the Appalachians raiding plantations and raising an army of freed slaves came to grief when he was defeated by a company of marines commanded by Robert E Lee, arrested and hung- also set us up for the debate on secession that began the civil war two years later… in which John Brown’s soul went marching on and he achieved posthumous revenge.

Having set out the issues – among which were the divergent pull of loyalty to Virginia combined with significant slave owning in rural areas, pulling against urban employment being heavily boosted by federal contracts for the Armoury (1) – she asked us, when we got to the next stop on the walk, to divide according to how we would have voted – secede and join the Confederacy to one side – or remain with the Union on the other.

Until that point everyone had seemed, and probably perceived each other, to be a common body of (mostly) modern, well off, middle class white Americans with broadly shared assumptions. But when the crowd physically divided there was a slight majority for the Confederacy. The two sides stared at each other across a physical gap that was far smaller than the fracture between their visions of the country they thought they were living in.  I found myself weighing them up in case it came to blows.

The cockahoop smirks on their side and the odd smartass comment- “They’re only votin’ that way to keep their jobs” (2) – and the affronted looks of shock and betrayal on ours – turned a piece of historical play acting into a sign of dangerous times; in which this old fracture in the framework of the nation might again render it incapable of containing the incompatible visions within it.

1 “By 1860 the use of slave labor in West Virginia was about 48% in agriculture, 16% in commerce, 21% in industry and 15% in mixed occupations”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_West_Virginia

2. The young woman in the bonnet had explained that the town’s largest employers had been very strongly against the Confederacy.

If, in early evening, you head down the hill towards Ladbroke Grove from Westbourne Park tube station, when you reach the bottom, at either end of a square just large enough to hold a pair of tapas bars spilling light, music and customers onto pavement tables stand two trees with bright, white lights strewn across their branches, interspersed with wire and paper stars. The effect is quite magical and, for a while, it is enough to perch on a bollard and stare up at it taking in the peace. If you are waiting for the love of your life – as I was – there is something transcendent about it.

At one time there was a bench underneath – which would have made it even more romantic had it not also been the place where the local smack heads would gather, so their surroundings somehow reflected their internal high – which meant that everyone else called it the “heroin bench” and avoided it.

So, the council, sadly, took it away.

In 1979 the same streets looked like a very different place. The same bone structure – magnificent Georgian terraces – but before they’d had face lifts and scrub ups – when they were still coal blackened, crumbling and run down, heavily squatted; with some derelict. In preparation for an overland trip to India I was in search of a publication called the BIT guide. This was a travel guide written for travelers by travelers. A sort of rough guide before these became commercial standardised products.

People who went on the hippy trail east would write down information about where to go to get buses, which hotels were cheap but decent, inspiring places to see, what the exchange rates for currencies were (three years previously) where the bazaars were, where to get drugs and how to avoid them, which hotels were busted regularly in Quetta; and to be wary of the border official at the Lahore to Amritsar crossing who seemed to enjoy frisking people a little too much. These reports from the trail were typed up and duplicated and stapled together to make a fat blue paper covered booklet.

This was wonderfully idiosyncratic, quirky, completely unregulated, massively out of date in detail; no one was “on the same page” or used a “house style”, no one was paid for it, no one was advertising or spinning, nor would anyone expect to be sued for inaccuracy because everyone was stating their own point of view, which you could either take or leave at your own risk. As a labour of love it was remarkably accurate and I’d have been completely lost without it.

Finding it wasn’t easy though. The address I’d been given was a huge old edifice with wide crumbling steps and a heavy front door that was wedged half open. No one seemed to be in. Either that or they were in the process of moving out. Inside there was no sign of people living there. Corridors and stair cases were bare. Piles of junk strewn rubble lay in odd corners. A tall, thin, silent guy with a huge beard – who looked as though he’d fallen asleep at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 and only just woken up – seemed bemused by me asking him for a BIT guide – as though the time for that had been and gone – but led me to a room in which there was a small pile of them laying about casually on top of another heap of rubble. He didn’t bother with the 50p it was supposed to cost. I suspect that I was the last person ever to get hold of one of the final ever editions.

Going to the doctors with a cough and discovering blood pressure high enough to require medication is one thing – being told that the medication is permanent is another. Apart from never being able to eat grapefruit for the rest of my life, the impact is primarily psychological.

Having had an almost survivalist attitude – that going to the doctors is best avoided because the immune system would only be weakened by taking tablets – that it was me and my body against all comers; a suburban Robinson Crusoe complex that implies a life under siege- it is something like being welcomed into a communion to surrender to the permanent embrace of the massive support network that is the National Health Service. Welcome home.

The local pharmacy is quite a social centre – with music (usually soft classics), the rolling news on a silent TV with those comically mangled sub titles translated instantly from speech by a machine trained in phonics but not syntax or meaning; which sometimes create a weird parallel reality – regulars who drop in (regularly) and the chief pharmacist presiding; as warm and conversational as the best sort of pub landlord. People put the world to rights while waiting for their Anusol ointment. If they had loyalty cards there my family would definitely qualify and apply – get enough points and you get a complimentary bottle of Ibuprofen. Accepting a dependence upon others is far more socially liberating than I’d expected.

Getting ready for retirement; sitting and watching the rugby on a Friday afternoon with the sound off and Mahler’s first symphony on the radio. Life on the edge.

 

The kind of day that people are default dressed for the season they expect and are sweating in bright sunshine in padded jackets and woolly hats.

The papers report that swallows have been seen in the South West and Wales.

Outside Parliament people are enjoying global heating while they can.

With calls of “TEACH THE TRUTH!”, outside the Department for Education a polite but determined lobby of over 100 teachers, academics, students, parents and children (mostly girls) gather in the light to call for the blinkers currently preventing our education system from properly acknowledging the urgency of climate breakdown to be thrown away- so we can teach comprehensively about it with no punches pulled – and generate the skills and values needed to stop it.  The way that our institutions press on regardless with business as usual in the face of the biggest existential threat human civilisation has ever faced is generating this bewildered determination to save our own future.

Speeches follow from a Professor at the Open University and Secondary teacher thoughtfully saying what they know and expressing their frustration at how little they can officially say in classes, Exec members of the UCU (lecturers) and NEU (teachers) unions beginning to turn their unions firmly into this struggle and calling for the government to realise its legal obligations under article 12 of the Paris Agreement to shift their education systems so they are part of the solution, fiercely articulate student strikers – one of them only 14, but with a maturity well beyond her years – excited by their sudden significance, sense of agency and solidarity; and scared by the reason they feel they have to break rules and previous bounds; and an American guy dressed in a rather Santa like red robe who seems to be there to prove that movements like this need a strong dose of eccentricity to keep them sane; who nevertheless speaks a lot of common sense.

After the speeches, a lesson. An average size class of about 30 students, but varying in age from 2 or 3 right up to 6 form – most of whom look like illustrations from a Shirley Hughes book -sits right in front of the speakers platform, mostly on little chairs made of cardboard boxes with the XR symbol painted on the backs, with extraordinary patience and better behavior than any class I have ever been in – either as a pupil or a teacher – as one teacher tries to cover climate change issues, while his Head of Department constantly cuts him off, asserts all the soul crushing routinism of exam targets that are geared to the needs of a mode of society whose time has gone; that had teachers and students laughing aloud in uncomfortable recognition.

At the doors of the DFE the security people seem equally bewildered about what all this is about. They look quite threatened by this gathering of very peaceful people. At one point a boy of about 10 volunteers to take copies of the lobby letter, calling for climate change to be treated as the emergency it is and overprinted with children’s hands in poster paint, in to Minister Damien Hinds; and the bouncers – who have formed a line across the door – won’t let him in or take the letters saying that the Minister isn’t at work in the building. A few surprised calls of “where is he?”, “keep it for him” and “put them in his pigeon hole” persuade them to take the letters off his hands.

Walking away afterwards and Parliament Square is extraordinarily quiet. Hundreds of black cabs – several of them pink – are arrayed all round the square and a way up Whitehall in each direction in a protest against the clean air zone. Save our exhaust fumes. With nothing except pedestrians and bikes able to move – they just prove how peaceful, clam and pleasant the streets are when their vehicles aren’t moving through them.

Waiting as the only other customer in the barbers in the mini mall by the bus stop (£6 for an all over number 2, usually with minimum fuss and conversation – a moment of silent reprieve) flicking through yesterday’s Metro, while the old guy in the chair is having a spirited conversation with the usually taciturn barber, in what sounds like Urdu. I recognise a few words breaking through the music of talk that’s like a duet by a pair of masters in its warm interplay of tones and tempos – sentences half completed by one, taken up and flourished by the other – hums of agreement and half laughs of recognition. My turn in the chair and find out that the language was actually Gujerati and he’d been talking about the custom his mother had, when he was growing up in East Africa, that every time she cooked chapatis she would give the first one to the cows – who would queue up every day lowing for their fix – the second to the crows and the third to the dogs – and only then would the family eat.

On the bus to Sainsbury’s opposite the Temple and a bloke who looks like a sadhu gets on. A tall, powerfully built man with a slightly anguished face and staring eyes – he is wearing a singlet, leather trousers, enormous boots, festooned with necklaces and beaded dreadlocks – faded tattoos – stars, tear drops, Chinese letters patterned across bulging muscles – and carrying several canvas and plastic bags; and two pointed sticks of different design and function as though they are staffs of office. He walks past the driver, plonking his bags on the side and starts rummaging in them muttering “bus pass” as a sort of talisman. Not finding it and giving up he stands opposite me muttering about “evil spiders and snakes”. I give him a friendly nod. The driver pretends that he isn’t there. Different rules for Holy Men.

There is something exhilarating about being semi retired and using a free bus pass on a day that would have been a work day until now; even on a wet and wind swept Wembley High Street- even if it is only checking out a different branch of a supermarket instead of the habitual one and noticing the subtle differences between the goods they stock as the cultural composition of the local population changes. Freedom Pass is well named.

By the old clothing charity bins, a man walking a foxhound. Perhaps someone is starting a hunt for urban foxes.

 

 

One of the many good things about my local library is the way that books are sometimes shelved in unexpected sections; so that people who might be stuck in their ways and reading habits might pick up something refreshingly different by mistake.

This afternoon the three Maigret novellas that I picked up from the crime section just before Xmas – and read one after the other as an immersion in another time and place -had been replaced by a discerning librarian on the “classics” shelf – a smaller and slightly stuffier enclave populated – this being England – largely by Dickens, Hardy and Elliot – with token spaces for mighty Russians like Tolstoy and – this being Brent – rebellious black voices like James Baldwin and Jean Rhys.

The three slim Simenon volumes looked like cheeky interlopers, with their CRI sticker with revolver logo clearly branding them as a lesser breed of text to be rubbing shoulders with these portly Victorian gentlemen and socially significant voices. And yet…

If the definition of “classic” literature is that it takes the reader into another time and place in their imagination and challenges them to think and feel on a deeper level and that this still works regardless of how long ago the work was written, I don’t think these books were mis shelved.

As a child, the 1960-63 Maigret BBC TV series was my first inkling that France existed as somewhere specific and apart. Chiefly the accordion heavy tango of a theme tune (by Ron Grainer – who also composed Dr Who and The Prisoner) accompanying Rupert Davies as Maigret in stylish mac and fedora striking a match on a wall to light his pipe; served as a meme for all things French in 1961 that weren’t actually General de Gaulle. That a Tango should be considered evocatively French is probably a tribute to English insularity. Paris, Buenos Aires …what’s the difference ? All sort of Latin and across the channel somewhere; and its an accordion for goodness sake.

As a detective hero, Maigret has got to be the least sexual of any detective other than Hammet’s Continental Op. A middle aged, married man in a childless marriage of unreconstructed patriarchy and affectionate bovine routine; in which he goes home for lunch whenever possible and Mme Maigret anticipates his arrival sufficiently to open the door before he gets to it.

There is a much sharper edge of social critique than I expected. Ian Rankin has argued that his Rebus series has been the best vehicle he could devise for running a series of stories about what’s happening in Scottish society. Andrea Camilleri would probably say the same about Montalbano. Reading Simenon is like that but also locked into a time and place that has gone. In 1950s Paris, if the Chief Inspector of the police Judiciare couldn’t commandeer the one car attached to the station, he would take the bus. I like that. He also spends most of the day having discreet and civilised nips of calvados or glasses of beer while ruminating in Bistros or cafes (putting away quite a bit but with no sense that he’d ever end up passed out on an armchair instead of in bed like Rebus does more often than not) which would now have him up on report.

There is an explicit statement in one story that the purpose of the police and the law is the upholding of power in the first instance, the rights of property in the second while the rights of people, especially those without wealth or power come a very poor third; and plenty of references to higher up judicial indifference to crimes affecting the lower orders, especially if they were ethnic minority.

This is a more effective look at themes of alienation, and the anxiety that human intuition, skill and empathy was being replaced with machines and systems, that ran through a lot of popular culture at the time. Comedy films like Jaques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) Spike  Milligan’s Postman’s Knock (1961) or Norman Wisdom’s Early Bird (1965) – the last of which I recall queuing round the block for at the State cinema in Grays with hundreds of other school kids for the Saturday matinee (stall tickets 3d) – were built around this, with a backward looking nostalgia for small business as an embodiment of human quirkiness in the process of being buried by huge conglomerates with standardised systems.

Attempts by Maigret to use his weight to humanise the impact of the legal machine by turning a blind eye are a all part of the empathy he uses to solve problems of motive and method – most of which are bound up with human relationships. He does the job – when it comes to the crunch – because he finds the people involved interesting in a ruefully accepting kind of way. There is no Manichean sense of good and evil, though no sympathy for the corrupt and powerful. Wrong doing is seen as a social activity – one way of surviving and fitting in. No one is inherently a bad ‘un. This is quite refreshing after reading too much Harry Bosch – because if you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Simenon’s motto was to seek to understand without judging – something anyone concerned with the increasing impact on our personal and collective mental health of systems that judge without understanding will find quite contemporary.

 

 

Sometimes the gap between popular narrative and truth is exposed very baldly. In Saturday’s Guardian Finance section the article Brexiters Hedge Fund wagers against Britain fail to pay off is gobsmacking but slightly misleading. Quotations are all from the article.

Crispin “Odey (who founded Odey Asset Management in 1991) was one of the most prominent supporters of the leave campaign and donated almost £900 000 to pro Brexit groups.” Hedge Funds made four of the five largest donations in the referendum campaign – all of them to leave. So his credentials and political leanings are clear. He copper bottoms this with his prime ministerial preference. “He has repeatedly called on Theresa May to resign as prime minister and said he would “love” Boris Johnson to replace her.”

Lets keep in mind that the key slogan of those keenest on Brexit is expressed by the injunction to “believe in Britain” – a masterpiece of messianic vacuity. You’d think that the funders of leave would be seeking exciting new ways to invest in the new global Britain, untrammelled by red tape and regulation – free to control its own borders by keeping out all those people who are eager to come to live and work here.

So, lets see what this true believer has actually done and where he has put his money. While funding the leave campaign…”he placed huge bets against the pound and government bonds before the June 2016 EU referendum, and made an estimated £220 million profit when the pound collapsed after a majority voted to leave the EU.”

In case this is not obvious, lets talk this through. He placed his huge bets that things would go badly before the referendum result. He must therefore have believed that the consequences of that would be negative on the pound and government bonds. On the day, he cashed in on the negative impact that he helped to create by financing the campaign to leave.

“On the day after the vote he told the BBC: ‘there’s an Italian expression – al mattino ha l’oro in bocca – the morning has gold in its mouth, and never has one felt so much that idea as this morning really.” Really.

And in the troubled days ahead, as the government talks of requisitioning ships, stockpiling medicine and keeping 3 500 soldiers on standby, “Odey has boasted that each day of Brexit related political crisis is a “good day” for him and his hedge fund. “I have had a good day” he told the Times last month when the pound fell 2%.”

The headline is misleading because the rake off that he is making by short selling UK government bonds and business ; to the tune of “£149 million of short positions against UK shops, banks, estate agents and property firms” slowed a little for most of last year, but has picked up rapidly since October; making Odey one of “the world’s best performing Hedge funds.”

Odey himself collected £5.5 million last year and £1.5 million this and stands to collect a lot more as the chaos continues. What price his “belief” for the rest of us?

Sitting in the local library – getting ready for being retired – reading Siegfreid Sassoon’s war poems and looking around.

The building used to be an office for Council services – quickly and cheaply converted. It is not plush or state of the art like the one in the Civic Centre or Willesden, the partitions are lightweight, water stains run down the walls, the movement sensitive lighting in the toilets is alarmingly hit and miss, the book selection well used and not quite up to date, the computers fat and slow, a photocopier that clunks; but it is packed out, there are books, activities for the children, meetings with local councillors, displays of local history, information about how to get help, books in many languages and newspapers in more than one and it suits the people who come to it – just as worn and struggling as the building but all busily engaged in enriching life.

On the same table two old geezers with very short, iron grey hair, heads poking out of their anoraks like turtles – looking at the world through the lenses provided by the copies of the Daily Express they are reading, confirming everything they think is going wrong. they look like displaced members of the DUP.

Around them are younger people from all over the world. A young man talks to the librarian in English – a second language for both of them. A child at the bank of chunky old computers – kept going because they still work – just – chatters a bit too loudly and is shushed by her mum. The old turtles grimace. The librarians are not the fierce old termagants of old, but almost everyone is quiet – the rules enforced by mutual consent. A child in a push chair breaks them chattering happily. One of the old turtles starts to grimace. I catch his eye and smile and his face softens. Life finds a way.

The soundscape that accompanies Christmas is primarily that of 1950s America. All that Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Jim Reeves and Perry Como; supermarket aisles recast aurally as sleigh rides through winter wonderlands. Later “rock” anthems feel like an awkward commercial compromise – rebellion against the man stopping short of the mince pies and Yule logs. For over a month everything is covered in nostalgic tinsel – then it stops. The remaining merchandise is marked down like an embarrassing relative who has outstayed a welcome and normal musical service is restored.

On the day, twiddling between the radio stations (from 3 to 4 and back again – are there any others?) a Christmas service was going on and the vicar reading the lesson had one of those voices that’s 3 parts Alan Bennett to 4 parts Jacob Rees Mogg.

In London the lights were still quite magical – even people who hadn’t had anything to drink were saying so – and the buskers were playing an amplified acoustic soundtrack that was somehow elegaic. A battered looking musical veteran in the middle of Hungerford Bridge was picking out haunting versions of Scarborough Fair and Blackbird; while the young woman with a violin by Embankment tube was playing contemporary songs in a way that sounded wistfully Chinese and the bloke with a saxophone at Baker Street was heroically resisting the temptation to pay Baker Street.

The halal butchers by Kingsbury Circle chopping up chicken giblets with enormous cleavers are all wearing bright pink sparkly stetsons as a gesture to the festivities around them.

Two women in puritanical black chadors with full face veil stop off at the open air gym in the middle of the park and start exercising.

A pair of crows, chasing each other, float, soar and swoop in the stiff breeze around the faux plastic towers of the Shree Swaminarayan Temple in Silver Jubilee Park; landing atop Vishnu’s flagpole with the blasphemous insouciance of life.

In the upper branches of a bare tree, fifty feet or more above the ground, the hefty, scar faced Growltiger of a ginger tom that usually sits in ambush in Ash Tree Dell, glaring balefully at passers by as if frustrated that he’s just a bit too small to eat them for dinner; carefully tests branches and twigs as he is mobbed by a pair of angry but cautious Magpies –  darting, chatting and fluttering at him in a piece of ritualistic asymmetrical warfare.

I have just been reading a biography of Wagner in which he is reported to have spread stories about Brahms that he would shoot cats on the Vienna roofs with a bow and arrow, haul them in on a line then make a note of their dying screeches to incorporate the sounds into his compositions. Catty.