My school career ended ignominiously when I was manhandled out of the building by the Headmaster for being a bit challenging…. by even being there! My closest friend Eddie had left voluntarily a month before me and was now working for the Port of Bristol Authority, getting rides on tugboats, and being paid for it! I was about leave my photographic technician’s job at the University and get a labouring job with a welding and fabricating company where I learned to weld and saw up big lengths of rolled steel joist; an occupation that has made me prematurely deaf. One of the jolly tricks the old hands would play on newcomers was to lock you inside a metal tank and then sledgehammer the sides so that your ears rang for days. The hydraulic saw that I used, threw fountains of white hot molten metal at me and sounded like the gates of hell. It was exciting and well paid but exhausting, hot and dangerous. The men I worked with were a bunch of highly skilled desperados who knew their worth to the company and taught me a number of insults so utterly disgusting I’ve had to ration myself. That phase lasted around three years and any number of jobs during which time any glamour attached to industrial life wore off. In the nick of time, aged 18, I met Madame, who was 15 and she got me a place at Tech College where I felt alive again apart, that is, from having to work nights alone in a factory cutting up sheets of polyurethane foam for the workers in the morning and with nothing but rats for company.
The reason for this background stuff is that I took A Level Sociology at college, and in my group was another student called Peter who appeared to be a different life-form from anyone else I’d ever met. It was impossible to tell whether his pronouncements were attributable to stupidity or bigotry; probably both. I write this because I often read journalists lamenting the rise of populist politics as if it started in the UK about ten years ago. In fact during the 1930’s King Edward 111 was a known nazi sympathiser. Half the aristocracy were with him and Oswald Mosley was injecting his venomous ideas into society.
By the mid 1960’s Peter was a fully formed racist, homophobic and sexist pain in the backside who had never been troubled by a moment’s reflection. How our wonderful Jewish lecturer put up with him was a mystery – but now? ……… Well we are where we are I suppose. Every way we turn, we see newly minted clones of Peter in positions of power; the fact that you couldn’t fabricate a half decent brain from a room full of them (although even a failed experiment might benefit the world), is a clue as to precisely why we are where we are.
And so to COP 28 where a non enforceable agreement to do precisely nothing has been trumpeted as a triumph by its only beneficiaries. And so, also, to Gaza and Ukraine; to Rwanda and to a prison ship in Portland Dorset, and to the homeless beggars and the hungry and impoverished children; and to the sufferers of preventable and treatable disease …… do I need to go on? Should I mention the endless waiting lists for affordable housing or the empty second homes and flats given over to Airbnb to enrich their owners? Should I mention the untreated shit flowing past our flat in the polluted river?
Even as I read these paragraphs I know in my heart that Charles Dickens could have written these words and that they would have been equally true. Homo homini lupus est – perhaps better translated people are wolves towards other people is one classical quotation you’re unlikely to hear Boris, sorry, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, using – although my sensitivity to sexist language seems a bit out of place in this context.
Truthfully, we’ve been drifting apart for years, like elves and dwarves, with the elves believing against all the evidence that decency and democracy will always win, and that the dwarves are really decent people who’ve just taken a wrong turn and to whom we should be kind in order to effect their transformation. Hm!
Am I distressed by all this? Hell yes! Distressed, angry and heartbroken. Yesterday there was a brief moment of hope that the Government might complete the task of euthanizing itself, but somehow the corpse overcame its apnoea and took another terrible gasp. My/our only solace is in the same Nature that’s threatened by them. Goodness knows I’ve preached often enough that without our mortality, love would become meaningless. But I’ve never really taken on board the fact that the more threatened the earth is, the more precious it becomes, and, for instance, the Winter Heliotrope in the photograph taken in Cornwall last January and back on the canal bank yesterday, becomes a pledge, a token of continuity in the depths of winter. We planted bulbs a few weeks ago in the little garden we’ve created outside the flats and now they’re pushing through the soil. I’m busy identifying old photographs of plants and fungi and recording them. I can already imagine the perfume of the soil in spring as it heats in the sun, and the prospect of another plant hunting season. I’ve got plans for new trips and for exploring new ideas – none of which will change the world but which are, cumulatively, a way of taking up pitchforks and cudgels against the enemies of joy and flourishing.
I absolutely refuse to be taken in by the imaginary world of dark caverns and darker threats where fear is normalized as a tool of control. We’ll fight them with carnivals, punish them with songs and drill into their little minds with poetry and drama letting in some purgative light. Oh and Peter – if you haven’t already gone to the great dictator in the skies; mind how you go eh?
