Synik is a hip-hop artist from Zimbabwe, currently living in Portugal. He released this album earlier this year, and it is his first since the left his home country and made the arduous journey to Europe. In it, he discusses exile, alienation, the exploitation of migrants and the hostility they encounter.
His real name is Gerald Mugwheni, and there is an article1 about the political pressure that drives artists to leave Zimbabwe, including an appreciation of the album, in the much-mourned online paper, The Conversation.
I don’t listen to much hip-hop. A year or so back, Englistan,by RizMC2 caught my attention. I listened to it again this week, as I have just bought a pair of bone conduction earphones, and can start listening to music as I walk the dog or cycle. I had had to give that up because earphones set off tinnitus – another of the indignities of encroaching old age. Englistan is a theatrical, even cinematic experience. A Travel Guide For The Broken strikes me as a more lyrical (in the classic sense of the word) style of rap. I think you’d describe it as downbeat hip-hop: it has a rich, melodic jazz inventiveness that is immediately musically engaging.
What has kept me listening, though, is the way the raps catch you with narrative force: on ‘Underground’, Synik talks about working in the shadow economy; ‘Wega’ is a clear depiction of being in an alien environment, while your heart is focused on home. The title track is quite special. It seems to describe a response to an experience which might be the defining adventure of our times – the experience of being uprooted by economic terror and political victimisation.
We were fractured
The scattered fragments from broken homelands
Transient bodies,
Dislocated and displaced
With borderless imaginations we discarded the familiar for worlds unknown
Forced to become adept in contorting limbs to fit in confined spaces
Which constituted a further breaking
We traversed inhospitable lands in search of new homes
And the warmth of other suns
I wrote about Thomas Mann in a recent post1 and recalled that I had read Death in Venice many years ago, but remembered little about it. I searched the house, but couldn’t find a copy, so I looked on ebay. I might have had a modern copy for under £2 but this one was available for a fiver plus postage. I am enough of a book fetishist to love old Penquins and when it arrived I was rewarded with that smell that is one of the most profound yet fleeting sense experiences: the smell of an old book as it is opened for the first time in a long while.
This copy did not betray any secrets with it. Often, books of this vintage come with the scent of tobacco mixed in with the paper-and-ink must; once or twice, enticingly, I have opened a book and had a hint of Chanel No. 5, triggering images of a languid reader in a Chelsea flat. More common are the suggestions of student reading: sandalwood or patchouli, or the faintest gust of weed, along with a wine stain or two. But, no; this book just smelt of its constituent parts, and did not even carry an owner’s inscription. Its past is a closed book.
Having reread it, that blankness seems wrong, for Death in Venice, though it is written in a voice that is, initially, detached and calm, is a story of intense passion and of a slide into madness. It is very much more vivid than I remembered and what really surprised me about it was the baroque tone of degraded magic. Despite being introduced as the perfect bourgeois rationalist, whose life is an ordered triumph of will and detachment, Aschenbach voyages through a vivid world of encounters with the grotesque to meet his lonely, perverted fate. The uncanny element is introduced in the vision of the stranger outside the mortuary chapel in Munich, after which Aschenbach conceives his plan to leave his well-ordered life for a few months of restorative travel. It is developed in various encounters on his journey to Venice, through the ticket agent, the old drunken reveller on the steamer, the unlicensed gondolier and the manager of the hotel, “…a small, soft, dapper man with a black moustache and a caressing way with him…”.2 It reminded me of the sense of uprooting that launches Marlow’s journey into the interior in Heart of Darkness, although that is another book I haven’t read for decades, and may be misremembering.
The oddness that seems to clamour around Aschenbach as he travels is heightened by his character. In the early pages, he is established as a prissy old maid, both stuck up and over-sensitive, who manages his squeamishness by controlling his surroundings. Mann describes this nature and its tendency towards paranoia in beautiful terms, worth quoting at length.
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
((Ibid))
And so, as the central non-relationship of the story emerges and Aschenbach’s passion for the boy Tadzio unfolds, his perversity does not seem as strange, jarring and ugly as it should. Aschenbach has already developed a seedy quality, reflected in his experience but also in his prissiness and impatience with others. His tendency to be disgusted by and dislike people is the other side of his capacity to idealise and intellectualise this objectified stranger. I mentioned in my earlier post that…
I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, engaged, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, in a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
I hadn’t remembered – or, perhaps, as a younger reader, I didn’t pick up on – how the aesthetic moralising degrades as Aschenbach’s obsession takes him over. This story is a quite clear parable of the fragility of bourgeois restraint. Nothing Aschenbach does is truly alien to him: in true early-twentieth century fashion, Aschenbach suffers a collapse of repression.
Even before he has let his passion take hold, the sickliness of the environment is pre-signalled in his discomfort with the climate. He attempts to escape, but is relieved when his plan to leave falls through and, realizing when he next sees Tadzio that the boy is the reason he wanted to stay, he is, from this point, lost to his obsession. Before then, he still holds on to the forms of his intellectual conceits, “…assuming the patronizing air of the connoisseur to hide, as artists will, their ravishment over a masterpiece.”((Mann, p35))
The sense of the uncanny has, by now, become monstrous, and is given a form in the growing awareness of the cholera outbreak which is threatening Venice. Aschenbach attempts to find out the truth about the epidemic, but seems also to lack the will to do anything about it, as he is lied to and soothed by the hotel manager, a street performer and the barber. However, when the young English clerk in the travel bureau whispers the truth to him, Aschenbach cannot turn the knowledge to action:
…the thought of returning home, returning to reason, self-mastery, an ordered existence, to the old life of effort. Alas! the bare thought made him wince with a revulsion that was like physical nausea. ‘It must be kept quiet,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘I will not speak!’
((p75))
A dream follows; a nightmare of orgiastic pagan savagery, after which, it is clear that Aschenbach is ill. The magic has become the detached ecstasy of low-grade fever, in which internal experience entirely overwhelms the outside world. He seeks to remake himself with cosmetics, with the help of the barber, who contrives to transform him into a grotesque as alarming as the drunk on the steamer:
There he sat, the master: this was he who had found a way to reconcile art and honours; who had written The Abject, and in a style of classic purity renounced bohemianism and all its works, all sympathy with the abyss and the troubled depths of the outcast human soul…whose renown had been officially recognized and his name ennobled…There he sat. His eyelids were closed, there was only a swift, sidelong glint of the eyeballs now and again, something between a question and a leer; while the rouged and flabby mouth uttered single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain by the fantastic logic that governs our dreams.
((p80))
Aschenbach’s final reverie is on the power of the passions that an artist must channel and repress in order to practice his arts. “…we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without Eros as our companion and guide.”((p80)) It is a complete reversal of the values he seems, at the opening of the story, to embody: an indulgent embrace of sensuality over learning, rejecting knowledge in favour of beauty:
For knowledge, Phaedrus, does not make him who possesses it dignified or austere. Knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving; it takes up no position, sets no store by form. It has compassion with the abyss – it is the abyss. So we reject it, firmly, and henceforward our concern shall be with beauty only. And by beauty we mean simplicity, largeness, and renewed severity of discipline; we mean a return to detachment and to form. But detachment, Phaedrus, and preoccupations with form lead to intocication and desire, they may lead the noblest among us to frightful emotional excesses, which his own stern cult of the beautiful would make him the first to condemn. Yes, they lead us thither, I say, us who are poets – who by our natures are prone not to excellence but to excess. And now, Phaedrus, I will go. Remain here; and only when you can no longer see me, then do you depart also.
((p81))
He seems here, to me, to be prefiguring his death. “I will go now,” means not just that he will finish the dialogue, but that he is aware, on some level, that this is the end for him. He is held to life only by his passion for Tadzio, but within a few days, he learns that the boy’s family are finally leaving.
The close of the story is magnificent. Aschenbach’s death is the central event, but, at the point before he finally collapses, a tableau plays out on the beach between Tadzio and his friend Jaschiu; a fight that seems to represent the collapse of their holiday friendship. Tadzio, humiliated, shrugs off Jaschiu’s attempts at reconciliation and retreats to the sea. The narrative voice never leaves Aschenbach; we see the boy’s isolated sulk through the eyes of the dying man, but, for half a page, the boy becomes a character rather than a figure, and the sense of the end of childhood and the clouds of approaching adolescence are drawn in the simplest description. He might have noticed the strange old man who has been making him uncomfortable over the previous weeks, but he is just a part of the cloudy, oppressive end-of-summer sorrow into which he has been plunged. For Aschenbach, however, the boy has acknowledged him, and legitimized his lechery.
It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation.
((p83))
And then, the end, unmourned by the reader, barely noticed by the love object, but,
…before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.
In our time the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.
Thomas Mann
Today is the third day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am travelling home after having visited my mother and my sister. This morning, the front page of my mother’s right-wing newspaper was covered with pictures of terror and pain and the business section noted that BAE systems are the best performing stock in a turbulent market. Even my mother, in her increasing dementia, raised the topic of the Russians’ massacre of the innocents when I got to her flat for breakfast.
My sister was less interested, or less obviously so. We are careful about our discussion of politics, although it animates us both, and we are sympathetic to one another’s outlooks. She is preparing for another Extinction Rebellion action, and for the appeal against her conviction for protesting against the Murdoch empire’s half-century of climate crisis denial. On Thursday night she spoke at a meeting. I spent the evening at my mother’s flat, then met Charlotte – my sister – at a pub afterwards. She was with people from her meeting; good, impassioned activists who are committed to pushing for real change in the way the world is run, in the hope of mitigating the damage done to the world by human activity.
I felt ashamed in their company. I am torn by a guilty desire to affect indifference, to the war and to the climate disaster. I had my season of political hope2 and it made me very unhappy,3 and the awareness of my impotence in public matters, and the apparently illusory nature of the virtues of democratic involvement, seem to press on me whenever I break my embargo on news. I leave my phone in another room when I sleep; I try to discipline myself to avoid the news, and I seek calm and serenity.
And yet my sister’s comrades seemed to me to be – not happier than I am – but more aware of themselves and warmed by their mutual endeavour. I’ve no idea whether there is a Christian among them, but they seem to have the clear-sighted tenacity of hope that I have always envied in true believers. I didn’t get to know them closely, but they included me in their round of goodbye hugs and I felt they were giving me access to the secret of their power, as they drew their comfort from each other and, generously, shared it with me.
I found the Yeats poem while reading an LRB article4 by Seamus Perry, on Colm Tóibín’s new novel,((http://colmtoibin.com/content/magician)) about the life of Thomas Mann. I intended to read the entire issue of the magazine, taking advantage of my train journey home, but this article has brought me up short. It seems to address perfectly the disillusionment I feel towards taking responsibility for anything outside my personal orbit. I was surprised to read that Yeats was a reluctant revolutionary. He wrote, after all, perhaps the greatest poem of struggle of the twentieth century,5 a poem that might today be applied to the awful glory of Ukrainian heroism in the face of the Russian spasm of fascist imperialism: in this horror, another “terrible beauty” is born. And yet, at least at the end of his life, in Politics, the last poem of the last collection he published, he expressed a weary indifference to worldly engagement.
I ‘did’ An Irish Airman…6 at school and I learnt the first stanza of Second Coming7 when I was a taxi driver, about twenty years ago, and I have, at times, taken a non-poetry-enthusiast’s limited interest in Yeats, as both an historical figure and an artist. I respected his reputation as one of the best of the modernist writers, but he was shaded from my enthusiasm by the fact that I despised them as a group because my teachers were all so uncritically adoring of modernism. Yeats got lumped in with (well, actually, overshadowed by) Lawrence, who was drilled into us as a paragon when he seemed to me to be a hack. It is only now that I realise that most of my English teachers just weren’t that good: they may have been devoted pedagogues, but their tastes were shaped by their polytechnic educations and their 1960s and ‘70s, lefty-ish, play-for-today political outlooks. Lawrence, with his leaden, explicit prose and his interest in sex and class, was easy to teach; Yeats, an infinitely more subtle and wide-ranging writer, was a more difficult study, even if his is the more beautiful work, by a country mile.
“Yeats sometimes feared that his work would be distorted by the restrictions of Irish culture.”8 He was, throughout his life, inescapably a political and public person, serving, to his apparent regret,9 six years as an Irish senator. It seems that, as he could not escape Irish culture, neither could he escape politics, living, as he did, in the long, bitter decline of British colonialism, whose death watch has lingered for over a century now.
It must be a terrible thing to be forced to upend your life in resistance to an inescapable event. How bitter the longing for the life abandoned must be. To my modern ear, the poem seems to drift close to depicting lechery as a virtuous alternative to engagement, but my response is, no doubt, an artefact of the time, and misses some of the poem’s cultural echoes: according to the notes in my copy of the Collected Poems of Yeats10, its phrases reflect the anonymous sixteenth Century English song, Westron Wind.
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.11
Perry has this to say about how Yeats gives privately cherished passion a greater truth than worldly knowledge and engagement:
You could imagine a much more straightforward poem that pitted public discourse against, say, the intimate conversation of lovers, but Yeats does something much odder than that: he sets public language against the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze. And here, too, Yeats was entirely in tune with Mann, who was similarly fascinated by the way that catching sight of someone you don’t know can make you forget yourself – or, rather, suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought.
(( Perry (2022)))
For Mann, apparently, aesthetics (that ‘forgetfulness’), at least partially, manifested in a life of secret and vividly focussed crushes on unsuspecting men and boys. The most famous expression of this in his art is the ecstatic fixation of Aschenbach the writer upon the boy Tadzio in Death In Venice.12 It’s decades since I read it, but I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, consumed, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, by a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
Like Yeats, Mann was dragged into political activity by his times: first by the German collapse into Nazism, and then by McCarthyism in the States.((Meyers, J. (2012) ‘Thomas Mann In America’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 51, Issue 4, Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1 Accessed 6th March 2022)) Even earlier, his Nobel acceptance speech of 192913 addressed the balance between art and the political atmosphere in which it is practised. He is, however, considered an ‘apolitical’ writer.14 After he had grasped the full stupidity and dishonesty of the McCarthy putsch…
Mann vowed not to make any more political statements, which could be dangerously distorted, and wryly remarked, “the world needs peace—but I need it too.”
Unsure how to respond to the experience of reading a poem that I feel might have been written for me in my current situation, I turned away from this post and read some news articles on my phone. The Russian attack was utterly mesmerising to watch, a dreadful deluge of iron and diesel spills, unleashed by the shrill screech of Putin’s deranged sanctimony. By the time I reached home, it had become clear that something that should be impossible was happening: the Ukrainians were standing up to their invaders and the Russians appeared to be stumbling. The Ukrainians’ courage was inhuman: it must have felt like watching a tidal wave coming at you, but as a million of them fled to the borders, hundreds of thousands of them rushed to take up arms.
By the next evening, there were interviews on the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast with British-resident Ukrainians who were equipping themselves to return home to enlist. In answer to the predictable question, they all said they had no choice.
No choice. Like Mann, more suited to a life of bourgeois deception than to confronting evil, and like Yeats, who felt himself fettered into a conflict that reached back as far as the Norman invasion of his country and of which he was weary before he even began to publish. But unlike me. I, for now at least, seem to have a choice and I have chosen to be inactive.
Charlotte told me, when she first threw herself into Extinction Rebellion, that she didn’t expect to change anything. She just wanted to be on the right side of history. I understood that, but I still believed in the virtue of political hope and was, at the time, deeply involved in the Labour party. I felt that party politics offered the best opportunity to make a change, but that all fell apart with the 2019 election. At the time I wrote:
So, I’m looking at my position…the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that…is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics…I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Instead, I crumbled when it became apparent that Starmer had lied to gain the leadership and was just another capitalist lackey, pushing the anti-Semitism lie to squeeze out any supporters of real social justice, in favour of returning the party to right-wing conformity.((https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/whet-does-starmer-stand-for/)) Rather than take my energy elsewhere, I retreated.
I have been surprised by how deeply I have fallen into nihilism, and how unable I am to rekindle hope. I have always believed that optimism is my natural state, and that pessimism is a pointless self-scourging: why anticipate sorrow? For the past two years, though, I have felt that our last hope of stopping the end of the democratic era has died, and that the drift towards authoritarian tribalism is unstoppable.
And yet, my ideals have not changed. I still believe that economic equality is a necessary first-condition of a just society. I still believe that the maltreatment of animals is at the core of the rapacious relationship of capitalism to the planet. What I have not done is find, “the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze” that Perry describes as the state in which one might, “suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought”. My fugues have been fruitless. I am as adrift as I was two and a half years ago, when my political hopes died. My courage – my optimism – has been overwhelmed by the sense that the world really is spiralling towards destruction.
Is it just a question of courage? Raymond Williams said that, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing,” but I never wanted to be radical. I don’t see my politics as radical: the belief that one life is no less valuable than the next should not be a radical assertion. It is the basis of decency, and its denial is obscene. I think, fundamentally, I’m not suited to political engagement: I’m too self-conscious and too naked; too heart-on-sleeve.
That’s an excuse, though, of course. Yeats didn’t want to be drawn into politics:
…But the strife engendered when an intensely inward mind finds itself cast into remorselessly political times was perhaps more of an epochal predicament than it sounds. The great works of Yeats…are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of ‘what’s difficult’, and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.
((Perry))
What to do? What to do?
I sought permission from Simon and Schuster to post this poem back in March. I heard nothing, and I did nag, so I’m going tp do it anyway. I own the book, and this post only makes sense if you’ve read the poem, so let’s see what happens. I expect I am beneath their notice, but if they do notice me, it will be exciting. [↩]
Today was a beautiful, late-winter morning, as clear and still as any day in the past few weeks. This was in contrast to yesterday, a Sunday, which was stormy and intermittently wet. Yesterday’s gloom gave me and Mrs DWC the excuse to have a do-nothing day: she stayed on the bed, reading, with the cat and the dog competing for the cosier spots, and I, having given Hazel a short walk, sat at my computer, planning the renovation of an old bike.
The fruits of my labours are contained in the document below. In fact, a good part of the document is redundant already, as I decided this morning that I would pay a professional to do the headset, but it was a pleasant day’s research which led me to muse on my bike ownership and the fact that, after a decade and a half of using bikes as my main transport, doing up even such a simple bike as the TIE Fighter is a major challenge.
This is the TIE Fighter. When I got it, I kept up the affectation of naming my bikes after spaceships from Star Wars, and she is the oldest of my bikes that, a) hasn’t been nicked and, b) is still in some sort of working order. I want to lay out my plans for this much-loved, but very tired, little beauty in this post, but, first, I’d like to return to point a) and indulge myself in reminiscence of all the bikes I’ve loved and lost, or neglected.
She may not look like much, but I’ve made a lot of special modifications…
She may not look like much, but I’ve made a lot of special modifications…
She may not look like much, but I’ve made a lot of special modifications…
It is, as you can probably see, a Boardman hybrid, of the sort that really became popular at the turn of the millennium: a road bike with flat bars and aggressive gearing, designed for whizzing around towns rather than for long journeys. Surprisingly, though, it has always been a comfortable bike, and a powerful workhorse: for several years I used it with a trailer, and carried up to thirty kilos behind it, doing up to fifty miles a week in that state.
Not a spot of rust.
Not a spot of rust.
Not a spot of rust.
Its original owner hadn’t used it very much and it had the gloss of newness. Compare it with the picture at the top of this post and you can see the years etched upon it.
In many ways, like a well-read book, I prefer a slightly battered-looking bike. However, the TIE Fighter has got beyond battered-looking, to just battered. Since I got it, I have tended to commute on whatever mountain bike I had in the winter but revert to the TIE Fighter whenever the weather was reasonable, as it was simply easier. I still used my mountain bikes, but as leisure bikes, not on the roads.
The A-wing, in her glory days.
The A-wing, in her glory days.
The A-wing, in her glory days.
However, around 2013 or so, after a succession of rough winters, the Island’s roads had got into such a state that using a road bike, particularly on my night-ride home after teaching evening classes, had become quite frightening. When the Millennium Falcon was stolen, in July of 2013, I used the A-wing for a couple of years, but that was overkill, and, in 2015, I bought a 29″ Voodoo Bizango; a Halfords mid-range bike which was absolutely perfect for long commutes with a laden trailer over pot-holed roads.
Gone, gone, and never called me Mother.
Gone, gone, and never called me Mother.
Gone, gone, and never called me Mother.
Alas, the East Cowes bike thief – may he (or she) suffer a thousand chronic saddle sores – struck again, in 2019. I’d forgotten to bring the bike into the back garden after cycling home one night and it was gone by the morning. In some ways, that was the more annoying theft, although I didn’t have the same affection for that bike that I had for the Falcon. I don’t have any pictures of it, for instance. It was, however, a superb tractor of a bike. I’ve since replaced it with a later model, and it is not nearly as good. For a start, the new version cannot pull my trailer, as it has stupid, smart-alec chainstays that mean you have no room for the extended quick release that secures the trailer’s bracket. The 2015 Bizango was a sturdy, capacious bike with a superb gear range that was both an enjoyable off-road ride and a useful and reasonably fast on-road commuter, able to cope with potholed roads.
At the time of this theft I hadn’t the funds to replace it and the A-wing, to my shame, was in an unusable state at the top of the garden, needing a lot of money to bring up to scratch, a situation that has only got worse in the intervening years. So much for leisure bikes. The TIE Fighter, on the other hand, needed some work, but it was within my means if I was careful for a month or two. So, I got it done up by a nice mechanic who works out of an industrial unit at the other side of Cowes. Understanding that I couldn’t afford to have everything that needed fixing replaced, he tightened the exhausted headset, managed to force a little more life out of the knackered hydraulic brakes and only replaced the cassette and chain, which were beyond repair.
It did the job. It felt a little sketchy with the trailer and it was odd to ride a bike with road wheels after several years of riding a 29″ wheeled mountain bike, but it was a bike and it got me to and from work. In the years since I’d bought the Voodoo, the Island’s roads had been resurfaced, so my reason for giving up on the TIE Fighter had been resolved. Nevertheless, I was saving for a new bike.
Then COVID happened. Suddenly, I didn’t need to drag folders and laptops around the Island and, in fact, I thought for a while that I would be out of work, so I volunteered to redeploy and was roped into two days a week of voluntary work at a retired people’s respite centre and short-term care home in Ryde. I bought a new Voodoo – a mistake, really, but I’ll discuss that at another time – and began to use that as my everyday bike and the TIE Fighter was consigned to the shed, and to an apparently permanent place on my rolling to-do list.
In this month’s Cycle Magazine, the excellent freebie sent out to members of CyclingUK, there is an article arguing that restoring an existing bike is a far better option than buying a new one. It sounds obvious, I know, but it inspired me. In particular, the following quote got me dreaming.
Cherish the bike you own. It’s easy to be distracted by the siren call of the shiny and new. Yet the fact that there’s a new bike that’s better than your old one doesn’t make your bike any worse than it was when you bought it…Recapturing that warm glow is partly mind games…I like a bike with what Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycle Works calls ‘beausage’ – a portmanteau of ‘beauty’ and ‘usage’, which means the former comes from the latter. In other words, a well-used bike with some scuffs and scars looks better than a pristine, unridden bike. But if you prefer a polished bike, shine that frame! Want perfect paintwork? Get a respray…The more your bike meets your ideas of how a bike should look, the more you’ll like it.
Dan Joyce, Editor, Cycle Magazine
I have never been a competent mechanic. I have tried and, more than once, got myself into a real muddle. My chin bears the scars of an accident caused by my not being meticulous enough in re-tightening a wheel after having a disheartening go at sorting out some brakes. That was a decade ago, and now, though I can beat a deraillieur into submission, given an hour or so, I still quail at the idea of bleeding hydraulic brakes. I did, in a moment of inspiration, manage to teach myself how to change brake pads, a task that costs £50 for just one brake if you pay a bike shop, so that’s a win. All my working bikes use Shimano – or Shimano rip-off – brakes now, so the pads are cheap on ebay. However, I suspect that fitting new brakes on the TIE fighter will be beyond my powers. There are some seductive videos of the process online, that try to persude you that it’s easy, but the variables in mechanical processes are what catch me out. What’s easy for Rod of MTBWhizzo’s YouTube channel (“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!!!”), who spends his days tinkering with bikes for which he doesn’t have to pay, is an anxious, fiddly, potentially ruinous mystery for me, nine times out of ten.
The Star Cruiser, unladen.
The Star Cruiser, unladen.
The Star Cruiser, unladen.
Fortunately, I’m in no hurry. I have the starcruiser, a heavy, pannier-rack laden wonder that I spent far too much money buying in 2020, and which is relatively maintenance-free, thanks to its internal hub gearing and carbon belt drive. It is my main bike now, for work and for shopping. The new Voodoo, though a chore for getting around, is lovely off-road, but I don’t have much time for that, so it stays in the shed, mocking me. I’m also not crazy about the slightly questionable brand name, so am thinking about getting the frame resprayed at some point, but I digress. The purpose of the TIE Fighter is to be a quick hop-on when I only need a couple of things from the shops, or when I don’t need to carry too much to work. It’s reverting to its original purpose, of being a fast, zippy runaround.
Walking Hazel this morning was a cure for the post-Christmas malaise.
The fog was thick even as far up the town as our house. In Whippingham, it was like a veil, and St Mildred’s looked like a fantasy castle. I was listening to The Sword of Destiny, by Andrzej Sapkowski, beautifully read by Peter Kenny. The weather suited the story telling, and I could almost picture a dragon gliding up from the Medina, the mist making swirling vortices at its wingtips.
Down in the woods, across the fields, the cobwebs were silver with mist drops. The mist settled on my beard and on Hazel’s muzzle. I wanted to go on, through the woods, down to the Folly Inn and along the path to Newport, walking all day. It was a workday though, and I had to be at Westridge by midday, to do paperwork and then teach an evening class: as prosaic a use of a day as the morning was poetic.
All the same, for an hour, I felt free, and my spirits were lifted, and work was a little less oppressive because of the beauty of the morning.
Last Friday, the day after the election, in a fog of tiredness and sorrow, I went to work, where I dragged learners through English mocks, and fought to believe that anything can make any difference now.
One learner, who manages an incredibly demanding life of balancing the needs of various dependents with a zero hours care job, was late. When she came in, she was, as ever, flustered. She offered her apologies and said,
“I had to get on to the Universal Credit. They’ve only paid half my rent.”
I sympathised and pushed her work in front of her. She completed it in her habitual rush, with her usual betrayal of her intelligence, because her way of coping with a life of overwhelming economic and familial responsibility at too young an age is to do everything in a hurry, avoiding dangerous reflection. We discussed each answer, interpreting how she hadn’t read the questions fully or considered all the options in the multiple choice section, and how, with a few minutes’ care, she is perfectly capable of passing what should be, for her, the formality of this exam. She promised to be early next week, and to take a few minutes to become calm, but I expect she will rush in to the exam room late, pre-occupied by another crisis that she will bravely cope with, as she tries to make the space to better her life.
In the afternoon, she came back for the maths class. I had been preparing for this class for several weeks, laying the ground for nervous learners: it’s the one in which we move from basic calculation with decimal numbers to working with fractions. This is where people give up: they believe that ‘fractions are hard’, and that they have some innate inability to ‘do hard maths’ and this section of the course is always as much an exercise in boosting learners’ self-belief and reflecting on how much they have already achieved as it is about introducing new skills and understanding.
She and my other learner who had turned up – there’s a wave of colds and stomach bugs keeping children off school, and two other women were at home with sick offspring – have developed a friendship that is still at the stage of curiosity about one another. Off-topic discussions, pleasurable as they can be, are a headache for me, as I only get two hours each week to teach a demanding curriculum. I had given them their warm up task – a few questions on what we had covered the previous week – and checked that they knew where they were with it, and I left the room to go to the loo while they completed it. By the time I got back, they were discussing the election result.
I groaned inwardly, and cautioned myself to be like a fly fisherman with a bite: to let it run until I could feel they were tiring and then take control again. A few weeks before, as part of my duty to ‘promote British values’, I had used a voter registration poster in our English class for an exercise on identifying presentational features in a text. At the time, the learner of whom I am writing had asked me my politics and I had explained that I wasn’t allowed to say, and she had responded, after a discussion of why that was sensible for a teacher, that she reckoned I was for Corbyn. At the time, I’d congratulated myself on remaining neutral. Now, as I sat quietly, waiting for my opportunity to get them back on task, she said,
“I was right about you.”
Photo: Isle of Wight County Press (I think)
Photo: Isle of Wight County Press (I think)
Photo: Isle of Wight County Press (I think)
She’d seen a photo on the local newspaper’s website, in one of the few articles the openly Tory-leaning rag had bothered to publish on Labour’s campaign, that had a picture of a group of Labour supporters gathering for an event in Ryde, smiling, comradely, happy, optimistic. At the back, peaking over the shoulder of the shorter man in front, grinning like a hungover idiot, I was clearly visible.
“You know I can’t talk about it,” I said, shaken.
“Yeah,” she said, “I voted for Boris. I’ve never voted before, but I voted Conservative.”
It was as if she hated me. I know she doesn’t, but that was how it felt.
I haven’t blogged about this election, beyond changing my homepage to a trite meme and linking to a couple of posts I’d heard about through the news. I haven’t blogged much this year, of course, but I did expect that, when the longed-for election campaign happened, I’d be leaping into prolix action, as I had in 2017.
Instead, I’ve been involved, ‘on the streets’, and through the Constituency Labour Party’s own systems. I’ve been the assistant secretary of the CLP for nearly two years, but that has, until recently, only meant being the keyboard monkey for the secretary and chair, both of whom have become friends. Just before the election started, however, the chair withdrew himself from consideration for the position of candidate, having been subject to sustained vilification, including threats to his family, since the last election, and the secretary got himself locked out of the Labour comms system for a mistaken breach of the opaque rules, which have more to do with internal politicking within the national party structure than they do with making the system work.
Thanks to these circumstances, my role became, accidentally, central. Over the last six weeks, I have probably written more words than in the previous twelve months. They just haven’t found their way here. The chair, who had become the new candidate’s campaign manager, told me, late on in the campaign, that his role was taking the fight to the Tories, and my role was galvanising the troops. I hadn’t been told that before, but had simply adopted the job that I didn’t see anyone else doing, or being in a position to do.
Each day after work, once I’d done enough to be sure that I would know where I was for the next lessons, I turned off my work laptop and went straight on to my own computer, where I would often be trapped until after midnight. If the next day wasn’t a teaching day, I would be out with the Cowes and East Cowes branch, delivering leaflets door-to-door, or helping with the distribution of garden signs and posters to people who had contacted the party, asking how they could help. In the evenings, there were many events, most of which were a pleasure: I have spent more time in pubs over the last few weeks than I have for many years.
At first, it was exciting. I was surrounded by people who believe, broadly, in what I believe: that humans are only of any account if they serve the group; that selfishness is a moral and intellectual failure; that the dominant political and economic system is, without question, evil; childish, rapacious and evil, but that elation had, after the first couple of weeks, begun to compete with exhaustion. I did not, however, lose hope, but I began to feel a little let down by comrades whose belief in the coming victory of justice and good sense was tempered with caution.
Two things gave me a different outlook to the majority of people fighting for a Labour victory in this election: my Christianity and my disavowal of social media.
I am not an ardently practising Christian, but I came, through the nineties and noughties, to realise that I cannot escape my faith, and that the arguments against faith that were trendy in those decades, were, in the words of Terry Eagleton, a process of Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching against a system of thought that the neo-atheists wilfully misunderstood and misrepresented. Earlier this year, I joined Christians On The Left. Through the election they have been sending out a daily email, the 2019 Prayer Diary. Written by a theologian who only introduced herself as Hazel, they were wonderfully welcome at a time when I didn’t have the space to read my normal blogs and news for which I receive update emails that, through the campaign, I simply had to delete, to be able to keep up with my inboxes. Each day, though, I read her prayers, and then got on with whatever needed doing.
As for social media, I think my absence from it since July 2017 has given me the clarity to think for myself and to avoid the political panic to which I am prone and which, I think, guided many people in this election. The Tories are crisis capitalists: they thrive on the established P.R. tactic of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). I suspect, without being in a position to offer evidence, that this was the election in which the capitalists realised their technological dream of controlling people’s reactions from within. I may expand upon that at another time, but I think that, accomplished as we in the Labour Party are at using social media to make ourselves feel effective, it means nothing unless the people who own the media are on your side.
Actually, I did rejoin Twitter for the duration of the campaign. It helped me to keep up with events in the CLP, where a disparate set of groups, spread over the largest constituency in the country (by population), were arranging their campaigning efforts semi-autonomously, and were not always brilliant at communicating outside their social media bubbles. I tried to join Facebook as well, but was frustrated. I think my use of Firefox’s Facebook Container extension, coupled with a disposable email address and a phone number linked to a burner SIM card I had no intention of using again, tipped the creepy capitalist bastards off. I’m rather proud to have been blocked by Facebook before I posted a thing!
A facile pretence of utility and ubiquity have made social media essential in politics, and have, I believe, handed the reins of power over to a capitalist hegemony as completely as any other factor in this election. I had set up my home server, after two years of study and trial and error, less than a month before the election was announced, and would have been lost without the calendar, to-do lists and contacts server it hosts, but I was still obliged to use a Google calendar for shared calendaring with the CLP. We need to look at owning our infrastructure, but it’s a hard sell. People who automatically accept the ‘services’ to which they are tied by their choice of computer system and mobile phone have a hard time understanding that they are being used, when they have put so much effort into just mastering the technology that seeks to control them. The idea that it is escapable defeats them, as the idea that all politicians are not the same defeats people who are struggling to survive in an economic system that is tightening around their lives. There is a simple answer (simpler than the route of learning and self-building that I have used), but how many people will make the effort to do it?
Earlier this year, I read Democracy Hacked, by Martin Moore. A couple of months ago, I read, almost in one sitting, the Edward Snowden autobiography, Permanent Record and, just before the election was called, I bought The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, which I will now have the time to read fully. If you want to understand what has happened to democracy over the last decade, you need to read these texts. You do not control your data, and, consequently, electronic communication does not, any more, give us a full say in our democracy. We’ve overthrown one tyranny of informational cartels to replace it with another. We need new mechanisms of resistance.
I’m not keen on going into mainstream media’s role in this election. Enough people are already examining that, although I will add a couple of personal observations. Firstly, the full emotional crash of the exit poll was pre-announced by about twenty seconds, for me, by the smirk on the face of Andrew Niel as he talked over the countdown to it. Rattling through his bland script, he looked as though he had a hand stuffed down his truss, so excited was he by the predicted result to which he, I assume, had had early access. If you believe in democracy, honesty or truth, the BBC is not your friend, any more than Facebook is.
Secondly, it dawned on me, as I angrily skimmed The Guardian’s website each morning, that the key figures among its columnists and editorial staff are probably on a lot more than £80,000 per annum and, while they cling to the pose of being ‘of the left’ as their journalistic USP, very few of them will have voted for a party that wanted to raise taxes for the richest 5%. I think their utter betrayal of democracy is a good enough reason to not “support independent journalism” for another year. Let them take comfort from their massive wealth, their second homes and their positions of quisling influence.
There is a lot of commentary on the election leaping out and I haven’t had the heart to try to keep up over the weekend. Yesterday, Saturday, we met other Island Labour members in a Newport pub to have a bit of a thank you session, with the candidate, Richard Quigley, a gloriously happy, funny, clever and warm man, bringing his wife and daughter so he could say his personal thanks. Richard has been a pleasure to support in the campaign, as Julian, his manager, was in the last. In the pub, many of us were talking about how we are now facing the very real dread of the last restraints being released from the Tory plunder of our country’s assets. We’re thinking about the fact that we will not be able to afford ‘health insurance’ when the Fascists pocket the bribes from the Yank money and drug industries; we’re thinking about the fact that those of us who are in public service jobs will probably endure a continued slide into deeper and deeper working destitution, if we are lucky enough to keep our jobs. We are finding it harder to think without real, urgent horror of the fate of disabled people, homeless people, people who cannot find legal redress for rape or harassment and how soon it will be our turn to join them. It’s personal. Dying, untreated, of some wretched cancer, or living with pain that would be treatable if we were part of the 5%, now seems like our common fate.
What we are supposed to do, if we follow the advice that we have told ourselves since Jeremy Corbyn first gave us hope, is to pull together, look to one another, and begin to support those people already jettisoned by the Tories’ campaign of exclusion and abandonment. Some people are talking about it, but we all know that the Blairites will try another deluded attempt to drive the party into impotence by reopening the insane whinges they’ve been picking at since they were crushed in 2015. And, pathetic as their positions are, they have The New Statesman and The Guardian behind them, so they don’t have to be right, just shamelessly persistent.
So, I’m looking at my position. If infighting does get a grip, I may decide to not stand for local party office at the next AGM. Over the election, I have made new friends, or deepened existing ones, and the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that, while it is not as powerful as political office, is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics. And, if I convince a few people to see through the lies of the capitalist hegemony on the way, all the better.
One other thing is troubling me; an issue that is like the ticking bomb that fascists love to use to justify their cruelty. If, by some miracle, the vile Bozo Johnson manages to hold together a government for five years, the timeline for installing a government that will meet its responsibilities to the climate emergency before the deadline that scientists now say is the very latest chance to save human civilisation will be halved. We have to stop the Tories before then. We have to. I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Let’s get back to my Tory voting learner. I can’t discuss her much more closely than I already have, but I can make some guesses about those things that drive her. Not ideologically racist, she has, I suspect, suffered humiliations at the hands of people whom she perceives as different, and came to the Island, partly, to get away from communities that are in turmoil and have been turned against one another by poverty and poorly resourced and led policing, social structures and political leadership. For her, Brexit seems like a triumph of the poor over the powerful – a reversal of the truth, as it turns out, but if your information comes from social media and tabloids, you can continue to believe that.
For her, also, they are all the same. It’s the FUD lie of lies, that says that politics is pointless and the safest and bravest response is to follow the herd. Political voting is confused with voting for a Love Island contestant, where the outcome is similar to a bet: you win if you back the winner.
In truth, of course, backing the winner in this election has guaranteed that the phone calls she gets, when she says, “Someone after money: they can jog on,” will increase. The waiting time for her Universal Credit will lengthen, the amount she is entitled to reduced, so her debts will deepen; the inadequate working protections she has at the moment will be removed one at a time, until she will be paying, not only for her work travel, but for her uniform, her equipment, and, finally, for the privilege of being employed.
She hasn’t yet noticed, I suspect, that the NHS has been privatised. The fact that ‘Boris’, as she calls him, lied about putting more money into the NHS hasn’t got through to her. They all throw figures around, don’t they? They’re all the same.
When she told me that she had voted Tory, I stared at her for a moment, taking in her beauty, her nicotine-stained front teeth, her bravely well turned out appearance that is testament to her courage, given the hours she works, and then muttered that I couldn’t get into it. It was an uncomfortable moment.
She got on with her work, doing well, grasping lowest common multiples and then comparison of fractions, but the moment must have lingered for her, as well as for me. I realised that, for her, I am part of the body of authority that keeps her working and working and working, denying her the right to gain full realisation of her talents and potential and, by confronting my politics, she was asserting herself; laying claim to a dignity she doesn’t realise I already see in her. She’s not to know that I earn less than her, and that, for all my education, I am as constrained and limited by the political and economic system as she is.
Finally, as we were summing up the learning at the end of the class, she brought it up again.
“It bothers you, don’t it,” she said, reverting to her mannered London speech, which is not how she usually talks to me.
I wanted to channel Jonathan Pie, and descend into a rant that would contain all the frustration and pain I had been feeling since ten o’clock the previous night, when Huw Edwards and Andrew Neil had gleefully pronounced my country’s doom. I stared into her eyes for a moment, trying to find the right thing to say. Nothing came.
In my struggle, I remembered Christians On The Left’s prayer email of that morning. I hadn’t absorbed it properly: I’d been too tired and too sad, but one line had jumped out at me:
Be still, and know that I am God
Psalm 46:10
I stopped searching and words came.
“Your vote is your own choice,” I said. “It’s wonderful that you voted. The fact that you have voted, for the first time, is a really good thing. The more people who vote, the more powerful all our votes are. I celebrate that.”
I doubt I fooled her. I suspect that, given the struggles she has and the job she does, she is a perceptive person, who saw how much pain I was in. However, she smiled, packed her bag, and went on to her next obligation, her courage and dignity undamaged by our exchange, knowing a little bit more about maths than she had when she came in.
Well, here she is, the new dog, to fill the aching void left by Tia, the Golden Dog,1 who was killed in a road accident on 15th December last year, after only thirteen months living with us. I can’t believe it was so short a time.
The new dog was named Buttercup by the rescue charity, but I wasn’t shouting that in the park, so we’ve renamed her Flora. Don’t let the look of innocence fool you; she’s a terror. The picture also gives the impression that she can read and is therefore a doggy prodigy: nothing could be further from the truth. I am fairly convinced that we’ve taken on a canine cretin.
In fairness, it is still only about four days since she left Romania, was transported hundreds of miles, separated from her litter mates and dumped in a house with two strange humans and a cat. She’s entitled to be a little disorientated.
I was working on the day she arrived and had an evening class as well, so wasn’t home until about half-past-nine. By then, she’d bonded with Amanda, and wasn’t about to spread the love. We’ve had a difficult weekend of adjustment. Flora hasn’t got the hang of me yet, and howls whenever Amanda goes upstairs, or pops out of the house. I’m supposed to completely ignore her and let her come to me. She’s shown some curiosity about me, but hasn’t decided I’m her friend yet. I don’t take rejection well, and am finding it quite difficult.
Amanda is working this afternoon, so I’ll be in the house with Flora going spare for her favourite human. To remind myself that it is worth it, I have made a gallery of pictures of Tia, to which I linked in the first paragraph of this post.
For now, I just keep thinking that I’m a cat person. Yes, since Tia died, I’ve missed the walks, and the devotion of a trusting dog, but I am finding all the adaptation a real headache.
Flora is quite pretty though, and I love the way she hasn’t quite grown into her paws yet. I’m sure we’ll be best buddies before long.
My father died on November 30th. He had been ill for five years, with one of the exotic derivatives of leukaemia that can be emolliated for a time, but will triumph in the end. We were very lucky that the care, for him and us, during his illness, was wonderful. He was treated in a well-funded Macmillan Centre in a large NHS hospital whose excellent condition is due, no doubt, to it being in a Tory semi-marginal constituency. He died there, with an attentive palliative care team staffed by nurses and a consultant he had come to know and who treated him as a friend. Everyone should have such care.
My mother and I were with him when he died. He’d been unconscious for a couple of days, stretched on a bed that was almost too short for him, his head and shoulders raised, his mouth open, a tube in his nose quietly hissing oxygen into him. Every few hours, his painkillers would begin to wear off, and he would rise towards awareness, wave his hands feebly and move his jaw. I was thrown into panic by this activity, pestering the nurses, or trying to dab at his mouth with a wetted sponge, making useless attempts to comfort him.
My sister, Charlotte, my mother and I stayed in the room overnight the night before. They slept on chairs and I had a pillow on the floor, and, horrible as the situation was, we were close in a way I don’t remember us being for many years. He was a missing part, just a bodily presence, although we spoke to him, telling him we loved him very much. In one of his periods of stirring, Charlotte said, “We are so lucky to have you as our father,” and I wept silently, so as not to upset him. In the small hours of the morning, with just my mother and me in the room with my father, Charlotte having popped home for a few hours’ rest, I noticed that he wasn’t breathing any more. It was that simple. After a controlled bedlam of nurses checking we were right, I closed his mouth, and a nurse switched off the oxygen, and my mother and I sat in silence with his body.
“I wish I could cry,” she said.
Over the rest of the weekend, we clung together, my mother, my sister, Amanda, our friends Vanessa and Pete, my niece and nephew and me, going through photo albums, walking the dogs, and coming to terms with a world without him.
Amanda and I had to return to the Island. I didn’t want to take too much time off work, as I had learners coming up to exams, and they needed my support. We returned to Bury St Edmunds the following weekend, though, and took part in the preparations for the funeral. Then we came home for another week, before the long drive back up to Suffolk for the weekend of the funeral, which was scheduled for that Monday.
Our car had developed a fault, which we had had fixed on the Island, but which had left the computerised engine management system messed up. On the Saturday morning, in bright, sharply cold sunshine, Amanda and I drove up to the Peugeot garage on the Morton Hall estate, and booked the car in. It was so cold that we stopped in a pet superstore place and bought Tia a coat, because we were worried she would be too cold on the walk back to my parents’ house. Then we ambled back through the leafy estate, letting Tia roam on a long lead, the grief of our loss a gentle topic of careful discussion, but feeling peaceful in the glorious winter weather.
Back at the house, my mother was worrying about my father’s office. He had kept the most bizarre things: hundreds of old coins; documents without any filing system; cuttings from newspapers about people we didn’t know, and instruction booklets for devices we had never come across. We’d spent the previous Saturday trying to make some sense of it, and Charlotte had dug out all the documents she needed for the registration of his death, and for the other annoyances of bereavement, like re-registering the car in my mother’s name, transferring the joint bank account to her and adding his investments to the estate, so that his will could be processed. Amanda and I spent an hour with her, in the office, trying to calm her nervous rummaging, and prevent her from messing up what order Charlotte had been able to impose.
We were rescued by Charlotte phoning to ask whether we wanted to go for lunch in town. The day remained bright and lovely and we leapt at the distraction.
While I searched for gloves and changed my shirt, I heard a commotion downstairs. My mother had accidentally let Tia out of the front door and she had done one of her disappearing acts. By the time I’d got my boots on, Amanda had already gone out of sight, chasing after her.
I ran across the square and through the alleyway that leads from the new estate where my parents’ house is, onto the industrial estate behind it. The A14, the major road through East Anglia, runs past the estate, on a raised bank with wooded sides about ten metres high. Because of the trees, and the good insulation of the houses, it’s easy to forget it’s there: like all nuisances with which you live, you either get driven mad by it, or zone it out, and I am good at zoning out nuisance.
Over the noise, however, I thought I heard a scream. I was behind a warehouse where I had walked Tia late the previous Sunday, and I ran back round to where I had a view through two industrial buildings to the housing estate. A man in mechanic’s overalls was walking hurriedly across the square. I ran towards the alleyway, but before I got there, through another gap, I saw Amanda carrying Tia and I registered, without absorbing it, that Tia’s head was lolling from her arms.
By the time I got back among the houses, and ran up to the house, Amanda had laid Tia down by the front door and run in, shouting about needing a vet. I knelt down beside the poor, broken dog, and, I think, saw a moment of consciousness before she died. There was blood around her muzzle, her tongue was hanging out and her neck was skewed in a position that said it was definitely broken, but she retained her beauty and her face was still the face I had come to love over the past thirteen months.
I shouted into the house to Amanda, “She’s dead,” and was humiliated to realise I’d wailed it. I buried my face in her fur, and there was no movement. She was warm, but lifeless.
It seemed one thing too many. For a moment, I considered running away. I am a selfish man at heart, and I had been at a high pitch of anxiety since my father’s illness had got worse, months before. For the past two weeks, since his death, I had been promising myself that, at the funeral, I would put this period of unhappiness and tension to rest, and return to sanity, calm and a life of hobbies and good living with a renewed sense of the basic rightness of life. Kneeling in front of my mother’s house, beside our dead dog, that seemed to be a future that I had just lost.
I think, though, that you do find the strength to do what needs to be done, in moments of crisis. My mother was distraught, although, as always, she wasn’t crying, but trying to behave with dignity. I got up and hugged her, and then went upstairs to find Amanda, who was crying on our bed. I comforted her, and cried with her for a moment.
“Our baby’s gone,” she said. I held her tighter for a few minutes, then went downstairs again to my mother.
I phoned Charlotte, and then my mother and I took Tia round the back of the house, through the car park and into the garden. Through my reassurances, my mother took control by trying to organise, and she said that we could bury Tia in the top of the garden. I pushed Tia’s tongue back into her mouth, and arranged her head so that she looked as though she was sleeping, and then I suggested we go inside.
I made tea and Amanda came downstairs. Incredibly, she had managed to compose herself. I loved her so much just then. She had wanted a dog for so long, and when it had finally become realistic, she had worried and fussed over the process, and had been surprised, I think, that it had been a joy, rather than the disaster she had expected, in her anxious approach to life. I knew, though, that she would be thinking about my mother, who was preparing to bury her husband of five decades in two days, and was trying to control the impact of this new calamity, that seemed to confirm her natural pessimism. Two sides of her character – her anxiety and her impulse to care about the feelings of others – were at war, and her selflessness triumphed.
Tia in her grave.
Tia in her grave.
Tia in her grave.
Charlotte arrived. I asked her to stay with Amanda while my mother and I took Tia’s body up to the top of the garden. We got a spade and a shovel from the shed and dug a hole in a patch of ground that my mother had only cleared of weeds that autumn, and which she was planning to use for climbing plants. When it seemed deep enough, I laid Tia into it, arranging her as best I could. When my mother asked me whether I wanted to start filling in, though, I said it could wait for an hour or two. Tia was still warm. “I don’t want those nightmares,” I said.
There didn’t seem anything else to do, so we went ahead with our lunch plans, walking into town. To get out of the estate, we had to pass the path that Tia had bolted up, onto the A14, and Amanda found that hard. She explained what had happened and reproached herself for chasing an excited dog, when she should, she felt, have hung back, waiting for her to come back to her. I doubted that Tia, once she had given way to curiosity, would have noticed, but I didn’t try to contradict her then. The man in overalls I’d seen was a mechanic in the garage by the main road, and Amanda and I dropped in to thank him. He was kind and sympathetic, but embarrassed, and I said to myself then what I would say many times over the next few weeks: she was just a dog.
My father’s funeral was on Monday 17th December, 2018, at half-past-two. If that seems a little histrionic in its precision, my excuse is that such details matter, two months on, as it all begins to feel a little distant.
By the good offices of the church warden, Teresa Goodenough, who is a long-term friend of my mother’s and a true Christian, we had been allowed to hold it in the church of Fornham All Saints, the village in which my parents lived for twenty years, although they had ceased to be parishioners when they moved into town, and transferred their worship to the cathedral, which was more accessible to them as my father grew frailer. Kindness surrounded us in the arrangements. Two friends of my father’s officiated: Canon David Crawley, who is the Anglican chaplain at the hospital where my father died, and Revd. Michael Edge, a neighbour of my parents who is a retired cleric and who used to visit my father at home to read with him and, it seems, chat about memories of the Church of England.
My cousin, Nicky, and her husband, Chris, stayed with us at my mother’s house the night before. They’d travelled up from Devon and the meal we shared on the Sunday evening was a joyous affair, with Charlotte and Eden (my niece) joining us. Later, we got out the photo albums again. I think I may have been obsessing slightly. I had been busy throughout the fortnight since my father’s death, burying myself in Labour Party stuff and trying to shut things out, and I felt now that I needed to throw myself into some role of mourner-in-chief.
In the morning, my uncle and aunt came over from Norwich. Charlotte, Eden and Ruben (my nephew) arrived mid-morning and then Vanessa, Pete and their daughter, Maya, turned up. It was another lovely, bright winter morning. The house was full of flowers and cards and the sense that my father was a man widely loved had begun to seep into my grief.
Charlotte and Amanda had taken my mother dress shopping on the Saturday and had had a proper girls’ day out. The pain of losing Tia was still hanging over Amanda and me, but we had been able to hold it off, at least around my mother; to keep the focus on her.
At the appointed time, the undertakers’ car turned up and Charlotte, my mother, Amanda, Ruben, Eden and I piled in. It was all a bit of a daze. You see funeral processions and you try not to stare, but it’s one of those experiences that can never feel entirely novel when it is finally your turn to sit ashen-faced in the extended Mercedes: it is too familiar as an observer. Our route was by ring roads, round the back of the sugar-beet factory and through Fornham St. Martin, all golf-courses and flat-pack housing estates, and so arriving in the centre of the village, outside the church, was like stepping out of a mundane world and into a picture-book one. Fornham is not what it was when my parents lived there, but it is still beautiful, and the church is like an archetype of a village church.
Going in was a shock, though. It was filled. Teresa was rushing about, organising more seating. In the end, just shy of two hundred people were packed in. My father had been a founding member of the St Edmundsbury Male Voice Choir, and a couple of dozen of them packed the choir stalls. Amanda and I were sat in the front row to the right of the aisle, while the rest of the family sat to the left. I stared up at the East window and prayed to the picture of Christ there.
The vicars and Charlotte had asked me whether I wanted to do a reading. I hadn’t wanted to do a eulogy: how could I sum him up? Chaotic, honourable, loving, daft, pompous, kind, gentle, brave and funny: none of it would have sounded like the stuff of a loving son. It would have sounded like a performance. I had latched on loving, and chosen the only text that came to mind at the time they asked: Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, on love.2 I’m not actually a huge fan of Paul, but he is very good on love, and it has been the front page of my website for over a year, so I know it. It seemed right.
When the time came for me to read, I got up and walked to the lectern and just kept my head down. Revd. Michael had printed the passage out for me in large print, and I took the sheets out of my pocket, laid them on the lectern-top and read. A sort of grace seemed to fill me. I didn’t rush, or falter, and, when I reached the line saying that love “endures all things,” I looked up, straight at Amanda, willing her to feel the comfort of this truth. She was crying, though, with her head bowed, and so I looked down again, and read on.
On Christmas morning, my mother and I went to the eight o’clock communion in the cathedral. We walked up in frost-sharp air, and took our places in the sparse congregation. It was a beautiful service. The sermon, by the Dean, the Very Revd. Joe Howes, was casual, chatty, included some good jokes at his own expense, but made a wonderful point about, I think, rebirth, although I cannot now clearly remember. It felt as though he had addressed himself to me. By the time we took communion, I was in a real state of prayer; calm and settled, the whirring calculation of my brain stilled.
We walked home through the Abbey Gardens and the sun was white-bright turning to gold on a perfect sheet of frost. In the middle of the gardens, we stopped to look round, and to appreciate the beauty of the morning, and I revelled for a moment in the aftertaste of prayer. Then, my blogging head kicked in and I got out my phone and took a few photos. These are the results.
Still, the grief muddled on, the great sorrow of my father’s loss overshadowed by the petty grief for a slaughtered pet. During the previous week, back on the Island, attending training at work now that classes had ended for the term, and filling the rest of my time with computing tasks to keep myself busy, I had become angry about it, and then worried, that I was not grieving appropriately. Nevertheless, we had a happy Christmas day with Charlotte, Eden, Vanessa, Pete and Maya round my mother’s table, doing it all with a sense of duty that, despite the circumstances, turned into joy. At one point on Christmas Day, my mother said to us, “Mike would have loved this,” and that made it feel alright, being happy, so soon.
On Boxing Day, Charlotte had us round to her house for a meal. Eden was there as well; a quiet, amused presence, treating life like a humorous spectacle, as is her manner. At some point, I must have looked around the room, at these four incredible, brave, kind women; my mother, my wife, my sister and my niece, and realised that, despite the double blow I had suffered, my relationships with them had been strengthened, not harmed, by our shared sorrow. In any loss, there is something to be gained, if you can find it, and, for me, this closeness was like a reward for my not having given way to my grief. I hope the same is true for them. I know that Amanda feels our relationship has been strengthened by the last few months’ turmoil, because we can discuss such things, and Charlotte has made cautious overtures to me as well, but I worry about my mother.
I wish she could cry.
I’m still worried that I haven’t grieved properly. I’ve done some research, and discovered that the advice is so consistent that it must be a reliable consensus: there are stages; they are not written in stone; everyone grieves differently. It all begins to sound a little lazy, as if the universality of loss has reduced the incredible unreality of someone you love no longer existing to a set of bullet points on a web page or in a leaflet that gets misfiled in a health centre.
What nags at me is how sharp my feelings towards Tia are, compared to my feelings about my father. She was just a dog. I can rationalise it by realising that, despite my policy of optimism throughout his illness, I had five years to understand that my father would not be with me forever, whereas Tia’s death came out of the blue, when I was already vulnerable. Nevertheless, it feels inappropriate, like a betrayal.
In the months since the funeral, I have returned to work, continued to tinker with computers, attended Labour Party meetings and enjoyed social events. Life goes on. Tomorrow, Amanda is going to the mainland to pick up a puppy, Buttercup (that’ll have to change), from a rescue charity in Hertfordshire. Life is beginning to regain its balance.
I am NOT calling her Buttercup.
I am NOT calling her Buttercup.
I am NOT calling her Buttercup.
Perhaps, for me, that is how grief will complete its form: there will be no great epiphany of feeling; no peak of anger or denial or bargaining or depression. Perhaps I will just slide slowly on to the acceptance. Perversely, though, I feel short-changed, and I feel as though I am somehow failing my kind, generous, unfailingly loving father, by not being racked by a sharper sorrow. It makes me wonder whether there is something wrong with me: something missing.
A month ago, I was worried enough about this to begin the process of seeking counselling. Through an employment support service, I have applied for an interview with the public mental health team. It is a service overburdened with supporting people in real crisis on austerity-slashed budgets, but I am told that I have as much right to seek assistance as anyone else. I hope I am not just being self-indulgent. I suppose I will find out.
There is one last event for me to record. A week and a half ago, we went back up to Bury St Edmunds, for the burial of my father’s ashes. On the way, half way round the M25, a fault light came on, and the car slowed to a crawl. I managed to nurse it to South Mimms service station where we spent an anxious couple of hours waiting for the rescue service.
It felt like a repeat of Tia’s death: another focus for my grief overcome by circumstances. In the fluorescent-lit hell of South Mimms, Amanda and I sat gloomily pondering our failings, unable to communicate. My anger was growing and I went outside, abandoning her, and walked to the trees at the edge of the car park and howled. Finally, I remembered that employment support had given me a phone number for a mental health crisis line and I had put the number in my phone.
The woman who answered listened to me patiently for a couple of minutes and then took over. Where was I? Was I safe? Where was my wife? Was she safe? Suddenly, prompted by her questions, my arrogance dissolved and I understood that nothing mattered as much as my responsibilities to my loved ones: my care for Amanda and my duty to her feelings. I thanked the counsellor, rang off, and ran back to Amanda.
Calmed myself, I was able to calm her, and apologise for my selfishness. Over the past five years, she has never once complained about spending almost every holiday with my parents, about driving up to Suffolk every weekend for two months without a weekend to herself, about having her grief for Tia buried beneath my father’s death. I couldn’t put into words how much I wanted to thank her, but she understood, as she has understood everything. We put our coats round ourselves, huddled together and waited together, accepting that what would be would be.
We were driven to Bury in a lorry, with our car bouncing on the flatbed behind us, by a cheerful driver who played Russian rock music all the way there. Some of it wasn’t too bad. We arrived at about two, and my mother, who we’d phoned when we realised we’d be late, had waited up. The house, which I have never really liked, felt like a warm coccoon, albeit, still a beige one. We settled into bed with a sense of renewed well-being.
The weekend passed pleasantly enough. We put the car back into the Peugeot garage, managing to get through the reminders of our last walk with Tia before her death, and then met Charlotte in town for a coffee, a wander round the market and then lunch at Pizza Express. My mother was in good form, her memory sharper than it had been recently, the terrible weight of her stoic grieving less evident. She was, however, dreading the burial.
Monday came, and we drove out to Fornham in my mother’s car. It was a wet, cloudy day. There was just us, the two vicars, Revd. Edge’s wife, Teresa and her husband Allan. We had a short service, led by Canon Crawley, in the chapel to the side of the church. My father’s ashes, in a pine box with a brass name plate on the top, sat on the altar rail as Revd. Edge read a beautiful reading from Isaiah, which he had chosen.
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
It will be said on that day,
Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Isaiah 25:6-9
Then, guided by Canon Crawley, I carried my father’s mortal remains outside, round the church, to a small plot beneath the east window. A hole had been dug, and lined with fake grass. After the familiar litany about ashes, I knelt down and placed the box into the hole, touched, but not overwhelmed, by a sense of the true awe of death. I was conscious of the sense of a performance and annoyed with myself for that. I forced myself to forget that there were people watching, and took care to make sure that the box was level, and square in the hole. My father, who liked his pencils lined up on his desk and his jackets hung in ordered rows in his wardrobe, would appreciate that. In that moment, I felt love for him, and I suddenly had tears in my eyes.
When I stood, Canon Crawley said, “Let us pray,” and we said the Lord’s Prayer. I had to keep wiping tears from my eyes, but I didn’t sob. When it was over, I kept staring down, into the hole, slightly horrified by what I had just done; the finality of it; trying to remember the promise of eternal life that Revd. Edge’s reading had so beautifully described. Someone was at my side, putting their arm around me, and I was moved beyond words to discover it was my mother. Charlotte and Amanda moved in close and we all held each other.
The grave is to the east of the church, beneath the window that depicts Christ the Redeemer. It will get morning sun, and it is large enough for my mother to join him there, when her time comes. Beside it, an old choir friend of my father’s is buried.
Going back through the photos on my phone, picture after picture shows a dazzled world: clear blue skies; smiling, tanned friends; sunlight lancing through rich green foliage or glinting, blindingly off sea or lake.
Tia, the golden dog, features in many of them, and she, as much as any other element in my life, has helped to make this a summer whose memory I will treasure.
How memories last is one of the mysterious revelations of middle age: the extent to which what we have experienced descends into a soup of glimpses and sense impressions that lose their sharp edges and become blurred.1 I suppose that is why I blog, or a large reason for it at any rate. Already, I cannot quite remember what I was doing when I took the photo above, of Tia asleep in our back garden. I suspect it was during one of the long afternoons when I was sitting outside, drinking tea and reading crap science fiction, enjoying the sun with Charles Mingus on my headphones. That has been a key part of this summer for me. I must post about the books I’ve read; the music that has shifted from new excitement to established favourite over this wonderful, sun-drenched year.
I should also, I suppose, record my achievements over this summer. I have completed a university access course, in science, technology and maths: a major milestone for me. I have, with Amanda, enjoyed the maturing of our relationships with our Labour Party comrades on the Island: in June, I went up to London for the SaveOurNHS march, and, with my sister, we attended the Burston School Strike Rally2 at the beginning of September. At work, the last academic year was my most successful so far, both in terms of results and the sense that I had helped several of my learners to move on with their lives, opening up new opportunities for them.
It has also been a summer of uncertainty. My father’s lymphoma has reasserted itself, and his treatment has shifted from fighting the illness to a more palliative-focused care. We have been up and down to Suffolk, and he has been, on some visits, frighteningly unwell, and on others, his old self, if diminished, physically. One afternoon, I sat in my parents’ garden with him, reading and chatting, warmed by bright sun, and I feel now a desperate need to grab at this memory; to preserve the comfort of being with my father, to record his anecdotes and loving enthusiasm.
I am beginning to feel old, but, at the same time, I’m swamped by feelings of never having grown up at all.
When Amanda opened the blinds this morning, the world outside was blanketed by fog: our first Autumn mist of the year.
From the river, half a kilometre away, the ferry’s foghorn lowed.
Signs of autumn have been settling throughout September, of course. We have had the heating on a few nights over the last week and I have been wearing long-sleeved tops, instead of tee-shirts, when I cycle or walk. Thanks to Tia, I have watched the passing of summer in Firestone Copse, as the blackberries fruited, ripened and, now, are beginning to wither on the brambles. A fortnight ago, there were still mushrooms all round the woods, layered on tree stumps and poking through the undergrowth, but they are, for the most part, past now; either gone completely or looking wrinkled, slimy, deathlike.
Yesterday evening, in wonderful autumn sunset weather, I saw the first major turn of leaf colour, and was walking over fallen leaves for the first time his year. I took Tia off the main path, across a hidden bridge on the path that, after the winter rain sets in, will be inaccessible, as it was all last winter. When I reached the top of the last descent to the creek, the sunlight off the water screamed up at me through the woods, white and fresh, rather than yellow and warm, as it has been through the summer.
A man was at the creek edge, by the bench, throwing stones into the water for his dog to chase. Tia, who doesn’t like swimming, waded along the shallows, barking at the other dog to come and play, but not quite able to summon up the courage to throw herself in and join in the fun.
Later, I bumped into two friends who were having an after-work walk. It was a lovely surprise, but threw me out of my dream: my woods-peace. I had hoped to make it back to the main path in time to see the low sun on the bank that rises up from the path, but we talked for a little too long. By the time we made our way back, the sun was set and twilight was setting in, the woods off the path turning dark, with the sense that life was stirring within. Tia had become bored, waiting for us, and disappeared, causing anxiety and shaming me. Eventually, as the shadows on the path were turning from chocolate to black, she came bounding out of the woods, tongue lolling out of her excited grin, as if butter wouldn’t melt, and we came home to a delayed supper and annoyed wife.
And so to this morning. I am working late today: my last class finishes at eight-thirty, so I don’t have to start until midday. Thus, we lingered in bed and I got a second pot of tea; a luxury usually reserved for the weekend. I put on the kettle and opened the blind above the sink to see a forest of webs over the denuded jasmine outside the kitchen window. I grabbed my phone and went outside to get photos. The paving slabs were cold beneath my bare feet, the air damp and fresh, the stillness of the fog enclosing me like a shelter.
Something sharp, joyful and clear will be remembered, when the irritations, fears and sorrows of this time in my life are swallowed by the passing of time. The blessedness of living through nature’s greatest truth is shaping this period in my life: the inevitability of change, and the awareness that that is life’s brightest magic.
A month or so back, a friend of mine who suffers from long-term, severe mental illness was attacked by a group of boys on her estate. They took photographs of that attack and posted them on social media.
They are pretty much immune from prosecution,1 thanks to the ‘viral’ response to their post. Granted, they are now pariahs in their close-knit community, and their ugly, stupid act will follow them into their adulthood, cropping up whenever they attempt to make any public progress in their lives. If you believe in mob-justice, then justice might be said to have been done. The state, however, because of the illegal publication of their identities on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is powerless to take action against them. It can only attempt to protect them from the self-aggrandizing vigilantism to which they have opened themselves by their use of social media and their grotesque immaturity. The legitimate, accountable, democratically-authorised legal system has been short-circuited by a foreign-owned capitalist monopoly that uses the everyday indignities of humanity as grist to its algorithms and regards legal and democratic structures as barriers to wealth creation and the self-actualisation of the cleverest, luckiest and most amoral elite in history.
I saw my friend last weekend. She is terrified. She is not engaging with the community which piously leapt to her defense after years of treating her as a local embarrassment, and she thinks the police are trying to victimise her: their inability to give her a clear course of legal remedy for her ordeal has confused the issue beyond her ability to engage with it. She is also mesmerised by her Facebook feed, which seems to be confirming her long-standing belief that the world is purposed towards her destruction. Horribly, I think that her fear that the hatred towards the boys will swing back to her may be justified. That is the nature of restless, self-righteous, technologically-enabled groupthink.
The rule of law is a mainstay of democracy. Facebook undermines that rule. It is inherently anti-democratic.
A Short History of Social Media and Political Campaigning
The 2015 Labour Leadership Poll was a triumph for people who sought to manipulate social media in the service of meaningful political change: what Jeremy Corbyn called, “…a thirst for something more communal, more participative.”((Cited in Nunns, Alex, The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power, (1st ed) OR Books, New York & London, 2016, p143))
By the 2017 general election, however, the political promise of the medium had begun to be diminished by forces other than the well-directed groundswell of public feeling that had empowered the Elect Corbyn for Leader movement. I am not an unquestioning fan of Momentum, but I think that the campaign to elect Corbyn as leader was a model of how to use social media to a positive purpose. What they achieved in ‘15 was to break the ‘echo chamber’ or bubbling effect of Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms, by pulling in unsympathetic friends of sympathisers, and engaging them in debate and exposing them to sincere voices of political hope.((Miller, Patrick R., et al. “Talking Politics on Facebook: Network Centrality and Political Discussion Practices in Social Media.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2015, pp. 377–391. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24371839)) By the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and by 2017, the social media companies had realised that this was a loophole in their control of users’ media consumption and had adjusted.
Before Facebook became a publicly quoted company, focussed on advertising spend, it had been chasing engagement over content control, powering for growth, and there was a certain freedom of expression allowed to its users. By 2016, it was chasing the control of what its users were seeing to a far greater extent, refining their offering to advertisers and data-purchasers and trying to present a soothing, ‘mimetic’ (ie, reflective, flattering) experience to users which would make viewing Facebook a comfortable and reinforcing experience to which people would return without worry.((Lanchester, John, You Are The Product, London Review Of Books, Vol 39 No. 16, Aug. 2017.)) That is why they bubble you. It’s not a service. It’s a mechanism of control.
Furthermore, the sophistication of the JeremyForLeader campaign, alongside the Occupy movement and the lessons learned from The Arab Spring movements, had caught the attention of other forces, both within the U.K. and outside it. Academic studies translated to media management policies((Miller, Patrick R., et al. “Talking Politics on Facebook: Network Centrality and Political Discussion Practices in Social Media.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2015, pp. 377–391. www.jstor.org/stable/24371839.)) which were adopted by right-wing forces((Schroeder, Ralph, Digital media and the rise of right-wing populism Social Theory after the Internet: Media, Technology, and Globalization UCL Press. (2018) https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20krxdr.6 )) and foreign intelligence services((llcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, pp. 211–235. www.jstor.org/stable/44235006)) to undermine the impact of organised popular campaigns. Populism swings in many directions.
In short, the glory days are over for democrats who use social media. An open technology – the internet – that was designed to release knowledge, communication and democratic access from the establishment gatekeepers who had directed public debate since at least the 1850s2, has been co-opted by a new capitalist, plutocratic, neo-liberal elite, to bind its customers into a tower of Babel, in which coherent exchange of ideas is anathema, labelled as TL:DNR.
The Limits of ‘Privacy’ Settings
Know this: a private Facebook group is not private. It is exclusive, in that the labour put into it is restricted to those who choose to sign up to it. This means that it serves as a mechanism of exclusion of those people who, for whatever reason, choose to not participate in social media. However, that ad hominen rant against a comrade to which you succumbed during the Owen Smith leadership challenge is available to the right level of advertiser, if they’re searching for dirt on the Labour Party during an election campaign.
And that situation assumes that you’re wise enough to restrict your rants to a ‘private’ group, and to not share your breathless prose in a moment of vainglory to your main feed. Or that all the members of the group have the best wishes of the party at heart. Or that the administrators have kept up with the constant changes to Facebook’s privacy rules, and that the group is still actually set to ‘private’, rather than just ‘closed’. Or that no one is taking screenshots for malicious purposes.
But you know that, really. How else do the rumours of ‘green infiltrators’ get started?
Unless you delete your account – not just a single comment, but your whole account – and forego logging back into it for two weeks after you have deleted it, everything you have ever uploaded, written, sniped or ‘shared’, is sitting in a folder on Facebook’s servers, available to the highest bidder, and linked to you. Have you ever enjoyed watching someone try to backtrack on an opinion they expressed five years ago in a drunken moment? It could be you. Only the safety of the crowd protects you.
The Great Con
There is a rather mischievous argument doing the rounds in internet freedom circles that claims China actually has more politically effective internet access than the free West. I consider that nonsense: Chinese citizens have definitely scored real successes in changing government policy through internet activism, but they’ve been pretty well educated in staying away from economic, central government and foreign affairs topics. However, the state is not the only enemy of freedom, and in the West, it is not even the most powerful.
As John Lanchester puts it:
Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens…Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.
The sight of large chunks of a socialist party beavering away, providing free labour to create content for a few American monopolist corporations fills me with despair. It is as if the Chartists had had their discussions about citizens’ rights in the tearoom of the House of Lords. In the light of what we know about how Facebook played (or, as they claim, were played, during) the last American presidential election, we should understand that they have worked out how to neutralise justice movements’ energy and commitment. They want to keep you happy, yes; that is why there are cat videos, but angry people click as well, and division is incredibly easy to sow, if you know where to lay the seeds, and you own the field.
Know this also: social media, particularly Facebook, is as much a product of manipulative psychological theory as it is a product of technology. Zuckerberg actually pursued a dual degree at Harvard: Computing and Psychology. The mechanisms written into Facebook behavioural algorithms are rooted in the theories of conditioned response which underpin the most nakedly dishonest branches of marketing, propaganda and behavioural control. The desire for a ‘like’ or a notification of any kind on a social media app or browser window, is the same conditioned twitch seeking content-free reward as is used by the designers of gambling machines. It is the behaviour of the rat that has been trained to associate a button with pleasure and will starve to death seeking the signifier of that pleasure, even when the actual reward has been removed from the process.
Von Clausewitz said that armies lose when they try to re-fight the last war. The limited, almost-victory of the 2017 election was successful, as far as it went, not because of social media, but because Labour concentrated on what mattered: having control of its content and being clear about what it stood for. The brief flowering of commercial social media as a medium of democratic liberation is over. We need to create our own fields.
We need a CLP Facebook feed, but it should be treated as a shop window, only being populated with content approved by the CLP, in a professional manner: another method among many to spread our Labour ideals to the public. It should be curated, nurtured and controlled.
We do not need a public kvetching arena, which is what our ‘private’ Facebook group is.
Get off Facebook. Start creating our own discussion groups on secure media that we own: Diaspora is a good first step, but a Rocket chat server would be more instinctive for most users and would be easy to set up, and cheap to run, and we would own it in a way we would not own a Facebook page. It would also be free of the pressure to keep up, to keep chasing the approval of an algorithm. It would remove the competitive fury inherent in social media slavery, and it would allow us to discuss again, instead of constantly arguing.