It's been an odd time over here, a calm without a storm since to justify it. I've been working too hard, getting stuff sent back, redoing other stuff and yet I've also been called a genius by a Swede in Finland. Baffling.
The shop has been open but there's been nothing to sell. And now we're back to us few, we happy few, we band of non gender-specific siblings. New title under consideration: Writing as an Insomniac.
One of the bonsai trees the chldn bought over the summer has gone brown, lapsing into a non-autumnal decline. The other hasn't. The world can be so unfathomable at times like that and I really don't know whether to build a set of parables about injustice and vagary around this sad event or not. What is the difference between wonder and bafflement? Can two small people share a small tree?
I arrived back yesterday evening to an extraordinary sight which has prompted a return to the blogface. I was confronted by pieces of printed A4 paper stuck up in the hall and on several doors. 'Jake’s Chore List' it read, followed by a series of itemised jobs with prices attached. My favourite is:
gardening=50.p
(sic)
Although I reject in principle the idea that any family member should be paid for housework my dilemma is that 50p for gardening seems an absolute bargain and I'm very tempted to take him up on it. Any distress on his part after a hard day with a trowel and strimmer could easily be turned to advantage as a particularly vivid lesson in unit pricing and the necessity to be specific in one's commitments.
The idea seems to have come to him because a schoolmate claimed that his parents had paid him £50 for doing the washing up over the holiday, a curious and suspect boast from a boy whose house definitely contains a dishwasher. No matter, this is where we are and I have to respond.
I am actually considering hunting down a copy of 'No Charge' by Melba Montgomery and playing it to him. It was a song that I utterly loathed at the time (1973) but reading the lyrics this morning brought a strictly manly tear to my eye. Partly that deep parental thing that strikes you unawares, usually at the worst, most laughably sentimental bits of dialogue near the end of Disney films, and partly the realisation that I am seriously considering living out an actual Country and Western cliché.
The last echoes of the Olympics have been slowly fading away over here, reappearing for one last time on Sat evening when Jake stuck a stick in the barbecue and ran round the garden holding it aloft like a sacred flame, giving his mother a panic attack over burns to the boy, sparks in the undergrowth leading to a second Fire of London, prosecution under the Clean Air Acts, and stepping in cat poo in the half dark.
I think that will be all for the next four years. When the whole carnival comes around again I expect they will be too old (at 14 and 12) to enjoy it all in quite the same way.
And they did enjoy it. The end of the holiday was dominated by their own Beanie Baby Olympics, in progress upstairs off and on throughout the Games. It turned into quite a production with great attention lavished on national symbols. I pointed out on several occasions that the Olympics were supposed to be about individuals putting themselves to the test but I spent most of my time in front of the TV coverage answering questions about where the athletes came from and what all the three letter abbreviations stood for. By the time I'd done that and explained where the countries were the races were usually over.
Early in Week 2 I bought a lavish book of the flags of all nations after repeated failure to recognise some of the newer and stranger among them. It was a big hit and soon Zoe's bedroom floor was covered in small crayon versions of the more exotic and colourful.
The giraffe (representing Moldova) won the High Jump, which was understandable, but the lobster (Bhutan) won the Javelin (a straw) which surprised everyone and which I put down as one of those suspicious improvements so typical of explosive strength events. The boxing got a little out of hand and was declared a draw, by me, after persistent fouling by both dogs. I took the opportunity at that point to give what I thought was a brilliant exposition of the Olympic spirit, with particular emphasis laid upon the ideal of the taking part being more important than the coming first. This seemed to make no sense at all to either child, and indeed ran counter to the evidence of their own eyes and ears.
"Why are they all trying so hard to win then, if this is the one time when it doesn't matter?" asked Jake.
I tried to explain that the athletes spent their entire lives trying to win in meetings all over the place and that they found it impossible not to try pretty hard in the Olympics. This brought us on to Paula Radcliffe more directly than I would have liked.
"She gave up, didn't she?"
"Yes."
"And she seemed pretty upset, didn't she?"
"Yes."
"And so did everyone else. They went on about it for, like, ages and ages and ages and ages and..."
"YES."
Quite clearly they have figured out that it's not the taking part, it's the giving up that gets remembered.
The new academic year has just started and I am watching closely for any signs of too much Olympic spirit on the homework front.
I have often described myself here as a non-partisan person and I think this a suitable outlook for a father of two. Taking sides is not the way to produce a happy home.
Actually I am, strictly speaking, a sceptic, which means that I am persuadable but not looking to be persuaded. It seems clear to me that most people end up believing what suits them, what they are comfortable with, so anyone’s opinions, including my own, should be considered with that in mind. This close link between what persuades and what suits does not invalidate any particular point of view by itself but it does serve to illuminate hidden agendas and assumptions.
I am quite happy to examine my own assumptions, and I know I have many. Unlike the Blessed Virgin, who only had one.
I am not a cynic. A cynic puts himself above persuasion and proclaims an invulnerability to emotion or logic. A cynic is someone who poisons the wells which contain good water and then wanders around complaining of thirst.
And now on to today’s quandary on SAAP.
After such a bad week for the planet I find that my readership has quadrupled and I’m mired in irony. Mini Murdoch, me. My figures go up when I speak of tragedy or use a strong polemical tone. What to do? When people are listening seems to be a good time to speak.
While I do not wish to come across as the blogworld’s equivalent of Radio 4’s 'Thought For the Day' I do feel I have things worth saying. What’s more the standard blog advice is always to write for yourself, not for a perceived audience or in a way that you think others might like, but by your own lights and for your own purposes. So that is what I will do, despite the fact that I’m running out of vocabulary in certain areas and I feel I’ve used up several useful words including ‘people’, ‘hate’ and ‘but’.
I had a large audience spike once before when I wrote this, a piece of anti-Darwin gene theory. I never followed it up, beset by doubts, scared off by the attention, fearful of accusations of bumptiousness, afraid that the idea that blog readers might want me to write more of the same was delusional vanity. Now I think perhaps I should. Is this ever the dilemma of militant moderates?
So, what of the mawkish compulsion of our news providers to fill our televisions with close-up images of other people’s tragic misfortunes? Over the years I have always found the Marxist concept of ‘commodification’ very useful, the idea that capitalism works by turning everything into something saleable. So p0rn is commodified sex, rock and roll is commodified rebellion. News is now commodified conscience. But we need more, we need understanding of why these things happen so that maybe we can stop them happening again. The superpower leaders decided that nuclear war would be too costly to wage and they took measures to avoid it. We could do with some thinking a bit like that in high places right now.
A real headache, I feel the need to go out and get some Indian head massage, administered by an expert. However I fear that going out round here is more likely to get me some Peckham head massage administered by a baseball bat.
I have been thinking a lot about sectional interests and the way they mesh and clash within our society. So I will move on this week to examine fox hunting.
Thank you to the many people who were so kind about the post below, the many who linked to it and the many more who have read it. I have now had enough time to become acutely aware of all its failings, its many jumps in reasoning, its ambiguities; in short the holes are now more visible to me than the fabric.
I wrote it on Saturday morning immediately after hearing an interview on Radio 4 with the Archbishop of Canterbury in which John Humphrys asked His Grace to explain where God 'was' during the Beslan massacre. I thought that was one of the most ill-judged questions I have ever heard asked of a senior public figure by a broadcaster of Humphrys’ standing. Shortly afterwards I found myself looking at a screenful of words that were a sort of reply, but which by then also contained tortuous apologies for engaging in punditry and for the depth of feeling that seemed to have welled up in me.
Some further thoughts now seem appropriate.
There is a difference between the following types of opinionising:
- expressing one’s views, which is what a democracy actively requires:
- telling other people what they should believe, having convinced yourself that your reasoning is in some way actively better than theirs:
- assuming that other people are either stupid or bad because they will not end up reaching the same conclusions as yourself, and that this much alone is a punishable offence:
- holding views that deny the connection, the shared humanity, between yourself and anyone who disagrees with your premises, conclusions or methods:
- killing people because they disagree with your starting points and therefore with your conclusions.
I am well aware of the many contradictions and idiocies contained within the concept of liberal democracy and most of what I have written on this site has been playing with these ideas, examining them within the context of my family and our daily doings, looking down a microscope at the values we have collectively embraced as Team GB. That all seemed rather irrelevant in the light of Beslan.
What horrified me that morning was not so much the slaughter of children, for the willingness to do that is not new and has been seen before in many places including Bethlehem, Amritsar, Hiroshima, Omagh, Madrid etc etc. Anyone who plants a bomb in a public place is by implication allowing for such a possibility.
What scared me was the degree of isolation from human kindness, the measure of indifference to human suffering, thrown into such stark relief in this particular situation, allowing that small band to sit next to, to watch all those hostages for a period of days and yet feel nothing for them. For these fighters the abstract notion of a human being had not partially or temporarily disappeared but had completely vanished, even when confronted directly with a thousand examples whom they must have seen, heard, touched and smelled for three whole days. If these are to be our new enemies, if they are so ruthless, and if they also have that much weaponry and cunning then we are moving into a very dark phase of our history indeed.
The 9/11 hijackers were resigned to death by the very act of boarding the planes. There was no other outcome allowable, no choices. The Beslan killers might have escaped, might have had their demands met. They could have spared their captives.
I am not looking for leadership on this from our elected representatives. They have an almost impossible task starting from where they stand. (Another post, not written.) But I do not wish to feel helpless and I think we can help ourselves, even if only a little, by examining the political debate we hear on a daily informal basis, not the cleaned up media version. We have to learn to live with differences of opinion and outlook, to understand what those differences might mean, to mark and protect the boundaries of legitimate views. Opinions validated by passion alone cannot coexist with their opposites, which will certainly appear in a climate of intellectual freedom. We must not let our open societies be exploited by bigots who will rob us of our liberties and give us nothing in return. Tolerance or carnage, it seems, but it is still our choice, for now.
Lest anyone forget, and many who do not live in London and are not gay may well have forgotten, how easily one demented hate-junkie killed without compunction in the Admiral Duncan, and how very lucky we were that he didn’t kill hundreds more both there and elsewhere. Don’t tell me that all terrorists are foreign therefore crazy, or are miles away and not about to kill someone like me who has never done them any harm.
Dilemma. To speak seemed presumptuous. To remain silent seemed somehow worse.
I am expressing 'strong' views here, but I accept your right to disagree with them or ignore them completely. I am stressing our common humanity, not denying it. I will not kill you or your children.
For the first time in months words are forcing themselves into my head. Here they are.
I’ve been stuck on the problem addressed by more senior and better bloggers than me about what to say on a blog when you have already said what you set out to say. I recognised that I had reached this point some time ago but I kept it more or less to myself. I just wrote less often.
I compare this moment, which others have encountered before me, to ‘the difficult third album’ faced by rock bands. It is a crisis reached when the manifesto points that got you started have been fully covered and natural momentum has been lost, when the tank of experience has been drained and the energy of novelty has ceased to propel. I stepped away from the daily blogging routine in about May and have not satisfactorily resolved my own doubts since.
Of course when I started I had fond dreams of becoming an instant national institution, loved and revered for my unique voice and unprecedented insights, lionised and rewarded with money, my own celebrity cooking show and a weekly column in a Sunday paper, giving endearingly modest interview on Parkinson. I had even begun to select my eight Desert Island discs.
But after that first post nothing seemed to change. It was greeted with a palpable silence. So I installed a hit counter to see what was going on. A mixed blessing, shall we say. The information at my disposal increased enormously but then it was starting from the lowest of bases. I sat and watched the numbers progress painfully to about 19 over a fortnight before I cracked, revisited Sitemeter and added another 500. Five hundred people acted like elasoplast to my sundered soul, a definite deceit but most beneficial to my psyche. I paid back all five hundred when my people account was suitably in credit.
I have not written about politics much here. Not because I don’t have feelings about them but because the web is already littered with strong opinions, like a pub floor strewn with glass after a fight. This on-line cab drivers’ convention ranges from the brilliant to the pig-ignorant and has always seemed somehow complete without my help. Any contribution I have considered melted gently away when I remembered the comment placed on a friend’s school essay. It read: 'Uninformed opinion merely irritates'.
To me the worst part of saloon bar political opinion is that it is delivered by people addicted to the sidelines who do not have to bear the consequences of their recommended actions, either electorally or personally. We can all have opinions about someone else’s decor or plumbing but we know full well we will never have to do anything about it or take the consequences of a job poorly done. And so we keep silent. Not so in politics with people who have never borne responsibility and who are happy to recommend extreme remedies for the world’s ills, and take the indifference of others to their ideas as proof of idiocy or degeneracy in the listener.
Blogs have no power to change anything much. They have the power to amuse or entertain and my ambitions always ended roughly there. They do, however, give people a global voice to express themselves in an uncensored unedited raw manner - a new development without obvious parallel. The closest I can think of is the mass marketing of the motor car which suddenly allowed ordinary people to go where they wanted, granting them the privilege of mobility and a kind of self-expression previously available only to the rich.
Blogs emancipate the unheard, cars emancipate footowners and explosives emancipate fanatics who formerly could only meet furtively and pass resolutions in small, hopeless organisations while the world ignored them in safety.
If, as a blogger, you could write one line of pure, compelling wisdom on your blog and yet the world refused to listen or change, what then? And if I can’t write about the Russian school siege then what am I doing writing this blog with this title? I could rename it 'Speaking As Me' but there again that was never my purpose. If you were to meet me at a party I would not talk about myself in any great depth and I had no intention of doing so on the web. I did not feel like a suitable subject for a blog. Not then, not now.
But nevertheless an enormous revulsion has seized me after the events at Beslan. I will change nothing - I have no vanity about this blog, honest - but the words have arrived.
How one person can carry a notion of God in his head alongside the intention to kill and maim children is truly very difficult to understand. Religion is about humanity. It is inseparable from it. Any religious person who has no concept of this is entirely missing the point. Humanity is at the centre of all religions; we made them, we live by them.
So are these killers religious people? No, of course not. Their purposes are secular. Sadly, very sadly, they are so self-obsessed that they have no perspective on history and fail to read the lesson that forced religious conversion of a majority by a minority has a 100% failure rate. Holy war, holy killing always burns itself out in cold indifference, leaving a tragic legacy of ancestral hatred.
Killing in pursuit of secular aims seems a little more understandable. Pol Pot really believed that killing a few million Cambodians was well worth it to produce a morally elevated society and purge the world he knew of acquisitiveness and personal vanity. Mad, yes, but on a comprehensible spectrum of intentions and outcomes.
Killing people in the name of God is not. Not. Not in any way. Never. Who is this God? Where is His voice? Can this please Him? No. And here is the lie.
There is no such thing as religious terrorism; it's all secular. These tiny cells have press-ganged God onto their side but theirs is not really a spiritual motivation; it is just another wretched visitation of the curse of violent nationalism, those believers in purification by blood-letting, the accumulators of mounds of trophy bodies. Lethal simpletons. There have been enough already in history but distressingly many in the recent era of mechanised and industrial death-dealing. At least the Aztecs had to kill all their victims one by one. So 'visionaries' unnamed from Sri Lanka to Palestine via Rwanda and Sudan have murderous abilities way beyond the power any one person should ever wield in human affairs, if we intend to continue living in civilised societies. Mad, bad, misled, hate-filled people live among us and have access to weapons.
I am seized with despair when I see the extraordinary blindness in the wielders of power on our planet that attributes such massacres to an excess of liberal values in the world. It is not a liberal act to slaughter people. Ever. Such doings are the bitter fruit of repression and injustice - an inconvenient truth to the perpetuators of injustices in the world. Flies will breed on rotting meat.
There is no place for secrets in our multimedia world. There is no further place for injustice in our multi-freedomed world. Killing for ideology must be banished from our repertoire if we are to live decent lives.
Internal and external factors meant that Northern Ireland was not worth fighting for by the year 2000, after repeated attempts to restructure the Province’s institutions, economy, housing and education, in a world without the Iron Curtain and with an EU. How long will Putin fight for Chechnya? How much more ‘strength’ will he show? To whom and for what? And still he stands there, like a bumpkin knocking down skittles in triumph without recognising that he is in a bowling alley and that a machine will replace the fallen pins long after he himself has tired or been replaced by another witless bowler.
I address these remarks pointedly to the holders of immoderate views of whatever nature on whatever subject, on the web, in the pub and especially in the semi-secret world of impotent hatemongery, racial or religious. No fanatic has the right to criticise another fanatic for fanaticism.
Hate has no value and no purpose beyond its own regeneration. Out with the virus. Those who hold strong views are responsible for them and for the climate they create. Those views are not harmless. They are never justified in the light of ordinary logic. Only in the dark and twisted personal worlds of those addicted to the euphoria of certainty do they become simple and compelling.
We can all do something to end this.
I notice that the Police are questioning a few individuals in an attempt to uncover evidence of race fixing.
I think this is a wrong turning and that they would make more progress rounding up and questioning the few remaining individuals who still believe that horse racing is NOT fixed, and ask them to produce the evidence they’re using.
So today I ask: horse racing - do we actually need it?
I think it does have a place as the ultimate living proof that anything can be rendered interesting if you bet real money on the outcome. However I think the argument that we need good bloodstock to sit on to charge at the French is looking a bit dated by now. Nor do we really need horses to thresh our wheat or deliver our beer, although there would be a green dividend if we revived those particular practices so I will mention in passing that I do not oppose such restructuring.
Let me be clear. I like horses and have yet to be kicked or hit by one, which goes to show in some ways what superior creatures they are, because horses seem to like humans and there can hardly be one on the planet that can say the same about us.
It is possible to love horses without making them race each other - ask the adolescent girls who just like combing them or the armies of tiny girls avidly following the doings of small blue and purple mascara-clad ponies who are so fat that it’s inconceivable they could ever jump anything or run anywhere.
Yes, summer’s over, term time looms and I’m back to cutting edge controversy over here.