Blindsided

I arrived late, which is a trend that seems to be increasing as though I’m subconsciously adopting lost qualities. Thanks to my newly found unpunctual nature I was forced to sit on the back row like a potentially disruptive thirteen year old. The woman on the stage at the front of oversized angel white tent, the one with the reserved pronunciation that could cut ice, was already speaking, licking plaudits onto each member of the panel.

For a flustered, slightly sweaty moment I couldn’t remember what I was listening to. Fortunately, I’d just sat down on a flyer: The George Orwell Prize – 2009-1939, how do we avoid the political crisis after economic crash?* Orwell’s stern, told-you-so, moustached face glared back at me, his brow recently creased by my bum.

It wasn’t exactly cheery stuff. My fellow visitors to the Oxford Literary Festival were booked onto something far chirpier, but because as well as being perpetually late I’m regressing to the organisational skills of a carrot, I have for weeks consistently forgotten to remove my finger from whatever unsavoury action it was undertaking and book myself onto the right lecture. So, there I sat at the only one with any spaces left.

But with Will Hutton of the Observer was on the panel (along with some other people) it looked interesting enough, if not exactly a barrel of the proverbial laughs.

As they talked and debated amongst themselves the woman next to me was restless. She was in her sixties at least, probably seventies. Her air matched the tent yet it was styled better than some of the twenty year olds I work with. Her coat smelled of money; pseudo fur of some non-nature. Tickets for every single talk happening (even those occurring simultaneously) billowed out of her bag, including one for the talk I’d been unable to get into. I considered stealing it off her, but her blood red lipstick so tightly pursed scared me off.

The spring sunshine and the lunchtime pint or two made my consciousness light. There, within the clammy confines of the marquee I felt myself drifting up and out.

“There’s no longer sufficient political discourse.”

“There aren’t any sides to take anymore.”

“Mm,” I agreed, although also wondered what the anarchists I’d encountered the other weekend who’d preached forcible squatting would make of it all.

“Mama-ma! Mama-ma!” sang a song in the depths of my head and all I could think was that it’s a strange, old world. It’s a world where in the twenty-first century, in rural Shropshire cattle rustling is on a dramatic increase, where a gang has stolen five hundred pigs – to do what with? To hack ‘em up, and pass pork chops off to blokes in tatty tracksuits in pubs called the Coach and Horses? A more lucrative industry than DVD’s recorded from the cinema screen onto a camera phone? It’s a world where foreign secretaries’ husbands masturbate and pass the cost onto the tax payer, where politicians acknowledge climate change as a challenge and then fly personal armoured limos and a small fleet of helicopters across the Atlantic in the luggage hold of a jumbo jet, where prime ministers play hide and seek with chancellors, where a country in the sky may hold the mineral of the future.

Except, in that moment it seemed as though everything always stayed the same whilst giving the impression of limbering forward. It’s the little coincidences of life, the mutual adoration for an obscure record, the bumping into someone in a random pub, that tie everything together, but still I felt as though everything could be predicted.

That there weren’t enough surprises.

Questions came from the floor.

“In the early thirties, the time that the panel’s established most accurately reflects today, fascism wasn’t seen as a threat. Sure, Mussolini was in power, but Hitler was seen as an extremist on the margins. I’d like to know if the panel think there are any loonies on the fringes who were should be wary of today?”

Good question, I thought, sinking my way back down to earth.

“Well,” Hutton began, “to be honest, I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more activity from the BNP-“

“You weren’t here Tuesday,” interrupted the Oxford chair. “I would never have expected to hear such anti-Semitic views in the twenty-first century, in Oxford, um...” she corrected herself “...in Britain. ”

The woman next to me turned and her temple vibrated slightly with rage. I thought that if her lips pursed any further they might burst.

“No they fucking well didn’t,” she scorned under her breath, stood up and barged past me towards the exit.

“Huh,” I muttered, but deep down there was a little ripple of pleasant surprise. I never saw that coming and somehow that pleased me.



*: Probably worth mentioning that despite the bizarre number of times Orwell seems to crop up in this blog, he is far from my favourite author. I would, however, recommend to everyone Coming Up For Air, sixty years old this year and still completely relevant.