It’s the economy, stupid

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our kitchen was installed in 1986.  It is fair to say it has seen better days.  The work surface is starting to come away from the wall.  It is a relentlessly brown colour which my wife was appalled by when we first saw the house, but I have become used to over the past two years.  Still, it needs replacing.  I never thought I would be the sort of person who buys a kitchen, although I also thought that I’d never own a property, so there you go.  It with some surprise, therefore, that I find myself heading to Croydon Ikea on a grey, miserly Saturday morning and as we grind through the slow moving traffic, I find myself thinking about politics in a grouchy, frustrated fashion.

1992 was a strange election.  It was the first I sort of understood.  I was aware of 1987, but it felt too vague.  I had no real comprehension that anyone other than Mrs Thatcher could be Prime Minister.  By 92, on the cusp of adolescence and beginning to listen to the six o’clock news, I at least realised that there were alternatives.

No-one expected John Major to be victorious.  A man seen as a bland compromise for a party unable to countenance Michael Hestletine’s flamboyance at its head, but recognised that Thatcher had gone past the rational.  It had no idea of what life after her would be like so played it safe.  Major was an experienced politician, but not considered his own man, many expected him to be a puppet for his forcibly retired mistress.  He was so anonymous that Spitting Image portrayed him as physically grey, saggy eyed and having a passion for boiled peas eaten in the gloom. 

On the other side of the floor, Neil Kinnock appeared confident of over-coming the characteristics middle England seemed so appalled by: being Welsh, ginger, left-wing with the misfortune to have, once, fallen into the sea at Brighton.  Even with those disadvantages it seemed inconceivable that the public majority wouldn’t swing for him.  The election process was merely going to be a coronation.

We all know what happened next.  Major, against all expectations, proved to be an exceptional campaigner trawling around small towns and cities carrying a soap box and a loudspeaker, willing to engage with and argue his case with anyone passing.  It was a piece of public engagement one can’t imagine David Cameron being willing to conduct, with his preference for carefully staged photo opportunities which add to his “I met a man” repartee on his travels “up and down the country”.  Backed up by a clever marketing campaign – “What can the Conservative party offer a working class boy from Brixton?” – and the support of Murdoch dominated press (If Labour win, will the last person in Britain turn off the lights?) the Tories managed to suggest that the party could be something for all people, that it had more than the interests of its wealthy backers at heart.

Kinnock, meanwhile, flew around the country by helicopter like some erstwhile President, shook triumphant fists with Roy Hattersley in arenas like he was in Simple Minds and preached to the converted with dull test group vetted phrases and not like the conviction politician inside him and probably not like a Prime Minister.  Not in those days, anyway.

Sigh.

Another missed opportunity.  Although to my young mind it simply felt like the natural order had reasserted itself.  Instead of something new we got another five years of Conservative government leading us into financial crash with Black Wednesday, a housing market bubble (again), and MPs who seemed less interested in supporting and developing public services than finding ways to discredit themselves through their personal fetishes and tearing their party apart over Europe.

It seems like nothing changes.

Ikea is as hellish as I remember it.  Insanely busy at ten o’clock, the majority of customers share the same dead-eyed, desperate expression for the whole experience to be over.  There’s a smattering of young couples setting up home for the first time, finding cheap furniture for their rented flat.  They seem to be enjoying themselves.  Let them; it won’t last long.

The Conservatives managed to keep the keys to Downing Street in 1992 even though the economy was sinking into recession, but it was close.  As we approach May this year, the current government are rushing out as many dubiously snaffled together statistics as they can to show that the economy is buoyant.   The reasoning is that if they could win twenty-three years ago with the country’s finances in the doldrums then harping on about wealth and growth being back up to pre-financial catastrophe levels will only help this time round.  And they’re right.  Nothing sells change like a recession, or a major scandal and they will do everything possible to prevent either occurring over the next few weeks. 

So, growth back to 2008 levels they cry.  The highest number of jobs created for any parliament.  But what does this mean, is any of it real and are we all better off than where we were in 2010?

The economy has undoubtedly improved.  Personally, my financial situation has never been more secure.  But both measures have to be put in the context of things being about as bad as they could possibly have been.  The fault for which rests, partly, with Gordon Brown.  Taking a greater interest in financial regulation at some point in the decade running up to 2008 would have helped, although 2008 was a global disaster and much of it was out of the UK’s reach.  Besides, Brown’s decisive action to refinance the whole system cleared some of the blame from his shoulders. 

In reality, just like every other statistic, the message being used for is one of over-simplification.

We have an economy and economic confidence (the latter of which is arguably, in political terms, the more important) overly reliant on an financial sector, which still (still!) sees itself as some sort of desperado ranger on the wild frontier with scant regard for anyone else, and that old British institution the value of our house.  Anyone would be excused for thinking that the global meltdown of seven years ago, which was caused by these two factors plus our own greed, never happened.  If the political market never changes, it would appear the economy’s chief drivers don’t either.

More jobs?  Well, probably, but that doesn’t mean they are the jobs which people want, or need.  There has been a significant growth in part time positions and the insane idea of zero hour contracts which not only put employees utterly under the thumb of companies but also, handily, restricts the benefits they’re entitled too because they are in work.  But not being paid.  The defence of this is that it creates a more flexible society suitable for the twenty-first century.  No longer should we just be expected to work nine to five, later for pub landlords.  Work is whenever you want it to be.  Except it isn’t.  The majority of data shows that those in part-time work want more hours to be financially stable.  Part time positions and zero hour contracts are skewed massively towards low paid and minimum wage roles, where less money on a weekly basis makes all the difference.

At my most financially stretched, I once ate boiled brown rice infused with gravy granules and some frozen spinach I’d had to scrape out of the freeze.  For three nights in a row.  An extra £20 would have made the difference.

If the rate of inflation for the minimum wage had risen to the same degree as senior directors, then it would be £15.30 per hour not £6.30.  In real terms, those on the minimum wage are a £1,000 a year worse off than they were ten years ago.  That’s not so far away from when I was last on the minimum wage and not so long ago that I can’t remember how little it felt in my pocket.  We’re creating a rich economy or those already rich.

So, average take home pay remains in doldrums and pay-day loan companies with interest rates worse than the Wiemar Republic’s inflation plug the gaps as people struggle to fill their shopping baskets, pay their gas bills, get their kids a new pair of shoes because the soles are hanging off the old ones, and besides they’re too small.  In the past few months prices have started to come down, but that’s more to do with economic sanctions on a Russia more interesting in dusting off the seventies approach to diplomacy and chaos in the Middle East both messing up oil prices than the economic genius of Gideon Austerity Osborn.  It is, however, fortunate timing and people are, understandably, more interested in the cost of their weekly shop than the global political picture.

Meanwhile, youth unemployment is stratospherically high as people emerge blinking and battle scarred from a university environment so terrified at the life buggering level of debts incurred that they’re turning to drugs, not for fun or escape but to get better grades.  How is this not storing up problems for the future?  Saddling everyone with levels of personal debt impossible to pay off when no-one wants to give you a job.  So what if it expires after thirty years?  You’ve still got it hanging around your neck like the heavy corpse of learning for a generation.

 Even if you could get a job, it would never as highly paid as expected.  Some politicians seem to think every graduate waltzs into the equivalent of a managing director’s chair when in the end, they’ll start on something around £19K just like everyone else.  So, people’s credit rating is screwed which will scupper their ability to buy a property – which they’ll be desperate to do because everyone tells them it’s the only guaranteed way to make money.  And when the property market, which is propping the whole fragile economy, tanks then where are we?

I can’t decide whether the current government really doesn’t care or just doesn’t get it.  Whether they’re verging on downright evil, only interested in short-term enrichment, or whether their world view is so distorted to their own privileged Cotswold set that they genuinely can’t see how much damage this sort of thing does to ordinary people.

In a recent speech, Cameron called on the private sector, on business to give Britain a pay rise.  Except Austerity Osborne has frozen public sector wages so he’s suggesting that the market should do the opposite of the government.  Unsurprisingly the market pretended not to hear and hoped everyone would forget about it.  That’s not how the market works.  High salaries erode profit margins, but if public sector wages look more desirable then the private sector will offer increases to keep hold of its best people.

There’s no reason for the public sector to be seen as inferior to or worth less than business, unless, of course, you have an ideological objection to the whole thing in the first place.  And so that means they have an ideological objection to me.  To you.  To everyone else, except those on the inside.  

The poor only have themselves to blame, they say.  If they don’t have enough money for what they want, then don’t buy it.  Except for when what you want is food for the first time in three days and there isn’t a penny in your bank account.  Eric Pickles has clearly never been in such a scenario.

A booming economy does not have a million people reliant on food banks.   Success is not having child poverty rates increasing for the first time in twenty years.

The Tories will say that we are recovered from financial disaster because their mates are doing okay.  There is a fundamental problem when this government gives, rather than loans, money to financial institutions for it to then be loaned to small businesses to kick start the economy, but when the banks kept the money instead the government simply gave them more.  On the flip side of the coin, local councils around the country are being denied permission to take on loans, not tax payer supported gifts, to invest into infrastructure projects.

My wife and I have never been to Ikea together, a fact she find remarkable and I attribute to careful planning. 

‘We should have done this before,’ she said when the South Circular ground to a standstill.  ‘It’s one of those tests all couples have to undertake to check they’re compatible.  If it all goes to hell this morning, it’s too late.  We’re already married.’

Inside, we don’t argue, but I do become grumpy and bored as for over two hours we examine the numerous barely distinguishable mocked up kitchens, with the same curiously uninspiring shiny cabinets and sympathetic lighting.  At one point I get my hand stuck in a handle, my wedding ring snagged between the curved aluminium and the slick drawer front.  There’s a metaphor in here somewhere, I think while I struggle to extract myself and my wife looks on, faintly embarrassed, once again.

‘What have you done?’ she asks, mildly exasperated.

Quite.  What have we done, indeed?  And more to the point: what are we going to do to fix it?

The Professionals

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ Tony beamed that morning, even brighter than he had all the time before that the camera clicked.  His smile, so parodied along with those overly sincere hand movements, symbolised mid-nineties politics.  Against all the odds, against the ravages of the previous eighteen years, the systematic assault on our cities and society, there was hope in that smile.  For millions of people, myself included, from May 1997 we believed things could only get better.

We were right.

And we were wrong.

New Labour bought a new hope for politics to Britain.  In a time of economic boom, there was the opportunity to rebuild, to care not only about our immediate families’ prosperity but for the rest of the country’s wealth as well. 

And yet despite the unprecedented funding being washed into education, the NHS, the establishment of the minimum wage, reductions in child poverty and a significant improvement in the standards of living for most people, you can’t help but wonder:  With a majority that big, was it enough?  If the terror attacks of September 2001 hadn’t happened, if Blair hadn’t become distracted – and ultimately all his and Brown’s good work overshadowed by – costly and of dubious morality wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, should they have done more? 

Maybe it’s because 1997 was my election, or rather the one in which I (almost) could vote in.  Four days too young, I watched the majority of my friends head off to the polling station and palatable change, for the first time in our lives, was in the air.  No wonder I’ve become increasingly disappointed, to the extent that, for years, I carried around an outline for a short story in my head about someone who assassinated Blair for letting him down.  I eventually discarded it as too teenage, too emotionally narrow.

Military misadventure took over from social reorganisation and then the financial catastrophe of 2008 swept into town distorting our view of what had gone before.  Sure, a ruling party which wins successive elections, while its once imperious majority ebbs away, will inevitably be seen to be hanging on too long, but we forget how dreadful our social infrastructure was in 1997.  We forget how drastically the country improved, but still, there’s that question: was it enough?  Though neither of them, or any of the other New Labour architects, would ever admit to it, I imagine them privately kicking themselves that the system reforms introduced didn’t go further.  If we’d been marched even further into a fair society, would we have so meekly allowed the Conservative government of the past five years to dismantle it?

Of course, too many changes too soon and we could have seen a different story in 2001.  I remember, being approached in the pub where I was working, in suburban Birmingham, by an elderly chap telling me I that I knew which way I had to vote, didn’t I?  To save the soul of the country?  Make no mistake, he wasn’t supporting the then incumbents of Downing Street. 

With the era of Blair and Brown, though, there seemed to emerge a new phenomena: the professional politician.  Examples of this species, such as Jack Straw – more of whom later - who was elected to his safe seat in Blackburn aged just thirty-three have always been around, but since the nineties parliament has been overrun by ex-spads, political heirs and party machine-smiths with a media profile.  And of course, those who never needed a job in the first place. 

When Cameron took the top job five years commentators said that he looked the part, that he appeared to be prime minister material.  Old Etonians, they’re all born to rule and they know it.  The House of Commons is awash with white upper-middle-class men with Oxbridge degrees and private schools, flush with confidence and an easy manner on the grand stage, but far removed from the daily worries of normal people.  Ian Duncan-Smith can see the spare bedroom tax as just way of reducing the benefits bill, because being married to a multi-millionaire he has no concept of tight finances.  Ed Miliband, for all his positive attributes, talks the right talk about a fair and equal society, but growing up in Primrose Hill, the child of professional academics, he doesn’t have any idea what it is to be  a manual labourer living in Mold, any more than I do.  Hopefully he at least recognises that.

In a week where we see long-term politicians, both former foreign secretaries no less, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind get caught pimping themselves out for access to the halls of power one doubts any of them ever recognise their own failings. 

No, that’s unfair.  The self-interested snouts in the trough world view of Nigel Farage does us no favours.  It is better recognise that most MPs are hard-working and there for the right reasons.  There have always been foolish men whose time in power has gone to their head, their belief in entitlement shakes their common sense. 

Rifkind even had the audacity to claim he was self-employed, dismissing his £67-£80-odd thousand, depending on the source, salary as not sufficient.  Maybe.  He is, after all, MP for Kensington and he’d near more than that to afford a shoebox around there.  Of course this does ignore the fact of all those other non-executive directorships he holds, which are unlikely to be unpaid.

But neither Rifkind nor Straw are, despite their long service in the House, the sort of bland professional I’m talking about.  Both, at least, are identifiable characters and have some ideological beliefs (aside from their own wallets).  They are not delivered flat packed, assembled at party headquarters and inserted into some smart shoes and a grey suit before being deployed to the provinces.  Somehow, this is another way in which Farage has managed to pull the wool over people’s eyes.  The privately educated, former hedge fund manager is somehow presenting himself as a man of the people, as something different to the establishment he is so embedded in.  It seems that people are fooled that, because he likes a fag and a pint of bitter, he’s of working class stock.

If politics is, partly, the magic of making people think they agree with you, then this is the ultimate example of the art.  It’s nothing but people on the inside, trying to pretend they’re on the out.  It’s a confidence trick, that’s all.  It’s not real change.

In the second half of the twentieth century, you had miners inventing the NHS and working class kids from Brixton running first the economy and then the whole country.  In the 1970sthere were 150 teachers in the House of Commons.  Now, it’s like we’ve travelled back to the regency – as though the prime minister could as easily be from the house of Lords as not.  As though elections barely matter.  It’s just changing the badge on the same people.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with professional politicians.  You would expect those with whom you entrust the maintenance of, say, your car or your boiler to have the requisite experience.  Maintaining the country is a little more complex, but it seems to generate people who are professional election winners, which isn’t quite the same thing.  In a representative democracy we want people to act on our behalf, not just to offer the blandest least dangerous opinions, scampering towards the middle ground.  It’s starting to look crowded in the centre and it’s hard to discern a difference at times. 

Put it another way, I can’t seen Aneurin Bevan having to answer charges as to whether the adjustment made to his Father’s will around the inheritance of the central London property constituted illegal or legal tax avoidance.

But it’s okay, because Labour are deploying John Prescott to “bash heads together”.  Whether that is the heads of Labour party workers, ministers and prospective ministers or the voters themselves remains to be seen.  Prescott is old school Labour, one of the highest ranking politicians of the late nineties, early twenty-first century and as far from what we mean by professional politician as its possible to get and yet we mock his rough edges, we ridicule his speech patterns and that he doesn’t conform into the anonymous dark suit brigade.  The poor beggars can’t win, can they?

Part of the problem is that MPs aren’t alone in being greedy.  The whole HSBC scandal encapsulates one of the growing problems in this country, which the Conservatives seem perfectly happy with:   Greed, wealth and the acumination of more booty at the expense of others.   It creates the haves and the have nots.  It gives us the likes of Rifkind and Straw seeking their enhanced pensions, either through a desire to be one of those who have or through envy of them.  It’s perfectly natural, but the more Ed Miliband talks about creating a country which is fair, the more it feels as though his challenge will be to reconfigure people’s natural instincts for self-advancement and preservation.  I think he’s right; I just worry not enough other people do.

Even my wife and I argue about this, despite both being comfortably on the left hand side of the political spectrum.  I see the payment of tax as a social obligation and would be happy to pay more.  This is not to say that my wife is pro-tax avoidance, but that she has more sensible – and significantly less pious – views of things like whether having an ISA constitutes secretly wishing to privatise the NHS.

(To be honest, I just couldn’t be bothered to do the paperwork and this was a clutching at straws defence, but ssh, don’t tell her.)

I’m easily impressed by people’s stance on taxation.  JK Rowling – for all her literary faults – at least has the decency to stay in the UK and pay her taxes.  As she says, the state was there for her when she was at rock bottom, when she had absolutely nothing.  It’s only fair that she gives something back.

Blair’s 1997 new dawn did herald in a political day of socialism-lite.  An awful lot of good in their thirteen years in office, but that term was twice that of the post World War Two Labour government which created much of the social infrastructure which dragged our country into the modern world, there will always be the question of whether they could have, should have, done more.  We’re still having the same introspective arguments we have had for generations, squabbling over high or low taxation rather than finding a system that works, rather than accepting that to get a better future for all we have to be good citizens now.  We should have sorted all this out.  Instead we find ourselves missing the really important things, like the Ukraine is being torn apart by the sorts of expansionist aggressive military zeal not seen in Europe for more than half a century.  Russian bombers over the coast of Cornwall, for Christ’s sake.   Who knows what happens next, but our council tax rate isn’t going to make any difference.

And, of course, the problem with Blair’s dawn analogy is that night must also fall.  Darkness shrouded us five years ago, under the cover of which the Tories has systematically pulled apart systems which it took fifty years to develop, trying to finish the job started in the eighties.  The only question we need to ask ourselves is whether this is a summer’s night or a winter’s one?

Things change

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I started writing this a couple of weeks ago.   The days when I could produce a blog every few days are long gone, so I like to give myself more of a run in than I used to.

The weather’s turned spitefully cold again.  The mornings are still darkly bleak and the chill as I carry my bike down the garden, to the side gate, bites through my fingers.  I want to be deep in my sleep, in my bed, with my wife, but instead, like the rest of the world, I have to go to work.  In the evenings, the temptation is to crank the central heating up higher because we can afford to, but instead we layer on another jumper, maybe have a small wood fire and huddle in the lounge.  It’s cold, but, I remind myself, not that cold.

Five years ago, I lived without heating in a small studio flat, not half a mile from where we are now.  Five years and half a mile, but it is starting to feel like a memory of a film about someone else’s life.  How, I ask myself, as my fingers cramp over the keyboard from the cold, did I manage for so long in that flat, through two of the coldest winters seen in a century?

Five years ago, it was so cold inside that it was better to be outside, to be moving.  So one 2010 January Saturday, as the snow finally cleared, I took myself down to Kent and walked along the coast line where Saint Augustine landed with plans to convert the heathen English.  January just gone, we find ourselves, by coincidence, a little further along the sea, in Faversham.  Parts of it look familiar and déjà vu plays tricks on my memory.  Things change, things stay the same.

Five years ago, I was angry.  Five years ago, I felt like we were on a precipice where one wrong step spelled disaster.  A lot can happen in five years.

Five years ago I lived in my chilly flat, surrounded by books and music.  I was single, in a low-paid administration job and trying to write a novel about a broken hearted alcoholic rock and roll band in a near future dystopia.  A world where all my biggest fears had come to pass:  the United Kingdom was a deeply unequal country and everyone only cared about their own troubles.  As I walked along the Kent coast that afternoon, the election loomed on the horizon and I was struck by the idea for series of blogs which would form both a commentary on the electoral process, our responsibility within it and a history of the country.

Where we are, how we got here and, perhaps, directions for how to lose an electorate.

It was one of those perfect writing moments when everything hit the right notes (or at least that was how it felt to me).  It was easy to convince myself that the zeitgeist poured through every angry, anxious sentence that I hammered out, too late in the evenings.  I am not ashamed to say that I got quite an adrenaline rush of putting those together, whether or not anyone was really listening.

While choosing to vote Green myself, I was hopeful of Labour majority and was interested in how the surge in Liberal Democrat popularity would play out.  I have to confess, I didn’t envisage a Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition.  Certainly not one which would last a full term or one which would see the Lib-Dems so willingly sacrifice their principles, and future, for the briefest sip of power.  With the great global crash of 2008 so recent and the effects still rippling out through the world, stability, a Keynesian approach and a utilitarian consideration of society as a whole seemed to be the best course of action and there was no way I trusted the Conservatives to deliver anything other than ideological preservation of the elite.

And I was right.

But, five years is a long time and a lot of things can happen.

There’s a quote often attributed to Churchill that if a young man is not a socialist he has no heart, but if he is not a conservative at forty he has no brain.  There is a dispiriting logic to that.  At almost thirty-six my days as an idealist seem numbered. 

The past five years have been the best of my life.  The transformation has been quite remarkable.  I find myself writing this a different man:  Married, with a mortgage on a three bedroom house, in a well paid position of responsibility.  In many ways, one could argue that I ought to be grateful for the political environment of the past five years, as though it were responsible for my happiness.

 I am no longer angry, by which I mean I am no longer irrationally furious with everything around me.  My wife brings me a sense of inner calm that is hard to articulate, but is certainly good for my soul.  The state of our country, however, still frustrates me.  The past five years have, largely, played out as expected.  The dismantling of society has ploughed ahead, but I have been surprised by two things: the absence of protest and the rise of UKIP.  A significant proportion of the country have let themselves be persuaded blaming people is better than facing up to our own inadequacies and selfishness. 

Things change.  Things stay the same.

As HSBC are exposed for systematic, illegal tax evasion for their clients we seem to have learned nothing about the financial industry’s malpractice.  People’s fundamental greed still corrupts.  

For the briefest moment it almost seemed that we were going to get rid of Rupert Murdoch; that his stranglehold over so many people’s worldview was going to broken.  But, no.  Arrests of former employees continue and a scandal that seems to involve half the country’s celebrities, numerous grieving families, the Prime Minister and a police horse seems to swerve right past Murdoch himself, as he persists with his public persona of a confused old man seemingly surprised to find himself in control of a vast, international media web. 

At least the aftermath of the last election saw the British National Party scuttle back to their cave, whipped beyond the pale.  The party went into the election with its leader promoting his odious views on every available platform and the media at least willing to air his lies so they could be challenged rather than ignored.  It confidentially strutted towards polling day only to find itself scurrying away, battered, bruised and not tolerated since.  Polls showed strange things.  The same systems which suggested possible wins for the BNP suggested a performance from the Lib-Dems not seen since the First World War, all off the back of Nick Clegg’s impressive – and unheralded – performance in the televised debates.  In actuality the party ended up with a net loss of one seat, albeit a significant increase in the popular vote.  Polls, tch.  No matter what they suggest, the only thing that matters is the result the morning after.

When Clegg snuck into bed with Cameron for a post-election fling, it seemed as though it might be a genuine romance.  All that flirting in the Downing Street gardens.  We could hope that the Tory’s old school right wing brigade might be tempered by Liberal sensibility.  Alas, it hasn’t worked out as such.  This has just been a dirty shag.  An exploitive relationship with the Lib-Dems so short on self-worth they’ve seemed pleased to be exploited, at least people have noticed they’re there.

Less than a month later, still recovering from the churning coincidence laden meta-fictional craziness of my personal life during the run up to the election, I met a girl in a pub, in Marylebone.  Over a couple of drinks we dismayed at the Conservatives taking office, saving our greatest vitriol for George Osborne.  ‘I’d like to see more of this one,’ I thought.  And now I see her every day.

But, perhaps naively, I want those days to be good ones.  I want us to live in a fair, tolerant, conscientious society.  I have a recurring nightmare that May the 8th, the morning after a marathon televised news schedule, I’ll wearily rise and find myself living in a hell whereby Boris Johnson has staged a dying moment coup d’état to form a coalition with UKIP.  Johnson is PM with Farage as his deputy.  In such circumstances, I may find myself fleeing these shores: it’s a scenario far worse than the dystopia I was trying to write five years ago, and it’s not as far-fetched.

The past couple of mornings though, as I’ve laboured my bike out of the shed, off for another day’s work, the sun has been nudging its way over the horizon.  It’s still cold, but the light gives me a flicker of excitement at the summer coming.  Things change, but there are cycles.  Things return too.

My wife likes to mock me.  She says that when we first met, that I still thought of myself as some sort of punkish rebel against society.  As evidence for this, she cites my accommodation and employment status, my tendency to only be seen in a leather jacket or to sneer at other people’s lifestyles.  This attitude, she says, is no longer valid given the utterly conventional path my life has taken.  I have joined the masses I was trying so hard to annoy and maybe, I wonder, this has been one of the things which has robbed my voice of late.  Has my writing suffered not only due to a lack of time and a sense of contentment with the world, but because I know that I’ve betrayed my self-image?  The voice of a disaffected not-so-youth is no longer authentic.  I have nothing to rebel against, nothing to be angry about.

And then I look at what the last five years have done to our country.  I look at the rise of a political party which is subverting notions of Britishness, of community, of decency and turning them into something spiteful.  I look at the direction we’re heading in and wonder how quickly I can get off.   I see all this around me and the apathy with which we seem to be shuffling into a less fair world and there’s isn’t much else I can do except slick back my hair into a Brando quiff, straddle my (push)bike, dangle a metaphorical cigarette in my oh-so pretty mouth, and look moodily into the monochrome middle distance.

What can I be angry about?

Whad’ya got?

Charlie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in 2005 I worked in an old factory converted into small office space.  Someone once told me that radar was developed in that building, down an alley over the road from the tennis courts of Highbury Fields, but I’ve never seen any evidence to support it.  Three years later a pretentious novelist would tell me of how he shrugged off writers’ block by beating a less pretentious writer to a humiliated heap on those same courts, the balls bouncing to an imaginary sonar ping.  These facts aren’t really relevant; it’s just another one of those odd coincidences that seem to puddle in my life.

The summer of 2005, there was just the three of us working for this small company in a room within the factory.  The intensity of the working environment, the same few people all day every day, was, with hindsight, a little odd.  You became too caught up in one another.  The boundaries of working life were completely eroded.  It was like working with your best mates, or your family:  At once brilliant and intensely frustrating.

The telephone rang.  I answered.  It was one of our clients, just checking in.  ‘I wanted to make sure you were all okay.’

That was nice of him, I thought, not yet realising what had happened that morning.  The seventh of July, 2005.  The day London exploded.

The next morning, the tube was back up and running.  I put myself on the Northern Line at London Bridge.  I had never seen the carriages so empty at eight o’clock.  On a normal morning I had to lever myself into the crush, be crunched up against someone’s armpit, cheek to cheek, face to face, almost an intimate brush of contact between us.  On the eighth of July 2005 there were four other people in the carriage.  One of whom stood, nervously, against the door.  There was a palatable sense of grief, outrage and fear in the air.  Tension between us and something unsayable, something not fully understood drove a pressure into my guts which was only alleviated when the doors opened five stops later at Kings Cross.

The attacks in Paris last week reminded me of the London bombings.  In many ways, such a connection is absurd.  There are a hundred thousand tragedies around the world every single day, but Paris feels closer to home.  I don’t know the city as well as I know London, obviously, but it is the place I’ve been too most frequently outside of these shores.   Five visits over almost twenty years hardly make it a second home, but it is enough to make it familiar.  There are streets I recognise, the geography remains inside my head.  I watch a film set in Paris, see the men getting on the Metro and the scene feels hyper-real.  The subtle sounds beyond the reach of the microphones, the smells, the temperature; all these things that aren’t conveyed through the screen, my imagination plugs the gaps because it remembers.

Paris’ tragedy seems worse than London’s, at least today.  Not just because those killed were targeted for their art, which feels a little close to the bone for any creative person, but because the victims weren’t random.  The deaths in London, almost ten years ago, were mindless and horrific, but the individuals weren’t singled out for perceived slights against the perpetrators’ beliefs.   To target someone for humour, for making a joke, for satirising something which needs to be reminded, at times, that it shouldn’t take itself so seriously, seems more vicious. 

Free speech is a complicated idea.  The mindless support of it gives rise to Fox News’ intriguing opinions (“Birmingham is a no-go area for non-Muslims”) and the UKIP brigade’s Political Correctness gone mad fallacy.  It is important to remember that there is a difference between free speech and being needlessly rude; there is difference between being humorous or satirising something and being crass, puerile or offensive.  One is the carefully constructed, construed, argument or denouncement; the other mindless.  Political Correctness, or perhaps reality in Fox News’ case, may be occasionally over-cooked, but it is full of good intentions.  The balance between stepping out of its parameters and slipping into something more hazardous, or indeed sending up an opinion by playing it out to the logical conclusion, is a tricky one to strike.  The route home from the Edinburgh Festival is littered with failed comics is littered who couldn’t manage it.  (Okay, so some of them still, somehow, manage to make a living out this basic failure of humanity; Roy “Chubby” Brown, I’m looking at you).

I’m not very familiar with Charlie Hebdo, but I was struck by the cover of this week’s memorial issue.  The racial stereotyping in the cover – despite the otherwise more complex message it was trying to convey – did seem a little lazily simplistic.  Even in our visual humour I thought we (as in humanity) had outgrown this sort of thing years ago.   As a message of ridicule, I prefer the directness of a series of banners which are from years ago but have returned to the internet recently:  stop killing people, you fucking twats. 

And yet one doesn’t go around massacring people as a form of criticism.  I don’t threaten any number of dire yet, to me, strangely popular authors with physical violence.  That’s just madness.

The world has many reasons to be resentful, to feel aggrieved with each other.  Citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan are entitled to be seriously cross with the Western allied forces – spearheaded by the USA and UK – who have buggered up their countries for the best part of a generation, even if it was with the best intentions.  Devout Muslims around the world are welcome to be irate at a cultural invasion that the internet and satellite television bring.  It must be depressing to find your values eroded by Miley Cyrus of all people. 

I appreciate all that, and I understand how repellent it must be for the millions of peaceful people to be condemned as something else by the likes of UKIP and Pegida in Germany party, to be blamed by small-minded, frustrated people for all many of things which aren’t your fault.  But response has to be to rise above it.  People should not descend into the futility of assuming violence will solve anything.

The likes of Nigel Farage think it’s funny to rage against a society of political correctness, but no restraints, no self-control about what we say and do ends in bullets.  I don’t mean that the staff of Charlie Hebdo were to blame – humour, done well, and satire, done rightly, should transcend offense.   You can use humour to break the mould, to say controversial things, without being cruel – you use humour to create a mirror in which people become disgusted by themselves. 

The correct response is not violence, but well argued deconstructions, or – even better – satirising the satirists, returning fire with your own jokes.

Instead, it ended on Friday in the clatter of machine gun fire around Paris.  The tumbling spent bullet cases, white hot, coming to rest on the ground which, over the centuries, has seen more than enough blood.  Hundreds of years of bigotry and futile petulance, of hatred and violence over things as immaterial as thrones and marginal variances in belief and supposed slight to honour, and we still find ourselves stuck in the same cycle.  Another twenty bodies join the countless, mourned today, forgotten eventually.  This isn’t revenge.  This isn’t anything other than a waste.

Read the sign.  Stop killing people.  Say something funny instead.

 

 

With thanks to the thoughts of Patrick Hudson.

Bliss

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the last week of October; the clocks have turned and the mornings are glummer than a month previously, when I’d last been in London.  My bike whips down the hill.  It feels good to be riding again, the anticipated burn in calves as I try to beat the day before’s commute is welcome.  Vietnam was wonderful, but it is good to back to the real world again, to be dealing with life after three weeks of fantasy. 

I pause at the junction, a brief glance right to check nothing is in the bike lane and I accelerate up the other side of the hill.  As I reach the crest I find myself singing under my breath, a Belle and Sebastian song of joy, a sign all is right.

‘Another sunny day, bah-bah,’ I sing to myself, forgetting the words.  It isn’t sunny, not yet and maybe it won’t be.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s the way I feel.  ‘I something in the garden.’

Ahead a bus pauses to collect passengers.  There’s a car in front of me and one just over my shoulder.  I signal and move between the two.  The three of us go around the bus and I head back to the bike lane. 

The bike surges forward; my feet lose the pedals:   A lack of traction and they skim off.  I feel the fork twist and hold on despite knowing what is going to happen.

‘Another sunny day,’ the voice in my head reiterates as I enter the air.

*

It’s been a while, dear readers.

I haven’t been writing so much recently, not for the past five months or so. 

I tell myself that the words aren’t there, that there are a million other things to be doing, that we’ve been out the country, that I’ve been recharging my literary batteries by reading. 

All of which is true, but also I haven’t really wanted to.

And that’s much more worrying.

*

‘It’s all right, mate,’ the guy in the fluorescent jacket leaning in to me says.  ‘Just stay still.  An ambulance is on its way.’

I blink.  I can’t see properly.  One side of my face is wet.

‘What do you mean?  An ambulance?  I’ve got to get to work.’

I try to get to my feet and there’s a great sweeping lightness in my head, like I’m adrift in the ocean, floating out to the depths. 

‘Maybe not.’

I look down at my body.  There’s an enormous gash on my shin.  There’s quite a lot of blood on my t-shirt.  Where’s it all coming from?

Fluorescent jacket applies a bandage from a first aid kit to my shin.  In the background, I see someone else leaning my bike against the wall.  Others look on, concerned.  Someone calls the police to go with the ambulance.  People who stopped to help.  People who gave up their time on the busy rush to the office.  People who could have just walked on by.

And I didn’t even manage to say thank you.

*

Since we last met, dear reader, if you remember, things have been busy:   I got married.

I still can’t quite get over that statement.  Six years ago, such an idea seemed ridiculous and yet here I am.  Beringed and besotted.  Nauseatingly happily married to a wonderful woman who surprises and delights me daily.  I could not be happier.

And yet the words won’t come and, to some extent, I don’t want them to.

They demand time I could otherwise spend with my wife.  They will put me in difficult places, to imagine people and lives far removed from my own mundane existence.  I have to find some of humanity’s darkness and shine a light on it, a process which often puts me in an odd frame of mind at the very least.

And I’m not angry enough.

*

I pierce together a hypothesis for what happened.  I think the car behind me nudged my back tyre, the impact knocking the chain off the gears and sending me out of control.  The car didn’t stop and no-one got the licence number.  I have a concussion, a whopping black eye, surgical glue holding my shin together, missing half a toe nail and a dozen or more nasty cuts and grazes.

I spend the morning in A&E, my wife finds me sitting, miserably, holding red soaked paper towel to my face. 

People are angry on my behalf and all I manage to say is: ‘Maybe they didn’t realise.’

*

All writing is, ultimately, about conflict.  Not, as in fighting and war.  Not obvious conflict, but emotional conflict, both external and internal.  There has to be a pressure, a sense of jeopardy, a tension of the unknown.  The narrative form, the construct, the broader themes, the question posed can be anything, but somewhere there is conflict which requires resolution.  If nothing changes, or threatens to change, then what are we reading for?    

My fears that with a perfect life, with a lack of personal conflict, I will run out of things to say seem to be coming true.  I am stuck.  The novel remains parked, its fundamental flaw still unrecognised.  I’ve been fiddling with a couple of short stories, one of which is probably a dead end and one of which could well be something after all.  I haven’t blogged for months.  Who wants to read about happy families, about domestic bliss, about a normal, calm life pottering along?

And so I don’t write.  Or, at least, not with the same urgency.  There were a few years where it was write or finish.  There was little else keeping me upright.  Perhaps I just need to find a balance.  Perhaps I just need to understand who I have become and therefore what words will be suitable.

I was at gig recently.  Two old, good, friends are in the band.  There’s a pause between songs and the guitarist introduces the next number:  ‘We’re not normally a political band, but these aren’t normal times.’

Perhaps I need to look beyond myself to find the conflict, the impetus, but it feels hard.

*

Early December and the alarm goes off at five o’clock, not for the first time that week.  Next to me my wife sleeps as I clamber to my feet.  The cat stretches, yawns and looks at me as if to say, are you sure it’s breakfast time already? 

The tiles on the bathroom floor are cold.  The heating doesn’t kick in for another hour and I feel the chill biting underneath my scabs, gnawing away and digging at the bone and marrow. 

I hack up phlegm for a minute or so wondering when my cough will give up and leave, when I will get some more sleep, when life will ease up for a moment.  I am cranky and tired, there’s a hint of bloodshot to my reflection. 

Later clean and dressed, I pop my head around the bedroom door, the mug of half-drunk tea in my hand, teeth freshly scrubbed.  My wife still sleeps, quietly and full of peace.  I silently wish her luck for the day.  I have no need of same, for no matter how early it is, how much I ache, I know I couldn’t be luckier. It might be dark and frozen out in the streets, but inside my head it’s another sunny day.  

Fear

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the day, it all comes down to this: I’m afraid.

I don’t cope with change very well.  I like things to remain the same and why wouldn’t I be?  My life is fabulous.  Who’d want to change that?

But sometimes you have to.  Endless procrastination does not cure the soul.

The blog’s good for me.  Regular deadlines are good for me.  They force me to put something out to the world even if it’s not quite perfect, otherwise I’d keep nitpicking, moving semi-colons around, making senseless, endless changes that don’t make any difference.  Not really.

I am scared of saying that my novel – or any other piece of writing – is finished because then the question is: what next?  I am scared of having to submit it for publication because if it’s rejected (again) then what am I supposed to do with myself?  At what point do I have to accept that being a full time (or even part time) writer is not possible?  When do I have to accept that this is nothing but a hobby with delusions of grandeur?

This is what usually happens, right?  You’ve probably read something like this before.  Six years ago my first novel spluttered to an unfinished end in a splatter of disappointment and life upheaval.  Just Like Falling didn’t deserve to be published.  It was so wrapped up in contradictions, full of lazy cliché and tired staged scenes that it was a mercy killing to file it away.

You’ll Never Be Joe Strummer was different.  I poured my heart – and a bottle or two of scotch – into that novel.  Over three and a half years it went from radically experimental in its use of the page, great heaving white space sloshing around and typeface tipsily piling atop itself to a more conventional layout with a self-consciously unconventional heart.    I touted it around several times, in different formats, but to no avail.  I found writing a synopsis of a novel with a fairly convoluted plot and multiple character arcs extremely difficult, which probably didn’t help the strength of my pitch.  Even so, I hoped for more than a paltry few “thanks but no thanks” replies.  A single word of encouragement would have been preferable to the metres, stacked high, of silence I accumulated.

And now I have Envy – a third novel which I’ve been working on for almost four years.  To an extent, it’s a finished article.  It has a beginning, a middle and an end.  I’ve worked through thirteen drafts of it, restructuring, fine tuning, ripping it apart and stuffing it back together.  The central thrust, the bit I’m really interested in, has stayed constant, but all the elements which swirl around that narrative have been played with until they either do what they’re supposed to and add to the words or have been, reluctantly, sent home.  It has characters which, I think, the reader will care about and a mystery which needs solving.  Multiple locations, carefully staged set pieces, moments of introspection, snippets of neatly paced action, heart-break, romance, buildings, self-lothing and bitter class war – what more does a novel want?

And yet, I know it’s not perfect.  It needs an editorial steer, I think.  I am not convinced I can, alone, help it fulfil its full potential.  But to send it out to either agents or publishers in that not quite beautified, meticulous divine state of readiness risks further rejection and disinterest.  This novel has gone through three homes and three computers.  It has been homeless with me, ignored while painting and decorating took precedence, whisked away for review in Turkey (where it enjoyed the sunshine) and the English south coast (where it sat, lifeless on my hard-drive while sudden inspiration for a short story took over). 

We’ve been through a lot together.  The first genesis of the idea came to me when I was a different person.  I know its lines so well that I can almost recite them by heart; I can’t change it any further because I can’t see its faults anymore.  Like a long standing lover who you’re still infatuated with, the cracks and flaws are covered by foundation and lust.  I forgive it its failings.

The real fear is not only that this novel proves to be yet another creative dead-end, consigned to the archives folder on my computer, but that – unlike with previous failures – there’s nothing coming up behind it.  For the first time I don’t have an idea, a theme, that pressing on my imagination, demanding for me to push the dying embers of one attempted novel aside and devote my attention to it.  As paid work takes more of my time, energy and, yes, creativity of a sort, as I recognise the need to be a responsible, home owning, income generating adult, I wonder how deep my reserves of make believe go.  I’m worried that this might be the end. 

A friend and I were waiting for Neil Young to come on stage and were discussing why a man in his late sixties still has songs which resonate.  We decided that it’s because life experience gives you the authority to talk about a range of subjects, because it helps you fit the detail into the scope of the world. 

‘It’s like a thirteen year old taking to Facebook and moaning about how much it hurts to split up with her boyfriend,’ my friend continued.  ‘What the fuck do you know?  You’re thirteen!’

I may be significantly older than thirteen, but perhaps that still encapsulates my problem.  I’m thirty-five and have a lived a relatively stable and sedate life.  While I don’t overtly write about my life experiences (away from this blog, anyway) it might that there’s only so far the ventriloquist can throw his voice.

I mean, what the fuck do I know about anything?