Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

HINC SPES AFFULGET

Rising an hour early because we forgot that the clocks went back last night, I caught a Radio 4 programme squeezed between the early news & Farming Today. It was called Hope Against Hope & it consisted of pieces of music & extracts from poems on the theme of hope, compiled by Geoffrey Smith, who also provided the commentary.

A small truth that I have uncovered is that what you hear on the radio whilst in the bath remains in place. Hope Against Hope needed no such context to make an impression: it was a small but perfectly formed programme.  And it resonated the more for me because it contained three favourite pieces of music with which I have always associated a sense of hope & redemption – Big Bill Broonzy’s Trouble In Mind (not the definitive version of the classic blues by any means, but the first I ever heard), the closing bars of Sibelius’ 5th Symphony, & the glorious Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis. 

However, I’ve always been a deeply reluctant optimist. Most of my friends see me as something of a harbinger of doom who, when contemplating probabilities, will predict decay & dereliction over broad, sunlit uplands. I am, to the shamelessly positive, a curmudgeonly Eeyore amongst relentlessly cheery Christopher Robins.

This is a fiction I am anxious to maintain.  Apart from the simple fact that most people want to beat cockeyed optimists about the head & upper body when they pipe up with, “Oh, it’ll all work out in the end, you mark my words”, I’m actually terrified of the implications & obligations of hope. I’m with John Cleeses’s Brian Stimpson, hapless hero of that bafflingly underrated film Clockwise, when he moans: “It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand". Hope is tumour that infects the entire human constitution, rendering dignified resignation in the face of irresistible force impossible.  Hope is for heroes & I don’t have a heroic bone in my body.

And yet how the blood stirs in an increasingly obdurate, implacable world when one reads the greats on hope…

- A favourite, this one.

'Hope' is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tunes without the words,
And never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson

- A Catholic Buddhist, no less. Like C.S. Lewis, a theologist eminently readable for an atheist.

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.
Thomas Merton

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

- With Primo Levi, the most powerful of the documenters of the Holocaust.

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Elie Wiesel

We judge of man's wisdom by his hope.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

- A poem largely forgotten but for this quoted line.

A man's reach should exceed his grasp; else what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning (‘Andrea del Sarto’)

He who has never hoped can never despair.
George Bernard Shaw (‘Caesar and Cleopatra’)

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.
Samuel Johnson

- Two men of similar breath.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Mahatma Gandhi

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston Churchill

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
Pearl S. Buck

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost:
that is where they should be. Now, put foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.
Albert Camus.

Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle

- A cracked romantic speaks.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
William S. Burroughs.

- In with two shouts.

Est autem fides credere quod nondum vides;
cuius fidei merces est videre quod credis.
(Faith is in believing what you do not see;
the reward of this faith is in seeing what you believe.)
St. Augustine

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.
St. Augustine

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
Vaclav Havel

"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
Sir Francis Bacon

- Never the counsellor of despair; always one who pointed out that hope requires the abandonment of ambition & expectation.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett (‘Worstward Ho, 1983)

.o0o.

DON’T BOGART THAT JOINT…

A couple of years ago cannabis was reclassified in law from Class B status to Class C, giving it parity in the eyes of the law with tranquillisers & steroids.  Although the momentum of the debate continues undiminished, both those who vigorously oppose the liberalisation of drug laws & those who have worked energetically for so long for greater leniency are likely to be united in seeing this concession & its aftermath as the first major inclination towards legalisation.  Recent pictures of media regular George Michael on the business end of a doobie & smiling confidently for the camera would seem to indicate that, for some, de facto acceptance is already in place.

Those who have taken up cudgels on either side have concentrated almost entirely on issues such as long-term health risks, links between cannabis & other drugs & the nature of dependency.  The proponents of liberalisation are satisfied that nearly all available data provides no indication of there being any cause for concern in relation to these & kindred issues.  They have a powerful case & one that, after several decades of agitation, has finally swayed not only our resolutely conservative Labour government but a number of equally resolutely conservative Conservatives (pace David Cameron’s coyness concerning his own acquaintance with the jazz cigarette.)   

But for many of the old guard in the pro-legalisation camp – those whose youths were passed within a fug of heavy rock & dope smoke - an interesting dilemma has emerged.  Many of them must have assumed, in a bleary sort of way, that significant movements towards legalisation could only take place within an enlightened & progressive political, cultural & social climate. The enemy was ever to be located within the forces of reaction, the suits, the faceless institutionalists.  The legalisation of dope would be part of a broader wave of long-awaited changes including, maybe, mass recycling projects, free public transport & crèches as standard provision in all workplaces.   

But confusion now reigns: it was a reactionary, suit-wearing, facelessly bureaucratic government that made that first move. A government that vigorously encourages free enterprise & the pursuit of wealth, yea, even to the point of uncritical support for the most rabidly pro-capitalist, anti-liberal American administration since the 1950s. 

So, in the likely event of hastening movement down the path towards the ultimate legalisation of cannabis, how does the grizzled dope-for-all pioneer imagine the coordination & regulation of the processing & marketing of legal cannabis will take place?  Maybe the government will make the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs responsible for the setting up of regulated plantations on which legal cannabis will be grown & harvested by hitherto impoverished farmers.  At a stroke the ongoing depression in agriculture will be lifted & the responsible management of the production & supply of cannabis will be clearly established. 

Actually not.  As we speak, conscience-free chemists are working on the blending, kids in Ralph Lauren shirts are working on the marketing, designers in Paul Smith suits are working on the packaging,  & executives in very high buildings with names like British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco & Phillip Morris above the big glass doors are guess-timating the enormous profits that they’re going to realise from the sales of the first legal spliffs. 

So what does a poor boy do if he believes fiercely in the right of every citizen to enjoy a bit of blow now & then?  Grow his own?  Not if a crucial part of the deal is that only the properly constituted companies are permitted the right to grow & market weed.  And who’s going to care from whence comes this great benefice?  Not the 50% of 15-year-olds who have, at the very least, sampled a joint at a party or behind the proverbial bike sheds.  Not the Thames-side futures broker who keeps a stash in the penthouse. 

What doesn’t kill a government makes it strong. Ideas & notions once revolutionary are always digested & reiterated eventually by that great, sprawling, mutating institution that we are pleased to call the democratic state.  Adopted, adapted & then – in the argot of business & politics today - delivered.   So put that in your pipe & smoke it while the debate retains its potency…

GYPSIES – TRAMPS & THIEVES?

[3.]












BEBEE HELEN’S MERRIPEN

Sometimes they stand in twos
and threes at the edge
of the road, arms folded,
eyes unfocussed, expecting nothing

but more of the same. Dogs bark
staccato over the pulse of generators.
Washing flickers between the vans,
random semaphore, and clocks

run slow.  Sun rises over the warehouse,
sets behind the chain link fence.
But on Sunday old Aunt Helen died. 
Inside her trailer mourners fidget,

watched by the gold-haloed faces
of her  best Crown Derby plates.
No-one speaks but half-words form
in the gas fire’s popping, in the wind

around the broken door. Holding flowers
and a card he cannot read, brush-headed
Johnny, the boxer hero, racks tears
into a cushion.  Sister Lizzie

glances sideways, gnaws a fingernail.
Traffic raises curtains in the rain
and Georgie stands where his mother
used to sit at night with her rollies

and her pint of tea. Arms folded
and his eyes unfocussed, he dreams
awake, pondering atavistic visions
of the fires of Little Egypt,

of the briar and the gorse,
of slower tides than these
that pull us all from history
and into the new lands.

*AUNT HELEN'S DEATH in Anglo-Romani, the dialect of Britain's Gypsies.

GYPSIES – TRAMPS & THIEVES?

[2.]

British statistics provide a bleak picture of Third World conditions within a nation in which health & educational provision is free.  For example:
•    The average life expectancy of a Gypsy is 48 years.
•    Only two out of every 100 Gypsies reach the age of 65.
•    Gypsy men die 10 years earlier than non-Gypsies on average.
•    Gypsy women die 12 years earlier than non-Gypsy women on average.
•    Infant mortality rates for Gypsies are some four times the national average.
In 1996 the government Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) reported that ‘only between 15 per cent & 20 per cent of Traveller pupils are registered, or in regular attendance (between the ages of 11 & 14).  The number of pupils who continue to (the ages of 14 – 16) shows a further significant decline to an estimated 5 per cent…’ It is estimated that over 3,000 families are without official sites or housing & thus neither aided nor protected by legislation.  In fact, the repeal of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act (which obliged county councils to provide officially maintained sites for Gypsies ‘residing in or resorting to’ their areas) & the passing of the 1994 Criminal Justice & Public Order Act (effectively undoing all the gains of the 1968 Act & applying swingeing penalties for trespass), the situation for Gypsies still on the road could not be much worse.   

However, thanks to the Court of Appeal in a crucial test case in 1988, Gypsies do constitute an ethnic group under the terms of the 1976 Race Relations Act.  Because of clear evidence of historical roots, cultural practices maintained over hundreds of years & evidence of bloodlines, a Gypsy belongs to an ethnic minority &, in the event of abuse, verbal, physical, institutional, a Gypsy can have recourse to the law.  It’s cold comfort in a country bound to so long a tradition of anti-Gypsy prejudice. But at least it acknowledges the extraordinary cultural tenacity of British Gypsies by which, in the face of the most systematically savage persecution over the centuries, they have conserved their rich & complex diversity.

THE YATELEY GYPSIES

My interest in Gypsies has its origins in pure romance.  Many years ago I picked up a book called The Wind on the Heath in a second-hand bookshop.  It was an anthology of historical writings about Gypsies & within a few pages I was entirely seduced.  The depiction of a raffish, swarthy, inscrutable people living not within but at the edge of society, sleeping out under the stars, poaching in the greenwood, speaking an exotic tongue represented a heady vision of freedom & self-determination & breathed new life into the fading utopian dreams of the early ‘70s. 

When, eventually, I put the books aside, took courage & encountered the real thing by walking onto an illegal site at Yately a few miles from my home in Farnham, Surrey, the trappings of myth fell away.  Well, maybe not entirely: the raffishness, the inscrutability, the aura of authentic difference from the (largely inhospitable) host population remained a distinctive feature always. But the loud, raucous, demanding, suspicious, sometimes confrontational persona became for a while the reality.  There were many times when – mistaken for a policeman, a council official, a bailiff, or simply seen as an intrusive stranger – I had to stand my ground & deal with bitterness, confusion & anger. 

I gained some credibility with the Gypsies simply by being in a position to articulate publicly their argument in the ongoing debate concerning the status of the local unofficial Gypsy site.  They wanted the site granted official recognition but residents were anxious to see the back of the settlers, citing the usual objections of plummeting house prices, rubbish left at roadsides, barking dogs & tales of thefts or incidents of violence that always seemed to have happened to some one else who knew someone else who was the victim. 

So I wrote a series of letters to the two local newspapers, both widely circulated, signing them as from the families on the site.  With something like 80% illiteracy amongst adult Gypsies at that time this was a service that made some sense.  My letters provoked fury in various forms ranging from the barely literate to the icily inhumane. Whilst a few murmurs of support crept onto the letters page now & then, accompanied occasionally by moderate, entirely reasonable pleas for consideration of the needs of local housedwellers, the overall effect of providing a voice for the Gypsies was to poke a stick deep into the wasps’ nest.  Through many of those extreme responses I had my first encounters with the ugliness & brute ignorance that underpins so much of attitudes towards Gypsies.

Gradually the implacable reserve & suspicion of the Gypsies with whom I was liasing melted away &, as I became more involved in the mass of practical issues that resulted from illegal encampment, friendships formed.  Working principally with three or four leaders (never acknowledged as such by the others, never officially accepted as such by the men themselves), I obtained legal representation & we set about prosecuting Hampshire County Council for non-implementation of the Caravan Sites Act.  The least we were able to achieve in the early days was the entanglement of the Council in so much procedural red tape that actions to evict were constantly delayed & postponed.  The most we achieved in the long term (& it took several years) was the provision of an official site for all the families in a decent area away from housing, sewage plants & the motorway.

During the 10 years in which I was involved with Gypsy families in Surrey & Hampshire I experienced again & again their generosity, their dark humour, their resourcefulness, their optimism, their powerful allegiance to family & their deep, self-defining pride in their ethnicity.  When I moved from Surrey I lost touch with the families.  But I have many abiding memories of good times & bad - of warm caravans on winter heathland, across which blew the very winds that introduced me to the Romany dream years before; of pouring rain & ankle-deep mud through which bailiff’s Landrovers slithered, towing out the very same caravans…  Of the following:
•    Trips up to London with men in battered hats & Luton ‘traveller’ boots to talk with Saville Row-suited barristers in Lincolns Inn Fields.
•    Striking deals with the property company that bought the land on which, at one time, the families were encamped - £100.00 per family to move off voluntarily, each family represented by how ever many caravans they owned (& Fuzzy Eastwood borrowing four tourers from his family in Berkshire & driving each one out in quick succession without being recognised by the paymaster at the gate.)
•    The one tap in the centre of the Napley Road site from which all the families had to draw brackish, brown water & the local doctor (who was angry about the proximity of Gypsies to his five-bedroom house) unable to deduce why so many babies & young children were brought to him with gastric complaints.
•    Eating jellied eels with Johnny Stevens, Georgie Collins & Bluey Bagley on the Derby Day hillside where, traditionally, Gypsies from all over Britain traditionally gather; listening to them speaking Anglo-Romani – the poggado-jib, or ‘broken tongue’ - & understanding virtually every word.
•    Turning up one morning to a piece of rough ground at the bottom of a slope in Farnborough where the families had moved days before ahead of eviction & being shown 12 variously charred car tyres that had been rolled flaming down the slope during the night.
•    Watching 70-year-old Joby Cooper step-dancing inside a circle of wildly cheering, ecstatically drunk Gypsy men & boys at Esther Collins’ wedding.
•    Arguing with a local Tory MP about obligations to beleaguered Gypsy families with nowhere to go as he posed for regional television cameras & being told (off camera) that since they weren’t householders & weren’t in rented accommodation they had no vote & thus fell outside his sphere of interest.
•    Standing by an outside fire one autumn evening listening to 98-year-old Nofella Smith, Bui & Georgie Smith’s grandmother, reciting without pause for recollection & barely drawing breath, the names & interrelationships of all her ancestors back five generations.
•    Taking photographs of Georgie Collins, Young Joby Cooper, Old Joby Cooper & his wife Esther, Johnny Stevens, Bui & Georgie Smith, Jackie Louder, Caleb & Mary Wenman on the opening day of the new official site; watching the breezy jubilation of the County Council officials, so proud of the results of their relentless & unsparing work for the Gypsy families; looking back at the impassive faces of the Gypsy men & women, displaying no gratitude to these fly-by-night local dignitaries, expressing if anything a quiet satisfaction at the successful culmination of 8 years of dogged, stubborn battle…
•    Then of walking around the trailers, all drawn up onto their own hard-won pitches to say goodbye to the families on the eve of my move from Surrey to Hertfordshire.




       

Young Joby Cooper, Georgie Collins, Johnnie Stevens

(Continued)

If, in the pursuit of social justice & a better way, I ever did anything other than drop coins in a tin, shamble with a few thousand fellow zealots through the streets of London & blather to all who would listen, it was through my involvement with Gypsy rights.  In the '80s & '90s I was an active participant in a long, enervating & largely fruitless struggle for the provision of sites for Britain's Gypsies.  It's a battle that continues today & one that looks set to persist for as long as Gypsies remain a legitimised target for prejudices that, in principle at least, have been proscribed against all other minorities.

I'm not an active participant any longer.  But my interest in 'the affaires of Egypte' remains acute  & only the priority of my current family circumstances prevents my becoming practically involved again. Maybe when the kids are all at school & I'm not I shall - ageing sinews & dwindling wits permitting - commit time & energy to the struggle again. One thing seems certain: however long it is before this might come to pass, those basic rights are likely still to be withheld. 

GYPSIES – TRAMPS & THIEVES?

[1.]

By & large, whatever sense we make of the information, in the Western World today we’re probably more aware of & knowledgeable about ethnicity than we have ever been.  There isn’t a large city anywhere in Europe, the Americas or Australasia that doesn’t contain substantial representation from non-Western races, creeds & ethnic groups.  Mosques, Hindu & Sikh temples, synagogues, halal butchers, Chinese supermarkets, Japanese sushi bars are commonplace in any conurbation.  Even those who lament the incursion of alien peoples into our pure Aryan culture might choose to weep into their pints of lager down at the local curry house of a Friday night.  So whether we welcome them into our midst & celebrate the cultural diversity they bring or resent them as interlopers & mongrelisers, our consciousness of their distinguishing features is acute. 

It intrigues me, therefore, that our perception of an ethnic minority that has been amongst us for upwards of 500 years is so wilfully incurious.  Apart from the sentimentalists who regret the passing of the colourful Romany chief, Nature’s Gentleman, & his motley clan in their brightly painted wooden caravan, the large majority see, & have always seen Gypsies as nothing more than a social plague & a blot upon the landscape.  They are indifferent to issues of ethnicity, distinct cultural practices, anthropological origins & a rich dialect based on a once-fully inflected language of Sanskrit roots.  They are aware only that Gypsies live in trailers, which they park, sometimes in large numbers, at roadsides, in fields, on car parks or on derelict ground & that when they go they leave rubbish behind.  Additionally, it is held to be common knowledge that they pilfer & cheat, are abusive & violent, avoid paying taxes & live of welfare. 

In short, Gypsies the world over fall far outside the battered & constantly shifting ring-fence of respectability that contains even the most nominally accepted of ethnic minorities.  It is no exaggeration to claim that the Gypsy represents for many the last available pariah, the remaining target for legitimised persecution at local, regional & national level.  It is almost as if the loathing & despisal that is directed at Gypsies is distillation of all the choking bigotry that is now proscribed by law against other, more conspicuous minorities.  Equally, it is no exaggeration to claim that in certain quarters at certain times, anti-Gypsy hostility is, at best, tolerated &, at worst, positively fomented by the authorities at the highest level.  It acts as both a safety valve & a diversion within a persistently uncomfortable multicultural society.

So who are the Gypsies & what are their origins?  If they are to be declared as having distinct ethnicity we need first to trace it to its roots & then to examine its present substance & functioning.  It is now widely acknowledged that the ancestors of the Gypsies can be tracked back to Northwest India over 1,000 years ago.  As members of low-caste linked tribes, variously identified as the Dom, Rom or Zott, they took on the despised trade of metal smiths.  Whether nomadism was a lifestyle factor brought on by economic demands, it became an imperative as the tribes moved into the religious, political & cultural melting pot that was the Middle East, Asia Minor & Europe at the beginning of the first millennium.  The rapid & widespread diaspora of these Gypsy ancestors took them into every region of the settled world.  And, over the centuries, with a remarkable capacity for selective absorption & adaptation based on their powerful, self-preserving sense of ethnocentricity, they absorbed & synthesised cultural elements – linguistic, artistic, social, spiritual – from the regions through which they travelled & in which, by the middle ages, they had settled. 

The first record of their presence in Britain comes from Scotland in 1541 with mention of conflict between King James V & one John Faa, Faw or Fall, supposedly the ‘Earl of Little Egypt’.  Faa & his followers were ordered from Scotland & the process of active & relentless persecution began.  A Scottish law passed against Gypsies in 1579 declared that ‘their ears be nailed to a tree, & cutted off, & them banished the country; & if thereafter they be found again, that they be hanged…the idle people calling themselves Egyptians’.  By the enlightened times of the first Queen Elizabeth, laws had also been passed in England meting out the same sort of terminal justice.

With the liberalisation of thought that came with the 18th century, perspectives on this remarkably tenacious & self-sufficient people began to alter in some quarters.  Artists were drawn to the exoticism of the Gypsies, to their dark features & decidedly un-English mode of dress.  Musicians & composers were drawn to their striking affinity for music & song.  Linguists were drawn to their language, Romani, at that time still a fully inflected tongue, based on Sanskrit, but peppered with words from all the regions through which, over time, the Gypsies had roamed.  Poets & writers were drawn to the very aspects of the lives of the Roma, real & imagined, that so frightened those who despised them most – their nomadism, their apparent lack of adherence to civil laws & religious commandments & their ostensible indifference to conventional cultural & moral restraints.   And there began during the years of the Age of Reason the lionisation of what was perceived by artists, intellectuals, scholars & dilettantes to be the Romany way of life, a romance which intensified greatly during the repressed & inhibited Victorian era & which, adapted to the tenor of the times, prevails amongst the same groups today.

The realities of the contemporary day-to-day lives of Gypsies in Britain today are starkly different.  At a time in which consciousness of imperilled minorities across the world is being raised constantly, those few laws that, for a few years, afforded British Gypsies some reasonable hope of protection & comfort have been repealed.   Where once there was some opportunity within law to obtain permanent caravan sites from local & county authorities, providing both a settled base & a chance to spend some time ‘on the road’, now, thanks to a draconian toughening up of laws relating to nomadism, the thousands of Gypsies who have no recourse to established sites live a precarious existence only days ahead of prosecution for trespass & constant eviction.        (Continued)

RETURN OF THE MEME

It’s been a long time since the last meme & I thought I was in the clear. But then I stumbled upon this site & all resolve, all resistance melted away… 

Here’s me…

What Your Soul Really Looks Like

You are very passionate and quite temperamental. While you can be moody, you always crave comfort.

You are a grounded person, but you also leave room for imagination and dreams. You feet may be on the ground, but you're head is in the clouds.

You see yourself with pretty objective eyes. How you view yourself is almost exactly how other people view you.

Your near future is calm, relaxing, and pretty much what you want. And it's something you've been anticipating for a while now.

For you, love is all about caring and comfort. You couldn't fall in love with someone you didn't trust.

How about you..?

.o0o.

Coming soon to this channel:

•    A major feature on Gypsies, part re-post, part new material.
•    Video clips – techno skills allowing – of R & R & M, & also of the revived Fishing for Eels, 21st century Anglo-Celtic ceilidh/world dance band.
•    A couple of new poems – if I can figure out punch lines within the next 12 months.

EVENT HORIZON

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light…
HENRY VAUGHAN

A dark treat, this sudden encounter with death.
Expecting the shadow-flicker in his neck,
the guttering fuse, she saw that he lay still
and that fine silver dust hung in the air.

Silence boomed in her blood.  She forgot
to breathe.  She stared into the hole in time
through which he’d slipped .  She saw dark wings
that beat too fast for angels’, saw

the broken place where bones come from
and where bones go.  All this in a heartbeat.
Wiser than scripture, swifter than light:
a destination on the other side of grief.

Independent on Sunday columnist Janet Street-Porter is at it again. ‘I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again – blogs suck’, she spits.  Something of a journalistic great aunt to our very own gonzo girl Julie Burchill, Street-Porter has been setting them up & knocking them down since the late ‘60s.  Rarely impeded by lack of research or just plain ignorance, she’s never been afraid to call a spade a spade, even if it is, in fact, a bloody shovel.

This time around (she took her first pop at bloggers back in July) she tells us that she ‘doesn’t give a toss what some nobody from the sticks thinks about David Hockney’s retrospective or Robbie Williams’ new album’.  Well, fair enough, I guess. But at least she has the option of avoiding such inevitably dire provincial blitherings altogether. I cherish my Independent on Sunday, only regretting the fact that there’s one full page of barrel-scraping hackery that I must step over if enjoyment is to be maintained uninterrupted.

‘All the blogs I read’, she goes on, ‘seemed to be written by people as anxious as possible to promote the idea that they are insanely busy. Give me a break! Most blogs are self-indulgent twaddle…’ Maybe she should change her Internet browser. I mean, we’re not talking about one in an infinite number of monkeys managing to produce the entire works of Shakespeare here. With an estimated 7 million bloggers tapping away in the UK alone, it seems a tad more likely that one of them – maybe even one stuck out there in the sticks – might be able to manage a match for her turgid prose.

That she might feel threatened by millions venturing into territory hitherto occupied only by the chosen few is understandable.  She’s been at it for a long time & the old cutting edge isn’t what it used to be. But that she should express her fears quite so unsubtly is surprising.   Time, maybe, to call it a day, Janet.  Stick to the celeb reality shows & the nature walks.  Or get yourself a blog & take your chances alongside the 7 million… 

If religious belief & consciousness of ethnicity cannot, in any circumstances, be made subject to humour, then our world’s in trouble.  A pal of mine, a Londoner, sent me this anecdote.  It concerns no more than an overheard brief encounter, but I found its theme of individual talking to individual across lines of religion & ethnicity oddly cheering.

I go to an evening class every Wednesday at Hackney Community College in East London.  I was there last Wednesday and it was a glorious sunny autumn evening as I walked across the vast square inside. An Asian girl in black, a Moslem, was sitting on a grassy knoll, wearing the headscarf, but not the mask, draped in black from chin to toe. She called to a passing friend, a girl of Afro-Caribbean extraction, who was wearing a very bright pink number: "Hi, you look great. Pink really suits you".

The other replied: "Thanks. It's new; I bought it at the weekend. Thanks. You ... er ... you look shit!"

They both laughed.

I laughed too and thought that maybe, just maybe, there is hope…

.o0o.

My oldest friend Geoff – an Englishman happily marooned in British Columbia but with us last weekend during his annual home visit – sent me this small but perfectly formed little story about media veteran Barbara Walters.  Stop me if you’ve heard it before…

Barbara Walters did a story on gender roles in Kabul several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked about 10 paces behind their husbands. She returned to Kabul recently and observed that the men now walk several paces behind their wives. Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghani women and said, "This is marvellous. Can you tell the free world just what enabled women to achieve this reversal of roles?"
"Land mines," said the woman.

.o0o.