The Edges of the Vast Victorian Hotel Lounge.

At the Party conference, stalls were situated around the edges of the Vast Victorian Hotel lounge. Some sold books, some gave away bags, cloth recyclable bags emblazoned with slogans, some sold badges. Some campaigned against alleged world overpopulation, another advocated wind power, another, the cause of the Palestinians. All gave out leaflets; many, many, many leaflets.

In daytime, this big room was a bit like a market place as conference goers and hotel stayers promenaded around it. The persons personning the stalls, depending on their degree of fanaticism and the nature of their relationship to the cause espoused in their particular location, either watched the passers by pass like goldfish in a glass tank; or attempted to engage them in signing a petition, buying some geegaw or  accepting yet more leaflets.

In the evening, the footfall thinned out. One evening Boris Dooligan was almost the only person left still sitting at a stall. He sat drinking sweet fizzy bottled cider which about as much bang for his bucks as he could get from the Vast Victorian Hotel bar. He sat at the Trade Union Group stall with his back to screens onto which various banners and been tied and/or stapled. He made half hearted attempts to tidy the piles of leaflets, pamphlets etc which were scattered across the trestle table before him.

The Vast Victorian Hotel lounge was big and tunnel shaped, as big as many a small provincial town railway station, and it had something of the atmosphere of one  as people, singly or in separated small groups drifted in, out and about it. It had an echoing acoustic too, so that when a concert of singers started up in an adjoining dining room, the dismal lyrics of folk-blues dirges drifted through clearly into Boris’ ears. He then heard every word of a Computer Scientist regurgitating the crusty old lament of some bloke who had been catching Herring, (and probably crabs as well). Then mad people sang opera, with great power and no music in their voices. The sound that they made had such force as it echoed and bounced around the Vast Lounge, and like migraine round the inside of Boris’ own bone dome, that he expected it to shatter glass and powder the meaningless ornamental droplets  that hung down from several chandeliers above. Boris would have run out on the streets screaming, to escape, but it was not his own town out there.

Yesterday he had gone out around noon. Black clad twitching figures had abused one another in incomprehensible accents around a cash machine. Boris could not grasp meaning from any of the phonemes that they had uttered, although he knew them to be using a local variant of his own English tongue.

So now Boris had no wish to leave the Vast Victorian Hotel again except to get back into the metal worm that went three hours down south to his own Smoke.

But where was that,? When he got back, he stood as a candidate in a local council by-election, representing a fourth and minor Party in a polity dominated by three, older, better organised and better funded rivals. Boris knew that he had no chance of winning or even of slightly upsetting the borough balance of power between its three current major beneficiaries.

There was a local spat brewing, which could, Boris hoped, give a political outsider a slight chink of an opening. A borough cultural centre building which housed a library, an art gallery and meeting rooms used by nearby churches, was threatened with closure by the Council. Boris’ conspiratorial take on this act of municipal vandalism was that it had been in the offing for a bit. The cultural centre had also once been home to a popular cinema and a café/bar that had hosted music gigs. Boris suspected that these had been allowed to run down, close and provide statistical ammunition for the argument that the whole of the cultural centre was “under-used” and should therefore be closed and demolished to make way for a profitable “re-development” on the flattened site where it had once stood.

Arguably, Boris hoped to argue, all three major rival parties were somehow mixed up in this piece of shennanigins. Party A were doing it as the party that ran the borough council and parties B & C together participated in a coalition National government which demanded spending cuts of every local council in the land.

“A Plague on all your Houses!” was an example of the type of ringing denunciation that echoed inside Boris’ skull as he thought about what he would say to the one hustings meeting that had been organised for this obscure local political contest.

When the hustings took place, about a week before polling day, Boris did deliver his rhetorical flourishes from the dusty Church Hall platform, and the audience liked them. However, this little bit of political point scoring was to no avail because the “hustings” weren’t really hustings, in the sense of being a meeting of potential voters in the impending by-election. They did not even hust within the ward where Boris was standing, so most of the audience couldn’t vote for him as they were inconsiderate enough to live in the wrong place; they were drawn from all over the borough and beyond.

After the brief pseudo-triumph in the non-hustings, Boris’ campaign faltered. Boris was physically crippled and so could not deliver leaflets or canvass voters on their doorsteps.  He had just a handful of helpers and by polling day only about two thirds of potential voters might have been leafleted on his behalf.

Furthermore contacting electors from street stalls, the one form of electioneering that Boris could manage relatively easily, and enjoyed doing, was inappropriate to this by-election, because the Ward was in some senses shapeless. It was not a town or village with a coherent popularly used centre where large numbers of its residents might regularly congregate or even pass through en route to somewhere else.

The Ward contained no commuter railway stations, although it was criss crossed by railway lines. There were no big bus interchanges, and major nearby shopping centres and big supermarkets were outside the boundaries. And then, like most of 21st century British suburbia, the Ward suffered from “street death” rather than hosting any form of street life.

In part 21^st century “street death” was a consequence of a northern climate, no British town or city had ever had the kind of public evening promenade of citizens such as that which happened in many Mediterranean urbs. But, this was the land where CAR was God, very household had to have two, most had three and many peaked at six per semi-detached home, even after excluding trades vans.

Thus it was that when Boris attempted street stalls, he spoke to about half a dozen people, and that very briefly, within the space of about three hours, as he gradually lost sensation in his ungloved hands and sock clothed feet due to immobility and cold.

The end result was a meagre 79 votes, about 3% of a turnout of about 3,000. Boris felt like a meaningless sound bouncing round the inside a hollow skull or the lounge of a Vast Victorian Hotel, like a false folk song sung to no one, Boris wondered why he had bothered and was not surprised to find himself, shortly thereafter, whingeing to a counsellor about how the pressures of this life had driven him to drink.

HEY, FISH FARMER

Fish grunt, click, whistle and cough

To one another,

As they swim about

But

They are fenced in

And fattened up into apefood.

But, it is wrong to restrain these swimmers.

And that is why we make our plea

HEY, FISH FARMER

Let them fish swim free

Let them swim all around the world,

Hydrodynamically.

It just ain’t right,

As you must know,

To put haddock in paddock

So let them trout out

And let the salmon run free

Let the bream beam

And the snappers snap

Hydrodynamically.

NO, FISH FARMER

Don’t constrain these finny beings

They can do better

Than be kept in by nets

Yes these fish got feelings

SO, FISH FARMER

Get humane with your Cod

Let the plaice go to every plaice

Let the skate take off

And let the dogfish go dogging

All around the scallops’ abode

Where the congers are all conging

Let the eels feel free

To go wherever they want

All along the Blue Whales’ road

TROUSER WAR

I want telepathic and telekinetic trousers now,

I want trews that can think,

I want strides that don’t shrink

Away from the intellectual effort

Of obeying my unspoken commands,

And that climb up my legs smoothly and coolly.

Without any word from my mouth

Or tug from my hands

I want legwear that’s always there

When I want it

And never there when I don’t.

As a youth I never thought of trousers

In terms of on and off,

But age and arthritis have changed the nature

Of the leg cladding game

Getting dressed and undressed

Is now a ruthless fifteen round wrestling match,

As I curse and swear, and sometimes tear

At those obstinate tubes of cloth.

My feet get stuck inside them,

My knees go crick and crack

I clutch at the wall

In case I fall

Like a tortoise onto my back.

But tortoises don’t wear trousers

They have more sense than aged old apes

They go around nude,

As perhaps I should,

Or wear a skirt, a kilt or a cape.

Instead of fighting my trousers

In a daily attritional war

Which I can’t win and neither can they

Until we both exist no more

I’ll be cremated in my trousers

Together flesh, bone and cloth will burn

Until trousers and I can both rest in peace

In a tasteful funerary urn.

The Metaphorical Squirming of Horace Goolan

As a schoolboy, Horace Goolan had learnt about the Reformation, the name that historians gave to the change in the religion of most of north Western Europe from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.  Even now in his sixties, Horace could remember a few key facts about it. In 1516, or ’17, or something, Loofah had nailed his faeces to a door after living on a diet of Worms etc.

Another aspect of the Reformation that Horace wasn’t too sure about was what might have been called, but wasn’t, the Thirty Nine Articles. This factoid was the number of different positions that various strands of Reformation religious belief, (eg: Roman Catholic, High Anglican, low Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, Anabaptist, Erasmian etc), held about the status or nature of the bread and wine ritually used in the Christian mass.

These positions formed a kind of spectrum. On one end the wafer was the flesh of Christ and the wine was his blood. On the other bread was bread and wine was wine, and if one’s particular sect celebrated mass at all, it might as well have done so with a turnip and a cup of cold tea, or find some other, or no other way of expressing whatever it was that mass expressed.

In between the poles of flesh and blood and nothing and nothing, there were ranged many intermediate positions, such as the belief that the bread was bread and the wine was wine until Communion at which point these things somehow, and for a strictly limited shelf life, “became” flesh and blood, specifically that of Christ. Others thought that Bread and wine were only symbolic or only symbolic until a priest touched them in the correct context, and so on, and so on.

It looked absurd to early twenty first century eyes, or at least to that pair of them protected by the skull of Horace Goolan; but in other parts of the early twenty first century world, people were drawing up and strictly enforcing numerous edicts about male beard length, or how much hair could show from under a woman’s scarf.

As Horace contemplated various emails, tweets, blogs and websites via his computer, he had begun to wonder if nit-picking fanaticism was not actually an inherent, deep-wired tendency in humans which, if it couldn’t be  focussed on bread, wine, beards or scarves; would get fixatedly focussed onto something else, such as the precise attitude that should be taken towards a British South Coast town council proposing to set an annual budget that would entail it in making cuts to the services that  it provided to the public.

Most of the digital correspondents whose messages  Horace saw, disapproved of cuts to public services, but this was an attitude that, in terms of public pronouncements at least, spanned most of the British political spectrum, unlike the USA where some politicians would say outright: “Damn the poor, let them starve!”, early twenty first century British Conservatives might imply that although they found hurting the poor, distasteful, they had to do it. Indeed, some seemed to find it so distasteful that, like Victorian gentlemen debauching child prostitutes, they literally found that what they did was unspeakable.

Liberals and the British labour party, (which by 2012 could hardly call itself socialist any more), also said like schoolmasters about to inflict corporal punishment; “I’m sorry it hurts, but it must be done, so down with your trousers and out with your bum.” And then others further to the left and probably further way from any prospect of real political power, floundered around mouthing like fresh caught fish in various media. Those who had got elected to a South Coast town council on an agenda of planetary rescue, used devices like extensive public consultation to conceal the fact that they too were rippers in dark alleys intent on doing a swift bit of slicing before slipping away into a dense green pea soup-like fog, leaving the coppers to ask “Whodunnit?”

The messages coming out of Horace’s computer suggested as many political stances in relation to this as there had been Reformation attitudes to sacraments. Some called the cutting councillors “traitors”, advocated walkouts, mass resignations and setting “Illegal” budgets. Others said, in effect “condemn the sin and not the sinner” ie don’t be rude to rippers and choppers as they are ripping and chopping because bad central government is forcing them to rip and chop; once they had finished and put their bloody cleavers down, they would get on with doing all the nice things, or at least those nice things that they had managed not to cut, which had been promised in their electoral leaflets and manifestos.

Horace dodged, weaved and vacillated agreeing with as many as often as he could. He swam, squirmed and slimed like an eel through the tentacles and past the beaks of many, many, many octopi. He was not dead in the water but he felt pulverised by the positioning and certainty of those around him, also swimming in the polluted seas of political discourse. They trumpeted and spouted out statements, jibes, attacks, pledges and condemnations.

Would it all blow up? He wondered. Would a cataclysm come, freezing and fossilising him and those around him in mud which would then be pressured into stone for museums, temples, ministries and palaces of some unknown future epoch? Or would it, like a squib, leave a trail of hot air behind, becoming like attitudes to bread and wine, a footnote of obscure political history? 

Mammoth eating Cousin

Thomas Doolin had a cousin called Maura who lived by the sea. She had written novels and eaten the flesh of long extinct mammoths.

She managed the former by having a powerful DeValerian imaginary view of the world. You would have insulted her, or she would have construed it as an insult, if you had called her English, but England was the English name for the country where she was born. The Welsh called it Llogyr in Welsh, meaning the Lost Lands, or at least that was the name on some road signs, Maura would have liked that.

As to the second achievement mentioned above, Maura’s novels were not bestsellers and she worked a Secretary to the Royal Geographic Society. This august body once obtained a frozen mammoth from Siberia or Kamchatka and decided to eat parts of it in a ceremonial banquet. Maura had some; she said that it tasted alright.

When Thomas first met her, he was a small boy of eight or nine and she lived in a poky damp basement flat in West Kensington. Then looking back on it perhaps Maura was left a legacy, because she bought a bungalow in a sedate Sussex seaside town. She didn’t just buy the bungalow ready built; she had it built to her specifications in a large plot of land. There were rows of about ten brick pillars out the back with a trellis over the top. It was like a mini Roman villa.

Thomas went down to visit there on many weekends with his father, who might have been having some kind of affair with Maura. Thomas was then a young boy, who was unable to know, notice or understand this. Sometimes the three of them would walk along the seafront where waves shooshed and swooshed along the pebble beach lined with vari-coloured beach huts. Once, with no apparent provocation she cried out. A phonetic approximation of her cry is: “Nyaaa harrra ny-ny-ny hyar, eeyah,eeyah. Hwawrrragh!” Before anyone could ask her “Cousin Maura, why do you cry out so?”, she explained that she had just emitted a Spanish Muleteer's cry, but this was lost on the gulls that circled above her. No Spaniards or mules emerged from the sea, or came down from the Downs inland, in answer to her call.

Maura took her hispanophilia to the point of wearing rope-soled shoes as often as the British climate allowed. Another interest of hers was ancestry, the surname that she and Thomas shared was not uncommon but Maura concocted the theory that “Doolin” was in some way more authentically Celtic than “Dolan”. Her ancestral theorizations took various differing forms over the years, once she insisted that the surname indicated descent form Czechoslovakian gypsies.

Thomas found, by trial and error, that it was difficult to disagree with Maura. Once she was charged with care of young Thomas, (his mother had died and his father was out), and Thomas had inadvertently uttered the word “bugger”, having no idea that it might be an obscenity. Maura was deeply offended and reacted with immediate severity, but instead of slaps, rage or shouting, she insisted on only speaking Spanish to Thomas for next twelve hours. It might not sound like much of a punishment in comparison to having your fingernails pulled out with pliers or something, but it induced psychological disorientation to have someone whom you had previously only spoken to in one language that you both understood, now only conversing in an incomprehensible tongue, inspire of all pleading. Looking back on this experience Thomas now though that it might have helped when he later worked as a teacher.

Later Maura somehow traced the “Doolin/Dolan” ancestry to Miltown Malbay on the west coast of Eire and she went there to die.

Thomas last saw her when he was about thirty, just before she left England. She was striding along the concrete promenade looking out across a steadily heaving sea under a grey sky perforated by shafts of sunlight beaming down to illuminate chosen patches of the Channel. Maura looked like she had already left England in her mind. Thomas did not speak to her; he was not sure what language she would use,

Over the years he got some postcards from her and sent some back. Maura's card messages were sometimes almost offensively ultra-Irish and Thomas was moving to a position of suspicion and distance towards questions of ethnicity and nationalism. He never visited her on the coast of Clare, but he could imagine her striding along the strand, uttering strange enthusiastic cries and fortified by an ancestral diet of Mammoth meat.

The tinkling teaspoons of the coast

The sound of the future is the clinking of teaspoons against the sides of china teacups, just after the spoons have been used to create millions of vortices in the freshly steaming beige liquid within the cups. The background sound of the future is polite reedy chatter in which all words are annoyingly only half audible. The place of the future is the South Coast of England, or the more picturesque, bits of it at least.The countryside of the future is nice flowery gardens with beds of neatly planted annuals and perennials. The food of the future is imported, it is all processed, it is grown and processed where labour is cheap or cheap labour can be imported to process it. The catering of the futures is carried out by polite immigrants.

Except that this is not the future, it is now. unless the future is just now but only more so, after all everything mentioned above has been going on and increasing for at least a century, may be more.

Then again different slices of now exist simultaneously in separate locations cut apart from one another by things like train journeys from the South Coast to the capital city. When Mauris made such a journey after only a week away on the Costa Geritrica, land of the tinkling teaspoons, he almost ended his journey home by emerging from the tube station that was nearest to his gaff, he was knocked metaphorically out with joy to see and hear all sorts, conditions and ages of people from all over the globe. He was happy to hear, within seconds of coming through the ticket barrier, about five different languages being spoken none of which he could understand and not all of which he could identify, even tentatively. But, it wasn’t just that, that cheered Mauris, most of the people here seemed to moving around with some purpose or aim in mind other than walking up the road to look at the sea and wait to die.

There are also other versions of present and future knocking around in the city too. Coming back from the supermarket, a day or two later, Mauris saw red and green banners flying proudly outside what had once been a small office and warehouse unit just off the Edgware Road. Mauris thought about what he would like this to signify; that a crazed vanguardist sect of eco-socialists, such as the one he belonged to, had decide to do a “Dublin post office job” to initiate the downfall of global capitalism.

Sadly for Mauris, as he knew all along, the flag fliers were marking an Islamic ceremony that was taking place inside the converted building. They seemed to be celebrating an eighth or ninth century martyrdom and perhaps their chanting could be the sound of the future, just as much as, if not more than, the tinkling teaspoons of the coast

.

PsyOps in the Civic Centre Carpark

Leona Pippin reminded Norris of something on the day of the demo outside the Mosque. She stood on the back of a small flatbed truck that had been rigged up with a portable PA system to make a movable stage for speakers at the demo. She had a voice that was high pitched and clear. It carried and Norris could distinctly hear every word that she shouted into the microphone, but she was not shrill. She was fired up but she was not excited.

She just went on and on and on. She was unrelenting.

“The EDL are not welcome here. We are all assembled here because we don’t want the EDL in this borough. This is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic community. People of all religions and none live here and we all get on together. We don’t need the EDL coming here to start trouble. Go away EDL, go and crawl back into your holes. We are all united to oppose you and we are not going away until you have left the borough forever……”

At the beginning of the demo a large picket, two or three hundred plus, had formed up on the roadside directly opposite the mosque. That was where the lefties were, they were mainly, but not entirely, white. Across the road, outside the Mosque people were assembled who by their dress seemed to be mostly Muslims; they were mostly, but not exclusively South Asian men. It was difficult to quantify which group had the most facial hair, probably on balance, the Muslims.

Speeches were made by political activists and priests from the back of the flatbed, but it was all to the converted. The only persons in the immediate locality who might not fit into that category were the police who were corralling the demo and the pedestrians and motorists who passed it by with apparent indifference.

Then some how the word spread, “The EDL are here”, “There in the car park over there, outside the civic centre”.

The whole demo turned and began to move about an eighth of a mile to the left, focussing on a place where behind multiple lines of police who you just make out the tops of the head of about fifteen or twenty people, the EDL apparently.

Most of the demo moved across the car park and the flatbed truck went with them and Leona Pippin’s diatribe commenced. Only after she had kept going for about an hour did, Norris recall Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley. In this fictionalised account of early medieval English history, a climatic battle between Normans and Saxon rebels takes place in the Fens near Ely that involved the Normans' use of an early form of what the Americans in Vietnam were to call “Psyops”. They erected a wooden tower with a platform on top from which a witch, hired for the purpose, hurled curses at the Saxons. Perhaps this was as much to boost the morale of the Normans as to spook the Saxons, after all a marsh is not the best place for heavily armoured cavalry to operate.

Whatever the historical case had been, Leona Pippin was now carrying out a similar function relation to an early twenty-first century struggle against English neo-fascism. However in doing so Norris thought that she fell into a trap called: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” At times she was creating a verbal picture of the suburb that she was speaking in, (which was not the neighbouring suburb where she actually lived), as some sort of multi-cultural heaven, where all sorts and kinds of people united together against the common neo-fascist enemy.

Norris doubted if he needed this romanticised account of a suburban shithole to impel his political action. Norris knew that the road he picketed against racists was also the road where men outside the Mosque were rumoured to spit at passers by who they deemed to be gay: they were probably not big on Feminism either.

The situation like Norris himself was a mass of contradictions. He decided that he was a multi-layered onion within a multi layered onion which rotated in an unknowable universe.