Happenings Archives - almost everything is unexpected.

Why are the British (well actually, English) people so unrevolting?

I will be brief. The place I grew up in, where I osmotically developed as an ‘Englishman’ (English person) is no longer that place. It is a different, a much darker place; but this is not the interesting or surprising thing.

The interesting and surprising thing is also the horrifying thing: far too few – look, it’s the English to be honest, not really the Scots, Welsh or the Irish; perhaps they have some ancestral, residual Gallic/Celtic spirit of rebellion – are willing or able to realise the patently obvious, let alone to do damn all about it: the country is being slowly and not-at-all subtly converted by its rulers into an authoritarian state. A whatee? A state wherein the ruling minority – not governing, per se (that demands working with reality), but ruling (imposing an artificial reality) using a well-worn combination of propaganda and thuggery (Putinism, for the sake of argument) – tell the ruled majority what they must believe and what they cannot do; and it’s always a very long list, often with criminal sanctions attached. Why are the non-ruling majority English people using every tired old trick in the book of Great English Mythologies – read: delusions carried over from times past – to convince themselves that this is not really happening? Why are the English people so unrevolting?

Perhaps, to respond as the French do under similar circumstances would be the ultimate treason: to adopt Gallic remonstrance over and above good ole un-French stiff upper lip. Ne’ mind eh? Perhaps its the under-studied multi-generational effect of funds pulled from public education. Perhaps it’s the boiled [human] frog syndrome: spiritual death by tyranny is a sly, gradual thing. Perhaps it’s the powerful distractions of gaming, streaming and social media. Et-bloody-cetera; I wish I knew.

But what I do know is that the dynamics of a radical shift away from democratic and egalitarian values (notwithstanding that those values are always judiciously manicured by the ruling minority) are well underway; more than you will ever admit, Oh Al-bi-on! The present government of ‘En-gland’ – in its nauseatingly obvious trajectory and its clueless, wave-riding reprobates’ associated, clumsy ideological slobberings – has more in common with Russia, Hungary, Myanmar, the US and the multiple other countries around the world recently or now fronted by – usually – fragile-ego’ed individuals who must never confront their personal demons and must make YOU pay for THEIR perpetual anguish, whether they are the Capo or merely the Capo’s creepy funereal willing servants. Nota bene: none _wish _you _good.

Once upon a few times, the ruled majority were partially revolting. St. Peter’s Fields? The Peasant’s Revolt? And now? Well, let’s say the signs aren’t good. People are too busy dealing with the consequences to attend to the (bloody) obvious root cause; that’s the most generous take. When I hear the incessant, incoherent ramblings, lies, excuses and self delusions being promulgated in the media and expressed more widely in various polls, I do, really, want to be sick. I want to turn off, but yet find it painful to ignore like the dilemma one might (and some do) face of having a family member lose their mind and yet not being able to accept it with both sides of your brain: that yesterday has gone away and won’t be coming back, EVER. There it is then; the answer to why the English are so unrevolting: plus l’Angleterre change, plus c’est la même chose.

Rabbits! Rabbits!

While I was browsing the used book shelves today a thought spontaneously evanesced (as they do) and I found myself asking: is it too late to say Rabbits! Rabbits! Rabbits!? No, I decided. Talking to the cats doesn’t count; they are not people, even if I speak to them like they were. This recitation trick, that my paternal grandmother of a rural upbringing embedded in my brain from the age of seven, rewards the speaker with good luck all month if and only if they say aloud ‘rabbits! rabbits! rabbits! before speaking to anybody on the first day of each month. Speaking to animals or yourself doesn’t count (that’s my gloss.)

Most months I remember to unlock the secret to good fortune, which in itself is remarkable since my grandmother stopped reminding me when her own luck ran out in 1985. Some months, like this one – March 2023 – I do remember, but too late. Either I’ve already spoken to another human being – the bus driver, my neighbour, a work colleague who also happens to have decided to come to the office that day – and so accept, with some regret, the futility of trying to cheat fate or, like today, I get the day wrong. Only sitting here, in the evening of March the second, do I now realise looking at my desktop calendar that my rabbits! ran a day late. Sincerely, I chastise myself, for a moment anyway.

What can I expect now? A month’s days of irksome ill-fortune? Late wakings, spilled drinks, missed buses, poorly-judged emojis and flapping shoelaces? The fact that these thoughts even occur is embarassing (thoughts that ‘just occur’ tend that way). I’m objective, rational, not given to organising my affairs according to, or even with a liminal nod to, time-interwoven superstitious tendencies (I claim).

Something more serious? Probably not. Actuarially: unlikely. But then again, one could definitely classify avoiding death or serious injury as good luck. That’s inarguable, we can agree; but devilishly hard to prove, in a causative sense. Stuff doesn’t happen all the time, it just doesn’t get clicks. The human gait is a controlled fall; we are one neurological hiccup away from a visit to the accident ward each time we lurch into perambulation – one second or less in our conscious awareness behind our brain’s grip on the reins (free will is an illusion: discuss).

So why do I recite (or try to remember to) on the first day of each month: rabbits! rabbits! rabbits!? Well, luck (or trepidation at the prospect of not renewing my subscription to the avoidance of bad luck), isn’t it. Traditions are triggers: reminders (if we really wanted or needed them) that we are mere synapses in the collective nervous system of all conscious life: conduits for signals – of the most miniscule and universal frequency. When I say rabbits! each month I see my grandmother’s smiling face, I see us picking raspberries in July, playing dominoes on Sunday, roaring fires and solemn chiming mantelpiece clocks. I give voice to time passing, to life branching and branching. Luck is being part of the tree.

Oh dear. I seem to have sadly died.

This is an impromptu submission so please forgive the wordiness. I might edit it one day. It’s inspired by a bursting into life, if you will, of a particular expression that is — insidiously and malware-like — embedding itself in the lexicon of public speech in this part of the world.

We do not simply die, in the public announcement sense — anymore. Our mortal coils are not shaken off. We no longer join the choir invisible or kick the bucket. Indeed, our last reported moments no longer merit such life-affirming drama; we do not not go gently into that good night. Not according to the evening news. Nope. Now, we go sadly: sadly, like a teddy bear missing an eye or a houseplant wilting, neglected in the corner. Death is then, after all, one of life’s casual disappointments: regrettable indeed (heartfelt thoughts and prayers et cetera), until our attentions are momentarily and predictably redirected to a talking iguana or a shuffle dancer.

If you wish your death to be publicly reported, beware then that there is probably nothing you can do to avoid your fate. You will sadly die. You will not fight to your last breath, drop dead in flagrante delicto in the arms of someone only recently known to you, or meet the side of a mountain in the cockpit of a jet-propulsed vehicle. The glory of your passing, of your heroic last act, will have sadly died. The answer to the question — how do you sadly die? — is rendered moot. Common usage has determined that your dying is mostly, well…sad.

I have to admit, sad is just the right word to use if you view the death of someone you knew as usefully comparable to the death of a houseplant. If a human life is broadly equivalent to an aspidistra then ‘sad’ is the proper adjective for our demise. But I would argue otherwise. Would you agree?

When I am drawing my last breath (however and whenever that might be) I am convinced that one of the least likely emotions I will be feeling is sadness. I imagine I’ll have other things on my mind. My relatives, if I still have any and they are sitting by my side, are surely not feeling ‘sadness’ either. Sadness is for the emotionally disengaged. Sadness is what professionally sombre undertakers express to relatives with a frowny face as the deceased is wheeled in for the two-thirty booking. Or, ‘sadness’ is for the embarassed reporter. Not wishing to give offence to anyone, or to be perceived to possess a cold-hearted journalistic objectivity, the ugliness of death is pixellated away in the editing room and replaced with a soothing dab of sugary ‘sadness.’ There now, all better.

But if we must all sadly die, what is the kind of death we have avoided? Is it a happy one? Some deaths surely are a relief to the unfortunate few, but are they ‘happy’ therefore? Probably not, I would say. If all the weeds prospering in my garden — and stifling my summer veggies — go the way of all living things a little sooner than expected, then as far as I’m concerned they did indeed – as much as I am concerned – happily die. But they’re the unusual case. They’d have been happy to have lived and stifled my beans.

I admit that, surely, for most sentient beings like ourselves, with the luxury of reflection after some time has passed, death could be described as sad: if I were explaining to a child, for instance, why we can’t go to grandma’s house on Sunday anymore, I’d probably use the word sadly somewhere in my explanation.

For the record, then: no death is sad. Death is a lot of things but none is adequately conveyed by this silly little adjective or its adverbial playmate. If you one day announce that I have sadly died then you can be sure of one thing: that I’m just plain dead, but perhaps the happier for being rid of you.

Riff on a John Clare Poem but which one?

Where is the sun when I arise?
I want some bird to sing
To dream her song in sleep’s demise
Each dawn is a birth
For a moment’s ease, ceased burden
The night’s release, unwelcome
I love the sun, the beckoning glow
That enriches everything
It enjoins everything below
Like swallow’s spiralled wing
A motion magical, in flight,
A glimpse and then, a parting light.

Action, and reaction.

Today, like yesterday, the sky in this part of The Netherlands is a cloudless, pure blue. It is…cerulean. After weeks of high winds, grey skies and freezing rain, and after years of shared constraint — including, for many, great suffering and loss — there is the merest glimmer of the approach of spring (daffodils have bloomed in recent days on the canal banks) and our spirits are prompted to lift again, to think thoughts of new experiences, embracing friends and relatives, journeys and events to plan and attend. Simple but profound and necessary pleasures to contemplate. Finally there is a chance to think of something other than how our governments are, or are not, making life and the future for the rest of us more or less awful.

To the east of here, though, something different is happening.

For some people, hopes are begin crushed, plans made suddenly to seem like yesterday’s foolish dreams. Lives are being wiped away like so much dust and brute force is being asserted as if it were the only conceivable power of persuasion. This shouldn’t be news. It’s been happening around us for years now, decades. We’ve become inured to the sight of Syrian people, of Yemeni people, many others, bloodied and stunned, their ordinary peaceful lives as parents, accountants, shopkeepers, bus drivers, doctors and nurses, brought to ruin by a few individuals — men, mostly –wielding the power they so desperately need and hunger for.

We are all qualified now to chime in, to assert our opinions and give our assessments of the situation — its causes, its likely trajectory, and the best solution for all concerned; after all, we’ve spent more than fifteen minutes researching our social media feeds and a few uploads on YouTube. I do it (I’m doing it now). You do it. We all do it. We can all expound usefully on all the world’s problems. How democratic our world has become! Our voices are finally heard.

I hear Boris Johnson expounding a lot. He enjoys, I’m sure, the fizzy sensation it gives him of worldly importance — all puffed up and then out, with booming, robust words bouncing off the walls into eternity and the ‘history’ books he will no doubt write for the benefit of mankind.

But Johnson, and the various other often-cited craven little men that I need not catalogue here (but including Putin, of course) are the problem, not the solution. Bloated with ambition and testosterone, encouraged by political and electoral systems that reward their useful sociopathy, they view the world and the human societies we exist within as something to control and exploit, rather than the fragile, complex interdependencies that they actually are.

None of this is new, of course. Only, it’s becoming so exhausting. How much more greed, incompetence, violence and cruelty can we afford, can we endure? Yuval Harari recognises that human life, our survival is faced with existential crises – advancing rapidly toward us if not already here – that can only be ameliorated by effective joint action. At this moment in our history, when we urgently need such collaboration, we have world leaders who create and promote division either to bolster their undernourished egos or by such inaction and incompetence that it might as well be intentional. The well-intended ones paint pretty pictures with words, but there’s no follow through. They know our attention, as feeble as it is, reacts badly to nuance. Nowadays, when I see obvious courage and selflessness — in the Ukrainian people and Zelenskiy, for example — I am, (as I imagine, too, are all humans exhausted by the extent of malfeasance in political and public life) filled briefly with a hope I know instinctively is exaggerated by how little of it we have in our daily diet: the hope that we will live through these storms of reactionary violence and emerge as a human society that no longer vaunts sociopathic machismo as the ultimate virtue of our species. It’s the hope of daffodils and blue skies.

Beach

We slept for some hour or so only, before dawn. The night dissolved time. If I were to reconstruct events within the framework of hours, I am sure it would prove a puzzle without solution. I know that just after midnight we left the house and drove up over the cliffs and down to the beach. We walked along the sand. It was cold and there was no moon, only the stars, frigid in space above us; and the ocean, its edges swarming over our feet as we passed between unseen rocks. The cliffs behind offered up only vacant blackness – a beautiful, terrifying blackness that draws your attention and arrests it, erasing all other thoughts but a recognition of infinity.

I took off my shoes and followed the direction she’d passed into the shadows. I remember shadows, lots of them, but there could have been none, only the visual impression of stones and rocks against the sand. I found her perched on a rock, facing out to sea. I clambered onto the rock, feeling slightly foolish. There, holding my balance with difficulty, I put my arm around her for the first time. It was cold, and the waves that crashed down and unfolded before us sharpened the sensation. We spoke, but the words that passed between us were then, and are now looking back, unimportant as unfit to express our other perceptions, as anatomy is silent on the import of the brush of a finger across the hip as it curves into the pubis, or how the smell of skin changes with arousal.

It occurs to me now, although without a doubt, then too: we were completely alone. It seems so ordinary a fact, so simple and unexciting. And yet, without that fact, the entirety of the experience would be made pedestrian, perhaps even ironic, a cruel trick concealing that solitude is an unattainable state except through the lens of relativity and so not attainable at all. As we were absorbed into the darkness, like ghosts passing through dimensions, the lights of houses on the sea cliff seemed distant and alien. We watched them, we spoke briefly of them, but they were not really there. We walked arm in arm.

It is a constant failing in recording any experience at a later date that we cannot avoid the dislocation of event and memory, as if without a second thought our memories are assumed to be not the events at all, but the impression left by them, the footprints of experience if not the experience itself. We reach back in search of essentials. Events are merely the necessary skeletal fragments around which memories are wrapped. So we walked back, embracing, and I remember not each step we took or even the tracks made by our feet in the sand. I remember most of all feeling at peace.

The Street is Their Stage (Gambit Magazine, New Orleans)

The crowds stopping traffic on Decatur Street speak for themselves. Passers-by might glimpse a baton in mid-flight, or a streak of flames bursting into the air.

In Jackson Square itself, the milling crowds take their pick from jazz bands, break dancers and unicyclists. Occupying street corners and vacant podiums, the mimes work miracles with their lithe bodies and unworldly expressions. Clowns mesmerise children with balloon tricks only the under fives can understand.

Jose Eduardo Tama is one of the more recognisable street entertainers in the city. His one-man act that encompasses magic, juggling, comedy and theatre regularly draws the two or three hundred people needed to fill the small, half-moon fountain area near the Moonwalk on Decatur Street. For him, New Orleans has been the perfect base from which to practice his art. Its well-educated blend of tropical and European influences gives him the freedom to develop his talent and at the same time pursue a career as a painter.

Jose came to New Orleans four years ago, to escape the stresses of life in New York, his home town. Although he makes many trips to perform at arts festivals in Europe and the U.S., he considers New Orleans his permanent home. For the more talented street performers, New Orleans streets provide the exposure needed to move on to the more lucrative contacts, such as commercials and private bookings. But in a town where ‘lagniappe’ is the password for anything that doesn’t require an invoice, a town made famous for ‘The Greatest Free Show on Earth’ it must be a matter of some diplomacy to actually profit from what some would be surprised to learn is often a full-time career.

Jose has his money pitches handled. His years of experience have built a stockpile of ‘pay me’ approaches. “Remember, ladies and gentlemen, the more money you give, the more money I have. I’ve given you all I can give you. Now you owe me .” When you’re asking people to show you the colour of their money in public, comedy is essential. As Jose points out, performing on city streets is no free stage. Jose and friends pay $74 annually for a permit to operate.

Even with a permit, life as a street entertainer is not always fun and games. In a city renowned for its liberating atmosphere, performers often find that heckling comes easily. More than once Jose has packed up early because of persistent yells from a gathering of those who have too much to drink. There are also those rules to be followed: one performer, Jose recalled, once spent the night in jail after being arrested in mid-juggle. On one occasion Jose was even asked to move on by a high-ranking member of the church because his audience was too loud. And them of course, there’s the inevitable rain.

In an area such as the French Quarter, however, where almost all events except eating take place on the streets, such small problems don’t prevent the continuous flow of touring musicians and troubadours eagerly seeking fame, fortune and an alternative lifestyle. The French Quarter remains one of the top three locations in the country for street performers. Only San Francisco and New York can rival New Orleans’ impromptu stages and eager audiences.

Throughout the coming months, and again again in the fall, the French Quarter will be the site for a whole spectrum of entertainment lost to a generation of couch-potatoes. Carnival passes, but the parade continues.

Highgate (Excerpt)

“Give her a shove, Brian, for fuck’s sake!” Michael groaned. Claire was very nearly over the fence but her long winter coat had become snagged on an overhanging tree branch and her trespass into Highgate cemetery had been momentarily halted. Not one for delicacy, Brian didn’t hesitate in promoting the upward progress of his girlfriend’s buttocks as she shimmied the last few inches over the iron railing fence. She landed with a comforting sibilance of crushed leaves and disappeared through the bushes that lined the perimeter path The two of them quickly followed. The others were already inside by an point of entry, but they would meet up on the path that ran the perimeter of the cemetery.

Claire’s plan was unanimously agreed, if not with equal enthusiam. It was approaching the end of October and it seemed appropriately mischievous to Claire that they should infiltrate the hallowed ground of Highgate Cemetery. Everyone who knew Claire realised that the prospect of being able to boast among friends of having carried off with aplomb another risky endeavour was the primary consideration. Hers was the broad masterstroke. Others could work out the details.