The collective finger – Part One

A room full of her own paintings; a lively gig in a pub in the Archway Road; a stroll in a cemetery in post-industrial Ohio. Glimpses of the life of Chrissie Hynde in a BBC4 “Arena” programme last week. I’d never known much about her, which was why I watched. I warmed to her when she declared how much she loathed words like “empowerment”. I held my breath as she went on to say how much she “hated everything” – by implication many irritations of today’s world – and then spluttered “I wish everyone would just fuck off”.

I breathed again. Relief. So it isn’t just me, then. I have those moments constantly. There is so much about today that – for someone who grew up during the fifties and sixties – is not only completely repellent and annoying in itself, and not only because it is so obviously vastly inferior to what we once had, but more significantly because I feel that I’m expected to be impressed, to like it, to want more of it.

Most of all I resent the erosion of peace and quiet, all the intrusions, the nosey-parkering, the false intimacies, the snooping electronics, the incessant announcements and halfwits jabbering special offers, all the unwanted junk and spam, the accelerating rate of change but not for the better, the obsession with collecting feedback, the denial of privacy and anonymity, the systems mentality, the resort to apps and algorithms – or to the law - instead of to knowledge or common sense or decency, to intelligence or creativity. The endemic stupidity, the ambient intolerance and prickliness of modern public life. Progress - a word I fear, though I didn’t used to. Technology, information technology especially, is a mixed blessing. The internet isn’t half as pleasant to use as it was a decade ago, and it’s deteriorating rapidly. Soon we won’t be able to fart without logging on, and if we don’t produce an acceptable chromatographic spectrum our collective fridge will mysteriously stop working. I am of course referring to a metaphorical fart, an incorrect or deviant fart, and to a metaphorical fridge as an instrument of punishment and control. Why do we do it to ourselves? Because we can.

Increasingly I can appreciate how one has to retreat inside oneself or out into the wilds to escape from it all, in order to stay sane. Luckily I can paint and write and make music, not that anyone’s interested. Of course I’m getting old, and I fart more than I used to though with increased likelihood that my deviances from the norm will be not so much metaphorical as metabolical. Or even diabolical. Perhaps getting old is synonymous with a pushing away of an unwanted world, tired of London, tired of life and all that. Except that I’m not, I’m merely tired of increasingly prominent and intrusive aspects of daily life.

So yes, I agree absolutely with Chrissie Hynde, who is a year younger than me. So often I would like – ever so politely - for it all to go away. That’s a core thought I’ve been fumbling towards for a long while. “Angry of Mayfair” was Kenny Everett’s version; “Modern Life Is Rubbish” was Damon Albarn’s. Chrissie nailed it in two words.

 
I believe that the technical term for all this is “having a rant”. Good !