Making up and bringing down

This week sees a UK general election that is more contentious and with fewer clearcut options than I, for one, can ever remember. In this era of “fake news” we have come to expect that politicians and media types of all persuasions will play fast and loose with the truth, will invent or deny policy claims as it suits them, and create “facts” and “statistics” as required. And so it has been. On the wider world stage, leaders of some of the most powerful nations have generated in their audiences a cynical expectation of what has come to be known as implausible deniability, the naked lie whose immediate detection bothers its perpetrators not at all. Spire-admiring tourists, re-education facilities, “I don’t think I ever met the guy”. That kind of thing. All of this is despicable enough, but its insidiousness, extensiveness, and apathetic acceptance should not blind us to how awful it is. Over time it is corrosive and hugely damaging. This is how our world is becoming.

Within this territory of deceit, one interesting variant is the small, but deliberately engineered untruth which, one feels, is so unnecessary, could so easily be avoided, and which serves as an “own goal” when it goes wrong. In other words, the old fashioned but spontaneously synthesised porkie. Its identification confirms its vendor as a liar, with the inevitable  corollary that if that person can lie about something which is so trivial, then surely they can lie about far more important matters. Thus – back to the election again - we were treated last week to the delicious spectacle of a certain Old Pretender being exposed in exactly this way by a smart female television interviewer.

This particular Pretender to the office of prime minister, who surely realises that his views on the monarchy are not vote-catchers with most of the traditional British public, was caught out when, quite unnecessarily, he claimed that he watched the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcasts in the morning. Unfortunately, and incredibly, unlike most of the adult population he didn’t appear to know that this broadcast is generally viewed through a post-lunch, sprout-flavoured, alcoholic haze at 3 o’clock on Christmas afternoon. That is the time when it is first broadcast. Watching him redden and squirm as he knew he’d been found out was a treat; it was one of those feedback things - he knew that she knew that he knew and that we all knew. He’d blown his credibility, and so needlessly. He could have just said that he didn’t watch the broadcast; we wouldn’t have been surprised or offended. Even the interviewer looked embarrassed for him, as he hastily tried to restore his halo by claiming that he visited shelters for the homeless at Christmas. Cringemas, more like it.

To err is human, but to deliberately invent “facts” which don’t need inventing is crass or downright weird. In my local library the other day I picked up a book called “Commuters”, by Simon Webb, published in 2016 by Pen and Sword Books of Barnsley. Glancing through it, I noticed references to the humour of suburban place names in such august sources of toponymic authority as “Python” and “Reggie Perrin”. My kind of book, I thought; absolutely spot on. However, settling into it, soon I was alarmed by the high incidence of typographical and other errors, the frequent repetition of the same themes, the intrusion of irrelevant padding reflecting the author’s views on, for instance, the theory of evolution, and much else that spoke of lousy editing and a lack of substantive content.  A shame, because parts of the book are very readable, entertaining, and thoughtful.

I really started to prickle when I found that, referring to Reginald Perrin, the author claimed that the fictitious “Climthorpe”, where Perrin lives, is probably Surbiton. It isn’t, it’s Norbiton, and Norbiton station was used as a location in the TV series. Everybody knows that (as they say). All right, not tremendously important in the scheme of things – one or other of those very suburban places you can get to when South West Trains aren’t on strike. It doesn’t matter, it’s only fiction, only a sitcom. What is not fiction, however, but a peculiarly ghastly tragedy, was the Moorgate tube disaster of February 1975, which Webb goes on to describe later in the book. Forty-three people (Webb says 42) were killed when the train failed to stop at Moorgate, the last station on the line, and compressed itself at speed into a concrete wall at the end of a blind tunnel. What caused the 56-year-old driver, Leslie Newson, whose long experience and habitual cautiousness were widely known, to crash the train in this way, has never satisfactorily been established.

At that time, the so-called Northern City Line upon which the train was running had its northern terminus at Drayton Park, in Highbury, north London, close to where the Emirates Stadium now stands and not far from the older Arsenal stadium then in use. Formerly, this line ran from Finsbury Park, but since construction of the Victoria Line the route had been truncated and trains started instead from the next station down the line, Drayton Park. On page 103 of “Commuters”, Webb states that “Newson was driving Tube trains between West Drayton, a station near Heathrow Airport, and Moorgate”, and goes on to say that “On his fourth journey that morning, Newson took the train from West Drayton at precisely 8:39 am and set off on the three mile trip to Moorgate”.

However precise the time, West Drayton does not have a tube station, is not on the Northern City Line but on the main line out of Paddington, is way out in west London (as Webb says, not far from Heathrow), roughly ten miles from Moorgate. While some slip of the memory may cause one to recall “Drayton Park” as “West Drayton”, adding in the other details is beyond explanation. Most people, especially the author of a book on commuting, would, I imagine, know that Moorgate is in the City of London and that Heathrow is nowhere near there. It’s a total, needless fabrication of detailed nonsense that instantly destroys one’s confidence in everything else the author has to say.

I don’t know anything about Simon Webb, although a quick dip into Amazon suggests he has written a great many books on a wide variety of subjects. From one of the often repeated themes within “Commuters” one may deduce that he is a native of somewhere in the vicinity of Ilford, in east London. I am unable to fathom why he wrote as he did, but the important point is that, for anyone lacking the appropriate knowledge, what he says would be plausible, would be fact, would be “the truth”. I have a sneaking feeling that I’ve seen the same error somewhere else. Actually, I was hoping to establish a trail of the same ludicrous “detail” repeated across multiple publications, but I’ve been unable to do so. As far as I can tell the invention is Webb’s alone.

The worrying wider implication is that, without a degree of pre-existing knowledge, one is unable to detect seemingly unnecessarily fabricated falsehoods of this sort. One believes them to be true. This conclusion pertains in any area of subject matter, at any level of detail and specialisation. If you don’t know that the Queen’s broadcast is at 3 pm on Christmas Day you might conclude that the Old Pretender is an honest man. If you don’t know some basic geography of the London area you might well assume that Webb’s book is reliable. But if you do know these things you will proceed very cautiously. You may even decide that complete avoidance is the safest strategy, and be grateful that you have been alerted in this way. Thus can reputations be brought down, by people tripping themselves up, so needlessly. But thankfully, so revealingly.

Lateral Thinking

A few weeks ago I mentioned the incident during the Great Train Robbery of 1963 when the need to alter a green signal to red was achieved by covering up the green signal and placing a red lamp nearby. In the darkness of a Buckinghamshire night the deception was undetectable. To my mind this is one of the great real life examples of lateral thinking.

First publicised in 1967, by Edward de Bono, lateral thinking implies solving a problem by not tackling it head on, or “vertically”, but coming at it sideways as it were, perhaps by adding in some new and unexpected feature, some kind of turbulence, going via an “impossible” middle situation, or applying an unusual thinking strategy. De Bono produced several books on the subject, with examples guaranteed to make one feel stupid. The examples that regularly get cited provide infuriating puzzles for parties or job interviews but, I suspect, are not of great practical significance. These days they get subsumed under the cliché of “thinking out of the box”. Some jokes work on the same principle. Rowan Atkinson, in some of his “Mr. Bean” films, applies inappropriate but workable solutions to domestic situations, releasing humour and using much the same kind of thinking.

Though, as we have seen, lateral thinking does turn up from time to time in real life, the popular examples can appear artificial and contrived. For instance, the question of whether a monk, struggling up a steep mountain slope to a sacred site at the top, is ever at exactly the same place as when he returns down the slope, albeit more easily and at a higher speed. This conundrum is solved by superimposing mental images of the monk, or indeed two monks, ascending and descending the mountain simultaneously. If you like, you can picture the situation as a kind of graph. However irregular the path, at some point it is clear that they must meet, and are thus at the same point at the same time. Another favourite is of the man who lives on the eleventh floor of a block of flats but when taking the lift always presses the button for the seventh floor, gets out there and continues via the stairs. There are two (at least) possible answers as to why he does this: (1) that he is trying to keep fit and (2), the “lateral thinking” answer, that he is of short stature and cannot reach beyond the seventh floor button. 

Back to real life. Well, kind of. In the last few weeks we have heard that Boris is supposed to send a particular letter to Brussels with respect to the Brexit negotiations. He doesn’t want to do this, and he’s said he isn’t going to, but the law demands it. If he fails to send it there will be consequences. I don’t know what the evidence is for this, but it has been suggested – in a true example of lateral thinking – that he will send the letter, and then send a second letter asking for the first letter to be ignored. Disingenuous or what? This is actually not quite as original a strategy as it might seem. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev exchanged several letters. One of them, with potentially fearful consequences, JFK ignored, and replied instead to the next letter from the Soviet leader. Disaster was averted and the world could breathe again. The principle is much the same as with Boris’s alleged proposed subterfuge.

As Sherlock Holmes said, fictionally, when you are having difficulty solving a problem, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Last night, getting out of bed in the wee wee hours to go to the bathroom, I was aware of treading on some strange, crinkly material on the bedroom floor. Nothing had fallen off the bed, there was nothing wrong with the carpet, and when I investigated further there was absolutely nothing there. It took me a little while to reach a conclusion, but eventually the answer was obvious and unavoidable, though admittedly unexpected. Part of my foot had fallen off.

Not quite as dramatic as it sounds. Some two months ago I had gone for a long walk in an unwise pair of shoes. There was some irregularity in the right shoe and after a couple of miles I developed a blood blister under my right heel. It hurt slightly for a few days but the whole of the base of the heel turned black and looked completely horrible. What happened last night was that, having forgotten all about it (for obvious reasons it was difficult to observe) the skin underneath my heel had died and dried up and was starting to crack and fall off, although for the time being was still attached to my foot. However improbable, that was the truth. That was the crinkly stuff I trod on. Thankfully, no illustrations this time.

The Universal U-Bahn

Emerge from the darkness, erupt into life. Parallel platforms, parallel lives. Busy people. Bright yellow trains come and go. The roundel, the bullseye on the platform wall, donated by London Transport, red white and blue, tells you that you are at Wittenbergplatz, one of the busiest interchanges on the Berlin U-Bahn, but at the same time reminding you of the commonality, the generality, of the Underground / Subway / Metro / Chikatetsu / U-Bahn experience. Berlin, London, wherever – people and their travel habits are much the same. The same corny metaphor – darkness, light, darkness – for mortality itself.  You may even hear “Mind the gap” announced in English, though there may be something subtle missing from the intonation, compared with the original.

All human life is here, and this is arguably the centre of Europe. Even the centre of Western civilisation in this era of hesitant Americans, especially now that the tragic  Brits are (perhaps) walking away (how could they after everything that’s happened here ?) and the gilets jaunes are doing nothing to make their own capital city attractive. 

As you bustle around the city’s underground passages or rumble across its snaking viaducts, while you may not encounter the sculptural extravagances of the T-Bana of Stockholm, the marble of Milan,  the lavish decor beneath Moscow or St Petersburg, or the choreographed frenzy of Tokyo, you may well be reminded of elsewhere. If you’re inclined to mystical ruminations you may feel that you’re on the universal U-Bahn. Travel out to Olympia Stadion on Line 2 and do a double-take that you’re not on a Charles Holden stretch of the Piccadilly Line; contemplate elevated Line 1 as it hovers above the Landwehrkanal and winds around Hallesches Tor and Kottbusser Tor and Schlesisches Tor and pinch yourself that you’re not in Paris (or more confusingly specific, Stalingrad, given the tendency of Parisian toponymy towards universalism and completism); travel on many parts of the system, including in the former East, (but perhaps best of all at Kurfürstendamm station), and convince yourself that you’re not in New York. West of Gleisdreieck, Line 1 emerges from a tunnel (within apartment buildings) at a startlingly high altitude to cross sports grounds where once ran the tracks from the Potsdamer and Anhalter termini; could this perhaps be an out-take from somewhere in Brooklyn ? Somewhere a little Smith and Ninth ? Is it a dream?

Because of its history – pre-war, post-war, divided, re-united, British, American, Soviet – Berlin is polycentric, and its urban rail networks have been distorted accordingly. The former centres of West Berlin (“City West” - around the Ku-damm and Wittenbergplatz) and of East Berlin, centred on Alexanderplatz, are still joined awkwardly below ground (OK, so the S-Bahn links them above ground), with annoying gaps in the system surviving to this day. Even short journeys can be complicated and dog-leggy. The massive multilevel Berlin Hauptbahnhof which opened a few years ago is poorly connected to the U-Bahn, and access to and from airports is less than brilliant. However, work continues to improve connectivity. Overall – functionally as well as architecturally and atmospherically - it’s a wonderful system in an amazing city. Where else, as you’re hurtling along beneath the streets, will a real time display tell you about the next bus to Spandau or Schöneberg? All right, nowhere else has those sort of places, but the thoughtfulness is impressive.

 
“I hate crowds”, a commonplace sentiment I often share, especially as I get older, seems particularly churlish among one’s thrusting fellow passengers at a station like Tempelhof where, just while changing trains between U6 and the S-Bahn ring line (S41/S42), one passes at least three mouth-watering bakery outlets. No, whatever your opinion of pretzels, the correct emotion is to enjoy the fact of human life in all its variety, to glory in the busyness, the complexity, the centrality, the sheer number of people. The fact that all those people exist and that it’s all going on. Zurück bleiben !

Divergent views

In Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “The Road Not Taken”, he wrote:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both”.

A dilemma that applies in cities as much as in forests, and metaphorically in life in general. The eternal “what ifs?”, the junctions and forking paths of decisions and fate. However, though one may not be able to journey along both routes, at least for the time being, there are occasions when it is possible to view both, taking a slightly boz-eyed  and divergent perspective to the scene. One of the most famous artistic renditions of this situation is surely “Paris Street: Rainy Day” painted in 1877 by the French Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte, depicting a complex street intersection in the Quartier de l’Europe in the 8th arrondissement, and recently star of the show at a disappointingly meagre exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, whence the photo below:

Curiously, there’s a very similar work called “Rainy Day Boston”, painted in 1885 by the American artist Childe Hassam. Quite apart from both portraying a wet day in a city, these paintings share a surprisingly overall similarity in terms of structure and perspective, showing divergent streets with sharply angled buildings between them, in effect, offering to the eyes two focal points. Hassam was aware of Caillebotte’s work in general terms, although I don’t know if he had seen this particular painting, from eight years earlier, and there is no suggestion of plagiarism. 

And then there’s my own, done with full awareness of both of the above, but based on a photograph I took five years ago in the Place de Dublin, just a short distance up the rue de St Petersbourg from the Place de l’Europe:

Such works may sensitise us to one not uncommon theme of urban infrastructure and groundplan. Once we have seen these paintings, such arrangements are rendered more easily noticeable, and we become more aware of them. They are to be found at Times Square, for instance, at the Flatiron Building, and at other intersections where Broadway crosses north-south avenues in Manhattan, and they abound in Haussmannised Paris and, especially, in other rigidly planned cities and city districts. Anywhere that an orthogonal grid of streets admits an angled intruder you’ll find them: in Barcelona, Rome and Washington, DC, for instance, and even in Pimlico, SW1.

Once alerted, one starts looking for this pattern elsewhere, recognising how it features, for instance, in many of the photorealist paintings by Anthony Brunelli, in works such as “Court and Chenango” and “Main Street”, both from 1994. Diagonals, acute corners, divergent perspectives. This particular geometric feature lends itself to an odd species of energetic and visual excitement, for those so inclined, and often makes for an attractive fragment of cityscape. It doesn’t really have a name, it’s merely a minor subjectively geographical trope, just one component in the syntax of the streets which, when pointed out, can encourage our everyday perceptions to be organised a little differently, and perhaps made more enjoyable. One might even dream up a modern day equivalent of the “I Spy” or “Observer’s” book, probably an app that you could consult as you flâneured your way around – so you could declare to your companion, “oh look, it’s one of those”, and score yourself twenty five points.

Isomorphisms of expectation

Resolutely stuck in the 1960s as I am, I recently watched yet another programme about the Great Train Robbery of August 1963. Concerned mostly with the identity of an alleged gang member who was never caught, the programme also discussed how the raid was carried out. One of the crucial requirements for the robbery to succeed was that the mail train needed to be halted at the precise point where the ambush was to take place, in rural Buckinghamshire. The gang lacked the technical knowledge to tinker with the railway signalling system. How then to stop the train? The solution, accredited to gang member Roger Cordrey, was to stuff a leather glove over the green signal, and rig up a battery-powered red lamp nearby. The train driver, speeding along in the dark, would see the red light and apply the brakes. He would assume that the red light was the signal; he had no reason to think otherwise. A signal, green or red, was what he was expecting to see. I’ve always considered this a clever, albeit criminal, illustration of lateral thinking.

Also recently, I’ve been attempting to watch the second series of “Hold the Sunset”, about which the only good things are the theme tune (“Have I The Right ?” by the Honeycombs) and fragments of pleasant Thames-side scenery around Richmond and Twickenham. This dire series has progressed from being merely negatively amusing to positively annoying. It’s so sad to see the long and illustrious career of John Cleese being tarnished by association with this dismal offering. However, thinking of Cleese in his former glory, and  in particular thinking of “Python”, for no very good reason I today recalled an episode first shown in December 1969, in other words almost half a century ago. Actually not featuring Cleese at all, this sketch concerns a psychopathic blood-crazed barber (Michael Palin) with his customer (Terry Jones). Wrestling with his own homicidal tendencies and with his customer settled in the chair, the Michael Palin character switches on a reel-to-reel tape recorder which plays typical barber shop conversations – about the weather, the football, etc – with suitable gaps for his customer to respond, and also the sound of scissors snipping away. Apart from the total absurdity of the situation the customer has no reason to suspect that the sounds he is hearing aren’t those of him having his hair cut. His expectations are anticipated … and fooled. An early outing in the direction of virtual reality, I suppose.

That is, until he susses the situation, and Palin famously confesses, “I didn’t want to be a barber anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack”. And we know what comes next.

Detecting analogies, finding structural similarities, patterns, isomorphisms across apparently dissimilar situations can be a route to creativity, it can be a symptom of hypomania or schizophrenia, and it can be extremely tiresome. But I wonder: the fake railway signal, the fake barbering sounds. There’s some sort of deep level similarity going on, but whether it’s worth anything, well, who knows. Are there other parallels to be unearthed in other walks of life, in other created works? I really don’t know. I never wanted to be a blogger anyway. I wanted to be a logger, leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia … The giant redwood, the larch … 

And that’s probably quite enough for one very warm Bank Holiday Monday.