The Magnanimity of City Walks

This week John Cleese observed that London “is no longer an English city”. For reasons both good and bad, he’s partly right and partly wrong. London never was entirely English (the Romans and the Normans, remember them?), but having enjoyed previous spells as the psychological “capital of the world” in the late nineteenth century, during the Second World War, and in the 1960s, London has again become the de facto World City. That is something of which we, as a nation, can be proud. That so many of the world’s peoples should, for a myriad reasons - admirable or otherwise - want to make it their home, and that so many more should want to visit it, implies a destination of unusual quality. World Central. London thus occupies a role different from any other British city and most other urban hubs around the globe  - Paris, New York and Los Angeles being obvious rival contenders. It is an English city, but it is both more and less than that.

Be that as it may, today’s London is not the same metropolis that Cleese first encountered, when first up from Weston-super-Mare via Bristol and Cambridge, and if it were otherwise, it would be a dead city, ossified and stagnant. Vital cities change constantly, though not necessarily, and not always, for the better. Some decline (Florence, Istanbul) or go through rough patches (Berlin, Glasgow). While it is Cleese’s observation of the markedly changed demographics of London that has drawn the hysteria of those congenitally hypersensitive to such matters there is much else that makes the city different from how it used to be, the architecture and the sheer busyness to be encountered almost everywhere being two of the most significant factors.

Cleese gets berated for talking about Englishness. Nigel Farage, who probably  knows better than most what it is like to be routinely and mindlessly slandered by the self-appointed arbiters of righteousness, wrote in his 2011 autobiographical ‘Flying Free’ - “Freedom of speech and belief is not subject to approval by a transitory authority. It is absolute or it is nothing.” That’s almost a definition of Englishness itself. Cleese’s generation (and mine, a decade later) flowered at a time when that sentiment was still true and completely unobjectionable. At the same time, Cleese himself was one of the two gigantic Johns (he was taller than the other one, and had better eyesight) who played a huge role in defining key aspects of English culture – comedy and music – in the mid-twentieth century, right across the English-speaking world, and beyond. So I believe he is more than entitled, as indeed we all are, for whatever reason or for no good reason at all, to like and to dislike what and who he chooses to. That’s called freedom. No ifs and buts.

Cleese’s later career has – perhaps inevitably - been less amusing than his earlier one, and because he’s 79 and has lived for many years outside the UK he makes himself an easy target for holier-than-thou finger-waggers. However, the key point he is getting at, and one with which I agree absolutely (and it is not unrelated to the fact of getting older) is that we are a less tolerant society than we used to be. This is ironic, because the more that attempts are made to enforce tolerance, the worse matters become. Fear of saying the wrong thing takes precedence over personal conviction; Cleese has dared to speak his mind, and good for him.

Compared to the mid-twentieth century what we have here today is a society in which everything has to be just-so, algorithmic, pre-defined, budgeted, quantified, formulaic, procedural, box-ticked, programmed, legalistic, deliberate, unironic, simplistic, shallow, sanitised, unimaginative, assertive-aggressive, angry, loud, unsubtle, inflexible, humourless, self-righteous, devoid of initiative, tediously literal, and often profoundly dim and depressing. Oh yes, and of course, smart. Smart is very important.

Seen from the perspective of older age, that’s the nation we have become, the kind of people we have become. Not, it has to be said, what we traditionally think of as English. I think that is really what John Cleese is getting at. Our traditional good-humoured fondness for self-deprecation has been turned round and weaponised by those who don’t appreciate such traits. We’re expected to be very left-brained, as befits a gadget-obsessed, money-fixated, quantitative-minded, secular society. In other words, half-brained. Not all of us, of course, but more than enough. Not much future for Basil or for the Ministry of Silly Walks. Not much future in being old, decent, sensitive, imaginative, or honest. Not much future in being silly.

Cleese’s last TV series “Hold the sunset” unfortunately lacked the focused scripts or hilarity of “Python” or “Fawlty”. Conventionally, perhaps, comedically, it was not a great success, but for me, Cleese limping laconically round the dog-emptying leafy avenues of Richmond was a delight – I was just waiting for him to erupt into some venomous outburst – but even though that never quite happened, his persona seemed spot on for a man of his age and past achievements. I felt I could read his thoughts: now that’s acting for you. What that gentle suburban setting emphasised for me, though, with my peculiar psychogeographical predilections and all that, was the difficulty in finding the kind of London that so many of us grew up to love; it was there in the programme, and it certainly still exists in small pockets, but you have to seek it out. This isn’t about simplistic observations of ethnicity or class, but rather more about the intangibles of subjectivity and atmosphere, of architecture and environment and way of life. England, London, as it used to be.

Nostalgia gets ridiculed, unfairly, but a sense of place and permanence contributes to psychological well-being. That’s a big part of Englishness (or any other national identity) – the streets and houses, not necessarily who lives in them. The trees, the horizons, the sky. Take away your origins, and don’t be surprised by subsequent unhappiness. When you’re getting on, you appreciate the comforts of familiarity, and you don’t always need edginess or change. If you’re younger you do need them, you need to live in the present and in the future, and you’ll reject much of what John Cleese (or I) have to say.

Not everyone will be entranced by Richmond, of course, so you have to wander around the vast and varied city and find what grabs you. Dalston or Catford, perhaps. You need to be generous and open minded, magnanimous (that Churchillian word) towards what you don’t personally get, adopting the attitude of the expectant flâneur (if you can put up with such pompous terminology) - because those moments of revelation that this is London can occur in unexpected locations.  Just round the next corner. Wow !

 
Whatever else it implies, Englishness has a lot to do with a sense of place and belonging, even more so with a sense of respect and love and longing, and – as Cleese has noted - with quietness, good manners, humour, and politeness. An attitude, a way of life, a shared past, a togetherness, a commonality. And – it would be nice to think – a common future goal. Qualities easy to mock as old-fashioned, elitist, reactionary, inefficient, boring and … old.  But, why ever not? They served us fine for long enough. For my money, Cleese is someone who has given me many hours of side-splitting pleasure, and for that I’m immensely grateful. He’s a national treasure and is to be hugely respected. Perhaps he should retire to Weston-super-Mare or to a small hotel in Torquay.

Private joke

I’ve been reading J. R. P. Fisher’s second book “More Than a Year”, a you-should-have-been-there semi-fictionalised muso-and-angst diary from the early Seventies – gigs (active and passive), TOTP, failure, estimations of the nitrogen content of sheep poo, exam traumas, glandular fever, getting lifts from dodgy people, more failure, UCCA applications, influences, alcoholic excesses – in short, frustrated adolescence. What it was like, growing up. I can empathise, although I never had nearly as much fun.

Today, J. R. P. Fisher is of course a living rock legend. Originating from the middle reaches of the Thames Valley, and while famously the composer of the synaesthetic hit “Getting Up (has a green sound)”, few people will be aware that he was also a chemist of startling perception and originality. The sheep poo episode was merely a foretaste of things to come.

I have the good fortune to be able to claim a personal connection, though not, it has to be said, with sheep poo. Some time after the period described in this book I met J. R. P. F. in a professional capacity. In those days, thanks to his inconvenient accumulation of initials and his long hair, he was generally known as H. By chance, we both worked for the same organisation, a household name big in personality modification. H worked in a tiny, airless unit called the Snorting Office. Here, a team of brilliant boffins, including H himself, and team leader Ned Kitwey (who had once just missed the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, having lost the application form amongst the detritus on his desk), spent their days seeking substances for commercially successful products that could be taken via the nasal route. Sniffed, snorted. Things to snort was the Snorting Office’s remit and speciality. H was crucial to this operation.

There’s one morning I remember especially, when – as often - I’d popped down to see Ned about something relating to my organisational role as a Scurrilous Wretch. H was also present. Now then. H was wont to bring his electric guitar into the workplace, and sometimes he attached its output to a mysterious device known simply as “The 108”, which the previous year Ned had rescued from a dustbin behind Bletchley Park. So it was this particular morning. At the time, H was going through a Bryan Zane phase, the “Hunky Doreen” album - as indeed we all were – and,  given his background, he was particularly attracted to songs with a Thames Valley flavour. One of them was called “Life in Marlow?” (the question mark was significant), whose lyrics compared William Tierney Clark’s suspension bridge across the Thames unfavourably with the one he built over the Danube in Budapest. As H strummed and sang the words “It’s a god-awful small affair …” out of The 108 pulsated an astonishing sonic distortion with profoundly disturbing psychological effects upon all those present.

Dee Twinky, who claimed Neanderthal ancestry on both sides, grinned dreamily as she sipped her habitual mid-morning beaker of ammonium hydroxide, while Wendy Tike, who had an artificial hump, was suddenly made whole. Enid Kewty, a professional bear impersonator, glued herself to the ceiling with a marmalade sandwich. Fearing what was about to happen, I had already stuck my fingers in my ears and so escaped the worst of the effects.

Ned was sat hunched over his desk, quill pen dangling from his knees, monocle draped over his left ear, gurgling over the structural formula for something that had been dubbed 13621, a complex tropane alkaloid undergoing assessment for snorting potential. “It’s an ecgonine” derivative, he muttered, meaningfully. As a young man he’d been raised by vicars. “C₁₇H₂₁NO₄”, he growled, salivating lecherously.

“As you do”, H commented coolly, twanging, and then singing something about sailors fighting in a dance hall in Marlow. I pressed myself back against the wall.

“Precisely”, drooled Ned. “None other than 3-(benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo-[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylic acid methyl ester”.

“Well obviously”, said H, “but it will never catch on. No way snappy enough”.

Just at that moment, a woman who looked like an unmade bed with its occupant still inside oozed through the door, snagging several cardigans in the process. This was Di Wetenky, and she was holding a small red can with swirly writing on it.

Ned looked up. “And what have we here?” he asked, peering at her quizzically over his eyebrows in cod Dickensian fashion.

“Coke”, replied his visitor. “It’s a fizzy drink popular with Americans”.

“Splendid, thou scurvy wench”, spluttered Ned, using his watch chain to adjust his mustard coloured sleeveless pullover without elbow patches. “That’s it ! Coke. We’ll call it that. Coke. Splendid”, he spluttered again, whistling his sibilants. I avoided most of the spray as he rose from his chair, ecstatic in the realisation that he and H, between them, had discovered the strongest ever candidate for the world’s best-selling snorting commodity, and not only that, they had a short, snappy name for it too.

H returned to his guitar, unplugged it from The 108, strummed the initial hesitant upward chord progressions of Bryan Zane’s “Ch-Ch-Ch-Chertsey” -  a song bewailing the problems of a chronic stammerer having caught the wrong bus  - and began singing “I still don’t know what I’d been waiting for”. 

Sensing an opportunity, I went back to my own office and forgot all about the episode until, in another life, this week, I read “More Than a Year”. Available from Amazon.

A tale of the infraordinary

Habit, necessity, and even common sense encourage us to notice some things while ignoring others, in all situations, whether trivial or newsworthy. History and daily life are similarly marked by the notable occurrence, while the greater reality recedes  unrecorded into oblivion. We tend to know what happened near Hastings in 1066, but not in 1065 or 1067; or what happened in New York on the 11th September 2001, though not on the 10th or 12th of that terrible month. “Ordinary” years and days are forgotten yet, numerically at least, they are more significant. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, but not less well defined multiples of time passing. The same thing applies elsewhere: we mostly observe our bodies only when they hurt or malfunction, not when they behave as expected. We see sheep in the field, while being less likely to notice the field; we hear the jet roaring overhead, but not the ambient sound of an average afternoon. The disaster or the revolution attract our attention, while the near miss, the ambient status quo, and the non-event are … non-events. No surprise there.

One way or another we learn to distinguish figure from ground, to highlight and to overlook, although in a statistical sense it may be the background situation, rather than the sudden happening, that provides a more reliable guide to how things are. The fields remain while the sheep come and go; the plane is far away now, but the air endures.  We note changes, shocks, discontinuities, paradigm shifts, boundaries, beginnings, ends, and tend to disregard what goes on all the time. There are many reasons for this, but among them are a concern for practicality and for our sanity. If we declined to draw out prominences it would be much harder to make sense of anything.

There are, of course, several well-known ways into the deliberate “reverse marking” of passing events, into the foregrounding of the habitually mundane and  recessive. There are, for example, the compulsive life-loggers, whose exhaustive and gadget-enhanced diaries record their every input, pulse, spasm, excretion and secretion; then there are the reports of those happy souls who sit in city squares  jotting down every feral fox trajectory, every take-off and landing of manky pigeons, every transit of white vans or of the Number 77 bus, every stir of wind and drift of leaves or litter, all the aircraft noises and car alarms, and the movements of that annoying little man who keeps pacing up and down outside Caffè Nero. Other than via such contrived procedures, the day to day banality so easily passes us by. A world we have lost even as we inhabit it. If we ever think of it at all, it’s likely to be after it has gone. “What was that funny little shop next to the newsagent’s ?”

One tool we use intuitively for deciding what is important to us, is language – so it’s “us” rather than “them”, “inside” rather than “outside”, “pet” rather than “pest”, a focus on features that are wanted rather than on those that are not. Words can be implicitly judgemental: grass growing on a lawn is grass; grass growing on a flowerbed is a weed. Weeds are not good. A daisy or a buttercup on a lawn is a weed; elsewhere it may attain the status of a “wild flower”. The same species; different perceptions, different valuations.

Perhaps because of the unusually mild and protracted Spring this year, all local forms of fauna seem to have been doing well, from weeds, via snowdrops, daffodils and tulips, to tree blossom. When I was little, daisies were the prototype lawn intruder, in the same way that sparrows were the default suburban bird; both have seemingly declined in recent years, but now appear to be making a comeback. I hope so. It was while the missus and I were walking by our local pond yesterday that we were astonished at the density of daisies on the surrounding grassy areas. So astonishingly so – almost resembling a covering of hail - that we took photos. I’d never thought of photographing daisies before.

Our walk took us to a disused railway line that has been made into a linear “green way”, and besides daisies we soon began to notice buttercups, dandelions, forget-me-nots, cowslips, nettles, and poppies, all of which we photographed as though they were “sights” on a tourist trail, as though they were the botanically exotic rather than the run-of-the-mill endotic inhabitants of suburban wasteland. As our walk continued across an informal common and alongside rough land adjacent to a building site we began to notice more and more species, the names of which, shamefully,  we were ignorant. More pictures, and we sensed that something slightly strange had happened. For one thing, we felt happier.

Gradually, and unexpectedly, we found ourselves focusing on smaller and smaller plants, whose existence we had never suspected. We had never seen them before because we had never thought to look. For anyone familiar with and fond of wild flowers this will no doubt read as a pathetic kind of admission by an ignorant “townie”, but I believe it’s a process that has much wider applicability. Observation, learning to see, noticing detail, and initial detail leading to more detailed detail. (Where, presumably, lies God, or the other fella).

What was formerly “ground” was now “figure”; we had unconsciously up-ended the habitual gestalt – pretentious though it is to say that. The closer we looked, the more there was to see. What had always been – at least since childhood – an assumption of an irrelevant background to more pressing concerns, had suddenly become a subject of extraordinary visual interest. I imagine psychosis and psychedelic substances can produce similar effects, as can mystical or religious experiences, but this was natural and healthy. Triggered in the first instance by an unusual prevalence of daisies, our habitual subjective perceptual attitudes had been subverted. 

“Boring had become the new interesting”, we noted, resorting to jokey journalistic cliché. Which is as it has always been, without the fancy language, and as it should be. If only there was a way of applying the theory to airport departure lounges.

Mayday Mayday

So urgent, they named it twice. Yes, folks, it’s today, a time of dire emergency for this once great planet of ours.

Though it’s rather odd that, for a life or death utterance, often transmitted electronically, the internationally (supposedly) recognised plea for immediate assistance should consist of a weird and unnecessary bilingual pun. Outside of the more tortured works of James Joyce or Georges Perec or a long forgotten song called “San Ferry Anne”, how many bilingual puns are there? Well, I suppose there’s Chocolatey Clare, but she’s more of a bilingual bun.

If your aircraft is plummeting earthwards or your transatlantic bathtub is filling up, surely you want to scream something simple (there used to be a programme called that on the Light Programme on a Sunday night), like HELP ! – rather than expecting some old duffer in a wind-blasted radio-enabled Nissen hut somewhere to untangle the cryptic clue that the First of May in English happens to be the phonetic equivalent of “m’aidez”, which is French for “get the **** here right now”. Other languages are of variable usefulness in this context. “Aiuto”, the Italian version, would be onomatopoeically spot on for the nosediving Max 8 scenario, while the German “Hilfe” might be misheard, resulting in a smirking but ultimately unhelpful attendance by Sid Bimmler and the boys in black. In Spanish, there is a useful word that is employed in response to pleas for urgent assistance, namely “mañana”, which apparently conveys a meaning rather similar to the French shoulder shrug, although without the accompanying fast-forwarding sense of “I’ll just have another ciggie first” deliberation as the cathedral smoulders. Quite a different timescale altogether; different nationalities have different timescales. In Switzerland, for instance, fires get put out before they’re even started, and plane crashes aren’t allowed to be late. Nor should we forget that in any case the French are far more likely to mutter “merde merde” than “mayday mayday”  as they stuff the remnants of their glowing Gauloise into the nearest historic hassock.

In desperate situations you’d think that the briefest signal possible would be the one that would be used. That would be the full stop (or period . as Americans are wont to call it, as in “so I’m like OMG I’m like I’m so dysmenorrheic”). Unfortunately, that small dot might just be a microparticle of gnatpoo landing on the screen or a crackle of static caused by distant nylon. Not reliable as evidence of danger, even when of titanic proportions. “Have you just hit a large iceberg in the North Atlantic?” “No, it’s a man in Birmingham taking off his pullover”.

However, some alternative alphabets do recognise the value of brevity in busy connotations. The Braille alphabet employs the single dot for the letter A, the third commonest letter in English, while Morse code uses it for E, the most frequently occurring letter (as it is also in French). Bearing in mind the problem of not being able to recognise reliably a single pulse as an expression of panic rather than a spike of random noise, Morse code famously uses dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash as representing SOS, “Save Our Souls”, a quaint expression rarely encountered these days, when ordinary folk are more likely to have algorithms than souls. British Rail and Transport for London have evidently declined to use nine dashes, which would represent “the three esses”, the all purpose announcement that means “if there’s a terrorist outrage we don’t know WTF to do but it’s up to you and we’ve covered ourselves because we’ve said the magic words”. But then they don’t use Morse anyway, or any other slightly comprehensible form of communication, so why should they.

Then there’s the old and tedious story about why keyboards are QWERTY and why emergency phone numbers aren’t 000. It’s all to do with redundancy. Yawn, and there’s a hospital called the Mayday in Croydon which - if my experience of Croydon is anything to go by - I imagine to be very busy. Its phone number ends in three thousand, which probably tells you something.  But so far, due to budget cuts, they’ve only named it once. Which brings us to politics and the present day.

 
So finally, let’s not forget the true meaning of May Day, that one day in the year when we can thank our beloved leaderene for being so wise, decisive, and determined, a day when we can wish that she be granted good fortune and divine wisdom in the governance of our country. Because she’s going to need it.