Joe Moran's blog

From Lime Street to Liverpool

2012-01-28T11:00:00.001Z

I wrote this piece, 'From Lime Street to Liverpool: A voyage in pixels, stone and glass', a while ago for the artist Simon Faithfull's book Liverpool to Liverpool.

In 2002, Liverpool City Council bought the freehold to the concourse around Lime Street station, with the aim of turning it into an expanded public space and more welcoming approach to the city. As part of this project they commissioned Simon Faithfull to produce a piece of permanent public art. Faithfull chose to create a work which tells the story of an epic journey from Liverpool, UK, to Liverpool, Nova Scotia, made by the artist in the summer of 2008. Faithfull’s images of his journey are engraved into the surfaces of the new concourse, a reminder of Liverpool’s maritime past, its historical dependence on the shipbuilding industry and transatlantic trade, and the survival of these global connections today. They offer a visual record of a voyage towards a remote place, one which has much in common with Liverpool apart from its name.

A common thread that runs through all of Faithfull’s work is his effort to re-enchant the everyday and find the magical in the mundane: his luminous fake moon lit up 2008’s Big Chill music festival in Herefordshire, rising and setting like the real thing and fooling many festival-goers; his book, Lost, each page telling the story of an object he has lost over the last three decades, was left in random places around Britain for strangers to find and then lose again; “Escape Vehicle #6”, a bogstandard office chair, was sent 18 miles upwards dangling from a weather balloon, the onboard camera showing it nestling between the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space. From an early age, Faithfull says, he was gripped by “a melancholy awareness that I was tethered to this mundane realm” and remembers being jealous of flies because they “could even walk on ceilings”.

Faithfull’s transatlantic journey is part of the same exploration of our failed attempts to escape “the trivial, the mundane and the self” but also of the beautiful futility of these dreams of escape. His 3000-mile, one-way trip eats up the vastness of the Atlantic and the Canadian tundra but also negotiates the bathos of a Virgin Pendolino train and the two-lane roads of Nova Scotia. Faithfull’s initial plan was to sail directly from Liverpool to Montreal, but his container ship, the Joni Ritscher, was diverted to Belgium, so on 9^th September 2008, he set off from Lime Street for the south coast and then got the early morning ferry to Antwerp to catch the container ship to Montreal. From Montreal he took the train to Halifax, then hopped on a bus and, three weeks after leaving Lime Street, arrived in Liverpool - a small town of just over 3000 people. Naturally, it was named after its British counterpart and also lies on the banks of a river Mersey.

That most of Faithfull’s miles are covered by container ship is not without its ironies. Like many ports, Liverpool, UK has suffered serious downsizing on the back of the rise to global dominance of the ISO (International Standards Organisation) shipping container: that uniform, stackable steel box invented in the 1950s by the American trucking entrepreneur Malcolm McLean, so that goods would not have to be handled when transferring between ships and lorries. These omnipresent cuboids, which Faithfull calls the “quantum units of 21^stcentury life”, are usually seen by ordinary mortals when they are stacked high and stationary near railway lines and motorways. But their parallel, invisible lives are spent in Lego-like stacks in these gargantuan container ships – at 175m long, the Joni Ritscher is a relative midget - carrying the flotsam and jetsam of modern consumerism, from Nintendo Wiis to Nike trainers. Their snail-slow, Homeric voyages are normally noticed only by customs officials and pirates.

Faithfull made about six drawings a day throughout his journey, documenting the detail of daily life on land and sea, from Liverpool to Liverpool, with his Palm Pilot. These sketches are necessarily simple, because the screen on his hand-held device is tiny and the act of drawing with the stylus is fairly tricky: you can scroll sideways to make the drawing bigger, but then this means you can’t see the whole image at once. Yet the improvised, on-the-hoof, quietly observational quality of these drawings somehow fits the quotidian nature of their subject matter, and it is striking how the simplicity and economy of the pixilated line still manages to convey the vivid particulars of the journey, and picks out the contrasts between English Liverpudlians crouched under umbrellas and Canadian Liverpudlians with moustachioed lips and pick-up trucks.

One of the main advantages of drawing digitally was that Faithfull could easily transfer the images into other forms and send them out electronically – an idea he developed on a previous, two-month residency with the British Antarctic Survey, when he emailed his Palm Pilot drawings of icebergs and penguins across the world. In Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Faithfull used a local copyshop to make 181 postcards of his drawings. Having taken the Liverpool (UK) phonebook with him, he then posted the cards to random addresses in it, all saying “Wish you were here”. (Despite being in the Liverpool phonebook, I wasn’t lucky enough to receive one.)

In a creative collision between the newly virtual and the conventionally concrete, these 181 digital drawings have now been sandblasted into some of the York stone pavings and etched into the glass arches at the entrance to Lime Street. Each drawing is given latitude-longitude coordinates inscribed beneath it in the corner of the glass or stone – the kind of navigational northing and easting now familiar to most of us from satnav systems - so that the viewer has a precise location, which in theory they can go away and explore further should they so wish (although please note that the herring gull perched on a lamppost at N.53°24.30 W.2°59.77 may no longer be there).

Harassed train passengers, hurrying through the new concourse to catch trains or taxis, might well miss Faithfull’s relatively unobtrusive artwork. Indeed, its modesty offers a refreshing counterpoint to the spectacularly visual nature of most urban regeneration projects. Such projects tend to favour the grand gesture: an eye-catching new building or a multi-million pound facelift, aimed at instantly changing perceptions about a place and attracting tourists and potential investors. Faithfull’s project instead insists on the importance of the local and vernacular, and the persistence of history and memory in even the most modernised environments. This book includes all 181 digital drawings, and Faithfull’s often wry, imagist commentary on the landscapes he was passing through and the humans he encountered as he drew them. Both the words and images attest to the survival of the texture and detail of individual everyday lives even in our restlessly mobile, globalised world.

Motorway song

2012-01-24T19:07:00.002Z

It's a shame, when I was writing On Roads, that I didn't come across this poem from Simon Armitage's Travelling Songs (2002):

Oh motorway, motorway,
where have you bin,
oh motorway where are you stopping?
I've bin down to London
to pick up the King
to take him up north to go shopping.

Oh bring him to us
for a Pontefract cake
and we'll light up the sky with a rocket
No, I'm taking him home
with the killings he made
with some fluff that he found in his pocket.

Arrows central

2012-01-18T22:10:00.001Z

A slightly longer version of the piece I did for the Guardian on Monday.

This last week, I have been staying up late, watching unathletic looking men hurling feathered pieces of steel at a tiny board at the Lakeside Club in Frimley Green, Surrey. I know little about these men, except that they look even more unlikely Olympians than me, but I have been lured slowly into caring about the thing they care most about. The world of darts is a forgiving one in which pot-bellied, dishevelled players can be welcomed on to the stage like stadium rock gods and a thirtysomething can still be described as "the youngster". The two rival world championships are fortuitously scheduled in January, when nothing much else is on, to buoy us up after the post-Christmas slump.

Darts, I discover, is enjoying a renaissance. Last week Jarvis Cocker was spotted at Lakeside; Stephen Fry is a fan and has been known to join Sid Waddell in the commentary box. One of the attractions for me is that, compared to the globalised mercenary trade of premier league football and other elite sports, the players are always identified as coming from a specific town or place. Local newspapers get more excited about the sport than national media. "We are the world capital of darts. Arrows central," declared the Stoke Sentinel after Adrian Lewis retained his PDC World Championship a fortnight ago. North Staffordshire's players, it said, were "the darts equivalents of Sachin Tendulkar or Pele".

Perhaps there is also a sense of non-vicarious liveness and realism, something of the old atmosphere of the tap room and the working men's club coming through the screen. Darts, said Sid Waddell last week, is "pure working class theatre". This, in fact, was the reason why ITV took it off the air in the late 1980s, because its aging working-class audience was less appealing to advertisers. But as Patrick Chaplin points out in his recent book Darts in England: A Social History, it has long been a working-class sport with cross-class appeal, dating back to the interwar era when the pub trade used it to attract custom in the face of declining beer consumption. Unlike snooker, which took a long time to shake off its seedy image, darts was a reputable game without the taint of illegal gambling. Long before Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall graced the PDC World Championship with their presence, the King and Queen gave darts the royal blessing by playing a game in 1937 at a Slough community centre.

What the success of darts on television really demonstrates, though, is the law of unintended consequences. Two serendipitous events brought darts to a mass audience. First, in 1972, the home office minister Christopher Chataway ended all restrictions on broadcasting hours. ITV began broadcasting on weekday afternoons, and one of the cheap programmes it commissioned was The Indoor League, set in a pub which, along with games of dominoes and shove halfpenny, showcased some of the best darts players in the world. Up to five million viewers, many of them also in pubs, watched it on weekday lunchtimes. Second, in 1978, the BBC came up with a technical innovation that coincided with the first darts world championship: the split screen showing both the dart board and the thrower, one of those ideas which seemed unmissably obvious only once someone had thought of it.

The new consumerist ethos that has developed in the multichannel television era treats viewers as rational choosers, flicking through the channels to find what they want and needing to be instantly attracted to a programme. In fact, we do not know what we want, and the things to which we attach meaning and significance are often entirely arbitrary and illogical. Darts, like most sports, is fundamentally silly and meaningless and relies on viewers becoming incrementally familiar with its previously unfathomable rituals. Like that other late-night filler, the snooker, the more you watch it, the more you want to watch it. If I were ever in a focus group, I'm sure I would never say that I wanted to see more darts on television. But, as it turns out, I do.

The art of lost property

2012-01-15T13:33:00.000Z

My favourite character in Craig Taylor's Londoners, his oral history of the capital which I've just finished reading, is Craig Clark, a clerk at Transport for London's Lost Property Office near Baker Street underground station. There is a lovely opening to this section which illustrates the unconscious synchronisation of millions of urban lives: 'I arrive at Transport for London's Lost Property Office near Baker Street station when it is loudest, between eight and nine in the morning - when all the lost mobile phones, programmed by absent owners and sealed in their individual brown envelopes, begin to chirp and ring and speak in novelty voices and vibrate and arpeggio on the racks where they are shelved, each with its own designated number. The chorus gets louder every quarter of an hour, until a last burst of sound at nine o'clock, and then most alarms go quiet for the rest of the day.'

As Clark the lost property clerk says, 'you learn about trends working here. There's a social aspect to it, you see what's in fashion with women in the summer because there'll be a ton of berets coming in or what's popular reading, like the Dan Brown books when there was that big craze with him, or the latest Harry Potter. You notice if the Evening Standard are giving away a free book or something, you get tons of them in; if we have an influx of six copies of the same book on one day you realize: it just came free with the Standard ... We also occasionally get drunks come in, or crackheads ... Once these two guys came in and said they had lost a swan. I think they were hallucinating.'

Mundane quote for the day: 'But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption. The true state of every nation is the state of common life. The manners of a people are not to be found in the schools of learning, or the palaces of greatness, where the national character is obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated by the assemblies of the gay, or the banquets of the rich. The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and the villages, in the shops and farms; and from them collectively considered, must the measure of general prosperity be taken. As they approach to delicacy a nation is refined, as their conveniences are multiplied, a nation, at least a commercial nation, must be denominated wealthy.' - Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland

Let's play Blockbusters!

2012-01-07T10:21:00.000Z

The death of Bob Holness has left me feeling rather sad; such happy tea-in-front-of-the-telly memories from long ago. Here is a lovely tribute from George Melly, written in 1988:

'"Let's play Blockbusters!" cries Bob Holness, and whenever possible I'm watching. Nor am I alone. I've discovered that this teenage quiz show has an enormous number of closet fans of all ages, and that when it's off the air we, its addicts, suffer badly from withdrawal symptoms.

What really gets us is the controlled hysteria of Bob Holness himself. Bob has grey, expensively cut hair and junior executive glasses. He wears unadventurous ties and apparently has the run of a whole Burton's warehouse of sports jackets. His manner is that of a fairly popular prep-school house master, but what makes him irresistible is his belief that everybody in the whole world watches Blockbusters ...

He is a master, too, at making sure we come back after the commercial break ("Don't go away now") and at ensuring the game finishes at a decisive moment of tension. He pulls out with a convincing flourish the card with the clue on it, eveything hangs in the balance, and only then he tells us that we'll have to wait "until the next edition of Blockbusters" to find out what happens.

Like all schoolmasters, Bob has his favourite joke. When someone says "I'll have a 'P', Bob", his eyebrows shoot up and he gives vent to a little cough. I suspect he's been told to give this one a rest, but he can seldom resist it ...

Of course, Bob isn't the only point of Blockbusters. There is the burst of Dr Who-like electronic music which precedes and punctuates it, the setting with its bas relief terracotta plaques of "great thinkers", the intermediary and solitary rounds of "gold run", which can yield extra and valuable prizes.

There is the tension as a competitor or competitors draw close to winning five successive heats, the maximum they may aspire to, the Pearl and Dean like logo in which two lozenges whizz through the streets of a sci-fi city towards the studio. There's the deceptive simplicity of some questions ("Yes, it's as simple as that"), the subtlety of others. There's the greed by proxy; it's possible for the champion or champions to win more than £300. There's the shameful pleasure of gloating at the downfall of the smug or unattractive.

But above all, there is Bob. Standing mildly in the quiet, grey space between hero and anti-hero, he is a schoolmaster from yesterday controlling the kids of today, a parental memory of what once was, and a parental fantasy of what might still be, if only ... Mr Chips with everything.'

The Listener, 28 April 1988

Time has no divisions

2011-12-31T11:17:00.001Z

I wonder how many diaries will be started tomorrow, and how many will outlive the month? In my experience of reading them, the most diligent diarists don't tend to write much on new year's day, as though they felt that the date itself was already too overburdened with significance. (This blog, by the way, waited until 17 January 2009 to get going.) Here is a brief selection of those that did bother to write something on the first day of the year. Happy new year everyone.

'Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry, and to sleep again.' - Samuel Pepys, 1 January 1662

'We were kept awake last night by New Year Bells. At first I thought they were ringing for a victory.' - Virginia Woolf, 1 January 1915 (her first diary entry).

'I felt the "blues" I'd missed last night enfold me like a mist, helped no doubt by an article in an American magazine the Atkinsons sent in, speaking of war as inevitable after 1951, and hinting at atomic bombs being puerile when compared to the germ bombs Russia was concentrating on. All my fears and conjectures of before this last one rushed over me.' - Nella Last, 1 January 1950

'It is the first time in my life that this day has been a national holiday. The only papers were evening ones! It is little short of scandalous.' - Kenneth Williams, 1 January 1974

'New Year's Day. These are my New Year's resolutions:

1. I will revise for my 'O' Levels at least two hours a night. 2. I will stop using my mother's Buff-Puff to clean the bath. 3. I will buy a suede brush for my coat. 4. I will stop thinking erotic thoughts during school hours. 5. I will oil my bike once a week. 6. I will try to like Bert Baxter once again. 7. I will pay my library fines (88 pence) and rejoin the library. 8. I will get my mother and father together again. 9. I will cancel the Beano.' - Adrian Mole, 1 January 1983

'Through a chink in the bedroom curtains my unenthusiastic eye caught an early-morning glimpse of the New Year: it looked battleship-grey. As I reluctantly swung out of bed I noticed my feet - never something on which I like to dwell. They appeared to be crumbling, sandstone monuments, the soles criss-crossed with ancient, indecipherable runes, which probably hold the secrets of eighty years of living and partly living - of happiness and fears, of distresses, of rather embarrassing successes and expected failures.' - Alec Guinness, 1 January 1995

Mundane quote for the day: 'Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm of blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.' - Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Millennium resolutions

2011-12-28T20:19:00.000Z

At the end of 1999, the Daily Mirror published a nationwide survey of New Year's resolutions by teenagers. The top 10 resolutions for the next millennium were:

1. Watch less television.

2. Exercise every day.

3. Become a pop star.

4. Drink more water.

5. Get drunk more often.

6. Study harder.

7. Buy fewer CDs.

8. Ask parents for less.

9. Keep secrets better.

10. Enjoy life more.

I hope these now late 20-somethings managed to keep their 21st-century resolutions.

The Christmas cookbook nativity

2011-12-21T22:37:00.000Z

A slightly longer version of my piece in Monday's Guardian.

Unlike the celebrity memoir, the cookbook aimed at the Christmas market seems to be remarkably recession-resistant: last Christmas, Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meals became the fastest selling non-fiction book ever, and books by Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Lorraine Pascale and others are among the bestsellers so far this year. A pagan Rip van Winkle, just waking up after a 2000 year sleep, would feel quite at home, observing a celebration taking place around the winter solstice organised around feasting, with little evidence of the intervening two millennia of Christianity. The kitchen has replaced the church as the focal point of Christmas: it is where we are supposed to unleash our creative, sociable, better selves.

The Christmas cookbook nativity goes like this. In the autumn of 1995, a visionary woman emerged out of the culinary wilderness, and her name was Delia. She had written a book, with a TV series attached, called Delia’s Winter Collection. And although this book created great anguish across the land, for it produced a terrible cranberry famine, it did help to slay a 95-year-old tyrant called the Net Book Agreement, which was cruelly forcing all books to be sold at the full price. Suddenly a small number of titles could be sold at huge discounts and millions came to our modern shrine, the supermarket, to pay homage to a new-born phenomenon: the hardback bestseller. Between 1960 and 1995, Elizabeth David's most successful book, French Provincial Cooking, sold just under 250,000 copies; by the end of 1995, Delia’s Winter Collection had sold a million.

Wise men began to spread the good tidings. In his 1999 book Living on Thin Air, Charles Leadbeater saw the cookery book boom as a paradigm of the new economy, “a worldwide upgrade of the software which runs our kitchens”, introducing us to food from around the world in a way that proved that “globalization is good for our palates”. While a chocolate cake could only be eaten once, Leadbeater pointed out, the same chocolate cake recipe could be endlessly replicated without anyone being worse off - just like the new weightless, knowledge economy which would be driven by ideas, information and networking.

People don’t talk so much about the new economy now: its vision of an endless expansion of knowhow and opportunity in which everyone would benefit has not yet materialised. And Delianomics didn’t explain the relationship between our obsession with cookery and our continuing culinary illiteracy: a new generation of amateur chefs with Smeg Ovens and River Cafe Cook Books was also sustaining the biggest market for ready meals in Europe. But the celebrity cookbook is still thriving, probably because people buy it for reasons more complicated than just following the recipes. These books are often given as presents and, as the sociologist Marcel Mauss pointed out in his classic 1925 work, The Gift, the ritual of gift-giving is a tangled web of mutual obligation, duty and status-seeking which doesn’t necessarily follow conventional economic rules.

Leadbeater called the exchange of cookbooks at Christmas “an annual, global knowledge transfer on a vast scale”. In retrospect, it seems to be the product not so much of a democratic exchange of information and skills as a heavily centralised and constrained market. Television programmes have become commercial opportunities to spawn books and merchandise, and the big chains can afford to offer such large discounts that small, independent booksellers are forced to buy celebrity cookbooks from supermarkets because it is cheaper than buying them wholesale. The books themselves are packaged not just as collections of recipes but as fetishised objects: food photography, in which meals are made to look delicious with the aid of hairspray and cigarette smoke, is now an art form and industry in its own right. These books may teach us how to cook, but they also promise to satisfy more nebulous cravings and desires.

Not that there is anything new about that. Before the 1970s, it was difficult to purchase Elizabeth David’s more “exotic” ingredients (like anchovies or aubergines) outside of Soho delicatessens or the food shops off Tottenham Court Road. For the middle classes, David’s sensuous descriptions of continental foodstuffs had a partly vicarious appeal, evoking fond memories of the foreign holidays they were beginning to take in places like Tuscany and Provence. The best food writing is, like David’s, an artful combination of precision and sensuality. And the cookery book may be selling us desires, but, should we ever get round to following the recipes, they are satisfiable ones. The new economy may be an insubstantial memory, but meals can be tweaked to take account of straitened circumstances and, however long our age of austerity lasts, we are unlikely to go hungry.

A Christmas Poem

2011-12-18T11:15:00.000Z

A poem by Chris Green called 'Christmas Tree Lots':

Christmas trees lined like war refugees,
a fallen army made to stand in their greens.
Cut down at the foot, on their last leg,

they pull themselves up, arms raised.

We drop them like wood;
tied, they are driven through the streets,

dragged through the door, cornered
in a room, given a single blanket,
only water to drink, surrounded by joy.

Forced to wear a gaudy gold star,

to surrender their pride,
they do their best to look alive.

The Great Snow

2011-12-17T13:28:00.000Z

In his unfinished story ‘The Great Snow’ the English nature writer Richard Jefferies, best known for his post-apocalyptic novel After London (1885), describes a London that has been entirely buried by a mammoth snowfall. The dome of St Paul's just about pokes out above the snow drifts; polar bears plod along the frozen Thames. A demagogic preacher addresses the remaining population:

'Where now is your mighty city that defied Nature and despised the conquering elements – where now is your pride when so simple and contemptible an agent as a few flakes of snow can utterly destroy it? Where are your steam-engines, your telegraphs and your printing-presses – all powerless and against what – only a little snow!'

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Soon the success or failure of Christmas will be rung up on the high-street tills. If we have spent more than last year we shall be succeeding as a nation. Supermarkets must look as though the Goths and Vandals have swept into them and the young shelf-fillers will see where they broke through their lines.’ - Ronald Blythe

A mediated dampness

2011-12-12T19:01:00.001Z

Cold, windy, wet and miserable here in Liverpool, and everywhere else, not like it said in the brochure and on the Christmas cards. This little passage from Adam Nicolson's book Perch Hill: A New Life (1999) sums it all up really:

'The whole of Sussex looked as if it had been in bed with 'flu for a week. Its skin was ill and a sort of blackness had entered the picture, as if it had been over-inked. No modern descriptions of winter ever put this clodden, damp mulishness at the centre of things. People always talk about ice and frost and glitter and hardness and crispness and freshness and brightness and sparkle and brilliance and tingle. It's all nonsense. England is at sea and has sea-weather, a mediated dampness. That winter it entered our souls.'

That is all.

Cognitive aliens

2011-12-11T13:44:00.001Z

Last week I introduced and led another Conversation Dinner at the School of Life in London and was again touched and surprised at the capacity of a sample of strangers - admittedly a self-selecting sample - to conduct a pleasant, informed conversation with each other. All the more so as I've been toying with the sobering thought lately how often we are simply cognitive aliens who talk different languages to each other while happening by accident to live on the same planet and look vaguely alike. 'Cognitive alien' is the term used by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget to describe children up to (I think) the age of seven. Piaget argues that there is no point trying to converse with a young child in the way that we would with an older child or adult: they are simply aliens who inhabit an entirely different mental universe to us. It's not their fault they won't do as they're told; their brains are just wired differently.

The only problem with this theory is that I often think it is also true about adults: they might as well be speaking in tongues for all the sense they make to each other. There seems to be an assumption in current affairs TV and radio that talk and discussion are a public good in themselves, but I wonder how much good the debate about Europe, the economy, the public and private sector and so on actually does, given that it simply seems to entrench people even further in their own versions of reality. Any author will be familiar with this feeling: people just get the wrong end of the stick about what you have written, or maybe you have failed to make it clear - but the tone and voice underlying your words (and sometimes even, although this is usually the least important thing, the content) has simply bounced off them as if you were two surly magnets repelling each other. 'A joke isn’t a joke if it has to be explained, let alone justified,' Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in 1994, 'and the same goes for many sorts of allusion, nuance, and affect – the invisible bits of writing and conversation that actually make it possible.' More often, what you have written is simply ignored: the writer Gilbert Adair, who died last week, liked to refer to himself as 'unread Adair'.

Still we remain what David Attenborough, in the last episode of Life on Earth, called the 'compulsive communicators'. It's just something we do and can't help doing, and sometimes our misunderstandings and misreadings of each other can be creative, funny and life-enhancing. So thanks to everyone who came to the Conversation Dinner for reminding me that, however hard it is, we shouldn't give up on trying to converse with other.

Mundane quote for the day: Habit, n. A shackle for the free. - Ambrose Bierce

Höger Day

2011-12-03T11:44:00.002Z

In October 1961, in part of a post-Suez spirit of Europhilia that led to the first serious discussions about a channel tunnel, the minister of transport Ernest Marples announced a public inquiry to explore the feasibility of shifting to driving on the right. Soon there was a precedent that showed it was possible for a country to make the switch.

Nazism had ironed out some of the differences in continental practice, Austria and

Czechoslovakia

having switched to right-side driving when they were invaded in 1938. So after the war, there was only one mainland European country still driving on the left:

Sweden

. As the number of vehicles crossing its frontiers rose in the postwar era, Sweden began to worry that it was the only country left driving on the left, particularly since it had frontiers with two right-hand driving countries, Finland and

Norway

. Almost all Swedes bought cars with steering wheels on the left.

In 1955, the Swedish government held a plebiscite on the issue. 'Leftists' and 'rightists' waged a fierce propaganda war, at the end of which 82 per cent voted to keep left. But the two main parties ignored this thumping majority and in 1963 cut a deal to force the change through. In a project masterminded by Lars Skiöld, director of the Right-Hand Traffic Commission,

Sweden

would switch to the right at 5am on Sunday 3 September 1967, the so-called Dagen-H or Höger Day (Right Day). A joke doing the rounds before Höger Day was that the Swedes, being confirmed social gradualists, would make bicycles switch to driving on the left first, then cars, then buses, trams and lorries.

What happened instead resembled a Situationist artwork, a poetic transformation of daily life. The changeover was preceded by a ban on all but essential traffic, while new traffic signs were uncovered and old ones covered up. Despite the early hour and the ban on traffic, traffic jams developed as tourists and TV cameramen swarmed on to the road to witness the change. At 4.50am all the traffic on

Sweden

's 60,000 miles of road was moved over to the right side, and ten minutes later it started moving. Within two days of the changeover, the police registered 13,000 cases of relapsing to the left side, and 58 per cent of drivers admitting doing so in the first week. Despite a big increase in head-on collisions, though, the overall accident rate was actually lower than normal. During the first year, road deaths dropped by 17 per cent – before returning to their previous levels.

Why, if Sweden had managed the seemingly impossible, could Britain not do the same? A big problem was that Britain had a much bigger bus population than Sweden, and ministry of transport studies showed that the conversion of buses to have entrances on the right-hand side would have been the costliest aspect of the operation. The issue rumbled on and, after Britain joined the Common Market in 1973, some Europhobes were worried that the Economic Commission for Europe would press for uniformity. But by the end of that decade, the costs - in new road signs, road layouts, right-hand drive cars and buses - were too high to contemplate a change. Driving on the left side of the road has become so ingrained that the suicidally absent-minded motorist who drives the wrong way down a British motorway today – a fairly common occurrence in the 1960s – usually makes the evening news.

Anarchy in the UK?

2011-12-01T17:50:00.001Z

It is exactly 35 years since the Sex Pistols appeared on the live teatime magazine programme, Today, on 1 December 1976, to promote their first single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ – a mere two-minute segment of the show in which the presenter Bill Grundy invited the group to ‘say something outrageous’ and they responded with some rude words. The tabloids played their required role in publicising a band clearly seeking notoriety, introducing the Sex Pistols to the nation as part of ‘the new “punk rock” cult’ which ‘specialise[s] in songs that preach destruction’ (Daily Mail, 2 December 1976). Thames Television broadcast an immediate, full apology on screen twice later that day, while Grundy was quickly suspended and his career never recovered.

Historians of punk have tended to see this moment, combined with the release of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ at the end of November, as a pivotal event. In his book England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage argues that the song’s ‘ringing phrases … were powerful enough to insert the idea of anarchy, like a homoeopathic remedy, into a society that was already becoming polarized’. But punk’s success in ‘inserting’ these ideas into society may be exaggerated. ‘Anarchy in the UK’ sold 1800 copies on the day after the band’s appearance on Today but by Christmas it had only reached number 28. The number one record was ‘When a Child is Born’ by the easy-listening singer Johnny Mathis, with ‘Under the Moon of Love’ by Showaddywaddy (a rock’n’roll revivalist band discovered on New Faces) at number two. The atmosphere of moral panic around punk soon abated, reignited briefly during the Jubilee summer of 1977 when the Sex Pistols’ song ‘God Save the Queen’ improbably described the Callaghan government as a ‘fascist regime’. But the cultural work had begun to incorporate punk safely into the mainstream. An issue of Woman’s Own in October 1977 carried an article, ‘Punks and Mothers’, which showed photographs of smiling punks with their mothers accompanying a text which stressed their benignity: ‘It’s not as rocky horror as it appears … punks as it happens are non-political … Johnny Rotten is as a big a household name as Hughie Green.’

George Harrison day by day

2011-11-29T21:06:00.000Z

Ten years ago today, George Harrison died. I thought I'd commemorate this by collating just a few of the many rather charming quotidian references to Harrison in Michael Palin's diaries.

Saturday, September 6th 1980

George is mending an electric hedge-cutter which cut through its own flex. As George tinkers in homely fashion with his garden equipment ('I was an electrical apprentice,' he assured me. 'For three weeks.') the boys and I swim in the buff in his swimming pool, surrounded by lifelike voyeuristic models of monks and nuns.

Saturday, January 9th 1982

Call George in Henley at nine o'clock. After a few rather terse exchanges he says 'You're obviously not a Dallas fan, then' and I realise I've interrupted a favourite viewing.

Sunday, June 16th 1985

George H calls from Australia. He's in a Sydney hotel room (it's 2.30) and for some reason announces himself as Jane Asher. He sounds at first rather sleepy and, as the call goes on, rather drunk. I'm reminded of GC's inexplicable midnight calls, except there is no invective here, just a rather sad GH reflecting on the joys of chewing 'Nicorette' gum, and anxious to tell me that he's given up smoking, and drugs, and his only vice is Carlton Lager, three of which he's just consumed. He wants to know if I will come to China with him and his acupuncturist next year.

Enter your pin please

2011-11-26T11:54:00.007Z

Reading Clive James's new book A Point of View, an anthology of his ten-minute talks on Radio 4 from a few years ago, I found this passage:

'People really do define themselves by their jobs, even when their job is humble. That's why the lady behind one of the many counters of the department store proclaims her ownership of the goods you wish to purchase from her. ('I've only got it in these two colours at the moment but I should have the complete range in again by Saturday morning.') At the supermarket, the person on the cash desk will ask you to enter your pin number even after you have already begun to enter it. ('Can you enter your pin number for me?') The person is really telling you that he or she is an indispensable part of the process. We should try not to smile knowingly: in the same position we would do it too. And in any kind of cooperative venture, to make light of somebody's job is the quickest way of making an enemy.'

Work defines us. 'Why do half the things we do,' asked Thomas Traherne, 'when one could sit under a tree?' But sitting under a tree would soon get boring, wouldn't it? Thoreau said we should not calculate our wealth by how much we earn or own, but by how much free time we have left over when our basic needs have been met. Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays, seems to have this Thoreauvian idea of work, because he refers to his large salary as 'compensation', as though it were keeping him from more important stuff he could be getting on with. But Thoreau always seemed to me to be pretty confident, if not overconfident, about finding things to do with his free time.

I have been on a research fellowship this year so I haven't been doing any of my normal teaching or admin. In September, although I was officially on leave, I kept being interrupted by knocks on the door by people who didn't know I wasn't officially supposed to be here. But people twigged soon enough: the knocks became more spread out, the phone stopped ringing, emails became less insistent. Much office conversation is spontaneous and accidental, and people don't stop by unless they need to. An MIT study conducted in the 1970s found that office workers are four times more likely to talk if they are sat six rather than 60 feet apart, and that people seated more than 75 feet apart hardly speak at all. We like to imagine we are in some way indispensable; in fact everything goes fine, if not better, in our absence. It is salutary to get this little inkling of a semi-posthumous existence when our jobs will go on without us.

Absorption in daily activities, even if they are as meaningless as the emptying of an in-tray, is a way of giving our lives rhythm and pattern, and the idea that there is something better we could be doing with our time is perhaps a comforting delusion. 'Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame', reflects Mrs Dalloway. 'All the more … must one repay in daily life to servants, yes, to dogs and canaries …'

According to Clive James, the most tragic line in Shakespeare is 'Othello's occupation's gone.'

Mundane quote for the day: 'Our life becomes divided between "work" time and "free" time. Both are part of that grand illusion, the Spectacle. Within the society of Spectacle all time is spectacular time. Sometimes we are the commodity and sometimes the consumer. In our "free" time we buy back what we made during our "work" time. "Work" time and "free" time serve each other.' - Guy Debord

A single oak tree

2011-11-19T19:23:00.001Z

I’ve posted before about the work of the painter Stephen Taylor, who spent three years in a field in West Bergholt, East Anglia painting the same oak tree in different lights, seasons and weathers. Now he has collected much of this work in a book entitled Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Painters (Princeton Architectural Press). ‘The branches from the lower part of the trunk had been pollarded (cut back), so its upper part seemed to float,’ writes Taylor, explaining how he chose the tree. ‘From the field in winter, it had a dramatic, clear structure against the sky. In summer, it was a magnet for birds, and as the sun crossed the sky it reflected sunlight in such a way that you did not see its shaded side, making the tree look quite flat. The whole thing lit up like a colour-changing emblem.’

As the series progresses you see the tree losing and regaining its leaves, developing a film of snow and being populated by crows, and the colour of the surrounding field changing dramatically as the crops are rotated. Taylor started painting the oak in June 2003 – looking for a ‘still point of the turning world’ after the death of his parents and a close friend - and finished in August 2006, sitting in a crop of rape when the seed pods were a garish green.

Taylor’s oak is, he estimates, 250 years old. There is something about the sturdiness of the oak that appeals to the English imagination. Ironically, as Richard Mabey reminds us in his book Beechcombings, much of this dates back to the birth of scientific forestry in the late seventeenth century. In Sylva: A Discourse of Forest Trees, published in 1664 to encourage tree-planting to provide timber for the navy’s warships, John Evelyn was probably the first to use the phrase ‘hearts of oak,’ which David Garrick later reworked for his 1759 sea shanty, now the Royal Navy’s official marching tune: ‘Hearts of oak are our ships / Hearts of oak are our men.’

As he points out, Taylor was painting just a few miles from Constable Country. Interestingly, Constable gave his famous painting of a cart and horse standing in a millpond the title, ‘Noon’. It was someone else who named it ‘The Haywain’. Artists, aware of the changing light, are far more sensitive to the time of day than ordinary people are: Monet’s Rouen cathedral series, which Taylor’s oak series has echoes of, are meant to show it at different times of the day and year.

John Mollon, professor of neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, has described Taylor’s work as ‘parsing nature’. I wish I could notice the day as it passes as lovingly and perceptively as Taylor does in these paintings. My days hurry by in a homogeneous haze of fluorescent strip lighting and computer screen glow.

Quiet pleas

2011-11-13T18:24:00.001Z

I wrote this for the Guardian a few years ago:

On 11 November 1937, an ex-serviceman, Stanley Storey, interrupted the two minutes’ silence at the Cenotaph. Breaking through the crowd and running into the road, he screamed “All this hypocrisy!” and something else that sounded like “Preparing for war!” Half a dozen policemen gave chase and, just yards from the Prime Minister, clambered on top of him and muffled his cries.

It turned out that Storey was an escapee from a mental asylum. But his shattering of the two minutes’ silence struck a chord. The Daily Mirror argued that the silence was now “a silence of shared impotence … what is the use of paying homage when every day we drift nearer and nearer to another war?” According to a 1938 Mass-Observation survey, 43 per cent of people were against continuing the tradition of the silence.

Nearly seventy years later, however, the silence remains unbroken. The British Legion, which has long campaigned for its observance on Armistice Day proper as well as Remembrance Sunday, is organising a big event this Saturday on the same scale as the Cenotaph service: an hour-long ceremony in Trafalgar Square which will culminate in the two minutes’ silence, followed by an RAF flypast, the Last Post and the scattering of poppies in the fountains.

The ebbing and flowing of observation of the silence has always mirrored political anxieties. In 1919, with much of Europe in revolutionary turmoil, it seemed like a good idea to have a secular ritual that could unite the people without demanding too much of them. “Capital and Labour were as one for two minutes,” the Times wrote approvingly of what was then called the Great Silence, “and the eloquence of the agitator was stayed by an impelling force.” The government moved the silence to Remembrance Sunday after World War II because it felt that commemorating the exact time of the 1918 Armistice was disrespectful to the dead of the more recent war. The revival of the silence on Armistice Day dates from 1996, following a two-year-long, rather bullying crusade by the tabloids to get the BBC and high street stores to observe it. The crusade began as a backlash against John Major’s ill-advised plans to “celebrate” the anniversary of the D-Day landings with spam-fritter frying competitions.

But the two minutes’ silence is more than simply a vehicle for the righteous anger of tabloid editors – partly because it hauntingly confirms John Cage’s observation that “there is no such thing as silence”. Jonty Semper’s CD, Kenotaphion, collects together recordings of the silences held at the Cenotaph since 1929. In each case the chimes of Big Ben are followed not by silence but by ambient noise: birdsong, distant traffic, shuffling feet, babies crying, the rustling of leaves. This is why the BBC lobbied hard in the 1920s to broadcast the silence from the Cenotaph. It knew that simply shutting down the airwaves for two minutes would not have the same impact as this resonant near-silence. The silence was a paradoxical by-product of mass society: a temporary stilling of the chaos of urban life which required all the accoutrements of modernity, like radio time signals and newspaper propaganda campaigns, to make it work.

Collective silence is now the default option to commemorate events of very different import, from the Indonesian Tsunami to the death of ex-footballers. No one is sure what these silences are for. So we have arguments about “silence inflation” - whether to raise the bar to three minutes for large-scale disasters – or wonder if it is more appropriate to clap than stand there silently. We seem to want silence to carry a freight of meaning that it can never bear, and to prescribe what effect it should have in a way that is likely to lessen its impact. The two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day, initially intended as a one-off, became a national tradition precisely because its meanings were so unstable and various. As one journalist wrote in 1919, it was an opportunity to unite in “thanksgiving, rejoicing, pity, life-long pride and grief”. The silence works by maintaining a delicate balance between public coercion and private reflection. All it requires of us is that we are silent.

Britain in a Day

2011-11-12T12:12:00.002Z

Today, Saturday 12 November, the directors Ridley Scott and Morgan Matthews have invited Britons to capture their day on video camera and to upload their clips to a dedicated YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/britaininaday

The resulting archive will be edited into a film that will be shown in cinemas and on BBC2 next year.

It follows Life in a Day, a similarly crowdsourced film about a single day – Saturday 24 July 2010 - lived all over the world. They received 85,326 clips from 198 countries, from Burkina Faso to French Polynesia. The film, which was shown on TV a few weeks ago, opens with the sound of a thousand concurrent breaths. Highlights include the Mexicans who produce a time-lapse film of the life of a pizza, from the dough being kneaded to the empty plate being washed up, and the man who takes viewers on a tour of Roanoke, Virginia, stopping to appraise his favourite lifts.

There is of course an Ur-text for these films and other similar projects: their inspiration is the Mass Observation Day Surveys, the first of which was on Friday 12 March 1937. Volunteers were asked simply to describe what happened to them on the 12th day of each month, however mundane. On 12 March, in Liverpool, a young office worker accidentally knocked down an elderly woman on his bike, and a labourer told him off for not ringing his bell. He went out at lunchtime to buy a hat for his wedding, and then ate at a Lyons Corner House with a friend. In a Birmingham suburb, a housewife was awakened from a strange dream about the author Aldous Huxley by her five-year-old son singing nursery rhymes. She waited for a man to call to read the gas meter, before going out to return some library books. In Northumberland, an accountant rose at 7.50am and decided to postpone shaving because he was going to a dance in the evening. At lunchtime he withdrew some money from the bank. On the evening train home, he noticed his fellow passengers had made little circles in the steamed-up windows with their coat sleeves so they could look out, which reminded him off ‘wiping the bloom off a plum’.

As the Belgian situationist philosopher Raoul Vaneigem once wrote: ‘There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies.’ One problem: I don’t have a video camera. Enjoy filming, the rest of you.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The early editions of the evening papers had startled London with enormous headlines: “Remarkable story from Woking.”’ – H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Under the office

2011-11-06T12:26:00.001Z

I’ve posted before about Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s wonderful book, The Office, a novel-cum-essay published in 1970 which is really more like a prose poem about those ‘minute rhythms like the slow breathing of the IN Tray, emptying and filling, filling and emptying’. Jonathan wrote to me to tell me that he has now written a play, Under the Office, based on this earlier book, which is to be performed at the Stahl Theatre at Oundle School between 24 and 26 November. It’s a bit far for me to go but if any quotidianist is reading this and in that area …

Office life is never news because, however unfulfilling it might be, it seems unproblematic and apolitical. Office politics are not real politics; they are petty, gossipy, personal, unchangeable. Office life is invisible to anyone who isn’t a part of it. According to the sociologist Ulrich Beck, the dynamics of modern, deregulated economies are increasingly hidden in this way: ‘The place of the visible character of work, concentrated in factory halls and tall buildings, is taken by an invisible organization of the firm.’ City-centre offices might serve as the company’s brand statement, with their high-rise towers, mirror-glass walls and welcoming atria. But the essential drudgery takes place where land and labour are cheap: in anonymous, shed-like buildings in out-of-town office parks, surrounded by parking lots and security barriers, without even a logo outside identifying the company.

Since this kind of mundane existence is how many people fill their days, it is odd that we reflect so little on its history and politics. With a few exceptions, like C. Wright Mills and David Lockwood in the 1950s, sociologists have steered clear of office life, preferring to focus on more obvious forms of social inequality. It has mainly been left to creative writers to cover this terra incognita. In Joshua Ferris’s novel, Then We Came to the End, rituals like ‘the great unsung pastime of American corporate life, the wadded paper toss’ continually subvert the managerial insistence that our working lives be creative and meaningful.

After World War II, William H. Whyte noted the rise of a management style that sought moral legitimacy through its emphasis on the employee’s ‘personality’ and ‘soul’. Whyte’s ‘organization man’ was suspicious of authoritarian leadership and viewed the group as the appropriate space for negotiating and resolving problems. But as Whyte noted perceptively, ‘if every member simply wants to do what the group wants to do, then the group is not going to do anything’. He invented a term, ‘groupthink’, to describe the forms of irrational collective psychology that developed in office cultures in which the overriding aim was consensus.

By the early 1980s, human-relations management had mutated into an evangelical new concept: corporate culture. In their book In Search of Excellence (1982), Tom Peters and Robert Waterman argued that the best companies had strong cultures, in which all employees felt part of the firm and bought into a common ideal. This book, the first management text to make the New York Times bestseller list, appeared at an opportune moment – in the middle of a recession in America, when the Japanese work model of company songs and other rituals of belonging seemed to be the future. Britain was also going through a recession at this time, as well as supposedly suffering from the more chronic ‘British disease’ of mediocre management and demotivated workers. Fostering a strong corporate culture, particularly by urging workers to have a positive, can-do attitude, soon became a ruling motif in transatlantic business life.

But the decline of formal office hierarchies comes at the cost of uncertainty about where work begins and ends. The academic Andrew Ross, who spent several months in a trendy, Manhattan media firm in the late 1990s, calls it ‘no-collar’ work. Its first-name etiquette and dress-down culture tend to blur the distinctions between the office and our social lives, reframing work as an ‘existential challenge’ and enlisting ‘employees’ freest thoughts and impulses in the services of salaried time’.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘An unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high-golden noons to selling junk – yet it rules us. And life is there. The office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition.’ - Sinclair Lewis, The Job

M25 at 25

2011-10-31T18:11:00.001Z

A slightly longer version of an article by me in Saturday's Guardian:

The M25 is 25 today. On 29 October 1986, Margaret Thatcher cut the ribbon across an eight-mile section of the London Orbital near Watford, the final and crucial bit that closed the circle. If there are any official commemorations of this anniversary, I have missed them; a birthday party for the most hated road in the country would perhaps not be well attended. Our antipathy to the M25 reveals much about shifting attitudes to roads over the last half century. In its thrilling early days, the motorway system was known by its epic cross-country routes (the M1 being called, with some fanfare, “the London-Yorkshire motorway”) but it is now the M25, mentioned daily on traffic reports as a vortex from which none can escape, that best sums up the public mood. The motorways that once carried hopes of uniting the nation now evoke images of eternal circularity, encapsulated in those mythical tales of foreign tourists (or, in some versions, confused pensioners or naïve northerners) who drive round the M25 for days in the mistaken belief that it is the M1.

But perhaps the anniversary should be celebrated, if only as a reminder of how distant the year 1986 now seems. For one thing, the M25 was opened by a prime minister prepared to attend a road opening and celebrate it as “a showpiece of British engineering skills, planning, design and construction”. In response to those who were arguing that the road was already congested, Thatcher said: “I can’t stand those who carp and criticise when they ought to be congratulating Britain on a magnificent achievement and beating the drum for Britain all over the world.” The M25’s popularity, she argued, was a sign of its success, and criticisms of it put her in mind of an old saying that “nobody shops at Sainsbury’s because of the queues”.

The prime minister was not alone in this attitude: the inauguration of the M25 was the last major road opening to generate real public excitement. The queues at both ends of the final section were much longer than usual because drivers were itching to be the first to complete an orbit. When the Guardian’s Terry Coleman drove along it shortly after the cones had been removed, he saw crowds waving from the bridges just as they had done when the M1 opened in 1959. His main complaint was that, at just three lanes, the M25 was not big or bold enough. It was also “absurdly too far out from the centre, which must be obvious even to those bicycling protectors of disused allotments, and the like who ensured by their protests that it should not be closer in”. The M25, Coleman argued, summed up “the mangy poverty of our present expectations”.

The completion of the M25 now seems to symbolise the high water mark of Thatcherism. It was accompanied by that mid-1980s phenomenon, a huge surge in house prices, all the way round its perimeter. Property prices in west Kent, in towns like Sidcup and Sevenoaks, rose by a quarter in 1986, exceptional even for the south-east equity bonanza of the period. The M25 also opened just two days after Big Bang, which ended restrictive practices in the City and ushered in a frantic era of takeovers and salary hikes. Some of these high-flying City traders quickly realised that the M25’s 117-mile circuit could serve as an illegal racetrack. They would meet up at a service station in the early hours of a weekend morning and race round the Orbital in their Porsches and Ferraris, the Dartford tunnel serving as an impromptu pitstop. The story of these Cannonball runs was uncovered by a young reporter for The Times, called Boris Johnson.

It all seems so eighties, a vanished world of red braces and mobile phones the size of bricks. But the M25 is still here and, even if nobody loves it, it hasn’t taught us much. The coalition government has made the same connection as Thatcher did between roads and entrepreneurialism, and recently declared an end to the “war on the motorist” by raising motorway speed limits. City traders no longer use the M25 as a racetrack, but the mood of braggadocio that inspired those midnight runs survives in certain quarters, undented by recent events. 1986 seems so long ago; and yet so little has changed.

The art of walking

2011-10-29T11:58:00.004+01:00

I’ve just finished reading The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism by Geoff Nicholson. Along with accounts of many other eccentric pedestrians, Nicholson tells the story of Captain Robert Barclay Allardice (1779-1854), who took part in a number of bizarre pedestrian contests, one of which was set him by ‘an unnamed Duke’ who bet a thousand guineas that he could find a man to walk the ten miles from Piccadilly to Hounslow within 3 hours, taking 3 steps forwards and 1 step back. In 1809, Barclay himself bet someone else a thousand guineas that he could walk a mile in each of a thousand consecutive hours. He began on 1 June on Newmarket Heath, walking a single mile, every hour once an hour, on a set course in Newmarket in Suffolk. It only takes about twenty minutes to walk a mile, so there must have been a lot of hanging around. An enormous crowd gathered to cheer him on as he completed the feat on 12 July.

Nicholson suggests that the longest ever uninterrupted walk was probably taken by the adventurer Sebastian Snow (1929-2001) who walked 8700 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Panama canal in 19 months. ‘By some transcendental process,’ Snow wrote in his book The Rucksack Man, ‘I seemed to take on the characteristics of a Shire [horse], my head lowered, resolute, I just plunked one foot in front of t’other, mentally munching nothingness.’ He had intended to walk all the way to Alaska but got bored.

Nicholson does not mention another epic walk, made by the comedian Ronnie Barker, as recounted in his autobiography, Dancing in the Moonlight. As a young man he worked unhappily as a hospital porter until, desperate to get into acting, he joined a touring mime company in 1950. After a few weeks of ‘misery and despair’, the tour collapsed in Cornwall without enough money for train tickets, and Barker had to walk all the way back home to Oxford.

Another great pedestrianist was Phyllis Pearsall (1906–1996), the founder of the London A-Z. (Nicholson once wrote a novel, Bleeding London, in which a character tries to walk every street in London using the A-Z.) Here is the account in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

Back in London in 1935 Phyllis Pearsall made a living painting portraits, but she was disillusioned by the pretentiousness of the art world and ready to take on a new challenge, and when she got lost one evening in the streets of London and subsequently realized that the most recent street map of London dated from 1919 she decided to produce her own. Starting with the Ordnance Survey sheets she walked the streets of London for eighteen hours a day, compiling a 23,000 card alphabetical index of streets, which she kept in shoeboxes under her bed, and produced the first London A–Z Street Atlas in 1936.

What the ODNB doesn’t mention, but which I read somewhere, is that Pearsall then took 250 copies of the A–Z in a wheelbarrow to W.H. Smith’s, and they bought them from her.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the same street each with the lamplight of the living-room shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels.’ – Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, cited in Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking

Motorway rambles

2011-10-23T14:44:00.000+01:00

Classic literature is full of warnings about the the vanity of human wishes and the transience of life and fame. ‘Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live register’d upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death,’ as Shakespeare writes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The paths of glory lead but to the grave, and so on. As Macaulay wrote rather beautifully of the puritans: ‘Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away.’

Mind you, that was before they discovered lamination. I wonder if Shelley would have felt differently about Ozymandias if he’d been immortalised in a non-biodegradable table mat. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that it was very nice of the photographer Edward Chell to send me some of the table mats from his recent photographic exhibition, ‘Gran Turismo’, at the Little Chef, Ings, on the A591 into Windermere, some of which incorporated quotes from On Roads. Chell has another solo exhibition, Viewing Stations, investigating the landscape of the motorway verge, in London in November. You can find out more here: http://www.edwardchell.com/. Chell is also co-editing a book, In The Company of Ghosts; the Poetics of the Motorway, to be published by erbacce-press next spring.

I note that, in his new memoir, Alan Partridge writes that one of the programme ideas he unsuccessfully pitched to the BBC, co-devised with Bill Oddie, was Motorway Rambles: walking the hard shoulders of British trunk roads with special permission from the Transport Police. Chell is one of several people – others include the vicar John Davies, who wrote a rather excellent book a few years ago about walking the M62 - demonstrating that this is not in fact a remotely Partridgesque activity but a worthwhile and enlightening one.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The question should be, then, not how we break through the sludge of habit to rediscover the hidden strangeness of things, but how we ever managed to convince ourselves that anything was not a dissemination of intelligence. Boredom is the amazing achievement, not wonder. Our senses can catch only a narrow portion of the spectrum: the cosmic rays, rainbows above or below the range of visible light, or tectonic groans of the earth all elude us. What the moralists have said about the universe, science since Faraday has proved to be empirically true: We are immersed in a sea of intelligence that we cannot fully understand or even sense.’ – John Durham Peters

An ecstasy of concrete

2011-10-19T19:00:00.001+01:00

A few blogposts ago I quoted from a letter written by Dennis Potter while the Hammersmith flyover was appearing outside his window. I’ve since discovered a contemporaneous piece by him in the Daily Herald, ‘Flyover in my eyes’, from 18 November 1961, in which he is rather more positive about this new piece of architecture. ‘Our second baby was born one warm night in July …’ he writes, ‘while a grotesque new machine was dropping concrete girders into position with all the gentility of a front-row Rugby forward bearing down on a tiny full-back.’ The Potters lived ‘on the top floor of a block of flats on a bloodshot-eye level to the thing.’ The Hammersmith flyover was ‘a beautiful thing, a cross between a Roman aqueduct and a Hollywood epic, soaring over earth-bound streets in an ecstasy of concrete, cable and sheer bravado.’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science; without the dyer’s art there would be no chemistry; metallurgy is mining theorized.’ – Clifford Geertz

Seen from the window

2011-10-16T12:06:00.002+01:00

In his autobiographical essay, ‘Seen from the window,’ Henri Lefebvre describes looking from the balcony of his apartment in central Paris on to a busy intersection over a period of several hours. After a while he starts to notice patterns in the apparently chaotic street scene: the rhythm of the changing traffic lights, the synchronised movements of vehicles and pedestrians, the contrast between feverish activity and moments of relative calm. In order to notice such patterns, Lefebvre suggests, you need the patience to watch mundane events unfolding in time:

The characteristic features are really temporal and rhythmical, not visual. To extricate the rhythms requires attentiveness and a certain amount of time. Otherwise it only serves as a glance to enter into the murmurs, noises and cries … Over there, the one walking in the street is immersed into the multiplicity of noises, rumours, rhythms … But from the window noises are distinguishable, fluxes separate themselves, rhythms answer each other.

I’ve been looking out of the window more often than usual lately. I am on a research fellowship this year so am not teaching, and my office at work is directly above a terrace where students and members of staff walk and sometimes chat between classes. I used to see people gossiping, laughing, exchanging cigarettes and lighters, and blowing their smoke into the air: that international, wordless language that breaks down the inevitable awkwardness between people who are not quite strangers and not quite friends. Now, because the terrace constitutes part of the building and is covered by the smoking ban, the smokers have been banished to the steps below the Anglican cathedral, where they sit on their own looking, at least from a distance, pensive and disconsolate. Now, instead of cigarettes, a hundred mobile phones flip open as soon as the students come out of lectures. You could write an MA thesis about the anthropological significance of the facial and hand gestures that people adopt when they are talking on their phones. The person on the other end of the line can’t see you, you know! And of all the windows in all the world, these little gestures, tics, glances and snatched conversations came to be seen by me out of mine.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees.’ - Bruce Robinson, Withnail and I

Crisis? What crisis?

2011-10-08T16:07:00.003+01:00

I’ve always been interested in the resilience of ordinary life, the way our basic routines survive even in the midst of a crisis, or regroup after a catastrophe. The governor of the Bank of England announced this week that we are living through the worst economic crisis in living memory. Everyone tutted and turned over to the Great British Bake Off. At the fringe meetings of the Conservative Party Conference, the hot issue was the smoking ban in public places. I cannot decide if this evasive attitude is healthy or not. It reminds me of the IMF crisis at the end of 1976, when ordinary life in Britain carried on against a background of talk of imminent chaos. There was a great deal of excitement, for example, about an ostrich glove puppet called Emu, worked by the entertainer Rod Hull, who had just achieved national fame by attacking Michael Parkinson on his chat show. Emu’s children’s television programme was attracting eleven million viewers and the Observer suggested that ‘the whole nation … has gone Emu crazy’. There was even greater interest in the appearance of the newsreader Angela Rippon’s bare legs on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show, the details of which were leaked to the press in the days before broadcast. ‘The excitement surrounding Ms Rippon’s perfectly agreeable legs convinced me that everybody had gone mad,’ wrote the jazz musician and critic George Melly. ‘Angela Rippon had – wait for it – legs! Did people really imagine she hadn’t? … She reads the news very well, clearly and crisply, but the secret is out. Under that tidy desk is a pair of legs!’

It is now normal to read these popular entertainments as a kind of wilful distraction from political events. But perhaps these trivial preoccupations point to a more complex account of late 1976 than the media rhetoric of crisis suggested. The mid-1970s ‘crisis’ was experienced most keenly by opinion-forming elites. The early and influential converts to monetarism – mostly in The Times and the Financial Times - tended to talk up the possibility of impending national disaster, and to remind readers of the dire predictions about Britain’s future in American right-wing media like the Wall Street Journal and CBS News, which had more than one eye on US domestic politics in seeking to present the UK as a cautionary tale. These moments of banality in daily life in the run-up to Christmas 1976 suggest that not all Britons were convinced by these apocalyptic narratives.

In early 1977 a Gallup international survey revealed that Britons believed themselves to be among the happiest people in the world. In 1978 the Washington Post’s London correspondent, Bernard Nossiter, argued in Britain: A Future That Works that the ‘voices of doom … the scribes and prophets of disaster’ had been wrong about the UK, that its levels of state spending and taxation were normal by European standards and the overall postwar trend of rising affluence, which had doubled living standards since the war, would survive the world recession. ‘Is it possible,’ he asked, ‘that the whole episode is a case of hypochondria?’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘”I see the news is bad again.” The banal phrase punctuates my memories of the late 1930s. I remember an adolescent anger that people would not name the things that were happening: the invasion of Austria; the cession of the Sudetenland; the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Albania – all packaged as “the news”.’ - Raymond Williams

The modern English style

2011-10-01T11:48:00.001+01:00

Some cobbled together words occasioned by the return of Strictly Come Dancing to our screens.

As the historian Ross McKibbin reveals in his book Classes and Cultures, ballroom dancing has long been a political minefield. The Official Board of Ballroom Dancing, established in 1929, was specifically formed to stamp out the ‘freakish’ steps of jazz-inspired crazes like the Charleston and the Varsity Drag, which threatened to ‘turn the ballroom into a bear garden’. The OBBC sanctioned only four official dances – waltz, foxtrot, quickstep and tango – and rigorously policed any illegal steps, lifts and sidekicks. Victor Silvester’s seminal textbook, Modern Ballroom Dancing (1927), claims that the basic principles of ballroom are ‘as permanent as the law of gravity’.

This ‘modern English style’ was an attempt to stem the inexorable invasion of imported American music and dance. One dance teacher lamented ‘the admission of jazz music and dubious steps into decent places’, insisting that they originated ‘in low negro haunts and had au fond a prurient significance’. The ruling bodies were terrified that dancing might be seen as sublimated sex, and indeed the churches often condemned the dance halls for their vulgarity and immorality. So the dancers’ feet had to be parallel, their hips straight and their knees kept together.

The social research organisation, Mass Observation, thought these rigid rules threatened the whole future of social democracy. The ballroom was creating supine, apathetic citizens by pointing them ‘away from social feeling and activity and towards a world of personal superstition and magic’. Mass Observation even calculated that people who went to dancehalls were 12% less likely to vote than average (an uninformative statistic, since under-25s were the most likely to go dancing and, then as now, the least likely to vote). The regimented ranks of ballroom dancers were sleepwalking to ‘the paradise-drug of the American dance-tune’ with ‘the same surrender of personal decision as that of uniformed Nazis’. Mass-Observation claimed in 1939 that anti-fascists broke up a demonstration by Walter Mosley’s black shirts by ‘doing the Lambeth Walk’, and they suggested that the communal, improvised nature of this dance could teach us ‘something about the future of democracy’. The Lambeth Walk was frowned on by the dancing professionals, along with other communal dances like the Conga and the Hokey-Cokey.

But even Mass Observation conceded the startling contrast between the ‘mechanized barbarity’ of dancehall music and the wordless decorousness of the dancers’ movements. In order to request a dance, a young man would simply touch a potential partner lightly on her elbow, and they would move silently on to the floor. It was quite normal for partners to dance for hours without speaking to each other, before going their separate ways. The ballroom was a world of conscious artifice and unspoken courtesies, as pointlessly beautiful as the laws of cricket. Its rules were simultaneously hierarchical and egalitarian. Dance steps were rigorously policed, but every local palais had learner nights where the most physically inept could be taught the same basic moves.

The modern English style was one of Britain’s last imperialist successes, spreading unopposed throughout Europe, America and the Empire. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela writes about spending endless hours of his student days in the early 1940s practising foxtrots and waltzes to a crackly phonograph record, encouraged by his idol, Victor Silvester.

Mundane quote for the day: 'You are always alone with the oddness of modern consumption. Walking under the white lights of Sainsbury’s you find out just who you are. The reams of cartons, the pyramids of tins: there they stand on the miles of shelves, the story of how we live now. Cereal boxes look out at you with their breakfast-ready smiles, containing flakes of bran, handfuls of oats, which come from fields mentioned in the Domesday Book.' – Andrew O’Hagan

Rendering unto Caesar

2011-09-24T11:45:00.002+01:00

I have finally got round to filling in my tax return, an annual ritual some way below dental scaling in my list of things to look forward to. This means I am not as virtuous as my dad, who generally fills it in as soon as he can, in April (the swot) but more virtuous than those poor, benighted souls who miss the 31 October paper deadline and are banished to the online wilderness, suffering the shame of being chivvied along in television adverts by the likes of Moira Stewart and Adam Hart-Davis. Why do they leave it so late? They should know that there is nothing certain in life except death, taxes and quiet disappointment. The Rosetta stone, I read from Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects, is ‘mostly bureaucratic jargon about tax concessions’. In Biblical times I believe taxes were known as tributes, and it somehow helps to think of myself as paying tribute, offering up a ritual sacrifice to HM Revenue and Customs by sorting through through my receipts and bank statements and trying to figure out why on earth a company I have never heard of paid me £25 18 months ago.

I always used to like the way a single person, with the title of Inspector of Taxes or somesuch, used to write to you in person and command you to let him know all about your taxable income and capital gains. He sounded like someone with the anonymous, unchallengeable authority of the Wizard of Oz or Big Chief I Spy, although like Big Chief I Spy, I imagine he got one of his redskins to do his filing. Nowadays HMRC have dispensed with this formulation, and make no attempt to keep up the charming pretence that a single person can be arsed to check though my calculations about my freelance writing. Anyway, I have rendered unto Caesar, in my case the HMRC Area Manager, and await the dreaded bill in the post.

In a recent post, I speculated that the to-do list was of recent vintage. But Nicola Shulman writes in Graven with Diamonds, her recent biography of the Henrician poet Thomas Wyatt, that ‘Thomas Cromwell had a habit of writing down his “remembrances”, that is to say, to-do lists for the business of the moment.’ The mea culpa is on my to-do list.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Life isn’t Hollywood, it’s Cricklewood.’ – Eric Morecambe

Pylon appreciation

2011-09-18T10:18:00.004+01:00

The industrial sublime is an awkward, unloved genre. There is the odd Victorian poem about steam power or bridge builders, but most people know the drill from those chaps in the 1930s who got lyrical about electricity pylons, of all things.

Pylons have been in the news again this week as the shortlist of designs in a competition to create new versions for the 21st century went on display at the Victoria & Albert museum. Pylons also featured on the One Show, with Professor Valentine Cunningham, an expert on the literature of the 1930s, reading from Stephen Spender’s 1933 poem ‘The Pylons,’ an ambivalent response to ‘those pillars/Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret,’ whose ‘quick perspective of the future’ dwarfed ‘our emerald country by its trek’. The presenter of the piece, the former England spin bowler Phil Tufnell, mentioned the Pylon Appreciation Society and the website Pylon of the Month, but fortunately with only the contractually obligated degree of archness.

This is from Rob Young’s book Electric Eden:

In 1928 Britain’s first electricity pylon was erected just outside Edinburgh. The steel structure was skeletal and vaguely anthropomorphic, with six arms to carry the three-phase cables across large tracts of terrain. Most of today’s pylons are variations on the original design by Sir Reginald Bloomfield, the architect responsible for remodelling London’s Regent Street as a curving neoclassical terrace. Blomfield was a fervent horticulturalist whose 1892 book The Formal Garden in England had reintroduced the idea of gardening as stiff upper-lip horticulture; among other opinions, he claimed to despise the ornamental fancies of William Morris’s organic tapestries. In 1953 a new crop of National Grid power stations was rolled out (including the one at Bankside in London, now Tate Modern), and the electrification of Britain was accelerated with the imposition of a “supergrid”, carried by the newly designed PL1 pylons that are still the dominant model fifty years later. Britain’s open fields and moors had become parade grounds for an army of steel wicker men.

Interesting fact from yesterday’s Guardian: Pam Ayres’s father was a linesman for the Southern Electricity Board, a Berkshire version of Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. There is a buried romance to the life of the linesman, just as there is in the design of pylons, which may have to be the subject of a future blog post …

Trains of thought

2011-09-14T21:52:00.003+01:00

This piece by me was in the Guardian on Monday.

Whenever I travel on a Virgin train, I always book a seat in the Quiet Zone. I am not quite sure why, because the prominently displayed notices seem to have little impact on the use of mobile phones and other noisy devices. But the transport minister, Norman Baker, and a number of MPs representing suburban London constituencies now want to see these zones more widely applied, and have asked Transport for London to consider putting quiet carriages on the Tube and overground trains. They cite the American example of Boston’s commuter train lines, on which passengers are not allowed to use phones or talk loudly in the rush hour.

The train carriage has always brought people together in an awkward mix of tolerance and irritation. Its forerunner, the stagecoach, was a garrulous mini-community by comparison. In 1818, William Hazlitt remarked that “you will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the Undergraduates or Heads of Colleges of that famous university”. When the railway carriage arrived in the 1830s, its greater comfort encouraged musing and window gazing, and made solitary, silent activities like reading and sewing possible. By 1862, the Railway Traveller’s Handy Book was complaining: “Generally speaking, the occupants of a railway carriage perform the whole of the journey in silence … This is most unnatural and unreasonable … Why should an Englishman ever be like a ghost, in not speaking until he is spoken to?”

When the earliest, brick-like mobile phones appeared in the late 1980s, this etiquette began to change. What might have been seen only two decades ago as unBritish self-display – having an uninhibited conversation in public - is now grudgingly accepted, without some of us ever quite getting used to it. It is not just that train passengers disagree about the nature and value of silence, but that mobile phones occupy the user and repulse strangers more comprehensively than books or newspapers. In doing so they have subtly altered the already fragile social dynamic of the train carriage, making us seem ever more absent to each other. In A Book of Silence, the author Sara Maitland argues that our ambivalence about silence stems from two conflicting contemporary ideas: first, “that we feel ourselves to be happy and fulfilled only when we are interacting with other people”, and second, “the equally popular mythology that stresses individual autonomy and personal ‘rights’.” Some of the occupants of a train carriage want to be left alone to get on with work; for others, such “work” involves noisily conversing with other people.

The expectation that other people should be silent seems to be an arbitrary, changeable affair. Actors increasingly complain of mobile phones putting them off in mid-soliloquy, but theatre audiences were not always expected to be quiet. In his recent history of celebrity, Fred Inglis traces this convention of sitting in reverential silence back to the actor-manager David Garrick, who in the mid-eighteenth century “taught the London audiences, bit by bit, to suppress their chatter, their zoo noises and bursts of ribald song, their bombardments of fruit onto the stage”. Perhaps today’s noisier theatregoers are simply returning to a pre-modern, natural state. Maitland sees the interruption of silence as an artificial affliction of modernity, but I am not so sure. Certain environments have certainly become noisier: libraries now seem actively to encourage conversation and clatter. But many things are quieter than they used to be: you no longer hear the incessant hammering of the typing pool, and today’s warehouses and factories are places of cathedral-like calm compared to a generation ago.

I share Maitland’s love of silence, although not enough to challenge anyone disturbing me in a quiet zone. But I cannot decide if the desire for it is natural or unnatural in our herd-loving, compulsively communicative race. When I was a student, I happily wrote essays in crowded common rooms; now I cannot write if there is so much as a creaky floorboard in the room above me. It is amazing how much noise you can get used to, and then how much silence you can become accustomed to demanding. So I am not surprised that the quiet zone of a train carriage is such an area of conflict: for I am never so estranged from my fellow citizens as when, in the middle of their never-ending noise, I feel the need for silence.

White dot

2011-09-11T16:32:00.003+01:00

When I was in London working in archives recently, I stayed in a house in which the flatscreen, home cinema-style television was so hi-tech that I could not work out how to use it – in fact, I couldn’t even switch it on - so I ended up listening to a lot of radio 4 and watching Match of the Day live on iPlayer. It’s ironic, at least in the broadranging, Alanis Morissette sense of the word, that I am writing a book about television and do not know how to use the latest television receivers. But I don’t suppose I am alone in my ignorance: at the last count, I believe there were 28,000 people with black and white television licences. One of them is, or was, the former MP Chris Mullin, as his recently published memoirs reveal. Mullin was questioned by the Daily Telegraph, which revealed the scandal of MP’s expenses, about his £47 black-and-white TV licence. He had owned the set for more than 30 years, long before he entered Parliament. ‘The Telegraph reports that I claimed for a black-and-white TV licence, which has been the subject of much amusement among colleagues, many of whom dwell in the world of plasma screens’, he wrote at the height of the expenses scandal. After deciding to resign from parliament, he still could not resist composing a speech announcing his candicacy for Speaker of the House of Commons: ‘In passing I might deny any intention to install a black-and-white TV set in Speaker’s house.’

This reminds me of a bit in the late Gordon Burn’s book Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion where George Best is marooned in his white-tiled modernist house in Bramhall: ‘The papers got very excited by the fact that he could lie in bed and open and close the curtains, dim the lights and open the garage doors at the flick of a switch. He could flick another switch and the television could disappear up the Scandinavian-style chimney … The remote for the gadgets went on the blink, with the TV yo-yo-ing up and down the chimney and the curtains opening and closing of their own volition …’

I am also reminded of an episode of the American sitcom Cheers in which the bar regular, Norm, is transfixed by a bank of big screen, satellite-linked TVs on the wall. ‘Well Normie,’ says his friend Cliff, ‘this is the information age. We can get up-to-the-minute stock prices, medical breakthroughs, political upheavals from all around the world. Of course, we’d have to turn off the cartoons first.’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Arthur Koestler's satire of academic conferences, The Call Girls (1973), included an extreme leftwing French professor whose secret comfort was to lock his door and retire to bed to read The Three Musketeers while eating chocolate truffles. I sometimes thought of him when I indulged in my own curious vice, which was to watch Blind Date when working out on the rowing machine. This prototype for many far worse versions of humiliation television took my mind off the hamster-wheel boredom of static, indoor exercise. In fact its true awfulness and the glimpses of young macho-macha life in this country proved utterly gripping. The girls were often the crueller, when putting down their artificially selected partners, and it was hard not to feel sorry for the inarticulate and pathetically boastful young males. They could not see how things had changed and how they had become potentially redundant in the brave new world of mass communication to which they had exposed their own pitiful inadequacies.’ - Anthony Beevor

Motorwayed out

2011-09-03T11:50:00.004+01:00

My friend rang me from the Hoylake branch of Oxfam yesterday to ask if I wanted a copy of the Shell Book of Roads for £4. Reader, I passed. I’m motorwayed out. As John Updike wrote about writing about marriage, it is a subject which 'if I have not exhausted it, it has exhausted me'.

However, I did like this bit from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Dennis Potter which reveals that Potter began his writing career in a west London flat in 1961, while the Hammersmith flyover was being built outside. ‘I live on the top floor of a block of flats on a bloodshot-eye level to the thing,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Only a few yards of exhaust-laden air separates us from The Start of a New Age, as Transport Minister Marples threateningly called the thing … For months and months they have been building [it] – pneumatic drills, monstrous creaking cranes, shouting foremen, acetylene burners, bulldozers, portable radios, and all the other things which more than justify a tea-break.

‘I spent a little time leaning out of the window, in a vain attempt to foment a strike, when our second baby was born in July, but she came into the world while a grotesque new machine was dropping concrete girders into position with all the gentility of a front-row rugby forward bearing down on a tiny full-back.’

Which reminds me ... Neal Ascherson argued in the Observer in June 1962 that the Hammersmith flyover had transformed the atsmosphere at Royal Ascot. ‘Once, in a vast tribal corroboree, Society congregated at Ascot in house parties for the four days of racing, renting mansions and entertaining splendidly in the evenings,’ he wrote. Now communications between London and the racecourse had become ‘fatally efficient: one of the last inducements to stay overnight at Ascot vanished with the construction of the local by-pass and the Hammersmith flyover, which allows the tired racegoer a chance of getting home to London in the evening at a reasonable hour.’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Bankers’ genes were Wall St. genes, especially in the big cities. If the banks were conservative just now [1955], it was because bankers still awoke in the middle of the night, trembling and sweaty with thoughts of the Crash. But in time a new generation would take over: ambitious, overcompetitive young men to whom 1929 wuold be merely a date on a page; such men would sever the roots of memory as if with an ax, not realizing that those tendrils were also the rudder cables.’ – Michael M. Thomas, The Ropespinner Conspiracy, 1987

Archive fever

2011-08-28T11:45:00.003+01:00

I’ve been down in London looking at archives: leafing through old copies of the TV Times and the Orkney Herald in the soon-to-be-defunct British Newspaper Library at Colindale; scrolling through the Radio Times on microfilm in Humanities 2 at the British library at St Pancras; looking at government files about the mounting of television masts in the National Archives at Kew. It’s a living.

In her book, Dust, the historian Carolyn Steedman uses a term borrowed from Jacques Derrida to describe the sensation that scholars sometimes feel when visiting archives: ‘Archive Fever’. Since the nineteenth century, she writes, a visit to an archive has been regarded as ‘a foundational and paradigmatic activity of historians’. She quotes the French Romanticist Jules Michelet’s phrase about the ‘dust of the dead’ which he believed he inhaled while in the archive. Archives really are dirty and dusty as the elderly paper disintegrates – at Colindale you can see bits of old newspaper all over the floor by the reading desks. I hope the cleaners are appropriately remunerated. When reading Michelet for the first time, Steedman understood ‘history-writing in generic terms, as a form of magical realism, with the historian’s contribution not the mountains that move, the girls that fly, the rivers that run backwards, but the everyday and fantastic act of making the dead walk and talk … Then there is romance in another meaning, in an earlier sense, as in chivalric romance, as in the sense of the quest: endurance of all kinds of trial and tribulation, in pursuit of some goal or grail.’ Agreed: I mean the National Archives at Kew are such a long way away, almost right at the end of the District Line, for goodness sake.

Steedman is sceptical about this ‘cult of the archive’ because it suggests some material, graspable world which once existed but can be recaptured, when actually an archive contains only the most fragmentary record of what happened in the past. Archive Fever, Steedman writes, is a kind of desire: ‘the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings’. The archive inspires ‘a Freudian romance, of finding all the lost things and names, whatever they may be: things gone astray, mislaid, forgotten, wasted.’ In fact, she argues, ‘nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities.’

And yet … the lovely, efficient way the files arrive by magic in your own little locker half an hour after you have ordered them by computer. The gentle sound of thousands of fingers tapping on laptop keyboards. The race against time to get through one last file before they kick you out at the absurdly early hour of 4.45. I have suffered from my own mild form of archive fever. And then I look at my notes and realise that most of the stuff I’m interested in – ‘the stupid little tragedies of those clipped and limited lives’ (H.G. Wells) – doesn’t end up in archives. And the fever vanishes as quickly as it arrived.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Tonight, the long-awaited leaders’ debate. The bland leading the bland. After about 30 minutes I found myself losing consciousness and went upstairs to watch a BBC2 documentary about the men who scratch a living on the huge garbage dump in Lagos. Uplifting, moving, humbling. Not a trace of self-pity. Their dignity, wit, optimism, sense of solidarity and community causing them to soar above their awful circumstances, putting to shame those of us leading what, to the scavengers of Lagos, must be lives of unimaginable comfort, wallowing in our tabloid-induced misery.’ - Chris Mullin, Thursday 15 April 2010, Decline & Fall: Diaries 2005-2010.

The queue at the bank

2011-08-14T17:34:00.003+01:00

A scene from modern British life. I am in the queue at the bank on Saturday, waiting to pay in a cheque. The queue is long, because there are only a few cashiers and this is now the only branch within a radius of several miles that is open. An elderly man, I would guess in his 80s, pulling a shopping trolley on wheels behind him, goes up to the cashier. He has received a new credit card in the post and wants to know what to do with the old one. Should he bring it in to the bank? No, he should just cut it up and throw it away. He is confused and worried that not knowing which card to use will mean that he will not be able to pay off his credit card bill, which he has also brought with him. A long, unproductive conversation ensues, conducted at high volume because he is deaf and cannot hear the cashier, but he remains polite throughout. The woman cashier keeps telling him to ring up the number on his bill, but he says he can't use the phone because he is deaf.

This man, who came to adulthood before most people had bank accounts, probably has no need of a credit card – he could just as easily manage with a debit card and a cheque book – but he has presumably been sold it as an easy way of managing his everyday financial transactions. And it has brought him only anxiety that he will be left in debt.

Credit cards, cashpoints and the internet have almost removed the necessity for high street banks to deal with their customers in person. Queueless services mean that they can focus on valued clientele and retreat from any obligation to the wider community. Online accounts allow them to cream-skim their wealthiest clients and offer them preferential rates. As smaller bank branches close, queuing up to be served by a cashier is now an old-fashioned way of getting hold of money – although I notice that there is also an alternative queue in the bank for ‘premier customers’.

The sad thing is that everyone within earshot, including the people in the queue, is laughing quietly at this elderly man. Why is he talking so loudly? How can he have got through life without understanding the basics of how banking works? The cashier is still laughing when I arrive at her till to pay in my cheque. She explains that the money will be in my account by next Friday. For six days, in other words, my money will cease to exist, except perhaps in the form of virtual chips on the international money markets.

I share the old man’s incomprehension at this way of ordering things.

A piece I did on birdwatching a while back is now on that excellent website, Caught by the River: http://caughtbytheriver.net/2011/08/off-piste-the-birdman-of-academia/

Mundane quote for the day: ‘How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with the distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless be speech, and a kind of undefined promise to communicate, guaranteed by the incessant coming and going of solitary words.’ – Maurice Blanchot

Writing at the terminal

2011-08-06T12:50:00.002+01:00

You may have read that the novelist Tony Parsons is currently employed as writer-in-residence at Heathrow Airport, following the successful residency of Alain de Botton a couple of years ago. There is a piece in today’s Guardian suggesting that this scheme for installing writers in everyday spaces could be rolled out nationally, starting with J.K. Rowling in the endangered Preston Bus Station (http://t.co/rNzKCUW). I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of people remaining sedentary in places of transit, and my book On Roads included several of these characters, including the couple who lived for 22 years, on and off, in a Travelodge overlooking the A1. John Wain foresaw all of this in his unjustly neglected novel The Smaller Sky, which is about a middle-aged scientist, Arthur Geary, who decides to live his whole life underneath the glass canopy of Paddington Station, where he finds solace and ‘perfect anonymity’.

In his recent documentary series, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis tells the story of Bill Hamilton, a brilliant but eccentric evolutionary biologist who thought that all human behaviour could be explained genetically. As Curtis explained it, Hamilton would sit for hours on the platforms of Waterloo Station, looking at the commuters, trying to figure out the secrets of human behaviour as an entomologist might examine the movements of ants. I think Curtis meant to suggest this was how deranged Hamilton had become, a judgment which, as a student of the everyday, I naturally flinched at. Whether or not people behave like ants, I am sure you could discover a lot from spending time in a commuter station and watching closely the patterns of lovers kissing and parting, and people dashing for the train or anxiously peering at the annunciator boards or just looking for the toilets.

According to Hamilton’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the truth may be more prosaic. Hamilton was not looking for the secrets of life but for somewhere to work. He ‘found it difficult to interest his fellow biologists in his work, and to get it published. He had failed to interest any potential PhD supervisors in the basic problem. They seem to have feared that it had something to do with eugenics. He did the work alone—in libraries, in his bed-sitting room, even on the platform of Waterloo railway station. He had no desk in a university department.’

Hamilton later wrote of his time at University College London: ‘I never had a desk there nor was ever invited to give any presentation to explain my work or my occasional presence to others. Most of the time I was extremely lonely. Sometimes I came to dislike my bed-sitting room so much that I would go to Waterloo Station, where I continued reading or trying to write out a [mathematical] model sitting on the benches among waiting passengers in the main hall.’

I am a fan of Curtis, by my way, but my ‘leap in logic’ warning light usually comes on about halfway through his brilliant documentaries, which I think of as works of art rather than argument … which is why I like them.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of doom.’ - Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs*

*Thanks to Marc Hudson for sending me this quote. His own rather excellent blog is worth a good look at http://dwighttowers.wordpress.com

Lighthouse

2011-07-24T21:07:00.002+01:00

I’ve recently been introduced to the work of a brilliant writer and oral historian, the late Tony Parker. His best known work is probably The People of Providence, about the inhabitants of a London slab and tower block housing estate in the early eighties. But my favourite book of his is Lighthouse, about the Trinity House lighthouse keepers, partly because when I was quite small I briefly harboured an ambition to be one. (It’s a good job I never acted on it; most of the lighthouses are now automatic.) The first thing you learn is that lighthouse keepers never use the word ‘lighthouse’. They say ‘lights’ and divide them into three types: land lights, which are on the mainland with living quarters nearby, rock lights and tower lights. Tower lights are the most isolated and the most dreaded, without even a bit of rock to walk around on and get away from your fellow keepers for a bit.

Lighthouse keeping is a somewhat melancholy profession, partly because promotion is not on merit – it is difficult to outshine your colleagues in job performance, after all - but on vacancies or ‘dead men’s shoes’. There is little to do on a light except linger over meals and make ships in bottles.

The lighthouse keepers are often articulate about their strange, lonely lives:

‘Somehow you’re the only person left in the world, everyone else has disappeared; there aren’t any other people anywhere, no one else alive but you … Sitting on your own looking out of a lighthouse window; it’s a funny sort of existence.’

‘The first day or two on land it hurt you to walk even half a mile on the flat; it was like someone had been kicking at the back of your knees, because all your leg muscles was used to was going up and down the stairs.’

‘Sometimes when I was on middle watch in the middle of the night I used to switch on the radio transmitter and sit and listen to ships talking to one another, just so I could hear the sound of people’s voices.’

There is also a cautionary tale for authors. Parker asked one keeper, Barry, what he thought of a Margaret Drabble novel he was reading: ‘He struggled, opened the sitting room window and threw it out into the sea.’

Now that is what I call a bad review.

The name badge people

2011-07-20T20:37:00.002+01:00

At this time of year, as the students migrate during the dry season, our little patch of Liverpudlian savannah is invaded by a tribe I call ‘the name badge people’. If one were drawing up what zoologists call an ethogram, a careful list of every type of action an animal makes, one would immediately note that they all wear name badges on their chests and that their other distinguishing traits are a craning of the neck and puzzled look as they search for the toilets.

They have come for a conference. Across the world, the planning and hosting of conferences has become a lucrative branch of corporate hospitality, and universities have muscled in on this business, with mints, biscuits, notepads and pens laid on like tea-making facilities in hotel rooms. I wonder if the market in easel pads and flip charts is seasonal to accommodate these yearly arrivals.

Interestingly, the name badge people generally gather together in a group size no bigger than that of a traditional tribe. In the mid-1990s, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar developed a much-discussed theory of gossip. Beginning with the observation that monkeys groom each other to consolidate alliances and hierarchies, Dunbar argued that gossip evolved as a sort of ‘vocal grooming,’ suitable for the larger groups, say 150 people, in which humans live. Perhaps the conference as social practice is also a form of vocal grooming.

In Alan Bennett’s 1988 documentary Dinner at Noon, in which he stays at the Crown Hotel in Harrogate, he encounters several of these away days and conferences. ‘Oddly touching I find these middle aged schoolboys,’ he says in the voiceover, ‘still wanting to learn, still convinced they can do it better, wives left at home who they’ll go up and phone later, to tell them how well their group did in the test.’ And in his memoir The Gatekeeper, Terry Eagleton writes, perhaps less generously: ‘Conferences are liturgical celebrations, affirmations of solidarity, symbolic spaces for those who speak a language (whether of socialism or orthodontics) unintelligible to most of their fellow-humans, and who therefore need from time to time to relax with those of their kind, as a cross-dresser might feel the gathering urge to withdraw from the world of the bank or bakery and ease into a pair of corsets.’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘There is an innocence, an unworldliness about most sociological writing which can be its greatest charm. With the possible exception of public relations, I can think of no field of cultural activity in which the expert seems to start off with so much less information than the ordinary citizen. This island is now full of voices announcing with an air of discovery that people do football pools and watch television and go dancing … The result of these gestures torwards objectivity is often that he begins to sound like a Martian – dazed by so much novelty, moving on from one topic to the next just when he seems about to say something that might interest a human being.’ - Kingsley Amis, ‘Martians bearing bursaries’, 1962

We the undersigned

2011-07-17T14:00:00.001+01:00

One of the proliferating phenomena of our times is the online petition. If Mass Observation were still around today, no doubt it would be examining these calls to arms in its attempt to draw up what it once called ‘weather maps of public feeling’. On the other hand, the ease with which these petitions can be raised, seconded and signed should perhaps caution us against reading into them a definitive articulation of the popular psyche. The following are examples of rejected petitions on the No 10 website.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to …

Instruct the relevant Minister to block the Halifax television adverts

GET A PRIMARK IN BLETCHLEY

Allow Colette Newton to remain on our table at work and not be moved to GN

Please stop the redistribution of the Yellow Pages

Promote potatos as a super carb

Facilitate the BBC in gaining legal permission to allow people to listen again to Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4’s website

Persuade Graham Coxon to rejoin Blur

Stop Neil Bamford from growing his hair any longer

Change ‘Holloway Road’ of North London to ‘Chuck Norris Road’

Make it illegal to pick your nose in public

Fight for British Milk!

Force William Gilbert to sell his Land Rovers or stop going on about them

Show support for the British home improvements industry by repainting the door of 10 Downing Street in a new colour every spring

Make cheese available free of charge

Offer a Knighthood to Mr. Gareth Hesketh

Wear a straw boater during Prime Minister’s Questions

Bring Back Discovery Mexican Sauce

Boil RMT Leader Bob Crow down for soap, in order that he may be of use to someone

Encourage Andrew’s Dad to grow back his moustache

Have a Neighbours omnibus on Sundays for all to enjoy

Do something about Bonsai kittens

Read the book ‘Shrub’

Supply the visually impaired with Guide Badgers

On my to-do list

2011-07-14T18:03:00.001+01:00

There is a nice line in Shrek: The Musical (no of course I haven’t been to see it; I read a review): Princess Fiona asks Shrek if he has killed the fire-breathing dragon yet and he replies evasively, ‘It’s on my to-do list’. I wonder when this phrase achieved currency? According to David Shields’s book Reality Hunger, the earliest forms of writing were lists. Plutarch sometimes arranged his essays into what we would today call ‘bullet points’ – the origin of which term comes, I think, from the US army, who were one of the first users of the overhead projector.

However, the to-do list must be of recent vintage, a way of giving a comforting sense of order and an illusion of completedness to our quotidian routines. In an essay, ‘Programming and play’, in Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham’s edited book, The Art of the Project, Dominique Rabaté muses on ‘this obsessional trait, this tendency to transform what has to be done into an injunction addressed to oneself’. She suggests that it is ‘a minimal device whereby we work to allay our anxiety over the future, considered as time waiting to be filled. But what a pleasure it can be when, finally, you can draw a line through one of your listed items.’

A word of warning: anyone who fobs you off with the words ‘it’s on my to-do list’ is, in my experience, an incorrigible timewaster and/or bullshitter.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘All this technology around – and yet they can’t get the perforations to match in two-ply toilet paper.’ – D.J. Enright

Twilight of the tea trolley

2011-07-12T18:19:00.002+01:00

This piece by me was in Saturday's Guardian.

Here is something to make you wonder where the years went. The first episode of the BBC sitcom, The Office, went out ten years ago, on 9 July 2001. Screened on a midsummer Monday evening and sandwiched between repeats of The Fast Show and Have I Got Old News for You, it was launched with no great fanfare and attracted just 1.4m viewers in each of its first three weeks. As Ben Walters points out in his British Film Institute book about the sitcom, only one other new BBC2 programme scored lower in that year’s Audience Appreciation index: women’s bowls. The Office was a takeoff of the then ubiquitous formula of the docusoap and many viewers did not realise it was a comedy. The soon-to-be BBC Chairman, Gavyn Davies, was an immediate fan but his wife, Sue Nye, who ran the office of the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, initially thought it was a documentary.

Nowadays, of course, that downbeat, understated style is the industry standard and the “fourth wall” sitcom, performed in front of a live audience like a play on a proscenium stage, seems painfully old fashioned, except when it is being affectionately pastiched, such as in Miranda. But in 2001 people needed to be taught that The Office was funny. “We are living in a new golden age, but this time it is the golden age of a much colder, cynical and more cliqueish kind of entertainment,” wrote Graham McCann, the biographer of Morecambe and Wise, in the Financial Times. “For every viewer who savours each awkwardly tender exchange between Tim and Dawn, and laughs aloud at the sheer awfulness of David Brent, there are several more who shake their heads and protest: ‘I don’t get it.’” We used to laugh at sitcom characters on the understanding that nothing really awful would happen to them. The Office tricked viewers into letting down their guard, and laughing at characters who turned out to be rather vulnerable and tragic. That was something new.

In televisual terms, then, 2001 is a long time ago; in the real world of the office, though, nothing much has changed. Although the computers look a bit ancient, that open-plan office in Slough still looks eerily familiar. And that is what The Office was partly about: the gap between the managerialist rhetoric of modernisation and change, in which employees had to sit through suffocatingly well-meaning “training days” and identify “strategic goals” in their annual appraisals, and the mundane reality of typing away at a workstation in an anonymous out of town office park and then suddenly noticing that ten years have gone by.

In fact, I seem to remember that it was about a decade ago that we were all being told that new technology was turning the idea of being chained to our desks from nine to five into an anachronism. Adverts for laptops and 3G phones all suggested that we could avoid the daily grind by being mobile and remotely accessible. The office has long attracted these valedictories. In his non-fiction book, The Office, published in 1970, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy wrote that it was “a large squat nanny, waiting comfortably there to gently fuss me with all the details of her tiny, cosy world”. For Gathorne-Hardy, this twilight world of tea trolleys and loyal retainers seemed like the last refuge of a backward-looking nation in gentle decline. But the office was still there in 2001, and it is still there now.

So yes, a decade on, they are all still working in that dilapidated tower block on the Slough Trading Estate. The Wernham Hogg paper merchants has ridden out the recession because that is another thing that was supposed to happen and never did: the paperless office. As the need to keep employees on message has created an avalanche of ritualistic emails and incantatory memos, the demand for paper has soared. Gareth has been promoted to regional manager and regularly watches The Apprentice for tips on business leadership. David Brent still hangs around, doing bad impressions of Michael McIntyre, even though he was sacked years ago. And Tim is still talking about leaving to study psychology at university, but the £9000 fees have put him off. Fortunately, he is now married to Dawn and they have found love and happiness away from the office.

I'll remember Aigburth

2011-07-10T16:17:00.002+01:00

I went to the last one-day international between England and Sri Lanka at Old Trafford yesterday with my dad. Watching cricket is as much a ritual as playing the game itself. I never cease to marvel at the extent to which groups of men, despite having paid forty pounds each for a ticket and over the odds for countless pints of inferior lager with a fake German name, will spend the entire day doing almost anything – playing bongos, making towers out of empty plastic beer glasses, screaming at Robbie Savage in the executive boxes to try to get him to wave – rather than watch the unfolding spectacle in front of them. I am sure this is not what C.L.R. James meant when he famously said, ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’

I think my two favourite books about cricket are Mike Marqusee’s Anyone But England and one I have just read, Duncan Hamilton’s A Last English Summer. Marqusee’s has a memorable description of how, as an expat American attending his first cricket match, he became entranced by the strange, pointless beauty of the changing field arrangements at the end of an over. Hamilton’s is a journey around the cricket season in the Ashes summer of 2009 (inspired by Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Best Loved Game which does the same for the 1978 season) covering everything from the Lords test to the Lancashire League. I was pleased to see that there is a chapter entitled ‘Yes, I’ll remember Aigburth’ – where I live – about Hamilton’s visit to Liverpool Cricket Club when Andrew Flintoff was appearing for Lancashire to prove his fitness to the England selectors, and where ‘the sun appears briefly, as if wanting to see for itself whether Flintoff is fit’. Hamilton, whom I knew previously from his brilliant biography of Brian Clough, has a lovely turn of phrase, from his account of Leary Constantine ‘hold[ing] the shot, as though posing for a sculptor who is about to strike his chisel against a huge fresh block of stone and free the shape concealed within it’ to his description of ‘the gasometer [at the Oval], rising and falling like a concertina’.

Hamilton also mentions a 1953 film, The Final Test, scripted by Terence Rattigan, in which one of the characters, a poet-cum-playwright played by Robert Morley, says, ‘Of course it’s frightfully dull. That’s the whole point. Any game can be exciting … the measure of the vast superiority of cricket over any other game is that it steadfastly refuses to cater for this boring craving for excitement. To go to cricket to be thrilled is as stupid as to go to a Chekhov play in search of melodrama.’

Instant good taste

2011-07-03T16:12:00.001+01:00

I was sorry to hear about the demise of Habitat, another example of the current carnage on the High Street that has also consumed Thornton’s and TJ Hughes. I loved the Habitat store in Deansgate, Manchester, when I was a child, with its primary colours, lower-case logos and Scandinavian blond-woods. Terence Conran opened the first Habitat store on the Fulham Road in South Kensington in May 1964. The day before its opening, a Sunday Times article entitled ‘What the smart chicks are buying’ publicised ‘a swinging shop called Habitat’ which would present ‘the pick of the furnishing pops under one roof’ and ‘make shopping for the home an impulsive, gay affair’. Habitat later branched out into the provinces and a flourishing mail-order business, but in the 1960s it was largely a London phenomenon, with other branches opening in Tottenham Court Road (1966), Kingston (1967) and Bromley (1968).

Conran recognized that the now servantless middle classes wanted elegant but low-maintenance housewares: cutlery that did not need endless polishing; tables that looked good without tablecloths; earthenware dishes that went straight from the oven to the dinner table; and new cooking utensils like the Wok which allowed meals to be prepared in minutes. One of Habitat’s bestselling items in the 1960s was the duvet, a continental innovation which ended the tedious routine of bedmaking with underblankets and top sheets. Other products, like the Boule Japonaise or spherical paper lampshade introduced in the mid-1960s, were statements of ‘conspicuous thrift,’ cheap but stylish items for young couples on a limited budget.

Habitat sold a complete range for the home, from salt mills to sofas, with the stores arranged in mock living rooms or kitchens to show how items could be combined to produce a ‘look’. The store’s first promotional brochure claimed that its ‘pre-selected shopping programme’ offered ‘instant good taste … for switched-on people’. This was important because its customers were drawn not only from the established middle classes but also from interlopers who were the first in their families to receive a university education and enter the professions. If urban gentrifiers filled their new homes with Habitat goods, they could avoid any obvious lapses of taste. Habitat combined a domesticated modernism (scooped-out eggshell chairs, modular Olga shelving, Magistretti tables) with rustic authenticity (pine dressers, iron bedsteads, quarry tiles). Its synthesis of urban minimalism and pastoral chic, ‘bang on the trend for cosy countrified living,’ allowed the new middle classes to live in the modern city while remaining disengaged from its seamier aspects. Like David’s recreation of Mediterranean cuisine in metropolitan kitchens, Habitat offered a kind of domesticated version of the ‘urban village’. The Habitat style had its roots in the work of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, with their emphasis on simplicity, naturalness and ‘fitness to purpose’. Unlike Morris, however, Conran embraced rather than denied the contradictions inherent in mass-marketing such a style at middle-class urbanites.

In London as elsewhere, gentrifiers often defined themselves in relation to other members of the middle classes who had not made the same life choices. In particular, they embraced the city as an edgy, cosmopolitan alternative to the supposed conformity and homogeneity of the suburbs. Habitat exploited this ethos, promoting itself as classless and egalitarian in a way that was implicitly anti-suburban, part of an argument between different sections of the middle classes over what constituted the good life. Habitat’s youngish customers liked the conspicuous absence of the furniture and materials they would have associated with their parents: coffee tables with splayed legs, cocktail cabinets, standard lamps, Blue Willow china, moquette and linoleum. They could use the distancing effects of time and geography to ‘slum it’ with the southern European peasantry or the below-stairs classes of the Victorian era, without actually losing their middle-class identities. While the store was theoretically open to all in the sense that its products were relatively cheap, it was clearly aimed at the educated, urban middle class. With great commercial acumen, Conran tied this lifestyle revolution to a general aura of social progressivism and ethical consumerism. Habitat’s left-liberal customers could embrace the marketplace without feeling they had ‘sold out’.

The Catechism of Cliché

2011-07-02T15:12:00.000+01:00

Although I have quoted from its ‘Not Many Dead’ column, I hadn’t actually read the Oldie magazine in full until this week. It’s hard to dislike a publication which has a non-cryptic ‘Moron crossword’, adverts that begin ‘Does sitting make your back ache?’ and ‘After 5 years of suffering … I now have no pain or swelling in my legs’, and a competition to win a mobility scooter. I learn, by the way, that there are four different types of mobility scooter: UltraGlide, SuperGlide, EasyGlide and MicroGlide. Caveat Emptor …

The Oldie also has a ‘Cliché Corner’ which is clearly a homage to the Catechism of Cliché, a regular feature of the column by Myles na gCopaleen, alias Flann O’Brien, in the Irish Times. The Catechism of Cliché, based of course on the question and answer format of the Catholic Catechism, was ‘a unique compendium of all that is nauseating in contemporary writing. Compiled without regard to expense or the feelings of the public. A harrowing survey of sub-literature and all that is pseudo, mal-dicted and calloused in the underworld of print.’ Example: Is a man ever hurt in a motor smash? NO. HE SUSTAINS AN INJURY. Does such a man ever die from his injuries? NO. HE SUCCUMBS TO THEM. etc. etc. The Oldie’s take on this in July’s edition is topical:

What season is now in prospect?
A SUMMER OF DISCONTENT.
How are we to characterise Trade Union leaders?
THEY ARE ANTIDILUVIAN.
And what are the walkouts designed to do?
TO CAUSE MAXIMUM DISRUPTION.
To what will the London Underground system be brought by threatened strikes?
A GRINDING HALT.
What will follow a strike by schoolteachers?
A. CHAOS FOR PARENTS;
B. MAYHEM.
And what are ministers going to put in place?
RIGOROUS CONTINGENCY PLANS.
What will be inflicted on the public?
REAL MISERY.
How is the public to be characterised?
LONG-SUFFERING.
And how will the country be affected?
IT WILL BE HELD TO RANSOM.

Indeed, it is safe to say that if there is ever a Chilcot inquiry into what Martin Amis called the war against cliché, the journalists and columnists of the summer of discontent will be completely exonerated.

The man in the bowler hat

2011-06-25T21:17:00.003+01:00

Before this blog started talking about the everyday, the avant-garde got there first. Surrealism and Dada juxtaposed random elements of daily life in the hope of making surprising connections, taking their inspiration from the Comte de Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldorer (1869): ‘As beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.’ They produced collages out of the ordinary scraps of urban life such as bus tickets, torn newspapers, bits of clothing and bottle-tops; transposed commonplace objects such as bowler hats or pipes into unfamiliar surroundings; read aloud from the telephone directory; and created poems by cutting out and reassembling words from newspapers, a practice continued today in the magnetic poetry that adorns a million kitchen surfaces.

I have just got back from the Magritte exhibition at the Liverpool Tate. One of the paintings on display I have always loved: that rainfall of bowler hatted commuters otherwise known as Golconda. In his book, The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, Fred Miller Robinson reveals that the bowler hat has not always served as a synecdoche for the respectable commuter. In the nineteenth century, the bowler was ‘the male (and sometimes female) headgear of motion and mobility, unfixed as to region, occupation, class, or gender. It was as fashionable among costermongers as among gentry, among cabdrivers as among bankers.’

The shift seems to have come in the first half of the last century, when Magritte was producing his series of bowler hatted themed paintings. W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice refer in Letters from Iceland to ‘the bowler hat who straphangs in the tube’. And in a chapter of his 1946 book The English Way, titled ‘Class Feeling and Bowler Hats’, Pierre Maillaud reflects on Sean O’Faolain’s remark that ‘between England and Revolution there will always stand an army of bowler hats’. After the Second World War, Miller Robinson writes, the bowler was worn almost exclusively by men in the City of London, or by London men who wished others to think they were in banking or trade ‘at the heart of things British’.

In the surprisingly late date of 1962, Anthony Sampson wrote that in the inner square of the city nearly everyone still wore a dark suit and bowler and carried an umbrella. ‘Every lunch time, the taxis and government Humbers draw up outside the palazzi of Pall Mall, and bowlers and umbrellas disappear through the great stone doorways, acknowledged by reverent porters,’ he writes about London clubland. ‘Through the big windows you see men reading The Times, hailing each other, exchanging surreptitious conversation with special clubman’s gestures – the pat on the shoulder, the grip on the forearm, the steering from the back.’

In my lifetime, the bowler hat hardened into cliché in the form of comedy sketches and adverts for the Bradford and Bingley building society. Perhaps bankers could try wearing them again to adopt an air of patrician respectability. Or maybe it is too late for that.

Despite my interest in bowler hats, I managed to resist the temptation to buy the bowler hat ceiling light in the Liverpool Tate gift shop, priced at £175.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Hancock’s moroseness was the very content of his humour – a humour based on the boredom and exasperation of a man who hated being ordinary. Sellers’ characters, intead of slumping and moaning, yawning and grunting, to get laughs, are in hyper-manic flight from the mundane.’ – Roger Lewis, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

Still no news

2011-06-20T20:00:00.003+01:00

I have blogged before about Not Many Dead, the column in the Oldie magazine which demonstrates conclusively that much of what finds its way into our newspapers is not in fact news at all but entirely banal and inconsequential. Since then, just for my own amusement, I’ve been collating some more examples of these non-news stories. They are not difficult to find. Most of the stories below are taken just from the last few days.

It should have been the headlines viewers were focusing on but last night all eyes were actually on newsreader Fiona Bruce’s glasses. The 47-year-old was sporting a new pair of spectacles as she read the 6pm bulletin on BBC1. Miss Bruce usually wears contact lenses when she is presenting programming but occasionally wears glasses to rest her eyes. But yesterday she was forced to wear them because she has a small eye infection, preventing her from wearing lenses or any make-up around her eyes. – Daily Mail

The prime minister has told the BBC that Larry the cat has caught three mice since he moved into Number 10. The four-year-old tabby was recruited in February after a rat was spotted in Downing Street. Speaking to Radio 2's Steve Wright, David Cameron said he was ‘a good mouser’ and was ‘doing well’. - BBC News website

Nicholas Cole, owner of the Scent with Love florists discovered a duck in residence in one of the hanging baskets outside his shop on Greevegate on Thursday morning. Since then, five eggs have been laid in the basket and there could be many more. - Lynn News

Emma Watson may be the new face of beauty and skincare giant Lancome and hailed as the ‘icon of her generation’. But the actress showed she wasn’t immune to the irritations faced by most other 20-year-olds. The star suffered an untimely break-out of spots only a few days after it was announced that she is taking over from Julia Roberts as the face of Lancome. – Daily Mail

A waxwork of former England and Newcastle United striker Alan Shearer has been unveiled. The figure, which took four months to make, is on show at Madame Tussauds in Blackpool. Shearer’s figure will stand in the ‘locker room’ with models of David Beckham and Wayne Rooney … Experts assessed Shearer’s hair, eyes and skin colour, studied pictures and watched videos to get to know a little bit more about his character. – BBC News website

‘I have been targeted by a very tiresome bloggerist who keeps altering my biog on wikipedia,’ tweets Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. ‘My wife is not called Sue, we did not meet in the frozen fish section of Cheam Sainsburys and I have never owned a lettuce farm.’ – Telegraph blogs

Yesterday's papers

2011-06-18T11:24:00.001+01:00

'Who want’s yesterday’s papers? Nobody in the world’, sang the Rolling Stones. Well, actually, the British Library is beginning to digitise millions of pages of old newspapers held at the newspaper library at Colindale and making them available online from this summer onwards. At present they are just nineteenth century newspapers but they want to make more recent ones available, although James Murdoch isn’t very happy about that. As a cultural historian dealing with the history of ephemera I spend a lot of time reading old newspapers, and am very familiar with the journey up the northern line to Colindale, with its special atmosphere honed out of the feel and smell of crumbling old paper and ink and the sound of frantic spooling through hundreds of pages of the Orkney Herald in the Microfilm room. There is something slightly subversive about perusing old newspapers because they are not meant to be read after their sell-by date. The French word ‘journal’ sums it up: a newspaper is ‘of the day’. ‘Quotidien’ also appears a lot on newspaper mastheads in France – a word that literally means to mark time. And the Greek word for newspaper, I learnt from a recent article by Graham Swift in the Guardian, is ephemeritha. Like the ephemeron fly, the newspaper is meant to die on the day it is born.

In his new book, Paraphernalia, the academic and cultural critic Steven Connor – whom I have quoted from before on these pages - writes that ‘newspapers are an emblem of the impermanence of writing, the subordination of writing to time. Time pulps the differentiality of newspapers – pro-government, anti-government, Establishment, sporting, samizdat, quality, tabloid – into pure indifference.’ Connor offers an intriguing aside on the history of using newspaper for bottom-wiping. He notes that the first proprietary lavatory paper in the mid-nineteenth century ‘made much of fact that printer’s ink in newspapers, along with traces of vitriol, lime and potash, was likely to cause or aggravate piles’.

Looking through old newspapers is a slightly melancholic activity. It has given me a particular perspective, a certain scepticism about collective manias and gadarene thinking, because there always seems to be another piece of groupthink along in a minute. You realise there is nothing new under the sun, almost everything is quickly erased from collective memory and lots of even quite famous people – TV presenters, writers, politicians, columnists - are forgotten as though they had never been. All that hot air you see on the newspaper comment sites: it will disappear like smoke. And even if is archived by the British Library, the chances are that no one will read it ever again.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The newspaper, incapable of seizing the insignificance of the everyday, is only able to render its value apprehensible by declaring it sensational. Incapable of following the movement of the everyday insofar as it is inapparent, the newspaper seizes upon it in the dramatic form of a trial.’ – Maurice Blanchot

Cut grass lies frail

2011-06-13T20:16:00.003+01:00

I had some kind comments about the lawns piece, although several people have asked me if the poetry of lawnmowing is quite as capacious a subgenre of English literature as I suggested or if I was exercising poetic licence. Well, apart from Douglas Dunn’s poem on Terry Street that has already appeared on these pages, and the examples provided by the commenters on the previous post that I didn’t know about, there is MacNeice:

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down
Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,
I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us
Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Larkin once wrote of McNeice in the New Statesman: ‘When we were young … his poetry was the poetry of everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting. In addition he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves and cigarette stubs: he could have written the words of “These Foolish Things”. We were grateful to him for having found a place in poetry for these properties.’

And then of course there is Betjeman:

From out the Queen’s Highcliffe for weeks at a stretch
I watched how the mower evaded the vetch,
So that over the putting-course rashes were seen
Of pink and of yellow among the burnt green.

Andrew Motion has written a moving poem, ‘The Mower’, about his father, who seems to have been like Larkin in that he felt the mowing had to be done, and would manicure the lawn into ‘those trim swipes and hover sweeps’, but did it grudgingly.

Larkin really does write about mowing the lawn all the way through his letters. To Robert Conquest he wrote: ‘I've spent the weekend slaving away in my sodding garden, mowing and scratching up weeds. Anything that looks bright and positive I take to be a weed.’ Mowing the lawn doesn’t appear much in the recent Letters to Monica, however, because he only acquired a lawnmower shortly after buying his first house in 1974, when he had more or less stopped writing to his sometime companion, Monica Jones. Ironically, she inherited his lawnmower, which she in turn donated to the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where Larkin was librarian.

There is, or was, a lawnmower museum somewhere. Raphael Samuel cites it in Theatres of Memory as an example of the vernacularisation of history. No doubt it is also mentioned in that anthology of English eccentricity, Bollocks to Alton Towers.

The hiss of summer lawns

2011-06-11T13:17:00.002+01:00

A slightly longer version of a piece I did for today’s Guardian about lawns:

At the Hay Festival last week, the Gardeners’ World presenter, Carol Klein, laid into lawns, calling them “monocultures”. Klein’s is one of several recent voices to suggest that, with climate change and greater awareness of the need to save water, we may be witnessing the slow death of the British lawn. Contemplating a future of dry springs and hosepipe bans, the nation’s gardeners may wonder if, as happened during the great drought of 1976, the brown lawn will soon be seen as the sign of the true patriot.

The ecological argument against lawns has only compounded their growing unfashionability over the last few decades. Once status symbols found mainly in royal estates and university quads, they became signifiers of suffocating suburban respectability. A survey by the London Wildlife Trust this week found that lawn area in London decreased by 11% between 1998 and 2006 as homeowners replaced grass with garden sheds and paving. In gardening fashion, the rectangle of grass surrounded by rosebeds has given way to more sinuous shapes and varied planting. Meanwhile the nature writers currently enjoying a resurgence in the non-fiction lists have tended to stress the value of non-human wildness and weeds, not the human-enforced, geometric neatness of lawns. And it is true that the environmental case against lawns is unanswerable. They are the most artificial of natural landscapes, using up copious amounts of water and chemicals for the benefit of a few species of grass at the expense of all other living things, from earthworms to daisies.

And yet I would be sorry to see the end of the lawn. Like the new nature writers, I appreciate the value of wildness, but I also value the capacity of people to impose shape and meaning on the world, however meaningless this might seem to those looking in from the outside. The poetry of lawnmowing, a surprisingly capacious subgenre of English literature running from Louis MacNeice to Andrew Motion, usually hones in on the touching futility of the ritual. The great lyricist of mowing the lawn is Philip Larkin, who mentions it throughout his poems and letters. “Have bought a new lawnmower ready for the spring offensive,” he wrote to a friend in 1981. “Must get the flame-thrower serviced, and invest in a few gallon drums of Weedol.” Larkin, it will be noted, was not afflicted with our modern anxiety about interfering with fragile ecosystems; for him, tending the lawn was biological warfare. And yet in his poem “The Mower”, he wrote movingly about accidentally killing a hedgehog with his rotary blades one June day in 1979.

Like many gardeners, Larkin moaned constantly about having to cut the grass, but never questioned the fact that he had to do it, in the same way that he complained about the tedium of library committee meetings while diligently chairing them and collecting the minutes. His ambivalent attitude to lawnmowing finds an echo in his poetry, which often suggests that everything is ephemeral and nothing ultimately means anything, but that in our fragile social conventions we find a respite from this knowledge.

Anyone who talks to a gardener with a carefully trimmed lawn will know that lawn care is a rich subculture full of social expectation and shared knowledge, from the relative merits of cylinder and rotary mowers to the dangers of close cropping. Like a lot of things in life in which we invest our physical and emotional labour, keeping a lawn tidy is ultimately pointless. The grass carries on growing, and the lawnmower eventually packs up, followed by its owner. If you want a vivid illustration of this, you can find Larkin’s rusty, grass-coated Victa Powerplus lawnmower (not, happily, the one that did for the hedgehog) in the Hull University library archive.

I work in an office that overlooks a large stretch of lawn. Every Monday morning a man comes to mow it. No one notices him, or the lawn, and I wonder if he ever reflects on the endlessness and thanklessness of his task. I barely notice him either, except to mutter under my breath about the noise from his strimmer while I am trying to work. But I do love the smell of newly mown grass in what Larkin called “the white hours of young-leafed June”, and would not want to see a nation carpeted in artificial turf. So when he comes next Monday, I’m going to go down and thank that man - for mowing the lawn.

The address book

2011-06-04T20:30:00.001+01:00

I’ve just read Tim Harford’s new book The Address Book, which is inspired by the tendency of children to locate themselves very precisely in space through writing extended addresses in books eg Joe Moran, 14 Gladstone St, Glossop, Derbyshire, SK13 8LX, United Kingdom, Europe, The World, Interplanetary Space, The Milky Way, Intergalactic Space, the Universe.

The power of the address in defining modern identity is brilliantly conveyed in the artist Tom Phillips’s ongoing work A Quest for Identity (1974-), a series of collages of envelope fronts from letters, bills and junk mail addressed or mis-addressed to Phillips’s various homes.

In recent years, the power of the address has been compounded by the addition of the postcode. Postcodes were once simply alphanumeric devices to help with the mechanical sorting of mail, assigned using an arbitrary combination of geographical location, alphabetical order and sorting office pragmatism. When the Royal Mail introduced the postcode system throughout Britain between 1959 and 1974, the well-to-do did not like having postcodes at all, in the same way that they traditionally preferred to have house names rather than numbers. As Nancy Mitford advised them in Noblesse Oblige (1956), the ideal upper-class address was simply a place-name, a describer and a county: ‘Shirwell Hall, Salop’.

It was the pioneering gentrifiers of the 1960s, doing up rundown Georgian terraces on the wild north London frontier, who first saw the power of the postcode as a way of marking upward mobility. Not for nothing was Alan Bennett’s 1966 TV satire about Camden’s media darlings called ‘Life and Times in NW1’, a title later borrowed by Mark Boxer for his Listener cartoon strip. In Soft City (1974), Jonathan Raban noted that London postcodes were becoming like talismans, ‘endowed with curiously absolutist values’ and ‘magical guarantees of a certain kind of identity’. In more recent years, the snob value of postcodes has increased as they are now a crucial piece of actuarial shorthand, used at no cost to themselves by banks, insurers and retailers to classify potential customers and target services.

Postcodes are ambiguous not just because they arbitrarily overlap the more natural divisions of districts and neighbourhoods, but because they are interpreted crudely. Most estate agents and housebuyers concentrate on the outward code (the first part, which denotes the general area) and ignore the inward code (the second part, separated by a space, which pinpoints the specific street). The latter code would be a much more accurate indicator of class and status in the complex demography of London neighbourhoods.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day to day living that wears you out.’ – Anton Chekhov

British television archive

2011-05-28T11:54:00.003+01:00

While writing a book about television, I’ve been collecting complete programmes from the history of British TV that I’ve found on YouTube, going back to 1953, and putting them on my playlist. It occurred to me that this archive of British television might be of interest to others. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL88962A63DD2D94D7&feature=mh_lolz

I’m not sure what the copyright status is on some of these programmes but since I’m just collating what other people have uploaded I assume it’s OK. There is plenty of banal stuff, obviously – Blankety Blank, the first episode of Countdown etc. – mixed with some little gems, from Ripping Yarns to John Betjeman’s Metro-land.

I’ll probably be adding to it as I go along, so keep checking back if you’re interested. I’ve also started a radio archive, but there’s not much on that so far.

Mundane quotes for the day: ‘The horrors of office life are soon forgotten once one has left the scene, in much the same way as summer holidays spent gazing angrily out while the rain drums against the windowpane and the clouds scud across a Chinese harbour are eclipsed, in retrospect at least, by occasional flashes of watery sun.’ - Jeremy Lewis, Kindred Spirits

‘Institutional life is only made possible, or evern tolerable, by the shared pretence that everything we do is – as, in the long run, it must be – a matter of life and death, and in the years ahead I came to find the small hierarchies of office life and the ways in which, after a holiday, the office worker had to play himself back into his part, learning once more to feign rage or delight or indignation, both moving and extremely comic.’ - Jeremy Lewis, Playing for Time

Daily life is scattered with marvels

2011-05-21T11:45:00.004+01:00

Under plain cover and with no explanatory note, I received through the post the other day the rather handsome first publications of the Pam Flett Press. Pam Flett is a pun on ‘pamphlet’ and a sort-of nod to Pam Ayres, another ‘somewhat wonky amateur lady who wished to launch her own poetry upon the world’. The Pam Flett Press seeks to expound on Michel de Certeau’s assertion that ‘daily life is scattered with marvels’.

One of its early publications is ‘Lord biro and the writing on the wall’, a meditation on the surreal graffiti that punctuates urban daily life: such as TWIGS, which existed for several years on a gantry above the M1 and merited mention on John Peel’s Radio 4 programme Home Truths; ‘The Alphabet of Brooke Shields’, which suddenly appeared in 2007 across London and was believed to be viral marketing but no one was sure what for, before it was eventually borrowed by a bunch of Bradford musicians; and the bright yellow exclamation ‘DRUNK FOOLS!’, visible from the East Midlands rail route where it colour-blended pleasingly with an adjacent field of oilseed rape.

Forthcoming editions will include ‘Waiting for a bus that never comes’, which borrows its title from geographer Doreen Massey’s suggestion that ‘this type of non-activity is what makes up much of our waking lives’; ‘Gumming up the works’, which will fantasise about ‘luminous constellations of dropped chewing gum on the street before getting stuck on the image of sticking plasters and confronting a horrible compulsion to seek out the hard stuff glued under desks or in the recesses of train carriages’; and ‘Witches' Knickers’, a disquisition ‘on the much-maligned plastic bag’.

The Pam Flett Press turns out to be the work of Joanne Lee, an artist and lecturer at Nottingham Trent University who financed the whole venture herself ‘having become tired of writing proposals rather than getting on with the work itself, and fed up with with fitting my own interests into other people’s funding agendas’. You and me both, Pam.

You can read more here:

http://web.me.com/generalistjo/Site/pam_flett_press.html

Mundane quote for the day:
‘Tramlines and slagphaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.’
– W.H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron, 1936

The fall and rise of the expert

2011-05-16T19:45:00.005+01:00

In January 2009 the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, while being interviewed on BBC radio, suddenly became angry when the interviewee mentioned a particular word. Bragg’s response is worth quoting in full:

One of the things that’s happened in the last few weeks is a total devaluation of the word ‘expert’. It is meaningless. People come on saying they’re experts and they know absolutely nothing … experts on banking who have the gall to tell us what’s going to happen in a few months or so. The word ‘expert’ should be expunged from the dictionary until it’s been cleansed and rehabilitated.

This verbal assault was clearly aimed at a particular sub-species of expert. In September 2008, the international money markets had crashed and a number of banks had failed, initiating a global recession. One of the causes of the crash was the unravelling of highly leveraged financial products - complex derivatives and securities, devised using mathematical models, which turned out to be so complicated that not even the experts were able to calculate the risks. The Queen was widely praised in the media for echoing the public mood when, opening a new building at the London School of Economics, she asked Professor Luis Garicano how this ‘awful’ financial crisis could have taken so many experts by surprise. ‘Why did nobody notice it?,’ she asked. ‘If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them?’ The greedy bankers may have been the folk devils of the credit crunch, but joining them in the rogues gallery were the financial experts, the clever fools who had departed so disastrously from common sense and forgotten that deficits and imbalances cannot be endlessly deferred …

This is the start of a long article of mine in the latest issue of Critical Quarterly on ‘The Fall and Rise of the Expert’. I’m afraid the rest of it is hidden behind a paywall, as is normally the case with academic journals. But if anyone is interested they can email me and I’ll send them a PDF.

The geographer Danny Dorling had some nice things to say about On Roads in this interview:

http://thebrowser.com/recommended/roads-by-joe-moran

Come friendly bombs

2011-05-14T12:06:00.006+01:00

In a postscript to her classic The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay compared the appeal of the ‘catastrophic tipsy chaos’ of postwar British bombsites with the ‘morbid pleasure in decay’ that the Romantic poets and painters experienced among the wrecked remains of Gothic abbeys and Greek temples.

In Christopher Woodward’s book In Ruins, I found an interesting discussion of churches bombed in the Second World War. During the blitz the art historian Kenneth Clark declared that ‘Bomb damage is in itself Picturesque’. On 15 August 1944 Clark and others, including T.S. Eliot and John Maynard Keynes, proposed that some bombed churches should be preserved in ruins, to remind future generations of ‘the sacrifice on which [their] apparent security has been built’. The campaign was elaborated in a book, Bombed Churches as War Memorials, which, Woodward writes, was ‘the last great fling of the British Picturesque, summoning the spirit of Stourheard and Stowe to soothe the trauma of high-explosive bombs. These churches would not be cold, black slag-heaps of unforgiving bitterness, as at Dresden, but garden ruins haunted by birds and soft with greenery, places that children would be thrilled to explore. Stone colonnades truncated by the blast would continue as rows of trees, and roofless crypts become sunken, sheltered gardens.’

We have our own bombed-out church here, St Luke’s, about two minutes walk from where I work, which has been a hollow shell ever since the Liverpool Blitz exactly seventy years ago. Strangely enough, I discovered recently that this church is following me on Twitter. You can follow its own tweets, should you so be inclined, at @BombedOutChurch.

There are plenty more contemporary ruins in the area where I work, which has now been rebranded the ‘creative quarter’. The patchiness of Liverpool’s recent redevelopment allows for spaces within the city where accidental survivals from the recent past are visible. Even in the centre of the city, where real estate should be most prized, there are no man’s lands blocked off with corrugated iron or wooden hoardings, and unoccupied buildings with peeling paint, shattered brickwork and rotting timber. In the sidestreets off the main shopping areas, the less visually appealing effects of regeneration are evident: masses of rubble, wire fencing and cones, and the fronts of buildings unceremoniously ripped apart. The passer-by can look inside these buildings in cross-section at the remains of ordinary lives, such as wallpaper peeling from walls, staircases ending in thin air, and the holes left by fireplaces. As Stephen Barber writes, the contemporary idea of cities as supermodern environments paradoxically opens them up to history and memory, as ‘the visual arena of the city … move[s] through concurrent acts of construction and obliteration, extrusion and intrusion, incorporation and exclusion’. This process produces historical remains which cannot be recuperated by official forms of heritage and nostalgia, but instead expose what Barber calls the city’s ‘burning core of banality’.

There are some wonderful descriptions of bomb damage in Daniel Swift’s recent book Bomber County, including a brilliant account of Virginia Woolf seeing her old flat in Tavistock Square exposed to the elements.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Strange things happen on the edges of places, where two opposed landscapes meet to create a mutant zone, lacking organic consistency. English suburbia typifies this strangeness, endlessly seeking new ways to feel at home with itself while engendering contradiction and compromise. The suburbs, because of their presumed orthodoxy, exaggerate the extremities of mood and movement; the darkest alley in the seediest district of the biggest city will lack the sheer oddness of suburban neatness, where all that appears most settled conspires to make its own drama … English suburbia has become virtually synonymous with the sinister and the sad – the very opposites of its founding intentions.’ – Michael Bracewell, England is Mine

Moonbounce

2011-05-07T15:18:00.002+01:00

I’ve been reading James Attlee’s Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, which is among other things an eloquent argument against light pollution and in favour of darkened skies: ‘What a profligate civilization we are, burning up our resources to light streets that nobody walks down and shop-window displays that nobody sees, pouring light on the empty pavements as a ritual oblation to the god of money.’

Attlee also discusses an intriguing artwork by Katie Paterson, in which she transmitted a recording of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon via morse code using an EME [earth-moon-earth] radio communication system in Southampton. Reflected off the moon’s surface, a process known as ‘moonbounce’, it arrived at another station in Sweden about half a million miles and 2.5 seconds later. But the music had changed: ‘the moon reflects only part of the information back – some of it is absorbed by its shadows, lost in its craters.’ Attlee considers the new version an improvement on Beethoven.

Paterson’s work reminded me of the attempts to transmit TV signals long distances in the days before Telstar and other satellites, as they tried almost everything to get the high frequency waves over what Marconi called ‘the stubborn curvature of the earth’. In the early 1950s, there was an idea – never put into practice - to use aeroplanes as gigantic TV transmitters. The planes would travel in lazy circles 30,000 feet above the earth, sending out short waves that would blanket the earth’s surface like a giant inverted ice-cream cone covering an area 400 miles in diameter. Another plan was to bounce radio waves off the surface of the moon. In May 1959, Jodrell Bank, in co-operation with Pye, the now defunct British manufacturer of televisions, sent morse messages via the moon to Cambridge Air Force Base, Massachussetts, but the sound was poor and in any case the signals could only be sent once the moon had set, which would have had the effect of severely rationing television. Perhaps, for those of us who have had the misfortune to catch some of the recent offerings on ITV2, this would have been no bad thing.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Wall! I wonder that you haven’t fallen down in ruin, when you have to support all the boredom of your inscribers.’ Graffiti in ancient Pompeii, from Peter Toohey, Boredom: A Lively History

In the metro

2011-05-01T10:34:00.003+01:00

I’ve been looking again at In the Metro, Marc Augé’s book about Paris’s underground system. Augé began his career as an ethnographer of tribal societies on the west coast of Africa, and his analysis of the Paris métro is part of what he calls a ‘reverse ethnology’: a response to ‘the death of exoticism’, the discrediting of anthropology’s traditionally hierarchical relationship to a primitive ‘other’, by finding new areas of ethnographic investigation closer to home.

Augé sees the métro as an especially fruitful place for ethnographers, because it brings the middle classes together with people on the fringes of society such as impoverished artists, buskers, homeless people using the concourses for warmth and shelter, and more active beggars patrolling the carriages with children in tow, all brought together in a kind of collectively experienced solitude. On the métro we meet ‘proximal others’, who are not so different from us that they can be reassuringly exoticized, but who still force us to reflect on the extent and limits of community.

Augé notes the ways in which commuters exchange fleeting glances, or the flickers of emotion that can sometimes be detected behind the apparently blank faces of daydreamers. These silent acts show how much the métro is based on both peaceful co-existence and the impossibility of knowing anything about the lives of one’s fellow passengers. Augé admires the ‘virtuosity tied to habit’ of the metro users. The movements of regular métro passengers, he suggests, have the balletic economy of endlessly repeated actions, with no unnecessary or redundant effort. They will get set and on their marks before departing from a carriage; will know whether or not to quicken their pace based on the noise of a train whooshing through the tunnels; or will stand on the platform at the exact spot at which the train doors will open, and which will deposit them near their exit on the destination platform.

The fundamental quality of the métro is its ordered and contractual nature, which is found not simply in its explicit rules (the ban on smoking, for example, or the regulation of travel through ticket types) but also in its ‘collective morality’, the complex etiquette necessitated by its cramped and warren-like environments. Although it is true that certain people remain indifferent to these rules, Augé write that what is ‘most astonishing is that there are not more of them’.

The cake of custom

2011-04-28T17:24:00.001+01:00

This piece by me about the royal wedding was in the Guardian last weekend.

Royal occasions have always offered rich pickings for anthropologists. It is no coincidence that the social research organisation, Mass Observation, began its life with a “day survey” of 12 May 1937, the date of George VI’s coronation, and that it is once again inviting its volunteers to write down an account of their activities on 29 April. These surveys always make fascinating social documents, because a royal event forces everyone, from ardent monarchist to diehard republican, into an imagined national community, whether they want to be part of it or not.

Even in 1937 there were a surprising number of refuseniks, though they seem to have been motivated more by cussedness than anti-monarchism. Mass Observation reported some people listening to the coronation with “embarrassed grins, and outright laughter when the commentator was outstandingly loyal”. As for the 1953 Coronation, they found plenty of people making snide comments at the television screen or going for a long walk to get away from it all. And yet republicans who look to find Walter Bagehot’s “cake of custom” crumbling on these occasions are usually disappointed. “Even people who wanted to avoid the coronation could not stop their eyes brimming with tears or shut themselves away,” concluded Mass Observation in 1937.

Indeed, the most inauspicious times for a royal celebration seem only to inspire greater fervency. The wedding of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips in November 1973, for example, coincided with the grave economic crisis that led to the three day week, which could easily have inspired public resentment at the grandeur and expense of the event. But despite fears beforehand that the wedding might be blacked out by power cuts, 28 million viewers tuned in for an eight-hour marathon padded out with a royal astrologers’ wedding breakfast and a visit to the stables where Princess Anne kept her horses. Auberon Waugh concluded that “the nation is as united as any nation can be – in a gigantic effort to be entertained … We are citizens of the world’s first satirical Ruritania.”

When Prince Charles married Diana in 1981, in the middle of a deep recession and riots in the inner cities, the loyalist mood was, if anything, even stronger. As a spokesman for the Electricity Board put it, the strain on the National Grid was “a barometer of national feeling”: viewers were so paralysed in front of their screens that there were huge power surges during the dull bits, such as the signing of the register, when they got up to boil kettles.

This probably has less do with our attitudes to monarchy, which are often absent-minded and half-hearted whichever side they are on, than with the power of television to put itself at the centre of any narrative. The 1947 wedding between Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth was one of the first major outside broadcasts of the postwar era and the BBC used it to convince people of the power of the new medium; it similarly used the televising of the 1953 coronation to create a tipping point in the purchase of sets and the 1973 royal wedding to convert several hundred thousand more households to colour TV. Television always tries to use these events as an advertisement for itself. “Be part of the big day on the BBC,” as Huw Edwards says on the trailers for 29 April.

The difference now is that we live in a multichannel era. 88 per cent of the adult population either listened to or watched the 1953 Coronation, but then there was nothing else on unless you could get Radio Luxembourg. Even at the last big royal wedding in 1986, the only way of avoiding the event on the main channels and stations was to watch pages from Ceefax on BBC2 or listen to Schubert on Radio 3. Now, with 200 channels to choose from, anyone who does not want to participate in the royal wedding can hardly feel coerced into doing so. And still I have a feeling that the mass observers of 29 April will write about how they switched on the television, just to see what was happening, and found themselves drawn in.

Motorway art

2011-04-23T13:31:00.005+01:00

There are lots of photographic projects on roads - Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Paul Graham’s photographs of the A1 and Catherine Opie’s untitled photographs of roads and flyovers, ‘Freeways’, spring to mind – but paintings of roads are much thinner on the ground. I would guess the genre was inaugurated by Matisse's 1917 painting The Windshield: On the Villacoublay Road, which pictures a Ford car from the inside, using the windscreen as a picture edge, a format later used by Ben Nicholson and Edward Hopper. More recently there have been Oliver Bevan’s paintings of the Westway, the elevated road in west London, and Julian Opie’s roadscape paintings titled Imagine You Are Driving, all subtle variations on the same grey road with white lines receding into the distance. Opie has also done blurry, photo-realist pictures of the M40 at night that look like action paintings: black voids illuminated only by the blinking tail-lights, cat’s eyes and central-reservation lights curving round. And then there is the writer and artist Bill Drummond who fell so in love with Jock Kinneir’s blue-and-white motorway signs that he stole one and replaced it with one of his own paintings.

But now I have a new, favourite road artist: Edward Chell, who in his new exhibition ‘Gran Tourismo’ – which is, appropriately enough, being held at the Little Chef restaurant, Ings, on the A591 into Windermere - combines oil paintings depicting motorway verges on the M6 with text pieces in the form of customised road signs, like the one illustrating this post.

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about Chell in their recent book Edgelands which I posted about a few weeks ago:

The painter Edward Chell has been drawn to this inaccessible wilderness, mundane and sublime in its infinity. Chell first noticed how rich a landscape this is, like many of us, while inching forward in gridlocked traffic. Motorway verges today are pesticide-free strips of wilderness, as difficult to reach as sea cliffs, miniature landscapes that run along this in-between space for thousands of miles. He works from photographs and sketches, but access is difficult and dangerous: these are forbidden zones, places where the traffic police will pick you up within minutes. Working on the M2 and M20, Chell learned how to make himself invisible by wearing a hi-vis jerkin and hardhat: the twenty-first-century en plein air artist in disguise.

The paintings he produces suggest the busyness and fecundity of roadside verges, rich and alive. He has described the powerful visual metaphor of the verge as poised between ordered, policed and restricted boundary spaces of the state that we are only allowed to look at while travelling at great speed, and the slower, uncontrollable energies of nature.

You can see some of Chell’s work at http://www.edwardchell.com/ and hear him being interviewed on Radio 4's Open Country at http://tinyurl.com/4ypaal3

Mundane quote for the day: ‘To hawks, these gritty country lanes must look like shingle beaches; the polished roads must gleam like seams of granite in a moorland waste. All the monstrous artefacts of man are natural, untainted things to them.’ – J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

A life in the day

2011-04-20T21:44:00.003+01:00

This pulled me up short. It’s from A Life in the Day, an anthology of the famous back-page column in the Sunday Times magazine. It’s from 4 January 1998, when Roko Camaj, who cleaned the windows of the upper floors of the World Trade Center in New York, described a typical day of his life with a certain quotidian lyricism:

Window cleaners are weird guys. I think it’s because when you go down the side of a building it’s a completely different world …. I’ve been working up here for 22 years and now it’s just like I’m standing on the ground … This tall city seems so shrunken and insignificant from up above. It’s like a toy town, with tiny cars and people who look like toothpicks. I’m even higher than the clouds and airplanes. When they flit by I have an urge to jump out and ride on the back of them. I see a few birds circling round and I often have the unpleasant task of cleaning squashed birds from the windows when they’ve crunched into the glass by mistake. Everything has to be secure in the cage. You can’t, for example, have loose change in your pockets. God forbid – if you drop one penny from here you can kill someone down below.

My world consists of windows and reflections. I prefer to be on the outside looking in. I’m the one who’s free. Inside it’s like a jail. I wouldn’t ever want to change places with the big shots sitting inside in their leather chairs. As I pass their air-conditioned cages, I can see they’d love to rip off their ties. Me, I don’t have any stress … It’s pretty hellish up there when the wind whips around, though the cage is rock solid. But I’ve often come off the building with windburn. In summer there’s a nice spidery breeze … But I love this job. I get $75 more than the window cleaners downstairs.

Roko Camaj was on the roof of the south tower on September 11 2001 and his body was never found.

A sad heart at the supermarket

2011-04-16T19:57:00.007+01:00

Every day on my drive to and from work through Toxteth I can see a new Tesco’s rising up out of the ground like a recession-eating behemoth. At first it was just a hole in the ground; then it was a prefab shell with access roads. Now the lights are on and you can see it taking shape inside: the long row of checkouts, the head-high gondolas, the massive overhead signs: bread, wine, meat, fish … Everything except the shoppers, in fact, and stuff for them to buy.

The first supermarket in Britain opened on 26 June 1950, when Sainsbury’s opened a newly refurbished store on London Road, Croydon. The London Co-operative Society had already opened some self-service stores, but the Croydon Sainsbury’s was big, over 3,300 square feet in area: the precursor of the modern supermarket. Not all the customers were happy. Alan Sainsbury himself gave one woman a new-fangled wire basket to collect her groceries, and she flung it back at him in disgust.

In those days of strict government controls, the Ministry of Food had given Sainsbury’s special dispensation to convert the store to self-service. The government saw the importation of this American retail method as a way of coping with labour shortages and cutting costs. The US Technical Assistance and Productivity Programme established under the Marshall Plan promoted “the gospel of self-service”. The abolition of rationing in 1954, and the ending of postwar building restrictions in the same year, led to the proliferation of supermarkets. At first many housewives were sceptical about this new form of shopping, worried about the loss of personal service, the temptation to overspend and even being accused of stealing goods bought in other shops. Drawing on memories of rationing, self-service advocates reassured them with the promise of queueless shopping: they would only have to queue to pay, with no time-consuming weighing and wrapping of food, and those requiring few items could pay for them quickly, while others could shop at their leisure. One upbeat article in The Times in 1959 claimed that self-service “saves thousands of hours of queueing time every day,” and that even a queue was now only “a queue in one store as opposed to queues in four or five shops”. This optimism proved to be premature. By 1964, the Consumer Council was reporting that the most common complaint of supermarket shoppers was the length of queues at the checkouts.

No amount of empathy for the corner shop, or suspicion of the supermarket as a super predator in the food chain, seems to be able to halt the spread of the Tescopoly. The supermarket is a place where, in Jean Baudrillard’s words, “all life is massaged, climate controlled and domesticated into the simple activity of perpetual shopping.”

Localism without line breaks

2011-04-12T20:40:00.003+01:00

First things first: Blogger seems to be getting rid of my paragraphing, which is why my last few posts, and this one, are an undifferentiated mass. My mundane quotes for the day will have to be suspended until I can sort this out - or, more realistically, until it sorts itself out. Anyway, Alexandra Harris has a nice piece, ‘The ground beneath our feet’, in last week’s New Statesman (not available on the web sadly), on the vogue for localist writing: ‘The small scale has seemed a big deal to me ever since a school biology lesson in which the class trooped off to a nearby field, equipped with squares of wire called quadrats. We had to throw our square randomly and then examine the bit of ground it framed. We counted the kinds of grass and tried to draw the flowers that we had never noticed under our feet … I remember the sense of revelation: narrow down your view of the world for a moment and a whole territory appears. Then try looking up again, and you find that the whole field is transformed.’ Harris mentions Michael Wood’s The Story of England, Madeleine Bunting’s The Plot and a book I loved which deserves to be better known and which I’m glad she reminded me of: James Attlee’s 2007 book Isolarion, which throws a metaphorical quadrat round the Cowley Road in Oxford. (An Isolarion is a type of atlas, originating in the 15th century, that attempted to build up an image of the world by mapping a little fragment of it.) Cowley road is not, of course, the Brideshead Oxford but the mundane Oxford of rundown Halal shops and hairdressers. I particularly remember Attlee’s description of a barber’s varnished wooden floor ‘across which hair drifts like the iron filings in an Etch a Sketch’. Unaccountably, though, Attlee neglects to mention a famous resident of Cowley Road: David Cameron, who lived at number 69 while he was a student in the late 1980s studying PPE. His daily routine there included watching Neighbours and the trans-European quiz Going for Gold, presented by Henry Kelly. Attlee has a new book out, Nocturne, which is on my wish list. And I also enjoyed Harris’s book Romantic Moderns – not surprisingly when she writes so evocatively about the provincial, particular, suburban contexts of ‘modernist’ writing and art, from John Piper and J.M. Richards’s planned ‘Study of a Hundred Yards of a Suburban Road’ to Stevie Smith’s weather-watching narrator in Novel on Yellow Paper, to Henry Green’s Party Going, which takes the reader up on high to look down on the crowds at a London railway station.

The Mecca of the multistorey

2011-04-07T21:19:00.005+01:00

Coming back on the train from London Euston yesterday via an unexpected route – because of ‘overhead line damage in the Wembley area’, a phrase I have now heard enough for one lifetime – I found the suburbs of Harrow and Wealdstone, Bushey and Watford strangely enchanted in the twilight. At Watford Junction I saw a medium-sized multi-storey car park bathed in light from the setting sun and I was reminded of the late J.G. Ballard’s description of Watford as ‘the Mecca of the multi-storey car park’. Watford’s multistoreys were an inspiration for Ballard’s novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, which describes car parks as ‘inclined floors … forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle’. For all its importance, parking occupies a passive place in the urban landscape. While the moving car has retained its (albeit compromised) iconography of speed, status and wealth, there is no iconography of parking. Car parks are buried underground or hidden away on side roads rather than integrated into prominent streets. Multistorey car parks, many of them built in the 1960s in the stark lines and untreated concrete of the ‘new brutalism’, are some of the least-loved buildings in Britain. Space is at a premium in the multistorey, so turning circles are tight, bays small, floor heights minimal and stairwells dark. With their cramped conditions and open sides to allow car fumes to escape, they are a strange mixture of the subterranean and the exposed. In many film and TV thrillers, the car park is an ungovernable space, where shady deals are done and crimes go unpunished. In the cult gangster movie, Get Carter (1971), for example, the eponymous anti-hero (Michael Caine) throws one of his adversaries from the upper floor of a Gateshead multistorey. The partly deserved reputation of car parks as dangerous and crime-ridden is closely connected with the poor status and scarcity of parking. When we buy a ticket to park, we are not purchasing a service but renting a small area of private land for a short period. The operator is not required to look after the vehicle or driver, and car parks will often display notices making this clear. When car parks are working to capacity, there is no good economic reason to make them any better. It is a sign of our peculiarly ambivalent approach to parking that it can be simultaneously acknowledged as a daily, near-universal obsession and dismissed as a nerdish, minority interest. The photographer Martin Parr once embarked on a project to photograph the last available space in car parks around the world. Explaining his motivation, Parr said with quiet profundity: ‘The one thing we’re all looking for in life is somewhere to park the car.’

Dirt and daily life

2011-03-29T20:54:00.005+01:00

Reading about the new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, ‘Dirt : The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life’, has made me think a bit more about dirt. Some of the reviews have referred to the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s classic description of dirt as ‘matter out of place’. For Douglas, dirt is ‘the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter,’ in which all kinds of inappropriate material which fall outside the taxonomic systems of civilised society are lumped together as a homogeneous ‘other’. The sociologist Kevin Hetherington has suggested that Douglas’s definition of ‘dirt’ is inadequate to describe the complex process of consumption and disposal in capitalist societies, because it suggests simply ‘something that we have got rid of’. While Douglas’s work suggests that the boundaries between dirt and non-dirt are carefully policed, Hetherington argues that the former functions as an ‘absent presence’ in society, which is never permanently removed. He points out that it is not simply bins which are used for disposal, but attics, basements, garages, wardrobes and sheds, where objects can be placed and forgotten about, often for quite long periods. Disposal is not just about getting rid of unwanted material but about ‘how we manage absence – how we order it, where we place it, when we use it as a source of value’. In her book Dust, the historian Carolyn Steedman explains this in terms of the difference between dust and waste: while the latter suggests something that can be easily discarded, the former ‘is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone’. Certainly, dust is one of the unnoticed constants of everyday life and perhaps the most visible expression of its temporality. The embarrassment of dust descends inevitably on the streamlined, laminate surfaces of modernity: the tiny particles of dead skin, lint, decayed wood and soot that settle on domestic surfaces or swirl around in shafts of light; the dirt that accumulates in the cracks and corners of neglected everyday objects; the gritty air of city streets and other public spaces. As Steedman points out, we can never remove dust completely, only disturb it until it is eventually deposited elsewhere. A good way of thinking about daily life, in fact, as something that remains, despite our attempts to overlook or discard it: the everyday, we might say, is where the dust settles.

Latched nozzle lives

2011-03-26T11:52:00.001Z

Petrol used to be dispensed by smartly-uniformed station attendants, who would not only fill your tank but also check your oil and give you directions. After wartime petrol pooling arrangements ended in 1950, however, single-brand petrol stations sprang up in Britain, and they looked for ways to make their operations more efficient. In the mid-1960s, Shell and Mobil experimented with the first “self-fill” petrol stations. Another key player in the development of the self-service station was the property developer Gerald Ronson, who developed a chain of petrol stations under the brand name Heron. Then, in 1967, National Oil introduced the latched-nozzle petrol pump with automatic cut-off, which made the unpaid labour of “filling up” much easier.

However, it was only after the OPEC oil crisis of 1973 that self-service began to dominate as a cost-cutting exercise. Self-service changed the architecture of the petrol station. Cantilevered canopies were built to protect motorists from the elements, and they were usually combined with branded totems like the famous Shell “pectin”. (One of the great marketing mysteries is why the petrol station needs to be so aggressively branded, for petrol is essentially a distress purchase.) In 1970 the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called the petrol station ‘the most repellent piece of architecture of the past two thousand years’. The architectural critic Martin Pawley disagreed, calling it ‘the last truly Modern design project of the Modern age’. Unlike, say, McDonald’s and Tesco’s, whose buildings had bland, neo-vernacular designs, Shell still believed in ‘Modernism and the International Way’.

Petrol stations also acquired adjoining shops, known originally as TBAs (tobacco, belts and accessories) and developing into general stores. In many British villages, the all-purpose petrol station shop has replaced the post office as the social hub, the equivalent of the parish pump.

Now we live latched nozzle lives, exchanging not a word with the shop assistant behind the glass as we go through the chip and pin routine and pay for our petrol and maybe a Sunday newspaper and a packet of hobnobs. Next customer, please.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘To travel swiftly in a closed car, as so many of us do nowadays, is of course to cut oneself off from the same reality of the regions one passes through, perhaps from any sane reality at all. Whole leagues of countryside are only a roar and muddle outside the windows, and villages are only like brick-coloured bubbles that we burst as we pass.’ J.B. Priestley, English Journey

Writing in the margin

2011-03-24T17:27:00.002Z

I hesitate to post this piece that appeared in yesterday’s Guardian, because the first paragraph seems to have made some people angry, and some of them even think I should be prosecuted. If it helps, which it probably doesn’t, I was referring to books I have borrowed from my own university’s library, not from public libraries, and I was trying to be wry, flippant, ironic etc. It’s rather sobering to generate such anger. ‘All's wrong that ever I've done or said, And nought to help it in this dull head,’ as I think it goes … Anyway, while I await the constabulary’s hand on my shoulder, and since I can’t make things much worse, here it is.

As anyone who knows me will confirm, I am almost neurotically law abiding. But there is one area of life where I remain an outlaw, beyond the pale, a fugitive from justice. I only do it in pencil, and sometimes I remember to rub it out, but … I write in library books. Those spaces down the sides of the page just seem so inviting, the impulse to anoint them with scribbles is irresistible. History is on my side: until the nineteenth century, books were often used as scrap paper and few people had qualms about scrawling on a pristine book. No jury in the land would convict me. Books are meant to be written on.

Is such annotation a dying art in our online era? Most ebook readers allow you to highlight text and take notes, but there isn’t the same visual aesthetic of columns of alluring white space tempting you to fill them with your thoughts. On the other hand, the web has whetted our appetite for sharing reading experiences. Amazon has just introduced a Public Notes facility to the Kindle, which posts your marginalia online so other people can read it. Social reading websites like BookGlutton, where you can attach notes for other readers of the same book, have been around for a while.

You could argue that this impulse is really a return to the great age of marginalia, which the literary scholar H.J. Jackson identifies as lasting from about 1750 to 1820. The practice then was widespread and communal. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who coined the word “marginalia”, published his own examples and wrote with a readership in mind. “You will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic,” he wrote, a little smugly, in one of Charles Lamb’s books. Many of today’s social networking sites similarly create a kind of ongoing collective commentary, not just on books but on the world in general.

And yet for me there is something missing from this electronic marginalia. First, it seems so ephemeral. Pencil marks left on a page will last several lifetimes, perhaps as long as the paper itself. Public Notes on the Kindle are less tangible and, even if someone is archiving them, are likely to be unreadable in the future because of changes to hardware or software. The most basic motive for writing marginalia is surely to create a sense of ownership: children often write their names over and over again in books. You can’t do that with a Kindle.

Second, this public notetaking seems too much like a performance. Marginalia over the last two centuries, perhaps as attitudes towards defacing books have become more disapproving, has been semi-private, almost furtive, a silent communion with the author or the unknown reader who might pick up the book second-hand a generation later. Marginalia is, by definition, something on the margins, undervalued, overlooked.

Such textual detritus is currently a voguish topic in academic literary studies. The Reading Experience Database at the Open University, for example, aims to map all evidence of recorded engagement with texts from 1450 to 1945: everything, from marginalia to commonplace books, that might show that ordinary people actually read books rather than simply using them to furnish a room. This kind of evidence is surprisingly sparse and often resoundingly banal. Many readers just wrote dictionary definitions in the margin, or “v. good”, or they simply underlined words. And yet this sub-Coleridgian commentary can also be rather touching, evidence of an earnest wrestling with meaning and thirst for knowledge. True marginalia is an end in itself, a brave attempt to bridge the ultimately impassable gulf between writer and reader.

And because marginalia is unguarded, meant only as an aide-memoire or for a select group of readers, it can accidentally reveal much about the person writing it. Recent releases from the National Archives disclose that Margaret Thatcher wrote words like “No!” and “This will not do” in the margins of draft documents. Now, I suppose it would have been more newsworthy if it had emerged that she constantly sprinkled the margins with encouraging words and smiley faces. But you can’t deny that Mrs Thatcher’s marginalia sums her up perfectly.

Barratt home Britain

2011-03-14T22:42:00.002Z

In the 1980s, Barratt was the housebuilding firm which became indelibly associated with new houses, especially small ‘starter homes’ for young couples. Its emblematic status was confirmed when the chief architect of the homeowning boom, Margaret Thatcher, bought a Barratt home in 1985, albeit a more upmarket model in a gated development in Dulwich. Paul Barker suggests that Barratt’s transformation of Britain’s vernacular landscape is of much greater cultural significance than the more critically acclaimed, flagship architecture of regenerated city centres. ‘When the social history of our times comes to be written,’ Barker writes, ‘he [Lawrie Barratt, the company’s founder] will get more space than Norman Foster. You can search out Foster masterpieces here and there. But Barratt houses are everywhere. Foster buildings are the Concordes of architecture. Barratt houses fly charter.’

Barratt reproduced many of the working methods and marketing tools of American tract housing developments. Like Levitt & Sons, who built the US Levittowns, Barratt altered the basic features in its houses each year in response to market demands and technical innovations; it made extensive use of showhomes, marketing suites and glossy brochures; and it bundled all the elements of buying a house (such as the mortgage, solicitor’s and surveyor’s fees) into a single financial package. Barratt homes came with almost everything included, even white goods and furniture. All first-time buyers needed to bring, the brochures claimed, was the crockery and bed linen. Barratt was a pioneer in using market research in housebuilding, scanning census data and government statistics for emerging trends. In Lawrie Barratt’s words, the company sold and built rather than built and sold, seeking to match Fordist production methods to consumer needs.

Barratt’s name recognition, though, was always greater than its impact on the housing market. It became synonymous with new houses largely because of an aggressive national press advertising campaign and famous television commercial of the late 1970s and early 1980s, featuring Patrick Allen, an actor from the 1960s series Crane, who promoted the merits of new homes from a helicopter flying over Barratt estates.

The British photographer Paul Graham made the Barratt home his subject in his House Portraits (1980), a series of metre-high colour photographs of houses on modern estates in Britain. Graham’s deadpan aesthetic, which captures the houses head or side-on in the strong light of early morning, brings into sharp relief their boxy uniformity and blank newness: the paint and putty stains still on the windows, the square lawns with no flowers or plants, the surrounding earth, rubble and waste not yet covered up or cleared away.

Cool memories

2011-03-07T21:08:00.001Z

I’ve been reading Jean Baudrillard’s Cool Memories, volumes 1-5. Baudrillard can be very uneven, to say the least, and I can see why he winds people up. But he can also be the master of turning an observation into an idea, as demonstrated by the quotes below.

‘The mystic dream of every iceberg is to travel so far south as possible, perhaps – who knows? – till it meets its end in equatorial waters. Poor iceberg laden with the despair of the poles at being so far from the equator, and so distant from each other. So far, not a single one of them has succeeded in this senseless venture.’

‘Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment.’

‘Nothing can match the loneliness of a pianist in a large hotel. All around him is just a hum of cocktails and small talk; he is more alone with his melody than he would be on an island. Yet at a particular moment, he stops and people applaud. You are doubly astonished: there was an end to this music then, and people were listening? He was playing something and he was not playing in vain? He seems stupefied himself. But he well knows, in the secret depths of his soul, that this applause only breaks out because his music has fallen silent, a silence these wild things notice in much the same way they notice the sugar melting in their glasses. So, like the bald prima donna, he quickly starts up with a new tune.’

‘A change in the speaking style of announcers. The plummy voices of yesteryear maintained a steady crescendo right up to the end of the sentence. Today, the sentence is suspended before its end in a kind of apnoea, of artificial breathing, of inner gasping for breath, mimicking a searching for words which would seem to reflect thinking. All done to give a sense of the interactive truth of dialogue. In the past there was a theatrical staging of message, feeling and truth. Today the obscure genesis of speech is mimicked.’

‘Ants, too, must know that God is dead, since they engage in such frantic activity. Is it to avoid internal revolts and boredom that they have developed such a relentless programme (not too different, perhaps, from the human race)? Have they developed a cult of the absurd or some crazed ritual for turning life and its meaning to their own perverse ends? Have they invented a perfect model of cloning, the only way of guaranteeing the eternity of a species and solving the problem of individual existence? A wonderful hypothesis, but how can we know? Let them speak, these ants, let them confess! What is their message? Yet they just go on walking enormous distances to bring back things that are actually plentiful around the anthill (in this, too, they are not so different from the human race).’

Mundane quote for the day: ‘What goes out of fashion passes into everyday life. What disappears from everyday life is revived in fashion.’ – Jean Baudrillard

Writing on the edge

2011-03-01T21:11:00.002Z

I forgot to say: the reason I wrote about David Rayson in a recent post is because I was reminded of his work by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’s new book Edgelands, which I’ve just finished. Farley and Symmons Roberts are both poets, and they write with lyrical exactness about the borderlands of our towns and cities, occupied by retail parks, rubbish tips, sewage farms, containers and what Richard Mabey called ‘the unofficial countryside’. This is a wonderful description of a landfill site:

Salt Ayre cross-sectioned, cut like a pie to reveal the strata of waste, or a deep core sample drawn from the ground. Here we can clearly see the fine veins of Christmas tree needles marking Januaries, a definite band that marks the UK electricity Act and the first Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation orders, the gradual inundation of platics and particleboard as we rise through the layers of years. Deep down, at the lowest levels, lie the peelings and scrapings of teatimes when Clement Attlee was Prime Minister. Vast colonies of microorganisms are busy at work in the dark. Leachate oozes from the ground into collection runnels and pipes, the compressed juice of the decades. Do we just imagine it, or does the ground give off heat?

And this is a great riff on the messages painted on strips of torn white sheets and tied to motorway bridges so they can be seen by passing motorists:

Occasionally, these bed-sheet bulletins are public declarations of private feelings: TRACEY M WILL YOU MARRY ME? Or SALLY P LOVES DANNY J. And a temporary bridge sign is a good way of delivering a spoiler too. Many parents can remember one fateful morning finding the home-made banner DUMBLEDORE DIES stretched out across the M6 in full view of their sleepy children. This was mere hours after watching TV news pictures of kids queuing at midnight outside bookshops to get a copy of the latest Potter tome. It is tempting to imaging a struggling children’s author, sick with jealousy over the young wizard’s success, queuing for one of the first copies, flicking to the end to see who dies, then heading out in darkness to the M6 with a freshly daubed sheet.

And this is on the wooden pallets on which the products of our globalised consumer culture make their journeys from the ends of the earth:

Pallets are consumer capitalism’s red blood cells. They convey the products around the organism. Unless you have taken this book to the top of a mountain to read (and we’d strongly discourage such frippery) then the chances are you’re surrounded by things from places far away, borne here on a pallet. And even if you are in the middle of nowhere, look to the labels on your clothes and wonder at the distances they’ve travelled. Pallets move the goods around. If we isolate the pallet, as Stephen Dedalus isolated the butcher boy’s basket in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pluck it out from the slur and texture of the everyday and consider it, self-contained, against the background of space, the thing it most resembles is a magic carpet with rigor mortis.

Much of what Farley and Symmons Roberts are doing reminds me of French writers on the quotidian: Lefebvre’s interest in the terrain vague of the suburbs, for example, or François Maspero’s investigation in his book Roissy Express of the scarcely visited hinterland beyond the Périphérique (orbital motorway), a concrete and asphalt sprawl of hypermarchés, grands ensembles and cheap hotels. This ‘circular purgatory’ consists of ‘pieces of badly stuck together space’ which, unless people have the misfortune to live there, are ‘only for traveling through. And quickly, by car.’

Mundane millions

2011-02-26T13:31:00.003Z

This piece by me was in the Guardian earlier this week:

It is not hard to see why The Million Pound Drop, the latest series of which ends on Channel 4 on Saturday, has been a ratings success. The format, in which contestants get to hold a million pounds in tight wads of notes, place the money on trapdoors and watch it fall if they get the wrong answer to a multiple choice question, generates some dramatic moments of elation and despair. But it is odd that this exact sum, a million pounds, should retain its symbolic and emotive power. Of course a million pounds is still an awful lot of money, but the word “millionaire”, as both a literal description and as shorthand for a very rich person, was first used in the early nineteenth century, and that was when a million pounds was really worth something. On television, though, a million pounds is always a miraculous, transformative sum that exists in a changeless world where inflation does not exist.

The TV quiz show has long had an unreal relationship with money. The first cash prize to be offered on British television was the jackpot of £1000 on Double Your Money, which began with ITV in 1955. But after the 1962 Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting condemned such extortionate cash prizes as appealing to “suspense and greed and fear”, we had more than thirty years of regulation and restraint. Quiz show prizes were only ever money substitutes suggestive of a genteel consumerism: canteen and cutlery sets, dining suites, music centres and small family cars. The BBC even made a fetish of its rubbish prizes, like the famous weekend in Reykjavik on Blankety Blank. Ironically, a drunken weekend in the Icelandic capital would later become a favourite jaunt for rich bankers.

With the broadcasting deregulation of the 1990s came a relaxation of the rules on quiz show prizes, paving the way for Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Here, though, the million pounds served another useful function: it formed part of ITV’s search for a more middle-class, advertiser-friendly audience, because money can be spent on anything, whereas mobile cocktail bars, mini metros and holidays in Lanzarote have awkward connotations of class and taste.

The problem with these million pound shows, though, is that money is not remotely televisual. Speedboats can be revealed from behind curtains with drum rolls and flashing lights, but money is less substantial, which is why National Lottery winners have to pose awkwardly with outsized comedy cheques. When set against the dramatic amphitheatre, tension music and dimmed lights on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Chris Tarrant handing over a tiny cheque to the winner was always an anticlimax. In The Million Pound Drop, they have come up with the solution of using the iconography of a heist movie, with burly security guards handling the banknotes and locking them away in steel suitcases.

Another problem with these shows is more intractable: since the late 1990s, as governments have become intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, the number of millionaires has risen to the point where being one is fairly mundane. As the gap between the super rich and even the prosperous middle classes has widened, the word “millionaire” has also become freighted with negative associations. The first New Labour scandal, in November 1997, was over that emblematic sum of a million pounds: the amount that had to be returned to Bernie Ecclestone after the government was accused of unfairly exempting motor racing from the ban on tobacco advertising. And when Who Wants to be a Millionaire began in autumn 1998, it was in the middle of a press campaign against millionaire “fat cats”, although back then it was the chief executives of the privatised utilities, not bankers, who were condemned for their excessive salaries.

Like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, The Million Pound Drop manages to ward off any resentment towards its potential millionaires by existing in an empathetic, non-competitive world of its own. The contestants are mostly young, and need the money to put a deposit on a house, to get married or to pay off student loans. They compete only with themselves and everyone wants them to win this magical amount of a million pounds, although by the time the trapdoor has done its worst they end up with fairly modest sums if they are lucky.

On television, winning a million remains the fulfilment of one’s wildest dreams, the narrative denouement, the end of the quest. In the real world it is nothing of the sort. All the recent evidence, from bankers’ bonuses to the endlessly creative efforts at tax avoidance by an international business elite, suggests that there is one thing the modern millionaire wants more than anything in the world: another million pounds, and then another on top of that.

Somewhere else is here

2011-02-21T20:38:00.002Z

The artist David Rayson has done a whole series of paintings based primarily on his memories of the Ashmore Park housing estate in Wolverhampton on which he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.

Rayson focuses on the bland exteriors and serial logic of houses as a way of revealing their collective life. His paintings convey the silence and emptiness of commuter estates in the daytime, with the lives of their residents implied only by surface appearances. The title of the exhibition that brought Rayson to wider public attention is ‘Somewhere else is here’. It is reminiscent of a line from Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘I remember, remember’, about his nondescript childhood in the featureless suburban streets of pre-war Coventry: ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’. As this title suggests, Rayson’s work often explores the tension between the generic features of housing estates, and the unspoken ways in which they reveal the small traces of individual lives.

In his study of still-life painting, Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson argues that historical art criticism has tended to divide painting into two spheres: a highly valued megalography (concerned with grand narratives, historical events and great figures) and a less esteemed rhopography (concerned with the unremarkable routines and objects of everyday life). Bryson suggests that rhopography [from the Latin rhopos, meaning trivial objects] has a tendency to turn into megalography. Rhopographic paintings often aim at a ‘re-education of vision’, a looking again at overlooked objects so as to make them seem unfamiliar and unique, which is actually a ‘re-assertion of painting’s own powers and ambitions’. But certain artists avoid this tendency by undermining the rules of visual composition, refusing to direct the viewer’s gaze towards particular elements in the picture at the expense of less ‘significant’ elements. The works of the eighteenth-century still-life painter, Jean-Siméon Chardin, for example, ‘cultivate a studied informality of attention, which looks at nothing in particular’. Chardin produces an overall, uncentred image which suggests that nothing needs to be ‘vigilantly watched’.

Rayson’s paintings work in a similarly inclusive way. The viewer is not sure which area of the painting to focus her gaze on, or how to divide the frame into accented foreground and unaccented background. In the exhibition catalogue, the preparatory drawings for these paintings have grid squares underlying them, suggesting a non-judgmental methodicalness which gives each element in the picture equal weight.

Rayson’s paintings are composites, drawn from his own childhood memories of Ashmore Park and speculations about what it might look like today. Ashmore Park is a former council estate which now reveals the unmistakable signs of owner-occupation: uPVC windows, a conservatory built on to a kitchen, a new car on a gravel drive, a satellite dish. Even smaller details suggest the lack of ownership of the public spaces that connect these private environments: stubbed-out cigarettes, crushed lager cans, crisp packets, cracked paving stones and graffiti tags. The studied ‘boredom’ of Rayson’s paintings allows them to hint at the human stories behind the blank surfaces of these newish houses.

Dinner with Georges Perec

2011-02-17T22:05:00.002Z

I’ve just got back from doing a ‘Conservation Dinner’ for the School of Life in London, themed around the work of the French author Georges Perec.

Perec’s stories and essays often engage in encyclopaedic listings of mundane places, objects and activities. In Espèces d’espaces [Species of Spaces, 1974], he makes a series of inventories of his neighbourhood in Paris, and urges his readers to think critically about how streets are named, houses are numbered and cars are parked: ‘You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.’ Perec’s method is a bit similar to the I-Spy Books, those monuments to trivia which have sent many a postwar British schoolchild on the pointless quest for a ‘no loading’ sign or a mini-roundabout. But in Perec the aim of this pained, excessive attention to apparently unpromising material is to access what he calls ‘the infra-ordinary,’ the sphere of daily existence that lies beneath notice or comment, and within which ‘we sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep’.

The point of making lists is that it forces you to observe the world as neutrally and contemplatively as possible, without pretensions or prejudgements. ‘Make oneself into the court stenographer of reality, let reality impose itself without intervening,’ writes Perec, ‘… and thereby found our anthropology.’

Some of the things Perec wrote:

‘The Rue Vilin’. Over a five year period from February 1969 to November 1974, he periodically chronicled the life of the street in north-east Paris where he spent the first five years of his life, from 1936 to 1941.

‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’. One weekend in October 1974, Perec set out to record ‘what happens when nothing happens’. He sat in a café window on the Place Saint-Sulpice and spent three days recording everything that passed before his eyes: people walking by, buses, cars, pigeons, advertising hoardings. This short book is certainly exhaustive and, to be honest, a bit exhausting as well.

‘Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Four’. Self-explanatory.

Notes from Overground

2011-02-10T20:55:00.003Z

As a student of the everyday, I’m ashamed to say it’s taken me this long to read – partly on the recommendation of Philip Wilkinson (http://englishbuildings.blogspot.com/2011/01/paddington-london.html) – Roger Green’s wonderful, out-of-print book, Notes from Overground, published under the pseudonym Tiresias in 1984. A former civil servant, Green tells the story of his 20-year, two-hours-a-day train commute from Oxford to London and back again in the form of a ‘Premeditated Notebook’ modelled on Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations and Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave. I thought it would be about the hidden enchantment of the everyday but in fact it is a very bleak but funny book about the lives wasted by commuting, this ‘small unspectacular tragedy’. Here are some quotes which will give you some idea of the book’s voice:

‘In the winter dusk, at successive stations, we peer out to see the wives waiting behind steering wheels, children scuffling in back seats. Daddies descend and are met. Each set of participants knows only of its own little scene … Each welcomed father ought not to learn of the existence of dozens of others along the line, any more than a prisoner should hear of the execution of his fellows.’

‘Orwell foresaw it all: loudspeakers blaring a humourless mixture of musak and disinformation. Twenty-four-hour digital clocks. Trainspeak coinages like Inter-City, Travellers-Fare, Awayday, Railair, Sealink …’

‘How often does someone point to an unoccupied seat and inquire: “Is anyone sitting there?” Usually the question receives a civil answer, yet it could only really be justified coming from Macbeth in the presence of Banquo’s ghost.’

‘When the train passes any kind of sporting activity … invariably nothing is happening. The bowler is always about to bowl, the referee about to restart play, the archer poised to shoot. Nothing takes place before our profane gaze. At our uncouth advent, the initiates freeze into a tableau vivant, waiting for us to pass before they resume celebration of the mysteries. This inexplicable phenomenon underlines the lack of rapport between our unnatural train-existence and normal life outside. The Grecian Urn syndrome.’

After reading this neglected classic, I’ve now ordered Green’s latest book, the intriguingly titled Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen.

On junk

2011-02-04T19:03:00.001Z

There used to be a place in the centre of Liverpool called Quiggins, a converted warehouse accommodating several ‘antique’ shops which would buy and sell ‘large or small items: anything considered’. The floorspace was sizeable enough to contain huge piles of junk, and the shops were something of a dumping ground for house-clearers who would rather not hire a skip or go to the tip. I remember coming across objects there that were surely unsellable: a naked doll with one eye and no arms, a deflated spacehopper caked in dirt, a single roller skate, a typewriter with no carriage return and several keys missing, an unstrung wooden tennis racket, some wrought-iron steps leading up into thin air. These random collections of stuff seemed like a testament to the levelling effect of junk: outmoded fads and celebrity merchandise suffer the same fate as more mundane household goods, as they are all shoved in a bargain bucket and stamped with a handwritten sticker for 15p. The term bric-à-brac, which comes from the French phrase, à bric et à brac [at random], captures this emphasis on casual abandonment and fortuitous survival. These objects are disconcerting because they are located at the end of a temporal process which, caught up in the cyclical rhythms of daily habit, we were not even aware was occurring. Amidst the leftover material of daily life, we encounter the unsettling evidence that routines have histories.

Christine Finn, a British archaeologist, investigated the durability of everyday ephemera by undertaking a year’s fieldwork in the unlikely site of Silicon Valley, California. Finn’s research examines the climate of easy disposability created by this boom-and-bust, high-turnover environment. The tech workers who populate the area are constantly exchanging jobs, houses and lifestyles, filling their living spaces with geek playthings and other transient objects, and even demolishing perfectly presentable homes in smart areas to make way for swanky rebuilds. Finn practises a kind of anticipatory archaeology, imagining how she would sift the evidence of the Siliconites’ lives after some hypothetical ‘e-Pompeii’. She suggests that the material remains would be confusing to archaeologists, who tend to look for singular explanations about the lives of dwellers in the surviving debris - the smudge of black on pottery providing evidence of a hearth, for example. They would be puzzled by the apparently wanton destruction of objects with no evidence of fire, war or earthquake, and would find it hard to disentangle the evidence of individual lives from that of an accelerated marketplace in designer lifestyles which ‘creates a bewildering array of cross-temporal and cross-cultural objects’.

As the ultimate expression of Silicon Valley’s throwaway culture, Finn shows how the state-of-the-art computer can become a mundane object and then a technological dinosaur within a scarily short period. For Finn, old computers are interesting because, apart from the few self-confessed geeks who run the chaotic computer museums that she visits, people do not generally value them as nostalgia objects. Last year’s model is passed down the market chain to a less fussy user, before being ransacked for its few valuable spare parts or ending up abandoned in a garage or landfill site. The obsolete PC becomes detached from its original context, ‘intriguingly anonymous’ apart from the personal histories encrypted in its indestructible hard drive.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Let me begin with the invisibility and blindness of the suburbs … The suburbs present us with a negation of the present; a landscape consumed by its past and its future. Hence the two foci of the suburbs: the nostalgic and the technological. A butterchurn fashioned into an electric light, a refrigerator covered by children’s drawings, the industrial “park,” the insurance company’s “campus.”’ - Susan Stewart, On Longing

Human snails

2011-01-27T21:24:00.002Z

Ever since the 1930 Road Traffic Act, which abolished the 20mph speed limit for cars but kept it for those pulling trailers, caravans have been vilified as “sheet-metal slugs” and “human snails”. It doesn’t help that they have traditionally had such unsuitably speedy names as Sprinter, Hurricane, Rapide and Cyclone. Or that they all come in that ponderous, semi-bulbous shape - ironically, a product of the discovery of aerodynamic streamlining in the 1920s.

Yet your chances of being stuck behind a caravan are surprisingly small. They mainly come out in the summer months, and their favoured habitats are the holiday roads like the M5 going down to the West Country, or the narrow lanes of South-West Wales and East Anglia, where caravan sites cluster on the coast.

The man chiefly responsible for this seasonal swarm is Sam Alper, who built his first caravan in 1947 entirely out of wartime salvage, using the undercarriage from a Spitfire and a roof made from barrage balloon material. A year later he designed the classic Sprite, an affordable (£199) caravan light enough to be towed by a small saloon. Alper’s talent was to recognise that postwar families were companionate enough to make do with less space and fewer partitions. The Sprite pioneered the bunk bed for children, an obvious space-saving idea that soon caught on in homes.

Alper may have domesticated the caravan, but his own adventures in it were quite intrepid. He fearlessly dragged his Sprite across continents, keen to prove how well it performed over long distances on terrible road surfaces. In 1951, he won an intercontinental rally from Frankfurt to Florence, clocking up 4400 miles in 11 days. Still more inspiring was his sprint around the Mediterranean the following year, covering 11,000 miles and 25 countries in just over a month – cannily, with a newspaper reporter in the passenger seat. In the Sahara, tribesmen attacked their Sprite, while more affable ones helped them dig it out after it got trapped in the sand. As well as turning Alper into a celebrity, the trip achieved its main aim: however cheap and flimsy it seemed, the Sprite had to be taken seriously. Another great caravanning evangelist was Alper’s friend, a swashbuckling, high-society dentist called Ralph Lee, who in 1958 steered his caravan through Norwegian dirt roads all the way to the Arctic Circle – and founded the Order of Bluenosed Caravanners for those who achieved the same feat.

Caravanning truly became a mass activity in the 1960s – a decade when the Caravan Club’s membership doubled and Sprite’s famous Alpine, with its distinctive green waistband, became the bestselling model of all time. Apart from the rise in car ownership, a key factor in this success was the decline of arable farming, which meant that it was often more profitable for farmers to grow caravans than crops. Caravanning introduced mass tourism to far-flung parts of Britain like Devon and Cornwall for the first time. By 1970, caravans made up one-fifth of all holiday accommodation in the UK, a figure that has remained broadly the same ever since.

Soon, though, the caravan-baiters seemed to have history on their side. The OPEC oil crisis of 1973, the introduction of VAT and rising inflation hit caravan sales hard. The seasonal nature of the industry had already forced Alper to diversify into other businesses like the Little Chef roadside café chain – and in 1982 his firm, Caravans International, went bust. In the era of cheap flights and last-minute package deals, caravanning seemed plodding and stay-at-home. As cars became ever more powerful and motorway speeds crept up, trailers were too slow even for the slow lane.

In the 1990s, when everything from speed cameras to traffic cones fuelled the modern motorist’s persecution complex, caravanners were caught in the crossfire. The Anti-Caravan Club, formed in 1992 after an advert in Private Eye, demanded that these “eyesores” be stored in already despoiled areas like power stations and sewage works. It called for a compulsory road test for caravanners and a daylight curfew so that they could only drive their trailers from dusk until dawn. At its peak, the ACC had 27,000 members.

But the anti-caravanning lobby seems to have gone rather quiet lately. Outside of the motoring programmes, few car drivers can muster up any resentment towards their trailer-towing cousins. Modern-day caravans, which have sorted out the traditional problems of under-braking and snaking, nip along at a fair old pace. And in any case, we seem to be rediscovering the virtues of slowness and localism over speed and distance.

Caravanning will probably never be trendy, because its devotees are creatures of habit and tradition. One reason that those dinky, rake-backed caravan “pods” have never really caught on is that the market is buyer-led. Caravans are only built when a client orders one, and caravanners are practical sorts who want the headroom. There has always been an uneasy relationship between the conventional “tuggers” and the parvenu “chuggers” – the camper van drivers who have somehow managed to nurture a reverse public image as hippyish free spirits. Caravanning seems to be perennially caught between the camaraderie of an exclusive club and the egalitarianism of mass consumerism.

The crisp at the crossroads

2011-01-19T21:51:00.003Z

In 1970 the architectural critic Reyner Banham wrote a celebrated New Society essay called ‘The Crisp at the Crossroads’. A champion of the serious study of consumer ephemera, Banham gave the humble crisp the sort of attention his colleagues reserved for buildings by Le Corbusier. His theme was the transformation of the crisp from marginal pub fodder into mass-marketed, multi-flavoured snack.

According to Banham, before the 1960s the crisp had the same purpose as a Babycham: respectable women could ask for a bag of crisps instead of a beer in a pub, thus remaining ladylike without dropping out of a round. Then, in 1962, Golden Wonder entered the market, building the largest crisp factory in the world in Widnes, and ending the 40-year dominance of Smith’s Crisps almost overnight. Golden Wonder introduced ready-salted crisps in direct competition to Smith's, whose packets had little blue twists of greaseproof paper full of salt. This led to the 'flavour wars', with Smith's and Golden Wonder battling to produce new varieties such as cheese and onion, salt and vinegar and smoky bacon. By the end of the 1960s, the crisp market had doubled.

In the year Banham wrote his essay, Golden Wonder invented the Cheesy Wotsit, thus paving the way for what the industry calls ‘mimics’: crisps made of powdered potato, maize or starch, re-formed into shapes such as hoops, monsters or Space Invaders. Some were aerated, so eating them didn't seem to fill you up. The high percentage of air in any bag led to the belief that they were unfattening, which has since been exposed as a myth.

Now the crisp is at another crossroads. In one direction we see the long-term decline of the bog-standard crisp; in another direction, we see the rise of ‘premium’ crisps such as Burts and Kettle Chips. As Banham pointed out, crisps are a non-food, with little nutritional value, so eating them has to be a theatrical, symbolic act. The posh crisps have this ‘audio-masticatory’ appeal in spades. They are solid and crunchy. Eating them is hard work; they do not melt in the mouth like Quavers or Ringos. Their bags have minimalist designs with restrained colours, and they seem pleasingly crackly.

Posh crisps also carefully target middle-class food obsessions with more exotic ingredients, although much of this is down to adding adjectives - instead of ‘salt and vinegar’ you have ‘sea salt and malt vinegar’, and instead of ‘cheese and onion’ you have ‘mature Cheddar and red onion’.

They don’t fool me.

The banana returns

2011-01-17T18:39:00.004Z

It was the first winter after the end of the Second World War, and the children of Britain were about to receive a late Christmas present. On 30 December 1945 a Fyffe ship, the Tilapa, arrived in Avonmouth from Kingston, Jamaica, loaded with a consignment of ten million bananas. Hundreds of children, most of whom had never seen a banana before, were there to greet it. As the ship docked, a crew member threw a yellow banana on to the quayside, where it was caught by the ten-year-old daughter of a dock worker. It was the first banana to reach Britain since 1940.

Most of the bananas were green and unripe and meant to be stored for a week before being distributed all over the West Country, but only to under-18s. A popular wartime song, by the bandleader Harry Roy, had asked “When Can I Have a Banana Again?” The arrival of the Tilapa was a symbol – unfortunately, a premature one - of the end of shortages and the return of good times. Many children had to be shown how to eat a banana, like an ice-cream cone rather than corn on the cob.

Ever since refrigerated ships initiated the global banana trade at the end of the nineteenth century, this fruit’s tropical origins, and its susceptibility to disease and shortages, had made it an exotic object. The words “have a banana” were popularly inserted into the music-hall song “Let’s All Go Down the Strand”, giving it free advertising which would have been the envy of any other fruit. In the interwar period, London’s Tin Pan Alley tossed out songs like “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and “I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana”, and dance halls held banana nights.

The banana went on to divide East and West in the Cold War, for it was rarely available behind the Iron Curtain. Nikita Khrushchev boasted that the Soviets could produce everything except bananas. As the Berlin Wall came down, West Germans pointedly threw bananas at the East Berliners pouring into the west. Despite being frowned upon by today’s low-carb diets, the banana is still one of the bestselling items in British supermarkets.

Mundane quote for the day:

Farewell to long lunches
and other boozy pursuits!
Hail to the new age
of the desk potato,
strict hours of imprisonment
and eyesight tortured
by an impassive electronic screen. – Christopher Reid, The Song of Lunch

A history of the world in 1 object

2011-01-11T18:46:00.004Z

I found this quote in Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, which I share with you just in case you’re one of the 23 people in Britain who didn’t get it as a Christmas present. It’s about the famous Spanish coin ‘pieces of eight’, the first truly global currency, which was produced in the 1570s and had spread across the world by the end of the century. Unfortunately this caused rampant inflation in Spain and a shortage of silver as it all went to pay for foreign goods and the upkeep of Empire. There was a lot of discussion among Spaniards about how their riches seemed more apparent than real. This is an unnamed writer in 1600 on the groupthink of speculation and the often illusory nature of wealth:

The cause of the ruin of Spain is that riches ride on the wind, and have always so ridden in the form of contract deeds, of bills of exchange, of silver and gold, instead of goods that bear fruit and which, because of their greater worth, attract to themselves riches from foreign parts, and so our inhabitants are ruined. We therefore see that the reason for the lack of gold and silver money in Spain is that there is too much of it and Spain is poor because she is rich.

Oh dear. We really haven’t learnt very much in the last 411 years have we?

Mundane quote for the day: 'Money is one of those human creations that make concrete a sensation, in this case the sensation of wanting, as a clock does the sensation of passing time.' – James Buchan

A brief history of the bus shelter

2011-01-08T20:11:00.003Z

Bus shelters were once boringly functional affairs, built solely by local councils. Some were iron-and-glass edifices covered in peeling municipal green paint; others were made of brick; some in rural areas even had thatched roofs. Then in 1969, two advertising billboard companies, More O’Ferrall and London and Provincial, joined together to form a company called Adshel. The idea behind the new firm was simple: Adshel would supply bus shelters to local authorities for nothing, in return for the right to display advertising on them. In the early 1970s, it began installing its first shelters in Leeds, which is why the Adshel bus shelters in Leeds are still numbered “0001”. The ads were displayed in “6-sheet” panels - now universally known as “Adshels”, whether they adorn shelters or other places like supermarkets and motorway service stations.

Bus-shelter ads really started to boom in the 1980s. In 1984 Adshel launched a campaign for a fictitious product called “Amy”. Market research revealed an impressive awareness of this imaginary product among the public – and since it could only have come from bus shelters, it proved the value of advertising in them. Then, in 1988, a new data system called OSCAR (Outdoor Site Classification and Audience Research) provided information on vehicle and pedestrian traffic for poster sites. This allowed advertisers to direct their campaigns at passing pedestrians and motorists as well as bus users. Bus shelters soon had illuminated posters and cantilevered roofs so the adverts could be seen by everyone.

Adshel and its rival firm JCDecaux now supply most of Britain’s bus shelters. The bus shelter is no longer just somewhere to wait for a bus; it has become a marketing opportunity. These two firms have built themselves into global brands – bus-shelter builders to the world. They are increasingly branching out into other types of street furniture, one of the fastest growing areas of the advertising industry. In a post-Thatcherite world in which local authorities contract out many of their public services to private companies, our towns and cities are being colonised by advert-laden objects – not just bus shelters but automatic toilets, benches and litter bins.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.’ - Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

No news today

2011-01-03T20:34:00.002Z

This blog has long been interested in news stories that turn out not to be news at all – see the post for 7 August, ‘Not many dead’.

Over the slack period of Christmas and New Year there are always lots of these non-news stories. In fact there are often stories that are not only not news, they would only be news if the opposite were true. Let me explain.

On Christmas Day the BBC reported that the Archbishop of Canterbury had said in his Christmas message that the nation needed to get ‘closer to God’. It is of course reassuring that the Archbishop is fulfilling his job description, but it’s not really news. However, if he had said that we all needed to get closer to Beelzebub this Christmas, that would certainly have been news.

Similarly, on New Year’s Eve, the BBC reported on its hourly radio bulletins that Australians had already celebrated the new year. Given the global acceptance of Greenwich Mean Time and the way the world spins on its axis, it would only really be news if the Australians hadn’t actually celebrated the new year before us – although that news would be so worrying I don’t think I’d want to hear it.

Lord Reith famously wanted BBC news to avoid the strident voice and restless search for drama and human interest found in newspapers. A Good Friday news bulletin in 1930 simply stated: ‘There is no news tonight.’

This now seems very long ago.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines … The daily papers talk of everything except the daily … We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.’ - Georges Perec

On new year's day

2011-01-01T11:41:00.003Z

‘The nineteenth-century revival [of Christmas] did little for the New Year, although the exchange of good wishes recovered its respectability. One might stay up on New Year’s Eve for a midnight toast, or make resolutions for self-improvement; revellers gathered in Trafalgar Square to see in the New Year and frolic in the fountains – a pleasure now forbidden on grounds of safety – but 1 January was an ordinary working day. However, in Scotland, which for long paid little or no attention to Christmas, the New Year was and remains a great occasion, being completely untainted by popery. By the Bank Holiday Act 1971 New Year’s Day was recognized as a Bank Holiday in Scotland, but in England it did not attain that status till 1974. Since then, however, many companies have determined that it is not worth their while to resume work during the intervening week, much to the disgust and envy of journalists, who enjoy no such extended holiday.’

From The Oxford Companion to the Year, eds Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Stevens

Around the A4074

2010-12-28T17:18:00.003Z

Hope you all had a mundane Christmas. Here’s a bit of quotidian ethnography for the festive season … A couple of months back I spent an interesting afternoon with Felicity ‘Felix’ Ford, a postgraduate student at Oxford Brookes doing a practice-based PhD on ‘domestic soundscapes’. You can read more about her work on her excellent blog:

http://thedomesticsoundscape.com/wordpress/

As part of her PhD Felicity produced a radio show celebrating the hidden world surrounding her own regular commute along the A4074 road between Reading and Oxford. The interview she conducted with me forms part of the programme which aired on Boxing Day on BBC Radio Oxford. It’s on iPlayer for the next few days here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00crt5c/Around_the_A4074_26_12_2010/

The programme sounded great but unfortunately I had to stop listening after two seconds when I heard my own horrible voice. Why did no one tell me I sounded like that? So you can listen to it for me if you like and I might pluck up the courage later on. FYI, if you write and research about everyday life the BBC is obliged under its charter to refer to you as ‘quirky’ and/or ‘offbeat’.

I also wrote about my favourite history book of the year for History Today magazine:

http://tinyurl.com/3y2pzdp

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The symptoms of the freeway – monotony, obsessive time and space, fatigue – do not exist for us; as soon as we get on it we get off again and forget it for five, ten hours, all night long. What can it matter to us if we barely see it, segmented as it will be in more than sixty pieces, brochette of serpent instead of a whole and hissing snake?’ – Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop, The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

Christmas special

2010-12-22T22:40:00.002Z

Before this blog shuts up shop for the Christmas break, there's just time to include a slightly longer version of my article in yesterday's Guardian. Merry Christmas everyone.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in the Pax Britannica of three and four-channel television, Christmas properly began with the family purchase of the double issue of the Radio Times. This seasonal institution, first published in 1969 with the arrival of colour on all channels, was founded in the confident belief that television was our lingua franca and the nation would join together at Christmas in a diasporic community assembled in 20 million living rooms. In those days every sitcom or quiz show, however secular and unenchanted, had its own Christmas show. I would trawl the Aladdin’s cave of TV listings in search of any old rubbish with a festive theme, from Val Doonican in a reindeer jumper to Christmas Celebrity Squares.

One programme is routinely cited as the apex of this golden age of communal television: the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas special which, according to the Guinness Book of Records, brought together 28.5 million people to delight in Eric and Ernie and various BBC presenters performing “There is nothing like a dame” from South Pacific. There is a long tradition in British culture, running all the way from William Langland to T.S. Eliot, which supposes that we once possessed an organic common culture that has been fragmented by modernity. This is the televisual version of the myth: a lament for the lost capacity of TV to create shared moments.

History, of course, is rarely so neat. Television ratings in the 1970s were fiercely disputed. The figure of 28.5 million viewers for the Morecambe and Wise show came from the BBC’s own audience research. ITV’s figures, which the British Film Institute now prefers to rely on because they sampled households using electronic measuring devices attached to TV sets, suggest that their 1977 Christmas special was only the 11th most viewed programme of the 1970s, with 21.3m viewers, and the 10th most viewed was the Mike Yarwood Christmas Show which directly preceded it on BBC1, with 21.4m. So perhaps, instead of Morecambe and Wise bringing the nation together in laughter, they made 100,000 people turn off or switch over when they came on.

The point, though, is that people really want to believe there was a moment when most of the nation congregated around the TV, and this yearning for community runs counter to the market logic of the last three decades. Ever since the Annan Committee on Broadcasting reported in 1977, the received wisdom of government has been that broadcasters are an unelected elite imposing their uniform vision of the world on the rest of us. Thatcherism championed the notion of consumer choice against this BBC-ITV duopoly. The irony is that, in the less regulated, market-led environment created by the 1990 Broadcasting Act, those who watched television the most - old people - were the most ignored because they were least appealing to advertisers. Instead broadcasters wooed the ELVs or “elusive light viewers”, such as teenagers and young singles with disposable incomes. Then, with the rise of digital and catch-up television in the 2000s, the era of “linear viewing” was supposed to come to a definitive end. Just as we could create our own playlists on an iPod, we could now personalise an evening’s viewing like the atomised individual consumers the post-Thatcherite market wanted us to be.

Only it hasn’t happened. Saturday night event television like the X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing has revived the concept of live shows watched by whole families. True, the viewing figures are smaller than in the 1970s but in some ways the potential for collective involvement is greater because there are so many opportunities to comment and participate. Twitter, with its improvised invention of the hashtag to allow similar content to be searched and tracked, has allowed vast virtual communities to meet to discuss shows while they are being broadcast. There is also far more discussion of popular culture in serious newspapers and so even people who have never seen the X Factor know more than they would like to know about it. For better or worse, such shows revive Dennis Potter’s vision of television as a mass democratic form that could break through the intellectual and class hierarchies of theatre and print culture.

One of the defining qualities of TV remains that it can be viewed by lots of people at exactly the same time. Over the next few days it will once again create this ephemeral, undemanding form of togetherness as millions of viewers sit down to watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special, the new version of Upstairs, Downstairs and the Top Gear team driving to Bethlehem. Even as our politicians continue to recite the mantra of individual choice, the continued popularity of Christmas telly points to this longing for a collective life.

Upstairs Downton

2010-12-18T15:38:00.002Z

I wrote a piece about Upstairs Downton and Downstairs Abbey for the Financial Times last week. It’s too long to paste in here so here is the link:

http://tinyurl.com/3xrs4sy

I know some people have read Downton Abbey as the usual recession era toffs’ TV but I am not so sure. When the middle-class Matthew Crawley arrives at Downton he prefers to do his own menial tasks and thus offends his new valet, Moseley, who complains of being “stood there like a chump watching a man getting dressed”. Crawley must be taught how to perform the role of master, to let someone else fasten his cufflinks. “We all have different parts to play, Matthew,” says Lord Grantham reprovingly, “and we must all be allowed to play them.” Of course, one could read this as a reassuring paternalist myth which imagines that the underlings are happy to collude in their own subjugation. But perhaps it is also about mutual entrapment: a recognition that much of the master-servant relationship is a House of Cards, a world of illusion and suspended disbelief which requires the constant vigilance of all its actors to maintain it. Julian Fellowes, who created the series, is an actor himself and much of Gosford Park was also about social life as performance: one of the valets even turns out to be a Hollywood actor, and the servants, constantly watching over their employers as they act out their comedy of manners, are well aware that the emperor has no clothes.

I also did a piece about one of my favourite books for Norman Geras’s blog, Normblog:

http://bit.ly/gPO1Jf

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The obsessive fear of the Americans is that the lights might go out. Lights are left on all night in the houses … And this is not to mention the television, with its twenty-four-hour schedules, often to be seen functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms … There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared).’ – Jean Baudrillard, America

Boring 2010

2010-12-13T18:51:00.003Z

On Saturday I made my West End debut, at the Dominion Theatre on Tottenham Court Road (see picture). OK, if you were being really picky you’d have to say it was in the Studio upstairs and not the main theatre. And fair enough, I had to squint a little and IMAGINE that the tourist crowds streaming into the foyer to see the Ben Elton/Queen musical We Will Rock You were actually coming to see me talk about the English motorway system. Granted, quite a few of my actual audience of c. 200 probably didn’t know who I was. And I suppose if you were a real stickler for the truth you’d have to point out that the giant gold statue outside was a likeness of Freddie Mercury and not me (although it’s a toss up which of us it looks more unlike). But these are mere details, tiny little flies in the massive jar of ointment smelling sweetly of my success. After years of studying what Lucky Jim called ‘strangely neglected topics’, I have arrived.

Thanks to James Ward for organising the event, Boring 2010. It’s about time someone took the boring seriously enough to have a conference about it. As I said in my talk, people who write about the mundane in this country tend to be met with an arched eyebrow, and placed within a particular tradition of English eccentricity, wryness and self-deprecation (see the above paragraph for an example of this defensive voice). It’s completely different in France, where there is a long and rich intellectual/literary tradition of reflecting on ‘la vie quotidienne’. If only we could write with the same depth, lyricism and elegance as Georges Perec, Marc Auge, Maurice Blanchot etc. about the Paris metro, autoroutes, service stations and airports.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘I am busy proving the falsity of the dictum that to a well-stocked mind the word dullness has no meaning – it has a great deal of meaning for me: I might almost say the meaning of meaning.’ – Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica

Brine town

2010-12-07T22:50:00.002Z

I’ve always been fascinated by those moments when daily life breaks down and becomes visible beneath its thin veneer of taken for grantedness - such as when snow falls and we are suddenly aware of the elaborate collective apparatus that lets us get to work, buy food, take children to school and otherwise allow our mobile lives to function.

When I was travelling round the motorway system for my roads book, I kept coming across these strange, unmarked pieces of architecture by the side of the road. They turned out to be salt barns for storing and dispensing road salt. One massive specimen sits by the edge of the M5 in Worcestershire. 21 metres high and 21 metres in diameter, it holds about 2000 tonnes of rock salt. Locals know it as the ‘Christmas pudding’.

Road grit is a mixture of sand and rock salt. Sea salt is too fine and dissolves too quickly to disperse snow and ice, so all salt used in gritting comes from salt mines. Towns like Northwich, Middlewich and Nantwich take their names from the salt mines, ‘Wych’ meaning ‘Brine Town’.

Sheep and deer are often killed on the roads when they lick the rock salt left by gritters. Sweet-toothed sheep are also partial to the new type of grit, coated in molasses, which is used because it is less corrosive to cars. Seaside species like Danish scurvy grass and lesser sea-spurrey thrive on motorway verges because of the rock salt spread on the tarmac in winter.

Our lives are intertwined with grit. And how dare our masters nearly run out of it, like they nearly ran out of it last winter!

Mundane quote for the day: ‘While the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields … In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position.’ – Henry Thoreau, ‘A winter walk’

Our man at the BBC

2010-11-29T18:54:00.002Z

I’ve been reading, for professional reasons, John Birt’s autobiography. I won’t bore you with the politics and the management theory, but I liked this quote from Malcolm Muggeridge, who described the BBC as an organisation that ‘came to pass silently, invisibly; like a coral reef, cells multiplying until it was a vast structure, a conglomeration of studios, offices, cool passages along which many passed to and fro; a society, with its laws and dossiers and revenue and easily suppressed insurrection.’

And this presumably unintended witticism from Margaret Thatcher: ‘I never listen to the Today programme. It was particularly bad this morning.’

And this account of Birt hearing the politest of activist chants from his office in Broadcasting House (the famous stairs of which are pictured above) one morning:

‘What do we want?’
‘Radio 4!’
‘Where do we want it?’
‘Long wave!’
‘What do we say?’
‘Please!’

As for news of the royal engagement, I am reminded of the poem that Pam Ayres wrote as an epithalamium on the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles:

My mother said, “Say nothing,
If you can’t say something nice.”
So from my poem you can see
I’m taking her advice.

Mundane quote for the day:
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
- Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Dreamers’

In praise of Ken Barlow

2010-11-20T11:39:00.002Z

This article by me about Ken Barlow appeared in the Guardian last week.

On 22 November a resident of No. 1 Coronation Street will become the longest running fictional character in television history and next month, along with the soap opera in which he appears, he will celebrate his half century. And yet still the nation refuses to love him. Never mind that he has had the sort of eventful love and working life that would give most of us nervous breakdowns. Ken Barlow remains our national archetype of a boring man.

Only, I don’t find him boring at all. Rather, I think Ken Barlow is a fascinating prism through which to read the political and cultural history of the last half century. In the first episode of Coronation Street we saw him living at home while studying at Manchester University, clashing with his postman father over the snooty look he gave the HP sauce bottle on the dinner table. I don’t know if the Street’s creator, Tony Warren, had read Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, published three years earlier, but Barlow was certainly the incarnation of Hoggart’s scholarship boy: the “uprooted and anxious” figure whose education had alienated him from his working-class origins.

The last few decades have been even more difficult for Ken. He was, after all, part of the left-liberal intelligentsia against whom Margaret Thatcher launched her long kulturkampf, blaming it for decades of national decline. And had he not already left the public sector, he would, as this newspaper’s most famous fictional reader, have been worried by Norman Tebbit’s prediction this summer that the spending cuts would “fall on Guardian readers , not Mirror and Sun readers doing essential jobs”. But Ken’s biggest problem is that, after 50 years of consumer populism, his own self-image as the street’s intellectual makes him seem so priggish and humourless. Clever people are now supposed to respond to contemporary culture with savviness and sarcasm, not judgmental earnestness. It is hard to imagine Ken watching a programme like The X Factor with the requisite combination of knowing irony, kitsch enjoyment and casual cruelty.

Ken’s life also sums up our equivocal attitudes to places like Coronation Street. The serial may have been instantly popular with viewers but Granada’s first chairman, Sidney Bernstein, thought its bleak imagery was the wrong image for “Granadaland” and many northerners agreed with him, blaming it for perpetuating southern stereotypes of the region and dissuading businesses from investing in it. Harold Wilson embodied this ambivalence by promising to demolish the nation’s Coronation Streets while professing to love the programme itself. The soap’s millions of viewers were still expected to follow the advice of the Tory MP Charles Curran in 1967 and rely on mortgages and the consumer boom to take them on “the escalator from Coronation Street”.

One stubborn soul failed to follow this advice: Ken Barlow. In the first episode, he was embarrassed about letting his new girlfriend see his humble surroundings and he has flirted with leaving the street many times, recently taking the drastic step of cancelling his order for the Guardian at the newsagents in preparation for going off to live on a barge. But once again he could not bring himself to leave. Unlike James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, who is rewarded for staying in his home town of Bedford Falls by a visit from an angel who reminds him how rich and fulfilled his life of thwarted ambition has been, Ken simply carries on with his imperfect marriage and dull life. He has been, among other things, a teacher, a journalist, a taxi driver, a waiter, a supermarket trolley pusher, a male escort and a Father Christmas. Rather than taking the escalator out of the class into which he was born, he has led what Hoggart once called a “carousel life”, a life not of the upward trajectory of the professional career but of living from year to year and taking whatever job turns up.

This is why Ken is so out of his time. He has refused to go along with the last half century’s stress on consumer aspiration and meritocratic elitism. Today’s young Ken Barlows might be lucky enough to win places to study at prestigious universities, but these institutions, as the recent Browne Report makes clear, will now be conceived solely as engines of economic growth and as places where students will pay higher fees in return for higher salaries when they graduate. By these lights, Ken has wasted his education and his life. He has played little part in “wealth creation” – fifty years ago, they didn’t call it wealth, they called it money – and is still stuck in the same house he lived in when he was a student, leading his carousel life, stoically and decently. What a dinosaur. No wonder we think he is boring.

On weeds

2010-11-10T17:46:00.003Z

I’ve been reading Richard Mabey’s new book, Weeds. ‘Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world,’ he writes. ‘If you have no such plans or maps, they can appear as innocents, without stigma or blame … I’m inclined to offer them a second opinion, to wonder what positive features we might glimpse in their florid energy.’

Mabey is in distinguished company. John Clare was the great poet of weeds and Darwin was fascinated by them as examples of accelerated evolution.

Naturally, I can't help drawing parallels between the common dismissal of mundane vegetation - except, I suppose, for the narcotic variety of weed - and our dismissive attitude to the human-made everyday. For buddleia and fat hen, read roundabouts and bus shelters.

I’ve also been reading Ronald Blythe’s new collection and found this in Mabey’s introduction, which summed up why I like Blythe’s writing so much, even if I occasionally find the lack of self-revelation tantalising:

‘Over the past half century we have been slavered with self-indulgent memoirs and egotistical confessionals, the literature of the “me” generation. Ronnie’s personal writing offers something far more valuable and noble: the literature of “us”, where the “I”, so to speak, becomes the eye, fascinated with the world beyond itself.’

The gift

2010-11-03T17:55:00.003Z

In his classic anthropological study of 1925, The Gift, Marcel Mauss showed that the ritual of gift-giving in tribal societies is rarely motivated by selfless good will, but is a tangled web of mutual obligation, duty and status-seeking. Mauss’s insights about ritualistic exchange could equally be applied to modern-day retail anthropology. Christmas shoppers will have been struck in recent years by the rise of the non-transferable gift: the product that no one would think of buying for themselves, and whose only function is to serve as a nicely packaged, reasonably priced present for someone else. At Christmas time, department stores devote large areas of floor space to these ‘gift ideas’, and newer stores like the Gadget Shop make a virtue of selling things of little practical use. The bizarre gizmos in the much-mocked and now-defunct Innovations catalogue seem to have been reincarnated on the high street.

There are several types of pointless gift. First, there are the ‘accessories’ linked to particular hobbies. Golfers fare particularly badly here, fobbed off with ball monogrammers, digital score cards, shoe bags and telescopic ball retrievers. Second, there are items that promise to provide their owners with a sense of humour by proxy, and which are usually associated with mildly loutish behaviour. Examples include beer belts (‘holds an entire six pack – hands free for convenience’), Friday afternoon hammers (‘It’s Friday afternoon. Get hammered: handy beer bottle opener with hammer’) and handbags inscribed with the words: ‘I smoke – deal with it’. Third, there are gifts that feed into media-created anxieties about health and hygiene, like talking calorie counters and ‘brush guards’ (toothbrush covers). Lastly, there are objects that do have a prosaic use but need to be given a veneer of classiness or labour-saving wizardry to turn them into gifts. Battery-operated corkscrews and metallic car tax disc holders fall into this category.

Pointless presents are linked to the burgeoning science of retail management. Companies now spend fortunes researching which areas of the store customers find most alluring, what forms of lighting and piped-in music make them buy things, and how shop layout and fittings can encourage customer traffic flow and ‘stopping power’. Shops spend most time and energy on so-called ‘point of sale’ displays situated near the checkouts, or in the queuing aisles at the checkouts themselves. These areas are called ‘impulse zones’, and are designed to sell customers things they never knew their friends and relatives needed. A logical move, given that not many people enter a store with the firm intention of buying an office voodoo kit.

Market analysts have seen these geek playthings as part of a new ‘kidult’ economy, as adults embrace grown-up toys to escape from stressful lifestyles and prolong their childhoods. But this assumes that customers make rational choices based on clearly defined needs. People don’t actually want any of these things; if they did, they would buy them for themselves, all year round instead of just at Christmas. In The Gift, Mauss discovered tribal communities that tried to drive each other to economic ruin by perpetually exchanging gifts of ever-ascending monetary value. At least there’s not much chance of this happening with grooming kits and screwdriver sets. The aim of pointless presents is to routinize the social minefield of gift-giving, making it profitable for companies and relatively painless for the rest of us.

The cardboard car

2010-10-27T18:37:00.002+01:00

One of the memorable sights of the weekend of 11 and 12 November 1989, after the Berlin Wall came down, was the endless stream of mustard yellow Trabant P601s, or ‘Trabis’, trundling through the checkpoints from East to West. Jubilant onlookers celebrated with the Trabiklopfen, an energetic thump on the car’s roof.

During the Cold War, while Mercedes, Audi and Volkswagen spearheaded West German economic success, the Trabi was the command economy on wheels. Nicknamed ‘the cardboard car’, it was made from Duroplast, an unrecyclable resin strengthened by Soviet cotton wool waste and compressed brown paper. Its two-stroke engine burned a petrol and oil mix producing ten times as much pollution as Western cars, although the accelerator pedal did have a point of resistance halfway down to discourage excessive fuel consumption.

The Trabi remained in production, virtually unchanged, for a quarter of a century. It was produced as either a ‘limousine’ or ‘estate’ car, in ‘standard,’ ‘special request’ and ‘de luxe’ versions, the latter having such exciting additional features as a different-coloured roof, chromium-plated bumpers and headrests. There was also a convertible Trabi with the trendy name, ‘Tramp’, a civilian version of the GDR army jeep.

After reunification, the East German market was flooded with used Western cars and the Trabant factory in Zwickau quickly went bust. East Germans, who had been on 10-year waiting lists for Trabis, now abandoned them in the street or exchanged them for more valuable currency like Western cigarettes.

But the process of kitsch recuperation soon began. Street artists made makeshift sculptures from these abandoned cars, and smart café bars recycled Trabi parts as furniture. Today, Berlin shops sell Trabi T-shirts, key-rings and die-cast models, and modish young people drive Trabis with jazzy paint jobs and souped-up engines. Tourists can go on a ‘Wild East Trabi Safari’ tour. You drive around East Berlin in a Trabi convoy, with a tour guide in the lead car providing a radio commentary, and at the end receive your ‘Trabi driving licence’. Trabi chic is part of the vogue for ostalgie, a tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for the old GDR which sees its pretensions to state-of-the-art modernity as endearingly dated. We can view the primitive rustbuckets of the past with a mixture of comedy and sentiment, safe in the knowledge that we will never have to drive the things.

The terrible privacy of the Toyota Prius

2010-10-21T19:30:00.004+01:00

I’m appearing at the Off the Shelf Festival in Sheffield this Saturday with Jonathan Coe. Come one, come all: I’m not sure of the details but I imagine it involves exchanging folding money with someone, although I don’t anticipate ticket touts and teeming hordes.

Coe’s novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, has some parallels with On Roads. It’s about a sales rep who drives off to Shetland in a Toyota Prius, hangs out at service stations, falls in love with his satnav voice, and loses his way in the motorway system in a similar manner to Donald Crowhurst in the Doldrums on the solo round-the-world yacht race in the late 1960s. There are some telling descriptions of the motorway as non-place:

There was absolutely nothing to see, nothing to look at, apart from the little punctuation marks that broke up the motorway itself – roadsigns, chevrons, gantries, bridges, all of which merged into one indecipherable, meaningless sequence after a while anyway. There was countryside on both sides but it was featureless: the occasional house, the occasional reservoir, the occasional glimpse of a distant town or village, but apart from that, nothing. It occurred to me that the areas bordering our motorways must make up a huge proportion of our countryside, and yet nobody ever visits them or walks through them, or has any experience of them other than the monotonous, regularly unfolding view you get through the car window. These areas are wastelands; unaccounted for.

The outlook is bleak

2010-10-17T15:49:00.001+01:00

It’s odd how attached we get to the weather forecast, that little extempore lecture to the nation, that consoling quotidian ritual that comes after the news. There has been a forecast on the BBC almost every day since 26 March 1923. The exception was during the Second World War, when the radio forecast was suspended in case it was helpful to the enemy, although the government partially relented in October 1944, allowing information to be given about the weather the day before yesterday. ‘Most people,’ the BBC bulletin stated laconically on the day the ban was lifted, ‘will have cause to remember it because in most parts of the country it just rained and rained.’ ‘Weather forecasts are a welcome return,’ wrote a Mass Observation diarist when the weather forecasts returned properly in 1945, ‘and we don’t care how many deep depressions threaten from Iceland or anywhere.’

Emine Saner from the Guardian contacted me on Thursday with the dismaying news that three of the BBC’s weather presenters are to be culled in a cost-cutting exercise. I was happy to express my admiration for one of the threatened presenters, Rob McElwee:

http://tinyurl.com/322gvqp

The journalist Brian Cathcart, author of an excellent short book about rain, recently tweeted that McElwee’s weather forecasts were ‘prose-poems’. It’s true, they are - and they also tell you what the weather’s going to be like, which is not as common as you might think.

This little efficiency drive is all, of course, just an amuse-bouche for the gargantuan main course of Wednesday’s announcement of the spending review results, which will I suspect feel similarly arbitary and illogical.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘If news and sports are of the same stuff and texture, then the weather report plays a literally pivotal role in the inversion and return from tragical or serious impressions of everyday events to their comical or farcical identities …

The programmers appeal to the archaic side of the divining arts in order to produce a timeless climate of myth … the myths which structure the manifold allegories also fabricate the news which frames the weather. In this fashion the meteorologist gives credence to catastrophe by forcing news to be subject to daily rhythms seemingly more timeless than the present currents of international events. He underscores their potentiality by folding them into patterns of the everyday, allowing us therefore to conclude that a balanced meditation on death (the news) and life (the weather) will allow anything to pass through the interstice of history and myth …

A most extraordinary and most everyday production of le quotidien, then, is the weather. It establishes a split between news just passed and future events and allows the occasion, in the time of the climate, for a fake presence to body forth through the report.’ – Tom Conley

Don't burn your books

2010-10-14T17:45:00.002+01:00

This piece by me about ebook readers was in the Guardian earlier this week:

The relentless rise of the ebook is turning me into a resentful Luddite. I want to snatch that smugly tiny ereader from the woman reading in bed in the Sony advert, and give her a doorstop of a hardback that will make her arms ache. As for that trendy young couple reading on the beach in the Amazon commercial, I want to kick sand in their third generation Kindles until they stop working.

My dislike of the ebook is partly motivated by selfishness: as an author I would like my words to end up in some concrete, permanent receptacle, not an erasable computer file which the reader does not even properly own. But mostly it is motivated by irritation at the orthodoxy, typified by Amazon’s widely publicised announcement this summer that its American ebook sales had overtaken those of its hardbacks, that there is an irresistible momentum in favour of digital downloads and the days of the printed book are numbered.

In search of counterevidence, I turn to the experience of the most Luddite author of the last century: George Mackay Brown, the reclusive Orkney poet who regarded the industrial revolution as a terrible wrong turning, warned against our worship of the “synthetic goddess” of progress, and used his column in the local newspaper to moan about voguish inventions like transistor radios and telephones. “What brisk hard-headed common-sense dehydrated little manikins we are nowadays,” he admonished his fellow Orcadians in 1955, “strutting around with our cheque-books!” He reserved his most caustic comments for television, which finally arrived on Orkney in the mid-1950s and which he feared would deliver a death blow to the already endangered activities of reading and communal storytelling.

Time passed, and television found its place on Orkney. It became a mild addiction, which weakened but did not come close to destroying the art of pub storytelling or the pleasures of the printed word. In his later years, Mackay Brown reluctantly gave “half a genuflection” to the goddess of progress. He belatedly acquired a black and white TV, a telephone, a fridge and a digital watch, becoming fascinated by its “dance of dark numbers”. He even listed watching TV as one his recreations in Who’s Who, alongside reading, while he carried on writing in longhand about twelfth-century Orcadian sagas.

I believe that Mackay Brown represents, in extreme form, how many of us late adopters respond to new technology. As the historian of technology David Edgerton argues, our understanding of historical progress tends to be “innovation-centric” rather than “use-centred”. We obsess about exciting new inventions and underestimate how much they will have to struggle against the forces of habit and inertia in our daily lives. Old-fashioned but serviceable technologies often prove surprisingly resilient. There was much amusement last year when the expenses scandal revealed that the former MP Chris Mullin, the Mackay Brown of Westminster, still had a black and white television set – yet, according to the most recent count, more than 28,000 other households also still have monochrome licences. A few decades ago we thought radio a dying form, but it is now thriving in the age of new media. Listeners remain emotionally attached to their analogue radios and a recent report from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport recommended that the switch-off of the FM signal be delayed, possibly indefinitely.

The valedictories for what is now disdainfully called “dead tree publishing” may be similarly premature. The lessons from history are that technological progress is uneven, that consumers are often sceptical of techno-hype, and that new technologies do not supplant old ones in linear fashion. Look at the iPad’s ebook reader: your book purchase is stored on a real-looking wooden bookcase and you take it off the shelf and flip its virtual pages over with your fingers. Why, it’s exactly like … reading a book! So long as the ebook continues to pay it the compliment of mimicry, I suspect that the printed book need not fear for its life just yet.

No one likes us, we don't care

2010-10-09T12:24:00.003+01:00

Term has begun. Lots of people wandering around looking dazed, confused and lost – and that’s just the lecturers. I haven’t had much time to do anything but try like some virtual King Canute to stem the relentless tide of emails and worry about how, as lowly bottom-feeders on the ocean, we will be affected by the coming Tsunami of public sector cuts. I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about it either way. I think I’m just going to adopt that old Millwall FC chant: ‘No one like us, we don’t care.’

In lieu of a proper post here are a few bits and bobs of not very much.

I did a review of a new book by Paul Addison about Post-War Britain:

http://tinyurl.com/2ws9ohy

I also wrote a long piece for History Workshop Journal about the cyclamate charm and strange political life of the television presenter Hughie Green:

http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/1/172.abstract

And the Boring conference I’ve signed up for on 11 December seems to have generated a lot of interest:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/boring-conference-2010-chairman-of-the-bored-2099915.html

Mundane quote for the day: ‘I am anxious to say a word about the potato. But will the Muse fail me? We sing the flower, we sing the leaf: we seldom sing the seed, the root, the tuber. Indeed the potato enters literature with no very marked success. True, William Cobbett abused it, and Lord Byron made it interesting by rhyming it with Plato; but for the most part it enters politics more easily and has done more to divide England from Ireland than Cromwell himself.’ – John Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough

So many tapeworms

2010-10-02T12:31:00.002+01:00

All the anniversary programmes about the Battle of Britain have reminded me of the ‘scrap for victory’ campaign that began in summer 1940, aimed at collecting and melting down scrap metal to build Spitfires. The most controversial part of this campaign was the removal of the railings around London’s parks and squares. The Times welcomed the scrapping of the railings on aesthetic grounds, as one would the removal of ‘an unbecoming pair of spectacles’ on ‘the face of a pretty woman’; others saw it as a democratic, egalitarian gesture, allowing access to squares which had been reserved for the well-to-do residents of the surrounding houses. Unsurprisingly, the inhabitants of the squares were less keen, believing that the removal of the railings threatened their property values, and presented an open invitation for the lower classes to play football and sunbathe on their private property. They pointed out that the scrap value of the railings was probably less than the cost of removal, and that less symbolically charged items, such as redundant tramlines, had not been uprooted. Since tanks and spitfires cannot be made from cast iron, many rumours circulated that the railings proved to be unusable and had to be secretly dumped into the English Channel, the North Sea or some remote Welsh valley.

In his Tribune column in August 1944, George Orwell praised the removal of the railings as a social experiment which had opened up more green spaces to ordinary people, allowing them to stay in parks until late without being ‘hounded out at closing times by grim-faced keepers’. He noted that, with the end of the war imminent, they were erecting makeshift wooden railings around London squares so that ‘the lawful denizens of the squares can make use of their treasured keys again, and the children of the poor can be kept out’. For Orwell, the resilience of England’s ‘keep off the grass’ culture was an acceptance of the legalised theft of land ownership, and a victory for the few thousand landowning families in England who were ‘just about as useful as so many tapeworms’.

Orwell used the railings controversy as a way of imagining what sort of society Britain would become after the war. If there was to be a true social transformation, he suggested, it would occur in the mundane spaces and practices of daily life, where inequities of money and class were naturalised. Orwell was not alone in thinking like this. In the Architectural Review, Gordon Cullen developed the concept of ‘townscape’ in articles about park railings, public squares and traffic roundabouts. One of his concerns was the needless restriction of access, the replacement of ‘Common Ground’ with an ‘Urban no-man’s-land, germ-free, hygienic but socially utterly sterile’. He particularly criticised the ‘railing mentality’ that cordoned off public space and then compensated with a token gesture towards amenity such as a flower bed or rockery.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘I like to have time and comfort in the loo. The bathroom is important and I couldn't live in a culture that doesn't respect it.’ – Tony Blair, A Journey

Modern-Day Mass Observation

2010-09-25T12:32:00.002+01:00

It all began with a letter published in the New Statesman on 30 January 1937. It was jointly written by three diversely talented young men: Tom Harrisson (an anthropologist and ornithologist), Humphrey Jennings (a painter and filmmaker) and Charles Madge (a poet and Daily Mirror journalist). The letter announced the founding of Mass Observation, an organisation which aimed to investigate daily life in modern Britain in the same way that anthropologists were studying remote, tribal societies.

It invited volunteers to co-operate in a new research project, an “anthropology at home … a science of ourselves”. Its list of suggested topics for investigation read like a surrealist poem on the hidden strangeness of mundane life: “shouts and gestures of motorists … beards, armpits, eyebrows … behaviour of people at war memorials … anthropology of football pools … bathroom behaviour … female taboos about eating.”

I was just wondering what a similar list today might look like:

Noises made in the quiet zone on Virgin Pendolino trains.
The tone of humourless earnestness on newspaper comment sites.
Queues for posh pie shops at summer festivals.
The strange svengali status of Simon Cowell.
Facial expressions of people conducting mobile phone conversations.
Twitter etiquette.
Anger towards speed cameras.
The counter-intuitive embrace of the discomforts of camping.
The varied topiary of the goatee beard.

If anyone has any other suggestions, let me know …

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question their sequence; thus it is undated and (apparently) insignificant; though it occupies and preoccupies, it is practically untellable, and it is the ethics underlying routine and the aesthetics of familiar settings. At this point it encounters the modern. This word stands for what is novel, brilliant, paradoxical, and bears the imprint of technicality and worldliness; it is (apparently) daring and transitory, proclaims its initiative and is acclaimed for it.’ – Henri Lefebvre

Britain's shame

2010-09-18T14:20:00.009+01:00

I wrote a piece for today's FT about Made in Dagenham and other factory films which is too long to paste in here but here it is:

http://tinyurl.com/35evyua

And this is my last defining moment for the FT:

At a press conference held at the Treasury on 15 December 1976, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, looks to be sharing the nation’s anguish. He has just announced a drastic package of public spending cuts in an emergency mini-budget. The headline in the Sun the next day is “Britain’s Shame”.

The autumn of 1976 had seen a catastrophic loss of confidence in sterling. On 27 September, Healey, due to fly out to a finance ministers’ conference in Hong Kong, had to abandon his trip at Heathrow because the markets were so nervous, go back to the Treasury and apply to the IMF for a loan. From October to December the government negotiated tensely with the IMF, which was demanding £2.5bn cuts in government spending in return for a $3.9bn loan.

The IMF crisis has become part of national political memory. For the Thatcher government of the 1980s, it was rivalled only as a moment of national ignominy by the winter of discontent. And it is often cited today by ministers – for example, by George Osborne in his recent speech at Bloomberg - as they stress the importance of cutting the deficit and maintaining the confidence of the markets. Britain, the mantra goes, must never again become a charity case.

The reality is more complicated. The situation at the end of 1976 was not uniquely dire. The government had already made two applications to the IMF at the end of 1975, with far less publicity, and the balance of payments had been in much greater arrears then. Healey later claimed that the Treasury had grossly overestimated the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement, the key figure used during the IMF crisis, and that if he had been given accurate figures he would not have had to ask for the loan at all. He also said that accepting the IMF’s strictures was a “Pyrrhic defeat”, forcing him into the proto-Thatcherite fiscal stringency he wanted to practise anyway.

But in 1976, just as in 2010, few Britons understood this language of exchange rates and public spending figures. What was really significant was the crisis’s symbolic elements: Healey’s volte-face at Heathrow, caught by the TV cameras, the arrival of the anonymous IMF team in the UK on 1 November with its humiliatingly infantilizing connotations, and the “shame” of the mini-budget. As often with the markets, what everyone thought and felt was just as important as the economic reality.

The poetry of Tony Blair

2010-09-10T20:59:00.002+01:00

Since the publication of A Journey, much has been made of Tony Blair’s writing style, and his rather touching pride in it, but I believe one aspect of it has been missed. I think someone once produced a book called The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld pointing out that the gnomic statements of the former US Defense Secretary actually made much more sense if you arranged them into lines that finished before the end of the page. I have found that some passages of our former PM’s memoirs can also be turned into poems. See what you think: I contend that there is something of the delicious ambiguity of Wallace Stevens, or perhaps John Ashbery, about them.

For GB

Our minds moved fast and at that point in sync.
When others were present,
We felt the pace and power diminish,
Until, a bit like lovers desperate to get to love-making
But disturbed by old friends dropping round,
We would try to bustle them out,
Steering them doorwards.

Regret

I can say that I never did guess
The nightmare that unfolded
And that too is part of the responsibility.
But the notion of responsibility
Indicates not a burden to discharge
But a burden that continues.
Regret can seem bound
To the past.
Responsibility has its present
And future tense.

I forgot to say that I’m appearing at an event at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road on Sunday 12th at 4.45pm, a panel on ‘How to write non-fiction’. Hope someone can tell me …

Slide rules rule OK

2010-09-04T15:22:00.002+01:00

I wrote this piece for the Guardian last week about my love of stationery and slide rules. Bonne rentree, everyone ...

“It is typical of Oxford,” says Charles Ryder after his return from an idyllic summer at Brideshead, “to start the new year in autumn.” Evelyn Waugh presumably meant to suggest that this was a characteristically perverse thing for an ancient university to do. It has never seemed perverse to me. Granted, I was the sort of studious child who was secretly pleased by the sight of the “back to school” displays in the shops. But I always liked the idea of starting the new year in September when, instead of that post-Christmas fagend feeling, you got the excitement of stocking up on new stationery.

The contents of a pencil case were my first encounter with the aesthetics of material objects. For me the smell and feel of a new eraser are as evocative of autumn as falling leaves. Stationery was also my understated introduction to the idea of utopia, the triumph of hope over experience. Forgetting all the false dawns of autumns past, I believed that if I could just find a pen with the right nib or highlighters in ideal colour combinations, I would at last have the tools to accomplish great deeds.

My affection for stationery even extends to those mathematical instruments, like set squares and protractors, whose purposes remained obscure throughout my school career but whose uniformity and symmetry I enjoyed. So I was puzzled recently when Melvyn Bragg, in the middle of complaining that his former employee, ITV, was obsessed with audience ratings, said that it had been “taken over by slide rules and suits” – in other words, overrun by sharply dressed, number-crunching managers going on about focus groups and audience share. I associate the slide rule, by contrast, with gentle, tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking engineers, calculating formulae for jet engines in sheds.

You never see anyone using a slide rule in a film. Matinee idol scientists always work out algorithms unaided in their brilliant minds, or scrawl them manically in chalk on giant blackboards. By the same token that unfairly condemns people with colour-coded ring binders as the owners of overly tidy minds, slide rules are supposed to belong only to the pedantic foot soldiers of science, the plodders who have to show us their workings out. But slide rules are lovely things: pleasingly solid, elegantly mysterious in their markings, the perfect marriage of form and function. Since scientific calculators rendered them obsolete in about 1980, some people (not me) even collect them.

I worry that today’s schoolchildren are being deprived of these tactile pleasures. Isabel Nisbet, chief executive of Ofqual, has questioned the future of paper exams because, she claims, pupils are no longer used to writing by hand. Hoping this isn’t true, I go to the “back to school” section of my local supermarket for reassurance. And there they all are - pencils with rubbers on the end, felt tips, even Tippex – just as they have appeared in late summer since time immemorial. I am happy to report that the death of the analogue classroom implement has been exaggerated.

Indeed, I can foresee a renaissance for these objects for the same reason that knitting and embroidery are again in vogue. People are embracing the texture and solidity of material things as a rearguard action against the growing touchlessness of the world, the tendency for our jobs to become an endless cycle of virtual exercises, an eternal exchange of emails and other digital surrogates. Not all of us know how to knit, but we can all buy something from the “back to school” displays, whether we are going back to school or not. We can sharpen our pencils, open a crisp new exercise book and create the world anew. Once a year, at least, we can imagine ourselves as noble artisans, transforming our little part of the universe with ink, graphite and paper. What we need, in these uncertain times, is some pencil case therapy.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The miner finds understandable pleasure in sending his pigeons winging afar off through the blue to distance places. There is Viking blood in English veins, so to me it is a pathetic sight to see those grown men sailing model boats on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens on a Sunday morning. Once we were a nation of sailors, not – as we are today – of civil servants. Their blood is the bacteria-free plasma from the cold deep-freeze stores in Whitehall.’ - Gilbert Harding, Master of None (1958)