2006: MY LIFE ON HOLD

Here's a confession. I learned one new thing only this year - to make music on my computer. I still remember last January gazing at the time-lines and various buttons of the comparatively simple (as it turns out) software GarageBand and sighing about the learning curve that it was going to involve. With help from a couple of my friends, and a bit of encouragement about the initial results, I finally got to record an album of digital sound quality where pay-by-the-hour time was not a factor. (Never before.) There's nothing brilliant on there, but I'm not in my 20s anymore. It's a good enough album, and it's a start. Making it gave me hours of pleasure, and only a little frustration - it's much easier than old-style 8-track cassette recording. So now I have a technique, and I want to go looking for some inspiration, perhaps in some of the "nu folk" compilatons that have been released in the last year or so.

Suddenly, the kind of music I've always liked - and actually been making, since 1990 - more or less psychedelic acoustic stuff with a nod to folk tradition, has become, if not exacty mainstream, a genre that's written about in the music press. I think Devendra Banhart really got this thing going - it started happening in the States following his Golden Apples of The Sun compilation. Congratulations to people like King Creosote, Tunng, Espers and Joanna Newsom, as well as Rob da Bank and the Green Man festival (wish I could have been there) for carrying the torch! Maybe there will be enough fans of this kind of thing to come out and fund Roy Harper's pension?

With this, and Doctor Who being so popular in the UK now, I feel part of the cultural mainstream in a way I haven't for years. It's an eerie feeling. The last time was when I eagerly anticipated the third Oasis album and shook Tony Blair's hand in Downing Street (Spring '97) - neither of which I'm proud of now.

In 2006, apart from my album, I have achieved little else that's new. My life is on hold. The things I have most dearly longed for since I was a teenager, I have not got. I realise it's selfish to dwell on it. I don't.

I've managed to be unrelentingly upbeat ("unrelenting self-confidence and positivity" is a mantra I got from a friend in 2002) but sometimes it seems like putting a brave face on things. Against the backdrop of real, if not severe, disappointment, I've been getting on with it this year. Three things that have made me happy are positive feedback at work from our TEFL trainees (month after month, it's a shot in the arm); my unstintingly supportive boss; and Brindle, who keeps smiling through anything, and is determined that there's a spiritual meaning behind all of this!

I'm also happy to come home to "my" new flat in Budapest, where I can read, play, get online, and download at will. But it all seems a bit "adultescent", the Dylan period! I've often poured scorn on,

"...them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in."

feeling that I was something different - free, and for the most part happy. But I do wonder when I can comfortably begin to invest in the future in any way at all - I don't mean money and property, though that's part of it. In 2007, I would like to discover something of this, something long-term. If I don't succeed, I may turn the corner towards unhappiness and the beginnings of bitterness. There. I said it.

Best of 2006:

The best album was Broken Boy Soldiers by the Raconteurs. It's full of enthusiasm, and presses all the right retro buttons. I said that about the White Stripes before. Funny, that! "Good Ol'" MOJO picked it as album of the year too. I enjoyed every track but one, quite unusual in an album. I also enjoyed the incredibly hard-to-track down El Perro Del Mar debut (the tracks I've heard) for her lightness of touch and melodicism, and the unashamedly Hammond-driven grooves of Winner by Big Boss Man.
Some of the refreshed Beatles songs on Love were amazing - great to hear I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields in rounded digital brilliance. Love really worked - 9 out of 10. (My only reservation was the new ending of Strawberry Fields, which was a bit too much.) The best thing I heard all year was easily No Fit State by Hot Chip (actually from 2005) included on the Uncut compilation this month. It reminds me of the 1980s, not always a good thing, but is just such a effortlessly well crafted and well produced song, I never tire of it.

Films I liked were Knallhart (gritty realism), The Wind That Shakes The Barley (ditto), Children of Men (for the chillingly convincing vision of Britain in the future.) Best of all was Brokeback Mountain, for the reasons you've read elsewhere! And also because we've been ripping off the Texan drawl ever since in our office to mouth obscenities and let everyone know "Ah'm sick of beans" (sic?) The best TV I saw was Blackpool, a couple of years old now, probably? To me, it was just the kind of entertaining drama where you couldn't wait for the next episode. Nice to have that Dennis Potter-esque musical "commentary track" revived. The second Doctor Who series had its moments (notably, The Girl In The Fireplace) but wasn't a patch on the first.

The best books I read were (#2) Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works, where he deals neatly with Nature v Nurture and whether we should follow the ethical "dictats" of our genes - in the first two chapters! Then he goes on to discuss the mystery of consciousness... It's ambitious. Haven't finished it yet; the diagrams slow me down a lot. #1 was The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, which I read and speculated about for hours, while I was living in Minsk (June) and gazing over the forest of tower blocks in the morning sun.

Being in Minsk was the peak of the whole year for me because it underlined that you can have an unforgettable experience form something you think beforehand will be disappointing. The summer was breaking out day after day, and the reaction of the trainees to the experience of communicative teaching added some belief against the doubt about whether the job I do is worth anything at all. (When you've turned your back on the property option and have opted to earn less to gain more in other ways, you need this!) My big wish in 2007 is for something else like this, and to feel that my life has some real momentum behind it. I'm also ready to record some more, in a stranger folkier vein. So bring it on.

THE QUALITY OF AMAZEMENT


I remember reading (in Sophie's World) the part where her philosopher friend reminds her not to lose the ability to be amazed by things. He mentions waking up to the fact that we are on a planet in the middle of "outer" space, and that we are sentient and so can reflect on it, except that people don't. Doctor Who echoes these sentiments when he tells Rose he can feel the Earth spin beneath him. The same idea is repeated in a different way in Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works when he writes about the "everyday miracles" performed by the human mind. He quotes Confucius: "A common man marvels at uncommon things: a wise man marvels at the commonplace." Now, is that enough intellectual backing? I get a lot of flak from people at work for using superlatives all the time; they think it's charmingly naive of me or something. It's not. I am in the world and this is my response: amazement.

Take this, as a random example of why. On Monday, I was travelling home for the midwinter festival (bring back the old festivals! by the way) and had time to think. I had just come through the futuristically refurbished Kings X, and I was sitting on a vehicle moving at great speed along a steel rail linking that surreal beast of a city which is London to my old home town. I was listening on these great Bose headphones I have to a digital reproduction of some Romanian gypsy musicians playing cymbalom, accordion and, over this, a seductively wailed melody line full of joy and real swagger. This was on CD not MP3 so it felt as if they were there in the same room. (Remember CDs?) I could stretch my legs out (on a cheap first class ticket) - it was bliss. And that was even before the wine hit. For the light effects, see below.

Be amazed again. It's worth it.

MIDWINTER LIGHT - UNCAPTURED


On this season's much anticipated journey home, I had to take at least three photographs in my mind. This is because I forgot to bring my camera. In fact hardly any of my best photographs have made it on to a format which can be publicly viewed. Come to think of it, it's true of my best music, which is often lost in waking up, and the best thoughts I come across, which spring up in a conversation but are never recorded for later.

First picture. I woke up, hours ahead of everyone else, on Sunday morning at a friend's house in Kilburn. It was just beginning to get light. The window looks on to an area of greenery, but from my sofa-bed I can only see twigs, branches and part of a tree trunk, bare for December. The sun, starting to rise, makes the tree look pale blue with green shadows against the palely lit (cloudless) sky behind. Then, at once, the branches are touched with bright coppery light. It's all framed by the window and looks like a perfect cover for a wintry song collection. But not mine, this time.

Second picture (sequence of films). Seen from a train window. On Monday, the countryside north of London was shrouded in freezing fog. (Still is.) The lines of trees across the fields look like a two-dimensional scene made with (does it still exist?) tracing paper. Each strip of scenery is covered with a layer so that the trees receding into the distance are greying into white and out of view altogether while the ones close to the train are quite distinct. Suddenly as we career past Morpeth, the sun shows, ghostly behind the mist at first. It's teasing, peering, gone again - then suddenly, and this is just as my first glass of wine kicks in, the clouds are gone as we emerge from the fog, and the scene is suffused with golden light, the white layer of frost on the fields accentuating the blueness of the shadows. Later as the sun sinks, it is all Christmas card silhouettes. The smoke and other vapours have turned dark blue against the sky which is still alight, its orangeness reflected by the pools of water (or ice?) on the ground. Now the freezing dark mist is low on the fields and as high as a person, or perhaps a house.

Third picture. Walking along Aberdeen beach putting off a bit of time before the James Bond film. Airbrushed sky (bright orange again, through green, to dark blue.) I can see the impossibly thin neo-gothic spires of Marischal College, the tower blocks winking at Bridge of Don, and a couple of cranes which must be at the harbour. It is all - and I'm not kidding - a keener pleasure, a more sumptuous memorable thing, than the film itself. Or is it only me? We should rate sky scenes and window scenes higher than we do.

Happy Solstice to all light lovers. Tomorrow the sun returns to the cold fields.

CHRISTMAS RUSH


Last weekend I went to Vienna on what's become a bit of an annual pilgrimage. I've always loved the pre-Christmas atmosphere anywhere - well, anywhere cold! It must be to do with childhood, an apprehension of magic that never quite materialises. Anyway, I went round the Christmas markets and took so many pictures of stalls that I could give you a virtual tour - but bought very little. There's something about a Christmas bauble that makes it look good in company, but throwaway on its own. Judging by the heaving crowd, it will have proved worth the stallholders' while taking all those hours to set up. In the - very - gentle haze brought on by some mulled wine, it was a perfect winter's day. The only disappointment was that there wasn't the least trace of frost in the air.

MORE STREET TROUBLE IN BUDAPEST

I knew that something would erupt yesterday on the anniversary of the 1956 uprising in Hungary. The first signs of this were when I was recording some music in my flat and I could hear a lot of shouting - with additional reverb - coming through the headphones. I stuck the microphone out of the window to record some of what was going on. The crowd - or elements of it - were very angry, chanting "You fucked it up!" (presumably a comment on the governing party's handling of the post-1989 era). I could see people carrying, as well as lots of normal Hungarian flags, the version of the flag adopted by the wartime Nazi-supporting Arrow Cross.

Later, I assumed it had all blown over and thought nothing of it when my friend invited me out for a drink. Of course, the streets were still full with the commemorations. I heard the sound of an orchestra and saw people laying candles on the pavements as tributes to the dead. Some of the main junctions were impassable, so I had to make a big circle in order to meet my friend, trying to arrange everything on a jammed phone network. The first I knew of trouble was when he phoned to suggest a different bar after having run into the middle of a riot and having had a tear gas canister going off nearby him.

We met in a central bar which is usually packed but yesterday almost deserted. I was born in 1968 and, being a true child of the 60s, have been waiting all my life for some sort of Green revolution, so I felt guiltily like an armchair (non-)activist, not being in the thick of things, but reading about it on Reuters and BBC News instead, and sipping beer! But it's not my cause and I have no reason to object to the government here. We were told it would be safer not to leave the bar.

Of course, we did leave. It was like walking into a scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four. To begin with, there was the tear gas that made my friend's eyes stream. Drifting clouds of it were picked out by the orange/pink of the street-lighting. It smells acrid like the waterproofing spray for shoes. The exits from the area where I was and the route back to my flat were blocked by ranks of helmeted riot police. People were wandering about aimlessly, trying to get away from the rioters and avoid the police. You could hear loud bangs going off (rubber bullets, I later learned) and helicopters were circling overhead. Again I went a circuitous route, and ended up going right past the stand-off at Ferenciek Tere, where a few minutes later the barricades went up and all hell broke loose. I noticed that a lot of the paving stones had been ripped up, a sure sign that people had come equipped for trouble.

Got home, watched the rest on TV. Phoned my friend whose flat overlooks one of the flashpoints. It's his photo that's attached. As he described the battle below, the call was interrupted by the report of a gun going off, and he saw someone collapse. Amazing to think all these incredible scenes were just streets away.

This morning, looking from the tram at Nyugati (West) Station, the street seemed immaculate; no sign that there had been any trouble there at all. The atmosphere is still highly charged, but I have a sense that the organisers who wanted to unseat the government have lost their big opportunity and that things will settle down as everyone returns to work.

Pestiside's leading article on Monday's events
Riots in Hungary blog

I was sent this poem by email. The warmth in the air is just starting to decay here in Budapest, so it's been on my mind.

THE SEVEN SORROWS TED HUGHES

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.


And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle’s palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it’s gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox’s sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox’s prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

STILL DELUSIONAL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

“I am with you always, even till the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20) Jesus's farewell to his disciples.

“Whatever you do, I'm always with you.” Tony Blair’s farewell speech. He can't have missed the reference. This is a better joke than the one about Cherie and the bloke next door.

You read it here first.

ECONOMY OF STYLE

I was talking to my friend, a Graham Greene expert, who said that his style is noted for its economy. The following excerpt, from The End Of The Affair, is a wonderful example of this. It’s about the amateur rationalist philosopher Richard Bridges, who has a deformed face, and seen through the eyes of one of the major protagonists.

“I had an idea that he was a man who really loved the truth, but there was that word love again, and it was only too obvious into how many desires his love of truth could be split. A compensation for the injury of his birth, the desire for power, the wish to be admired all the more because the poor haunted face would never cause physical desire.”

The ironic comment on rationalism is insightful, and nothing new, but you have to admire that GG is able to sum up in one paragraph what it took Freud (on sublimation) and Nietzsche (on Will To Power) whole books to say!

POLITICIAN COMES CLEAN, PROVOKES RIOT

I can’t pretend to know a lot about Hungarian politics. Even in my ignorance, however, I knew that both main parties lied about their future plans in order to win the General Election in April. And the government talked up the economic situation pre-election, while the opposition rubbished all their achievements. Big deal.

The irony is that there are riots now because Mr Gyurcsany, the PM, was inept enough actually to tell the truth about the political process! Which everyone knows anyway. I have a sneaking liking for the PM, just because he is such a maverick. Ever the politician most likely to slip on a banana skin, he actually loses patience with his party, upbraids them all for lying to the public, and publishes the whole transcript on his website. It's so blatantly the wrong thing to do, people here are hinting at some kind of conspiracy.

I'm all for less slick politicians and an end to tacit consent. If people were consistent, there’d be riots every day. Until the whole house comes crashing down.

UPDATE ON MY LIFE IN BUDAPEST, AND THOUGHTS ON WHY GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO

Last year, a close friend visiting from the UK told me I’m living an “alternative lifestyle”. Anyway, I’ve just returned to it – for a third year, and in a new (rented) flat. I don’t know why I feel I have to justify this to myself, but I suppose living here could be considered an irresponsible choice, failing somehow to grow up and grasp the nettle.

The flat is all high ceilings, double doors, large mirrors: the feeling of 19C opulence for less than £200 a month! The previous tenant, a friend and colleague, also left her entire video and CD collection behind, for the moment at least. This weekend, I’ve been finishing off a song on my laptop, and Brindle & I have started a new instrumental piece. It’s the same feeling a child gets when playing – pure, unconstrained fun. We also took the tram to Margit Island, for a burst of colour and to take digital pictures of flower beds and each other.

This afternoon I wandered down a narrow, deserted street where the only sound was the dull beat of my trainers on a dappled pavement, and past an old church into Raday utca, where I’m writing this blog. It’s a tree-lined old world style street, with wrought iron copper-topped lampposts and a parade of cafes. It’s also a perfect early autumn day and the sun is angling in spaces between the high facades. This is pretty normal for Budapest, but basically picture postcard stuff.


Tomorrow, I am back to work. It’s the most fun job I’ve had, and in some ways the least demanding. Not that I don’t have to focus on the work during office hours, but for the first time in my life I don’t often have to take it home with me, and I am not burdened by piles of meaningless paperwork.

Well, I have the nagging feeling that I should be making pension contributions and that I should be a property owner. But I hope this blog goes some way towards explaining why I’m loath to give up life in this beautiful city for a £200,000 mortgage in Bedford or somewhere, and the stale pleasures of trailing round HMV on a Saturday, or doing up the kitchen before settling down for another instalment of Changing Rooms. There is a painless alternative. I’m living it.

“AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED”

E.F. Schumacher’s ideas in Small is Beautiful have come as a revelation to me. I honestly believe that if the political will existed to apply these ideas, the problems associated with climate change, poverty and social breakdown would be ameliorated. It is not a case of not being able afford to do these things - "economically." We can't afford NOT to.

Schumacher exposes the craziness of narrowly-defined economic thinking, and criticises progress viewed merely as a “forward stampede”. I couldn’t help thinking of Tony Blair when he characterises people who hold this view, but it would be equally true of all politicians in the post-Thatcher mould. That's all of the major parties, isn't it? “You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down… we must take our fight forward and not be fainthearted… if there is trouble with the environment, we shall need more stringent laws against pollution, and faster economic growth to pay for anti-pollution measures… if there are problems about fossil fuels, we shall move from slow reactors to fast breeders.” etc.

By contrast, Schumacher’s humanistic economics wants to give the idea of growth “a qualitative dimension”. We need to take stock and see that we are destroying the very basis of our existence. Then, using the courage of our convictions, decide which things we want to help grow, and which we'd like to see less of.

BUDDHIST ECONOMICS

Here are his ideas on labour (from Wikipedia):

1. “From the point of view of the employer, it (labour) is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.”
2. “From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.”
3. The Buddhist view, “takes the function of work to be at least threefold”: “to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.”
4. “to organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence”.

TECHNOLOGY WITH A HUMAN FACE

“Modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all.”

Schumacher suggested superimposing on large-area states a cantonal structure of modest size so that vast industrial concentration (with all this entails in imbalance, ineptitude, and diseconomies of scale) becomes not only unnecessary but also impractical and inefficient. Once the development district is 'appropriately' reduced, it becomes possible to fulfill a society's material requirements by means of less expensive and simpler equipment than computerized, labour-saving machinery. This is the famous “intermediate technology”.

The reduced efficiency of intermediate technology provides the same amount of goods, but at a higher cost in labour. However, since this can be achieved only by full rather than partial employment of the available labour force, it represents no additional cost at all, socially. It is, in fact, a benefit. (adapted from Wikipedia)

Well, does it sound hopelessly idealistic, or just idealistic? As for a concrete plan for how to get from here to Schumacher’s kind of social, agricultural and industrial organisation, I’m not sure. (I’ll have to answer Neb’s points on Pol Pot! To be continued...) Meanwhile, it would help if the Department For International Development started prioritising people rather than mere productivity.

Here are some short videos of the Schumacher approach in action. Small is Working

SYD BARRETT (1946 – 2006)



Syd Barrett, of (The) Pink Floyd, died on July 7. As soon as the news was announced, tributes flooded into the BBC’s entertainment website. It’s fascinating that someone who probably recorded no more than ten outstanding songs, nearly all of which are featured on one album, should have such an enduring appeal. What is it about these songs that distinguishes them?

In the mid-1960s, the Beatles were the real innovators, leading the way into the territory of childhood as a storehouse for the imagery with which to communicate the psychedelic experience. Other musicians dutifully adopted this template, creating a very British style of psychedelic music utterly different from what American bands were doing at the time. For a short time, attachment to childhood was cool and the underground was awash with nursery-rhyme songs from the likes of Donovan, Kaleidoscope, The Idle Race and Tomorrow. Syd Barrett was – for the brief time when he sang for Pink Floyd – the unacknowledged master of the genre. He, more than anyone else, created the flawed, but often brilliant, psychedelic album The Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Because he had never really severed connection with his childhood, Syd’s songs are both more playful and more genuinely affecting than anything that his contemporaries were able to produce - perhaps with the exception of Strawberry Fields Forever. The Pink Floyd, produced by Norman Smith, brought the songs to life with sparse experimental arrangements featuring moments of Syd’s jagged tinny guitar and liberal use of reverb. Bass lines meander, scamper around and often disappear altogether; the most startling effect is brought about, for example in the Scarecrow, by omitting the low frequency sounds and then introducing them unexpectedly. (This almost never happens in modern music, which uses bass more or less formulaically, dead-centre and constant, until the listener tunes it out.)

The album opens with Syd, like a child fascinated with a new book on astronomy, stringing together the names of astral bodies into a seamless incantation in Astronomy Domine; it is perhaps the first, and certainly the most evocative, piece of “space rock” ever produced. In Matilda Mother, there are obvious psychedelic parallels in his description of being read a fairy story: “You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines…” (Vocal harmonies suddenly drench the last word here, creating an unforgettably synaesthetic effect.) In the nonsense song Flaming, where he is “lying on an eiderdown” and “travelling by telephone” there is something euphoric in the way these vocal lines are delivered. It’s typical of his best vocals: artless, sometimes a bit flat, but sung with such teasing knowingness that the listener cannot help being transported to the enchanted space where the lyrics were captured.

One of his songs, Effervescing Elephant, was so obviously a children's song that I managed to get away with teaching it to my class of 8-year-olds to sing at assembly. One of the girls subsequently learned the words by heart and went around singing them to impress her classmates. I wonder if she ever found out its origin.

Syd’s obvious yearning for a more innocent time, amplified by copious LSD use, probably contributed towards his mental breakdown. Sadly, none of his later work after Piper At The Gates of Dawn come from the same land as these early songs. You can only hear the hollow voice of someone completely losing their bearings, as the other musicians struggle to keep to his erratic time signatures. The sound of this lonely encounter with madness is one reason why he has such a cult following, but it is in these few short pieces of English whimsy where his genius lies: See Emily Play, Astronomy Domine, Lucifer Sam, Matilda Mother, Flaming, Bike, the Scarecrow.

Pink Floyd, with a new guitarist who briefly tried to write and sing in Syd Barrett's style, went on to conquer the world as arguably the most artistic of all rock bands, but in a completely different vein, and without any of the lightness of touch that characterised their founder.

Obituary on Pink Floyd fan site

TRUE GREEN

According to The Observer, Mr David Cameron is courting the "muesli vote" or something. Well, here's something which may surprise him: green voters can see through this kind of cynicism.

Here is another quotation from E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which remains startlingly relevant more than thirty years since its publication around the time of the 1970s oil crisis. His critique of Keynesian economics is based on our treating irreplaceable natural capital as mere income; he argues that countries’ pursuit of growth has necessarily institutionalised greed and envy as a basic mechanisms, resulting in instability and conflict worldwide. All other values have been subordinated to the economic one. Drawing on ideas from Gandhi, he comments here on the dehumanisation of work.

“It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the ‘standard of living’, and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would condemn the central preoccupation of society as a crime against humanity.”

Schumacher was a true visionary. It’s incredible to think that, had his ideas been taken seriously at the time, all the foolishness of “Thatcherism” – in whose shadow we still live – might have been avoided. That her successsor is attempting to mask hardline industrial capitalism with a few "green" gimmicks is shameful. It's time that the "muesli voters" took to the streets.

ВПЕЧАТЛЕНИЕ О МИНСКЕ

At the end of 2005, when I opted to come here to Minsk to run a course, little did I know that similar assignments in Zurich, Paris, Palma and Palermo would end up being given to colleagues. I felt I’d drawn the short straw. As I was being driven into the city under an overcast sky, I saw nothing in the endless concrete blocks to change my mind. The Director of the school here told me that the architecture was “Stalin-style” and that people loved the city despite the lack of historic buildings – it was completely flattened at the end of WW2, which is known here as the Great Patriotic War, a period in which every fourth citizen died. I struggled for something cheerful to say about the look of the place, and failed.


I stepped out of the car into a clearing in the forest of tower blocks, like in a scene from Eraserhead. They have patchwork surfaces with damp stains. Between them is untended, overgrown grass and dandelions, criss-crossed by broken paths. My heart sank, and a rook squawked as if to mock my discomfort. I was determined not to show any sign of well-heeled squeamishness at the chipped walls, smelly lift and dark old-fashioned decoration of the flat I was ushered into. But all these things rolled together into one thought: Belarus is grim. Then it rained for three days straight.

This is the land the USSR never left – well, except for a 4-year sniff of freedom in the early ‘90s. Travelling round the city, I feel as if in I’m in a looking-glass alternative reality. This is the world I left a few days ago, but everything is a bit different. Women are sweeping the streets spotlessly clean. There’s a distinct lack of bars, and advertising. Billboards have patriotic propaganda posters. There is no graffiti, except “Eminem” scrawled tentatively in a lift. Service in state-run shops is reluctant at best. And every fourth man – surely it can’t be true – is a policeman. The cops, bastard-looking in those huge circular Soviet caps, are everywhere. They throw their weight around, for example by stopping their cars by jaywalkers and yelling four-(Cyrillic)-letter words at them through loudspeakers.

As a foreigner, you feel that people will suspect you of something, though they turn out to be – mostly – very friendly, apart from one instance where I got abuse from a drunk guy on a tram. (My Russian didn’t allow me to interpret his exact words, thankfully.)

I never mention politics, then discover to my surprise that people do it quite freely. Just like at home in “my” world, everyone hates the President. Here, it’s a crime. Yet people are not completely unhappy with the status quo – they certainly prefer this to being overrun by Russian gangsters. My friend asks me what is the difference, anyway, between Mr Lukashenko wielding his might in this restricted sphere, and Bush & Blair doing it globally. You can watch Euro News and access the internet freely (although there are rumours that the government has approached China about buying technology that would prevent this). In the parliament canteen, apparently, members sit round drinking gallons of vodka before going to provide their rubber stamps. And below the main building are nine subterranean levels…

If there was no sex in the USSR, it’s unstoppable in this remnant of the old Empire. Or maybe it was just me, in the heatwave that began a few days later, feeling all charged up with the sun high, high in June. I just couldn’t help noticing that this city is full of great looking women – everywhere. And I couldn’t help looking at them, squeezed together on the trams, hanging out by the fountains in the park during the long summer evenings, waiting in the marble halls of the metro, click-clacking up and down corridors in their thin high heels – which are de rigeur here. Typically, thery’re dyed blondes in tight white trousers that show everything, or tight denim skirts. I guess it’s enjoyable, and makes a clear break with the past, because the regime hasn’t banned this kind of self-expression. All these women are unavailable, though; it’s in the culture here to get married at 17 or 18, certainly before 25. I was told the women make themselves look stunning so that they can keep their men.

“Why do you eat so many vegetables?” asked one of the pretty adminsirators at the language school as she pored over my salad. “Because they’re good.” Probably getting rid of free radicals and all that. On second thoughts, these ones probably won’t! Since my arrival, I’ve learned that Belarus was the worst affected country following Chernobyl, 20 years ago. A whole area of the southern part is off-limits as far as agricultural produce is concerned, and there are villages where after forced evacuation, only the very old have returned to live out their last years. Tragically, young people who grew up in the affected area develop not-so-mysterious cancers; there are thousands of deaths every year, still. Vegetable stalls can be visited by radiation inspectors, and you normally take your Geiger counter with you if you go to pick mushrooms in the forest. I was told I should cut tomatoes and mushrooms in a special way to remove potentially radioactive bits, and not eat the insides of carrots.

Waking up on another sunny morning, I watched a woman cutting the edges of the green areas in front of my block – she is attentive and keeps at it. She doesn’t look ashamed or impatient. I get the feeling – just sentimental, perhaps - that this kind of work is still valued here, by everyone. Money has not (yet) become the sole arbiter of value, except among the young.

There’s no copyright law. So you can pick up MP3 disks with hundreds of songs for $3 each. One stall-owner found it hard to believe that it would be an offence in the West to sell them, and that the police have the power to get information from ISPs and arrest people for downloading music. “And it’s supposed to be a democracy!” he laughed.

There are more obvious good things about a planned society– everyone has a flat or, at least, each family has access to one or two, which doesn’t amount to the same thing. Maybe people don’t take the same pride in them, but this has its benefits: People do not find endless fascination in talking about property prices and doing up property. There are no makeover shows! There is no homelessness at all, although young couples very often have to live with their parents. Everyone, it seems, has a little dacha in the country that they go to every weekend – rather than going shopping – to dig the allotment and swim in a lake. Babushkas return to the city with bundles of spring onions and other produce to sell on the streets.

Last weekend, I went into the country with a few of my trainees. We visited a rural life museum, which was once a real village, with pre-industrial wooden houses and barns full of old butter churns, sleighs, and handlooms. I’m told things are still like this in some places. I would like to say that I plunged into the lake nearby, but it was actually much more tentative because of the muddy bottom and alien podded underwater reeds to negotiate. Lots of young people were out doing the same thing – and I noticed there were a lot of nice cars parked nearby, and some very expensive-looking dachas being built too. (Formerly, there had been a size-limit.) It won’t be too long before aspirations to conspicuous wealth get the upper hand here, as everywhere else. Meanwhile, it’s been a privilege to have a glimpse of a different way of life.

EARTH DAY 2006: FUN, AND FUTURE POLITICS

Imagine your city without any cars just for a day, or even an afternoon. This is the idea behind Critical Mass, when thousands of cyclists take to the streets in a carnival atmosphere, and often with scant regard for the rules of the road. My earliest memory of this event was making wide arcs in the middle of Tottenham Court Road in London, reclaiming a street from its usual association with slavish Saturday shopping, for the delighted amazement of childhood. You could hear birds sing and a distant faint rushing sound was the only reminder of cars.

The Budapest Critical Mass is an annual event, which makes it more of a crowd-puller than its London equivalent. Imagine a procession of bikes, almost unbroken for a mile or so on the banks of the Danube on both sides and right across two of the bridges. Policemen bargain with the crowd to keep order and the good-natured participants agree to let a tram pass. Every so often the procession halts and cyclists hold their bikes aloft triumphantly, whooping with unrestrained glee. As we head through the tunnel beneath the castle, it’s almost deafening. It’s the sound of a spontaneous, albeit pre-arranged discovery of ‘people power’, a rare enough thing. People smile easily at each other; some have rigged-up sound systems; people of all ages take part. A toddler in a child’s seat gazes round himself mutely; a dreadlocked adolescent experiments with a series of wheelies. Somehow, everyone manages to respect everyone else’s space, gracefully coordinated like birds in flight.

Close to the end of the route, there’s a Brazilian style drum-out, a well-practised band whose thumping music matches exactly the enthusiasm of the crowd, which must be at least fifty thousand, if not twice that.

There’s no real agenda to Critical Mass. There’s probably a vague green leaning here, but nothing resembles a focussed political programme. And so much the better. The contrast between the joy of today’s crowd and the carefully staged pre-election political rallies of two weeks ago (on behalf of both major parties) is marked. Today was the free expression of the human spirit; the former events the result of manipulation. The electorate are far from apathetic - the politics of the future can emerge from such a self-aware, vibrant and non-institutional movement as Critical Mass.

How is it possible that this beautiful poem was nowhere to be found online? Let's change that. (Potential update: "pressing button A" would now be scrolling and clicking.)

THE INVADING SPRING - Phoebe Hesketh

Man has fenced the wilderness back in the hills;
Tamed in the town he walks on concrete blocks;
And in the park his heart with pleasure fills -
But not at Wordsworth’s school-book daffodils.
No, his delight is catching up with clocks
And turning knobs and pressing button A -
The train is due; there’s half a minute to go
But the lift’s gone down and the escalator’s slow -
Praise God for the Underground this lark-song day!

Breathing, yet dead, his life is caged with steel -
Wire, wheel, and cable - automatic aids
To living - he exists but cannot feel
The slow barbaric beauty that invades
A world at Spring. He moves in crowds and queues
And reads the Morning Star and the Evening News
But cannot read the sky though April beats
A golden fanfare down the dusty streets
And breathes a green breath through the petrol fumes.


Yet a third-floor room is powerless to deny
The feel of leaves, the pollen-smell behind
New flowered cretonnes where a rebel wind
Is strong and blue with ranging through the sky.
And though the files of his mind are entered up
Like office ledgers, unknowing he holds the cup
Brimmed with the light of moons beyond his reach.
The street is thronged with more than he can know -
The Invisibles who know him; without speech
They call him; without form they come and go
And catch him by the sleeve until the slow
Unwilling flesh is beckoned from its task.
Released, he finds the vital stream that spills
A primrose light on sullen window-sills.

THOUGHT FOR SPRING

"Through this estate runs a stream. It is not quiet water running peacefully to the big river, but a noisy cheerful stream. All this country around here is hilly, the stream has many a fall and at one place there are three falls of different depths. The higher one makes the noise, the loudest; the other two are on a minor key. All these three falls are spaced differently, and so there is a continuous movement of sound. You have to listen to hear the music. It’s an orchestra playing among the orchards, in the open skies, but the music is there. You have to search it out, you have to listen, you have to be with the flowing waters to hear its music. You must be the whole to hear it – the skies, the earth, the soaring trees, the green fields and the running waters, then only you hear it.

But all this is too much trouble; you buy a ticket and sit in a hall, surrounded by people, and the orchestra plays or someone sings. They do all the work for you; someone composes the song, the music, another plays or sings, and you pay to listen. Everything in life, except for a few things is second-, third-, or fourth-hand: the Gods, poems, politics, music. So our life is empty. Being empty we try to fill it – with music, with Gods, with forms of escape, and the very filling is the emptying. But beauty is not to be bought. So few want beauty and goodness, and man is satisfied with second-hand things. To throw it all off is the real and only revolution, and then only is there the creativeness of reality."

J Krishnamurti, Letters to a Young Friend

BLAIR'S TRAGEDY

Why has Tony Blair acted as he has over Iraq? I have little concrete evidence for what I write here - it's what I can glean from the facts, as we now know them, and the character of Mr Blair, as far as we can discern any consistency in it.

You can only understand Blair's actions if you understand that people, all people, have "mixed motives". His priority was to do the best thing for Britain in the long term - it was probably a matter of personal vanity too since he knows that history will judge him in terms of the long-term consequences of his decisions; in the end, can we be sure? Don't we often present slightly selfish decisions to others, and even to ourselves, in a favourable light? It's the essence of 'spin', and that's been at the heart of this administration from the beginning. Let's hope God accepts the spun version!

What is clear, and public, is that he decided to adhere to the so-called 'special relationship', in doing so following a consistent strand in UK foreign policy. He thought that the best idea would be to be on the side of the most powerful player in the apparently dangerous new world situation and at the same time to use this, as he thought, perhaps naively, to exert leverage on Bush to reopen negotiations in the Middle East. This decision, in principle to support an invasion of Iraq, was taken days after 9/11, we now know. Blair almost certainly thought long and hard about it, consulted his conscience in the little time he had (hours? days?) then committed. He also seems to have made some effort to bargain at this point and at various other stages along the road to war, though it's clear he had very little influence over the US. After that initial commitment, there was no return - he has had to be disingenuous, and actually to lie, in order to make things happen the way the US wanted. This inconvenience occurred because the UK Parliament has to agree to a war, and we still have our own foreign policy. A more honourable man would have resigned.

A real opportunity for global dialogue post 9/11 was thrown away, there have been thousands of deaths, and the situation in Iraq is a disaster. It may have been better to follow the EU line, as many people advised at the time. All this is debatable, and beside the point here. The point is that anyone who thinks this sits easily with Blair's conscience misreads the man.

He will not be forgiven for not talking to war victims' families. Of course, he would have to tell them that he was prepared to throw away their loved ones' lives to help maintain an important alliance, and probably he should be prepared to do so. It's the least he owes them, though the scenes of confrontation would be simply heartbreaking for all concerned. As for what it has done in terms of tarnishing his political reputation, destroying his popularity, and ruining his ambitions for achieving a more just social settlement in Britain, this is Blair's personal tragedy, a fate which should not be enviable in anyone's eyes, despite his material comforts. These are things that probably keep him awake at night, things that cannot be shared with Michael Parkinson, or with anyone apart from his closest friends for years to come.

Trying to make good decisions as PM, let alone ones that you can also square with your conscience, can't be easy. Blair's belief about God's judging him is sincere, but someone should have told him a long time ago that politics and religion do not, cannot, mix. It should be obvious that someone of a genuinely religious persuasion (i.e. who wants to live according to Christian or any ethical precepts) ought not to be doing a job that requires many decisions to be taken according to utterly different principles. It is these, rather than his religious faith, that Blair has followed to the best of his judgement and history may yet absolve him, as it usually does with realpolitik, as we move into an era defined by political instability and an uncertain oil supply.

GUITAR LOSS

I've been picking up my guitar a bit more lately, and half-heartedly playing some OK cover versions with friends, though what I/we should really be doing is writing writing writing new material. Anyway, in order to kick-start some inspiration, got a lesson from a colleague here who's a kind of latter-day Django Reinhardt, and a bit of a musicologist to boot. So far so good. I picked up my guitar today to restring it, with the idea of practising some of the new chord shapes and bang! The bridge just came off and was hanging there forlornly. I surprised myself that I didn't shout or swear but took the impact very calmly.

I'm very attached to this L'Arrivee guitar - it's the first thing I ever saved up for and I've been playing it for over 13 years. Wrote some good songs on it too, mostly a long time ago, it has to be said. But for it to be broken was a wrench! The 'damage' looks superficial, however - the bridge was just glued on to begin with, so all that's called for is a bit of superglue, right?

I rushed it down to the music shop as soon as I could but when I produced the instrument, the guy there informed me (with a lot of grimacing and sighing) that it should never have been strung with steel strings in the first place! He thinks it's designed to be a nylon-strung instrument, lacking some kind of metal bar reinforcing the neck. I just don't get it - if that's the case, why has it worked so well up till now? Why is it obviously a steel-string design? I've been frantically trying to picture how a metal bar would make any change to the pressure on the bridge (as opposed to the neck) anyway. The neck has shown no signs of strain. Anyway, it's an uneasy wait till Tuesday to see if I can get a second opinion. And the first time I've been without a guitar around the house for years. Maybe I should give it all up as a bad job - it's been fun, at times almost compulsive, but has brought me almost as much pain (in terms of non-recognition) as joy (in creation).

Afterthought: Supergrass just released another well-crafted album at the end of last year. As usual, it sank without trace. These guys, a kind of latter-day ELO, have good melodies and arrangements just pouring out of them. Is it time for an Arts Council subsidy?

THE REAL HEART OF DARKNESS - 2


(Where are the Praetorian Guard when we need them?)

You should never blame people for their country's foreign policy, but I remember at University in the 1980s asking a American student indignantly why the hell the US had bombed Libya. His reply: "because we can", before launching into a lot of anti-Arab humour. He was one of those smart people who don't take anything seriously.

It's a truism that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I'm becoming persuaded by the idea that this is a kind of Law of (Human) Nature. It operates in every sphere: personal, financial, professional, political. Not that there aren't exceptions - we all know them. But, in general, the amount that people act on principle is in inverse proportion to the range of opportunities open to them. The morality we were raised on, itself a veiled system of social (in this case parental) control, loses its hold as we flex our muscles a bit. Of course this is Nietzsche's Will To Power.

Who are the passionate believers in social justice, out campaigning, going to political meetings in the rain, and handing out leaflets? Committed idealists are usually young, dispossessed, property-less. It's no accident that middle age is full of compromises - they go hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth. What was it hippies used to say - "Don't trust anyone over 30"? And whatever their replies, when powerful people are pressed by journalists about their motives, the real reason is almost always "because I can".

SPRING, EPISODE 1: IN THE SKY

Today, I emerged from the stuffy interior of my thoughts into a bright morning. The pavements were no longer gleaming and their heaps of hardened snow had lost their rockiness, full of holes and the crystals merging and turning into big drops. The breeze was unmistakably mild. Rounding the corner to the riverside tram stop, I was surprised by warm sun on my face. An incomparable moment: nothing prepares us for the first touch of Spring, and none of the things we normally hanker after is half as good. On the tram, I looked out at the unfamiliar light reflected by the rooftops and steeples.


I’ve always thought of roofs, and specifically chimneypots, against a sunny sky, as one of the best images of freedom. You never look at them if you’ve got to be somewhere in a hurry. Like in a Magritte painting, the effect lies in the contrast between the perfectly mundane architecture and the blue infinity beyond.

FOOL, n.

A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through loading up on heaps of junk from a series of adjacent retail outlets, and compulsive downloading. He is omnific, omniform, omniject, omnicidal and oblivious. He it was who invented clubs, hierarchies, contracts, the steam iron, pop-up advertising, the annual appraisal, the mullet, snakebite, and mobile phone jewellery. He created patriotism and taught the nations marching – then devised,“flagged up” and “actioned” political economy, management theory, fatwas, postmodernism, corporate training, consultancy (medical specialists excepted) and Las Vegas. He established totalitarianism and democracy, left-wing versus right-wing, the “third way”, and centre-partings. He is from everlasting to everlasting – such as creation’s dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence headed the sitcom of being. His myopic gaze falters as the rolling credits of civilisation blur and fade to grey, and he steals a furtive peep at a random cleavage. And after the rest of us shall have retired for the night of eternal oblivion he will sit up to compile a Top 100 goals of all time. (adapted)

POLITICS, n.

A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

From The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

DOING THAT SCRAPYARD THING


Got the following email from a good friend of mine, who works for a big car magazine. Shows just how messed-up autophiles can be. (This description, with its overtones of, well, self-love, fits nicely.)

"...in return for my soul?

Usually I enjoy editing our letters page. This month, we have one guy who loves himself and his Porsche so much he thinks he can see the'hope, warmth and happiness' in people's eyes when they just look at his car.

We have another guy who tells his wife she should be thankful he spends so much time with his cars, because he could be in a hotel room with his niece instead.

And another guy who blames environmentalists for the decreasing number of lovely, wonderful scrapyards.

I'm doing my bit for the world... by changing 'niece' to mistress."

HOW TO BECOME HIP WITHOUT REALLY TRYING



“Went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head … “

I first heard these lines about a year ago, sung in a high-pitched shaky voice to a spooky, almost monotone tune, and with a chorus of dust and scratches in the background. It was such an otherworldly sound, it stopped me in my tracks. My painstaking researches (click, click, click) revealed that they were from a WB Yeats poem set to music by Dave Van Ronk (early Dylan era New York folkie).

“And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out …”

I stumbled across the MP3 by accident, hunting down the Donovan version from Jon Savage’s Donovan recommendations in MOJO magazine. The details are important – it seemed to me that, musically speaking, this could be the least hip thing you could possibly be up to in early 2005. But I’ve always loved Donovan despite his “hippy-dippy” reputation, and this kind of pursuit is painless in the privacy of your own home, as opposed to over the counter at HMV, where it’s potentially hazardous.

“But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair…”

Around the same time last year, I discovered internet radio and Brindle sat me down to listen to Radio 1’s dance/ambient/acoustic/dub show, The Blue Room. It was the first time I’d heard Radio 1 since 1991 (when I decided it was just no good to wake up to someone, anyone shouting inanities at you, even if the music had been good, which it generally wasn’t). It goes out at 5.30am at the weekend and is aimed at people stumbling home from clubs, coming down from various psychedelics. The choice of music is inspired and unpredictable – I can deal with the odd bit of machine-grinding techno because I know there will be something great in a few minutes. I’ve been introduced to El Perro Del Mar, Hot Chip, TV On The Radio, The Ralfe Band, The New Young Pony Club, The American Analogue Set, and loads besides. (A couple of years ago I’d have been hard-pressed to name any but the best known bands.) Besides which, Rob da Bank is a really affable and non-shouty DJ. It’s just what music radio should be.

In yesterday’s show, he also included The Beatles, a reworking of a song from The Wicker Man, and… Wandering Aengus by Donovan.

“And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.”

SPOILING FOR A FIGHT


When I lived in Ghana and was the chairman of the campus debating society, I organized a debate on the motion, “religion is the opium of the people” and spoke in favour, with some relish. For various reasons, mostly frustration that the European Enlightenment had failed to make any inroads into their society, I wanted to give my students a nudge in the direction of atheism, or at least skepticism. My intensely devout Christian and Muslim students viewed me as an eccentric “free-thinker” and, thankfully, did not take offence. One of them even volunteered to second me! The debate passed off without incident. I was judged the winner (by a panel, not a show of hands); this was actually a foregone conclusion, as I was one of the masters.

It’s the same impulse to shove believers into modernity that causes Matthew Parris to write (in yesterday’s Times) in defence of publishing the cartoons of Mohammed:

‘But let us not duck what that “I do not believe” really means. It means I do not believe that there is one God, Allah, or that Muhammad is His Prophet. It means I do not believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, or that no man cometh to the Father except by Him. I do not believe that the Jews are God’s Chosen People, or subject to any duties different from the rest of us. It means I do not believe any living creature will be reincarnated in another life.

In my opinion these views are profoundly mistaken, and those who subscribe to them are under a serious misapprehension on a most important matter. Not only are their views not true for me: they are not true for them. They are not true for anyone. They are wrong.’

Let us assume for the sake of argument that matters of religion do in fact fall into the falsifiable-by-science category (see ‘Who Lives in a Postmodern World?’ below), and therefore can be demonstrably wrong. What grounds are there for showing a deluded believer the error of his ways? Might there be any factors that would hold us back from so doing?

As far as I can see, in the case of the cartoons, there were no good grounds to publish. They are NOT going to help shift the balance of power in oppressive societies. Besides which, they may well incite religious hatred; the one with Mohammed sporting a bomb doesn’t look too dissimilar to me from the anti-Jewish cartoons in 1930s Germany. While upholding the freedom of the press to publish, we should recognize that to do so was a pretty poor decision all-round.
It looks rather like a piece of playground provocation – picking a fight. And the result has been perfectly intelligent journalists and crowds of Muslims on the street just spoiling for one – in their own different ways. It’s so exciting, isn’t it, this impending “clash of civilizations”? It’s something to talk about and it’ll sell a lot of papers, to be sure. But where are the peacemakers now? In the face of the disintegrating order, where’s Piggy to wail impotently about people “acting like a crowd of kids?”

While recognizing that satire is a powerful weapon in deflating pomposity and chipping away at the armour of authoritarian regimes, we should use our freedom to criticise people judiciously. After all, I am free to tell my overweight friend that he’s eaten all the pies. Just as I am free to discuss how diverting pornography is with my feminist colleague. I am free to tell an advertising consultant I meet at some party that he’s in an evil trade, or a committed Robbie Williams fan that his idol is a media-manufactured talentless chimp. Many of my closest friends believe passionately in astrology and I am of course free to trash their beliefs mercilessly. You get the picture. The thing is, I choose when to say these things, and often hold my tongue. It’s not hard; it’s the usual process of seeking not to give offence. It’s valued only a little and so easily scorned, but behaving respectfully is not merely a social nicety; in Ghana, and in our modern multicultural European societies, it can prevent bloodshed.

I now regret having held that debate in Ghana, and sincerely hope that I was not the catalyst in bringing anyone to give up their opium habit. I now see clearly that it was a society in a different stage of development. Belief in Providence and in the afterlife gave people a practical reason to hope, to get up in the morning and plough their fields, to strive to better their lives, to smile. And generally people in Ghana, barring personal tragedies, were happy and fulfilled, with some belief that things were going to get better for them. How could skepticism possibly improve this? It was a clear case where happiness, albeit opiated, was better than “the truth”.

Simon Jenkins: These cartoons don't defend free speech; they threaten it

Life hangs by a thread, but while it's still dangling there, and at the risk of sounding pious:

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

Principally, friends. With the powers available to us through language, we can express our reactions to the world in a way that others can understand and respond to. Over a period of years. To me, nothing compares with this hum of sympathetic communication between two spirits.

A (temporarily, but long-term) fully operational multi-sense mechanism, worth more than any amount of money. If we had to rent or buy this apparatus, it'd be priced at least as much as a house, and probably more.

Light, the sky, clouds, season change.

Piping hot water that gushes out of a showerhead, even though it’s the depth of winter. (What was life like before? What's it like now for street-sleepers? As well as sparing some change, you have to imaginatively enter into that bitterly cold world to appreciate just how great it is to wake up and have a hot shower.)

The availability of a huge variety of food from all round the world only a few minutes’ walk away from where you live. Including fresh fruit juice all year round: another reason to get out of bed.

Free downloads, blogs, and the whole circus of the internet at your fingertips.

Books, books, books to lose yourself in.

All the years left to experience these things.

This might just sound smug. Of course I realise the impossibly large numbers of people who do not have access to some, or all, of these things. If thinking about that prevents you from enjoying your own life, you have the privilege to go out and do something about it.

Life's beautiful. If Nietzsche's little eternal recurrence devil came to me, I'd say "Yes - every moment again!"

MANNERS

The other day, I was standing waiting for my bus to depart in a morning daze. Two teenage boys were standing next to me, on their way to school. They must have been about 14 or 15. Their friend saw them from the street and also stepped on, said “servusz” (hi) while pulling off his mitten and offering his hand. The others did the same, and it was handshakes all round. I was taken aback at this show of calm, mature camaraderie. Was it some kind of ritual they’d evolved in their group? Surely, even in Hungary, teenage boys must jostle each other and say things like “How’s it going, dickhead?” In Scotland, we used to call each other names as a bonding device. The whole basis of my experience of friendship in adolescence was learning that a good slagging meant the other person really cared. Anyway, in terms of manners, this is evidence that Hungary hasn’t really caught up with the 21st Century world.

RESPECT



Laughably, Tony Blair seems to think he can legislate to bring back “respect” among the young. While transferring the burden of proof on to people suspected of committing petty crimes may well be a good idea, no amount of sticks, carrots or political speeches will make the slightest difference in promoting a real culture of respect for others while every micro-message pouring out of the entertainment media exhorts contempt for authority, pure individualism, success at any price – all the modern virtues.

There are two kinds of respect: the philosophical theory and the everyday practical kind demanded by your elders and betters, or some guy pointing a gun at you in a gang fight. “Respect”. Born of fear.

The first, respect for human beings merely by virtue of their being human was always more an aspiration than a reality, a supremely admirable enlightenment project that was dead in the water by the time Nietzsche had finished with it, though echoes of it are still heard from time to time in well-intentioned international proclamations from the Charter of Human Rights to the G8 summit. Meanwhile, corporations and the militaristic junta in command of US foreign policy continue to wreak havoc regardless, aided and abetted by guess who?

A government with any guts would commit to this philosophy of mutual respect. For example, by facing up collectively to the impending ecological disaster and helping to inculcate a new value system based on environmental responsibility. That would demonstrate, and probably command, respect. It’s not going to happen. Standing up for human rights against international capitalism and its enslavement of millions in the developing world. That might promote a culture of respect. It’s not going to happen. Standing up for the dispossessed against greedy landlords extorting people’s wages from them would show a commitment to a “respect agenda”! But, surprise surprise, that’s not on this agenda either.

It’s the other watered-down kind of “respect” that Blair & co are now promoting, something that shouldn't involve too many difficult decisions! It was shown by most schoolchildren to their parents, teachers and to policemen in the post-war years, and went into irreversible decline after the advent of the Rolling Stones. So the story goes. Now, I know nothing of the mysteries of parenting, but I do know something about teaching. If you want to get respect from a class of kids in September, you have to first make sure they’re a bit afraid of you, then you have to build up a relationship with them by showing an interest in them, and showing that you’re even-handed in the way that you distribute attention, rewards and punishments. Since the fear factor is no longer present in our schools, teachers are going to have to work all the harder to earn respect. And they do. (This will not have been helped by the inexplicable decision by some irresponsible official at OFSTED to write to schoolchildren at a failing school, over the heads of their teachers, telling them that the teachers “could do better”!)

Outside the school gates, it is futile to try and reinstate some version of old-fashioned values without the fear factor, and Blair knows it. Society has changed irrevocably and, it’s true, we don’t “know our place”. (Wouldn’t it be great for politicians if we did?) So it’s fitting that he has chosen as the principal weapon in this campaign the one thing that can really motivate people, the only thing that still counts: a fine! In doing so, he reveals the bankruptcy of ideas at the heart of government, and of a socio-economic system that’s on its last shaky legs. If financial incentives are the only social glue left, the minute there is less money sloshing round the economy (in the next oil crisis, say) there is going to be some very bad behaviour indeed.

Pictured: scene from the Paris riots, 2005

ICE MENAGERIE

It's minus 15 now in Budapest, or thereabouts. I've been dogged by a cold which found it hard to develop fully in the stew of Vitamin pills and echinacea that's my January blood, and then exploded for a day. Every morning I get into my thermals to go to work. (And quick change out of them as soon as I arrive in the overheated interiors.) The sky is clear and there's always some trick of the morning light that makes the Parliament building pink or peach-coloured. No matter how much of a hurry I'm in, I try to walk the slightly longer but far more scenic river way and watch the cloudpour of vapour from all the heating systems. From the tram today, I caught a glimpse of the ice sculptures for a second time. They're giant versions of the kind of glass animals that might grace some old lady's mantelpiece. They remind me of the plastic ones I collected in a tub when I was a child. They're kitsch, I know - I can tell from a distance. The mammoth, the hummingbird, the gryphon are all a bit cute. But they're ice. And the coloured lights shining through them from behind, playing on the edges, make them look as if they've got Christmas tree lights inside. I make a mental note - which becomes a physical note - to return later.

When I do, after a good day when I could feel the cold retreat, the animals are surrounded by people and digital cameras. They're illuminated. The lights look as if they're coming from the inside. They pick out patches of haze and some thick veins in the crystalline structure of the ice. Small children wander round, dying to touch, but too well behaved. Would their hands stick to them, perhaps? Nightlit, the creatures are redeemed from their kitschiness - a parade of ambassadors from the ice kingdom - fantastic, rough-hewn, gleaming, perfect.

Ice Art: the artist's site

WHO LIVES IN A POSTMODERN WORLD?



I'm writing this following the recent debate on Puskas's blog (see sidebar) on truth v happiness, and the nature of truth.

I've always been curious about postmodernism, and never quite grasped what it is, probably because there's nothing concrete to grasp. It mostly to do with fragmentation, perspectivism and flux: the intellectual result of millions of trans-cultural interactions on a global scale. The most lucid explanation of postmodernism I've read is towards the end of Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind. His style involves endless reformulation of the same idea, which, in the case of such an elusive phenomenon as this one, proves incredibly useful.

Here are some extracts:

"The mind is not the passive reflector of an external world and its intrinsic order, but is active and creative in the process of perception and cognition." "There is no empirical 'fact' that is not already theory-laden." These ideas seem to me to be uncontroversial.

What follows, however, is a real bombshell: "Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign." "All human understanding is interpretation, and no interpretation is final." "Every object of knowledge is already part of a preinterpreted context, and beyond that are only other preinterpreted contexts. All human knowledge is mediated by signs and symbols of uncertain provenance, constituted by historically and culturally variable predispositions... Hence the nature of truth and reality, in science no less than in philosophy, religion, or art, is radically ambiguous." (italics mine) You get the idea. And through this chink in the city wall of Scientopolis marches the whole magical, mystical New Age carnival parade - beliefs become a kind of lifestyle choice, and no longer have to submit to the rigour of scientific testing. Why should they? They are all equally valid. There are no meta-narratives.

Is the (clearly stunning) success of science in predicting everyday occurrences the only philosophical reply to this radical perspectivism? This is a genuine question. Could the success of science be merely a huge coincidence, and end tomorrow?