Five Dials

Number 12 The Utterly Broken Britain Issue

Featuring interviews with 42 citizens on the state of the nation Plus Tories in East London Death Duels Circumcision Typewriters Intergenerational Love Affairs and Dangerous Snakes CONTRIBUTORS Sophia Augusta is a member of PLATS, an illustration collective she co-founded in 2005. Alain de Botton is the author, most recently, of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Paul Davis is an illustrator and artist. His work has been shown in Osaka, Bangkok, Birmingham, New York and many other cities. Colin Elford works as a Forest Ranger on the Dorset/Wiltshire border. He is the author of Practical Woodland Stalking and, most recently, A Year in the Woods: The Diary of a Forest Ranger. Jamie Fewery conducted most of the interviews for our Broken Britain survey. His blog can be found at bottledandshelved.com. Jeremy Gavron is writer in residence at the Marie Curie hospice in Belsize Park, London. His most recent novel is An Acre of Barren Ground. Dan Hancox writes about music, politics and pop culture for the Guardian, New Statesman and Prospect. He spent two months following the 2008 US Presidential election, which turned into a book called My Fellow Americans. He has an uncanny habit of running into extremists on poorly lit street corners, from San Diego to Budapest. Simon Prosser is the publishing director of Hamish Hamilton. Emily Robertson’s illustration of a house adorns the UK hardcover edition of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs. She is a member of PLATS. James Robertson is the author of The Testament of Gideon Mack, among others. He has also translated Roald Dahl’s classic novel The Fantastic Mr Fox into Scots as The Sleekit Mr Tod. Social Commontating are pamphleteers. Their work can be found at socialcommontating.com. Brenda Walker is the author of four novels, including The Wing of the Night. Her contribution is excerpted from her memoir Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life. Stuart White is an illustrator based in Glasgow. His clients incude The New York Times, Howies and the Lighthouse.

Thanks: Juliette Mitchell, Anna Kelly, Ellie Smith, Debbie Hatfield, Aisha Mabadmus, Nadia Bonomally.

Subscribe: www.hamishhamilton.co.uk

Illustrations by Paul Davis, Emily Robertson, Sophia Augusta, Stuart White and Social Commontating Designed by Dean Allen

In Memoriam Alex Bernstein A Letter From The Editor a book of detective fiction – beautiful, mysterious women, men in sharp suits, hotel signs that flash ominously. I remem- On Broken Britain and Nick Dewar ber listening to a speech by David Lynch around the time we were putting together the first issue, and when Lynch’s quaver- e’s dropped it from his speeches find out inside, although I’ll tell you now ing voice started talking about plumbing Hnow but there was something trou- that one resident views modern Britain the depths of the imagination to pull up bling about the way David Cameron used as ‘a sloth carrying a briefcase of oil’. It’s a images I thought of Nick. These sorts of to say the word ‘broken’, as in ‘broken soci- phrase that has never appeared on the com- images don’t need to make sense because ety’, as in ‘Let’s mend our broken society’. ment page of the Daily Telegraph. For our they come from such a strong, secret Perhaps it was how he hit that hard ‘b’, ges- many international readers, consider this a place. They carry their own mystery. It’s turing with both thumbs, stabbing them chance to learn something about the state there in Nick’s work. A man’s striped down as if to depress some Broken Britain of Britain so that next time you’re lured suit liquefies in a pool around his feet, buttons. In his speeches he backed up his into a conversation with your young cous- the beam of a woman’s torch bends and vision of the current nightmarish society in who is studying Political Science you can curves into space, a tree blooms from the with anecdotes plucked from the disobedi- lean back, nod, make a steeple with your bottom of a well-made shoe. ‘What does ent, unruly Yobland beyond the cameras. fingers and say, ‘Interesting point, Tristan, it mean?’ people ask when they examine Stitched into his phrase was an unfortunate but I’d have to describe Great Britain, as it the particular image that is emblazoned evergreen quality, so that if Britain did is today, by using an image I plucked from on our green cards. Because the name improve there would always be evidence the noted current affairs journalFive Dials – of the magazine is written above it I of its broken-ness somewhere, and since a sloth carrying a briefcase of oil.’ sometimes feel obliged to fumble for an it was such a large and baggy concept you We’ve also got an excellent bit of report- explanation, something along the lines could throw anything into it, so that a dip age from the battleground constituency of, ‘Great things grow from unexpected in road rage would only give more promi- of Poplar in east London, a poem based places.’ My attempts are often met with nence to binge drinking. And who would on a Joni Mitchell song but written in a strained smile. I don’t know why the tell us when the place was fixed? There is Scots, some fiction, some Alain de Bot- drawing appeals. I don’t know what it Cameron; we see him now after a cross- ton, a memoir on circumcision and an means. I don’t have to. Nick’s work is country cycle ride the length of Great Brit- archival excerpt from a book called Snake important to us because of its ‘Why not?’ ain, as he finally stops on the south coast Man, about a man dealing with the life or quality. Why not grow a tree from the and dismounts. (The support car stops a death moments after receiving a bite from bottom of a shoe? At Five Dials, ‘Why few feet back.) ‘Fixed,’ he says softly. The a poisonous snake – a situation that is still not?’ is a phrase that is often used – it’s sunlight shines on his face. ‘Fixed.’ remarkably rare, even in this Broken Britain. the best reason for running a magazine I don’t know about you, but at my like this and I’m glad that impulse is house it became a useful phrase – if a bin The other day, after putting some of embodied in the work Nick gave us. If liner ripped or a DVD skipped or it started the final touches to this issue, I went to you go to nickdewar.com there is an icon to rain: Broken Britain. It’s a phrase that play football on a fake grass pitch in west of a postbox, which used to provide a link fascinates and disturbs in equal parts. Run- London, when an illustrator turned to to his email address. Move your mouse ning a magazine is a good excuse to go out me after putting on his boots and com- over it now and the numbers 1973–2010 and conduct surveys so we decided to put plimented Five Dials. Then he said, ‘You appear; if you click on it a drawing fills together an ‘Utterly Broken Britain’ issue. know that Nick Dewar died of cancer your screen that shows a man leaving his We’re not trying for a Sociology degree recently?’ I didn’t; I was caught by sur- desk and his laptop and a smattering of but we did wander the country and ask prise. It’s hard to know how to react, Post-its on the wall of a drab room. He’s people what was so broken about their while sitting on a football pitch lacing been caught exiting through a window surroundings and then we thought, Well, your shoes, to the death of someone with foliage edging around the borders what does this broken-ness really look like? you’ve never met but whose work enrich- into some sort of golden glow. Look So we asked for a graphic representation es and perhaps even defines this magazine. closer and you’ll see it’s not a window at of how broken (or slightly cracked, or For those of you who have been with all, but a pad of drawing paper hanging whole) Britain is in 2010. As befits a liter- us from the beginning, or ever seen one on the wall. We’ve caught him stepping ary magazine, we love words but there has of our pistachio-green calling cards, or through. been so much comment from commenta- been paying any attention to the world Here at Five Dials we printed Nick’s tors commenting all over the place on of illustration for the past decade, you’ll work in black and white but I like this Broken Britain that we turned to visuals, recognize Nick’s work. Download our drawing in colour. I like the golden light crafted by some of our friends at the illus- first issue and you’ll get a glimpse into his that pours into the room. There’s no tration collective PLATS, as well as Paul world – his drawings are never messy or explanation about what makes it gold or Davis, who can always find a beautiful unsure; their strong lines originate in an what lies on the other side of the frame, way to draw societal breakdown. earlier era and at first glance the figures but I imagine it’s a good place for an artist What is Britain like these days? You’ll and settings seem to have drifted in from like Nick. After all, why not? —CT

3 Currentish Events number of social housing units, yet, Archer says, the two groups rarely interact and the young professionals will move out The Fight for Broken Britain to the home counties when they’re ready to raise families. So, I ask him, if anyone’s Dan Hancox travels to the Eastern Front letting down the idealized East End sense of community in 2010, it’s not the ‘broken’ he first time I met prospective of residents live in social housing. Around working-class poor but the bankers – the TConservative candidate Tim Archer half of those residents are in social classes one group who are instinctive Tory voters? I boarded the Docklands Light Railway D and E – the poorest members of soci- He nods. Theirs is the kind of antisocial at Bank station in the City of London ety, mostly unskilled manual workers or behaviour that’s never going to warrant and sailed on the noiseless, driverless ves- those reliant on the state – and one in five an ASBO. sel into Canary Wharf, the heart of the were born in Bangladesh. The population ‘Everyone says it’s the gated blocks that futures market, where imaginary trading turnover rate for Tower Hamlets bor- are helping the Conservatives, but these and abstract finance are raised up to be ough as a whole is nearly 19%; ever since people don’t vote,’ one of Archer’s team, revered in totems of steel and glass. In the the Romans created the docks here, the another local councillor, tells me later. shadow of skyscrapers, I followed Archer, area has been underscored by The wealthy transient are often a thirty-five-year-old banker, to an Italian transience. Transience and only around for six months, or deli framed by open shelves of truffle oil. unassailable Labour elec- they’re foreign nationals, or He sat amongst the business lunchers and toral success. Until 2004 they’re working from six a.m. spoke to me about the strange world of the Conservatives had never to nine p.m. ‘As long as the short Poplar and Limehouse, a freshly carved held even a council seat here, walk from the tube station or DLR constituency straddling east London’s let alone a parliamentary one. stop to their gated block is clean and polarized extremes, a perfect test-bed On 6 May 2010, Jim Fitz- crime free, they’re fine,’ Archer says for the Conservative Party’s urge to heal patrick, a fireman-turned-MP with more than a touch of frustra- what is known as ‘Broken Britain’. and Minister in Gordon tion. ‘That’s the limit of their The Conservatives take ‘Broken Britain’ Brown’s government to interest in the area.’ That’s the very seriously; seriously enough, at least, boot, will seek to reassert limit of their engagement, to appoint a man named James Broken- Labour authority on too – a corridor from cap- shire as their Shadow Minister for Crime the new constituency; sule to hermetically sealed Reduction. Yet even this commitment to remarkably, Archer capsule. nominative determinism has not silenced will only need a swing Search Hansard for complaints that the Tories are manufac- of about 5% to win references to the Barley turing fear of crime and a ‘social recession’ it for the Conserva- Mow Estate, which sits to get elected. tives. It would be a just north of Canary In February 2010, the Economist decided tremendous scalp for Wharf, and you will to interrogate Tory claims that Britain the Tories in the find just one entry, from has become a broken society. They found Labour heartlands, 1990, in the dying days that violent crime had almost halved and an indication of the Thatcher premier- since 1995, while crime generally fell by that the ‘broken soci- ship. The full parliamentary an extraordinary 45%. The figures for ety’ message had cut through question reads as follows: teenage pregnancies – a favourite of those to Britain’s poorest. For what it may be talking about social decay – remain con- worth in such an unpredictable elec- Ms Gordon: stant since Labour came to power in 1997; tion, Archer is narrow favourite with the To ask the Prime Minister whether so too do those for teenage abortions. bookmakers. In the deli he divvies the she will visit the Barley Mow Estate in So when Tory leader David Cameron constituency up into three broad groups – Limehouse. declaimed in October 2009, ‘It’s time to Bangladeshi families (approximately 37%), mend our broken society’, where did he white working-class families and wealthy The Prime Minister: notice the cracks? Constituencies like young professionals (mostly bankers) who I have at present no plans to do so. Poplar and Limehouse are the perfect are dotted around Docklands in what he test-bed for the former ‘nasty’ party’s called ‘gated communities’. This invoca- The Iron Lady may have turned her conversion to social healing. Contested tion of the super-rich of Rio de Janeiro nose up at it, but Tim Archer can’t afford for the first time at this general election, or Buenos Aires speaks volumes about to – the gated blocks are locked off and following boundary changes, it’s a seat how divided British society has become – Limehouse is the most marginal part of which hyperbolizes Britain’s widening only four European countries have more the constituency. It’s January, it’s freez- national class divide: from the riverside unequal distributions of income. In Brit- ing, it’s wet, it’s ten a.m. on a Saturday luxury flats feeding Canary Wharf to the ain, swanky new-build luxury-apartment morning – and behind a massive billboard estates of Bromley-by-Bow, where 70% blocks are required to contain a certain of David Cameron’s airbrushed face sits

4 Westferry DLR station. Under the railway the Limehouse Community Forum. He accidentally trespassing, buying some- arches the Tory activists begin to gather, gestures to the Tory leaflet: ‘This fear thing, or running head-first into a cement hands in pockets, dodging rusty drips and of crime thing you’re pushing – it’s too mixer. If you’re not careful you’re sud- finishing Diet Cokes. By coincidence, the much populism.’ They nod attentively – denly in Credit Suisse’s PRIVATE car park, local Labour team are arranging them- Hugh’s views are clearly important, influ- with two hoggish security guards bearing selves directly opposite. Jim Fitzpatrick ential. down on you. ‘I’m lost!’ you cry. Which and his activists are outnumbered thirteen After a few hours, time is called on the you are. to five by the Tories. This baker’s dozen day’s campaigning and we retire to one Britain’s empire was constructed via comprises one woman, a few councillors of the activist’s houses for lunch, with its London’s docks – it has been the conduit and a lot of white males between the ages thick white carpets, immaculate uphol- for British wealth since the Romans took of thirty to fifty. Clipboards are handed stery, mantelpiece trinkets and cut glass, a look at the Thames and decided some- out and we shuffle back out into the rain. veggie lasagne, roaring central heating and thing could be made of this septic isle. On the Barley Mow Estate, things woolly jumpers. The rain still hasn’t eased But as always happens at the arrival points don’t seem broken. Half drowned by the off, the whole of Docklands is liquid; for vast sums of money, the glittering British winter, perhaps, but not broken. outside, through French windows with a haul is adorned with a local halo of grime, The staircases are clean, painted an Art riverside view, the Thames merges with crime and insobriety. Violence, drunken- Deco white, the gardens are lively, well the sky into an infinite battleship-grey. ness and prostitution were commonplace kept, adorned with trees and bushes Next time I hit the streets, only a in the area historically – especially in the and fresh paving. It’s low-rise, it’s pretty month later, sodden winter has changed less salubrious districts of Wapping, – and it’s seemingly deserted. Council- to blinding spring sunshine. Mediterra- Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. lor Ahmed Hussein is allocated to call nean men sit outside Mediterranean cafes Things are calmer now. The Second upon any flat occupied by someone with on Burdett Road, as bustling school kids City of Canary Wharf is a life-size artist’s an Asian-sounding name. Sabrina, a of all hues carry their library books to impression, rendered in three dimensions; trainee solicitor, speaks five languages swimming lessons, sashaying happily past free from clutter, free from litter – and and seems to know everyone in Tower an idle pair of police officers. The cracks free from heavy explosives, you presume, Hamlets. We run into a Labour council- aren’t showing in this part of Broken if the police presence is anything to go by. lor for Bromley-by-Bow in the street at Britain. Five minutes away, in a part of the one point, who it turns out is Sabrina’s Around the Isle of Dogs that used to be known uncle. Everyone stops to chat; he and corner on West as ‘The Land of Plenty’ during Tim exchange awkward words. ‘This is India Dock Road Britain’s colonial heyday, the . . . the politics,’ he says in broken English, the David Cam- Hope and Anchor sits boarded up, which Tim repeats with a bemused smile. eron poster outside unloved, its business pre- The activists and politicians are every- Westferry DLR has sumably swallowed by where, but the electorate are staying been replaced with the two-storey Thai inside; hardly anyone answers the door. another Conserva- restaurant next door. ‘I may be poor, but I am a Conserva- tive billboard, read- The architecture on the tive,’ says one of the first people both to ing, ‘I’ve never voted island is mostly a mix- open the door and keep it open – a wom- Tory before, but we’ve ture of eighties super- an in her fifties wearing pink fluffy slip- got to mend our bro- high-rise flats like pers. She’s got the kind of resilience that ken society’ over a Topmast Point (twenty- would make her an icon for working-class picture of Danielle one storeys and over Toryism. Her mum died last year, her from Brighton, a six hundred dwellings) husband left her, her dad’s deaf, she’s a cheery-looking thirty- and five- or six-storey cancer survivor and her son’s in a wheel- something black new-build compromises. chair, so she had to get rid of the piranha woman. The sunlight One such block is called tank, because he kept bumping into it. reflecting off Canary The Quarterdeck, with There’s still a sign reading BEWARE OF Wharf behind it is so a curved blue roof to THE FISH on the front door. Sabrina does bright you can’t read add to the nautical a lot of sympathetic nodding. ‘Well, let the words on the poster. theme. Outside it us know if there’s anything we can do for Finance overpowers everything in this children play happily, making their own you,’ she offers brightly at the end, taking part of the world. entertainment; it’s not just the seagulls: it down contact details. Walking south towards the Isle of really feels like a seaside town. At the next door we discover that Dogs, the atmosphere intensifies from Halfway down the promontory lies Labour have been canvassing this block sparse commuter-land to the churn of Millwall Outer Dock, a sort of inland already, an hour or so earlier. ‘Why do commerce and construction. In the foot- lake bordered by houses and warehouses. you all come at once?’ a middle-aged hills directly beneath Canary Wharf and Chained-up canoes sit stacked by its side, man named Hugh asks. He knows its neighbouring towers, it’s impossible buildings lie dormant, one light in every Archer already from his involvement in to walk more than twenty paces without ten turned on. The spring gloaming casts

5 a beautifully dim light over the water other out.”’ He raises an eyebrow a little already,’ says Vicky, leaning on her beer as dusk falls, and to my amazement the and laughs. ‘But if you go back to the six- taps. She points to a decline in levels of only sound is a very distant murmur of ties you had the Irish mafia running the respect from young people, even since traffic and the somnolent squawking of council. So I just give them a wry smile her relatively recent adolescence. ‘School sea­gulls – literally hundreds and tell them, “Well, you’ve ties hanging round their ankles, giving of them – drifting off to had your turn.” it all the YES BRUV, ALl RIGHT BRUV,’ sleep on the water. Not ‘There are pockets of she mimicks lairily, waving her hands. one person passes me real poverty here even Beyond the pre-election slogans, there is in half an hour sitting now though, mothers no expectation that any party has even by its shore. For a place without shoes and so noticed the problem, the estates, let alone teeming with the ghosts on – meanwhile you that they will do anything about it. And of empire, hard labour, have something like what could be done to bring school ties hard liquor, sailors and a third of Britain’s up from around kids’ ankles? prostitutes, it’s almost gross domestic product Epigrams don’t win elections – and in any unbearably tranquil. This passing through Canary case probably alienate more people – but I Britain isn’t broken: it’s just Wharf.’ We talk about did encounter one phrase, in the Museum quiet to the point of being crime on the estates – things of Docklands next to Canary Wharf, that unsettling. aren’t so bad, he says. Not lately, neatly sums up Poplar and Limehouse. It Back on the main drag, Westferry anyway. ‘Two years ago the police was the title of an 1885 W.L. Wyllie etch- Road, a converted church called wouldn’t even answer 999 calls ing depicting river workers shovelling The Space is hosting both tie-dyed from some estates on the island. coal against a backdrop of distant trade ‘Psychic Readings’ and a modern- We had to get Jim Fitzpatrick to ships: Toil, Glitter, Grime and Wealth on classical performance by come in and give them a a Flowing Tide. Whichever way the tide the unassumingly named kick up the backside.’ flows in the election, some things will Metapraxis Ensemble. Back on West India never change. We have always been a lit- Next to it sits a real, non- Dock Road, the Oporto tle broken. converted house of worship, St pub has acquired a score of post- ‘So, what are they saying, Britain’s bro- Edmund of Abingdon church, which work drinkers, and I join a few regulars at ken, is it?’ Vicky finally asks from behind seems like a good place to ask about social the bar. It’s a locals’ pub where cockney the bar, her pitch raising in tandem with collapse. If there’s one group other than is still an accent, rather than ‘an area in her incredulity. ‘What does that even the Tories that’s always ready to tell us London where criminals live’, as Alan mean? That there are scrubby estates full how badly we’re behaving, it’s the Catho- Partridge memorably put it. of single mothers? Oh well, thank god they lic Church. When I ask about the election they spotted it!’ There is laughter around the Inside, the parish underlings are over- give weary-faced sighs and make they’re- bar. ‘Tell us something we don’t know.’ cautious, seemingly scared of what they all-the-same noises. Eventually, once the Walking back to Westferry DLR, via the might let slip out. ‘We’re not allowed to quiet anger has been worked through, ‘broken society’ billboard, I pass commut- talk politics,’ they say. ‘No comment,’ they they concede they’ll definitely all vote. ers power-walking heedlessly underneath, say. ‘The Dean of Tower Hamlets will be ‘You have to vote, otherwise what’s the as the cloudless night sky turns cold. The here in a minute for the service . . .’ one point?’ asks a man called, simply, ‘Sumo’. march of progress may be relentless, but priest tells me, teasing, before shaking his What’s the point of what? I ask. ‘Democ- it pays to stop and look up once in a head. ‘But . . . but he’ll tell you the same racy!’ says Sumo. ‘You’ve got no right to while. ◊ thing. We can’t talk about politics.’ Two complain otherwise. Another lot will get seconds later Father Peter Harris, Dean in, but it won’t make a blind bit of dif- of Tower Hamlets, strides confidently ference. We’re in a global recession – it through the door and, brilliantly, he has doesn’t matter who’s in charge, we’re not read the memo and launches into a screwed anyway. It really wouldn’t detailed, heavily editorialized social his- have mattered who was leading the tory of the Isle of Dogs. country in the last two years – if the ‘These days, it’s a strange place, but Asian economies aren’t recovering, it’s fascinating. All the way around the ours won’t either.’ edge you’ve got new wealth; in the top Incredibly, for a pub directly facing right you’ve got a large Asian commu- it, not one of them has even noticed nity; in the middle you’ve got a spine of the Conservatives’ ‘broken society’ big council blocks. They used to say “no billboard – the barmaid and landlord blacks, no dogs, no Irish” round here, included. and some of the older parishioners, Irish ‘You see kids walking to school in Catholics, do say to me, “Oh, the council the morning and nine out of ten of is so corrupt, it’s just Asians helping each them have fags hanging out their mouths

6 A Single Book that I stayed overnight in hospital for the next five, while the fluttery machine washed saline through my veins. Some- The Line of Beauty one came with a big silver space blanket when my teeth started to chatter. This Brenda Walker on the restorative powers of Alan Hollinghurst was the pattern: one night in hospital, three weeks to recover, then a resigned have a taste for cold weather. That’s eyelids in portraits by Jan van Eyck and return. I felt, childishly, that I was paying I easy to say when you live, as I do, in suddenly, even though we all looked a terrible price for recovery; I felt that I a warm seaside city, but I like the way deathly ill, we seemed to carry a Flemish was being punished. the face numbs in severe northern hemi- light within us, something foreign, north- My travel bag, the one with the space sphere cold, the way a coat blows open ern, bare and bright and cold, something for a book under the zip, was starting to in the wind. The exhilarating bite of the deeply out of place in Australia. In the look rubbed around the edges, like the bag air, the possibility of snow. Snow changes street, people stared; we were so thin we of a politician with a country constitu- everything. The air warms beforehand – were almost fashionable, in a corpse-bride ency, or a mine worker on a fly-in, fly-out and afterwards, if the fall is heavy enough, kind of way. contract. One of the books I took to my even a great city can almost be hushed. I had the first chemotherapy episode chemo treatments was Alan Hollinghurst’s A New York winter some twelve years in an outpatients ward: a room with pol- The Line of Beauty, a novel strong enough ago gave me a passion for the cold. The ished wooden flooring and tall windows to hold the attention of a person sitting whole city was white and silver and overlooking a park. There were vast, upright in a hospital bed, waiting for a dif- watercolour-brown. Lean squirrels rushed end-of-the-day armchairs, fresh cake and ficult night to fall. For a night of this kind and paused, rushed and paused, over chicken sandwiches, but no books or TV. you need a populous, witty but serious crusts of old snow. Cigar smoke seemed It was companionable. Young men with book, like The Line of Beauty. A good-sized to pool and remain in the air and I walked younger wives at their sides boasted about book, in terms of characters and pages, is through these pools of smoky masculine the size of their tumours. At this stage I what’s required, since the night will be breath long after the men who made was curious as well as nervous, I noticed long and the book shouldn’t end too soon. them had ducked inside. everything. The slide of the cannula into Hollinghurst’s novel takes us into Chemotherapy is a little like a private my vein. The machine that delivered the a world you see on the front pages of winter. It brings its own weather, inde- drugs, which made a fluttering noise like broadsheets and tabloids, the world of pendent of the clouds or sunshine outside the wings of waterbirds striking the sur- British politics, and shows the way the the hospital. But not all winters are pleas- face of a lake at take-off. I felt fine. Then I popular press deals with privacy, includ- urable, full of interesting scenes for the was seized with cold, my hearing dimmed, ing the publication of a diagnosis of AIDS. traveller – some are simply bitter. During the ordinary world receded. Or it came in A gay man living provisionally in the treatment, teeth chatter, sound travels dif- close and this closeness felt dangerous. A household of a conservative politician ferently and the body must learn to wait, few hours later, I started to be sick. has a grim insight into death. ‘He stared to endure. It’s an icy climate, chemothera- As I worked my way through the six out of the window and after a minute py, and it’s difficult to carry a living story treatments, I grew familiar with these found Henry James’s phrase about the out of that grey place, to set it down in symptoms, which were accompanied by death of Poe peering back at him. What light and warmth, and hope that it might an odd sense of paranoia. This seems to be was it? The extremity of personal absence had hold together. common. I heard a singer who once had just overtaken him. The words, which once By the time I’d had my fourth episode cancer describe how she expected to die sounded arch and even facetious, were of chemotherapy I’d lost my hair and my every time the cannula was settled in her suddenly terrible to him, capacious, wise illness was visible and public. During my arm, every time the drugs began to thread and hard. He understood for the first recovery from surgery the seriousness of through the plastic tubing. And I’ve read time that they’d been written by someone my medical situation could be concealed, one perfect brief description of the effects whose life had been walked through, time but twelve weeks on I was unmistakably of chemotherapy, by the American writer and again, by death.’ suffering from cancer. In the oncologist’s Joyce Wadler: ‘I feel thick-headed, as if ‘Personal absence’ is such an elegant, waiting room, many of us were as bald someone has hit me on the head with a dispassionate way to describe death, but if as monks and we felt a particular kinship, sledge-hammer wrapped in a towel, but at you think about it, the phrase is crushing- a solidarity that set us apart from the the same time I’m anxious and speedy.’ ly extreme. And death – as distinct from newly diagnosed and from those who had Wadler describes the strange mixture fantasies of murder and criminal investiga- finished their treatment and were there of overexcitement and flat depression, tion – walked through the lives of people for a check-up. Our faces were pale, with the dull and jittery mood, the bad sleep. with much greater immediacy in the none of the fine surface hair that goes Everyone knows about hair loss and nau- nineteenth century, when the dying were unnoticed until it’s gone. Light fell with sea, but mouth ulcers? A shredding of nursed at home. There was almost a cult strange clarity on our bare flesh, and this the walls of the tongue, making speech of mourning: physical relics such as hair light seemed oddly familiar to me. Then I difficult? were commonly retained, sketches were remembered the distinctness of women’s I was so sick after my first treatment sometimes made of the dead. The wearing

7 of black for an extended period was ritu- medical visit reinforced this. ‘How have not believe that those he loved could die, ally observed in well-ordered households. you been?’ the kind oncologist would ask above all that he himself could die.’ We In our times we tend to focus on aber- casually, from behind her desk. And the all have a little of Seryozha within us. rant death, the basis of so much of our previous three weeks of partial recovery – I have a postcard of Mount Fuji tucked entertainment. Not that this was absent in a lurid, shattered jumble of sudden shocks, into the back of a book. The mountain is the nineteenth century; we are the inheri- unpleasant sensations and events – lined photographed from an angle that renders tors of Poe’s detective stories, the forerun- up neatly in the form of a story that some- it deep blue, almost the same colour as ners of the investigative dramas we enjoy one else was listening to, with interest. the sky. I read somewhere that when the now. Today, of course, we also have foren- I wasn’t a perfect patient. ‘How can Europeans who first climbed Mount Fuji sics and the case-by-case resolution of you do this?’ I asked the oncologist before saw the view they forgot what it had cost individual deaths, creating the illusion that my fourth treatment. I was in the mood them to get to the top – some of them mortality is a problem that can be solved. for complaint. unlaced their boots to find that their When I was very low – after the first ‘I can do this,’ she answered sensibly, toenails had floated off in little ponds of few sessions of chemotherapy, after the ‘because I’m going to save your life.’ blood. routine was established but before the On the back of the postcard a Japanese end was in sight – my high-school boy- The young men in the outpatients room woman I knew when I was a student has friend tracked down my phone number made themselves heroes of tales of mis- written: ‘I’m going to be all right. I wish and began to call from the other side of diagnosis or difficult surgery. They were I could visit you.’ I let myself believe, the country. His voice was a little indis- happy because they had control of a story, for a time, that she was going to survive tinct but still recognizable, and suddenly and in a terrible way they were happy advanced bone cancer. I was fifteen again, filling a bucket with because they weren’t about to run out of When I was going through chemo- blackberries pulled from canes that bent material, not yet, not with a cannula in therapy I felt that I wore my life lightly, over cold shallow water, or sitting on a their arm, different from every other can- and oddly enough this was a great relief. gravestone in a country cemetery, wearing nula. There was the drama of insertion My life was charged with narrative mean- an op-shop dress while he took black-and- and fresh dialogue with the nurse; they ing but it was also so unimportant. I was white photos with an important-looking were amassing new material as they spoke. thin, in more ways than one. I felt free to camera. I was a long way from the hospital, What will happen next? we ask our- go. I didn’t want to, I had my son and my wrapped in memory and a familiar voice. selves, often dreamily, all through our work, but I felt that if I chose to loosen How is it possible to submit to all this? lives. Let’s go to the hospital. Let’s find my grip on them I could easily slip away. To sit with the other Flemish faces in the out what happens next. It didn’t necessarily feel sad. oncologist’s waiting room, to settle into Nobody accepts that it might be death. Perhaps I’m romanticizing this. Per- a hospital bed with a book, then lay the In Anna Karenina, Anna’s little son Sery- haps I spent too much of my adolescence book down to push up a sleeve when ozha is told that his mother is dead. It’s sitting cross-legged on gravestones. But the nurse arrives with the drugs and the a lie, and he protects himself from it in when I think of that time in treatment it machine, and turn calmly aside? You need the only way he can. ‘He did not believe has a wintry glitter; my face was like the to have confidence in the medicine, but in death generally, and in her death in face of a stranger in the mirror and I was it’s also possible because the mind turns particular . . .’ He’s right about his mother strangely glad to be clear of my ordinary, everything into a story. and he does see her, briefly, again, which comfortable self. What I didn’t enjoy was Each phone call from a friend, each must encourage his conviction. ‘He did the means of escape. ◊

Thirty-eight Typewriters The Escort 33 The Helios-Klimax The Erika 5 The Century 10 The Hermes 3000 The Marx Dial The Bing 2 The Monica No. 1 rnest Hemingway said, The Royal Aristocrat The Remington Streamliner The Japy 5 E‘There is nothing to writ- The Voss DeLuxe The Olivetti Valentine The Tip Tip ing. All you do is sit down at a The Remie Scout The Wellington 2 Thrust The Mercedes Superba typewriter and bleed.’ The Olivetti Lettera 22 Action The Klein-Urania But what do writers bleed The Olympia SM-3 The Remington Noiseless The Halberg Traveller over now? Gone, sadly, are The Royal Quiet DeLuxe The Columbia Bar-Lock The American Visible the days of the typewriter The Torpedo 18 The Groma Kolibri The Imperial Good Compan- – and with them the often The Royal Mustang The Granville Automatic ion wonderful names their manu- The Smith-Corona Super G The Fitch The Tower Skywriter facturers bestowed on them. The Underwood Ace The Peerless The Generation 3000 Here are thirty-eight of our The Cole Steel The Postal 5 –sp favourites:

8 The Utterly Broken Britain Issue squeaky-clean meritocracy I’d like us to be, but it’s because we have so few other problems that we’re even A Nation Speaks worried about such an abstract ques- tion as ‘Is Britain broken?’ If we as a What is Britain? A rug? A mouldy book? A game of Tetris? country were instead regularly dealing with questions like ‘How can we make We travelled around the UK, did a little door- Sure, Britain has had its share of prob- sure British children can get at least stepping, made a few calls, and asked Britons lems recently, but has life ever been a primary level of education?’, then the following three questions. Answers below. that different? From year nought: the addressing a question like ‘Is Britain 1. Do you think that Britain is a) broken, Romans roughed us up for a while; broken?’ would be a long way down b) slightly cracked or c) not broken then we had a massive civil war; then our list of priorities. at all? some more civil war and a plague; 2. An old and valuable pocket watch; it 2. What could Britain be compared to then lots more civil war with some works as it was intended to, but that right now? famine thrown in; then we spent lots still means that it needs to be regularly 3. What could be done to fix it? of money on men fighting in the Mid- wound up. dle East; then there were some more 3. I don’t believe it needs fixing, but a Jean Harding, 79, retired, Garston famines and more war; skip over lots good place to start with improvements 1. Slightly cracked. more Horsemen of the Apocalypse would be to implement proportional 2. A cracked teacup. to modern history and we have two representation in general elections, to 3. Glue it together. world wars, several smaller wars and invest heavily in urban regeneration some economic downturns. It’s life as and failing schools, and to rehash Zarmena Javed Khan, 23, student and normal in the Britain Household. maternity leave laws to reduce the Admissions Assistant, Hatfield 2. Britain is a secondhand Skoda in a sec- potential for gender discrimination in 1. Broken. ondhand Skoda dealership, in a world the workplace. 2. A beautiful, intricately woven rug, with populated by secondhand Skodas driven people’s dirty shoe-prints all over it. by people who like to pretend that they 3. Keep people away from Britain who once owned a Ferrari. don’t contribute positively to its health. 3. Nothing will ‘fix’ Britain. It will just Welcome those who want to help. continue to be. It’ll get better for some people and worse for others. Bryan Fitzsimons, 24, student, York 1. No, it isn’t broken. The image of a ‘Broken Britain’ suggests that at one Rob Walker, 26, communications strate- point construction was complete. gist, London 2. Britain was built by cowboys who 1. Slightly cracked. never really finished the job, leaving 2. One of those canteen dish meals where us with draughts and exposed brick- all the foods are separated and you work. I don’t think we’ve really got have to mix them yourself. the stomach to gut the place and start 3. I think integration of racial differences again. We’ll just try to do the odd bit Doreen Mason, 67, retired, Watford and cultures; a strong teaching of Brit- of rewiring on Sundays before The 1. Slightly cracked. ish history in schools would help make X-Factor results. 2. A sad, downtrodden old man. people understand who they are and 3. I don’t really think anything needs fix- 3. A firm government willing to work who others are. ing. It’s still ‘under construction’. towards giving us back our pride. Oliver Meek, 32, Totleigh Barton Centre Ruby McGuigan, 20, student, Sheffield Beth Craggs, 23, graphic designer, St director, Devon 1. No more broken than it has always been. Monans 1. Not broken at all. 2. A jigsaw of the Queen. Not a really 1. I don’t believe Britain is broken, or at 2. N/A. hard one though, like, 500 pieces. least, not if that implies that at one 3. Nothing. 3. Something, anything, that doesn’t point it was ‘working’; in fact, I think involve David Cameron and his mas- that it’s probably better than it has Russel McLean, 29, bookseller, Dundee sive forehead. Seriously, get a fringe or ever been. Greater levels of oppor- 1. Slightly cracked. I think we’re fixable. something. tunity for a variety of people means Or at least I hope so. there are fewer obstacles in the way 2. A book that has been left in a cupboard Sonny Malhotra, 23, photographer, London of the British people’s ambitions. Of too long and gone mouldy. 1. I’m not sure it was ever fixed. Is any course, we still have a very long way 3. Less of the culture of blaming other country truly perfect and pristine? to go to before we’re the egalitarian, people. It’s about attitude.

9 Rachel Ramsey, 25, student, location not breaking down that barrier, progress 3. I advocate for a spiritual change. We given can be made in restoring our faith can live with less. Less is more. 1. Britain is broken but not in a way that in the banking industry. After that, means it’s a desperate, crumbling heap we need to understand the decision- Jenni Canwell, 23, tape librarian, London of rocks. Instead, I see the British making process behind the bailouts, 1. Slightly cracked. Broken is a bit public as a relatively cohesive whole what conditions were attached to the extreme. We still have a fairly good that has distanced itself, if not broken bailouts and whether those condi- economy and society despite what apart, from its government. While the tions have been upheld. Finally, we the media has sensationalized. Some public can never be completely uni- should be told when we can expect the people are worse off than others, but fied in their views about what makes rewards Darling promised us for saving it’d be so boring if everyone lived in for an ideal society, or even why the the banks. In response to our feelings harmony all the time. government has become so alienated of alienation from the government, 2. An incomplete puzzle, with the pieces from the rest of the island, it does seem the kneejerk reaction is, of course, to a bit muddled. to agree on some salient issues which vote for a Conservative government. If 3. Education reforms to make higher could unify the public and the govern- anything is pointedly not the answer, education more accessible. And they ment once more. Take, for example, it’s that. need to sort out immigration because the British reaction to Barack Obama’s it’s a bloody joke. race for the US presidency. If nothing else, Obama’s autobiography’s ranking Gill Gorman, 66, retired, Garston in the UK book charts suggested that 1. Slightly cracked. British people recognized the need 2. A cracked hen’s egg. for a powerful and progressive leader, 3. Everyone should talk and write about and perhaps realized the stark contrast the good things about our country. between who the American public Focus on those instead of all the bad were voting for and what we had voted Lewis Hill, 29, marketing executive, London things – those are in the minority for some years ago. Americans were 1. Slightly cracked. anyway. promised change and motion while we 2. A game of Tetris where you have put remain stationary, surrounded by what a crucial piece in the wrong way and Clare Adams, 25, artist, Hemel Hempstead now appears to be an illegal war, by you can’t stop the next piece coming. 1. Broken. With the expenses scandal, the notion that we are shareholders in 3. Put quality of life at the centre of unelected leaders and the war crimes banks which, despite Alistair Darling’s every political, economic and moral of Tony Blair hanging over us, British promises, and despite their systematic decision. End the ridiculous obsession democracy is well and truly bust. The failings which brought the country to with the working class. needs and voices of Britain are becom- its knees, will continue to reward their ing overlooked with our two-party employees with significant bonuses, by Jo-Anne Rowney, 22, student, Brighton system; big business comes first these cuts in higher education which under- 1. Slightly cracked. days. If ID cards become the norm mine the government’s position that 2. Fractured arm. then, for me, Britain is in the scrapyard. universities will be crucial in our eco- 3. Respect, tolerance, action. 2. Sloth with a briefcase full of oil. nomic recovery . . . the list goes on. In 3. An end to two-party politics. sum, the British people are quite rightly Peter Bloxham, 24, software trainer, Staines asking, ‘How the fuck did we end up 1. That depends heavily on what sort of Tom Darlington, 26, marketing executive, here?’ We are skint, yet lining the pock- society we want. For certain people, it London ets of a tiny group of the population. is working in exactly the way it’s sup- 1. Slightly cracked. We still enjoy a better And nobody seems to want to tell the posed to. quality of life than a great number of truth about why we ended up in Iraq. 2. Britain is a television showing an countries around the world, both in 2. A saucer which has had the indented advert for a £7 cup of coffee, available terms of wealth and personal freedoms. area (the bit that holds the cup) with 0% APR. Whilst the idea of ID cards may be knocked out. 3. Close the VIP room. unacceptable to some, we live in a dif- 3. It’s difficult to pinpoint what could ferent age. Threats from terrorism are be done to glue these two pieces back Anna Cardona, 39, export officer, location at the greatest level since the end of together. In order to reach any sense not given ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. It of closure over the economic crisis, the 1. Slightly cracked. amuses me that people who object to public should first be told what caused 2. A broken seashell. We should leave our ID cards are often giving away much it. A sense of general ignorance pre- comfort zone (the seashell), forget our more information to companies such sides over the whole issue, and nobody prejudices and follow our intuition as Google, Tesco and so on, but their – myself included – really seems to to conceive a new life free from the power is never considered. I am more understand why it happened or what vagaries of banks, firms, multination- concerned by rising train fares than I role the UK banks played in it. By als and markets. am by ID cards or a DNA register.

10 2. A flat tyre; still capable of functioning, 3. God knows. I’m strangely optimistic but in need of reinvigoration. about the future, though. 3. As with most western societies we have become fat and bloated on eas- Sue Avery, 60, retired, Hertfordshire ily available credit. Banks offer credit 1. Slightly cracked. because the consumer demands it. It’s 2. An earthquake fissure with earth-­ not acceptable to simply blame those moving machines in the background. in charge. As a wider group of indi- 3. Good government run by people of Pat Stuart, 74, retired, location not given viduals we have to think about what real conviction and ability. The best 1. Slightly cracked. That crack will wid- contribution we can make to improv- brains are not going into politics, en without quick action. ing our own lives. which is very worrying. 2. Two ships. One without a captain and the other with all the crew in place Betty Lambert, 84, retired, Abbots Langley Charlotte Gibling, 21, student, Lincoln sailing well. 1. Broken. My identity has been stolen. I 1. Slightly cracked. 3. Strong leadership, not just from gov- am English, but I am not allowed to be 2. A battered old vase that has been badly ernment but from within our social called English. I can be Scottish, Irish, patched up with Sellotape and glue. and educational institutions. Every Welsh, but not English. It is demoralizing. 3. Perhaps a greater respect for differ- ship needs to have a reliable captain. 2. A shattered glass. ent age groups (especially the elderly) 3. Reward effort, punish wrongdoers, reflected in theN HS and the education Louise McMahon, 24, teacher, Berkhamsted make parenting popular and teach system. Help offered to those who 1. Cracked. But majorly rather than children right and wrong. Return to need it, without them having to fill slightly cracked. It’s seriously damaged, standards; the government should lead out hundreds of forms in order to get but I don’t think it’s completely bro- by example. noticed at all. ken. These problems are reparable. 2. One of our potholed roads. Gener- Rebecca Woodhead, age not given, novel- ally sound but there are areas that are ist, Cotswolds rough, cracked and in some places 1. Not broken at all. have enormous gaping holes. 2. Britain is broken in the same way that 3. Working in an educational environ- a butterfly is a broken caterpillar. ment, it is scary to see the type of 3. See above. Britain is not broken, so no children being produced by the need to fix it. present target-driven culture. Schools Vicky Godber, 23, childminder, Boreham- are scared of slips in results, which Jeff Goad, 26, support worker, Wigan wood can trigger an Ofsted [Office for 1. Slightly cracked. 1. Broken. Too much going on at the Standards in Education, Children’s 2. A nuclear power station. moment! Normally the news is all, Services and Skills] visit and affect 3. Legalize ganja, it might mellow all the like, ‘a coach crashed into a ditch’ but their places in the league tables. This pissheads and earn a bit of tax money. it’s all politics at the moment – the MP then has a knock-on impact on the Make areas look nicer by planting scandal, the Iraq hearing and the reces- numbers of students applying, which more trees. Give benefits in vouchers sion. There’s too much that needs to affects the amount of money the rather than money. Allow guerrilla be fixed. school receives. Deadlines are being gardening and give children more 2. A broken window in a house with job- extended, redrafts of work produced. places to hang out. This country kicks less people all around. Failure isn’t an option. Students aren’t ass, although it’s a little overpopulated. 3. No idea, because truly I don’t think aware of deadlines, and shirk their David Cameron could do much of responsibility to actually sit there Beverley Caddick, 22, student and lec- a better job. They all seem to be on and do some work. If they do badly, turer in Law, Liverpool the same track. They say they’re so it isn’t their fault – it is that of the 1. Broken. different but they’re not. Something school. Sadly, this is a culture encour- 2. Alex Ferguson’s broken heart at not radical needs to be done to shake the aged by most parents now. The move being in the Champions League. whole thing up. People vote, but it’s back towards producing well-round- 3. New government. With no expense half-hearted and nobody does their ed students rather than just ticking a ‘mishaps’. Is that possible? research. Nobody finds out about any box needs to be made. other parties, they just vote for the Daniel Paul, 27, mechanic, St Albans same one they did the year before. Jane Wheeler, 56, retired, Surrey 1. Very broken at the moment. 1. Broken. 2. The Cutty Sark; something that Ryan Cox, 27, restaurant owner, Abingdon 2. A footballer kicking another player could be great, a burnt-out hulk being 1. Broken. intentionally, showing a lack of desperately patched up just to stay in 2. Quicksand. respect; wanting to achieve, but not by existence. 3. A change of government. fair means.

11 3. Go back to a moral code of conduct so these devolved areas have more say, Owen Robarts, 26, occupation not given, we respect and help one another. more influence and more access to their Manchester politicians. This gives them a greater 1. Broken. Lisa Clague, 22, unemployed, Ainsdale sense of national purpose. Until Eng- 2. Smashed like a pane of glass. 1. I think Britain is slightly cracked due to land gets its own devolution we will 3. Reintroduce community so that the economic problems of the last few remain an unequal partner. groups won’t fear each other and hope- years and what many consider to be an 2. Britain could be compared to a CCTV fully people won’t feel the need to be unstable government. People seem to camera. Everyone can see what is violent to show how ‘hard’ they are. have forgotten what community means wrong but no one’s prepared to do and there appears to be a large amount anything about it. Elizabeth Norman, 22, student, Darwen of antisocial behaviour in certain areas, 3. My first priority (ideally) would be to 1. I’d say maybe slightly broken, no more which is causing disruption to many. have a republic with an elected second than many other countries. Obviously 2. It could be comparable to a teenager house and a written constitution with we have our problems, but the idea of who has lost their way between the inalienable rights for all citizens. calling our society completely broken innocence of youth and the maturity of just seems really wrong to me if we com- adulthood – the idea being that Britain Rachel Wood, 20, student, Darwen pare it with other nations like Zimbabwe. is simply going through a bad ‘phase’ 1. It is broken due to disinterest in poli- 2. I’d say it has cracks, not big ones but and will eventually turn out okay. tics. My school in Blackburn (private, the kind you have in your car wind- 3. In order to ‘fix’ the country, more good school) did not study politics screen that get a little bigger the longer effort needs to be made to help com- or even have extra classes to teach us you leave them. It would take a lot of munities interact with each other. how the country was run. As a result wear and tear for it to shatter com- Many people are critical of immigra- I came out of school and college with pletely. tion, yet do not personally know any- little understanding of the governance 3. Politicians working together instead of one who is in that situation. of the country. point-scoring off each other, and also 2. A shattered glass. just making more people politically Billy Grant, 22, student, Warwick 3. Make politics compulsory in the cur- aware from a younger age – perhaps 1. Slightly cracked. riculum or have separate classes, for even teaching it as a compulsory les- 2. An object balancing on the edge of a example ‘life skills’ where politics son in schools. A lot of the problems table. could be taught. in our society come about from people 3. Improve education, motivation and being unhappy with the government, work rates. Sarah Rees, ‘just the right side of 50’, but if people had a greater knowledge bookseller, Mumbles of how the system works then they Natalie, 22, unemployed, Liverpool 1. Slightly cracked. would have a better idea of what they 1. Broken. 2. A chipped wine glass. were actually voting for. Then perhaps 2. A bicycle with no brakes heading for 3. For people to be fair with one another. there wouldn’t be the problem of this disaster. BNP [British National Party] and UKIP 3. Focus on young people. Increase the Nicole Fuller, 24, occupation not given, [United Kingdom Independence Party] number of youth centres or sporting Birmingham culture that there seems to be today. activities for younger children to keep 1. Britain as a whole is slightly cracked, All you have to do is look at how polit- them off the streets. Place less empha- with the middle and upper classes only ical parties play up to this fear of immi- sis on sending people to university and just becoming aware of how deep gration by highlighting how their poli- encourage more vocational learning the cracks run. The working class, on cies could go wrong, and so on. But options. the other hand, is at breaking point. they could work at actually fixing the Racial tensions, the economic down- irrational fear of such issues by point- turn and political unrest are all causing ing out how beneficial immigration can a potentially volatile mood within the be to the economy for creating jobs. lower classes that only needs a small spark to ignite and become much Eleanor Sherman, 23, personal assistant, worse. These tensions are played out Thame daily on Birmingham’s streets with 1. Broken. gangs of whites and Asians fighting, 2. A customer service desk. Clint, 50, chemist, East Riding throwing stones and attacking each 3. Lib Dems, maybe . . . hopefully. 1. The problem is one of identity. Brit- other with weapons, even on Saturday ain doesn’t really exist anymore, with afternoons as people are shopping. Mary, age not given, retired and a volun- devolution in Scotland, Wales and, to a The police have no powers to stop the teer, Falmouth lesser extent, in Northern Ireland. This trouble. 1. Not at all. makes the concept of Britain defunct. 2. A volcano. 2. A complete and untorn map. We live in a society where people in 3. I think it’s too late. 3. Kindness. ◊

12 TEXT TRAUMA FOR HEADTEACHER ADDICTS STEAL CHARITY DAY 2 BOX IN BROAD DAYLIGHT Inverness Times DAY 3 Fort William Courier

NEIGHBOURS FROM HELL MOVED IN NEXT DOOR DAY 1 TEENAGERS RUN WILD John O’Groats Gazette AFTER AUDITIONS FOR DANCE SHOW DAY 4 Carlisle Observer

15 YEAR OLD BOY BECOMES FATHER FOR THE SECOND TIME DAY 5 Burnley Echo Broken Britain 10 days from John O’Groats to Lands End. In every nook and every cranny, Britain is broke.

BENEFITS CHEATS ON BOOZE CRUISE SHAME DAY 6 Wolverhampton Citizen

SMOKERS FORCE LOCAL NHS TRUST INTO DEBIT DAY 7 Cheltenham Express

PUBLIC WANT A STOP FALSE CLAIM OF INCAPACITY TO THIS BROKEN RECORD BENEFITS A SYMBOL OF DAY 10 OUR TIMES - JUDGE SAYS Lands’ End Evening Telegraph DAY 9 SHAME AS MAJORITY OF Glastonbury Star 3 YEAR OLDS CAN’T WRITE THEIR OWN NAMES DAY 8 Bude Post

13 How can Hit them with you fix it? a big stick.

Jeremy asks Audience member replies

How would Build a big wall to you fix it? keep them out.

Noel asks Ben from Rugby replies

How would Take them you fix it? into care.

Nicky asks Lorraine calling from Derbyshire replies

How would By being ever you fix it? so self-righteous.

Mumsnet asks Mumsnet replies

Are we talking about you? Stop talking about us.

The media asks The people reply

14 Unbroken Britain The young trickle skirted and slid and reached a narrow cut, shaped from the past movement of water over its stony The Stream bottom. Here the water was as clear as any chalk stream; it sent out a soothing by Colin Elford sound, it babbled and spoke, and then cascaded into a channel running along- he frost worked overnight, coat- tiding of magpies surrounded a lone buz- side some thorny vegetation. Its soft Ting the countryside in jewels, each zard who was resting too close to their music changed in tone. The water passed encrusted in its own icy tomb. Muddied future territories, and they pecked at their through the hedge, hidden behind a thorn russet leaves formed a frozen carpet hunched victim, shrieking abuse. The shield of wild rose and bramble; the underfoot and sent up a crisp complaint buzzard was outnumbered but deter- guard of dry barbs was as sharp as talons. with each step. Stacked in layers by the mined to stay put, so he clumsily raised Once hidden, the stream song changed winter winds, the leaves were joined by a bared wing at his attackers in protest. and gave out the groan of an injured ani- a thin film of frosted ice, once a seam of Overhead a gang of rooks added to the mal. I paused, listening to each sound, the moisture from the drizzle of a passing noise in drawn-out raspy calls, each tone odd unusual crackle and guttural moan. cloud. unique to the caller. They dropped as a Peering into the gloom of the hedge I Above the frozen path, a pair of cock group to investigate the raging argument, saw a small sandbar where the washed-up blackbirds rose from the ground and swooping over the magpies’ position, debris gathered, a mix of dried bramble faced each other, enraged and territorial, but instead of joining in the disturbance sticks and leaves. On leaving the hedge only a feather’s-width apart. They flew they lifted, thinking better of the situa- the stream reappeared and gained more up a few feet, then fell back to earth as tion once the buzzard noticed, rising fast strength. Where once it flowed around spiteful as a pair of bantam cocks, blind and high as one body and leaving the sky small boulders of rock, now it scaled and with battle and too busy to notice a quieter than when they’d arrived. In time glided over the peaks, its music loud and stranger in their territory. Above, a pied the magpies were joined by several of constant. Crowfoot plants anchored on wagtail looked down on the foray while the local bird population, all raising their the edges of its sandbars, while further swinging back and forth on the electric annoyance at this large outsider. Unde- downstream rotting leaf litter, brought wires, just a bobbing flick, flick, flick of terred, and still as a rock, the buzzard on the current, clung to its banks. The black-and-white. remained. thrust of the stream released a mass of Before mounting the stile ahead I I left the neighbours arguing and froth and at times the water let out a stopped and rubbed the overnight stub- picked my way down the slope towards shriek: the surface rippled in pulsing ble on my chin, suddenly awake and the valley bottom. To my right, running rings. It sounded like a fast-running tap. tickled by the sharp north-easterly. The from just beneath the ridge of the slope, The chest feathers of a blackbird, its weak winter sun offered no warmth; was a strip of over-grazed rush and heav- life cut short by a hungry raptor, swayed the gold leaf it spread on the opposite ily trampled ground. The cattle’s hoof on the edge of the stream. A single bank barely cast light onto the tussocky prints trapped pools of still water; the feather clung to a dry strand of last sea- grass of the path. Blue haze and shadow sodden ground was marked with these son’s goose grass, half in and half out of painted the bottom of the valley. Across ringed tracks that carved a soft inscrip- the water, caught between two worlds. on the distant bank, buck and doe rab- tion on the hillside, a chain of raised tufts Orange berries and drowned haws were bits frolicked in courtship in the enclosed attracting the available light. The hillside swept along the sandy bed of the stream glades between the clusters of gorse. On shimmered as I walked past. In the damp and rolled over the stones, to be caught the ground around my feet, woolly tufts ground of the valley I spooked a snipe by waving arms of underwater vegetation. of blue-grey hair torn from the coat of that exploded into the sky from a frozen No longer quiet, the stream showed its a rival coney lay scattered, as soft to the hoof indent, twisting and jinking into the newfound strength, passing deep holes touch as a baby. grey, then vanishing in all but sound. with ease, diving over and under stones, The top layer of cloud was as white as A young stream came down through massing around a large, stubborn rock, an Arctic snow scene and from this vantage the valley, laying the grass flat as it flowed. stirring the waves and rippling the surface. point it felt as though I could reach out and It started in a crease in the grass, but its At times it bubbled with sheer enjoyment: stroke it. The sun slipped behind a pressure slow momentum built along the route of was it laughing now at the maelstrom, ridge of virgin snow and was gone. my journey. When it was ankle-deep the glorying in the whirlpools and fish-scale The track continued across the field. water flowed under a stock fence, over ripples it sent spiralling across its surface? Grey rocks covered in greyer lichens submerged pastoral grasses, and cascaded The stream’s pace was slowed by a erupted from the soil – ankle-high grave- over an occasional raised hoof print. It fallen fence across its path that created stones for unobservant walkers – and ter- was as splendid as the pushy effort of any an island of dirty froth, and sections of races of pasture and down, moulded like waterfall. Side channels widened into this island peeled off as bubbles into the waves, rolled down to the valley floor. miniature lakes and then widened again, revolving rhythm of water, each floating In a narrow thicket a squabble erupted, searching for light and reflecting the gift towards one another, clinging together breaking the stillness of the morning. A back with the glare of a mirror. like shipwrecked sailors, growing larger

15 as a cell. Together they circled, caught in first signs of spring. plank that made for a bridge, the ground the whirlpool; the smaller ones exploded, Near the tree the edges of the stream softened beneath my feet and the stream regenerating the growing central bubble had been disturbed by thirsty cattle was barely audible. It drifted into a moist with every sacrifice. This selfless ceremony crushing the sides, leaving them badly furrow and seeped into the ground to continued until the last remaining sphere trodden and misshaped. Each half-moon some unknown underground pathway, grew to a clear dome, the perfect fish- track between the cattle-cropped rushes as though it wanted to leave unnoticed, eye, and then popped to let the process of slowed down the progress of the stream, slipping away like an old relative, not birth begin all over again. diverting the flow and sending seeping wanting to be a hindrance; so different Once past the fallen fencepost the fingers of water into dead-end channels. to its shape as a young trickle, quiet and stream found its own course, crossing Within a central channel a blood-red stem, reserved, and to its adolescent noise and crevices, spreading over shallows, widen- softened by the water, caught a batch of confidence, running quick over obstacles ing and narrowing as the land permitted. quivering bubbles more delicate than a with strength. When the wrong path As the valley levelled, the song of the chandelier. could lead to stagnancy, as the stream stream grew quiet and once again bird- Other than the chirring of a greenfinch widened was there a wisdom in its flow- song sounded over the noise of the water. in the distant scrub, there was no sound. ing water? Nearing its task it slowed, It coursed over the roots of an ancient A horse-tail swished, breaking the surface quiet and ready to return to its waiting and scarred russet hawthorn and a cock of the water with ripples, as the stream mother, through secret ancestral cracks chaffinch pinked from the bare branches. glided under a raft of small sticks lodged in some cave wall, dripping down to be Swelling buds on the limbs waited for the into the side of the bank. Past the single reborn again. ◊

16 Questions For… 5D: Do you think older women were dif- ferent back when you were young? SV: No. I hate this notion that human Stephen Vizinczey nature has changed. We haven’t changed a fucking thing in thousands of years. The On sex, morons, literature, and how love affairs might just save our society worries might change, the pretensions might change, but human beings have felt He is a short, well-groomed man with a large, just don’t think it’s important. If people and talked the same way for tens of thou- white-toothed smile. We sit in his study in a don’t want to deal with something they sands of years. There will be change even- flat near Earl’s Court, surrounded by the books say it’s not important or it’s not something tually if we become illiterate and totally he returns to as often as possible. A musician, to write about. Phony sex books sell won- visual and forget reading. In that case, in he says, practises the works of the great. A derfully because they don’t touch people. ten or twenty thousand years, a different writer should read Balzac as often as possible. But if you write a book that hits home and kind of human being will appear. It’s hard to imagine Vizinczey’s career path touches people then you are in trouble. I as an effective template for a young writer – an really didn’t know what it was to be hated 5D: But older people now are made to exiled Hungarian gets shipped to Italy and then before I wrote my book. I got a lot of fan look younger with different surgeries. Canada after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 mail, but I also got a lot of hate mail. Older women – women who would have and decides to self-publish a novel celebrating been the same age as your characters – are older women. He distributes In Praise of Old- 5D: What makes a book phony when it pressured to look different now. er Women himself until somehow – thanks comes to sex? SV: No. This is the media image. It may in no small part to its title – its notoriety takes SV: The reader will know when you apply to famous actresses but not ordi- over. Eventually the lead character of this bil- write truthfully about any subject. Any- nary people. Friends of mine are not like dungsroman is played by Tom Berenger in one thing that is untrue does not connect with this at all. This is the media world that of the two film adaptations. First published in people’s experiences, so readers are not doesn’t apply to over ninety per cent of 1965, the book was finally reissued in Penguin touched. A book works when the readers the population. Classics in 2010. can put their own experience in it. There is one difference. Stupid people Vizinczey drinks a cup of coffee and speaks A text is like a music score; it is just are much more affected these days. So if about the title. ‘It did not make the book popu- notes on the paper. The reader is the you’re a stupid man or woman, you are lar with some women,’ he says. ‘I remember musician. The reader creates the music. very much affected by this type of thing. when I was at the French book fair years ago. If the book is good, the reader’s reaction You try to be a model, or behave like one. A woman who looked to be in her forties was is built into the book and their mind But the people affected are the morons. inspecting the cover. ‘Are you interested?’ I is engaged. It’s a very funny thing and Morons are always morons one way or asked her. She said: ‘I am too young for this.’ I don’t know how I do it when I do it. another. Most of the time I don’t do it, so I throw Stephen Vizinczey: Years ago, after I away more than ninety per cent of what I 5D: Yours isn’t a book about one-night had moved from Canada to England, I write. That’s why I publish so few books. stands. It’s about love affairs. was on the David Frost show with Bar- If the writing is not true, the reader is just SV: Sex without connection is destructive. bara Cartland [novelist] and Dennis Nor- an onlooker. If you write truthfully about It doesn’t have to be love but there has den [comedy writer]. Norden loved the anything, the reader is part of the scene. to be an affection. You have to like that book and defended it and Barbara Cart- person. land abused me for half an hour. 5D: Why do you think readers want to enter into this particular piece of music? 5D: Is a person missing out if they have a 5D: What did she say? Do they want to live through these love love affair with someone their own age? SV: How horrible the book was – shock- affairs with you? SV: It depends. I know of lasting love ing, immoral and terrible. SV: They respond to something. Anybody affairs of people of the same age. They who has had a happy sex life loves the get along very well. The most important 5D: Why did she find it immoral? book. thing is that you fit. You need to have the SV: Because sex is a diverse subject. It is Literature answers two questions: Do same heartbeat, the same nervous system very difficult to write objectively about you remember? And do you know? All to get along with anybody. That can sex. Men put in all the complaints and all literature is summed up by these two happen at any age, but it rarely happens the hurt women have caused them and questions. between young people. Kids get together, women write about all the horrible things but neither of them knows anything. men do. Most books connected with sex 5D: So the book leads people to remem- Love is a serious business of learning are really about the war between the sexes. ber the good love affairs? about yourself and learning about the My book is different. For some reason I SV: Yes, they remember their happy other person. There is no way to get it think I can write objectively about sex. experiences. Or even a bad experience if right when you are 17 or 18. Also it is a happy book about sex. Most they survived it and it didn’t make them The nerve of the book is how two peo- people lead an unhappy sex life, so they twisted. This book is not for the twisted. ple get together, regardless of age. It is

17 about the moment of courage. You need sex has a profound effect. This particular the world but they reassure you that courage. The important thing about sex book was banned in South Africa and all you’re not alone. In time I realized the is courage. There is no greater hurt than over the Soviet Union. Canadians are absolutely the same as being rejected. Hungarians. They had the same human 5D: Was that because of the sexual con- problems and intelligence. The more 5D: What does an older person bring to a tent or because of what you write about intelligent a person is, the less it matters relationship with a young person? political oppression? where they come from. The biggest dif- SV: Friendship and affection and knowl- SV: The two cannot be separated. Any- ference between people is the level of edge. The biggest tragedy of our society body who oppresses doesn’t want a intelligence. is the separation of the generations. person to rely on the self. Joy gives you What I hated about Toronto was that I saw in the Daily Mail that fathers strength, so joy is never celebrated in an the art sections were about some pop do not talk to their sons. This inter-­ oppressive society. No regime likes it singer, Elvis Presley or whoever. When generational conflict is a vicious thing. when you have strength in yourself. I came to England in 1966 I was very The young say the previous generation I was very lucky in love. I was loved glad to see that the review sections were took too much. The older generation and I loved, so about writers. Seri- blames the youth for social decay. I was never ous things. But it’s The greatest social impact of connections a slave. The changing. It’s now between the young and the old is that the powerful know like North America young learn their experiences. They have this: they want used to be twenty a notion of the previous generation and you to respect or thirty years know of their optimism and their struggles. medals and ago. The popular They begin to learn how the world worked. titles but when morons are on top, you find joy in so we are again in 5D: Do you think we’d be better off if love you have the position where there were more love affairs between gen- the confidence writers are not vis- erations? to turn away ible. And when you SV: It is the essential part of any civiliza- from those sur- are not visible you tion. Without that bond, you will have face displays of get scared. a broken society. That’s why we have a power. The horrible broken society. There was a thing about stupid If you think someone from a previous wonderful Italian cartoonist who drew people is this: anything they don’t know generation is your enemy because she ate the great politicians of his time naked. they think is unimportant. Stupid people up your future and that’s why you don’t They all had tiny penises. Their power know everything. Anything they don’t have a home, then you have a broken disappeared. know doesn’t matter. society. It breaks the family, the friend- ship, and, most importantly, the love. 5D: You left Hungary because of the rev- 5D: What’s wrong with entertainment? My book is not quite an autobiog- olution and ended up in North America. SV: All the great writers gave you a good raphy, but I have always loved older What effect did the move have on you? time but the main point is to nourish women. I had a forty-year-old lover SV: The experience of changing lan- your soul and to tie you to the rest of when I was fourteen. She was an expert guages was hard. I didn’t want to leave mankind. in English literature and poetry. She had Hungary. I went to Italy but it wasn’t a When you read a great writer you are travelled around the world. It was an big change. But when I went to Canada I reading a kindred spirit and a kindred education. was in a totally different world and I was mind. They put into words something scared to death. There was a time when I which is only half formed in your own 5D: And what do you remember about thought I had dreamt my past. mind. They can clarify what you’re that particular love affair? When I arrived in Montreal, thinking. That’s why it is so important. SV: She was wonderful. Older women Beethoven’s violin concerto was on the taste and smell good. I had a sixty-two radio and between the second and third 5D: Do you honestly feel something year-old girlfriend and she was one of movements they had a Coca-Cola ad. I important is slipping away? the best. Nothing is lost in the wrinkles. thought it would be front-page news the SV: No it will never slip away. It’s like You can have great sex at sixty, but a lot next day because it was so fantastic. But mathematics. People say they don’t of people lose confidence. You can have it wasn’t and that’s when I felt scared understand algebra, or that algebra does great sex when you are older. I’m soon to death. I thought there was no way I not have mass appeal, but that doesn’t going to be seventy-seven and I’m having would ever make it in that country. alter the fact it has absolute significance. the best sex of my life. Much better than I thought I was crazy, but then I read It keeps the world going. If no one when I was 20. It’s much slower but it Stendhal again and thought they were understood algebra the world would just gives me confidence. crazy. That’s another very important end. I am happy to say the same is true This idea of confidence embodied by thing about books. They will never save with literature. ◊

18 Poem TOD James Robertson efter ‘Coyote’ by Joni Mitchell

I dinna blame ye, Tod – Hoo could I blame ye for bein yersel? For haein that hell-mend-ye attitude While hoormaisters weigh oot pokes o kiss n tell While doom merchants buy and sell futures in naethin They used tae cry ye vermin, Tod And kirkmen fecht ower whit’s sand and whit’s stane Till the PC crew got yer name aff that leet Ye’re aff rinnin through the here and noo They’d award ye a social worker and rights Makkin the widds and the hills yer ain If only ye’d settle and gie up meat Sometimes I’ll catch ye in the car’s heidlichts But ye’re nae Tam Paine on liberty The quick yella glent o yer arrogant ee The notion o that’s niver crossed yer mind Sometimes ye’re crushed at the side o the road It’s yer instincts drive ye, drive ye, drive ye But even deid ye show anither life tae me Heedless o ony borderline Seein ye there is somehow a guid sign Fermers want yer guts for nicky-tams It means ye’ve nae plans yet tae retire Faithers want yer tail hung oot tae dry It tells me we’re niver dune till we’re cauld Ye’re a flittin shadda at the hen-hoose door And we’re niver cauld till we canna shine Ye’re a silhouette on the mune-bricht sky Lit up wi the licht o ambition’s slow, slow fire Sometimes I smell ye at the neb o day The bowf o yer pish and yer dug-desire I wis niver wild like you were It hings in the air like a memory Reason and commonsense aye held me back A switherin proof o existence or mibbe The logic o law and the scent o fear The drift o the ash o ambition’s slow, slow fire The safety in numbers o the howlin pack We were yince cousins back there in the hauf-licht I looked oot the windae o a breengin train You and me, aye and the auld wolf tae Efter bein up aw nicht, efter bein doun in Lunnon But he’s lang awa and I’m hoose-trained noo And I saw ye, Tod, through the blearit gless Hame-drauchtit – though I ken fine weel whaur I’m frae Lowpin and flingin in the new blue dawn Sae that leas yersel, oot o order, ootside And yer tail wis a bleeze, a fireflaucht That faur oot it seems ye hardly exist A wallopin wild reid banner o flame A fitpad, a felon, a thief in the nicht And I wis that fou o envy A shift in the trees, a shape in the mist And I wis that fou o shame Aw Tod, look at me, I’m chowin ma lip Thinkin on aw the dangerous joys Slaiverin tae get ayont the jaggy wire That micht hae been mine if I’d had yer heat Dreamin o jinkin the boondary fence Yer gallusness or jist yer poise Claucht atween icy prudence’s grip I wis gaun back tae a grey, grey room And the lick o the licht o ambition’s slow, slow fire Tae anither windae I’d look though frae inside But noo I think that wee glimpse o yer freedom And the fierce flash o yer unkent pride Wis the lunt tae some kinna funeral pyre Some consummation even Or the spark that set me burnin Burnin wi the licht o ambition’s slow, slow fire

19 Memoir Abraham, then two-and-a-half thousand years to the writing of Genesis, which tells of the covenant God made with Abraham Living In Snip to be God of his descendants as long as they circumcised their sons. Both Judy and A parent’s choice. By Jeremy Gavron I were descended from Eastern European Jews who had lived in close religious com- So this fellow is walking down the street and Jacob Snowman, no less, who also did munities and had been circumcising their he sees a shop with a hat in the window. Now Prince Charles), my father had subse- sons for hundreds, quite possibly thou- he’s wanted to get a new hat for ages so he goes quently distanced himself from his Jewish sands, of years. In the shower I looked into the shop and after calling for a while this upbringing and neither my brother nor down at myself and tried to imagine what old man with a white beard comes out from the I had been offeredbar mitzvahs or been it would be like to have a son with a fore- back. ‘Can I help you?’ the old man asks. ‘I’m taken to synagogue on Yom Kippur or skin. Uncircumcised penises had always looking for a hat,’ the customer says. ‘Hats we at any other time. We did have a copy of seemed to me somehow foreign, the other, don’t sell,’ the old man replies. So the customer the Bible in the house, but my father kept almost – well – almost unbecoming. asks what he does sell, and the old man explains it on a high shelf, where other parents And yet what was this identity with that he is a mohel, a Jewish ritual circumciser. might have kept books by Henry Miller which, if we chose to circumcise him, we ‘Well, why do you have a hat in your window or Anaïs Nin, and took it down only would be marking our son? The north then?’ the customer asks. The old man holds to mock it by reading out the names of London Jewish culture that my father had out his hands. ‘What would you like me to Noah’s sons (‘Ham – hah!’) or claiming reacted so viscerally against, and which I have in the window?’ that in the copy he had as a boy if you myself often found so cloying and hypo- turned over several pages at once it read, critical? The state of Israel, the Jewish he first circumcision I ever ‘Cain was sick . . . and the lot fell on Abel.’ state, whose ideals I had watched over Tattended – other than my own My father hadn’t rejected Jewishness my lifetime being warped by fear and which, as I was eight days old at the time, entirely, but for me, growing up Jewish aggression? Judy and I had also recently I do not remember (though there are meant the boxes of avocados that arrived watched the filmEuropa Europa in which a some who would argue that I still carry each year from Israel, where my father’s Jewish boy fends off death by joining the the psychic as well as the physical scars) – more Jewish brother lived, and an affin- Hitler Youth and is constantly at threat was the brit milah, or covenant of circum- ity for the Marx Brothers and that great of betrayal by his lack of a foreskin. We cision, of the son of an old friend. It was comedy recording The Two Thousand Year thought of the German Jews so secure in done in my friend’s sitting room. The boy Old Man, in which Mel Brooks plays a their Germanness until the rise of Nazism. was carried in on a pillow and handed to two-thousand-year-old manufacturer of Did we really want to mark our child out his grandfather, who had been honoured Jewish stars (‘As soon as religion came in for the next holocaust? Dipping, a little with the role of sandek, or holder of the I was one of the first in that’) put out of guiltily, into the Bible I found a passage boy during the cut. There were sixty or business by the cross. in Deuteronomy that talked about the seventy friends and relatives in the room, My older brother already had two importance of circumcising the ‘foreskin the men in suits, the women dressed up sons, neither circumcised. His wife wasn’t of the heart’ as well as the penis. Couldn’t as if for a cocktail party, glasses of cham- Jewish, but he insisted that their choice we do only the foreskin of our son’s heart, pagne in hand, though as the moment had nothing to do with rejecting Jewish impress on him his origins without carv- drew closer Judy and I edged out into the tradition – they had given both boys Old ing them into his skin? hall, which was where we were when the Testament names – but was a rational At least, we decided, we should find baby’s grandmother stormed out, red- decision not to subject their infant sons to out what the medical consensus was on faced, holding something in front of her. unnecessary surgery and distress. In pri- circumcision. What were the risks and ‘Naughty little boy,’ she announced. ‘He vate my brother would also demonstrate benefits? Would our child feel any pain? pooed in the mohel’s hand.’ another reason. Taking your hand, he But a medical consensus, it turned out, The occasion had a special delicacy would run a finger first across the back of was not so easy to discover. There were for Judy and me, as we were expecting your hand and then across your palm. The plenty of papers on circumcision but all our first child. For our friends, as for former was what it felt like if you were of them seemed to be written by either most Jews, circumcision wasn’t even a circumcised, he said, the latter if you’d Professor X of the B’nai B’rith Jewish matter for consideration. It was one of been spared the cut – though how he Hospital or Dr Y of the Genital Integrity those things, like having a bar mitzvah, could know the difference he did not say. Society. On the one hand we could com- or going to synagogue on Yom Kippur, But Judy and I were both Jewish and fort ourselves with studies showing that that most Jews do without question. But though we too, in the nervous state of the circumcision reduced the risk of urinary Judy and I came from secular, and in my newly expectant parent, baulked at the tract infections in babies, and of penile case one could say profane, backgrounds. prospect of instructing someone to take cancer and sexually transmitted diseases Although my parents had married in a knife to our child, we could not quite in adults. But on the other hand we read synagogue and my brother and I had embrace my brother’s certainty. Jewish of cases of severe bleeding, of penile been circumcised (by the famous Rabbi circumcision goes back, if not actually to necrosis, of rare but not unknown slips

20 of the knife that in the past had led to at Reassured by this we decided one thizing over the need for intervention and least one Jewish boy being raised as a girl. evening, during the mid-lesson break, the loss of an entirely natural birth. As Our research also uncovered a whole when we ate kosher biscuits and talked these things do, the conversation turned world of psychological and legal study about people we knew in common, to to circumcision. Here, finally, we felt, into the question of circumcision. In the bring up our doubts about circumci- we had found an objective opinion. But, literature of the genital integrity move- sion. Here, we thought, we had found a no – our midwife, it turned out, was the ment we read that by ‘encoding a boy’s community that would understand both equivalent of a mohel for the Nigerian pleasure centre with violence in his first sides of our dilemma. It was as if we had community in London. It was with a few days, parents are fundamentally unleashed a litter of squealing piglets. great deal of relief, as well as delight, that changing his whole outlook on life.’ In There was a collective intake of breath I looked between the legs of the baby the America there had been instances of and then an outpouring of indignation. midwife eased out of Judy an hour or two men suing their parents for the loss of Did we not know the health benefits? later and saw that she was a girl. their foreskin and it was, apparently, not The better hygiene? ‘If it’s good enough As it turned out, our second child was uncommon for men to have their fore- for the Royal Family it’s good enough also a girl. My brother and his wife had skins reconstructed surgically or to sys- for my son,’ one woman said, folding her one more son, whom they called Moses, tematically stretch the skin that remained, arms defensively across her prominent, and did not circumcise. My two younger a process known as ‘tugging’. accusatory belly. We appealed to our sisters have also had five children between By now Judy was well into her preg- teacher, but she was busy eating a kosher them, three girls and two boys, neither nancy and we had started attending biscuit and adjusting her wig. of whom have, as yet, been circumcised. a National Childbirth Trust class. By Finally Judy’s labour began. We lived One of my sisters is married to a non- chance the class that was most convenient close to a large teaching hospital and we Jewish man, and there was little discus- for us to go to was run by an Orthodox set off on foot, carrying the beanbag Judy sion about circumcision, but the other has Jewish woman and was attended entirely had been advised to use in our NCT class. a Jewish husband and there has been con- by Jews. The first evening there had been Halfway there Judy had a contraction and siderable debate, if as yet no action, over one non-Jewish couple but the next week squatted over the beanbag on the pave- what to do with the last and only fully they did not appear and though we were ment, much to the amusement of our Jewish grandson in our family. My father, a little surprised to find ourselves being local drunk, who squatted next to her and who has in his old age become milder taught about childbirth by an Orthodox breathed his fiery breath at her until she towards Jewishness, smiles benignly when Jewish woman in a wig we reassured our- told him where to go. The labour turned the subject comes up and tells his joke selves that with eight children of her own out to be rather longer and more com- about the mohel or remembers the insult she had plenty of experience. The NCT plicated than anticipated in our class, and he once received from a Jewish cabbie is also an entirely secular organization. in the end Judy succumbed to drugs and whom he failed to tip generously enough. Originally named the Natural Childbirth an epidural. We had seen off a couple of My brother-in-law’s father, however, is Trust, it was set up to demystify and pro- midwives and were finally taken in hand a survivor of Theresienstadt concentra- mote a non-interventionist approach to by a reassuringly competent Nigerian tion camp and finds the presence of the childbirth. Every Tuesday we would learn midwife. Judy was now free of pain and offending part of his grandson more pain- about the dangers of pethidine and epi- resting as the synthetic hormones she had ful. But then little Noah is not yet two durals and practise breathing techniques been given took effect. The midwife sat years old and Abraham wasn’t done until and natural birthing positions. with her, holding her hand and sympa- he was ninety. ◊

Help Pages dreds of thousands of men across Europe. During the seventeenth century, in Spain alone, it was responsible for five thousand The Agony Uncle deaths. Visitors to the country were told to take extra care when addressing locals, Alain de Botton will make your life better lest they offend their honour and end up in a grave. ‘Duels happen every day in I’m not a violent man usually, but the other ended up in hospital with a broken lip and now Spain,’ declared one character in a Cal- night, as I was walking home from a night really regret the whole incident. But what is one derón play. spent in a bar with my girlfriend, two young supposed to do in such situations? I guess in the Though duels were at times sparked men started whistling at my girlfriend and call- olden days, one could challenge people to a duel! by matters of objective importance, the ing me ‘shortie’ and ‘mummy’s boy’. I was so But is that really the answer? —Peter, Bath majority had their origins in small, even annoyed by their taunting that I’m afraid to say petty questions of honour. In Paris in I got into a fight with them. They’d offended From its origins in Renaissance Italy until 1678, one man killed another who had my honour and I didn’t want to look shame- its end in the First World War, the prac- said his apartment was ugly. In Florence ful in front of my girlfriend. Unfortunately, I tice of duelling claimed the lives of hun- in 1702, one literary man killed a cousin

21 who had accused him of not understand- exchange flirtatious banter with other than a dishonoured one, what the Spanish ing Dante. In France under the regency men. Female honra, meanwhile, depended termed a deshonradas, a category whose of Philippe d’Orléans, two officers of on being sexually modest, demure in pub- contemporary connotations may best be the guard fought in Paris on the Quai lic, fertile and devoted to children. Dis- captured by the chillingly contemptu- des Tuileries about the ownership of an honour flowed not only from one’s own ous word ‘loser’. To fail to reach certain Angora cat. infringements of the code, it also occurred professional goals, to be thrown out of Duelling (and fighting generally) sym- whenever one failed to respond with suf- work and so be left unable to provide for bolizes an extreme rejection of the idea ficient vigour to an insult, aninjuria , from one’s family or not to be able to protect that our worth is our business, something someone else. If one was ridiculed in the one’s girlfriend may constitute as much we decide and do not revise according to market square, or given an offensive look of a violation of the modern honour code, the shifting judgements of our audience. in the street, it was imperative that one and prove as shameful in its effects, as For the dueller, what other people think seek vengeance or one’s inaction would anything that might have befallen a mem- of him is the critical factor in settling prove that the offenders had been right in ber of a traditional community who had what he may think of himself. He can- their accusations. flouted the rules governinghonra, tīmē, not continue to be acceptable in his own Other countries have harboured similar sharaf or izzat. eyes if those around him find him evil or notions of honour to those of the Spanish. A central alternative to duelling and dishonourable, a coward or a failure, a In traditional Greek society, honour was fighting – and an honour-based view of fool or a mummy’s boy. So dependent is called tīmē and required of men machismo oneself – is offered by philosophy. Hav- his self-image on the views of others that and money, and of women coyness and a ing once watched Socrates being insulted it would be preferable to die by a bullet maternal instinct. In Muslim communities, in the market place, a passerby asked him, or end up in hospital with a broken lip honour or sharaf was thought so impor- ‘Don’t you mind being called names?’ rather than to allow unfavourable ideas tant that it might require a man to kill his ‘Why? Do you think I should resent it if about him to remain lodged in the public own sister if she had been raped and hence an ass had kicked me?’ replied Socrates; mind. spoilt the good a characteristic attitude for philosophers. Even those who name of her family. Philosophy suggests that before listening do not directly In Hindu commu- to what people say about you, whether pick up guns or nities, honour or positive or negative, you should first swords in response izzat depended on decide whether or not it is true; if true, to insult may share the possession of it should be listened to, if false, it can the mindset of property for men be rejected harmlessly with a laugh or a the duellist; the and sexual purity shrug of the shoulders. belief that one’s for women. Loss In his Meditations (AD 167), the degree of virtue of izzat (through emperor and philosopher Marcus Aure- or shame is prima- bankruptcy for lius, living in the turbulent world of rily determined men, or for women Roman politics, repeatedly reminded by how much one through sexual himself to submit any views he heard is honoured or misconduct) was about his character or achievements to calumnied by oth- viewed as more ter- rational study before allowing them to ers; and that one rifying than death. affect his self-conception. ‘Your decency consequently has Modern, multi- does not depend on the testimony of a duty to respond ethnic Western someone else,’ the philosopher–Emperor to infringements societies may no asserted, thereby directly challenging his of honour by reas- longer have such society’s faith in a reputation-based assess- serting one’s good clearly defined ment of people: ‘Will any man despise name, usually honour codes, the me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it through violence word ‘honour’ itself that I may not be found doing or saying to oneself or others. Entire societies have may have grown anachronistic; and yet anything that deserves to be despised.’ made the maintenance of ‘honour’ the the pressure to be seen by others to fol- Instead of taking all negative opinions primordial task of every adult male and low prescribed patterns of behaviour has about him equally seriously, he would female, laying out a code of what a noble lost little of its hold on individuals’ sense first ask himself if there was any truth life requires. In traditional Spanish com- of priorities. Though duelling may have behind them. ‘When people blame or munities, in order to possess honra, a man declined, a computer programmer from hate you, go to their inward selves, pass was expected to be physically brave, sexu- Chichester is no less free of the require- in and see what kind of men they are; are ally potent, predatory towards women ments of an honour code than a hero they right or wrong?’ before he was married and loyal thereafter, in a revenge tragedy by Lope de Vega. If they are the latter, then we should able to look after his family financially Modern societies retain daunting ideas of never listen – and certainly never end up and authoritative enough with his wife what is required in order for someone to in hospital with a broken lip because of to ensure that she did not sleep with or be viewed as a ‘real’ man or woman rather their words. ◊

22 The HH Archive back and he began to wriggle and strike at the stick – somewhat to my horror, for I’d had no idea of the power a mamba could Snake Man by Alan Wykes put into those strikes. I could feel his immense febrile energy transmitting itself Looking back at the world of herpetology circa 1960 along the stick to my hand, and I saw that in a very few seconds he’d wriggle free if Snake Man by Alan Wykes is the story of the ‘Now you can be really useful,’ Ionides I didn’t do something. But what to do? I author’s journey to Africa to meet C.J. Ionides, said calmly, ‘and write down what I tell had no idea, of course; and I could feel an explorer who became known simply as the you I’m feeling. “Sharp pain – ordinary the sweat running down my back. I just ‘snake man’ after earning a reputation for catch- pressure of fang puncturing skin – intense yelled for my boy to bring another stick, ing the snakes that plagued locals. Ionides is an numbness round infected area – ” ’ He which he seemed to take about three eccentric character, apparently once pictured in paused and regarded the bitten finger with centuries to do, and when he brought the bush wearing a diving mask to shield his detachment, though there was a sheen of it I just managed to get it horizontally eyes from cobra venom. ‘In his thirty-five years sweat on his forehead. For several minutes across the snake’s neck and pin him to the in Africa, Ionides has lived for ten days on the the discolouration spread until his finger ground. I had a lot of luck there, because partial contents of two ostrich eggs,’ Time mag- became uniformly blue with a black blotch he was thrashing about like a mad thing; azine reported in its review in 1961. ‘[He has] half an inch across where the puncture was, and when his head was pinned down the been trampled by a charging elephant resulting and there was an obvious swelling of the rest of him – he was a hell of a length – in total deafness of one ear, climbed a hundred- finger – it grew as thick as the adjoining got wound round my leg and the other foot tree, despite acrophobia, and with only one one while I watched. But there, it seemed, stick. My boy was having fits of horror arm free, brought down a writhing mamba.’ the symptoms were for the moment deter- and dancing about like a firecracker, and In this extract Alan Wykes details an inci- mined. I asked him if I should have a poul- there was, in general, a chaotic entangle- dent in which Ionides is bitten. He remains tice prepared in lieu of an antivenene injec- ment, of snake, man and sticks. But at last unflustered and simply asks Wykes to record the tion, but he said no, the pain was now no I had the bright idea of whipping the hat effects of the snakebite. more intense than might have been caused from my head, screwing it into the sort of by a trio of wasp stings. ‘Disappointing. I’d pad a woman uses to grip a flatiron with, When the morning came we opened the thought we might record something really and grabbing the mamba’s head with it. house door wide to let the chill dawn useful. But it seems that unless something I gripped it very hard and somehow or wind blow into the living room and into else develops I’ve gained a certain degree other got the rest of him coiled up like a Popkiss’s cage, to keep him cold and sleepy of immunity from my previous bites. But lasso. Then of course came the problem of while Ionides handled him for the first even that’s a useful bit of information to getting him into a box. (I hadn’t worked time. He lay forming an omega shape. I record, in a small way.’ out the bag technique, and didn’t till years watched with considerable apprehension later.) I’d got an ammunition box ready while Ionides knelt before the cage and Afterwards, when he regained his health, with a lid swivelling on one nail, and of made the same slow, swinging motion of Ionides recounted an encounter with a black course I just tried putting the snake in his hand that he had made every morning mamba he found in a toilet. and letting go. I need hardly say that that by way of introduction, followed by the method is not a successful one. To put it holding of the stick and the opening of the ‘I remember thinking snakes would be a simply, the snake springs out again, like lid. But this time he handed the stick to me pleasant study for my old age. As it turned a jack-in-the-box; and I had a wearying and put his hand in instead. There was no out, I was forced to take my wheelchair few minutes trying to stuff in eight feet response from Popkiss, and Ionides went and my herpetology rather earlier than of mamba and swing the lid shut without on stroking him for three minutes, keeping I’d intended; but that’s not for discussion doing any damage to the snake or get- to the tail end, before taking his hand out at the moment. I haven’t anyway finished ting any done to me. I fear he got a lot of and going through the whole business of the story about the mamba yet. I thought bruising in the process, and I lost a good introductory movements, stick pretence there might be a good chance of catching deal of weight in sweat. But the box got and stroking once again – this time for five it when daylight came if we left it undis- shut at last with the snake inside it, and minutes, and slightly nearer the head. turbed overnight; and indeed the follow- if you care to call in at the Coryndon It was at this juncture that a sudden ing morning it was still there – not on the Museum when you’re next in Nairobi flurry of wind whisked the door shut with seat but on the ground, with both head you’ll see it there. Eight feet four inches a bang and the vibration unnerved Popk- and tail concealed, which didn’t help me he was. A fine snake. When I’m forced iss, who struck with startling rapidity at much. Still, I’d chosen by chance the time to visit that dreadful vulgar city I always Ionides’ hand. I thought at first that he’d when he was sluggish and I’d brought a visit the Coryndon to get out of the noise, snatched the hand away from the snake in forked stick with me – it was the only look at my mamba and recall that splendid time but it wasn’t so. There was a conspic- method I’d worked out, and of course it’s oasis of silence so many years ago when I uous single fang mark on his right little basically the same method I use today. But sat in my lavatory at Liwale and heard the finger, which within a few seconds began being unable to determine which end of sound – the very faint dry sound – of his to turn bruise blue, while I turned white. the snake was which I put the fork too far approach towards me.’ ◊

23 Broken Britain 1 · Paul Davis

24 Broken Britain 2 · Paul Davis

25 Broken Britain 3 · Paul Davis

26 Broken Britain 4 · Sophia Augusta

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