THE LAST OF MAY

I must admit the view from this fence is making me rather nauseas. On one side, I have David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson trying to woo me; on the other, I have Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Gorgeous George, Nasty Nigel and Boris doing likewise. It feels a bit like joining a dating site and being offered two suitable matches – Ronnie Kray or Reggie Kray. Should I refuse the entreaties of either, the consequences will border on the apocalyptic. Every menace that can befall mankind awaits me – war, terrorism, recession, economic catastrophe, the prospect of England never hosting another World Cup (and that was so odds-on that it doesn’t bear thinking about). And I haven’t even mentioned the numerous journalists and media commentators who usually make me want to pull out my own fingernails lurking on either side. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right – or, to quote another well-known pop lyric, should I stay or should I go?

The one Armageddon scenario I actually can envisage as a likelihood is that if the UK does vote leave, the SNP will instigate another Independence Referendum; having said that, I think the SNP are looking for any excuse to do so, and will keep doing so until they get the result they want – regardless of the opinions of those Scots who don’t want independence. I should imagine Sturgeon and Salmond are praying the Brexit camp come up trumps; it’s just the situation they’ve been waiting for ever since their grapes turned sour two years ago. But Scotland isn’t the only part of Britain divided; traditional divisions in Northern Ireland are also falling into line with this pattern. Recent surveys suggest Protestants are more likely to vote Remain, whereas Catholics favour Brexit. Anyone believing an official separation from Europe will somehow serve to unite this kingdom anew is clearly too blinded by the desire to give the Mandarins of Brussels a shiner to contemplate the realities of the aftermath.

The current holiday from routine Parliamentary business has seen the Devil make work for many an idle hand during the recess. News bulletins have given air time to toadies singing the PM’s praises and denying the Cabinet split over the EU issue will leave permanent cracks in the united front, as well as others within the Government criticising Cameron with uncomfortable candour and even predicting he will be ‘toast’ if the country votes leave. How anybody can realistically expect Dave to resume working with a group of underlings who have aimed the kind of personal barbs at him that are usually reserved for the Opposition should he still be in a job come June 24 is residing in a land consisting of clouds and cuckoos. Few can carry a grudge like politicians.

I apologise to a degree that this bloody subject has come to dominate the blog of late; but it is such a unique occurrence for a Prime Minister to dispense with collective responsibility within his Cabinet that it makes for good copy. To see Ministers let off the leash, actually saying out loud what they genuinely believe rather than toeing the party line and reading from a script penned by the whips is both a rare insight into the personalities behind the bland, spin-doctored facade and a chance to hear the kind of home truths that are generally the preserve of Westminster mavericks with nothing to lose. I’ve never previously known this happen, not even in the botched ‘Alternative Vote’ cock-up of a few years back; and my seven-year-old self was largely oblivious on the one occasion we’ve been here before.

As has been mentioned more than once, my age at the time of the last occasion in which the Great British Public had their say on the funny foreigners across the Channel negated any interest or real knowledge of what was going on; but had I been asked who the Prime Minister was back then, the name Harold Wilson would have come to me as quickly as any other question I might have been posed. My niece, who is three years older than I was in 1975, was presented with the same poser last week (courtesy of me) and she didn’t know the answer; granted, she didn’t know who the President of the USA was either – which surprised me more, considering Obama’s frivolous celebrity – but is that nature or nurture? Anyway, whatever that says about the society she and we inhabit is immaterial when it comes to doing what Bucks Fizz advised when they themselves made a strident entry into Europe 35 years ago.

For every argument I hear in favour of remaining, an equally valid one is made for leaving. I’ve watched and read as much as someone with a life can over the past couple of months and will no doubt continue to do so right up until the moment I embark upon my trek to the local polling station. I’m not ashamed to admit I’m undecided, for I believe I’m not the only don’t-know out there. Perhaps if one of the camps took a leaf out of the Al Qaeda manual and promised a Paradise with umpteen available virgins as a reward for the right vote, that might swing it. But then the police would be obliged to get involved, and I think they’ve enough ‘historical sex crimes’ to keep their quiet lives busy for the next couple of decades, some even coincidentally stretching back as far as 1975.

© The Editor

PASS THE VIBES, VICAR

Street Cred – don’t do it! It’s Gordon Brown referencing ‘Eastenders’ in a speech and adding the prefix ‘The’; it’s William Hague attending the Notting Hill Carnival in a baseball cap; it’s Tony Blair carrying a guitar; it’s Nick Clegg boasting of his sexual conquests to a lads mag; it’s David Cameron claiming he supports Aston Villa and then confusing them with West Ham because they play in the same colours (Admittedly, I do that fairly regularly with Leeds Utd and Real Madrid). Step back in time and it can also be Jeremy Thorpe jamming with Jimi Hendrix, as well as Harold Wilson hobnobbing with The Beatles. Attempting to shed a little Westminster formality and prove politicians don’t have to be stuffy old farts out of touch with trends is bad enough; but when it extends to a charm offensive aimed at ‘The Kids’ by appropriating their lingo and encroaching upon their cultural touchstones, there are few things in life more guaranteed to curl the toes.

There’s a TV commercial for the Daily Mirror from the early 60s in which a group of teenagers have their enjoyment interrupted by a pompous father figure denouncing their noisy presence, to which an off-camera announcer responds by informing him the kids are entitled to their fun and he’s the one who’s in the way. What’s amusing about this ad is that the teenagers seem less authentic than the old fart, resembling the kind of clean-cut Pepsi-sipping stage-school adolescents ready to put on a show at a moment’s notice that populate the Cliff Richard films of the period – safe, sanitised and utterly unthreatening to a concerned middle-aged audience imagining everyone under-21 is a flick-knife wielding Teddy Boy. It’s not hard to imagine the commercial being dreamt up by the same demographic it’s intended to soothe the fears of.

The two key comedy series of the early 80s, ‘Not the Nine O’Clock News’ and ‘The Young Ones’, both parodied the cringing attempts of the over-30s to present their vision of contemporary yoof in a television setting. The former featured a spoof TV show for teens called ‘Hey! Wow!’ Presented by Griff Rhys-Jones as a laidback, shoulder-shrugging casual character slightly older than the adolescents surrounding him on set, the programme promises music from Lufthansa Terminal and mime from Alternative Car Park, and tries to begin with a debate on the current yoof issue of unemployment; but the host soon drops the trendy teacher act and rapidly reverts to a more authoritarian classroom tyrant. ‘The Young Ones’ eavesdropped upon a similar show called ‘Nozin’ Aroun’, presented by Ben Elton as a leather jacket-wearing member of the target age group, albeit one not quite as ‘street’ as he makes out – a bit like Elton turned out to be himself, actually.

Although understandably rooted in time in place – that time and place being the post-punk era of ‘Something Else’, ‘The Oxford Road Show’ and ‘The Tube’ – both parodies nail it. The moment a sea-change in pop culture is appropriated by adults as a means of speaking the Kids’ language, the moment has gone. This was especially prevalent in the 70s and into the 80s when virtually every year saw a Next Big Thing emerge, though it has considerably slowed down in recent years, leaving the mums and dads free to cherry-pick from slang and symbols that have been common currency amongst teens for the best part of twenty-five years – indeed, stretching all the way back to when they themselves constituted the teenage tribe (which probably makes things even worse for their kids).

The use of the phrase ‘Raving’ in the unbelievably bad Remain campaign ad for the EU Referendum (intended to persuade Young People to register as voters) suggests the word retains the relevance it had when first emerging at the end of the 80s, thus making it easier for those who produced the ad to stitch together the vocabulary of their children in cut & paste Burroughs fashion without much in the way of research – and it shows. The decision to drop the letter G from each word that flashes up on-screen (and dispensing with apostrophes in the process) is a ham-fisted concession to Estuary English of the kind George Osborne uses when donning a hard-hat and luminous jacket during his state visits to workplaces packed with common people who know the price of a pint of milk.

I would rather David Cameron strolled out of No.10 in his Bullingdon uniform, perhaps embellished with a top hat and a monocle, than painfully pose as something everyone knows he’s not. Equally, I’d prefer it if an ad which should be making a valid point didn’t wrap itself in a sequence of clichéd images and phrases the wankers that produced it have figured will best communicate that point to the under-30s. But then, if it hadn’t been as excruciating as it is, I couldn’t have responded with this…

© The Editor

SARTORIAL EFFLUENCE

It’s an old saying, but it rings true – clothes maketh the man. I believe they maketh the woman as well. Whether we like it or not, first impressions are often made by the way in which an individual is ‘turned-out’, and sartorial choices can speak volumes as to what kind of individual we are encountering. These first impressions can also stretch to those we don’t even encounter in person.

I was recently watching one of the extras on the DVD of a cult movie, featuring footage from a BFI-type event wherein the director of the film in question attended a special screening of it and answered questions from the audience. I’m sure you’re familiar with the set-up. As per usual, there was a guy with a microphone doing a little interview prior to hands being raised in the auditorium, and as the segment progressed I found myself becoming more irritated by him – not so much the evident absence of interviewing skills that is customary for the amateurs chosen for such a duty, but by the contrast between the dress sense of him and his counterpart on stage. The old director, well into his seventies, was a dapper gent who had clearly made the effort, whereas the interviewer looked like he was attending a gig by a Death Metal band – unshaven, clad in black baggy T-shirt and well-worn jeans. He may as well have travelled to the event straight from the sofa after dozing off with a half-scoffed pizza settled on his beer-gut the night before. No attempt at entering into the spirit of things, just the standard slob chic that now appears to be the default setting for so many men under fifty.

The history books tell us the hippies are to blame, that their emphasis on ‘letting it all hang out’ and dispensing with the straitjacket of the suit has led us to where we are now. This theory tends to overlook the fact that the initial hippies (at least on this side of the pond) morphed out of the Carnaby Street Dandy; photographs from the late 60s prove these were no scruffy hobos. Victorian velvet frock-coats and Regency ruffles were compulsory; only in the early 70s did a more tramp-like variation on the theme appear, most obviously in the likes of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. At the same time, however, mainstream fashion retained its peacock aspects and presented the male of the species with a dazzling dressing-up box that even those too old to have participated in the Swinging 60s (i.e. Jon Pertwee and Peter Wyngarde) took full advantage of.

For me, it stems more from the Rave/Madchester era of the late 80s/early 90s, a deliberately slovenly style that was in part a reaction to the suited and booted Yuppie and the most public pop culture promoters of the look such as Rick Astley. Britpop may have boasted a certain debonair eccentricity via Jarvis Cocker and (on occasion) Damon Albarn, but its core audience members were largely disciples of the Stone Roses ‘jeans, T-shirt and sneakers’ ensemble, an unimaginative uniform that has subsequently become the standard acceptable male wardrobe.

There is also the ‘sportswear’ look, which is equally responsible for the decline in dress. This grew out of football fans following English clubs during their all-conquering European sojourns in the early 80s, picking up Italian designer products en route and developing the ‘casual’ look as a consequence. They always looked like thuggish versions of Val Doonican to me, but this style gradually bled into the mainstream and eventually resulted in clothes originally designed for sports arenas evolving into accepted street gear. The most odious of this to me is the tracksuit bottom, the ultimate slob statement, usually worn by people who are the least athletic types one could ever imagine. Sod banning the burqa; ban the bottoms!

Teenagers, I believe, can be cut a little slack. I myself had a proto-Grunge look in the middle of the 80; photos of Kurt Cobain from the same period – and he was born the same year as me – show I wasn’t alone, despite my parents’ best attempts to convince me I was a one-off freak. Teenage studied scruffiness is nothing more than a traditional reaction geared to get up the noses of mater and pater and they do (or should) grow out of it. Any female adolescent is also contending with the narrow role models she’s bombarded with on a constant loop, all those designer dolls endorsing girlie stereotypes that any woman with anything about her would instinctively rebel against. This, however, is no excuse for the most recent female street style that is simply unforgivable. I’m talking, of course, about wearing bedroom outfits outdoors – dressing gowns and pyjama bottoms. I applaud schools and supermarkets that have barred such monstrosities from their premises. What does it say about someone if they can’t even be bothered changing the sweaty rags they’ve slept in when they venture beyond the doorstep? Unless you’re an old dear stricken with dementia, a slipper is not designed for the pavement.

There has been much talk of the Metrosexual male of late – the well-groomed semi-Dandy who actually takes the time to present himself to the world at his best. Metrosexual males may exist, but they tend to be small in number as well as mocked in that predictable knee-jerk manner so characteristic of the man who regards any aesthetic effort to look good as a sign of effeminacy. I do my bit, usually in financially-deprived circumstances; but not having the ready cash to buy the clothes I’d like means I improvise and have developed my own personal look that requires the kind of preparation before facing the world akin to an actor taking to the stage in full costume. Penury is no excuse for the slovenly. Everyone can look good if they want to. It’s just that society is now telling them they don’t need to.

© The Editor

IF YER NAME’S NOT ON THE LIST…

Probably like most people, I didn’t even notice the changes when they came in; I’m aware of them now, but only because I’m paying attention. A lot aren’t. I’m talking registering to vote. The law tells us we can all do it once we’re 18 – as long as we’re not being detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, of course. So why is it not as straightforward as it once seemed? I doubt the 1.5 million potential voters to have vanished from the electoral roll since the changes came into effect could answer that question. They disappeared because their identities couldn’t be verified via council tax and social security records on the DWP database, initially placing their automatic transference to the new register in stasis; they remained on the register until December and now they’ve gone.

Changes to the way in which the electorate register for the right to vote could reduce the numbers gaining access to the polling booth on June 23, apparently. The PM was urging ‘yoof’ to register and cast their vote this week, yet it is the abolition of the old registration system which he was instrumental in abolishing that could leave many young people out in the cold (and it probably will be cold on June 23, going by our summer climes). Individual Electoral Registration became law two years ago, twelve months before the last General Election. Whereas the previous pattern was for the head of a household to register all residents eligible to vote, with a similar process at universities, where all students would be listed together, the onus being on the individual to register alone means those people who don’t necessarily stay rigid in one place – renting tenants and students alike – are less likely to have their names down on the electoral roll.

Are these potential lost voters more likely to vote Brexit? Possibly. Are these potential lost voters more likely to vote Tory? Doubtfully. But the changes made by the previous Tory-dominated administration could have a far wider-reaching impact on voting than what happens in the EU Referendum.

The ongoing plan to bring in electoral boundary changes, reducing the number of constituencies in the process, is a plan that will base its redrawing of the map on the geography of the electorate, using the list of voters who have registered since the IER was introduced in 2014. With the majority of those registered unlikely to include serial wanderers or students, this means the boundary changes will be heavily favoured towards the traditional, stable and affluent Tory fan-base residing in rural heartlands rather than densely-populated urban areas with an ever-changing population. This imbalance gives the Tories a distinct advantage which, let’s face it, they’d obviously be foolish not to want.

When the Individual Electoral Registration became law, it was theoretically introduced to reduce the prospect of electoral fraud, but a spokesman for the Electoral Reform Society claimed the change could provoke a decline in electoral registration, ‘looking at registration rates in the 50% region’. When the new rules had been in place for a year, the 2015 General Election took place and 186,000 absent voters applied to register after the deadline. There seems to be a strong likelihood the same thing could happen again come the Referendum. How that will affect the outcome remains to be seen – or possibly Remains to be seen.

I suppose it would easy for some belonging to older generations, those for whom voting as a virtual duty was in the blood, to say that those who haven’t registered to vote have only themselves to blame. Fair point. But that implies politics figures as highly in daily discourse amongst the under-45s as it is prone to amongst the over-45s; and by and large, it doesn’t. It’s only when a media bombardment comes around every four or five years that those who don’t pay constant attention realise something is happening. We’ve been rather spoilt over the last couple of years: first the Scottish Independence Referendum, then the General Election and now a Referendum everyone in the UK can actually participate in, so anyone who hasn’t registered has no real excuse, right? Maybe; but wouldn’t it be easier if we could just turn up at the polling station with some ID and get on with it? We have to provide ID for everything else now; it should be sufficient. We’re all supposed to be on file these days, our every move monitored and tracked; so why not just endorse the myth that every free man and woman over 18 can vote and dispense with electoral registration altogether? The new system was allegedly intended to lessen the risk of fraud; it might well do that, but it doesn’t appear to be working where it really matters.

The deadline for registration re the EU Referendum is June 7; despite the fact that Mr Cameron claims a million have registered since the start of the campaign, there could be thousands who miss the deadline and won’t be able to have their say. Will they be back on the register in time for the next General Election? The way things have been going since the Individual Electoral Registration was introduced, there’s a strong possibility they won’t be.

© The Editor

PRACTICALLY A POLANSKI

The notorious underground filmmaker, author and disciple of Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger got there long before him (fifty-one years before, as it happens), but it seems a current Hollywood B-lister has decided the time is right to expose Tinsel Town as a hotbed of vice and debauchery, that’s if Elijah Wood’s weekend accusation is anything to go by. Perhaps he’s got a movie to plug. Mind you, someone ranking far higher in the constellation of contemporary celluloid royalty beat him to it when she decided to side with the ‘injured party’ in a marital squabble that has been revived after two decades in abeyance. Step forward Susan Sarandon, leading light of the liberal left in Hollywood, the one that was so mercilessly (not to say brilliantly) skewered in ‘Team America: World Police’.

Sarandon didn’t mind getting her tits oot for the lads in earlier cinematic outings which (probably to her embarrassment) have retained cult appeal, specifically ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ and ‘The Hunger’; but since her marriage to Tim Robbins and celebrated role in ‘Thelma and Louise’, Sarandon has been elevated to the PC Premier League in that self-important corner of California that reached an apex of patronising preaching at this year’s Oscars ceremony. What Sarandon has to do with the subject she publicly intervened in last week remains questionable; but she has taken sides, of that there is no doubt. And the side she has taken is that of a woman scorned.

Let’s be honest, fewer cases of a woman scorned come more humiliating than the scenario Mia Farrow experienced in the early 90s, when her partner of twelve years, Woody Allen, left her for her adopted daughter from a previous marriage. It’s hard to think of a harder hammer-blow an actress in her late 40s could receive than her partner abandoning her for a 21-year-old, let alone one that had kick-started her serial adoption programme. How did Mia react? Well, she immediately alleged her seven-year-old adopted daughter Dylan was a victim of sexual abuse on the part of the man who had just walked out on her.

It seems a long time ago now, but the whole unedifying Farrow-Allen abuse battle was headline news for a good year or so in the early 90s, long before such things became fashionable. Farrow was quite a pioneer in devising new means of vengeance for an injured party. The director who had revived Farrow’s movie career by giving her 12 leading roles in his films was denied access to his children with her for a period, though when enough time had passed since the height of the scandal, Dylan Farrow started the abuse ball rolling again by making fresh allegations a couple of years ago. In response to these renewed claims, Farrow and Allen’s adopted son Moses retorted by claiming his mother was the abuser, albeit physical and psychological rather than sexual. He also alleged Farrow ‘coached’ her children into believing every accusation she’d flung at Allen.

Ronan Farrow is yet another of the numerous children to have filled the Farrow household during the tenure of her relationship with Woody Allen, yet his paternal parentage has bizarrely been attributed to his mother’s ex, Frank Sinatra, who was in his seventies when Ronan was born, twenty years after the end of the short-lived Sinatra/Farrow marriage. He recently added to the renaissance of the abuse allegations by endorsing his sister Dylan’s accusations in ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ via a piece titled ‘My Father Woody Allen and The Danger of Questions Unasked’. He compared Allen’s ‘immunity’ from the law to the current experience of Bill Cosby, citing the advantages that the so-called powerful have over their accusers when an allegation is made as being responsible for the doubts that continue to plague his sister’s allegations. We’ve kind-of heard it all before over here (at least since 2012), though that hasn’t prevented it – as the Kids say – Going Viral.

Eavesdropping on a famous family at war is a horrible voyeuristic exercise encouraged by media outlets that thrive on such scandals, yet the unnecessary intervention of Susan Sarandon when at Cannes to appear at an event called ‘Women in Motion’ (not to be confused with the parallel Cannes event, ‘Women Stationary’) has merely added fuel to the fire. ‘I think he sexually assaulted a child and I don’t think that’s right’ was the earth-shattering observation made by Sarandon that received the most coverage last week. Sarandon said she had nothing good to say about Allen and then added ‘I don’t want to go there’. Afraid you already have, Susan. Ronan Farrow’s contribution to the ongoing scandal was perfectly timed, appearing as it did on the same day as Woody Allen’s latest movie premiered at Cannes, a red-carpet event at which (unbelievably) Susan Sarandon was present.

I confess I am a long-time fan of Woody Allen’s work, particularly the string of movies he produced from the late 60s through to the early 80s (roughly ‘Take the Money and Run’ to ‘Stardust Memories’), and whether he did or didn’t do the dirty with a little girl won’t alter that at all. But I don’t really believe we’ll ever get to the truth of events that did or didn’t occur when he was involved with Mia Farrow because the nature of the arena in which these disputed events have been played out isn’t concerned with the truth. That’s show-business, honey.

© The Editor

INTOLERANCE

Is it possible to love the art and loathe the artist? Why not? I’m sure there must be more than one person whose emotions are stirred by Wagner’s music yet who experiences guilt because a part of themselves over which they have no control has responded positively to a composer with well-publicised anti-Semitic views, one who was later adopted as the in-house tunesmith of the Nazis. It’s true that the art is an extension of the person who created it; the art is as much a part of them as their physical being; but it could be argued that the art is the best of them, the aspect of them that matters above everything else, the aspect of them that renders whatever else they do in their lives, good or bad, irrelevant.

If I might be excused a moment of self-indulgence, I remember being devastated as a small child when every picture I drew or DIY comic I made with my own pencil mysteriously disappeared from my bedroom whenever I returned home from school. My mother considering them fit for nothing but the dustbin to me implied that’s all I was fit for. I considered my ‘art’ to be the best of me. There, self-indulgence done. Anyway, this is why it is fundamentally ridiculous that, say, Gary Glitter records are blacklisted from oldies radio stations – a major artist of a specific era in British pop music can no longer be included in the roll-call of its leading lights; and it has nothing to do with his art. For decades after Oscar Wilde’s arrest, trial and imprisonment, his works went unperformed in this country and his name was a dirty word. Hard to imagine now, but it happened; and it was all about the artist, not the art.

It is possible to be fond of or even like a person who has enough good about them to enable us to overlook those elements of them we dislike. It should be, anyway. That’s what being ‘grown-up’ is all about, isn’t it – that ability to accept aspects of others that contradict some of our own aspects, beliefs or opinions? Well, in an online age of instant hate campaigns, that’s not always evident. Discourse has regressed to juvenilia in many cases, so that any unpopular opinion expressed embodies the whole of the person who expressed it. Not in favour of gay marriage? Scum of the earth – end of. In favour of fox-hunting? Scum of the earth – end of. There is no room for debate or discussion. That one opinion represents everything you are. It utterly defines you.

For all its innumerable faults, Parliament could not continue – indeed, could never have existed in the first place – were it to adopt the same attitude. Whenever an especially contentious vote is taken in the Commons, unlikely cross-party alliances are regularly formed for the duration; there may be huge ideological divisions between the respective members of the alliance, but these are put to one side in order that a crucial shared belief can momentarily unite opposites. It can even sometimes stretch to a far longer arrangement. How else was the Coalition Government of 2010-15 able to last the course of a full five-year term? How else has the Northern Ireland Assembly managed to outlive every other previous attempt at bringing the two Ulster communities to the same political table?

If we’re not careful, we could be in danger of losing this skill. We could end up like those fanatical football fans who won’t have the colour worn by the rival team they hate anywhere in their house. Having being a vegetarian for over 25 years, most of my close friends throughout that quarter-century have been meat-eaters. Has this altered my opinion of them in any way? Has it made me think any less of them? Has it placed our friendship in peril? Has it hell. Sure, we all possess certain strongly-held beliefs on some subjects, but to expect everyone in our orbit to fall into line with our own viewpoint on everything is little more than pure narcissism. I used to live with a girl who owned a lot of UB40 albums – and not the early UB40, who were at times on a par with The Specials, but the cabaret reggae incarnation of the band from the mid-80s onwards. I couldn’t bloody stand hearing it. But she had more going for her than what I considered to be an occasionally lousy taste in music. We didn’t eventually go our separate ways just because my ears could no longer tolerate ‘Red Red Wine’ one more time.

It goes without saying that if one is best buddies with a person one discovers to be an active serial killer, friendship should really have its limits. But that’s a slightly different kettle of fish to disowning somebody because they convert to a religion and we’re atheist, or if they vote Tory and we vote Labour, or if they support Manchester United and we support Manchester City. If they’re able to tolerate elements of us that they find not to their taste, we should be able to do likewise. If not, where are we? Probably in the NUS.

© The Editor

AS NATURE OFFENDED

A paediatrician asks a mother to video her mentally disabled daughter enduring one of her regular spasms in order that he can make an effective diagnosis; a side-effect of her child’s condition is that the spasms cause her to rip her clothes off. Upon being told this, the physician whose job it is to tend to the medical needs of children informs the mother he cannot view any such videos. Despite the fact that visual evidence of the spasms will enable him to treat them correctly and possibly ease the girl’s suffering, he cannot look at it because he fears possession of such material will result in him being placed on the sex-offender’s register. The mother also hesitates at capturing her daughter’s spasms on video for fear she will be charged with making offensive images; sending them to the paediatrician could land her with an additional charge of distributing offensive images. Therefore, a woman who gave birth to a child born naked and a man whose profession sometimes requires him to examine children without clothes on both back away from helping a sick child because of fear. This is a true story, told to me by someone who was told it by the mother of the child. What an absolutely ludicrous, not to say tragic, scenario.

This is an extremely smug century. A consensus is afoot that we are sophisticated, liberated and no longer hindered by the repressive sexual pressures that stifled personal freedoms in the past. If the products of this culture have an imagined nemesis, it is the Victorians. Women couldn’t vote and were second-class citizens encased in constricting corsets; homosexuals were locked away and broken by the prison system; black people were oppressed colonial cheap labour, barely better off than when they were slaves; the poor lived in squalid hovels with no social safety net other than the workhouse. Weren’t the Victorians terrible and aren’t we so much better? Are we?

Last year, a BBC documentary on Lewis Carroll aired, in which the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ author’s pioneering photographs received extensive coverage. Carroll – or as he was known beyond Wonderland, Charles Dodgson – specialised in somewhat sentimental portraits of children that enraptured their parents, most of whom were present when Dodgson’s elaborate set-pieces were staged and captured on camera. Many of these images featured children unclothed, something that at the time was supposed to emphasise the virtuous innocence of vulnerable cherubs whose lifespan hovered in a permanent state of uncertainty. Sensibilities today see such images rather differently.

One overlong segment of the documentary was devoted to an image of an unidentified naked pre-pubescent girl whose identity was speculated as being that of the real Alice’s sister, Lorina Liddell; nobody could even say for certain that Charles Dodgson had actually taken the photograph. But this formed part of the predictable discussion on whether or not Dodgson’s penchant for participating in a late nineteenth century vogue for photographing children pointed to him being a paedophile. The squeamish icing on the twenty-first century censorious cake, however, was that the programme-makers wouldn’t even let the viewers see the photograph in question. A Victorian photo of a girl who will have been dead for at least fifty years – and that’s if she lived to a very ripe old age – couldn’t be shown on television in 2015 because it was deemed to be offensive to the sensitive sensibilities of our oh-so superior age.

‘Victorian Values’ is a wide-sweeping term that is only ever used dismissively; it is supposed to represent everything bad that has gradually been superseded by more enlightened thinking and living. Yet, as hypocritical as the Victorians’ attitude to flesh and pleasures thereof allegedly were, they were not terrified of the flesh of children – and they were not expected to see pleasure in it at all, unlike their ‘sophisticated’ successors over a hundred years on. Of course, there were some adults then who had unnatural sexual desires towards children, just as there were before the Victorians and just as there are today; but the key difference between then and now is that the nineteenth century acknowledged paedophilia as a rare symptom restricted to a minority rather than a commonplace perversion inherent in the majority.

Today, one has to prove the absence of such feelings because their absence is not accepted. It is a given, a presumption that they are in all of us, simply waiting to be exposed. A series of laws introduced over the past decade seem designed to catch us out, to coax these feelings into the open, like some form of thought entrapment; and if they happen not to be in us, they have to be implanted in us because they’re supposed to be there. These laws encourage instant suspicion and rushes to judgement, and they persuade people to think the worst of everyone. They negate rationality, provoke paranoia and self-doubt, inspire mob mentality, and more than anything, they generate a primitive brand of pseudo-religious, finger-pointing fear unprecedented in a secular society.

The Victorians were supposedly so averse to the sight of naked flesh that they covered piano legs because they resembled the indecently-exposed legs of ladies. How silly, eh? But they weren’t horrified by the sight of children as nature intended; we are. And that’s progress.

© The Editor

MONUMENTAL CASES

Despite the fact that this is the second consecutive post to be illustrated by a statue in Stalingrad, I’m not poised to turn ‘the Telegram’ into a blog dedicated to Soviet sculpture. Rather, using the iconic image of the Barmaley Fountain in the shadow of the carnage from one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare reminded me of a statue erected as a monument to Russia’s war dead in the same city. The strange juxtaposition of joyous children dancing hand-in-hand while surrounded by burning buildings is a chilling reminder of how the ordinary and extraordinary sit cheek-by-jowl when the boulevard becomes the battlefield. Long-gone, though recently superseded by a new version standing in roughly the same city centre location, the Barmaley Fountain became a symbol of the Soviet Union’s resistance to Nazi Germany by default. High above the city formerly known as Stalingrad stands a statue erected with that resistance in mind – The Motherland Calls.

Unveiled in 1967 as what was then the world’s tallest sculpture, the Motherland dominates the Volgograd skyline, standing 279 feet atop the Mamayev Kurgan hill; the towering figure of a Boudicca-like warrior woman wielding a sword that itself measures 108 feet is the centrepiece of a memorial complex dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad. Not only is the statue a jaw-dropping edifice due to its immense size, it also serves as a masterpiece of structural engineering, a mix of prestressed concrete and wire ropes kept in place on its plinth solely by the strength of its colossal weight. Recent reports that the Motherland has moved as much as 20 centimetres, however, have led to work aimed at preventing the statue from collapsing. It wouldn’t be the first such collapse. Accustomed we may have sadly become to man-made destruction of statues courtesy of aesthetic vandals such as the Taliban and ISIS, but nature sometimes intervenes as it did in the granddaddy of all giant figures on the landscape – the Colossus of Rhodes.

Although nobody knows for certain what the Colossus of Rhodes looked like or precisely how tall the bronze representation of the Ancient Greek Sun God Helios actually was (estimates reckon around 98 feet), the legend of the goliath that bestrode the harbour of Rhodes proved so alluring that it was enshrined as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It allegedly collapsed during a devastating earthquake in 226 BC and various literary sources thereafter claim its remains were a local tourist attraction for the best part of 800 years.

For most of their existence, what are now referred to as ‘public works of art’ were largely stone or bronze facsimiles of mythical Gods and Goddesses, with the odd real-life King or Queen thrown in for good measure. They tended to be the centrepiece of temples and then progressed to becoming detached monuments in their own right. Over the centuries, the statue gradually established itself as the definitive civic tribute to a significant public figure, especially those who had played a pivotal military role in the history of a nation. In Britain, the Victorian era was the true golden age of the outdoor statue, though the victory of Protestantism over Catholicism ensured these were mainly secular, with the only real ‘religious’ ones being the spooky angels dotted around grandiose Gothic graveyards. Elsewhere in the world, the likes of the Statue of Liberty also epitomised the move away from overtly religious iconography in stone. However, the majority of gigantic statues commissioned in the past century have surprisingly maintained a spiritual tradition, with most appearing in the Far East. Buddha retains quite a fan-base over there.

I confess to a lifelong fascination with stone figures. It began – as it did with many, I suspect – with pre-school exposure to the unforgettable scene in ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ when Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation blew life into a huge statue of Talos. That scene also seemed to breathe life into statues surrounding me – including a white one of Christ on the cross attached to the exterior of a nearby church, one that seemed luminous when seen at night; it didn’t take much imagination to picture him coming to life when nobody was looking, ala Looby Loo on ‘Andy Pandy’. I used to wonder why all statues were old, but their age appeared to bestow some supernatural magic on them. It’s hard to feel the same about the sudden glut of statues that have appeared in the last thirty years or so.

The more esoteric, such as the Wicker Man-like Angel of the North, have tended to succeed and have become beloved of both locals and tourists; it is the newcomers sticking to the traditional template that disappoint. It’s not too outlandish to say there are some truly terrible statues that are so facially unlike the figures they’re supposed to depict one cannot but wonder if sculpture really is a dying art. The less said about the appalling ‘Di and Dodi’ abomination in Harrods, the better; but statues such as the one of Charlie Chaplin in Leicester Square, the one of John Lennon at Liverpool Airport, the one of Ernie Wise in Leeds or the one of the Queen erected at Runnymede to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta are especially bad.

The only saving grace is that they’re not on a comparable scale to The Motherland Calls. Then again, few are. I must make a date to see her one day – while she’s still with us. She may be safe from Islamic philistines, but changes in groundwater levels provoking movement in the foundations make me wish Ray Harryhausen had sculpted her; then she could simply get up and walk away. But we know they all do that when our backs are turned, anyway…don’t we?

PS This video of a drone’s eye view of the Motherland Calls gives a good indication of its sheer scale…

© The Editor

PEACE IN OUR TIME

David Cameron invoked it as part of the ongoing scaremongering surrounding the impending EU Referendum; and now a retired NATO General has followed suit in order to plug a book. WAR! Yes, that’s what Europe’s got to look forward to if we a) leave the European Union or b) turn a blind eye to Putin’s military ambitions. But both the PM’s recent Remain ploy and the soothsayer-isms of Sir Alexander Richard Shirreff are issued as warnings that would require key incidents occurring years, even decades, beforehand to come to fruition; and unless these key incidents have indeed happened and won’t become apparent as such till the dust settles, it’s hard to discern them while the mongers are busy scaring.

The two instalments of twentieth century World War – what historian Stephen Ambrose described as ‘a European Civil War with no European victors’ – had roots that stretched back a long way. For me, the roots of the First World War can be traced back to Napoleon’s vicious dismemberment of Prussia a century earlier, whereas the eventual outbreak of the Second World War was a direct consequence of Germanic humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles. Unless Yeltzin’s poorly-thought out rush to dive into a western market economy during the 1990s is cited as the cause of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, or the 2008 economic meltdown acts as an eventual catalyst for conflict, there isn’t really anything in the modern era that can be viewed as the crucial foundation-laying for war to match those that lit the blue-touch paper in 1914 or 1939.

The official line goes that peace has been maintained in Europe since 1945; if one ignores Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and a certain barney in the Balkans during the 90s, the line holds true. Not that the EU could – or should – take credit for that. It didn’t exist in its current incarnation in either 1956 or 1968 (the years of the USSR’s brutal intervention in failed, admirable attempts to embrace democratic freedoms), and I don’t recall it doing much to prevent the relentless bombardment of Sarajevo in 1992-96.

Granted, there is no denying that the past seventy years have been relatively peaceful when compared to the turbulent history of Europe, which is the bloodiest of any continent on the planet; but to attribute this rare stability to the existence of the EU is stretching it a bit. For an institution that spent its formative years as a purely economic arrangement between Western European powers to be promoted as some form of benign peace-keeping force in the centre of the continent for seven decades is dishonest, even if the peace angle was pivotal to its initial conception. However, it would undoubtedly be rather mean and churlish to express retrospective cynicism towards the movers and shakers behind both the United Nations and the European Economic Community when none of us were there to absorb the forward-looking determination they shared to see something genuinely positive arise from the ashes of a thirty-year conflict with a decade for dinner in the middle.

The current refugee crisis comprises the greatest mass migration of peoples in Europe since 1945, it is true, though the difference between then and now is one of direction. Today, Europe’s refugees are largely of Middle-Eastern descent and have viewed the continent they risked life and limb to get to as a kind of economic Promised Land; after the war, the refugees were home-grown, wandering from one devastated European nation to another, with the Jewish ones desperate to get out of Europe altogether and head for their own Promised Land…in the Middle East. One also needs to take into account the estimated deaths of around 70 million Europeans during the Second World War if comparisons are to be made with the immediate post-war continent and Europe in the twenty-first century. Europe in 1945 was a landmass that had experienced a population wipe-out on a par with the Black Death; today, it is a landmass experiencing a rapid upsurge in population.

A sudden influx of immigrants can provoke panic in some natives and foster grievances that, at their most paranoid, have a tendency to morph into far-right political parties; whether these have sufficient mass popularity to eventually cultivate a consensus whose natural outcome is war remains to be seen in this case – though Austria’s Freedom Party are poised to make a promising start. Similarly, while Putin has been able to do whatever the hell he pleases in the face of little worldwide opposition bar ineffective sanctions, is the only route available to the West to take him on militarily? Either way, there are so many ifs and buts (not to mention a fair few leaps of the imagination) if the doom ‘n’ gloom forecast is to be fulfilled that it’s hard not to see the motivation behind it as being a cynical ploy on the part of those with a blatant agenda and a degree in the politics of nightmares. The lights are still on in Europe at the moment, and the moment is all we have.

© The Editor

GOODBYE SAM, HELLO SAMANTHA

I’ve spoken before of pushy parents projecting their failed ambitions upon the vanity projects they call children, of vicariously living thwarted dreams through offspring, regardless of how unfair a burden it is for that offspring to carry. I’m not speaking of it again, though certain aspects of a new odious development remind me of it. This is parents picking up on a particular personality trait in their mini-me’s and coming up with a psychological diagnosis that ticks the PC boxes and enables them to advertise their right-on credentials by using their children as a sandwich board. I’m talking about parents who come to the decision that any characteristics of the opposite sex displayed by the kids evidently means the kids are gender-dysphorian, non-binary, tiny tot trannies.

I used to go to school with children, so I can recall what they were like. There were always boys who were routinely called ‘cissies’, the ones who appeared to have no male friends in the playground and always hung out with the girls, doing as the girls did; moreover, there were always girls who rejected girlishness and preferred the rough ‘n’ tumble of male company. The Nancy Boy and the Tom Boy are enshrined as archetypes in British pop culture, from Dennis the Menace’s effeminate nemesis, Walter the Softy to ‘George’, Enid Blyton’s butch little ball-breaker in ‘The Famous Five’. Both were defiant aberrations, going against the stereotypical grain; both may have grown up to be gay. But being in closer contact with their respective feminine and masculine sides than the majority of their contemporaries didn’t necessarily mean either wanted to eventually assume the full gender reassignment process. They were unselfconsciously taking a stance against what society defined as masculine or feminine.

I’m not ashamed or embarrassed that I’ve always been ‘in touch with my feminine side’, nor should I be. I’ve always believed a man who aggressively fights it is half-a-man, in denial of what is a biological truth. When that femininity is manifested as visual flourishes of a kind that an overtly masculine male culture reacts to with hostility, it’s not the easiest brand of honesty to embrace; but to volunteer for a two-dimensional testosterone straitjacket is not in my nature, and I’d be less of a man if it was. Any past problems I may have had with being a man were, I can now see, a direct consequence of being presented with such a limited portrait of the sex. The hair is short, the clothes are colourless, the drink is beer, the passion is sport, the libido is triggered by the Page 3 Girl; and any deviation from the rulebook is precisely that – deviation. But as I instinctively reject imposed rulebooks in other aspects of life, why should gender be any different?

Ironically, the haste with which some misguided parents are now prepared to redefine their sons as daughters (and vice-versa) at the slightest hint of a preference for aping the opposite sex plays straight into the hands of the narrow male/female stereotypes they smugly imagine they’re challenging. Little Sam prefers to play with the girls and their dolls, therefore that must mean he’s a girl trapped in a boy’s body; we must start calling him Samantha and send him to school in a skirt next term while letting his hair grow long; that, after all, is the extent of what a girl is, isn’t it? If we swap one set of gender clichés for another, then everyone will then know he’s a girl. No shades of grey there, just black-and-white boys and girls where there is no room for the Nancy Boy or the Tom Boy, those genuine rebels.

Girls and boys pass through numerous phases as they grow-up; that’s what growing-up is about. I changed the comics I read on a virtually monthly basis; one week I was in love with Joanna Lumley in ‘The New Avengers’; the next, I was in love with Jaclyn Smith from ‘Charlie’s Angels’. My female cousin’s bedroom wall had a different pin-up staring down at me every time I visited. ‘I thought you liked David Cassidy?’ ‘No, I like David Essex.’ The first song I apparently proclaimed to be my No.1 ‘Desert Island Disc’ was ‘Yellow River’ by Christie; 46 years later, I can honestly say I’ve never cared for it since it was a chart-topper in the summer of 1970. Anyone with anything about them experiences life as a permanent state of metamorphosis, changing opinions on subjects every ten years or so; a great deal of what I thought at 18 I now consider bollocks – and it’s only right I should. The concept of development being frozen at any age is a particularly horrific one for me, let alone life choices being set in stone by parents when still a child and some distance from even puberty, let alone adulthood.

Gender identity is an especially delicate area of a child’s life for parents to play with, far more serious than them mapping out their child’s career or drilling a religious belief, a forced dedication to a musical instrument or a specific sport into them. More than anything, it is something the child needs to formulate when it has experienced a little bit of what life has to offer beyond the nursery or the playground, when it actually ceases to be a child and can be classified as an adult. There’s nothing wrong with a boy finding more affinity with girls or a girl finding more affinity with boys; by surmising this implies a desire to actually become that which the child has an affinity with is to expose a parent’s own limited awareness of the rich variety of what being a boy or a girl actually has the potential to encompass.

© The Editor