The folk with the sandwich boards may be right. I don’t mean the folk in Oxford Street proclaiming “Golf Sale” with gigantic arrows on boards, though they are probably also right - it makes little commercial sense to lie about such things. Unless they are directing you into the knifepoint of some one-too-many-time-happy-slapped disgruntled youth trying to save enough money from hapless tourists and Chino-wearing golfers for their next fix of superglue. Incidentally, if you want to peddle golf equipment to people, I can think of better places to do it than Oxford Street where most people are listlessly pacing, chewing like drunken cattle, aimlessly spinning like tops into the path of buses in a vain effort to thrust themselves into some alternate Universe where life does not consist of supermarket queues, pickpockets and limpet-like shop assistants. Perhaps set up a golf range on Hampstead Heath with some tasteful caricatures of Gordon Brown or Wendy Alexander for the general public to aim at. Put the figures in those “Trust me, I’m not a fuckwit” poses beloved of politicians and the infuriated public will soon get into the swing of it. Groan.
Anyway, what I was referring to is those people with the “The End Is Nigh” billboards. You see, in a year’s time, that pound in your pocket – or anyone else’s – will be worth 3.3% less than it is now. Actually, it feels like things will be worse than that, perhaps the mighty Bank has been a little optimistic or perhaps that figure will be the start of a rollercoaster tumble featuring larger and larger numbers until we are lost in a whirlpool of scientific notation, lists of zeroes jamming down our throats as we hold a fuel pump pistol-like to our welcoming temples. Or perhaps not.
In an effort to find out what the fuck is happening, I went to the Bank of England Museum, which you can reach off Bartholomew Lane in The City. It was a strange mixture of Legoland and Imperial Celebration, what with springy toys demonstrating the link between inflation and interest rates, and all those 19th Century black and white sketches of wagon-loads of gold pilfered from the colonies trundling through the doors of Threadneedle Street while scantily-clad street urchins with chimney-soot faces dance endearingly to scores from Oliver with synchronized choreography.
Now, the museum is really great and all and I heartily recommend it, but it hadn’t caught up with events. In tone, it seemed self-congratulatory about how in over ten years of independence from the Government it had only failed on its inflation target in one month, information two days out of date by the time I visited. Dejected, I found another source, namely fiscal expert Lord Farquhar of Sotheby, and sent this blog’s fictional minion, Slug the Journo, to meet him at his orchard near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire to discuss exactly which shade of shite we have collectively found ourselves in this time, and whether Dulux would be able to keep their promise to produce a paint of that colour to fittingly bedeck the innards of the London Stock Exchange come autumn.
The scene is a lovingly restored orchard. Restored, of course, after the catastrophic Great Scrumping of ’04 in which many newborn apples were needlessly slaughtered by tykes on unicycles. Slug and Lord Farquhar are deep in conversation about the serious and dour-faced economical woes facing the British economy today:
Slug: Lord Farquhar, great to have someone of your esteemed stature with us on this fine day.
Lord: This is my orchard, mine I tell you. You are with me. My secretary said that you were a professional.
Slug: Indeed, humble apologies. Now, you have been dealing with the economy for a number of years. Might I ask in what capacity you have been involved?
Lord: Indeed [brushes cravat clumsily to one side, though it immediately flops back to the front].
I have been involved in a number of ways, buying and selling and that kind of thing. Mainly buying though. Things like bread, milk, croutons. Though in fairness my secretary usually deals with it all ‘front line’. I can’t stand those newsagents as they call them, their musty air plays havoc with my lungs, they have been so feeble of late.
Slug: Now you are known as something of a giant in the economy, coming in at a hefty twenty stone which is pretty bloody heavy for those of you reading in metric, indeed it took three hours for the contractor to winch you into this apple tree in which you have insisted we conduct this interview.
Lord: Yes?
Slug: Well, is there a reason that you have chosen this setting?
Lord: Indeed. Now I don’t want to labour the point, but the economy of late has been a frightful fucking mess. I had my home repossessed by the Bank two months ago. Those forty or so seagulls you can see orbiting the mansion are the new tenants.
Slug: Indeed that is fucking frightful. What would you have us believe is the reason for this?
Lord: Well in the main, all this inflation is being caused by rising fuel prices and rising food prices. I personally believe that a few speculators have been buying in vast quantities of oil and taking it off the market, which has the effect of inflating prices for the rest of us. Of course that could be mere speculation on my part!
[Finding his own joke incredibly funny, he proceeds to guffaw in a raucous manner so that the folds in his stomach can be seen to quiver from under his waistcoat. The entire tree gyrates dangerously under his heaving weight before the trunk lurches to a fifteen degree angle].
Slug: How do you think these rising prices, combined with the credit crunch and the effect on house prices is going to affect us in the near future?
Lord: Well I know for a fact that the credit rating of a few of those seagulls is pretty poor, so I don’t imagine that they are going to be able to hold on to it for long. The wider picture is that with the price of fuel rising exponentially to an estimated ten pounds a litre by next year, and perhaps ten-fold for each of the following five consecutive years, we are going to have to indulge in some very unpalatable activities.
Slug: Such as…?
Lord: Please, do have an apple, you are my guest after all. Yes, I am talking about walking. In fact it is my prediction that we will evolve to have much tougher soles on our feet, like frogs, or trainers have. The human race has an enormous ability to adapt you see. Look at how we survived the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs using the never-before tried or tested ‘duck and cover’ method. The shape of the dinosaurs’ skeletons precluded their adopting that position. That’s what evolution did for us, baby.
Slug: Quite.
Lord: Also, with the supermarket cartel tightening its grip on the public’s wallets like the thieving claws of a soap-dodging street robber, other sources of food and nourishment are going to have to be considered. Won’t you have another apple?
Slug: Thank you. And what shape might these new foodstuffs take?
Lord: Well, there are always those biofuels that people are talking about. A couple of pints of that stuff will knock you cold for several days at a time leaving you incapable of worrying about the cost of food or fuel. My dear wife Dorothy unfortunately drank a yard of biofuel for a bet shortly before her sudden and unexplained death last year, so I can vouch for its potency. Also, we might have to resort to more drastic measures, food-wise.
Slug: You mean…
Lord: Yes, cannibalism.
[At this point, Lord Farquhar looks down at my thigh. It is exposed as my trousers suffered a large gash when I tried to climb into the apple tree prior to the interview and snagged the trousers on the deliberately sharpened point of a tree limb. On that same tree limb had been skewered four squirrels in various states of decay.
Lord Farquhar licks his lips and moves his head almost imperceptibly closer to my flesh. I try to combat an urge to ditch my journalistic integrity in favour of fleeing for my life].
Slug: So, do you see any other way out of this financial crisis apart from a human society defiled by excesses of drinking biofuel and ravaging each other like deep-fried chicken drumsticks after a particularly savage night out?
Lord: None at all. In the wayward trends in our economy, however, I do not see a reason to give up hope. Rather I see an opportunity. This is merely a stage of advancement for the human race, where we ditch currency and markets and economy and all the chains and morals that bind our society into our current primitive state and move in to a freer more equal society where we can feast on each other at will, lathering each other in peanut butter before gorging ourselves on street-side banquets fit for Zeus.
Slug: Lord Farquhar, thank you for your time.
[At this point, the tree collapses, and the aforementioned tree limb skewers Lord Farquhar through the heart so that he appears inanimate, like a fifth, obese, aristocratic squirrel, pierced and motionless, waiting for his slow demise by decay, never to view the dawn of the day when society would act out his words and devolve into a cesspool of horror and fermented wheat].
===
LAST NIGHT, Kiran saw Radiohead in Glasgow Green which was so fucking fantastic that it defies words. At several moments he experienced joy so profound that he almost had a seizure. Indeed his left leg has still not fully recovered which makes using the clutch hard. Today is his last official day in Glasgow.
Experience some live Radiohead action for yourself – here is a snippet from a secret gig they played in London’s Brick Lane back in January.
Saturday, 28 June 2008
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
The Great Smokey Vortex
Four months passed. Unutterable things happened. Not all of them, I should add, interesting.
“Does it make you feel large and tragic?”, asks a character in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden about another character’s unrelenting self-pity. Perhaps that is at the root of the contented knifeless masochism we call self-pity. Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, it had to be trampled into the ground. Wading knee-deep through the viscous surrounds that it produces is a ticket to stagnation, apathy and misery.
Glasgow seems to epitomise self-pity. Here is a city that once proudly held itself as a giant of trade and commerce, that thrust up stone into the sky as if it were feather to form gargantuan edifices and then carved ornate embellishments into the façades, treating the stone now as butter. At one point in the nineteenth century, a third of the steam locomotives in the world could claim to have been born in one district of Glasgow – Springburn. Four hundred shipyards lined the banks of the humble River Clyde, humble both in width and in trajectory. Even in its present man-modified state, it still takes a hefty depth of imagination to populate it with ships, grit and clinkers and the metallic noise of grinding industry, so peaceful and insignificant does it now appear.
Then it was all gone. The city that had weathered industrial rifts of the past - the decline of cotton, the gaining of independence in America and the resultant overnight destruction of the tobacco trade - felt unable to cope with a competition so profound that is simply curled up into a ball and died. It haemorrhaged population, diminishing from well over a million to just over half that today. All the while it faked regeneration as it tore lumps out its own torso and deposited its inner-city population, tentacular in method, to countryside ghettos. All this frenzied activity of construction was merely an exercise in disguising death. In thrusting scaffolding thirty-storeys into the sky and encasing citizens in erect cuboids of dull concrete, the city kidded itself that it was reanimating itself, renewing itself. It is damned into this spiral now.
But, I here you say, for my mind in its madness is more pervious to the whispered insecurities of the breeze: Has there not been real progress? Have there not been awards, accolades, sporting events, beautification, do people’s hearts not soar at the majestic transformation of Buchanan Street? Cosmetically, the city has burned its industrial core it is true. It has denied its past and repaved its fabric with street-performers, opera, galleries of commerce so that we can consume, consume, consume and forget that it is all falling apart not one mile from the centre. As if putting foundation, mascara and lipstick on the hopeful face of a snake would gloss over the sloughing scales and withering tail of its fermenting body. Glasgow rots from the edges in, and it renews from the centre out, and in between lies a doughnut of half-built luxury apartments that will not be graced by gentrified footsteps for many years.
I digress though, at the heart of all this, is that the mindset of Glasgow is not to be reborn. What is mistaken for regenerative zeal is probably just the words and actions of a few whose own progress relies on the perceived success of their ambitions for the city. All the while, the Graduate Graveyard plods on, like an asthmatic tortoise towards an uncertain end. Its rueful nostalgia for long-gone days of industry cannot help it. I have a great emotive connection to the city, I will schizophrenically continue to sing its praises because I will never be able to deny the profound impact that is has had on my life, on my outlook. But I should only return when my own state of mind has melded with that of the city. In practice, this should be when my blood is becoming tumourous, my bones bubbling with the onset of osteoporosis, when this embryonic daily wheeze I have gained turns into a full-pelt clamour for oxygen, and when my liver has been stained kaleidoscopically from years of abuse. It should be in the sunset of my life when I view with terror the setting blood-red orb burning slowly through its throne of cloud. Then I will be happy to lie face-down in a Glasgow puddle, but not a moment before.
Mighty feelings indeed, and undoubtedly utter bollocks – for I am too young to know anything and too old to learn anything. I have no experience to make such high-minded claims, I will turn tail a thousand times and learn nothing. I will make proclamations and extol pretensions and then throw my promises away while no one is looking. There is only one place where that frame of mind could be tolerated or subsumed. Will Self described it as “thrashing and mewling”, and whether in hatred or in awe, he was talking about London.
London, that feeling of burning behind your eyes when you have been manacled upside-down from the ankles for too long. That dark silhouette of a dagger lurking behind the shower curtain. That great smokey vortex within which you disappear from all who knew you in a theatrical whirl of fog and scuttle with such energy that all thought becomes reduced to a characterless list of items which has no end and which you will never be furnished with enough time to finish. Venture into Victoria Park and muse at the wonder of undead grass in the inner-city. Pierce a javelin through your lip and hurl yourself drunkenly across Camden High Street. Enter the ring of steel and wonder how long it will take a determined woodworm to tunnel through the Bank of England’s vault wall in Princes Street. Feast on desiccated coconut next to a police cordon at a Hare Krishna parade. Forget the terrifying thought that you might need the animation of the city to substitute for a lack of your own inherent energy and that the only way you can survive is to feed parasitically off the bustle. I’m trying to. Or go to a Somali market in Whitechapel and legally buy four bunches of hallucinogenic khat leaves to chew on if it all becomes too much.
So here I am, gluttonous traitor that I am. In six days I start work. For four days I have inhabited this flat, and in a colourful (though mainly red) daze of scene-blurring cycling and memory-blurring inebriation I have subsisted, not entirely sure what form this particular failure will take, but determined as hell to make sure that this episode is the finest drip to ever top that banal pyramid of ear-wax we call life. For I have failed again, both by my own standards and by the recessive standards of society. Though meet me and you may find that I’m the happiest failure you ever have the misfortune to shake hands with.
Back to normal after this: less of this pretentious shite, and more objectivity hopefully – though what is objectivity but the collective sum and average of a billion subjectively held opinions? Muse on that as you feed bread into your toaster. And wonder at the glory of such an invention.
“Does it make you feel large and tragic?”, asks a character in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden about another character’s unrelenting self-pity. Perhaps that is at the root of the contented knifeless masochism we call self-pity. Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, it had to be trampled into the ground. Wading knee-deep through the viscous surrounds that it produces is a ticket to stagnation, apathy and misery.
Glasgow seems to epitomise self-pity. Here is a city that once proudly held itself as a giant of trade and commerce, that thrust up stone into the sky as if it were feather to form gargantuan edifices and then carved ornate embellishments into the façades, treating the stone now as butter. At one point in the nineteenth century, a third of the steam locomotives in the world could claim to have been born in one district of Glasgow – Springburn. Four hundred shipyards lined the banks of the humble River Clyde, humble both in width and in trajectory. Even in its present man-modified state, it still takes a hefty depth of imagination to populate it with ships, grit and clinkers and the metallic noise of grinding industry, so peaceful and insignificant does it now appear.
Then it was all gone. The city that had weathered industrial rifts of the past - the decline of cotton, the gaining of independence in America and the resultant overnight destruction of the tobacco trade - felt unable to cope with a competition so profound that is simply curled up into a ball and died. It haemorrhaged population, diminishing from well over a million to just over half that today. All the while it faked regeneration as it tore lumps out its own torso and deposited its inner-city population, tentacular in method, to countryside ghettos. All this frenzied activity of construction was merely an exercise in disguising death. In thrusting scaffolding thirty-storeys into the sky and encasing citizens in erect cuboids of dull concrete, the city kidded itself that it was reanimating itself, renewing itself. It is damned into this spiral now.
But, I here you say, for my mind in its madness is more pervious to the whispered insecurities of the breeze: Has there not been real progress? Have there not been awards, accolades, sporting events, beautification, do people’s hearts not soar at the majestic transformation of Buchanan Street? Cosmetically, the city has burned its industrial core it is true. It has denied its past and repaved its fabric with street-performers, opera, galleries of commerce so that we can consume, consume, consume and forget that it is all falling apart not one mile from the centre. As if putting foundation, mascara and lipstick on the hopeful face of a snake would gloss over the sloughing scales and withering tail of its fermenting body. Glasgow rots from the edges in, and it renews from the centre out, and in between lies a doughnut of half-built luxury apartments that will not be graced by gentrified footsteps for many years.
I digress though, at the heart of all this, is that the mindset of Glasgow is not to be reborn. What is mistaken for regenerative zeal is probably just the words and actions of a few whose own progress relies on the perceived success of their ambitions for the city. All the while, the Graduate Graveyard plods on, like an asthmatic tortoise towards an uncertain end. Its rueful nostalgia for long-gone days of industry cannot help it. I have a great emotive connection to the city, I will schizophrenically continue to sing its praises because I will never be able to deny the profound impact that is has had on my life, on my outlook. But I should only return when my own state of mind has melded with that of the city. In practice, this should be when my blood is becoming tumourous, my bones bubbling with the onset of osteoporosis, when this embryonic daily wheeze I have gained turns into a full-pelt clamour for oxygen, and when my liver has been stained kaleidoscopically from years of abuse. It should be in the sunset of my life when I view with terror the setting blood-red orb burning slowly through its throne of cloud. Then I will be happy to lie face-down in a Glasgow puddle, but not a moment before.
Mighty feelings indeed, and undoubtedly utter bollocks – for I am too young to know anything and too old to learn anything. I have no experience to make such high-minded claims, I will turn tail a thousand times and learn nothing. I will make proclamations and extol pretensions and then throw my promises away while no one is looking. There is only one place where that frame of mind could be tolerated or subsumed. Will Self described it as “thrashing and mewling”, and whether in hatred or in awe, he was talking about London.
London, that feeling of burning behind your eyes when you have been manacled upside-down from the ankles for too long. That dark silhouette of a dagger lurking behind the shower curtain. That great smokey vortex within which you disappear from all who knew you in a theatrical whirl of fog and scuttle with such energy that all thought becomes reduced to a characterless list of items which has no end and which you will never be furnished with enough time to finish. Venture into Victoria Park and muse at the wonder of undead grass in the inner-city. Pierce a javelin through your lip and hurl yourself drunkenly across Camden High Street. Enter the ring of steel and wonder how long it will take a determined woodworm to tunnel through the Bank of England’s vault wall in Princes Street. Feast on desiccated coconut next to a police cordon at a Hare Krishna parade. Forget the terrifying thought that you might need the animation of the city to substitute for a lack of your own inherent energy and that the only way you can survive is to feed parasitically off the bustle. I’m trying to. Or go to a Somali market in Whitechapel and legally buy four bunches of hallucinogenic khat leaves to chew on if it all becomes too much.
So here I am, gluttonous traitor that I am. In six days I start work. For four days I have inhabited this flat, and in a colourful (though mainly red) daze of scene-blurring cycling and memory-blurring inebriation I have subsisted, not entirely sure what form this particular failure will take, but determined as hell to make sure that this episode is the finest drip to ever top that banal pyramid of ear-wax we call life. For I have failed again, both by my own standards and by the recessive standards of society. Though meet me and you may find that I’m the happiest failure you ever have the misfortune to shake hands with.
Back to normal after this: less of this pretentious shite, and more objectivity hopefully – though what is objectivity but the collective sum and average of a billion subjectively held opinions? Muse on that as you feed bread into your toaster. And wonder at the glory of such an invention.
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