Defending the Planet

The older I get, the more I stay the same. I’ve always liked having a paper copy of The Guardian. Now I’ve got a chromebook, which I regularly consult, I’m for the first time in a position to compare The Guardian online with my old-fashioned, expensive version on paper. And the latter wins every time. The double-page photos in the middle of the paper trounce the copies on screen, and there are so many little, out of the way stories that I come across turning the pages which I would never find online unless I already knew what I was looking for.

Francisco Vera, for instance, is a keen environmentalist, aged twelve, grinning for his photo as he proudly displays his “There is no planet B” T-shirt. The catch is that he lives in Colombia, where they’ve killed 65 earth defenders in the last year, and he’s had death threats. The men who run the fracking and the mining don’t want defenders of wild life pointing out the damage they do, and they’re in the habit of paying to have them removed. It’s scary, but it’s also cheering that he plans to keep going, contacting other environmentalists around the world, insisting on the power of social media. Definitely my kind of hero.

Golden Oldies

I have a shelf of novels in the dining-rom that I call Golden Oldies, substantial books that I’ve really enjoyed, where I’ve deliberately sought out hard-back copies so that I can enjoy re-reading them. One of the side-effects of Covid has been to drive me back to this, to see if what I once thought was terrific still grabs me in the same way. The results have been very mixed.

There was a time when I really thought Martin Amis’ Money was terrific. So witty, so smart. Yes, the central character is repulsive, but we don’t have to like everything, and so long as the writing is good…Not any more. There are moments when he really turns on the pyrotechnics, bravura paragraphs where I can see what all the fuss was about, but overall I lost interest, and ended up just not going to the end - which hardly ever happens.

Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls, on the other hand, was sheer joy all over again. Another fast-talking, witty young man with an American slant, but tackling a serious theme (money, as it happens, and the image of success) and serious, complex view of a marriage over time. After the Amis disappointment, I feared that I might have been carried away by juvenile excitement, but if that’s the case then the symptoms remain identical - I loved it all over again. There’snowt so queer as folk.

Promoting Labour

What is the Labour Party for, and why should people vote for it? Apparently the party themselves are in some disarray, and are looking around for convenient formulations which will reverse the shock of the last election, and put Keir Starmer in Downing Street. The last solution I heard was “wear suits and display the union jack”, and I’m not sure that’ll do it. Send your answers, on a postcard, please…(Or, in my case, in a sonnet. See “Manifesto” in Poems from the News, also on this website.)

For me, the theme of decency is a key part of the answer, and that surely was one of the reasons why, despite gloomy predictions, Labour won Batley and Spen. Those voters, knowing Jo Cox, knowing Kim Leadbetter,, voted for a decency they could respect. (And it may actually have helped that George Galloway was around as a reminder of the alternative.)

What Labour shouldn’t do, it seems to me, is sack members like Ken Loach. He’s an old style idealist, sure, closer to Corbyn than to Starmer, but he also represents a kind of basic decency, and people like him won’t be encouraged to see that Labour would prefer to carry on their campaign without him.

Looking Ahead

Way back in the gloom of December 2019, I was - with many others - depressed about the result of the general election. not just that it didn’t go my way (there’ve been plenty of those) but that victory seemed to have nothing to do with the realistic future of the country. More important, it had no consideration for the generation of youngsters who are going to have to pick up the pieces.

My response was “Looking Ahead.” This is a set of plays for teenagers to act or read, and discuss and think about. There’s ten short plays, very deliberately targetted at current concerns - social media in football, knife crime, policies on drugs, surveillance capitalism. they sound heavy stuff, but I’ve tried to make it lively and accessible, and offer kids contrasting viewpoints on the various issues.

Finally, after interruptions from the pandemic and a lot of work by people other than me, this collection is coming out into the big wide world of schools. It’s published by ZigZag, a firm with whom I’ve worked happily for twenty years, and you can find it at https://zigzageducation.co.uk/synopses/11023-looking-ahead-10-original-scripts-with-activities?pod=11023?utm_source=Online&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=ZZTA

Just Google it...

It sounds so simple. Everything’s on the internet, so just stick in what you want, and up it comes. Well, not quite. I’m currently revising a set of plays for school pupils, that I wrote a year ago. One of them concerns Dr. John Marks, a doctor in Widnes who ran a revolutionary scheme back in the 80s, supplying heroin as a prescription for addicts. He almost stumbled into it by accident, and was thinking of closing it down - but the local police argued strongly for him to keep it going, because supplying good quality drugs, for free, was having a beneficial effect on the local crime rate. It sounds too good to be true, but it was a brilliant success, and was only closed down after American pressure, because it made a nonsense of their “Just say no” war on drugs. So much so radical.

My source for this was a long Spectator article from 1995. I’d found it on the net, kept the link reference and - as is required these days - included it in the school pack. The publishers wrote to say that the link didn’t work. They’re right - it’s gone. Between 2020 when I wrote the play, and 2021 when I revised it, this crucial piece of evidence has gone walkabout. I have my own printout of the article, and the precise date when it was published, but if your only criterion for evidence is “can I click on it now?” neither of those are any use.

Black Lives Matter

Last year I submitted some poems for a new poetry anthology - “Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World.” It was edited by Ambrose Musiyiwa, a writer and activist based in Leicester, who’d been impressed with the size and energy of a Black Lives Matter protest there, in response to the killing of George Floyd. He put out an international call for poems on this theme, and was deluged with hundreds. The book was published in June 2020, with over a hundred poems filling 150 pages. Ambrose was keen to promote it, but although I was sympathetic I didn’t see myself as central to this movement. I told him that I was a member of two writing groups, both all white, mainly comprising writers over fifty in rural areas. “That’s fine,” he said. “You get the audience, I’ll supply the writers.” And that’s what happened, with substantial help from Steve Pottinger and Colin Wells. . Last night, for an hour over zoom, we ran a reading which included nine contributors to this collection, each of whom read their poem from the anthology. Six black, three white. Six women, three men (but not the same). In an hour a varied audience got a taste of very different voices and angles, and also the chance to hear from the poets about how they viewed their work, and its impact on this issue. As Hannibal used to say when I watched the A-team with my kids., “I love it when a plan comes together.”

White Teeth

More time to read and less access to library resources mean I keep going back to my shelves, revisiting the greatest hits. And this time it’s a joy. I always knew Zadie Smith was a marvel, but it’s astonishing to rediscover how ambitious she was, right from the start. White Teeth is enjoyable, witty, fast-moving. It’s also long, very clever and skilful, and exhibits so many different ways of being a good writer. Simple routine description: “the bus did one of those arching corners where it feels the merest breath will topple it over.” Witty dialogue - “the whole plan’s so high on the cheese factor it’s practically Stilton.” But beyond that there’s a range of sympathy, an ability to get inside the skins and head of a huge cast of characters, whatever their age, background and racial origin. History is important, but so are ideas, and so is her huge affection for the Willesden area where she grew up. she has a long, sustained riff about the local comp attended by one of her characters, but within these two pages of lively evocation there’s a sly little dig - “Better to have an utterly forgettable face, better to be able to cadge a fag and come back five minutes after for another without being remembered. Better to cultivate a cipher-like persona, be a featureless little squib called Mart, Jules, Ian.” That couldn’t - could it? - be a cheeky little reference to Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan?

Poetry Launch

As an obsessive, prolific self-publishing poet I’ve organised a number of poetry launches in my time, many of them enjoyable and memorable. But yesterday’s was something special. Yes, it was remote, on zoom, but with none of the impersonality which that might imply. First of all, it wasn’t just me pushing myself. It was organised by Nadia Kingsley, of Fair Acre press - and publishing my collection “Rescue from the Dark” was very much her idea. And she put together a varied bill of voices and talents - Stella Wulf, John Mills, Emma Purshouse and me - which guaranteed variety within an hour. From the sound of it, people got their money’s worth - though it was actually free - and we all enjoyed being involved. There were fifty of so people there, and it had quite as much sense of occasion as any launch I’ve attended - a special event. Obviously we’d have sold more copies at a live event, and I don’t know what the future promotion pattern will look like, but in these tough times (and much tougher for professional poets rather than leisurely amateurs like me) I was very happy to settle for this.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

I am in awe of the different things that good writers can do. Jennifer Egan, for instance, has for twenty years anticipated what digital connection will do to us with prophetic insight, while also producing smart, witty dialogue worthy of Bogart and Bacall. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is a perfectly calibrated piece of machinery, moving effortlessly between different characters in various times and places. The receptionist who is a marginal character in one scene is the central protagonist of another as a rebellious teenager, but then reappears elsewhere as a middle-aged mum. It’s like a blend of Cloud Atlas with Middlemarch. But then, at the level of the sentence she can also work magic with a powerful image. On page 217 she writes “he had taken the passion he felt for Susan, and folded it in half…” and then proceeds to develop that for a sustained paragraph, as if it were a poem. Just astonishing.

Go Went Gone

One of the advantages of this lockdown compared with the first one is that there’s more access to the library service. It was good, and salutary, to have to explore what I already had on my shelves, but on the other hand a functioning library service gives me contact with recent books - particularly fiction - that I hate to do without. This week I’ve been totally bowled over by Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Go Went Gone”, which is actually five years old but still worthy making a special effort to catch. She is an East German whose whole life has been dominated by re-unification, and in this book her central character is a retired academic for whom that’s also true. He’s a bit dull, a bit lost, in no way charismatic. The book charts his growing interest in, sympathy for and relationship with a group of refugees. In different hands this could be sentimental or preachy, but this book never comes near either. It’s careful, thoughtful, totally involving, rooted in thorough research but never dull or over the top. Each time I went back to reading it I was immediately relieved to be back in its world, and now it’s finished I immediately want it back.

Line of Duty

“Better than ever” Lucy Mangan drawls, in her Guardian review, but not for me, it isn’t. I’ve been a Jed Mercurio fan since Cardiac Arrest, and I thought Line of Duty at its best (Keely Hawes, maybe?) was wonderful. But since it went BBC 1 and mega, it’s got far too big for its boots. Huge spectacle, no limit to the crowds of officers involved in the dramatic arrests - but old fashioned probability is lying by the roadside as an abandoned casualty. Four vehicles purposefully heading to one operation - when they divert because the person in charge sees a white van. Senior woman police officer goes home at the end of the day - when we find she’s just breaking up from a lesbian relationship with a junior black officer - there you are, have that dumped in your lap as a ton of potent factors, none of them convincingly established. Oh, and said officer has a senior male officer who’s total bluster and incompetence. Clearly an idiot. But the shouted conversations going on in his office are clearly important, as we’re treated to endless prolonged shots of silent officers watching apprehensively from outside. And we thought we’d lost Vicki McClure, who’s had enough of shopping coppers and wants to do proper police work, but hey - she just happens to be working for the next person they’re going to be investigating, so maybe she’ll have second thoughts and join up with the old team again…it’s all cardboard, contrived for effect on the viewer, and I don’t believe a word. It’s sad when a decent series comes to the end of its proper life, but nothing like so sad as the determination to keep it going beyond that for the sake of the ratings.

Look at Me

More raiding the back catalogue, this time from my fiction shelves. Jennifer Egan’s novel “Look at Me” was first published in 2001, and it’s amazingly prescient. It’s about a model who’s appearance has been drastically altered in an accident - which occasions an exploration into identity appearance and gender - but also social media, honesty, capitalism, all kinds of stuff which sounds boring but isn’t. there’s a varied cast, all of them interesting and capable of surprises, and an endearing interest in the obscure details of the history of Rockford, Illinois…It sounds like a mess, but it’s such a treat to read.

It’s full of jokes and human observation, and simply on the level of the individual sentence it’s full of treats. “Scott’s head lay on her chest like a meteorite…But Moose’s eyes were dull, as if he were asleep behind them…”Can I help you?” A girl roughly the size of an American refrigerator.” It’s sat on my shelves for nearly twenty years, and - but for lockdown - I might never have looked at it again.

Back Catalogue

It’s a while since I went into a record shop and bought anything. so I’m driven back to the shelves of ffmailiar CDs and yes, now I think about it there are quite a lot of them. So one of the pleasures of lockdown is to follow the impulse provided by stuff I read and watch. The Guardian has a double-page spread in which a wide range of musical names look back over 50 years of Carol King’s Tapestry - so that gets played. I listen to the brilliant Malaika Kegade on a zoom poetry night, send off for he book, and re-eread her wonderful poem Music. that includes the line “Winehouse - that voice could fix anything.” Of course it could, so she goes onn the player as well. As does Keith Jarrett, subject of a stunning portrait by the film-maker Mike Dibb (on Whitechapel Gallery’s website - see my blog entry for Jan 23). I read a book review, where they’ve republished Jackie Kay’s portrait of Bessie Smith, so I remind myself of exactly how good she is. I like this game. It could go on a while.

Another Country

Regular readers will note that the range of fiction I’m reading is expanding all the time - Bulgarian, for instance. I’m reading new stuff, re-reading old favourites, and also digging up books that have sat on my shelves for years but somehow never got read. I can tell this when I pick up a 1973 copy of Another Country, and the blurb says “The greatest Negro Writer “ (The Spectator). They’re talking about James Baldwin, famous as the distinctive, angry voice of “I am Not your Negro”. But in this novel he’s more like George Eliot. It’s a panorama, that moves across a group of characters who are male and female, black and white, straight and gay, like some 1960s Middlemarch. And for each of them Baldwin presumes to enter their heads and hearts, convey the mixture and development of how they think and feel. And within that he’s quite capable of throwing in a lyrical paragraph describing how it feels to be walking though New York. It’s hugely ambitious and at moments it goes over the top or doesn’t quite convince, but that’s a small price to pay for ambition and adventure. I’ve never read anything quite like this, and I’m so glad I got round to it.

Bulgarian Fiction

Asya, my son’s partner, is Bulgarian, and for Christmas she gave me a contemporary novel from there - The Physics of Sorrow, by Georgi Gospodinov. Obviously, I had no clue what to expect. It turns out to be a total treat because (a) it’s clever, sad, funny all at once (b) brilliantly translated and therefore a pleasure to read AND (c) a really interesting insight into contemporary Bulgaria. And yet it’s only by that freak accident that I’ve come across it.

And this must, of course, be happening all the time. As a teacher and timetabler, I remember the teaching of languages being deliberately downgraded by a government with other priorities, and that’s of course an English government, with a high view of its own exceptionalism and very little interest in other countries. As it happens, I’ve never been that good at languages, and haven’t explored foreign writers with anything like the energy and curiosity of other people I know so I’ve obviously missed out, and will continue to do so in this post-Brexit fantasy of isolation to which our leaders wish to guide us. But it’s salutary to get the occasional reminder of what we’re missing.

Father of Brexit

I love The Guardian, but it’s not enough. At various times (not too often) I sample what the rest of the world is reading., so that’s how I get to read, direct, the thoughts of Nigel Farage. The Mail on Sunday, since you ask. And this is how he’s billed: “Father of Brexit tells Boris…THE WAR IS OVER..” Well, he should know. And he looks over the battlefield that is Brexit, remarking “It was accompanied by a coarseness not seen in modern politics.”

That’s certainly true, but I’m wanting to ask “So, Nigel, where do you think that came from?” It is, of course, nothing to do with him. Just like the time he welcomed Brexit as the revolution where not a shot was fired - until someone reminded him that Jo Cox had been shot. That, too, was nothing to do with him. It was a nutter with a gun and a knife, shouting “Britain First” - but he must got that from the internet.

Still, he must have secrets to share. When Johnson got his election victory in December 2019 everyone was quick to analyse what went wrong with Labour’s campaign. Very little was said about Johnson’s campaign - which was appalling - and even less about the key fact that helped him win. Farage had over six hundred candidates across the country, ready to do battle for Brexit - and cut the Tory vote - when all of a sudden he cancels the ones in Tory seats, and Johnson gets an easy ride. No consultation; of course; talking to the members isn’t Nigel’s thing, let alone listening to what they have to say. But you have to wonder, what was in it for him?

Teaching them a lesson

One of the pleasures of Christmas is the annual round-up of news from friends and contacts I don’t normally see. Each year I look forward to hearing from someone I still remember as a bright sixth-former, although that’s more than thirty years ago and she’s now an acting head. Her account of what she’s had to cope with over the last few months breaks my heart, but also raises my estimation of her still further. None of which will matter to Gavin Williamson, who thinks he’s been placed on this earth to tell the teachers where they go wrong, and to give them incomplete and bewildering instructions at very short notice.

When I was training to be a teacher - yes, OK, it was the sixties - there were these magical little books for 3/6, Education specials, about a whole series of important issues. One of them was about Antony Crosland and Edward Boyle, (Labour and Conservative) education ministers. They had their differences, but both of them saw it as their duty to tour the country, offering encouragement and congratulation to the teachers who were doing the actual work. Those were the days.

The World of Zoom

Another Wednesday afternoon in lockdown. Same old, same old…Well, not quite. At 2.00 pm I’m joining a poetry reading by Steve Pottinger, which is also being beamed to students and staff at a college in Dubai, though for them it’s an evening gig. This is a Black Country poet describing a late-night bus from Birmingham to Wolverhampton…although as he’s also dealing with Trump, a Mexican woman who’s been “disappeared” and a young musician last seen near a Swansea beach, you couldn’t describe it as parochial. Whatever he’s doing, they love it. And so do I, but after ninety minutes I have to break off and have a quick cup of tea, because at four pm I’m watching the Putney debates.

A work-out for the mind, as lawyers and academics wrangle over the balance between the legislature and the executive, and distinguish between parliamentary sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy. But this all needs putting into context i.e. British history from the middle ages and the current practices of lawcourts across the world in ensuring social justice…Phew! But it makes a change from Brexit caricature about the will of the people. And it’s all there, available in the ether, for free. What did we do before zoom?

Birds and People

In that precious interlude between lockdowns, when the libraries were still open, I borrowed “Birds and People.” I’d read good reviews, but had no clue what I was in for. It weighs in at over 2.5 kg, 592 pages, double columns, small print. Could look a bit boring, except that there’s stunning photographs on every other page. They’re from all over the world, and they’re all by David Tipling. How did he manage that? By spending eight years on it. This book looks like an encyclopaedia, but it has none of the dryness that suggests. It’s written by Mark Cocker, a lively thoughtful writer who’s also built up a massive network of contributors, who’ve sent him their observations, memories, favourite poems about birds. One of them is Jim Crace, whose cover quote describes the book like this: “A uniquely beautiful and engrossing volume, absolutely drenched in knowledge and love.”

And he’s right. I got this book out of the library, out of curiosity. I’ve taken it back now - but I’ve also bought my own copy, a bargain at £40.00. I’m not anything like an expert on birds, but one of my consolations during this further lockdown will be to go back to this book, again and again, and to keep finding in it something striking, amusing or entertaining, which will then lodge in my mind for days thereafter.

Back with the Books

I’m not sure I realised, until lockdown, how much I depended on libraries. I’m lucky in that I have a ton of books, and in a crisis there’s a lot I haven’t read, and many I’m happy to re-read. But there’s nothing quite like a steady supply of recent books for which you don’t need to find space on your shelves.

For the past week, for instance, I’ve had William Gibson’s “Agency” downstairs, and Tana French’s “Broken Harbour” by my bed. So at least once I day I wander into two completely different imaginary worlds. “Agency” is a dystopian glimpse of a possible future, but heaving with present references - Brexit, Trump, “the klept”. Which makes it sound deeply depressing and dull, except that it’s lively, witty and constantly entertaining, with much more optimism and love than you might expect.

Not a lot of optimism i n “Broken Harbour.” A dour detective in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, investigating a grisly mass murder in a grim Irish seaside town. He’s also got a new, young partner to adapt to, and a ton of family demons which he’s never managed to face. Again, it sounds like total gloom, but there’s ferocious energy and intelligence in the way French delivers the twists and gradually shows you more of characters you hadn’t quite understood the first time around.

Coming to the end of both. I need to go back through the reviews and reserve the next ones on the list, before lockdown shuts the library doors again.