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Blackadder goes Brexit

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February 13, 2019

An un-ironic advert seen at London’s Heathrow Airport

In moments of national self-implosion, we must cling fast to those wisest and most foundational of texts. At these moments we need the guidance of our national bards, and for me, nothing gets close to Blackadder.

In terms of national self-implosion, nothing in my lifetime has got close to Brexit, either. The breathtaking chaos, tinge with tragedy, is almost Greco-Roman in its scope:

“We’re in the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun”

Only a few men can do it justice.

Baaaaaah!

There’s the obvious:

“That’s the spirit, Blackadder! If all else fails, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.”

And while General Melchett is doing his best Jacob Rees-Mogg impression, there is of course:

“You look surprised, Blackadder.”

“I certainly am, sir. I didn’t realise we had any battle plans.”

“Well of course we have! How else do you think our battles are directed?”

“Our battles are directed, sir?”

“Well of course they are, Blackadder. Directed according to the Grand Plan.”

“Would that be the plan to continue with total slaughter until everyone is dead apart from Field Marshal Haig, Lady Haig and their tortoise, Alan?”

“Great Scott, even you know it!”

Then there are those lines that reflect my own steady ennui with the entire business of the national self-implosion:

“You a bit cheesed off, sir?

“George, the day this war began I was cheesed off. Within ten minutes of you turning up, I’d finished the cheese and moved on to the coffee and cigars, and at this late stage I am in a cab with two lady companions on my way to the Pink Pussycat in Lower Regent Street.”

And then, in light of Donald Tusk’s brilliant “special place in hell” musings on the fate that should await Brexiteer politicians, there’s the wonderful:

“I’m not a religious man, as you know, but henceforth I shall nightly pray to the God who killed Cain and squashed Samson that he comes out of retirement and gets back into practice on the pair of you.”

A telephone rings

“Captain Blackadder speaking. Ah, Captain Darling… You want two volunteers for a mission into no man’s land? Codename: Operation Certain Death? Yes, I think I’ve got just the fellows.”

Turning to George and Baldrick

“God is very quick these days…”

Feel free to comment and share all the beauties I’ve missed out…
The Baltic cure for fear

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February 7, 2019

Time for a refreshing dip?

Last night, I had a Baltic cure for fear. It was a hole broken in the ice of Helsinki harbour in Finland. The water was 0.6C – as cold as water can get without turning to ice – with mini icebergs floating in it. I went in. Twice.

Why twice?

The obvious question is what on Earth would you do that for? The second obvious question is why would you do it again? OK, the first one first: I was visiting Löyly – a public sauna designed out of solid wood and glass by Avanto Architects.

It’s an amazing communal space with a traditional smoke sauna opening directly onto a path into the Baltic. No, I couldn’t believe it either. When the waif-like receptionist said she always went for a dip, I knew backing out would be hard.

Accumulated fear

One ominous effect of age is that you notice how fear accumulates. It’s not a single event sensation. The more you live, the more you have a tendency to store up fear and so get better at it.

I notice this in many circumstances – flying, leaving my child at his nursery, bungee jumping – and I certainly noticed it when the Löyly Sauna informed me about the Baltic plunge hole.

Breaking it down

What I discovered while at the Löyly Sauna was that the process of fear accumulation can be put into reverse. I initially got far too hot in the smoke sauna. This obviously helps. I then went and dipped a leg into the Baltic.

It was only a leg. I was alone, staring out into the Baltic night and the black water below me, icebergs jostling. No one would hear my screams. No one would see me sink. Can a 40-year-old body handle such extremes? Etc. Etc.

The revelation of an ice bath

When I finally went in, with the help of camaraderie, it was a shock, but not in the obvious way. It was fun. My skin tingled when I came out. I bounced for the sheer joy of bouncing. Most miraculously, fear evaporated.

Maybe this is the elixir of life: the evaporation of fear through action? Once I’d done it, the only thing left to do was get hot again in the smoke sauna and… go back for another immersion in the hole in the ice.
How to spend a long haul flight

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January 30, 2019

Gazing down on Central Asia

I find the thought of long haul flights intimidating. The prospect of 13 hours of reading time is mammoth even for me. I’ve no interest in the films or in sleeping, so it’s all about the plane meals and the reading.

Read about somewhere you fly over

Before my flight from China to the UK, I happened to find a short novel called Jamila by an author named Chingiz Aitmatov in the local charity shop.

The fact that the back cover claimed he was Kyrgyzstan’s most famous literary figure gave me a thought. I was pretty sure my flight would pass over Kyrgyzstan – so why not read about it?

Watching real time maps

The other thing I love to do in a plane is look out of the window. Anyone who is obsessed by maps will find a particular delight in air travel. It provides real life maps that you can gaze on for hours, spotting features you knew only from atlases.

As we flew, I interspersed gazing down at the Kyrgyz mountains, the foothills of the Altai range and the Kazakh steppe with reading Aitmatov’s little novel. I hadn’t realised it was old, but soon understood that it was written about the Second World War period.

In fact, Jamila was published in 1958. Gazing down at Kyrgyzstan as Aitmatov’s story gazed back into Soviet history gave me an extraordinary sense of time and space. The story itself is beautiful and simple, the story of life and love in a Kyrgyz village.

Next time you travel in a plane, pick a country en route, the smaller the better. Then go and search for its greatest novelist and see what you find…
When Baldrick met a QR code in China

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January 24, 2019

What is this strange plastic card stuck to the table?

Unbeknownst to me (I don’t get out much and the only news item I have seen since 2016 is Brexit), the Chinese have quietly departed for the future. I went there last week. I wasn’t expecting to time travel, so it was a shock.

The quiet QR revolution

QR codes now rule. You know, the little pixelated black and white squares you point your smartphone at. Yes, we’ve all (most of us) done it, but not like the Chinese.

And yes, I know there are Londoners for whom Apple Pay is now old hat. But I’m living in the Welsh borders, and out here, not a single sheep has a QR code on it. In Shenzhen – China’s shiny new metropolis – everything has a QR code on it. I mean everything.

Do you accept farthings?

I disembarked at the Chinese border armed with a fistful of renminbi. I met two guys from Beijing whom I’d be spending the week with in Shenzhen. They looked at my fistful of notes with misty-eyed nostalgia.

“I don’t think I’ve taken my wallet out for about three years,” said one. The other showed me a stash of notes he said he never touched. This revelation occurred as we sat in a café to order lunch and I spotted the QR code stuck to the table.

“What’s with the QR code?”

“Oh, we’re ordering lunch.”

“With a QR code?”

“It’s bringing up the menu on my phone. I’m then ordering us lunch with my phone, and at the end of the meal, I’ll pay the bill by phone.”

I nodded, feeling like Baldrick in Silicon Valley.

You don’t have to be a hipster to zap it

What threw me the most was that this wasn’t a smart restaurant. It was just a normal café. But I was only just starting to get up to speed. It was soon revealed to me that everyone used QR codes.

They were in ANY food outlet. They were in shops. They were on parking machines. When my friends told me that even market traders and street food vendors used them, I realised just how much catching up the UK needed to do.

“So what’s with this Brexit thing you’ve been doing?”

I knew the question might come up eventually. I was dreading it. Yes, we’ve been bickering about our own importance for two years. Yes, I can see you’ve been busy while we’ve bickered. Yes, it’s a bit embarrassing.

The Great Chinese Firewall knocked out most of my American apps while I was there. I used the WeChat app, a great platform through which WeChat Pay is one of the top two payment systems, alongside Alibaba’s Alipay.
Is it your right to migrate?

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January 3, 2019
Is migration a moral right? Not for birds or whales, but for people. It’s a given that non-humans can migrate, but can people? The knee-jerk response is usually two-fold:
1. Are we talking about rich, educated people or poor, uneducated ones?
2. I am a liberal or a conservative?
Imagine you were this kind of migrant…

You’re born in the wrong place

You enter the world within the political borders of a state that’s not America, western European, Australia, New Zealand or a few others places. You don’t even have parents or grandparents from places like that.

Your parents are dirt poor

Welcome to the majority! Dirt poor in the countries people like to get out of means no education worth mentioning. It means no college, no degree and sure as hell no semester away at an American or European institution.

Make something of yourself!

Wherever you are in the world, so the free market aspiration goes, you can make something of yourself. What? Are there no entrepreneurs in Eritrea? Of course there are! But social mobility outside well-run functioning states is seriously stalled by small corrupt elites controlling most routes to wealth.

Can people globalise, too?

If that were you, would you grant yourself the moral right to migrate? Or would it just be hard cheese? Make the most of Malawi, mate.
Lost and Found Words

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December 27, 2018
This Christmas, I read my 3-year-old son The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris — a ‘spell book’ of poems and illustrations with the neat hook of celebrating nature words that have vanished from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in recent years.

Unprompted, he simply started naming the birds whose names he didn’t know. Here’s the result…

Camilo’s new words
- Canderlop — Heron
- Gaiun — Raven
- Kindercorn — Buzzard
- Cheep — Wood Pigeon
- Arandadoe — Sparrow
- Lockantanj — Lark
(The kingfisher and the magpie, which he already recognises, he simply called by their known names. Making up a name would be stupid, obviously.)

Living language

The Lost Words has gone as viral as a large illustrated hardback can. It has spawned campaigns to get a copy into every primary school in Scotland, Herefordshire and no doubt elsewhere by now. It has touched a nerve.

The book makes the point that such things as the kingfisher or the dandelion have had other names that have fallen out of use. Kingfishers have been known as halcyon, evening angler and rainbow bird; dandelions as lion’s tooth, windblow and milkwitch.

They also make up new names: colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker and river’s quiver for the kingfisher. Bane of lawn perfectionists, fallen star of the football pitch and scatterseed for dandelion.

I expected The Lost Words to teach my son natural words we are losing. Instead, it led to him creating brand new words for birds he had never seen before. It turns out we’ll never stop speaking. It’s what we see that shapes our language.
Uncivilising

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December 19, 2018

Rewinding civilisation (Photo by Nirzar Pangarkar)

A clash of civilisations is indeed underway, but I’m not talking about Islam versus the West. I’m talking about a clash between civilisation as we have come to understand it, and its unraveling in pursuit of something better.

The revolution won’t be televised

This clash is between people who instinctively want things to stay the way they always were (or rather, have been for a long time), and people who want to find new ways of living (or rather, resurrect older ways of living).

Unschooling, ‘barefoot’ footwear, chucking out the TV, rejecting car and plane travel, eating only local produce, being anti-plastic, sitting on the floor rather than in a chair, burning your bra, buying experiences instead of bling.

What do all these micro-tribes, these mini-movements, have in common? They are all about uncivilising. They are rejections of a highly artificial, manmade way of living in favour of lifestyles stripped back to more authentic essentials.

Living in a two-speed world

It could be assumed that those not taking part in the uncivilising movement would be in the emerging economies where people are experiencing prosperity for the first time. Maybe, but it’s not the whole truth.

In fact, many innovations that could be part of an uncivilising movement are being led by emerging markets. China, for instance, is innovating for a sustainable urban future better than most Western nations.

It’s quite possible that the biggest resistance to uncivilising movements may actually come from people brought up on Western consumer values and with a sense that such manmade commodities are their birthright.

Hence the clash of civilisations – or the civilized versus the uncivilised, as it may well be couched – that is already playing out in most Western societies. Things – it seems – are only going to get more tribal, which might just be yet another dimension to the uncivilising phenomenon.
Being Middle Class Man

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December 12, 2018

Is male and middle class the ultimate turn-off? (Photo by Gregory Hayes)

I love Grayson Perry. Who doesn’t? All but the most unsalvageably entrenched blokey blokes must love him for everything he has done to open debate about gender – particularly being a man – and identity.

But how much of what Grayson has done – has been able to do – is rooted in his working class identity? Yes, he dresses in women’s clothes. Yes, he questions the most basic assumptions about male culture. But he’s still an honest, straight-talking bloke from solid working roots.

The legitimacy this identity engenders often seems to hide in plain sight. It reminds me of the way Billy Bragg – another boy from the ‘wrong’ end of London with the accent to back it up – can deliver English folk music with an authority lacking in even the most hallowed middle class revivalists.

Of course, there is some slippage.

Some no doubt view both Grayson and Billy as class-suspect. In Grayson’s gender-bending analysis and Billy’s love of olde worlde folk, they could both be seen as working class boys now long since consumed by middle class airs and intellectualism.

Pity Middle Class Man

Everyone hates the middle classes, as the joke goes, even the middle classes themselves. Yes, they are a comfortable place to be born and to live, but they are eternally unloved. Which makes Middle Class Man the hardest to crack.

Does Grayson’s accessibility as a working class man make his bold forays into questioning social norms more palatable, under the cover of class legitimacy? Could a middle class version of Grayson Perry have broken down as many barriers as the real Grayson Perry?

Would we have bought it? By we, of course, I mean the Great British Public (GBP), that toughest of critics. Never mind the male gaze. The GBP gaze can be withering.

Spare a thought for Middle Class Man – fighting to remake himself, despite his eternal lack of credibility, even in the eyes of his peers. Lumbered with maleness and middle classness, he needs all the help he can get!
Swedes are Brits with good branding

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December 7, 2018

The darling buds of May, June, July… (Photo by Christian Widell)

The Swedes have branding sown up. It’s like they ingest it from birth. Sweden just rings so true as an idea for the rest of the world. Happy, blonde people living fairly with each other and in harmony with nature – and no matter what the weather, doing everything well.

What’s so Swedish about a maypole?

Think Sweden. Think fish as a national dish. Think dancing around a pole in Midsummer. Think lagom – not too little, not too much. It all seems so quintessentially Swedish. But hang on…

A British national fish dish? Fish’n’chips, anyone? Dancing around a pole. That’ll be why we call it a maypole. Brits may not have done it since before the Industrial Revolution, but we still call it a maypole. Lagom – not too little, not too much? Pure Presbyterian self-moderation.

Not only that, but listen to a Swedish – or indeed Danish – voiceover on TV, and you could be forgiven for thinking you’re listening to a very drunk Geordie. We’re practically national siblings. But boy, oh boy, Swedes have sold themselves so much better.

Maybe it’s that Industrial Revolution? Maybe it’s the Imperial twitch? Maybe Britain’s problem is that there are just too many strands to pick? A good brand needs focus, a single narrative. Is it Cool Britannia? Is it Brexit Britain? Is it Global Britain? Form an orderly queue…
Planet Earth in one village

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November 27, 2018

Planet Earth in miniature (Photo by Dimitri Scripnic)

“If we could shrink the Earth to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, there would be:
– 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 8 Africans and 14 from North and South America.
– 52 would be female and 48 male.
– 70 would be non-Christian and 30 Christian.
– 70 would be non-white and 30 white.
– 6 would possess 59% of the world’s wealth and would be from North America.
– 80 would live in substandard housing.
– 70 would be unable to read.
– 50 would suffer from malnutrition.
– 1 would have a college education.
– 1 would own a computer.

…If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the world…if you have money in the bank, in your wallet and some spare change lying around, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.”

An excerpt from The Holistic Manifesto by William Bloom

With thanks to Alan McSmith for drawing my attention to it on his blog