Nathaniel Handy

Writer

Natural blonde, 6’0”, surprisingly intelligent, winning smile, GSOH (why fly in the face of public opinion?)

Currently writing propaganda, journalism, novels, screenplays and old fashioned letters. Hell, I might even try poetry

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  • Long hair spells danger

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    Why do we cut boys’ hair? Because girls have long hair and boys have short hair, that’s why. But why do we do it? That human hair grows is natural. It just happens. So why the scissors? Is baldness to blame? 

    As Canned Heat observed in 1968:

    The police in Denver, they don’t want none of them long hairs hangin’ around

    Some things don’t change much 

    I had a haircut today. You may have noticed I often like to wear my hair long. It goes right back to my teens, when I realised that the act of not cutting, but growing male hair was one of the most rebellious inactions available. 

    Grow your hair

    It was free. It was easy (it just happened). It was passive, which was useful if you were a pretty shy, retiring kind of kid. It was a way of yelling loudly at authority without actually yelling loudly at authority. 

    Now, I just like the look. My son is a mini me, so is often mistaken for a girl (My stubble gives me away). But it regularly reminds me how we culturally link hair length to gender by pruning our children accordingly. 

    Grrrrrrrrrr

    It wasn’t always so. Look at Samson and his strength. Jesus Christ and all his disciples, wafting their locks. 17th century gentlemen and Indian braves. But somehow, ever since we began delousing soldiers with short back’n’sides, that’s been it for men. 

    Rather like the Western suit and tie, it’s gone global. When I do return to hairdressers, it’s with a hint of trepidation. I await the: I only do one kind of men’s cut, and that’s all coming off, son! 

    But of course, that’s only in my head. Right? Here’s to hirsute variety. After all, remember kids: 

    All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into your brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.

    Danny in Withnail & I

    While we’re on the subject of what boys should like, Boys Don’t Like Flowers

  • Imagine your vote counted

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    Person voting at a ballot box
    They all count (Photo by Element5 Digital)

    I voted last week. Local elections. Just local people with local issues. Nothing exciting for the outside world. But something unexpected and previously unknown happened… The candidate I voted for won. 

    Guess what, my vote counts

    My candidate didn’t just win – she won by a landslide. In that moment, it dawned on me. All my life, I had walked into polling stations with reverence. I knew how lucky I was to be able to vote. But I never actually thought my vote counted. 

    I have always voted in rural England, a place where politics barely exists. I realised in that moment that to vote in rural England is a bit like voting in Egypt. Yes, you can have a vote. Choose whomever you like. It makes no difference. 

    The Tory will always win

    Because the Tory will always win, I realised that even at the age of 40, I still hold that slightly disgruntled, apathetically accepting peasant’s attitude that someone else will always serve.

    I can get all the education I like. I can be as well-informed about the world as possible. But I will never enact decisions. The Tories do that for me. Them, and occasionally Labour. I’m merely a passenger. 

    What will you do with your power? 

    When the candidate I chose – The Green Party’s Diana Toynbee – won with 531 votes, taking 52.9% of the vote, I had a new sensation. I felt like the Muslim Brotherhood in post-revolution Egypt. Wow. We won? Now what do we do? 

    The act of responsibility, of actually being given the opportunity to make decisions, is a heady one, even by the proxy of representative democracy. When it happened, I realised how much potential is wasted when people like me spend most of their lives assuming they are voiceless. 

    Democracy is a great idea

    I could paraphrase Gandhi here. In England, democracy would be a great idea. If we could move on from the notion that the Tories simply run things – outside a few urban Labour areas – we might stop grumbling about them. 

    More importantly, we might learn the lesson the Muslim Brothers briefly learnt in Egypt. That running things is hard. Much harder than living in eternal, angry, impotent opposition to power. 

    Talking of votes, fancy another one on Brexit?

  • The bums lost, Lebowski

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    Desktop computer screen on an office desk in a dark room
    Time for work (Photo by Josh Sorenson)

    In mid-April, Jack Ma – founder of Alibaba – praised the 996 system. 996 means working 9am till 9pm, 6 days a week. In Shenzhen, China’s tech boomtown near Hong Kong and Alibaba’s home, that’s normal. 

    Workin’ 996…

    I was in Shenzhen in January. I spoke to a successful innovator in the tech industry. Like many in this city, he’s an incomer from the Chinese interior. He spoke to me about the reality of the working culture in Shenzhen. 

    “We sacrifice our youth and our health” 

    He told me he was exhausted. He almost never took a holiday and could count the days he hadn’t been to work that year on one hand. “We sacrifice our youth and our health to get a certain comfort,” he explained, before adding: “Collectively, we have made China stronger.”  

    He reached for President Xi Jinping’s little red book and insisted that all that hard work was for a greater good than simply his own. It echoes Jack Ma’s observation about the ‘996 system’ being a “blessing” without which China would “very likely lose vitality and impetus”. 

    Oliver Twist or what?

    It feels reminiscent of Victorian Britain, where such a work culture was for the betterment not only of the individual, but the British Empire. It’s also perhaps the root of the American commitment to a work culture that permits only two weeks’ holiday a year. 

    “The number of slackers has rapidly grown”

    Richard Liu of ecommerce company JD.com concurs. He believes Chinese growth has enlarged the pool of slackers, and that the market will punish Chinese firms. The trouble is, China wants to become a leader in innovation and ideas. These are things people create when they pause, think and perhaps live a little. 

    Industrialisation requires drone workers. But at some stage in the process of no longer being poor, hungry and sick, people are wont to ask: what’s the point? 

    As answers go, ‘To make your country more powerful’ just doesn’t get most people up in the morning. 

    996? Make them work 24/7 if you want, but there’s a ceiling on what you’ll get out of them until you start offering more human answers. 

    Never mind work, what’s school good for?

  • Does shandy have an age limit?

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    Reading Will Self’s novella on Brexit in The New European last week, I read the following:

    “The prime minister’s holed up in Chequers, on the Chiltern fringe. I used to walk out that way, towards Wendover Hill, with my unpatriotic, but deeply beery father, back in the flannel-and-Gannex sixties, when you knew where you stood: in Britain; and what you stood in: leather. We’d stop at the Sundown Inn, and he’d pour half his pint into my lemonade, then we’d stagger on. I’d have been around 10 years old, but it was an innocent era – and when my mother chided my father for giving me watered-down wine at lunch, he’d say, “The French do it”. As if that settled the matter.”

    In its contents, that paragraph was almost a carbon copy of my own childhood, two decades later in the 1980s. That means whatever kind of puritanical tide has engulfed Britain in the meantime, it hadn’t yet happened in the 80s. They, too, must have been an era of innocence. 

    Has it really become unacceptable to give your child a shandy? Or is it still happening quietly behind closed doors up and down the land? I can’t give a definitive answer. My child is 3 years old, which let’s face it is just too young, so I have no primary research to fall back on. 

    “The French do it”

    This is the telling line. It reminds me of my gap year on an Italian farm where the farmer gave me weak red wine in the morning as a thirst quencher while digging potatoes, but where I never saw anyone actually pissed in my entire trip. 

    The French do do it, but like most southern Europeans, they seem to do it steadily and with sobriety. Given the northern tendency towards oblivion, whenever talk turns to allowing a child to drink, it tends to conjure images of a youngster reeling and barfing on a stupid father’s pack of Stella. 

    More interested in food than drink? Here’s an idea for reinventing how we eat

  • Fancy a dinner share?

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    Break bread together (Photo by rithwick. pr)

    A lot of things are becoming shared these days – cars, energy, childcare – yet one of the most everyday and immediate of our needs continues to be atomised: our food. Imagine a community hub that provided a square meal every evening, for everyone to enjoy…

    Surely that’s called a restaurant?

    No, not a restaurant. And no, not a bring-a-quiche community buffet. I’m thinking of something more. Especially in northern European countries – like I’m used to – eating out has always been a bit of a posh thing to do. 

    That’s because the entire economic structure makes it so. The cost of running a restaurant means that the food has to cost a certain amount to be worth preparing – a certain amount more than most people would contemplate more than once a week. 

    Costa del London

    I got a taste of something else in London, where competition is so fierce, and people so time poor, that eating out can happen a lot more often, at much lower cost than small town Britain. But still, it’s a solitary pursuit. And it’s always a one-off transaction. 

    Imagine a place that you subscribed to, paying your monthly rate in order to go to the community kitchen every night – or as often as you like – to eat the meal of the day – on seven-day rotation, reflecting the seasons.

    Now that’s what I call community

    It would eliminate the strange way in which every little household individually buys tiny, pre-plastic packaged pieces of food to take back to their individual tiny kitchens and prepare their individual tiny meals. Imagine the resource savings!

    It’s been done with car sharing. It’s been done with energy where we can sell unused renewable energy back to the grid. Why not with the way we eat? It would also, in the process, have a knock-on effect on our social life. 

    It might mean a reduction in the epidemic of loneliness and alienation. It would mean that, on cold winter evenings in the northern hemisphere, we wouldn’t all be eating our solitary meals, aside from those rare occasions when we thought f*k it and went out for a £15 pizza. 

    • If this is one of those zeitgeist things that’s already happening somewhere, please comment and tell me all about it

    • More urban life brainstorms? How about making cities soft?

  • Why is race so black and white?

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    Why is Barack Obama more black than white? The question of race and the ownership of different racial and therefore cultural spaces is a vexed one. As someone most people would look at and identify as ‘white’, I feel the exclusivity of the discourse. 

    The American banjo player and roots singer Rhiannon Giddens – talking about her latest project Songs of our Native Daughters in Songlines magazine – spoke about the slavery of “my ancestors”. She is the daughter of a European American father and an African American mother. 

    I’ve never taken a DIY DNA test

    If I did, I might discover some unforeseen racial mix. We’re all African if you go back far enough. So why the segregation? And why, when that segregation is defined, is the black identity so wide, and the white identity so stunted?

    For a clue, consider what V. S. Naipaul had to say about ex-slavery societies in the Caribbean, such as Martinique, where he travelled before writing his book The Middle Passage in 1961:

    “Pedigrees are so carefully watched that there is no possibility whatsoever of anyone with the least tincture of Negro blood, however unapparent, passing as white.” 

    This fear of miscegenation runs deep in all American ex-slavery societies, as it does elsewhere in the world. Even in black or Indian communities, an instinctive preference for a lighter shade of skin in pervasive. 

    Perhaps this is at the root of the keen divide in US society today, where anyone with any amount of black ancestry therefore becomes designated, and self-identifies, as black?

    Where does this leave me?

    If my DNA showed up traces of African blood, what then? Could I claim the slaves of the Americas as my ancestors? Or am I condemned to forever be the descendant of oppressors? 

    And can I ever claim fraternity with Barack Obama? He is a politician I hugely admire. He stands for what I stand for. He is culturally my brother. Yet by current social mores, he is ‘black’ and I am ‘white’. We are divided. 

    Read this post for more of my musings on V. S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage

  • What makes you think you’re so special?

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    Exceptionalism is a concept often attached to entire nations or societies. The idea that a nation or people are the exception is attractive. ‘We are God’s chosen ones’ is a sentiment found across national, ethnic, religious and other groups. 

    But what about little ol’ me?

    Think what you will of collective exceptionalism, but I have a confession: I suffer from personal exceptionalism. Is it a curse? Am I delusional? Or could I make an apparent affliction into an asset?

    What I mean by personal exceptionalism is an innate sense that I was meant to be alright, on the winning side, happy and content – that the arc was meant to be a rising one. Is this just dangerously wishful thinking? Perhaps, but could it be useful?

    It’s not fair!

    The obvious pitfall of personal exceptionalism is that it won’t cope with reality. What happens if I’m not alright, if I’m not on the winning side, if I’m not happy and content? Hey, [could be your response] who short-changed me? Was it you, punk? 

    While that dangerous road is there, the more I learn from others, the more I start to see personal exceptionalism as a useful base to start from. It’s what Rick Hanson calls ‘being on your side’. He points out how many of us are not, in our heads, on our own team. We beat ourselves up. 

    At its best, I believe the personal exceptionalism that many of us hold inside ourselves can be used to help us live better. Of course it can be a demon in a dark corner. It can easily be used to tell us how unfair life has been. But it can also be turned into a beacon, reminding us where we could go.

  • Brexit and morality

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    ‘Democracy’ and ‘the right thing to do’: we’ve heard a lot about both from British Prime Minister Theresa May over the past few years. Everyone claims the moral high ground on the issue of Brexit. 

    But this was never about democracy. It was always a power struggle: one that began inside the British Conservative Party and was allowed the spill out of pubs and sitting rooms into the political mainstream. 

    “You don’t want a referendum and neither do I”

    When Mrs May spoke these words in her live address to the nation on 20 March, it was yet another example of the echo chamber politics of Brexit. She has only ever spoken for Leave voters. 

    Mrs May is as instinctively Brexiteer as her opposite number, Jeremy Corbyn. Both have insular notions of a strong, centralised state and are uncomfortable with globalised fluidity. 

    Carry on until you vote the right way

    Before the 2016 referendum, Nigel Farage speculated that if the Leave campaign lost narrowly, it would not be the end of the issue. Yet it was remarkable how quickly Mrs May decided that the wafer-thin result had been the final, definitive will of the entire nation. 

    She persistently repeats the idea that democracy will be fatally undermined by another poll. Yet this isn’t principle, otherwise why does she keep asking MPs to vote again on her Brexit deal?

    Mrs May doesn’t want another referendum because she is happy with the result achieved the first time out. Mr Corbyn is of the same mind, with the subtle difference that he wants to be in Number 10 instead of Mrs May.

    But don’t mind me. It turns out I’m so old the only politician I understand anymore is the Right Honourable Ken Clarke. 

  • Ever wanted to be a bear?

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    Silver birch trees next to a frozen lake in Finland
    Prime swinging trees in Finland

    Last month, I met a woman in Finland who teaches what she terms “evolution training”. Since I love moving outdoors – and particularly love swinging from trees – I immediately wanted to know more. She told me. 

    Her name is Pauliina Toivanen. She is not only a natural movement trainer, but also a serious snowboarder, surfer and wild food forager.

    How to start moving like an animal

    “You start from the human and go down through the animals. You start using more of your body,” Pauliina explains. Step 1: move like normal. Just walk. Step 2: move like you would if you were riding a horse. 

    That’s where being human ends. “Next, move like a bear, then a pig, rabbit, lizard and worm,” says Pauliina. “That’s what children do. They have to build their body from worming movements.” 

    Now here’s the neat part:

    “Finally, go back to walking like a human and realize that you usually don’t use many muscles.” The resulting awareness is what Pauliina terms – in true somatic language – “a good natural scan of your body”. 

    So, to recap…

    • Step 1: Walk like normal
    • Step 2: Move like you would if you were riding a horse
    • Step 3: Move like a bear
    • Step 4: Move like a pig
    • Step 5: Move like a rabbit
    • Step 6: Move like a lizard
    • Step 7: Move like a worm
    • Step 8: Walk like normal again

    Try it. Go on, no one’s watching…

    Want more ideas like this? Check out my post: You are how you sit

    Want more Baltic natural madness? Check this out: The Baltic cure for fear

    Want to learn more about somatic natural movement? Click here

  • Christianity for export

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    Naipaul book The Middle Passage sitting on a travel trunk
    Travels in the West Indies

    Christianity is an imported religion to anyone who’s not from the Middle East. This may be a historical fact, yet it’s often overlooked. I am reminded of it by V. S. Naipaul’s reflections on “the faith of the heathen convert” in his 1961 travelogue of the West Indies, The Middle Passage. 

    “Indian girls not good.”

    Naipaul is being led through the Guyanese jungle by two Amerindian teenage boys from a local Christian mission. One of the boys says he wants to marry, but not an Amerindian girl: “Indian girls not good. They don’t know anything.” By anything the boy means, of course, anything of Western civilization. 

    “The missionary must first teach self-contempt.” 

    For anyone outside the eastern Mediterranean to embrace Christianity wholeheartedly, must they inevitably renounce something of their own heritage? Is there something fundamentally alien to the land in which it lies that a British country church is full of references to Middle Eastern places and people? 

    Naipaul was reflecting on the more visceral import of Christianity from a colonizer to the colonized, and from the slave-owner to the slave. Christianity was initially a racial faith in the West Indies. It enabled the European plantation owners to divide the population into (white) Christians and everyone else. 

    “The Berbice slave rebellion of 1762 was a war between Christians and rebels. The captured rebels were tried for ‘Christian murder’.” 

    This reflection of course makes the conversion to Christianity across the entire ex-colonial world problematic. Is it a final vestige of European domination? Can it ever be detached from that history? And to what extent is the Christianity of Britain a vestige of its subordination to Rome? 

    All quotes: V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage, p. 160, Picador, 2001