Leave something nice

A quick glance at this blog and you'll see that these days I scarcely do blog posts any more. No one seems to want them. Instead, I do tweets. No one wants those either, but at least they take up less time. Here's my latest one:

I understand not going gently into that good night. But that's no reason to kick the nurse.

This post is intended to be a footnote to the above, just in case it's not clear enough. Shouldn't take long, but you never know with me. Sometimes I need to say quite a lot to know what I think.

The Dylan Thomas reference: it was his dying father he was on about. Now I don't know what sort of a Dad Dylan had: maybe he was the sweetest and wisest of souls, maybe he was a bit of a plonker, maybe he was a dispenser of frequent beatings like the one I had. Point is, he was (we gather from the poem) on his deathbed, and he was Dylan's dad. And the thing about when Dad is on his deathbed is, it doesn't seem to matter whether he was a bit of a plonker or not. You want him to not die, regardless. You tell him not to. 

"Doesn't seem to matter..."? Not good enough, the starmers of this world retort. That's not an argument. It's not even universally true. There are "cultures" out there (I use the term inadvisedly) where deaths in the family are not only celebrated, but participated in with quite unseemly alacrity ("honour killins", they call it, killin it). Thus, it is possible to at least envision a society (a British society, let's say, for the sake of plausibility) in which telling one's father not to go gentle into that good night - worse, doing so in public, in a tweet, or in a chance word exchanged over lollipops - might lead to arrest and imprisonment, on the grounds that the dad in question, like all terrestrial dads, was a thoroughly bad apple and that lamenting his death therefore constitutes a confession of the sort of unseemly nostalgia for an unenlightened past that, for judicial purposes and with a little spectral handwaving, we might describe as "offensive".

OK, so no one's been arrested yet for mourning their father. But they have been (see link above) for mourning their dead or dying, or anyhow increasingly unrecognisable, neighbourhood. And from a certain angle, mine anyway, it seems to me we're really talking about the same thing.

You, dear reader, probably won't get this unless you've celebrated quite a few birthdays, or read Chekhov, but take it from me: unless you're some sort of celebrity, there will come a time when you become a wheezing, pouchy old fucker in a bath chair, a taaa ta-ta man (in B, Fenby!) or daa da-da woman, an embarrassment to those around you, an anachronism (d'ye ken John Peel, with his sessions so gay?), with incomprehensible tastes and disgusting habits - a boomer, in short. And when this happens, that's when you'll know, finally, what a culture is.

There are (still) people who view "culture" aspirationally, as something you can have more of or less of, the best people naturally having more. Nah, don't think so. That's not culture, that's just being a snob. Culture, so we're clear, is whatever you were marinaded in when you were a kid. Reportedly, people today never stop being kids (I envy them, if so) - anyway, if that's true, then culture is what you're being marinaded in now. Me, like most of my generation I suspect. I stopped absorbing culture sometime in my twenties or thirties, and had difficulty way before that. I guess the watershed might have been puberty, as I've hinted elsewhere. When you're a kid, what is there? There's colour, marbles, the neighbourhood, the abattoir down the end of the road with the strange smells, there's the corner shop with the Bensons et Haies on permanent display in their sacramental niche, there's climbing trees and wanting to live in them, honoured among Wagon Wheels, there's plastic water pistols in Opal Fruits hues, there's the top 40 on the car radio on the way back from Nan's on Sunday, there's the poems and stories you read, in which the thing you recall is that if you ever have an old woman in a sack you have to poke her with your finger and say "look you, look you". That's culture. But once you hit puberty, it's pretty much over. All there is after that, is tits. Tits and work. Work for the sake of tits. "Culture" (or a reasonable facsimile of) for the sake of tits. And by the time the testosterone starts to decline and falter, and you remember you used to assemble Airfix Spitfires and wish you still could, and discover there is more to life than just tits, you're an ankylosaurus in odd socks. Culture has passed you by, and has other playmates now. 

Nah, but you're different. You remain open to life, to new experience and new ideas. You're not some backward-looking gammon-faced farty apoplectic tosser in a wheelchair harrumphing about the good old days. You sure, though? See, all I'm saying is that leaving genes aside (and I'm not aware there's any gene for honor killins, or liking the Beatles, so yeah, I think we can leave them aside) we are all what we were marinaded in, we are an accumulation of our experiences, some of which we would like to keep alive, if possible. Culture, in this light, is what we can't get outside of, because it went into our construction. It's whatever - family, music, books, trees, food, language, courtship display protocols, virgin-dispensing desert god c/w paedophile prophet - you will get up off your arse and actually go out and defend, if you have to, because without it there's no you.

And the problem we're having now, it seems, in the UK at any rate, is that some of that stuff is shared.

Anyone who knows me will be able to assure you I'm not a community-minded person. It's not that I don't like people, it's just that I'm not very good at being with people. Over the years, for the sake of a label, I've tried, or others have offered: shy, aphasic, depressed, timid, mildly autistic, maybe Aspergers, reserved (my teachers offered me that), quiet, lumpish, Catholic, "British" (covers a multitude), social phobic, or let's try this: not exactly the life and soul. In passing, it's worth pointing out that being a comprehensive social failure has its good points, among which, you get to spend time ruminating on why people are the way they are, and noticing how much, despite appearances, you are like them, and they you. (You can also sink more pints if you're not gabbing to people.) But the reason I mention being a social washout is simply so you don't get the idea I'm one of those Us vs Them folk. I don't have an Us, never did: never been invited if truth be told. An awkward Brit permanently resident in Ecuador could scarcely pretend to belong to an Us without becoming the butt of justified hilarity. The Them-creating algorithm in my head still sputters into life from time to time, usually with the aid of Twitter, but it's old and increasingly unreliable. So yeah, I'm just me.

And it's in my capacity as Just Me that I too, at the risk of being deported to the UK and imprisoned, lament the neighbourhood going to the dogs. Which neighbourhood? Which dogs? Does it matter? No, really, does it? If you insist, though: I wish there were still passenger pigeons and great auks. I wish there were still red squirrels south of Nottingham. I wish there were still smoke-filled pubs (no, mon cher zoomer, we did not all die in a great heap). I wish there were still pop songs you could actually listen to. I wish there were cold days, rainy days. I wish there were still coal mines, and Brazilian rain forests, and US presidents who could form a coherent sentence, and genuinely funny TV programs, and Barrett's sherbet fountains, and phone boxes (great for sheltering in if you're in Uxbridge on a subzero winter's night) and Sunday matinee films in which there's a fetching brunette who needs to be rescued from the crafty villain. I wish there were old maids cycling to Holy Communion old copies of Mayfair lying around in woods in the morning mist. You get the idea. I'm just normal, you see. Not "far-right" at all, as far as I can tell: just some pathetic old geezer feeling sad about the way things disappear, and wishing some things wouldn't. And by my reading, this makes me the sort of person your average starmer wants to lock up for as long as possible, even if they have to drag me across the Atlantic to do so. Not for being violent, not for offending people (I probably do sometimes without meaning to - doesn't everyone?) but merely for this: for being sad when things disappear, disappear into that good night from which nothing ever, ever comes back.

(Re: violence. It should go without saying, but as the tweet goes, "don't kick the nurse". It's not her fault you're about to snuff it. She's just here to change the pillowcase.)

The UK riots, to be clear, are to my mind about a conveniently ugly, pasty-faced boomer generation in a creaking, impoverished backwater nation on the northern edge of Europe not wanting to die just yet. And as so often, this not wanting something that's inevitably going to happen anyway gets rationalised as follows: OK, so yeah I'm gonna die, but a part of me will live on, in _______ . You fill in the blank. Maybe - here's a thought - ask them? Sir, Madam, what would you like to be still around after you pop off? Chrissakes, you'll say: you boomers, so fucking entitled, half the things you don't want to disappear have already been declared National Treasures, and have fences round them, and have half price admittance for OAPs. All right, maybe that's true. On the other hand, maybe if you ask the question you'll get a surprise. Maybe it's not so much statues of old war heroes and university buildings named after celebrated racists that people want to keep. Maybe it's more the recollection of how you used to play in the street and parents didn't need to know where you were. Maybe it's being able to wander back home after the disco in a short skirt unmolested (never tried it myself, but reportedly it used to be possible). Maybe it's being able to have a quiet Sunday morning pottering in the garden without having to listen to some bloody muezzin. Maybe it's ... I dunno, I'm the last person to speculate, me being a complete hermit. I go by what I read, mostly, and that's what people are saying: they wish things were more like how they used to be, whatever that was. Do you still want to blame them?

About statues, since I mentioned them. I used to walk every day to school past the statue of a bloke called Sir Scoffleby McToffleby (this is a lie, by the way, but bear with me). I never found out who this Scoffleby McToffleby was. Some Victorian gentleman, probably. Point is: pigeons used to sit on his head. Once, a kitten was found nestling in his shiny breech pocket. On one memorable occasion, me and Amanda Taylor had a bit of a snog round the back, under his cast-iron coattails.  When you saw Scoffleby, you knew you were turning into Spittle Street. That, convenient fictional anecdotes apart, is what statues are: street furniture, objects people grow up with, like trees. To see them as political statements is almost unbelievably crass and stupid. No normal person sees them that way. They may once have been, OK. when they were cast and erected and inaugurated with great snippery of scissor blades by the fat Mayor: but that was then. Since then, they've insinuated themselves into people's life experience, and become Culture. Culture, once again, isn't knowing who Scoffleby was, still less agreeing with his no doubt picturesque views on the Yellow Peril. Culture is that snog round the back of Sir Toffleby's coat. Culture is the bit that actually matters to you, and it's why sane people are no more gleeful about cutting down statues than about cutting down trees: all you're doing is losing something, if only something smallish, clumsily wrought and guano-encrusted. It's still something as opposed to nothing, which is generally what statues tend to get  replaced with.

Now, it so happens that most of my culture isn't shared by many other people, at least living people, so I can be more philosophically fatalistic about it all being bulldozed and turned into shopping centres. But I sort of get people who do actually share a surprising amount of stuff wanted to defend it collectively. As I've said, you can pretty much define culture as those things people are prepared to defend. Of course throwing bricks at the police isn't a very good way of defending a culture. But not many people actually do that: mostly, as far as I can tell, they (a) stand around in the street looking a bit sad, and (b) complain on Twitter. And it's both these things, especially the second, that your average starmer is currently locking people up for, for no perceptible reason other than that your average starmer is - genetically as far as I can tell - a bitter, resentful, bumbling, authoritarian twat. (No offence, Keir.)

Let's zoom out a bit. I read at the beginning of this week that various Asian countries, notably Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi, are going to become uninhabitable in the next 20-25 years or so as a result of global warming. That's quite a lot of millions of people who are going to need to migrate elsewhere. Concurrently, Brits and Europeans have pretty much stopped having kids. These are very large, macro trends for which there are no realistic palliatives at scale. It's therefore a foregone conclusion, whether you approve of it or not, that the UK (and probably most of Europe) is going to become majority Muslim in your or your children's lifetime. What does this mean? A lot of this is arguable, but as far as I can tell it means things like: the end, definitively, of free speech (there'll be blasphemy laws probably within the next 10 years), of free assembly, of gender equality, of gay marriage, of pubs and of drunken Welsh poets. Very likely it will mean the end of what anyone alive today would recognise as literary, pictorial or musical art. The idea that it's OK to address a dying father with a message of defiance in the form of a poem will also probably not survive the holocaust. A lot of venerable buildings, statues and landmarks will be defaced and toppled. Charles will announce his conversion and become an emir. No one in Europe will ever see the sun reflected off a woman's calves again. Overall, one suspects that life for everyone will become even more miserable than global warming, and the breakdown of global food supply chains, in and of themselves have already decreed. These are just facts, immune to how you may feel about them. That Muslim majority countries turn into shithole countries (defined as "countries people want to migrate from") in a relatively short time is one of the very few absolute historico-statistical certainties we have.

All you can do is decide how to react in the face of the whirlwind that is going to carry you off. ("You", by the way, means all of yous: when Andromeda meets the Milky Way, if not before, we're all toast. As Keynes said with uncharacteristic perspicuity: in the long run, we're all dead.)

Which brings me to the title. You are not going to win anything, certainly not a "culture war", and neither are your enemies. Entropy is implacable. "Sustainability" is a fairy tale. Whatever it is you think you're saving, it's not going to last very long. So, bugger the future: do something nice today, make something nice, surround yourself with nice things and nice people, and leave something nice behind. "Defend" your culture today not by being a nuisance in the street but by living it, or by evoking it, however the hell you want, and let the average starmers do their worst. There are, increasingly, a lot worse things in life than ending up in a UK prison. You could, for example, be in Venezuela.