In A Regular Column Stylee

Caerwys, 17th - 23rd August 2003

This holiday in Wales was framed by two curious dreams. Before driving
down here our rabbit escaped, and due to constrictions of time - I had
to drop her off at my sister-in-laws - I had to dive at her rather
brutally and hold her tight as she struggled against me. That night at
the lodge in Clwyd I dreamt that I had caught a huge butterfly, and
could only hold it by cupping both hands. It had a strange, leathery
texture, rather like a balloon coated lightly in olive oil; and it
tried to escape by inflating itself, and turning from red to green and
back again. It is bizarre how these events manifest themselves in the
sub-conscious. Then on the last night, I dreamt of teaching my first
evening class in A-Level Business Studies, and I was completely
unprepared. It is this latter dream that concerned me more; as if it
was some kind of indication of an unsatisfactory attitude to life.
Throughout the ordeal I kept thinking: "What will the student feedback
forms say?" It seems that I am destined to have these kind of
disconcerting, enigmatic dreams rather than the purely air-headed,
cheerful variety, like naked women wrestling in jam. Bugger!

I am sat at the dinner table reading the Sunday Times. Photographs of
Idi Amin on the event of his passing. One of the corpulent Amin being
carried into a 1975 conference by four besuited white businessmen,
probably the kind who love to do business with corrupt and violent
dictators. Unfortunately there is something personally admirable about
Amin. This is typical of the type of despot who - like Saddam Hussein -
never really answered for his tyranny because he always had the big
ugly West to rail against. Like Stalin before him, Saddam would argue
that he had to be cruel; innocent people had to be trampled, because of
the legacy of national disunity and under-development left by the West;
in his case the British Empire. Personal accounts of meetings with
dictators such as Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini have often revealed them
to be personally likeable men. The avuncular moustache of Stalin and
Saddam is not simply the fruit of propaganda: there is something innate
in seeing them to be benevolent family men; not necessarily
demonstrative in their affections, but protective and comforting in
their own way.

The accompanying article featured a quote from a Blairite official
whose family had been expelled from Uganda in 1972. Her attitude spoke
volumes as to the unsatisfactory nature of the non-ideological liberal
when confronted with that type of oriental despotism: she actually
heralded Amin's death - in comfort and relative peace at the age of
eighty - as a punishment from God. God must be a liberal too, as his
punishments for crimes against humanity certainly seem to tend towards
leniency. This is the lily-livered centre-left response to the likes of
Amin - imagining that posterity has taken care of him when the West -
hampered all along by those toadying businessmen - lacked the guts to
do so.

Returning to my first point, it must be stressed that like other
dictators of the so-called 'Third World', Amin tended to strike a chord
with disadvantaged groups in other nations, particularly as they did
not have to live under his rule. Calling himself King of Scotland was
the ultimate in tragic-comic flamboyance. Effectively I think what Amin
was saying was: "look at me on my throne with my robes. Isn't it
ridiculous?" and in this case he is surely correct. It is vulgar and
stupid for anyone to call themselves king of anything. Amin, despite
his immense crimes, is a funny man.

There were more troubling discussions of the future of the male of the
species, centring around the quite unflinching revelations of an Oxford
geneticist that due to the progressive degeneration of the Y
chromosome, a time will come (in around 125,000 years) when males are
no longer born. Of course this is hardly grounds for immediate panic,
but speaking as man there is something intensely irritating at the
gleeful amusement of this particular scientist at his thesis. I am
drawn to wondering how best to personally smear him. There is the
possibility that he is utterly wrong, or perhaps simply one of those
load-mouthed egotists periodically thrown up by the academic
establishment, but many feminists will undoubtedly be rubbing their
hands at the thought of a world without men.

In rejecting the class struggle in favour of banal and repetitive
intrigues over gender, mainstream feminism seems to have accepted the
tenets of capitalism almost uncritically. The heroine of this type of
thinking tends to be the high-flying career woman - the utterly amoral
materialist cow who gets away with everything and claims to be
'progressive' by simple virtue of her reproductive organs. A world
populated entirely by this specimen would almost surely perish within a
generation or two as most of its children would die of neglect. Perhaps
we men should content ourselves with this thought. The whole
gender-political debate smacks of a form of millenarianism, and all the
ethical and semantic laziness this implies. The worst things imaginable
can be brought upon men as a gender, because of the actions of
successive ruling classes throughout the historical development of the
human race. It seems odd that to level the most outrageous libels at
blacks, Jews or Muslims is illegal and reprehensible, but to do so
against all men is automatically accepted. But then there are always
the few exceptions - the Indian beggar, the Burmese peasant, the
Palestinian stone-thrower. The common refrain of racist football
hooligans springs to mind: "They are mans, but you're alright 'cos
you're me mate." Of course there will be no Idi Amin in the female-only
world of the future, but certain features of this coming civilization
are inevitable; namely unendurable tedium and self-righteous
cant.

Our lodge is right on the edge of a small lake which I think has been
artificially created in a slate mine or brick works/quarry, like
something from Hemingway's Islands in the Stream. The place looks like
an archetypal relic of nineteenth century industrialism. I took two
volumes of George Orwell's collected works, covering the middle of the
second world war. It rings true somehow; to read tales of the end of
the world in this half-forgotten little place. There are a few rainbow
trout in the lake, plus the usual ducks, geese and swans, the odd
moorhen, heron and wagtail. Best of all is the preponderance of bats at
night - swarms of them - which swoop disarmingly close to one's face.
The whole place gives an ambience of peace, tranquillity, yet also to
the over-stimulated post-modern mind; boredom. Yet in this it is surely
the lake and not post-modernity which is correct. The contemporary
Westerner, with his frantic gesticulations and his art-school sneer,
portends loudly and confidently to be full but is in reality as hollow
as a New Labour promise.

I understand now why my fiction - sparse though it is - tends to be
centred upon intrigues that are essentially hopeless and futile, and
set amidst the decaying ruins of a collapsed post-industrial
civilization. I find myself wishing for the knowledge and skills needed
to survive in such a world. As a bare minimum I've made a start by my
father-in-law introducing me to fishing. Of course such a collapse
probably won't happen, but a return to some form of earlier
agricultural civilization, at least in some sense - spiritual at least,
might be no bad thing. Or on the other hand, I may be simply making the
familiar mistake of the anti-capitalist reactionary by imagining that
true 'rustics' are not really poor because they live in beautiful
surroundings. All this is romantic and in the last analysis utterly
ill-judged. It leads me to thoughts of a review by Peter Gibbs
(formerly of the Western Goals Institute) of a novel by Julian Barnes -
I forget the title. Gibbs wrote approvingly of a future Britain which
had returned to an agricultural past, with its chief export cheese.
Britain was the poorest country in Europe, and was 'depopulated', or in
other words, there was no-one darker than Rudyard Kipling. This is of
course a selfish impulse, a misanthropic desire to escape the ugliness
of the contemporary world, and to go back to a time of large families
and back-breaking labour. It is nothing but a futile yearning for the
internationalists and feminists to go away, and I have absolutely no
desire to see my children driving oxen at six years old.

Anyway, it is nice to daydream. While walking along the Offa's Dyke
path it seemed as if it could almost be 1003 and not 2003. The silence
save for the wind in the trees and the distant sound of running water,
combined with the semi-permanent odour of 'five different types of
shit.'

More hubris in the news - a group of Parisian 'bohemians' leading
'unconventional lifestyles' or, in other words, the worst of both
worlds. Lots of money allied to a desire for 'decadence' which makes
ostentatious display 'screamingly fashionable'. This is essentially the
stench of Bloomsbury re-constituted; the kind of creatures who are
'rabidly socialist' but don't really want anything to change. They are
a perfectly useless breed - there is nothing emptier on God's earth.
The likes of the jewellery designer Loulou de la Falaise ('Yves Saint
Laurent's official muse') may speak of the 'fantasy and freedom of
hippydom', but how many nostalgics have ever recognized the material
comfort needed for such an existence? 'Hippydom' is for ordinary
working people as distant and unreal as winning the lottery. The
'bohemian' set desire roughly 'leftward' shifts while blissfully
unaware that a true socialist society would deem them morally bankrupt
and move for their social extinction. Amazingly La Falaise says of
Saint Laurent: "he hates rich, bourgeois followers of fashion', so
perhaps the idea of a difference of degree not being a difference is
not a fallacy after all. The bohemians are 'not anti-money but prefer
to earn it'. How this is not bourgeois - in fact the essence of the
capitalist dream - is anyone's guess.

This cosmopolitan infestation seems to have spread to elsewhere in the
Sunday Times. I speak chiefly of two writers: Louise Brown, a
thirty-something who slept with some bloke a few years ago then
subsequently decided she probably hadn't wanted to, and Maria McErlane:
"The struggle with alcohol/smoking/weight gain/exercise/body image
affects us all, no matter what gender or sexual persuasion." Of course
I shouldn't complain. I should simply imagine myself a smug and
contented AB professional - the Times' core market. Can such people
really have nothing else to worry about? I don't know whether to envy
them or not.

To the telly, and Channel Four's 'Masters and Servants' seems to have
been originally designed purely to irritate. What it did achieve and
what it's producers most certainly did not intend was to starkly
illustrate the destructive effect of excessive materialism on the human
soul. The family from Warrington - presided over by the orange
Christine topped with cast iron black hair - were perfect specimens of
lower middle class vulgarity and ignorance. She was a shallow braying
pantomime cow, her husband a boorish and throroughly unpleasant
self-righteous shit-head. When taking their turn as 'servants' in the
house of the other family they quickly descended into infantile insults
of the most personal kind, transparently because the family in question
had a large conservatory. The lifestyles of the two families were
simply too comparable for comfort, so the erstwhile Christine had to
preserve her superiority somehow. It goes to show how quickly a certain
section of the petty bourgeoisie will resort to forms of fascism, as
soon as the question of who is 'considerably richer than yow' becomes
ambiguous.

Bollocks to that, and on to happier things. In addition to Orwell,
holiday reading included 'The Forever War'; a sci-fi novel by Vietnam
veteran Joe Haldeman. The work possesses some clear allegorical
references to Vietnam: the human army has to train in extreme and
forbidding conditions (on Pluto's moon Charon); the alien enemy is
mysterious at first but upon engaging them the human soldiers are
gripped by empathy and grief. The 'good guys' are fed xenophobic hatred
by hypnotic suggestion, which leaves them traumatized. Perhaps the most
telling feature is the curious time-dilation which means that for every
few months the troops pass in inter-galactic warfare in deep space,
centuries have passed back on Earth. The blurb on the back undoubtedly
rings as true for Haldeman as it does for his protagonist: 'When I
return as a veteran they won't even speak my language?'