Why Does America Like Me?

Ive been to the States a few times. I had a great visit to Atlanta once, and an unforgettable holiday driving around the South West, starting and ending in the Rockies, oh and I gave a paper at a conference at Stanford Uni one time and stayed a few days in Palo Alto and that was terrific. So I've got some fond memories of beautiful places and lovely people.

That's why it makes me a tiny bit guilty sometimes that here in this blog, (and the other one) I tend to be rather critical of the place. It's why I've been pretty quiet this time around about the Republican primaries (although, I have to say, that guy Santorum is a certifiable nutjob - and the War on Women makes me shudder - but let's not go there). It's hard to listen to the GOP's insane rantings without wanting to lay into them with a syringe full of antipsychotics, or an axe. I thought G W Bush was bad, but this year's crop is just scary.

So, as an antidote, I'd really just like to say thank you to the good people of America for all the support they've given me over the past few years. Consistently, I find that five times as many Americans than, say, Australians or Brits, read my blogs - even though I come from the UK and now live in Oz. Better still, ten times as many Americans have bought my novel, TimeSplash, than Brits, (and ten times more Brits have bought it than Aussies)! That is just amazingly kind of you all.

So, to the thousands and thousands of Americans who have been helping me out over the past few years: Thank You. You guys are great. Sorry about all the carping. And I hope you get your economy fixed soon, and you don't get saddled with too big a loony at the next general election, and you finally sort out that church and state thing you've been having so much trouble with.

TimeSplash Twitter Tour Starts Now!

The TimeSplash Non-Stop 24-hour Round-the-World Twitter Tour starts soon. The process is complicated but all you need to know is that I'll be in your timezone between 7pm and 8pm during the next 24 hours. To shout out to me as I go by, send me a tweet on Twitter.

This is my Twitter ID: @graywave ( http://twitter.com/graywave )

I'll be using the hashtag #timesplash if you'd like to follow the whole thing (and have lots of stamina and a very high tolerance for me saying "Hello New York", "Hola Argentina" "Gruetzi Switzerland" and such for the next 24 hours.)

Don't forget to shout. And if you know people in odd places, tell them to shout out too. I've a feeling some parts of this are going to be very lonely :-}

The Price of Christmas

I see that a priest in York, England has recommended that his parishioners steal the things they need this Christmas since no-one else is going to help them out. Is conspiracy to commit a mortal sin a sin too? The theology could get tricky. However, the humanity is plain and simple. The plight of the homeless in the UK - while not nearly so bas as that of the homeless in the USA - is heart-wrenching. No decent person can witness it without revolting against the system that creates and sustains it.

And that system is capitalism.

Christmas may be a good time to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The food heaped on our plates, the mostly-unwanted gifts, the treats and indulgences, the lights and the shiny, plastic baubles, all have to be paid for.

In a capitalist society, the payment is made by the consumer - you and me - from money we get by selling our labour to the people who control the capital. They get their money by selling the product of our labour back to us in the form of meals, plastic baubles and so on. The magic of capitalism is that, by this process, capital increases. Somehow value is added by the act of production. Where does it come from?

It comes from various kinds of exploitation, but two in particular: the exploitation of workers, and the exploitation of the environment. Workers are exploited by not paying them anything like the value of their product would suggest they should be paid. The excess goes to the owners of the capital. These days, when workers in the consuming countries ask to be paid more fairly, their jobs, and the exploitation, are moved overseas to places where workers are paid even less and can be more thoroughly exploited. That this leaves people with no source of income because they have lost the ability to sell their labour, might be seen as a bad thing, but for capitalism it is good, it means that labour becomes a plentiful commodity that can now be bought more cheaply. (This is also one of the reasons why capitalists like population growth.) It means that the workers who were once in danger of earning enough that they were no longer so badly exploited, but who lost their jobs, are now forced get new jobs at lower wages and be properly exploited again. To keep capital growing, exploitation of workers has to be increasingly efficient and widespread. It is called 'productivity'.

Even so, you can only take the exploitation of workers so far before the rate of increase declines. For capital to keep on growing you have to keep pumping new wealth into the system. That's where the environment comes in. Along with people's work, the environment is the source of all wealth. Fuels and materials dug from the ground, animals and plants taken or farmed in the seas and on the land, are the raw feedstock of capitalism. To keep capital growing, the people with access to these resources, must keep acquiring them in ever-larger amounts. The consumption of raw materials by our 'primary industries' is nothing less than the consumption of our planet. With increasing speed, capitalism is taking whatever is usable from the world, using it to fuel growth, and dumping the rest as polluting slag - on the land, in the seas, and in the air. What's more, like the exploitation of workers, the exploitation of the environment must also be driven to ever-greater efficiency.

It is clear to everyone who thinks about these things, that capitalism cannot survive forever - or even for very much longer - without finding more things to exploit. The 'global market' has now, pretty much included every possible worker on the planet in capitalism's web of exploitation. There is plenty of of opportunity for growth there still, but the resource - us - is finite. The environment is starting to show signs of breaking down under the strain. Global warming, peak oil, extinctions of fish stocks, and global food shortages, are all signs that we are using up what is there at an unsustainable rate.

Technology has always been capitalism's friend. The need for more efficient exploitation has always driven technological development. The people who control capital - and the people who depend on its products - are in a precarious position just now. It looks as if the environment might collapse, or run out of key materials, before technological fixes have been found for these problems. We need new places to exploit - the asteroids? other planets? - before this one runs dry. We need ways to keep the environment patched up long enough to bring these new resources online. And, we need more efficient ways to exploit labour (global recessions are good for capitalism, but they do carry the risk of revolution.)

Capitalism is great for the owners of capital, it's not bad for many of the rest of us either (as long as we temper its worst excesses with democracy,) but it isn't a free lunch. In the end, we will have to pay the price for all this wealth.

Some, like the homeless, the people on welfare, and the working poor, already pay that price for us. It is by putting a certain proportion of us in such misery that capitalism ensures the low cost of labour and hence adequate returns on investment for the owners of capital. The suffering of the starving and the homeless in our cities is helping to put the lights on our trees, the iPods in our pockets, and the piles of food on our plates this Christmas.

Is it really so bad if they snatch a can of ravioli from a supermarket shelf in their desperation?

Australia is Endangering Global Democracy

Just thought I'd point this out in case any Rudd government ministers are reading.

Even children's groups like Save the Children oppose the Australian government's plans to censor the Internet. Since the government censorship plans are ostensibly to protect children, surely this should give them pause.

Or maybe they would rather just go ahead and put their censorship technologies in place and then come clean about the real reason they're doing this? On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't. Their whole attitude seems to be, "Stuff you, Australia, we're going to censor the Internet and nobody can stop us."

Maybe other Western countries should start agitating against this move. After all, once one Western democracy has taken complete control of the Internet and what its citizens can see there (yes, just like China) won't other Western governments want to do the same? Once there is a precedent, it will be much easier for this to happen in the USA and the UK too.

The scary thing is, no-one seems to understand the danger that government-controlled Internet filtering poses to Australian democracy. Why is there no national and international outcry against this?

Good on ya Joanna

I was born just ten years after World War 2 ended. I was raised in Hull in Yorkshire, a major fishing and cargo port and one of the worst-bombed cities in England. When I was a kid, my friends and I played 'Jerrys and English' in the bombed out ruins of buildings still not yet rebuilt. Every adult male I knew back then had been in the army or the navy. All my friends' fathers, and all their grandfathers too. My own paternal grandfather was bed-ridden all the time I knew him because of injuries sustained in the war.

I don't know how kids view war these days. I imagine they don't see it in the way we did. Since World War 2, wars have become shabbier and less honourable. The disgraceful invasion of Iraq makes even Vietnam seem marginally reasonable. Yet everyone I knew as a child was proud of what we did in World War 2. We had stood firm against oppression. We had saved the world from tyranny. We had been brave and strong.

And among all the many stories I heard in those days, of bravery and courage and skill, the stalwart loyalty and fierce bravery of the Gurkhas was often mentioned.

I think, like many other Brits, I was astonished to discover that Gurkhas who had served in the British Army Brigade of Gurkhas had no automatic right to settle in Britain on leaving the army. I was also shocked to discover that a sly deal at the time of Partition had left the Gurkhas with a reduced pension compared to other British Army servicemen.

For some years now, there has been a campaign to achieve better rights for Gurkha ex-servicemen. Small wins have happened from time to time but the big battle - for their right to settle in Britain - has only just been won. After a surprise 'first day motion' defeat for the Government (the first since 1978) the British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, announced that "All Gurkha veterans who retired before 1997 with at least four years service will be allowed to settle in the UK". As Nick Clegg, a UK politician quite rightly said, it was "a victory for decency" and "the kind of thing people want this country to do."

Certainly it is what people of my generation would want, people who heard the admiration and respect in the voices of our forebears when they spoke of the brave and loyal Gurkhas.

But there is still work to be done on the Gurkha's behalf. We still need to ensure that Gurkha Brigade veterans receive full pensions in the UK. But, as 'Gurkha Justice Campaign' lawyer David Enright says, "that is for tomorrow". Today, he and other campaign leaders - including figurehead and active campaigner Joanna Lumley, whose father was an officer in a Gurkha regiment - are celebrating yesterday's tremendous victory.

Jobs, Justice and Climate

In the UK yesterday, Trades Union Congress general secretary, Brendan Barber, said this to world leaders assembling for the G20 summit meeting next week. "The old ideas of unregulated free markets do not work, and have brought the world's economy to near-collapse, failed to fight poverty and have done far too little to move to a low-carbon economy."

The Metropolitan Police estimate that 35,000 people marched through London on the 'Put People First' demonstration, the first of many events planned for the G20 summit. Put People First's slogan is "jobs, justice and climate".

With civil unrest growing across Europe as job losses mount and the recession bites ever harder, I really hope that the G20 leaders are listening. We've had decades of unfettered greed and government-backed corporate callousness, the rich have got richer and the poor have starved. The fiction that 'economic growth' will filter down to the poorest and make everybody better off has been exposed, and the future is looking bleak for working people everywhere as the value of their pensions has halved in a single year.

We might struggle through this recession but worse ones are coming. Peak oil is nearly upon us. Climate change is now unstoppable. The population is still growing and resources are still dwindling. Economic growth has natural limits and we are reaching them. Managing global capitalism requires more skill and ability than the world's capitalists and their governments are able to provide.

This is the kind of future that leads to uprising. It is the kind of future that leads to riots and even revolution. I hope the G20 leaders, isolated as they are from real life by their power and wealth, do not underestimate the amount of anger there is among the people they have been exploiting for so long. That crowd of 35,000 in London is the tip of an iceberg of resentment and disgust. It could easily turn from a peaceful march with reasonable requests into a furious mob, burning effigies and storming the parliament.

McCain Makes A Hideous Mistake

I've mentioned before what an idiot presidential wannabe John McCain is. Well this week he rose to new heights of folly by choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running-mate.

What makes a man - even a man who can't think straight - choose a woman who is known as 'the barracuda' to help him run the country? Why, when America is reeling from the right wing fundamentalism of George Bush Jr., would he think that picking a tough-minded, right-wing ideologue would help him win the hearts and minds of the voters. This woman has a lifetime membership of the National Rifle Association for Heaven's sake! She likes shooting things - living things! She thinks it's fun to kill animals! (Not foetuses though - she's a rabid anti-abortionist, of course. But I imagine she approves of the death penalty so she won't mind killing grown-ups. She definitely thinks the Bush Administration is being to soft on polar bears by declaring them a protected species and would prefer the great hairy things not to be around eating fish and hanging out while her friends the oil companies ravage Alaska.)

Let's face it, McCain is no spring chicken. If anyone is dumb enough to vote for McCain, this woman could become President!

Can I make a plea to all my American readers: for your own sakes, don't vote McCain. Now that he has this Palin creature gnashing and slavering at his heels, his presidency could turn into something even worse than Bush's. And if you don't believe me, talk to anyone who was alive in the UK during the reign of Margaret Thatcher. It was a dark, dark time and I still shudder at the memory of it. Thatcher was a vicious thug in a skirt, a monster that wore lipstick. She crushed civil liberties wherever she found them. She trampled on democratic rights. She terrorised and politicised the civil service. She took the country to war. She was the worst Prime Minister ever to blight the British Isles.


















Don't, please don't, put a woman like that in a position where she might become President of the USA. You will regret it.

Intelligent Design Defeated By Intelligent Politicians

I see from The Register (and elsewhere) that the UK government has declared its intention to keep Creationism out of the classroom. Specifically, they concluded that “intelligent design” is a religion and should not be taught as science in British schools. To quote them:

The Government is aware that a number of concerns
have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to
whether creationism and intelligent design have a place
in science lessons. The Government is clear that
creationism and intelligent design are not part of the
science National Curriculum programmes of study and
should not be taught as science.

It is so rare that a government ever does anything so sensible and praiseworthy, that I'd like to take this opportunity to express my congratulations to the people who made this decision. 'Intelligent design' is a pernicious, fraudulent and disgraceful attempt to deceive people into accepting magic as legitimate science. It is extremely heartening to see that there are people in the British government who are clever enough and level-headed enough to reject it out of hand.
The decision comes in response to an online petition organised by James Rocks of the Science, Just Science campaign. From the bottom of my nouveau-Australian heart, I'd like to say, “Good on ya, Jim!”

Over in the USA, it's another story. The outcome of the battle there between good sense and religious mania is still moot and the cowardice and, sometimes, the insanity of American politicians has given succour to the forces of madness. The amazing fact is that the USA is a country where three of the Republican presidential candidates do not believe in evolution! (The mind boggles! Do they also think the Earth is flat and the Sun revolves around it? If not, why not?) Perhaps this seems just normal or even reasonable for an American (or maybe most Americans don't even care) but, from the outside looking in, American religiosity just looks crazy – like looking at ranting Muslim leaders condemning 'the great Satan', or the old Soviet regime's attempts to deny the evidence of genetics for ideological reasons. This kind of head-in-the-sand Christianity belongs to an ancient, unenlightened world and to see it flourishing in the USA is somewhat scary.

Yet I'd be happy to leave them to it (except that it will eventually bring down their economy – look at how research has been weakening under George Bush). However, the American churches are funding the lobby groups and the 'research institutes' that are distributing Creationist propaganda around the world. So it's not just their problem anymore. It's everybody's. Which means more governments ought to take a stand, like the UK has just done, and keep these crazy people out of our kids' heads.

Equality Beyond Humanity

Should the great apes be granted rights to life, liberty and freedom from torture? Well the Great Ape Project says they should. There is almost no doubt that, like human beings, the other great apes are clever, self-aware, emotionally complex and horribly capable of suffering. There is also no doubt that they, unlike human beings, are quickly going extinct. If the wild populations of chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang utans are not gone in my lifetime, they will be gone in my daughter's. Something has to be done urgently if we want to save them.

Of course most people don't want to save them and that's the main problem they face. Some people are eating them. So called 'bush meat' is not just popular with starving people in remote jungles, it now has a worldwide customer-base - about 12,000 tonnes of bush meat (not all of it great apes of course) is imported to the UK each year, for instance.

But even if people don't eat gorillas and chimps, the chances are they are totally indifferent to their plight. Scientific work and medical research around the world is the very least of it. It is the huge, global habitat destruction that is crushing these creatures out of existence. And the political debate is on the effects of deforestation on global warming and therefore on our own economies. Never mind the world-wide genocide that is happening.

A recent news article about a rebel group threatening to kill mountain gorillas in the Congo is indicative of the contempt in which so many people hold the lives of our poor cousins. But it also shows up the enormous problems organisations like GAP face in securing rights for the great apes. This same rebel group killed a wildlife officer and wounded three people just before making their threat about the gorillas. If they don't care about human life, why should we expect them to care about the lives of apes? If we think cheap paper and furniture is so incredibly important that we have to chop down the world's forests, then of course we're going to let these almost-human relatives die for the sake of it. If we let people sit in our city streets and beg for food, or let our police and intelligence agencies torture our enemies, or lock up poor people for crimes that rich people get away with, what are the chances we will show compassion to any creature unable to speak out for itself - however much like us it is?

Kinky Boots - A Step Towards Transsexual and Transvestite Acceptance?

You may have noticed the unpronounceable Chiwetel Ejiofor in other things (Serenity, Inside man). He's one of those actors you sometimes don't recognise - they seem so different in their different parts. But you could not have missed him in Kinky Boots playing Lola, a larger-than-life drag queen. I saw this very funny film just a few days ago and was immensely impressed. If you like dry, understated British humour, you'll probably love it too. The film is all about a down at heel shoe factory (sorry) in the English Midlands that saves itself from bankruptcy by producing a line of exotic footwear especially for cross-dressers. Apparently 'inspired by' a true story it is a noteworthy film in several ways.

Firstly, it's good – funny, clever and great fun. Solid entertainment.

Secondly, it is one of a rash of recent films that deal with male cross-dressing. Transvestitism and transsexualism appear to be increasingly in vogue these days. It reminds me of my childhood in the sixties and seventies when films and the media increasingly featured gays, as part of a gradual social change from absolute rejection to (general) acceptance. Maybe something similar is going on for cross-dressers. Seems unlikely but how else do you explain all this media and film activity?

Next there is the way the film was so very sympathetic to Lola the drag-queen-tuned-shoe-designer played by Ejiofor. I haven't seen anything like it since The Crying Game (which would have been a great film except for that silly plot about a terrorist attack it was lumbered with). In Kinky Boots, Lola is a real person, we get to know her and like her. She isn't just a monstrous character or just comic relief (both of which are pretty much what they did to the character of Lady Chablis in the film of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, despite a generally sympathetic treatment.)

Finally, it was the first film I've seen featuring cross-dressing that actually distinguished between drag queens (what we old folk used to know as 'female impersonators') and ordinary transvestites. Every film I have ever seen that had a cross-dresser in it has featured a drag queen. These are the RuPauls of the world, the mostly transsexual, gay, stage performers who are the tiny, shiny toe of an enormous submerged court shoe of ordinary non-extrovert, non-performing, and almost exclusively heterosexual men who like to dress up as women. Maybe people like that don't make good material for films, or maybe the drag queens are simply the vanguard of a very long process of changing public perception.

Anyway, rent or buy Kinky Boots this weekend. It is highly recommended.

What Today's Generation Won't Get From Global Capitalism

Wifie often says that she and I have lived through a Golden Age. In case you didn't notice, she's referring to the period from about the end of World War 2 to the end of the 1970s. This was a time - in Europe at least - during which the Welfare State was built and flourished. In the UK, where we lived during the Golden Age, there was free education for everyone - including university education - and it was first class at all levels. There was free health-care for everyone - no-one need pay for GPs, medicines, dentists, hospitals, X-rays, blood tests, spectacles, or specialist consultants - all of this also first class. There was generous support for the unemployed, for pensioners and for invalids. Town councils built huge numbers of low-rent, good-quality houses and ran excellent bus services. The State owned all the infrastructure - gas, electricity, telephones, the roads, water, and the railways - and it was pretty well-run and affordable. There was even a decent legal aid system so that not only rich people had access to the law.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, it really did happen. Although my father was a docker and earned a miserably low wage, my family lived in a comfortable, new, three-bedroomed house. I went to decent, well-equipped schools. When I went to university, my fees were paid and I was given a grant on which to live. I did a degree and studied for a PhD at the State's expense. Without the Welfare State, I would have grown up in a slum and finished school at 16. It was an amazing act of social welfare, for which I will always be grateful. In my very large family, the generation before me were almost all casual labourers with a handful of semi-skilled labourers. In my generation, a few of us rose to 'professional' status. In the generation after me, university education is the norm and a crop of lawyers, scientists and engineers is expected. It would not have happened without the Welfare State and the way even people without money were treated as valuable human beings.

But that kind of caring society could not survive the forces of capitalism. Slowly, at first, and then with increasing speed and ferocity, the former elite reasserted itself and clawed back its privileges. A real class war was fought in the Reagan and Thatcher years, and the poor people lost. (Maggie Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4th May 1979 by the way – 28 years ago today.) Since then, the social reforms that were made in the '40s, '50s and '60s have steadily been dismantled, paving the way for today's global capitalism and laissez-faire economics. The Welfare State hasn't quite gone. Some vestiges still remain. Healthcare isn't free now but people are still protected from it's full cost. The same is true for education, although standards in the state-run sector are dropping all the time. Legal aid has almost gone, though, and not much of our infrastructure is in government hands anymore. Bus and train services have been whittled away, and power, telecoms and water supplies are unreliable and increasingly costly.

The fact that I can now afford private health care for myself and my immediate family is offset by the fact that most people cannot. The fact that I own my own home is offset by the fact that there is almost no low-cost rental property for those who need it. The fact that I have a car is offset by the fact that there is no bus or train service within 15 km of where I live. The only reason that I, a poor boy from a poor family, now have the money to look after myself and my family, is that the housing, healthcare and education I got when I needed it, were provided by the State. Without them, people like me in the current generation won't be able to raise themselves out of poverty.

Wifie's right: it was a Golden Age. And I'm surprised that more people don't want it back.

David Bowie

I don’t know about you but tunes are always running in my head. It’s something like hearing voices, I suppose – but in a good way. Today the tune was ‘Teenage Wildlife’ by David Bowie, one of those pieces the reviewers tend to call ‘anthems’ (for the under-fifties that’s one of those numbers like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana). Since I’m my own man these days, and can pretty much suit myself as to what I do, I went to my computer and played the track – and played it loud! And, as ever with Bowie, it was even better than I remembered. So I set my media player to play nothing but Bowie and feasted on his work.

There are several musicians (by which I really mean composers) I admire unreservedly. Mozart, Beethoven, JS Bach, Handel and Haydn for instance. Then there is a second tier who almost make it into this league – Wagner, Brahms, Verdi, Mendelssohn – and many others, less astonishing but nevertheless breathtakingly brilliant (the Mahlers and Puccinis are in there with the JC Bachs and the Berlioz’s). Somewhere in the late 1800s though, the list peters out. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, there were a few – Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky – but I can’t think of a single ‘serious’ musician I admire who is writing today. Where did they all go?

I think that they turned to pop music. Or, to put it another way, the musicians who really felt genius surging through them, began to express themselves in fresh and exciting new ways – writing popular music – the way musicians like Mozart once did. And judging by the criteria of impact on the genre, groundbreaking innovation that pushed the field forwards, the sheer number of imitators, and the subtlety and emotional intensity of the music itself, there are very, very few people who stand out like David Bowie does (you might argue that Bob Dylan is a contender and I might even grant you The Beatles, if we allow ‘collective’ composers).

I know, I know. It’s hard to think of a guy in a silver catsuit, who named his son Zowie and used to do that invisible wall mime thing on stage, as the modern equivalent of Beethoven or Mozart but I really believe he is. In another age, he could certainly have been Wagner and, let’s face it, since he ‘got God’, I can see him churning out cantatas as JS Bach too. If you don’t believe me, get hold of a copy of Scary Monsters – in my opinion the best album Bowie ever made – stick it on your iPod and go for a long drive with it blasting in your ears. You may need to listen to the album a few times through before you start fully to appreciate its quality but that is no hardship at all.

I’ve been a ‘fan’ of Bowies since I first heard his really early work (Rubber Band, Uncle Arthur, etc. – lightweight but fun) and there are major gems throughout his career. Hunk Dory was his own ‘Sgt. Peppers’ but there are many truly great albums you should listen to (Aladdin Sane, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Young Americans, Lodger, Diamond Dogs, Black Tie White Noise – tell you what, just listen to them all!) But it was Scary Monsters that convinced me that Bowie was a truly great artist, that living in England in the 1980s was something akin to living in Vienna in the 1780s, that people 200 years from today would wonder what it was like to be alive now, the way we wonder what it must have been like to share the world with Mozart.

Actually, guys, it was pretty great!

The Pathway Code - Part 2: Advanced Techniques

(Read Part 1 first.)

Yesterday, I looked at a few simple rules for pedestrians so that we can all use the streets a little more safely. Today, I consider some rather more advanced techniques.

My own view is that walking about without a license should be a criminal offence—but nobody listens. Once you’ve mastered the basic techniques, you should be able to walk in a straight line, turn a corner and stand still. For most people, this is enough. For some it is too much (these people should avoid standing still in public unless they have a competent friend to help them). However, for the few who find themselves unsatisfied with this, here are the rules for the more advanced pedestrian skills.

First: walking backwards. You might ask, as I often do, why on Earth anyone should want to do this. Yet there it is. The length and breadth of your nation, people are causing mayhem by suddenly reversing direction or, more frequently, starting out backwards from having stood still (hole-in-the-wall cash dispensers are death-traps as almost everybody leaves them walking backwards). I can only think of two reasons why people do this. One is that they have to concentrate so hard on standing still, or walking in a straight line, that they grow confused and forget which way is forward. The other possibility is that people suffer frequent, brief delusions that they have inexplicably found themselves in the presence of the Queen (perhaps the delusion is triggered by shocks—like finding a working cash machine). Anyway, if you want to walk backwards, here’s how it’s done.

• Look all around you. If there’s nobody there, proceed. If there are people you might walk into, don’t move.
• When walking backwards, try to keep your speed down and don’t forget to keep checking all around you as you go.
• If you bump into someone, don’t just apologise profusely—get therapy (it’s probably a good idea to get therapy anyway).

Second: walking with other people. This can be a real challenge. People who walk in pairs are bad enough. Two people side-by-side is enough to block most pavements. Many people, however, following some atavistic herding instinct, like to wander the streets in gaggles of four or five, or even more. This kind of thing presents a real problem for the legislators because, while behaving in such a mindless way is clearly anti-social, it might seem over-rigid to compel families and groups of friends to walk in neat, single-file crocodiles like schoolchildren on an outing. The best that seems achievable is a Code of Conduct but, herd animals, beware, if this fails to have results, I shall be lobbying for legislation.

• When walking with one or more others, try to bear in mind that none of you is immaterial.
• Contrary to what seems to be believed, staring straight ahead with a glassy-eyed, fixed expression does not make oncomers disappear.
• If a pedestrian approaches you, maneouver to avoid him or her (he or she can’t avoid you, you see, because the pavement is packed with your half-wit family or friends).
• Never attempt this with small children. It is just not possible.
• Never stand still. You simply cannot find a spot that is out of the way for two or more people. All that happens if you stop is that you become the object of the collective hatred of the five hundred people who have to struggle past you before your group lumbers back into motion.
• If you encounter another herd coming in the opposite direction, do not panic. Just wait patiently until the emergency services arrive and sort things out.

Finally: the evasive maneouver. This is perhaps the most difficult of all the pedestrian’s skills and yet one which is so frequently necessary. You need it almost every time you pass a cash dispenser as someone is bound to walk backwards into you. Then you have to execute either the Emergency Stop or the Little Sideways Dance both of which will invariably land you in more trouble as a little old lady carreens into your back or you find a 150 kilo salesman in the spot you needed to dance sideways into. Only the following advice can be offered.

• Be vigilant. Walk defensively. Never let your attention wander for a moment.
• If you are approaching a hazard (like a herd of accountants on their luch break, a cash dispenser, or a shop doorway) slow down. Proceed with caution and be prepared to stop.
• Keep to the road side of the pavement. This will keep you out of the way of window-shoppers and other menaces.
• Use the Saab Tactic. Wear heavy boots, a crash helmet and padded clothing. This will ensure that, should anyone catch you unawares and make a collision necessary, they are the one who is going to come off worse.

Well, there it is. I can do no more for you. Learn the rules. Practice the techniques and let’s all be a little safer on the pavements this year. Mind how you go.

The Pathway Code - Part 1: The Basics

Following the huge success of my series on driving in Queensland, I now tackle the problem of the heavy traffic on the pavements* of our cities. This is part one of a two part series. More tomorrow.

Of course, what consenting adults do to each other in their own homes is between them and their local security agencies. It’s when they’re out in public that they need to be controlled. I’ve given up hoping that the behaviour of motorists can ever be improved. I think that most motorists just simply want to kill people and that’s all there is to it. Instead, I’d like to try to get some order into the way people on foot use our streets. That’s why I’m proposing a code of conduct for pedestrians: The Pathway Code.

The idea is simple. Using a pavement as a pedestrian may not be as lethal as using a road as a driver but it is damned irritating to be barged into, to have your way blocked and to be trodden on every time you step into the street. People just don’t seem able to control themselves or to show the kind of civility and consideration required on our busy streets. I generously assume that it’s because they are all stupid and ignorant rather than that they are deliberately malicious, so I therefore propose a set of simple rules, that even the thickest could follow, to ensure that walking through a city street becomes more like walking in the country and less like trying to make a fifty-yard run against a psychopathic rugby team.

The Basics

First we’ll tackle something simple: walking in a straight line down a straight pavement. Sadly, most pedestrians cannot manage even this. So this is how you do it:

• Walk in a straight line at a constant speed.
• Do not stop suddenly to tie your shoe laces or to ponder the meaning of Life. Do not weave from side to side like a drunk. Do not stick your arms out sideways to point out interesting sights to your friend. Do not start walking backwards for any reason.

It would probably be a good idea to mark out lanes on pavements to guide the feeble-minded and make walking in a straight line easier for them. Anyway. Having mastered this, we can go on to the other basic skills: like turning a corner. The universal rule is this:

• If you’re going to deviate from a straight line, look over your shoulder before you do to check that you’re not going to barge into somebody.

This is a deceptively simple technique but sadly lacking from most pedestrians’ repertoires. Surprisingly, it isn’t adequate on its own to prevent collisions. What is needed is an additional rule:

• If you see someone that you might collide with, or who might have to take evasive action if you turned in front of them, don’t do it.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. You’re walking along the pavement and the person in front of you decides to turn. They glance over their shoulder and see you and they can tell at once that if they turn, you’re going to fall over them. Then a look of bovine idiocy suddenly blanks over their features as their feeble brains give up the attempt to cope with this simple problem and they turn right into you.

Finally, in this section on basic rules, we must consider the one that almost everybody gets wrong: standing still. This causes endless problems and I’ve seen appaling examples of sloppy standing still as far apart as London and Los Angeles, Brisbane and Bangkok, Ottowa and Oslo. Again, the rules are straightforward.

• Only stand still where you will not be in the way.
• Do not stand still in the middle of busy streets—especially in herds of five or more. Do not stand still in doorways. Do not stand still in the middle of narrow passageways while you read your map or look in your shopping bag for your purse. Do not stand still in the entrances to subways or bus stations. Do not stand still in turnstiles, however confusing they may be—step aside while you ponder the mechanism, watch a few people go through first, then, when you’ve got the hang of it, progress straight through.

Stepping out of a shop seems to have a completely paralysing effect on many of our more intellectually challenged pedestrians. They take one step into the busy thoroughfare and then seem to be hit by instant brain death as they stand, gazing blankly about them. This has the threefold effect of causing pedestrians on the pavement to have to swerve around them, forming a small crowd of people on the pavement who are trying to get past them into the shop, and creating a blockage inside the shop of people trying to get out.

So, that's the basics. Go out and find yourself a quiet place to practice. In Part 2, we tackle the hard stuff.

(*American readers should keep in mind that the rest of the English-speaking world speaks English. In English, 'pavement' means 'sidewalk', 'road' means 'pavement' and 'shop' means 'store'. But don't worry, if you can just bear with it for a few more years, we'll all be speaking American anyway.)

Aberystwyth

Advertising copy writers are not nice people. They lie and exaggerate, they twist and hide the truth, they play on our fears and hopes for their own ends, and they invent words like ‘pinta’. It is advertising copywriters who gave us such twisted phrases as ‘genuine rum flavour’ and ‘95% fat free’. On the moral ladder they are sitting in the mud with the politicians and the pimps, gazing up at the unreachable first rung.

So it was a bit of a shock to find that the book I’ve just finished reading and which I had enjoyed greatly, was written by just such a one. The book is ‘Aberystwyth Mon Amour ’ and the ex-copywriter who wrote this little gem, is Malcolm Pryce.

I’m sure you’ll agree, ‘Aberystwyth Mon Amour’ is not a title to inspire confidence. Derision, perhaps, incredulity even, but not confidence. Yet this book, set in the back alleys and seedy night-clubs of a Welsh seaside town dragged down by organised crime and tea-cosy shops, manages to rise above its dodgy title like the smell of beer rising above a rugby prop forward. And yes, if you think I’m being a bit colourful, you are dead right. The book is so full of this kind of Chandleresque, tongue-in-cheek purple prose that I’ll probably still be writing like this for days to come.

It’s the story of a hard-bitten private detective, alone, broke, and drunk, caught up in a web of intrigue and ice-cream, haunting the 24-hour whelk stalls and sinister sea-front promenades of this dark and dangerous holiday resort, trying to unravel the mysteries of a dead schoolboy’s essay and its significance to the druid crime boss, known to the town as ‘the Welsh teacher’.

It may sound silly. It may sound very silly. But if you imagine a first-class Raymond Chandler spoof with a heavy dash of Monty Python thrown in, set in the most unlikely place on the planet, you have ‘Aberystwyth Mon Amour’ – and a few hours of very odd entertainment.

I can only hope that you will rush out and buy this book. If we can keep Malcolm Pryce fed and clothed through book sales, perhaps he won’t ever turn back to the dark side and start writing ads again.

Meeting Germaine Greer on the Road to Damascus

Another famous person whose birthday I’ve just missed is Germaine Greer. As of two days ago, Ms Greer is 67 years old. Happy birthday Germaine.

It was writing about Jane Fonda and Lewis Carroll that got me thinking about Greer. By the usual subterranean mental processes, I moved from the topic of “Australia Day”, via the recollection of 1970s radical females, to Greer’s comment that the Australian people are like the English working class with money. (Sorry but I can’t find a source for that. You’ll just have to trust me.) Having lived with the English working class for the first 20 years of my life and with Australians for the last 10, I’d say she was pretty spot on with that one. I think the things that really give it away are the fanatical obsession Australians have with sports, gambling and drinking; also their racism, sexism and an extremely strong anti-intellectualism. Just like the English working class. All of these things go from the very top to the very bottom of Australian society (i.e. from the workers all the way down to the thugs with money who run the country).

This doesn’t especially bother me. It’s like going back to my roots – but with money. (Actually, the politicians do bother me. I can’t get used to the idea that the kind of people I’d see at the local ‘working men’s club’ on my council estate back in Hull, are actually running the country here.) However, Greer seems to have disliked it quite a lot. Once she left Australia at the age of 25, she never did come back. What’s more, after her recent comments on the late Steve Irwin – who would now be Saint Steve if the locals had anything to do with it – she probably wouldn’t be welcome at too many barbies around here.

But I remember reading The Female Eunuch back in 1970 and the epiphany it brought on. In the sexist, misogynist, patriarchal, English working class culture in which I lived, that book might as well have come from Mars as from Warwick (where Greer was working). The ideas it contained were new and surprising – not at all the kind of thing I was used to. A veil was lifted. It set me thinking along paths that quite literally changed my life. I’m not saying I would never have noticed all that oppression going on without The Female Eunuch but I’m pretty sure it opened my eyes a lot sooner than would otherwise have been the case.

People often comment on Greer’s ranting tone, that she likes to shock people for the publicity, and that she doesn’t have good evidence for much of what she says. This may all be true but the fact remains that when I first read what she had to say, it resonated with what I was seeing in the word around me. And so much of what she has said since keeps on ringing true.

A Sense of History

On 17th October 2006, one week from today, the Brits are going to do something eccentric. So what’s new? Well, they’ll be doing it as a nation, rather than as 60 million individuals, and it will involve blogging.

The National Trust and English Heritage have organised an event in which they hope to get hundreds of thousands of Brits to participate by each of them writing a blog on 17th October, describing their day and how they have been influenced by history. The hope is to raise the nation’s awareness of its history (even more) and at the same time to create a huge corpus of writings by ordinary people all over the UK that will be an unique historical document for the benefit of future historians.

As an ex-pat Brit myself, I’m filled with a peculiar yearning to participate. Unfortunately, it’s just for people living there (and, anyway, I’ll be on holiday on that day and unable to blog about anything). I can’t help thinking that the organisers have missed a trick though. Being British doesn’t stop just because you’ve moved overseas, nor does the effect of having been raised among people so much aware of their national identity and history. Surely, the hyper-blog they create next Tuesday would be enhanced by the voices of the millions of us who have gone off to live elsewhere but still carry that heritage with us. The document would then be a global testament to the thoughts and feelings of Britons everywhere.

So, what would I have written?

October 17th 2006: On holiday today in Lennox Head NSW, Australia. Drove here from Brisbane on Sunday and it’s great to be here at the beach again. My wife, Christine, and daughter, Becky, are with me and, since Becky is now 20 and itching to travel and explore, I can’t help but wonder if this might be our last family holiday. It is hard to know how best to make the most of it. Laugh a lot, do something memorable, have long and deep conversations, try to act normal. Who knows?

There is no history here – or very little. Brisbane itself is barely 150 years old and Lennox Head perhaps half of that. There may have been Aboriginal habitation here going back 40,000 years for all I know but their history is as alien to me as it is to all the other settlers here. The broad Pacific Ocean with its promise of migrating whales and frolicking dolphins is visible from my hotel. There is more of my own history there than here on land, but even that stretches back only to bold European explorers of the 17th Century.

I have stood in cathedrals in England that were begun in the 6th Century. I have walked along Hadrian’s Wall. I have stood in henges and touched carved stones from three thousand years before the Roman invasion. My surname is from the Viking settlers who came to Northern England in the 9th Century. In the complexion and colouring of my many relatives, I see my Celtic ancestry. Even the stories about the two World Wars, told by the people who had lived through them, that filled my childhood, anchored me in an idea of being British that has held me fast all my life.

It is strange to be in a place with so little history. The history of Australia is all ahead of it. Under this glorious sunshine, beside this blue ocean, on these white sands, we are writing that history now. Shaping it and causing it. Are we building something that will last five thousand years? Even five hundred seems optimistic.