Writer-insighter – Page 43 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

The enemy within

There was a miners’ strike 30 years ago. Now you have to explain to people what miners actually were. They were the British men who dug the coal we were told we didn’t have that is imported now instead of digging out the 200 years of the stuff sitting underground. Ten years back before that the government switched the electricity off to make people believe the miners were ‘holding the country to ransom’ in a way that banks and financial fraud never does. Chiefly because the banks had lawyers who would shut your mouth for you if you mentioned it and the NUM didn’t.

When you watch this video you will see a Britain that a lot of people who lived here then can recognise while few foreigner can. I still hate Thatcher’s voice, along with every single one of her policies. That whining, artificial, hypocritical drone filled the airwaves with lies.

“We don’t talk to terrorists. The IRA must be denied the oxygen of publicity” while the government was talking to them all of the time for just one single example. Oh actually, ‘violence doesn’t pay’ for another. It was supposed to pay for Our Brave Boys who were sent to fill bodybags in the Falklands, a place the Foreign Office had been discussing giving away to Argentina since 1946, when the election would have been lost otherwise.

It wasn’t the miners who were the enemy within. It was the lying media that chose to report one side and not the other, time and again. Back then, 30 years ago, a friend of mine worked for BBC TV. He was a young news reporter in the thick of a demo that was kicking off when he walked past a police van with the back doors open. It was full of guns. Not confiscated guns from arrested miners. The miners didn’t have any guns. These were guns the state’s enforcers had decided they’d take to the demo to shoot miners with. There was never even a public allegation that the miners had guns and what happened next showed that would have been all over the media if any government minister had even suggested it, or there was any police intelligence to back it up.

My friend saw the police guns. He had the camera. He didn’t switch it on. His boss said it wasn’t even interesting.

About six years after that a man called Michael Ryan went berserk in a small town and shot lots of people with guns he should never have been licensed to have, given the list of offences and complaints to the police that had been made about him. In those days it usually took about six weeks to get a firearms certificate. Ryan got his in a few days, for reasons that the police have never seen fit to discuss. But then, a lot of what happened at Hungerford isn’t discussed. One of the tabloids showed American armoured vehicles on the streets of this small English town, although since when Hungerford became part of the jurisdiction of Greenham airbase was never mentioned.

There was a rumour the SAS were involved in ending the proceedings that day. That a helicopter had taken off from Hereford and somebody onboard had sniped Ryan, which was at odds with the official version that he had shot himself. Pictures of the body were only shown in camera at the inquest. There was never, ever an official enquiry. But the media didn’t want to talk about that either. I met a man who totally legally built sniper rifles for a comfortable living. He sold them, perfectly legitimately, to armed forces around the world. So when someone came to him with some information that what happened at Hungerford was extra-judicial murder, the same way it had been in Gibralter, when IRA suspects had been gunned down in a carpark by the SAS, with photos of a neat high-velocity hole through a school window to back it up, he tried to get it made public.

My friend came and interviewed him. I was there. We all looked at the photos. I wouldn’t know one type of bullet hole through glass from another, but remember what one of us did for a living.

My friend made some notes. Went back to the BBC. We’re not going to run it. It’s ‘not in the public interest.’

So now you know. When your government decides to shoot people without a trial the BBC don’t want all the fuss of telling anyone about it. And the miners are supposed to be the enemy within. That makes sense to me.

Somewhat overshadowed

Not to be confused with sloightly on th’oof, whatever that bit of fake Suffolk dialect means this week’s Lifeboat Party show as slightly overshadowed by the fact that as of 16th December I become homeless. It’s not an experiment and I haven’t messed up my life more than usual for the rest of this year, although frankly that’s not saying much.

I’m selling my house. My stuff is going into storage and I have somewhere to live as of the new year, but right now, now, very now, as Shakespeare put it, I’m a bit stuck.

So I was a bit bothered about the show. We had a baking ukelele player on first, or maybe a ukelele playing baker, Martin Clarke, who had the decency to drop his bombshell half an hour after we came off air, telling me he’d been a radio presenter for 17 years. Yes. Ok. Cheers Martin.

Then I tried to interview Emma Thomson again, after I totally messed up the sound in her first interview. Emma’s plan to race cyclocross for Elmy Cycles in Ipswich, as well as raising money for cancer research ahs been a bit altered by the fact that someone has stolen all three of her bikes. These aren’t exactly the kind of thing that you can get in Halfords or Tesco, even if it is Christmas.

Just checking the recording now and I think it’s going to be ok.

Mega line-up next week, with not just Justine de Meirre but Buckshee as well. Check-out their sounds. See how down with the kids I am?

It’s going to (folk) rock. Sorry. Meanwhile I still need somewhere to live for jsut over Christmas. A dog is for life. I’m not. Ask anyone. Or actually, maybe don’t.

All Of Your S**t

Years ago I read an ad in the Personals. No, honestly, it really was years ago, although it’s probably time to start reading them again. There really was a real ad from a woman who took about a quarter page ad, telling everyone about her children and how devoted she was to them (as if anyone was asking) and how she would always put them first (as she should) and how nobody would get between her and them (as if they’d want to).

It just went on and on and on, as if someone kept suggesting the opposite, over her shoulder. I don’t know if anyone ever replied. I didn’t. The saddest thing was also the funniest thing, the very last line:

I’m looking for a man with no baggage.

It’s always stayed with me. So I updated it a little, in case that poor woman is still out there somewhere, still going on about her adult children. I should say now, this poem, if that’s what it is, is NOT based on or about anyone I have ever known, met, spoken to or done anything else with. Ever.

All Of Your S**t

I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage

I am a man woman couple looking for a fun

Reliable person partner soulmate

Who is tall short and dark light

Who is funny serious adventurous

And likes staying at home

And going out with friends,

Just chilling, doing the same things.

They say opposites attract lol.

I love my children, my home, my family

My car my job I would give the world

Lay down my life for or

Never forgive them or someone, for something.

I love my pets and

I don’t want any ties right now.

I like walking on beaches in the mountains.

I love going on Citybreaks in the countryside.

I want someone to be there for me

When I need them and I can’t handle commitment

Right now. I love having no responsibilities

And caring and going away

Whenever I like.

I love staying at home.

I am looking for a life

Partner a serious relationship

A one-night stand

Who knows let’s see. Fun.

I am married, single, divorced,

Separated, just looking.

And widowed. It’s complicated.

Delete as appropriate.

Delete as inappropriate.

Friend me. Chat. Txt. IM me.

Review my post and report me to Facebook.

Delete my posts on your timeline.

Remove your profile and change

Your privacy settings

Even as you change mine.

Forever and ever,

Or until the next time.

Mark me as flagged until that thing happens when

First the Xs disappear from your msgs

And quickly then the txts get shorter

And less often until sooner than you thought

There’s no reply at all and quite finally

Without appeal and irrevocably,

You just unfriend me.

So I’m looking for someone

Without any baggage.

(c) Carl Bennett 2013

Looking back I can see I posted this on November 28th. That was the day I went to the Blaxhall Ship and my life changed quite considerably.

You want to WHAT?!?!?

Ah. One of those things that make you go oooooops…..

I solved the problem of the phone not recording interviews or interview guests not turning up by not having any on the Lifeboat Party radio show I do this week. All of the people I’d asked either didn’t have projects ready that they wanted to talk about (and there are some really good local music things coming soon) or they suddenly found themselves really busy on Monday lunchtime.

I played the traditional Pink Floyd song Sheep for the local farming story, except it wasn’t really about farming even though it all happened near a farm.

I decided to ramp up the music a bit, hopefully getting rid of the allegations of the Lifeboat Party being the Slumber Party on Radio Snoozeshire. My rock advisor hasn’t talked to me for a week or so, so I played some of the stuff she’d talked to me about from memory, just after a story about the crinkle-crankle wall at Easton suddenly being 15 metres shorter after a car ran into it.

Closer

Nine Inch Nails. What could be more um, uplifting, yes? That should ramp up the energy a bit.

“Up next, Closer. Maybe they can use those Nine Inch Nails to fix the wall at Easton.”

Playout One slider up, Purple Microphone slider down. Lean back, breathe and look through the CDs I brought in while it plays.

You let me violate you, you let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you, you let me complicate you
Help me I broke apart my insides, help me I’ve got no soul to sell
Help me the only thing that works for me, help me get away from myself

Well. I think that’s ok so far. The penetrate word might be a little bit strong for a cold November Monday lunchtime, but nothing OFCOM can really complain about. I’d forgotten the next line.

I want to **** *** like an animal.

Um, that’s not actually sort of within the taste and decency guidelines, is it, for rural Suffolk? I mean, when somebody says the song is how they feel that’s one thing, but when you’re standing in your kitchen in Tingly Bavant wondering if you’ve got time to do oven chips for lunch it’s not really what you thought you were going to hear.

Still, it was sort of nice of someone to say that once. It would have been nicer if they didn’t feel that way about themselves.

Into the dark

“This is the sad time,” she said. “When you do that.When it’s that time of year again.”

She looked at the coat liner I was fastening into my Barbour. It wasn’t last winter. The one before. It’s been that time of year for a while now. It’s ten days since I saw zero degrees on the car thermometer in a year of strange weather. I had to put a down shirt on in June. I remember everything from that time as if it was fixed under glass, like this bright, clear, still day today, so shining and so cold.

A fine clear winter's day. — A fine clear winter’s day.

I knew what she meant. On the one hand we’d known some years,so we could remember other times when I pressed the brass studs of the liner into my coat, other Springs when I took the liner out again. But she meant the end of the year coming. The quickly shortening days when just not long ago it was light at ten at night, sitting in the summerhouse.

Today it was dark before five o’clock. Soon it will be dark at four thirty. But the end of this year is like every year. I don’t know what it’s going to bring. I said last Christmas I would not be in this house in a year, but this year, that will come true. I don’t know where I will be instead. Everything has seemed moveable, in flux and shifting.

It’s past Samhain, just over four weeks until the shortest day, December the 21st and then the days slowly, slowly start lengthening and long before the winter is over it’s getting light again in the evenings, so you can go for a walk at a reasonable time and soon, even if it’s cold after that, you can walk after work in the evening, with the rooks calling raw on the March wind. A time of paradoxes, just as Midsummer can be the saddest as well as the longest day, the day the year starts to shorten and wither, so slowly you can’t notice it until now, when each day seems to race the one before into the dark, so the shortest day, however dark it is, means that the days after will be longer, brighter. That there is hope, even in the darkest time of the year. That whatever happens, like everything else, the year, the days, won’t be like this forever. We’ve just got to get through until the shortest day. That’s easy enough, surely. Where will I be? The same place everyone else is, really. Nobody knows.

The Masque of Anarchy

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you.

Ye are many — they are few.

This is from Percy Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, written shortly after the Peterloo Massacre. Not quite 200 years ago people in Manchester held a meeting in a place called St Peters Field. They were some of the first generations who worked in factories, which meant more than a weekly pay packet. It meant a complete change of life. Nowadays most people expect to go to work and earn wages. Before factories, the majority of people didn’t. They worked on the land, one way or the other. They were paid in kind more often than not. A lot of people felt short-changed, and they were. Getting used to a money economy made many people victims; this was why the Co-Operative movement started.

People were short-changed politically too. Somewhere around 60,000 people had a meeting in a field. They didn’t think they were being represented properly by a government of aristocrats in London. The government did what governments often do when they realise the people they pretend to represent have a different attitude to the one they’re told to have: they sent the army in to teach them to shut up. At least 15 people were killed and 600 injured, but these were days before NHS trusts and ambulances and 999 calls and performance targets. Nobody knows how many were really hurt because it wasn’t properly reported.

They don't use horses and swords any more. Not much else changes. — They don’t use horses and swords any more. Not much else changes.

In exactly the same way the BBC isn’t reporting things now. On November 5th an event called the Million Mask March happened in London and other cities around the world. It had the same objectives as the meeting in St Peters Field; to protest a world where disabled people who for example, need a spare room for a dialysis machine have their housing benefit cut by 14% because they have too many bedrooms to suit the doctrine that there just are plenty of jobs for everyone, the playground tabloid obscenity of Skivers vs Strivers, promulgated by people who inherited millions and had jobs found for them by their relations. Ask the Prime Minister about that. Or the Health Secretary. Or the Chancellor.

According to the BBC this is 200 people. And Russel Brand.

On November 5th there was a traditional bonfire in Lewes, near Brighton. There always is. That’s why it’s a tradition. The BBC put it on their website. It took them another four hours to bother to report the Million Mask March gathering outside Parliament. When they did it was chiefly because Russel Brand, a known media figure had turned up.

It was shameful. No major UK news source carried the story while it was happening. I first heard of it on Twitter. Then Al Jazeera picked it up. The US airforce has bombed the Al Jazeera offices in the past, but that was ok because it was an accident, apparently. This isn’t me and my opinion; that story was reported by Reuters, the place where newsmen get their news.

Nobody was killed in Parliament Square on November 5th. Camera phones and Twitter are quite useful these days. But the Masque continues. Shelley’s poem talked specifically about the government of the day, the Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh who appears as a mask worn by Murder, the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth whose guise is taken by Hypocrisy, and the Lord Chancellor,Lord Eldon whose ermine gown is worn by Fraud. Led by Anarchy, a skeleton with a crown, they try to take over England, but are slain by a mysterious armoured figure who arises from a mist.

Arthur, the once and future king? Drake, sleeping there below until his drum beats again? Or the last thing left when Pandora’s box was opened, Hope, revived, who through the poem called to the people whose families weren’t aristocrats or tax advisers or related to former Cabinet ministers.

The Masque Shelley was writing about wasn’t a physical mask. A Masque was a ball, a dance where masks were worn. People who ought not to have done could dance with people they ought not to be dancing with, despite the fact that everyone in the circle invited knew who was who anyway. It was a pretence, a charade. A polite game where everyone knew that everything was not what it seemed to be and nothing was really what it was called. Democracy. Freedom. Objective news reporting.

Two hundred years on and the biggest difference is the soldiers don’t usually carry swords on horseback any more. It’s not enough of a change. But they are few and we are many. And it’s time we woke up and remembered that.

A matter of prestige

Back in 2002 an old oil tanker sank off the coast of Spain. The scale of the environmental disaster was impressive, if you’re impressed by destruction. 63,000 tonnes of oil spilled into the sea. 230,000 birds were killed, or rather, those are the ones people know about. 1,137 beaches were polluted, some of them being totally unusable and some just having lumps of oil sticking to people’s nice shoes they only bought that morning on holiday.

After 11 years a Spanish court has decided it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Environmental group Greenpeace is predictably furious. I was working in maritime business research when it happened. It was everybody’s fault, but most of them never got anywhere near a court.

Captain Mangouras was 63 when he was in charge of the Prestige.. After it sank under him and he was helicoptered off he was arrested on the dock, handcuffed, taken to jail and bail was set at three million euros. AS he didn’t happen to have 3,000,000 euros he sat in jail for 893 days until the money could be found. Ship insurance companies were horrified, not just at the size of the bail (which was not covered by insurance anyway) In the same week but by the principle which seemed to be being set: consequences depend not on what you did, but how it is seen. After all, nobody died.

Back on the sinking ship a lot of people shared in the blame when the Prestige broke in half. The Port State Control inspectors who passed the ship safe to sail at its previous port. The Spanish Environment Minister who was on holiday at the time also should arguably have shared some of the blame, because there was a way of avoiding the environmental damage, at least on the scale it happened.

Ships don’t often suddenly break in half. When they do they usually go straight to the bottom in minutes, far too fast to get to safety in a lifeboat once the sheer size of the ship pulls itself apart. There are warnings. Lots of different people noticed the big splits in the deck. In this case the split was 15 metres long. which is why Captain Mangouras had requested permission to put into a Spanish port. Spain denied permission, as did Portugal.

One option was to sail up a river and ground the vessel to stop it going anywhere else. When it split the oil spill could be controlled by putting a boom across the river. Oil tankers could drive up hopefully close enough to pump the oil off the ship. As plans go it was making the best of a horrible job, but it wasn’t going to work out that way.

Mindful of the fact that local fisherman would lose their income for years wherever the Prestige broke up, when it was 15km off the coast Spanish authorities ordered it further out to sea, where 21,000,000 gallons of oil would spread hopefully somewhere else. Let’s think about that for a second.

An experienced seafarer who has done this for decades radios the nearest maritime authority to say help, my ship is about to sink. When it does it’s going to go down in a few minutes. Anyone onboard when that happens will be killed and the 20 million gallons of oil we’re carrying is going into the sea. Let me into a port or let me shove it as far up a beach as I can get it, then we have a plan to control the damage.

And the official response from a first world nation state is officially: take it somewhere else and they can deal with it.

Old history. So what? The Captain was in charge so the Captain is to blame. It was all his fault. That’s what responsibility is all about. It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t fit the facts. Some of the 27 members of the ship’s crew said the crack started after the ship hit something, possibly one of the hundreds of shipping containers floating about the world after they fall off ships each year before the door seals leak.

The Spanish maritime authority rejected this view and said the Prestige was in bad condition; it wasn’t sinking because of an accident, it was sinking because it was one of thousands of vessels out of date, not maintained, patched up with weld, registered somewhere they didn’t really mind what the vessel was like and passed safe to sail by variable inspection regimes based more on who was paying cash than what was and was not internationally acceptable, the reason why the International Maritime Organisation has White, Grey and Black lists of ship registries.

But given that, the ship owner wasn’t arrested. The owner of the oil wasn’t handcuffed. The inspectors in the embarkation port weren’t put in jail. Just the captain, the bus driver, who did everything he could to stop a bad thing getting worse.

Yesterday Captain Mangouras was cleared of blame for the oil spill and the events leading up to it. His career was over the day he was jailed. Yesterday he was sentenced to nine months in prison aged 73, for refusing to sail his ship out to sea, where it was towed before it sank.

If you’re looking for perspective try this. In February 2003 Adriano de Souza was music producer Phil Spector’s driver. When he saw Spector walk out of his house holding a gun, saying “I think I’ve killed someone,” he called the police who found the body of actress Lana Clarkson found shot dead in a chair. Bail was set at $1,000,000 and Spector stayed out of jail until his trial four years later.

Anthem for doomed youth

A doomed show for the 11th November, anyway. I left my box of essential CDs on the kitchen table when I drove in to the studio. My Kid Creole signature tune, the Rachmnainov for the not-very-sad story about the uselessness of utilities in East Anglia, the Gotan Project I was once addicted to and was going to play In Memoriam.

The show before over-ran so I had to cut across it and go straight into the telephone interview. Where the problems started. The deck said the ph9ne was recording. It wasn’t. The listeners were treated, if that’s the word, to me talking to nobody, as if I’d gone nuts.

Then a total sound-out, dead air, when I slide the wrong thing on the mixing deck. I think. I was panicking by now, trying to play something off Soundcloud that just wouldn’t play, the same way it wouldn’t when I played it at home after the show.

Read out Anthem for Doomed Youth, the Wilfrid Owen poem as it was Rememberance Day and kept calling it Memorial Day as if I was American. I hate doing that. Remembered the story about the American artillery battery that kept firing after 11 o’clock on 11th November 1918, so they could bravely say they fired the last shots of the war. Got stuck on the pronunciation of ‘orisons.’ I know why he had to use the word (to rhyme with ‘guns’) but it’s a word nobody ever uses now; all it does is distract from the poem.

Anthem for doomed middle-aged men

Nothing else could go wrong, right? Wrong. Phone call from the studio guest, fifteen minutes into the show. They’re too busy to come and publicise the thing they were doing that depends on people coming to it. Oh ok, I understand how that could work. Second time they’ve done that.

“I don’t want to be on the radio” is a really handy phrase. Not for me, but guests. I had a request for a song, Robbie Williams’s Feel. Nice song. Sad, but you can hear how he got rich. Snag was I know the person who requested it. I know she hates people knowing anything about her. Read the name out like a normal request? Decided not to in the end.

It’s a juggling act, this show. I was trying not to slip off the wire any more than I had.

I’m not listening

A long time ago I went to stay with an uncle. Like a lot of people on the up then, he had a vastly complicated stereo system that he liked to talk about more than he seemed to play it. When he did it was like nothing I’d ever heard. It wasn’t just the volume and the volume wasn’t just how loud it was. It was a fullness of sound I’d never heard before, certainly not out of the ten year old Bang & Olufsen my father mysteriously turned up with one night when it was brand new.

My uncle’s tastes in music matched his Zappata moustache, his recurve longbow mounted on the wall and his aptitude with explosives. It was what he did for a living, at a quarry. Knowing about grenades and fuses and it has to be said, his mouth, got him into trouble with the police at least once that I know about, but that’s a long and other story. Some readers will see some similarities already.

Best of Bread

He was into Bread. The band. Not The Band. They were totally different. Bread, you know Bread. They did that song, Baby I’m A Want You. You do know it. Come on. Dah da da da daaah da. Da di di di dah da, then the high bit. Everyone knows that one.

After my short holiday I went into town, as we called walking into Trowbridge in those days. There were two record shops then, both owned by the same company but in different locations as well as the stall in the market. They didn’t have the album cover I remembered in the racks so I had to order it. I really wanted this music. The snag was (and yes thank-you, I can hear the chorus of you just don’t LISTEN, do you? from here) I couldn’t quite remember the name of the band. It was that one that goes Dah dadada daaah da. You know the one.

Oh, that one. The guy behind the counter did know. He ordered it. It took a week in those days, but when I went in the next Saturday it was there. It was in a different cover, but there it was.

Cream's Disraeli Gears. It's not quite the same thing at all, is it? — Cream’s Disraeli Gears. It’s not quite the same thing at all, is it?

Until I got it home. I was 13. I’d never heard anything like Cream. It changed the way I thought about music. It certainly changed the way I thought about Bread. The Tales of Brave Ulysses wasn’t like anything we’d heard about in English, or Latin, come to that.

Sometimes, just sometimes, things get better when you don’t listen properly. But not often.

Caught by the river

Farleigh Castle, where the wild garlic grows.

I want to write about summer forever, that last perfect summer, the one in everyone’s head. When wearing shorts for the heat of the day and a hooded thick sweatshirt for the cool of the evening and driving your first car seemed so impossibly grown up while equally impossibly, I was doing it.

The river that caught me was at Farleigh Hungerford, a place where the wild garlic grew, a place with a tiny Post Office but no people there any more to use it. I went in once, just to see. I didn’t want anything. Except I did. I wanted to see the lost places, the empty rooms. Things still happened there, near the castle. The Village Pump Folk Festival, the motorcycle races. But always the castle, on top of the hill, overlooking the river. There was a Roman flashlock in the bend of the river. Oliver Cromwell took the roof off it. There was a cottage at the bottom of the hill made from the stones of the castle and an old couple who lived there. One day they took up a floorboard and found a gun, hundreds of years old, secreted away there for nobody knew how many lifetimes. The old woman turned deaf one day when she thought her son was drowned in the river, caught by the weed. Once long ago I had a picnic there one night, with my mate Phil and my girlfriend, and Emma, this girl who was sort-of Phil’s girlfriend, a bit, and someone I was sort-of hoping might be my girlfriend. It was cold that night, that Easter. Cold and we were young and not used to being in an old castle at night, even one open to the night.

But when I remember that place it’s always summer. The same as it was one morning just before the sun was up when I cycled past so early, so early in my life.