This morning two things were reported which ought to scare you senseless.
The Defence Minister whose idea of defence includes blowing people up in foreign countries any time he feels like it said he’s fine with that. The RAF launched a drone, a big explodey model airplane and controlled it from Lincolnshire.
It killed two British people in Syria. According to the Prime Minister they’d been going to threaten our way of life. Again. Before he collected himself the Prime Minister said they’d been going to kill the Queen. So far as I remember in the tabloids they were going to do that the other weekend as well. Then he used the magic word:
“Such actions are required to prevent a terrorist attack.”
He didn’t once use the phrase extra-judicial murder, which was odd. The plaintiff “We have to work extremely hard” just sounded a bit pathetic tagged on the end.
It’s terrorism though, you see? The Attorney General said it was ok and if he wants to keep his very nicely paid job and pension then as every previous one, he’d better. So it’s ok to fly an airplane somewhere and blow people up. You don’t need a trial or any of that old nonsense. You can just go and kill them. It’s fine. Because terrorism.
The final solution
As Michael Fallon said, there was ‘no other way’ to deal with people accused of terrorism. After all, we’ve tried all that arresting people and putting them on trial and witnesses and burden of proof and all that he said but she said and ah-yes-but-m’lud and frankly, where does it get you? Maybe Rebeka Brooks can tell David Cameron some time.
Seconds later on BBC Radio 4’s one o’clock news today we were told a 28 year-old policeman had been arrested along with several others for conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice. That’s serious. You can go to jail for life.
Just because his lapels are like that doesn’t make it not scary.
For reasons which were never made clear, as Hunter Thompson used to say, the Birmingham policeman had made-up a story. Which sadly isn’t totally unknown among police officers as any cursory viewing of the Sweeney will tell the impartial observer. But this story was different.
This story was that terrorists had been going to kidnap a police officer. Except there weren’t any terrorists. It was all made-up.
Do you see a problem yet? Maybe you should. Because now you don’t need proof to go and kill people any more. Just someone’s say so. For example, a lying policeman’s word on it.
If you’re ok with this kind of drone strike it’s probably best if you don’t even look at people the wrong way in future. The party of conservatism is taking us a long, long way from Dixon of Dock Green. Mind how you go.
In the Catholic church there are two kinds of sin. Sins of commission cover off the things you did and oughtn’t to have done. The sins of omission are briefly, everything else. Specifically, the things you ought to have done and didn’t. Which as a get-out-of-that clause is comprehensive to the extent that you have to wonder if insurance policies are the ultimate proof of a Divine plan.
Every bad thing is a sin. Even some good things are sins if you do them for bad reasons. Probably. I’m not too clear on this. But things you might think are good are almost certainly sins, or one kind or another. But it’s the ones of omission that are the real Gotchas. You don’t get away with saying ah yes, but I didn’t do it. Because that’s the whole point. No, says God. You didn’t, did you? Get out of that.
The biggest one I ever experienced was a lie. It happened in Israel, a long time ago. It altered the entire way I think about the place and the people who live there. The ones I knew told lies. They lied habitually, as a first response to anything. They lied about being able to borrow a car whenever you felt like it, which I was told would be happening before I even left England. They lied about the pigs they kept on the kibbutz. They kept the pigs on wooden pallets so their feet, or more specifically their cloven hooves didn’t walk upon the earth, to make it ok with God to eat bacon. Which we did more than once while I was there, but as the pigs were called turkeys it didn’t matter. The sad part is I’m not making any of this up. This happened, it was lied about and everyone seemed completely happy with the arrangement.
As they were the night we got machine-gunned. There were quite a few lies and sins of ommission that night, as well as some committed too, given we were all in our teens and early twenties and away from home and it was a warm night. I wasn’t committing any sins myself, you understand. Not that night anyway.
It was probably about 1am when those who were asleep were woken by a burst of automatic gunfire. I’d grown up near Warminster, the army officer training base in England, well within hearing distance of the gunnery ranges on Salisbury Plain. I shot every Thursday night at a local club. I knew what gunfire sounded like. And everybody who hadn’t had heard it on television anyway. Being young and stupid we all piled out of our beds and wandered outside to see what was going on, which looking back, isn’t the best response to a terrorist attack. We were lit up by bright lights floating down out of the sky; parachute flares shot off to spot the incoming invaders on kibbutz Revivim, which always saw itself as the front line, not least because it was one of the southernmost kibbutzim but also because it was Golda Mier’s kibbutz for a while. Some of us wondered if we were going to get shot. More of us just watched the girls in their underwear, softly lit in the pink and white glow of the descending lights.
After a couple of minutes of this an older man from the kibbutz turned up carrying an Uzi submachine gun. He got everyone out of their huts and marched us all off to the tennis court, where what we thought was a toolshed turned out to be the top of a set of stairs leading down to a brick-built shelter underground. So we sat there. Someone asked what was going on. Were we under attack?
No. Ok, so what’s going on?
Nothing was going on. It’s just a precaution.
Against what?
Nothing.
And that was final. Nothing was happening. Nothing had happened. Nobody had heard any gunfire. We must have imagined it. Nobody had shot off any parachute flares. We must have imagined those too. Whatever they were, which they weren’t, because nothing had happened. None of which explained why we were sitting in a bomb-shelter under the tennis court, which we didn’t even know existed yesterday evening.
It took about two weeks to worm the explanation out of several different people. Because it always thought of itself as a frontier kibbutz, they used to use fifteen year olds to guard it every night. They gave them all an Uzi and a bicycle. What could possibly go wrong?
There isn’t much happening on a kibbutz at night. Nothing that needs a submachine gun, anyway. So if you’re fifteen and standing under a palm tree you get bored. But they’ve given you this 9mm gun, just like your heroes. Just like in the movies. You could, I don’t know. Take the magazine out and put it in again. Unfold the stock then fold it up a couple of times. Slide the bolt back just enough to see if there’s a bullet shining in the chamber. Or .. I know! Check to see if the safety is on by pulling the trigger.
Not by looking at the indicator on the side. Not by feeling which way the lever’s pointing with your thumb. Not even by holding the gun without your hand on the grip, where there’s another safety which has to be depressed, so the gun won’t fire if you snag the trigger on a branch or something. No. By holding it cocked and pulling the trigger, like a bored fifteen year old who some idiot gave a submachine gun.
Different person, same gun. Exactly what a bored 15 year-old needs.
Which obviously never happened, because like the turkeys with curly tails, there was one version of the truth on kibbutz Revivim, and that was whatever the kibbutz council said it was. Anything else didn’t happen. And anyone who said it did was an enemy of the kibbutz, so they must be lying anyway. That’s what enemies do.
I lived like this for three months. I have no intention of ever going back.
Over twenty years after I’d banged the dust of Revivim off my boots someone invented Google Earth. I looked-up the kibbutz, just to see how it had changed. The map showed me the names of two Arab villages I’d never known were there for the simple reason that they weren’t. There was no trace on the ground that there had ever been people living in houses where the peach groves were now. It was called the nakba, and it’s something else that didn’t happen. The villages aren’t there on Google Earth any more. We’re not even allowed to see the names of them any more, as if they were never there at all. I emailed Google to ask why they were obliterating history, when they’d used the names in the first place. They emailed back to tell me my comments weren’t helpful. I’m glad they weren’t. I don’t want to help Google tell lies.
The nakba is where Palestinian refugees come from, the ones who were such a threat to Israel in the 1980s that it was fine to bomb them or drive a tank through their tents on the BBC News most nights without a single word of explanation about how or why or when all these refugees had suddenly materialised out of nowhere.
Except refugees don’t. They exist because of people’s deliberate actions. And pretending they’re just one of those things, or some kind of natural event, nobody’s to blame, nobody is responsible and hey, they’re economic migrants anyway, because nobody was trying to kill them except when they were, trying to blot them out of nice people’s history is a huge sin, whichever religion you believe in. Including none.
I saw a Tweet today from a law firm, quite sensibly asking people if they didn’t have a will, what did they think was going to happen to their digital legacy when they died?
I don’t have any next of kin to leave things to but it set me wondering what kind of digital legacy they really meant. I invented some software once. Well, twice, to be honest. The first one got stymied by a “Top Six” firm of accountants, whose Watford branch was absolutely no help raising VC money AT ALL, for all their ‘we can get you a million’ hot air. Much like Tony Blair, the person in charge of the project didn’t really do email. And yes, that’s exactly what they said. To both things. As someone more sensible than me pointed out, the Top Six is a very, very different thing to the Top Five.
Then a tech crash and the dawning realisation that these provincial accountants had no more real access to that kind of money than I did and relied on going round asking people if they’d like to invest in something. Which I could have done myself. The other was a bit more successful, and would be today if the company who were buying it hadn’t been bought and then bought again and re-structured and moved and all the associated disruption that goes with that. Still. Don’t look back in anger and all that. And relax.
I made a Moodle website for Chalmers University in Sweden, the first one they had. Does that count?
What?
I don’t just sit here writing this stuff, you know. Although some days it feels like that. Maybe this is the kind of digital legacy they were talking about. I hope so. Because otherwise we’re going to have to consider who I bequeath my collection of Tweets about Kate Bush and New Labour to. My Facebook posts of videos of Wendy James.
I mean, really? Surely people could go and look at You Tube themselves. If not at Wendy James. I saw her down Portobello you know. She was sitting on a wooden pallet, I was selling Georgian tea caddies…. oh, you don’t need to know the rest, do you? Really?
Ed read it from cover to cover and still couldn’t understand why he lost.
Radio4 just told me that Gordon Brown is about to make a speech in London. There are several newsy things about this, not least that he hasn’t made a big speech for years. The other is that he’s going to say how awful Jeremy Corbyn is, presumably because Corbyn actually has some socialist principles while when Ed Milliband was accused of being a socialist by David Cameron he acted as if it actually was an insult and all but said ‘sorry.’
Given that Milliband spent most of the five years he was leader of Labour seemingly determined not to do anything that would in any way resemble contradicting the Tory Party’s policies then the title Leader of the Opposition was always misplaced. The full title was and is Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition; where it went wrong was that it was supposed to mean loyal to the Crown, not to the Prime Minister.
Yvette Cooper is another contender for the leadership of the Labour Party. She got her own little soundbite in the same piece on Radio4 too, explaining that Labour was out there listening to people and ‘trying to understand’ why they lost the General Election.
She also showed again why Labour lost the election and why they deserved to. Gordon Brown was probably the least charismatic figure any party could have chosen as a leader. It wasn’t just that his entire public persona as someone who was barely containing his inner fighty pub drunk wasn’t very attractive to the people who he wanted to vote for him. It wasn’t just that like Callaghan before him, he was supposed to be Prime Minister by inheriting the title and nobody outside the Labour Party thought this was credible. If they did, they hid the fact at election time. It wasn’t even that he got into probably the least edifying public competition with David Cameron ever, both of them doing all but digging-up the tiny corpse and screaming ‘my baby’s deader than your baby.’
How useless do you have to be exactly, to lose to him?
More, it was the fact that he was a workplace bully whose behaviour was tolerated and encouraged by a Party who claimed to oppose exactly that behaviour. It was the fact that in selling off gold at its lowest price for years he clearly believed his own nonsensical ‘no more boom and bust’ rhetoric. He did nothing to stop the slide towards privatising the NHS and nothing to stop the City of London rampaging out of control. His Freudian slip when he broadcast that he had ‘saved the world’ rather than bankers and their bonuses, primarily by giving money to banks without any stipulation they should do anything with it other than keep it and count it now and then spoke volumes about his belief in his importance in the scheme of things. And as the 2010 election showed, it was a belief few other people shared. Being unable to win an election against a collection of cartoon characters drawn from the Lord Snooty faction of the Beano illustrates that point better than anything I could write.
Cor Lumme, eh readers??
Gordon Brown was a joke. Like Bernard Manning, he appealed to some people but from here you can’t really see why. Milliband was too, but like Yvette Cooper, for a different reason. In trying to listen he shows he doesn’t have any principles or policies or passion. Aside from anything else he uses the wrong tools to listen, if that’s really what he wants to do.
Shortly after he became leader, Ed Milliband – or someone paid to pretend to be him – went on Twitter mourning the death of a ‘pollster’ (to use Ed’s own words) who had done sterling work for the Party. Except he hadn’t. He was dead, admittedly, but what his company had produced, recruited, interviewed and reported on were group discussions. Whatever else they’re for, groups are not a snapshot of what people are thinking. They’re done in a hurry and there aren’t enough people talked to that could give a representative idea of what other people think. If you’re interested, group discussions are a great way of generating ideas and discussing things to clarify your own thinking, but they aren’t in any way reliable for polling opinion. Because they aren’t opinion polls. Notwithstanding that a large body of UK market research thinks that two groups (ie about twelve people) can give the answer to anything, (a) they can’t and b) it might have been nice for the dead researcher to have what he did described correctly by the person who wanted to be seen to be paying tribute to him. Assuming he hadn’t described groups as polls himself, of course.
Because I worked in market research at the time I tried to talk to Ed on Twitter about it. He did what he always did in Parliament: stay silent. I thought then and now how pathetic that response was. I wasn’t abusive or rude in any way. I just said that polls are not group discussions and hence the deceased was not a pollster. I didn’t say that calling anyone a pollster is a fairly yucky faux-chuminess that isn’t the best epitaph anyone could wish for, especially as it was wrong anyway. But I might as well have done.
I tried to find the Tweet but it was years ago. I found another more recent one instead, from just before the election.
Ed probably thinks this is fighting talk. This is why he lost. Because like him, it doesn’t say anything that means anything. It’s a silly, irrelevant platitude that can mean anything you want it to mean. It doesn’t just suck up to the Tory line about ‘hard-working families.’ It says nothing about cutting child benefits at all. It says nothing about what if anything he intended to do to help families who aren’t working. It says nothing about creating an economy that creates jobs. Writing this – and let’s assume he did – Milliband could actually have CUT Child Benefit to families who weren’t working and stay true to his word. But first of course, he’d have to have some rubbish research done to see if a few people liked the idea.
Blair turned Labour into an Alice In Wonderland Party where words mean anything you want them to mean. But people outside Parliament don’t think like that. Most people mean what they say. They think about things and put together an idea of how they see the world and how they’d like it to be, then they do what they can to make it that way. What they don’t generally do is keep pestering everyone to find out what other people would like them to think. Because it’s creepy. About as creepy as gurning over a newspaper that despises you, pretending you’d even keep it in the bathroom in case the loo roll ran out.
When the truth is found
There used to be a band called Jefferson Airplane. Their break-through song, White Rabbit, was an acid-drenched soaring scream of wonder about leisure pharmaceuticals, drawing on Lewis Carrol’s Alice adventures. One of the most memorable exchanges in the book was between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. Alice was puzzled about the way that according to Humpty and countless others, words could be made to mean anything you want them to mean. She found this odd and not the case; Humpty disagreed. I often wonder if it was just coincidence that on the very next track on a Jefferson album I have the very next track is “Somebody to Love.” It starts: ‘when the truth is found to be lies.’
One of the things about modern life is the belief that you can’t do anything. That other people are experts. That someone knows better than you do. And when they’ve trained to do that, it’s true. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer is that simply because he’s always been best mates with the Prime Minister from uni onwards, it patently isn’t true at all.
It’s the same with the things we use. I know I’m supposed to throw things away, but the thing is: I paid for them. I bought them in the expectation that they’d keep working and when they don’t I firstly get annoyed and then more usefully, try to repair them.
All you need for this project. Not including sticky-backed plastic and tea.
When my Macbook battery started to die, so much so that it even asked for help in a desperate little note on the screen, I know I’m supposed to have gone to a Mac repair place. They could have done a lot of sucking of air between teeth and the compulsory “can’t get the bolts, see, Fella?’ which enrages me more than almost anything else (being called that, even by policemen, who at my age should be calling me ‘sir,’ always preferable to ‘do you mind if I call you Carl?’ but let’s move on) as (a) I am not anyone’s fellow and (b) you could if you could be bothered, which was always true).
You say carbon-fibre spludger, I say chip fork.
Then I could have been embarrassed on the Mac shop person’s total failure to know how to repair anything at all without sending it to be somebody else’s problem and weeks later I would have got a bill for a couple of hundred pounds and it might or might not have worked. So forget that.
Instead, I bought a new battery on Ebay for £17 which arrived less than 48 hours later, looked online for how to do it and got my toolkit out. The first thing the web page listed was the three tools you need for the job. A tiny crosshead screwdriver, a triangular screwdriver and a bit of plastic called a spludger they wanted £2.49 plus post and packing for.
It’s just more pretend nonsense. A pair of wooden chip forks work just as well. They’re free and more to the point, are there in the car ashtray in case they come in handy for something. Which they did. And they’re recyclable too.
The black bit’s the battery. Recycling it around here is a 20-mile round trip.
First switch it all off and take the plug out. Obviously. Then you turn the Powerbook upside down and take the screws off the back of it. The only thing that can go wrong (apart from dropping the whole thing, or losing the screws, so that teacup she never even noticed, not least because I didn’t know she didn’t like tea when I bought it came in handy at last) is shorting the entire thing out with the static electricity in your body. You get rid of it by shorting yourself out to earth, which literally means that: take your shoes off and do the job with your feet on the brick tiles in the kitchen. If that’s not an effective earth I don’t really know what is.
A half hour screwing
The only iffy bit is getting the stupid triangular screws out, put there by some total arse who was trying to be clever in Cupertino, or maybe they just had a load of triangular screws they got cheap because nobody else wanted them, which seems likely. I have a few triangular screwdrivers but nothing that size. A tiny flathead screwdriver works just as well. Sort of.
Gently feel where it goes and press it just a bit. Come on guys, you should know how to do this.
Undo all the screws, flip the connector off the battery with the wooden chip forks (do check for vinegar and lumps of batter first; a good wipe down with your fingers works nicely, take the old one out, put the new one in, plug the connector, put all the old screws back and start it up. It altered the clock, but otherwise it’s fine and charging happily. And a lot faster than the old one.
I gave it all a good clean with a camelhair brush I had in a box of art supplies someone keeps forgetting to come and get out of my spare room however many times I say I’ll throw it all in the bin as she knows perfectly well I won’t.
No, I don’t know why most of my stuff is German, either.
And it all works. Because you can do this stuff. Anyone can. It’s just there’s a whole industry devoted to telling you that you need to give other people money instead of doing anything yourself. There was one slight problem – one of the screws holding the battery in didn’t want to bite. Given that the battery is held in place by the other ten screws holding the back cover on anyway I don’t really think it matters. It’s not as if it’s going anywhere nor as if the screw can fall out because it’s a long one. Maybe it’s like those parts on old British motorcycles, the metal thing you have leftover after any engine job, that has no noticeable effect on the engine running whatsoever.
We learned to be helpless. And you can learn not to be.
One of the good things about dead people is that they can’t sue you. You can say whatever you like about them. Quite a lot is being said about Cilla Black recently. Sadly, none of it quite like the revelations you might expect if she was anything like the character she played in Benidorm, which she obviously wasn’t.
Instead, we’re told that her life was altered by a ghost. Some of the papers half-heartedly tried to write it in inverted commas, but The Express and Daily Mail ran it as a real, true story. Cilla saw a ghost. That’s a fact. Kim Kardashian is talented for more than just having a huge arse. That’s another one. There’s a plot to blow up the Queen on Saturday and nobody’s been arrested. That’s another fact right there. All of them sounding as if they’ve been written by over-excited eight year-olds and given the fact that HuffPost and their ilk don’t pay anyone, maybe they have.
Something else in an otherwise predictable Sky “report” on ISIS was interesting but went uncommented completely: Peshmerga commanders have described how ISIS goes to great lengths to hide the identities of its fighters – including shooting dead bodies they are unable to remove from the battlefield repeatedly in the face until they are unrecognisable. Quite why was left unquestioned, let alone unanswered. What for? Why would they? Whatever name we’re supposed to call them this week?
But a lot of things routinely go unanswered these days. Such as why it’s ok for Turkey to buy oil from ISIS, which isn’t a rumour but something the US Treasury states. Or why Turkey bombs the Kurds who actually stand up to ISIS and fight back effectively against them. Or why ISIS has never fired a single shot against Israel that I’ve ever heard of, which is particularly odd if they’re really supposed to be rampaging through the Middle East and imposing a caliphate. Google ISIS attacks Israel and see what you come up with. It won’t take long. Or why the Isreali Prime Minister has been saying Iraq will have a nuclear weapon within two years for the past twenty-five years and nobody ever publicly says “but you said that last year. And the year before. And the year before that Mr Prime Minister.”
Or why BBC reporters claimed David Cameron publicly threatened to shut the BBC but they didn’t feel they ought to mention it until after the election. Think about that one for a moment. Or why the same newspapers who have space to print rubbish about a dead pop singer’s nights disturbed by apparitions somehow don’t have the column inches to print much about the Chancellor’s loss-making sell-off of RBS shares and still present his reign as an uninterrupted financial success story.
I think I saw a ghost once. I was in a very old-fashioned restaurant in a six hundred year-old manor house which had once been much bigger. We waited about 20 minutes before we could attract a waiter to our table and then waited longer to get anyone to take our drinks order. Eventually a man I presumed to be the owner came into the dining room. He stopped suddenly as if he was surprised anyone was there, then quickly left the room and turned down a corridor. I got up and followed him. He was wearing a white shirt and yellowish trousers, much the same kit I sometimes wear at weekends if I’m in that kind of mood. He was about ten years older than me. The only odd thing about him was that he looked so surprised and rushed off so quickly. That isn’t strictly true. The other odd thing about him was that the corridor I followed him into was a dead end with no doors and he wasn’t there. He would have had to have walked past me to go anywhere else. He simply wasn’t there.
H.A.F. You can work out the acronym yourself.
When the waiter came back he avoided the subject. It turned into a loud night. We assumed there was a stag party because of the noise that went on until the small hours. We talked to the waiter about it at breakfast the next day. He said we were the only guests and that staff didn’t stay on the premises overnight. He didn’t have any explanation for any of it.
Things that go bump
Did I see a ghost? I don’t know. Maybe and maybe not. I know it wasn’t in the least bit scary – I thought it was a real person I saw and as somebody once said to someone who said they’d never seen a ghost, in a room full of strangers or a busy street or train station, how exactly would you know? And it doesn’t matter. What does is that things like this are being pumped out to occupy people, while real, big questions go unasked, let alone answered. And it’s deliberate. And that’s much more scary than Cilla’s dead maid.
The ancestors. Simple folk. They couldn’t even fix an iPhone battery.
In the USA it means a place that needs some work. But for me it’s what I do. I fix things. I always have. I wasn’t much good at things like woodwork at school and I had no clue about how my Scalextrix cars worked other than that the electricity turns the motor that turns the wheels. Maybe there isn’t much else to know. It didn’t help me fix them, but maybe removing 3-in-1 oil and carpet fluff isn’t strictly electrical engineering. I’ve never looked at a syllabus.
I had motorcycles that didn’t and cars that sort of went and mainly because I had next to no money I had to fix them myself or they didn’t go. The one time I gave up and paid for a garage to fix my car they took about half a term’s grant (ah yes, dear reader, there was such a thing before Market Forces and your total indifference to doing anything about it) to fail to fix the kind of problem that is obvious when you start looking at it and begin to think. There was an intermittent electrical fault. The car would stop, then start, or miss a couple of beats, or slow down, or just stop for no reason anyone could see. In those days the sparks came out of a distributor which did that, spinning round and working a cam to put the spark into the right wire at the right time. To regulate things a pair of weights pulled a spring apart as they spun round at thousands of times a minute. The little pile of metal dust told me (and not the garage) eventually what was wrong. The spring had worn out after fourteen years or so and the weights were hitting the edge of the distributor, inside. So the electricity didn’t get to the spark plug when that happened, which wasn’t always.
I don’t know what happens under car bonnets now. You’re not supposed to. Like mobile phones and computers, you’re supposed to chuck them away and get another one when they start to go wrong.
Except that hardly squares with saving resources, whether they’re child labour in China or cadmium in batteries or just my money. So this week it’s time to fix the laptop as well as my iPhone. Both of them have the same problem – after three years of use you can only use them for about two hours at the outside. I know I’m letting the entire economy down but we’re hardly on speaking terms anyway.
Right now I’m waiting for them to arrive in the post, along with the special tools to hack the iPhone apart and the earthing strap to put on my wrist and my metal desk so the static in me doesn’t fritz the electrics. And you’re reading about someone who used to have blue flashes coming out of his fingers when he closed the car door on a Ford. Switching to a Mercedes cured that. It was what the seats and carpets were made of, natural fibres instead of static-generating synthetics. So wish me luck. I can still fix things. It’s what I do.
The joke went that a receptionist got this brilliant job for Wang, the computer company, back when nobody really knew what computers did apart from the Accounts department and typists. She’d done some German at school so when she got the chance to apply for the Koln office she thought that might a good idea for the CV, see a foreign country, all kinds of reasons. But it didn’t work out. She kept answering the phone by giving the name of the company and the location of the office and people thought she was saying something else. If you use the English pronunciation of Cologne, which she wouldn’t as the office was in Germany.
Like any joke, like any reference, you have to have a shared set of assumptions for it to work, a supporting world where everyone in on it knows much the same sorts of things. So obviously you have to know what an Accounts department is and roughly what they do, and accounts and therefore sums is pretty much enough knowledge to understand how a computer might help out there. Except of course computers did much more than help out there when before that there were only manual adding machines you typed a number into and pulled a chrome lever like a pinball machine which printed the number you’d typed on paper that came off a rotating drum, ratcheted forward by the cogs and teeth pulled around by the lever, pulled around mechanically by you.
If you were there. But you can imagine it anyway, whether or not you were. We make a picture of her in our heads, this girl, just from the words we use. Because it’s Wang it’s the 1970s or maybe 1980s, whether or not you were even born then, so we know what she’s wearing. We’ve seen pictures, at least, films, or old photos with the colour just that bit wrong enough to tell us whatever was happening wasn’t now but then. We know she’s probably blond, probably dyed and she wears coloured nail varnish. Her skirt’s a bit tight, even if it is respectably knee-length. She probably smokes too. JPS, or More, those long, thin, menthol cigarettes that reeked also of sophistication if you lived in a country town.
She might have her own car, this girl, a Mini or maybe on the furthest shores of reality, a Renault 5, but not a new one. No way a new one. In the winter she has problems starting it and the windows fug up with condensation sometimes, just from breathing and the heater, not smoke. But she definitely smokes. As for what else she definitely does, apart from worries about her weight but not so much that she goes to a gym, because people don’t back then, certainly not girls like her and there weren’t any anyway, we don’t know. She probably does. I mean, look at her. That’s the look you want on Reception, pretty much wherever you go, back then. In our heads.
And we know exactly what her voice sounds like as she says the two words, the two words, the three syllables that she pronounces with a tonal shift to make it sound like four, the flat tone of Wang then the same tone again for the first syllable, the /co/, the raised tone of /low/ and the split drop down of /own/, the single syllable split into two tones so the word rises in the middle but not so much of a drop that it starts back at the same tone. It doesn’t. It’s a little higher. You can see her saying this on the phone, in this cheaply furnished Reception with the wood painted black, on her red phone with her red nails and the grey and beige switchboard, her eyes on yours although she’s on the phone, a cheap pen in the other hand held aloft. If you move a bit you can probably look down her shirt; she knows you’re trying to do that anyway. Depends whether she’ll let you or not. But she does know. Definitely. The same way she doesn’t know that when she says the company name and the town like that, it sounds like she’s recommending solitary onanism. But of course she isn’t. Because she wouldn’t be calling it Cologne if she answered the phone in Germany. And Wang probably never had an office there anyway.
We don’t need her. She never existed. She’s gone. She never was. Except you can see her in your mind, picture her sitting on a wall in the park one sunny summer lunchtime. With all our shared assumptions. All our histories.
I totalled a car once. I was younger and I liked and at the time needed to go fast for reasons which aren’t clear to me now, at all. I had some bumps but because of the country roads that I drove on I didn’t hit any other cars. The only time I did wasn’t my fault. It happened when someone with his whole small family in the car decided to turn into a side road, across my lane. I braked and turned as well but it was just physics – I couldn’t stop fast enough to avoid hitting him. Nobody was hurt.
I nearly killed my best friend. She would have been dead if she hadn’t put on the seat belt she ought to have been wearing anyway, just a few minutes before I ran out of road one icy night on a reverse camber corner in the middle of nowhere, but sadly somewhere not quite remote enough not to have a telegraph pole that I put smack in the middle of the front of the car. She still talks to me.
If you pick up any newspaper you’ll see what you’re supposed to be afraid of this week. It could be immigrants, ISIS, D’aesh, Al-Quaeda or Cilla Black’s ghost maid, which according to the Daily Express is a real thing. Between them all, these sources of supreme evil managed to kill less than 10 UK citizens in 2013. You killed over 1,700. That’s probably why it’s not in the news.
According to the Government – and you can see the exact figures if you click on the link about how many people you killed – in 2013 1,713 people were killed in road accidents in the UK. More than rail crashes, airplane crashes, shipwrecks or acts of any war we’ve had for decades. And we don’t care. If we did we’d put it on the news.
Why don’t we care? Maybe we do, but we can’t face it. The same way that hardly anybody ever gets prosecuted for manslaughter when they kill someone with their car or truck. The same way you can drive a car up onto the pavement in Southwold, kill someone and not even get a arrested. That happened a few summers ago. I don’t know any other crime where the defence “I didn’t do it on purpose” works so well.
Next time you see the news and marvel at the latest ‘terror threat’ or swarm of people who only have hope left, and hear how all of this is this week’s existential threat to our way of life, think about our existential way of death, and how you know the acceptable casualty rate after which something must be done. In 2013 it was 1,713. Nothing else came even vaguely close.
We had dogs when I was a boy. The first one was a Collie I went stealing with. We used to go to the village shop in Snitterfield before I was even two and help ourselves to the things laid out on the lower shelves. We were firm but fair – if we had to reach for things we didn’t eat them. If we didn’t then we did, on the spot. It was a simple strategy and effective as only simple strategies with limited objectives tend to be.
Later in Gillingham (the Dorset one, thankfully) there was a labrador I have no memory of whatsoever. Where there should be a dog there isn’t even a dog-shaped hole through my memory, like the ones on the Tom and Jerry cartoons. There isn’t. It’s just blank. Lots of that time is. I don’t know if there was a dog when we moved to Southwick. There was a cat, but it ran off, we were told. I don’t think it did. The main road at the end of our road killed all kinds of things, dogs, cats, chickens and people, at least twice in the time I lived there, the road carpeted with Maltesers one morning after a lorry crashed.
This isn’t me, you understand….Then there was a dog. It was the time of the Dulux dog. Because my father was a lying fantasist we got a Pyrenean Mountain dog, the same as the one on Belle and Sebastian, before the name was synonymous with Millenial yawn-pop. And that was a weird TV show if anything was. An orphan in a tiny snowy village who distincly looked a few steps along the autistic spectrum with a penchant for polo-neck sweaters had a huge dog as a friend. He lived in a stone house in the mountains and nobody seemed to do anything much that anyone would pay them for: a guy who looked like a former Maquisard with PTSD, an old man who had trouble shaving and an elegant, sultry, chic woman who had obviously taken a wrong turning and who seemed to be Sebastian’s reluctant foster mother. When she wasn’t making me feel funnily.
So far so silly. But not as silly as getting a Pyrenean Mountain dog that you think an advertising agency is going to hire and make your fortune. This was the total BS we were told as children. And you wonder why. Anyway. The advertising agency who my father didn’t know never called and he was never there, so I had to take this sodding dog for a walk, aged eight. It was nothing like Belle and Sebastian. At all. There were no mountains in Wiltshire, for a start. And very little snow. Nor smugglers, avalanches nor leftover stuff from The War, which used to take up quite a bit of time on TV shows for kids in those days, not just on Belle & Sebastian but on The White Horses too, where some blond girl and her mysterious protector who was nothing whatsoever to do with the Lippizaner Stud, nor the SS troops who ran it and weren’t just dab hands with a lunging rein but who also stopped the American advance on Vienna, oh dear me no, nothing whatsoever to do with all that at all, just an honest businessman who happens to be fond of long black boots, that’s all. They were strange times.
The dog was a pain. I had no idea how to control it and it was physically bigger than me anyway. It used to run away quite often and given the choice I would have done too. My father did what he always did: left problems like walking the thing twice a day for everyone else to sort out and came back to pose about playing the big man with his fancy dog.
Eventually it went to live with a friend of my mother in Ealing, which seemed fair. Then there were no more dogs for about eight years, until my step-father got an Irish terrier. He thought it was going to be about Jack Russel size, remembering how he thought they were. I think he was thinking of a different breed altogether. This thing was more like the ones you used to see on trolleys, with a handle for small children to push, pretending they had their own dog. Maybe my father should have got one of those instead. It would have been easier all round.
Nobody trained the thing. It wasn’t the dog’s fault. It used to run off too, but somehow by that time I could run faster than the dog, which came as a surprise to both of us. It wasn’t my dog anyway. Then there was the Great Dog Disaster when I was supposed to be helping a girlfriend look after her Afghan hound while her parents were away for a week.
I say helping, but that just meant taking it for a walk. I wasn’t actually supposed to be there, but obviously, her parents were away for the week. It was a big dog but a quiet one. They got burgled once and everyone thought the dog was the target because the house was empty when everyone got home. Until the dog came out from behind the sofa where it had been hiding from the burglars. The only time it ever bit anyone, which it did several times in those less litigious days, was when it was tied to a postbox while whoever was walking it went into a shop. The dog had the idea it had to guard whatever it was tied to, so posting letters became more complicated than it needed to be. The week too, as the dog managed to become not just one of the first black Afghans in the UK, which it was, but also one of the first to die of parvo virus. It took just a few days. It was all pretty horrible.
Then no dogs for years. I went to look at a house to buy in Burnham on Crouch. I stood talking to the owner while her terrier ran in to the room, jumped up on the sofa behind me and bit my hand. The woman totally denied anything had happened, which was at odds with the blood coming out of my hand. Oddly, I didn’t buy her house. I should have had her dog destroyed.
Then I met someone with huge, muscley dogs. She brought them round occasionally. I woke up one morning and reached for flesh, as you do, to find something bristly and warm that seemed to have steel underneath it. I didn’t remember her being quite like that the night before; her dog had crept into the bed between us while we slept. She told me that I’d get bitten if I behaved the way I did around her dogs. Then her dogs would be taken away and put to sleep, which she didn’t want, so she taught me how to behave so dogs wouldn’t detest me on sight.
It worked with someone else’s dogs after that, too. She had two rescue dogs. One was boisterous and disturbed while the other one was traumatised by having been nearly killed by a bigger dog. Maybe it was to protect the little dog that the bigger one almost invariably attacked other dogs without any warning at all if they so much as looked at him. Or even if they didn’t. We walked a lot last winter, into the spring, as the weather stopped being so cold and the evenings started to get longer. It was a quiet time, walking the river path with those dogs. The little one learned to play with a ball, something she’d never done before. And to bark when I arrived to take her out. Often her owner was asleep until the little dog barked, then she woke and handed me the leads. The door was usually left open, on the latch. I asked if she thought it was safe leaving the door unlocked like that. She said there wasn’t any danger at all.
