My Other Stuff – Page 9 – Writer-insighter

Where are we now?

I was fourteen. I had a stupid haircut that lumped-up over my ears and parted naturally down the middle, the way it always has, the way it always will if I grow it too long, although back then Too Long was an impossible dream away.

It was Wiltshire. We had cows and grass and snow and frost and car crashes that left blood all over the road walking home from the school disco on a Friday night. Only once. How often does that need to happen?

We had a pork pie factory and a brewery in the centre of town. On Tuesdays, you could hear the pigs screaming until noon when they were all dead. After about one o’clock you could smell the lard as the carcasses were flensed with a steam hose. On Thursdays, huge clouds of steam wafted the smell of hops all over the Georgian mansions that had become a bank and a cafe and a row of offices in Fore Street, just up the hill from the eighteenth-century single cell jail house and the Gateway supermarket.

And then there was David Bowie. And we didn’t know what to make of all that New York and space and saxophone zoot-suited androgynous stuff at all. WE didn’t have androgyny in Wiltshire. Ok, the manager of Gateway had a bit of a turn and invited first the delivery van driver into a new lifestyle and then invited his new friends in day-glo singlets into the store while there were customers still there. But it wasn’t much like the kind of thing David Bowie might sing about. We had a shot-away ex-hippy definitely not ex-junkie calling himself Ziggy who used to unwantedly follow Theresa Powell around. But again, probably even David Bowie would have had a hard time making a song about that, that anyone would want to listen to.

He was singing about another planet, one none of us had ever seen. So were the New York Dolls. So was Iggy. So were the Velvets. So were The Eagles and Little Feat and all kinds of massive bands. But Bowie did something none of them did. I don’t to this day know what it was. This is the day he’s died.

I loved Hunky Dory. When it came out I used to play Ashes to Ashes, the whole album, while I took breakfast in my digs in my first term at Bath, the sound of a tortured ghostly clown singing while I ate bacon and eggs in a newish house in distinctly not-newish scruffily Georgian Larkhall, still my never-happen fantasy place to live, snuggled under Solsbury Hill in the frost, my Triumph 650 waiting to take me to uni, up the hill that trashed my clutch the first term I was there.

Radio On (1979) by BFIfilms

Heroes had been the anthem for a time in Bristol and Bath, a time of leather jackets and silk scarves and patchouli and cowboy boots on Park Road, hanging around the record stores and bookshops, living our preposterously tamely genteel version of street-life that was unimaginably alien to parents brought up on rationing. Our rebellion was making sure all our girlfriends were on the pill. That’s how wild we were. You think I’m joking.

This was still a time when I went to the doctor one day to discuss the pros and cons of this policy with my family doctor, a man so cool he hand-rolled liquorice papers in the surgery while telling you not to smoke. He didn’t approve of our practice. It wasn’t the idea of shovelling hormones into people whose hormones were all over the place that he objected to. Just that when, as he put it, the word got around that a pretty young girl (he had that kind of voice, the kind of voice you could say that with, then) was on the pill it was people like me that were the problem. Me? You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.

You’re like dogs with a plate of meat, he told me. I was shocked.

And all the while we could be heroes. And nothing could keep us together. And then nothing much that I listened to from David Bowie until Heathen, twenty? thirty years later? I liked that. Then nothing for another decade until the desolate survivor-story of Where Are We Now. I haven’t heard Blackstar. Not except the Radiohead version, the one that like so much of Bowie’s stuff, takes me back to Radio On and Bristol and Bath and silk scarves and girls with curled hair and Afghan coats. Cold cheeks and warm lips. The flash of white teeth bared in a smile in street light. Blame it on the black star. Blame it on the satellite that takes him home.

Faking it

A woman in Wiltshire has just had her car stopped by a fake police car. as Morcheeba used to sing back when I was cool, who can you trust?

The odd thing, the thing about being older, is that I remember this happening before. Wiltshire isn’t exactly a crime hotspot. So two fake police car incidents made me think a bit. The one I remember was in Trowbridge. A real policeman walked over to a police van to ask the driver something and realised he wasn’t talking to anyone he knew from Trowbrodge police station. Someone had faked up a police van and got their fun just driving around pretending to be in the police. They’d never stopped anyone, or gained anything by it. They just liked playing at being a policeman.

In a world where grown adults pay hundreds of pounds to squeeze 18stone into football kit to go to watch a game, maybe that’s not so odd at all, really. Me, I’d have chosen a cowboy outfit. But Trowbridge was always odd. A couple of years after the fake police car another van got someone arrested. It was camouflage. It belonged to whoever had taken over the old army-surplus shop that sold sand-coloured canvas haversacks and Canadian army greatcoats for sixth formers, back when that was what sixth formers wore. As a tip, maybe it’s best if you do break in to the army gun room and steal a Sterling machine pistol, or know who did, it might be better to keep a lower profile than cruising around town looking like you’re auditioning for The A Team. As I said, a strange place, Wiltshire.

Share if you don’t care

I’ve used Facebook too much. There, I’ve said it now, out of the closet, loud and proud. I am what I am. Someone who thinks Facebook if it isn’t bona fide actually evil, certainly is something that allows people to wallow in stupid, spread it around and smear it up the walls. Especially when it comes to religion.

Look, Arthur, I need the Grail back. It was a loan. You know full well it was only a loan. — Look Arthur, open this door. I need the Grail back now. It was a loan. Two millenia you’ve had that and I need it back. You know perfectly well it was only a loan. I’m not joking. I know you’re in there…..

For the Chosen People, obviously the Church of England (and if you disagree then I’m sorry, but we’ll have to invade your country, burn your huts, put whatever of yours we like in a museum in London and work as slaves those of you who don’t get smallpox from us, same as we always used to), the thing about our sacred faith is that apart from weddings and funerals and Midnight Mass at Christmas if you stay sober that late, you don’t really have to do much about it.

As our Prime Minister told us, you can tax the poor and cut services for the sick and God, apparently, is pretty much ok with that, even if vicars and bishops aren’t, in the same way you can decide you’re (well, ok, other people are) going to have a war and still pitch up at the Cenotaph doing your solemn Brave Soldier face using the same expression you wore when you first read about the Princess of Blandings getting swine vesicular disease.

An article of faith

As you may possibly have gathered by now, I’m not very religious. But even so, I think I’m more religious than the person who posted a thing about not denying Jesus on Facebook yesterday. It pretty much cemented my view about stupid and Facebook and how the symbiosis between the two isn’t just flourishing but essential.

The American (think Gahd, guns and too many grits) Facebook post ran like this:

A drunk man came home from a bar and shot his wife and the neighbours in front of his little girl until the police shot him. The girl was taken to a care centre where she pointed up at a picture of Jesus at Calvary and asked “how did that man get down from the Cross?’ The doctor told her, “He didn’t.” The little girl said yes he did, that was the man behind the sofa with me who told me everything would be ok. 66% of you won’t share this. So remember Jesus said if you deny me I will deny you to your father.

Awwww!

I don’t know which part of this I find the most loathsome, apart from all of it. The sanctimony, the made-up statistic used to assert the fact of it all, the blackmail, the threat, the nonsensicalself-contradictory plain stupid of the idea that if you don’t repost some trite bullshit on Facebook your God, the one you’ve just been pretending is a God of compassion not even fifteen seconds ago will consign you to eternal damnation, the total acceptance that hey, people do come home from bars and shoot up the neighbourhood, or the total lie that there was anyone behind the sofa with the equally non-existent girl.

But most of all, I despise the fake Christianity of the thing, fake in the most fundamental way, bullying masquerading as religion, the same way it always was in my family.

Church of England Archbishops don’t really have to be on much more than nodding terms with God when they believe in him at all, but even my dim recollection of Sunday school at St Thomas’s – and no, I didn’t make that up, that’s what my boyhood church actually was, Thomas the Doubter’s – told me one fundamental thing that seems to have escaped the gun-totin’ blackmailing bullying misogynists who go for that kind of post and that kind of religion: the whole point was that He actually WAS supposed to have got down from the Cross and risen again.

There isn’t anything more fundamental about the entire religion than that. That’s the central thing. Born in a stable. Ox and ass. Carpentry. Easter. Cross. Tomb. Walking. Ascension. Ever and ever. Amen.

And if you like as an optional extra where I’m from, his uncle Joseph of Arimethea took the Holy Grail to Glastonbury and planted a thorn tree that sprang out of his staff and almost certainly lent it to King Arthur. And yes he did exist because I’ve seen that tree with my own eyes, so ner!

We know that much. In the West Country, anyway. Which is more worth knowing than trying to blackmail people into doing what you want citing a religion you can’t even remember the basic details of.

The French Lieutenant’s Christmas

Twenty years ago I went to Lyme Regis.

It’s one of the oddest, most wonderful English seaside towns I know. Ten days at Christmas there was magical. Even though I nearly, very nearly, got killed, along with the person I was with.

It was my fault.

We’d driven down some hundred miles or so, staying in a friend’s flat that was the top floor of a building about 250 years old where the sound of seagulls woke us every morning for an early walk down to The Cob to see if the huge ship moored and obviously dragging its anchor closer to the beach each day was going to be still there or wrecked, until one morning it was simply gone.

We’d witnessed a car crash outside the town on a snowy road caused because someone was changing their CD and had been driving like an accident looking for somewhere to happen. So we set off to the west of the town, where the cliffs crumble into the sea, more each time it rains, a place you can hear the landslips, hear the water oozing through the mud and rock, which isn’t reassuring. We walked along the beach, looking for fossils, because we knew we were safe from the tide coming in. I’d read the tide tables. Except I’d read them back to front, so when I thought it was low tide it was high tide and now we were trapped between a rising tide and shale cliffs that were marked “Impassable” on the map.

We proved that was wrong but it wasn’t funny. We couldn’t go back along the beach. And as we climbed we found ourselves on all fours a few times, then literally surfing back down the cliffs on lumps of rock that had come loose. We didn’t have a choice. Both of us thought at one point that we might not actually get out of this. We didn’t have phones with us. We got up onto some sort of plateau of wind-blasted trees at some point, about half-way up, where we knew for the first time that we wouldn’t fall back into the sea. But there was no road or path leading to this place. We still had to climb the rest of the cliffs or stay there forever, so we climbed. It took hours. It wasn’t as bad, but it wasn’t great. Nor, when we reached the top, was finding we were in the middle of a huge bramble patch and had to go through it to get to someone’s farmyard. It wasn’t a day of choices, after the first wrong one. But we lived.

We went to church at midnight after we saw practically the whole town go past the windows of the Naval Volunteer, the pub we were in. There’s another pub at the bottom of the hill but I’ve never felt at ease there. It used to be used as a mortuary after shipwrecks. There were old people going along to the church, middle class couples wrapped in big coats and odder, young people, girls in their teens straight out of the pub and into the church standing like the beacon it was, bright lit on the hill in the dark.

I was given a saxophone that Christmas. Before we’d got home the mouthpiece disappeared and although we looked everywhere we could think of in that old flat and searched the car and pockets and everywhere else, it was gone. We drove to Bridport thinking there might be a music shop there but no luck. Except when we got back to the flat the mouthpiece was sitting in the exact centre of the floor. There was no possible way we could not have seen it if it had been there. It just wasn’t.

Lyme, where one summer we saw a family and their adult friends, all of them tall and blond and fine-looking throwing something down the Undercliff rocks, one to the other, passing it like a rugby ball and as it was thrown past we both of us thought, separately, ‘that’s a baby.’ We talked about it later. Years later we still both think it was their baby, wrapped up and apparently used to this.

More things as odd have happened there. More things more magical. I love that place. But I won’t be there this Christmas. Another year.

Solstice blues

The longest day is 21st June, but the day that feels longest is 21st December, the shortest.

Actually, that’s not true. Right now, every one of them seems like the longest, dreariest, dullest, dark by five o’clock but some days it seems like four day it’s possible to imagine. It’s ok. Even though it’s not. I just get like this every year.

Seasonal Affected Disorder or Seasonally Acquired Depression or whatever it’s properly called happens to lots of people. And as I type that I can hear my mother’s faux-joy denying there was anything wrong, denying utterly that there could possibly be anything wrong, and certainly nothing that needed any investigation by outsiders, oh dear me no. But there was. And there is.

In this light, with this mood, you look at this picture and think ‘I didn’t even see there was a couple there when I took this. Smug gits. I hope the tide came in and caught them out.’ It’s not right, is it?

The light messes me up a bit. The lack of it. It makes me spiral down and because it’s not like breaking your arm or even getting a cold, where one day you’re fine and the next day you’re very obviously not, it’s easy for me to forget it’s happening, as it always does, and do something about it.

Which is easy, just get out of the house and put the SAD lamp on when I’m in. Because otherwise I’ll just sit on the sofa or lie in bed, focussing on things that have gone wrong (the same kinds of things everyone has. I hope…) and how it will always be this way now. And forgetting that actually, that’s bollocks. It won’t be.

In a fortnight the shortest day comes and the days slowly, but then quite quickly get longer and the evenings lighter, until by the end of January, by any stretch of anyone’s reckoning still winter, it’s much lighter and brighter. Even if it’s usually colder than December, in my experience, anyway.

And I can deal with that. That’s what the scarf I bought at the Christmas market in Hungerford, 21 years ago this Christmas, or maybe it was only twenty, but it wasn’t any less, is for. It was as brilliant as Christmas markets always are, sparkling in the dark, little stalls where you could talk to the people who actually made the things they were selling, the woman who made my green scarf. It’s got some holes in it where the zip on my Barbour or a succession of them snagged it, as it will again this winter. As perhaps it should. That’s what too the big wool gloves lined with Thinsulate and the palms faced with leather are for, the ones I got in Copenhagen one freezing day in March, 2005, few minutes I had between getting off the ferry and catching a train to Hamburg, the glove-shop more like a big wardrobe than any shop in England, but despite its size perfect, with exactly and precisely what I wanted, real gloves that would last a substantial chunk of a lifetime.

The hat – well, the wool hat lined with Thinsulate went the way of all the best hats, on someone else’s head and I don’t know where. Or when. I haven’t got it now. Nor the Mercedes I had when I drove down to Lyme Regis for Christmas and New Year twenty years back, one of the best Christmasses ever, nor the stone barn I had in Stow-on-the-Wold nineteen years ago this Christmas, rather blighted by the bank deciding to pull a third of the business overdraft. At least I had the satisfaction that the bank manager was sacked shortly afterwards. I haven’t got something I thought I might have from last Christmas either, but I never really did anyway. What I need to not have is a downward mood because it gets dark early.

It’ll be ok. Really. Everything. It will. It does every year. It’s just the light.

Risking it

I used to research things. That was my job. I stopped doing it when the internet told everyone they knew everything anyway, because we live in an entitled world of stupid. And I couldn’t be bothered with telling people what they were already paid to know. I didn’t have the patience any more to sit there while people just wanted their prejudices confirmed and blamed the research and therefore me if their prejudices were shown to be just that and nothing more. Especially then.

Stupid people wear me out. Especially when they pay people not to call them stupid.

The decision to bomb Syria must count as one of the most stupid things I’ve seen in a long time, just on statistics alone.

The ISIS attack on the cafe in France killed over 150 people. It was utterly horrible. Nobody there deserved to die. So how much more horrible must it be when over ten times that many people are killed?

Imagine 1,700 people killed and 180,000 injured, not just once, but over and over again? Every year. In the UK.

Please don’t say that’s really horrible, because you don’t think it is. In fact, you think that’s an acceptable fact of life in exchange for the convenience of driving to the supermarket.

Meanwhile, the average number of people killed in the UK per year is……5. That’s the average from 2001 to 2011, including 7/7, which bumped up the average massively.

Five people dead is too many. Nobody could argue with that.

And at the same time 1,700 is just one of those things.

I don’t understand how that works.

A Christmas Ghost Story

Except it didn’t happen at Christmas. More people than I used to think don’t say ‘there’s no such thing as ghosts,’ grammatically or otherwise. One Catholic, one Lutheran, several nothing really, as if any of that makes any difference. I had it in my head that Catholics aren’t supposed to believe in ghosts apart from the Holy Ghost, but the name is a bit of a give-away in itself.

‘There’s this er, well, there’s this um, not sure how to say this. Ghost then. Ok, ghost. But there’s no such thing as a……”

It must be tricky being a vicar, sometimes. A little like the best religious joke I ever heard, about the little chapel in Ireland where the trainee priest looks up one day and see a man who he thinks is Jesus, glowing, in what was until then an empty pew. The trainee goes to the vestry and finds the priest, asks him what they should do if it is, to be told: “Look busy.”

Aye, it was on a night like this, but I’ve said too much a’ready…

But dear reader, to my story. I was in Scotland a couple of months ago, on the shores of a mist-bound loch. I was leading a tour of 50 people from the US, the Philipines, Canada and Australia. All strangers to each other. Some with no intention of making that otherwise. I Googled the old hotel we were to stay at, to find some local colour I could tell the group about, but all I could find was a tale about a Green Lady someone – and very much only one – had claimed to have seen there once, forty years ago.

I asked the manager there about her, but he didn’t know anything. He asked me not to talk about it, not because it was so dreadful, he said, but because talking about it scared him. So that was all I could tell the group. “Is it like …hanted?” could only be answered with “Maybe. One person a long time ago on a night like this – but I’ve said too much already.”

I didn’t notice some of the group crossing themselves, but there was no more I had to say. I wasn’t going to make things up. I wasn’t that kind of tour guide. Or no more than I had to be, anyway.

I woke up at five. I’d had a strange dream that someone was screaming, close to me. I was on my own and it wasn’t me. It’s when you go to sleep screaming that you need to worry. Just a dream. I went back to sleep for an hour.

It was only when I tried to talk to some of the more talkative holidaymakers that I thought something was a bit wrong. They hadn’t slept, they said. Because of the ghost. And what sleep they had ended at five, when they heard someone screaming in the corridors of the hotel.

The (screen)play what I wrote

Once upon a time when the world was young and even I was younger too, people used to like to stay in on a Saturday night. Not because they’d get mugged or stabbed, or they were worried about drink-driving or they didn’t have any money. They didn’t; only one person ever was in my town and that was when he opened his front door; they weren’t, very; and nobody did, in that order. The past is a different country. They did things differently there. It was great.

The thing I liked them doing differently was having things on TV that were clever, my own definition of cleverness defined as making words dance. I wanted to get down to the Rose & Crown or the Red Lion as much as the next person who wanted to squeeze past Wendy Sedgewick. And no, nowhere else. Except the Lamb on a Monday night because there was what would now be open-mic, and although I didn’t, someone mistook me for someone who ran another club. That matters at 19 in a small Wiltshire town. In those days teens went to pubs.

Yes, I know it was illegal and all that blah. Everyone knew where everyone was and nobody ever got hurt, ever, so tell me the big deal about it. And I wanted to go. But I usually only went after I’d watched The Two Ronnies. Or Morecambe & Wise, both for the same reasons.

They, but in particular Ronnie Barker, made the words dance. Yes, a load of it was about suburban middle-aged dinner parties. Yes, a lot of the women were dressed in long, clingy evening gowns I’d never, ever seen anyone in Trowbridge slipping into, let alone out of. But the words. The words were the thing. And not like that moronic song that asked what are words worth. GEDDIT!!!!????

But hark, I might get to the point of this. I just wrote a screenplay. My first one won a BBC Writers Room competition (actually, as one says). I pitched it to Cascade and astonishingly the first time I pitched a script which was the first one I’d ever written, they didn’t go with it. Life is so unfair, as I didn’t bother to say as I went down Berwick Street and had an espresso at the Italian deli around the corner, same as I’d been meaning to for twenty-odd years. Anyway, after thinking about it for 15 years and fretting at it for two and boring a friend absolutely witless about it for a solid year, six weeks back with pneumonia I decided that I either got it written for another BBC script window deadline or I forgot about it for ever. Promise.

So I wrote it. A friend of a friend sent it to Film Suffolk, who seem quite taken with it. In fact, rather more than that. It needs some revision. A German resistance historian loves it. But what I don’t love is people saying “have you read Save The Cat?”

The answer is ‘not yet.’ Not because I think it’s bad – I haven’t read it so I don’t know. Because of this review, one of many.

This book is awesome and totally relevant to writing fiction! This book saved my plot! I had reached a stage in my MS where I had lost sight of what was actually happening. I was writing scenes but I couldn’t see where they would fit in the grand scheme of the story. By reading this book, I could easily see the bigger picture. I was able to put all my chapters into an order and look at the plot as a whole. So I would definitely advise reading it to help save your plot from the death spiral!

You don’t have to do the silly high voice when you say ‘Ahsome!!” but it will probably help. Like toadly. May I?

Don’t make a scene

I was writing scenes but I couldn’t see where they would fit.

Yep. OK. Let me stop you there. I know the reason for this. That’s because you don’t have what writers call “a story.”

I’m sorry to spring all these technical phrases on you like this, but bear with me. I know, because if you had a story you’d know the beginning, the middle and the end of it. Because you couldn’t think of a story that didn’t.

But you don’t really want a story, with that mindset. Instead you want a Paint-By-Numbers Hollywood millionaire kit. And you’ll find that right next to the unicorn horns, Aisle Three.

Right. I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. I’ll have a look at it, ok? I promise. But first, I want to think about the only thing that matters in a story. And that’s whether it’s there or not.

Would you sit and listen to it? Read it? Sit in a cinema and watch it? Because if not then you haven’t got a story and all you’re trying to do is get rich quick. So if you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll begin.

Once upon a time when the world was young and I had more patience and couldn’t tell a story, then I’d have thought deconstruction was a toolkit that could help you build something too. Except as someone whose student grant went to a motorcycle shop one term, I knew something important.

I knew that understanding how a Norton 500 engine comes apart and what all the bits are called – even understanding completely what they do, or what they’re supposed to do – doesn’t mean you can get it back together again. A Norton 500 engine, in case you’re wondering, is something made of metal. A lot more tangible and solid than words.

And that’s a true story.

Oh little town

The Christmas lights are on in Aldeburgh, shining blue and white in the dark. It’s meant to look festive. It just reminds me how empty this place is when the summer’s tourists and weekenders aren’t here. The Christmas tree placed out there on the shingle beach is standing on its own, no lights, no tinsel, surreally placed where no tree ever grew for reasons, as Hunter Thompson used to say, that were never made clear.

It’s lonely. It reminds me of this time last year. I’d met someone again who I used to know but by then she was living in the dark. Smiling, but looking worried and scared almost all of the time. She was crucified with toothache, so much so that she couldn’t arrange a dentist because of the pain. I got her an appointment, drove her there, sat and waited with her so she didn’t have to go in alone. We went across the road to a pub afterwards. She bought a Christmas card there, wrote it on the bar and gave it to me, more a letter than a card.

In all of our time last winter I remember only night or darkening evening or a morning so bone-numbing cold that it might as well have been night, walking her dogs early in the morning, letting myself in quietly so she could sleep an extra hour. Her little dog barked though.

“I knew it was you,” she said. “She only barks for you.”

I miss those dogs and the lights going on in houses we passed as we walked out along the river path, over the narrow plank, so narrow I had to help the little dog become brave enough to cross into fields where there were no footprints, no sgn that anyone had been there since the floods. And later, another day in the teeth of a gale, in bright cold that made you think your fingers might snap off, walking a new path up along the hill, back down by another route, thinking that soon, in just a few weeks there would be bluebells here, the way there were when we met.

The bluebells came but we had gone by then. I never found her again. It was too dark. I hear her still, especially on evenings like this, when the Christmas lights shine in an empty street. I can still hear her footsteps, never in synch with mine.

We’ll always have Paris

I’m old enough to remember the IRA, the UVF, the Red Army Faction, Scritti Politi and the Miners Strikes. Both of them. All of them, except possibly the band, were supposed to be the worst thing ever, dedicated to destroying our way of life. Then the Ayatollah, Sadam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the guy in Korea and all the other Worst Things Ever.

I grew up near Warminster, where the School of Infantry was and is. The police said there had been a car-chase through the grounds of Longleat house, them chasing the Bader-Meinhof gang. Except Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Greenslade said that was bollocks when I interviewed him. Whether or not, an Army officer opened his front door one morning and someone shot him dead. It was a time when, when I found a six-wheel armoured car in a shed at the back of the Territorial Army centre where I went to shoot every Thursday evening, I wasn’t really surprised. It’s how things were.

As I got older other things happened. I went to Israel and walked into the middle of an ambush. I went to the US and had police sticking a pistol in my stomach. Years later the US Navy drew on me again. None of these things are fun. My step-sister walked down the street in London and minutes later a car she had walked past exploded. A friend walked past Liberty’s window shortly before it blew out into the street. I was close enough to another bomb to hear the bang and see the black smoke billowing up afterwards.

And none of it works, because governments do not give a stuff whether or not civilians get killed. That’s the way it is. They can’t, apart from anything. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise. It wasn’t me that said that, it was Lenin, who knew a thing or two about terrorism.

The IRA blew up shed loads of stuff in the UK. It didn’t work because it isn’t supposed to. I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. Dead civilians are dead civilians. People don’t like it but they don’t do anything about it, except run around screaming about freedom while they take some more of their own away. Which is what they’re supposed to do: be terrorised. This isn’t difficult stuff to understand.

The IRA got what they wanted when they blew up Canary Wharf. Suddenly, with the prospect of massive financial damage to the City of London instead of massively permanent damage to ordinary people having a night out, the British government revealed they’d been lying to their own population for years: they did talk to terrorists after all.

I’m not advocating bombing the VAT office, convenient though it might be. But I am sick of the gibberish being spouted on the TV and the radio and the press about how “France is at war with terrorism.” It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying you’re at war with the sky, or water, or turquoise.

We kill people every day of the week. We, the UK and the USA, killed over 100,000 civilians in Iraq, without any argument from anybody except maybe it was a lot more people than that, but then, we didn’t count. They literally did not count.

We are asked to believe more and more preposterous nonsense each time. The Twin Towers fall down because a fire burned through steel but it wasn’t hot enough to burn one of the hijackers’ passports. Amazingly and astonishingly, in a terrorist attack literally the day before the G20 conference on terrorism, the day after the entire British press was crowing about the extrajudicial murder of a man their searing analysis dubbed Jihadi John, in case the public couldn’t say his real name and had to be fed baby talk instead, another passport was found at the scene of the crime. A Syrian one, amazingly conveniently, one that even some of the press are now saying may have been fake. So just please, don’t bother telling me about how much you care about it, unless you care about all of it.

I am fed up with this. I am fed up with being lectured on the meaning of global war by people who live with their mum. I am fed up with people advocating the mass murder of other people when their experience of being shot at is playing Call Of Duty. I am fed up with morons killing each other. I am fed up with being told ‘we’ are better than ‘them,’ that when we kill them it’s fine and when they kill us it’s murder and the sky is going to fall in unless we kill more of them. I am fed up because I thought Alf Garnett was dead and instead he’s alive and well on social media. I am fed up with people wrapping themselves in a flag one day and not giving a toss about the murder of the same number of other people literally the day before, when for example, 121 people were killed in Yemen by an Allied US and UK airstrike on a civilian hospital, the same way another hospital was bombarded by Allied artillery for 90 minutes last week.

We still pretend to wonder why these things happen. It’s because they always have and they always will until we stop doing them. Until we stop thinking of them and us. All we ever have is us. All of us. Whoever we are.