The news as zombie apocalypse

(Andrew Calcutt is away in the sun this week - this is a guest post by Mark Beachill)

“Quick, on Radio 4. The news said there was a zombie apocalypse.”

My girlfriend has a fascination with all things zombie. Myself I'm too squeamish to watch The Walking Dead with her. Had she misheard, imagined?

A quick search on Google News led me to the story of a traffic accident in the USA brought on when a parade(?) of people in zombie costumes mobbed a car and the driver, panicked, knocked over a passer-by.

"No! It was in the UK and it said zombie apocalypse."

Back to Google News. It turned out the railway station announcer in Brighton had bizarrely declared a zombie apocalypse over the tannoy. This was his description of the torrential downpour after several months’ rain fell in the space of an hour or so, flooding the station. Even more bizarrely BBC Radio 4 picked it up for their hourly national news bulletin.

When we get freakish weather nowadays it is not usually zombies that are invoked. More commonly the living are said to be out of control: reckless consumption brings energy use that warms the globe and increases the likelihood of “extreme weather events”.

The threat of ecological and meteorological catastrophe means consumption must be reined in, goes the argument. In less secular times the Biblical flood that put Noah on his ark – with God’s plan to cleanse past sins and start again – might have been invoked. Today it is through is our sins against Gaia through over-consumption that are said bring warning storms. So sure are the BBC, for example, that they now limit air-time for any with an alternative view or even an alternative solution.

But, weirdly enough, perhaps the zombie metaphor is not all too distant from the orthodox explanation. Contemporary zombies are a child of the 1970s, their endless hunger a metaphor for our endless consumption prompted by critiques of mindless consumerism that first emerged in the seventies. It was no coincidence that George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead, the film that re-launched the zombie, had most of its action set in a shopping mall.

The witty announcer reached for the wrong end of the world scenario and so made us laugh resonating way beyond drenched travellers. And perhaps humour is at least part of what we need to negotiate the many millenarian settings that seem to crowd the imagination today and still carry on – in our “mindless” pursuit of a better life.

Stephen Hero

‘Hi! My name’s Stephen and I am pretty much like your average teenager – except for the last three years now I’ve been battling cancer.’

This is how 19-year-old Stephen Sutton introduced himself on the Just Giving internet page which he set up to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT). Sadly, Stephen himself died of bowel cancer in the early hours of 14^th May 2014. Later that day, charitable donations pledged via his site reached £3.6 million – more than the TCT knew what to do with.

Stephen’s mother Jane announced on Facebook that her ‘inspirational’ son ‘had passed away peacefully in his sleep.’

In a Press Association photograph featured in the Daily Mail’s coverage of Stephen’s death, she appears as a strawberry blonde wearing a strawberry-print blouse, half-smiling (her lips have managed the right shape but her eyes are struggling), standing next to her emaciated son.

Not that long to go now. His jaw too big for a frail neck, arms much thinner than the arm cuffs on the hospital crutches he’s using (lightweight walking forearm crutches, approx £50 a pair).

In Stephen Sutton’s eyes at that moment, I think I can see something not much noted: a touch of what might be adolescent anger; just a little bit Liam (LG); echo of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, declaring ‘a pox on both your houses’; in this case, the living and the dead.

To do anything at all in the face of death, while looking down the barrel of the last syringe, surely calls for a do or die attitude; even a touch of the impious attitude of James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, who refused to re-enter the Church despite his mother’s pleading – and she on the point of dying of cancer. Likewise, our new Stephen Hero keeping death waiting for his dominion, must have been something of an act of teenage rebellion.

A mother who survives her son’s death from cancer must be entitled to say whatever she likes about him – or, if she prefers, nothing at all. He will have been her inspiration for as long as she carried him. In the womb, in her arms, toddling through schooldays and holidays all the way to his death bed. Now she will have to carry his not being there to see her grow old.

Stephen’s mother’s grief can hardly be straightforward; its complications could last her a lifetime. But many of those who hardly knew him, or not at all, who’ve rushed to find him ‘inspirational’, seem to have simplified Stephen Sutton to suit themselves.

In their rendition of him, the last few weeks of Stephen’s life were a saintly progress of smiling through adversity; his death, nothing but a course of morphine – letting go, letting go, letting go.

It’s as if they are laying him out in clothes they’ve had the cheek to choose for him; and in the act of finding, defining him so, while acknowledging Stephen as hero, aren't they also pursuing a claim on him, their ticket to today’s Priority Area?

Of course I may be guilty of same. But I simply can’t believe that n-n-n-n-nineteen was ever that simple.

Welcome To WorldVision!

Barack Obama became a drag queen yesterday in a new effort to secure the 2014 WorldVision title.

The United States president appeared as ‘Michelle’ in a heart-felt performance of #Bring Back Our Girls prompted by the abduction of more than 200 female students from a boarding school in north-east Nigeria.

Produced by the White House (rumours that Apple Inc is poised to take over the visionary production company, are completely unfounded), the ‘first lady’ sampled Malala, the award winning women’s education campaigner who first came to public attention when she was shot in the head by the Taliban – and survived.

Michelle/Obama also re-worked some of the best known tunes in American culture, e.g. realising your full potential in the land of equal opportunities, giving these a new twist – pro-women’s education, anti-terrorism – in response to the kidnappings and bombings carried out by militant Islamist band, Boko Haram (rough translation: ‘Western education is forbidden’).

White House Productions are thought to have launched Barack Obama’s alter ego Michelle, in order to re-assert themselves at the top of the WorldVision rankings after their Ukrainian foreign policy number failed to chart successfully.

There have been complaints that the Whites imposed their traditional House style on a supposedly new performer (the word ‘unconscionable’ jarred with the otherwise conversational tone of Michelle’s lyrics); nonetheless the Washington version of #Bring Back Our Girls has met with widespread approval.

Wearing a powder blue top and sitting atop an antique chair with the Stars and Stripes in the background, Michelle put in a deliberately understated performance – in contrast to the Shirley Bassey-style torch song which last night won the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria’s ‘bearded lady’ Conchita Wurst (real name Tom Neuwirth).

Michelle’s #Bring Back Our Girls was restrained even by her own standards: she previously gave an energetic performance of Let’s Move, an anti-obesity campaign which served as the White House white label in advance of yesterday’s official WorldVision release.

In Africa earlier this week, from far up country where Nigeria’s oil wealth does not run to (northern Nigeria is now poorer than it was 50 years ago), the leader of Boko Haram (or perhaps a stand-in) released an hour long video of riffs and raps about selling the kidnapped girls into slavery.  (The heirs of Ronald Reagan would no doubt disown his use of the world famous chorus, let the market decide.)

As a band, Boko Haram is so far removed from the international performance circuit it will do anything to gain precious nanoseconds in the global attention economy. Instead of the pantomime leer of ‘a brown eyed handsome man’ singing ‘Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl’, or the mythical depiction of the Rape of the Sabine Women, this group is actually acting out everyone’s worst nightmares. Not only piling on the hyperbole but also doing rhetoric for real. (Imagine Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and The Dead Kennedys all rolled into one).

Members of Boko Haram such as the gangly youth photographed in custody wearing an Arsenal football top, are acting out of desperation. As if their lives depended on it; not least because the West has created a media-centric way of life which does indeed depend on being uploaded, becoming part of the performance circuit, not being left to rot in the dark, dungeon of the invisible, unheard of, the non-existent.

Being in the medium by any means necessary – that is the message of the current, Western-led WorldVision rendered by everyone who is anyone – from Lady Gaga to Michelle/Obama and even Conchita Wurst (Tom Neurwith currently enjoying his best 15 minutes).

The appalling irony is that heartless Boko Haram has already taken this message to heart.

Man's Inhumanity To Man: towards a more humane explanation

‘A unique concept for senior living in beautiful surroundings’. This is how the Old Deanery residential care home describes itself on its website. It’s a bit rich, coming from the Essex home where ‘care’ workers were filmed abusing residents. Undercover footage of their heartless actions featured prominently in the BBC Panorama programme on residential care in the UK, broadcast on Wednesday 30 April 2014.

Cue national scandal – and not for the first time. After successive revelations over the past few years, the horror, the horror of residential care has become a dog bites man story. That is, the latest revelation that care workers are slapping elderly residents and calling them bitches, is hardly more surprising than a dog bite on the postman’s bum.

I am not saying – not for a nanosecond – that ‘elder abuse’ is on the same level as the postie’s posterior. I am saying that since we already know it goes on, also that the goings-on are more than isolated incidents, discovery of a further, furtive episode is no grounds for sounding like Cilla Black on Surprise Surprise! Moreover, feigning surprise is as unhelpful as the official response – the Department of Health announcing plans to test workers on how much they care, as if those capable of violence towards the elderly are not also capable of acting, playing the role expected of them, for the duration of the test.

Some may find my comments callous. I disagree. It seems to me that for those not immediately involved – whose relatives have not been abused in residential care homes, who have no direct role in the immediate prevention of abusive behaviour, the first line in a truly humane response is NOT to be caught up in the rush to say how disgusted we are. Instead we should be looking around for an explanation. It is not for us to give vent to our emotions; moreover, the whole Shock! Horror! routine, on the part of those who have no business performing it, can only obstruct the level of circumspection which must be arrived at in order to address the wider problem.

So what is it about current circumstances which prompts some people working in care homes to treat other people as if they are non-people – like beasts to be prodded and pushed around? Stock responses to this searching question include: low-paid workers are not paid enough (their low pay is effectively an insult which some of them pass on to the people in their care); and, bearing down on care workers, time pressures prevent adequate care and create tensions which cannot be taken care of, so that some care workers end up taking it out on the people they are meant to be caring for.  

There is something to be said for both these observations. On the other hand, care work never has been highly paid; and throughout history it has often been performed in straitened circumstances – seemingly without recourse to the level of abusive behaviour which, in its frequency and intensity, appears to be a distinctly recent phenomenon. Hence, if such behaviour is indeed increasing and increasingly virulent, it can only be accounted for by reference to something – something peculiar, something different – in the way we live now.

Could it be that some people are now treating other people as non-people because, according to current definitions, those other people hardly qualify as people, and the task of looking after them is not something that any proper person should be seen doing? From this perspective, people, i.e. ‘care workers’, who are paid to look after persons who do not qualify as people, i.e. elderly care home residents, are also being called upon to destroy or at least negate their own personhood, as currently defined, throughout their entire time at work. In which case, every hour spent doing care work, is also an hour of being an un-person ‘caring’ for non-persons; with predictable results.

But surely only a Nazi nutcase would take the demented position that those suffering from dementia do not count as human beings? Unfortunately, something akin to this position is not such a rarity. While ‘master race’ eugenics have been consigned to the nut-house of history, the cultural equivalent of eugenics now occupies centre stage.  The dominant culture of the day is narcissistic – we have to keep looking at ourselves; and heavily aestheticised – to participate, you have to be good-looking enough to be looked at. Moreover, if you fail on either of these counts, under present conditions there is little or no justification for your existence.

However sketchy, this outline at least draws on how our sense of who we are and what we should be doing, has changed considerably in recent years. We have only recently arrived at a version of the self which is defined by the selfie. According to the current definition of selfhood, I am only myself as and when I am doing something which I would like to see photographed and uploaded as a selfie; on all other occasions I am something less than myself, not a real person under the terms of the current definition.

There is clearly no place for washing old men and cleaning old ladies according to the selfie definition of selfhood; although there may be a place for me (and my narcissistic sense of selfhood) next to the old codgers when they are photographed trying to blow out the candles, preferably a hundred of them, on their birthday cakes.

Seen in this light, a care worker slapping an elderly woman is the barbaric realisation of today’s culture of narcissism. The terrible irony is that being inhuman to the elderly conforms to the emerging definition of what it means to be human: manifesto ergo sum – I show myself, I upload myself; therefore I am.   

It is fitting, then, that the latest residential care scandal involves a care home in Braintree, Essex, better known as the home base of the reality tv show, The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE). In TOWIE, a cast of photogenic people play themselves in a series of semi-scripted scenes. Of course everyone knows that ‘reality tv’ is largely artificial. But no more so than our real lives are supposed to be, according to the current definition of what it means to be human.

On a day-to-day basis, if you do not do anything which is up-loadable, which is comparable and compatible with the kind of actions and facial expressions on show in shows such as TOWIE, then, according to today’s definition, you are not living the life of a human being; you have failed to meet the minimum requirements of being human; you are not so very much more than a piece of meat.

Of course this is a grossly fetishised interpretation of our common humanity; there is no room for the terrible mess of contradictions that we really are, which being human really is. In particular, it cannot encompass the continuous contradiction of growing old and feeble, of slipping inexorably away from what we were in our prime, yet not going gently into that good night (pace Dylan Thomas, whose 100 candles would have been lit this October).

The fetish deals only in icons and their antithesis: the iconic version of self – the selfie, versus that which prevents me from living in the iconic world of selfies, e.g. my job cleaning up after the elderly. Ironically, this is the iconography which the Old Deanery website is still trying to ingratiate itself with (‘a unique concept for senior living in beautiful surroundings’). In a further irony, even the Shock! Horror! response to elder abuse accords with the flattening out of our contradictory humanity into a set of up-loadable icons. Here the horrified response becomes the inverted image of the horrifying events which prompted it; in their current appearance, both of them are equally one-dimensional.

More disclaimers: I am not claiming that TOWIE made them do it; rather that TOWIE reflects a culture disposed towards a particularly narrow, fetishised definition of humanity. I am not absolving the guilty parties of individual responsibility for their actions. Again, I am trying to account for the disposition to behave in this way, which is not the same thing as explaining why some people give in to this disposition while most others succeed in resisting it.

For myself, as someone trying to live by a spirit of inquiry rather than the culture of narcissism, I see it as my responsibility to arrive at a more humane description of the current, historically specific iteration of man’s inhumanity to man.

Pope's Wedding

An earthy man with jumbo, Dumbo ears. Even as he raises the unleavened bread for it to become God incarnate, the body of Christ, it is not hard to imagine him at table – enjoying his food; also at stool afterwards – with similar satisfaction.

Pope Francis is performing a miracle – bread into body. Don’t be surprised: he does it all the time. Another one will be along in minute – wine into blood; and here are two he prepared earlier – the dead popes (John Paul II and John XXIII) which he transformed into saints before going on to celebrate mass.

Yes, it is easy to reveal the pope and his retinue for what they partly are: men with feet of clay and an appetite for repairing the sullied reputation of the ‘holy’ Church, host to all their privileges.

And then there is that gesture, performed by popes and priests alike, held throughout the process of consecration except when the celebrant is required to fiddle with bits of bodily bread and the carafe of bloody wine.

They all do it – this gesture; and no one else is allowed to. Elbows tucked in; hands raised to shoulder height, held sideways on; palms open – facing each other.

In the space between the celebrant’s two palms – about the length of his forearm, there is room for all the men and women in the world. With all of us included in this space, there is God – in the instant. There is God, the moment all humanity is here.

Then again, not. Nothing but a rhetorical posture which grossly distorts the universal relation between human beings – you and me and anyone who reads this and everyone who never does, never did, never will. But by trying and even by failing to formulate this relation in the prescribed gesture of a designated individual, at least the relation itself is acknowledged.

It’s not heaven – we must know that; but surely better than the interpersonal purgatory in which nothing exceeds networking.

Two months before the World Cup opens in Brazil (and three months earlier and four months before that), an excess of violence. In Rio, what else would they do but riot? N.B. In the relation outlined above, ‘they’ is really some of us. Denied entry to the forthcoming festival of futebol; pacified – occupied – by military police presence. Meanwhile the Catholic mass – the holdall – is simply not big enough to hold them all, all the time.

Of course we always knew as much: that is why football in the first place, and why it matters more than mortal life.

One night in Rio, a few blocks from the Maracana, a man hurls a long wooden pole at police lines, his body a perfect arc of strength, movement, completion. But Robocop is a long way off; the missile will fall far short. Between its trajectory and the line of police, a middle aged woman walks unperturbed, carrying her shopping.

The woman is solid, earthy: she might be the pope’s sister…….or his wife.

XXXXX XXXXX Has Left The Club

Forlorn, fatalistic, farewell. Just the one hand raised – splayed fingers, flat palm facing camera – says all of these. A gallery of many, further images shows him variously driven, distraught, rueful, resourceful, far-sighted, near-sighted.

Clear blue eyes surely clouded with regret? Doesn’t show; you wouldn’t know. No mean face – Glasgow-born; leafy suburb – labour aristocracy. Built to take hard knocks and stay in shape (composure’s for keeping not losing). Regular features; teeth now more regular than they ought to be, going by early photos from playing days. Winning smile – that’s a laugh – may always have lacked conviction; or this may be reading history backwards.

Was there a moment when you lost them; more accurately, when you lost yourself and couldn’t keep hold of the squad? I know nothing of your sort of dressing room. Showers and towels and all kinds of shenanigans back in the 1970s – stock pictures are all I’ve got to go on. On stage I know it can happen in the space of a drum beat, all because you didn’t leave enough space between one beat and the next. But even the instant – the moment of failure – is not simply instantaneous. Ever the before and after: continuously unfolding; never predetermined.

None of them pre-set, a series of defeats beat David Moyes, former Manchester United manager as of 8.30am Tues 22 April 2014. 

The Magician's Moustache

David Axelrod’s moustache is much the same as Peter Mandelson’s, as worn by ‘Mandy’ in the pre-New Labour days when he was trying and failing to turn Neil Kinnock into the stuff of legend.

Axelrod, the communications strategist who helped Barack Obama win two US presidential elections, has just signed a consultancy contract with current UK Labour leader Ed Miliband – a boyish figure who hardly seems old enough to grow a moustache.

Mandelson, you may recall, was Tony Blair’s secret weapon in his successful bid for the Labour leadership in 1994. Mandy disguised himself by shaving off his moustache and going by the name ‘Bobby’. Re-re-named ‘the Prince of Darkness’, he led New Labour’s team of spin doctors in the run-up to the 1997 general election landslide in which he himself was elected MP for Hartlepool; he went on to be a controversial cabinet minister and European commissioner.

Although Axelrod is the man most closely associated with Obama’s successive election victories, even his moustache bristles with the stuff that sloughs off successful candidates. In Blair and especially in Obama, the electorate saw and identified with an ethereal quality which both connects with the world and leaves worldliness behind. Exactly the kind of contradictory magic which a moustache is made to dispel; as Marcel Duchamp must have known when he drew one on the Mona Lisa.

Not the Mother of God, but (damaged) God himself: in post-ideological politics, the electorate consecrates its favoured candidate, who is both put on a pedestal and prepared for crucifixion later. The reason for this is straightforward: without a meaningful battle of substantial ideas, there is no other way for politics to rise above horse trading.

The real mystery is the role of men with moustaches. How do they fit in to a quasi-religious experience? Perhaps part of their achievement is to keep all incoming out of the way, so that nothing need impede the moment of transcendence which is variously described as Hope, Change or Social Justice. Acting as feet of clay they also drain their candidate of responsibility, leaving him gravity-free to exist as proto-holy spirit.

Without his man of the moustache, Obama could never have seemed so clean shaven; would not have been deemed acceptable to so many white voters.

Will Axelrod now enable Miliband to become equally magical – who knows?

Putin's Mother

How does he do it? On both sides of the Atlantic Western leaders can only marvel at Vladimir Putin’s positioning. All week he has outsmarted them over Ukraine. Throughout three hours of Q&A, broadcast live from the Kremlin earlier today, he more than held his own with a domestic audience.

Where Putin is concerned, foreign policy success is not just a pretty face saver for failure at home. The Russian president is simply firing on all fronts.

Is it all down to appearances? Judging by today's performance, indeed there are iconic elements in the way Putin presents himself; such as the starched white shirt (the more effective because we have previously seen the bare torso underneath), and chillingly blue-grey eyes. Yet his Yul Brynner bone structure is countered by, of all things, a comb-over, linking Putin to various downtrodden husbands from a spate of late twentieth century sitcoms. The studio set didn’t help much, either. The ice-blue background was meant to be cool; instead, of all things, it looked like leftovers from a UK Aids-awareness campaign of the 1980s.

But none of this matters much because with Putin, appearance is not what’s paramount. This is not a man of whom you would dream of saying, he is a brand. Of course by now his reputation precedes him, but only because, long before any concern for brand building or reputational enhancement, he first of all addresses the question – any question – in and of itself. This approach allows Putin to appropriate the situations in which he finds himself; in other words, he grasps the nettle instead of being stung by it.

While British politicians and even Barack Obama are afflicted by an unbearable lightness of being, Putin’s actualité has allowed him to develop a successful realpolitik. He personally may pine for films about KGB men in the Soviet era, or dream of returning to the womb of Mother Russia, but it’s Mother Thatcher he resembles in his address to the world as it really is.

Blanket Coverage

I slept with a Banksy. After it had been prized off the external wall and brought inside a Bristol boys’ club for safe keeping, youth worker Jordan Powell stayed the night with the stencilled image of a man and woman embracing while checking their phones; or, checking their phones while embracing – just as long as they both saw it the same way.

The mural is thought to be the work of graffiti artist Banksy.  There were clear skies across England overnight, and temperatures fell towards freezing. Mr Powell may have snuggled up to the couple to stay warm (assuming they hadn’t turned cold towards each other).

Winched to safety in wire baskets (like pets on the way to the vet), survivors of the South Korean ferry disaster are wrapped in checkered blankets, pink and blue. Their faces are inscrutable. Yes, I said it; but this is not to continue the Occidental caricature of Orientals. The young woman stepping out of the basket and into the helicopter, is so busy taking the crucial step to safety she cannot also make the leap to her own emotions. Similarly, high school students in matching red life-jackets – looks like they all made the team, sitting on the upturned hull of the stricken ship, calmly await their turn for the winch. On the face of it, there’s more trauma at the average adventure playground.

Nearly 300 passengers still unaccounted for. Back at Danwon High School in Ansan, near Seoul, more blankets are issued as parents and relatives prepare for a long night.

A mother’s profile, head tilted back on her husband’s shoulder, eyes aligned upwards. She isn’t, they’re not; but you could hardly blame them for checking their phones.
Beyond Banksy, Henri Matisse could not have made her more beautiful; but if he wanted to make her feel better, he should have cut out her heart.

Humanity abhors the icon

Instead of prompt resolution, i.e. Crimea Annexed, this time the fomentation of civil unrest, i.e. Crisis Deepens. With a light touch light the touch paper and retire, only in order to re-appear as peacekeepers – reducing ethnic tension; curtailing civil war.

That’s the plan, but which side is being talked about here – Russia or the West? The same could be said of either: they've both been stirring up strong emotions; then stealing away with faces covered or wearing well-rehearsed expressions.

Note from the Fashion Police: if you can’t go for the Balaclava round here, where can you be seen in one?

In the realm of realpolitik, the plot is always thickening, bubbling away like Bisto. Meanwhile in Liverpool on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, or in Boston a year after the bombing, there is only the absence of guile; abdication of self-interest in memory of the dead; the transparency of innocence.

I think not. Rather, after loss of son or daughter, I suspect every step out of bed has to be negotiated. Rounds of diplomacy are required to answer the question of self-determination:

Why should I be, when my child is not (to be)?

Recurring question, secret diplomacy, successive rounds – all this before you’re out the door.

Be advised: there are no absolutes of innocence or experience. Behind the balaclavas, even the veterans wear both of these. Hence the mask: to hide the other side.

And the line about Fashion Police? Only something silly to undermine the iconography.

Hero in the Hood

Second time around, it’s farce. At Fort Hood, a US Army shooter shoots at his own side in a four-minute tantrum. Before turning his gun on himself, Specialist Ivan Lopez chalks up a ludicrously low number of casualties – three dead and 16 wounded; 10 fewer fatalities than the first time this Texas army base became a shoot-to-kill firing range, back in 2009.

As George Bush Jnr is to artist, so the second shooter is to psycho-killer (from photos, only his nose looks like Robert de Niro’s in Taxi Driver – nothing else). If not for previous form – (a) former president with a reputation for poor taste and matching intelligence, i.e. the dumb dauber; (b) the military base already blighted by human tragedy, i.e. uncanny echo – neither one would fit across the Front Page.

Forget farcical: the Fort Worth sequel should be up there, anyway. Not for the tawdry shooting spree, possibly sparked by a dispute about leave days and work rotas among Uncle Sam’s truck drivers; but for the truly headline heroism of Sergeant First Class Danny Ferguson. According to local sources, Ferguson held shut the door which kept the shooter away from a roomful of innocent occupants – and got himself shot up instead.

He even looked like Tom Hanks, for chrissake.

For all I know, Ferguson might have frowned upon ‘chrissake’ for taking the name of the Lord in vain; or he may have been a blaspheming sonofabitch. Either way, his courageous action – Jeez, he chose to go From Here To Eternity – requires hero worship from the rest of us.

Couples

Putin has proposed to Obama, only moments after POTUS had ceased courting the King of Saudi Arabia. The pre-nuptial agreement drafted by President Putin awards the Sevastopol dolphins to the Russian navy (dolphins guard the Crimean naval base against deep-sea mines and alien frogmen), while the Ukrainians get to keep the sea lions which are also based there.

On camera, UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg refused to look directly at Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party and Clegg’s opponent in Wednesday night’s televised debate over Britain’s membership of the EU. Clegg looked away because he didn’t want to be seen viewing Farage as a fully credible interlocutor; but he couldn’t simply stare straight ahead or he himself would have been cast as the Westminster Village idiot. Nowhere else for his eyes to go but down, and downcast eyes made him demur; a blushing bride compared to the front-footed Farage, who was clearly keen to exercise his conjugal rights.

Clegg has much to be modest about, after nearly four years as DPM in a dubious government.

Meanwhile in Brighton, the pioneering couple looked like a pair of original Teddy boys. Not the young toughs who hijacked the Edwardian-style tailoring designed in the early 1950s as an ode to the joy of winning the war; more like the young toffs that the post-war frock coats and suede collars were first intended for.

Writer and actor Andrew Wale and guest house owner Neil Allard wore three piece whistles, complete with suede collared jackets and pin collar shirts, when shortly after midnight on Saturday 29^th March they entered the Music Room of the Brighton Pavilion (more Rococo than rock’n’roll) to become one of the first same-sex couples married under English law.

After the ceremony, the newlyweds stepped into a blaze of publicity so intense it turned night into day. The whole world was invited to their nuptials – except Nigel Farage.

Without even mentioning UKIP’s policy on gay marriage, Farage would only have to walk into the Brighton Music Room for it to be immediately apparent that he doesn’t fit in: the severe side parting (not even ironic); a whiff of tobacco smoke; lounge suit that says ‘pub lunch’ instead of ‘gastropub’.

If Farage was a guest house owner on Channel Four’s Three In A Bed (‘B&B owners throw open their doors and take turns to stay with one another’), he would lose hands down to newly married Neil Allard.

Come the general election, however, the frogman’s lack of polish may spit in the eye of Britain’s cultural elite.

That's All, Folks!

Streaked across the tiled floor, the blood of four young gunslingers sent into Kabul’s Serena Hotel to shoot up the celebrations (kill count: 9) for New Year’s Eve in Afghanistan. They themselves were later shot down by government soldiers; their bodies were photographed where they fell, then dragged out of the hotel in the early hours of Friday morning.

By now, Kabul’s Hotel-of-Terror is almost dog-bites-man. In June 2012, the Spozhmai Hotel was similarly shot to pieces at the start of another festive weekend (23 dead including five Taliban); in June 2011, the Intercontinental (21 dead). In the aftermath, the same spokesperson for the Afghan government, and the same spokesperson for the Taliban.

Not much for this youthful quartet to celebrate, knowing they would hardly live to see in the New Year.

With firearms hidden in their socks the Taliban boys had evaded the hotel’s security checks, hiding in the toilets until the time came to come out and blow the guests away.

A photo of their shoes – two pairs black, two pairs brown, all of them chunky, hunky things – shows they were not from Son of Rambo or Lord of the Flies. These youths were much older, if none the wiser.

Was there the smell of festive cooking, wafting in every time a hotel guest came in to use the loo? Or nothing but cleaning fluid and abrasive mutterings that the toilet stalls were still occupied; just what the hell was going on?

Just how the hell did you sit it out, boys, those hours of waiting for your lives to be flushed away?

What a waste. You could have been getting changed in there, waiting to go on stage in a rock’n’roll band; first night nerves every one night stand.

Easy to imagine a youthful play of tender and tough, of Mercutio’s contempt for his own life as well as others'; to recall Raskolnikov, even Alex and his Droogs. But for all I know, your actions had nothing to do with the modern condition. Perhaps you hated Hotel Mayhem – Serena: is someone having a laugh? – not because it was cheesy and a little bit Dubai; more that you were good ol’ country boys whose idea of the human race only stretches as far as your own clan, along with its racing horses and fighting dogs.   

Whatever the reason, whether or not you reasoned it at all, in youthful haste you’ve already left your one and only mark on the world: famous for 15 hours, topping the Reuters list early on Friday morning; washed away into the archives by Saturday evening.

And nothing else will ever become of you.

What's In A Name?

Glenn Ford (64) was released from Louisiana State Penitentiary on Tuesday 11^th March. Wrongly convicted for the murder of a Shreveport jeweller in 1983, at the time of his release Ford had been in custody for 30 years – most of that time awaiting execution on Death Row.

Glenn Ford was a Hollywood star. In 1958 he topped the list of ‘Box Office champions’. Ford came to the attention of police when it was discovered he was keeping leghorn chickens in the grounds of his Beverly Hills mansion. The police ordered the removal of the chickens.

Louisiana State Penitentiary is a prison farm built next to the Mississippi River on the site of former slave plantations. (Also known as Angola – where the original slaves originated, the prison property is bigger than Manhattan.) Inmates pick cotton, grow food crops and keep livestock – except maximum security prisoners including those on Death Row, who are kept in their 8’ x 10’ cells 23 hours a day. The temperature in these cells exceeded 125 degrees on 85 days between May and September 2011.

In Superman (1978) Glenn Ford played Clark Kent’s adoptive father, Jonathan. ‘Superman’ also happens to be the name of a Texan air conditioning company which recommends servicing your AC system every six months.

Outside the prison gates, Glenn Ford said how much he missed seeing his son grow up. Now his baby boy has babies of his own, he observed. Ford had not been outside his cellblock for seven years prior to his release.

Glenn Ford played an escaped convict in The Secret of Convict Lake (1951).

Glenn Ford was incarcerated in Angola when guards shot and killed 29 year-old escapee Tyrone Brown.

Glenn Ford campaigned for Ronald Reagan to become President of the United States.

Ronald Reagan was in the White House when Glenn Ford was first sent to the prison house.

In 1950 Glenn Ford was born in California, where actor Glenn Ford’s actor-friend Ronald Reagan would later become Governor, before going on to become President.

Glenn Ford was born in Quebec in 1916. As a child he moved with his parents to Santa Monica, California.
Glenn Ford looked young for his age. Photographs issued at the time of his arrest suggest an overgrown boy with a 1970s-style moustache.

Glenn Ford was boyishly good looking. In westerns and war films alike, his small features affirmed that masculinity need not be brawny or brutish.

Jowly and overweight – he hadn’t been out of his cell block for seven years, Glenn Ford now resembles a middle-aged lady. With a lightweight beanie stretched over his head (Huck Finn’s Widow Douglas might wear it with her curlers in), when interviewed by WVLA-TV at the gates of Angola, Ford’s face seemed somehow emasculated.

After a series of minor strokes Glenn Ford died at his Beverly Hills mansion on 30^th August 2006, aged 90.

After almost three decades as a dead man walking, Glenn Ford has come back to life in the outside world.

Glenn Ford, ceci n’est pas Glenn Ford (look at the dark skin on his pinkie and you'll see it immediately).

Grief Beyond Compare

The not knowing was the worst, you will tell yourself later. But of course you did know all the time. Not as if an airliner can go missing; walk out without telling anyone, then turn up at the police station or pop back home after a name check on the radio.
Beijing International Airport: the Chinese woman in the white padded jacket; looks like Julia Roberts. Right now there’s an airline official on the phone to her – the phone painted with pink flowers (of course she knows it’s silly).
Like wind across a wheat field, her face spreads, widens into panic, grief, collapse – call it what you will, and anyway it looks strangely like a smile.
As she hears of the disappearance of flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing (239 people on board), what I’ve just done – looking at her, making notes and comparing – is just what padded-white-lady can’t do. She cannot see herself doing what she’s doing. She’s not now going to notice the something that doesn’t square with something else you’d expect it to match. News of loved-one-missing-feared-dead has rendered her existence incomparable, at least for the time being.
Being beyond compare – how exceptional it is, even for a moment. Until this very moment, padded-white-lady-in-waiting had been hanging around the airport lounge, window-shopping, people-gazing; killing time comparing this with that, him versus her……and look, there he is again.
At KL airport, back where the ill-starred started from, a chic geeky boy wears an Oasis T-shirt featuring a cartoon face-off between Noel and Liam Gallagher. Choosing to wear this T-shirt when he got dressed this morning, geeky boy was sort of saying: they’re a bit like me; I’m a little like them. It’s what he said, metaphorically speaking, out of the corner of his mouth. But now the news fixates him: straight ahead, full face; no scope for anything sideways-on.
Padded-white-lady is condemned to come back to this moment, over and over again. On one such occasion, recalling how she first heard about her lost love, she may also recall the Everly Brothers’ ‘Ebony Eyes’. Thinking about the 24 Chinese artists returning from an exhibition in Malaysia, who are also feared dead, geeky boy may liken the crash to The Day The Music Died. Or perhaps by then there will be a new K-pop song about Flight MH370. And in 12 months’ time surely a sociologist will have analysed the weekly flight paths of today’s Far Eastern professionals, comparing them to early-sixties East Coast suburbanites and their daily commute.
Over time, with increasing use of metaphor, even raw grief will metamorphose. It has to: my brief comparative study has shown that human nature abhors the incomparable.

Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick, Slow

The red tea lights are the same: outside Kunming railway station; inside the Maidan (square) in Kiev.

Lights lit in memory of 29 knifed to death on Saturday by Uighur separatists in south west China, and 77 killed during successful demonstrations against pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych, who fled the Ukrainian capital on 21^st February.

Lively little lights to take away the stillness; unholy stillness which otherwise outlives removal of human remains.

Meanwhile in the Crimea, an Orthodox priest (just don’t say ‘Russian Orthodox’ to the wrong person) uses what looks like a washing-up brush to spray holy water on soldiers from both sides – Ukrainian security forces and troops from the Russian Federation.

The diplomatic situation seems too big for them; absurdly large like the hats on the heads of Black Sea sailors. While Russian infantry with chins tucked into dust masks are perhaps trying to hide their tender years; kissable mouths would give them away as conscripts.  

Yet any Ivan can easily become Terrible, should the situation demand it. Terrible as the knife-wielding posse which ran riot – slitting and stabbing – through Kunming station, Yunnan province.

On the periphery of the world economy, in far-flung provinces and narrow peninsulas, the slow pace of development can turn into its opposite at almost any moment; outrunning the most mercurial diplomat, turning gunboats and sabre-rattling into live ammunition and thousands of little red candles.

Heavyweight

‘I am not that human being, who will abscond.’ So said ‘flamboyant tycoon’ Subrata Roy Sahara in a statement issued before his arrest in Lucknow for failing to repay billions of bonds to India’s small investors.

Though his arrest made national ‘news of the day’ (Roy's remand and the prospect of the Indian tiger ‘losing its stripes’ in a further economic slowdown), Roy himself seems not of our time. 

His moustache belongs in a wartime wardroom - or perhaps the members’ lounge of a post-war Home Counties golf club; his (surely) dyed black hair is bouffed up for an American boardroom in the 1970s; and his way with words – see above – is based either on elderly Hindi phrases, or the Anglo-Indian habit of learning English like it’s Latin (in Britain this tradition died out 50 years ago), or both.

As for the broad lapels on the black sleeveless jackets he likes to wear over short-sleeved white shirts and a company tie, they are as extraordinarily anachronistic as the gull-wing doors on a DeLorean; though less likely to drop off.

Of mockery an almost too easy target I am, as Roy might have said of himself. Except he almost certainly wouldn’t say it of himself because to say it of himself implies a level of self-consciousness in keeping with the widespread Western selfie-ishness which he himself seems barely conscious of.

Yet for all his gaucherie there is something incontrovertible about Roy - a substance that comes from employing 1.1 million people in his Sahara conglomerate (hotels to aviation). More than a million people earn their living from being in his employ; enough to make his being a matter of fact, rather than the subject of speculation, self-examination or some other 'first world' trait.

Compared to the unbearable lightness of being a Londoner - living on thin air and the tiniest share in a bubbling property market - goofy, bouffy Subrata Roy is a world heavyweight.

Either Way, He Dies

Throat cut by cable stretched across a street in Caracas, Santiago Enrique Pedroza seems to have died a Driver kinda death: half-fate, half-chance, happens fast.

But how did the 29-year-old, working class motorcyclist come to be riding into the middle class district of Horizonte? And what about the wire – who put it there and why?

Scenario One: when the supermarket closes, hard-working shop assistant Pedroza climbs onto his motorbike and rides home to his family. In the dark he can’t see the cable which slits open his throat – the death trap set by middle class boys looking for kicks, desperate to lose their own insignificance. Lying on the pavement, lifeblood dribbling away, he can’t understand how it happened like this.

Scenario Two: when the supermarket closes hard-working shop assistant Pedroza climbs onto his motorbike and rides home to his family. In the dark he can’t see the wire-trap laid by middle class ‘fascists’ acting on the advice of a retired general. The same kids who’ve been firebombing trucks used in state sponsored food programmes, have taken it upon themselves to defend their home-ground against ‘criminal elements’ and supporters of the post-Chavez government. They didn’t mean for Pedroza to die. But he knew which side he belonged to, just as much as they do.
Maybe Scenario One, perhaps Two, most likely Somewhere In Between.

Redundant Composition

Of their faces shiny with virtue and simultaneously sooted with smoke from burning tyres, there is little more for me to say. The young woman shot in the throat, who tweeted her last tweet and then came back from the dead, leaves nothing unsaid. Protestors barracking their leaders for settling too easily; the presidential palace deserted except for animals in the private zoo – all of these articulate what’s happening in Kiev with the possibility of its opposite, without needing any help from me.

There is realpolitik: Russia's sphere of influence versus the self-interest of the EU, played out on the streets and played badly – for short-term positive image-points rather than the long game of Diplomacy. But the turn of events in Ukraine – the possibility that they will turn and turn again – eludes both the diplomatic game and the critical analysis of it. 

At the other end of the news reporting spectrum, there are pin-sharp pictures which bring the-right-now to us readers right-here. But their technical quality lends a spurious clarity to events which are still hazy; their outcome yet to be decided.

Analysis and illustration: neither approach quite captures the quickening uncertainty of the moment.

Nor is this the time for Singing The News. Other events have prompted me to use an experimental form of reporting in order to locate the true liveliness of those involved; and this, in turn, is to suggest the possibility of other outcomes – that it is possible, after all, for events to turn out otherwise.

Nowadays we are normally so far from recognising this possibility, it takes an unusual form of composition to construct it. But in Kiev today the possibility speaks for itself. It is writ large in a situation which could patently go either way; and there is nothing for newscompositor to do but sign off for the night.

Cheers!

On The River

The sunny river is dotted and decked with yellow, and blue, and orange, and white, and red, and pink. All the inhabitants of Hampton and Mousley dress themselves up in boating costume, and come and mooch around the lock with their dogs, and flirt, and smoke, and watch the boats, and altogether, what with the caps and jackets of the men, the pretty coloured dresses of the women, the excited dogs, the moving boats, the white sails, the pleasant landscape, and the sparkling water, it is one of the gayest sites I know of near this dull old London town.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men In A Boat (1889).

This is the sight near old London town:
The dull brown river is dotted and decked with cars, and road signs, and one that says ‘Ferry’ even though it’s in the middle of the wide stretch of water not at the edge, and bins for scooped-up-and-bagged dog-pooh attached to poles you can’t see because that’s how high the water’s risen, with not a dog-walker in sight and not likely since there’s no walking to be done; only wading (downcast eyes) or messing about in boats (half-smile if you’re in the boat, serious expression if you’re pushing or pulling the occupants to a place of safety). 

All the inhabitants are dressed down in wellies and woolly jumpers and the occasional bib-and-tucker like the ones trawler men wear for gutting fish. No landscape: the streets awash with floodwater and abject politicians, and the military moving sandbags (in foreign news ‘military’ means coup and governments overthrown, but here in the waterlogged Home Counties the undertow is upbeat - expect to see Wills and Harry mucking in), and everyone’s gutted and the guts of Middle England are spilling into blocked drains and backing up.

Enough Prog Rock imagery - STOP!

Surrey’s inhabitants were high and dry and laughing when others were sinking into poverty 30 years ago. Half-of-me – the bitter half – doesn’t mind them getting wet. But there’s no question of them drowning. Worn down, yes, since Three Men In A Boat in Victorian high summer; nonetheless the mark of prosperous respectability remains far above flood-level. 

Whatever Happened to Baby Jayne?

You couldn’t make it up.

The name of the killer dog is ‘Killer’. The 11-month old baby which it killed, was ‘like a china doll’, according to her paternal grandmother.

Infant Beauty murdered by Chavs’ Beast of Choice, geddit?

There’s more: father and mother are no longer together; the dog, which was put down after the attack, belonged to the mum’s current boyfriend. Mum-and-Baby-Photo, as released to the press, has both of them doe-eyed and Bambified; while the current boyfriend – seen in another photo – boasts high cheekbones, cupid bow lips and a hard look.

The attack took place on a redbrick housing estate in Blackburn, 20 miles north of Manchester. The litany of those involved sounds like the cast list from a nearby episode of Shameless: Bernadette, Chloe, Lee, Dean and ‘china doll’ Ava-Jayne.

What were the parents thinking of, mashing-up Ava (Gardner) with Jayne (Mansfield)? Just the one film star wasn’t enough?

Shame on you, Mr News Compositor! Their moment of grief is not the time to inflict your cultural snobbery on Ava-Jayne’s parents. You’ve reduced their lives – and the sad death of an innocent child – to the level of a cartoon show, The Chavs.

Agreed, it can never be right to write anyone off like this (see Shane Meadows’ movies: he takes the lives of working class people and writes them up properly). But please note that if I have caricatured the baby’s family members, it was only to draw out the way their lives have been cartooned in mainstream media coverage.
More reductionist than mainstream media coverage, amounts to a critique of it – really?

Conceded, this is not sufficient justification. But there is something more - and more important - which my piece is meant to draw attention to.

Perhaps the cartoon character of the death of Ava-Jayne was not only introduced after the tragic event (in the subsequent depiction rather than the event itself). To some extent, it may have been there all along. Not because these really are the creatures of a mythical underclass; more that in this part of the world acting the part might have become part of a general attempt to get real.

Blackburn – how exactly does it work upon the world nowadays? Does it do anything for anyone else – anything that would make it real to the rest of us?

Blackburn used to be King of the Cotton towns, playing a dominant role in the textile industry. But the UK textile industry is now defunct – gone way, moved, address unknown, though everybody knows it’s not here. Furthermore, when the mills of the town were decommissioned, so too were the people: disassociated from the rest of the productive world; demobbed from social reality.

This means that towns such as Blackburn are not all there.

The people of these towns continue with their little, local existence – same as anybody else, anywhere else. Except it is not the same: not without the means of connection to the rest of the world; the connection to our common humanity previously provided by employment within the means of production.

Without this, there is bound to be a search for something else to effect reconnection, and this, in turn, seems to promote the tendency to act out ready-made roles. At least such roles are recognisable, tangible; a discernible part of the bigger picture.

Even if the roles themselves are so crude and one-dimensional they can only negate the complex humanity of the people playing them – Killer Dog Owner, for example, taking on these roles is nonetheless an attempt to re-enter the realm of social being and rejoin the human race.
Anything's better than remaining on the terrain of merely individual existence – even if one of the unintended consequences is the sad death of an 11-month-old baby.

Immigration Satus

Neat hair, neat features, neatness itself; but immigration minister Mark Harper has resigned over the untidy business of his cleaner’s visa. She doesn’t have indefinite leave to remain and he’s the employer who really should have vetted her more carefully, being also the minister in charge of doubling the fine for failure to check; and the government immigration spokesman who sent the vans round last summer saying ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’.

Neat, neat, not-so-neat. Interviewed, he never misses a beat. I did this, I did that, I should apply a higher standard to my own behaviour. Therefore…..
No traction in his seamless voice. Smooth words from a Teflon talker. But if his ministerial career is remembered at all, it will be for the sticky end.

Meanwhile a young male giraffe called Marius was put down in Copenhagen Zoo this morning in an effort to prevent in-breeding among giraffes in captivity.

Photographed poking his head towards us, Marius the Lugubrious – except this is only us projecting human characteristics onto a dumb animal, now deceased.

When various zoos, including one in Doncaster, were keen to adopt Marius, there was never any concern about his immigration status.
Though the Copenhagen keepers cut up the corpse and fed it to the lions, in this regard Marius was afforded more humanity than Mark Harper's cleaner.

On The Levels

Champagne waves spuming the sea wall and houses behind.

Dog down the street turns out to be a seal pup. But the floodwater’s not deep enough and it throws itself back into the pink-tinged harbour.  

Sunset returns, now the clouds have broken; reflected by so much water, more glorious than ever.

Inland – if that’s the word – lush green acres outnumbered by limitless grey lagoons.

The expanse; and the expense.

Then a dry patch where builder Sam Notaro has defended his self-built £1m house with five foot earthworks. Red brick pile and a band of brown earth throw a ring of orange into the surrounding floodwater.  

Prime minister David Cameron pronounced this ‘a biblical scene’ when he helicoptered into Somerset. But Cameron is no deus ex machina. His last-but-one predecessor famously didn’t do religion, and Cameron can’t do biblical.

Years of shirtsleeves, matter of fact; conversation not oration. Now Wellington boots and a warm fleece. Because Dave will always be on your level, OK?

Water’s rising but Cameron cannot find it in him to offer a moment of transcendence – the prime task of a Churchill; occasionally Tony Blair. Amidst the ‘biblical scene’ in which he is clearly only ankle deep, he fails to minister to the people of the Somerset Levels.

Drifters

Two days after he and his scratched-up fibreglass boat washed up on Ebon Atoll, there are no still no photographs of Mexican mariner Jose Ivan.

By his own account, Ivan was blown 8000 miles across the Pacific having set out from Mexico in September 2012, originally making for El Salvador. He survived 16 months afloat by catching fish and turtles with his bare hands, eating them raw and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain.

Not much bigger than a big boat, the outcrop of land he landed on is lower in the water than a passenger liner. There isn’t a phone signal, and the plane that flies in once a week is temporarily out action. Hence Ivan’s image is currently unavailable.

Having found him on the beach in a pair of raggedy underpants, his rescuers are resting and re-hydrating him in relative isolation. Without a selfie to upload – ‘this is me as Robinson Crusoe’ – his story makes mere radio instead of holding the front page.

Sixteen months of blue. Blue sky, blue sea, blue-sea-sky-blue. Like living in a Rothko.

Against that relentless background, memory and fantasy must have thickened. Clotted as closing-time conversation. Matted like your overgrown beard. Then died away, leaving days and days and days of dumb survival.

While you were surviving: an American president re-elected; civil war continues in Syria; London living off Olympic glory, slowly fading. The world which takes you back is little different from the one you accidentally left behind.
The dumb world you’ve come back to, has been adrift for some time.

(Failed) Theft of Spirituality

Unhloly heist. Sacrilegious  swindle. Capillary crook. The New York Daily News reported the theft of a vial containing traces of the blood of Pope John Paul II (‘pontiff’s plasma’), as a kind of cartoon caper. Presumably to permit the paper’s readers – Guys and Dolls, Native New Yorkers – to live out their lives among the cast of characters in Damon Runyon’s low-life off-Broadway stories.

Containing a shred of cloth stained with the pope's blood during the failed attempt to assassinate him in 1981, the vial was itself contained in an elaborate package or ‘reliquary’ – half- box, half-holy writ. 

(Pope John Paul II died in 2005 to cries of Santo Subito – make him a saint now! He is due to be beatified at the end of April 2014.)

Not a vial but a river of blood between the two sides of the civil war in Syria, now facing each other for 'peace talks' in Switzerland. So much blood – leaving aside the not-so-well documented stories of people eating each other. So much certified blood it can't be easy for them to stay in the same room together: the foreign minister who interrupts the UN secretary general interrupting him because he must, simply must finish his speech; and the opposition spokesman at pains to explain to waiting journalists that the government delegation is guilty of using confrontational language.

Overlooking the unruffled waters of Lake Geneva, at any moment the negotiating chamber may be flooded with blood – a tidal surge of it. The levels keep rising – then falling a little; rising and falling.

Rising into the air above St Peter’s Square two doves, released from the papal balcony by children accompanied by the new pope, were attacked by seagulls and a crow.

Pope Francis, the people’s pontiff, Time’s person of the year, man of his times, though still wearing those spectacles favoured by 1990s German chief execs. He is Papa to us all, allegedly. Raised above the square, he stands for all the Syrian fathers who have not been allowed to be Papa, whose children were ripped and torn out of their arms.

Except that his standing isn’t high enough. Dove of peace? You might as well ask him to remake their civil war as a cartoon caper complete with unholy hostages, scintillating sieges and people’s plasma.

Here's a heist which the religious vernacular has not managed to pull off - not even with all that papal paraphernalia.

Hell On Ice

Old age doesn’t creep up. It rages over you like the flames which engulfed an old people’s home (Residence du Havre) in small town Canada (L’Isle-Verte, Quebec) on Wednesday night, leaving up to 31 dead. 

Even Frankie Boyle couldn’t make it up: residents reliant on walking frames, washed-out shuffling things, overtaken by quickfire. See how they cannot run! Now they have run out of time.

Chief firefighter Yvon Charron described it as ‘a night from hell’. Away from the flames, the temperature dropped to 20 degrees below freezing. Pumped onto the fire to put it out, gallons of water turned to icy, witchy fingers.

Hell froze over. The world stood still. In our flaming youth we often saw it that way. We could afford to, with all that time hanging over us.

Mixed Messages

On Saturday night they queued outside St Andrew's Church, Muirhouse, to attend a memorial service for Mikaeel Kular. Early that morning police found the three year old's body in the woods next to his former home in Kirkcaldy.

The Kirkcaldy address makes you wonder why deaths like his don't happen more often. Think of a caravan built of bricks with a Sky dish tacked on. In Newmarket the stables - houses for horses to live in - look more prepossessing. 

Welcome to the pinched world of Kirkcaldy, part of the Ancient Kingdom of Fife....or Poundland, where masked robbers raid Glen [the] Bakers, making off in the delivery man's van with cash from the till, his phone, and perhaps a pile of Scotch pies (salt content to rival the Dead Sea); and the local sign writers haven't yet mastered the English language.

Back in Muirhouse on the north side of Edinburgh, again there's little to stop us killing each other. Many of the postwar flats have already gone - the last bonkers tenant ('no surrender', 'remember the Alamo', 'citizens' republic of Pennywell Gardens') was evicted in 2007. But the new housing stock seems to have the same pinched look built in. Is it something they add to the cement?

Then look again at the Saturday night queue. These people are more than the sum of their 'built environment'. They are not tacky or tawdry. They don't appear to be climbing on to the emotional bandwagon, either. Suffused with light, which happens to be coming from inside the church, they look like people who wanted to help find that boy and give him back his life. Now he's been found dead, they'd like to give something back to each other.

Just don't read the messages tacked to the teddy bears.

Oh, America

Dennis McGuire (53), who was put to death earlier today by the State of Ohio, ordered a last meal of roast beef, fried chicken, fried potatoes with onions, potato salad, toasted onion bagel with cream cheese, butter pecan ice cream and a Coke.

America, where death sits down at the diner alongside representatives of the Coca-Cola corporation. There’s no need for spicy food, everyone agrees, when you’re gonna have it fried.

That’s not what happened to McGuire: the electric chair is little used nowadays. Instead he was injected with a novel combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a morphine derivative. The State of Ohio has previously administered lethal injections of a barbiturate, pentobarbital. But Danish manufacturers Lundbeck have refused to supply the drug to the United States for use in executions.

America, is your Big Pharma so belittled – so much in decline – that you can’t come up with a new killer drug? Is this what you call R&D nowadays - trying out a new cocktail?

The drugs used on McGuire did not work well. Following the injection (do they rub their arms with alcohol to prevent infection?), his wife and grown-up children watched as he heaved, choked, snorted and gasped, suffering the effects of ‘air hunger’.  After 10 minutes of this, McGuire remained still for a few minutes more before he was pronounced dead.

Still as the placid man with a light beard in the mugshot issued by the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Thrashing around as he and his heavily pregnant victim must have done, when he raped her and slashed her neck so that she bled to death in the woods where her body was found the following day.
America, the Big Country where executions are small and mean……and not very well executed.

On Trial

On his way in to Southwark Crown Court today to face charges of ‘historic’ indecent assault and sexual assault, former Radio 1 disc jockey Dave Lee Travis seems bemused by the sight of so many cameras. Having lived so long on the airwaves, perhaps he cannot stop himself associating media attention with professional success. Because being seen and heard – that’s-what-it’s-all-about, folks. Even though he knows they’re here this time to capture him at his lowest ebb.

Dave Lee Travis might have bumped into his old BBC stablemate Rolf Harris, also facing ‘historic’ charges at Southwark; except that Harris was allowed to use a side-entrance so that he could push his wheelchair-bound wife into the building.

Both men deny all charges.

‘DLT’, Travis’ radio moniker from the old days, sounded a lot like BLT: three fillings in just the one sandwich; proof that we don’t have to pinch pennies any more.

In those days, we took it that everyone should have the price of a BLT because DLT says so. Of course he never really did, but you could hear as much in his radio voice.

Nowadays our intrinsic self-worth is not so readily understood. You can hear as much in the spread of Operation Yewtree and the sexual assault trials sandwiched into Southwark Crown Court.

News In Brief

The barge slips across the River Styx to the Underworld. No, the barge which looks like a cargo container with the top-half sawn-off, is ferrying Syrian refugees across the Tigris to the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. Of those climbing out of the barge on the Iraqi side (one soldier tries checking them for entry, another hovers ineffectively), among the cheap shirts (men) and the women wrapped up in paisley peasant bundles, the refugee with the most unkempt hair and grizzled beard is not a wild man of the country. ‘Designer’ leather jacket, pulling airport-style luggage behind him, he could be the business man who had come back to his birthplace to retire; or perhaps the teacher from a war-torn village (one of many). Either way his old life isn’t there anymore. Assuming he reaches Baghdad 150 miles away, will he have another go….? Or burrow into his suitcase, living off leftovers for as long as he can make them last.

In the UK Tristram Hunt MP, newly appointed shadow spokesman for Education, has revealed Labour’s plans for a Teachers’ MOT. Teachers would have to apply for their licence to be renewed every few years, subject to satisfactory professional development. Hunt, himself a former lecturer, is bright-eyed and coiffed like a posh sixth-former. Strip back the mature jaw and tone down the full-square chin, and you’d take him for Head Boy, mugging something up for Speech Day on the Future of Our School. His rationale for the Teachers’ MOT is half-way between sixth-form vernacular and infantilised self-esteem-speak: ‘This is about believing that teachers have this enormous importance.’

PC Keith Wallis tried to make himself important, claiming he had witnessed Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell slagging off police officers as plebs. Now he admits making it up. Watching Wallis on his way into court to plead guilty, you can well imagine what he hoped to gain. Thinning hair, moustache from another era, lower jaw bulging to the left – neat enough, but he looks like a man who’s still a PC at the age of 53. Then there’s the question of the way policemen wear a collar and tie and a suit with an executive overcoat on top. Somehow it always looks mutton. Perhaps the indelible stain of being plebeian.