Posts Tagged ‘modernity’
a glimpse of a runaway horse
A few days ago I was reading somewhere that modernity is a runaway horse. Democracy was the only rein we ever had on it. Unfortunately a jockey can slow a horse down, and the owners don’t want that. Now there’s a ghost in the saddle.
Last week saw another big nasty nail driven into the coffin of democracy – and the protection of the environment – as Gordon slid the new planning laws past the sleeping electorate. It’s true that most of the time all we can do is slow the bulldozers down rather than stop them. But when they’re destroying irreplaceable and precious things, time matters. It’s some consolation to be able to spend a little while longer with things we love before they’re gone forever. Saying goodbye is so heartbreaking. It’s a bit much to expect people to accept these things being whisked away from them overnight.
Speaking of night and things beyond our control, one day last week they were working on the Citadel site well after midnight. The Citizens were understandably incensed. The Council replied there were no restrictions on working at the site, contrary to the impression that both they and Griff had given previously. Just another glimpse of the horse that has no rein.
And of course the Citadel has continued to grow mercilessly. A vast labyrinth of girders and scaffolding has now consumed the skyline from our conservatory. It looms over our gardens and peers down into our bedrooms and kitchens. Its size is far greater than were ever led to expect. There is no doubt that the Council and their partners in this project – by which I mean the egregious Griff and the parcel of rogues he sups with – seriously and systematically misled the residents about this. The structure is now far closer to us than it was a fortnight ago and its shadow falls across our house even earlier in the evening than I thought it might. We are losing more than an hour’s sun every evening. And because the Citadel has consumed the entire horizon we must now accept that every night the sun will be swallowed by it. This brutal, intrusive monument to ruthless privatisation will look down upon us for as long as we live here. We have lost so much more than we were ever told we would. We have lost peace and quiet, privacy, the sun in the evening, the darkness at night, the sky above the garden fence. I suspect we still don’t know how much we will lose in the end. And just as they never warned us it would be like this, never once have Griff or his partners acknowledged the scale or depth of our loss. They probably never will. It’s a disgrace they might have to pay out for if they did.
One evening this week Hugo in checked shirt and baggy jeans stood up on the boards around his pond, three ducks at his feet, elbows leaning on the top of his fence. He was gazing out at the Citadel. For the first time it seemed to me he was feeling the weight of its inescapable presence. He looked reflective, even despondent. I stood in the conservatory with De Kooning in my arms watching him. Margaret came in and I asked her how the Citizen’s struggle was doing.
She shook her head. ‘It’s like walking through treacle,’ she said. ‘They just take all the fight out of you.’
She looked despondent too.
‘You’re not giving up, are you?’ I said.
She shrugged her shoulders. She said she wasn’t but she was beginning to wonder what the point was now. Hugo was still leaning against his fence, his pond pump gurgling behind him.
‘At least the slippers are selling,’ I said, trying to cheer her up.
She smiled half-heartedly and remembered she needed to ring Brenda about something.
Flinty was released from prison at the beginning of last week and has already wreaked havoc. One of his license conditions was that he must reside in Bedlington and is not allowed to enter the area north of the Wansbeck. However he is dressing up in various disguises and using various borrowed cars to enter the area and settle old scores, make drug deals and worry Mandy. Last Tuesday – the day after his release – he dressed up as Felix the Cat and drove north in a clapped out green Datsun to do a deal on some cowies with Black Peter from Newbiggin. Deal done it seems he made his way to Lynemouth and kicked seven bells out of Dekka Douglas for allegedly grassing him up to the police and getting him sent down. Dekka is undoubtedly a police informant and as a result appears to live a charmed life. It’s said he’s been involved in everything from armed robbery to GBH and money laundering but has never yet been charged with anything more serious than having a broken stop light. Dekka seems untouchable, although Flinty proved that this isn’t literally true. Ironically Dekka seems blameless on this occasion. The grass was Elephant Carmichael, Flinty’s best mate. Flinty is currently staying with Elephant until he can find somewhere else, and the word is that it was Elephant who pointed Flinty in Dekka’s direction. Dekka isn’t likely to point out Flinty’s mistake, of course: Flinty sees Elephant as his blood brother and besides Elephant is every bit as psychopathic as Flinty only three times his weight and twice as ugly. Dekka probably took the view that a hammering from Flinty was preferable to being mangled by the Elephant.
On Wednesday Flinty came over dressed as Bjorn Borg, wearing a blond wig, headband and tennis gear. He was probably inspired by Wimbledon. His vehicle that day was a red Toyota 4×4 pick-up, courtesy of Elephant’s cousin. At some point during the afternoon he turned up outside Mandy’s door. Just before tea Mr Zee came out to go to the corner shop to get some milk. Flinty seeing this jumped out of the Toyota and began to approach him. Mr Zee at first thought he was just any other man dressed for tennis, not a common site on the estate although not entirely implausible. However when this Bjorn Borg lookalike began to call him unsavoury names and to gallop towards him, Mr Zee realised who he was lurking behind the headband. He made off up the street, showing a surprising turn of speed for a man wearing knee length boots and a brown cape. It may be that Flinty is out of condition following his period of incarceration, because despite the obvious advantages of plimsolls and shorts he was unable to keep up with Mr Zee and quickly gave up the chase. He then swaggered back to the red pick-up and stood beside it in his white shorts, one hand resting on the bonnet, getting his breath back and glaring belligerently at Mandy’s door. For whatever reason he obviously thought that discretion was the better part of valour on this occasion, however, and quickly made his way back south to Elephant’s. That evening Mandy received many strange phone calls, all from number withhelds. Some of these phone calls were completely silent, but on all the others Yvonne Fair’s recording of It Should Have Been Me was playing in the background. It is Flinty’s favourite song.
On Thursday Mandy, Mr Zee and the kids came into the office. They were requesting help with a house move to another area. Debs suggested they needed to inform the police about Flinty’s behaviour as he was in breach of his release conditions. Mandy had done so, but the police felt that the evidence – Mr Zee being chased by Bjorn Borg, and a dozen dodgy phone calls from an Yvonne Fair fan – wasn’t enough to act on, even though they said they knew ‘with one hundred percent certainty’ that Flinty was responsible. ‘Perhaps this was because Elephant Carmichael has told them so’, Debs suggested.
The weekend was quiet, but on Monday Flinty went up to Amble to do a deal on some crack cocaine. He was dressed as a surfer – wet suit and Oakley’s on his head – and driving an old VW camper van. On his way back he parked up opposite Mandy’s for a couple of hours. Sparky spotted ‘the scary frogman’ from the window. He went away about teatime, abandoning the camper van on the spine road when it broke down. That night Mandy received five further unsolicited telephone renditions of Yvonne Fair’s brash anthem.
On Tuesday morning Mandy came into the office to talk to Debs. She said she was thinking about going back to Flinty.
‘I thought you loved Mr Zee,’ Debs said.
‘I do,’ Mandy said. ‘But Flinty will murder him if he doesn’t get me back.’
‘But Mandy the kids love Mr Zee, don’t they? And they’re shit scared of Flinty, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, I know, I know. But he won’t let me go, Debs. He really will kill me too if I don’t go back to him. You don’t know him like I do.’
‘Does Mr Zee want you to go back to Flinty?’
‘No. He says I shouldn’t do that. He says he’ll stay with me no matter what. But he’s scared, Debs, I can tell. He’s terrified in fact, I know he is.’
Debs shook her head. ‘I’ll ring the police again,’ she said. ‘You need to see this through for the sake of kids. But you all need protection. I’ll see what I can do.’
Debs rang the police who accepted that Flinty probably was ‘making a nuisance of himself’, as they put it, but that without clear evidence that it was him and that he’d crossed north of the Wansbeck and that he was actually intimidating Mandy there wasn’t a lot they could do. They said they’d alert the local Bobby and ask the patrol car to be aware of the address. Besides the odd musical phone call in the middle of the night things have been quiet since then. But Flinty won’t go away, we all know that. It’s only a matter of time.
I interviewed Hermann Evans last week. He was a great disappointment. Far from being the unapologetic absurdist anti-hero I was hoping he might be, he quickly turned out to be a blubbering Bavarian baby. I was looking forward to the delights of a conversation with a Teutonic Dadaist. I got a man on his knees, a man who saw himself as a complete victim, and who, between the sobbing, while never admitting to saying anything whatsoever, said that whatever he did it was just in fun and he had been misunderstood. In short Hermann thought that senior managers must hate him for reasons not known to him or to me, and that my whole investigation was a shabby attempt to bring him down.
I abandoned the interview because of his distress and suggested he needed to go and see his doctor. He didn’t seem to me a well man. Interestingly enough it seems the distraught Hermann remembers the real names of people much better than his bold unsuspended counterpart. In this too he was an immense disappointment to me. I only hope that when we meet again he shows a little more spirit. I want to hear about Freddie Faust and the mysterious Mr Ferret, Brunhilda and Gay Goldilocks.
It rained again today. I went into the garden this evening with De Kooning while Margaret was cooking some onions and potatoes. A hedgehog wandered around the border for a while. The damp air was heady and thick with the swoony scent of stocks and pinks. The yellow lily too is beginning to bloom in the grey evening. We went in and left the hedgehog to go about his business while he can.
.
the citadel
They’re building a Citadel in the fields behind our house. Actually it isn’t really a citadel, it’s a new school. Margaret is part of a group known as Citizens Against the Citadel, CAC, or The Citizens, as they call themselves. They are loosely knit alliance of the disgruntled and discounted whose motivations are probably complex and varied but who are united in their feeling that the Citadel is an abomination and that building must stop now. They are right that the building will be gruesome and that it is already ruinous to the quality of life around here, and that it is an imposition and something about which ordinary people were never given any real say. It’s true that the consultation was a sham. It’s true that the Citadel Construction and Development Company – led by the Tyneside businessman Sir Toby Griffiths (‘Griff’, to the Citizens) – misled local residents about the scale and impact of the project. But the Citizens are almost certainly wrong in believing there’s anything very much they can do about it now. They won’t even get an apology from Griff on this one.
The phone rang about eight thirty. It was Geraldine. She lives across the road. She doesn’t work now, but her husband, Mick, is a council officer of some sort. Geraldine, who has been a leading light in CAC and for whom Margaret really doesn’t care very much, was ringing to tell her that Griff’s men were working and they shouldn’t be, because it was Saturday. Griff had said that Saturday working would not happen. This is the latest in a string of broken promises. Margaret’s response was predictable and instantaneous.
‘They’re bloody kidding!’ she said. ‘Let’s get everyone together and get around there and stop it. Let’s get Griff over here NOW!’ And so on.
The general strategy of the Citizens is to rant among themselves by telephone or over coffee and chocolate digestives in one another’s front rooms and then, one after another, by telephone, to bombard Griff, his minions, local politicians and council staff with unbridled disgust and indignation and, if the moment calls for it, a serving of personal abuse. Needless to say construction of the Citadel hasn’t been delayed one rivet as a consequence of this strategy. Water and ducks’ backs come to mind. Nevertheless the fight must go on.
Margaret rang a couple more Citizens and began to make ready for the incursion into the Citadel building site. Her battle dress was a pair on Marks and Spencers jeans, her old but little worn Timberland boots, a grey sweater, her old red fleece and black gloves. It was a cool morning and it was drizzling; hypothermia on the Citadel battlefield was a real danger. I lay in bed, De Kooning at my side, pretending to take no notice of all this activity.
‘Have you heard that bloody racket?’ she said.
‘Er, yes,’ I mumbled, as if still slumbering. ‘I thought I’d heard something. Is it Fletch?’
‘No, it isn’t bloody Fletch – it’s the Citadel men. They’re now working on a Saturday! Can you believe that?! They’ve got a bloody nerve. Well, they’re not bloody well getting away with it this time, I can tell you!’ And so on, again.
I ignored her and pretended I might be unconscious again. She left to meet Geraldine and the other Citizens to go into battle. The Citizens, curiously enough, are more or less all women, an Amazon legion. With the exception of Big Trevor, of course, who doesn’t work and likes to insinuate his booming and bellowing into any context where it might make what is essentially always only a textural contribution. But almost everyone agrees completely with the Citizens’ complaints, even if they never join the battle. Hugo might be the exception here: so far as I can tell he hasn’t even have noticed that the Citadel is being built. If he has he must regard it as just another extraneous object that’s fallen from heaven. The right attitude will be to accept it with equanimity and to leave it exactly where it is. Haphazardist politics tend to be marked by a passive acceptance which at times can look very like complicity or collusion.
I didn’t expect Griff’s men to stop working before lunchtime. I did think however that it might be a good idea to get up and go out for a while. De Kooning looked at me: he agreed.
It’s not that I too don’t agree with the Citizens and think their cause isn’t a good one. It’s just that the battles are futile if the war is already lost. They are no more than quixotic gestures, and while I know this sort of comic-tragic futility is what makes us human, sometimes you can have just a little too much futility in your life. It’s not always good to bang your head against every brick wall you find. Modernity is a steamroller and it will flatten us all. We will all become one dimensional people, as Marcuse said long ago. The future is a Citadel: massive, inhuman, noisy, computer generated, absurdly geometrical, obsessively orderly, built by robots to accommodate the robots we will all become. It will be lifeless and it will not belong to us. Gordon, Griff and their like are at the wheel and the whole planet is their building site. Start saying goodbye to the things you love, Maureen, because this is the way the world really ends.
I left Margaret a note stuck to the top of her laptop.
Dear Margaret, modernity is a steamroller and it will flatten us all. The Citadel Men are unstoppable. I’ve gone shopping as there are some things I need. Please feed the cat when he comes in.
I went to see my dad this afternoon. He was watching an old film version of The Importance of Being Earnest on TV when I got there. I told him that they were knocking down bits of Park Farm in Newsham. He was born and grew up there so I thought he’d be interested.
‘Where is it?’ he asked.
I described its whereabouts and he told me this place was always called Thompson’s Farm when he was a kid. He used to play around there sometimes. I told him I’d taken some photographs of it just in case it was demolished. He went on to tell me about all the other buildings there used to be at South Newsham – the pit, the winding house, the rows of houses, the school and the Star Foundry. They’re all gone now, of course.
I asked him what pubs there were near where the shipyard used to be. He said they included The Sun, The Ship, the Fox and Hounds, and the Blagdon. They’re all demolished now too. He told me that a boxer called Seaman Tommy Watson had been the manager of the Blagdon for a long time. It seems Seaman was a good fighter and had fought Kid Chocolate for his world title at Madison Square Garden. He lost on points but some say he would have got the decision had the fight taken place over here.
When I got home I asked Margaret how the visit to the Citadel site this morning had gone.
‘I was a complete and utter waste of time,’ she said. ‘Geraldine just took over.’
De Kooning was in the conservatory. He sat with me as I read the newspaper. In an interview Cherie Blair says Tony is a socialist. I laughed out loud and, for a moment, De Kooning stopped cleaning his jet black face.
Margaret had gone in the bath. She was going to a poetry evening at Brenda’s house this evening. In two days time it will be exactly seventy five years since Seaman Tommy Watson lost to the little Cuban in New York.
yammering 