The Waves

He, doing so, put forth to seas,
Where when men been, there's seldom ease;
For now the wind begins to blow;
Thunder above and deeps below
Make such unquiet, that the ship
Should house him safe is wreck'd and split;
And he, good prince, having all lost,
By waves from coast to coast is tost.
William Shakespeare (Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Act I, Scene IV)

AT WARWICK ACADEMY, from time to time, the recess or lunch break on the playing fields would be interrupted by loud shouts of “Fight! Fight!” and suddenly a knot of boys would form here or there, encircling something unseen but understood. One boy would have taken umbrage at something another lad had said or done, and would launch an attack of fists and feet. Sticks, stones or knives simply did not enter into it.

The spectators would continue to call out their encouragement until one (or both) of the boys was bloodied; and then the knot would unravel rapidly, the gladiatorial ended, and runny noses, split lips and blackened eyes would be dabbed at in the toilets.

I do not recall teachers, or even prefects, ever breaking up a fight.

I might add that I do not remember ever seeing girls fighting, except by way of words and distant gestures. The girls were as adept with a rude finger or two as their older brothers were.

There was not a great deal of bullying at Warwick Academy, bigger boys lording it over younger or smaller pupils. That said, in my day, some of our young tin Caesars felt it necessary to dictate hairstyles and the length of one’s hair. As this demand for short hair was the same as that dictated by the Headmaster, I never saw people punished for ganging up on boys with hair a little over the ears or collars. Our Headmaster could never be accused of being fair.

Only once was I threatened with a haircut by my classmates, and that was at a party one weekend night. I simply slipped out of the host’s door and walked a few miles home in the dark. I can still remember the walk home, 45 years later. Slipping out of the house, slipping along the roads, and taking a longer route than I need have done so that if anyone came after me they would expect me elsewhere, slipping into my home after midnight and never telling my mother I had walked home. One or two friends at the party did worry when I had vanished, knowing I had no transport and four or five miles to get home.

The Headmaster bullied me over my “long” hair. Many the times I was called up in morning Assembly, and told to report to the Headmaster after our little services were done. In his office, I would be shrieked at by a man twice my size, who would go so red in his rage that one expected something to pop. I can tell you he lived into his nineties, possibly because when he retired from his position at Warwick Academy he grew his hair longer than mine had ever been.

Last night, very late, I watched rioters, looters, and arsonists attempting to level part of London, starting in Tottenham’s High Road. Apparently, a small protest over the shooting death of a bloke two nights earlier got “out of hand”. It appeared more likely that a peaceful protest was hijacked by mini-gangsters who wanted to rumble. Soon I was watching people fleeing, while a few males pitched rocks and petrol bombs at vehicles and buildings, and there was a live view of the arsonists’ younger brothers wheeling shopping trolleys loaded with electronic goods from shattered storefronts.

A reporter from the BBC seemed to have taken a position in the centre of a street, with fires raging in the buildings behind him, and rock-throwing youths battling mounted police nearby. Two teenagers, in jeans and T-shirts, came up behind the reporter. First, Yellow Shirt gave the viewing audience a bit of a dance and hand gestures that were offensive even to someone as out of it as I am. Punching fists, rude fingers, and thrusts. Then Blue Shirt jumped in from the dark and shoved Yellow Shirt, who stumbled about.

I was waiting to hear “Fight! Fight!” However, the shirts decided to play for the cameras, smiling widely and looking anything but tough. The BBC reporter did not seem to know what was going on two feet behind him, or was simply not going to be bothered by it. The camera operator narrowed the shot so that only the reporter’s face and some flames behind his left ear filled the screen. The boys were out of the shot. That is when the reporter got the push and other rioters and yobs went for the camera and the BBC van. The presenter back in the studio told us that there appeared to be some confrontation between their team in Tottenham and protestors. "And here are some earlier pictures ..."

Today, it is all smouldering buildings, streets covered in rubbish and ash, and police walking about looking for “evidence”. Walls of now-roofless Victorian buildings are tottering in Tottenham. The locals are homeless and some even have no clothing but that they wore to flee the fires in the night. Somewhere, one supposes, boys and their slightly bigger brothers are setting up splendid stereo systems and HD television sets. How do young kids explain the new 42” telly with a surround-sound feature in the front room to their parents? Do they even have parents, or people who parent them?

From what I can gather watching the Beeb, at first only about 15 police officers were on duty when the protest started. One of the Police bigwigs tells us they misjudged the size of the crowd and the emotions of those taking part. Several riots this summer have also been poorly anticipated. Our Government is busy reducing the police services, and our military, despite protest marches and gatherings and the heartfelt anger that the population seems always to feel during Tory administrations.

Right now, our Government is off on holiday. No doubt Cabinet Ministers travel well on the taxpayer. The world’s economies are collapsing, and the world’s leaders (all in their holiday digs) simply do not have a clue and no end of photo-ops will calm the markets.

Our Government’s huge budget cuts have resulted in the closure of youth clubs. Notably in the parts of London with the ethnicity of Tottenham. Is it not time to weigh up the many millions lost in riots and arson and looting against the cost of providing boys and girls with somewhere half-decent to go on a Saturday night?

In the television coverage last night I was amazed at the many different types on the streets, though must admit there were 9 boys to every girl. But there were whites and blacks, Arabs and Hasidic Jews, and people in all sorts of clothes, from conservative to rather sluttish. Nearly all, when interviewed, seemed to speak with English accents. Imagine the fun they could have at youth group events!

Yesterday we saw a posed photograph of President Obama of the USA chatting on the phone with his military advisor, being told that over 30 US soldiers had been killed when a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. Obama’s hair looks grey, he looks weary, and that is how he had to look. It was a single still picture, not a film. Did he also swear? Shake a fist? Curse the Taliban and their Allah? Did he shed a tear, edited out?

Could the economies of the great western nations be up shit creek because we are fighting unwinnable wars? Not just unwinnable wars, but wars that nobody seems to understand (or want) back at home.

Why are we bombing Libya, but not Yemen or Syria or Bahrain? Why not North Korea or Burma? Do we even protest at Cabinet level when a Saudi woman is the victim of Sharia Law?

Why are we being asked to send tens of millions of pounds of food aid to starving Africans who are forbidden by their Muslim leaders to accept aid from Infidels? We have to borrow to get the money to send on its lost cause. Why cannot rich Islamic nations like Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states send aid to their Islamic brothers in Africa?

Over the last 30 years, we have been accompanied on life’s journey by no end of video games. We have shot down Space Invaders, blasted dragons, and outgunned dark-skinned forces in a desert town. At the end of the day, we have pressed the “reset” button and all returned to normal. For 30 years, death has been brief and life restored in a click. Magic! No wonder boys shoot their mates without a second thought. Press reset a thousand times to revive your dead, and pull a trigger twice. What is the harm?

Civil unrest, military disasters, monetary mayhem. It is as if natural disasters, those typhoons, tornados, tsunamis and great rumbling earthquakes just are not enough suffering for us.

I enjoyed my late night walk home from the party that threatened to cut my hair in 1965. The air was cool and the lights sparkled on the water. I just left the hassle behind and enjoyed the new moment.

Waves.

Revolution Revisited

Protestors. Grosvenor Square, London. 17 March, 1968

This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a

foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures,

shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions,

revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of

memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and

delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the

gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am

thankful for it.

William Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, Act IV, Scene II)

I HAVE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS. Do people who work the night shift ever suffer from sleepless days? Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on my mood, these hours awake when others sleep are not so regular, so frequent, as to render me useless most of the time. Four or five times a week I can get safely to the minimart for milk, to the greengrocer for broccoli, and to Roland's Butchers for a bit of fresh lamb's liver for Cailean, and not be standing out on the street wondering whether it is Thursday or Norway. When I am truly knackered in the daytime, I try not to stray past the pages of the book I'm reading. Cups of tea and a blanket over my legs on the sofa, and the dog kipping on his back alongside me.

When I become the vampire, the creature of the night, I usually have fallen asleep in the early evening, as early as tea-time, and wakened by nine o'clock. From that hour my mind races, I often pace the floor, and have to fight the temptation to leave the flat and go walking in the mists that this seaside village hides in every night. Fortunately for me, Cailean is not much of a werewolf, and he doesn't often care to go outside after dark, except for pee breaks in the courtyard, and snappy ones at that.

I did actually take him for one late night walk recently in the moonlight, near the River Coquet, and very nearly had to carry him home: hooting owls, barking dogs, splashes in the water, rather a lot of bunnies, and the clanking of cables on the aluminium masts of the sailboats. Oh, I think Cailean would have stayed by the river, but I was scared shitless and couldn't get home through the heaped autumn leaves fast enough. We were like two protons in the Large Hadron Collider!

Back at home. I find I can watch the television comfortably until midnight, and can push on for another hour if there's a good film showing. I rather like weird foreign films with subtitles; T-rated films: transvestites, transsexuals, tortured priests, twinks, trolls, tits, theatrics, twists in the plot, therapy, trench-coats. Well, anything by Pedro Almodóvar.

When I've had enough of the telly, I read for a while. Cailean, for many hours by this time, has been asleep under several blankets with all his toys. Approaching two-thirty in the morning, bladders must be relieved, mine first. Then out into the cold with the pup. The security light blazes and any inclination to sleep is blasted right out of me. We run back inside, switching off any lights, stand-by switches and the heater if it has been on. Cailean vanishes under the covers with "Snakey", a favourite stuffed toy that is a good deal bigger than he is. I pull the blankets up, face the ceiling, and start thinking.

Some years ago, I wrote a newspaper column that tended to be about days gone by, which were sometimes the good old days of my youth, sometimes about the travel I'd managed when my health and finances permitted, about people that I'd met, books I'd read, things that influenced me, the shitty experiences of childhood, conversions and diversions. My therapist thought I was getting all the past out of my system. I kept a journal for over twenty-five years, scrapbooks as well, and photo albums. Everything was on paper, somehow. As we carry the past along with us, perceiving time as we do in these dimensions, I hardly expected to get everything out of my system!

Three years ago I took all my journals to an industrial incinerator plant, along with my scrapbooks. So much for what I did in 1980; so much for the newspaper clipping of my mother's funeral notice; so much for important telephone numbers; so much for jokes that were so funny when I heard them that they had to be written down; so much for my thoughts on 11 September, 2001; so much for theatre tickets, and an address blotchy on a beer-mat, and a coin I picked up that I did not recognise. Into the fire.

I left my photo albums (and I'd been the keeper of the family photographs among my siblings), my personal papers, my newspaper columns, my reference books and notes, everything that I'd written, in an old cargo container in a damp field in Bermuda. When I turned my back on it, I knew that I'd not pay the storage fees after the first six months, and I didn't, and that was three years ago. Those things have gone. Apparently, as of three years ago, I'd pretty much dumped the baggage of my past, mentally, and the physical followed.

Back in England, I found I was unable, couldn't be arsed, to write about schooldays and fishing off the rocks and climbing Mount Pisgah on Beaver Island, though I was vaguely conscious of those times. Instead of panoramic views of driving through the Grand Tetons that just go on and on, I have a little, the smallest, Post-it Note reading "Saw the Tetons". Enough seen, enough said.

I'm tending to write about the moment, or at least last night or a day or two ago. I've taken up photography, I see something interesting, camera always at the ready, I get my snapshot, and I write about it. Or delete it. I don't save it.

And, in the night, in the last few hours before sunrise, my mind races. Something I saw the day before. I have a tiny torch, the sort that one might attach to a key ring, and I reach for it, my biro pen, and a jotter pad (they are scattered all around the flat), and I write down my great thoughts. Light out. Another thought. Light on. And through the night. Light off. Light on.

Sometimes I sit up completely and my thoughts become visual. In the room, awkwardly manoeuvring around the clutter, walk people and animals, sometimes flags flutter, things blow across the carpet which has become a street. There is no sound, unless I make it, and I don't want to disturb Cailean by talking to short-term memories.

Last night, I watched water cascading downwards through what should have been the carpeted floor, only it had become a rough path down a mountain, and pine trees hovered behind the furniture. It was quite remarkable; I made a note of it on my jotter pad. Had there been full sound, I imagine I might have been frightened.

Cailean only needs to pee once in the night, but I must go two or three times, so I got up from the sofa-bed and walked out of the woods, down the hall to the bathroom. When I came back, the room was a room again. I decided to make a large mug of coffee, which I do using skimmed milk rather than water. Four minutes and ten seconds in the microwave does it exactly. And I sit in the dark and drink the coffee and listen to music playing in my head. Coffee does that to me. Indie and Brit Pop.

Coffee also makes me sleepy at five in the morning. This morning, I wrote a few more notes and then rolled over in the bed, felt Cailean curl up behind my knees, closed my eyes, and then it was eight-thirty. Cailean was playing with Snakey on top of the blankets; the room was so bright that I knew it was a sunny day outside.

I do my house-cleaning chores on Friday, and I made beef stew from scratch, which takes two hours, not including the suet dumplings. So, I've done all that, it's Friday evening.

Just now, I had a look at my jotter pad. It reads, in part: "Revolution revisited before 2008 has passed!"

I must tell you my mind is not so far gone that I cannot figure the line out. You see, 1968, exactly 40 years ago, was quite the year for social unrest and upheaval, assassinations, invasions, riots and beatings and strikes.

The Rolling Stones sang their take on it, their anthem, Street Fighting Man, which is a shit song as far as music goes, but it included the lyric: "Summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy..." which is memorable to an old Stones fan such as myself.

John Lennon wrote one of my very favourite Beatles' songs, Revolution, which includes the lines:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

On 17 March, 1968, which was a Sunday, I was in London with a dear friend of mine, who reads this blog from time to time, he's still dear, and we saw crowds in the streets heading for the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest against the Vietnam War. The riot that followed kicked off the revolution season that year.

I was into all that Peace and Love business back in 1968. However, I am looking for some evolution, some revolution, in 2008. In international finance, in coming to grips with hunger and pollution and terrorism, in international political relations. I am hoping that a revolution of common sense over prejudice will see Barack Obama become President of the United States of America. The election of John F. Kennedy back in 1960 broke the evil spell over Roman Catholicism, and I imagine only those hillbillies and crackers in the USA give a hoot about the Catholic influence now. Can Barack Obama, even if he is only half a man of black African blood, if elected, contribute hugely to a decline in institutionalised racism and prejudice? I think so. I hope so.

I'm afraid, for me, Obama's opponent, John McCain, is the hero from the Vietnam War. Can a war that should never have been (and that was ultimately lost) truly have great heroes? I'm not sure that suffering, which McCain certainly had his share of, can be equated with heroism. Many would disagree with me across the Atlantic.

Struggles against suffering, however, can be heroic at times.

I say I want a revolution. I do!