Thoughts from a body-bag

One hour inside a white plastic body-bag, lying on the cold slab stones of Piccadilly Circus, just outside the tube exit, supposed to be a dead body.

An hour was quite enough; you begin to understand, in this curious position, just how Edgar Allen Poe's buried alive character might have felt, if it had not been foe the coffin and the weight of the soil.

Oh, well I suppose I could ays that once again I am fulfilling my destiny, that is to act the corpse.

And yes, once again at the behest of Belarus Free Theatre.  If ever you've seen them you'll know why I was happy to get up at 6am and cycle to central London to be one their bodies.

And if you haven't, read this BBC article on Belarus for an introduction to the techniques of a government which seems not to have noticed the passing of Joe Stalin.

It was meant to be warm today, but at 7am there were low clouds and an icy east wind buffeted central London The coldest place of all was at ground level.

 I couldn't quite fit into my small to medium body bag. It felt like a useless sleeping bag, too short and too wide and too thin. But, as the marvellous Belarus Free Theatre's Fenella said, the main thing was that they were breathable.

Not that it would've made much difference to me, as half my face was sticking out into the freezing air.

Apart from that, each bag really made a little cocoon for each of us  - the 10 or so volunteers, at this location, many more in the more high-profile spots, Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square -  who for whatever reasons had chosen to lend our bodies to Belarus for a couple of early morning hours.

Last year, we gave our bodies, naked on the ice-cold concrete paving of Hammersmith's Riverside Studios for Fuck Realpolitik.

This year, we were part of the Belarus give-a-body-back campaign.

Our carcasses were there to represent the bodies of  Belarusians who had died - no, who had been executed - in Belarus, and whose bodies had never been returned to their families.

Each time I meet or see or listen to any of the BFT people, who are always so delightful and friendly and appreciative - but I se in their eyes that there are dreadful,  urgent matters to be dealt with, they are driven - they are driven because in many cases, their friends and partners and lovers and family and colleagues and neighbours have already become victims to what is now (again thanks to BFT) widely known as the last dictatorship in Europe.

By comparison, being a corpse for an hour was easy stuff. Or so I thought.

The trouble was, once zipped up in your bag, you could see nothing but the vaguest shadows of passing people. Voices came and went. In the first few minutes, loud male scorn seemed to be pouring in - "oh dead bodies, but are you really dead?" "you're going to get very stiff  mate - watch out for piles", they said, on their way to god knows where.

After that, a strange silence descended - punctured ever few mintutes by the voices of our supervisors, trying to interest passers-by in the demo. Sometimes you'd hear the clip-clop of high-heeled shoes getting closer, and closer , and about to stamp on your face - and then they'd pass. Office boys and office girls on their way to work, gasping on their last fags before the working day began. Lost tourists failing to meet he people they'd wanted to meet, phoning, texting, cursing. A few vaguely amused arty types on their way, perhaps to some gallery or auction room. "oh my god, dead bodies! Cool!".

Then again just you and your aching, freezing body. It is June but there is a cold East wind coming in over the back of my head and my legs are about to walk away from all this on their own.

 Feels like it's blowing all the way from Minsk, just for us.

Have I been here long now? Is it half-time yet?

Then - amazingly, the voice of our friendly organiser: "Volunteers! Ten minutes more."

The last 10 minutes seemed much longer than the first 50 - nothing but white and grey shadows to see, and disembodied voices to hear. And then, oh thank god, the 9am call, the tricky unzipping, staggering back to vertical, staggering past Eros to reach the bit of the square in sunshine.


 www.freebelarusnow.org/bodies.

#GiveABodyBack

South circular: a day out

Was it 2010?  The years flash by so fast, I cannot be sure.

It was a warm day, I remember, that I drove across my old cycle route to Goldsmiths. Brixton, Camberwell,  Peckham, New Cross, and then kept going on, as far as Woolwich, then turning left down towards to the river, down towards Belmarsh Prison, parking and meeting the already quite successful playwright in the Visitor Centre.

This place was already familiar - I had been visiting my former workmate, who became a friend, in this prison quite regularly since his sentencing in 2006. Then he'd been sent away to  a prison in Nottinghamshire for a year or so before being returned to this (it seemed to me) exceedingly vicious and soul-corroding place on the jagged south-eastern edge of estuarine London.

Belmarsh! A great name for a prison, with its echoes of Dickens, mixed so well with the late 20th century's love of euphemism - "bel" up against the "marsh" of Marshalsea. Not far from that delightful settlement, Thamesmead - oh, the mead, with its echoes of flowers and honey! Oh ! The lovely marsh!

Each time, visiting, getting off the train, crossing that dual carriageway, getting onto the shining way down  a sort of emaciated linear park, past stained concrete crime scenes, past a trading estate, past caravans selling saveloys and so on, past the bike track through the trees too short to look over the great walls of the prison and its attendant Crown Court  - more echoes, this time of Venetian fortifications, and of the great fortress cities of 16th century France. Smooth high walls, like a Jarman film set for Ken Russell. Featureless. The gate. The double airlocks and the fingerprint checks. And then another airlock. Crossing an inner courtyard. Waiting with the child-brides and babies of the villains, the sniffling mums and the super-well made-up girlfriends, and the leery mates. Standing in numbered rows, being sniffed by eager doggies.

Then into the visiting hall, like a big school canteen, the table-and-two-chairs set up, the yellow lines which the inmates must never cross. In they come, some swaggering, others stumbling, seeeming dazed by the light, their high-vis sleeveless orange jackets making it all seem like a lunch break at a motorway building site.

Usually he was cheerful and upbeat, eager to get the most out of each visit. I would go and buy coffees, crisps and chocolate from the WI volunteers. He would scoff it all and then start on the latest news. We had about 90 minutes. Sometimes it was too much time.

Sometimes a visitor would sit there and their prisoner would never arrive. Sometimes - more often - you'd see an anguished prisoner waiting, their loved one never appearing.

But this day was different. We were not visiting, we were collecting. Still, we had to wait in the centre, watching the great gate. After an hour there was sudden activity. A small bald man, stooping, with a heavy bag, fell out of the tiny door in the gigantic gate, fell into the arms of one woman - his mum? And then another - his aunt? And then more waiting.

We decided it was time to cross over to wait nearer the gate, and as we did so, out he came. Ridiculously thin and nervy, the formerly plump old friend shot out of the gate, spotted us, looked back into the prison, said something, then asked, where's the car?

"In the car park".

My companion - what shall we call her? had her tape recorder ready and waiting for this crucial scene, this liberation. Of ocurse it was an anti-climax. I can hardly remember now - did we embrace, or did I just pat him on the shoulder? Probably the latter. Well done, old man. You're out.


But not free, became clearer as we traversed that south circular route back through Plumstead, Woolwich, Blackheath, New Cross, Peckham, Camberwell, Brixton, Stockwell. Talking excitedly,  congratulating himself on his own writings about these dodgy areas which so often featured in his stories and those "Clapham Omnibus" columns for Prospect magazine.

For what it's worth

"The pound is down against the Euro.....
which makes one Euro worth 85 pence..."

"The pound is up against the Euro, which makes one Euro equal 85 pence..."

"The pound has hardly budged today, meaning one Euro is worth roughly 85 pence...."

"The pound has been scraping along the bottom of the barrel of currencies today, it's down against the Euro, so that one Euro is now worth very slightly more than 85 pence..."

"If you're off on your summer holidays, you'll be pleased to hear the pound is up against a basket of currencies. This includes the Euro, which as of today is worth just 85 pence..."

In orbital love

After many weeks dithering, took the new (and slightly bigger) version of the old little train from Wandsworth Road.

A bright Sunday lunchtime. Somehow elated after finding some bargain CDs at the local charity shops (Traffic, Pink Fairies, Bowie, Dylan, etc....) I shift from my default depressed mode to my default manic mode and almost run to the library to borrow something to read on what I expect to be a long train journey. I boorow a Flann O'Brien book and a biography of Man Ray.

The nearest station is now Clapham High Street, so that's where I head. People are up on the platform looking like normal travellers. In the past I remember  getting stoned right here on someone else's skunk fumes.  These were popular dealing and skinning up spots, in the very recent past.

Not any more. Perhaps. All has changed. Perhaps. It's now smartly branded "Overground" with the orange roundel and orange everything, and the trains are brand new - and quite disconcerting at first as all the seats are placed lengthways along the walls of the carriage, and you can see all the way up and down the train (unless it's going round a very tight corner).

But - it all seemed wonderfully efficient.

Seemed.

Am I beginning to thaw, to actually start loving the modern world, the post-modern, post Olympics, Boris Johnstonian London - the thing I sort of assumed I would hate, I must hate, I had no alternative but to hate?

Maybe. This is the old line but , once past Queen's Road Peckham you realise you're being transported into a shabby version of a brave new world, or at least a shabby old-new London.

Instead of humbly shuffling itself into London Bridge Station (having passed the Milwall football ground and that big waste-burning power station) it shoots off into the docklands, Surrey Quays, Canada Water, the fast-fading shine of that deeply depressing Canary Wharf business area - and then links back into the East London/North London Line.

It plunges into and out of cut-and-cover tunnels, flashes past some of the most fashionable spots in the the city (Hoxton, Dalson Jct etc) and rattles you through so many views of the Shard  and the Eye and Hawksmoor, and Brixton market, and and and and St Pauls and so on....you swear the whole thing was a London tourist board commercial.

So I suddenly find myself passing Wapping (christ, wish we'd had this  service when I was at TES) and then Whitechapel.

The marathon has been run but the streets are still full of beaming spectators with their souvenir bags, they're crowding up Brick Lane, I just want to find the old bike parts market further up towards Shoreditch.

By the time I get there the stalls are being dismantled, so I make do with 3.2kg of Cyprus potatoes for £1 and a couple of sacks of very ripe tomatoes and trundle on to Canonbury....

Yes, I am falling back in Love with London, and it's not just the weak sunshine that's repsonsible.

We loved to hate her

Listening to Wah!/Pete Wylie's  The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies (A Party Song) and quite enjoying its mash of Wild Thing and Get Off Of My Cloud. Was this how they imagined it would be?  It was a cold evening for those death-day parties in Brixton, Bristol, Glasgow and other places that said lady's policies hit so hard back then.

Then thinking about that claim, that old Maggie would be delighted so many old lefties were doing what she wanted everyone to do at the end of the Falklands war: rejoicing.

As I staggered out of Brixton's 99p Store (around here we can't afford Poundland) I saw "The Bitch is dead" stencilled onto a wastebin and then saw the smashed-in window of the Barnado's charity shop, and I had to stop to think about what I was thinking.

Seen in Brixton High Street, the day after
Mrs Thatcher died

 Yes, I hated Thatcher, I lost my first and best job within 6 months of her getting power (yeah I worked for one of the hated quangos, and educational film outfit) because of her policies, I felt only elation as I wandered around the Trafalgar Square area on the night of the Poll Tax riot, I smelt that same heady burning smell as on the morning after the first Brixton riot of 1981 (I was not there, only cycling through Brixton to work  the morning after, when the ruins were still smouldering).

Since then, we've seen Thatcher defeated, we've seen her ageing, struck down by dementia, we've seen iron lady become sad old lady. All my instincts were to think, what about forgiveness? And I thought, why? Well,  she reminds me strongly of some of my own relatives - aunts of the same sort of age, and of Thatcher's same social background - with the same scrimp and save and stand on your own feet  philosophy - and I can't deny part of me feels, let her people have this day, the funeral etc.

But it's a very precarious feeling. Especially when you start to think of "her people". Mark? Carole? Sir Bernard? Jim Davidson? Tebbitt? That bastard who used to edit The Sun?

Next day i cycle to work in Kensington, along streets lined with hideous lumps of metal on fat tyres - things they call Chelsea Tractors, although that is truly an insult both to tractors and even to poor hijacked Chelsea. I see these beautiful old houses being gutted, turned inside-out  to create revolting palaces for the beneficiaries of the latest global crises - the hedge-fund-fuckers and their like, the legit money-launderers of city-boy united who are the natural heirs of M T - and think, no, her poison is still very much at work in the body politic.

The absolute polarisation of London  - super-rich, desperate poor - is so obvious, so tragic and so dangerous, and so much the legacy of that decade, that you can only wish, not that she should burn in hell, but merely that she should never have existed.

Spinning yarns at thirty-three and thirds revolutions per minute – Vinyl life, or "There is such a thing as society"

And so to The Social, a very modern bar of sorts in the scary hinterland of BBC, for a strange evening of talking heads and vinyl.

It was really a glorified PR event arranged by Faber, a smart way of giving three of their authors an airing to a group of would-be authors and musos critics and their friends and their friends of friends in this delightful venue - a place that is so much on the cusp that you feel that is nowhere near the cusp, even though you are approx three times the age of their ideal punter. In truth, a pleasant drinking spot.

Apart from good beer, there were good words and good things to learn. For example, I never knew  that the 33rpm/45 rpm,  LP to single divide was the result of an early audio format war - CBS vs RCA -  which was resolved to everyone's benefit by simply accepting both formats. Nor did I know that Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line" was originally just a last-minute filler for a Chris Barber LP because Chris had not realised how much music you could get on one of these new-fangled vinyl things.

This came from an erudite and quite nervous young writer called Travis Elborough, who illustrated his rather beautiful lecture with examples of rare LPs he had brought with him in an old record case - each time, fumbling to pull out the cover he needed. It went well, though. He won a lot of hearts, I think, in that young and brainy audience. All those nuggets of vinyl history. If I was a Faber PR I would be pleased in the certain knowledge that at least half a dozen of the audience will buy his new book, The Long-player Goodbye.

A certain Prof Simon Reynolds then held forth; he is already famous, and his specs had even thicker black frames than anyone else's, it seemed.

He read from an A4 notebook. I was reminded of a slightly more detached Geoff Dyer, as he described a visit to some US dance music festival; he became almost apologetic when he had to describe the teenage girls wearing only semi-translucent glittering underwear at an EDM festival somewhere in LA. I wish I could remember  his excellent metaphors on the inferiority of this new US digital sound,  the way it made this hollow massive crashing sound.....and  how much better our own rave/ecstacy-fuelled bands using only the crude instruments of 80s techno - 808 state etc - had been.

But....I have forgotten them all. I will have to wait until the release of the updated edition of his 2008 book on the whole rave thing, Energy Flash, but of course by then I will have entirely forgotten the whole evening.

The event was beginning to seem a bit like a flashback to the early 80s, those  earnest post-punk polemics, the NME, Scritti Politti etc...until along came the lovely Pogues accordion man with his shiny pate and his lyrical prose. Name of James Fearnley,  he's written a memoir of his times with the Pogues in their heyday called (and where did we hear this before?) Here comes everybody, and as soon as he started reading i thought of ....our old punk poet....it was  as though he'd signed up for a 10-week course on public reading from John Cooper Clark, but had dropped out after the first lesson... but loved it all.

And of course, Peter Paphides in the flesh!

We had already enjoyed his intro mixtape dj set - a jewel of unimpeachable taste, the perfection of the blend of white and black music, or should I say musics?

Paphides. The name, which had buzzed around my brain for oh decades - there he was, exactly as you'd imagine him, the erudite, north London rock music Guardian writer (did he ever work for City Limits? No, surely too young). I was reminded of a precursor, Charles Shaar Murray, who we kept bumping into at IPC chapel meetings in the 1980s....It's that English Lit rock criticism thing, the seven types of ambiguity somehow underpinning the cooler-than-cool writing styles, the smart-arseries and the self-effacement that didn't quite efface the self.

In fact the best comments of all came from the vinyl man, the man who used to work for Rough Trade and now does the record shop thing. His name was Spencer Hickman and he had the only really acceptable argument for the infinite superiority of vinyl over any other audio format. It was better, he said, because, well, it was just obviously better.

I agree.

Oh lord, will you forgive me ever?

The Shard? Maybe it's too good for London.

Today, the Shard was showering silver light across Southwark and into my borough, Lambeth. I liked it a lot.

The  debate about Renzo Piano's strange addition to London skyline has been quite good fun, if predictable. Many have complained that it's too big or damages views of St Paul's or whatever. As if London actually had a skyline worth preserving, before this rather beautiful  reverse icicle appeared, shaming all the shabby 60s and 70s and - ugh - 80s and - yee-uch - 90s stumps it looks down on.

That great Canaletto skyline of St Pauls lording it over all the other Wren churches and warehouses was finally trashed in the 1950s and 60s. I'd argue that the so-called Shard (spike? stalagmite? stretched tee-pee?) acts as a sort of peg for all the new rubbish. It gives them a wonky sort of focus, hints at what might have been had London had a proper cluster of aerial architecture. It suggests this most strongly only from directly due north and due south viewpoints. From Brixton Hill, or from suicide bridge in Highgate, say.

From others - as from the little south London train that clatters between Clapham High Street and Peckham Rye - you see all of London's new, tall buildings in a washing-line parade, or as a receding gum stabbed with an absurdly variegated assortment of rotting and disintegrating teeth.

Like the Gherkin, but unlike most others, the Shard works well as a standalone. Nothing else built in this muddy riverside settlement over the past three decades has quite so cleverly exploited our fast-changing estuarine skies and cloudscapes. I am very biased, I love real skyscrapers. By real, I mean something that soars away and makes you gasp. In the 70s, Centre Point and Barbican and the NatWest tower tried and failed. I have always despaired at London's pussyfooting approach, and I hate the dreary cluster of sub-Dallas identikit bricks downriver.

But even sceptics are beginning to enjoy the Shard. I love the way it pinpoints London Bridge for anyone anywhere within a 20 mile radius. How, as you follow the Thames, it approaches, and recedes, and approaches again, and teaches you just how extreme are the river's bends.

I love how it disappears into the grey eiderdown and blotting-paper clouds that so often flop down  across the city. I love how it wears its glass like a sort of frozen gown, translucent drapery that reveals flashes of the muscles beneath.

I love how it rises, so un-phallic, above the city as you cycle down any of the seven south London hills towards the centre, and get that reverse-Whittington view of the golden cow of the city. I love how, quite often, I think I am looking at yet another view of the Shard and then realise it's just another Victorian church spire a few hundred yards away.

From Hampstead Heath, it complements St Pauls, standing back, offering the great cathedral some reflected light, and in no way competing with it.

I love how it seeems to bulge at the base and embrace poor ugly old Guys Hospital next door. At times, it's almost a mother-and-child portrait - you wish the shard could wrap some of its glittering glass skirts around the malformed granny, hide her brutal planes. But then again, Guys has a mad beauty about it. It is really the dwarish grand-parent of this ludicrously elongated sapling.

I love how it shines with almost biblical auras at dawn on clear winter mornings. And how on dull grey afternoons it takes on much of the grey-green muddiness of the thames water it rises out of.

It's really a far better building than London deserves at the moment. The true spirit of London of 2013 seems more honestly reflected in the thuggish, moronic, shoulder-padded silhouette of the lump going up on Fenchurch Street. Now that really is ruining views.