HEAVEN KNOWS I'M MISERABLE NOW

The Morning After

Yes, of course the sky has not yet fallen in, though that’s partly because chaos in the financial markets doesn’t have immediate visible effects, but I cannot help but be sad. Today we have an exhibition opening in the Crypt of St.Mary Mags, “Magic of Light”, which is organised by Tomek, a Polish artist. On Sunday I am going to a party given by Germ, Helen’s old supervisor, who is a Dutch academic. It is no surprise that London voted heavily to remain in the EU, because here we actually see the value that our European brothers and sisters bring to our lives. Most particularly we also reject the poisonous politics of division that are signified by this result. It’s no surprise that Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen think it’s a great result because they recognise what it says. Mr Farage may insist that his voters are “decent people” and of course most of his voters are, but he cannot escape the fact that the people with really despicable views will also have voted for him, and he has given plenty of signs that he understands and welcomes them.

The Revolution

Round here we still have some revolutionary Socialists, and I know some who have proudly voted to leave the EU, which they regard as a bourgeois conspiracy. They are delighted at the fall of David Cameron, as they relish the prospect of his being replaced by a more nakedly right-wing figure whose tyrannical rule will motivate the workers to rise and overthrow the bourgeois regime. But this is fantasy. The Referendum result demonstrates that the workers are much more ready to form  mobs to hound out foreigners than they are to turn on the bosses. Watch the hedge-funders and currency speculators (Nigel?) getting rich as the markets boil over, and see whether the workers mobilise. My revolutionary friends think it will be absolutely fine for Prime Minister Johnson to scapegoat immigrants, and repeal workers’ rights and employment protection because that will hasten the uprising of the proletariat, and as Lenin said you had to break a few eggs, but actually the revolution isn’t just around the corner, and real people will suffer. The poorest and weakest are always the victims, and so it will prove, comrades.

R.I.P. Amjad Sabri

And just in case you thought things couldn’t get worse, look at the news from Pakistan. Amjad Sabri, a musician, has been murdered by the Taliban in Karachi. He was part of the world famous Sabri Brothers ensemble (the “Brothers” were his father and uncle) who perform qawwali, the Muslim devotional music of the Indian subcontinent. The Sabris are hereditary musicians, descended from Tansen, the court musician of the Mughal Emperor Akbar back in the sixteenth century, and while they perform on secular stages (I saw them at the South Bank once) their art is entirely based on the worship of God. Listen to a Sabri Brothers CD and appreciate the devotion. Amjad had broadened the repertoire to engage with new audiences (a bit like Youssou N’Dour has done, and just as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan did) but the core of their repertoire was still the traditional qawwali sung at Sufi shrines every Thursday night for hundreds of years, which are love songs to God. Helen spent time in Karachi two years ago and reported how lawless it is, but there is still something profoundly shocking about the murder of a singer of devotional music.          

EURO 2016

You Got This One Wrong, Boris

Last night two leaflets came through my door from the Vote Leave campaign. One is headed “Thursday is Polling Day. Your street is one of the most likely to Vote Leave in the country”. Well, sorry to break the bad news, Boris, but no it isn’t. You see, when I go to the polling station on Thursday and the poll clerk looks up my address, he will find just one name in my street, mine. I remember that the Conservatives at the last General Election tried some targeted leaflets with a similar idea, so presumably some research has told them that people are more likely to vote if they believe that their vote will make a material difference, and that their neighbours are thinking the same. Well, you don’t need research to tell you that people vote more enthusiastically if they think it matters, but doing the same as your neighbours? I’m not sure about that. And frankly, I’m not sure they’re right anyway. I seriously doubt whether anyone has actually surveyed the Warwick Estate to see whether the residents favour Brexit, and so this must be based on some sort of extrapolation. I suspect that the logic is that some research has suggested that the poorer you are the more likely you are to vote Leave, and since we are one of the most deprived wards in London someone at Vote Leave has assumed that means we will support them. The flaw in the logic is that there are multiple factors, and their research represents findings about white British people, who are quite thin on the ground here. We have a lot of residents who weren’t born in the UK, and most of them will not vote enthusiastically for Brexit, especially when it is represented by posters of queues of migrants represented as a threat, whom they regard with empathy.

…And Statistics

The research does seem to show that the less well-educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Leave. It’s worth pointing out that lots of our local residents have degrees and professional qualifications that are simply not recognised here, which may deceive the statisticians. No statisticians are deceived by the notorious “£350 million a week” claim, though, and I am staggered that Vote Leave continue to use it. It is simply a lie. The leaflet states “We send the EU £350 million a week” which Vote Leave know is not true, and which has been exposed as an untruth. Sure, we send a lot of money to the EU, but that figure is simply a lie. And as for the next line, “Let’s fund our NHS instead”, that’s simply shameless, as Farage would happily dismantle the NHS altogether, while Gove and Johnson have been part of a government that has persistently undermined the NHS, and has had the chance to fund it better but has chosen not to do so. The leaflet also bears the inflammatory map showing the “accession” countries that are applying to join the EU at some indeterminate point with the untrue claim that they are “joining soon”. No they aren’t. I’ve been to Albania, and to suppose that they will be ready to join the EU in thirty years would be optimistic. And it is perfectly clear that Turkey has no chance of joining until the division of Cyprus is resolved, which seems unlikely in our lifetimes. If you think the bureaucrats will fudge that one, think again; it cannot happen. It will be vetoed. But not only is this untruth promulgated, but alongside it is the map, with the accession countries coloured red, and Syria and Iraq coloured orange, with no explanation whatever, just prompting the thought in your mind that  they are somehow connected. This is shameful, using the plight of those countries to provoke xenophobia and fear.

Ourselves Alone, or not

Brexit thrives (like ISIS and Donald Trump) on crude identity politics, promoting the idea that we each have just one essential identity that overrides all others. You don’t have to have studied Social Identity Theory to see that this is nonsense; in real life we all have multiple identities which we use or privilege at particular moments. Well, on the Warwick Estate you can see this demonstrated. If you take a walk along Senior Street just now, during Euro 2016, you’ll find plenty of flats with flags draped from their windows, but several flats have both an England flag and an Ireland one. I know some of the families concerned and I can quite understand; both identities are meaningful for them. It would have horrified Michael Collins and the other leaders of the Easter Rising, but it shows how far we have come in a century.   

UGLY DUCKLINGS

Ugly Ducklings

A pair of swans on the Canal have produced a brood of cygnets, six of them, and at present they have succeeded in keeping them all alive for a fortnight. I imagine they are taking them onto the island in the Pool overnight, which is at least safe from foxes. Usually they get picked off while still small by foxes or dogs. A pair of Canada geese had a couple of goslings about a month ago, but considering how many of them are on the Canal we see very few goslings. A first for me last Saturday was seeing a baby Egyptian goose in Hyde Park, a delicate thing covered in black and white fluff (unlike the Canada geese, whose goslings rejoice in lemon and grey fluff). I have a soft spot for the rather charming Egyptian geese, who always go round in pairs rather than gaggles, and don’t try to bully you, like Canada geese; we sometimes have a pair on the Canal, but they don’t seem to be permanent, so perhaps they fly up from the Serpentine (following the course of the Westbourne River, maybe?)

Alright for Fighting

Yesterday evening I came to the Parish Office at a quarter to seven and was transfixed by an enormously loud row going on outside the pub opposite (The Squirrel, formerly The Skiddaw). A youngish woman was screaming abuse at the top of her voice at a woman seated at one of the tables outside the pub with a companion, who were responding. I was on my bike, so not really in a position to give my full attention to proceedings, but people waiting outside St.Peter’s for the self-help group meeting had been watching for some time and reckoned that the standing woman was drunk. Remarkably, it hadn’t progressed to actual violence, but the fury was of such a level that you feared that it could escalate at any moment. The landlord seemed to be trying to stop it, but without much success, though I presume he must have succeeded eventually. It was the volume that was so striking, together with the (presumably alcohol-fuelled) disinhibition in a public place in broad daylight. A reminder of the fragility of social stability.

Pining for the Fjords

One of my Churchwardens was called to the public lavatories in Maida Hill Market a few weeks ago, because “There’s someone dead down there.” She was understandably anxious, and so went down with caution. She ascertained that the woman in question (lying on the floor) was not in fact dead, but drunk or high, so she gave her a slap to wake her up, which was effective. Getting the woman out of the loos and set on her way home was a bit less easy, but some help turned up after a while. You’d think people would be able to distinguish between dead and dead drunk, but apparently not. Sometimes, in an environment like this where chaotic things do occur, people leap to the most melodramatic conclusions.

Franglais

I’ve noticed that the English have a tendency to pronounce any apparently foreign word as though it were French (I guess it’s because French is the default foreign language for us). For instance, my mother used to pronounce bergamot (the oil which flavours Earl Grey tea) as “bair-zha-moe” (which ironically wouldn’t even be correct in French). Another example is Farage, a name that appears French and so gets pronounced “Fur-arzh”, but why? It’s not quite the same as the genteel pronunciation of garage which seems to have won out over “garridge” (which was quite normal when I was a boy) but that’s not natural English either. Surely it’s the same syllable as at the end of manage, salvage or porage? It’s very odd; why is he not Mr “Farridge”?

The BBC gets itself into terrible confusion over some French names, with a desire to be correct, but not be too pretentious (and actually pronounce things in a French way). A recent test case was the rugby team Racing 92, who the BBC scrupulously called “Rasseeng Ninety-Two”. Could they not spot the illogicality? “Rasseeng Quatre-vingt-douze” would have been okay, but not “Rasseeng Ninety-Two”. Just saying Racing 92 in English would probably have been better. They seem to have abandoned their insistence on pronouncing the first S in Catalans Dragons which they persisted with for some time, but that one is a total mix-up, because if it’s French you wouldn’t pronounce the S, but if it’s Catalan you would, but either way “Catalans” is an adjective which ought to come after the noun it qualifies. Their website proclaims them to be Dragons Catalans, which makes sense, and surely that (pronounced in a French way) ought to be their name.