Walk into any pet shop in Barcelona this summer and you are likely to hear the resident parrot spouting one party line or another about possible independence for Catalonia.
With a referendum for only Catalans to vote on this October first, those who live here without Spanish citizenship cannot participate and are frozen out of having a say in the final result.
As I said the other day to a foreign-born local photo journalist, I am sad that I can't vote in the referendum. Just like plenty of others, my wife and I have lived here for over a decade on European passports and have a son who will soon be going into the workforce, so the near future is extremely important to us.
To exclude people who are not Spanish citizens but have lived here (continually, and regardless of how long) is clearly a mistake because it just makes you seem unimportant and disregarded. In a genuine, fully-developed democracy everyone is included and everyone has the impression that they count.
Naturally though, the referendum has value even though the Spanish state will not recognise it. The collective opinion of the people -- or at least a majority of the population -- is an important statement about where they want to live and who they believe they are.
The minority conservative Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy is doing all they can to prevent the ballot boxes from being delivered then used and they are employing legal methods as well as trying to intimidate civil servants into ignoring instructions related to the referendum from the Catalan administration.
In this way, they will be denying a basic, universal democratic principle in action.
In truth though it's actually quite difficult to know the exact pros and cons of an independent Catalonia because the debate has largely been so polarised, emotionally jingoistic and partisan. I do think that any referendum has greater legitimacy to it if there is an informed and balanced education campaign from both sides and that this should be publicly funded. Not the case in Catalonia.
Both campaigns should also be put under scrutiny from the media but without the rabid nationalism that we have continually seen up until now. Only then will the referendum accurately mirror the population's decision.
Of course if you are not a holder of Spanish nationality, you are as good as irrelevant in the outcome of what has simply been called "the process." You may as well be just another parrot in a pet shop.
_______________________________________________________________
Brett Hetherington is a journalist and writer living in Catalonia, northern Spain.
At the school where I worked there was an annual expedition-cum-challenge known as the Black Country Tie Night. Those who had passed the ordeal were entitled to sport a tie around the school featuring a foaming mug of beer. Another select club was wearers of the You Lad Tie, conferred on a teacher seen to stop a child in his tracks from a distance with a bellow of “You, lad!”
The Black Country is a region in the English Midlands, so called because it was heavily industrialised and in the old days everything was stained with soot from coal fires and furnaces. Before the recession of the early 1980s the area was still thriving and a key element in working class culture was an appreciation of beer. I remember a crossroads - I think it was in Lower Gornal - that had a pub on each corner.
There were many little breweries and pubs that brewed their own on the premises. Brands included Batham’s, Hanson’s, Simpkiss’ and Holden’s, the middle two now long gone. Some of the hostelries were very simple, not exactly spit and sawdust but certainly bare floorboards. It was in one of these that I saw something I fervently wanted (which is rare for me): a short-haired blue cat, muscular and disdainful of the customers as he made his way between the legs of the chairs and people. The next time I saw such an animal was when a similar one appeared from nowhere to inveigle her way into my mother-in-law's house. Bobby, a British Blue (as I now know), came to live with us for the next twenty years. What a peculiar coincidence; I am afraid to wish for anything else.
It was usual for us to start at the Lamp in Dudley, a Batham’s pub serving a light-coloured bitter similar to a lager but much mellower. Candidates for the tie would be paired with a marker who would check off pints on a beer mat as they were drunk, generally only one pint in each pub. And so the minibus made its tour around the Black Country. The challenge was to drink ten pints without being sick, at least not until after the tenth, which by tradition was always drunk at Ma Pardoe’s in Netherton (she was still alive and brewing back then). That one was served in two halves downed one after the other and then, if necessary, it was off to the gents’ in haste.
One time part way through the evening we bumped into a colleague who was having a drink with friends and asked what we were doing. When we explained he joined in. He was a big Jamaican with a great love of life and famous for his so-called Rocket, a punch prepared with over-proof Jamaican white rum and served surreptitiously to staff in the know throughout the final day of term, which gave a second meaning to the “staggered dismissal” of the children at the end. He was not expected to have any difficulty, even though he had started several pints behind the line; but after a gallon or so he looked stricken and said with tears in his eyes that he couldn't continue. He was most relieved when we clarified the rules for him: he had thought that he wasn't allowed to visit the toilet for a call of nature before completing. Having passed easily, he stayed on for further drinks after the rest of us climbed back on the bus.
The kicker in this challenge was that tie runs were always held on a Thursday so that staff had to come in the following day to teach. One of our colleagues turned up with straw in his hair, having not made it home the night before. The children appeared to be very considerate on the Friday, as I remarked to one of my coworkers, who explained to me that they would remember seeing their dad white-faced in the morning and had learned when it was wise not to provoke.
I never made the tie: I simply haven’t the capacity. Nor did the headteacher, a whisky drinker who asked if he could have doubles instead of beer, but was turned down. Rules are rules.
All is changed. In the ‘80s, secondary schools were male-dominated; now, only one in four of the staff is a man. We have to watch patiently as the women drink Prosecco and dance.
In December 1891, Maurice Baring left Eton early, having shown a talent for languages that had won him the Prince Consort's French prize, and was sent the following January to a German family in Hildesheim, near Hanover. At that time he couldn't speak the language at all, but soon picked it up.
He would go drinking with boys from the two local schools, the Gymnasium (grammar school) and Real Gymnasium (the British equivalent in recent times was the "grammar tech" or "secondary tech", which never really took off as it did on the Continent).
The German tripartite school system was abolished only a few years ago but it's worth noting that the historian Correlli Barnett says Britain's economic decline is partly attributable to the failure to modify its education system to train people who could turn scientific and technological discoveries into profitable commercial enterprises. Too many classical scholars, not enough engineers. Even now, in Britain engineering is a white-collar job, whereas in Germany it's a profession and you put letters before (not after) your name, e.g. "Dr.-Ing".
Drinking culture and customs are a vast area and perhaps readers will offer some thoughts. In the meantime here is how youngsters socialised and learned habits of social adjustment, mutuality and conformity in North Germany in the late nineteenth century. (I have broken the prose into more paragraphs for ease of reading.)
___________________________________________________
From Maurice Baring’s “The Puppet Show of Memory” (1932)
Online: https://archive.org/details/puppetshowofmemo00baririch
The boys from both schools used to meet in the evening before supper at a restaurant
called Hasse, where a special room was kept for them. Braun
was an earnest and extremely well-educated youth, a student of
geology. Before I was taken to Hasse, he said I must be
instructed in the rules of the Bierkomment [I don't know the correct spelling of this word and it is not in the dictionary], that is to say, the
rules for drinking beer in company, which were, as I found out
afterwards, the basis of the social system. These rules were
intricate, and when Braun explained them to me, which he did
with the utmost thoroughness, the explanation taking nearly
two hours, I did not know what it was all about. I did not
know it had anything to do with drinking beer. I afterwards
learned, by the evidence of my senses and by experience, the
numerous and various points of this complicated ritual, but the
first evening I was introduced to Hasse I was bewildered by
finding a crowd of grown-up boys seated at a table ; each one
introduced himself to me by standing to attention and saying
his name (" Mein Name ist So-and-so "). After which they sat
down and seemed to be engaged in a game of cross-purposes.
The main principles which underlay this form of social
intercourse were these. You first of all ordered a half-litre
of beer, stating whether you wanted light or dark beer (dunkles
or helles). It was given to you in a glass mug with a metal top.
This mug had to remain closed whatever happened, otherwise
the others put this mug on yours, and you had to pay for every
mug which was piled on your own.
Having received your
beer, you must not drink it quietly by yourself, when you were
thirsty ; but every single draught had to be taken with a
purpose, and directed towards someone else, and accompanied
by a formula. The formula was an opening, and called for
the correct answer, which was either final and ended the matter,
or which was of a kind to provoke a counter-move, in the form
of a further formula, which, in its turn, necessitated a final
answer. You were, in fact, engaged in toasting each other
according to system.
When you had a fresh mug, with foam
on the top of it, that was called die Blume, and you had to
choose someone who was in the same situation ; someone who
had a Blume. You then said his name, not his real name but
his beer name, which was generally a monosyllable like Pfiff
(my beer name was Hash, pronounced Hush), and you said to him: "Prosit Blume." His answer to this was: "Prosit,"
and you both drank. To pretend to drink and not drink was
an infringement of the rules. If he had no beer at the time
he would say so (" Ich habe keinen Stoff"), but would be careful
to return you your Blume as soon as he received it, saying :
" Ich komme die Blume nach " ("I drink back to you your
Blume ").
Then, perhaps, having disposed of the Blume, you
singled out someone else, or someone perhaps singled you out,
and said: "Ich komme Ihnen Etwas" ("I drink something to
you ").
When you got to know someone well, he suggested
that you should drink Bruderschaft with him. This you did
by entwining your arm under his arm, draining a whole glass,
and then saying : " Prosit Bruder." After that you called each
other " Du." Very well.
After having said " Ich komme Ihnen "
or " Ich komme Dir etwas," he, in the space of three beer minutes,
which were equivalent to four ordinary minutes, was obliged
to answer. He might either say : " Ich komme Dir nach " or
" Ich komme nach " ("I drink back "). That settled that
proceeding. Or he might prolong the interchange of toasts by
saying : " Uebers Kreuz," in which case you had to wait a little
and say : " Unters Kreuz," and every time the one said this,
the other in drinking had to say : "Prosit." Then the person
who had said " Uebers Kreuz " had the last word, and had
to say: "Ich komme definitiv nach" ("I drink back to you
finally "), and that ended the matter.
If you had very little
beer left in your mug you chose someone else who was in the
same predicament, and said : "Prosit Rest." It was uncivil if you
had a rest to choose someone who had plenty of beer left.
If
you wanted to honour someone or to pay him a compliment, you
said " Speziell" after your toast, which meant the other person
was not obliged to drink back. You could also say : " Ich komme
Dir einen halben " ("I drink you a half glass "), or even " einen
Ganzen " (" a whole glass ") . The other person could then double
you by saying : " Prosit doppelt." In which case he drank back a
whole glass to you and you then drank back a whole glass to him.
Any infringement of these rules, or any levity in the
manner the ritual was performed, was punished by your being
told to " Einsteigen " [or " Spinnen"] (or by the words, " In die Kanne "),
which meant you had to go on drinking till the offended party
said " Geschenkt." If you disobeyed this rule or did anything else equally grave, you were declared by whoever was in
authority to be in B.V., which meant in a state of Beer ostracism.
Nobody might then drink to you or talk to you. To emerge
from this state of exile, you had to stand up, and someone
else stood up and declared that " Der in einfacher B.V. sich
befindender" ("The in-simple-beer-banishment-finding-himself
so-and-so ") will now drink himself back into Bierehrlichkeit
(beer-honourability) once again. He does it. At the words,
" Er thut es" you set a glass to your lips and drank it all.
The other man then said : " So-and-so ist wieder bierehrlich "
(" So-and-so is once more beer honourable ").
Any dispute on a
point of ritual was settled by what was called a Bierjunge. An
umpire was appointed, and three glasses of beer were brought.
The umpire saw that the quantity in each of the glasses was
exactly equal, pouring a little beer perhaps from one or the
other into his own glass. A word was then chosen, for choice a
long and difficult word. The umpire then said : " Stosst an," and
on these words the rivals clinked glasses; he then said : "Setzt an,"
and they set the glasses to their lips. He then said : "Loss,"
and the rivals drained the glasses as fast as they could, and the
man who finished first said : " Bierjunge," or whatever word
had been chosen. The umpire then declared the winner.
All
these proceedings, as can be imagined, would be a little difficult
to understand if one didn't know that they involved drinking
beer. Such had been my plight when the ritual was explained
to me by Mr. Braun. I found the first evening extremely
bewildering, but I soon became an expert in the ritual, and
took much pleasure in raising difficult points.
These gatherings used to happen every evening. If you
wished to celebrate a special occasion you ordered what was
called a Tunnemann, which was a huge glass as big as a small
barrel which was circulated round the table, everyone drinking
in turn as out of a loving-cup. A record was kept of these
ceremonies in a book. The boys who attended these gatherings
were mostly eighteen or nineteen years old, and belonged to the
first two classes of the school, the Prima and the Secunda.
They belonged to a Turnverein, a gymnastic association, and
were divided into two classes the juniors who were called
Füchse and the seniors who were not. The Füchse had to
obey the others.
A musical treat! The art of Flamenco is rooted in Andalucia, specifically in the south west in and around Sevilla and Cadiz. It is thought that it came to Spain via the Moors or possibly the Sephardic Jews or maybe because the Emperor Charles the Fifth used Flemish body guards who were famous for their exuberant Burgundian behaviour. In those days the gypsy music was much heavier than the Castillian songs, they called it ‘flamenco’, the name also means Flemish. It is probably a combination of all of these factors and many more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamenco When I first went to live in Madrid many years ago I discovered that the flamenco dance form has its roots in Rajasthan in India where one of the traditional dance forms is called Kathak. http://www.kathak.org/index.php/about/what-is-kathak In recent years many artists in Spain have been rediscovering the origins of their music and dance and have been collaborating with Indian artists and musicians to create a new fusion of the two traditions.
(I had hoped to include video from Prashant Shah and his Kathak/Flamenco fusion but the sound quality was very poor so it can stay hidden in YouTube.)
Over the weekend I watched two very contrasting TV programmes on BBC.
The first, on Saturday, was the City of Glasgow honouring Billy Connolly with three portraits for his 75th birthday. Paintings by John Byrne and Jack Vettriano plus a photograph taken by Rachel MacLean.
Byrne's painting is very good, as one would expect from him. The Vettriano is painted from a photograph (a still from a video in fact) as are all Vettriano's paintings which is why they are all superficial in appearance. MacLean's photograph was a wonderful tribute to the man. Connolly loved all three of them, the generous gentleman that he is.
It was a genuinely 'magical' hour especially when he was with his old friend the painter John Byrne.
These millionaire 'bright sparks' are seriously insane even the one who has run away to hide from the world in the Canadian wilderness. Biggest worry is they all think they are saving the world and building a better future, a phrase they trotted out quite regularly.
The most seriously deranged, to me, was the one who allocated his time very precisely and allowed 35 minutes and no more for his interview with the man from the Beeb. I think I would have asked him rather more difficult questions. He said that work was what people did to earn enough to live and 'have fun'. Such shallow thinking is the opposite of what I tried to outline in my post "What is the purpose of work?" Or perhaps I am the one who is deranged?
The 'runaway' in the Canadian wilderness would have been funny if it were not so tragic. He is there only because our entire civilization created the means to allow him to escape: he didn't build his 4x4 vehicle, he didn't dig the ore nor smelt it nor build the machine tools which created the ammunition he was so proud of - "This will be the currency of the future" he declared. What happens when his 4x4 breaks down? Can he get it going again? What happens when he runs out of ammunition? You could think up countless examples of how other people's creativity and endeavours had given him the means by which he is able to run away from the world he has helped to create and of which he is so frightened.
The most significant thing, in my view, was they are all dodging their tax obligations there at home just as they do in the rest of the world. So it is really just good old-fashioned self-enrichment by lots of snake oil salesmen and some of their business models look suspiciously like 'Ponzi' schemes even better than the derivative trading scams or of Enron!!
Strange world we live in: the benign and the loonies all mixed in together.
I had the pleasure of visiting the Paul
Nash exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich on the UEA campus. I have
visited before for other exhibitions but this was a bit hurried as the exhibition
closes on the 20th of August and a couple of “promises” to go did
not materialise.
Nash of course is renowned for his work in
the First World War after he fought on the Western Front and the impact it had
on him which he translated into his paintings.
Between the wars his work changed direction
into the fantastical world and surrealism in many cases using the landscape as
a backdrop to his visions.
At the start of the Second World War he was
employed as the official artist attached to the RAF and produced a series of
paintings of aircraft depicted as aerial creatures in animated positions ready
for action, and then a series of crashed enemy aircraft.
But the interesting painting was his most
famous Second World War work "Totes Meer" (German for “Dead Sea”), painted in 1941.
The work was a version by Nash of the
Cowley dump, not one of the most obvious by products of war but a necessary
place for the disposal of crashed enemy aircraft. It also contained as much
British material but Nash focused on the German. It's a place I had not heard of
before and not the only one of its kind in the UK, but it is the one
immortalised in the painting.
It was of course on the site of the motor
works, much of which had been turned over for the manufacturing of aircraft, and
the salvage yard was a valuable resource of materials for refurbishment
cannibalisation and reuse of valuable metals at this time of shortage.
The painting was done shortly after the
Battle of Britain and this is what Nash said of his work.
'The thing (the salvage dump) looked to me,
suddenly, like a great inundating sea. You might feel – under certain
circumstances – a moonlight night, for instance, this is a vast tide moving
across the fields, the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain. And then,
no, nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and
dead. It is metal piled up, wreckage. It is hundreds and hundreds of flying
creatures which invaded these shores (how many Nazi planes have been shot down
or otherwise wrecked in this country since they first invaded?). Well, here
they are, or some of them. By moonlight, the waning moon, one could swear they
began to move and twist and turn as they did in the air. A sort of rigor
mortis? No, they are quite dead and still. The only moving creature is the
white owl flying low over the bodies of the other predatory creatures, raking
the shadows for rats and voles. She isn’t there, of course, as a symbol quite
so much as the form and colour essential just there to link up with the cloud
fringe overhead.'
What also comes out of this story is that
it could be multiplied many times world wide during the war, showing the
incredible production during the war effort, most of which ended up in places like
this or the bottom of the sea.
So a fascinating snippet emerged from my
morning of culture, that I would not otherwise have learnt about, time well
spent.
James Damore, an engineer working at Google, has been fired for circulating a memorandum questioning his company's biases in monitoring and effectively legislating the opinions of its employees:
Interestingly (if you're nerdish), a Google search for this term this morning yielded 690 results, whereas Bing (which usually is far less helpful to me) showed 74,400:
Damore's sin was to suggest that generally, men are different from women and that this affects their work and lifestyle choices.
"Gibson’s series Mirrors Behind the Curtain reveals the self-censored workings of this all-seeing, all-knowing medium. The screenshots in this series are rare glimpses of Google’s elusive Street View camera, busy at work, virtualizing the interiors of different museums, castles, and institutions of power around the world. Unlike normal street view though, in which Google’s car and camera have been easily masked out, the museums’ and castles’ plethora of mirrors present a situation where Google cannot cover its tracks. These images are ambivalent portraits of the often invisible, panoptic power of Google’s observation."
It’s interesting how social stratification encourages people lower down in the scale not only to mock the accents of their superiors but to adopt them, with the result that in some cases the ‘refined’ version has become the standard for all: From W G Elliot’s “In My Anecdotage” (1925) Page 233: Let me confess, there is one sort of person who is about still - though there were more before 1914 - whom I cannot bear. We all know the Cockney accent is hideous, and the Glasgow accent still worse, but the accent of some of the swagger and fashionable people takes the cake. They speak thus - men and women alike : “Shall we lunch heah or theah, were they have some first-class beah ? Heah ? - good - heah, heah !” This horrible accent is supposed to be a sign of one who “goes the pace” and consists, as I have shown, in turning word such as “here” into much the same pronunciation as “dear” or “Leah.” Page 242: I wonder if any of my readers have ever noticed that when two common people meet and one of them recounts a conversation of his with a “toff” he always reproduces the “toff’s” tones thus: “Ai saye, old cheap, can you tell me how Ai can get to Ba-aker Street?” I suppose that, to them, the voices of the upper classes all sound the same, full of false refinement and artificiality, like that of the “refined” lady at the Telephone Exchange who, if you ask for “549 Gerrard” almost invariably answers” “Gerard faive four naine.” I thought this disgusting pronunciation was quite modern, but on turning up an old book of Thackeray’s stories written in the ‘fifties, I found that that he makes a middle class lady say to one of her husband's old brother officers when he calls there: “I’ll ask my husband to put the ‘waine’ upon ‘aice.’” My idea is that in some remoter period Society people used to talk with these mannerisms of speech and that they are now the property of some of the middle and lower classes. From Maurice Baring’s “The Puppet Show Of Memory” (1932) Pages 58-59: A picturesque figure, as of another age, was my great-aunt, Lady Georgiana Grey, who came to Membland once in my childhood. She was old enough to have played the harp to Byron. She lived at Hampton Court and played whist every night of her life, and sometimes went up to London to the play when she was between eighty and ninety. She was not deaf, her sight was undimmed, and she had a great contempt for people who were afraid of draughts. She had a fine aptitude for flat contradiction, and she was a verbal conservative, that is to say, she had a horror of modern locutions and abbreviations, piano for pianoforte, balcŏny for balcōni, cucumber for cowcumber, Montagu for Mountagu, soot for sut, yellow for yallow. My wife’s father (born in the early 1930s) would sometimes say “cowcumber” as a humorously self-conscious archaism. And her mother, as a child, would play “Chainies” with her friends, that is, dig up bits of old crockery and use them as imaginary Chinese tea-sets. Samuel Pepys’s diary (25 September 1660) [http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/09/25/]: “...afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before, and went away.” I suspect ‘tee’ was then pronounced to rhyme with ‘say’, as in modern German, and among the Irish until recently in English as well as Gaelic [http://www.bitesize.irish/inirish/1259]. I wonder if some professor of old languages such as Anglo-Saxon, if sent back undercover in a time machine to the period of his study, would be instantly spotted as an interloper as soon as he opened his mouth.
In Jerome K Jerome's “Three Men In A Boat” (1889)[1]
there is a passage where the men get lost and are relieved when they hear
someone playing a popular melody:
"I do not admire the tones of a concertina, as a rule;
but, oh! how beautiful the music seemed to us both then — far, far more
beautiful than the voice of Orpheus or the lute of Apollo, or anything of that
sort could have sounded. Heavenly melody, in our then state of mind, would only
have still further harrowed us. A soul-moving harmony, correctly performed, we
should have taken as a spirit-warning, and have given up all hope. But about
the strains of “He’s got ’em on,” jerked spasmodically, and with involuntary
variations, out of a wheezy accordion, there was something singularly human and
reassuring."
Intrigued by this, I attempted to find out more about the
song. This proved more difficult than I had expected. Via Google and Google
Images, I now know it's from the Beefsteak Club's 1878 "Forty
Thieves" burlesque, originally performed at the Gaiety Theatre (see W G
Elliot, "Amateur Clubs and Actors" [1898] Chap. 6)[2]
and (I think) re-staged there from 1880 onwards. An image of the front page of
the song sheet is on the V&A website at
However there is a reproduction of the same thing in
"The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914"
by Christopher Breward[3],
and there it says it's in the Bodleian's John Johnson collection under
Entertainers and Music Hall Singers.
I emailed the Bodleian to ask for a copy/transcript of the lyrics and notation
- and they replied the same day ! - but they only have the cover. I then use
the V&A’s contact form and asked the same thing - silence, so far.
The libretto of the
Forty Thieves is still available[4].
Written by Robert Reece, W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and a couple
of others, it was a highly successful production which raised a lot of money
for charity.
Having some experience of amateur drama myself I looked up
Elliot’s book and then came across another that he wrote later in life called
“In My Anecdotage” (1925)[5]
I bought the latter and have just finished reading it. It's a fascinating
insight into the mind of an upper class man from less than a century ago. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Elliot was
writing in 1924, two years after the foundation of the British Broadcasting
Company (radio) and five years before the first UK television broadcast and the
first British talking feature film.[6]
Cinema was only just beginning to replace live theatre as a profitable form of
mass entertainment and Elliot could still recall a time when a theatre could
make money even when only half the seats were taken.
In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras upper-class
gentlemen and ladies were expected to have amateur personal accomplishments such as acting and singing and many a grand house would entertain its guests with skits
and parlour games such as “dumb crambo” (a kind of Charades with costumes and props). The head of the
household would lead the family in prayers and the country was run by a
relatively small and tightly-knit group educated at a handful of public schools
and Oxbridge.
But the UK had just (1924) elected its first Labour Government. Of women, so far only householders had been granted the right to vote (1918); Liberal and feminist sympathisers like Elliott welcomed their new freedoms while
at the same time being somewhat taken aback by how some of them exercised it. Not far ahead were the General Strike, the Wall Street Crash, the Depression and another world war.
At the airport I bought Tom Marcus’ “Soldier Spy” (Penguin
edition, 2017)[1].
This purports to be, and may be, an entirely true account of the life and work
of an undercover MI5 officer.
However, as a reader I have the lingering suspicion that I am
being played. As with accounts by soldiers of the SAS, a work like this
requires official permission to be published and the question arises, what
reason would MI5 have to allow this into the public domain?
I think it has to
do with public reservations about MI5’s past and present behaviour. For example, there is the alleged role of MI5 in the case of
Binyam Mohamed,[2]
who claims that they were complicit in his illegal “extraordinary rendition” to
Morocco at the behest of the United States in 2001 and that they supplied information
and lines of questioning for his torturers.
Then there is the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the
Brazilian electrician who was shot dead by undercover agents on the London Tube
in 2005. The press release from the BBC's Panorama programme the following year[3]
says that the decision to pursue and kill him was a consequence of the
implementation of operation Kratos, a policy approved at MI5 headquarters in
2003. The shooting of Menezes came 15 days after the 7th of July attacks on the
London public transport and it has since been alleged that Menezes was armed
with a pistol and far from being an innocent electrician was involved in
preparing the explosive mechanisms used in those attacks. However, these allegations by Michael
Shrimpton in his 2014 book “Spyhunter” may have to be taken with a pinch of
salt, firstly because they come so late after the event and secondly because
the author himself appears to have crossed the line somehow or other - perhaps
not relating to this case - and ended up in jail.[4]
Generally there is growing public concern about the
intrusion of the intelligence services into the daily activities of (so it
seems) almost everybody in the country. Many will still recall former agent
Peter Wright’s claim in his 1987 book “Spycatcher” that MI5 agents “bugged and
burgled their way across London at the State’s behest while pompous, bowler-hatted civil
servants in Whitehall looked the other way."[5]
Perhaps readers will also recall how hard the British State fought in court
against the publication of Wright’s book. Since that time 30 years ago, we have
seen massive growth of spying on personal electronic communication and social
media via GCHQ and its foreign intelligence partners.
So true or not, Marcus' book comes to us in a social and
political context and therefore has to be seen as playing a part in a
“narrative”, to use a term favoured by such media spinners as Alastair
Campbell. The postmodern approach to truth is that it does not exist and to me
the implications open the road to madness, for what are we to make of the
beliefs held by the spinners themselves? Further, at the same time as taking
account of the public’s perceptions and attempting to mould them into a story
favouring the powerful, other elements are carefully excluded and if an attempt
is made to introduce them into the public discourse there are sustained attempt
to discredit the objector. For example the admittedly colourful George
Galloway’s opposition to the developing momentum for the second war on Iraq was turned into insinuations of his having
sympathy with terrorism, as indeed more recently have Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn's remarks past and present on
similar subjects. The “military industrial complex” must be somewhat
discomfited by the fact that Corbyn's views on Gulf War Two, which he
consistently opposed, now appear to be held by the majority of people in
Britain.
Either Marcus is a gifted writer or he has been expertly
edited. He has certainly been professionally presented for a target audience.
The cover of the paperback edition shows the lower half of a face with no
visually distinguishing marks as per SAS requirements and half obscured by a
hoodie which he also wears for TV interviews.[6] Perhaps the hoodie is a subliminal appeal
to directionless youngsters, similar to the way in which Andy McNab appears to
nod to boys and gang lads by featuring them in some of his stories. The lower cover also shows a lone
figure standing in mid-road in a cityscape, rather as in a typical Jack Reacher
tale.
Like McNab’s Nick Stone, the character of the protagonist in
“Soldier Spy” starts out as a loser from a broken home, but is saved by his determination, intelligence and
physical ability together with his courage, all qualities to be refined and
used by the Army and subsequently the Intelligence Services. He almost forces
his way into the Royal Engineers and soon makes his commanding officer retake
the physical fitness test, as a result of which the CO pushes him in the
direction of the SAS. He is later
handpicked by MI5, a rare honour. The descriptions of his undercover work with
all its danger and privations are highly thrilling but also underscore the
importance of what he does to protect the public.
At least as edited, Marcus is at pains to repeat that MI5 is
the best in the world at what it does, which might be disputed by the Israeli
intelligence services and perhaps former members of the RUC, to name a couple
of alternative contenders for the crown. This is where a little bell
rings: I recently read “Soldier Five” by
Mike Coburn, one of the members of the now famous 1991 Bravo Two Zero SAS
patrol in the Iraqi desert. This account acts as a corrective, sometimes with
embarrassing implications, to some of the earlier accounts by other members. At
the end of his book Coburn recounts the difficulties he had in getting his book
published against the wishes of the British Establishment. It appears that an important motive of the
latter was to preserve the reputation of the SAS for the purposes of
saleability of their services. Part of the court transcript[7] runs:
WT: In your view, this case is all about enforcing the
[secrecy] contract to safeguard the employability of the Regiment, keeping
ahead of its competition within the UK and to protect your customer base…
ST: Yes the reason I hesitate to answer it kind of is
putting a market spin on this...
WT: They are words in
your cross brief document…
ST: Which words?
WT: Employability,
customer base, protecting the market, competition...
ST: Yes.
In line with what I take to be MI5’s preferred narrative,
Marcus omits mention of the cockups and issues that might detract from the
overall message of the State as guardian angel. Is there an element of brand protection and promotion here, also?
Even his motivation
is slightly incoherent, for more than once he tells his superiors that he is
not doing the job for Queen and Country but simply because he is good at it,
yet he concludes his story with a theatrically jingoistic flourish, a message
to the country’s enemies that “we are strong and united; that strength has been
built on thousands of years of hardship and if you even think about trying to
hurt us my friends will find you and f****** destroy you. Semper Vigilat.”
Just as with the latest interpretations of Batman and James
Bond, our hero is flawed and vulnerable,
having his career cut short by post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a
suffering to which Andy McNab also refers in his books, noting that the support given to its Service victims
in the UK compares unfavorably with that provided to American Special Forces. Again,
Marcus's misfortune may be perfectly true but it fits into the way that modern
hero narratives are told, appealing to
our sense of shared personal weakness and confusion while at the same time increasing our admiration for the hero.
In all these tales of derring-do there is an element of
deliberate presbyopia: we are encouraged
to focus on the challenges immediately before us and allowed a certain
blindness as to the conditions that gave rise to them. Our attention is diverted by fear and hatred from a consideration of how not to get
into such situations in the first place. Undoubtedly there are enemies who now have to be dealt with,
but there might not have been so many had we conducted ourselves in a fairer
and juster manner. If I had to choose between the life of a secret agent
fighting an endless succession of foes, and that of a public protester like
Brian Haw[8]
trying to obviate the need for conflict (and see how the GLA and Parliament
unsuccessfully tried various sledgehammers to crack his little egg[9]),
I hope I would follow the latter. We in the UK, who are the most CCTV-watched in the world, might then have greater privacy and personal freedom.
“Soldier Spy” is a skilfully packaged and well-sweetened coating for a pill that treats symptoms rather than causes, and has undesirable side-effects.
Not the finest of crooners but he does it with great style and having spent forty years in the business he must be doing something right. Behind all the glamour and glitz is, in fact, a very serious and professional exploration of musical genres from 'glam-rock' to jazz to avant-garde, all of which are reflected in the following videos. Like most artists at the top he can and does pick the best for his backing musicians (we can excuse a bit of nepotism with his son Tara Ferry on drums, although he is rather good) and some of those musicians are new to me; Jorja Chalmers on saxophone and a very, very good guitarist in Oliver Thompson.
A note on the avant-garde aspect of Roxy Music: In my view Roxy's work in this genre, as in the last video here, is far superior to the more famous names such as John Cage or Dane Rudhyar or Stockhausen to name a few. "For Your Pleasure" is a complex and mesmerising piece of work and ends, appropriately enough, with the voice of Judi Dench whispering "You don't ask. You don't ask why."
Sometime ago I mentioned in a small piece
that was an adjunct to a quiz on what make my first motorbike was, that the
company had an illustrious history in motorcycle racing and motorcycle production.
NSU, an abbreviation of the town of
Neckarsulm near Stuttgart, originally started its life in 1873 as a producer of
knitting machines. After rapid growth they started making bicycles and by 1892
bicycles took over all the production. The first NSU motorcycle appeared in
1901 and the first car in 1905.
They never managed to break through with
their car production so that by 1932 under pressure from the banks the car
factory at Heilbronn was sold to Fiat for assembly of Fiat cars in Germany. The
company continued to make an increasing range of motorcycles, some innovative
including supercharged race models up to the Second World War. During the war
they made a half track motorcycle that saw service mainly on the Russian front;
this was continued in civilian form after the war:
It was after the war that the company
regrouped and the totally bombed out factory started production of the pre war
models, but in ‘49 the new designs starting with the Fox appeared These were
revolutionary, using a pressed steel monocoque frame. In ‘53 the Max appeared
with a 250cc four stroke engine that had the overhead cams driven by con rods
and by ‘55 NSU was the biggest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. Many will
remember the original moped, the Quickly, that sold Europe-wide in huge numbers.
At the time of the Max coming on stream NSU
were breaking world speed records for motorcycles at the Bonneville salt flats
and in ‘56 an NSU became the first motorcycle to top 200mph. In the same period
they entered Grand Prix racing with a very advanced 125 and 250cc twin cylinder
Rennmax machines that were at the time in a class of their own. This is the ‘53
250cc Rennmax - the later racers had full “dustbin” fairings:
In ‘54 NSU stopped factory racing but had
developed a race version of the single cylinder Max known as the Sportmax that
in a private rider's hands became the only production racer to win a world
championship. Only 32 were ever made and went to selected riders with a spare
engine. They became the mainstay of the 250 class for many years, and alongside
many road going Max’s were converted to racers with Sportmax parts; these too
had many successes in club and international racing.
Sadly by ‘63 motorcycle production finished
for NSU as the drive towards car production was seen as the way forward for the
company, plus by then the ominous presence of the Japanese companies was
beginning to be felt.
To complete this short section on NSU's
racing pedigree, one of the selected riders to become a Sportmax owner was John
Surtees. He won numerous races on his and set many class lap records. His lap
record for the old Crystal Palace circuit stood for over twenty years, something
unbelievable in today's racing: he also won the 1955 Ulster Grand Prix on his
version.
In 1957 Surtees' father, a friend of Mike
Haiwood's father, was pressured to sell the bike for Mike to ride.He took it to
SA for a winter's racing and won every race he entered, setting many lap records. In ‘58 aged 18 he won 25 races with the Sportmax and his first world
championship points and his first TT podium.
Surtees was known to always want to
retrieve the bike for his collection but it sadly never happened: in 2014 the
motorcycle was sold at auction for £69,000, a record for the marque. It must
have a unique pedigree with the two owners being two of the greatest of all
time on two wheels.
Here it is in all its glory with the Hailwood
team colours:
So in ‘68 NSU ended its association with
making motorcycles. In ‘57 NSU had re entered the car market with the Prinz, a
small car with a doubled up version of the Max engine. This as a small runaround
was fairly successful and was produced until ‘68 but in the meantime NSU was
preparing for something totally different, a car with a rotary engine designed
by Felix Wankel.
In ‘64 NSU offered the public the world's
first rotary engined car, the Spyder:
A version of the Prinz followed, one having
a twin rotor engine. At the time many believed this was the dawning of a new
age in automobile propulsion but under the surface problems were already
beginning to emerge: unreliability in the rotary engines was mainly caused by
unsuitable materials to seal the rotor tips and rapid wear was causing failures
and the warranty bill was rising.
It was in ‘67 with the unveiling of the
company's first hopefully mass production car with a rotary engine that the
clouds of failure started to gather. The NSU Ro80 was a very modern design with
independent suspension and disc brakes and the twin rotor engine giving 115bhp
and for then a very modern design one that has stood the test of time.
Virtually every car manufacturer in the
world had taken out licenses for the rotary engine, though only Citroen who had
share of the hopeful engine plant built a rotary car. The model was aborted. NSU
had had great hope that royalties would pay for their investment in ever
increasingly costly development, but it was not to be: there were several
prototypes built by other companies including a Corvette by General Motors with
quad rotors, but nothing went into production.
Despite winning the car of the year award
in ‘67 and several design awards, the car had slow sales:
- and the increasing heavy costs of engine
replacements even at low mileages was sinking the company. In ‘69 the company
was taken over by VW who used the factory for Audi production though the Ro80
staggered on until the last NSU was produced in ‘77. The name was never used by
Audi after that time.
The only other company to produce a rotary
engined car was Mazda, in fact under license they pre-dated the Ro 80 as a mass
production car with the Cosmo, a sports car that stayed in production for twenty
years:
Mazda have persevered and improved the
rotary unit over many years, even largely overcoming the main problem rotor tip
sealing using ceramics. In 1991 Mazda won Le Mans, the only Japanese
manufacturer to win Le Mans; they had overcome reliability problems with
earlier race efforts:
Le Mans promptly banned the rotary engine
from competing again, though the ban has since been lifted, to late to save a
unique exhaust note.
Mazda have of course until recently
persevered with the rotary and the last model the RX – 8 had overcome most of
the reliability issues and this lovely car deserves a successor, but the fuel
economy was still poor compared to peer cars and the emissions , that are now
such an issue were also sub standard,Mazda stated that they would come back with a rotary engined car in
2019, but that is with the charge towards electric and hybrid vehicles now in
doubt.
So now all that effort to produce a better
fuel driven power unit for automobiles has come to naught, save a very
prestigious Le Man win which Felix Wankel would have been ecstatic to see as
proof his design worked; for NSU it was a very costly venture.
Footnote
Some years back I saw a Rs80 on the road
when I lived in Essex,:very modern and distinctive in style, many of the cars
having used up their engines were converted to Ford V4s the engine being short
enough to fit in the smaller rotary engined bay, it was probably one of those.
In a previous music post featuring some of the original Blues artists I had included Screamin' Jay Hawkins but then changed my mind because he was more than a Blues singer.
It is also possible that Opera was too 'serious' for him. Starting out as a straightforward blues singer and piano player he soon developed his own style which was less than serious: very theatrical shows with great humour and, above all, a wonderful sensational voice. His most famous song is the first one here "I Put A Spell On You" which has been covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Bryan Ferry. But he could be serious when he wanted to as the final video here proves.
So fasten your seat belts and pin back your ears to be 'assaulted' by the most electrifying and outrageous performer I have ever seen. I saw him in the sixties in one of those dingy, sweaty beat/jazz clubs and these videos do not do him justice!
