Archives for 2011

I was sitting on the Tube with my six-year-old son. I’d bought him a bag of crisps and he was munching them while I read some boring periodical. Then: “Dad, Dad …” He pulled at my elbow. “Shush!” I admonished him. “I’m reading.” Then again: “Dad, Dad …” He pointed towards the only other person in our carriage: a young man of Asian appearance wearing a shalwar kameez, a prayer cap, sporting a wispy beard and with a small rucksack on his back. I realised what my kid was driving at – but shushed him again. Once we were off the train, I asked: “What? What is it?” He stared back at me with the triumphant expression of the junior spy: “That man,” he said authoritatively, “was a suicide bomber.”

This happened a couple of months after the 7/7 attacks in London, and while as a general rule recounting the precociousness of one’s children is the dernier cringe, I think it worthwhile setting down here as an example of how far this malevolent syllogism had sunk, by then, into the collective consciousness: the suicide bombers were Muslims, that man was a Muslim, QED, that man was a terrorist. It doesn’t matter how elegantly this fallacious “reasoning” is gussied up, or how it is tied in the rhetorical ribbons of politicians, policymakers and the leaders of the other two big monotheisms, the conclusion always remains the same: an entire group of people is damned by association with the crimes of a handful of individuals.

To understand just how crazy this is we have only to observe that we do not treat all men as if they were wise simply because Socrates was a man – the men who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks are dead, so are those who killed London commuters on 7 July 2005, so they cannot be punished any further by pulverising peasants in Afghanistan, let alone by shunning British Muslims who live and work in this country.

This morning, I was musing on the tenth anniversary of that grotesque spectacular, which, even before the dust had settled on the streets of Manhattan, was already being employed as a handy historical way-marker – musing and organising a car rental in a small Scottish city. The man doing the paperwork was a British Asian Muslim – not that you’d have been able to tell if you couldn’t see him: his accent was as broad as any urban Scot’s. I asked him if he minded if I asked him a personal question, and he said he didn’t, so I said: “Did you experience any problems, personally, after 9/11?”

It was as if I’d released a valve – for out it gushed. He had been studying in Glasgow at the time, and his friends were so worried for him that they formed a scrum around him and conducted him home like that. Even so, he was spat at in the street. This continued for four or five months after 9/11: verbal abuse, spitting, people automatically moving when he got on public transport: “I had no problem getting a seat on the bus for ages …” he quipped ruefully. What he found most difficult was that the shouters were by no means the usual suspects but “educated-looking people, y’know, all suited and booted”. He told me that when his sister-in-law asked two police officers to stop a group of men following her and taunting her, they merely shrugged their shoulders.

With the first anniversary it all started again, and so it continued, year after year, like a bizarre addendum to Ramadan, as if it were the lot of every English or Scottish Muslim to suffer collective punishment. The man in the car-hire place spoke not as if personally aggrieved – because he understood there was nothing personal about these assaults.

There are many state-sanctioned ways of honouring those killed during the 9/11 attacks, but I have a novel suggestion: why not, on the tenth anniversary, express some sympathy towards the living victims. If you see a young man in shalwar kameez and with a wispy beard sitting on a train or a bus – go and sit next to him, strike up a conversation even. Individuate him just as you yourself would wish to be individuated. This is the sane thing to do.

After the unprecedented disorders of early August – a rending of the fabric of civility on a par with the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths – it behoves even this column, concerned as it is with the plebeians’ daily bread, to name and shame the guilty parties. By this, I mean that small, core group of bodies who know no shame . . . But first, a digression, a wander across the grassy verge, under the tendrils of the willow that waves beside the boating pond – see! There strains the fat man on his pedalo, while, over there, the anorexic vies with her whippet. And lo! Does not the cacophonous coo-burble of the filthy pigeons scrapping for scraps lead you into that drowsy, questioning reverie yet again: why is it that you never see a juvenile pigeon or, for that matter, a hoodied crow?

This week, it’s park life. If you’re anything like me – two legs, gastrointestinal tract and mouth – I dare say you eat quite a bit in park cafés. I know, I know, the well-organised among us take the cooler, the rug, the folding chairs, the antique Victrola grinding out Chaliapin singing “The Song of the Volga Boatmen”, the ox tongue in aspic . . . but for those of us bobbing in the mainstream, the park is usually an extempore decision.

For years, I’ve had children, dogs or both to justify my park life – but I don’t think an excuse is needed. What is inexcusable is the hefty mark-up that park cafés charge for their provender. It’s as if, by wandering across that grassy verge, you had incurred a sort of al fresco premium, when most park cafés offer no better prospect than the aforementioned pedalo, whippet and willow, together with the dubious delights of fresh dog excrement – its bouquet, not as a dish. My local park, Battersea in sarf London, offers four establishments: a kiosk selling panini, tea, cakes and sandwiches, sited beside the ornamental ponds and pergola that are all that remain of the old funfair; another kiosk – offering the same menu – by the car park; a more plebeian trailer by the playground, which, when open, shovels out fat, white chips, hot dogs and other guilty pleasures; and then there’s La Gondola.

We usually go for the first option. In summer, the flowerbeds and fountains make it easier to bear the £15 price tag for a couple of toasted sandwiches, a brace of Cokes and a cup of Earl Grey. In winter, we gravitate towards the playground trailer, seeking grease to line our shivering stomachs – but what we never, ever do is eat at La Gondola. Housed in an echt modernist hatbox beside the boating lake, La Gondola would seem to be the best eatery in the park – its trestle tables provide great views of the Victorian rockeries on the far side of the lake, while its menu is extensive, running all the way from full English to full Italian, with an outside barbecue in summer offering grilled chicken, sausages and burgers.

As you draw closer to La Gondola, however, you notice the signs plastered all over the place: “This area is exclusively for customers of the café. Anyone found with food and drink not bought from the restaurant will be asked to leave”; “Please note: we don’t fill up empty bottles of water”. And so on, in a mournful tirade of officiousness. Then you spot the prices. Park cafés are pricey, that we expect, but £6.90 for a burger, chips and a scrag of salad? And £18.50 for a jug of Pimm’s? And £4.30 for a child’s portion of risotto? Time was when I would take La Gondola in my stride, figuring this was just the way the world turned – but then I began to say: “Nyet!”

Passing by there the other day, I thought, hmm, I wouldn’t mind giving La Gondola a shitbagging . . . but, being a conscientious soul, I went in to have a word with the proprietor first. Rafaela, who has held the lease for eight years, agreed with me: the prices were extortionate – but what could she do? The landlords were charging her £14,400 per annum to rent the hatbox premises and this was likely to rise to 18 large ones next year.

And who was this Rachman whose greed was forcing me to pay £1.60 for a can of Coke? Step forward, Wandsworth Council, which, not content with planning to evict people from their flats because they’re related to someone nicked during the recent émeutes – the sort of collective punishment associated with a Nazi occupation – also sees fit to try to turn an outrageous profit out of what should be a public service.

In his superb memoir Jackdaw Cake, the late Norman Lewis told the story of his upbringing in uttermost north London in the 1920s. His parents were a wacky pair who professed spiritualism and held seances at which ectoplasm was teased out of Lewis père’s mouth and made to assume phantasmagorical shapes. More bizarre was the way that, during the interwar period, Enfield advanced across Middlesex in a flying column of cul-de-sacs, armed with telegraph poles, creosoted fences and pebble-dash facades. I grew up in a not-dissimilar suburb, East Finchley, and remember finding Lewis’s account almost supernatural – as, even as an adult, I found it hard to believe that the suburbs hadn’t been there since time out of mind, so immemorially dull did they seem.

In the space of less than a century, Enfield has gone from greenfield site to brownfield riot territory. When I heard the news, I pictured Women’s Institute members setting fire to privet hedges and chucking Molotov cocktails at leylandii. However, I soon got a grip: the ebb and flow of gentrification in our cities means that no district escapes the undertow of deprivation, whether material or – gulp! – spiritual.

The kind of deprivation that animated these riots seems to have been highly relative: our disaffected youth may now lack after-school clubs, courtesy of the 70 per cent cuts in such services, but they still have BlackBerrys to co-ordinate these acquisitive thrusts against the soft underbelly of late capitalism. These were the riotous goings-on not so much of the alienated (although I have no doubt that they are) as the early adopters.

Having witnessed a fair few riots in my time – some of them, such as the poll-tax riots of 1990, beautifully blocked out and scripted – I have no problem in seeing them as street theatrics. So, if the medium is the BlackBerry and the CCTV system, then the message is as much ennui as anomie. The hoodie-clad kicker-in of plate-glass windows may have had Garbo-like incognito but he was still playing for the cameras. In short stories and several novels – including his last, Kingdom Come – JG Ballard hypothesised that willed and destructive mayhem might become the only therapy for the mass psychopathology of consumerist society; a malaise that he characterised as – in two words – utter boredom.

The dominant trait of the crowd is to reduce its myriad individuals to a single, dysfunctional persona. The crowd is stupider than the averaging of its component minds. In a culture in which every consensual sexual act and narcotised state is, in effect, permitted, Ballard would argue that violence becomes the only remaining form of stimulation. I agree with this unreservedly – yet what struck me still more forcibly was the folly of the crowd of politicians and police who attempted to shame them into conformity with the law.

Back from sashaying across Tuscan hillsides, the have-mores returned to call time on the have-less. Having encouraged an economic system that devalues all social capital in favour of pelf, while ramping up the consequent financial inequalities, the so-called political class professes itself astonished by the childish greed that is sanctified by their hallowed free market. Yes, the looters may only be “relatively” deprived – but then, the politicians are only relatively corrupt, the police are only relatively on the take (and relatively prone to shooting unarmed men) and the media is only relatively likely to invade privacy by whatever means possible. Relative to each other, all four estates are absolutely morally bankrupt.

That brings us full circle: back to Enfield. Spiritualism was a quasi-religion that scintillated in the dying embers of Christian faith in the afterlife. Following the hecatomb of the First World War, the bereaved sought to contact their deceased loved ones through mediums such as Lewis’s father. Just as the distraught relatives saw the faces of their fathers, sons and lovers in the fake ectoplasm he extruded, so our finest theorists read the statistical vital signs, desperate for that quickening economic pulse. Spiritualism is no crazier than attempting to resurrect a dead economy by stimulating “demand” among the (relatively) impoverished. Theresa May calls them rioters. I see them as overenthusiastic but misguided shoppers.