Archives for January 2014

It must have been in the late spring of 1982. I went down to London from Oxford, where I was at university, to buy a bag of marijuana from a friend of a friend who had a room in a squat immediately behind Brixton police station. “It’s a great gaff to deal out of,” the bespectacled little fellow said. “I mean, this is the last place they’d come looking – right by their back door.” Maybe he was right; after all, it was only a year since Brixton had been up in flames, the railway bridge was still black with soot and the premises to either side of the squat were boarded up. It seemed reasonable to think that the police might have had more serious things on their mind.

We took our bag – it was a big green dustbin one and contained about half a pound of weed – and sauntered off into the city. Even with this plastic-wrapped potential jail sentence dangling from my hand, I didn’t feel particularly paranoid – but then some things don’t change and, statistically speaking, we were the wrong colour to get stopped and searched by the Met.

My friend, who is now a thoroughly respectable provincial solicitor, suggested that we go up to Clapham Common and have a snooze with our grass on the grass, which we did. We then sauntered back down Clapham High Street, took the Tube to Victoria and got the coach back up to Oxford. The reason I vividly recall that day has nothing to do with the marijuana at all – obviously – and everything to do with Clapham High Street, because I remember thinking, as we trolled down it in the late afternoon sunlight, what a benighted and miserable stretch of road it was. It had none of the vigour and buzz of Brixton Road and on the way from the common to Clapham North Tube – where the commercial zone ends and the residential one begins – there can’t have been more than one or two restaurants and cafés and perhaps a boozer or two. As in Brixton, quite a few premises were boarded up, or their windows were fly-posted, and overall there was such an atmosphere of psychic despair that the rubbish drifting across the roadway reminded me of tumbleweed blowing through a western ghost town.

Fast-forward 32 years and here I am on Clapham High Street again. It’s not terribly surprising – I live down the road in Stockwell – and at least once a week I find myself metonymically riding the 88 bus and having all sorts of rather conventional opinions. On this occasion, it was the night bus, because we’d been to a late screening at the Picturehouse, and the opinion was . . . well, it wasn’t so much an opinion as an experience of profound shock: who the hell were all these people?! And what the devil were they doing – many of them half-naked – on Clapham High Street at 12.30am on a Sunday morning in January?!

I’m not so blinkered that I haven’t noticed the rising commercial tempo of Clapham – where there used to be a brace of hostelries, there are now scores of them. Indeed, along the stretch where once I toted my bag, it’s pretty much a continuous strip of tapas bars, pizza parlours, Belgian mussel shacks and Brazilian steakhouses; there are assorted themed bars and several clubs, including Infernos, which – rather suitably – suffered a fire a few years ago. I knew all that but what I couldn’t quite credit was that come Saturday night all these joints really would be jumping – but they were and there was no room on the pavements, either, so that the crowds spilled out into the road.

London barely went into recession after the 2007-2008 crash; last year, house prices in the capital rose by an average of £50,000, so that people who own property are, once again, earning more off it than they are from their employment. The visible evidence of this bunce is the crowds whooping it up in Clapham – Clapham!

While they swill their property bubbles and dance the night away, there are many other Londoners living in a permanent hangover. I’m not in the business of inciting revolution but a society that can become so crazed and decadent that it seriously considers Clapham a fit destination for a wild night out is clearly in need of a savage reality check. What next, the Balham carnival? Mardi Gras in Mitcham? As I sat on the top deck of the bus, it occurred to me that I’d become a one-man constabulary – after all, while I knew there was criminality like this going on, it had never occurred to me to look for it by my own back door.

No, I only put on my judgemental hat for a crowd of one nutter: Prince Harry. He set off for the South Pole in early December, accompanied by the obligatory entourage of limbless ex-servicemen (and women), the aim being to show that limbless ex-servicemen (and women), and lame unemployed princes, are all capable of inspirational levels of achievement. It’s difficult to know where to begin when it comes to unpicking this giant bezoar – or should I say pseudo-bezoar – that’s stuck in the British gastrointestinal tract.

In a country in which ex-servicemen (and women) – whether limbless or not – have disproportionately high levels of all the following: unemployment, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and familial breakdown, how on earth is the realisation that Prince Hal and pals have made it to the pole going to help one jot?

What these folk need are decent job prospects, homes at genuinely affordable rents and consistent welfare. What they get is the capricious compassion of charity and the example of “achievements” confabulated for them out of the most threadbare tropes of imperialist delusion. For the British loyalist the South Pole will always remain a proving ground: we was robbed – they still madly and impotently believe – by a gang of horn-heads who had the temerity to go properly equipped, using effective techniques (most of them learned, mark you, from the lowly Eskimos) that included that ultimate atrocity: feeding their sledge dogs to . . . their other sledge dogs. Damn it all, you cannot possibly consider a man who’ll watch such dog-on-dog action any kind of adventurer – let alone a victorious gentleman.

So it is that even after half a century of painstaking revisionism by the likes of Roland Huntford, the Scott debacle remains embedded in the national gut as a splendid example of pluck, fortitude and self-sacrifice, instead of a criminal one of officer-class arrogance, cravenness and homicidal ineptitude. But the really important thing to remember about this ill-fated expedition is that it prefigured, in miniature, the grotesque “sacrifice” of British lives that came two years later in the killing fields of Flanders, where the manufacture of limbless  ex-servicemen was conducted as if on an assembly line. Perhaps the most pitiful addendum to the whole sorry business of British polar exploration was the fate of Shackleton’s men, who, having survived the loss of their ship in the Weddell Sea in August 1914, made it across the pack ice to Elephant Island, from the isolate wastes of which they were finally saved, only for many of them to return to Europe just in time to get killed in the First World War.

This year will be wall-to-wall remembrance, and the British state, which excels in co-opting dissident voices to its oxymoronic ideology of post-imperial imperialism, will have a field day propagating the bizarre double bind that while the First War was a dreadful business, it nevertheless produced some excellent poetry, and of course it remains the case that Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Seen from this angle, His Dumbness was simply the vanguard of a great horde of bonkers militarists. We’re at a curious juncture in our island story: despite being defeated in almost all the theatres it has engaged in over the past decade, the British army has never been held in higher popular esteem. This isn’t down to state, it’s a function of a populace who subconsciously view our troops not as puissant warriors fighting for a noble cause but charity cases in the making, just like themselves.