Thereby Hangs a Tail

Not for the first time, an excited dog at the altar rail with its owner calms down and gazes rapt as I bless it with the Host.

I would like to think this is the mute Creation recognising the sacramental Presence of its Lord, but I suspect Tommy just thinks he's going to get a biscuit.

'I Was a Teenage Banshee' (Sue Webster, 2019)

Very very vaguely, I think I’d been aware of artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble,  but really only began to pay attention when they’d separated and it became clear that Ms Webster was one of PJ Harvey’s chums. Polly wrote a poem as an introduction to Webster’s The Folly Acres Cookbook in 2015, and, for a fan, Webster’s Instagram feed is worth keeping an eye on as occasionally they do stuff together and PJH even consents to be photographed. But Webster also has other enthusiasms, and I couldn’t help noticing that Siouxsie Sioux pops up on that Instagram feed rather often.

Sue Webster’s current book, I Was a Teenage Banshee, delineates her own relationship with the Queen of Gothdom and how it wove in and out of her bumpy adolescence and partnership with Tim Noble (PJH appears very fleetingly). One Wednesday morning in 1978 the eleven-year-old Sue Webster sat beside the letterbox of her family home in Leicester, waiting for the highlight of her week – the arrival of music magazine NME - and its plop to the floor on this particular morning was to bend the trajectory of her life, like a prism twisting the light. ‘I found myself catapulted across the room by a pair of killer-heeled, thigh-length patent leather boots … The figure I saw rising above me, wearing Cleopatra-style make-up and sporting a Nazi swastika armband, belonged to the surrogate mother I’d long been searching for’. Bowie, Kate Bush, the Slits, the Sisters, and a Leicester band or two, are all present in the book too, but they are barely even support acts; years later, Webster reflects that ‘everything I ever learned in life was from listening to the first four albums of Siouxsie and the Banshees’.

But the narrative doesn’t start there. It starts in the middle, with Webster leaving for university and her father packing three cardboard boxes full of tat which she then carts around with her for the intervening years, never examining them until the day in 2014 when she and Tim Noble part. That’s when she chooses to open them. Box one contained school work and juvenile art work. Box two sheltered diaries, personalia, and ‘letters written to me by friends I had forgotten and who had once cared for me’. Box three was the Banshees box.

It was, Webster says, ‘the obsession that dragged me kicking and screaming throughout my adolescence’: LPs and singles, concert tickets and coach passes, ‘crumpled posters with economical squares of Blu Tack still attached’, her fan club membership card, bootleg tapes and ‘much sought-after concert T-shirts held together for dear life by safety pins, not for the punk aesthetic but in order to retain their very existence’. She uses the memorabilia to prise open the story of her life.

I Was a Teenage Banshee is a big, floppy paperback, pricey and quite difficult to handle both physically and conceptually. Ms Webster presents her tale, a narrative of difficult growing up, love, loss and art, as an excavation of artefacts, elaborating on ‘Crime Scene’, the wall-collage she made out of the bits and pieces from the cardboard boxes and the links between them. Some items come from the boxes and some are the artworks she and Tim Noble make, apart and together: especially together, filtering their own enthusiasms and the works of past artists through their own trashy and deeply committed aesthetic. There are two contextualising essays – ‘A Touch of Insanity’, about Webster’s teenage skirmishes with the mental health system; and the concluding ‘I Was a Teenage Banshee’, laying out how she met and fell for Siouxsie Sioux – and, straying and rambling through memory and rant, they are moving and illuminating, but for the most part we have to draw our own conclusions from those juxtapositions of paper scraps, photos and artwork.

Doing it isn’t that easy, and clearer statements about Webster’s actual interactions with Siouxsie and her music come from other sources than the book, for example a recent account in US magazine Interview. Here, she describes how she listened to The Scream and heard not raucous punk but ‘almost like a soundtrack to a film … it left a lot more to the imagination’. Goth hadn’t really been synthesised at this stage but that’s as good an account of the difference between the two as you might ask for. Her leather jacket with studs and painted Banshee images she made herself: ‘it was my pride and joy, my armour that I put on when I went to the gigs … It’s the thing that defines you, because you aren’t afraid to step out of your front door wearing something that you’ve made’. By the time she went to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham in 1988, there to meet her future lover and collaborator, Webster had dyed her hair blonde, acquired a baseball cap, and, whether her earlier phase was best described as Goth or Punk, she’d left it behind. No Banshees music later than 1984’s baleful album Juju gets a mention, but Webster doesn’t forget completely: she sees Siouxsie perform again several times in the 2000s, adding to that pile of fading concert tickets. She doesn’t tell us what she thinks about those later encounters with her idol, coming to her again after so many years have passed, more experienced, more secure, much better-off, and with her hair black again albeit not as spiky as in 1984. There’s a lot she doesn’t tell us, in fact.

But really all you need to unlock the mystery is that statement that Siouxsie became Webster’s ‘surrogate mother’. If her natural birth into a working-class Leicester family promised nothing very exciting, her second parturition from that dark musical and sartorial womb created a new potential life, one of exploration and provocation, one of different responsibilities. ‘I came home from school and hacked off my beautiful long shiny black hair with a razor blade. That’s when everything changed and my life became a serious matter.’

Confronting Countered Truths

Ms Trollsmiter was on her way home from her regular Friday protest slot outside Liverpool Street Station yesterday and at Harrow Station got into quite an altercation with a gentleman who took exception to her climate-change placard. To quote her:

His first sentence was: “You don’t believe in that, do you?” Pointing accusingly at my poster.

“Dude.” I gave him a prolonged look. “I am really tired and I have no interest in being in an argument with you right now. Come back some other day.”

“But you carry that poster, DON'T YOU? And you don’t believe in that, DO YOU?”

The brawliness was still somewhat tempered for about 2-3 minutes in which I tested his claim that the planet has gone through temperature changes before by asking him if he knew ‘why’ the planet had gone through these changes in the past, which he, naturally, didn’t … there was a point during the brawl when he started citing my poster loudly: ‘You’re a SCAREMONGERER!’ Now, at THIS glorious point, I was the LAST-PERSON-EVER-to-stop-him, because he was literally making every single person on the platform want to know what was on my poster …

You may recall my only encounter with a climate-change sceptic was more polite and centred on his bizarre assertion that carbon dioxide isn’t a greenhouse gas, a position which I suppose might be true but, if so, would demand the overturning of quite a lot of science; however, the conversation finished with the same assertion of irresponsibility on my part. I wonder whether all such meetings follow the same trajectory.

Of course we had the same thing from POTUS at the Davos summit a few days ago. It would be a waste of time to pick apart Mr Trump’s assault on ‘prophets of doom … alarmists’ and ‘fortune tellers’; but I have heard similar sorts of sentiments even from people who say they accept the scientific consensus, let alone those who don’t want to think about it. The conclusion you have to draw is that the motivation for this comes from somewhere other than the evidence; its source is, I suspect, not even primarily self-interest, but a facet of individual psychology which no amount of argument is going to shift. I mean, as a Christian priest I am used to dealing with apocalyptic and am very much aware of all the sorry souls who down the centuries have concluded that the End is Nigh based on the interpretation of ancient texts and current political events; but what we are facing presently is not that, it’s the result of decades of measurement across a variety of scientific sub-disciplines which all appear to point in exactly the same direction. For the record, I don’t yet think this is The End, as there are elements of the picture in the Book of Revelation which don’t seem present. It might not be the preliminary to Judgement Day, but merely to an unprecedentedly disruptive and damaging episode in human history involving the deaths of untold millions of people and the breakdown of our current civilisation, no worse than that. No biggie.

Given there is a persistent human constituency inclining towards ‘irrational scepticism’, perhaps we ought to be grateful that Mr Trump is there to articulate it so thoroughly: it shows it vividly for what it is, and as a result might dislodge some of the waverers and float them in the direction of reason. Others will find their attitudes confirmed. I suspect they will not number many in this country, but any at all challenge the belief most of us dreadful liberals have most of the time, that reason counts for a great deal in human affairs.

To Tintinnabulate or Not

So far nobody has asked me that we ring the church bell at Swanvale Halt on January 31st to celebrate the UK's departure from the European Union. I wonder how well the campaign to make this happen across the land is doing more generally. I see that the bit of www.Leave.eu that refers to it has, since I last visited, removed some insulting references to the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, God knows, many of us have some frustrations with), but there are still all the purported parallels with World War Two, despite many Leavers trying to tell us that nobody ever, ever draws on that rhetoric and to say that folk do is a Remainer smear. Ah well, that's by the by really.

When new bells are installed in churches they are, traditionally, not just blessed as any other bit of kit might be but hallowed in a ceremony referred to as Baptism, which suggests that there is something special about them which doesn't apply to statues, altar hangings, candlesticks, or anything else you might find around a church. I suspect this is because bells speak and therefore have a life about them which other inanimate objects don't no matter what holy uses to which they might be put. And what do they speak? In a way they are the voice of God. They summon, they proclaim, they announce his joy and his sorrow. They do not vocalise what we feel, but what he does, and our task is to align our wills with his. That means we ought to be very careful about how we use them. I genuinely do not presume to know what the Lord's opinion might be of the forthcoming shift in the international status of the United Kingdom, and so I will not try to speak for him.

Swanvale Halt only has one bell anyway. If anyone has a million quid or more down the back of the sofa to construct a bell tower it would be splendid to have a few more!

Putting Clergy in their Place at Shamley Green

In rather a companion piece to the last post, my travels a couple of weeks ago took me to Shamley Green to inspect Christ Church, a church which was built on land donated by the uncle of its first incumbent, appointed in 1881. Those were the days in the Church of England. Architecturally and liturgically Christ Church is a modest place, advancing in a moderately Catholic direction over a long while: its Lady Chapel was created out of the south aisle (the usual pattern) in the late 1940s, a modern statue of the BVM arrived in 1958, and the aumbry wasn't installed until 1994. However the great treasures of this little building are the reredos and eastern wall paintings, designed by a pair of sister artists, Mary and Eleanor Dacres, in the 1870s and 1890s. They aren't works of wondrous quality, but have a charm. 

The parish history contains short pen-portraits of previous incumbents, and among them are quite the frankest statements I have ever read in texts of the kind. The hapless Mr Alexander who was vicar in the 1940s is described as 'well-meaning but inept ... He had the ability to get people's backs up without meaning to, a process to which his wife unfortunately often contributed'. Makes you wonder what they'll say about you when you're gone.

Des Res

Back in the ancient, far-off days before I came to Swanvale Halt, I applied for the incumbency of Aybourne, a living with a former vicarage which was so colossal it now houses an entire junior school. The existing parsonage house was substantial enough, but it didn't tempt me (it didn't help that the previous vicar had given his dogs free run of the first floor and it wasn't quite clear what would be done to make good the damage). Aybourne, though, is not the only Surrey church whose priest used to live in some style. 

A couple of weeks ago I visited the church at Ewhurst whose incumbent lives in a nice post-WW2 house. I complimented the nice arched window lighting the stairs landing to be told that they'd had to have a blind put over it as otherwise from the churchyard you could see straight into the upstairs loo. The rectory replaced what is now the Old Rectory, a care home and which, when first built in 1874, looked like this:

In fact the Old Rectory has been expanded a bit to suit its current role, but it's pretty substantial. However, the 1874 building replaced an earlier one which, when I saw a print of it in the church history booklet, positively made me gulp:

What on earth inspired the Revd C.A. Steuart to have a slightly humbler version of Strawberry Hill constructed at Ewhurst we don't know, but its tragic demolition was blamed on its 'dilapidated and unsafe' condition - surely an excuse for his successor who for some unaccountable reason scorned living in a set from a Gothic novel.

Tailoring Tale

My cassocks have served me well, really. I had them made while I was at theological college so they have lasted the better part of seventeen years before the cuffs have started to look a bit worn. To be fair, I look a bit worn after seventeen years too, but I can do something about the cassocks.

Mr Taylor (appropriately enough) made my cassocks. He used to have a shop on the Cowley Road in Oxford which was convenient both for him and the theological students who found their way there, but a few years ago he decamped some distance away to Eynsham Sawmill. 'I hoped that things would get a bit quieter, but they haven't,' he told me, which is a surprise considering that students can no longer literally walk across the road from where they live to buy clerical shirts, collars and stoles. 

The nearest railway station to Eynsham Sawmill is Hanborough, about a mile and a half away. Miss T lives nearby and gave me a lift from the station before we went for a coffee, so I outsourced some of my carbon emissions. Mr Taylor has recreated his shop within the smaller and somewhat rougher surroundings of the sawmill outbuildings, though I didn't spot the antique till he used to use in picturesque fashion. 'It'll be a while before I can get the work done,' he apologised, blaming the company that usually supplies his Russell Cord for dragging its feet. 'They did a load before Christmas but then mucked up the dyeing'. 

Miss T realised that she knows one of the other businesses working out of the mill. Corset-maker Julia runs Sew Curvy, a couple of units down. Apparently Mr Taylor occasionally gives her offcuts of dramatic ecclesiastical fabric to be turned into very upmarket underthings.

I made sure we went through the right door.

It's That Time Again

When the next Archdeacon's Visitation takes place, I warned the PCC, we will be expected to have a new Mission Action Plan in place with all our aims and objectives related to the diocesan Twelve Transformation Goals, so we may as well begin. These days I am less convinced that the whole Mission Planning process is a way of galvanising the life of a church community, but it still makes sense to bring laypeople on board with what has to be done - if only so that the workload can be better shared. The resulting PCC meeting - where we were just trying to add definite ideas to the broad themes we'd already identified - went on a bit, but it was surprisingly positive and productive. Perhaps after five years of thinking intentionally about the future, people are actually getting a taste for it!

I intended to get the whiteboard for this brainstorming exercise but that was behind a screen in the hall, the hall being occupied by the prisoners of Slimming World, so I reverted to a lower-tech alternative. The chalk, though, was the stuff I'd blessed for Epiphany, so that must have added divine approval. 

Snakes and Ladders

Professor Abacus will be pleased that for once I have taken up one of his suggestions and bought the ladder that he recommended to me a couple of years ago. It's a tall, splayed-legged tripod ladder in aluminium, designed in Japan but imported, funnily enough, by a company in Shaftesbury. And I must say it is a delight, allowing me safely to butcher plants on a higher level than ever before. I took down a gigantic limb, which was threatening my neighbours' gardens, from the hazel you can see in this photo, and the rampaging bay has had reason to regret the purchase, too. 

St John Climacus saw the spiritual life in terms of a ladder: The Ladder of Divine Ascent was his masterwork, hence his Latin nickname. I haven't read it, so I don't know whether he includes the possibility that you might descend the ladder as well as fall off it entirely, his main concern. 

This morning I went to see Lillian, our former Lay Reader and now exercising other responsibilities including being a spiritual director. She has a depressive tendency and said that at the moment 'I go to bed rather hoping I won't wake up again'. 'I can tell you', she went on 'because I know you won't just tell me to cheer up.' Indeed I won't, because I have been feeling similar things. I wondered whether I could blame particular tasks of the day for thinking 'Oh no' the moment I woke up, but it didn't seem to dissipate once those tasks were done. Instead it seemed to be another of my periodic cloudbanks of misery and I know there's not much I can do to disperse it: I can only hope and pray that it doesn't interfere with work too much. I think I am emerging from this particular episode: certainly this morning there was a moment where, just after my absolutely lowest trough, a switch seemed to be thrown. My experience is often as sudden as that. What follows is not joy, but at least a change of direction, getting to the bottom of the snake, as it were.

This morning the switch was partly the dawning thought that some of my akedia might relate to the strange sense of living a kind of afterlife which has come on turning 50, as though I really shouldn't be here, and an accompanying purging of certain comforting habits of mind. Perhaps, I thought, this is a further bit of detachment that God is working in me (St John Climacus would approve that idea), and once it is done I will be able to understand those who are going through the same sort of withdrawal better. Then on the BBC website I happened to read about Hevrin Khalaf, a Future Syria Party activist who was butchered in the Autumn by a Turkish-backed militia. I was struck by this young woman's dogged work for a free, non-sectarian future for her country in contrast to my own exhaustion at my not-very-demanding duties. If she could carry on until they shot her, I thought, I probably can as well. 

Lillian and I agreed that being convinced of the purpose of what you're doing is helpful in avoiding akedia. The trouble is that it requires a sort of blinkeredness which in other circumstances can be a very damaging trait but which does allow those who have it to persist undaunted against adversity and actually achieve things, and possessing it is a matter of personality rather than choice.

Nu Gothic in Verse

A couple of months ago I found myself in a little basement room beneath a vegan café (what else?) near Covent Garden for a book launch. The Emma Press makes tiny, pretty and loving volumes of poetry, and other excursions into the realms of writing and publishing for no return. Various poets came up to the mike to read, either works from the book or other pieces, and by the time they'd finished I reckoned I was the only person in the room who wasn't a poet or a poet's friend or partner. It was jam-packed, but it was a very small room.

I bought both small books, the Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse, and Siofra McSherry's Requiem, a poem cycle framed around the texts of the requiem mass and the illness and death of the author's mother. Both raise the question of what you think Gothic is. Requiem's subject matter brings us face to face with pain and sorrow but that isn't Gothic in its own right, notwithstanding the cover's grinning skelly based on a carving at Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. The anthology, in contrast, spans that skewbald combination of menace and excitement that sits at the centre of the Gothic web: tales of Golems, witch bottles, Bluebeard, 'the sweet/subtle tang of old skool Goth' open vistas into other realities, the suspicion picking at our sleeve that our everyday understanding might unravel any moment, and enjoying the idea. 

I most appreciated Charlotte Eichler's three poems: 'The Coffin Calendars', in the voice of a model posing for Polish coffin-maker Lindner's annual extravaganza of weird glamour; 'The Balloonist', about the death of Lily Cove at Haworth Gala in 1906; and a poem which imagines a convent of nuns keeping pet blackbirds and eventually their songs merging, which nearly got me misty-eyed. That third poem isn't in the book, or in Ms Eichler's collection Their Lunar Language, which I thought it would be as it concerns the relations of humans and nature. I wonder where one might find it.

Repairs and Renewals

"Some clergy have unrealistic expectations. Ministry is a costly calling."

These were the words which concluded the briefing notes from the last Area Deans' meeting with the Bishop, and which were communicated to the Deanery Chapter this week; some dissatisfaction with the working of the diocesan Properties Department had apparently surfaced and this was the conclusion. One of my colleagues has been waiting for two years to have holes in his roof fixed and yes, during heavy rain, does have to get buckets out; others report a reluctance to talk about matters such as collapsing driveways and the like. The 'cost' of ministry is usually thought of in terms of the modest financial recompense of the ordained life relative to other similar professions, the demands on time and family life, and the sense of exposure a clergyperson has, that sort of thing, not having to run around your house with saucepans when it rains a lot. It's not like asking to have a minibar installed in the bedroom. To have it put in these terms - well, it doesn't go down well.

My own experiences with Properties have been mixed. Last year my shower was packing up and on the brink of having it replaced by Alan, the plumber who's a member of the church, the thought suddenly occurred to me that it might be a diocesan responsibility, and so it was. They got it fixed very quickly. However, when I reported that I thought my little garden shed - the former outside toilet of the house - had what looked suspiciously like sheets of asbestos in the roof, sheets which were cracking and falling down, the person I was promised would come and have a look at it never did. I now just tend to hold my breath when I go to get the rake out. I wonder whether mesothelioma will be one of the costs of my ministry, in particular. 

Conversation Piece

The Antisocial Behaviour Officer from the local police sits with a mug of tea in the church office and discusses the action which is finally being taken against some of the troublesome youngsters in the area. 'You might think it's quite draconian,' he warns, and that's what 'banning from every railway station in England and Wales' does sound like, but it seems that some of them have been travelling far and wide to spread disturbance, not just here. He's an affable ex-Met officer.

Sally the church office manager tells me her dad is in hospital and his dementia has suddenly advanced. The family aren't sure what's going to happen, and she sees no alternative but to vary her working hours until things become clearer.

In the entrance area to the church, I find a young woman reading a Bible. Tearfully she explains how radically her life has gone wrong since I baptised her children seven years ago (I recognised their names rather than her). To me she seems articulate and caring, but she can only see negativity and 'evil' within herself, and thoughts of suicide grapple her and pull her downwards. She's frightened. She will try to come to a service.

After Evening Prayer I sit with a teenage boy in the church. He has quite severe anxiety attacks from time to time. He describes horrible visions of a hellish landscape which assault him occasionally, and something more positive - a sapphire-eyed white stag that stands in the snow, regarding him, and who has appeared when he's been really desperate. A version of God, perhaps, something pure and strong. 

Swanvale Halt Film Club: A Dog Called Money (2019)

It’s taken a long time for the third and final stage of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy’s project to reach the public. The Hollow of the Hand, the book of photographs and poetry, came out in 2015; the album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, in 2016; and only at the very end of last year were most of us able to view the film, A Dog Called Money. I’ve finally watched it!

Over ninety minutes, the documentary follows the composition of Hope Six, picking out the experiences which influenced the way the songs developed – though not all of them, and not exhaustively, and not all the songs featured actually ended up on the album (we get versions of the junked ‘Homo Sappy Blues’ and ‘Age of the Dollar’, the latter jettisoned due to John Parish’s disapproval even though everyone else liked it (‘I wish just for once she wouldn’t listen to what he says’, commented one fan on thegardenforum.org). Episodes from Murphy and Harvey’s travels are interspersed with scenes from the studio at Somerset House, and visitors watching the musicians through the one-way glass. Harvey reads excerpts from her notebooks and just occasionally someone else says something – an Artangel employee taking visitors through the passageways of Somerset House, or Paunie, the lesbian gang leader Harvey and Murphy met in Anacostia. A few elements aren’t from their joint travels, but from trips Murphy made separately: an anti-Assad demonstration in Syria, a Trump campaign rally in the US, refugees on the Greek border with Macedonia.

There are lots of fantastic vignettes. Harvey meets an instrument-maker in an upstairs shop in a Kabul backstreet and gives up trying to explain to him where Dorset is. She goes to a museum of mines, also in Afghanistan, and reels off some of the terrible exhibits. She sits attentive at a raucous church service in Anacostia and looks a bit fazed at a very different one in Kosovo, though listening enough to quote the words of Fr Sava Janjic: ‘If you don’t have to break the branch, don’t do it. If you don’t have to kill the animal, don’t do it.’ A young woman is baptised at Union Temple Baptist Church; little girls learn Arabic at an Afghan maktab (at least, that’s my interpretation of what’s happening); tourists mill around the Washington Monument while a chap wees behind a tree to right of shot. Everywhere are mountains, traffic jams, birds in and out of cages, rivers, ruins, children, dust.

The trouble is, it’s all vignettes. Determined, like the book and the album, that observation, witnessing, should be the keynote of the project, the film presents images without context or comment. That this is the point is stressed by the very first shot, a little Afghan boy with his nose pressed against glass, and it’s echoed by Harvey’s wanderings, Murphy’s camera lens, and the faces of the visitors to the recording sessions. Having taken that decision, the film has no choice but to leave us in the same position, without helping us make the connections that would turn the succession of moments into a story. The US observation blimps hover with intent in the Afghan sky, but even the anger and sense of conflict which is shot through the album is absent here, any very political feeling dispersed by the amiable banter of the musicians back in London. It’s like much of Harvey’s poetry, so quiet and spare it’s easy to miss the significance of what she describes.

The reticence means there’s a lot that doesn’t get mentioned. ‘I’m the only woman here,’ Harvey points out at an Albanian village ceremony in Kosovo, leaving us wondering how it was arranged. That’s surprising enough, but surprise is hardly an adequate response to seeing her watching an ecstatic Sufi prayer-session at an Afghan mosque – how did she get to be the only woman there, a place where no woman would ever normally be? What did they say to make that happen? We have the familiar footage of the Union Temple Baptist choir singing lines from ‘The Community of Hope’, but not a word about the church’s own unhappiness at the political firestorm the song raised when it was released early in 2016. This isn’t really ‘the story of the album’ except in a very minimal way.

Of course it’s all delightful for Pollywatchers, but what about anyone else? It seems to me that you have to be signed up for the project: without reading the book and listening to the finished songs, it’s hard to fathom the film, and (notwithstanding a single introductory caption) if you don’t know who PJ Harvey is and who the old codgers playing instruments in the studio are, you may well be left adrift. One viewer on the MUBI website, where you can see the movie, commented concisely and brutally (as others have for twenty years or more), ‘get your head out of your ass’. That’s a nasty dismissal of one of the least self-regarding artists in the world, and Harvey does explicitly acknowledge the ambiguities of her position as observer: crunching through the debris of an abandoned house in Kosovo, she notes ‘a handmade rotting wooden ladder, a corn store. These were country people. And I’m stepping on their things in my expensive leather sandals’. Yet you can still wonder whether the project’s achievements have matched its ambitions. There is only one abiding message: the unity-in-variety of human experience, and human dignity against the emptiness of ideological (especially national) rhetoric. In the silence is the point. And you either take that, or leave it.

The Tale of The Trousers

It would be good to have a new pair of trousers. Marks and Spencer usually provide me with mine. This is what happened.

I go to M&S in Guildford (via a bus, I don't want to drive and the trains are cancelled) and find a pair which fit. I get them home and realise they are polyester and within a year will be as shiny as the plastic bags they spiritually are.

I return to the store. I'm on my way to see a friend and am in an awful hurry as I am trying to fit too much in. I find a pair of wool trousers in the right size and, at the till, hand over the polyester ones and pay the difference. 

Later, at home, I find that what I haven't noticed is that the new trousers are 'slim fit'. This means they are designed for the kind of young fellow who wants their legwear to look as close as it can to a pair of skinny jeans. If you wear them at my age you look like John Cooper Clarke or, worse now I think of it, Max Wall.

I return to M&S a second time. They don't have a pair of black, wool-rich, regular-fit trousers in the store in my size. I go to the Orders desk who tell me to go to the Sales desk. At the Sales Desk the child who serves me says they don't do black, wool-rich, regular-fit trousers at all, but they might have something called Tailored Fit. I don't know what that is, so I go to try and find a pair. There are none, but finding and trying on a pair of offensive blue checked trousers I discover that Tailored Fit is marginally less ludicrous than Slim Fit (there is also Skinny Fit which defies belief) so I return to the desk.

There is a long, snaky queue. I don't want to have to explain all this again, and so wait for the child I've spoken to before to be free. I wave a succession of customers past me, and one middle-aged lady simply stands in front of me and goes to speak to the child herself. Finally I can gain access.

'Tailored Fit seems OK, but you don't have any in this style,' I explain. 'Can you order a pair?' 

The child checks on her phone (I do hope it belongs to the store). 'You won't believe this, but they're out of stock.'

'Oh yes', I reply. 'I not only believe it, I was waiting for you to say it.'

Somehow my receipt had disappeared, and the best I could get was a credit voucher to the sum I'd spent on the unwanted trousers. I returned home, via the train, with nothing more to show for my efforts than a small bit of shiny paper which had cost me £54.

Future Forecasting

My nine-year-old self found James Burke’s 1978 TV science programme Connections absolutely compelling, at least the bits of it I saw. I didn’t have much of an idea what he was talking about, of course, and my knowledge had only incrementally increased by the time his subsequent shows were broadcast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the most interesting thinkers about scientific matters are not, strictu sensu, scientists, but those who can see science in a broader perspective: Burke’s first degree was in English, specialising in Middle English language and literature, not the most obvious way into a career examining and explaining science to the public. That’s what made the series fun.

The core conviction of Connections is that scientific and technological change does not take place in intellectual isolation, but that individuals take decisions based on their own motivations with no idea of what the results will be, and that consequently predictions of how change will pan out are nothing more than conjecture. Some people make accurate guesses, but that’s just luck.

That belief hasn’t stopped Burke having a good go at predicting where technological change will take the world, as I was reminded when he popped up on the radio again a couple of days ago with what I discover is his customary spiel about nanotechnology (which I’ll return to in a minute). As well as his exhilarating analysis of the history of science and thought, Mr Burke’s reputation as a prophet of the modern world rests on some of the statements he made decades ago about the effect of the onset of the digital society on how we behave. This year someone dug out a clip from the 1985 series The Day the Universe Changed and popped it onto Twitter to demonstrate how Burke foretold the chaos wrought in our political life by the Internet.

Note that what he doesn’t describe is how established political forces will manipulate that chaos for their own ends. Now let’s cast even further back to 1973, when Burke was presenting the series The Burke Special, a pell-mell rollercoaster ride of futurology almost all of which was wiped from the BBC archives. That year, the Radio Times decided to get him to make his predictions about what might be going on twenty years hence.

Burke’s world of the future is a world of databanks, citizens’ dossiers, identity cards, and restrictions on the individual. He believes the storage of personal information in databanks will be accepted, not resented, at least by the young … In 1993, ideas about personal liberty will probably be as different from ours as ours are from those of a century ago.  Citizens will be generally far less reluctant to provide information about themselves, because they will realise that it will help society to organise itself better: they will accept that they must live for one another, because if they don’t, they’ll be headed for anarchy. It will be an open, honest society, in which the distant hum and chatter of the machines will be as commonplace as birdsong. Computer-aided learning systems will provide every child with his own plug-in superteacher … each [computer in a factory or office] providing rapid forecasts on the effects of management decision-making.

You would expect some predictions to be right and some wrong, and you can set aside the timescale, but what strikes me most here is that where Burke was right, it was for the wrong reasons. Citizens share so much information now not out of altruistic consideration for one another, but because it enables them to buy things faster and because they’ve been softened up for it by social media, seeking an addictive rush of validation by Likes and Loves.

This brings us back to nanotechnology. I’ve spent ages trying to find James Burke’s recent contribution to what was probably an episode of Today in which he predicted over the course of a couple of breathless minutes what was going to be happening in 2030, but I can’t chase it down so you’ll have to take my word for it. He envisaged the development within ten years of ‘computers the size of dust’ that would manipulate matter at a sub-atomic level to turn any substance into anything else, mud into plastics and plastics into gold, straws that would convert polluted water into clean as you sucked them, and microscopic machines to draw down carbon dioxide from the air, ‘so that’s climate change solved, by technology instead of by destroying the world’s economy as we seem about to’.

Hmm, I thought. It turns out that Burke has been talking about nanotechnology for ages. In a 2013 discussion on Radio 4’s PM revisiting his 1973 Radio Times prophecies, he harped on the theme using almost precisely the same terminology as he did this year (nanoscale is ‘weeny-weeny’; making things out of ‘air, water and dirt’). It’s the same thesis he laid out in 2018 in his think-piece The End of Scarcity, a world in which all our existing political systems are rendered obsolete by ‘personal nanofactories’ making everything any individual could ever want from food to music.

As Burke points out, this is a future first glimpsed as long ago as 1959 by Richard Feynman in an impromptu lecture to the American Physical Society, ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’, and it’s true that a team from Manchester University led by Professor David Leigh has indeed developed a ‘programmable molecular machine’ which can manipulate atoms. But note this: a ‘molecular machine’ is only a machine conceptually, and Professor Leigh’s machines are ‘programmable’ in that by the addition of a positive or negative electron they can operate in a right-handed or left-handed direction. Such machines are not ‘clever little nanobots’ as the good Doctor encounters on TV, which we might imagine as microscopic robots made of metal and silicone and capable of independent decision-making: they are artificial chemicals designed to do one specific task at a time. So far nanotechnology hasn’t got us any further than putting molecule-thick layers of graphite on a metal sheet, and we can’t yet envisage saying to a future iteration of Alexa, ‘Make me a strawberry milkshake’ and moments later the concoction will arrive. I’m not sure we can wait for this to solve our more pressing problems.

Mr Burke mentioned the plug-in superteacher this year again, just for good measure. Technologically I can’t see why that can’t happen now, with the knowledge we already have available: the fact that it hasn’t presumably means we don’t really want it to, and there are different constraints operating than merely what we can and can't do.

Future Facing

The New Year struck Swanvale Halt as it did everywhere else and even when you are on your own it is still worth marking the switch of the clock and giving thanks for everyone who means something to you - in my case, with a lantern, a couple of sparklers (one for me and one for everyone who was not there) and a little bit of fizzy liquid. It is small, but makes the point.