The Problem With The Polis

So as new camera-phone footage of various police brutalities from the G20 protests continue to flow past the soggy remains of the flood-gates and onto our global news channels, my thoughts have turned to my own feelings about the police.

Small-town rozzers are no joke as any fellow small-towner will tell you – ‘they’ll do you for anything mate’ is the opinion I grew up with. The theory we often whined from the rain-drizzled cocoons of our adolescence was that - to quote Shakespeare - ‘tis grand to have a giants strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant’ - in other words, give a man the power of a policeman but nothing really to police and he’ll soon start stamping on the little people just because he can.

Over the course of our tribal years stalking the streets of Alnwick with nothing but sullen glances, greasy hair and pretentious asides about music we thought no one else understood, my friends and I were regularly arrested (or at least accosted) for the tiniest of misdemeanours. My old pal Dillon spent a night in the cells once just for pissing behind a wheelie bin – although to be fair, he had chosen inexplicably to pull his jeans and pants right down to his ankles to do so, thus landing himself with an indecent exposure charge to boot. Looking back, I’m fairly sure it was the reflection of the moon’s sombre glow on the pimply crescent of his arse that alerted the copper in the first place.

I myself reached my nadir one regrettable night staggering home while polishing off a bottle of Happy Shopper merlot. Last drop of acidic bile duly sunk, I placed the bottle beneath a parked car next to me so I could continue up the road with my profound thoughts when, from no where, a police car stopped and told me to pick it up – something I obliged to do with a slurred grumble.
Once they’d pulled away again, I sat the bottle back under another car with all the smugness Ronnie Briggs must have felt as the Great Train became a Tiny Dot in his wing mirror - only difference was, I got caught. The copper saw it happen, reversed back up the road and told me to pick it up again.

With muted outrage, I proceeded to inform the policeman how incongruous I felt his actions to be in the context of our fine town where not four streets away, fights were likely to be breaking out as people left the pubs – how, as a tax-paying young citizen with a clean public record and a bright future ahead of me, I resented being ‘nannied’ by the state or indeed any of it’s front-line employees.

Six months later, when preparing for my court appearance, the policeman’s report described the incident more like this:

“AT APPROX 02:12 AM, THE DEFENDANT WAS SPOTTED LITTERING IN THE STREET AND WAS ASKED TO PICK ITEM UP. DEFENDANT OBLIGED THEN REPEATED THE OFFENCE A SECOND TIME. WHEN ASKED TO PICK IT UP AGAIN DEFENDANT SAID ‘LOOK MAN FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY DON’T YOU GO DO SOME REAL WORK?'. WHEN TOLD ONCE AGAIN TO PICK ITEM UP DEFENDANT SAID ‘FINE FOR FUCK’S SAKE THERE LOOK I HAVE IT – CAN’T EVEN WALK HOME WITHOUT YOU GIVING ME SHIT CAN I?’” Etc. etc.

I’ll never quite forget the mixture of mirth and shame on my Mum’s face as her only son pleaded ‘guilty’ to littering in a patch-work suit of old school uniforms one chilly morning in November. The subsequent paragraph in the Alnwick Gazette was, incidentally, my debut in print.

So small-town police can be petty in their approach to their job, but then small-town people can be petty in their approach to their lives full stop. The policeman could have let it go and not charged me but then I could have just carried the bottle to my front door and no been so petulant – his churlishness and mine formed a symbiotic circle of frustrated behaviour, two parts of the same grim condition. Having grown a little wiser and travelled a little further, I’ve realised that the police are a bit like God in that you’ll scoff at the thought of them but then, in the most desperate of circumstances, you don’t half find yourself wishing they’d show up somehow.

But what about the masked figure who took a baton to the back of Ian Tomlinson's head, the anonymous architect of the bewildered fall which has proven so emblematic of reckless policing, as well as a chilling precursor to a father’s pointless death?

Behind the yellow jacket and the scary mask, it’s easy to imagine a frightened young officer whose training has led him down. Confronted with a mob of protesters to whom you embody the general antithesis of their aims, sprit and conviction, what would you do?

Would you keep it cool, stand your ground, try to reason? Or would you lash out in fear?

I’ll never know, mainly because I’ve got about much chance of becoming a policeman as I do of becoming Barrack Obama’s second pet dog. But I do think it’s worth bearing in mind that grace under pressure is a tall order as well as a fine concept. Perhaps the person behind the riot gear was stood there wishing, against all logic, that somehow the police would show up and make everything safe for him.

Like everyone else in Britain, the wake of the G20 protests has done much to shake my faith in the police, just as listening to N.W.A's 'Fuck Tha Police' did much to shape my default antipathy toward them all those years ago, and I sincerely hope that lessons are learnt by all. In the mean time, I'll just be doing my best to avoid getting into situations where I find myself praying for a man in blue: and watching where I leave my wine bottles, of course.

The Three Great Unmentionables #1 - Religion

Staggering hung-over through the musky folds of the internet brought me, for once, to a pure and happy place this morning.

Karen Armstrong - a religious scholar who I won’t pretend to have known about before my accidental (or perhaps divinely intervened) divergence from alternating between pages of football gossip and blue-tinted voyeurism, has articulated brilliantly what I have always felt but never had the brain cells to say about that flaming potato, religion.

Far from seeing God-stuff as force for evil simply because it’s been misappropriated over our bloody history to aid various political objectives, Armstrong views it as having the potential to help achieve global harmony. She’s called for a ‘Charter for Compassion’ to be drafted up between all the world’s major religions – a document that keeps at its centre what her study has shown her to be the ‘golden rule’ or the principle that underpins all religious teachings, from the chilled out vibes of The Buddha to the seriously out-of-fashion orders of Allah to our own beardy, Bush-bothering JC.

Weirdly the principle – ‘don’t do unto others anything you wouldn’t want done unto you’ – is something my dear old Mum used to drop surreptitiously around the edges of my Lego sessions and generally proffer as good guidance through life. Clearly this means She harbours the combined wisdom of all mankind’s prophets from Confucius onwards, and that maybe I should do a little less eye-rolling when she speaks and little more sitting cross-legged in attentive silence with candles.

In any case, I find Armstrong’s view of religion a lot more palatable and interesting than the Nu-Atheists currently sneering at religion from the sides of buses. For me there was always something uncomfortably smug about the Atheist Bus Campaign which saw the message ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ scrawled across the body of Number 32s all over Europe.

It’s not the idea of atheists being allowed to say their piece that bothers me but the line they went with – ‘stop worrying and enjoy your life’ – like Richard Dawkins and his followers hop, skip and jump through their care free existences tipping their bowler hats at bemused strangers and out-whistling the song-birds all because they’ve decided there’s no God.

Frankly, I think religion is self-made whether you worship Satan, yoga, the music of Marvin Gaye or the whisper of Autumn leaves cradled in the wind – whatever gives people meaning and some inner-peace through this sometimes weary toil.

But what Armstrong points out is that in the case of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism – proper, big religions – ‘belief’ isn’t a state you can be in or a possession you can have, it’s an action you have to perform. Reminds me of the start of that Massive Attack song where she harks: ‘Love, love is a verb / Love is a doing word’. Religion teaches that divinity and enlightenment – or the ‘light’ that atheists snigger at – is reached through actions and discipline, and the central endeavour to these actions and disciplines is the concept of compassion – putting others first. It is in this dethroning of the self from the centre of our own worlds, religion teaches, that divinity is achieved. And we all know how fucking difficult that can be.

The problem with religion then isn’t that it ‘causes war’ or breeds intolerance but that people can’t be arsed to learn about or follow it properly – if they did, things’d be hunky-dory. A bit like Communism, if only the pesky aspects of human nature – greed, selfishness, malice – didn’t blinker us all then religion would have a lot of the answers we need.

My personal ambivalence on the subject stems from an early childhood in which, when troubled, I would lie awake at night and whisper to what school, my Mum and Sunday mornings had told me was an all-loving, ever-listening God - a best friend. From the portal that was my duvet, flanked in soft, cuddly versions of things that would eat me in real life, I would order my thoughts and pray; for situations at school to be resolved and the survival of my parents and sisters and a nightmare-less sleep and all the other things that preoccupy a young mind.

Now of course I never contact God unless I’m exasperated or accidently trodden-on, but I do remember the comfort of faith and so hate the dogmatic over-simplification that characterises many people’s attitudes to religion. When scriptures are followed, rather than manipulated or preached, you usually end up with a good person trying to do good things, and no – you don’t need religion to be a moral or decent person, but then why object to people who let it help them out?

Ultimately of course defending or finding a place for religion in our modern world is a task too great for my mediocre intellect or probably even that of Richard Darkins or Karen Armstrong. No, best as ever to leave life’s greatest conundrums to life’s wisest TV show: The Simpsons. And which character is happiest in that..?

Diddly.

Twitter In Schools? When Will They Learn...

So the Guardian announced today that a new shake up in Primary school curriculum will teach children how to master Twitter and Wikipedia. Isn’t that rather like teaching High School kids how to source tobacco pipes, or toss off to sepia stills of half-revealed Victorian breasts?

The little nippers will ‘get’ simple interfaces like Twitter as instinctively as they’ll understand how to smear chocolate on walls, and besides, by the time this legislation comes into practise Twitter will be yesterday’s fad (my Dad has a cautionary tale about assuming things will be ‘yesterday’s fad’ and that’s Madonna, but I think it’s safe to say Twitter won’t be still ‘reinventing’ it’s self in 50 years time, dancing around younger websites in a grotesque, air-brushed bid to remain relevant – it’s just not the way the web works).


Even if they replace Twitter with whatever comes next, I still think it’ll resemble that scene in Good Will Hunting when the teacher, all long-scarfed and learned-browed, gets himself into a right tizz trying to work out a blackboard equation when Matt Damon’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks genius blurts out ‘Do you have any idea how easy this shit is for me?’ and storms off, leaving the professor a crumpled, impotent mess. I imagine five year olds across the country doing the same: flinging their mouse across the classroom with contempt and telling their doddering custodians: ‘This is a piece of piss: don’t you REALISE you need to download the latest Java Script here?!’

The second money-shot in the Guardian’s report is that news that the Second World War and Victorians will no long be compulsory – outrageous! you may cry - but it goes on to explain that this is to prevent ‘duplication’ with secondary school education in which WW2 is covered extensively.

I remember with great poignancy being taken on that school trip everyone goes on to Belgium: the one where they show you the rows and rows of perfectly lined white grave stones and make you listen to the old bloke play the bugle at the same time every day to honour the fallen. Deeply moving that, tracing the engravings with your puffy little finger tips, trying to locate your own surname in the endless deaths sprawled out before you in the brittle stone… I remember looking out over the sea of graves and stumbling down the remains of the trenches with a lump in my stomach, over-awed with feelings of empathy and guilt and pity that I couldn’t quite understand... I also remember seeing my first vagina after Matthew Brown bought a porn mag from a dodgy Belgian newsagents and spending all my travel money getting vaguely dizzy on cans of lager from a vending machine outside the hotel – the point is, none of these experiences should be denied tomorrow’s youth by a right-on liberal curriculum, so it’s good news ole’ WWII is still on there.

Other proposals put forward by former Oftsed chief Jim Rose – a man with a name so rounded, wholesome and cheerful you’d probably nod warmly if he tried to introduce sadomasochism and bull-fighting onto the national curriculum – are apparently to teach children to “use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.”…

Does anyone else see the folly in this? It’s like showing them how to ‘use the answer sheet to a math test alongside how to pass without cheating’, or how to ‘cleverly smuggle a playback device in your pocket and mime during recorder practice alongside how to play the instrument with discipline’. Presumably in P.E. they’ll be showing them how to inject steroids into their thighs before getting the hula-hoops and bean-bags out, with the optional knowledge of how to train to develop geniune hand-eye co-ordination. At worst they’ll produce a generation of Dwain Chambers and at best a generation of me, who long ago decided learning to spell properly was pointless because the spell check does it all for you.

Finally, and perhaps most perplexing of all, the report contains a single line bullet point that frankly couldn’t be more incongruous, either in level of detail or in general spirit:

“Less emphasis on the use of calculators than in the current curriculum.”

What an anomaly! What a strange, dull note to sound in the midst of this hip melody of progressive reforms. ‘Less emphasis on calculators’, with no clear indication of what will be used instead: presumably just an abacus and a cane. It’s as though some aggravated conservative nipped into Jim Rose’s office the night before this report came out, heard the mounting footsteps of a security guard and hastily scribbled into the margins the first thing his fusty brain could think of before ducking out again. ‘Less calculators! They won’t have calculators when they’re buying their tights and dripping in the shop!’ Well they will, actually, on their touch-screen mobiles, but never mind…
All in all and taken into context, the full curriculum shake-up sounds like a good thing. I just wonder why when putting together these reports, the government includes such silly lines like ‘teaching them to use Twitter’, inviting off-focus headlines in papers and easy lampoonings from members of the public like me so that the essence of what they’re saying gets lost.

Perhaps the reality that politicians reluctantly face up to these days is that without inserting these ready made headlines and mild controversies, no one in the media would give a shit and award any coverage to their hard work at all. Maybe they ought to start releasing their important papers with an appendix of naked celebrities - now there might be a way to politicise an apathetic generation - they'd just have to make sure it's someone like Chanelle from Big Brother, and not a chubby 1860's burlesque model.

London.

I've often heard people talk about the 'Comfort Zone'.

You know, as in:

‘A family trip to Alton Towers? Hmm… you know how Granddad doesn’t like to be out of his Comfort Zone…’

For me the term conjures visions of some fluffy alternative universe where you can come to no harm – a world where the clouds have fallen to buffer the roads in moist cotton, and the buildings are all bouncy castles minus the deadbeat dropping coins into a bumbag, and sheep lollop in ‘Z’ formations in the rosy hue of a constantly setting sun.

Actually though, the ‘Comfort Zone’ is not another dimension but an abstract concept pertaining to personal boundaries of security and confidence. And the place where I step outside of mine, it would seem, is London.

Now I love London. It fascinates and excites me in a way that it probably always fascinates and excites wide-eyed kids from Northumbrian bog lands. I reckon if you went to Piccadilly Circus right now you could probably find an earnest Northumbrian runaway trying to explain to a policemen why they have a pick axe with them, a puzzled glint in the corner of their malnourished eye as they look down and wonder how gold can be so dirty and dull in real life.

The sense of purpose and activity in the air is intoxicating in London, whereas up North it tends to only be the intoxicants that are intoxicating. But despite all of this, I still feel out of my comfort zone because I take my Northern tendencies there with me.

When someone charges rudely into my shoulder, knocking me a foot backwards before striding ignorantly onto the tube, I instinctively stutter into a series of grovelling apologies that stops only inches short of choking on my own teary snots and promising them things can be different next time.

Even when I manage to traverse the ‘Underground’ with reasonable confidence, remembering to keep to the right and pausing all but imperceptibly to consult the maps, I feel like everyone around me knows I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing – an impression rarely rectified by referring to it accidently as ‘the Metro’… (Note to self: the Newcastle Metro is a twee little chug-a-long in a rickety old yellow cart, the London Underground is a white-knuckle ride on the inside of a bullet headed for Satan’s heart. There is really no excuse for getting them mixed up.)

I feel intimidated too by the sheer size of the thing. Trying to contemplate how big London is and how long it would take to learn your way around it all is like one of those hypothetical exercises people dream up when they either need a metaphor for impossibility or they’ve taken too many magic mushrooms: ‘counting every grain of sand on a beach’, or ‘reading every book ever written’ or ‘accepting the Pope’s point about not using condoms to combat HIV in Africa’ – you just can’t do it, not unless there is something very wrong with you.

Despite these discomforting characteristics, London is where I want to take myself next in this jaunt we call our ‘youff’, and I think it’s because trying to expand your ‘comfort zone’ is a natural thing.

My Granddad may not fancy a trip to Alton Towers these days but he sailed the seven seas as a young man, his comfort zone encompassing the four corners of the globe and the humbling, treacherous blue depths that weave across the continents between them. I fancy he’s earned the right not be bothered from the greenhouse, because he took his comfort zone and spread it as far as he could while his youth allowed him.

I’ll bear that in mind when I finally get to London, and try to stop yearning for the lolloping sheep.

Money, Vanity & The Dentist

I’ve never handed over hundreds of pounds for anything as saddening or defeatist as a new television, or a sofa, or a deluxe latte maker simply because I cling churlishly to the Marxist dogma that material wealth does not equate to happiness. Well, that and the fact I have no where to put anything.

Instead, on the odd occasions that the God of Chaos stumbles drunkenly into the game of my life, rolls a hazy six and I end up with expendable money (as the God of Grinding Fiscal Normality storms off in a huff) I’ve always proudly squandered the coins on ‘experience’.

‘Experience’, of course, adds up to little more than getting drunk somewhere different to normal – at a music festival, or in a Cuban youth hostel, or between the prickly thighs of a nameless prostitute on a bed of desecrated tulips in a Turkish graveyard (never again…).

A wreck less, selfish bout of sententious whimsy comes over me whenever I receive a windfall – I always want to defy the significance of having money by immediately blowing it, not on something tangible and practical, but on something I romanticize as being ‘better’ or ‘more important in life’ than the dough itself. It’s the same idiotic rebellion that causes me to stuff fivers in charity boxes when I know I’m approaching the end of my bank balance - I think I try and defy money because I’m afraid of it ever controlling my life, a high-minded notion I hope I outgrow long before I come to reproduce.

How exactly this daft relationship with money applies to today’s visit to the dentist is something I’ve been pondering, mouth in hand, ever since I left the sour-faced receptionist counting out my two-hundred sheets onto the tabletop of her unfulfilled, Formica-studded life.

I’ve had a dead tooth in the front of my smile that’s been bugging me for years – winking at me in the mirror and gate crashing flash photographs and making me look, to all intents and purposes, like I’m chewing a dead wasp. It’s ground me down, over time, and so it was vanity, simple vanity, that lead me to spend such a princely sum on what can be considered a ‘commodity’ for the very first time in my short, shabby life.

God knows, lying back in the dentist’s chair as a pair of distant eyes ground my front tooth to a sharp spike ready for its new ‘cap’, I knew that for once I hadn’t paid for ‘an experience’ – unless the experience was the novelty of getting a woman that close to your mouth without first listening wide-eyed to her hopes for the future and subtly plying her with Chardonnay.

As an experience, it was vile – as a commodity, it will function to make me feel more complete and attractive as human being. A shiny new tooth. Is it really any different to purchasing alloys for my (non-existent) car, or a touch-screen mobile phone, or a pair of sunglasses with Somebody’s initials built authentically into the frame?

Where do I go from here, now I’ve entered the murky waters of cosmetic improvement? When Chaos next kicks me some money, will I find myself cruising the aisles of a nose supermarket, or flicking woozily through a penis-enlargement catalogue? What happened to the man who has been previously so resistant to aesthetic improvement that he’d bought no new clothes in two years, and regularly denounced bars of soap as part of the ‘beauty industry conspiracy’?

Maybe it’s the first step in developing a mature relationship with money. Now, rather than impulsively spunking any I have on the slippery notion of living a life worth living, I’ll use my new tooth as a building block to bigger and better things.

‘Things’ being the operative word. As shaky recollections of unremarkable hedonism dwindles, tangible wealth will sprout up around me like the well-kept blades of safely fenced lawn.

Food blenders, and digital cameras and nice suits will keep me indoors to bask in their warming presence. As the digits in my annual salary steadily roll upwards they’ll unfurl an infinity of glistening trinkets to sooth the natural impatience of my soul.

And at the centre of this circus of objects, I’ll be grinning, with my two hundred pound tooth wedged firmly in my big, empty head, as the Gods roll 6, 6, 6...

The Ambivalent Agony of the Fashion Show Gawker

If the ratio of beautiful to average-looking people that existed in the basement of our student’s union the other night (80:20) were to somehow ripple in sultry waves out of the doors and spread to the real world, we as a population would be sentenced to years of ugly civil violence within a generation.

While the lucky majority who would suddenly resemble the attendees of the Fashion Rocks fashion show on Thursday night rejoiced, allowing industry to grind to a forgotten halt as they fawned over each other and masturbated furiously in hastily-arranged rooms of fresh mirrors, the 20% left without shapely noses, straightened hair or adequately rimmed sunglasses would be driven underground like the proles in 1984 (I mean the ones from the book, not miners) to squander a decade in confused self-loathing before a unifying average-looking leader (later played by Mel Gibson) emerged to lead them to a bloody coup. The beautiful people would provide resistance by their number but ultimately capitulate via their reluctance to blemish their perfect faces with sweat. Beautiful heads would roll.

Stood in a £2 Primark t-shirt (with a shandy stain on the left sleeve) I contemplated this dystopia and my probable role in it as before me, on the ‘cat-walk’, another 9-foot monument to mankind’s aesthetic potential strutted and pouted in some sort of dress I was vaguely aware I was supposed to notice.

On one of those evolutionary scales that shows a monkey gradually getting his shit together and becoming a man, this girl would occupy a space six places to the right of the first straight-backed one, two spaces to the left of a great swirling orb of transcendental purity so beautiful and true it can only be seen by babies in the first 30 seconds after they emerge from the labia. ‘She’s hot’ was my dry-mouthed observation – as adequate a summation of a person as it would have been to tell Hitler: ‘you’re a bit of a tinker Adolf, aren’t you…’

There is no ambivalence quite like that which afflicts a man when he is confronted by a woman so unattainable she might as be perched on top of a 300 foot high greased pole, boxed in a force field of searing agony and orbited by angry crows.

Far be it for me to reduce people to merely the sum of their looks, but when seen for the first time from an unassailable distance that is precisely what people are - and so perhaps it is not too trite to compare a beautiful man or woman to a wave breaking on rock dappled by the first ascending shadow of dawn, or a summer breeze snaking through the tips of a corn field, or a really, really nice tree. They all make the same eloquent case for a God, after all.

The problem for men is that in the case of seeing the beautiful woman (rather than the wave or the wind or the tree) is that seeing is not enough: the compulsion to ‘capture’ resonates suddenly in your core with an aching jolt. Herein lies the ambivalence. You never feel simultaneously more alive or more dead than at the sight of a woman you know wouldn’t give you any more than a bemused smile if you ever hiccupped your way over to talk to her.

This isn’t because she’s shallow, unapproachable or even necessarily that put off by the fact you obviously only own one pair of jeans. It’s because the sheer disparity between her physical beauty and yours would manifest its self in negative ways: in my case, most likely, a cringing effort to over-compensate with abstract gags and lots of animated shuffling, like a tearful crab trying to make its self walk like all the other animals.

Best not to try. Best to stand in the basement of the union, a crude chip of slate strewn upon a glistening infinity of bright, colourful pebbles, washing back the ambivalence with a plastic cup of beer, gazing up in a suspended sigh at beautiful impossibility, silently thankful that the ratio is the freak, not you.