365 Day Challenge - Questions for October to December 2019

Below are the questions for  October to December 2019 of the internet phenomenon/cultural behemoth/almost legendarily pointless waste of time that is the #365DayChallenge

January to March 2019 questions are here.
April to June's 2019 are here.
And July to September's are 2019 here

October 1st - GUEST QUESTION from @dmartw - Which album can you only listen to at a certain time of the year?

BONUS QUESTION - Your Wu Tang name is comprised of a word that rhymes with your favourite uncle and a word taken from the worst job you ever had.

October 2nd - What TV programme do you always try to catch (but wouldn't necessarily brag about it on Twitter for example)?

October 3rd - Have you ever named anything after an ex?

October 4th - When did it all start going to shit and what realistic move can we take to start turning it around?

October 5th - Which “baddie” would you most like to see a backstory film of?
October 6th - Where the fuck are the orange Twirls? And what tv show do you think you’d make a good guest on?
October 7th - You are washed up on an island like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. What piece of sporting equipment would you most like to wash up on ze beach?
October 8th - What's the most thankless role in Britain?
October 9th - GUEST QUESTION - @JunkyardFool - name an @ that's gone and you miss
October 10th - GUEST QUESTION - @SarahChurch - What three words would someone definitely not use if they were describing you?
October 11th - GUEST QUESTION - @ChrisDuzTweets - What's a story you've heard that you hope is true??
October 12th- GUEST QUESTION - @StuartLaidler - Which inanimate object from your childhood do you miss the most?
October 13th - What commodity’s scarcity will cause the first riots in the post Brexit shitfire?
October 14th - Have you ever accidentally stolen something?
October 15th - GUEST QUESTION - @NeilTague - Have you ever been in the stationary car on the hard shoulder everone gawks at?
October 16th - GUEST QUESTION - @DuncanMcVey - What's the weirdest dream you've ever had?
October 17th - If you had to be stuck in a lift for 12 hours, who would you choose to be stuck with?
October 18th - GUEST QUESTION - CW York - what's the strangest thing you've caught someone watching on YouTube?
October 19th - What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen at a cinema?
October 20th - GUEST QUESTION- denjw - What is the greatest lack of cultural reference you've ever witnessed?
October 21st - GUEST -QUESTION Kate Andrews - Why is your best friend your best friend?
October 22nd - What’s the circumstances when you’ve heard yourself saying “You’re not going to believe this but...”?
October 23rd - GUESTQUESTION - ChrisSamsDad - Have you ever been deeply affected by an insult
October 24th - GUESTQUESTION - DiaryofAnnePank - if you could climb inside a piece of artwork
October 25th - GUESTQUESTION - FifeDawg84 - What line in a movie makes you physically feel ill when you hear it?
October 26th - What's the most archaic cultural reference you regularly deploy?
October 27th - GUESTQUESTION - GreenRedSonja - Have you ever been humiliated on live television or radio?
October 28th - What have you got away with at work that, if caught, could have resulted in disciplinary or dismissal?
October 29th - Have you ever witnessed or been caught up in a huge pub brawl?
October 30th - If you could press a reset button on your life and go back to a specific point in your life, with the aim of not making critical mistakes the second time around, would you?
October 31st - What did you want to grow up to be when you were eight years old? How close did you get?

November 1st - GUEST QUESTION - @TheStevenThomas - If you had to be on Stars In Your Eyes, who would you be and why?
November 2nd - What is your favourite related Beatles thing, song or anecdote?
November 3rd - Name a time when you fucked up only for it to somehow work to your advantage?
November 4th - GUEST QUESTION - @RobertDee - Which TV or film catchphrase would you like to have on your gravestone?
November 5th - GUEST QUESTION - @johnedavid - What arcane items from your childhood do you miss seeing?
November 6th - GUEST QUESTION - @DeanoB24 - What five fictitious characters would you put in the Big Brother house?
November 7th- GUEST QUESTION - @KirstyKomodo - What creative thing have you done/made that you thought "Wow, actually that's quite good?" pleasantly surprising yourself?
November 8th - What's the one thing you've continually failed at?
November 9th - GUEST QUESTION - @RobertDee - What's your safe word(s)?
November 10th - If you were sat at the bar in the First Dates Hotel, who or what would you not want to see walking towards you?
November 11th - GUEST QUESTION - @MrAndrewNeary - What piece of music would you have playing on the end credits of a film based on your life so far?
November 12th - GUEST QUESTION - @cherryaimless - Trump's launched the nukes. You've got a bunker with a room for five. Which four people are joining you?
November 13th - GUEST QUESTION - @Denchthefirst - If, as in Anchorman, you had a fight with peers in the same job as you, what's your weapon of choice?
November 14th - GUEST QUESTION - @bazzrose - Ever seen yourself on TV unexpectedly?
November 15th - Everyone knows a Dave. Tell us your most amusing Dave/David/etc related anecdote.
November 16th - If you had to pick three of your belongings to place in a time capsule to tell future generations about life in 2019, what would you pick?
November 17th - If you were on trial for your life, but had no access to properly trained and briefed legal counsel, which non legally trained buddy would you call upon to defend you in court?
November 18th - GUEST QUESTION - @johnedavid - What prejudices have you inherited?
November 19th - If you could unknow one thing, what one piece of knowledge would you be shot of?
November 20th - You're launching a National SOMETHING Day. Raising awareness of or celebrating something, but what are you choosing?
November 21st - GUEST QUESTION - @Cut_Thumb - What tattoo/hair/body modifications did you almost get and chickened out of?
November 22nd - GUEST QUESTION - @das_munch - What is a place and time that exists only in your memory, that you can never now go back to?
November 23rd - GUEST QUESTION - @scareyjoe - What freaked you out as a kid and still does as an adult?
November 24th - If you were giving a guided tour of your hometown, what's the first place you'd take people?
November 25th - GUEST QUESTION - @YPLAC - What inanimate objects or places from your childhood scared the shit out of you?
November 26th - GUEST QUESTION - @twoclownseating - What real or imagined celebrity couple, seemingly loved by everyone, would wind you up the most?
November 27th - GUEST QUESTION - @Countrychic1976 - What phrases really get on your nerves?
November 28th - Your Victorian villain name is the place you holidayed as a child with a word from the name of the nearest train station to where you live. Who are you?
November 29th - Have you ever been brave and immediately regretted it?
November 30th - Have you ever assisted a celebrity in a mundane task?

December 1st - GUEST QUESTION - @DeanoB24 - Which company would you like to film a festive ad for and what would be the premise?
December 2nd - GUEST QUESTION - @matthewjh - Do your parents do one of those round robin letters and, if so, what's the worst thing they've ever shared about you?
December 3rd - 100 years from now, there's a blue plaque outside your home marking your residing there. What have you done to deserve such decorative commemoration?
December 4th - GUEST QUESTION - @cherryaimless - What's the name of the cocktail you would invent, and what's in it?
December 5th - GUEST QUESTION - @DuncanMcVey - What would you have in your bespoke advent calendar?
December 6th - GUEST QUESTION - @Nolanwriter - What's the greatest nickname you've ever encountered?
December 7th - Share with us your favourite Christmas clips, songs, memories.
December 8th - If you could be the CEO of any organisation in the world, what would you do with that authority?
December 9th - GUEST QUESTION - @Countrychic1976 - What 21st century/first world trends irritate you?
December 10th - GUEST QUESTION - @DavethePitt - What have you been falsely accused of?
December 11th - GUEST QUESTION - @Sergio_Georgini - What would you nationalise if you could?
December 12th - GUEST QUESTION - @Barcajim3- What's the biggest fashion faux pas you have committed?
December 13th - GUEST QUESTION - @scareyjoe - What silver lining can be found with this Tory victory?
December 14th - GUEST QUESTION - @drunkenbutcher - List your top 5 soft drinks in alphabetical order.
December 15th - You have to rename the planets but in such a way the mnemonic My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets can still be used.
December 16th - Which fictional character would you be happiest with running the country?
December 17th - GUEST QUESTION - @zellishrose -  What's the funniest customer service phone call you've ever taken?
December 18th - What's the last thing that someone admitted to doing that generally shocked you?
December19th - GUEST QUESTION - @Rover 9495 - What's the best bit of karma you've ever seen?
December 20th - What's the shortest amount of time you've ever had a job?
December 21st - GUEST QUESTION - @Rover 9495 - What's the shitest Christmas present you have ever received?
December 22nd - Have you ever helped solve a crime?
December 23rd - What's the funniest thing you've seen someone do on waking up?
December 24th - GUEST QUESTION - @Rover 9495 - What's the worst Christmas present you have ever bought in a last minute panic?

BONUS GUEST QUESTION from @TheStevenThomas - What did you learn at school that you can still recite.

December 25th - You can give any celebrity a gift today. Who is getting what?
December 26th - What would your schoolmates best remember you for?
December 27th - Have you ever ruined (intentionally or otherwise) someone else's surprise?
December 28th - What's the biggest news story you've got caught up in?
December 29th - What's your favourite romantic moment in a movie or TV show?
December 30th - GUEST QUESTION - @crowbloke- What's your favourite, but often overlooked, line from a sitcom?

BONUS GUEST QUESTION from @zellishrose- Have you ever cried reading a book? If so, which one.

December 31st - HUGE FOUR PART GUEST QUESTION from @bigpaulwales

Out of all the contributors to the challenge over the last 12 months, which one made you
a) Laugh the most
b) Cry the most
c) Rethink your general view/outlook the most
d) Want to meet in person the most

Within

Don't usually write poems much. Felt inspired to by the sight of a nurse holding a vigil outside Downing Street for 4 hours. Every minute's knelt silence equal to one NHS member killed by Boris and Cummings.

Within

 

In a pale mask, the nurse kneels.

A black door in the background.

Death lives here.

In a white room, temperatures spike

And hearts fail.

In darkness, Truth flails a weakened fist.

 

On a blank page, words matter.

A message is transmitted.

Hope lights a world.

In a news flash, lies became facts

And lives ended.

In a painted corner, Treason sings.

 

In a blue sky, clouds hover.

A world spins.

A child cries in the distance.

In a pale mask, the priest intones

And makes a cross.

In smoke, the soul ascends.

 

In a side street, a banker claps.

And claps again.

Champagne is opened, poured.

In a clear glass, the bubbles fizz

And mock applause.

In silence, wealth remains.

 

In a pale mask, the nurse kneels.

A black door in the background.

Death lives here.

In a white room, temperatures spike

And hearts fail.

In darkness, Truth flails a weakened fist.

How I Almost Became A Bot

Sometimes, it is best to admit defeat.

Sometimes, you have to hold up your hand and say that you do not have the strength to carry on.

Tuesday night, I confess, was a dark night of the soul.

Some context. I have never voted, and would never vote, Conservative. My reasons are my own, personal and profoundly felt, a mixture of things witnessed, lived through and survived. Suffice to say my hopes of the current government overseeing this pandemic with anything like the humanity, bravery and humility needed for any government to help the nation recover were slim.

I tweeted in February that I expected the government’s response to be ideological rather than scientific and that I expected many unnecessary deaths to occur.

Not in my darkest nightmares did I imagine the numbers that have died. Not in any way, shape or form could I imagine a government doing the bare minimum at the last minute in a token effort to keep the death toll down. I knew Johnson was all bluster, a billowing, bellowing shitsack with the integrity of a paper toilet. I had hoped that, like his hero Churchill, he would have risen to this occasion, found an inner statesman that would surprise us all. Hope is important, the currency of optimism, but the well is full of pennies.

Johnson has spent the last 9 weeks either hiding from scrutiny, hospitalised with self-inflicted Covid, or lying to the nation. His slaphead Rasputin, Dominic Cummings, the de facto Prime Minister, ignores the advice he gave to the nation, and smirks in our faces. Laughter is contagious. Today, television viewers were treated to the spectacle of the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, a man at least partly responsible for the many thousands of unnecessary deaths so far, laughing on national television at accusations he’d rushed forward a Track and Trace app to deflect from the Cummings scandal.

I can’t watch the news on television. It angers and sickens me. I don’t read our papers anymore. I get my news from Twitter. Like the BBC before it, Twitter has been effectively labelled a left-wing echo chamber without any evidence to suggest that’s true. I follow a variety of people and news sources on Twitter. The government has always spun stories to favour them, that is politics but, for the first time in my life, the government are lying through their teeth as a matter of course during a national crisis.

Not for the fear of lowering the national mood any further, but for the purpose of staying in power. Armed now with an army of bots, any repudiation of their statistics, any criticism of their policy is now met with identically-scripted tweets to shout you down. It is hard to be angry at an algorithm.

My anger is for those, admittedly few, Tories I know who cannot admit that their vote and their party is responsible for this continuing disaster. This is a very 21^st century problem, this digital tribalism. An inability to admit blame, share the burden of guilt. In a time of sloganeering politics and alternative facts, truth does not matter as much as volume. The louder the shout, the greater the chance of victory. Only power matters. The dead cannot vote.

I’ve had to step away from Twitter, a place that has become 90 percent of my social life in lockdown, because I was turning increasingly poisonous. Writing things that would shame anybody with a conscience and deleting them before posting, I was in danger of becoming a monster, a shrieking, mindless bot of my own volition.

I’ve taken the decision, for the good of my mental health, to stay away from the one thing that was keeping me sane. Our collectively irrational populace don’t need another madman in their ranks. Time to refocus, to regroup, to find the strength for the battles yet to come.  

Chernovid and Cobyl

We have entered the black hole. Falling further into time – good old linear, everyday, diurnal and atomic time whilst simultaneously putting the species-engine into reverse. We stare out of the rear window, our head turned rigidly from the future, staring at the dusty, dirty places we have been. In an ironic turn of events, this has not reversed the ageing process, rather it has taken us closer to Death than we have ever known in our inoculated bubbles of elitedom.

Across the world the spectre of Covid-19 has caused different reactions in different people. A virus lottery that seems to do different things to different people, it has affected governments in much the same random way. Those countries with right-wing, populist/racist demagogue leaders like the UK and USA have suffered death-tolls thought to be impossible in technocratic countries. Sweden, until recently the poster boy for sensible politics, opted for a herd immunity policy and it too has paid the price with thousands of deaths.

Daily statements from the Government are now so filled with lies and misleading statistics that comparisons have been drawn to the Soviet Union’s disastrous handling of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Caught on the back foot, the Soviet effort to underplay the extent of the crisis had as much effort thrown at it as the efforts to contain the fire and radiation. In the astonishing television dramatization last year, the scientist Valery Legasov asks the viewer “What is the cost of lies?”, adding “The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all.”

The comparisons are pertinent. Central to the success of identitarian politics in Britain the last few years has been this idea that we are special, that we alone kept the spectre of Nazism from conquering the world in the 1940s. This myth of a national exceptionalism is present in much of our culture and the way History is taught at school. Similarly, the Soviet Union, a Communist superpower gained much of its strength from the idea that her people too were forged from some greater stuff than those people from elsewhere. Chernobyl could not be seen to be a symbol of Soviet weakness and vulnerability. Once the truth emerged, the facts of everyday life could be challenged, and established notions of power with it.

Johnson knows this. Unlike Chernobyl, a genuine accident, Covid-19 came with an advance warning. China, South Korea and Japan reported cases long before the first wave hit the UK. Accordingly, COBRA meetings were called. The Prime Minister, a man obsessed with the vision of him becoming leader but not so much doing the actual work involved, declined to attend any of them.

The death toll that ensued should be a scandal worthy of toppling governments. Over 50,000 people have died. Seeking to protect the economy at all costs, Johnson did the one thing leaders shouldn’t do in a crisis, he prevaricated. Having been part of a government that underfunded the NHS deliberately, he left the country ill-prepared for a pandemic. An exercise in our country’s capacity to withstand such a disaster had been held in 2016 – the results of which were so dreadful, its findings were barely reported till now. Thousands of nurses, doctors and other frontline medical staff were infected for want of basic equipment and many hundreds of those are dead.

In the panic of the first deaths, the government then did what it should have done in the first place, attempted a lockdown. But it was a half-arsed lockdown, with such deliberately vague instructions, that many felt it didn’t apply to them. The idea of national exceptionalism in the UK, fostered by forty years of fuck-you governments, has led to a personal exceptionalism. People felt that the rules didn’t apply to them.

The shutting down of all non-essential businesses saw a long overdue refining of the idea of key worker. Supermarket staff, delivery drivers, food producers and fruit and vegetable pickers – traditionally amongst the worst paid people in Britain – were suddenly the heroic wall between the public and food shortages. The Chancellor launched a national furlough scheme which guaranteed 80% of wages for the majority of people forced to stay at home.

Such a scheme would of course be massively expensive. But there was a recent precedent as to how to pay for this. The banking crash of 2008 saw morally bankrupt lenders rescued by the government printing enormous amounts of money to bail them out. This money was to be paid for by the austerity measures of the Cameron government. The poor, the sick and the vulnerable had had too easy a time of it. They would foot the bill for the largesse of a banking sector driven by nothing more than greed. A United Nations report into the devastation this caused the most vulnerable people in the UK estimated that these measures had contributed directly to the deaths of over 120,000 people. It was the first UN report ever rejected by a British Government.

As the cost of the furloughing (a scheme designed to stop people from starving to death, remember) spiralled into the hundreds of billions, the narrative of lazy and workshy Britons began to pepper the pages of our right-wing papers. Since Norman Tebbit’s infamous “get on yer bike” speech 40 years ago, this idea that the British working-class are lazy, pampered bastards has captured the imagination of our least imaginative columnists. Despite the fact that the majority of us enjoy some of the highest working hours, the least public holidays and lowest pay in the developed world, this narrative continues to hold firm.

And so the “lockdown” has begun to be eased, people forced to return to work in the middle of a highly contagious pandemic. People who can barely afford to house themselves are castigated for not being able to afford either a car or a house close to their place of work. Images of packed tube trains are tutted at by the very people who sent them off to die as cattle.

There is a British laziness and it has been deliberately encouraged by successive governments in my lifetime. It is an intellectual laziness, introduced in our schools by a selective-memory take on historical events, a curiosity for facts over context. Culturally, our seemingly endless fascination with World War 2, a global conflagration in which our opposition to Hitler stemmed from our own desire to exploit the world’s poor rather than a fear of right-wing populism, and one in which we were not the sole saviours of the day but rather a team player in a game the aftermath of which saw us able to rightly view the horrors of Auschwitz as proof of our moral victory but more hesitant to look at our part in the Bengal famine which helped fuel the British war effort.

What will be the truth of Covid-19? What will be taught in our schools in the years to come? Will there be a day of reckoning for Johnson and his incompetent gang of spivs, crooks and cronies? It is hard to imagine. Truth can be unpalatable. In this country we prefer the comforting brew of lies we sip each day. The recent 75^th anniversary of VE Day saw a speech which championed those ideals of truth, honesty and self-reflection necessary for a country to move on in the face of tragedy. It was made by the German president. It was a call to be ever vigilant to the dangers of extremism, of exceptionalism and of evil. I’ll end on his words.

“Wherever your roots may lie, take a moment to revisit your memories, your family’s memories, the history of the country in which we all live. Think what the liberation and what 8 May means for your life and your actions.”

Here we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Our self-deluding eyes stuck to the places we have already been to, ignorant of the present, fearful of the future.

Stay alert, muthafuckas.

Shouting

I don’t even know why I’m writing this.

I just want to drive to a Home Counties village, kick the first door in I see and smash a Tory cunt’s head through their television screen. I want to blow up the Cotswolds. I want to dig Cilla Black up and launch a nuclear missile through her decomposed skull.

60,000 dead. So far. Fuck what you’ve been told by the media. Double the total. It’s about the same as the population of Tunbridge Wells.

Forget dead Cilla. Nuke Tunbridge Wells.

They filled every care home they could with people they knew to be dying and threatened the owners of the care homes with the removal of their funding if they failed to comply. Just to keep the figures down. Most of these people were someone’s grandmother, father, aunt or uncle. All of them were people left to die by a government that has the gall to celebrate the defeat of Nazism whilst carrying out, by stealth, policies that echo the darkest days of the last century.

Having underfunded the NHS in order to let your Bransons pick up the lucrative slack, they sat by and watched as hundreds of doctors, nurses and paramedics died for want of the protective equipment they were promised.

They had the cheek to then bang pans in celebration of the heroic effort made by the NHS.

They said everyone who couldn’t work from home could stay home and have their wages furloughed by the government. And then, when the economy threatened to tank, told people to go back to work. Not you the well-paid middle manager with a laptop and Wi-Fi at home. No, not you. Those minimum wage cattle over there. Not you. Him. Her. Tell them to pack yourselves onto the bus like sheep for slaughter. Catch the virus, please. Die.

They said herd immunity would save more than it would kill. Then panicked, then changed their mind, and denied they ever said it. Instead, and this has always been their way, they introduced a cull by stealth.

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last. That’s how it’ll go. Until a vaccine is found, and who knows how that will be rolled out. My guess is we’ll all be paying a new form of National Insurance on top of everything else for the privilege of not dying. Those of us who can afford it, that is. For people on low wages or none at all, i.e. those people most likely to be unattractive to health care providers, there’ll be an even more pitiful form of healthcare after all this.

In a just world, Boris would already be in prison, awaiting trial. His advisors too. For all of his moronic acolytes claiming they were just doing as they were advised, hear this. They chose the advice they liked best. The advice that didn’t cost them or their moneyed friends anything. Intellectually they fancied using Britain as a petri dish to prove their “survival of the fittest” bollocks on a grander scale.

In everything they talk about, “survival of the fittest” is key. Good for competition, keep the price down, best return for the taxpayer. It never applies to them. Always money to save their own skin, always enough in the pot to ensure they never have to fill it themselves.

Conservatism is all about tapping into a fear that certain people have got something that they weren’t entitled to. The big flat screen telly in the lounge of someone on working tax credits. The cancer treatment of the asylum seeker. The narrative is You Give, They Take. The reality is of course, the other way round. The nurse, the surgeon, the hospital porter are all finding out the extent of the establishment’s generosity now. Just like the soldiers before them. Your country loves you as long as you don’t need proof of that love, evidence of it. Do as You’re Told. Keep Calm and Carry The Fuck On.

The post-war settlement was a blip in the relentless tide of the historical masses being exploited and crushed by the moneyed few. It irked the Tories. Churchill didn’t want an NHS and neither does Johnson. There will be no such settlement this time. Maybe a statue to a fallen nurse on an empty plinth near Whitehall. A couple of meaningless silences. Just gestures, nothing more. This after all is the land that lives for meaningless bluster. And for a country fat with Live Laugh Love bollocks this will be enough. Your house price won’t suffer. We’ll be told that the country just wants to Move On. There will be no inquiry. No one will be held accountable. The Tories will win. Again.

I don’t know why I’m saying this, if you’re reading it this far, you probably agree. I’m just pissing into a hurricane, screaming into an endless fucking void. Watching the leader of a democratic country lie through his teeth day after day about what a great job we’re doing fighting this virus, boasting what a tremendous success it is that only 30,000 people have died so far.

Still, at least Corbyn didn’t get in, eh? What a fucking disaster that would have been.

 

 

Beasley Street

Songs that mean something to me.

Hardly an original idea. Ever since Nick Hornby introduced the idea of blokes writing about their favourite records as a means of illustrating their life stories, you’re rarely more than six web clicks from somebody banging on about how acid house made them determined never to work in an office (usually becoming buy-to-let landlords instead btw) but here we are. I’m in a creative rut and this might help.

 

Beasley Street

Originally released on the 1980 album Snap, Crackle and Bop.

Words by John Cooper Clarke.

Music by Martin Hannett and Steve Hopkins.

 

“In the cheap seats where murder breeds, somebody’s out of breath”

 

At the start of the suddenly-prescient 2002 film 28 Days Later, a group of animal rights activists infiltrate a laboratory where chimpanzees are exposed to images of human violence for hours on end. This somehow creates the Rage virus which decimates mankind. Anyway, I was thinking about these chimps, strapped into the chair for hours of terrorism, murder and various forms of bloodshed and I started thinking about my childhood.

I hasten to add here that I didn’t see much in the way of terrorism, murder and bloodshed as a kid. We were in Hyde Park the day that bloke fired an airgun at the Queen. My sister was at a disco where a boy was murdered. The most blood I ever saw was when Mark Mercer inadvertently planted his proverbial size nines into the top row of my mouth, changing me forever.

I was scared of everything as a kid. The whole world seemed dangerous, every paving stone a mugger-in-waiting, every stranger a bully-to-be, each waking day a minefield to be carefully navigated. A lot of this seemed to me to be a sensible reaction to the outside world. I grew up in a time of endless public information films, where children would be electrocuted, drowned, trapped in fridges, smashed by trains, slashed by glass, blinded by the casually tossed firework and bitten by French Alsatians. The 1970s were grimy, filthy times. Everywhere you went there was noise and dirt as the country seemed to be in a continual state of repair. I didn’t like going out. I was a chimp, cured of rage.

In the grip of coronavirus, mild agoraphobics like myself have been cured of our plight whilst those previously in the grip of fresh air fanaticism have been converted into zealous acolytes for the Great Indoors. And all of us, happy box setters and hesitant jogger alike, have become hand-scrubbing lords of a disinfected world.

Beasley Street is a depiction of late 70s Salford, the same town and time that gave the world Joy Division. JCC and JD shared a producer, Martin Hannett, whose trademark sound evokes collapsing industry, impending violence and increasing despair with claustrophobic dubby bass, stabbed pianos and spiky guitars. I listen to it and I hear the world as I imagined it to be when I was 8 or 9 years old, a terrifying labyrinth of murky threats and greasy accidents, of sudden wounds and fatal steps. Cooper Clarke’s unapologetic Salfordian scowl is heard in every syllable, the spite and grime oozes through my headphones and makes me feel wretched, anxious, alert.

I’ve upped my anxiety meds recently. I’m not ashamed to say I wasn’t coping at first. I don’t watch the news if I can help it. It feels like Beasley Street has come back for us all. That, beneath the gentrification and regeneration of places like it up and down the land in the last forty years, the residual squalor and misery that haunted these streets never went away, was waiting for something like coronavirus to make us all feel dirty and scared once more. And when you look at the panic buying fools eager to believe the proven liar that leads them, you feel it again, the fear, the resignation, the unkempt presence of dread in the streets.

And no amount of performative pot banging for dead nurses will cleanse you.

 

Your Amazon Order – The Coronovirus Box Set Has Been Delivered.

“Back to life, back to reality. “

SOUL II SOUL, Back to Life, 1989.

I turned 18 in 1989, at the very start of that extraordinary year. Arrogantly, I felt that it was my generation that were going to turn this shit around. The Green Party had unprecedented success in the European elections, protests in China threatened briefly to bring that dictatorship to its knees, and then the insane events of the last ten weeks of the year saw the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain.

The unknown protestor with the shopping bag in Tiananmen Square, his faceless, distant almost pixelated form defying a tank to mow him down was an image that no one who saw it will ever forget. One can only presume he is now dead, the most surprising thing about the image was that the tank did not simply run him down.

I wonder if Communism (and this is in no way a defence of the atrocities perpetuated in its name – I’m a leftie but I’m not that kind of leftie) acted as some kind of unseen check and balance against the worst excesses of Capitalism. Once the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union with it, there was nothing left to stop the tides of consumer demand.

Now, as we well know, there are islands of plastic the size of France in the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of species are made extinct every year, having given names to every beast on land and in the air, we then hunted them out of the dictionary and into the history books.  The bee, the most valuable species in the world, the pollinator of plants and seeds is under threat.  The polar ice caps, melting slowly for decades in a fluorocarbon shimmer, are now becoming mighty rivers. The earth’s waters are rising, preparing to claim forever huge swathes of land. The Amazon rainforest is on fire, deliberate infernos started by loggers desperate for their own slice of the last fortune to be made.

We have entered the denaissance, a period of unenlightenment. Humanity has been overtaken by technology and, stunned by the potential of what it has unleashed upon the earth, it has retreated and begun to regress. The world’s largest corporations act as nation states, taking up land and resources and refusing to be taxed. Our streets are clogged with delivery drivers, bringing food and entertainment and clothes that we dare not ask the price of. And while the bee numbers dwindle and the Amazon forest smoulders, we ironically fill the skies with drones delivering Amazon-branded bundles of transient happiness.

There was a moment or two of hope for a better world in the last 30 years but there will not be another. Our lap of the track is almost run, we are on the curve and the crowd are on their feet.

Except they’re not, they’re on their arses, shrugging their shoulders and pretending it isn’t happening.  Each new human atrocity, each new depth plumbed shocks the world for a moment and then we return to our burgers, our selfies and our own problems.

The President of the United States is a paedophile, a racist and a crook. The police in America largely share his views on race, shooting as they do a disproportionate amount of black and Hispanic citizens on a daily basis. The President is backed by the NRA who, hiding behind an 18^th century scribble, sell semi-automatic rifles to mass murderers in order to prop up their share price. He is in power largely due to the efforts of the Russian President, a gangster and thug with an army of bots able to influence, it seems, the opinions and votes of millions of gullible Americans. This trick was also utilised in the EU Referendum in Britain, a Tory gamble that, like every other Tory gamble of the last 40 years, has backfired spectacularly for the ordinary people. Freed of the dogma of old style Communism, but fired by the grandeur of a proud Russian past, Putin has managed to instil a puppet President in the White House and now he sets about dismantling the power of the EU trading bloc.

Across the world, populist politicians claim they are challenging the elite and bringing the voice of the ordinary voter back into the spotlight. Populist is a new word for Openly Racist. The British media, owned almost exclusively by people ready to cash in on a 21^st century form of Popular Bigotry, fan the flames of hatred and then deny the rise in hate crimes is anything to do with them. Simply saying you believe the referendum result was rigged by outside forces and is therefore invalid is enough for you to be called a traitor. Death threats are common place. In the streets and on the internet, an uneasy peace sits. Name calling is the norm from both sides. No one is capable of backing down. Every day is a new Cuban Missile Crisis on the web. It is only a matter of time before the horror of civil war trickles into reality.

Last summer was the hottest summer on record. Again. The Earth’s lungs are on fire, like it has inhaled a particularly hot lump of hash. But the stoned, hazed Earth won’t be getting up for a glass of water. It has been rendered almost mute by the excesses of the human infection. The average length of the dominant species time at the top of the world is 100,000 years. We’re around that mark now. It’s us that are powerless. All empires fall. The queen bee cannot be protected forever. It dies and its spell of infertility in the other females is broken, the colony survives, finds a new queen and sanity is restored. But we will learn nothing from the bee whilst it is with us. Our stoned planet will hallucinate the last bee and try to swat it with an empty Amazon box. It will flail its arm a couple of times, unable to comprehend the ghost-bee’s refusal to yield. Eventually the planet will crash back to the sofa, the bee dream will fade and the last humans will fall unconscious, casting no shadow in the black smoke night.