Tony Harrison

I saw the Oresteia during  its original run at the National Theatre when I was in the Sixth Form. I don’t think I knew any thing about it, except that it was a play everyone was talking about and students could get cheap tickets midweek. Everyone knows that Greek tragedy is difficult and stodgy; but the translation made it accessible and exciting — to the point, in fact, where I couldn't quite see why it was such an Important Literary Work. The translation seemed to create its own vernacular: ancient Greek rendered into metrical modern English, but with a huge stock of invented composite words where the Greek had no direct English equivalent.  So that the line about not killing a bird because (in the standard Penguin version) “the sky is heaven’s protectorate” had become “Birds! Guest-strangers in god-spaces”; and the comment that Athena had access to Zeus’s lightning became “the mighty high he-god’s munitions of thunder”. It seemed to bring the ancient world close while showing how distant it was from us. 

I saw The Mysteries as an undergraduate. The Oresteia had been three shortish plays making up one longish evening. The Mysteries were three full length plays performed over a whole day — The Nativity (from the Creation to the birth of Jesus); the Passion (Jesus’ life and death); and most excitingly Doomsday, which begins with the harrowing of Hell and takes in the Resurrection and the day of judgement. The nasty gym teacher from Kes (Brian Glover) was God, riding around the stage in a fork-lift truck. The tomb of Jesus was a conjuror’s cabinet from which the actor playing Christ vanished, only to reappear on the other side of the sage. (I assume that the Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, was well aware of this conceit.) The text was mostly taken from the Wakefield and York mystery cycles, rendered into an earthy, alliterative poetry with much dialect but no anachronisms. 

“I am maker unmade and most hight in might” says God before the creation “and aye shall be endless, and nowt is but I”, rubbing his hands together with glee. The “knights” crucifying Jesus grumble about the weight of the cross: “Workers worthier than we / you’ll find them few enough” “This bargain buggers me/ I’m proper out of puff”. And Judas, deciding to make his bad bargain, admits “The poor’s plight pricked me not to play no pretence / what pricked me and pined me was t’loss of my pence.” I didn’t know I liked folk music at the time, but the music was provided by John Tams and Bill Caddick. 

I heard Tony Harrison do at least two poetry readings, once at college and once at a Bath literary festival. The college one was I think a retirement present for one of the English lecturers. I felt I was listening, not to a modern poet whose work I hadn’t previously encountered, but to someone doing whole new thing with words. I like all the difficult modern poems well enough, your Howls and your Wastelands your roosting hawks. This didn’t feel like “poetry” in quite the same way. I can almost understand why stupid people have always thought it clever to say that he is like Pam Ayers with added politics. (Not that comic verse is necessarily easy to write, or that our Pam is anything other than a skilled craftsperson.) 

Very often, when I try to read an anthology by some modern poet who has won the award for modern poetry I find myself thinking that

This

Seems like a perfectly valid thinkpiece

(Piece think; think of peace; pink pease)

That has for some unfathomable

Reason

Been broken up arbitrarily into lines of unequal

Length.

Harrison writes sonnets (the kind of sonnet that has sixteen lines) and blank verse and rhyming couplets. He writes in actual English sentences. But you are never in any doubt that Poetry is what you are in the presence of. 

Complaining about the English teachers who wouldn’t let him speak in his natural accent, he writes

all poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see’

s been dubbed by [^S] into RP

received pronunciation, please believe [^S]

your speech is in the hands of the receivers

The rendering of “you see, has” as “you see’s” and the splitting of it over two lines is typical. He uses the phonetic alphabet to distinguish the northern pronunciation “uz” from the southern, “uss”, which he thinks is a marker for the division between “them and [uz]”. The same sonnet contains a couple of words in Greek, to compare the wailing of a Greek chorus "αἰαῖ" with the typically Leeds greeting “Ay-ay!" (He doesn’t go out of his way to make it easy for his reader!) 

He has a great eye for metaphor, and often runs with them for pages at a time, as in his great mediation on first tasting a kumquat in Florida; 

You’ll find that one parts sweet and one part’s tart

Say where the sweetness and the sourness start. 

I find I can’t as if one couldn’t say

Exactly where the night becomes the day

Which is makes for me the kumquat taken whole

Best food and metaphor to fit the soul 

Of one in Florida, at 42, with Keats,

Crunching Kumquats, thinkign as he eats

The flesh, the juice, the pips, the pith, the peel

That this is how a full life ought to feel…

But he is perhaps too inclined to tell the reader what the symbols mean. Remembering his father’s cremation, he imagines him greeting his late wife

Light streaming from his mouth to shape her name

Not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie

I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame

But only literally, which makes me sorry…. 

From Jude Fawley to DH Lawrence, literature is full of working class lads who have got an education and felt alienated from their roots. His mother used to say that he and his dad were “like bookends” and he extends the metaphor: “for all the Scotch we drink what’s still between us/’s not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books”. When his Da storms out and tells him to write his mother’s epitaph on his own, he writes: 

I’ve got the envelope that he’s been scrawling

Misspelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling, 

But I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.

In 1985 there was a concocted media furore about the film poem called (lower case) ‘v’, which described his reaction when that same gravestone was vandalised by a football thug. In the end he decides that the word “united” is quite appropriate and doesn’t clear it off. But not before he has imagined a dialogue with the skinhead who daubed the graffiti, asking him if the vandalism was about frustrated aspirations: 

Our aspirations, cunt? Folk on fuckin’ dole

‘ave got about as much scope to aspire

above the shit they’re dumped in, cunt as coal

aspires to be thrown on t’fuckin’ fire

Obviously, the British media went into meltdown. It didn’t help that the “v” of the title referred to a divided society, “us v them” (again) “personified in 1985 by Coal Board McGreggo and the NUM”. SCARGILL POEM IS THE PITS! explained the Sun. The still extant Mary Whitehouse opined that the f-word, intrinsically, by its shape and sound “negates and destroys the nature of love, sensitivity and commitment” which should be at the heart of sexual intercourse. Auberon Waugh, who had been running a rather silly campaign for “real” poetry which scanned, rhymed, and made sense, to his credit admitted that v did all of those things, even if it sometimes meandered from the point. 

I never completely bought into the genre of poetry/documentary he tried to create for the BBC: it always seemed just that little bit contrived. His long poem in defence of Salman Rushdie included scenes in which he purchased a bust of Voltaire in an auction while thinking about censorship. I didn’t quite buy it. But some of the stanzas hit home: 

The Koran denounces unbelievers who

quote ‘love this fleeting life’ unquote. I do.

I’m an unbeliever. I love this life.

I don’t believe their paradise is true.

And, looking at young girl

It won’t be long before she knows

That everything will vanish with the rost

And then she’ll either love life more because its fleeting

Or hate the flower and life because it goes

The Guardian had the idea of sending him off to war-zones to write poetic dispatches. His meditation on a photograph of a dead Iraqi soldier tries (typically, again) to put words into the mouth of the corpse. 

It’s easier to find such words 

For this dumb mask like baked dog-turds

So lie and say the charred man smiled

To see the soldier hug his child.

The ending of the poem admits that soldier is dead and can't say anything:

I went. I pushed rewind and play 

And I heard the charred man say:

I heard him recite that in a lecture room with a ticking clock, which he said put him right off his metre. 

Some Boffins once worked out a scientific method of measuring how sad a particular poem was. It involved asking volunteers to read poems out loud with a gadget attached to their throat. The gadget was able to record exactly how often the reader’s voice cracked during the performance. On which metric, Harrison’s poem Long Distance is the most moving poem ever written. 

You can find it here: try for yourself.

https://poets.org/poem/long-distance-ii 

Fantastic Four: First Steps

I’ve just seen The Fantastic Four: First Steps for the second time. I’m happy to confirm that it doesn’t put a single foot wrong. It could be taken as a masterclass in how to translate revered properties from one media to another.

Perhaps surprisingly, I was more emotionally taken-in by the schmaltz, melodrama and sentiment the second time through, when I knew what was going to happen, than the first time, when I didn’t. Or perhaps that isn’t surprising: perhaps comics are by definition twice-told tales and you can only be properly sad about the death of Snow White once you know that she is going to get better. (It’s probably not giving too much away to say that, yes, a major character dies, yes, I was sad, and yes, they do get better.) Sue’s speech to the angry crowd about how all the people of the world are one big happy family; and Reed’s confrontation with Galactus (“You will not take my planet and you will never take my son”) are corny as heck and succeed for just that reason. 

The film has, of course, a lot of visual and narrative call-outs to the comic book; but the film works fine if you don’t spot them. Sofa-buddy, who despite stringent efforts on my part has never read an FF comic, thoroughly enjoyed herself. But that’s the wrong way to think about an adaptation. We don’t watch a dramatisation of Middlemarch and wonder if Nicholas Bulstrode is an easter egg for sad George Eliot fan-girls. Mark Shakman has used an extensive repository of characters and concepts and forged them into a stand-alone work.

The Incredibles, which was until now the best Fantastic Four movie, began in media res with the family as established heroes, and made extensive reference to previous adventures and bad guys that the audience knew nothing about. Underminer and Bomb Voyage have no existence outside of the movie script, where every true fan knows that the Mole Man, the Red Ghost and the Mad Thinker appeared in Fantastic Four #1, #13 and #15. There is a flashback to the Fantastic Four fighting one of Mole Man’s monsters, which is a pretty explicit call-back to the very very first Fantastic Four cover. Arguably those of us who can identify the Super-apes and know who the Puppet Master is are getting a worse aesthetic experience compared with the general audience who just feel themselves being bombarded with an excess of creative brainstorming.

(Granted, I am assuming that Joe Public’s prior knowledge of the Fantastic Four derives from the not-as-bad-as-people-make-out 2005 movie. A Batman franchise would be on much safer ground assuming that J.P knows who the Joker and the Riddler and even Commissioner Gordon and Dick Grayson are. But perhaps I am wrong: geek culture has been substantially mainstreamed in the last twenty years.)

From the opening caption, the movie positions itself as a tribute to Jack Kirby’s vision of the FF. If Stan Lee’s main contribution were the (extremely good) words in the speech bubbles and caption boxes, then we would have to say that Stan has been substantially erased from this re-imagining. None of the team really sound as they do in the comics. HERBIE the robot, introduced in a 1977 cartoon and the last contribution Jack made to the Marvel Universe is a taken-for-granted fixture. He has a role somewhere between R2D2 and a high-tech vacuum cleaner, but manages to hardly ever be annoying.

There is nothing wrong with a Fantastic Four fan hoping that a Fantastic Four movie will stay true to the Fantastic Four comic. No-one has forgiven 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer for depicting Galactus as a cloud of purple space gas (of the kind V’Ger probes generally hang out in the middle of). One can follow the studio's train of thought: having persuaded us to believe that the angel of death is a naked guy on a flying surfboard, you can’t also convince us that the Deity is a big purple guy with a funny hat. But fandom let out a collective sigh when the answer to the question “How are they going to do Galactus?” turned out to be “They aren’t even going to try”. The franchise died on the spot.

The desire for “Comic-Book Accuracy” is almost always focussed on superficials: if Galactus is not purple then he is #not-my-galactus. But very frequently the films which dispense with surface detail are the ones which have best understood their source material. The Stallone Judge Dredd looked a lot like a 1980s issue of 2000AD but had bugger-all to do with the character and wasn’t even that good an action movie. The 2012 Karl Urban version made no attempt to emulate the look and feel of the comic, or indeed the details of the backstory, but basically seemed to “get” Dredd. [1]

With the exception of Ben none of the characters in this movie really look or sound a great deal like the comic book characters do. I couldn’t think of Pedro Pascal as “Reed” or Joseph Quinn as “Johnny”. But what the movie unquestionably takes from the comic is the team dynamic. Reed and Sue are Mum and Dad, Ben and Johnny are the quarrelling younger brothers who are nevertheless devoted to each other. There is the smart, emotionally reticent one; the older, taciturn one prone to bouts of temper; the younger, hot-headed one; and the sensible motherly one. Superpowers are consistently less important than personalities. Granted, Galactus is in the end defeated with flame, force-field and clobbering; but not before Reed has come up with an extremely far-fetched scientific deus ex machina, which, after a huge build-up, completely fails.

Galactus is not a cloud of purple gas. He is huge and speaks with a deep voice. His armour has a purple tinge. He is darker than his comic book counterpart, with a gothic undertone. Perhaps he knows that his onlie begetter also begat Darkseid. Something about his ship recalled HR Giger’s Alien. He also  emulates the Borg: a huge, impersonal, force that lumbers through space assimilating worlds. He is plugged into the ship with a gigantic cable, but when he reaches New York he pushes over skyscrapers and glowers down at the Statue of Liberty. This rather reduces the Cosmic God to the status of Godzilla or the Staypuft Marshmallow Man, but it looks tremendous.

In Jack Kirby’s original conception, the Silver Surfer was an alien being, presumably created by Galactus, with no human emotions until the Thing’s blind girlfriend Alicia shows him that humans are OK. Stan Lee’s inept retcon (now irreducibly part of the character) was that he had once been Norrin Radd, a dissident hippy on the planet Zenn-La. Norrin Radd made a devil’s bargain that if Galactus spared Zenn-La he would find him alternative sources of food. Lee also decided that Galactus used to be a human called Galen, the sole survivor of the planet Taa: to his great credit, John Byrne salvaged this terrible idea by placing Taa in the universe before the Big Bang. Kirby seems originally to have envisaged Galactus and the Watcher as having a common origin. 

Norrin Radd/The Silver Surfer is permanently in mourning for Shalla Bal, the girl he left at home, particularly when Galactus exiles him to earth for siding with the human race. The “Comic Book Accuracy” obsessives have, of course, wet their pants because in this movie it is Shalla Bal who sacrifices herself and becomes the Silver Surphress. I am afraid that all too often “Comic Book Accuracy” is a coded way of complaining about diversity and inclusion in movies [2]. But in the context of the movie, the change of gender makes excellent sense. The Surferette is still a silver skinned alien on a flying surfboard. The sequences in which she chases the Human Torch to the edge of the atmosphere, pursues the FF’s spacecraft into a neutron star, and zips round the world blowing up Reed’s science installations, do a very good job at transferring the physics of Californian wave-riders to outer space. She is still the angel of death, announcing to the human race that the Devourer is coming from them: and she still, at the last possible moment, develops a moral conscience. The idea of the Surfer and the dynamism of Kirby (and Buscema’s) artwork has been "accurately" translated to the cinema. 

The fact that she doesn’t look exactly like the comic book character plays to the films’ advantage: in all of her scenes I felt that I was encountering a new, unfamiliar character: I was uncertain what this Silver Surferina would do next. (By contrast, I was completely unable to connect Tenoch Huerta’s Namor in Wakanda Forever! with the Submariner of the comic books: I don’t say that I wanted to or needed to, but I couldn’t. It seemed comedically incongruous when he shouted out “Imperius Rex!”) 

In the original Galactus trilogy, on which this movie is partly a riff, the Silver Surfer changes his mind about the human race after encountering the Thing’s blind girl-friend Alicia Masters. In this version, the Thing has an implicit lady-friend, a Yancy Street school-teacher named Rachel, but she’s only a minor part of the plot. It makes excellent narrative sense for it to be one of the team to have a quasi-romantic interlude with the Surfer. In the original story, it was Johnny who saved the universe, ascending to Galactus’s spaceship and stealing the Ultimate Nullifier from under his nose. Johnny’s diplomatic encounter with the Savage She-Surfer arguably retains aspects of both ploy elements.

There are a lot of other things I could say about the movie. It is interesting that it majors so heavily on Franklin, given that director Matt Shakman was also behind Wandavision. (Agatha Harkness originally entered the Marvel Universe as Franklin’s nanny.) I have said for many years that the Fantastic Four is an old-fashioned story rooted in its time-period and any movie version needed to be set in the 1960s or even earlier; [3]: but the Jetsons retro-future was an inspired solution to the difficulty. It is full of visual in-jokes and asides: the Future Foundation flag flying on the moon; the brief view of an un-named writer and an un-named artist drawing monsters for “Timely” comics; the footprint in the dust on Galactus's base the running-gag about the in-universe Fantastic Four cartoon. 

The first hundred issues of the Fantastic Four, and the first Galactus/Surfer story in particular, represent a kind of sacred scripture for comic book fans. This movie doesn’t simply transcribe them to the screen (what would be the point of that?): it is a fresh, new thing by someone who loves Reed and Sue and Ben and Johnny— but especially Jack — almost as much as we do.

[1] Similarly, gender-swapped all Black naturist productions of Hamlet are frequently faithful to Shakespeare in a way that aging Englishmen in hose with posh accents simply aren’t. 

[2] You see, that guy was right: 100% of everything I write about movies is not about anything apart from the culture wars, ever.  I do not mean to imply that the person who says “I didn’t think it worked for Doctor Manhattan’s plan to involve a nuclear explosion; I wish they had stayed with the giant squid” or “I don’t think the Joker ought to be the one who kills Batman’s parents: it really has to be a nameless thug for the story to work” is necessarily a culture warrior: only that the phrase "comic book accurate" is frequently found in sentences along side "woke garbage", "Disney shill" and "liberal groomer". This is also true of the unqualified phrase "bad writing". When someone says “It’s not about race or gender, it’s about bad writing” it’s about race and gender.

[3] I would also like to see a Golden Age Superman movie, in which the hero leaps over buildings, punches slum landlords and sends gangsters to the electric chair. 

If you enjoyed this, there's loads more on my Patreon: support me for $5 a month...

"Rilstone Box Set" -- Infrequently Asked Questions

In June, Andrew threw open the floor to his Patreon supporters: ask him anything — and he promised to answer.

Each reply was written in a single sitting, with only the lightest of edits. 

The questions ranged far and wide. The answers? Surprising, revelatory — and sometimes much longer than anyone expected.

Now collected as a digital "box set", the full series is available to non-Patreons for just $12.

But if you'd like to support Andrew’s writing — and throw your own questions into the ring next time — consider becoming a Patreon supporter today.

1: Your old pre-blog site contained much that is worthy of preservation, including your thoughts on the LotR films. Do you have any plans to restore these posts?

2: Who does the grail serve?

3: As someone who's spent *ahem* some time contemplating the intricacies of various canons, do you have any thoughts on the loosening of control over IPs we're seeing. E.g. AI Darth Vader saying any old thing in Fortnite would have been unthinkable in the Lucasfilm days. Where do you think this leads?

4: Why do we keep remaking the same stories, and what does that say about us?

5: What's your typical writing process? Your essays often seem carefully crafted, and I wonder whether that happens through rewriting and editing, or if they spring from your fingers in something close to their final state.

6: What is Doctor Who?

7: Your Doctor Who blog posts have been very interesting, although they've mostly focused on the Tom Baker era and the new series. Will you ever post about, e.g. the Pertwee or McCoy era?

8: In the 19th century both the pro- and anti- slavery forces used biblical arguments to make their cases. What are the biblical arguments for and against slavery?

9: Alan Moore's Jerusalem -- discuss.

10: What do you remember most about your (worthy, in my opinion) adventures in game design, and have you ever been tempted to try again? If so, what ideas have been bubbling under?

11: You've spoken in the past, off-handedly, about being uninterested, or in some way psychologically unable, to write fiction, despite your facility with essay-writing. I wonder if you'd care to elaborate on that...?

11 (continues): ....

Are there projects you outlined and abandoned? 

In what mediums, what genres? 

What is it that actually 'stops' you in the process, if it's anything definite? 

Is there anything — barring trivialities like "a billion pounds" — that would spur you to give it another go? 

Appendices

1:  I asked Andrew Rilstone to answer the question "Why Do We Keep Remaking the Same Stories?" what do you think he would say?

2: What Question Would Andrew Rilstone like me to ask him on his blog?

3: If I asked Andrew Rilstone the question: “What do you think about the way ChatGBT answered the question ‘If I asked Andrew Rilstone to answer the question “Why Do We Keep Remaking the Same Stories?” what do you think he would say?" what do you think he would say?

Epilogue

Was the cover for the "America" book AI generated? 

America [11]

        For two or three generations, the default cultural consensus has been that it is better to be nice than to be nasty. Which must be really uncomfortable if you are one of the nasty people. Imagine living in a world where every children’s book has a message that kindness is good; that you can do anything if you try, and you shouldn’t pick on people who are different from you, when, with every fibre of your being, you believe that kindness is a sign of weakness, that most people are inferior beta zombies who will never amount to anything however much they try and should damn well accept it, and that it is your absolute patriotic duty to be horrible to people who are different.

        Years ago I laughed at an evangelical book that said that the Smurfs were Satanic because one of them was a magician; and that My Little Pony was Satanic because there were pastel coloured unicorns in the book of Daniel; and that the Care Bears were Satanic because the message was that you should do your best to be nice when actually there is no point in trying to be nice without the blood and grace of the lawd jee-zus. [1]

The political Right must feel that way about the entirety of western popular culture.

What must it be like, truthfully feel attacked or threatened because Norman Osborne, who is a white man in the comic, is a black man in the new Spider-Man cartoon? What must it be like to turn on a new Star Wars show and honestly feel that the fourteen year old Ravi Cabot-Conyers is, by his very existence, part of a plot against America? To describe a live action version of a cartoon version of a Grimms’ Fairy Tale as “the wokest movie ever made”? And to honestly believe that these are not isolated incidences of racially sensitive casting, but part of an orchestrated anti-Caucasian conspiracy. To feel in short that the whole world is against you?

I guess, like being a Black person or a gay person for most of the twentieth century. I adore classic Doctor Who: but for almost the whole of the original run, the BBC were operating an anti-diversity, anti-inclusivity, anti-equality programme. They didn’t call it that; there were no boxes to tick, but it never occurred to them that there was any other way of doing things.

I think that there is a very real possibility that the boot will soon be on the other foot. Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness will be swept away. In its place, there will be Uniformity, Inequality and Exclusivity. When the next Doctor Who is a white male, many of us will think that this is the result of a political agenda, even a conspiracy.

And this time, it will be true.

People sometimes ask “why are there no anti-woke movies?” in the same way that they sometimes ask “why are there no right-wing comedians?”; and the answer is the same in both cases. It is very hard to tell a funny joke that says “Isn’t the President doing a great job! Aren’t policemen brilliant! I was on the bus the other day and there was no nutter sitting next to me!” I suppose a very rich comedian might get up in front of a very rich audience and say “Isn’t it funny that poor people are poor?” but it doesn’t strike me as an obvious comic vein to mine.

“Why was the oil company that wanted to pull down the Muppets’ theatre portrayed as the bad guy?” “Why was Dickens biased against Scrooge?” I think that in most stories at most times the good guy will be empathic, polite and not-a-Nazi because that is almost exactly what we mean by good.

I am not going to take an unholy oath that if Disney adopt a UIE agenda then I will boycott the company in perpetuity. If Steve Rogers is replaced by “Captain America, Muslim Basher” (who fights Captain Sharia and his nefarious plot to make the streets of New York flow with curry) then the question of a boycott won’t arise.

I am not boycotting Twitter; I just don’t read it any more because there is nothing on it worth reading. I won’t necessarily type “Not my Captain America”, but he won’t be.

I am not, and never have been, an anarchist. I like rules; I like structure. I am the sort of person who is inclined to ask “Why is no-one in charge here?” about a work-place. On the other hand, I am opposed to nearly all forms of punishment, and one possible definition of anarchism is “without coercion”.

There is a theory that when the first Christians talked about the Kingdom, they didn’t mean a place in the sky where they would eat pie when they died, nor a future state of this world when the righteous (the really genuinely righteous) were in charge. The Kingdom was themselves, how they were living, as well as they could, right here, right now. “The Kingdom of God is spread out over the earth and people don’t see it” as Jesus almost certainly didn’t say.

There is a romantic idea that the best thing you can do to make the world beautiful is to live a beautiful life right here, right now. Which is much easier if you are Oscar Wilde and much harder if you are a London chimney sweep. And much, much easier if you are a middle class blogger in Bristol than a child in a hospital in Gaza.

I sometimes think that if I were younger, I would, simply drop out. Although when I was younger, I didn’t, so I probably wouldn’t. Unless hanging out in a bedsit in Tooting Bec counts as dropping out. But maybe I can drop out conceptually.

I will reduce my reliance on the Internet. In particular I will back up my online writing to physical media. I will look at putting my words into physical books. At the very least, I can see myself as having provided a testimony of what went wrong in the last days of our civilisation for the people at the beginning of the next one.

“How will you turn the things you wrote on the internet into books, Andrew?”

Using a print-on-demand company that I found on the internet.

“But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Andrew, dear Andrew.”

I will at any rate diversify the online platforms on which my work appears, so that if Google falls, there will be alternative streams.

I will look for outlets and sources of culture at a grass roots, community level. I went to a workshop about storytelling and was said to show promise, but haven’t taken it further. I have started to sing songs at folk-sessions, rarely in key, but other people clap, sometimes without irony. I once said frivolously, that the real sequels to Star Wars were the ones that were played out on my bedroom floor when I was twelve or on college gaming tables when I was twenty four: I ought to start living that.

I don’t care to belong to any church that would accept me as a member. I am too pagan for the Christians but too Christian for the pagans. But still.

I will be nice to people.

I will do my best to understand diversity and difference and what is appropriate and inappropriate and in general try not to be a complete bastard.

I will look for physical analogues for the Internet which I can retreat to if idea space is occupied by MUKGA and UID. There would be something very post-apocalyptic if I ended up giving photocopied fanzines to strangers in coffee shops.

In the very short term, this means publishing my writing in books and pseudo-books like this one. In the medium term it means obtaining a better laser printer. [2] In the long term, is there any argument for obtaining an old fashioned manual typewriter? If we are reduced to writing longhand with a quill pen, then I am well and truly fucked.

“But, Andrew, you will still be hopelessly compromised, and so will all the things you love: and your focus on culture and idea space is going to seem very trivial when the bombs actually start falling, or when the jackboots actually start arresting people.”

Remember those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War?

But I think that is where I am.

I haven’t said any of the things I wanted to say but putting this down has been therapeutic. I shouldn’t think more than seventeen people will read this to the end. Probably the same seventeen people who got to the end of Dave Sim’s Torah commentaries.

I am going to mostly stop reading the news. Oh boy. Ignore Trump and Badenoch and Farage. I don’t need to know that Starmer wants to make Trump an honorary member of the Royal Family.

I am going to concentrate on Not Being a Nazi to the best of my ability until the world ends.

I am going back to my happy place. My next project will take me back to my beloved 1978 season of Doctor Who; the one after that will involve the Marvel Comics of 1966. [3] And in the day-to-day there are pubs where people sings songs and small theatres where people do Shakespeare plays and some people have even said I am quite good at my day job.

Trump is a cancer. It is sometimes a good choice to learn to live as well as you can with cancer, than to perform surgery that probably will not cure it and will certainly ruin whatever time you have left.

Keep calm and carry on.

Live as much like a Narnian as you can.

Stay loyal to the dream.

Be excellent to each other.

Have respect for those around you and try not to be a dick.

Keep hoping machine running.

[1]  Turmoil in the Toybox was a very silly book: but a lot of people read my satires and agreed that nothing has a subtext, or that cute things don’t have subtexts, which wasn’t the main take-away point.

[2]   Will the free speech absolutists allow me to own a laser printer? I believe the former Soviet Union banned Gestneters.

[3]    Having said that is what I am going to do, I can almost guarantee that I will do something else. Did I mention that there may be a three letter abbreviation for this kind of thing?

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