Author: David

David Charles is co-writer of BBC radio sitcom Foiled. He also writes for The Bike Project, Thighs of Steel, and the Elevate Festival. He blogs at davidcharles.info.

Think Crisis, Think Hope

This is the sixth in a daily series of articles taken from Elevate #10. I hope you enjoy the read – and come back tomorrow for more!

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

Think Hope

“Hope explodes, volcanically, with rage.” It just so happens that John Holloway lives next door to a volcano in Mexico, and can contemplate the aptness of his metaphor every day. “Revolutions for me are volcanic,” he says, “the burning lava is always just beneath the surface.”

It’s early Friday morning and John Holloway, Professor of Sociology at Puebla University, is sharing his ideas of hope and crisis. Two extra banks of chairs are pulled out, students perch on the floor, the balcony door is opened for ventilation, someone is sent to copy another thirty sets of workshop notes. The people of Elevate are eager for hope, it seems.

John begins by recalling recent expressions of popular revolution and rage, in Oacaxa 2006, Athens 2008, Cairo 2011, Istanbul 2012, Rio and Sao Paulo 2013. “Explosions of anger are at the same time explosions of hope,” he says. “People go out on the street and break windows because they actually believe things can be different.”

This is a remarkable statement to make in a society where it seems that any form of protest is dismissed by government and media as “looters… criminals”, “the same game, the same trap, the same aim” and “wanton vandalism”. “These expressions of hope are expressed,” John explains, “not in the long term building up of the Party, but in these volcanic expressions of rage.”

But before you drop this book and rush out to smash some windows, you might want to ponder Greece.

Greece has suffered the most terrible consequences of the crisis of capitalism; at the same time it has the most militant anti-capitalist tradition in Europe. In Greece over the past few years, there has been action after action, protest after protest, against the imposition of austerity. And it hasn’t made the slightest difference to the imposition of capitalist aggression on the people.

“We need to re-learn hope, we need to think rage into hope,” John says. “It doesn’t make any sense to say you shouldn’t be angry – of course we should be angry!” But, starting from this rage, how do we think this rage into hope? The question reminds me of Deanna Rodger and the channelling power of her teenage creative writing workshop. For John, the answer is the Zapatista concept of digna rabia, dignified rage. Even this dignified rage, however, must find an echo within the world, as Ernst Bloch writes in The Principle of Hope. For us to have true hope, the world must at least be able to respond to our hope. Or, as John says, “We have to find the hopeability of the world.”

“Across the world,” John says, “we’re getting the sense that we’re banging our heads against the wall and we’re getting no response.”

I have felt this frustration myself, as one of millions of citizens who participated in the global anti-war demonstrations of 2003: no response, only the endless bombing of Iraq. And again in 2011, as one of millions of Occupiers around the world trying to find an alternative to the excesses of capitalism: no response, only a multi-trillion dollar bail out of the richest in society. This total lack of response to democratic protest is an enormous challenge for hope and our struggle. “When governments are so distant from society that there is no response there at all,” John asks, “how do we think about the hopeability of the world?” The question is open and increasingly urgent: Can we even imagine the possibility of change in the world?

Hope explodes volcanically, but hope also ebbs – or is commodified and religionised. This ebbing of hope in the last twenty-five years, John calls The Great Disillusion. “The Soviet Union was horrible,” he says. “But it was, in spite of that, and paradoxically, a symbol of hope for many people.” Even if no one would want an alternative society like the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was at least proof that we could create something that was different. “Over the last years, there hasn’t been a reduction in anger, but there’s been a shrinking of horizons,” John says. “People no longer think of how to get rid of capitalism and this narrows our mind.”

John’s generation, anti-capitalist hippies in the sixties, over the course of the Reagan and Thatcher eras, became disillusioned with the possibility that capitalism could be opposed. This culminated in the fall of the Berlin wall and “the end of history”. Their view, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, has become: “Capitalism is the worst form of economy except for all those others that have been tried.” This disillusion was passed on as blind acceptance to their children. For their children, the question of questioning capitalism was never considered until the 2008 economic crisis and, more specifically, until the Occupy movement brought the idea that “capitalism is crisis” to the mainstream.

For most, however, the question is once again creeping away under the every day threat of austerity and poverty.

Hope and Historicity

This generational difference hints at the basic Marxist point that capitalism is a historically specific form of organisation. “Marxists believed that we were able to go beyond capitalism and have a happy ending,” John says. “I think we can no longer believe that.” Instead, John follows German philosopher Walter Benjamin in characterising history as an express train rushing us towards our doom: “We are locked inside and we don’t know how to get out.”

But capitalism has only been around for a few centuries. “There is no reason to assume that capitalism will go on forever,” John says. “And yet, it is easier to think of the end of humanity than the end of capitalism.” With the newspapers full of runaway climate change, the Mayan apocalypse and nuclear holocaust, people talk a lot about the end of humanity. What they don’t do is talk about the end of capitalism.

Unlike the Marxists, John believes that the hope of a happy ending is not inevitable, but only possible. “To think hope is to feel the push of the world that is not yet,” John says, before adding, “this is Bloch or my Bloch.” Ernst Bloch wrote that hope depends upon the push of the world that does not yet exist. John’s been doing some hopeability research while here in Austria. “In the last ten years in Graz,” he says, “there are five social centres that did not exist before, there are the urban gardening projects – these are the pushes of a world that is struggling to be born.”

But, despite these nascent struggles and despite the fact that capitalism is proving itself over and over to be a disaster, we continue to lose the battles for hopeability. We get no response from government, or from the media or from broader society and, as John says, “we think of ourselves as the eternal losers, morally justified – perhaps there’s no way out”.

Think Crisis

Marx was in exactly the same situation, in a world of struggle. What Marx wanted to ask was how to go beyond hope and ground that hope in reality. “If we can only see that the system is weak or mortally wounded, then that will help us think how we can go beyond it,” John says. “What we want to find is some sort of fragility in the system that we can latch on to and think: We are not the losers in all this.”

John argues that crisis is a category of hope: only through crisis can we find a new way of doing things. The crisis of Fukushima led to the end of nuclear power in Germany, something that had been fought for by activists for decades. The economic crisis in Iceland resulted in a popular assembly to re-write the constitution. But, at first blush, the crisis of capitalism doesn’t seem very hopeful. Austerity disproportionately hurts the poorest in society, we are not “all in it together” and our protests are violently put down.

If we are the ones who suffer from crisis, then perhaps there is no way out, no way of turning crisis into hopeability.

But John has found a way out. “Capitalism is a system of domination and we refuse that,” he says. “Therefore we are the crisis of capitalism.” Our suffering is only apparent if we externalise the crisis. We must instead internalise the crisis and embrace the fact that, by being human and wanting to be free of this system of domination, we are throwing the spanner in the works. “Once we say that the banks caused the crisis, we’ve lost,” John says. “No: we are the crisis of capitalism, that is our pride.”

Huh? I don’t feel much like a crisis, John. But that’s just my perspective. John has other ideas.

I don’t wake up in the morning and look forward to a productive day of creating value as part of a capitalist economy; I wake up in the morning and start working on this book. But, according to John, I’m deluding myself; there is another way to look at my day’s work. “We create capital,” he says, “But because of the thingification of social relations, we don’t recognise that is what we’re doing.” Even this book creates capital value for someone out there, if only the printing and recycling companies.

As John says, the fact that we are the ones creating capital, “has to be understood as capital’s weakness”. All systems of dominance suffer from the dependence of the rulers upon the activity of the ruled, and capitalism is no different. If we can find a way to refuse capitalism, then we do become the crisis.

Furthermore, this dependence of capitalism on our labour is only sustainable through constantly renewed aggression. Constantly renewed aggression, however, will inevitably only provoke more of us into becoming the embodiment of crisis: strikes, protests, riots, occupations, refusals. “The class struggle,” John jokes, “is the struggle of the alarm clock – get up out of bed and create some value!”

I suppose the question now is why shouldn’t we just surrender to the aggression and the dictates of capitalism? After all, isn’t it the “worst form of economy, except for all those others that have been tried”?

The critical problem with capitalism is that, as John says, it is driven by its own inadequacy. A profit is never enough; capitalism demands greater and greater profits, as measured in economic growth. This demand drives a process of what John calls “totalisation”, the integration of all human activity into the pursuit of profit.

Driven by its own inbuilt sense of inadequacy, capitalism will not rest until all human life and all planetary resources are funnelled through its profit motive. And then it still won’t be happy. The more capitalism dominates, the more capitalism must dominate. This is a basic factor of the way capitalism measures itself: in growth. Capitalism never says “that’s enough now”; economic growth of 0%, where things stay the same, is a disaster for capitalism. The aim of capitalism is growth on growth, year on year; the more capitalism dominates, the more it must dominate. And that economic growth represents another portion of the world funnelled into the totality of capitalism and swallowed up.

Debt is another expression of the incapacity of capitalism and the inadequacy of its domination. “We don’t generate enough surplus value for the system,” John explains, “so we create it in the hope that tomorrow we will.” The vertiginous rise of what economists call “consumer debt” in the last two decades is little more than a bribe or a white lie to cover the broken promise of capital growth. Most people simply don’t benefit from capitalism, but it can’t be seen to be that way, so we give them interest-free credit cards and zero deposit mortgages.

“Debt expansion is the basis of an increasingly fictitious world,” John says. “This world is volatile, aggressive, fragile, random.” Debt is one of capital’s tools of totalisation, sucking more and more people down the funnel. If capitalism was a success on its own terms, then why do we have government stimulus packages, bank bailouts and subsidies for the automobile industry?

“We are pushing against the process of totalisation,” John says. “In universities, students don’t just want to learn; they want to think. Farmers don’t just want to use pesticides; they want a good relationship with their animals.” Revolution, therefore, can be seen as a process of “de-totalisation”, a movement against the centralising aggression of capital. To borrow a line from the Zapatistas: How can we create a world where many worlds fit?

Not without a fight is the answer. Remember the example of Greece? If you don’t do what capitalism wants, then be prepared for a fight. “The chronic inadequacy of domination,” John says, “pushes capital into fiercer, more violent measures to control human activity.” This aggression will naturally provoke a defensive reaction in us, the victims.

“This defence is usually conservative defence,” John explains. “We want to go on living the way we were living before, even if we weren’t enjoying it much.” But this conservative defence can overflow into something else: the Zapatista movement grew out of a conservative defence against the Mexican government selling off communal land, for example. Now, the Zapatistas self-govern their entire region, almost independent from the government.

“The growing aggression of capital is something that that will go on for a long time,” John warns, “but capital is unable to subordinate us sufficiently; most people at some point will say no.” Indeed, John argues that capitalism, at some level, is antithetical to our very humanity. Capitalism’s drive of inadequacy bleeds into our every day lives as an insidious neuroticism, a feeling that we ourselves are inadequate: We are not beautiful enough, we are not intelligent enough, we are not working hard enough, we are not rich enough, we are not happy enough, we are not enough.

That might sound like reductive pop psychology, but one recent study among many has shown that an intervention as tiny as using the word “consumer” to describe ourselves instead of “citizen” is enough to make us more selfish, more miserable and less concerned about the welfare of our fellow human beings and the state of our planet. As the authors of the study say, “the costs of materialism are not localized only in particularly materialistic people, but can also be found in individuals who happen to be exposed to environmental cues that activate consumerism – cues that are commonplace in contemporary society”.

In other words, if such a small change to our discourse can have such a large impact on our well-being and our politics, then what kind of an effect will living completely submerged in the logic of capitalism have? What kind of effect is the impossible aspirational logic of advertising having on our natural altruism? What kind of effect is the acquisitive logic of consumerism having on our treatment of the planet’s resources? What kind of effect is the transactional logic of money having on our human relationships?

But the very toxicity of capitalism to humanity is a cause for optimism for John. “Our desire for love is the obstacle for capitalism,” he says. “We are the crisis of capitalism and that is the basis for hope.”

Thank you for reading – I hope you found something here that was enlightening and inspirational. Come back tomorrow from 8am for more from Elevate #10.

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

Mimu: Instant Choir

This is the fifth in a daily series of articles taken from Elevate #10. I hope you enjoy the read – and come back tomorrow for more!

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

Mimu is late, bounding on stage, puffing, out of breath from running up the mountain into the Dom Im Berg cave. “There are many musicians,” she says, once she’s caught her breath, “that are actually preparing their instruments so they can work with every sound quality that that device is able to give. And I was thinking: but no one plays the audience.” She smiles. “This is such an unused resource and I really want to see what is possible.”

So she gets us to take out our mobile phones and exchange phone numbers with the person next to us. There’s a buzz of chatter and a clattering of bottles as feet shuffle. “Please exchange phone numbers really quickly,” Mimu says, “so we can proceed to the actual happening.”

The actual happening involves calling the person next to us, switching our phones to loudspeaker and experimenting with what Mimu calls “something like a really, really easy ping-pong delay with your phones”. The closer the two calling phones are to each other, the more apparent feedback loop. “And also,” she adds, “if that is working, you can add some sound like bah, oh, ah and you will see that it is going to be looped.”

“So please call each other now, switch on loud and enjoy the silence.” Something remarkable begins to happen. The cave is filled with digital crickets, or perhaps bats, chirping and kurking. Mimu holds the microphone to the front row phones. Monkeys join the crickets and wooahs loop around the walls of the cave.

“This is just a small example of an everyday hack,” Mimu shouts over the monkeys. “Just an example of how you can misuse, playfully, technology that surrounds you.” She laughs as the crickets continue their chirping unabated. “I used to call it the instant choir: human resources as an instrument.”

Dr Vandana Shiva: We Need to Elevate

This is the fourth in a daily series of articles taken from Elevate #10. I hope you enjoy the read – and come back tomorrow for more!

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

Dr Vandana Shiva fills the screen, a fifteen foot pixilated message from India. Vandana was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, the “alternative Nobel prize”, in 1993 for her work on the social and environmental costs of development, particularly the violence of India’s Green Revolution.

“We are facing multiple crises,” Vandana Shiva says with a slight smile, “crises of planetary dimensions.” We face a climate crisis. Over five hundred people were killed and over eighty thousand evacuated from their homes in Kashmir during September’s disastrous floods, making it impossible to argue when Vandana says that “climate change is not about the future; it is happening today”.

We also face an economic crisis, which has brought about a widening divide between rich and poor. Perhaps more significantly, however, this crisis is the crisis of a system. This modern capitalist economy has left half the population of the world redundant. Echoing John Holloway’s earlier remarks, Vandana says that, in this economy, “there is no place for small farmers, no place for future generations”. She describes it as “a world of corporations and oligarchs, extracting the last bit of profits from the earth”.

Finally, we face a political crisis and the erosion of democracy. “What we now have,” Vandana Shiva says, “is not a public state, working for democracy in terms of of the people, by the people, for the people. It is a corporate state, working for the interest of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.”

For Vandana, these crises arise from a particular way of thinking about the world: the scientific capitalist paradigm that describes the universe as solely mechanistic. This viewpoint encourages division and separation between ourselves and the resources of the planet. “The reality of our lives,” she says, “is that there is an earth that gives us everything and we are co-creators and co-producers with the earth, to produce our food, to harness the water, to make sure all our human needs are met.” Gandhi’s words are never more appropriate than today: “The earth has enough for everyone’s needs, but not enough for some people’s greed.”

Vandana Shiva states her anti-capitalist thesis explicitly: “The economic model that turns nature into land and a commodity, people into labour and a commodity, and capital as the creator of value, is at the root of both the exploitation of nature as well as injustice.” She goes further. “Capitalism is a system that was wrong to start with,” she says. “It has been held in place for a few centuries by shifting every policy to make the false assumptions of capitalism work for a while.”

There is much evidence to support this view. Were it not for agricultural subsidies, the industrial-scale farming of capitalism wouldn’t be able to survive. “That is why half of Europe’s budget is spent on the Common Agricultural Policy,” Vandana explains. By 2011, the US alone had lent, spent or guaranteed twenty-nine trillion dollars to keep capitalism alive after the economic crisis of 2008. Vandana describes the current negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP) as “another artificial measure to keep a dead system afloat”.

In its most terrifying garb, TTIP will hand corporations the power to sue governments for “loss of profits”. This could ensure that our common goods, such as the National Health Service, our genetically modified organism-free fields and the data we’d like to keep private on the internet, are open to commercial exploitation.

If you think that this sounds like a lot of balony, then consider the fact that these kind of bizarre legal agreements are already in place. One Swedish energy firm is currently suing the German government for billions of dollars of “lost profits”. Why? Because, having seen what happened in Japan when the Fukushima nuclear power station exploded, the German government took what would appear to be a perfectly reasonable public health decision to stop using nuclear power. The final cost to the German tax-payer of this ghoulish pursuit of profit will not be settled democratically either: the matter will be decided through an arbitration tribunal, as if the needs and desires of profiteers and of the people bore equal weight. TTIP threatens to give unelected corporations the power to force policy on elected governments, and you can be sure, as Vandana Shiva says, that corporations “will make decisions for themselves, to keep raping the earth and to keep ripping off from society”.

All of these examples of policy manipulation are described by Vandana as “life support systems for a dying order”.

The insecurities caused by the failures of capitalism create social polarisation. “Insecurity deepens divides,” Vandana says, “so we have the rise of politics of exclusion.” This politics of exclusion leads to a rise in fundamentalism, pitting people against each other on the grounds of religion, sect and ethnicity. “Diversity has been turned into a major problem,” Vandana says, before turning the whole argument on its head. “But diversity is the solution for the future.”

Vandana Shiva believes that the crises of capitalism also represent an opportunity to create a new paradigm, one that puts humanity to work, not in the service of exploiting the earth, but in healing her, by saving seeds, planting trees and rejuvenating water resources. “It’s limitless how much work needs to be done,” she says. “Regenerating the earth needs our hands and our hearts and our minds.”

Who will lead this regeneration? “Every worker fighting for justice. Every unemployed youth demanding a place in the scheme of things. Every small farmer telling the world that it is small farms who feed the world.” The UN estimates that 70% of the world’s food production comes from the work of small farms, rather than from industrial production. Vandana Shiva singles out women for special responsibility. “Women,” she explains, “through having looked after the economy of care and the economy of sharing and an economy of responsibility, can shift to make the entire economy based on these principles of caring and sharing, not exploitation and destruction.” These shall be the leaders of our regeneration, but, as Vandana says, “there is no person who is irrelevant to the transition we must make if we have to survive”.

“The message I have for you at Elevate,” Vandana Shiva says, “is what your festival is about: We need to elevate. We need to elevate our knowledge. We need to elevate our consciousness. Let us elevate our energies, let us elevate our solidarity, let us elevate our imagination.” She raises an eloquent hand and a smile burbles about her lips. “There is nothing beyond our dreams and there is nothing to prevent our dreams from being turned into reality if we are committed.” Her voice takes on a playful warning tone. “In any case, there is nothing to lose but our extinction.”

She leaves us with a beatific smile.

Thank you for reading – I hope you found something here that was enlightening and inspirational. Come back tomorrow from 8am for more from Elevate #10.

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

Patrick Wurzwallner: Head Cleaner

This is the third in a daily series of articles taken from Elevate #10. I hope you enjoy the read – and come back tomorrow for more!

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

Patrick Wurzwallner, hair scraped into the blonde ponytail that appears to be the distinctive tribal mark of an Austrian artist, settles himself at the drums. After the intensity of John Holloway’s opening speech, Patrick promises us a “head cleaner”, a short solo percussion piece. “At the end,” he says, “I would like to invite you to sigh, as relief.”

Silence settles as he adjusts his seat, his sticks. Then, with a slight intake of breath, he raps a singular totemic beat, managing the reverberations with his left hand.

Head slightly shaking from side to side, the bass kick steadily joins. Louder. His left hand doubles the rhythm, pulsing. Then the hands split off in two directions, spiralling frequencies faster and faster.

Rapid blurring climax, both hands in concert again. Now on the one drum, slight, coming close together. Slower. Until just a pulse on the kick drum, like letters on an old typewriter.

One foot keeps up the beat while Patrick prepares pans on the drums skins. Thin tinny clang-tings. A quick one-two on the snare, right arm in the air – and a collective sigh of release.

John Holloway: Opening Speech

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be publishing a series of articles taken from my latest book, Elevate #10. This is the second such post, from the Elevate Festival’s opening ceremony, John Holloway’s Opening Speech. Enjoy.

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

“My opening speech has a title. The title is: Opening Speech.” John Holloway laughs with our laughter, stepping away from the Elevate podium and swiping at the air in front of him, as if he’d just thrown a frisbee. But the title is no whimsy.

Nor is his decision to speak in German. “Mainly it’s a protest against Englishification,” he explains. “Not from a nationalistic point of view, but because of the social narrowness that is brought along with this Englishification.” John Holloway is Professor of Sociology at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico, so is well aware of the effects of a cultural hegemony.

Balancing the levity of the laughter, John Holloway justifies his carefully-chosen title. “A speech that opens is just what we need in this world, a world that is closing.” By that, he means a world where alternatives are being closed off and all of human activity is being funnelled through a shoot marked Capitalism.

I’m sure that John Holloway’s choice of imagery – opening and closing – is not coincidental. The British legal process of removing land from common use and passing it into private ownership is called enclosure. A better example of what John means by “a world that is closing” could not be found. Once land is privately owned, the alternative option of subsistence farming is impossible and growing food suddenly becomes a matter of access to capital, rather than skill or knowledge of farming.

John Holloway peers hopefully out at his three hundred friends in the Dom Im Berg audience, out at his unknown audiences on Austrian national television, on the internet livestream and in smartphones hashtagging on international social networks. “Maybe this is the speech that opens the festival that opens the world,” he suggests.
For John, the cause of the closure is clear. “A certain logic is being imposed on all aspects of life,” he says. “The logic of money, the logic of profit, the logic of closure.”

“In the countryside, this logic tells us that you can’t expect to live as your parents did, growing only the food that you need to survive,” John says. If you’re thinking that the last time your ancestors grew the food they needed to survive was the Middle Ages, then bear in mind that there are over 100,000 subsistence-level farms in the UK and it is estimated that 40% of the world’s population are small farmers, most of whom cultivate less than five acres (two hectares) of land.

But this new logic of closure means that, according to John Holloway, “to survive, you must farm mass production, or you must make way for motorways, for dams, for mines”. He smiles, wryly. “Or, even better, why don’t you just disappear altogether?” A third of the urban population in the developing world now live in slums, thanks to rapid urbanisation and migration from the countryside. This is in part due to the closure of traditional subsistence farming as an alternative to capitalist industrial-scale agriculture.

Many people would argue that industrial-scale agriculture is a necessary consequence of the massive growth in the world’s population in the last fifty years. This argument flies in the face of statistics that, while an estimated 70% of the world’s food production comes from small farmers, the overwhelming bulk of government subsidies and research funding goes to supporting conventional industrial agriculture. Indeed, Professor Hilal Elver, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, argues that small farmers are the only people who can feed the world, rather than just the wealthy nations. But, regardless of the validity of the increased population argument, it does not follow that dispossessed small farmers must live in poverty. That is a consequence of the logic of money.

“In the cities, the logic of money tells us that you can’t do what you want with your life,” John Holloway says. “You must earn a living and that means you must do something that increases profits; that increases the power of the wealthy.” This is the nature of capitalism; without redistribution, profits will aggregate in the hands of the owners of businesses. “And this is what is happening,” John continues, “an obscene concentration of wealth across the world; a huge growth in the power of the wealthy, in the power of money.”

The richest 1% in Europe own a quarter of the continent’s total wealth, and that figure has been rising steadily since the 1980s. In the US, the richest 1% own a third of the total wealth of the country, rising to levels of inequality not seen since the 1930s. As economic researcher David DeGraw says of the situation in the US, “It’s got to the point where 0.5% of the 1%’s wealth could eliminate poverty nationwide in this country.”

But back to John Holloway. “If you do not want to follow the rule of money,” he says, “if you want to do something else with your life, you are either mad or a criminal and should certainly be locked up.” Hand-in-hand with the rise of inequality in the US since the 1970s has been an astronomic rise in imprisonment of the general population, from less than half a million in 1970, to well over two million people today.

“The dynamics of money,” John continues, “are shattering the hopes and dreams of youth; dreams that are broken on the reality of unemployment – or, often worse, the reality of employment!” The laughter this time is not so warm; it bites with a harsh edge. I wonder how many people listening are living with the reality that the market logic of money demands unemployment. Full employment – by which I mean enabling the talents of all men and women on the planet – to capitalism means inefficiency.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that the logic of money and employment are separable. Every living being yearns to pursue meaningful work, and most of us do, whether we are following the logic of money or not: the mother or father raising their kids at home, unpaid; the volunteer nurse travelling to West Africa to care for Ebola patients, unpaid; the sports fanatic updating within seconds the World Cup Final Wikipedia page, unpaid.

“It is not just that we live in a world of closure,” John Holloway warns, “but the enclosure is getting tighter all the time. Money cannot stand still. The rule of capital is faster, faster, faster.” The success of capitalism is predicated on year-on-year growth, which means that we must find ever more ways to exploit capital resources, whether that means fossil fuels or workers.

“This rule means out of the way to the people who are too slow,” John says. “Out of the way with the people who are holding things up; out of the way with the people who don’t speak English; out of the way with the protesters, into the prisons, into the mass graves. Out of the way with the forty-three students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico who disappeared a month ago.” The students were arrested by police after a protest, handed over to the Mafia, shot dead and their bodies set on fire.

John Holloway pivots his speech to optimism, inspired by the words of Ernst Bloch, author of The Principle of Hope, a book written in exile from the despair of Nazi Germany. John argues, like Bloch, that our future depends on hope – not on a silly, blind hope that things will just “turn out right” – but a hope founded and grounded in practice.

In Bloch’s day, hope was still bound up with the idea of the Party and winning control of the state for the workers. “But now the Party is over,” John says, waving encouragement to the flickers of laughter for his pun. “After the depression, this is what I needed!” He laughs, before delivering more depression. “Hope lies not in building a party and not in winning control of the state, because the state is an institution integrated into capitalism and cannot be used to overcome it.”

But if we don’t have Bloch’s state-building hope, then what hope do we have? John essays an answer. “Hope,” he says, “lies now in the millions and millions of us who say: No, we will not accept your destruction of the world, your guns and your wars. We will not accept the rule of the rich, the rule of money. Not any longer.”

John Holloway’s hope is not only rejection, but a rebuilding of an alternative to capitalism’s corruption of the state. “We shall do things in a different way and connect to one another in a different way,” John says. “We do not want your totality of death and we do not want any totality,” he adds, referring to the failed Communism of the USSR. “We saw in the last century what happens when one totality is replaced by another and now we say no.”

John Holloway’s alternative is alternatives, plural. “We break away from the totality of capital death in a million different ways,” he says. He urges us to rebuild the commons, to reverse the enclosures that have already occurred in our societies and to fight to prevent future enclosures. We will have to fight on almost every field: for our land rights, for our water supply, for the environment that we share with other forms of life. “We fight to open a gap between the future of capitalism, which can only be death,” John says, “and the future of humanity, which can still be life.” He takes a breath. Then adds, “If it is not too late already.”

“Ernst Bloch pinned hope to the power of the not yet,” John explains, “the power of that world that does not yet exist and therefore exists not yet; in our refusals, in our dreams, in our pushing against capitalism. We have to learn to listen to the leaders of this world that does not yet exist and sing their songs with our full voices.” He quotes Arundhati Roy, one of those leaders: “Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Three hundred people hold their breath and listen.

Out of the respectful silence, John Holloway closes his opening speech. “Thus, in my opening speech,” he says, “I want to open this world. My wish for the festival is that it will be an Opening Festival, that it sings the songs of the world that has not been born yet, that it sings these songs as loudly and as beautifully as possible.”
The rising of this opening audience to this opening speech for this festival of opening gives me a sniff of optimism that Elevate 2014 will jam a rubber sole against the slamming doors and prise a common crowbar into the cracks of capitalism.

Let’s make it happen.

Why does society need people who go on crazy, stupid, arduous adventures?

My friend Simon Moore is doing something crazy, stupid and arduous.

With Maria Gallastegui, he is sailing in a sixteen-foot dinghy over three thousand miles, from London to Lebanon.

It’s hard to capture quite how crazy, stupid and arduous this is unless you’ve done something similar, which I haven’t. And that’s kind of the point of this article.

Within about five minutes of us waving Simon and Maria off back last July, they discovered that their boat had holes in.

Then they discovered that, actually, waves could get pretty big in the North Sea and, if they capsized now, they’d be dead.

It took them four days, beaten back each time by gales and high seas, to get around just one point in Kent. Then they faced the Channel crossing.

Limping into Calais port, more coastal storms “encouraged” them to change their plans, from sailing around the Atlantic coast, to navigating through France along the canals.

That change of plan meant, rather than filling their sails, they faced instead months of back-breaking rowing.

Some days, Simon told me, he didn’t want to eat or drink anything because he didn’t have the strength to build a fire.

When he left, Simon thought the whole journey might be over in six months. Six months later, like Odysseus returning from Troy, Maria and Simon face an Odyssey that might take years.

Simon has now returned to the UK for the winter, to recover and take stock, waiting for the better Mediterranean sailing conditions of spring.

He is also thinking of giving up.

When he told me this, I was shocked. Shocked, a little panicky and then confused.

I could understand why he would give up; as if the journey wasn’t dangerous enough, the spread of the Syrian civil war into Lebanon makes even the destination deadly.

Any sensible, rational algorithm would calculate risk, profit and loss and conclude abandonment of the project.

I could understand his doubts and his concerns and could not blame him for such a decision.

So why did I feel shock, panic and confusion? Why should I take his retirement personally?

Because, I realise, I was relying on Simon’s journey.

Facing down my personal daily struggles – publishing a book, fixing my bike, taking clothes to Calais – relied in some small way on knowing that he was out there doing something far more crazy, stupid and arduous.

And I realised that, as a society, we need people like Simon and Maria, sacrificing themselves to do crazy, stupid and arduous things.

Why? The Philosophy of Inspiration

The process of doing anything starts in your imagination, with the conception that it is possible.

Without the imagination, there can be no action.

That’s why the most reliable indicator of whether you’ll end up as a doctor is if someone in your family is… a doctor.

This is also one reason why rich or privileged folks are more likely to embark on ambitious projects: thanks to their elite education and lineage, they have witnessed that anything is possible.

They have an arrogance of potentialities; they do not doubt what they are capable of.

Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of the charity Kids Company, remembers as a child hearing her grandfather and uncles talking about setting up the biggest ski resort in the world. Within a month, they’d started.

Camila grew up with that as a model: You dream something up and then make it happen.

Camila had written the business plan for Kids Company by the time she was fourteen.

The charity now helps 36,000 of the most vulnerable children in the UK with practical, emotional and educational support.

It wouldn’t have been possible – it wouldn’t have been even imaginable – if she hadn’t had her family’s lineage of imagination and action behind her.

You can’t do anything of which you can’t conceive; nor can you do anything you believe is impossible.

Camila Batmanghelidjh believed she could set up Kids Company because she’d experienced as a child that such things were possible.

I never considered a career in medicine because I had no conception that such a career was possible for me. I had no role models so it just wasn’t on my radar.

It might be illustrative to demonstrate how imagination turns into action with an example from my own life.

The Genealogy of an Adventure

Until 2009, I had no lineage of grand cycling adventures in my life. Bicycles were annoying machines that rusted in the garage and occasionally used to cycle two miles into town.

I had no conception that anyone could use them for adventures. My imagination for cycling extended as far as Wallingford and that was about it.

My parents did travel widely before I was born, hitch-hiking to Australia in the 1970s.

On Sunday evenings at home, to a soundtrack of Peruvian panpipes, they’d often show slides of their adventures in South America, my sister and I gazing in awe from the sofa.

But I didn’t connect cycling with such adventures until I stumbled across Alastair Humphreys at the Royal Geographical Society’s Explore Conference in 2008.

Alastair had recently finished cycling around the world, which is about as extreme a demonstration of the adventuring possibilities of the bicycle that you could hope for.

That conference marked the beginning of my imaginative lineage for cycling adventures.

The next year, I cycled to Bordeaux, followed by trips around Britain and then around Tunisia.

Each time, I stretched my imaginative conception of what was possible on a bicycle. As my imagination grew, I burst with new ideas and, gradually, I became able to turn those ideas into realities.

But none of my journeys would have been possible without the imaginative lineage I inherited from my parents and from Alastair Humphreys.

The Ripples of Transformative Stories

As a society, we need people like Alastair, Simon and Maria to do these crazy, stupid, arduous things because they are the ones who stretch our imagination and our conception of what is possible.

Everyone who comes into contact with Simon’s story now understands that such an audacious adventure is within their grasp.

Hearing Simon’s story forces us to confront an alternative reality, an alternative way of doing things.

We can’t ignore Simon’s journey precisely because it is crazy, stupid and arduous. It is a challenge to ourselves to overcome whatever struggles we are facing.

You cannot listen to Simon and go back to your life unchanged. He has given me the gift of an expanded imagination, an expanded reality, in the same way that my parents and Alastair Humphreys did.

Their stories are transformative; they force you to reconsider your conception of what you are capable of in life, in an instant.

That’s why journeys such as Simon’s are important to our society and that’s why I believe he should persevere.

Not for himself (although he will learn much from the journey), not for his charity Syrian Eyes (although they will benefit much from messages of solidarity and fundraising), but for the immeasurable millions of ripples his story will riffle through society.

Unbeknownst to him, Simon is transforming lives, opening minds, broadening imaginations. His arduous journey, his risking death, is not in vain; he offers us the gift of expanded imagination and a new perspective from which to examine our lives.

In this way, these kinds of journeys are a precious social service and it is a shame that they seem to be undervalued in our society.

Because their impact cannot be easily measured or monetised, these journeys are dismissed in value and left to people like Simon.

And people like Simon, if left without appropriate recognition of their positive impression on society, can get disheartened about their worth and think about giving up.

We must treasure these people; not worship, but treasure them. They do productive and inspirational work that is no less great for the fact that its impression is immeasurable.

Support them, share their experiences, spread their ripples. We need them.

I’m not saying that I’m going to rush off and sail to Lebanon, by the way, and I’m not saying that you should either. But I can never go back to believing that such a thing is impossible.

And, if sailing 3,500 miles in a dinghy is not impossible, then what else in my life is not impossible? What other potentials must I reassess? What else is my imagination capable of conceiving and making manifest?

We must not ignore or run from the audacity of our imagination. We must embrace it and surprise, delight and inspire the world.

UPDATE: Kids Company was dissolved in 2015 after the withdrawal of government funding and the support of major donors due to concerns over the charity’s financial management and a police investigation into allegations of child abuse.

A shocking denouement, but the story of the foundation of Kids Company is still illustrative of my point in this post. The police investigation found insufficient evidence of child abuse to meet the threshold for prosecution.

Deanna Rodger: Read My Lips

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be publishing a series of articles taken from my latest book, Elevate #10. This is the first such post, from the Elevate Festival’s opening ceremony, Deanna Rodger’s poem Read My Lips. Enjoy.

CLICK HERE FOR PAY WHAT YOU LIKE DOWNLOAD OR £10 IN PAPERBACK

Deanna Rodger’s steel-capped poem, Read My Lips, kicks down the door to the tenth edition of the Elevate Festival. The poem embodies the elemental forces of Elevate, its gravity and its magnetism; the creative-response to not being heard.

Sometimes – by which I mean often times – it can feel like we are not just being overlooked or ignored, we aren’t even being heard over the sound of seven billion people upgrading phones, paying treadmill rent or pawning for a payday loan. Not being heard is about the most frustrating emotion a human can feel. It’s the emotion that spawns violence, anger and hate.

“As a teenager, I was really pent up,” Deanna Rodger tells us. “I had a lot of anger living inside of me and I didn’t have the means to let it through.” But we don’t have to respond to not being heard with unfocussed anger; we can use that anger to respond creatively.

Luckily, teenage Deanna Rodger ended up at a creative writing workshop, a reluctant tag-along for her best mate. “I didn’t really want to do it,” she says, “but then they said, Write about fire, and I thought, Ooh, I can definitely write about fire! I know what it feels like in my belly, I know what it feels like in my heart, I know what it feels like in my brain.” She has been writing and performing, burning anger into poetic fire, ever since.

The solitude, space and silence of, not school, not work, but creative writing is what gave Deanna Rodger her voice. “Not having to worry about my spelling or my punctuation or even it rhyming,” she says, gave her “that freedom to write whatever was in my head and then mould it into exactly what I wanted to say.” Writing allowed Deanna Rodger to respond creatively to the anger she was feeling, reclaiming it as something useful and empowering. And we hear her in a way that we wouldn’t if she’d stayed stuck at the angry stage, with empathy, love and solidarity.

The Elevate Festival gives voice to people, projects and ideas that are not being heard, or not being heard loudly enough. For four days in October, people from all over the world come together in Graz to hear each other and to relay, amplify and broadcast each other.

Elevate is, like Deanna Rodger’s writing, a creative-response to not being heard. But it is also a demand that we shall be heard.

Humanity is Easy: Supporting Migrants in Calais

Over the New Year break, me and some friends went over to visit the Calais migrants. We brought over 200kg of clothes, tents and blankets to distribute around the jungles and squats, where over two thousand people from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Syria and other conflict zones, live in what can only be described as icy squalor. On the 31st, we used funds we’d raised in the UK to help throw a New Year’s party for around two hundred people – migrants, activists and local Calaisians – in the Galloo squat, with dancing, fireworks and cake.

Now, though, I want to take this opportunity to inveigle my way into your brain and, using the power of hypnotic suggestion, to cajole you into visiting Calais for yourself. I promise you an experience you cannot – and will not wish to – forget.

“But there’s no point me going over – I wouldn’t know what to do or say!”

You don’t have to do or say anything. We’re all the same, we’re all humans and we could be Calais migrants tomorrow, living on the streets in freezing temperatures without food, shelter or running water. Besides, as much as I try to be useful over in Calais, I feel that I get way more out of every trip than I can ever offer. I hear stories that make my synapses struggle and tales that make my teeth chatter. The least I can do is be a friend.

On New Year’s Eve, we’re chatting to a Syrian guy who was planning to cross the Channel in a dinghy that night. “It’s my last chance,” he says. “It’s the last night of the holidays, there will be less shipping traffic, less security.” The weather is calm too; he can escape before the high winds return. “I grew up next to the Euphrates, where I would swim against the currents, so I’m a strong swimmer,” he says. “And the boat has three chambers, so I have three chances if there is a puncture.”

But he doesn’t have a life jacket. We offer him money to buy one, but he refuses our help. “I used to give money to charity,” he says. “I find it difficult to take charity.” Some activists try to convince him to stay, to wait until he’s got a life jacket, until he’s got a winter wetsuit, until he gets some sea flares, until he’s got a support team who can call the coastguard if – or when – he gets into trouble. As we talk, he tells us his story.

In Syria, he’d been tortured by the regime. He shows us deep burn marks on the fingers of his right hand. “They knew I was an artist,” he explains, “so I couldn’t do my work.” He tells us how they would force him underwater for minutes at a time, but he grew up diving in the Euphrates and could hold his breath for longer. “They couldn’t take my soul,” he says, “because I was a bigger asshole than them!” He laughs – now – and we laugh too.

Living in Damascus, he’d literally looked death in the eye. “I saw the shell coming towards me,” he says. “It was like in the Matrix, you know? When the bullet ripples the air?” We nod. “It landed six metres from me, but only my face was covered in dust.” Another time, he was standing on a hill to get phone reception to call his mother and father in a different part of the city. “I heard the thump, thump of the shells,” he says. “I waited for the whistle – when you hear the whistle, then you know that you are dead.” He looks at us urgently. “I would never wish it on my worst enemy, that feeling when you hear the whistle. I listened. Then I hear the whistle. I know that I am dead.” He survived again, one lucky asshole, and left his country to find another land where he could work without fear and live without death.

But when he got to Calais, he found something else. “I used to believe that I was better than the other migrants,” he says. “I used to have respect for the police. I don’t want to run away from them, like the other migrants.” He’s proud of the fact that he’d got from Syria to France without paying the mafia or people traffickers. “I used to think I was better than the other people, but now I see that I am not. We are all the same. The police treat us all the same, with beatings and pepper spray,” he says. “That has changed me. Now I see how the activists have a hug for everyone, no matter who you are. You can be black, white, Arab, Christian, Muslim – it doesn’t matter.”

I lower my head when I hear him say this, some wash of tears in my heart. I’ve done nothing except be there; listening, giving a shit. That’s all that’s needed. Don’t underestimate your power to be there. It’s amazing how much how little is.

“I used to want to get to England, get my papers and start a normal life,” he continues. “But my experience has changed me. Now I want to get to England, get my papers and – insha’allah – come back to Calais and be an activist.” He smiles. “I want to be a pain in the ass for the Queen.”

We do manage to convince him to join the New Year’s Eve party at Galloo. He’ll be trying to cross the Channel again soon – this time with a life jacket, he promises.

What can we do now?

If you want to go to Calais, then go! Get in touch with Calais Migrant Solidarity on +33 7 53 47 51 59 or with me directly in the comments below. Tents, sleeping bags and shoes are the best things to take over there right now.

BONUS: The Daily Mail Migrant Solidarity Tour!

This is the funniest shit that has ever happened in history. The Daily Mail are kindly offering to support activists going over to Calais to help migrants. I know, right?! Hilarious. If you go to http://dailym.ai/1HnZmkE, you can get a massive discount on return ferry tickets from Dover to Calais – £1 for foot passengers, £15 for a car and four people or £17 for an overnight return for a car and four passengers. Plus you get a free bottle of wine to share with your new migrant friends!

I’m definitely going to take advantage of the immigrant-hating perversity of The Daily Mail before the offer expires on the 1st of February. Give me a shout if you want to join us!

Happy New Year!

Creative-Response, Urban Exploration and Twitter

I am being edged out of participation in a society that communicates in the language of technology. In a couple of years, I predict that I won’t be an owner of a mobile phone. Already I am receiving messages from unknown friends that my non-smartphone cannot read because they (presumably) contain HTML, a language my phone doesn’t speak. Over the next couple of years, more and more communication will happen in languages that my phone cannot interpret, as more and more people start using smartphones and start to forget that there could ever be an alternative. Well over a billion smartphones have been sold in 2014 alone and, already by 2013, more than half of all American adults owned a smartphone, with over a million Google Android devices being activated every day.

In the next couple of years, my phone will become next to useless and I will become one of those people who are whispered about at parties – He doesn’t even have a phone.

Already I miss out on a vast amount of communication that happens over proprietary systems, driven by the smartphone technology boom. The average smartphone user checks his or her phone a hundred and fifty times every day, using an average of forty-one mobile apps. I don’t blame users for this, but it drives us all into the hands of the closed communication systems that are promoted on these devices.

SMS and email are open systems. In other words, anyone can send anyone else an SMS or an email; it doesn’t matter who provides them with the service. But not just anyone can communicate through Twitter, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, Instagram or any of the other communication tools that are supposedly at our service.

None of these “tools” is like a phone book. A phone book is a collection of telephone numbers attached to names that anyone can use to contact anyone else. How quaint. If you weren’t in the phone book, however, that didn’t mean that no one could contact you and it didn’t mean that you couldn’t contact anyone else; it just meant that your number was private. Facebook, to take the most popular example, is not like this. In order to contact someone on Facebook, you have to register with Facebook. Likewise, in order for someone on Facebook to contact you, you have to be registered with Facebook. It is a predatory system; it feeds off its membership; the more time you spend on Facebook, the more sustenance you give that mode of communication.

With well over one billion users, choosing not to be on Facebook is, to a certain degree, choosing not to participate in communication with those people. Facebook has around 1.35 billion active users. WhatsApp: 600 million; Instagram: 300 million; Twitter: 284 million; Viber: 209 million. Likewise, choosing not to have a smartphone is increasingly choosing not to be able to communicate with your friends. You can’t even use WhatsApp or Viber without a smartphone. I still have no idea who is sending me those unreadable messages.

As Shoshana Zuboff says, this is an illegitimate choice, it really is. Systems that used to be open and free are being fenced off and monetised. Email is open and free; Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are not. If you use Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp, you can never communicate with me without contributing to the business model of these closed systems. There is a further risk, with the current threat to network neutrality, that a “First Class” internet will be established, excluding those like me who opt out.

What’s the problem with social media?

I concede that I’m probably in a minority who feel disgusted that Facebook are profiting from my communication with my friends; that they are mining my communications for data in order to more effectively sell products to me, my friends and family. British Telecom might have profited from my telephone calls to my friends back in the nineties, but my calls weren’t bugged, screened and fed back to me in the form of personalised advertising.

I think it’s important at this point to distinguish between the traditional way that advertising paid for “free” services and the way that companies like Google are able to provide “free” services. Cable television, for example, uses the traditional model: adverts are beamed in a fairly scatter-gun fashion at just about anyone who hasn’t bothered to switch over or get up to make a cup of tea. The advert hopes to influence your purchasing choices maybe tomorrow, maybe in a couple of weeks when you go shopping. Google, however, extracts data from you and can use that data to influence your purchasing choices directly, right now. There is a big difference.

But perhaps you feel like exchanging your data for “free” communication is a good deal. I accept that this is a price that many people are willing to pay for a “free” service. Fine, but there’s a lot more to my objection.

By using Twitter, I would not only be contributing to a business model that I fervently disagree with, I would also be shutting down options for other people. I would be adding my voice to communication that happens in exclusive, fenced off, proprietary and predatory spaces; rather than in inclusive, open and free spaces. That closed space keeps some voices out. The thought disgusts me. I don’t want to be a part of that clique.

But perhaps you feel like Twitter gives voice to more people than it excludes; certainly a lot more than are excluded by illiteracy or a military dictatorship2. Good point, but there is still more to my objection.

Twitter, it is worth pointing out, is not a democratic organisation. It is a business and will operate to extract the maximum wealth from us. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, WhatsApp, all likewise. There is no democratic oversight for these businesses, aside from government regulation. Unfortunately, these technology businesses have significant advantages over government regulatory bodies, namely much greater financial, computational and intellectual resources. More sinisterly, they are fulfilling a surveillance role for our more secretive governmental bodies that will always mean that regulatory bodies are fighting with one hand tied behind their back. But what, you might ask, is wrong with this hobbled regulation?

Well, as Shoshana demonstrated, perhaps the greatest consequence of the rise of these exclusive, fenced off, predatory, proprietary technology companies is the threat of the total erosion of democracy. As Shoshana explained, Google has pioneered a new economic logic: the company needs us as neither employees nor customers. If Shoshana is correct and democracy did indeed grow from the need for capital to employ labour, then what will become of democracy if the world is filled with companies like Google, vastly profitable, with a minuscule workforce? Google is the oligarchy of the internet age. Their only oversight is their “corporate mantra”: Don’t be evil4. Their clemency is extended on a whim. With annual profits of twelve billion dollars, a highly educated workforce with development interests including artificial intelligence and drone technology and a user base of one billion people, great evil is certainly within their power.

Beneath this threat lies the real problem: Google, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and all the rest make good products. That is the real problem, as Micah Lee identified. Because these products are so good, we are choosing this closed future for ourselves without really thinking through the undemocratic consequences of what Shoshana calls “surveillance capitalism”. And, as more and more people choose this future, it becomes harder and harder for people like me to choose any alternative. We either go along with the masses or we refuse to participate in mass society. Can you see the dangers inherent in these “choices” now? Sorry to employ the meretricious appeal to fascism, but the Germans chose Hitler.

Those without smartphones or a Facebook account already feel like an excluded underclass. Without a revolution in communication, it will only get worse.

How can we operate in this closing world?

Bradley Garrett is famous for taking a scenic photograph from the top of the Shard, Europe’s tallest building, recently erected on London’s riverside with buckets of Qatari money. The shot is famous primarily because the Shard wasn’t quite finished yet, it certainly wasn’t open to the general public and he was seventy-six stories up in the midnight air, peering over a ledge.

For obvious reasons, that photograph, and hundreds of others taken in equally adrenalin-pumping circumstances, became exceedingly popular on social media. I believe the term is “viral”. Popularity on social media led to a surge of interest from the mainstream media and suddenly Bradley’s night sport (and PhD research subject) of “urban exploring” was blown into the limelight. What Bradley was doing was not only borderline illegal, but it was also a great insult to the powers that would try to control our movements in the city. Bradley challenged the physical closed space in a spectacular, creative fashion that brought awareness of the enclosure to people who would otherwise have just gone on about their day. Creative-response.

I’m sharing this story because Bradley’s experiences with academia, social media and mainstream media can teach us something about how to get our message heard and change people’s perceptions of their world; precisely what we try to do at Elevate. “The only way to forge broader coalitions and get people talking about the politics of closed space and the control of narratives over our histories,” Bradley writes, “is to use the same techno-cultural media circuitry that is constantly entangling and distracting everyone.”

In other words: Never mind the threat to democracy, get a Twitter account.

Bradley, however, has one major caveat. “The danger here,” he says, “is that if you try to change the system from the inside, often what becomes changed is you.” Participating in a social media that encourages constant changing fashions, that advertises luxury goods, exotic holidays and foreign brides, will have a detrimental effect on your health and happiness.

Interestingly, given the dubious legality of his activities, Bradley is more afraid of the media than of the police. “While the authorities have largely failed to stop us,” he says, “the media is still working diligently to de-tooth urban exploration by buying us out.” Appropriately enough for a man used to evading the British Transport Police while running the Underground, Bradley has an escape route for the media as well. “Now that we have used their channels to broadcast our messages,” he explains, “it’s important that we slip the net and re-form as something equally inspiring and hard to pin down, and then reform again from another angle.”

Those words capture the essence of Antonino D’Ambrosio’s creative-response and his exhortation to be “flexible and fluid”. They could also be the beginnings of a battle strategy for using social media in the spirit of revolution.

1. Be hard to pin down. Do not give the social media corporations your life and livelihood; use an alias if you wish, lie to them.

2. Be inspiring. It is the message you communicate to us that is important, not the accumulation of surveillance data on social media servers. Use and abuse them to broadcast your message, not theirs. But you must make that message inspiring. It must be creative-response; it must speak with passion and with compassion. If it does not, then leave Twitter and keep working until you have something to say.

3. When your broadcast is over, burn your accounts without nostalgia or mercy. Be a citizen, not a “consumer”.

And, for pity’s sake, save your brainspace and use an ad-blocker.

The ideas contained herein are taken from my work with the Elevate Festival. The book of the festival is available now in paperback from lulu.com. It’ll be arriving before Christmas for download…

Me interviewed by Documentally

Last week at Elevate, I had the honour of being interviewed by Christian Payne, AKA Documentally. In the interview, we talk about the Alphasmart Neo, why I started writing, travel, Calais and the superiority of an analogue book.

I can also recommend his many other interviews at Elevate, with luminaries such as Antonino D’Ambrosio and Elf Pavlik. I’m honoured to be in such company!

listen to ‘David Charles on writing and the nourishment of a long read’ on audioBoom

Shoshana Zuboff: Reality is the Next Big Thing

I’ve been blogging from the Elevate Festival in Austria this week. Here’s a little something from yesterday…

Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School professor, is beamed into Forum Stadtpark from the US over a live videostream. She sits in a leather padded chair in a wood panelled study decorated in luxuriant high taste. The scene could be straight from a 1930s Hollywood film set, if it weren’t for the microphone on the desk in front of her and the black dog who wags back and forth in the background.

If her taste in décor is embedded in the past, her taste in the politics of business couldn’t be more futuristic. This post is a summary of her initial statement, which kicked off Saturday afternoon’s panel ‘Reality is the Next Big Thing’. Continue reading Shoshana Zuboff: Reality is the Next Big Thing

Think Hope, Think Crisis

“Hope explodes, volcanically, with rage.” It just so happens that John Holloway lives next door to a volcano in Puebla, Mexico, and can contemplate the aptness of the metaphor every day. “Revolutions for me are volcanic,” he says, “the burning lava is always just beneath the surface.”

John was in Forum Stadtpark early on Saturday morning, sharing with a packed room his ideas about hope and crisis. I only have time here to share a tiny proportion of what he said, but the ideas fell like the Autumn rain outside.

John started by recalling recent expressions of popular revolution and rage, in Athens 2008, Oacaxa 2006, Istanbul 2012, Cairo 2011, Rio and Sao Paulo 2013. “Explosions of anger are at the same time explosions of hope,” he says. “People go out on the street and break windows because they actually believe things can be different. These expressions of hope are expressed, not in the long term building up of the Party, but in these volcanic expressions of rage.”

But there is a warning in the wind: Greece.

Greece has suffered the most terrible consequences of the crisis of capitalism, but at the same time it has the most militant anti-capitalist tradition in Europe. In Greece over the past few years, there has been action after action, protest after protest, against the imposition of austerity. And it hasn’t made the slightest difference to the imposition of capitalist aggression on the people.

“Greece is a clash of hope on the one hand and the reality of crisis on the other,” John says. “Crisis hits struggle on the head and knocks it down. And, if that is the case, how on earth do we think about revolution? How on earth do we think about hope? How on earth do we think about radical change?”

“We need to re-learn hope, we need to think rage into hope,” John says. “It doesn’t make any sense to say you shouldn’t be angry – of course we should be angry!” But, starting from this rage, how do we think this rage into hope? For John, the answer comes from the Zapatista concept of digna rabia, dignified rage.

John returns to the inspiration for his opening speech: Ernst Bloch and his book ‘The Principle of Hope’. Bloch says that our subjective hope has to find an echo within the world itself. In other words, the world has to respond to our hope – or, in John’s words, “We have to find the hopeability of the world.”

“Across the world, we’re getting the sense that we’re banging our heads against the wall and we’re getting no response.” For example, the millions-strong global anti-war demonstrations in 2003 drew zero response from governments, who went ahead with the invasion of Iraq. This is an enormous challenge for hope and our struggle. “When governments are so distant from society that there is no response there at all, how do we think about the hopeability of the world?” The question is open and increasingly urgent: How do we think about the possibility of change in the world?

During the rest of the workshop, John went on to discuss hope and historicity, crisis, debt and commonising – but your humble writer has not the space to share more! You’ll have to find John himself or wait for the Elevate 2014 book, where I’ll be able to explore John’s ideas in much more depth.

What the Woop Woop is Creative Response?

Antonino d’Ambrosio grew up in Philadelphia during the Reagan years; not a politically auspicious start for the son of a immigrant bricklayer, you might think. Then, all at once, Antonino discovered the mysteries of punk, rap, graffiti and the skateboard. And, as he transformed his city walls into canvasses and his sidewalks into skateparks, he realised that another world was possible.

These art forms, which grew up in the free space between public and private, permitted and prohibited, Antonino calls “creative response”.

The rest of this evening’s panel contributed their ideas of what creative response means to them as artists. For Ursula Rucker, a US spoken word artist, “creative response is everything I do. It’s why I’m sitting here, why I don’t give up.”

Ksenia Ermoshina’s creative musical response is with experimental noise. “Noise is somehow a metaphor for everyone who is marginal – for us, here,” she says with gathering excitement. “We are kind of noise for global corporations. Let’s be noisy, let’s become noisy and break into the frequencies of this culture.” On cue, the crowd breaks into applause, laughter, whooping.

“Creative response is saying aloud the things that are on your mind,” says Deanne Rodger, a British spoken word artist. “The things that frustrate me, that don’t make sense to me, make me feel small, marginalised. Creative response is an exploration of the self.”

For Austrian electronic musician IZC, creative response is not so simple. “For me, my music is not always a conscious direct response to something I read or saw – but it’s in there. It takes some detours and it takes some time, but it’s in there.”

And, of course, as Antonino says, the Elevate Fesitval itself is a creative response: electronic music and visual arts side by side with intense political discussions. Dom Im Berg, the heart of the festival, is a cave that was hollowed out by slaves and is now transformed into a place for all to come and celebrate our common struggles.

“We all have the talent to creatively respond,” Antonino says, in conclusion. “Maybe not as a painter or a novelist, but as a citizen of the world. That’s very important.”

For a fuller exploration of creative response and Antonino’s ear-popping soul-dropping film, “Let Fury Have the Hour”, you’ll just have to wait for the book of Elevate 2014!

Elevate Festival Opening Speech: John Holloway

‘My opening speech has a title. The title is: Opening Speech.’ John Holloway laughs with our laughter, stepping away from the Elevate podium and swiping at the air in front of him, as if he’s just thrown a frisbee. But the title is no whimsy.

Nor is his decision to speak in German. ‘Mainly it’s a protest against Englishification,’ he explains. ‘Not from a nationalistic point of view, but because of the social narrowness that is brought along with this Englishification.’

(Half a dozen sentences into the festival and already my spell-checker is choking on a new word. I love Elevate.)

Balancing the levity of the laughter, John justifies his carefully-chosen title: ‘A speech that opens is just what we need in this world, a world that is closing.’ He peers hopefully out at his three hundred friends in the Dom im Berg audience, out at his unknown audiences on Austrian national television, on the internet livestream and in smartphones hashtagging on international social networks. ‘Maybe this is the speech that opens the festival that opens the world.’

For John, the cause of the closure is clear. ‘A certain logic is being imposed on all aspects of life,’ he says. ‘The logic of money, the logic of profit, the logic of closure.’

‘In the countryside, this logic tells us that you can’t expect to live as your parents did, growing only the food that you need to survive. To survive under this new logic, you must farm mass production or you must make way for motorways, for dams, for mines. Or even better – why don’t you just disappear altogether? Millions of people are forced off the land, to move into the world’s slums.’

‘In the cities, the logic of money tells us that you can’t do what you want with your life. You must earn a living and that means you must do something that increases profits; that increases the power of the wealthy. And this is what is happening: an obscene concentration of wealth across the world; a huge growth in the power of the wealthy, in the power of money.’

‘If you do not want to follow the rule of money, if you want to do something else with your life, you are either mad or a criminal and should certainly be locked up. The dynamics of money are shattering the hopes and dreams of youth; dreams that are broken on the reality of unemployment. Or, often worse, the reality of employment!’ The laughter this time is not warm, it is edged with cold reality.

‘It is not just that we live in a world of closure, but the enclosure is getting tighter all the time. Money cannot stand still. The rule of capital is faster, faster, faster. And this rule means out of the way to the people who are too slow. Out of the way with the people who are holding things up. Out of the way with the people who don’t speak English. Out of the way with the protesters, into the prisons, into the mass graves. Out of the way with the forty-three students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico who disappeared a month ago.’

John pivots his speech to optimism, inspired by the words of Ernst Bloch, the author of ‘The Principle of Hope’, a book written in exile from the despair of Nazi Germany. John argues, like Bloch, that our future depends on hope – not on a silly, blind hope that things will just “turn out right” – but a hope founded and grounded in practice.

In Bloch’s day, hope was still tied to the Party, to winning control of the state. ‘But now the party is over,’ John says, waving encouragement to the flickers of laughter for his pun. The room catches and thrills with three hundred rhythmic clappings. He thanks us: ‘After the depression, this is what I needed!’ John laughs, before delivering more depression. ‘Hope lies not in building a party, not in winning control of the state, because the state is an institution integrated into capitalism and cannot be used to overcome it.’

But if we have not Bloch’s hope, what hope do we have? John essays an answer.

‘Hope lies now in the millions and millions of us who say: No, no. We will not accept, we will not accept your destruction of the world and your guns and your wars. No, not any longer. We will not accept the rule of the rich, the rule of money. Not any longer.’

‘We shall do things in a different way and connect to one another in a different way. We do not want your totality of death and we do not want any totality. We saw in the last century what happens when one totality is replaced by another and now we say no.’

‘We break away from the totality of capital death in a million different ways. We commonise. We force cracks in the system. We fight for our earth, the earth of people and other forms of life, before the capitalist system destroys it completely. We fight to open a gap between the future of capitalism, which can only be death, and the future of humanity, which can still be life.’

John takes a breath. Then adds, ‘If it is not too late already.’

‘Ernst Bloch pinned hope to the power of the “not yet”, the power of that world that does not yet exist and therefore exists “not yet”: in our refusals, in our dreams, in our pushing against capitalism. We have to learn to listen to the leaders of this world that does not yet exist and sing their songs with our full voices.’

John quotes Arundhati Roy’s beautiful expression of Bloch’s same idea: “Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

‘Thus, in my opening speech, I want to open this world. My wish for the festival is that it will be an Opening Festival. That it sings the songs of the world that has not been born yet, that it sings these songs as loudly and as beautifully as possible. Thank you.’

The rising of this opening audience to this opening speech for this opening festival gives me a sniff of optimism that Elevate 2014 will jam a rubber sole against the slamming doors, hurl a tonne of dynamite at the thickening walls and prise a common crowbar into the cracks of capitalism.

Let’s make it happen.

John Holloway is a Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades in the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He has published widely on Marxist theory, on the Zapatista movement and on the new forms of anti-capitalist struggle.

You can read all of my blogging from Elevate on these pages – or on the much prettier Elevate site.

Calais Migrant Factgasm: Episode 1

Welcome to the first edition of Calais Migrant Factgasm, in which I quite metaphorically round up every piece of internet about the Calais migrants and incarcerate it in the detention centre of my blog.

Featuring news from the past week and analysis of Eritrean migration vs big business and the lorry driver protest organised for this coming Saturday. Enjoy.

News in Brief

Monday, 15th of September: Ashford motorhome owner Teresa Tyrer discovers Calais migrant underneath vehicle

“He’s now sitting on our lawn having a picnic. He’s not shown any need to get up and walk. You’ve got to feel sorry for him. He’s only young and it’s just a shame they are prepared to do things that are so dangerous.”

Someone gave the migrant a sandwich, before calling the police. This mild act of human compassion caused a certain amount of internet hatred, including this from Lrg8:

Should of had a knuckle sandwich for doing that. GO HOME!! instead of sponging off of us

Home got bombed, honey, and I’m not sure who’s sponging off who, to be honest. Have Britain been “sponging off” Iraqi oil for the past century? Are Britain “sponging off” Eritrean gold mines? Meanwhile, a person calling themselves change says:

“I don’t know if its true but was told that they have been discovered coming in on lorries pretending to be mud flaps.”

Sneaky illegal immigrants coming over here, taking our… Oh wait. It’s a mud flap. Sneaky mud flaps coming over here… (Credit: Trucking Accessories)
Friday night, 19th of September: Egyptian squat on Avenue Blériot attacked by four youths with Molotov cocktails

The Egyptian Squat on Avenue Blériot. (Credit:La Voix du Nord)

One of the squatters got a busted leg. The police tried to catch the youths, but they got away. I think it’s safe to say that these youths were fascists. Like parasites, wherever there are migrants, there are fascists who come to prey on them.

Why? Boredom combined with empathy-erosion, probably. Chucking a Molotov cocktail and then running a car chase with the cops must be pretty exciting. And these youths just can’t see that the problems faced by the migrants are exactly the same as the problems they face: no jobs, no money, boredom and a sense that their life is going nowhere.

Saturday morning, 20th of September: Ten migrants – including a little baby – discovered in the port of Calais, hiding in a lorry bound for the UK

A baby. The baby was taken to hospital, the other nine were taken for questioning, detention and perhaps deportation. A baby.

Who’s to blame? The migrant parents for being so irresponsible? The French authorities for not caring for the innocent? The British authorities for closing the border to the innocent? The world order that creates political situations and conflicts in which ordinary people with families feel they have to flee their homes in order to build a better life for their children? Hmm.

Saturday, 20th of September: Home secretary Theresa May and her French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve agree a deal for Britain to give £12,000,000 to help tackle ‘illegal immigration’ from Calais

“This money will be used to construct robust fences and to bolster security at the parking area of the port, which migrants use as a staging post for efforts to cross the Channel.”

Because that will solve the problem of war, poverty and starvation in Eritrea, Sudan and Afghanistan, won’t it?

Migrants in Calais banned from playing football

Every Sunday for the last two years, migrants and their friends have enjoyed a game of football in a park in Calais. Now, the mayor is going to court to stop them, sending in the police and bailiffs. If I was more of a conspiracy theorist, I’d think this was a Machiavellian move on the part of the mayor. If the migrants don’t take out their frustrations by kicking a ball around a park, then how will they? Riots?

Threat to public safety. No shin pads either. (Credit:La Voix du Nord)
Monday morning, 22nd of September: The Express rounds up more stories of migrants arriving in the UK

“Traffic on the M25 came to a standstill as the 20 people, who are believed to be Ethiopian, got out of a lorry as it was driving between Chertsey and the junction with the M3 in Surrey at about 8.50 this morning.” … “A 35-year-old Sudanese man was found hiding underneath a coach bringing children from Perry Beeches Academy, Birmingham, back from a trip to France.”

Tuesday, 23rd of September: La Voix du Nord reports a “special mission” to Calais

“Two senior officials will be on a special mission to Calais on Wednesday for three days. Appointed in late August by the Minister of the Interior, they have seven months to analyse the situation of migrants in the Calais and propose solutions.”

The mission will be based in Paris. They have seven months to work on this and they’re spending an entire three days in Calais, before squirrelling back to their ivory towers. Baffling.

And, finally…

From Stormfront.org (“Voice of the new embattled White minority!”) comes this comment by natsoci (harmless enough alias, don’t you think?) on an article about the migrants in Calais:

“Take them to the med, push them in, and tell them if they can make it here by swim-power alone then we’ll personally give them the passports.”

If only that were true, I bet thousands would try it. And succeed. Many of these people have already survived torture, bombings, slavery, crossing the Saharan desert, crossing the Mediterranean in sinking ships, four different kinds of Mafia and several Italian and French prison cells. They’re not going to be intimidated by a bit of swimming OR casual fascism on an internet message board.

Newsatrolysis Feature: Eritrean Migration vs Big Business

“We are human beings”: The treatment of immigrants in Calais, France by Petros Tesfagiorgis. Published on the 22nd of September, on Eritrean news network Asmarino.

The irony is while Europeans are complaining of the number of refugees entering Europe, they don’t hesitate to encourage their private companies to do business with the repressive regimes in Africa who are the underlining causes of flight of refugees. The West is gaining far more lucrative profits from the third worlds than they give back in terms of aid and giving sanctuary for refugees.

For example the British Government has encouraged a number of mining companies to invest in Eritrea and a visit was recently led by a British Government official to facilitate contracts. A mining company named London Africa Ltd has recently been granted a license covering over 1500 square kilometres of Eritrea. They have joined companies like Sunridge Gold Corporation and Bisha Mining Shared Co (BMSC). This is a real Gold rush like “El Dorado” in contrast to the asylum seekers desperately seeking safety in European countries.

What is sad is that many of these companies are using forced labour to extract the ore…

Just a brief insight into the nuances of a migration that is usually presented (by government and media) as lazy scroungers running away from their homes to sponge off the beneficent welfare state of Britain. This simplistic narrative conveniently hides our role and the roles of our governments and our government-supported businesses in the creation of these desperate migrations.

The BIG Report: The Lorry-drivers’ Perspective.

Tuesday, 23rd of September, Port of Dover blockade on Saturday to stop illegal migrants entering Kent could be illegal

“Lorry drivers, whose vehicles come under siege by foreign nationals desperate to reach Kent, are being slapped with fines of £2,000 per immigrant found in their vehicles – despite their efforts to stop them stowing away in their trucks.”

That is proper unfair, pushing the blame for the conflicts of the political classes onto a different set of the innocent working class. Divide and rule.

Wednesday, 24th of September, BBC: Lorry driver tells of risks of driving through Calais (Video).

Hmm. Interesting. I can empathise with these lorry drivers, who are just trying to do their jobs without killing anyone or getting fined.

Wednesday, 24th of September, Express and Star: Lorry drivers are being treated as “scapegoats” and penalised unfairly as the illegal migrant crisis worsens.

This features comments from Natalie Chapman, of the Freight Transport Association (FTA):

“It’s about managing EU borders better. A lot of migrants are coming through places like the Italian island of Lampedusa. We need to help those who are dealing with the initial influx of migrants who are coming through the Mediterranean. The Government needs to be protecting the drivers, not penalising them with fines.”

Is it about managing EU borders better? Or is it about addressing the causes of these migrations? But then we might not have such cheap oil, we might not have such cheap consumables and we might not have such pliable markets for our exports. Tricky one.

Protest organised in Dover for 1pm this Saturday (27th of September)

According to the “Support the Calais to Dover truckers” Facebook Group, the reasons to attend the demonstration are:

To stop a driver being injured or worse.
To stop Isis terrorists from re entering this country.
To stop Ebola being transported into this country.
To stop unchecked criminals from entering this country.
To stop rapists and child molester’s into this country.
To stop drivers being fined for clandestines being on their trucks.
To show the government your not happy about uncontrolled immigration.
To show the government your not happy being in the European union and it ruling our country with tin pot human rights laws.

NB: I’ve left the grammar exactly as the original writer intended. I think it’s funnier that way.
NBB: It’s not that funny.

Worth closer inspection…

The Facebook group has been described as having links to far-right groups in the UK and are supported by Sauvons Calais (Save Calais), a French collective notorious for their “war against immigration and pro-migrant associations”. A counter-protest by leftie groups has also been organised… Can’t see this going badly at all, can you? Divide and rule.

* Please note: Although some of this blog post might smell funny, this is NOT a parody. This is happening, here, there and all over the world, right now, a witch’s brew of UK and EU border and foreign policies. It’s really easy to stand in solidarity with other humans, though. Pop over to Calais and see for yourself. They do really good and cheap cheese there too. Win-Win.

Essential Security Feature When Travelling

Last week, I went to a story-telling night in Brixton. I wasn’t expecting it to be open mic. I also wasn’t expecting for my two friends to stand up and tell a story. But least of all was I expecting that, ten minutes later, I’d be standing up in front of fifty strange faces telling a story about – well, about this:

https://davidcharles.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/David.mp3?_=1

Read more about my little adventures cycling to the Sahara here.

P.S. I have no idea why the Tunisian mafia had Somerset accents.

David Charles: English Arms Dealer

“Having another language is like having a gun.”

So said one of my English students. And, I realised, he’s right.

There are two ways of persuading people of your point of view: a firearm or rhetoric.

Credit: Keary O.
Credit: Dimitris Papazimouris



By this logic, as an English teacher, I am basically an arms dealer; an English arms dealer. I provide students with the weapons they need to get what they want in English.

This concept, of course, has a sinister side to it. Not everyone wants to learn a language to communicate in peace and harmony with the native speakers of that language. The best language school in the world? Arguably the United States Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey. And they don’t teach Arabic so that they can read كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة‎ One Thousand and One Nights…

But, on balance, I’d rather be selling words than arms because at least words can be used for peace.

Do We Need Borders?

You might have seen some stories in the news recently about illegal immigrants trying to get into the UK. I recently spent some time in Calais, teaching English and generally hanging out with the wannabe immigrants there. I was staying with about sixty people in a squat originally set up by an activist group called No Borders, whose aim, you won’t be surprised to hear, is the dismantling of all national borders.

One migrant, who grew up in London, but is illegal there and had recently been deported, asked me: “What’s with all this No Borders stuff? Why do you bother? It’s obviously not working.”

It’s a good question, until you see that it’s loaded. You might as well ask why the government bothers with borders, because they’re obviously not working either.

A barricade in Calais set up to defend against border police.

Borders aren’t working

Borders aren’t working for the hundreds of people killed every year trying to break into Fortress Europe, fleeing civil conflicts frequently armed by UK arms dealers. They’re not working either for the thousands of lives suspended in the limbo of Calais and places like Calais. These are human lives we have branded illegal and forbidden from working, forbidden from rebuilding their shattered dreams and contributing to their new society. Because, like it or not, these people aren’t going anywhere; they’ve got nowhere to go.

The borders are not working, you could also argue, for the people they are supposedly designed to protect. How are British jobs safeguarded by borders, when a transnational, borderless corporation like Amazon can suck our small businesses into the void, while contributing next to nothing to our society? How are British lives safeguarded by borders, when borderless ideologies – religion, politics – can twist minds and precipitate outrageous acts of violence from within?

In this article, I will ask: Do we even need borders?

The sign leading to the border at the port of Calais.

Why do we have national borders?

National borders really took off after the First and Second World Wars. They evolved to deal with a very specific problem: How can we divide nation states? You need borders.

Before the World Wars, there were only a scattering of recognised nation states – France, the United Kingdom, Germany and so forth – the rest of the world was divided among those nation states according to Empire. While the First World War was essentially the violent collapse of the imperial world order, the Second World War was the battle to decide what system would fill the void – nation states – and where the borders would be drawn.

From the end of the Second World War, for reasons of geopolitical organisation, every corner of the earth had to have a sovereign master, demarcated by borders from its neighbour. New nation states appeared overnight, defined only by lines drawn on a map. Where on earth was Palestine, where Israel? Where was India, where Pakistan? They were all invented and the borders often arbitrarily drawn with indelible marker by fallible administrators thousands of miles away.

My point: National borders were not and are not the “natural” way of breaking up territory. They were arbitrary servants to the invented political idea of the nation state. We only need borders because we have nation states.

The Channel: The final frontier of the Schengen Zone.

What is a nation state?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a nation state is:

An independent political state formed from a people who share a common national identity (historically, culturally, or ethnically).

I’m sure you can already see the problems we might run into if, by any chance, those unlucky administrators happened to draw borders in inauspicious places (i.e. almost anywhere).

To give you a guide of how ludicrous the idea is that a state-sized territory would have this mythical common national identity: at the time of the French revolution only half the population of France spoke any French at all. Some national identity, eh! France has taken hundreds of years to evolve a national identity. It’s too much to go into detail here about whether it was worth it or not.

My point: Nation states are not the “natural” way of organising ourselves politically and the global creation of nation states after the Second World War has been nothing less than catastrophic. If we didn’t have nation states, we wouldn’t need borders.

Activists raise a sign: “We Want Freedom”.

What’s the problem with nation states and their fixed borders?

Basically, if arbitrary borders don’t fit perfectly with mythical national groupings, then we’ve got trouble.

Entire populations were uprooted and marched a thousand miles, as between India and Pakistan, as earlier between Greece and Turkey. In other places, the fall out was not nearly so “civilised” as population exchange. Rwanda, Palestine, Israel, Armenia, Turkey, Iran, Iraq – scarcely a single new nation state survived birth without bloodshed.

You could confidently argue that this calamitous squeezing of round pegs into square borders is the original cause of the continuing civil wars in Sudan, in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya. Even the civil conflicts between privileged and non-privileged – in South Africa, in Brazil, in the United States – could be said to be overspill from the decision that each arbitrary parcel of land shall have a sovereign and centralised supreme government, regardless of history, culture and ethnicity.

“Everything is improbable, nothing is impossible.”

But borders are a good thing!

Borders have been nothing more than an attempt at a solution to a problem of politics. That problem was how best to manage our human affairs in an increasingly connected world – remember that, in a generation, wars went from cavalry charges between aristocrats to atomic weapons dropped by flying machines. That’s a radical shift in the scale of geopolitics and required a radical new way of organising ourselves.

You could argue that borders have been a decent solution to that problem. For many, particularly those in the west, the world has effectively been at peace since the Second World War. A strange thing to say, but I am not completely naïve. Considering how that conflict ended, with the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, things could be much worse than they are.

But my point remains: There is no natural law that commands we live with borders. For most of human history, we didn’t have or need borders.

“No one is illegal. We are all equal.”

So do we need borders?

In a world where corporations and ideologies are borderless, are national borders, where we can restrict only the movement of people and goods, still the best solution?

I’ll let you make your mind up. Ultimately, whatever your viewpoint, we’re on the same side. This is a race to find a solution to a problem of politics. Perhaps the governments of nation states will find a solution that works for everyone. Or perhaps the solution will come from elsewhere, from groups like No Borders.

But who cares where the solution comes from? The important thing is that we try to find one, because what we have now isn’t working.

A manhole cover announces the presence of No Borders.

The Literary Consultancy Manuscript Assessment Review

I know some of you are writers or would like to become writers, whatever that means. One of the problems with writing is that it’s almost entirely subjective. I say almost because there comes a point when the mass of subjectivity is so overwhelming as to become objective. Subjectively, I wasn’t entertained by the first dozen pages of the Harry Potter fiasco. 450 million book sales tells me I’m wrong. Objectively, Harry Potter and his minions are the very definition of excellent writing, writing that captures and holds an audience.

The only problem with this form of objectivity is that it requires a mass, a horde, of subjects. And this horde is precisely what the becoming writer does not, by definition, have. So we have to seek out other subjectivities, expert subjectivities, in the hope that they add up to something like a stab at objectivity.

(I should note that publishers have this exact same problem. Their decision on the worth of a new submission is taken on the basis of a dozen subjective opinions. That’s nowhere near good enough to match the objective opinion of the mass audience out there. Hence why many, many books fail, despite getting the seal of approval from an expert publisher.)

But to get back to the becoming writer. After friends and family, one of the places we can turn for a stab at objectivity is a manuscript assessment service, like The Literary Consultancy. In the spirit of scientific enquiry, I handed over my 257 page manuscript, along with a cheque for £449.75. And I held my breath.

Now, bearing in mind that I’ve scarcely earned £449.75 from my writing ever, that’s an awful lot of money to spend. Why did I do it? Because I had to know. The testimonials from writers who had used the service were glowing. I had to know if The Literary Consultancy could sprinkle the same gold dust on my manuscript as they had on Bruno Cassidy’s. “I can honestly say,” Bruce gushes, “that I received more engaged and positive criticism from him on this story than at any time during a two year part time Creative Writing MA.” I suppose £449.75 is a small price to pay in comparison to funding a two year part time Creative Writing MA.

I waited six weeks for the report. It arrived precisely on time, straight into my email inbox.

It was a touch over ten pages long, as promised – but some of those pages were not filled. It was double spaced. The whole thing totalled 3643 words, each one costing twelve pence. My first thought, on reading, was Have I wasted half a grand on this? I felt blood rush to my cheeks. I closed the email and forgot about it for a week.

After I got back from Calais, I printed the whole thing out and re-read it, with a pen in my hand. There must be some treasure to be found between these pricey pages. It was written by a man who had published books. He had won Wales Book of the Year. The Independent on Sunday had even called his most recent travel book “thorough”. So I dug deep down into his report, determined to uncover the treasure.

NB: From this point onwards, non-serious writers may get bored. Sorry. This isn’t really written for you. For the serious writer, wondering if it’s time to shell out for professional objectivity, I hope you find this report summary useful.

Approach (0.25 pages)

This was a short précis of my story, useful to ensure that he got the gist of what I was trying to do. He did. Phew.

Where am I coming from as a critic? (0.25 pages)

A short biography of the critic, establishing his bone fides as both a writer and a traveller. This made me feel more comfortable that he was a suitable critic for my book. I should say that The Literary Consultancy had given me a choice of two critics, so I had already done some research on the man. This put me at ease.

Opening Remarks (1 page)

This section addressed my cover letter and synopsis, as well as the title and the fact that I look young in my photograph. On the plus side, the manuscript was well laid out and “very professional”. Neither of us liked the title and he suggested a couple of alternatives.

Concept (0.5 pages)

This section placed the manuscript within the wider world of publishing. This is where the central problem with the manuscript was first addressed: “you have to offer something distinctive in delivering the story, to make it a commercially marketable book”. Storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

Technique (1 page)

General comments on style and structure. I have a “breezy no-nonsense prose style”, combined with a very good ear for speech. I’m particularly proud that he says: “There were no significant passages where my interest flagged.” Now there’s a review for the front cover! However, he is right when he says that there is precious little description of landscape and culture in the book. That is a weakness.

The Narrative (3 pages)

This is the meat of the report. Here he gets into more detail about the manuscript, its achievements and its failings. He addresses story-telling style, dialogue, characterisation, use of detail and description. He gives advice on how I could increase the reader’s emotional involvement and interest, through use of more encounters and personal reflection. He even raised the possibility of importing characters from elsewhere, à la Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin… By my honour!

Details (0.5 pages)

This addressed half a dozen typos, factual inaccuracies and general puzzlements. He missed several that I’ve later caught, but this wasn’t supposed to be a proof-reading.

Conclusions (2.5 pages)

Here he tackles the root problem of the manuscript and offers ideas for its development. The question is: “Will your book force its way to the front of the queue?” His answer is no, despite enjoying the story and seeing that I have the skills to write a publishable book. The manuscript as it stands is “a little short of rounded interest”. He urges me to “be more ambitious”, believing that I have “the potential to write at a higher level”. He finishes with a reading list of published books that could hand me the key to this higher plane.

Overall, I would say that the Literary Consultancy report told me nothing of the manuscript that I hadn’t already suspected myself. But I think that is a good sign: it would have been terrible if he’d hated all the parts that I thought were brilliant and vice versa. It shows, at least, that I have an honest eye for my own work.

Where the report hides its genius is in how it has inspired me to go back to the manuscript and improve it. That is what I have paid for, not the words of the report, but the encouragement. That encouragement, from an independent, experienced writer is invaluable.

I have since read and re-read the critic’s words many times and they have been an invaluable guide in my most recent edit of the book. I feel now that I have the thematic structure of a richer dish. The light shone by the report has improved my writing.

Was The Literary Consultancy worth £449.75?

In short: Yes.

Of course, I couldn’t afford to pay this every time I write a book, but perhaps I won’t have to. The report confirmed my suspicions of my literary weaknesses and affirmed the skills I do have as a writer, so perhaps all I will need next time is more confidence in myself.

HELP! Cycling Around Britain Book Title Poll

As you may know, I have recently “finished” my book about cycling 4,110 miles around Britain. The only problem is that I haven’t got a title for it yet. And that’s where YOU come in!

Hopefully you’ve read a bit about the book, but in case you haven’t – it’s a book about cycling that is more about lost love and finding myself again after the death of my grandmother. It was she who inspired me to go on this journey, with the words: “Do it while you can.”

So please give us two seconds of your time and click on as many of the titles below as grab your interest.

[poll id=”2″]

I’ll probably slap in a sub-title as well, probably something like “Four Thousand Miles Cycling Around Britain”.

If you can come up with anything better (I know you can!), then please post them in the comments. You’re the best.

Most Living and the Meaning of Life: Sailing 3,500 Miles for Syria

Most Living at its Most: Simon and Maria embark on their journey of 3,500 miles.

On Saturday the 12th of July, Simon Moore and Maria Gallastegui stepped aboard ‘Rumi’, the sixteen-foot Wayfarer dinghy that they hope will carry them 3,500 miles by sea, from London to Lebanon.

A few hours after seeing them off with a pile of home-baked flapjacks, I joined a thousand other cyclists on a night-long joyride from London Fields to Dunwich, 114 miles away on the Suffolk seashore.

Two journeys: one political, one pointless. Both high on exertion, both involving the sea, both journeys into the unknown, testing our spirit and endurance. But the question is Why?

Why do we do these things?

Simon and Maria are sailing in solidarity with the people of Syria, hoping to raise awareness (and, incidentally, money) for the disastrous humanitarian crisis that is forgotten in yesterday’s newspaper headlines.

The Dunwich Dynamo, as it’s known, had no such charitable purpose. It was a last-minute decision to do something stupid.

But neither of those responses really answer the question. Why do we do these things?

There are a thousand ways that Simon and Maria could raise awareness (and, incidentally, money) for the plight of Syrians. So why this way? Why risk their lives doings something that has a high probability of failure and that will likely be forgotten the moment they leave?

There are a thousand ways that I could have spent my Saturday night. So why this way? Why risk my knees doing something that will only hurt and leave me sleep deprived for a week?

It is the purpose of this article to find a better answer this question of why.

Saturday Night Most Living: Halfway through the Dunwich Dynamo 114 mile night cycle from London to the sea.

Albert Camus and The Reason We Don’t Commit Suicide

Albert Camus was, in my opinion, the most successful of the French existentialist authors of the mid-twentieth century (he’d hate me for calling him an existentialist, but that is how he is remembered…). His philosophy, however flawed, at least made a stab at giving us practical answers to the problem of existence. And his works of fiction are streets ahead of Sartre.

Existentialism is most frequently diluted in our collective memories to become a particularly French form of nihilism (he’d hate me even more for associating him with nihilism!). If people make a distinction between the two philosophical schools, it’s mostly by sticking a Gaullois between their lips and shrugging their shoulders. And, unfortunately, nihilism is seen as a highly negative way of viewing existence: there is no purpose to life, existence is pointless, so why bother?

But Camus himself, in the first lines of The Myth of Sisyphus, asked this very question.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

In other words: Why, if there is no purpose to life, do we not just go and kill ourselves? His response, teased out over the course of a hundred pages, is the concept of ‘most living’.

Best Living versus Most Living

The existentialist idea that life is ‘absurd’, that there is no inherent meaning in the universe, means that there can be no such thing as universal morality. The only problem is that this leaves us with no road map for life. Without universal morality, there is no model existence for us to strive to follow: Jesus was just another guy. There is no such thing as ‘best living’.

But the only thing more absurd than the absurdity of life is taking the absurdity of life so seriously that you would kill yourself to avoid it. And, if the course of ‘best living’ is no longer open to us, as it was to our believing forefathers, then the only course of life that we can pursue is ‘most living’.

Most Living at its Most

And this is why we choose to spend twelve hours cycling overnight to the seaside, when we could be asleep and dreaming. This is why we choose to spend six months battling across the high seas in a dinghy with four holes in the hull, when we could just fire off a petition or two to parliament.

It’s not about finding the best way to spend our Saturday night, or finding the best way to raise awareness of the plight of the Syrians – because the mythical best does not exist. It’s about investing in our present moments the most we can. That is all we can do to rage against the absurdity of our life and our inevitable death.

And there was no greater ‘most’ way that I could have spent my Saturday night. There is no greater ‘most’ way for Simon and Maria to demonstrate their solidarity with the people of Syria. These are heroic challenges that take every ounce of strength. It is most living at its most.

Rowing a sixteen-foot dinghy under thunderous skies: insignificance is no obstacle to most living.

From Theoretical Philosophy to Practical Psychology

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus implores us not to commit suicide, either physical or philosophical. He encourages us to throw ourselves into life with full force: as Don Juan, as Conquering Hero, as Stage Actor – without losing sight of the ultimate absurdity of our actions.

Yes, Camus was an optimist. You may, as a rigorous philosopher, be able to pick holes in his argument. It’s not the most logical I’ve ever heard. But that hardly matters now. What matters is that, half a century later, psychologists are offering some tantalising evidence of quite how accurate his dichotomy between best living and most living was.

Carol Dweck and the Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck has been researching motivation, personality and development for many years, at Colombia, Harvard and now at Stanford. In the course of her research, she has discovered that the human brain approaches the various challenges of life through one of two mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

The fixed mindset follows patterns of thought like this:

1. (MINDSET) Artistic talent is fixed, it can’t be improved. You’re either born with it, or you’re not.

2. (OBSERVATION OF THE WORLD) When I try to draw the still life of an apple, it looks nothing like an apple.

3. (CONCLUSION) I have no artistic talent and I might as well never bother trying to draw an apple every again.

The growth mindset follows patterns of thought like this:

1. (MINDSET) Artistic talent is something that you can improve through hard work and practice.

2. (OBSERVATION OF THE WORLD) When I try to draw the still life of an apple, it looks nothing like an apple.

3. (CONCLUSION) If I want to be able to draw an apple, all I have to do is put in the hours and practice.

In both cases, the challenge is the same and both people realise that they’re bad at drawing. But only the person with the growth mindset will ever do anything to improve themselves. It gets worse.

It got better, actually. For those most living, that is. For those best living, all that was left was knee surgery.

Fixed Mindset and the Fear of Failure

The fixed mindset also breeds fear: the fear of failure. If intelligence or strength or artistic talent is fixed, then any failure is final. If you have built your self-image around being superb at drawing the still life of an apple – and you lose the annual still life of an apple contest, then what are you? Any opportunity to be judged becomes an existential crisis and you will cease seeking out new challenges. This has the effect of shrinking the fixed mindset’s world until it only participates in the smallest fields of endeavour, where success is guaranteed.

The growth mindset, on the other hand, sees failure as an opportunity to learn. Any new challenge, opponent or obstacle is great fun because it is only by failing that you are able to improve and grow. A growth mindset says yes to everything, even when failure is almost certain. A growth mindset is greedy for new experiences, for shocks and jolts and tests and obstacles and difficulties.

Growth Mindset and Most Living

The fixed mindset is focussed on judging others and on being judged. Success is measured in concrete successes; a zero-sum game in a finite, competitive world. The growth mindset is focussed on learning and helping others learn. Success is measured in growth; an infinite horizon in a world with so many secrets.

The fixed mindset is obsessed with being the best in life. The growth mindset is obsessed with getting the most out of life. The fixed mindset yearns for a mythical best living. The growth mindset is Camus’ most living.

Which mindset would set you out into the world, sailing 3,500 miles in an absurd attempt to raise awareness of a crisis that you can never alleviate? Which mindset would put you into a thousand-strong bike ride through the night, knowing that you’ll end up with broken knees, sleep deprivation and a £100 taxi fare?

Which mindset would you choose?

Under open skies and an empty sea. What could be more than most living?

The Complete History of the Moon in Sixteen and a Half Verses

Last night, I made my second ever spoken word appearance at Utter! Space in King’s Cross, reading The Complete History of the Moon in Sixteen and a Half Verses. Considering my first appearance was half naked at a FemDom club, I think I’m making progress.

You can hear the poem in all its educational glory by pressing play on the player below.

https://davidcharles.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/History-of-the-Moon-clean.mp3?_=2

Please note: this may be less THE history of the moon and more A history of the moon… But at least I didn’t go for any cheap Michael Jackson gags.

BONUS MATERIAL YOU NEITHER ASKED FOR, NOR WANTED!

The process of writing a poem involves much scribblings and almost as much crossings out. Here are some of the verses that didn’t make the final 16.5, mainly because they weren’t about the history of the moon:

The moon goes round the earth,
Which goes round the sun, in ellipse.
When all three are in a line,
That’s a total eclipse.

There is a word for this celestial alignment,
But it’s testing my poetical wizardry,
Because there isn’t any rhyme in my dictionary
For syzygy.

I don’t know if you’ve heard
of The Man in the Moon.
It’s another crap pub,
from JD Wetherspoon.

It looks nothing like a man,
It’s more like a foetus.
Or maybe a panda,
If you’ve drunk a few litres.

But of course we all know
that is total bullshit.
The Moon is really an
abandoned alien spaceship.

You might have heard of mooning,
Where you pull down my pants.
And then I’ll pull down yours,
Just like they do in France (pron: “Frants”).

The author, David Charles, is available galaxy-wide for lunar lectures and astronomical addresses.

Photo Credit: Beth Granville

Them and Us: Evolutionary Politics and The Philosopher Kings (and Queens)

The People’s Parliament is defiantly held in the least democratic building in the United Kingdom: the Houses of Parliament. Every Gothic gargoyle, every vaulted ceiling and marbled floor, every gun-toting copper screams totalitarianism. My local Territorial Army base is more democratic than the Houses of Parliament. Never mind. Our parliamentary host, John McDonnell MP, flaps his hands in despair at the larger-than-life oil paintings of dead monarchs around him, glad that this feudal building is being used “for something worthwhile, for a change.”

Not authoritarian at all.

That is how I started a blog post on a session of the People’s Parliament for Strike! magazine. The proletariat parliament had gathered in Committee Room 8 of the House of Commons to debate two questions posed by Zer0 Books: How has capitalism got away with the financial crisis? And (as if that wasn’t enough): Why is politics scared of political ideas?

* * *

A SIGNPOST: If you’d like to read a summary of the actual debate, then I politely usher you away from this post and to the very excellent Strike! blog. This post, on the other hand, will be a meta discussion on the very concepts of the People and Parliament.

* * *

Two things immediately struck me about the proceedings of this People’s Parliament. Firstly, that second question – Why is politics scared of political ideas? – seems to be missing a pronoun. Politics isn’t scared of ideas, not at all – why, only today, chancellor George Osborne dropped the Bingo Tax! And, over the course of the current parliamentary term, we’ve also seen the biggest reforms of the National Health Service since it was founded, austerity packages that have contributed to the slashing of the deficit by around £60bn and an Act of Parliament ensuring the environmental protection of the Antarctic (celebrated, I kid you not, with a commemorative tea towel and tartan tie). What’s wrong with these political ideas? Well… they’re not ours, are they? The question should be revised: Why is politics scared of OUR political ideas?

Which leads me on to the second thing: for a self-styled People’s Parliament, there is a lot of talk of “them” and “us”. And, make no mistake, this imaginary parliament is composed entirely of us: the Left. Even the man sitting next to me, dressed in leather shoes, wearing a smart suit and waistcoat, carrying a handlebar moustache and a leather briefcase with shiny brass buttons – even he is one of us. Neither the organisers of the People’s Parliament, nor Zer0 Books are particularly to blame for this imbalance – there were no Marxist goons at the door to the committee room, checking Party subscriptions or testing for neo-liberal sympathies. Theoretically, anyone could have attended – but I’m not even remotely interested in why they didn’t. I’m interested in why there exists a “them” and “us” in the first place.

The Right are often spoken about by the Left as if they are a monstrous sub-species, blood-sucking vampires and one-eyed cyclopes (the Right, I’m sure, feel the same about us). Now, I have some bad news: despite appearances, the Right aren’t diabolical creations of Frankenstein (George Osborne might be), they are as much a part of the human race as we are. But if that is true, I hear you cry in horror and disbelief, then why don’t they all give up and become more like us? Can’t they see that they’re wrong?

But, dear reader, we could ask the same of us. What are the Left? Why do we exist? Please tell me there’s more to us than good haircuts and indie bands. Well, let us find out…

Typical Lefty.

* * *

Chimpanzees would vote Conservative. After spending ten minutes watching them picking nits at London Zoo, I’m almost certain that they’re Conservatives. In all my hours at the monkey house, I’m yet to witness any primate light up a spliff, read The Guardian or argue for a womanzee’s right to choose. And that’s why it’s the chimpanzees in the cages and us humans handing out the bananas. Chimpanzees don’t have evolved politics.

Cavemen were a fairly conservative bunch too, preferring grunts and wooden clubs to Marxist dialectics and nationalised healthcare. But, as well as the cave-conservatives, nascent human society had something else: mutant socialists. In order for evolution to proceed, there must be mutation. In political terms, this means we need people who blow away the status quo and do something Fucked Up and Wrong. And, politically speaking, that’s us, that’s the Left.

Sometimes, of course, those mutated ideas are genuinely Fucked Up and Wrong and result in a sicker society, one that ultimately destroys itself. Just as 99.9% of all species that ever existed are extinct, so too 99.9% of all societies that ever existed are now extinct. And that doesn’t mean that we have the best possible society now either – not at all. Just as some superb genes have been lost to the gene pool (I always thought that a pair of sabre teeth would have been useful for opening tins), so too have we in the West lost some superb social arrangements (anyone for matriarchy?). But without this constant Leftist innovation and mutation of politics and society, humans would still be stuck in caves, flinging shit at the walls, making friends by divesting their hair of head-lice and indulging in infanticide to preserve the purity of our bloodline.

You may wonder, then, why we’re not all brilliant socialist geniuses. The answer is that, sadly, for every one Lefty caveman who proposes the first primate parliament, there are a thousand who propose cooperation with sabre-toothed tigers, equal rights for head-lice or the League of Nations. Most ideas we have are Fucked Up and Wrong: the Right, then, exist to stand back and judge. If, by some miracle and contrary to all sensible advice, some loony Leftie has a break-through, the Right will immediately start copying us (and pretend that it was their idea all along). The Left and the Right are fundamentally different, but society is not them and us: human society is Left and Right together.

Left and Right together at Occupy?

* * *

None of this is to say that the Right don’t innovate: Hitler was nothing if not, ahem, an innovator. But the Right don’t innovate the future; they innovate the past. Hitler innovated for the past of the Aryan race; Mussolini for the Romans; the BNP for a time before immigration. And, of course, most humans are neither far Right nor far Left: most people are somewhere in between – but it’s the extremes that define the debate, as we are finding out with David Cameron trying to out-UKIP UKIP and Nick Clegg trying to engage Nigel Farage in a debate on the EU.

* * *

Ancient Roman society innovated like mad in the industries of straight roads, the military and the imaginative torture of Christians – but why did they never invent the steam engine? Answer: because they had slaves. Their authoritarian Right would not allow the widespread manumission of slavery: free slaves are dangerous subjects and they must be kept occupied, doing the things that a steam engine could otherwise do. In the West, we had to wait for the radical Left to abolish slavery before a gap opened up in our technology for the steam engine – which kicked off the entire industrial revolution (for better or worse). The Left believed that the industrial revolution would result in a Utopic civilisation where days could be spent in the idle worship of beauty and smog. But, of course, our authoritarian Right wouldn’t allow that: free wage slaves are just as dangerous subjects.

The history of human society is a history of this constant pushing back and forth between Right and Left. An optimist would argue that the general trend of evolutionary politics is to drift left (because we’re awesome). An optimist would argue that the current lurch (lurch is a technical term from political science) to the Right is a mere blip in the millennial trend that has seen the end of feudalism and the start of a comprehensive welfare state. It is my belief that the Left should take great pride in this, our DNA-given role in political evolution – to fuck up society with a scatter-gun of new ideas and direct action. But we, the Left, must not also be complacent. If we are not vigilant, then the Right will nick all our best ideas and use them to justify their own ends (see “parliamentary democracy”). Dare they? Do they? Yes. Because they vastly outnumber us. It’s a hazy estimation, but one regular US poll judges conservatives to outnumber liberals by about four to one.

From an evolutionary point of view, I’m reluctant to admit that this balance makes total sense. In the battle for survival from one generation to the next, a genome wouldn’t want the entire population to be loony Lefties, inviting tigers home for tea. A genome wouldn’t even want half the population to be loony Lefties. A genome would want most people to be boring, a genome would want most people to keep doing what their great-grandparents did to survive – but with just enough loonies to keep things fresh. Evolution is a cosmically slow process, which can be frustrating to us revolutionaries, but you can see evolution’s point: If the status quo has worked for a billion years, then why change overnight, in a year, or even in a generation?

Typical scene after another failed revolution.

* * *

Apologies for going on so – that’s the nature of impotent Lefty theorising. I assure you that the end approacheth, together with a (gasp!) practical proposal, as reward for your patience.

* * *

So the Left will always be outnumbered by the Right: that’s pre-determined in human DNA, I’m afraid. But we can load the game in our favour by exploiting maths (heinously flawed maths, but stick with me, if you will). Supposing that the above-cited US poll is approximately correct: that only twenty percent of humans are Leftists. Then, given that there are 650 seats in the House of Commons, we should find about 130 are on the Left. Now, assuming that MPs of the Labour, Liberal Democrat, SNP, Alliance, SDLP, Plaid Cymru, Respect, Sinn Féin and Green parties are at least Left-leaning (massive assumption given the last Labour government), then what we actually find are 333 Leftist MPs. That’s over fifty percent: a clear majority, even in this Tory-dominated government. The conclusion we draw from this anomaly is that Left-leaning humans are vastly more politically active than their Right-leaning counterparts. We are DNA’s anointed Philosopher Kings and Queens.

Why, then, do we find ourselves suffering such Right-wing authoritarian abuses as austerity, even under a coalition government including the Liberal Democrats? Why did those same Liberal Democrats drop their promise to abolish university tuition fees? Why did the Blair-Brown Labour governments embrace financial neo-liberalism? The answer, I fear, is terrifyingly simple: logistics. Societies with a large population, like the UK, are almost impossible to manage fairly. It’s hard to be democratic when 63 million people are represented by only 650 politicians. The very idea makes authoritarianism seem appealing, even to supposedly Left-leaning governments. By the way, it won’t surprise you to learn that David Cameron supports the idea of reducing the number of MPs from 650 to 600, making the country even more authoritarian (or “less bureaucratic”, depending on your viewpoint).

The Left has a difficult time wielding power in large societies. The poster-girls of Leftist European government are Sweden (population 9.5 million, 349 MPs), Iceland (population 320,000, 63 MPs) and Denmark (population 5.5 million, 179 MPs). I conclude that it is in the Left’s favour to build and work in smaller societies. In these smaller societies, Philosopher Kings and Queens aren’t so easily drowned out by the clamour of X-Factor.

Therefore, I would politely suggest that the Left should throw their entire weight behind the YES campaign for Scottish independence. This will make whatever remains of the UK slightly smaller and the Westminster parliament marginally more democratic, marginally more of an actual people’s parliament. But, far more significantly, a YES vote will also give us a glimpse of what a smaller, more democratic and more Leftist population can achieve on their own. Scotland will become a precedent for total regional autonomy: If they can go it alone, then why not Wales? Why not Cornwall? Why not Humberside? The referendum on Scottish independence takes place on the 18th of September 2014. The rules say that anyone whose permanent address is in Scotland, ahead of the deadline for registration on the 2nd of September 2014, can vote.

Bonnie Scotland.

Finally, here follows my practical proposal:

This summer, gather your friends and allies, pack up your megaphones and polish your anarchist pin-badges and let’s move to Scotland en masse. Let’s create an independent Leftist state together, severing all ties with this most undemocratic of buildings forever.

Mel Gibson would be proud.

City to Coast; Midnight to Dawn

It’s raining even before we leave. My toes are already burning with cold, poking out of my sandals. It’s a midnight in March. The weather forecast is for rain until two or three o’clock in the morning. Heavy rain in places. We won’t arrive at the coast until six.

It’s the first Friday Night Ride to the Coast of 2014. For the last eight years, a group of cyclists have been gathering at Wellington Arch on Hyde Park Corner at midnight on a Friday, to cycle through the night to the coast. I’ve done this once before, to Felpham last August. But it wasn’t raining.

My feelings at the moment are: I don’t want to do this. I hate everything about this. I hate the fact that none of my friends are with me, the fact it’s cold, the fact it’s raining, the fact I went for a run this morning and my legs are already aching, the fact I didn’t bring more clothes, the fact that I cycled five miles to get to Wellington Arch and now we’re going to cycle five miles back the way I came to the Rotherhithe Tunnel, the fact that I forgot to wear my cycling shorts.

There are more than fifty people on the ride and that means progress is slow, stopping every mile or two for everyone to catch up. Slow means cold, with nowhere near enough leg-pumping to warm me up. By London Bridge, my feelings are: How can I get out of this? I have plenty of excuses, starting with the fact that I’m freezing cold and wearing pneumoniac shorts and sandals. I’m also due to go on a road trip to Wales this morning – in just a few hours. I should be getting some sleep. And it’s hailing now, for fuck’s sake!

But none of these excuses are good enough. One of my friends is meeting me on the other side of the pollution-warmed Rotherhithe Tunnel – one of the glorious friends I have who are imaginative enough to see a night-ride in the rain as a good idea. She has even more excuses than I do not to come: she’s been working in Eastbourne all day, only got back to London a couple of hours ago and her cooker ran out of gas halfway through cooking a cycling-essential carbohydrate dinner.

So I keep going, for her sake.

The FNRttC (as it is known) is a superb idea: at midnight after work, meet up with some friends and cycle from the mucky city, through the mucky countryside, through the starlight, into the dawn, to the lung-balm coast and the sea. Have a swim and a full English breakfast, then take a lazy train back home. What better way to blast away the choke of the working week and begin an unforgettable weekend?

The FNRttC is a superb idea, but there’s one problem: other people. I’m sure someone enjoys crawling along in a peloton of fifty, but it’s not me. I want to stretch my legs and sprint against the hailstones – but I have to wait for the back-markers, the Tail End Charlies. The leader of the ride orders me to, “Drop back, young man!” when I dare to push up at the front. We have to wait at the bottom of London Bridge, we have to wait to be escorted through the Rotherhithe Tunnel. We have to wait and wait – and all in the rain. It’s miserable.

So, as soon as I meet up with Anna, we quit the ride and the hail and push our bikes into a chicken shop on the Barking Road. We order a couple of black teas and apologise for our puddles. It’s one o’clock in the morning and the only customers are garrulous drunks, astounded, admiring our audacity.

Over the brackish brew, we consider our options. Quitting is something I’d dearly love to do right now, but I can’t disappoint myself like that. Besides, Anna knows the way to Burnham-on-Crouch. We can go it alone, we can sprint into the night, we can throw off the shackles of organisation. It might sound strange to say that cycling all night from London to Burnham-on-Crouch is following the herd, but there were over fifty lycra-bonded white sheep that night and I have always been black. And hated lycra.

Organised rides might not be for me, but a thousand thanks to the FNRttC. Alone, I would never have had the audacity to even think I could pedal all night to the sea. Now, I am stealing your idea and taking it for myself, spreading it like jam across my life.

After five hours of cycling, the clouds roll away and I stare into the sunrise, into the eye of god and I swear to live: Why don’t I do this every night?

Pedestal (a poem)

Tonight: I will cancel my evening plans,
And dress you in your favourite clothes.
I will rub some lotion on your hands,
And in between your toes.

I will iron the creases from your dress,
And cook for you your evening meal.
I will make you sigh with one caress,
If you think that would appeal.

I will run the water in your bath,
Thirty-seven point four degrees.
I will pull a face to make you laugh,
And wear your silk chemise.

I will rub the sores from your shoulders,
And paint your nails and blow them dry.
I will fight a hundred thousand soldiers,
And, if I have to, I will die.

I will scent you with your perfume.
And tuck your hair behind your ears,
I will walk from here to Khartoum,
And survive like Ray Mears.

I will stroke your hair and read you poetry,
And not fall asleep before you do.
I will truss myself like shop-bought poultry,
And cook myself for you.

I will enter my heart in your Grand Prix,
And put my foot down on the throttle.
I will turn the heating up one degree,
And fill your hot water bottle.

I will oil and massage your forehead,
And whisper naughty words in your ear.
I will swallow a nuclear warhead,
And make George Bush disappear.

I will bake my heart for you, in a bagel,
and serve it fresh with salmon and cheese.
I will out-think Thomas Nagel,
And out-joke John Cleese.

I will kiss your Achilles heel,
And all your downy leg hairs.
I will stand before you and kneel,
And address to you my prayers.

Goddess divine,
Goddess celestial,
I will place you where you belong:
On your pedestal.

Written on 31st January 2014 for a literary soirée at Club Pedestal.

I should credit John Fuller’s Valentine for at least some of the inspiration. The rest of the inspiration will go uncredited – I’m sure she knows who she is!

Update: Canterbury Retales


Before Christmas, I walked from London to Canterbury with a Polish girl and a dog called Stitch, sleeping in the rough and rain. I’ve been working on the book of the walk since then and I hope to have a first draft more or less complete by the end of next week. I hope, at any rate, that it’ll be finished before the pain of 70 miles of hard road has left my shins; I haven’t been able to walk properly for a couple of weeks now. Of course, the story is also very fragile at the moment and may yet never see the light of day, but I’m optimistic that it will, and that it will be worth the struggle.

All the best for a happy New Year, dear reader, and stay tuned for more…

Update: 58 Days

This week, I’m mostly working on my book about cycling around Britain, provisionally titled ’58 Days’ because that is how long it took me. Hopefully, more imagination will be expended on the interior pages of the book…

In other news: I’ve rediscovered two almost books, which I hope to clean up and publish as soon as I’ve got ten minutes. Teasers: Dylan, Bicycles.

In further news: I’m going on a walk next week, to seek out the true meaning of Christmas. I shall be starting from The George in Lambeth and finishing at Canterbury Retail Park somewhere outside Canterbury. Provisional title: ‘The Canterbury Tales Retailed’.

Update: A New Website

As you can see, I have a new website. I appear to have leapt before I looked, leaving everything somewhat amateurish. But I am trying to ween myself off FATMAGS* and that means that Blogger (Google owned) has to go.

So hello WordPress and my own server space.

*Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and SalesForce – the seven tech giants without whom we cannot live. Apparently.

10 things you learn when you cycle 4,110 miles around Britain

Cycling right around the coast of Britain is unquestionably the single most rewarding thing I have done in my life. The wonder of it is that I didn’t do something like it sooner.

1. You can do anything, if you just take it one wheel at a time. 4,110 miles is nothing but 1 mile done 4,110 times. Nothing is impossible when you break it down.

2. You’re not special. Anyone can do this. Anyone can buy a bike and cycle from their front door, to god knows where. Don’t imagine that you’re not fit enough to try: fitness comes with every mile you pedal.

3. Rain isn’t an excuse. Rain is a circumstance out of your control, like the condition of the roads, or the terrible music on CapitalFM. You’ll just ride through it.

4. Cycling is addictive. One mile breeds another, seeing the numbers click forward on your odometer turns every stretch of road into a game to be beaten. Make sure you spend enough time sleeping, eating and sight-seeing, though!

5. Ever fancied sending the waiter back for a second main course – and then having dessert? Ever wished you could eat a Full English every morning? Ever fancied seeing how long it takes you to burn off the calories contained in a full bag of Jelly Babies? Welcome to the cycling diet.

6. Britain is stunningly beautiful. You need never go to another country as long as you live. There is an infinite supply of fascination and adventure right here for us.

7. Cycling isn’t complicated. Modern bikes don’t break much. Modern tyres don’t get punctures. Absence of a degree in bike mechanics is no excuse.

8. The hardest part of doing anything is starting. Once the wheels have started turning forwards, they don’t turn back.

9. Achievement is the surest way to courage and confidence. All you have to remember is: 4,110 miles.

10. Nothing will be the same again. You will always have cycled around Britain. Your conception of the possible is transformed.

11. One day you will cycle around Britain – the other way!

You will play “Spot the blue sign” a lot.

Start an ambitious physical challenge, or die not knowing!

The Death of Elmore Leonard: 10 Rules of Writing

DC: In honour of the passing of US crime writer Elmore Leonard, here is a reprint of his 10 rules for writing, first published in the New York Times. There is no better or more concise schedule of advice for writers, young and old. Over to Elmore:

WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle

By ELMORE LEONARD
Published: July 16, 2001 in The New York Times.

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s ”Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ”I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ”she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ”full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ”suddenly” or ”all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ”suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ”Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s ”Hills Like White Elephants” what do the ”American and the girl with him” look like? ”She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ”Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ”Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, ”Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled ”Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter ”Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ”Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

”Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

The start of the Not Just Watching Football Season

The Never Ending Story: Monotonous or Life-affirming?

It’s that time of year again.

At this very second, men in ill-fitting polyester advert shirts are gathering around faux oak tables in dingy back rooms to accumulate another season’s worth of adipose tissue. And all for the pleasure of watching socially dysfunctional teenage athletes earn more cold hard cash in ninety minutes than their admirers could dream of earning in a month.

Yes, the football season is with us again, heralded by England’s defeat of Scotland on Wednesday night, thanks to a well-timed headed goal by 31-year-old debutant Rickie Lambert. Mr Lambert, exercising his imagination like never before, described the crowning achievement of his career as a ‘dream come true’.

I have a deeply humbling confession to make: I don’t play professional football. I never have. Rickie Lambert’s dream come true is about as relevant to my life as Emmental meteorites.

My relationship to football is exactly the same as a reader’s relationship to a book. I am not a player inside the world of football; I look on from the sidelines. I read about the world of football in exactly the same way that I read about the world of Miss Marple (but with less murder and significantly worse dialogue).

Millions of other people enjoy these same soccer stories and I could talk football with them until the Cowdenbeaths come home. But I will never myself take part or affect the world in which I am cognitively immersed. And I will probably never even meet someone who does. Just like I’ll never one day take the 4.50 from Paddington to St Mary Mead, nor meet Mrs Elspeth McGillicuddy.

Not the 4.50 from Paddington. No trains leave Paddington at that time. Do your research next time, Christie.

So what?

I suppose that what I’m trying to say is that football might as well be a fiction, a story, or combination and complex interaction of stories, told every day, all over the world. The football fan’s longing for the start of the new football season is no different to the crystal meth fan’s rabid anticipation of Season 5 of Breaking Bad. Football is the ultimate box set: a never-ending reel of intertwining plot lines, with a cast of thousands and story twists that no writer has even written.

The question we have to ask ourselves is:

Is this story interesting enough to justify a few hours of my life every week?

The answer, I suspect, is increasingly no. But I’m going to try to find out. Instead of just watching football this season, I’m going to start thinking more deeply about what it does for me, does to me – and does to and for us all.

So I hereby declare the official opening of the Not Just Watching Football Season (catchy, I know). Stay tuned for my football-based examinations of such topics as Tribalism, Slum Clearances, Sexual Assault and Consumer Capitalism. To be fair, it’ll almost certainly be a game of two halves, at the end of the day.

10 things NOT to take on an epic bike ride

There are a million and one lists of gear that the internet implores you to take on an epic bike ride. I’m not here to add to those mighty fine lists. I’m hear to tell you what to leave behind.

#1 Don’t take your 4×4.

1. A fancy bike. You don’t need it. I’ve cycled over 6,000 miles on my ‘entry-level’ hybrid city bike, everywhere from the Highlands of Scotland to the Sahara.

2. Fancy panniers. You don’t need them. What was good for the school run is probably good for starters.

3. A fancy cycle computer. Sure it’s nice to see the miles click over – but it’s also a massive pain in the ass. Keep your head up, looking at the scenery/traffic – not hunched over your speedo, trying to hit 20mph.

4. Fancy Lycra cycling shorts. You look like enough of a prat. Take a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, for Christ’s sake.

5. Shoes. Chances are where you’re going is gonna get wet at some point. Then you’ll thank me. Note: don’t go barefoot; you’ll bleed everywhere and that won’t be pretty. Wear sandals.

6. A tent, fancy or otherwise. Tents are heavy, man. Even fairly fancy ones. Take a bivvy bag. They roll up to the size of a jacket and they’ll keep you dry at night.

7. A gazillion spares and tools for repairing your bike. Chances are your frame won’t snap in half without any warning and any car mechanic can help you out with tools.

8. A library of maps. It doesn’t take a genius to work out where you’re going. Ask someone. Sure, take a compass if you have to.

9. A pile of money. Cycling is cheap. Sleeping in a bivvy bag is cheap. Beg, steal, borrow. Do whatever you have to do to get started. Once you’ve started, there’s no going back, sucker!

10. Any knowledge whatsoever. I took a one day course in bike mechanics before I left. The only thing I learnt from the session was that my bike was a death-trap and that I wouldn’t survive. To be fair to the instructors, they were correct about the first part – but thank god I didn’t listen to them!

That’s all there is to it.

Feel free to ignore all of these suggestions, especially if you love fancy kit. If you’re skint and just want to get started, then I hope I’ve reassured you: fancy kit is for show-offs.

Tiny Tips for Writers: Emotional description

Rather than flatly describing sights, sounds and smells, provide contours by showing us the emotional responses of your characters as well.

From A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith:

The boy nodded and licked his thin lips. The sight of his tongue near the soft moustache was peculiarly disgusting to Theodore.

An entirely irrelevant detail of the boy has become a character trait for Theodore, and we can feel an unsteady current in the subtext.

10 great excuses to avoid making your dreams come true

Worried that you might be about to embark on the trip of a lifetime? Looking for some excuse not to step out of your front door? Scared that perhaps you might finally become the person you always dreamt of becoming?

Fear not! For I have compiled here an easy-to-remember list of great excuses that will successfully prevent you from ever making your dreams come true.

Note: These fail-proof excuses have been tried and tested on literally millions of people just like you. The human race has been proudly dodging, delaying and demurring their dreams since time began. (Warning: 97.2% of these humans did not procreate and are lost to the gene pool forever.)

1. I don’t have enough time. (Variations: I am too busy / I have too much work.)

Not too busy to take a photo of a clock, though.

A thought experiment might suffice here. If you carried on doing whatever it is that you are doing now, what will the world look like in ten years? What about if you take steps to follow your dream?

Without prejudicing your answer to the above thought experiments, there is the old saying: No one, on their death-bed, wishes they’d spent more time in the office. What kind of world are you building with your time, as currently allocated? What could you be building instead?

There is another aspect to this objection: Is your time actually yours to allocate? The most obvious answer, if you’re an employee, is No. Likewise, you may feel, if you are a mother or father or even a member of the local trombone choir. But these are all different orders of obligation. There is hierarchical obligation, that is weighted on your shoulders without your choice. And there is volitional obligation, like that towards your fellow trombonists.

Obligations can always be re-negotiated. Even children can be accommodated (see below).

 2. I don’t have enough money. (Variation: I don’t have the right equipment / stuff / shoes.)

16 Twixes for £2 or 2x 9 Twixes for £2?

What is it that you think money will accomplish for you? Think not in terms of needing money as a prerequisite for X. Think rather about how you can acquire X. Sometimes the answer will be through money alone, but I fear that would indicate a failure of imagination more than anything else. (But I accept that often we are tired and our imaginations exhausted.)

Ask the question: What would happen if I tried to do this without a million dollars / new shoes / a buffalo? Really think. 99% of the time you’ll find your imagination can fly over any apparent obstacle with ease.

Solidarity, mutual aid and recycling are all ways that you can make things happen without recourse to huge amounts of money. Do, swap, borrow.

3. I don’t have the right contacts / network / friends to make this happen.

Maybe you hate other people. Maybe you are anti-social. Maybe you don’t like asking other people for favours or access. I don’t either.

Is there something you can do to push yourself towards your goal that doesn’t require other people? As you march towards your future, you’ll find you naturally bump into people who will help you make it happen. There is no need to force relationships and there is no reason why you can’t start without them.

Taking that a bit deeper: Why do you think you need other people? Are you sure you’re not just using them as a crutch? If you are: well done! You’ve found a great excuse. You’ll never know if you could have managed without them and you’ll never know if you could have made contact with them.

4. I have a family / business / goldfish to look after.

Good for you! Caring is one of the most genuine human actions. But why are you being hierarchical about this? Speak to them (technical note: goldfish speak Portuguese) and involve them in the power structure. Why can’t you take your family / business / goldfish with you through your dream? Were they not part of your dream in the first place? If not, then perhaps you should think more carefully about their place in your life.

Alternatively, maybe you can swap dreams. Maybe they have a dream ready for the taking too. Take some time out and explore each other’s dream-lives. You might find that the world is a better place afterwards.

5. My boss / dad / government won’t let me.

My dad, yesterday.

Ooh, that’s a low blow. Delegating your responsibility for your life to someone else. Shifting the blame to an outside agent. Removing yourself from the equation. You might think this is an infallible excuse, but really… Why are you making an exception of your dream? You’ve already disobeyed your boss, your dad, your government – and any other figure of authority or representative of hierarchy – countless times! Why let them stand in the way of your dreams?

If you’re still having trouble squaring feelings of obligation, loyalty or guilt with your desire to act, then you should think more deeply about where the feelings are coming from. Some feelings of obligation aren’t hierarchical. The example of your dad above is mischievous. Of course your dad deserves consideration. Ask: is he being hierarchical about this? Is there room for negotiation? Are my desires being taken into account? Is there a threat of force if I disobey?

Any answer of ‘yes’ to the threat of force test is a sure sign of hierarchy and a relationship that you should immediately discontinue if possible, or disobey. Only by standing against hierarchy will you be able to win freedom for your actions. And you will probably be surprised by the emptiness of the overlord’s threats. The world will not collapse down upon you. And you will have won an element of freedom.

If you decide that this hierarchy is just too convenient an excuse to give up, I have one word of advice: Don’t tell the person that they are stopping you from becoming a god because they might get a bit pissed off with you. Also, you might find that they release you from their unwitting bondage.

6. The time isn’t right. (Variation: I’m too old / young.)

We’re all just birthday candles in the wind.

When is the right time? When should I take the bins out? Now? In ten minutes? At 4.27pm? On Tuesday? Does any of this make sense? No. Is this an extraordinarily boring discussion? Yes.

Am I too old to take the bins out? Am I too young? At what age should we start taking the bins out? At what age should we stop? Does any of this make sense? Is this an extraordinarily boring discussion?

Ultimately, as any parent who intends to devolve bin-removal duties to their offspring will know, you just have to pick a day – any day – and start. The time is never right, so don’t wait for it.

7. I have no grand dream to follow. (Variation: I have too many dreams!)

I can sympathise with this one, having swung from one extreme to the other several times. A “dream” is a stupid concept that means nothing. Last night I dreamt that I had a heart attack and my mum had to give me CPR. Full of symbolism, perhaps, but utterly useless as motivation.

What is a dream, then? A dream (he said, blithely attempting the impossible) is simply something that you think about or do for long enough that it begins to define you. You don’t define the dream, the dream defines you.

For example: I got it into my head about twelve years ago that I was going to be a writer of earth-shattering proportions. I flounced around university for a few years boasting of my soon-to-be-realised achievements and did precisely zero writing. BUT this wasn’t all hot air. Eventually, I started to feel that being a writer of earth-shattering proportions WAS part of my destiny. And I started to feel bad that I wasn’t doing anything to help fate along. So I started writing. Twelve years on, that stupid adolescent “dream” has defined me.

Don’t panic about not have a grand dream. Just do something you enjoy. Then do it again. And again. And again. And gradually, you’ll find that your actions define you and, retrospectively, you’ll define your actions as contributing to your dream.

Likewise, don’t worry about pursuing countless “dreams”, goals or white elephants. Find a way to combine them all into one thing. For example, my first book, The Soles of My Shoes, was a travel book – and that’s my top two right there – travel and books.

8. There’s no point. (Variations: It’s all been done before! / I can’t make a difference.)

This is particularly common as an excuse in the fields where there is the most point, where the difference to be made is greatest: politics, medicine, education to name but three. The size of the problem is so great that a single person feels overwhelmed and doesn’t see the point in swimming against the tide.

But it is those three fields which perhaps illustrate best the answer to ‘It’s all been done before!’ syndrome. Just imagine a doctor, faced with open heart surgery, heaving a big existential sigh and muttering, ‘It’s all been done before!’, before dropping his scalpel and going for a cigarette. The sentence loses all meaning.

The value of something is not in its uniqueness, but in its doingness.

I hope this illustrates the answer to ‘There’s no point!’ as well, but there is a more obvious response to the fear of ennui: you have more allies than you think. Logically, you know this must be so. On a planet of seven billion people, you cannot be the only person who thinks what you are doing is a good idea. You can even be alone with one other. There are literally thousands, millions probably, of people who think what you are about to embark on is the bee’s knees.

‘But how do I find these legions of allies?’ I hear you cry. There is only one answer: by starting. By starting, you are pushing a beach ball down a dune. You and all your friends begin to live your new reality, your new reality starts to define you and everyone you encounter starts to associate you with your new reality. Before long, you aren’t looking for allies; they are looking for you.

9. I don’t have the right skills / fitness levels / brain.

Get fit! Frowning uses more muscles than smiling.

Nobody does. I can tell you right now that 0% of basketball champions, 0% of Nobel Prize winning scientists and 0% of dauntless explorers came out of their mother’s wombs being able to do what they ended up being famous for.

Cycling 4,110 miles is a long way. Guess what: I didn’t have the fitness to cycle over 100 miles in a day when I started. How did I get to that level of fitness? By doing it. By getting on a bike and riding, day after day. Start now and you’ll get there.

10. I’m scared.

There is nothing to fear, but fear itself. And a traffic warden with a shotgun.

Ah – congratulations! You have discovered the catch-all excuse des champions, mon ami! This would appear to be the perfect excuse. It doesn’t harp on about circumstances, it can’t be bought, it won’t disappear over time – and, to top it all, it has the glossy veneer of self-deprecating honesty about. “I would do it, mate, but to be honest, I’m scared!”

Well, I’m sorry. You may be a champion excuse-finder, but this one won’t cut it. In fact, being scared is the ultimate motivation. When you feel scared of something, you can be 99% certain that this is exactly what you really want to do.

Tiny Tips for Writing: Reality in Failure

[This is the first in a new mini-series of tiny tips for writers; those little insights into the things that make fiction believably real. Those forgettable details that make the fourth wall melt away, drawing the reader into the world of the book, as imagined by the author, but without feeling the author, without being clever.]

For every interaction, there is reality in failure, in minor conflict, in minor obstacles.

At a cafe advertising an all day breakfast.
‘Sorry, we’ve finished breakfast,’ the waitress says. ‘Today’s the day we change the oil.’

Not a huge problem, in the usual scheme of things, so the only possible explanation for this (otherwise redundant) piece of minor conflict is that it must be true. And if that was true, then the fiction around it must be as well.

For even greater reality, slip one tiny extraneous detail into the scene.

The cafe is called Tiffany’s.

Cute. You could have Breakfast at Tiffany’s – if not for the changing of the oil. And those two details make the fiction.

The Most Interesting Country in the World: Part 1

“So what’s the most interesting country you’ve been to on your travels, David?”

If you travel often, you’ll recognise this tired impossible question. Tired and impossible to answer, that is, because the very idea of “travel” is absurd. Indulge me.

If Person A is in Place Z at Time 0, and then “travels”, he becomes Person A in Place Y at Time 1. Agreed? Good.

Now suppose that Person A is mortal: he has only 10 time units of life. Does it matter that at Time 4 he is in Place W? Or could he instead be in Place H? Or Place B?

Does it matter at all? No matter what he does, he will still be dead at Time 10.

But what if he remained his whole life in Place Z – wouldn’t that be boring?

Well, no, not necessarily. All places, like persons, are changing with time. Place Z at Time 0 is not the same as Place Z at Time 10.

You could say that Person A at Place Z at Time 0 is actually at place Z-0, when he moves to Time 1, he moves equally to Place Z-1.

There is nothing new or radical here. As Heraclitus put it, two and a half thousand years ago:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Not the same swan.

But this is a truth that makes the very idea of “travel”, as movement from one place to another, absurd.

If, as Heraclitus and Jamiroquai suggest, I can be travelling without moving, then frantically launching myself across the planet is not uniquely “travel”; travel is simply the difference between today and tomorrow.

What is the difference between today and tomorrow?

First glance answer:
Today I am packing my bags in London; tomorrow I shall be on a beach in Mogadishu. Or: today I am at work; tomorrow I shall be relaxing with friends. Or: today I have to finish the finance spreadsheet; tomorrow I have a dentist’s appointment.

Truthful answer:
Nothing. Nothing, that is, except for the fact that one day I will run out of tomorrows.

Twenty-four hours will run equally through tomorrow, as they do today. Twenty-four hours in London is exactly the same as twenty-four hours in Mogadishu. The same hours, the same minutes, the same seconds: the same day.

Or, to put it in another, more cheerful manner: the same fraction of my life until death.

That might be the objective truth, but our first glance answer is a powerful instinct.

Our instinct is always to look forward to the beach at Mogadishu, to seeing friends, to the dentist’s appointment (or at least finishing the spreadsheet) – but this too is absurd.

What does it mean to be ‘looking forward’?

It means that you are valuing today’s hours at less than tomorrow’s (or Tuesday’s, or next week’s, or When I’m a Grown Up’s).

But we know that is absurd – the hours, as we have seen, are the same, the same fraction of life.

No matter how much you want to be in Mogadishu, or how much you want to see your friends, there is nothing you can do to make tomorrow come sooner; just as you can’t do anything to make tomorrow drag out over three days.

Tomorrow will happen tomorrow and only tomorrow.

Time is indifferent. This hour here and now has the same value as an hour in Mogadishu or with your friends.

You cannot put an arbitrary value on an indifferent hour, whether you want to or not.

There is no ‘best’ way to spend your time when time is spending you. All you can do is be conscious of this sand sliding through the hourglass and make the most of every conscious second.

It is absurd, complete nonsense, to talk about one hour being ‘better’ than another.

There is no ‘best’ hour, only an indifferent, amorphous spread of time between now and your death.

And of course, you can’t buy more seconds on the clock. There is no rich man’s clock with a thirteenth hour. Time is indifferent to your travails.

The inevitable end to an amorphous spread of time.

So why are we talking about travel?

You’ll have noticed that we’re not talking about travel, we’re talking about an attitude to life.

We started with travel – and I consider this to be an article about travel – because travel can often inspire a conscious attitude to the absurdities that we’ve discussed (the idea of “travel”, the instinct to look forward to tomorrow, the idea that there is a best way to spend your time).

Often when you travel, your mind opens wide and experiences are sucked in.

That is what it feels like to have a conscious attitude to life. That is what we are looking for. That is what we can use to laugh in the face of absurdity.

A Quick Warning: travel is one easy way to feel this attitude – but it is by no means a guarantee for it. A dullard in London is still a dullard in Lagos: the only difference is his sun burn.

Why are we conscious when we travel?

Because the simple act of jumping on a bike / train / ferry throws us outside our comfort zone.

Outside our comfort zone, our survival instinct pins our ears back, bugs our eyes, raises the hair on our skin. We don’t know what’s around the next corner – a tiger! – a snake! – a Tiger Snake!

If leaving our comfort zone is the surest route to consciousness, then you can see the problem with staying at home.

At home, our comfort zone is vast, like a great big sofa, sucking us in to watch endless re-runs of Miss Marple, where the Toff murderer always gets his or her comeuppance and order is restored in the form of a pillow-dribble nap.

Or is it? In truth, at home our comfort zone is much more nuanced.

If you will allow me to resort to infographics, I shall proceed to illustrate.

First, here is an infographic of your apparent comfort zone when you’re at home.

The blob in the middle is you, the bubble around you is your comfort zone and ‘consciousness’ is what floats beyond the bubble.

In order to reach it, we have to burst that bubble (stick with it).

The sofa of complacency.

Next is an infographic of your comfort zone when you are travelling. Consciousness comes easily because everything is new and potentially threatening.

Tiger snakes.

But the reality is much more nuanced. There is no one comfort zone. There is a comfort zone for everything you do, from cooking to chatting up Tiger Snakes.

In truth, consciousness is more easily reached than you think from your sofa. It just takes a little imagination – and a dollop of bravery – to get there.

But there is a further benefit to breaking your comfort zone at home: the more bubble you have to burst to get to consciousness, the deeper your learning.

If a concert pianist had stopped as soon as he felt comfortable with Greensleeves, he wouldn’t have made it. He kept bursting that bubble, from positions of greater and greater comfort in relation to Greensleeves.

Serial travellers run the risk of keeping their comfort zones small, burning off the buzz of easy consciousness.

Travel, then, is by no means the only way you can access this attitude of consciousness – you can use meditation, music, maths, Matalan – anything that draws you in.

And what you’ll find in this attitude is the infinity of everything.

Note: We are slowly rolling around to the main argument of this post. Apologies for the lengthy premise, but I didn’t want to confuse anyone by jumping straight into unsubstantiated conclusions.

So what is the infinity of everything?

As far as humans can ever experience, everything is infinite.

The complexity of interactions and the fourth dimension of time, when combined with the five senses, language, thought and the simple three dimensions means that everything can be experienced in an infinite number of ways, an infinite number of times (if only we had infinite lives).

You don’t need to go to the Algarve (or the polar ice caps, or the Amazon) to experience something new.

Something new is happening on the back of your right hand, right now. The cellular activity of your epidermis is infinite. You could (and people do) dedicate your entire life to such investigations.

If you are infinite, it follows that other people are infinite.

The man sitting opposite you on the train to Hayes is as infinite as a camel driver in Cairo, as infinite as a Michelin-starred chef in Paris, as infinite as a Japanese polar explorer.

In fact, on a practical level, you are more likely to be able to delve into his infinity and actually share something because you probably also share a common fluent language with the man from Hayes.

Who knows, he might end up having a very interesting story indeed.

And yet people (myself included, often) tend to dismiss the exotic of their familiar surroundings.

We are gravely mistaken, because the truth is that the more you know of something, the more fascinated you become with it.

Think of two secondary school kids reeling off reams of data on Premier League footballers. The most boring topic known to man – and yet their eyes are alive with the thrust and revelation of shared depth.

Yes, the Premier League is infinite as well, and the more familiar you become with its infinity, the more fascinated you become in its nuance, in its depth – in its apparent mundanity.

As with the Premier League and our man from Hayes, so too with Jiskairumoko, Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service and the collected works of Françoise Mallet-Joris (to pick three random topics from Wikipedia).

The infinity of everything – so what?

The infinity of everything is an attitude, an attitude to absurdity that will help you defeat the Looking Forward to Tomorrow demons.

If everything is infinite, then everything is infinitely interesting. Whatever happens today is as interesting as whatever will happen tomorrow.

The infinity of everything will help you confront the absurdity that, even after all your efforts, the seconds will indifferently pass until you die.

If you confront that truth with an absurd smile, then you will have won a moment of freedom.

That freedom will only come when you realise that tomorrow will be no different to today; no better, no worse.

It will only come when you realise that there is no different to here; no better, no worse.

The only difference between today and tomorrow; between here and there is that you are here, today.

Your attitude to life must take account of those ineluctable facts; you must make the most of here and today.

Beware society’s hierarchy of experience!

Unfortunately, despite all our efforts here towards equality of experience, person and place, society still likes to imprint a hierarchy on everything, even travel.

Everyone acts as if a desert safari in the Empty Quarter beats camping in Oxfordshire. When we do this, we are wrong.

I feel the pressure of this hierarchy as much as anyone, but by now, we all know that one place is as good as another: time passes equally (and death encroaches equally) whether you’re in Shanghai or Salcombe.

What matters is your attitude to the passing of time and your attitude should be the same whether you’re in Teignmouth or Timbuktu.

So if you take one thing from this article, please take this: it is absurd to hope that travel in far-flung climes will be somehow ‘better’ than travel closer to home – even AT home.

We are all rushing through life at the same incredible speed: one second per second and the way we spend those seconds has got nothing to do with where we spend them.

Everything is infinite, so the more you see of a place, the more you realise how little you have seen of it and the deeper you fall down the rabbit hole.

That is why, when I’m asked, “What’s the most interesting country you’ve been to on your travels?” I can easily reply: Britain.

(Coming soon never: Part Two, in which I leave my desk.)

Experiments in Productivity: CompuTen

Last week I did something counter-productive. I switched off my computer at 10am. Switched OFF.

This meant that, after ten in the morning, I couldn’t do any writing on the computer, I couldn’t edit any of my works-in-progress, I couldn’t connect with people online, I couldn’t work on my blog, I couldn’t promote my book or advertise my English classes.

By switching off my computer so early in the day, I successfully cut out 99% of my capability for productivity.

How on earth could this help me become more productive?

Before starting this rather drastic computer-diet, I used to be on my computer all hours of the day. Some days I would be tied down for as much as 7 hours 34 minutes.

How do I know this? I signed up to RescueTime, which logs what programs I use and what websites I visit. RescueTime tells me that about 3 hours of that was spent on email, on reading the news, on social networks and on entertainment. Less than two hours per day (on a good day) was spent on writing.

The Plan

So the plan was that, by cutting off my computer-use at ten in the morning, I would be motivated to get up earlier and do more writing.

The rest of the day, when my productivity dips anyway (RescueTime tells me that I’m 50% productive in the morning, but only 48% productive in the afternoon – with a 50% reduction in time at the computer as well), I would be able to get out into the world.

I would teach, I would go on adventures, I would read and think and cook and perhaps do some writing with pencil and paper. I would, in short, become more human and less virtual.

The Results

In the last week, when I was on my CompuTen diet, I averaged less than 2 hours of computer-time per day. Great!

In addition, because my computer-time was squeezed, I became more efficient at doing the important things. Like social networking. I found that I still spent 20 minutes a day on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ (whatever that is).

And I spent significantly less time on the less important things like writing – just 2 minutes 23 seconds last Friday, for example.

Success!

Wait. That doesn’t sound like the plan. The plan was that I would get up early and write like hell for as long as I could, until the 10am cut-off time.

What actually happened was that I would wake up, somewhere between half seven and eight, and immediately get stuck into email and news-reading, pretty much until my alarm went off at 10am. This isn’t the healthiest thing in the world.

So what went wrong?

Well, as it happens: nothing. But as with all experiments, you don’t always get the results you’re expecting. 
I was expecting to get up earlier and be more focussed when I was on the computer. I certainly didn’t get up any earlier, but I was more focussed on the computer. I teach English, so I had to make sure that I prepared any worksheets or articles for my lessons first thing in the morning. No more procrastinating.
However, this compression meant that I had no time for computer writing or editing. I found myself mildly frustrated when all this free-from-computer-time brought writing ideas to the surface that I couldn’t implement.

So what went right?

It was easy. I had a concrete rule to follow and there was nothing so urgent that it couldn’t be achieved without a computer, or couldn’t wait until tomorrow.
It was relaxing. There was no rush and panic to check something immediately. If I thought of something I wanted to do, I would write it down on a piece of paper to do the next morning. And then, often, when I got to it the next morning, it wasn’t worth doing anyway.
I stopped using the computer for entertainment. Instead of watching the recent Montenegro-England football match online, I listened to it on the radio. This took me way back to my childhood and it was a real treat for my senses and my imagination.
I didn’t read so much news and comment online. I did read a lot more fiction and non-fiction offline. I learnt the obvious: offline reading (from a real book!) is deeper and more meaningful. Last week I read the entirety of The Impact Equation and I feel like I absorbed more of it than I would normally (for those interested: it’s all right).
I spent more time on my sofa. I spent more time in the kitchen. I spent more time idling. These are all good things in my book.
But, best of all, the CompuTen diet pushed me onto my AlphaSmart Neo 2. This cunning device is perfect for writers. It is nothing more than a keyboard with a tiny display. It does one thing and it does it brilliantly: it writes. Over the course of last week, I wrote more than 5,000 words on the dear little thing (including the kernal of this blog post).
Neo: The One.

Conclusions

I consider CompuTen to have been a success. However, it’s not a long-term solution. The main problem with it is the forced computer usage in the early morning. I would rather fill this time with meaningful writing (not necessarily on the computer), eating breakfast and showering.
However, CompuTen showed me a number of things:
  • I can resist the computer, if I have a concrete rule of when I can use it and when I can’t.
  • There is nothing so urgent that it can’t wait until tomorrow.
  • Multi-tasking is a killer.
Multi-tasking is surely the most pernicious capability of computers. My PC can deal with everything I throw at it: a to do list, six documents, a couple of PDFs, a novel in YWriter, iTunes, a couple of browser windows, each with five or more tabs open on news, social networks, Blogger, YouTube…
The problem is that I can’t keep up. Humans are programmed to be able to deal with one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is for dweebs. 
So my new computer regime (which I am using right now) is to use the PC like a precision instrument.
  • I will only use the computer for 25 minutes at a time.
  • Before opening the computer I will write down the goal of my activity. One concrete, defined goal, so that at the end of the 25 minutes, I can answer the question: Did I achieve my goal? 
  • Having just one goal should eliminate multi-tasking, but to make it easier on my will-power, I will only have one program running at a time (when building the links for this blog post, I nearly got distracted by another review of The Impact Equation – but stopped myself just in time!).
  • At the end of the 25 minutes, I will close my computer and walk away – no matter whether the goal is achieved or not. I can always set a new goal and work for another 25 minutes, after a short break.
  • If the computer task is likely to take less than 25 minutes – DON’T DO IT. I will batch these tasks until I have enough to fill 25 minutes. Email falls into this batch as well.
So that’s my experiment over. I do anticipate that my new regime will be harder. I’m going to need rock-hard will power. But I have only 1 minute 22 seconds left of this 25 minute block, so I’m going to press Publish right now! 
What are your techniques and tricks for staying on-task at the computer? Please do let me know in the comments – we can get through this if we help each other!

Sounds Unseen: The Work of Libero Colimberti

Danger 400 volts! One glance at the auditorium tells me this isn’t your usual cinema. One solitary wooden school chair, sharing space with the electrical consumer unit, in a cupboard under the stairs of what used to be Deptford JobCentrePlus, now an art venue called Utrophia.

I’m here to see three short films by sound artist Libero Colimberti. Libero’s films are projected onto the slanting underside of the staircase, for an audience of one. As you would expect, sound is the star of Libero’s films. The unusual projection angle only emphasises this, forcing me to lean back in the creaking chair.

The first of the films (‘Microlanding Strip’) visually consists of one continuous fixed shot of a quiet residential street at night. The scene is empty: the pavement, a row of houses on one side and a grassy verge on the other. But the sound is full of traffic, of buses and cars, of dislocated shouts, a man whistling, a police siren – and a mysterious mechanical cranking noise. Sight and sound do not match.

The eye of the camera stares at the scene, but our ears are somewhere else. At the bottom of the picture a clock counts down – but to what? Then a bicycle bursts into frame, racing towards us from the far end of the street. The cyclist is Libero, holding an enormous microphone. Sight and sound dramatically converge; the bike crashes into the camera, the clock hits zero and everything goes black.

The second film (‘Salami!’) I heard as an exercise in focusing our auditory attention. We follow Libero around his world. We see him trying to cross the road, walking past a construction site and through a park. In each location, though, our attention is on the sounds; we hear things Libero’s way. The traffic noise, the birdsong, the noise of the diggers, each is turned up, crisply distinct, filling the cupboard-cinema, burrowing into our brains.

The richness of our auditory world is often overlooked for the flashiness of the visual. Libero tries to address this injustice. When we concentrate on sound, it fills our brains and we hear things that we’d swear weren’t there a moment ago. Try it for yourself for a moment. Turn off the radio and listen. Can you hear the birds? The traffic of the road outside? Your neighbours? As you concentrate, the sounds swell and you begin to realise that there’s a symphony happening out there (not always melodious symphony in London, but still).

If Libero’s ear is sensitive, his eye is playful. When he reaches his house we hear the persistent orgiastic cries of a woman in coitus and the banging of her bedroom door against its frame: she’s fucking against the door. Libero listens: half-horrified, half-fascinated. Then he sees the salami. Just inside the ecstatic woman’s door is a plate with a salami sausage on it (not a euphemism). The banging of the door stops, orgasmically spent. Libero greedily seizes his chance to slip his hand through the gap for the salami – but before he can seize his sausage (not a euphemism) the banging begins again, battering his hand and Libero has to beat a retreat.

The first two films play with the interplay between sound and visuals: the first by dislocating the sound from the visuals, the second by exaggerating the sound over the visuals. The third (‘Frame’) does away with visuals altogether. A red frame appears, bathing the cupboard-cinema in its glow. A clock counts down in the top right corner of the picture. The sounds alone suggest the story. We hear traffic, then a girl shouting in the distance. Slowly, we realise that we’re eaves-dropping on a domestic argument, as a neighbour might – we can’t see the drama, hidden behind a fence or some trees, perhaps. “Don’t you f****** dare!” Subtitles highlight essential phrases. “Oh f****** hell!” A woman is screaming at a man – her boyfriend. “Because I f****** love you!”

We piece together the scene from the dialogue: “What does it matter if I jump off here?” the man shouts. The woman, we can hear now, is trying to calm him down, trying to talk him down from his suicide. He must be standing on a window sill or on a rooftop. “I f****** love you,” the man shouts, in despair – “But I f****** hit you! What does it matter if I jump off here?”

But Libero doesn’t let us hear the conclusion to the story. The sound of sobbing shake the cupboard-cinema and a drunk walks by, singing “I love you…” The countdown stops. We’re left to fill the silence with our thoughts.

The triumph of the films of Libero Colimberti is that he directs our attention to the hidden sounds of life, those sounds we take for granted, or hear only as irritants, not as music. As I duck out of the dingy cupboard, out into the bright sunshine of Spring, I listen for a moment to the symphony of Deptford Market and sing.

‘Salami’ by Libero Colimberti

‘Microlanding Strip’ is playing at Window 135 in New Cross until this Saturday 9 March.

Having Hair

It all started over a pint of peanut butter milkshake. For the twenty-seventh time in seven and a half months, I take the piss out of Mike’s luscious locks of red hair. They reach to his shoulders in opalescent curls and have to be flicked out of his face whenever he laughs, which is often and loud. I know that taking the piss out of a man with long hair is childish and lazy, but I am both of those, so it seemed appropriate.

But there must have been something about that twenty-seventh insult because, instead of brushing it off like so many fallen leaves, he leans in over the milkshakes and says: ‘I’ll be cutting it soon.’

Like a wingey child who instantly regrets his playground cruelty, I shudder in alarm: ‘Why! It’s a part of you, Mikey – you can’t do it! How will I recognise you?’
‘Because,’ he replied, ‘I am making a wig…’
I laugh and start to say, ‘Who would want a curly ginger wig!’
But he cuts me off (pun alert): ‘…For little girls who have cancer.’
Oh. I felt so bad that I vowed there and then to do the same myself.

Little did I realise that my careless promise would involve eighteen months of hard work, as my lazy follicles strain to reach the requisite seven inches of cut-offable hair.

June 2011

Now, as I stand on the cusp of returning to the normal world of normal hair, what have I learnt?

There are many phases to growing hair. There is the initial phase where nothing is happening. My hair was just growing, silently. I’d done a one-inch buzz cut a couple of weeks before the fateful promise, so during the first four months it grew to a normal length and nobody noticed.

August 2011

Then I started to look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo for another month or so before something extraordinary happened. It poofed. Suddenly, without warning, my hair was cool. It stuck out all over the place and adolescent girls on the street walked past me, shouting things like, ‘Look at that guy’s hair – it’s so cool!’

November 2011

It wasn’t to last, of course. Spring brought a growth-spurt, the poof fell in on itself and I was left with serious eye-flop.

May 2012

Over the course of the summer it struggled manfully towards Kurt Cobain, defined as the point at which long man hair becomes cool. But Kurt Cobain is dangerous territory. It could, under certain conditions, look awesome. It could also be a total pain in the ass.

November 2012

If I managed to eat breakfast without getting beans in my hair, it was a good day. Brushing my teeth took on a new angle: literally. I had to tilt my head to one side – like a GIRL – to flop my hair out of the reach of my toothbrush. It didn’t always work. Last night I dreamt of getting my hair stuck between my teeth, like dental floss – and it was a realistic dream. Any form of exercise had to be undertaken with a Bjorn Borg headband, which looked cool, until it didn’t.

The petty practicalities I never quite got the hang of. When to wash hair? How often to wash hair? What do you mean the hair blocks up the drain! It takes two years to dry instead of two seconds? There were times when my hair actually felt uncomfortable to wear after washing. It was dry and brittle and set my skin on edge whenever I touched it. Then someone told me to use conditioner. That helped. But it still looked puffy after washing and I was only happy with it about two days after a wash – by which time it needed washing again.

I had to learn how to brush hair – and that hurts! I learnt that if you hold the hair, then you can stop the hair brush from ripping from the root. I learnt the different in pull between a comb and a hair brush (thanks Cat for the hair brush donation). I learnt that hair gets everywhere, picking it off chairs, books, faces. I learnt about the smell of hair, the smell of grease, hanging down into my face.

Whatever my hair was doing, it wasn’t normal. I had joined an exclusive gentleman’s club of long-haired don’t-give-a-fuck dudes. Look at all those dorks who buzz cut their hair every month and for what? So they can carry on looking like every other dork on the street.

Hair on a man equals rocker, hippie, celeb, hipster – depending on where you are and what else you’re wearing. I am none of these things, so I felt like an imposter, as if I’d had a hair transplant from the eighties. That didn’t stop drunk people shouting at me in the Underground: ‘Look – it’s Allan Carr’s mate!’

Long hair was also most useful for my secret life as an undercover cop, instantly putting multiple disguises at my disposal. Hair up, hair down? Hat hair, bandanna hair? Top knot, pony tail?

I had assumed that I would become a hate figure for street urchins, but the worst came when a Tunisian lad squinted up at my beard and asked, ‘Are you man or woman?’ One of my ex-girlfriends refused to even look at me, demanding that I tie up the offending hair and squash it under a hat: ‘Better.’

More favourably, only last week I drew comparisons to Brad Pitt in the new Chanel adverts. But I still prefer the Kurt Cobain. I remember, when I was twelve years old, my sister telling me that (being blonde) I should grow my hair to emulate the suicidal pop star. I didn’t of course; I wanted to be normal as well back then. Well, she finally got her wish.

Now it is cut. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it next. I did quite enjoy the poof-phase, but it’s not for grown ups. On the other hand, the first comment my hair-dresser makes is, ‘You’re going bald!’ So maybe I will grow it out again, for the comb-over.

Long hair is an identity. I’d never had to identify with my hair like that before. It wasn’t an identity that I had chosen, but society foisted that identity upon me. The long-haired outsider. It was an entertaining eighteen months and maybe I feel like less of a person now I’m back with the short stuff. But then again, as my house-mate says, ‘A hairstyle is not a lifestyle.’

Now, for those of you with more patience than sense, a video of my locks being hacked. Warning: High pitched squawking may distress farmyard animals and the nervous of disposition.

UPDATE (September 2020)

I’ve now donated my hair on no less than five occasions – but perhaps for the last time. The comb-over has become too extreme!

  • January 2013
  • June 2014
  • August 2016
  • May 2018
  • September 2020

Hopefully that repays my piss-taking guilt, Mikey!

David Varela, Goldeous Kline and Me

Last week, David Varela took a vow of silence and spent one hundred hours writing stories. To prove it, he streamed all one hundred hours live on www.100hours.tv and created a live notepad so that the whole world could see his words appear on their screen as he typed them.

David was raising money for the Arvon Foundation (they run residential creative writing weeks for schools and community groups – I went on one of their paid courses in October: outstanding) and for every person who donated, he would write a story.

I found out about this spectacular project through my friend and neighbour, Naya. She recorded an interview with David Varela for Trans Limits Storytelling, and you can watch a snippet here:

You can help the other David reach his well-deserved £3,000 by donating here (although he won’t write you a story any more!).

One of the glorious features of David’s project is that all his writing is freely licensed under the Creative Commons copyright. That means I can (and you can) share the story he wrote for me! So here it is, along with a little comment by David before he started writing:

###

DAVID CHARLES: Goldeous Kline and the Borrowful Glaxons

4 hours to go…

At this point in proceedings, 95 hours in, I really do start to doubt my sanity. If I’m writing slower it’s mainly because I’m double-checking that everything is real. David Charles has made that deliberately difficult.

He’s asked me to write the story of Goldeous Kline and the Borrowful Glaxons.

Not being sure what exists and what does not, I Googled this phrase and was ‘shown results for Golden Kline and the Sorrowful Klaxons’ because clearly I’d made some kind of typo. So I know that these are not pre-existing entities. One David has come up with their names, and another David will come up with their story….

I’m excited. Are you excited?

—

Having destroyed the Amaloid horde and saved the galaxy once again, Goldeous Kline fired up the thrusters and headed back to base. She could expect a heroine’s welcome – indeed, she did expect it, as she had a shower of Finusian champagne at least every couple of weeks, the galaxy being as dangerous as it was.

Once out of Amalon’s orbit, she engaged hyperdrive and was back in Sector Omega-6 within milliseconds. She opened the comms channel.
“This is Goldeous Kline, requesting permission to dock. Repeat, Goldeous Kline. Yes, it really is me.”
She awaited a response.

And she awaited some more.

“Switching to secondary wavelength… This is Goldeous Kline. Acknowledge.”
More silence.
Maybe this was a prank. The boys in the comms shack did enjoy a good joke – but not normally on duty.
“This is Goldeous -“
“Hi Goldeous. Just hang on a sec. We’ve had a -“

There channel went silent again. Were they under attack? Was there a fire in Command?
“Sorry, Goldeous, we’re – no, let me – let go of that -“
“Command? Everything all right?”

The channel buzzed into life for a second and she heard what she thought was somebody being slapped across the face.
“Bzzzk… Eh oh? Eh oh.”
“Hello?”
“Greeting, pilot. All your base are belong to us.”
“Excuse me?”
“No excuse. All your base are belong to us. Also your ship.”

There was the sound of wrestling at the other end of the line again. Goldeous wondered who this invader could be. Their dialect was unusual, but the larynx must be humanoid. The Provaricons? Shepsy? Yes, she’d never trusted Shepsy.

“Kline, are you there?”
“Yes! Status.”
“This is Commander Sheppard…”
“Commander – good to hear your voice.”
“Yeah… bit of an issue back here. Admin cock-up really. Problem with the bank.”
“Who are the ‘Bank’? A new enemy alliance?”
“Could say that, yes. Thing is, they rather have the Galactic Council on their side on this one.”
“A conspiracy!”
“I’m not really making myself clear, am I? Goldeous, fact is, we’ve got ourselves up to our ears in hock. Acquisitions went wild with the credit card last year and now the lenders are foreclosing on us. Seems we were borrowing against our bases, but what with all the conflict recently, property prices have gone through the lunar crust.”
“I… don’t understand.”
“They’re repossessing everything. The bases, the ships… even Deckard. Apparently galactic law still regards him as a thing not a person.”
“But this is absurd! Sir – permission to launch a counter-offensive!”
“No, Goldeous… do you have any idea how much those photon torpedos are worth? Save your ammo and bring your ship back here. That’s a direct order from your Commander.”

She wrestled with the concept in her mind. Surrender? It felt… so wrong.
“Sir. Yes, sir. Requesting permission to dock.”
“Granted. Bay Three.”
“But Sir… I don’t understand how we could have spent so much money so fast.”
“Finusian champagne isn’t cheap, Goldeous. Glaxon Command out.”

—-

I’m going to end it there – because I’d have to stop at that point or follow through and finish a whole sci-fi parody novel, and I’ve only got three-and-a-bit hours left. Thank you, David, for the inspiration!

###

And thank you, other David, for the story! It was perfect, especially given my current reading of Debt by David Graeber (The Davids are taking over!).

“My name is David Charles and I’m Britain’s funniest qualified Egyptologist.”

It’s not a great opening line, but it is accurate. At least, I’ve not met a funnier qualified Egyptologist. Tony Robinson doesn’t count; he’s an actor. Did he get a First in Ancient History and Egyptology from UCL? No. So screw him.

This is an auto-review of my stand up show at The Camden Head on the 4th of November 2012. You can listen to the whole show by clicking on the play button below. Let’s do this!

This is only my third gig on the London stand-up scene and there is an audience of about fifty people waiting to be entertained. Only three of them are my friends, so that leaves forty-seven people to win over. Forty-seven people. That’s two football matches’ worth (including a referee and two linesmen). Two football matches playing out in front of me and only three supporters. Sounds like Hackney Marshes on a Sunday morning. But it’s not; it’s the Camden Head on a Sunday night and these football teams are missing Downton Abbey and Homelands to be here. Sacrifices have been made. I’d better be funny.

I stay sober and don’t eat for hours beforehand. This, combined with the fact that backstage is a exterior fire escape, means that I’m shaking like a leaf, when that leaf has drunk too much caffeine. But I am also on stage and that means I am under threat. To my caveman mind, the audience are lions in the Serengeti. Instead of fight or flight, though, my only defence is having faster neurons than them. This is why I don’t drink beforehand, whereas they are drunk. Hopefully. I also have the advantage that I have written six hundred and fifty-six words of funny material and if I can only remember those six hundred and fifty-six words, then I will have made them laugh and the lions won’t eat me.

But stand-up is more than just paper writing; stand-up is the scent of blood. Stand-up happens live, in the Colosseum, a gladiatorial battle of wits between the comedian myrmidon and the lion audience. I’m lucky, these particular lions want to roll over and have me tickle their tummy. But, as in all human-feline flirtations, the cat holds at least as much power as I do. And there are forty-seven of them. Merely repeating written words into the arena might get a laugh, but it is the liveness of stand-up that has the lions rolling around on the floor like you’ve just sprayed the room with catnip. Every reaction from the lions, every laugh, every cough, every ooo, urhh, eww and whahey, is registered in my brain and my neurons must react with funny. That’s liveness.

I can feel a punch-line coming up and the lions aren’t ready, I back off and set them up again, this time they roll over and I tickle their tummies, before dancing back to go again. They howl and mewl at one joke, so I rub it harder; they roar again, I rub still harder; they roar a third time. These are the moments, off script, where the lions have forgotten they’re lions and the myrmidon is in complete mastery of the Colosseum. These are the moments where feline and human fall in love.

Five minutes later, I’m off stage and the game resumes with another gladiator*.

*This is a classical metaphor, rather than an Egyptological one, because the Ancient Egyptians weren’t barbarous animal torturers, unlike Boris Johnson.

Gravel Beach, Lac de Saint-Cassien

The only signs that someone has been here before us are bird prints in the sand and a discarded washing machine. Trudging mud tracks here, through brushwood and whipping growling tearing underwood. The sun is sitting on a hill of scrubbed trees. Clouds push and pull themselves into streaks and whips. Abandoned boats tug the shoreline, resting to be used. A skiff scuds the surface, sculling past. We take our place on gravel beach, the sound of the road opposite a white noise from a far far away world.

Two fishermen are hunting into hiding. A dragonfly helicopters past our tent at night, a huge hanging thing of wings and tail. Wasps thrive on our trashy sweetness. An oil drum rolls on the shore, waiting for a fire or flotation. Cork driftwood litters the gravel, playfully begging a seating. Roots poke up through the floor, between the shards of glass. A jerry can of plastic sits on our gravel beach, with tin can lids and a discarded boat seat, shoved into a hole. There’s a hole in the ground: fill it with rubbish, sandals torn at the toe.

A rower pulls her way past at fifteen strokes per minute, coursing the multicoloured lake, from white-frozen ice to deepest darkest blackest black. She rows into silhouette, a Baskerville barks at her. Dogs in the shallows shake off spray, which mists around them in the low-light like the halos of mystical hounds.

Tranquillity splendours over the lake, where electricity pylons hang. Mountains range, back-layering the scene, trees and television towers. The sun bleeds into the sky. The two fishermen will be joined in the night-time by trance music and a female. Mating will be performed, doubtlessly.

The lake little laps at my feet, dusty rocks beneath my behind and sand under my tread. The roll of the road and the wind in the leaves of the trees blow like static. Ripples ripple on the lake, broken by the ducking dive of the fish, sometimes a plip of a plop, sometimes an almighty splash of leviathan. A wasp bothers my typewriter. The moon curves and daggers into the tree horizon, its mirror in the lake slipping to the shoreline. I smell Egypt, the freshwater seaside, broad water, blowing with the wind-waves: your way, my way.

How to Make a Good First Impression: The Scientific Way

Do you smile a lot? Do you wear a suit? Is your hair combed? Do you wear loud ties? We are judging you! Unfair, but true. The good news is that we can use the science of first impressions to subvert.

This study from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin looks at everything from the neatness of your attire to where you place your hands and examines how important each is in the overall judgement people make of your personality. The study also looks at how accurate the first impressions were for the subjects’ personality traits, but what I’m interested in is how to manipulate other people’s judgement of me. Obviously.

The study looked at ten personality traits:

  • Extraversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Conscientiousness
  • Emotional stability
  • Openness
  • Likability
  • Self-esteem
  • Loneliness
  • Religiosity
  • Political orientation (liberal)

I’m going to ignore the last three because, frankly, I’m not interested in coming across as a lonely, religious liberal. So that leaves seven personality traits.

The study measured the effect on first impressions of the following ten physical attributes:

  • Healthy vs. sickly appearance
  • Stylish vs. unstylish appearance
  • Distinctive vs. ordinary appearance
  • Neat vs. messy appearance
  • Smiling
  • Looking away from camera
  • Arms folded
  • Arms behind back
  • Energetic vs. tired stance
  • Tense vs. relaxed stance

So let’s get straight to the point. How can I make the absolute best first impression?

Smile and have an energetic stance. These correlate strongly with all seven traits. If you do nothing else, just smile: we can all do that, even if we’re tired.

Almost as effective as these two is having a relaxed stance. This correlates strongly with all of the seven traits, except for conscientiousness. So be energetic, but not frantic.

If you can’t manage these three, then a combination of dressing neatly and stylishly, holding your hands behind your back and looking generally healthy should make a favourable impression. Don’t bother folding your arms: it has a negligible impact on other people’s impression of you.

I’m actually quite heartened by the findings of this study. The key to a good first impression is not artificial social markers, like a fancy watch and £600 shoes. The best way of making a good first impression are things we can all afford: a smile and an energetic and relaxed manner.

Finally, a warning for those who dress ‘distinctively’: yes other people will think you are open, but they will also think you are lonely, liberal and irreligious!

This blog post is entirely based on the following paper, which I recommend you read:
Personality Judgments Based on Physical Appearance
Laura P. Naumann, Simine Vazire, Peter J. Rentfrow and Samuel D. Gosling
(Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2009; 35; 1661 originally published online September 17, 2009) http://www.simine.com/docs/Naumann_et_al_PSPB_2009.pdf

No Money Mondays

This is something I’ve been working with for a while. The premise is simple: don’t spend any money on Mondays. This is a fairly meaty post, so I’ll cut to the chase:

Why No Money Mondays?

  • It helps me to be more mindful of money, of how easy it is to spend, and how pointless. A day without money somehow frees my mind. I feel less stressed. I’m out of the game for a day. I can look at adverts, but I’m not part of that world.
  • It helps me live more healthily. I can’t just buy a nice packet of biscuits when I feel like it; I’ve got to finish up those lentils that have been sitting in my cupboard since January. I can’t pay for the bus; I have to cycle or walk.
  • I realise how possible a day without money is. It makes me dream of a life without money and what that would mean.
  • It helps me become more creative with how I spend my time and energy. A quick thought comes into my head, like: ‘I need to buy some new batteries for my dictaphone.’ I hear myself think this, but I have to reformulate a solution. I can’t just buy some new batteries. I can take the batteries out of my bike lights for the time being.
  • It saves me money! Every day, I record my spending. Over the course of a year, this forms a fascinating record of my spending patterns. On weeks when I have a No Money Monday, not only do I reduce spending on one day of the week, but that parsimony spills over into the rest of the week. This is another good reason why I do it on a Monday, the first day of my week. (The main reason is, obviously, alliteration.)
  • I am more productive: no more time-wasting shopping-excuse excursions.
  • Monday is when I do my accounts (usually with horror). It feels good to have a money-fast after that.

The History of No Money Mondays

I’m not the first person to think not spending money once a week is a good thing. No Money Mondays used to happen every week in Britain. Not on Mondays, but on Sundays. Shops, markets and businesses were forced to shut down for a day – by law. But now Sunday trading is part of every British high street – and even if it wasn’t, the internet would provide for every fleeting desire.

Sunday trading surged forth as a result of the free market reforms of the moribund Conservative government of John Major. The Sunday Trading Act 1994 made buying and selling legal. I’ll rephrase that: before 1994 it was illegal for shops to open on a Sunday. Illegal. Those of a younger generation will find this hard to believe, but it’s true.

But Sunday trading didn’t come into Britain without a fight. It was vigorously opposed when initially put to the House of Commons by Maggie Thatcher back in 1986. It wasn’t just vigorously opposed, but it became Thatcher’s only policy defeat in the House. The only time Maggie Thatcher was defeated in the House of Commons was when she tried to let shops open on Sundays. I’m sorry for the repetition, but this seems impossible to believe today. She wasn’t defeated on the Falklands War, she wasn’t defeated on privatisation, she wasn’t defeated on emasculating the trade unions. She was defeated over her Sunday trading bill.

The Bill of 1986 was defeated by an alliance of Christian Conservatives and Labour trade unions. The Christians wanted to ‘Keep Sundays Special’, to protect the sanctity of the Sabbath, and the trade unions opposed workers being forced to work on Sundays. When the Sunday Trading Act finally passed in 1994, it was only because of amendments that protected workers rights: Sunday working would be voluntary.

I’m interested in why Sunday trading was opposed. I can see why trade unions wanted to protect their interests: a seven-day working week isn’t everyone’s idea of fun. I can see why Christians wanted to defend the Sabbath: the Book reserves Sunday as a day of Holy rest.

But is there something more? I would say yes. I would say that behind this opposition was an instinctive desire to protect ourselves from continuous striving. A day with an open shop is a day with the possibility of buying and selling. And if you’re buying and selling, you’ll profit or lose: you’ll move up the escalator or down.

Close those shops and the escalator stops. A moment’s respite from the pressing needs of survival.

The Rights of Religion

I am a big believer in religions. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a Believer (or even a Belieber), but I can see that religion grows out of an instinctual need. And these instincts are usually good for us, or serve some purpose. Religion dominates in three domains:

  1. Community.
  2. Contemplation.
  3. Charity.

These three areas are not well served by other organisations and none cover all three, all together, all the time. Large, participatory organisations like Amnesty International offer us a combination of community and charity. Certain activities, like yoga, might give us community and contemplation. But religion alone nourishes all three. This comprehensive coverage explains both the rise of religions – and their ongoing popularity, in spite of all their absurdities and inherent threats.

It is with absolutely no surprise whatsoever that I see science gradually demonstrating the crucial importance of these three areas of life to our well-being as humans. A healthy network of colleagues and friends is an excellent marker for happiness. Purposeful contemplation, of the sort that prayer or meditation offers, is great for our physical and mental health. And charity, including volunteering our time, makes us feel happy.

To me, it is obvious that such a recurring and popular phenomenon as religion must provide the human race with some large benefits. I remain an unbeliever, but I am happy to take my lessons from religion. A money-fast Sabbath is one such.

I believe that the fight against Sunday trading in Britain, although economically indefensible, was an instinctive response to a real threat. But because it was a threat that we could not frame in a logical way, the Bill passed when all logical opposition was overcome (the trade unions’ objections to Sunday working). However, both the threat and our instinctive response to it, represented by the religious Christian Conservatives, remain.

So I would like to bring back the money-fast Sabbath. In my own irreligious fashion, I propose No Money Mondays. Instead of using laws, we will have to use our will-power, but I think it is worth it.

Experiments in Publishing: Success?

A month ago, I published a book. But I didn’t publish it the usual way. Oh no. ‘Usual’ doesn’t work any more. I published it in three different ways:

  1. as a paperback book (£5.99);
  2. as an e-book on Amazon and the istore (£1.99);
  3. in 152 episodes on hitchhikingbritain.com (Now discontinued).

I called this experiment Slow Publishing, for obvious reasons (it should take about a year for the whole book to trickle onto the blog). I had very low expectations, especially as I had no time for promotion – but how is it going?

The Website

Well, I’ve been publishing three episodes a week since the 23rd of July, so we’re up to Episode 16 now (about halfway through Chapter One). I’ve had over 600 visitors in total since the start and I can count on 15-20 people reading each instalment, plus 9 people have signed up to the ‘Soles’ RSS webfeed.

Sales

In terms of conversion, I’ve sold 10 copies of the e-book on Amazon, 1 copy on the istore and 1 copy of the paperback. I’ve made about £16.43 in royalties from these sales.

Promotion

The only promotion I’ve done has been one email to my good friends at the start of the project, plus notifications of new episodes sent to my twitter and Facebook accounts.

I’m hoping that some promotion will start to trickle in from my readers. I’ve already had my first 5-star review on Amazon, from which I quote here:

The Soles of My Shoes is an erudite, eloquent and warm book. A deceptively simple tale of a long weekend spent hitchhiking with an unrequited love-of-his-life, the protagonist reveals insights into love, life, class, wealth and what it is to travel… I left this book wanting (a) to climb Ben Nevis and (b) to go hitchhiking. Possibly to visit Scarp as well… Highly recommended.

Interim Conclusions

Well I don’t think £16.43 is too bad for a month’s work. True, all my friends who are likely to buy the book, probably have. But that just means that any sales from now on will have been earned. I’ll post another update here in a month or two and we’ll see.

But, for now, I like the idea that the internet is never closed for business and people are stumbling upon my book while I sleep. ‘The Soles of My Shoes’ will never be out of print and, who knows, perhaps in fifty years I’ll be drawing my pension from between its e-pages.

Straw Bale Building at Braziers Park

Last weekend, I went to Braziers Park to have a go at building a straw bale house. Here’s a little film I made about the project, run by Hugh Makins.

Straw Bale Building: Braziers Park from David Charles on Vimeo.

An introduction to straw bale building by Hugh Makins. Hugh is driven by his passion to find innovative solutions to the economic, environmental and social crises faced by humankind today. Affordable and sustainable straw bale building is just one aspect of his vision for a better world.

Hugh is a resident of Braziers Park in Oxfordshire. You can learn more about straw bale building by joining one of his experimental weekend building courses.

Filmed on location by David Charles in July 2012.

Facebook Zen

  • Do you have a problem with information overload?
  • Are you frequently lured to Facebook AGAINST YOUR WILL by the evil cookie monster, ‘Cool link, dude’?
  • Do you confuse looking through your Facebook News Feed with being productive?
  • Do you wish you could quit Facebook, but fear the consequences?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, then you need Facebook Zen.

What is Facebook Zen?

Facebook Zen is this:

My News Feed

Oh yes. That is my News Feed. You will notice that THERE IS NOTHING ON THERE.

That means:

  • Nothing to get distracted by.
  • Nothing to time waste with.
  • No empty information calories.
  • No ‘cool links’ to lose three hours over.

And it means there is no need to quit Facebook.

Why not quit Facebook if it stresses you so much?

Because Facebook can be useful. Honestly, it can!

You probably don’t care about why I find Facebook useful, but perhaps my list will help you make your own list – AND THEN MAKE SURE THAT FACEBOOK ISN’T MAKING YOU DO ANYTHING THAT ISN’T ON THAT LIST.

Do you see?

So, for me, Facebook is great for:

  • Making contact. I once saw a guy on a bus in Croatia quickly scribble out his name on a piece of paper and stuff it into the pocket of a girl he’d been chatting up, saying, ‘Find me on Facebook!’ – just before she stepped off the bus and out of his life.
  • Staying in contact. I’ve got old, old friends on Facebook who I haven’t seen for years (not since I chatted them up on a bus in Croatia) – you never know when they might come in handy.
  • Stalking people – but on my own terms, not because Facebook thinks I’ll be interested in their lurid holiday snaps.
  • Spreading something that I have created, that I think others will find valuable. Like this blog post, for example.

If you’re worried about what you’ll lose by getting a Zen-like Facebook page, then consider this:

  • If someone really thinks you’ll really appreciate the minutiae of their daily routine or that you would benefit from seeing an inspirational quote or a picture of a kitten doing ninjitsu, then they’ll either post it directly onto your wall or tag you in the post. Or tell you in person, like in the good old days.
  • Therefore, all you’re really filtering out is information vomit and spam. Or, more politely, water cooler chit-chat.
  • And, remember, you’re not quitting Facebook, you’re just turning down the volume so you can hear yourself think. OM.

If you desperately want the serendipity and spontaneity that the News Feed (let’s face it: incredibly rarely) provides, then by all means surf some of your friends’ pages and go where your finger clicks you. But make it a deliberate choice, not because you’re forced to by the Facebook News Feed cookie monster.

Most of the time we need less information, not more. Facebook Zen provides this, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So…

How do you get Facebook Zen?

Well thankfully (and quite against form), Facebook makes it easy.

If you’re a sharp Facebook user, you’ll have noticed Lists. These are a way of grouping friends. Among these lists are Smart Lists. One of these is called Acquaintances. It’s supposed to be used in partnership with another smart list called Close Friends, but we’re only concerned with Acquaintances.

Why? Because one of the features of the Acquaintances list is that people in that list DO NOT APPEAR ON YOUR NEWS FEED.

Score. Now, down to business.

First: forget the name Acquaintances. It’s just a name, you’re not defriending anyone. In fact, they’ll never even know about their demotion*. Into this list you are going to put every single Facebook friend you’ve ever made and will ever make.

Here’s how:

    1. Go to this page: https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize (sign into Facebook if you aren’t already).
    2. A page will pop up saying something like:

See less from these 8 friends in News Feed? You haven’t interacted lately with these friends. Would you like to add them to your Acquaintances list? (You’ll see them less in News Feed.)

    Haha! This is the stuff – but we want MORE!
  1. So scroll down down down to the bottom of this page and you’ll see a link that says something like: Include 163 others – now click this!
  2. Then press the Add to Acquaintances button on the right hand side at the bottom of the page.

If you have any other ‘Smart Lists’ running (like location-based or school-based lists), Facebook may prompt you to add even more friends to your Acquaintances list – just go through steps 3 and 4 above until it stops prompting you.

Et voilà! You have now pushed all your friends out of your News Feed and you now have achieved Facebook Zen.

OM.

*Except for all my friends: yes, you have all been turned into acquaintances. Sorry.

Amazing isn’t enough: Cycling 4,110 miles around Britain*

What inspires you?
What do you admire in other people?
What do you want to achieve?

I ask myself these questions all the time and the answer is always the same – at the risk of sounding like an idiot – awe and the awesome.

Warning: Much of this article is going to sound like a cheap Dale Carnegie knock-off. Sorry about that.

The awesome (according to the OED definition) inspires in us “a reverential wonder combined with an element of latent fear”. Hemingway on a fishing boat in the terrible sublimity of a storm – “The Old Man and the Sea”.

The day I left to cycle around Britain, that metaphysical “element of latent fear” had a very physical grip on my bowels. I had never done anything like this before. I was scared of my bicycle, a six-gear second-hand Raleigh with a proclivity for catastrophe. I was scared of my knees, which were about as strong as the hinges on our bathroom door. I was scared of my camping arrangements, which (in my imagination) involved ditches and shotgun-wielding farmers. But most of all, I was scared of the weather.

In some ways it was a typical English summer’s day, in other ways it was Hemingway’s sea-storm. The clouds were bursting in freakish pressure drop rainstorms every few hours and I sat in my friend’s kitchen for hours, clinging to my cup of tea as if it were a lifebuoy, prolonging the fear. This was the classic fear of the unknown. This was the fear that made me certain the whole trip would be worthwhile.

I did (eventually) overcome my fear, I did (eventually) leave my friend’s kitchen, I did (inevitably) get soaked in a rainstorm and I did (surprisingly) realise that rain isn’t so bad, but fear made it so.

Incidentally, I found that rain, more than any other weather, can provoke a whole range of powerful emotions: anger, hatred, depression and joy, as well as fear. It is emotion that bends our mind’s response to weather, not the weather itself. Once I realised that, I could bend my mind back again to something more positive. Sometimes.

Stop: The last thing I want to do here is write a puff-piece, showing-off about how great the journey was, about how great I am and how I did this and that and the other. I’m not kidding anyone: it was nothing more than a long bike ride. I didn’t have any good reason for the trip: I didn’t raise money for charity, I didn’t give talks in schools about sustainable transport, I wasn’t even going to write a book about it. I did it for myself alone. It was the cycling equivalent of a two-month asphyxiwank: pain and pleasure in equal measure for no discernible purpose. So, instead of writing about me and my bike ride, I’m going to try and explain why I did it.

For people who don’t know what I’m talking about, some background: this summer I cycled from London to London via Scotland, the Shetland Islands, the Outer Hebrides, the Lake District, Wales, Cornwall and just about every point in between. I went through two bicycles, three baskets and about four thousand calories a day. I slept most nights in a bivvy bag, got a bad-ass tan and am now as fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog. It took me 58 days and cost way more money than I expected.

So: why did I cycle 4,110 miles around the coast of Britain? Because awe told me to.

There was one other reason as well. In my life, I’ve been lucky enough to travel a fair amount. I’ve travelled all across Europe, North Africa and Eastern Asia, but only very rarely in the UK. It got to the point where I knew Cairo better than I knew any place in the UK, bar London and the environs of my South Oxfordshire birth-place. That had to change, but awe was the main reason why I did it.

Awe

Bear with me, please, while I talk about awe for a bit. The explanation of why comes at the end.

I think cycling is a good thing. It saves you money, it saves you time and it gets you fit. But the general idea of cycling somewhere is not awesome to me. For me, there’s no awe to be had in cycling down to New Cross. There might be fear – of the traffic, for example – but there’s no awe. I’m not struck dumb with wonder at my achievement when I step off the bike at Kismet Supermarket. I could imagine being awed by someone else cycling to New Cross – if they pedalled with their hands, say – but, because I’ve cycled that kind of distance thousands of times since I learnt to ride a bike, it’s no longer awesome for me. It might have been awesome when I was six, but not now.

This tells us two things: that awe is personal to us and that awe never stays still. My awesome isn’t your awesome and my past awesomes are no guide to my future awesomes. On the day of departure, sitting in my friend’s kitchen with a cup of tea, I was still awed by the prospect of cycling around Britain. I was probably still awed by it right up until I made it back to Sanford, gradually growing in confidence as I went. Now it is a past awesome, something I’m proud of, but not something that I’d be awed into doing again.

So here’s the why of the trip: somehow I picked up the crazy idea of cycling around the country. It was nothing more than that: a crazy idea. But the idea stuck. And the more I thought about it, the more it filled me with awe. The feeling is at least two-parts terror to one-part wonder and manifests itself as a tingling sensation in my balls (I’m sure there’s a female equivalent). And I know that, when I get this feeling, my future will be nothing more than a series of craven apologies if I don’t act on it. If I’d just cycled to New Cross, I wouldn’t be writing about it on this blog. It doesn’t interest me. Awesome, on the other hand, does.

Note: I’m not saying you should think I’m awesome, by the way. Like I said, awesome is personal, it’s all relative. Now I’ve done it, I myself wouldn’t be awed by someone who’s cycled around Britain. And even if you’ve never done anything like this, maybe you couldn’t give a toss. Maybe you reckon it was a shocking waste of time and money. That’s fine. This is about your personal awesome, not mine.

Awesome Barriers

Inspiration, admiration and achievement are all connected and they are all connected by your own personal definition of awesome. You are inspired by awesome things. You admire people who do awesome things. And awesome, because of its fear-inducing properties, is always an achievement.

Not all achievements are awesome, of course. Achievement is simply what happens when you overcome a barrier. Driving a car, for me, is no longer an achievement. It’s easy. I can never unlearn it, as much as I might wish to. It has become automatic, and an automatic action is never an achievement to the person doing the doing. When I was seventeen, driving was definitely an achievement – hell, getting the damn thing out of the garage was a bloody achievement! There’s got to be some sort of barrier to an achievement – and the awesome is always blocked by the biggest barriers.

Believe it or not, there is an ugly brute of a barrier sitting right in front of me on my desk: a humble pot plant. The man who sold it to me told me that I should re-pot it soon, otherwise it will suffocate and die. That was two weeks ago. It’s not that I’ve been too busy, it’s just that I’ve never re-potted a plant before: a nasty little barrier. But if I can overcome that barrier (before the plant dies, ideally), then I’ll be as contented as anything: I will have achieved something worth achieving.

Now I’m not saying that re-potting a plant is awesome, but if you ratchet up that achievement, from re-potting the plant on my desk up to, say, planting a new forest in the City of London, there is a point at which the task becomes so daunting, the barrier to achievement so high, that it can be called awesome.

That point will be different for everyone, of course. We all have different barriers at different heights. This is why even our greatest heroes can have heroes themselves, even Bob Dylan has Woody Guthrie. In the 1950s, Woody had already achieved young Bob’s vision of awesome, so he won his admiration as well. The best news about this is that it’s a virtuous circle. Woody inspired Bob to achieve awesome for himself, and he in turn has inspired generations of singer-songwriters to do the same (for better or worse). By following your inspiration and overcoming your barriers, you become an inspiration yourself.

Achieving Awesome

More good news: awesome isn’t necessarily difficult and in many cases it is laughably achievable.

There are a lot of things we don’t do simply because we’ve never done them before, like me and my suffocating pot plant. This is easy awesome territory. There are also a lot of things we don’t do because we’re frightened of them for no good reason. For me: making money, meeting strangers, falling in love or facing a crowd. It follows that I’m not very good at these things because I’m scared to try. But the truth is that there’s nothing inherently difficult about meeting strangers. If I could only overcome my pathetic social-fear barrier, I could pick up a pretty easy awesome, by making a few friends, or even by falling in love.

But there’s another kind of awesome as well, the kind of awesome that pushes something you are already very good at. We’ve had easy awesome, so let’s call this one epic awesome. For me: to go from writing novels in my bedroom to selling best-sellers in Hollywood. In many ways, this is the most productive strain of awesome. This is the way cures for cancer are found, the way revolutions change regimes, the way cooperatives are built.

But don’t underestimate the power of the easy awesome and doing something for the first time. I will never cycle one hundred miles in a day for the first time ever again. I will never free-wheel downhill at 43.2 mph for the first time ever again. I will never sleep rough for the first time and have a slug splat across my face for the first time ever again.

That first time breaks the barriers. It is a dopamine rush that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing, but will never recapture. It is the inspiration that drives further achievement. The first time opens up worlds. I can never go back to a time when I didn’t play guitar, when I didn’t write lyrics to silly songs and make even sillier videos for them. Now I can never go back to a time when I wasn’t a round Britain cyclist. The first time makes possibilities possible. Now I can plan more long-distance cycle trips, I can look at a map of Scandinavia and think: “Yes, that is possible.”

That first time also pushes our threshold of awe further forward. I’ll have to go further and deeper to find my next cycling awesome. However, this constantly moving threshold of awe means that it’s also very easy to become blind to our own awesomeness.

Cautionary tale: A couple of thousand miles into my four thousand mile trip, I was totally inured to the awesomeness of cycling seventy or eighty miles in a day. In fact, I was feeling a little down that I was barely halfway and I’d already been going for a month. That evening, I met some Swiss girls in a hostel in Oban and we chatted, as you do, about our respective travels. I was awed to hear that they’d been working for six months in Glasgow, thousands of miles from their homes, to learn a foreign language, English. But they were equally astounded that I’d cycled sixty miles that day. To me, it seemed a bit on the low side, but their awe allowed me to reflect on what I’d done so far and I was able, once more, to enjoy my achievement. It can be hard to feel our own awesomeness when we are always pushing for more.

Living the Awesome Life

Awesome burns memories deep into your hippocampus. You never forget awesome. I stopped for dinner one evening at an eco-hostel in East Yarde in Devon and I got chatting to the owner, another David. He told me about a cycle trip he’d done from Beijing, through Tibet, all the way to India. His eyes shone and his beard bristled as he talked about cycling through paddy fields, crossing the Himalayas and escaping from the Chinese secret police. It was as if he’d just got back that morning, so I asked him when it was: 1986. He hadn’t done another trip since, but he said that never a day goes past without him thinking about that cycle ride twenty-five years ago. It still inspires him, a well-spring of joy that will never run dry.

This story probes deeper into the nature of awesome. Why did this other David not feel the need to go on another cycle trip? The answer is that a trip like cycling through China, or cycling around Britain, is discrete. It has a very defined beginning and end. It is a wonderful learning experience, but it shouldn’t be confused with life. Chinese cyclist David made his trip, learnt his lessons and kept his memories, but his life is dedicated to sustainable tourism. This is his life’s epic awesome, the awesome that others benefit from, the awesome that will be left behind in other people’s memories. This sort of awesome is built gradually. Not every day can be escaping from Chinese secret police.

By following life-goals that provoke feelings of fear and wonder, like setting up a sustainable eco-hostel in the nowhere of Devon, you will be living the awesome life. And, by living the awesome life every day, like this other David, awesome achievements will naturally follow. You will astonish yourself and become an inspiration to others.

Never forget that you might be blind to your own awesomeness. Just living here on Sanford puts you into a bracket of awesome that most people won’t have the fortune of experiencing – unless you spread the good news.

For me, amazing isn’t enough any more. I want awesome.

* If you want an idea of how far 4,110 miles is, take a plane from Heathrow to New Delhi, in India. Or, if you prefer, to Chicago in the US. It’s far. If I’d cycled east instead of in a circle, I would have made it to Iran.

If anyone is planning a cycle trip and wants to discuss the practicalities and psychologies of long-distance cycling, then please get in touch.

On this trip, I took a photograph every 10 miles. You can see them all, sped up to an equivalent 72,000 mph, in a four-minute video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvNRY-KpmNQ

This article was first published in The San, the magazine of Sanford Walk Housing Cooperative. I have no idea why it wasn’t also published here at the time I wrote it! Better late than never.

Consume Skills, Not Stuff

Instead of consuming more stuff, why don’t we consume more of our skills?

That little thought struck me yesterday, while I was sitting waiting in the bank, having loans advertised at me.

We all like to acquire new things. There’s nothing wrong with that desire; it’s a pretty decent developmental tool. But acquiring new things doesn’t have to mean buying new stuff. In most cases, new stuff is not the kind of acquisition that makes us happy.

For example: why should I buy a new guitar? A new guitar won’t help my skills, it won’t help me play any better. What will help me play better is acquiring a new song.

So I went home and ‘bought’ a new song by looking it up on the internet. I now ‘have’ a new song in my head and it cost me nothing. I can forever get pleasure out of my new acquisition, merely by sitting down and playing it.

Best of all, the song’s warranty won’t run out and it won’t break through overuse – in fact it only ‘breaks’ through underuse. What material stuff can you say that about? Certainly not my Argos toaster, recently replaced.

Some things need to be bought as stuff, like my toaster, but a lot of our desire can be slaked by picking up a new skill or by developing existing skills.

So from now on, whenever I desire something new, I’m going to think first of nurturing my skills.

What a to do! Suggestions for list-makers

I have a problem with TO DO lists. They are impossible. Not only that, but – being optimists – we don’t even realise it. It’s almost tragic, our list-making.

Bob Dylan’s TO DO list.

What I mean to say is: if you managed to survive the public education system with a shred of your imagination intact, then of course your life is going to be overflowing with things TO BE DONE.

Put another way: there will always be more on your TO DO list than CAN BE DONE in an average human life-span.

You still don’t get what I’m saying, do you?

Here it is: if you were to write out your TO DO list in full, you must understand that you will DIE long before every item is ticked off.

There.

That might sound a little morbid, but it does give a certain poignancy to all such lists, which could be useful. Perhaps if we considered these lists in their true light, we would spend less time on TIDY ROOM and more time on READ HAMLET.

Suppose you have a TO DO list of ten items. What six items would you immediately strike off if you knew you were going to DIE after only doing four of that list? That should be a pretty reasonable guide as to what you should be doing and what is probably not worthwhile.

I also wonder what items would miraculously appear on our TO DO lists if we are honest with the truth that our time on this earth is finite. Perhaps CREOSOTE FENCE would be replaced by APOLOGISE TO JANET.

Think about it the next time you are looking down your TO DO list…

###

Even if you don’t follow my rather morbid objection, I have a further problem with TO DO lists. The name.

I believe that the first step in doing anything is to think of doing it. So merely by adding a task to your TO DO list, you have (by definition) already started it. Therefore, it shouldn’t be called a TO DO list, but rather a DOING list.

This has the advantage of being far more optimistic and gives you the impression that the task is pretty much over and done with. Which (I would argue) it is. If you think about it, you can easily write a novel without ever being able to spell properly, but it is an impossible task if you never even think of writing a novel. The thinking of it is always our biggest hurdle to accomplishing a task.

So I challenge you to change the name of your list and see what a difference it makes to your productivity and contentment.