Category: And another thing…

“I want to put something back into the community.” Heaven help that community.

What strikes fear into any self respecting higher education tutor, business start up mentor or Miss World Judge? The phrase “I want to put something back into the community”.

Whilst it wants to suggest acts of beneficence and good deeds, all too often the phrase points to a rather nasty slime trail of good intentions over which other people have to delicately step over in order to avoid the results of someone else’s emotional incontinence.

Putting something back in the community begs the question of what did you take out of it in the first place that now requires to be replaced? Are we talking about the Elgin Marbles here? Or gas fracked from underneath our neighbours lawn whilst they were out shopping in Blackpool? Or the settling of old scores which now need resolving by some swift spade work?

Good intentions in the community which go sour was predicted by the German sociologist Frederick Tonnies in the late 19th century. He wrote about community as resulting from one of two types of relationship: one based on Gemeinschaft or one based on Gesellschaft. The former suggests relationships built on blood, family and kith and kin: the latter points to relationships built on contingency, contract and rationality.

He argued that whilst community was constantly a story of one in which our relationships shifted from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft because of the allure of money, fame and fortune, in actual fact we continually hankered after a return to Gemeinschaft and the emotional security that entailed.

In this world view, taking something from your community – whether this be underground gas, pensions, or works of art – meant that whilst it might enable you to large it for a few years in Sodom and Gomorrah, it would only be a matter of time before you repented and wanted to return the remainder of the earth, money or artworks from whence they came.

Whether there is anything worth returning to the community that had been previously desecrated is another matter altogether. So when people profess to want to put something back into the community, it’s always worth asking yourself, whose community, for what reason and on whose terms and at what future cost.

Coming Closer to Home: what it’s like to live upside down.

When we were kids we’d occasionally get perplexed about how people could live upside down in Australia and not fall off the planet.

Having two European guests, Anton and Srdjan,  take root in your home town, courtesy of a Youth in Action Grant, makes you realise that up-side-down-ness isn’t about gravity at all but much more about how you drink, eat, navigate local traffic and your own national identity within the wider European maelstrom of identities.

Hosting European guests has many pleasures to it – showing them your favourite pub topping the list of course – but the most entertaining one is looking at them looking at us and finding out that it’s a perpetual source of amusement for them.

The most obvious example is of course the fact that we Brits drive on the wrong side of the road, compared with most of the rest of the world. There are a lot of early visit gags about the lads sitting in the wrong car seat and pretending to drive with imaginary steering wheels and hammering imaginary brake pedals in pseudo emergency stops. No-one’s hurt though and there’s no damage down.

English beer is also a source of wonder and bemusement. Not only does it have no head to it but it also tastes of bread according to Anton.  Or is something that would be fed to the pigs in the summer, if you lived in Srdjan’s home town. The idea that we drink this stuff at all leaves the boys incredulous.

Things get more complicated when we talk about what constitutes typical English food. The road the boys live on is awash with Chinese, Greek, Turkish, Italian and Indian takeaways and when we point out that the most popular meal in the country is Tandoori Chicken, this too provokes a lot of head scratching, puzzled looks and eventual boredom when we discuss some of the consequences of being an ex-colonial power.

Perhaps our up-side-down-ness is something that we should recognise and enjoy more frequently. It would allow us to challenge all sorts of international orthodoxies like McDonalds, Starbucks and NATO for instance. We could cheerfully opt out of some of the tackier sides of modern day living with the reason that we’re an upside down kind of nation and still haven’t fallen off the planet despite the gravitational pull of the large multinational conglomerates.

There are lots of benefits to being funded by the EU: and realising that you live most of your life upside down is probably one of the best.

Tripping off the tongue: truth, reconciliation and disruptive playground politics.

My second visit to Cape Town in 2002 was the time I understood how teachers can hunt in packs and why we can never do everything on our own and have to rely, as much as we might not like it, on the ineffable.

Mandela’s colleagues had led us to schools in some of the Western Cape townships for a week and as the week wore on, my colleagues and I became increasingly inebriated with the achievements and challenges that Mandela’s colleagues were demonstrating.

One inebriation led to another and before we knew it we were walking around a Stellenbosch vineyard, knocking back the free tasters, plying ourselves with goats cheese, biscuits and fruit and one slip of a post-it note led to another and before you knew it, bang! The atmosphere was shattered, distrust washed over the group and we UK colleagues looked at each other: embarrassments were waved away, giggles were hidden, smirks stifled and post-it notes and pens hurriedly hidden in handbags. The pack was out in force and it’s ability to join forces and stand shoulder to shoulder against outsiders summonsed up. The old empire is never far away when Brits are abroad.

Mandela’s colleagues managed to patch the group back together again, well versed as they were in truth and reconciliation but the schism in our group never healed, albeit that disruption happening over 10 years ago.

If it’s hard to heal a small group of teachers out on a weekly field trip, how on earth do you go about healing a nation?

Some time later that week we visited a disability centre where disabled people were being trained in new employment related skills and tentatively being prepared for the workplace. We asked them how this was possible in the country at this time.

Jimi, one of Mandela’s colleagues pointed to a large map of South Africa hanging on the wall. There were three pieces of thin plastic tubing coloured red, blue and white, fixed into the map. The red tubing spanned the length of the country and, explained Jimi, represented the blood of the people required to make the changes necessary; the blue tubing started mid- country and ended in the Pacific Ocean and represented the water and resources required to make the changes necessary; the white tubing started mid-country and went northward up to the limits of the map, disrupting the frame in the process. This, explained Jimi, represented God as there was no way human beings were capable of making the changes necessary on their own. There was a need for something else in this process, something which couldn’t be described and passed by all of our understanding.

We all looked at each other surreptitiously not quite knowing where else to look or what else to say, the earlier events of the week still fresh in our minds. We may have shared a common blood between us, we certainly had no shortage of resources to draw on but we were distinctly impoverished when it came to being able to draw on an ineffable source of power that we could all confidently identify and draw on. We were in fact, distinctly alone in our school trip.

Perhaps the first step in our truth and reconciliation process would have been to recognise that it was loneliness we shared, not the false gang mentality of the pack that the earlier inebriation had succeeded in unmasking.

Free Nelson Mandela? A confession.

I never did like The Specials’ song, “Free Nelson Mandela” back in 1984. There, I’ve said it and a small white man’s burden has lifted.

You couldn’t dispute the lyrical intention – unless you’re of the Tebbit clan – but the jaunty ska trumpets always left me rooted to the dance floor back in Leeds University Students Union. Not that I was a natural in the student discotheque, surprising though that may seem.

I was more of a svelte glam rock poseur and could do a mean languid impression of Phil Oakey or Marc Almond. I once provided a memorable routine to Soft Cells ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’ at an overcrowded student party in Hyde Park, but Jerry Dammer’s anthem invariably led to me half heartedly jumping up and down out of time with my compadres until one evening I realised I just didn’t like the song at all so slinked off to the kitchen to hang out with members of the SWP (the Socialist Workers Party in those days before it had a Blairite conversion to the Socialising Workers Privileged Tendency in the late 1990s).

But now that Mandela has left our shores, I’m fully expecting the track to be re-released any day now only this time around on multiple formats of CD, I-Tunes, YouTube, DVD, and who knows, perhaps even 7″ rainbow vinyl: which lets face it, was the height of choice back in the mid ’80s.

Those days, the choice of vinyl symbolised an act of political solidarity so you had to be careful as you stepped around Jumbo Records in Leeds Merrion Centre to make sure you made the right choice for those student parties later on that day when us student geeks would earnestly look each other up and down, compare shoe size and argue whether it was plausible that the purchase of the record could play a small but important part in contributing to Mandela’s release and ultimately over throwing the apartheid regime. I hope it did, even though I couldn’t bring myself to buying a copy. Times were tough then and Human Leagues Hard Times seemed more in tune with both my personal and the wider public mood.

This time, though, I shall try harder to like the song although the chances that I shall be able to dance to it any more effectively are extremely remote.

First disruptive steps in South Africa.

I first visited South Africa in 1999 when I was working at LIPA and Lee Higgins, our community music tutor at the time, had been involved with various ISME activities and had come back enthused about what he had seen and heard and made a very persuasive case about why LIPA should be out there and how it might be a great source of potential undergraduates for our course in our august institution.

Whilst LIPA released some funding to pay for a market research trip for the two of us, we realised very quickly that asking potential students to pay what in some peoples case would have been the equivalent of a life times earnings to study for a three year degree programme was a form of optimism which bordered on the deluded. Of course, there would have been some students whose parents could have paid – but they almost certainly weren’t going to be from the black families who lived in the townships of Cape Town that we visited. And sure – we could dream about sponsorship of talented black musicians by benign white multinationals all we liked – but the fact is that going on a student recruitment drive to South Africa in the late 1990s was a potentially ridiculous mix of idealism, naïveté and market forces.

What wasn’t ridiculous though was what we did find. We went looking for students and sources of institutional income and instead found people and places and sights and sounds and colours and textures and atmospheres and politics and religions and a place on earth which was simultaneously heaven and hell and which blew apart our preconceptions of notions of community, of music, of Black and White and of good and evil.

Mandela of course infused the air we breathed, the ground we walked on, the talks we talked and the music we listened to. We saw, heard and felt Isicathamiya; we heard Xhosa and Zulu, we wondered why there had never been a civil war in South Africa and we were astounded. In fact, there wasn’t one single day when we weren’t astounded by something or another.

That first visit led to several future visits which became less about attracting the South African Rand to the coffers of LIPA, and more about wider educational and cultural exchange between artists and teachers but the astonishment we felt during that first visit continued to dance around our footsteps as we met many inspirational people whose lives were also infused by Mandela’s presence – or absence, given the amount of time he had been incarcerated on Robben Island.

I don’t really want to say RIP Nelson Mandela as there are millions more saying that right now much more authentically from places that can still astound. His death not only opens up other ways of being astounded by the stories of South Africa: but also how we live our own lives in places which may be thousands of miles from Cape Town but which may as well be on Mandela’s doorstep given the racism, bigotry, fear and ignorance which are still evident everywhere you look and tread.

So I hope his family and people find some peace once he has been laid to rest; but for the rest of us, Insha’Allah, we could do a lot worse than to allow ourselves to be constantly astounded at the world we continue to live in and infuse some of his spirit into disrupting those worlds.

Things not to talk about: lessons in keeping your mouth shut.

Well, there’s lots of them at the moment. Always have been, always will be: and there’s lots of people who always want you to keep schtum; keep your mouth shut; keep mum; go shhhhhhhh.

And the current topic not to say anything about is: well, clearly I can’t say. Otherwise it would be in the public domain and that would be the end of it. So there. On the other hand… No, there’s no other hand when it comes to keeping your mouth shut. You do it. End of. There is no alternative.

So, for those who need some advice and guidance on keeping your mouth shut, here are some tips and tricks. In the best of social media protocols, this post is open to suggestions and refinements so please feel free to add them liberally. As long as no-one else objects of course.

Lesson 1. Don’t turn UP. If you turn UP to something, it makes it difficult not to spread the word afterwards about what you have turned UP to. If you don’t turn UP, there is no risk that you’ll be tempted to spread those words which form in your head through that something or indeed afterwards. If 50% of life is about turning up (on time, to the right place, with the right people) then the other 50% is about not turning up and being saved the awkward moments of being asked your opinion.

Lesson 2. You don’t exist if the media aren’t interested. Lots of things we do these days rely on the power of the media to spread our words for us. This means we have to talk, behave and exist in a certain way if we are to gain their interest. If we don’t do any of those things, then we don’t exist as far as the media is concerned and you have effectively been shut up. It’s like having your photo taken or waving at the camera if you’re inadvertently on TV – you only exist when someone has snapped your face or waving arms. Until that happens, you are nothing. Zilch. Nada. A media-free zone.

Lesson 3. When someone in authority says ‘advice’ they mean ‘instruct’. Many people in charge feel awkward about their role and try to adopt all sorts of friendly mannerisms to hide their discomfort. They might say to you that they advise you to do something (like keeping your mouth shut) when in fact they mean they’re instructing you to do it (ie shut your mouth). So, when it comes to helping you knowing what to do in difficult political situations, just pay attention to the person who says ‘I advise you to….” They really mean shut the fuck up. And you would best to adhere to their instructional advice.

More lessons in keeping your mouth shut to follow over the next 2 months!

An Open Letter to Russell Brand: Voting. So what?

So, yes, Russell, democracy ain’t perfect. Voting is a corrupted and corruptible process. History will show us what we want to look for and voting will either be the peak of human endeavour or a sleazy, compromised dance of settlement with partners you’d not want to get too close to in case you catch something nasty like realpolitik.

But Mr. Brand, marvellous entertaining and uplifting man that you are, voting is the best it’s gonna get for the time being. And I don’t mean the macro choices of Cameron Heavy, Cameron Light or Cameron Rosé. I mean the voting in the little places of the classroom, the workplace or the pub on a Friday night when we might rashly vote to go for a kebab or stay for another Subrowka shot.

We need constantly to practice our voting skills in all sorts of places and at all sorts of times – and often in the knowledge that whilst the ‘majority’ voice should be heard, the ‘minority’ voices also need listening to – otherwise we face a future of loud mouth boorish fat bastards in blazers calling all the shots about which pub to drink in, which school lunchtime option to gobble down and which Labour Party leader gets elected by what kind of vote.

The issue about the act of voting is not about whether you ignore it – but it’s about how you can do it more often, more sophisticatedly and with more joy in the complexities it offers us when it comes to understanding the social lives we are woven into.

Banging on about HS2 – a really meaty subject to bang on about

High Speed 2 – HS2 as it’s popularly known as in the UK (albeit not with a huge degree of popularity) – is proposed by the the UK government as being one of the most significant infrastructure projects to be produced in the UK since… Well, I don’t know, since ever.

As such, it is a perfect subject to bang on about given it will touch every raw nerve ending in English civic life: trains and the railways, urban regeneration, the North:South divide, town vs country, the nature of our national identity and every other political agenda item imaginable.

One of the exquisite features of this debate is that it will run and run well beyond the life time of any one political party’s tenuous hold on power – more than likely for the next 30 years. I may well be dead by the time we see its official opening. All the more reason to devote part of this blog to a subject which will transcend party politics, local and national allegiances and personal preferences for sitting in an aisle seat, a window seat, a quiet zone, facing the direction of travel or where you’ve come from.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, unborn children of the next generation, I give you my next blog subject: Banging on about HS2. Future posts are likely to be late, diverted via Crewe or cancelled. And certainly not likely to be completed before 2043. Your news and views are very welcome! The journey (dread cliche) starts here…

Why is Coca Cola thanking us for ‘sharing’ our summer with them?

Sharing – that ancient tradition of passing something onto someone which may be of mutual interest – has taken on a new dimension recently with the advent of social networks and the desire of many commercial operations to generate compelling content which can will be transferred painlessly from customer to customer in a mimetic act of contagion.

Marketeers – and we’re all marketeers now apparently, even if its a simple matter of telling others about our pet dogs foibles – are sighing a huge sigh of relief now that bloated advertising budgets have been replaced by viral videos, popular posts and contagious copy. It costs them a fraction of what it used to and the happy conduits of their marketing message are now the rest of us and we’ve taken on this mantle of the surrogate marketeer through our adoption of the concept of sharing.

In the old days, per-social networks, sharing as a young boy used to mean pretty much one thing. I have something – a dead hedgehog –  I think you’d be interested in. I’d like you to experience it in order to strengthen the bond between us. Usually this act was reciprocated. You had something – a frog in a bucket – which you thought I might like to see. We swapped hedgehog and frog, back and forth in acts of unconditional sharing. There was no other agenda and pretty soon we moved onto other objects of our desire and affection- axolotls were big in those days.

Post social networks however, sharing has come to mean something else. Not only do I have a dead hedgehog which you are interested in, but I also have an old copy of The Beano I’m trying to get shot of.  I give this to you in an act of sharing, even though you’ve read it a thousand times and have moved onto 21st Century Schizoid Man. Likewise, your frog in a bucket eventually loses its interest to me and I’d rather you share your mountain bike with me, even though I haven’t passed my cycling proficiency test yet and you have no desire whatsoever to ssee me wreck your shiny new acquisition.  In social network protocols, I will continue to bombard you with requests to share my Beano in return for you sharing your mountain bike with me for a week.

Coca Cola, in their recent campaign which thanks us for sharing our summer with them know this meaning of sharing only too well.  I had no intention of sharing my summer with them and would have much rather banned their empire for a month than have negotiated their sales camps set up in the local supermarket. And whilst they were after my hard earned cash in the spirit of sharing, I would have much rather dumped a shed load of dead frogs in buckets on their door step in return for knocked down bottles of black fizzy nastiness which rots your guts, social networks and moral fibre.  Coca Cola – I didn’t share my summer with you and I will not be sharing anything with you any time soon. Not even my Beano.