MANY in Scotland like to think of themselves as being "Celtic" without necessarily having a coherent idea of what that means. Cambridge historian Simon Young's the Celtic Revolution has little or nothing to tell us about the Scottish Gaels, nor indeed anything about "the Celts" into modern times other than that from the Middle Ages they retreated into insignificance in the pan-European story. In short, Young is not interested in mysticism, revivalism or the elevation of history's losers.
The result is a clear-sighted view, supported by burgeoning linguistic scholarship and archeological evidence, of who the ancient Celts and their Dark Age successors were. They may not have been empire-builders but they inhabited much of Europe and, the author asserts emphatically, they matter, "as the Greeks or Romans, the Etruscans or Carthaginians matter".
To the novice Celticist there are plenty of juicy surprises along the way: the Iron Age Celts wore trousers but had a less refined penchant for human sacrifice and would often flay and boil the heads of captured enemies before turning them into candle-holders; in the early centuries BC, Celtic tribes sacked Rome, had successful military campaigns in Macedonia and Greece, and for a time terrorised modern-day Turkey, where they established a kingdom, Galatia; and the Dark Age Christian Celts of Ireland, into all sorts of self-harm and abnegation, originated the practice of lying out on beds with naked girls in order to "test themselves".
The ancient Celts are often lumped in with the other "barbarians" in antiquity and it is true that they do not conform to the traditional yardsticks of civilisation: they were illiterate, they were nomadic, and they glorified invasions and conflict where southern European writers of the time agonised over whether their wars were "just". Yet what is clear is that, in the Iron Ages, tribes who spoke Celtic tongues, shared the same style of possessions and art and had broadly similar spiritual traditions, covered enormous swathes of Europe, from Britain and Ireland to Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of Germany and the Lowlands.
In 500BC they appear in Italy; in 390BC we have the first recorded military campaign involving the Senone tribe, who sacked the Etruscan city of Chiusi before going on to humble Rome. Celtic warbands then spread eastward along the Danube corridor into the Balkans, Bulgaria, Transylvania, even reaching Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In 280BC, mere decades after the death of Alexander the Great, they routed the Macedonians, then sacked Thermopylae in Greece before being stopped at Delphi.
A century or so later the Romans arrived in Asia Minor to crush the Galatians and so began the Celtic retreat. Harried out of southern Europe they were pushed towards extinction until, by 500AD, they existed only in Britain, Ireland and Brittany. What Young cogently argues, however, is that the Celts' military successes paved the way for Rome's ultimate domination by weakening other states and kingdoms in the region; and having shown that they changed the course of European history once, he turns to the Dark Age Celts of Ireland to prove that they did so again by helping to preserve "the universal faith" after the fall of the Christian Empire.
This episode is well-rehearsed, but it is worth reminding ourselves the extent to which Christianity teetered on the brink in Europe as the Goths, Franks and Vandals overran it and other parts of Christendom fell to Islam. To the early Irish monks, exile was another form of self-flagellation, and when they left their homeland it was to set up monasteries and exist in Godly solitude. Within a generation of arriving in Iona in 563AD, however, Collum Cille (Columba) was the most feted holy man in the British Isles. In France, Columbanus - before he angered the local king Theuderich by refusing to bless his royal bastards and had to leave - was similiarly revered, and, slightly later, Aidan Christianised much of Anglo-Saxon England. Young shows that these men did not so much alter Christianity - Celtic Christianity was later subsumed within Roman Christianity - but preserved it, injecting the faith with a zealous intellectual energy at a crucial moment.
The third part of Young's book is given over to an explanation of how the Celts - posthumously - begat the secular, modern western mindset. Once Arthurian legend -which for the Dark Age British-Celts told of a messiah-like figure who would, some day, restore their lands - was altered out of all recognition by the courts of Europe, giving rise to the cults of chivalry and Courtly Love, the feudal aristocracies emerged with a code and a non-Christian language of their own, which in turn, Young hypothesizes, enshrined the early modern idea of separating Church and State. It's speculative, perhaps fanciful, stuff, but in the context of a book that so painstakingly sifts fact from fiction, reality from myth, Young earns the right to so indulge.
This review appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>Saviour of the world though he may be, we're not talking about President Obama here. No no. Chicago is Oprah's town. Somewhere along the line she wrestled Al Capone's heirs off the throne, and nowadays she gets to do what she wants, with Mayor Richard M Daley's blessing: on our visit half of Michigan Avenue, one of the city's main arteries, was closed off for two days while Oprah partied with her celebrity friends to mark the start of her 24th "season" on television. Most of the locals, shuddering to think what she has planned for her 25th, went about their business; some lapped it up, happy to hold aloft polystyrene clappy hands, ogle the slebs and stuff their faces.
Oprah, queen of empathy and psychobabble, "made it" in Chicago. The city, we are told, "made" Obama. There is, I'm sure of it, something about the place that revels in the containment of such dual narratives: tabloid talk host and self-help wet nurse on the one hand, cerebral politician and civil rights attorney on the other. Indeed, the president may have drawn up his ideological map living and working in Chicago's South Side, a place steeped in social activism and blue collar pride, but where would his campaign have been without its populism, its implacable showbiz optimism and the saccharine "yes we can"? Oprah's endorsement of Obama, incidentally, is estimated to have delivered him over a million votes.
There isn't, as yet, an official Obama-lover's tour of Chicago, although guides will point out the president's mock-Georgian mansion (surrounded by Secret Service goons), the church he used to attend before his pastor said unhelpful things about whites and the basketball court on which he won permission to date Michelle after impressing her brother with his dribbling. Much more visible around town is the insignia of Mayor Daley, who famously responded to Chicago topping the US murder league table in 2001 by insisting that the 9/11 deaths should have been included in New York's figures.
Given the historic scourges of gangsterism and corruption in Chicago, you can just about follow the PR logic. But Daley, whose father - also mayor - died in office in 1976 having served just a bit longer than the current incumbent's two decades, has never been entirely free from the suspicion of corruption himself, a suspicion that is wont to linger around most political dynasties but particularly around those in cities where politics, big business and the unions have always been close.
The upside of such fellowship is, perhaps, that, in Chicago, things get done: buildings go up, people get paid, the streets are clean and civic-mindedness thrives. The city's parks cover a total of 30 km²; one of them, Grant Park, hosts an excellent free Jazz Festival every year; and the Art Institute of Chicago houses some of the finest collections - European, American, Asian - anywhere in the world. The vibrancy and positivity that helps young Senators into the White House is not, indeed, hard to seek: it is there in the built environment, in the sports-mad citizenry whose baseball team never wins and in the nightlife that, according to Sinatra, not even Billy Sunday could shackle.
Chicago is, absolutely, the prototype of the modern metropolis. Razed to the ground by fire in 1871, it was rebuilt, skywards, round about the same time that it found itself at the intersection of the railroads from California to the North Atlantic and a shipping route that connected the cities of the north to New Orleans in the south. In 1900 the city's engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River, a feat that made the Mississippi navigable from Lake Michigan. And so a town built on swampland became a major industrial player, not least - courtesy of the Refrigerated Railcart - as the nation's meatpacking hub. Yes we can, indeed.
Today, the vertical building styles of the last century and a half collide and caress on Chicago's street grid, a checkerboard designed by Daniel Burnham, the great American architect and urban planner who tried to put his vision of "the city beautiful" into practice in The Plan of Chicago. The neo-classical and the neo-Gothic are everywhere at street level; stretch your neck and you'll find elegant art deco skyscrapers, among the oldest in the world, and the bombastic modernist creations, all steel and glass, of Mies van der Rohe and his acolytes. Van der Rohe wanted to strip architecture of all historical peculiarities, but his buildings have a theatricality about them in-keeping with the majesty of the 20th Century American cityscape, which is to say a skyline suggestive of endless possibilities rather than of social engineering.
Chicago's buildings are also more visionary than those of New York, the city to which Chicagoans most frequently compare their own and occasionally find it wanting. In reality, there is little reason for them to feel in any way second best: Chicago doesn't share Manhattan's anger or its snobbery, it's cleaner and less frantic, and just about everything that's world-class in New York is at least as good in Chicago. Its theatre audiences can stomach more than just musicals, it gave the blues a home and invented house music and it sits right bang on a freshwater lake that's bigger than Wales.
The city that reversed a river also gave the world McDonald's, Playboy, rollerskates and Wrigley's, and, courtesy of the Chicago School of Economics, the free-market ideology some reckon brought last year's crash. Were he alive Milton Friedman might have stuck up for himself by pointing the finger at those who encouraged banks to make credit so easily available, ie governments. But as laissez-faire capitalists and Democratic Party machine politicians alike know, it'll take more than the laws of boom and bust to bring Chicago down.
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald magazine
]]>One possible reason for the lack of a fuller understanding of Munro is that during his life he seemed at pains to distance himself from a significant part of his own output. It was under the pseudonym Hugh Foulis that he created such Glaswegian figures of fun as "Erchie" and Jimmy Swann, and, in the fictional Clyde puffer the Vital Spark - captained by the wily Para Handy - a parallel comic universe to rival those of Wodehouse.
Meantime as a journalist - Munro's "day job" for much of his life - he often chose to write under such guises as 'The Looker-On' and 'Mr Incognito', albeit regular readers knew exactly who they were getting. And it was the greatest paradox of his life as a writer that while he professed to deem journalism a low, dishonest profession and made no secret of his desire to be done with it altogether, he was exceptionally good at it. For the earnest writer of fiction to have to resort to hackwork is not unheard of; what is unusual is for such writing to retain its vitality and its powers of regalement a century later.
Munro does not concern himself as a journalist with heavyweight political subjects - again, his worldview remains elusive - but from it we get an intimate sense of the kind of man he was. In his introductions to The Brave Days and The Looker-On, the two volumes of Munro's journalism published shortly after his death and now re-printed for the first time by Kennedy & Boyd, George Blake, a friend and colleague of the deceased and a novelist in his own right, explains that while the author of John Splendid and The New Road frequently toiled over his most serious work (falling prey to the novelist's "despairs and self-mistrusts") his less exalted prose came easy, read always crisp, alive and whimsical and was "hammered out".
That these collections account for only a fragment of all his journalism supports such a thesis. And significantly they confirm that this writer of "romantic" novels had also that most under-valued of literary gifts: he was a humourist of the finest order. By all accounts Munro generally went about life "gay" in the old sense, kept a mischievously sardonic tongue in his cheek and deplored pomposity; and the sketches, features, essays and reminiscences culled from the Glasgow Evening News and from the Daily Record and Mail reflect this. His wit is for the most part subtle, often self-effacing and rarely savage. Often the humour comes from what is left unsaid, as when he describes the rural quiet of a sleepy village being disturbed by the arrival of sailors visiting: "The blacksmith's shop - which may be called the parish club - disgorged a surprising number of farmhands and idlers, who had been watching a man getting his hair cut." He delights in picaresque descriptions of various aspects of Glasgow and West Highland life, revels fulsomely in the popular song and theatre of the day and gently savages the fin-de-siecle spiritualist craze. A certain Rabelasian drollery is put to work on various "odd fellows", cranks and chancers but rarely without an accompanying ration of fellow-feeling, and he even feels sorry for the poet William McGonagall, in whose honour he attends a dinner, the Dundonian bard unaware that he is the subject of cruel mockery.
And yet even as he makes us smile, there is the same mastery of language and synthesis of English with Gaelic idiosyncrasies of thought and expression that is such a feature of his novels. In one seamless passage relating a distant evening's bacchanalia, for example, he tells us of a wine merchant of his acquaintance now "gone beyond these voices" who, after Keats, invites the company to wind up the evening "with a beaker full of the warm South, the true, the blushful Hippocrene".
It was during Munro's journalistic career that the so-called "new journalism" emerged in Britain, and there would be no greater practitioner of it in his lifetime in Scotland. In his early years in the trade, he recalls, "it seemed to be assumed that politics, commerce and the law courts exhausted almost the entire field of human interest". At some point in the 1880s he edited St Mungo, a short-lived "satirical-humorous" weekly journal in Glasgow that was "meant to be a playground for all the bright young journalists who had not sufficient opportunity to let themselves go with joyous abandon 'on their lawful occasions'." Over time, however, at the Glasgow Evening News - the newspaper in which he wrote for almost forty years, full-time for long spells, and which he edited from 1919-24 - he was given increasing license to let loose his brio on features and causeries relating to almost any matter of his choosing. According to Blake this was largely thanks to the good sense of the proprietor, James Murray Smith, whose enlightened attitude meant that "a writer of unusual gifts had an opportunity of self-expression quite unique in the history of newspapers." "It is no exaggeration", Blake adds, "to say that Neil Munro made that paper."
That his articles were so prized must have been due in large part to the way they reflect and interpret Glasgow. Though born and bred in Argyll (he was the illegitimate son of a kitchen maid at Inverary Castle) and for much of his career seemingly desperate to return there, he has a special feeling for "the city" per se, its dynamism and its mystery. One crepuscular scene, actually in Greenock, contains echoes of Conrad's London in The Secret Agent: "When [the lamplighter] lights the lamps, the night, which is a giant bird, comes swooping down like a moth attracted by the candle, and men walk for a space of hours in the shadow of its wings. And in this shadow, slimey and leperous walls, and squalid entrances, windows foul and broken; make-shift expediences of poverty or slovenliness; the dirty, patched, degraded and ramshackle - all that affronts the day is half-transfigured, half-concealed."
The sense of dread we find in Conrad, whom Munro knew as a friend and admired, is not altogether absent, but neither is Munro's Glasgow the same as the Glasgow that filled Edwin Muir, his not quite contemporary, with abject fear and loathing. Munro's Glasgow is rather the city of the Clyde in its tumultuous pomp, a city of "lascars and Chinese" and "boys just off the heather"; it is the city of the Glasgow Boys and the International Exhibitions of 1888 and 1901, a city of both art and commerce and the city of which the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia is reputed to have said in 1880: "Glasgow is the centre of the intelligence of England."
There is much to delight the social historian within Munro's accounts of Glasgow. He describes an exodus of 30,000 people on trains from Queen Street in order to skate on the frozen surface of Loch Lomond in February of 1885, and recalls that Miss Cranston's tea-rooms (the lady herself "always with something of the fete-champetre in her costume") were among the first businesses specifically tailored to female predilections. He remembers that in his youth Trongate was a "Saturnalia" on Saturday nights and makes certain long-vanished city centre taverns and restaurants sound reasonably appealing, others less so. Fine dining existed, but even the well-to-do tended to lunch on a mutton pie; the Glaswegian diet, it would seem, has always been gelatinous.
He also relates that in 1899 a group of "wealthy and influential Glasgow men", when shown a cinematograph, convinced themselves that "moving pictures could never successfully compete with the waxwork, the menagerie and the diorama." Munro himself is fascinated by technological innovation and new inventions and in one delicious episode he and Conrad end an evening X-Raying one another with a machine belonging to their host, a doctor on Bath Street.
Munro's acquaintance was wide and varied. Besides Conrad he knew Arnold Bennett and, at the behest of Andrew Carnegie, entertained the American novelist George W Cable on a visit to Scotland. He was on friendly terms with Sir Thomas Lipton and with Kennedy Jones, the Gorbals boy who became editor of the London Evening News and secured its purchase, cut-price, for the future Lord Northcliffe. He was a director of the short-lived Scottish Repertory Theatre Company and a member of the Glasgow Art Club, and knew well a number of the Glasgow Boys and other significant figures in the art world, including Muirhead Bone and Whistler's trusted Glasgow-based dealer, Alexander Reid.
Given that the record he left of himself in his journalism is the closest Munro came to any autobiographical endeavour, it invites us to scour his essays in criticism and his verdicts on others for clues as to his own weltanschauung. As regards literary figures he revered RLS and Scott - both enormous influences on his work - but hated the cult of Scott-worship. He admired Carlyle and Kipling, despite branding the latter a "recruiting officer" for the British Army in a rare moment of political asperity. (His reticence on such matters as war and Empire is marked. He lost a son, Hugh, at Loos in 1915, but cannot be dissuaded from exploiting the war on the western front for gallows humour: the French, he says, are "a romantic people, whatever you may think of the claims they made to compensation for damages to middens in Picardy".)
Elsewhere, he is scathing of "kailyard" literature and of the Celtic Twilight but demonstrates a keen appreciation of Burns' earthiness and use of the vernacular. Like Burns he is unswayable in the view that majesty and profundity are to be found in the common man and common herd. But his equability and willingness to view his fellow Scots in the best possible light is such that he seems incapable of entertaining dissenting views of them. Commenting on some scathing remarks about the oppressive nature of Scottish religion - made by Cunninghame Graham, another towering figure he knew well - Munro simply states "Scotsmen are not made like that now." And the conclusions he draws from meeting George Douglas Brown are, at best, breathtakingly counter-intuitive: "In what could only have been the impulse of a reckless mood, he had written a prose Song of Hate [The House with the Green Shutters] about his native village, every feature of which - town or landward - he actually loved as a crony of old years".
Disdainful of "intoxicating" literature, mysticism and, with regard to the Highlands, myth-making, at other times Munro seems not immune from such tendencies, writing in flights of fancy about ghosts and superstitions and old Highland traditions. In his novels he often allows the "romantic voice" to speak through him, ironically, as he satirises various aspects of the clan inheritance or martial Gaeldom, in particular the notion of a noble, warrior race. Underpinning this, however - and it comes though in his journalistic musings - is a lapsarian view of an essential goodness lost, an exaltation of a "true" Highland culture corrupted and deformed successively by tribal warfare, feudalism and, later, clearance. It is a weird sort of myth and one in which there is always room for pathetic fallacy: things are never allowed simply to be, landscape must always yield up a sorrowful human narrative.
If he anticipates Gunn and Gibbon in this regard, he anticipates Hugh McDiarmid in another. In praise of Cunninghame Graham's prose style, infused as Munro perceives it to be with the influence of his mother's tongue, Spanish, he could easily have been referring to his own use of Gaelic vocabulary and prosody; substitute Lallans for Spanish and you get Scots modernism: "It is not enough to know it as the teacher instils it - by looks or on the Berlitz system; it must be a language you can think in, a language whose every idiom gives access to the inner life of the generations of the people who have used it. Any language will do that has passion and poetry in it, but preferable is a language that has not known the blight of 'progress' as English has done, and best of all is the language that - like Spanish - retains its ancient spirit and enshrines a little - not too much - noble literature."
His own linguistic dexterity, the preponderance of contradictions in his work and a certain intellectual elusivity are all decent enough reasons for renewed study of Munro. The sheer enjoyment to be had from his journalism is another.
This article appears in the Scottish Review Books
]]>On the face of it one would have thought they would be cheered by such an endorsement of their creed and the seething reaction to it of religious people of varying stamps. Their discomfort has arisen, however, from the implication that Tim Nicholson's "philosophical belief" should be afforded merely the same validity as religious beliefs, which due to the cravenness of our policy-makers have been protected by law for some years. To the chagrin of those who believe anthropogenic global warming (AGW) to be beyond debate, their dogma has finally been categorised for what it is: an evangelical and absolutist faith shot through with misconceived altruism, millenialist visions of catastrophe, and delusions of grandeur.
Mr Nicholson, availing himself of multiple invitations to gloat about Mr Justice Barton's ruling live on television, said: "I believe man-made climate change is the most important issue of our time and nothing should stand in the way of diverting this catastrophe." Even in the face of mounting grounds for scepticism and the reality that warming isn't currently happening at all, then, it is not enough that one should acknowledge climate change MAY be afoot or that man-made carbon emissions MAY be a significant factor in the process. No, green activists who subscribe to the notion of "runaway" climate change - and there is no "moderate" position on this - brook no opposition to their views. Theirs is an aggressive secular fundamentalism, one which necessitates the rest of us being cajoled and bullied into mending our ways.
We do not know what will come of Mr Nicholson's appeal against his sacking. We do not know the circumstances of how it came about. His complaint that the firm's chief executive, Rupert Dickinson, responded to his concerns about saving the planet with "contempt" tells us only that he had his views gainsaid. The freedom to hold whatever "philosophical beliefs" one happens to find agreeable is cardinal to democracy; but so should we be able, in the name of democratic freedom of speech, to challenge or even disparage beliefs held by others. Where the great and the good on the liberal left, ever in thrall to the misguided ideology of multiculturalism, have erred gravely is in encouraging people with religious views to believe everyone else must respect ("tolerate" is no longer enough) every aspect of their faith and traditions.
The law, of course, offers most protection to those it fears: to the Islamists calling for the enemies of Islam to be "beheaded", "massacred" and "annihiliated" in the aftermath of the publication of the cartoons of Mohammed got up with a bomb on his head, but not to the counter-demonstrators daft enough to have brandished images of the Prophet. And certainly not to other groups whose views do not chime with the government's: like the Catholic adoption agencies who were told they must allow same-sex couples to adopt children. But once it was written into the law that adherents of non-secular belief systems automatically qualified for our respect - and that anything less was actionable - it was only a matter of time before others with agendas of their own caught up with the game.
]]>Gordon Brown has tended to put a very similar reading abroad of the current economic recession. The credit crunch, he would have us believe, was just something that landed on Britain's doorstep one morning, something the Americans cooked up, like cheeseburgers or the idea of intelligent design, and decided to share with the rest of the world. And what he says is partly true: the pricking of a confidence bubble in financial instruments in the United States had profound shockwaves globally. Brown, having been one of those credulous enough to believe the normal dynamics of market economics were vanquishable, was taken by surprise by such a pricking, but he was no doubt also quickly jolted by the reminder that such market corrections are, if not without cause, as naturally occurring as the dissipation of support for unelected Prime Ministers.
The sale of bits of "our" banks this week is a tacit acknowledgement that though the free market may stutter it is still better than any rival system. Brown's scorched earth policy - another "fiscal stimulus" is to be announced in the pre-budget report later this month - in the face of likely electoral repudiation is entirely in-keeping, however, with the wholly irresponsible way in which he has administered the nation's finances for the past 12 years.
Britain now has the worst public finances of any comparable western economy. Interest payments on the national debt are higher than the education budget and stand to increase further if we lose our Triple A credit rating, which seems more and more likely. Nebulous outside forces cannot be held responsible. Public spending, fuelled by borrowing, doubled during the boom years under Labour, debt spiralling against no great collateral. Blair's attempts to reform public services were resisted then ditched; now the public sector is bloated, entrenched in inefficiency and encumbering on those who fund it. The government signally failed to control the supply of money and encouraged an unsustainable house price boom. Brown, in his Mansion House speeches, urged bankers to take ever greater risks, and his tripartite system of financial regulation left neither the Treasury, the Financial Services Authority or the Bank inclined to bother with sniffing out malfeasance in the City.
It will take years before we return to fiscal normality - plenty of time for New Labour to admit its actions postponed the eventual date.
]]>It did not escape my notice, however, that STV were showing other Champions League football this week. On that channel on Wednesday you could watch Chelsea entertain Atletico Madrid, with Rob McLean and Terry Butcher in a studio on the Clyde and Ian Crocker and Craig Burley providing the commentary, possibly also from a studio on the Clyde. This was, alas, not preferable to watching it on ITV1 - accessible to most digital viewers in Scotland - where you had commentary from Clive Tyldesley and Peter Drury and the bons mots of Andy Townshend back in the studio. Other than the kindly aim of providing former Setanta employees with work, the whys and wherefores of this doubling up are a mystery. Is this the future of Scottish broadcasting? Will BBC Scotland insist on sending Paul Mitchell to next year's World Cup final?
Tyldesley, whom the Daily Telegraph called "occasionally poetic" earlier this year, was back at work the following night commentating on the Europa League match between Celtic and Hamburg on ITV4. Doubtless he will have annoyed some Scottish viewers by finding cause to mention Steve McClaren and the job he is doing at FC Twente, but Jim Beglin at his side is an adroit summariser and Townshend, Matt Smith and Robbie Earle in the studio were refreshing in their tone of realism as regards Scottish football.
Earle is another busy man, although perhaps not quite as busy as Gabriele Marcotti, with whom he had been round a table the previous evening picking over the night's games on ITV's Champions League highlights programme. ITV, it emerged, had seriously missed a trick by not screening the Real Madrid versus AC Milan match - a beezer of a game, won 3-2 by Berlusconi's lot - but, more concerningly, Earle seemed to be having problems with the offside rule when it came to Man United-CSKA Moscow. "Not for me", he cried, though the replays clearly showed Antonio Valencia to have been offside when he was played in for United's late winner. Marcotti wore the slightly stunned expression of a child reared by NASA scientists who meets someone of average intelligence for the first time.
It was an odd moment indeed, but you'd still take Marcotti speechless over the permanently stunned-looking Colin Murray on Channel Five, probably the most annoying channel in existence. Unfortunately for the viewer Mr Murray is never lost for words but on the evidence of his fevered excitement at half-time in Fulham's Europa League game on Thursday, it is to be hoped that Five do not staff the World Cup. Spain versus Argentina? He would surely explode.
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>Spurred on by the campaigning of film-maker Ken Burns, whose 2005 documentary Unforgiveable Blackness charts the boxer's life, and the sponsorship of Senator John McCain, a boxing aficionado, that end now looks to be within reach, Senate and Congress both having given their seal of approval. Fevered debate in cyberspace in the wake of President Obama's silence on the matter to date, coupled with reactions to Jenkins' blunder, have served as a reminder, however, of just how deeply Johnson's career divided America, and how issues of race continue to map onto boxing to this day.
By the time London - a man of the political left - was citing the white man's "30 centuries of traditions ... all the supreme efforts, the inventions and the conquests" as evidence of his racial supremacy, Johnson, the son of freed Texan slaves, had won dozens of fights against both black and white opponents. Already World Coloured Heavyweight Champion, in 1908 he took the belt that mattered, from Canada's Tommy Burns. Revelling in his status as America's first black superstar, he then laid waste to several challengers before James J Jeffries, who'd refused to fight Johnson and retired undefeated in 1904, agreed to a comeback "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro."
When they eventually fought, in Reno, Nevada, in 1910, the ringside band played a song called "all coons look alike to me" and an all-white crowd chanted "kill the nigger." But Johnson, faster, stronger and smarter than his opponent, knocked him down twice before Jeffries' minders called time, after 15 rounds, in order to avoid a knock-out. His title now undisputed, Johnson walked off with $225,000 and black America erupted in spontaneous rejoicing. In more than 50 cities, however, there were riots, as the celebrations drew a violent response from white mobs. At least 20 men were killed in what was the most widespread racial turbulence the US would see until after the 1968 assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.
The day after the fight the Los Angeles Times intoned: "A word to the Black Man... No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of your victor at Reno." Johnson, meanwhile, refused to condemn his fellow blacks for having "provoked" whites and was not forgiven: two years later he became the first person to be prosecuted under the Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of women across state lines "for immoral purposes" and was designed to stop the "white slave" trade in prostitutes. The charge involved a young white prostitute, Lucille Cameron, whom Johnson subsequently married. She refused to co-operate and the case fell apart, but another prostitute with whom he'd been involved four years previously testified against him and the authorities got their man: he was sentenced to a year and a day in jail but chose to flee, first to Europe and then to Mexico, before eventually surrendering seven years later and serving 10 months.
While in exile Johnson lost his title to Jess Willard in Havana after being knocked out in the 26th round. He tried to resurrect his fighting career on his release from jail but Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion from 1919 until 1926, refused to fight him, and in 1928 he retired, aged 50, having lost seven of his last nine bouts but with an overall record of 91-14-12. In 1946, he died in a car crash after racing away from a diner in which he'd been refused service.
The recent resolution on Capitol Hill stated that "the racially motivated conviction in 1913... unduly tarnished his [Johnson's] reputation." Others, though, deny this version of events. In April the Chicago Daily Observer noted that Johnson certainly violated the spirit, if not the letter of the law, "as he openly consorted with prostitutes" and even bankrolled a brothel madam.
Like Muhammad Ali half a century later, Johnson made boxing an act of defiance and he was loved and hated for it in equal measure. He refused to know his place in white man's America, lived his life as he saw fit and courted controversy by marrying three white women. The first, a Brooklyn socialite named Etta Duryea, he beat up several times. The second, Cameron, he wed less than three months after Duryea's suicide. Johnson's career unfolded against the backdrop of religious revival in America but there are few yardsticks by which he could be judged a saint.
Some have argued that a pardon in this context would amount to an empty gesture and that it is too late to do "the right thing." Others go further, resenting the impugnation of the whole of white society at the time and pointing to Bernard Hopkins' outburst before he fought Joe Calzaghe in 2007 ("I would never let a white boy beat me... I would never lose to a white person") as evidence that boxing is a sport in which race seems still to count and in which racism cuts in various directions.
Johnson wrote in his autobiography that he had been determined to "act as if prejudice does not exist." Obama has been clear that it did, and does. Whether that's enough for him to see a pardon as meaningful remains to be seen.
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>Dance music - electronic dance music, consisting primarily of programmed, repetitive beats, lest you think we're talking about sarabandes and minuets - accounts for the most enduring youth phenomenon the UK has ever seen. Prone to constant self-renewal and reinvention and despite the best efforts of rock critics at proclaiming it dead every 18 months or so since about 1992, it is also the most diverse.
Bubbling up from the fag-end of the disco era in the US, "house" music - so-named after the Warehouse club in Chicago - came spluttering and cranking out of America's north-eastern cities in the mid-1980s. Chicago DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy effectively played about with the raw materials of sound: experimenting with computer technology and already-vintage drum machines, they looped samples and collaged existing records, then laid down the results on new tracks or live in clubs. In Detroit, their contemporaries evolved the sparser, more alien and futuristic sound that would become known as techno.
At the legendary gay New York club the Paradise Garage, DJs fused these novel sounds with their own extended and distended mixes of funk and disco records. It was frenetic, euphoric underground music that found a captive audience, thanks in large part to a new club drug of choice: Ecstasy. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, the "love drug", induced overwhelming sensations of well-being and empathy and made it just about possible to dance all night.
Received wisdom has it that this potent, heady mix only breached the consciousness of young Britons after a few hundred bohemian drop-outs and itinerant suburban south Londoners experienced it in the bars and clubs of Ibiza - which had long been a haven for hippie jetsetters - in the summer of 1987. In truth, house records were being heard in clubs in places as far north of London as Scotland well before the Balearic-inspired scene began spawning its own records and its first distinctively British sub-genre, dubbed acid house.
At any rate, 1989 was the year dance music made Britain sit up and take note, the year it jumped from the underground into the charts, the newspapers and even the countryside. Twenty years ago, parliament and the tabloids were in the grip of consternation about illicit all-night "raves" at which young people were taking a new drug whose effects their moral guardians were smart enough to perceive were not those of alcohol. In England, rave entrepreneurs and the police were locked in a contretemps - having had events in disused inner-city warehouses busted, the former were staging huge parties on farms and greenfield sites around Oxfordshire. Alarm in the press - one scare story in the Sun reported that youngsters were "so drugged up they ripped the heads off pigeons" - gave the whole scene the oxygen of publicity and numerous events attracted upwards of 15,000 people. At one of them, Scottish proto-ravers the KLF demanded their fee of £1000 in Scottish pound notes, scribbled "we love you children" on them and showered them on the crowd. But by the following summer the government had passed new legislation introducing harsher penalties on organisers.
In Scotland, there was little of the same tension at play, at least according to Ricky Magowan, a promoter whose company Streetrave - now Colours, the biggest organiser of dance events north of the border - was also putting on its first parties in '89. "We didn't really do anything to that level that was going on in England so we didn't get the same flak for it - we were in established buildings and had health and safety certificates," he says. "When we started, it was about us as clubbers creating a new scene. We were already running buses to different places like the Hacienda in Manchester, so we thought 'why not start something for ourselves?'".
"There was already a scene already a scene that existed with stuff like the soul all-dayers, but then this new generation came through in 1988 and 1989 and it became something totally new and different. We started doing a monthly night at the Ayr Pavilion, which got 1300 people every month and things just grew from there."
Another former promoter, Andy Unger, who still DJs in Glasgow, says the years 1989-1992 represent something a "golden age". "There was this whole package," he remembers. "You didn't need the drugs because the music was so good, but they were there for whoever wanted them. I think it was similar to what happened with punk rock but on a much bigger scale. Dance music felt like a revolution at the time, it was very inclusive and it triggered an enormous reaction in people. It was the last form of music that was entirely unlike anything else, and it inspired a lot of people to do something for themselves, like produce their own records or DJ or run a club night."
Various commentators and social historians have argued that dance music in the UK both tapped into the individualism being championed by the Tory government and catered to a deeper need for communal experiences. Dance music and Ecstasy are variously credited with uniting black and white, straight and gay, and even pacifying football hooligans. A lot of vocal dance records rhapsodise along preposterously utopian lines, but notwithstanding anti-capitalist techno-hippies' attempts at using ear-blisteringly awful hardcore techno to "hack the consciousness interface", for the most part it's been hedonism first, second and third on the agenda.
But just as the naive, loved-up idealism of dance music's pioneers became diluted by gangsterism, the drug economy and rampant commercialism, throughout the 1990s the scene itself splintered and forked into scores of specialist sub-genres and sects. Some clubs stuck to the basic diet of house and techno, others branched off into hard dance and trance, and the burgeoning rave and hardcore scenes snowballed - ever-harder, ever-faster - with a logic of their own. With the emergence of jungle, breakbeat and drum n bass, all rooted in London's long-standing black soul and funk subcultures, there was genuine innovation - this was music which sounded to mid-1990s ears every bit as radical and spell-binding as had Chicago house a decade before, and, in turn, it would go on to spawn sunnier subgenres like speed garage and two-step, as well as the more menacing grime. But by about 1995, rave had changed from being breezy, silly and fun into something aggressive, intoxicated and downright daft, due at least in part to people experimenting with more debilitating drugs - for some Ecstasy was no longer enough on its own; it had to be mixed with the likes of temazepam, cocaine, speed and ketamine, and with strong drink.
Ian Kinghorn, a 36-year-old Edinburgh-based artist, admits he was a "late starter" with dance music, but his experiences with Ecstasy - though fairly "melodramatic" - are not atypical. "I started going clubbing in 1999," he says. "I went to mostly gay clubs that were playing trance and progressive house, but it was really Ecstasy that got me into it because I never really understood the music before that. When I took E everything made sense and sort of locked into place - I was converted almost overnight and after that it became almost a religious thing.
"I went through a sort of honeymoon period - you're just in love with everybody and everything. I had suffered from depression before and I never knew that happiness like that was possible. For that time, in the club, I realised I loved who I was and because everyone was on the same wavelength it was a really beautiful, friendly atmosphere."
Over a period of about two years, however, Kinghorn's Ecstasy intake increased. He also started experimenting with cocaine and ketamine and while his weekend highs were "still worth it", he began experiencing crippling mid-week comedowns. "The scene itself became a bit stale and predictable," he says, "and I think I was trying to compensate for that, chasing that initial rush. There came a tipping point where it became too much and I just had to stop it altogether."
Tales abound of Ecstasy users experiencing burnout - Kinghorn ultimately suffered a "sort of breakdown" - but for many more moderation militates against any real ill-effects. And for others the drug's seemingly inbuilt provision of diminishing returns prompts them simply to realise good things don't last forever. That which goes up comes down, and so it was with the superclub and superstar DJ phenomena that came crashing about the ears of the UK's super-annuated dance music megaliths in the early years of this decade. Dance had forced the liberation of licensing hours up and down the country and become a part of the entertainment establishment, but large swathes of the population suddenly realised it just wasn't worth paying £50 to stand in front of Judge Jules for five hours.
These are, perhaps, slightly saner times, and if you can drag yourself away from binge-drinking and fights in kebab shops- corollaries of what now passes for this country's primary entertainment industry and by-products, in part, of dance culture's all-night sensibilities - it is a comfort still to be able to sneak off to dark, underground spaces like Glasgow's Sub Club and tune in to the universal language of house.
Daisuke Nakajima, a young Japanese journalist who spent four years in Glasgow reporting on Shunsuke Nakamura's exploits at Celtic, knows the truth of this. Nakajima fell in love with dance music after seeing Underworld play in Tokyo in 2000, made most of his Scottish friends on visits to "the Subbie" and illustrates pointedly the music's international, cross-cultural and cross-generational appeal. "Dance music brings people together," he says. "To me it's about friendship and being open-minded; it's not about drink or drugs. In Japan no-one thinks of it as being American music or British music, either. It's just truly global."
A version of this article appeared in The Herald Magazine
A Celtic fan based in England, he was, in fact, in the habit of attending the Emirates with some Arsenal-supporting friends and, even before their Croatian superstar's coup de theatre, he'd been grooming a justifiable chip on his shoulder over the disparity in the size of the jackpot on offer contingent on which of the sides won that tie. Had Celtic got to the Champions League group stages they stood to rake in £12m if they were lucky; Arsenal will rack up at least £35m. The answer, said my friend sorrowfully, was to go and watch cricket instead. I can only imagine he hadn't heard about all the sledging, ball-tampering and match-fixing.
The level playing-field we like to fantasise about in sport is akin to a brownfield site in a run-down part of town that's about to be redeveloped as a call centre. The Corinthian spirit may yet exist but it's a shy, shrivelled, elfin thing; it tends to stay at home, embarrassed by all the cheating it sees on television. Perhaps it was ever thus, but what is undeniable is that, as sport has become more saturated with finance, as its elites have grown more dominant and as the rewards on offer at the sharp end have grown, so the temptation to cheat has grown commensurately.
As the Renault scandal broke these past few days, the conclusion was unavoidable that the only reason it did so was because the whistleblower himself, Nelson Piquet Jr, wanted revenge after being given the heave-ho. As a result of Piquet deliberately crashing, his team-mate at the time, Fernando Alonso, was able to win a race he would otherwise have not. Under normal circumstances these things do not emerge at all, which is why when such egregious cases do come to light, punishment from the relevant authorities must be swift, decisive and retributive.
Over the last decade or so, the scale of doping in cycling has emerged bit by bit. The signs now are that the sport has started to reform itself but so widespread and intractable was that form of cheating that the tipping point only really came when the whole thing threatened to become a PR bloodbath. Other sports may be yet to face such self-immolation; other forms of cheating we may not consider to be so heinous. There are degrees of cheating, but how much does the absence of prima facie pre-meditation mitigate against the seriousness of the crime?
Was the Spygate affair in NFL, where the New England Patriots were caught videotaping the New York Jets' coaching signals - the sporting equivalent of espionage - a more reprehensible instance of foul play than Diego Maradona scoring past Peter Shilton with his hand? Was the "bloodgate" scandal in rugby less intolerable than the "Calciopoli" match-fixing debacle in Italian football?
What is certain is that, the more cheating occurs and the more it is plain to see - whether because whistle-blowing has become more profitable or because televisual evidence is more dependable than ever - the less we are inclined to trust sportsmen and women, umpires, coaches, clubs or directors of sport. The court of public opinion is a powerful chamber and if people perceive that they are being duped they will make themselves heard.
Instances of the opposite of cheating - magnanimous gestures of fair play such as Paolo Di Canio's when, playing for West Ham United, he opted to catch the ball rather than score past the injured, and grounded, Everton goalkeeper Paul Gerrard - are so rare that we cherish the memory of them.
Equally, cheats go unforgiven. Eduardo's reputation will remain tarred. When Aberdeen play Rangers, their supporters will remind Kyle Lafferty of how he contrived to have Charlie Mulgrew sent off at Ibrox last season.
When people cheat in exams or in relationships, or when governments defraud their citizens or banks their customers, our sense of fair play demands a reckoning. We may hope for one but we do not expect it.
Sport is different: it's neither love nor war; it's not supposed to be about the dictates of the market or winning at all costs. If it takes retribution, retribution, retribution to preserve what sport should be about, then so be it. Now when is Cristiano Ronaldo next on the TV?
This article appeared in The Herald
]]>But still, I often wonder whether us chaps are thinking any more or any less about sex than we used to. Every seven seconds it was at one time, I think. My feeling is that it must be more now; every four seconds, say, and sometimes even during the other seconds in between. For try as we might to ignore it, female sexuality confronts us everywhere: on the high street, in the background noise of advertising and pop videos, in the negligees and thigh-boots women go out in at night. Shame and modesty are old hat; Girl Power is rampant.
And then there is pornography. Yes, there is pornography. And the internet. From the beginning porn was a major driver of the worldwide web: one of the first industries online, it helped shape a consumerist model of it. Now there are some 450 million adult web pages out there, a vast ocean of naked flesh, gift-wrapped femininity, straightforward, kinky, perverse or just downright disturbing sex. And it's all just there, always, at the click of a mouse.
Perhaps inevitably, pornography has also gained a foothold in mainstream culture. Soft pornographers like Hugh Hefner have long been part of the plutocracy in America; nowadays the world takes an interest in what Paris Hilton is doing, Hollywood churns out fluffy comedies about porn stars, and chat show hosts like Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross are rarely stuck for semi-ironic but still cool-with-it repartee about vaginas, fisting or w***ing.
And the word, too, has started to drift in meaning: to label reality television or documentaries about the Nazis "pornographic" is to be derogatory about those things, but also betokens cultural acceptance of pornography itself.
Being cool about porn has, in fact, become almost an assertion of one's lack of stuffiness. Any debate over its rights or wrongs tends to focus on whether the women who feature in it are empowered businesswoman or exploited victims; but it's a debate many liberals shy away from. Put off, perhaps, by the thought of coming down on the side of both hardline feminists and the religious right, most tend to take the view that so long as children aren't involved this is something that should be left to the dictates of the market. Some go further, though: Salman Rushdie has argued that a free and civilised society can be judged by its willingness to accept pornography.
But what of the users of porn? Men and boys in civilised societies have taken an interest in depictions of sex for at least two millennia, as the Victorians were rather shocked to discover when excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s. But the Victorian attitude to pornography - that it should be forbidden to the masses - is distinctly at odds with our own; and neither the Romans nor the Victorians had to contend with hardcore.
Studies have revealed that a sizeable minority of children in the UK are now being exposed to the most "adult" material imaginable at a stage when they are only just discovering their own sexuality. Today's adolescent has ease of access to the whole gamut of the polymorphous perverse. What does he take away from it? Do the myths peddled in pornography about female sexual availability influence how boys, and men, see women generally? Do we start assuming they're wearing hardly any clothes because they want to attract our attention?
Pornographers, like advertisers, are smart: they know they must drip-feed stimulation. And so they tease and tantalise, but ultimately they give the hard sell, they show you everything, they frame it for maximum exposure, the pneumatic breasts, the flat stomachs, the luminescent skin, the hairless crotches. There can be little doubt that women nowadays feel pressure to conform to certain ideas of anatomical correctness. Pornography, in its commodification and regimentation of such correctness, is unlikely to foster reasonable expectations among men of how women should look.
Psychologists and psychotherapists have all manner of theories about why it is boys take an interest in pornography and girls, generally speaking, don't. In their book Raising Cain: Protecting The Emotional Life of Boys, Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon argue that objectifying sex comes easy to boys because from the moment they start getting erections they become aware of their physical hardware making its own demands.
Pornography, thereafter, offers the adolescent male release from the alienating experience of continually striving against his peers, provides a sphere in which he is in control, in which the object of his desire is eager to please and cannot pass judgement on his performance. Most young men will have experienced this as a "phase" on the way to more fulfilling sexual relations; but the more time is spent in this illusory world in which real women are kept at arm's length, the more pornography acts as a fix.
In Pornified: How Porn Is Ruining Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Family the American writer Pamela Paul argues that the ubiquity of online pornography has created an epidemic of male addiction to the instant gratification of "adult entertainment." Using interviews with "sex addicts" as her source material, she extrapolates the theory that young men start out curious about softer pornography but quickly become "desensitised" to such material. They then expand their menu of pornographic interests to the point where their habits make them neglectful of real-life partners or indeed less likely and less able to form relationships in the first place.
But as one of Paul's critics, the author and "mating" columnist Amy Sohn pointed out when Pornified first came out in 2005, it would be unwise to deduce general trends from the stories of men being treated for sex addiction. "The real question," she wrote in the New York Times, "is whether the ease of access afforded by the internet is changing American male sexuality for the worse, or simply appealing to male urges that predate the internet - and porn - entirely."
In his 1966 essay On Pornography, Gore Vidal wrote his now oft-repeated line about the only thing pornography causing being masturbation. In 2004 anti-porn advocates stood before the US Senate and likened pornography to heroin, which is probably reason enough to steer clear of talking about porn "addiction" at all.
Oliver James, the clinical psychologist and author of Affluenza: How to be Successful and Stay Sane, says anyone who becomes addicted in any real sense to pornography is already likely to have other problems. "Boys who access pornography are much more likely to do so if they're depressed or lonely or feeling inadequate," he told me. "The great majority of boys will be curious at first but very quickly switch off. The same goes for men. Those who become addicted happen to become addicted to pornography, but they could easily have become addicted to something else."
Besides "addictive isolation", he says, pornography can encourage promiscuity. "The sort of teenager or young man who watches quite a lot of porn is often more likely to have multiple partners. He's more likely to be sexually adventurous." So pornography might actually help some men, um, get laid? "Well, it's probable that it encourages them to play fast and loose and to imagine that all women are gagging for it. And they'll be more likely to attempt sexual practices that they wouldn't otherwise.
"But there again, there is a potential up-side of that. There's a book by Brett Kahr called Sex and the Psyche, which is a study of the sexual fantasies of 20,000 Britons. It shows that there is a huge gap between people's fantasy lives and what they actually do in practice. So, yes pornography may cause problems to do with addiction and the stereotyping of women, but it must also be said that it may lead to better sexual relationships in some cases."
More openness between sexual partners is perhaps a desirable thing, but while consenting adults may rejoice in society becoming a bit more, well, Dutch, this does not address the as-yet unknown consequences of a generation becoming sexualised with the internet for company. In an investigation for the BBC earlier this year, the journalist Penny Marshall discovered that a growing number of girls in their teens and early 20s think nothing of posting naked or semi-naked pictures of themselves online, for "a bit of a laugh". Their male peers are then seizing on these images and passing them around on their mobile phones.
Parents may well be concerned, but they are increasingly powerless to regulate the online activities of their clever-dick offspring. Arguments about freedom of expression and the rights-based society seem all-persuasive, but perhaps we forget about the rights of young people to grow up without feeling pressurised to conform to a pornographic yardstick; or indeed the rights, as Paul has put it, "of people who don't want pornography shoved in their face everywhere they turn."
A feminist conceit Paul repeats is that women cannot enjoy pornography. Anti-porn campaigners in the 1970s, including Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg, said it was all about hating women and linked it to rape (not on any evidential basis, mind: more that, uh, they had a hunch about it), but Dworkin subsequently lost credibility for her crusade when she extended her argument from pornography to all male-female sexual intercourse.
Nowadays there are those, like Paul, who claim that female enjoyment of porn can only ever be a performance for the benefit of men, and others who insist that it offers modern women an avenue in which to explore the innumerable facets of their sexual identities. Meanwhile, feminists on the whole tend not to have such a problem with pornography when it's written down (by women) and given a bit of literary polish, as in Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M, a best-selling account of the author's best efforts at shagging her way around Paris and, for the most part, enjoying it.
Simultaneously a new wave of female stars - from the risqué Pussycat Dolls, to the queen of burlesque, Dita von Teese, to Sasha Grey, the porn "actress" who stars in Steven Soderbergh's new film about a sex escort, The Girlfriend Experience - are busy hawking a narrative all about pushing boundaries and pioneering female sexual freedom. Grey has said: "I am a woman who strongly believes in what she does - it is time that our society comes to grips with the fact that normal people, women especially, enjoy perverse sex."
This is where we are at now. One no longer has to look at pornography to find the pornographic in our culture. And in a sense online pornography and what it may or not be doing to men is inseparable from a more general depersonalisation of our interest in sex. Grey, like Rushdie, clearly believes in a free society; but free societies must have the moral conviction to protect those things they cherish most, including modesty and innocence. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton has written that sexual shame arises not, as moral shame arises, "by the thought that you are being judged as a self, a free being," but rather that you are being "judged as a body, a mechanism, an object." For better or worse, sexual shame has been abolished; the genie is out of the bottle. And yet we must be clear that it would a catastrophic stain on liberalism if the realm of pornographic fantasy were henceforth to be allowed to dictate sexual norms.
In our state of shamelessness perhaps it will become easier for fathers to talk to their sons about women and sex - whether or not young men come away from watching pornography feeling hateful of women, hateful of themselves, recklessly lustful, perturbed, unperturbed or unaffected may well depend on what other influences are at play in their lives.
A small minority of them may come to ruin using it. At the other end of the commercial equation some women are victims pure and simple. But, in another sense, pornography is equally degrading to us all as a species. Oliver James says of hardcore pornography: "It is a complete bore. It's a tedious succession of bits of meat colliding." More than that, perhaps, it enjoins us to discount the differences between ourselves and the other animals. By observing the machinae animatae, the human animal, at such close quarters, we disavow the duality of body and soul; we judge others and come to be judged as mechanisms. And ultimately we risk feeling somehow less human.
Pornography's champions point to the fact that "obscene images" were outlawed in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China. Being afraid to challenge the smug consensus that porn is a mere benign indulgence is unlikely, however, to benefit our overall sense of freedom or well-being.
A version of this article appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>Regarded variously as a "national institution" and "the voice of English cricket", Blowers, who turns 70 in September, has been talking since 1972, the year he joined Test Match Special from The Guardian. He has talked a lot, too much for some of the cloddish contrarians who've written in to the BBC over the years; but for the remainder of his auditors there is good news: "I shall never retire," he says. "I may be incapacitated and therefore have to stop working, I don't know, but I shall never deliberately retire. Work is more fun than fun."
So the voice endureth, though it be of a vanishing timbre, plummier than an orchard garden, delectably upper class. Blofeld's anecdotes swarm with swashbuckling references to wonderful chaps and extraordinary matches. He is painstakingly polite, his humour gentle and Wodehousian, his delivery rat-a-tat-tat, all so much so that his on-air gaffes - "Ryan Stringfellow" for Ryan Sidebottom, "Monty Python" for Monty Panesar and "Yasser Arafat" for Pakistan's Yasir Hamid - are both in-keeping and somehow explicable.
In further mitigation, 400-odd Test matches is a lot of talking hours; it is a great many innings, not to mention rain delays, to bring to life. But while Test Match Special remains a big part of Blofeld's life, - "I enjoy it immensely" - like his old friend and former colleague, the late Brian Johnston, he has been able to develop his interest in talking away from cricket. "My main life is on the stage now," says the man who, it should be recalled, grew up with Noel Coward as a family friend. His one-man show, An Evening With Blowers, has now been staged some 130 times. Last month he performed it in front of 2,500 people at the Royal Albert Hall, and in August he will bring it to the Edinburgh Fringe.
"There's hardly anything about cricket in it at all," he says. "It's all about people I've met and people I've known." His life is "good value". Besides Coward, the people he has known include the actor Tom Courtenay, Ian Fleming (the friend of his father's who borrowed the family name for James Bond's arch-enemy), Johnston and the other mainstays of Test Match Special, and cricketing friends Keith Miller and Fred Trueman.
"It's funny," he says. "Even if say so myself. It makes people laugh." Laughter there may be but Blofeld's formative years weren't all japes and mirth. His Edwardian mother he describes as "a cross between Queen Victoria and Attila the Hun." "It was quite a tough upbringing actually, incredible when you compare it today. I never saw my parents practically until I was about 14. It was all nannies and boarding schools."
At Eton, Blofeld scored a century for the Public Schools against the Combined Services at Lord's but in 1957 had the misfortune of being run over by a bus. "I was incredibly lucky not to be a cabbage," he says. "In fact, I was lucky to be alive." He spent 28 days unconscious and his eye socket had to be reconstructed, and though he recovered well enough to play first-class cricket for Cambridge University, his career as a sportsman soon fizzled out.
A brief spell in the City followed an unspectacular academic career before a "lucky break" gave Blowers the chance to write his first cricket match report. The rest, besides the foregoing, is all in the show, although if his radio commentary is anything to go by there will also be plenty of tangents, encompassing everything from pigeons and cakes to 'elf and safety. But there is also a postscript to Blofeld's own cricketing career. England, on tour in India in 1963/64, were bedevilled by injury and illness when, on the eve of the Bombay Test, David Clark, the tour manager, took Blofeld to one side and told him he might have to play. "I would certainly play if needed," replied Blowers, "but if I scored 50 or upwards in either innings I'd be damned if I would stand down for the Calcutta Test."
In the event vice-captain Micky Stewart hauled himself out of his hospital bed and turned up at the cricket ground, thus denying Blofeld. Any regrets? "I was rather thankful, actually," he admits. "I'd have made an idiot of myself probably."
He may never have played for England, but neither did he sledge. "No, you never saw sledging when I played cricket," he says. "But I'm the wrong generation. Different times produce different customs and I think cricketers probably respect each other less than they used to. Cricket, like any other sport, reflects society at the time. There's far less discipline than there was 50 years ago."
And so he is off on an agreeably arch critique of modern sport. Sledging, greed, bad manners: all are ripe for a clobbering. But for all he is unmistakeably of the old school, there is a telltale hint of relish too, an element of tilting at windmills in the best, most entertaining, traditions of Test Match Special.
"It's no good people my age saying this or that didn't happen when we were young," he relents. "We lived in a very different world in the 1940s and 1950s." What of Twenty20? "I like the Twenty20, I think it's good fun. The danger is it mustn't be allowed to swamp cricket. Players can't learn the lovely cricket strokes and techniques through playing a game that is about bottom-handed slogging."
Time's up and we haven't got round to talking about the Ashes, other than to establish that it's all very evenly-matched. Not to worry. Twenty20 matches are over in a flash, but Test cricket brings you hours and hours of talk, pigeons and cakes inclusive.
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>For the most part they are suffered like naughty children, enjoined to turn up, sit down and shut up. One supposes that is progress from the days when they were caged in behind fences like animals, but just as in the aftermath of the G20 protests and the Damian Green affair people are wondering what exactly the police are for, it's worth noting that patrons of what is one of the country's biggest leisure industries still seem to have fewer rights than animals.
Last year, Cliff Auger took his two teenage sons to Stamford Bridge to watch their team, Chelsea, beat QPR in the FA Cup. When, after the game and walking away from the ground, 16-year-old James was bitten by a police dog, Cliff instinctively jumped in and kicked it, only to be set on by officers wearing riot gear, who broke several of his ribs and landed him in hospital for the next four days. He was then found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal and fined £500.
"There was a simple presumption on the part of the police that he was a trouble-maker because he was a football fan," says Michael Brunskill of the Football Supporters' Federation, a body which represents 142,000 registered members in England and Wales. "There was no acknowledgement that a father protecting his son is a natural instinct."
Policing and stewarding in and around football grounds is one of the FSF's main areas of concern and they receive complaints from fans about mistreatment every week. Stewards, says Michael, are often little different to bouncers: "An example of that is at Newcastle, who decided they would have a singing area but, of course, there was to be no standing. If you sing in church, you stand, it's natural, but these guys go in and effectively man-handle people, which they've no more legal right to do than you or I."
The FSF are also worried by the new ploy of locking supporters in pubs near stadia so that they miss the game. Section 27 of the Violence Crimes Reduction Act 2006 allows police to restrict the movements of individuals in this way but the law has been misapplied. In November a group of around 80 Stoke City fans were kept in a pub in Manchester for two hours, even though, according to the publican, their behaviour was exemplary.
I haven't heard of the tactic being used in Scotland, but Steve Sutherland of Aberdeen's Red Ultras supporters' group, which was set up almost a decade ago with the aim of putting some colour and passion back into Scottish football, recognises the intent behind it. "We've had guys arrested for as little as handing out bags of confetti, or for standing up, or for not moving where they're told. It's the same for other groups like ourselves around the country. It's amazing that something so innocent as wanting to support your team can become so complicated.
"The issue of standing is a bit of a sticking point. When Elton John played a concert at Pittodrie, the whole place was standing; but then there's a football game in front of a half-empty stadium and all of a sudden it's considered dangerous."
Gone today are the swaying terraces of yesteryear, and with them much of the chorused banter and vitriol that formed part of the cultural experience of watching football. A generation has grown up for whom watching on television either at home or in the pub is the authentic ticket, and if you do go to the game, at whichever identikit stadium your club or their opponents were forced to erect to keep the bureaucrats happy, it'll be made quite clear that if ever football was the people's game it is no longer. Having forked out handsomely to watch men who care more about wresting ever-greater sums of money from the chairman than they do about your club's traditions, you won't know much about what your fellow fans are shouting or singing anyway because your ears will still be hurting from the Robbie Williams song they played when the teams ran out.
It's not this uniformly drab in other parts of Europe, mind. When Spurs travelled to Wisla Krakow in the Uefa Cup recently, the Polish crowd mocked the atmosphere at White Hart Lane the week before by sitting behind their newspapers for the first 15 minutes of the game. And in Germany most grounds have designated safe standing areas where fans can jump around, sing and do all the other stuff that would have the authorities here spitting feathers and clutching for the health and safety manual.
Not even Lord Taylor, let's remember - in his report in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster - was able to argue that standing at football matches is inherently unsafe.
Football clubs and their governing associations in the UK have instead assisted in the stifling of passion and spontaneity at grounds. They have done so to placate sponsors and politicians and, perhaps, because like everyone else they must be seen to reinforce political correctness. "We're not saying we want a return to the bad old days and there should be no place for racism or homophobia in football, but it's arguably naive to think that football supporters can or should be made to behave like boy scouts," says Brunskill. "How far do you go? Shouldn't we have a debate, for example, before people who've verbally abused this or that player are named and shamed on Crimewatch?"
In Glasgow it is well known that chorused invective can be as an overture to real violence, but in most cases it is understood that going to the football involves a partial suspension of the rules of everyday life. Spurs fans, case in point, do not go about calling Arsenal supporters "HIV c***s" at work, do they? Tribalism, rivalries and petty antagonisms are all realities on which the game thrives. If they're being honest the Old Firm clubs know this full well. And where there is no real social basis for a vicious footballing rivalry, one evolves anyway - how else do you explain Kilmarnock versus Ayr United?
I remember going as a boy to the football with my dad and hearing, for the first time, all manner of swearing and vitriolic abuse. It didn't put me off going back, but nor did it set me on the path of recidivism. It told me, I think, that football could be a bit rough around the edges, that here was a man's game. Is that really so bad?
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>We're in the tasting room at Highland Park's five-star visitor centre and Russell has put seven different malts in front of me and told me not to get pissed. He's very good at explaining what are essentially industrial processes in ways that make you go "aah", but I'm still not picking up Turkish Delight off the 25-year-old. What I can say is that Highland Park has a finer balance between sweet and smoky flavours than any other whisky I've tasted.
That, see, is the happy result of a combination of natural and human factors, not least the trace of heathery sweetness left by Orkney's distinctive, aromatic peat, the judicious use of Spanish oak casks that have previously held sherry, and the gentle maturation process afforded by Orkney's relatively constant temperatures. According to F Paul Pacult, an American expert past whose nose, presumably, nothing escapes, the 18-year-old is simply "the best spirit in the world." When tasting, he says, the tongue should tingle and the mouth sweeten; it'll then go dry, but water again three or four seconds later. Amazingly, it's all true. The 18 is a marvellous whisky, but the alchemies of the barrels are equally to be savoured in the 25, 30 and 40 year-old malts.
Forty years, even the 211 during which whisky has been made at Highland Park, is as the life of a dram sipped in a peaceful moment to the long sleep of Orkney's living yet unknowable past, the 5,000 years of civilisation that have so richly left their mark on the place; and yet the distillery has about it a sort of time-honoured purity of spirit and purpose that to the untrained eye at least is the very stamp of these islands.
A greater sense of being out of time, of the past resonating in the present, is made mainfest by the Neolithic remains that dot the landscape: houses, tombs and - great monuments to who knows what? - standing stones. Skara Brae is Europe's best-preserved Neolithic settlement; viewed by visitors from above its neat warren-like, dollhouse layout seems tactile, familiar. All of a sudden, prehistory is no longer recondite: it is near. And near at hand, too, with their brochs, are the Picts, who farmed and fished for centuries before the Vikings arrived in 875 and annexed the joint.
Norse Earls ruled Orkney until 1472. One of them, Magnus, was made a saint, primarily because he hadn't the stomach for a fight, preferring to stay on board his ship singing psalms during a Viking raid on Wales. His pacifism didn't do him much good when his cousin Haakon, who disputed Magnus's claim to the earldom, made his cook Lifolf split Magnus's head with an axe in 1114, but the cathedral built in his honour, in Kirkwall, at least provided somewhere for his bones to lie undisturbed until 1917, around about the same time as Orkney was again playing its part in Albion's "island story".
Scapa Flow, a sheltered body of water just south of the Orcadian mainland, was used as a Royal Navy base in both world wars. The German High Seas Fleet was transferred there during peace talks in 1918, but the defeated Boche decided to open their sea-cocks and scuttle their ships. Another wreck, that of HMS Royal Oak, dates from 1939, just weeks into the World War II, when a German U-Boat passed into Scapa Flow and 833 men were killed. As a result, Churchill tasked Italian prisoners of war with constructing the Churchill Barriers, causeways that closed off most of the access channels and had the added benefit of joining up some of the islands; and the Italians were also responsible for another Orkney attraction, the ornate baroque chapel they built out of leftover concrete, wrought iron and no little ingenuity.
To varying degrees, people on Orkney feel Scottish or British. First and foremost, however, they feel Orcadian. Orkney and Shetland were pledged to Scotland by Christian I of Norway as security against the payment of a dowry on the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James III. A clause in the contract gave Norway the right to redeem the islands for a fixed sum , but later attempts to do so were rebuffed. Norn, a kind of Norse dialect, died out some 200 years ago; but still islanders guard their distinctiveness jealously. Their culture is emphatically not the same as Highland culture, with its clans and tartan and sad songs.
In 1987, the Orkney Movement, a political party that supported devolution for Orkney, contested the constituency in the general election, its candidate polling 14.5% of the vote. Given the extent to which the islands rely on subsidy, it may be legitimate to wonder how much thought was given to the idea. It recently came to light that the Labour government of the 1970s, desperate to counter economic arguments for Scottish independence, calculated that should Orkney and Shetland be regarded as separate from Scotland, they would own 53 per cent of oil reserves in the North Sea; but regardless of whose oil it is, or was, it is probably worth remembering what it is we subsidise - an older way of life, a community not blighted by crime and social breakdown, custodianship of World Heritage and conservation sites.
This being my first visit to Orkney, I wondered whether a place I had read about in the works of George Mackay Brown and others would match up to the unreasonably fanciful ideas I had formed of it: an archipelago whose islands - Westray, Shapinsay, Stronsay, Ronaldsay - sounded like they existed in a song, and where strong-limbed men and women went about rearing cattle, knitting jumpers, leaving their doors open and telling their children stories about sea monsters. Conversely, I wondered whether if I lived in Orkney I would eventually find it boring. Remote places where not much happens can depress the life out of some people. Having been, I am now convinced Orkney would not make that remoteness felt negatively; that to belong there would be to feel blessed. That is not to say that its way of life is invulnerable: islanders think long and hard about the impact on landscape and ecosystems of developments like windfarms; public services are stretched; farmers resent being told by the RSPB that they're not allowed to thin out the flocks of geese that wrack their grass. In Kirkwall, the demise of Woolworths has been felt sharply, and local shops and businesses fear the impact of a planned new Tesco superstore.
But other shops and new entertainments have grown up in Orkney in recent times - a cinema, theatre and leisure centre, a thriving arts and crafts industry, a programme of music festivals, not the least of which, the St Magnus Festival in midsummer, attracts musicians and premieres of genuine global standing.
What's more, that much-vaunted sense of community is palpable, and there is next to no crime. At the airport shop there is an 'honesty basket' in which you are asked to leave the right money when there's no-one about to serve you, while the court reports in The Orcadian tell of one young man being ordered to "grow up" after giving his girlfriend a hard time, and another who simply "entered a house and stared at a woman." Reading between the lines, he would have been down as the local idiot a generation ago. Still, though, doors go proudly unlocked, apart from during Christmas week, when, in Kirkwall, they are barricaded against intrusion from the ba' game. An obscure tradition that frequently results in mass brawling, it is contested between two groups of men who live either side of an arbitrary dividing line. One team, the Doonies, must strive to put the ba' into the harbour and stop the Uppies from touching it against a wall at the other end of town. What greater purity of purpose can you ask of a place?
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>David Cameron, the man who looks ever more likely to be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, may seem to Scots - the way Thatcher did - as English as clotted cream and country houses; but where the Iron Lady effectively forced her will on Scotland Cameron, Goldie is assured, will respect the mandate of whoever sits at Holyrood and allow the Scottish Tories to dictate their own policy agenda. Devolution, the horse the Tories previously wanted shot at birth, has bolted. Cameron, though, wants devolution to work, and to work better.
In an exclusive interview ahead of the party's Scottish conference, Goldie praised Cameron's honesty and courage in "reconfiguring" the Tory Party, and said he had made it clear that if elected he will work with Scottish politicians in a spirit of co-operation.
Having gained leadership of the party in Scotland around about the same time as Cameron was chosen to head up Her Majesty's Official Opposition, Goldie, who now attends Shadow Cabinet meetings at Westminster, described their relationship as one of mutual respect. "From the word go we got on with each other and that has grown to a very constructive political relationship because David Cameron is a highly intelligent man who is eminently easy to talk to," she said. "In amongst taking the Conservative Party and making it fit for purpose in the 21st Century he has still found time for Scotland, in which he takes a very keen interest. I literally can phone him any time I want to.
"He and I have discussed at length how to get devolution to dovetail better with Westminster, whether it's at party level, parliamentary level or government level. It's interesting that the Labour Party, essentially the architect of devolution, has offered the most lamentable illustration of how to conduct relationships between the two parliaments.
"Holyrood and Westminster should not be in competition - they both have vital and different roles to discharge. David Cameron says 'if I am elected Prime Minister, I will respect the role of Alex Salmond as First Minister. I may not agree with his policies, I may not agree with his politics, but he's a democratically constituted First Minister and I must respect that and engage with him.'"
Any incoming government will have to get to grips as best it can with the parlous state of the UK's public finances and the possibility of a very slow economic recovery, realities which are likely to mitigate against the traditional Tory policy of tax cuts and put an enormous fly in the ointment of welfare reform, a keystone in Cameron's mission to heal "the broken society." Save to observe that Cameron is under no illusions about the severity of these challenges, Goldie was light on the specifics of how he will set out about resuscitating either society or the economy, but she did pay tribute to the way in which he has energised and modernised his party.
"David Cameron has taken decisive and courageous decisions as leader of his party, both on party issues and policy, and that is the character of the man that will be demonstrated as Prime Minster of this country," she said. "The Conservative party of all parties is not an easy entity to reconfigure, and yet he effectively said to it, 'go and think about yourselves and the issues that are going to confront your children and your grandchildren, and understand that time moves on and that there are new issues emerging that are just as significant as the ones we considered were of paramount political importance 25 and 30 years ago.' When he talked about green issues and the environment and society being broken in the context of broken families and social breakdown, I think people thought the Conservative Party saw itself as slightly remote from all that. But David Cameron has made the party face up these things."
According to Goldie, those who portray Cameron as being out of touch with the average Joe deliberately misconstrue him. "It's easy for sections of the media to parody him as a toff and an Old Etonian and so that's what they do, but at the end of the day he's a husband and a father and I believe he is, genuinely, in touch with the lives of ordinary people," she said. "He and George Osborne are saying there are tough decisions and they are being fair and square with the electorate on that. We are stepping into a situation in which the British economy is in hock up to its oxters and to that extent is burdening not just the current tax-paying population but the next generation and arguably a generation beyond that.
"David Cameron is very clear that there is no silver bullet to all of this - he is not going to go into the election claiming it will all be wonderful under a Conservative government. What he will say is that we face a very challenging situation that will require leadership and courage and that he is prepared to provide both."
Part of this interview appeared in the Sunday Herald
]]>Compared to Hamilton, David Peace, who wrote The Damned United as a novel about the manager's disastrous 44-day stint at Leeds, had it easy. All he had to do was try and get inside Clough's mind for a while, and if the latter's widow Barbara and son Nigel are to be believed he didn't do a very good job of it. Clough (ITV, Wednesday, 10.30pm) took a wider view of its subject's career and life, but it was also very much the family's riposte to Peace's "mean-spirited betrayal" of the man on whom they doted.
They were having none of it: Barbara insisting Brian never swore all that much, Martin O'Neill and John McGovern at pains to tell us his drinking is over-hyped and even Johnny Giles, a former Leeds player with reasonable cause not to come to his defence, telling us that in fact Peace's portrayal of Clough as a "raving lunatic" is "outrageous".
The problem with "faction", as The Damned United is styled, is that it's very believable, which is not the same as being accurate. But as a version of the truth, it reveals things an authorised documentary such as this one cannot.
The programme was pacy, non-linear and a bit arty farty, but towards the end, as we watched the unveiling of a statue of Cloughie in Nottingham, ITV started up with its trademark weepy music and we were left thinking fondly of a cuddly, family man. Maybe Nottingham, a bit down-at-heel these days, can't be doing with a warts-and-all figure for a hero, but there was simply no acknowledgement of the Lear-type character Clough became in later life after falling out with his friend and former assistant Peter Taylor.
The other striking thing about this programme, apart from the fact that Nigel Clough seems nice but fairly dull - and maybe it was heightened by the arty farty style - was how distant and long ago everything seemed: the ramshackle football grounds, the protagonists' dress and manners, their lack of pretension. And there was something fabulously anachronistic about Cloughie boastfully claiming not to know anything terribly much about the Hamburg side his Nottingham Forest side were about to beat in the European Cup final. No manager nowadays would dream of giving the impression he hadn't done his homework.
Would you still have Ol' Big Head over 99per cent of them? You're bloody right you would.
This article appeared in the Sunday Herald
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