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To the seafront

This article appeared in The Herald

“You are not here,” it says above the door of the boarding house we’ve parked in front of: 38 The Promenade, Whitley Bay.

Nice view. Not the sort of place you expect nihilist sloganeering. No harm in being different, though; it’s a change from Seaview, or Whelk Chambers, or Neptune’s Crib. Maybe it works on postcards: “You are not here … would that you were,” or “You are not here … count yourself lucky,” depending on sender’s mood, level of fussiness and/or tenor of humour.

It’s a puzzling place, Whitley Bay, one of hundreds of puzzling places along Britain’s coastlines. Catch the eye of alien passers-by and there is a look that says: “What will become of us?” Rightly proud we are of the city centres the Victorians built – nearby Newcastle being no exception – but they made the seaside what it is, too, and don’t get a whole lot of credit for it.

England’s north-east has the entire range of British resort types: the genteel sleepiness of Alnmouth, Blyth (which is not very blithe at all) and once-buzzing summer hives such as Culler Coats, South Shields and Whitley Bay, whose grandeur has been fading – as grandeur is given to – for decades.

It is all very well lamenting this, of course, but anyone who claims they actually holiday, properly, at the British seaside is either a liar, a politician or both. All the traditional “miniature gaiety” (Larkin’s words) has gone. Kiss-me-quick hats? Sexist. Donkey rides? Violation of donkey rights. Punch and Judy shows? Trivialise the throwing of babies out of windows, I should think. And don’t imagine you’ll get away with having a drink outdoors.

The response of most people to the recent news that Blackpool is being considered as a Unesco world heritage site was one of amusement. Surely it had merely been earmarked for another new Tesco? But it is all too easy to dismiss a place such as Blackpool as a toilet, and the longer-term prospects of seaside towns seem to me bright, if only because of rock festivals.

Every year now, millions flock to these events, in many instances sleeping overnight in filth-ridden campsites. The music they listen to is often exceptionally dull and usually there is a lot of new age eco nonsense on the brochure. Some day soon, everyone will recognise the futility of such pursuits and run, demented, for the cliffs.


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On the question of dogs

This article appeared in The Herald

In his memoir Fast and Louche, Confessions of a Flagrant Sinner, the writer Jeremy Scott, whose father was an Arctic explorer, begins: “On Easter Sunday Father shot and ate a dog.” The heroic age of Arctic exploration being over – many people now find paying for a gym membership and going once satisfies their thirst for adventure – it is probable that few dogs perish this way these days.

In the west sentimentality for dogs, cats and even inconsequential things like rabbits is one of life’s constant tyrannies, but the Koreans, apparently, have a taste for canine flesh. Indeed, considered from a Korean point of view, the resources put into rearing dogs in other nations must seem like an enormous waste given that the blighters don’t end up on the table.

If the charity the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) is to be believed, 35% of dogs in the UK are now obese, that figure rising to 37% in Scotland. In a mere three years, according to their calculations, it could be 50%. But what should be pointed out whenever a Korean person brings these statistics up is that even if a dog is too fat to pick itself off the floor and go for a walk, it can hardly be blamed for its condition and therefore shooting it seems a bit on the harsh side.

Presumably there is a link between the weight of a dog and the weight of its owner, but the PDSA does not provide this information. What can safely be concluded, however, is that if dogs whose forebears rollicked about all day can no longer lift a leg at a lamp post, the case for obesity having to do with one’s genes starts not to look so convincing.

Another recent study suggests that a great many dogs suffer from depression. This may or may not be because they are self-conscious about their weight; my guess is that they simply find their masters odious.

In America, where dogs are presumably fatter even than Scottish ones, many owners now take their pets to special church services to give them a better chance of making it into heaven.

Christianity does not traditionally apportion animals with souls, but now it seems the modern dog, bloated by sugary snacks, must grapple with such matters as to whether salvation is to be attained by good deeds or faith alone. Little wonder that sometimes the hand that feeds is bitten.


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A whole lot of Globish

This article appeared in The Herald

George Bernard Shaw was an early advocate of simplifying English spelling. It wasn’t one of his better ideas, but if the entries on, oh, online football message forums, say, are anything to go by, it is one that has been belatedly taken up. English, meanwhile, continues to be mangled in other ways: only this week I saw water coolers bearing the legend “water with integrity”; when using ScotRail’s services, one frequently hears the word “detrain” put over the Tannoy; and the Americans are never done bastardising things.

It is doubtless a comfort to many native English speakers that there is no real call for them to learn other languages. The Labour MP Chris Bryant was wrong to say that French is a “useless” language – certainly, schoolboys can use it to try and chat up nice-looking French girls when they are in France – but it is true that English, or at least a form of it, is the nearest thing we have to a modern universal lingua franca.

The journalist Robert McCrum has just written a book, Globish, about how English, shorn of its complexity, idioms, cultural baggage and about 648,500 words (the OED contains 650,000) has given non-native speakers a common currency in the context of international business, politics and so on.

In a whiggish sort of way, he seems to be rather taken by this, the simplification of English on the net and in the boardrooms of the world being tantamount to hobbling “elites” – in this instance those of us lucky enough to know more than 1,500 words.

The term Globish was, in fact, dreamed up two decades ago by a Frenchman, Jean-Paul Nerrier. Having noticed that non-native English speakers found it easier to do business with one another than with native speakers, he saw there was money to be made from knocking up a list of words and phrases that would serve their needs while simultaneously striking a blow against Anglophone hegemony: if people learned Globish, he reasoned, they wouldn’t need to bother learning English.

I don’t know whether “detrain” would be considered Globish, but look online (80% of websites are said to be in “some kind of English”) or lift the phone to Mastercard and you may well encounter it.

Meanwhile, the French expunge their own language of words such as “weekend” and “toaster”, and the advances of Anglophone suitors continue to be met with shrugs.

 


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Climate change and other matters cut and dried

This article appeared in The Herald

Channel 4 is to celebrate the start of the World Cup by screening a Come Dine With Me special featuring four Wags. I read about this in the hairdresser’s the other day. As you’d expect, all the Wags are either married or affianced to footballers, some of them reasonably famous, although clearly not famous enough for their Wags to be getting on with, hence their desire to go on television.

There was a Wag in the hairdresser’s too – the strangest thing, reading about them in the paper like that and there’s one sitting there, her lump of a footballer waiting in the corner, giving the game away somewhat.

Not a player who does it for me on the park, I have to say and, by all accounts, not half as bright as a pork pie, but she seemed happy enough. And why not? One in four girls wants to go out with a footballer, I read a while back. It’s probably more than that now.

A bit of a mouth on her this one, though. Yak yak yak. If she had been his missus, I’m not entirely certain John Terry would have had the balls to mess around on other manors, as they used to say round where he grew up. “I wanted to go to Dubai but he didn’t fancy it, but anyway my friend says it’s not all that good and it’s too hot.”

“It’s getting hotter out there, I heard,” said the middle-aged woman next to her, in an idle sort of way.

More stuff about Cheryl and Cashley in the paper. Posh has done something with her hair. Some other stories not about Wags. Give it time, though. In a fortnight there will be stories about Wags going shopping, and there will be stories about Wags whose menfolk have been messing around on other manors, and there will be nothing else.

The Wag shows off her new all-white iPhone, then remembers her sister has just given birth and proceeds to tell everyone about it. Lancashire: that’s where she lives, the Wag’s sister, but not the bit where all the immigrants are.

The demure, attractive Polish girl having her fringe chopped sits demurely and attractively. The footballer grins as though he’s just remembered how much free money he gets paid every week.

Some schoolboys walking past recognise him at the open door. One of them blows a raspberry at him. Bit lame, I’m thinking; but then, just for a second, he looks genuinely hurt.


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In memoriam, Tito’s elephant

This article appeared in The Herald

I read with interest that an elephant which belonged to Tito, the former communist leader of Yugoslavia, has died in a zoo in Croatia.

In 1963 Tito became, or at any rate made himself, President for Life of the bizarre federal agglomeration of republics he’d fought heroically against the Nazis to preserve, but he was outlived by his elephant, Sony, by 30 years. Now Sony is gone too.

Not much at all survives of the old Yugoslavia; in fact, not even the Jugo, the somewhat useless motor car which was exported to western countries in great numbers for a while in the 1980s. But the people of Yugoslavia are apparently nowadays experiencing nostalgia for “the good old times.”

I cannot profess to be surprised. Well I remember the enjoyment I derived from looking at Yugotours brochures as a child. Yugoslavia was quite clearly a happy place of castles, mountains, beaches and pretty women. But after hearing friends of my parents – serious leftist types who wore Russian hats and drove a Lada – talk ruefully about how the country had been “opened up”, it was only a matter of time before I stopped asking to be taken there on holiday.

Now we learn that economic recovery after years of war and strife having been set back in most Balkan states by the global recession, older people remember life in the old Yugoslavia was good. A bit rummy for dissidents, secessionists, radicals and the like, maybe, but other than that a model of prosperity, fraternity and so on.

Sadly, one cannot go to Yugoslavia any more. The closest I came was some years ago when I stayed in a London B&B London that was listed as Yugoslavian-owned; and to see the walls there hung with photographs that could have adorned the pages of Yugotours was very bliss.

In the morning there was an embarrassing moment when I had to ask for a knife and fork with which to eat my cooked breakfast (English, not Yugoslavian). The man serving looked aghast but nevertheless entered the kitchen and returned with a “fork an’ knife”. We did not get around to discussing the photographs.

Of course, many of the old places can still be visited even though they are now in different countries.But now that Sony has been taken at 42 – elephants routinely live until they are 70 – there is one reason fewer to go to Croatia.


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Two decades of house and techno

A version of this article appeared in The Herald Magazine

IT will doubtless be to the indissoluble chagrin of old hippies and old punks, in whose daydreams still lurk fragments of counter-cultural zeal or situationist argot, that they have been outdone and outlasted by a youth movement that’s as disinterested in political posturing as it is in guitars and leather.

Dance music – electronic dance music, consisting primarily of programmed, repetitive beats, lest you presume 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 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.”


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Porn – what is it good for?

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

BASED on the evidence on offer in dentists’ waiting rooms, it seems to me there was a time in the 1990s when women’s magazines always contained articles about the frequency with which men think about sex.

Such information seems difficult to come by these days, the reason being, perhaps, that post-feminism, post-religion, and whatever else it is we’re post- these days, women themselves are allowed to think about sex all the time, too. More than that, they’re entitled to be at it (and, my old son, it had better be good. Or else).

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 pornographic sex.

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 stomach, the luminescent skin, the hairless crotch. 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 penned the now oft-repeated line about the only thing pornography causing being masturbation. By contrast, 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.


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An interview with Blowers

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

In interviews with sportsmen and women, the talk is often incidental: we’re interested more in what it tells us about battles won or lost, opponents better or bested, than the talk itself. In the case of Henry Blofeld, talking is the sport. And few are better at it than he.

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.


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A View from Dundee

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald

I’ve just stepped off the train into Dundee’s lunchtime smirr, and the first guy I’ve asked for directions to the Doghouse, the bar where I’m due to meet The View, the city’s most successful recording artists since the Average White Band, is telling me a story about someone he knows who had to stop on the M90 and phone for an ambulance after the stitches from a recent vasectomy burst open. I thank him for his help and head on, reflecting that his bizarre, scabrous tale would not be out of place in one of The View’s songs.

Dundee, so we’re told, is all abuzz with new-found vibrancy and confidence. Its booming creative, cultural and biotech sectors ensure that it is one of the first cities mentioned in dispatches on regeneration; and like other regenerated cities – Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow – it now boasts a music scene that is the envy of other more boring places. Of course, the irony is that much of the best music in these towns tends to come from their unregenerated underbellies, and so it is with Dundee. For Oasis and Burnage, read The View and Lochee, for it’s this particular neighbourhood we have to thank for producing one of the UK’s most interesting guitar bands of recent years.

I’ve met The View before, in early 2007, just after their debut, Hats Off To The Buskers, had gone straight to No 1 in the album charts. They were on that year’s NME Tour, shockingly young, even shorter than I’d imagined and clearly determined to enjoy as much free booze as they could snaffle, lest perhaps someone came and took it away.

Two years on and with their second album about to come out, what has changed? The new record is more reflective and more rounded than its predecessor, and departs from the punky, anthemic indie script with string arrangements, bluesy strains and even a hint of Two Tone colouring the mix. In other words, it doesn’t sound like a band who can’t get into the US because frontman Kyle Falconer was caught with cocaine in 2007, are banned from every Travelodge in the land and had to abandon a gig last year because they were too drunk to perform.

And neither is there much rousing of rabbles going on at the Doghouse. Kyle, the only member of the band who no longer lives in Dundee – he has moved in with his girlfriend in London – is asleep on a sofa when I arrive, wakes up for Vimto, some loud burping and the interview, then resumes the foetal position as I’m leaving. In his upright phase he shrugs when I put it to him that album number two has the whiff of a new maturity. “Done a lot of growing up this last year,” he sings on one track, Glass Smash. And then there’s the line on One Off Pretender: “To be 10 different people, that’s easy / It’s easier than being yourself.”

“That’s about getting wrecked, and stuff,” he reveals. “How you play at being somebody else.” Doesn’t that come with the territory of being in a band and being successful and being schmoozed by a lot of people you don’t know? “Aye,” he says. “But that’s alright. Success hasn’t changed us. I don’t feel different to what I was. It’s more that people treat you differently. People might say you’ve changed or whatever, but it’s people that never knew you in the first place. I like it, being in a band. You see a lot of bands that don’t look as if they’re having a good time, and you think What’s the point?’ A lot of the stuff in the press about us is true, so you can’t really complain about it; but they deliberately make us out to be off the wall. We’re just getting up to the same things as any other band.”

Glass Smash, a slick blast of new wave, and Covers – more of which later – might both be construed as love songs. Both contain lines of understated beauty and tenderness, rendered, as ever, with a locution that is entirely the singer’s own. Yet there seems, at times, to be a mismatch between Falconer’s almost honeyed Celtic intonation and the kind of tabloid coverage of the band that might have put, if not The Stooges, then certainly Oasis in the shade.

Like the Gallagher brothers, The View share a penchant for the greyer areas of political correctness. The album, after all, is called Which Bitch? and Falconer’s explanation of Gem Of A Bird, its skiffly closing track, suggests a certain antagonism at work as regards womankind. “It’s about a bird I was going out with who was a wee bit older than me and was dead intelligent,” he says. “She knew a lot of words that I could never remember; but there’s a bit of irony in it, because it’s about how I knew better than her.” Not for me the role of feminist inquisitor to a bunch of 21-year-olds from Lochee revelling in their rock’n’roll inheritance, but you wonder if there’s just a hint of an attempt to wind people up.

The parallels with Oasis are instructive. Rumours that The View are now banned from the remote Welsh studio where they recorded Which Bitch? are enthusiastically scotched, and, if needed, producer Owen Morris could come to their defence. Morris worked with Oasis from 1994 until 1997, and it’s arguable that the two albums he has now made with The View gesture at the sort of music the Gallaghers could and should be making were it not for the fact they disappeared up their own backsides after Britpop. Which Bitch? has new layers of instrumentation and a broader musical canvas than Hats Off To The Buskers, but its melodies still soar and delve with working-class vim and vinegar. “We’ve still got the big tunes with choruses and tracks that go down well at gigs. We didn’t make a conscious decision to make a new sound or anything like that,” says Kieren Webster, the band’s bass player and co-songwriter.

Guitarist Pete Reilly fills me in on the Doghouse and its importance to the band’s story. “We practically lived here when we left school,” he says. “We’d rehearse for hours then nip across the road to buy 12p noodles from Lidl. One minute we were on the dole, and the next we were top of the album charts.”

I wonder what ructions they might have experienced, four lads from a scheme stepping out into the limelight armed with nothing but catchy songs about their native city. “If you’re born and bred working class, it’s always going to come across. It’s ingrained in you,” says Webster, who has just bought a new flat in Dundee. “But it’s not like we have chips on our shoulders.” Falconer adds: “Where you’re from is where you’re from, and that’s what you write about. It’s just that the majority of bands aren’t from where we’re from, but bands from London write about the same things we write about.”

There is, nonetheless, a ring of authenticity to the rebel yell of One Off Pretender. “It’s about being flung in the jail in Aberdeen,” explains Webster. “Me and Kyle were DJing in a club, and things kicked off on the dancefloor and we went to jump in for our mates.”
“Actually,” Falconer butts in, “we split the f***ing fight up. We f***ed off from the gig and jumped on the bus to go back to Dundee, but the police caught up with the bus and arrested us.”

On Thursday, the band are set to play a special one-off gig at London’s Hard Rock Cafe. It’ll be the first time they’ve performed two gorgeous new tracks, Distant Doubloon and Covers, with live strings and brass. The former twines snatched references to “Robbie Stevenson” and Treasure Island with street-wise Dundonian vignettes; it’s surreal, funny and possibly the best thing the band have ever done. Covers, meanwhile, is a charming duet they recorded with Paisley crooner Paolo Nutini, who just happened to be making his own album in a studio along the road from his fellow Scots in Wales.

Given Nutini’s heartthrob status, this collaboration might help his new mates get back on-side with the ladies. Because, men’s men or otherwise, and for all their swagger and front, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that there’s more to The View than they want us to see.


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It’s tough being ginger

A version of this article appeared in the Sunday Herald magazine

NOT so very long ago I was sitting on a train trying to read an article by the journalist Brendan O’Neill. I say that I was ‘trying’ as across from me sat a group of teenagers who did not appear to have considered the idea that train journeys might afford other passengers the opportunity to read. Their conversation was loud though not especially obnoxious; not at least until it veered onto the topic of someone called Lindsay’s new boyfriend. “He’s that ugly ginger guy, is he not?” guessed one of the boys, correctly as it turned out. All were agreed that the lad in question was indeed “well ginger”, a “minger” and, further, “a ginger bastard.”

O’Neill’s article was about race. As far as I recall he was arguing that the issue, in the west, is now one of etiquette: the white liberal establishment is more bothered about getting everyone to use the correct race language than striving towards anything as tricky as actual equality. It was a view I have time for, but, in that moment, as a red-haired person on that train, another line of thought occurred to me. Gingers, I reflected, have never been seen as less than human; we have never been enslaved, rounded up and massacred or even denied our basic legal rights. There’s no real question of inequality. And yet, and yet: maybe we could be doing with more of a look-in when it comes to this business of etiquette.

People being rude about ginger hair is never all that surprising but hearing such obloquy from adolescent mouths again was a reminder that kids are generally nastier brutes than adults. I don’t have any particularly feverish memories of having been bullied as a boy, but I do remember around the age of six or seven earnestly wishing I did not have red hair anymore and believe I even went some way to convincing myself that indeed I did not.

This involved no small measure of cowardliness. My older brother, also a redhead, also adorned with freckles, was my advance party. Being a fairly rugged infant he had worked out that the best way of dealing with unhelpful epithets was to strike back at others with impunity, shot-across-the-bows style. In the sibling context, that meant picking on me on account of being both scrawny and ginger. Clear as day, I saw that if he could get away with this then so could I; and to my shame I duly set about taunting a girl who lived nearby and whose hair, we decided, was “orange”.

There is a recent novel, written by Laura Marney, called Nobody Loves a Ginger Baby. Ginger babies with loving parents will have baulked at this – and, given the chance, thrown Marney’s book in her face – but there is little doubt that, growing up, redheads fall prey to more slings and arrows than their less radiantly-bonced peers. What displacements, what hurts, one wonders, will fester in the minds of the two red-haired sisters who were attacked at school in Alberta, Canada in November following a campaign on Facebook to start a National Kick a Ginger Day? Down the way, Americans are supposedly kinder to redheads – standing out from the crowd is, perhaps, something to which Americans instinctively warm – but the campaign was seemingly inspired by an episode of the animated US TV show South Park in which the clinically obese Cartman decides people with red hair are soulless and evil.

Over here, a red-haired family in Newcastle were in the news in 2007 after being terrorised into moving home, twice. Kevin and Barbara Chapman’s four children, all aged between 10 and 13, had been routinely kicked and punched in the street, they had had their windows smashed and at one address thugs daubed “ginger is gay” on the outside of the property. It is all very well surmising that people bent on being thuggish will reach for any excuse and that the Chapmans’ neighbours therefore targeted the family simply because they were somehow different and not because of their hair colour per se. And it is all very well (though it might land you in bother) explaining such behaviour away by clutching for bromides about Geordies being uncouth or indeed Canadians backwards. The Chapmans’ story is a shocking one and a rebuke to the idea that people with ginger hair are simply over-sensitive to jokes and gibes.

In 2002, a Big Brother contestant was held up for ridicule when it emerged that he dyed his red hair black, a revelation that somehow licensed sundry tabloid hacks to wonder whether or not he also dyed his pubic hair. Some – including the auburn-haired editor of this magazine – have wondered whether this kind of public ‘dissing’ of red hair is evidence that attitudes towards it in Britain have ossified or regressed over the last 20 years or so. Perhaps they have. And yet it may be that what has regressed – as the BBC has been finding to its cost of late – is popular culture and its idea of what is actually funny.

Two years before that, in 2000, 219 complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Agency after the electricity and gas company npower ran a poster campaign featuring a photograph of a ginger-haired family along with the slogan: “There are some things in life you can’t choose.” The ASA decided not to uphold the complaints as “the light-hearted humour of the ad was unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence.” I find it difficult to get hot and bothered about this sort of thing – and yet I wonder how such humour would have played had the family been, say, brown-skinned.

A redhaired girl I knew at school and who is now a teacher, believes she knows the answer. A couple of years ago she was verbally abused over a sustained period by a group of pupils. She believes epithets like “ginger cow” were chosen merely as the most obvious route to undermining her authority, but adds: “Other people, even other teachers, thought that was funny more than anything else. If it had been something of a racial nature, it would have been a much more serious matter in the eyes of the local authority or the police.”

The comedienne Catherine Tait poked fun at attitudes towards ginger hair – from the betwixt and between of strawberry blond to siren red and deep russet – in a series of television sketches in 2005. Ginger “freaks”, it turned out, were being terrorised by hate mobs and had congregated in a refuge shelter, away from the loathing of “normal” people. As a portrayal of victimisation it pushed the limits of comedy to the wall, and probably wouldn’t have been seen as funny at all if the joke hadn’t been built around the exaggeration of what most people see as trifling, low-level prejudice. Tait was able to carry this off precisely because she is a redhead.

Others, one would suppose, might take a more cautious approach. Not so Zadie Smith, the chick who put multiculturalism on the post-colonial literary map – and someone you’d rather expect not to make appearance part of a character assassination. In her breakthrough novel, White Teeth, she introduces her readers to Horst, “an enormous man with strawberry-blond hair, orange freckles, and misaligned nostrils, who dressed like an international playboy and seemed too large for his bike.” There’s nothing particularly nasty about the description but neither is there a point to it. We do not meet Horst again. Elsewhere, in Smith’s short story The Trials of Finch, Ruth Finch is a misfit, unloved and unloveable. Her visible traits are afforded no little delineation: Finch is “stout, orange-haired, and stacked front and back like the Hottentot Venus; she wore a big red face that looked always as if she’d been fishing in a storm.” She has “an unfinished face, boneless and round, dominated by hulking spectacles” and “wore an unfortunate red jumper paired with a more unfortunate pair of orange dungarees.” Smith’s idees fixes about redness seem too incontinent to be merely incidental.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission – formerly the Commission for Racial Equality and a body, incidentally, no longer as enamoured with the ideology of multiculturalism as once it was – does not monitor cases of discrimination against redheads and has nothing to say on the matter of ‘gingerism’. In any discussion of how the phenomenon compares or relates to racism, it will be pointed out firstly that red hair comes from mutations of a particular gene, the melanocortin 1 receptor, and isn’t necessarily directly inherited from parents; and secondly that redheads have not suffered centuries of systematic abuse. Yet if we accept that black people are capable of being racist towards whites, or that whites of one nation can be accused of being racist towards whites of another, then definitions of racism become somewhat less watertight.

Helen Cuinn, a young performance artist from Glasgow, believes being unpleasant towards ginger-haired people has become “the last legally acceptable form of discrimination”. And she knows a thing or two about that unpleasantness. “It sounds really stupid,” she says, “but a lot of people really don’t like red-haired children. I had a lot of negative experiences when I was younger. I had very thick, tight, dark red curls and people would spit on me at school and in the street. When I stopped being an adolescent and got older suddenly I was considered sexy, which really crept in without me noticing. When I worked in a bar guys used to tell me I looked like Nicole Kidman, which just isn’t true, but there’s this notion of red-haired women being sort of beacons, sirens even, which I think you can trace back to some of the red-haired Hollywood icons of the 30s and 40s.”

Now, Cuinn says, she’s happy with the way she looks, though she still contends with insults from strangers. At the RSAMD, where she studied Contemporary Theatre Practice, she developed an interest in identity politics and queer theory – yet more than being gay, interestingly, it is her experience of growing up with red hair “hanging over me” that informs her work. Her current project, The Hair on My Head is Dead – a reference to the wig she had made of it in all its former glory and which she now wears only when she wants to – has so far involved “performed installations” at festivals around the UK, including the Arches Live! event in Glasgow, and is to be developed into a piece of theatre, “part stand-up, part one-woman play” that will run as part of this year’s Glasgay festival.

“Through drawing attention to my hair, I’m hoping to examine the assumptions people make based on the way others look,” she says of it. “I’ve been thinking about this my entire life. Hair is a multi-million pound industry – people really do care about it. It’s seen as something women care about more than men; but we’re told it’s a superficial thing and it’s our personality underneath that counts. In actual fact, the image you present is the first indicator of who you are and people absolutely make judgements.

“Your race or your creed or the way you look is exactly who you are. Bizarrely, in Scotland – where we’ve got more red-haired people than anywhere else in the world – it’s completely fine to sort of slag that off. My work is quite tongue-in-cheek – I think I’m entitled to have a humour and negativity about it. Making jokes at your own expense is quite a Scottish way of dealing with things, actually.”

Cuinn is interested in drawing out some of the stereotypes that inform contemporary attitudes towards red hair. On mainland Britain, anti-Irish sentiment dating back to the pressures brought about by mass migration in the wake of the potato famine may have had an impact, yet many believe the most durable slurs date from mediaeval times. Certainly in early morality plays colours tended to be used to signify good and evil and red was like to be associated with the devil, his associates, werewolves and the degenerate.

Even before then, Judas Iscariot was believed to have had red hair, and the ancient stereotype of the Jews was that they all had it – even on the Elizabethan stage this held currency, with Shakespeare’s Jewish money-lender Shylock in the Merchant of Venice tending to sport a red wig. Shakespeare, indeed, called red “the dissembling colour.” Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Jewish mythology, and the personification of lust, turned out to be a redhead somewhere along the line, too, and was later painted in that guise by Gabriel Dante Rossetti, but sales of hair dye among god-fearing redhaired women must surely have bottomed out when not one but two of their own – Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots – ruled entire kingdoms, albeit the English queen subsequently had her French cousin killed.

The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, is seen as having been a moderate, sensible sort of a monarch – at least when held up against her father, Henry VIII, another redhead – but Mary’s fiery temperament was more in-keeping with the idea of redhaired women being flighty and sensuous. It was by the 16th Century common for artists to paint Mary Magdalene – another biblical figure associated with sin and desire – with long red hair, while over in Venice Titian was busy painting so many red-haired women he eventually lent his name to a shade of the colour.

Even into our own age redhaired women, from Rita Hayworth and Katherine Hepburn to Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Kidman are seen as sultry and glamorous. That glamour has tended to escape ginger men. The journalist James Medd, though not a redhead himself, wrote in the Guardian last year about being the father of redhaired sons. He now believes ginger to the best hair colour going, but suggested a little positive discrimination might go a long way towards increasing its popularity. Forget Christopher Columbus, Napoleon and Churchill – a few new ginger role models, Medd believes, are what we need now.

“Movie stars like Robert Redford and Damien Lewis have that kind of strawberry blonde shade that’s always been quite popular,” he told me. “The test is darker red hair and freckles – I don’t know how people would respond to that being more visible on television or in movies. Proper red hair is still kind of stigmatized, or else it’s the geeky side-kick who has it – Biggles’s mate, or Ron Weasley in Harry Potter. Weasley is such a kind of cliched, geeky redhead, although he does get the girl (Hermione) in the end, doesn’t he? Maybe she’s doing her bit!”

Medd lives in London where school playgrounds are full of every skin colour and creed imaginable but there are, proportionally, fewer gingers than here – three per cent of people in the British Isles have red hair but that rises to 13 per cent in Scotland. He admits to being slightly worried about bullying, but adds: “It’s been really good so far. No-one has said anything negative about my boys in public and they’ve had nothing at school, although the eldest is now eight so I guess this is about the time it would be likely to start.

“When I grew up it was seriously bad luck to be a redhead. You were bullied; it was considered ugly, straight off the bat. But when I grew up racism and homophobia were also rife and people would use words like ‘spazz.’ Those things have changed. It just seems that anti-gingerism is still socially acceptable in a way that political correctness hasn’t reached it yet, but I do think things have improved.”

Regardless of whether this is mere wishful thinking, Medd and I are agreed that any sort of monitoring of people’s behaviour around redheads would not be constructive. It may be that the proscription of other forms of discrimination has made slights towards gingers more common, or at least more conspicuous, but it is unlikely that the badging up of yet another minority group would do anything much for social cohesion. Everyone has the right – and sometimes it is a duty – to be offended; but it would be difficult to argue that we have the right not to be offended. Charles Kennedy for the next James Bond, anyone?