You'll Take the High Road and I'll Take the Low Road

This Thursday, Scotland will have its long-awaited referendum on whether to become an independent country. A week or so ago, one single poll gave a tiny majority to those in favour – which has turned the Scottish question from a matter of purely local interest to the leading issue in British politics. For the moment.

The No Campaign, aka Better Together, has rightly taken a lot of stick for its abysmal campaign. Not only has it given nobody in Scotland a better reason to stay in the UK than the fear of something worse – missing the point entirely that the Yes Campaign’s principal appeal lies with the hope of something better.

Better Together’s hopelessness was funny until that poll last weekend startled the powers behind the campaign out of their complacency. The week just gone has seen, on the one hand the pitiful spectacle of the three main party leaders crawling up to Scotland to tell them how important the Scots are to Britain – after having treated the whole affair up to that point as having all the interest to them of a parish council by election. Too little, too late boys, although it was fun to see David Cameron talk about the “effing Tories”.

On the other hand, it has seen naked economic threats as various businesses based in Scotland (Standard Life) or doing a lot of business there  (BP) have “come out against independence”. As other people have pointed out, BP has no trouble doing business in countries like Russia and Zimbabwe, so quite what they’re afraid of happening in Scotland is unclear.

It’s depressing, isn’t it? The primary line of argument anyone was able to think of to keep the UK going started off as “think of all the things that could go wrong with your economy” and developed into “we will fuck your economy up if you don’t do what suits us”.

Scotland’s case is not really helped when some nutjob SNP types start calling for BP to be nationalised though. Nice one! That will bring the foreign investment flooding in!

If I was the sort of person who was able to develop a rational argument and see it through to a strong conclusion, I’d like to think I could have gone on to write something like this piece by Fintan O’Toole in the Guardian. Unfortunately, I am not that focused. So I’ll link to it instead and let you read it and be astonished at my perspicacity in having brought it to your attention...

For many people in Scotland, this may well be a matter of ethnic nationalism. Some of them may really hate “the English” and regard the 1707 Act of Union as colonisation.

For far more (I hope, at any rate), this is being seen as an opportunity to take back a stake in politics from a distant, uninterested Westminster. You don’t have to think Alex Salmond is any better than any of the other leaders to believe that decisions that affect you, your family and your friends should be made nearer to those people rather than further away.

That, I think, is what the British malaise about politics stems from – decisions that affect us are made far, far away from us. Geographically if you live in Scotland, but in all sorts of other respects as well.

It’s sharpened to an edge capable of cutting through only by the “national” fault line in the case of Scotland. As O’Toole says:

The Scottish independence referendum poses a very good question but suggests an inadequate answer. The question is: where does power lie? This is not a marginal problem to pose in a 21st century democracy. It cuts to the heart of a deep crisis in the relationship between people and politics. But the answer implied on the ballot paper is a geographical one: power lies in either London or Edinburgh. Most Scots – and most of the rest of us – know that while this choice is far from meaningless, it also rather misses the point.

Most people are still so bewitched by the 19^th century idea of the nation state that they can only imagine a group of people wanting to govern themselves, in their own interests, if they form a “national” group. Whether they acknowledge the legitimacy of that wish depends entirely on how they feel about that group (see, oh, I don’t know...the entire history of the 20^th century, for example).

One of the few things I remember from my political theory degree was a quote by a chap called Benedict Anderson, who called nationalities “imagined communities”.

That in turn made me think about all the people bleating last week about how their British identity was going to be harmed by the Scots becoming independent.

If they want to imagine another community, surely that’s up to them? And if it pains you so much, well, why not just carry on imagining that they’re still in your imaginary community? Are you still imaging the Irish in it too? Why don't we add some others? The Norwegians, perhaps. They're very tidy. 

That’s the psycho-cultural bit taken care of. If the Scots don’t feel like part of the same imagined community as us...well, that’s that really isn’t it? You can’t force them to imagine themselves as part of the same community as you.

SUBHEADING - It breaks up the text

But suppose they do still see themselves as British. Why does that HAVE TO entail being governed from Westminster under a single unitary state entity? It only does when you start assuming in mystical qualities about “proper” communities and their “natural” territories and (dare I say it) “god-given” rights.

The best reasons for Britain being governed by a single government are military reasons. This is an island, and a whole island is easy to defend. If someone else is in charge of part of the island, then you don’t have the natural advantages of being an island.

Britain being invaded is unimaginable. England being invaded with the connivance of a hostile Scotland is beyond unimaginable. We’re living in the 21^st century, FFS.

If anyone can tell me point out anything else that is ideally organised on the precise level of “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (plus its various overseas territories) then I’d be astonished.

Hence, large areas of policy are governed at the European level – precisely because markets bigger than the UK are more profitable, a trading bloc bigger than the UK has more international clout, standards in goods and services that are heavily traded need to be common across areas bigger than the UK etc etc.

But things should only be managed in bigger blocs, further away from the people affected, when that is efficient.

That old EU chestnut “subsidiarity” should be the norm and it should start at home. Power should be exercised as close to the people as possible, and it should ONLY be moved upwards to more distant, larger institutions when smaller bodies are clearly unable to do a good job.

I don’t think that nation states have a special privileged position above supranational bodies and subnational bodies. They are not the fount from while all authority flows upwards and downwards.

The idea that Britain will lose its seat at the top table internationally without Scotland is equally ridiculous. First and foremost, I believe that governments and states are there to promote the welfare of the people who live in their jurisdictions – and so international clout is only a means to that end, nothing more. National prestige for its own sake is meaningless.

Secondly, are we still sitting at the top table? Or are we on a little card table extension the USA has shoved onto the end to save our embarrassment when we turned up uninvited?

The other Alex S

Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out that only defeat can really bring a country to terms with itself –

never having recognised itself as having been defeated, Britain has no sense of its real place in the world. If losing Scotland forces a reassessment of Britain’s idiot pretensions and forces it to look at itself, so much the better.

So, for all these reasons, I don’t think that Scotland being “another country” is a big deal at all. The trains will still go there, 300,000 Scots will still live in London, money will continue to flow north and south, and we’ll all feel the same about each other as we do now (ie general lack of interest) - but they will be running their affairs and we will be running ours.

How does that undermine anybody’s identity?

Whatever happens on Thursday – this whole process has opened up the kind of thinking and reflection you don’t often see in this country. If for no other reason, it will have done Britain some good because of that. 

Bring Back the Battle of the River Plate

A pocket battleship - HA HA HA

I was shocked and dismayed to discover that the naval battle recreated in Scarborough’s Peasholm Park in the “Scarborough Naval Warfare” event is now presented as fictional.

Because ever since I heard that a park in Scarborough staged a re-enactment of the Battle of the River Plate, I have been yearning with a passion to go and see what must have rated as one of the most randomly bonkers events going.

What does the very name “Scarborough” evoke, more than the 1939 South Atlantic encounter between the German commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee and Commodore Harwood’s Force-G? Nothing, obviously.

Tancred and I recently pitched up in Peasholm Park. Roger Jr had fallen off his scooter and was being examined in Scarborough hospital within an hour of our arriving in the North Yorks Moors on holiday. Elvira was in attendance, and the youngest and I were attempting to salvage some sort of pleasant leisure out of the whole accursed experience.

Roger Jr was fine, by the way – and that hospital’s bad reputation was, as far as we could see, entirely undeserved.

The Naval Warfare event wasn’t on that day, but the ships were out in the lake. Apparently, they are operated by council employees. People’s council tax is being spent training miniature sailors, for god’s sake.

I know that most people today would probably have no idea what the Battle of the River Plate was, or would give a toss if they did know. And that's probably why it was changed.

SCUTTLE! goes the real Graf Spee

But it seems a terrible shame that they – whoever “they” are – have just turned this event into a demonstration of little boats pretending to fight in a lake, rather than a lunatic commemoration of real history. 

Barcelona: It was the first time that we met

Elvira and I have just come back from a long weekend in Barcelona, which has just leapt to the top of my list of favourite cities in the world.

Here are some of my pensées arising.

More whining about airports

As I mentioned last week, coming up with blog material is – for me – dependent on having time and space to mull over an idea continuously, until it has been mulled out of all proportion.

This is why I have written so thoroughly on air travel before. There is always a lot of waiting, and there is always something absurd happening or about to happen to think about.

For example – is the whole “take your shoes off to go through the scanner” now a permanent thing? On the basis that once ever – 12 years ago - some fucknut put a bomb in his shoes, which failed to go off?

I know that real life terrorists tend not to be the brightest, but is anyone really likely to try this again – when everyone’s shoes have to go through the scanner?

As if the superiority of pretty much every other culture to the British was in need of any evidence, Barcelona airport has accommodated this state of affairs by carpeting the walkway through the scanner. That, my friends, is a real sign of civilisation.

La Sagrada Familia

This, for those of you who don’t know, is that funny looking church.

Seriously – I thought it was the most impressive building I have ever seen. It is like nothing else on earth. And it’s not even finished yet.

The exterior is simply astonishing. From a distance it looks organic – like something HR Giger would have drawn or HP Lovecraft would have written about. The towers in particular look unchristian, like something that has risen out of a crack in the ground during an earthquake. I was particularly struck by how they have "Sanctus" written around them in exactly the same font as hotels have "Marriott" written on them. 

Plastic martians come out of it

Close up though, it is as ornate and religious as Notre Dame or Chartres cathedral. Above is a picture from the Nativity facade. This is presumably the first and only turkey featured on a major religious building.

For all its organic, sensuous curves, the Nativity facade is recognisably a more-or-less conventional church door. Contrast that with the modernist Passion facade, which is terrifying in its own way. 

I have to say that, while it was still very impressive, the interior of La Sagrada Familia didn’t move me like the exterior did. My first impression was that is resembled the set of a 1960s sci-fi, particularly when I saw the lifts going up and down the towers.

But what impressed me more than anything was the sheer ambition of it. Gaudi and everyone else who has worked on it knew they would not live to see it completed. Yes – that is true of cathedral builders throughout history, but to think that 20^th century people thought like that as well? The work, I suppose, is itself a collective act of devotion – very difficult for us individualists to comprehend. And yet there it is, being built with the money from the hordes of visitors paying 13 euro 50 a head to go and look.

If you go to Barcelona, you MUST go and see La Sagrada Familia.

Barcelona itself

It’s never a fair comparison to put somewhere you go on holiday alongside somewhere you live and/or work.

But let’s do it anyway.

Barcelona has a warm welcome for sailors

The weather was beautiful. Everyone we spoke to was friendly and helpful – despite my having gone there with the belief that it was simply a matter of time until we were pickpocketed. Everything was clean. Families were doing things together. Generations and nationalities were getting along just fine together. The food was good. Nothing was overcrowded. Even the many dogs seemed polite and relaxed.

I saw none of the waddling, tracksuited urban peasants one sees everywhere in the UK. Maybe they were all at home watching “Javier Kyle” instead of wandering about public spaces like grotesque overweight zombies.

LOL: "Quim"

OK, we did see a fair sample of that uniquely Iberian phenomenon - the man with long hair up in a bun - but then even the beggars were picturesque... ;)

No-one seemed to be doing anything purely for the sake of pissing everyone else off – apart from the (mostly, but thankfully not exclusively, British) stag and hen parties.

It almost made me think that living in a city need not be a hell on earth. And the scooters!

OK, on the last night on the way home we saw (i) needles, (ii) vomit on the Metro and (iii) a broken bottle on the station steps – but the fact that this was remarkable rather than entirely commonplace seems important.

Like I say, it’s probably not a fair comparison. Tourists who jet in and do the sights for a few days only see the theme park Barcelona. I’m sure it has its problems. But my god, its best side is so much better than the best side of any city I’ve ever seen in the UK.

So THAT is where I am retiring to.

¡Visca Catalunya!

Post-Industrial Yorkshire

Walking my dog this weekend, I ended up in the ruins of an old mill.

It was called Buck Mill and it was on the banks of the River Aire. Seemingly, a mill of some sort had been there since the 17th century, but it fell into disuse in the late 1800s and was demolished in the 1930s.

Now, it is a half buried pile of stones, overgrown with moss and vegetation at the side of a footpath where nobody would even take a second glance.

For hundreds of years, this was where the people of the local area brought their wheat for grinding into flour. So it was the economic heart of this little corner of West Yorkshire.

By the time of the industrial revolution, it looked much like UNESCO World Heritage Site Salt's Mill a couple of miles up the waterway - but in what turned out to be a really crappy location.

The late Victorians built a bridge but it was too late for the mill. The bridge is in excellent condition for something of its age.

This is what Buck Mill looks like from the pathway to the bridge. You would not know it was there unless you took the trouble to look at the sign situated a strangely long way away from the actual site.



Buck Wood is full of huge chunks of rock (millstone grits, as it happens) and old bits of drystone wall. Apparently, there was a neolithic settlement in there thousands of years ago - although the evidence thereof today is pretty much restricted to the sort of post-holes and thoroughly mundane-looking bits of stone that archaeologists seem to get so excited about.

So it would be easy just to imagine that this ruined mill was nothing more than a natural phenomenon or yet another wall people stopped giving a toss about at some point in the past.

And yet it isn't. This is what happens to industrial heritage that stops being useful before people become nostalgic.

Working in the supremely ephemeral field of online marketing as I do, it was quite eerie walking around the practically invisible aftermath of a former phase of the UK's economy. Will we even leave this much of a trace a hundred years from now?

More to the point, what is down this mysterious hole? I didn't get any closer than this, but there is clearly a subterranean structure down there...

It was at this point that I was cursing my iPhone.

Sure, it takes good pictures, but why no zoom? Jesus, phones I had three or four years ago had zooms on their cameras!

Which is itself quite ironic, in terms of how quickly we come to take things that are quite miraculous in their own way for granted, and how unimaginable a different way of life really is.

Look at the state of the river if you want a lesson in taking things for granted.

This is a little side channel off the main Aire. When it's high, the water flows through. When it's low - as you can see - it's just a depository for all the crap that has fallen in or been thrown in upsteam.

Plastic bags look like being our generation's main legacy to future archaeologists.

And there are people living down here too. This was not actually at the mill, but a few hundred yards away.

We like to sneer at the Victorians and their class snobbery, their disregard for the poor, the squalor hidden away from respectable people. We are much more civilised, aren't we?

And yet here is a duvet in a reedbed.

Here are some burned cans of beer. This is within walking distance of my house (obviously).

I don't really know where I'm going with all this.

It was pouring with rain. It was freezing cold. That might have heightened the overall melancholy of the experience.

I just found the whole thing extremely sad. We like to think that society progresses, and yet here was evidence of it going backwards. Of traces of civilisation just being left to rot.

The only evidence that anyone is remotely concerned about what goes on down there once the joggers, dog walkers and cyclists are safely tucked up in bed was this. A fitting metaphor, I thought.

Architecture and Morality

I have been wandering around Leeds city centre at lunchtimes since the start of the year.

Given that one can only get so far and still have enough time to get back to the office, as you can probably imagine, the novelty soon wore off.

However, seeing as I am doing it for exercise – having cancelled my gym membership at the end of the year – I have been persevering with it, while trying to find new ways of making it interesting.

First off, I am listening to my Michel Thomas German language course a lot. All I need to take this to the next level (as we say whilst inwardly dying in management meetings) is find someone else who wants to speak German and start speaking to them. In German.

Right now, all I’m doing is walking about whispering to myself – which is, of course, the international language of the mental patient.

Secondly, I am looking up.

Most of the people shuffling around the city streets rarely raise they eyes above the level of the shop-fronts. I, however, have been looking at the uppermost parts of Leeds’ buildings and I’ve reached two conclusions:

1. There is a hell of a lot of vacant commercial property in the city centre - so if you need business premises, you should be able to get a very good deal.

2. If you flooded or buried Leeds to a depth of about 15 feet, you'd actually be left with quite a beautiful place.

There are some really fascinating buildings around which you would never give a second glance to because of the staggeringly banal contents of their ground floors. The most extreme example of former "oooh" and present "meh" surely has to be the one-time Jubilee Hotel on The Headrow – now the "Red Leopard" lapdancing establishment.

My personal favourite is St Paul’s House in Park Square (right). It looks like the Doge’s Palace, only with an “office space to let” sign pinned to the outside.

The Leeds City Markets building (at the top) would not look out of place in Paris or Vienna, despite being inhabited primarily by people offering to unlock stolen mobile phones. And the Town Hall is also a thing of beauty.

THEN, you look at what’s in between these brilliant examples of Victorian ambition and craftsmanship and you realise that if the Victorians were wrong about one thing, it was that history moves forwards towards a better future. 

Pretty much every building from the 20^th century onwards looks horrendous, cheap and nasty.  The court buildings look like they’ve been made out of Lego, for example. And they probably have. 

“Ah, here he goes again, imagining the past was SO MUCH BETTER than the present”, I hear you say. “The reason why old buildings look better than modern ones is that the crap old buildings fell down or were knocked down years ago.”

Please excuse any Prince Charles tendencies here. Some modern buildings are indeed impressive and beautiful in their own way. The Gherkin in London is quite something.

But – to me - they are things you look at and say “that’s a clever statement” rather than “that is a work of art”. Same as the difference between Tracey Emin’s bed and a Caravaggio.

 So, present-day architects: more stone-work please. More domes. More intricacy, less concept please. OK?

Tetley Brewery - or what's left of it

Another thing you notice about Leeds’ buildings is how many of them are completely derelict. I’m not talking about boarded up shops – I mean entire city blocks of buildings going to ruin. The whole area just north of the bus station, for example, around Templar Street and Lady Lane.

Clearly, no one is going to buy them or rent them in their present condition. So why not demolish them?

In fact, here’s an early policy for my future dictatorship. If a building is left unoccupied for more than a year, it has to be EITHER opened up to homeless people OR blown up and returned to nature until someone can think of something worthwhile to put there instead. 

Top Ten English Place Names

The roast cream of old England

Having spent some 15 hours or so as a passenger in a car on English roads this weekend (including two hours at Markham Moor (northbound) services on the A1 awaiting recovery by the AA), I have had more time than usual to reflect on the wonderful variety and velvety richness of our English place names.

Rejoice, sons and daughters of merrie Englande, in the inventive dexterity of your mother tongue.

Rejoice also, for no matter how much modernity - or post-modernity or whatever shit era it is we currently live in – would iron out every crease and rumple of history into a smooth, shiny, ECHR-compliant, sensitivity-trained monotony, the powers that be ain’t never going to be able to change these names for something more reflective of the way we live today.

If they try, however, I am going take out a trademark on “Diversity Good Community” – which is surely some people’s dream future name for London.  

Before I begin to sound too much like the comments section on a Telegraph blog page and make reference to “ZaNU-Labour”, let me explain the methodology.

1. While I like smut as much as the next man, I am ruling out places like Bell End, Cocking and the many places that begin with “Gay” on grounds of being clichéd. You will see innuendo below, but I hope it will at least be relatively virgin innuendo.
2. This is not intended to be a complete or fair list. It’s pretty obviously focused in certain areas. If you have better suggestions, put them in the Comments section below like a good boy/girl.
3. In no way do I vouch for any of these places being actually funny, interesting or unusual. I don’t think I’ve actually been to any of them – I have just seen their names on road signs or on maps. I have no doubt that if I went to any of them and saw a Nisa Local alongside a prestigious new development of David Wilson Homes, or a high street with a Primark, a JD Sports and a load of charity shops, I would find them just as dreary and depressing as almost everywhere else in this country. If you want villages that are actually weird in the sense of interesting as opposed to weird in the sense of creepy, I refer you to the fiction section.

So, without further ado, let the listing commence!

Tydd Gote, Lincolnshire

As previously discussed, I love goats and so a village named after them AND spelled wrong has got to be on the list. Tydd Gote is deep in the Fens, where Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire not so much collide as seep into one another.

There are a whole host of Tydd-prefixed villages around there. Most of them are named after boring saints (not even good ones, like Botolph or Guthlac) – but you’ve got to love the Gote.

Barnoldswick and Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire

I can’t even say these words without pulling a Wallace and Gromit face. I would like also to give an honourable mention to Birtwistle Standroyd Bungalows in Colne, as delivering the ultimate Lancashire hit.

Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire

Roll that one around your palate, savour the earthy taste of Yorkshire phonemes and contrast with the above. That is the difference between chewing a white red and a red rose for you.

Lumbertubs, Northamptonshire

This whole area looks like a dreary modern suburb, but that name reaches straight out of the Middle Ages and grabs you in its hairy, calloused grip.

Donkey Town, Surrey

We used to live just a few miles from Donkey Town and yet we never went there. How amazing would a town of donkeys be? Probably about as amazing as Dewsbury.

Blubberhouses, North Yorkshire

That is a name that speaks for itself in all its Anglo-Saxon glory.

Lickfold, West Sussex

I promised you smut. Lickfold is very near to the almost as ridiculously-named Lurgashall, in what can only have been intended as an early public health warning.

Burton Coggles, Lincolnshire

Or, to give it its full name, Byrton-en-les-Coggles. Don’t let the sun go down on you here unless you know the secret of man’s red fire.

Hampole, South Yorkshire

Just off the A1, near to the city of Donk. Never fails to raise a smile.

Clenchwarton, Norfolk

Not far from Tydd Gote lies my favourite-named place in the whole country. Regular readers of the Comments section will know my fascination with the word “clench”, and here it is seared into the very land.

Say it out loud and you can taste the piece of grass in your mouth, feel the clay hat dribbling down your head and the rough canvas smock tickling you on the clenchwarton. If there is a more English place - nay WORD - out there than this, I have yet to hear it.