Left/Right

Much is being made in the Daily Heil of Bob Ainsworth's membership [not, it seems, even a full and proper membership], back in the day, of the International Marxist Group. In the paper's more fevered imaginings he probably appears as above, complete with armoured train, when he is in fact just a rather more mediocre than usual neo-liberal.

But Not A Pacifist At All Costs

Following on from the previous post: don't get the idea that I'm a pacifist at any cost. Approving references throughout this blog to the Commune, the Spanish Civil War and the Makhnovschina suggest otherwise. Plus the experience, 1939-45, of my father in the RAF, his older brother in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and his younger brother in the Royal Marines, all doing their bit to putting a stop to genocidal fascism.

'Oh, Jesus, Make It Stop'

Another quotation (you are dealing, the dozen of you who dip in here regularly, as you ken fine by now, with a literary cove), this time from Siegfried Sassoon's Attack (available, read, in a way that will make you weep, by the author, on CD from the British Library). I was put in mind of this heartfelt cry of an inhabitant of the trenches by reading a discarded copy of The Times which I picked up on my travels today. Of course it has dumbed down despicably under the Dirty Digger, I even managed the crossword puzzle in 15 minutes, for fuck's sake, and I'm aware enough of my own limitations to know that that wasn't because I'd got smarter since last I did it. But the paper's comment on the passing of Harry Patch, the last survivor of those who fought in the trenches with Sassoon and my grandfathers, was atrocious. They 'sacrificed much in a noble cause.' Aye, right. Apparently 'Wilhelmine Germany was not as brutal as the Nazi regime, but it was a militaristic autocracy.' And driven by its desire to emulate our own imperialist swagger, a longing for a 'place in the sun'. Fourteen years before the Great War broke out this country had been using its own militaristic power to force the Boers back into line and was still dominating most of Africa and the entire Indian sub-continent. Don't even mention Ireland. And anyone who thinks pre 1914 Britain was a wonder of democracy is utterly deluded: in 1911 40% of the male population was still disenfranchised because that's the way the ruling class liked it. And in the war that was fought for the said ruling classes of various rival imperialisms by the proletarians of all countries ('Bayonet: a weapon with a worker at both ends') the brunt of the losses was borne by said proletariat. T.C. Smout, in A Century of the Scottish People 1830-1950, page 267 : 'It is still not known how many Scots died in the war. One well-argued estimate put the figure at 110,000, equivalent to about 10% of the Scottish male population aged between sixteen and fifty, and probably about 15% of the British war dead--the sacrifice was higher than for any country in the empire. Thirteen out of fourteen were privates and non-commissioned officers from the working classes.'
This blog is nothing if not internationalist and I'm ending with a reference to another colonial nation that paid over the odds, a far better memorial than the arrogant ignorance provided by today's Times:

They collected the crippled, the wounded and lame,
Then they shipped us back home to Australia,
The armless, the legless, the blind and insane,
Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla,
And as our ship sailed into Circular Quay,
I gazed at the place where me legs used to be
Thank Christ there was no-one there waiting for me,
To mourn, to grieve and to pity.

Names

Norwich North was no surprise, though the Tories, duck-houses, moats and all, should have come in for a greater caning than they did. Good to see the Greens beat the fash and, best of all, to see the Libertarians get all of 36 votes. It looks as if the good folk of East Anglia aren't yet ready for John Galt [not, if it comes to disambiguation, the author of the still very amusing 1820 novel The Ayrshire Legatees]. The name 'libertarian' in this context means 70% Stirnerite, 20% Poujadiste and 10% foumart. OK, the quantities can be re-arranged to suit all tastes. Whatever way you mix the components they are not 'libertarians' in the sense that would be recognised by the FIJL, Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias, the youth wing of the Spanish anarchist movement in the 1930s. They were part of a movement that was against the state all right, but also against private property, fiercely anti-clerical, for self-managed collectives and for direct democracy. Oh, and they turned the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona into a workers' canteen. As a help to confused parties a real libertarian is pictured above.

'Haben Sie Frische Blutegel?'

A post title taken from that handy companion of the road, Baedeker's Traveller's Manual of Conversation, ca. 1890. It is part of this medically-minded set of phrases: 'Where is there an apothecary's shop? I want some medicine, some salt, rhubarb, calomel, blue pills. Have you fresh leeches? These do not bite. Please to change them for others.' I was put in mind of this little monologue by the 'flu-like symptoms I've had over the past few days. I haven't a clue whether it was the pandemic variety or just a very bad summer cold with raised temperature and headache flung in and I didn't bother going on line or 'phoning a hotline to find out, just treated it with bed rest, paracetamol, masses of vitamin C and lashings of hot tea. It seems a lot better today and my decision not to demand Tamiflu was supported by a letter in today's Herald. The writer recalls advice given in his virology lectures in Glasgow University 40 years back, viz, 'the only thing we needed to remember from our virology course was to tell our patients that the illness would last two weeks with treatment and a fortnight without.'

'The Miniature Gaiety Of Seasides'

One of Larkin's more upbeat poems, To the Sea, contains that line and celebrates the English seaside, remarking upon how

"Everything crowds under the low horizon:
Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps,
The small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse
Up the warm yellow sand, and further off
A white steamer stuck in the afternoon--"

Breathless Hush

The strangest highlight of the holiday was Saturday afternoon. While his partner busied herself with an Ian Banks novel on the couch beside us (but not excluded: there was a hilarious moment when, in answer to her questions, we did a mime-show of umpiring signals with suitable explanations), my son and I bonded over the test match on TV. This is strange because I usually hate sport and we have only ever played cricket at what might be called an England, Their England level, both at the same institution and on the same pitches. My father played for his foundry side as an apprentice before the 1939-45 war and for his RAF squadron (he was, I'm proud to say, an oily-handed member of the ground crew, the men who kept the planes in the air in the most unpropitious circumstances) in Egypt during said war, but did not pass on to me his considerable skills--my favourite memory of him is the occasion when he visited me at university one Sunday when I was due to play in some shambolic and ludicrous match and he stepped in when we were a man short. He opted for just the one pad when batting, which tells you all you need to know of his opinion of the bowling, and when fielding in the slips made a magnificent catch, effortlessly reaching up one hand to pluck the ball out of the air. He didn't even remove his tweed jacket. Regardless of all that, perhaps inspired by it, the boy and I spent a wonderful afternoon gripped by events at Lord's, joining in when the umpire signalled a boundary, an event that recurred with astonishing frequency as the middle order batsmen piled on the runs, knocking the Aussie bowling all over the ground, elegantly waving our index fingers from side to side as we downed the Newcastle Browns. It was a day to savour. And on this occasion at least the boy, who has dual UK-Australian citizenship, had no doubts about his loyalties.

Greeneland

Part of last week was spent at an English seaside resort. I enjoyed it: weather was excellent, pubs had good beer and reasonable food, I like the seaside. There's also something about people in shirtsleeves ingesting fish and chips, candy-floss and rock beside lurid amusement arcades and seedy souvenir shops that reminds me of a certain 20th century English author. As Edmund Crispin commented after describing a similar scene in one of his highly artificial, parodic and witty crime novels: "Somewhere, surely, someone was saying a Hail Mary."

Taking A Break

Off on holiday this evening for a week.

Proletarians, To Horse!

At a meeting today of interested parties from various unions to discuss resistance to the crisis. This is going to hit most harshly the weakest, the poorest, the least able to organise against it, but numbers attending were very low. OK, it was a sunny Saturday but a lot is on the line. It was good to hear the passion of those who came along and to learn of unions taking on the sharks of the big companies and winning victories but too many of us were of a certain age and we were too few. Where were the young men and women who are going to be hit by the redundancies, the public service cuts, the firms going belly up? Who are left in this airt with no better options than call centres and burger-flipping or its equivalent? Oddly, I wasn't depressed by the event's poor attendance. I'm 90 years too late, to say nothing of being too old, overweight and unfit, to be galloping across the steppes in a tachanka but whatever I can contribute to the struggle I will and I'm resolved to give even more time, money and effort to my union to do so. And to plan better ways to educate, agitate and organise.

Wackohimmelfahrt?

'Location of Jackson's body a mystery' says the MSN headline. Waiting breathlessly for Germaine Greer's piece in The Graun.

Over A Barrel

Diageo is threatening to close down its bottling plant, with a loss of 700 jobs, in Kilmarnock, home of their Johnnie Walker brand. There's talk of strike action but also, amazingly, reports of East Ayrshire Council considering offers of financial incentives to the bloated plutes to make them change their minds. I can't believe the naivety of people who think that offering what will be sweeties as a bribe to a global behemoth like Diageo is a clever move. Have they never heard of the phrase, 'Take the money and run'? Expect nothing from a Scottish Government that is too chummy with home-grown capitalists or a Westminster Government that has bottled out of firmly regulating the nationalised banks. Expropriation, on the other hand.......

Somewhat Understated

Weather back to normal for the Scottish summer: pouring almost all day ('If you can see the hills, it's going to rain. If you can't see the hills, it's raining.') Holed up with Evan Mawdsley's history of the Russian Civil War and found this description of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg--'an unbalanced Baltic nobleman.' And some. In a conflict not remotely lacking in carpet-chewing monsters of a generally anti-Semitic bent, this man was the psychopath's psychopath, unleashing the only pogrom in Mongolian history among other atrocities. Access to a cossack host and absolute power must have seemed like all his birthdays come at once. The Red Army shot him, not a moment too soon.

Green Thoughts In A Green Shade

Two months ago I paid to have the back garden, which was not so much inspired by Gertrude Jekyll as by Gertrude Hyde, gutted, permeable membrane laid on all surfaces, the beds covered in bark chips and the centre in stone chips. The intention was to plant shrubs in the beds in gaps cut in the membrane. The plan is that weeding will be minimalised if not eliminated. Largely because I do not drive/own a car, I haven't been able to get hold of the shrubs as yet and have found extremely soothing the almost Zen-like aspect that I look out on from the kitchen window as I wash up. The temptation is to leave it as it is and just make patterns in the pebbles with a rake but now my wee sister is back from her holidays her wheels will be pressed into service and the grand plantings can take place.

Why I Am Not In Glasgow Today

It's the summer and I'm actively getting out and about on the bodach's bus-pass which costs me nothing. It's some time since I visited Glasgow and especially the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Today might be perfect for such an excursion. Except for one thing. The city's 182 [yes, that's one hundred and eighty-two] Orange Lodges will be parading through the city centre to Kelvingrove Park. According to the Assistant Chief Constable in Friday's Herald, 'The force's priority is public safety. We want to make sure people can come into the city centre without too much disruption or feeling intimidated by excessive drunkenness and sectarian or disorderly behaviour.' Leaving out the excessive drunkenness and disorderly behaviour, which, I imagine, the police can do something about under the law, there's 'sectarian behaviour.' What the fuck do they think the whole swaggering, bullying piece of shit is predicated upon but sectarian behaviour? Frankly, and I speak as an atheist, this is the equivalent of a march, with military bands, by the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler as far as propagating hatred and asserting perceived domination and racial superiority is concerned. This exposes completely the reality of a desperately sick and vicious strain in the country's psyche. The fact that no political party has proposed more than feeble palliative responses in terms of ending the whole despicable business indicates how useless they are.

'In Tropical Climes....'

'..there are certain times of day/ when the citizens retire/ to tear their clothes off and perspire.' Such has been the case even in this northerly airt over the past week. Yesterday, in spite of a very early start, even the walk down to and back from the Coapera'ive, a mere ten minutes each way, was a case of 'murder, polis!' All it needed was Brian Donlevy as the sadistic Sergeant Markoff snarling 'March or die, mes enfants!' to complete the scenario. Even the winds that we get here were hot and humid, reminding me of a friend moving his deck chair repeatedly one very hot day in Aberdeenshire, trying to escape warm breezes, and ultimately remarking 'Curse these mobile Föhns!' Now it is tipping down with rain, the monsoon season having replaced the sort of weather that makes you 'put your Scotch or Rye down/ And lie down.' Still hot enough for the wonderful Made-in-India-aluminium-heavy-duty fan to be in operation tonight if I'm to get any sleep. It is a magnificent object, bought, I think, in John Lewis in Oxford Street some decades back and looks very 1930s. In the breeze from this Sydney Greenstreet (in a fez) could swat flies.

A Train Set

News, whether reliable or not is a moot point it appears, that the East Coast Mainline service, currently on franchise to National Express, may be taken into public ownership. Not, we hope, like the banks: saved from going down the gurgler but allowed to continue their self-serving bonus culture etc regardless of how much public money has been pumped into them. I use the East Coast line several times a year and have not been impressed by National Express. I can't believe that when Lord Adonis takes over as the Fat Controller it will get much better.