Directory of Lost Causes

I have been in London these past few days for what Ulrich Haarburste might describe as "sundry reasons".

Yesterday, travelling on the Underground, I noticed an advertisement for some magazine or similar publication that purported to be a guide to the world in 2009. On the cover of this magazine, amongst other headlines, was the question, "Can sustainable living work in Britain?"

This seems to me a very good example of how (even) those who are forming our opinions via the media are simply unable to think straight. What does 'sustainable' mean if not something that works in the long-term? Therefore this headline could be re-written as, "Can a lifestyle that works in the long-term work in Britain?" Well, if it can't then we're screwed, aren't we? The only alternative to a sustainable lifestyle is an unsustainable lifestyle - one that won't work in the long-term. Our current lifestyle, in fact. And the only way that sustainable living won't work in Britain is because people can't be bothered to get off their fat arses and do what has to be done - the kind of contemptible apathy to which this headline seems to pander, whatever the actual conclusions of the article inside.

So let's say we take the unsustainable living... er... 'option', a few years down the road we'll all be refugees, and I doubt that there will be many other countries willing to take such apathetic, lard-arsed, criminally boring, badly-dressed, complacent, gastronomically illiterate, oafish, eructating, unsustainable scum to their bosoms, however much we might have changed our minds about immigration by then.

The irony of Britain topping the polls in a survey on literary travel destinations is that the British themselves are such thumping philistines when it comes to literature. Or just about anything, come to think of it. Oh, also, in my opinion, English literature is amongst the most desiccated and boring in the entire world.

Last night I spoke to an old friend on the telephone. He asked if I watched S4C, the Welsh TV channel. I replied that I did not have a television. Flabbergasted, he then asked, "But what do you do with your flippin' time?!" I hope and expect that there was at least some alloy of satire in this remark, but these days, who can tell? I replied, "Well, nothing really, just write lots of stories that no one will ever read because they're too busy watching television."

The British, well, specifically the English, like to be 'amused', and can't stand metaphysics, which is why English literature is so shallow. 'Amusement', a la Jane Austen, is considered the height of cultural endeavor. What this boils down to is a kind of conceitedness, and belief that one is cleverer than everyone else on Earth, and will certainly not get tricked into taking anything but one's own cleverness seriously. Of course the evidence for that cleverness consists of nothing but the fact that one refuses to take anyone else's concerns seriously (on this score I'm recently less and less impressed with brittle British comedy). The conceitedness of English cynicism is therefore as airtight and self-perpetuating as American patriotism.

But the English are, in fact, so downright crap that we even have to get a bloody foreigner in to manifest English cleverness for us; Oscar Wilde, the epitome of the English wit, was, of course, Irish. The English themselves would have found actual manifestation of this vaguely held cleverness to be beneath their dignity. (In other words, they didn't have the ability.)

These days, even the very hollow cleverness that once existed has been dumbed down, so that the conceitedness and cynicism are as dull as some blokey journalist's warm beer.

Can you tell how much I hate this country?

To be fair, in terms of literature, we do have a certain amount of variety on our side. The desiccated nature of our culture sometimes gives rise to a kind of stilted eccentricity that does not seem to have a counterpart elsewhere in the world: A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll... Er, maybe that's it, actually. And perhaps the best English literature is children's literature, since the tyrannical and very tiresome light of reason reigns elsewhere with such completeness, it seems as if it is only in or through childhood that the English imagination can be expressed. I'd favour E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle over, say, Thomas Hardy, any day.

And as to Shakespeare, I remain unconvinced. He still seems to me like a bloke who could write some good one-liners, but I've never found the stories at all engaging. What did he actually convey, apart from the fact that he was the Bard, and therefore pretty damned clever? People (and critics) will sometimes give someone like H.P. Lovecraft as an example of a bad writer, because of certain things that, stylistically, you are apparently not supposed to do, and because he didn't flatter society with amusing comedies of manners, but at least Lovecraft conveys something in particular, whereas, to me, Shakespeare conveys nothing at all. And Shakespeare is the jewel in the passage to India of English literature, apparently. No wonder all the rest of it is so crap.

I phone the 'customer service' number for the Cardiff-Swansea Shuttle 100 bus, 01792 572255. I ask if the timetable on the website is current, since it has the words 'winter timetable' in the URL, and I can't find a corresponding 'summer timetable', and even here in rainy Wales, I'm fairly sure that the beginning of July must be classed as 'summer'.

"As far as I know, the timetable is current," comes the reply. It's not a very reassuring answer. "If it's the same one I'm looking at."

Well, how big is that 'if', exactly?

"It says 'winter timetable' here," I reiterate, "so I just wondered if it was still valid."

"Does it have May the 6th on it?"

I look. I can't see any date written anywhere.

"I can't see any date anywhere," I say. "I'm looking at the Firstgroup website. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"So, that should be the right timetable then?"

Throughout this exchange I have sensed - without too much surprise, unfortunately - a general unwillingness to communicate. It's almost as if this man resents that fact that people should phone a number that is advertised as being for 'customer service' asking questions. And now there ensues such a poisonous silence in answer to my tentative question that I can virtually see the fissures in the cancerous old man's greying lips as he presses them tighter. It's possible that the man hates me because he's Welsh and I'm English, and I'm just ridiculous enough to feel guilty for that. It's also possible that this concentrated sulphur of silence is simply due to the fact that the man is British and works for a bus company. Service, in Britain, is... well, there's an old joke that goes like this: "I didn't come here to be insulted." "Well, where do you normally go?" British 'service' is basically where people go to be insulted.

I made my excuses and hung up, reminding myself how foolish I had been actually to expect anyone to be at all helpful on the end of a British 'helpline'.

This whole process of planning my journey to London by bus has taken me a few days. I did not expect it to take so long. Things have changed. Of course, I did start by looking things up on the Internet, but all the 'journey planners' turned out to be entirely useless. Like bureaucracy in the film Brazil (and in actual life), each webpage I found simply referred me to another. The actual task of planning a journey had been 'out-sourced' so many times that there was nothing left but the process of out-sourcing; the service itself, which should have been at its end, had been forgotten.

The assumption in this age being, however, that everything is done instantaneously at the click of a mouse, human service has atrophied shockingly. No one knows how to answer a phone any more, or answer a question. In the past, if I wanted to plan a coach journey, which I often did, I would simply make one phonecall, ask a number of questions of one person, who had the amazing ability to tell me times, prices and the locations of stops, and my journey-planning, and booking, was complete. The people were not always cheery - this is Britain, after all - but at least they could do their job.

I've had to resort to photographs of timetables in bus shelters and bus stops to help me fill in the final pieces of the puzzle. There is something refreshing in walking to a bus stop and seeing, laid out clearly, all in one place, the times and destinations of buses, without having to be redirected to anything, without having to turn a switch or click an icon, and without having to talk to some sour old cunt who is determined to find some reason to hate you because he hates the job he's too shrivelled and pickled with resentment and mediocrity to be able to do.

First of all, apologies are in order to just about everyone for just about everything.

Secondly, I'd like you all to think of England.

I know I do, frequently.

It is actually a scientific fact that it's ridiculous of me to be critical of England, unto which Stevie Smith likened happiness, however, I live only to be ridiculous in the eyes and bosoms of all those who behold me, and so, let me proceed.

First of all, I've linked to this before, but I do think it's an excellent essay and expresses a lot of what I also would like to express. I differ from the opinions of Momus management here and there. For instance, it looks like I'm not a real man, since I don't really like gadgets (apart from my digital camera). But that's not really a surprise to anyone, now, is it? Errr... Am I referring to the same essay? Haven't got time to re-read it. To continue...

Oh yes, so there's not much left to say after that, but I shall say it, anyway.

The other day, lamenting the existence of my blog to a friend whilst soaking a whole boxful of mansize tissues, I found myself confronted with the following reply:

I like your blog. I think you should carry on writing it. It makes the world feel less English.

(Before I go further, let me point out I'm not treating England and Britain as interchangable, even though they are... No, I'm just joking.)

A couple of days later I came across the following collection of British adverts on Youtube:



Now, I do actually have a sense of humour somewhere, if I could only find it, BUT, just how many layers of 'brilliant' English/British irony (everyone wants some if it's irony we're talking about) are there in these adverts? What finally comes out on top? The beer is being sold as 'no nonsense'. That's what comes out on top. I'm not having a go at Peter Kay. He's talented and funny enough not to need my permission to exist. But let's analyse in a very (un)English way, the first of these adverts {actually the last one is not bad, and perhaps shows the genuinely good side to British (but not English) 'no nonsense'}. Okay, I'm not well up on sports, but some kind of international sporting event. Some foreign Johnny types do some fancy twirly things off the diving board. Then it's 'good old' John Smith from 'Great Britain'. "What can he do?" we're asked, almost as if it's a rhetorical question. Because we're crap, aren't we? (Is the subtext.) And what he does is 'a running bomb'. The foetal version of a bellyflop, or perhaps the Dambusters version, eh? Anyway, needless to say he wins. That's the spirit! And, the advertising slogan for this horrible beer that tastes like Fairy Liquid is 'No nonsense'. Really? I think there's quite a lot of nonsense in there. However. 'No nonsense' is what the British, and specifically the English, pride ... I want to say 'ourselves', to be inclusive, but I can't, because I don't share these sentiments... is what they pride themselves on. What does 'no nonsense' really mean? Not trying. Being crap. Hating other people for being better than you. Hating to see your mates do well. Etcetera. He hasn't been in the pub since Tuesday, his new girlfriend really has him under the thumb etcetera etcetera. (Oh yeah, the one about the old people's home is particularly horrible. Funny? Didn't raise a titter.)

Sorry, but I don't find it funny. Even as a joke, it's lazy. How ironic can a pint of beer be?

I do enjoy a drink, but... there is more to life than beer and 'a running bomb'. There really is. Open your eyes, if you don't believe me. There is... Well, let's start with Momus. There's Momus, criminally underrated Scottish musician and blogger. There's.... Justin Isis, Mark Samuels (ha ha, no I'm not going to just list all my friends, sorry), Bruno Schulz, Juana Molina, Chinese landscape painting, flying gliders, entomology, Arthur Machen, that really grim Polish artist who was knifed whose name I can never spell and I'm probably embarrassing myself and getting the country wrong, too, Maruo Suehiro, C.G. Jung, Stanislav Grof, Gurdjieff, Kate Bush, Sifow, Maeda Ken, Zhongguo Wawa, Jorge Luis Borges, Jeremy Reed, The Tindersticks, some people that I have unforgivably not kept in touch with (sorry again), Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Naruse Mikio, Takahashi Rumiko, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ivor Cutler, William Blake, Yang Lian, Wang Wei, Li Bai, tai chi, Six Feet Under, the Peter Harris Experience, Andre Gide, Immanuel Kant, Fucking Amal, Thomas Ligotti, Kierkegaard, Ann Kavan, tree frogs, duckweed, two-tone, wolf-children, Marcus Aurelius and Norman Lovett in my living room alone. And that's still a very, very biased list, it has to be said. (Oh, and Kahlil Gibran, he quipped.)

And some of them are even English.

And some of them are even British.

Errr. I think that's all I really needed to say. I'll leave the last word to Kit Wright, a poet. I know nothing about Kit Wright except that he or she wrote the following poem. (If there are any copyright problems, will Kit Wright please get in touch with me, and I promise that the John Smiths will be on me for the evening):

Everyone Hates the English

Everyone hates the English,
Including the English, they sneer
At each other for being so English,
So what are they doing here,
The English? It's thick with the English,
All over the country. Why?
Everyone ever born English
Should shut up, or fuck off, or die.

Anyone ever born English
Should hold their extraction in scorn
And apologise all over England
For ever at all being born,
For that's how it is, being English;
Fodder for any old scoff
That England might be a nice country
If only the English fucked off!