Insert 'pun' that swaps 'you' for 'EU'

I've been following the build-up to the in/out referendum on the EU with some interest. I find it fascinating how the political spectrum does not divide along the usual lines. Sometimes if I'm feeling lazy and can't be bothered to think about where I stand on an issue, I can fairly reliably fall back on tribal loyalties. Not so on this one. I mean, whose camp do you want to be in? David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt want to remain. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove want to leave. 

The Case For Staying

There is a 'What have the EU ever done for us' meme floating around social media at the moment in which is listed the various EU legislation that can be pretty universally agreed to have been beneficial to everyone. 48hr working week, clean air acts, equal pay legislation and 60 years of relative peace are my particular favourites, you can pick your own out of the original letter to the Guardian from Simon Sweeney published in January 2013.

The Case for Leaving

There is a lot of talk and scaremongering from the right about immigration control and sovereignty that I find rather tedious and ignores the argument for leaving that I find most convincing. The European Union is an undemocratic (possibly antidemocratic if you look how it punished Greece for electing left-wing party Syriza to their government) institution that's primary purpose is to further the agendas of the big business and banking sectors. It is about to sign the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that is the latest threat to democratic structures from the corporate sector. Read about TTIP here. 

What the Papers Say

All the corporate proprietor-owned newspapers have lined up behind the leave campaign. This should be a red flag. What do they stand to gain from departure? Newspapers represent corporate interests particularly clearly. (If you don't believe me, compare the international and domestic politics pages to the financial pages: the former are full of comment and criticism, the latter are dry and uncritical - ask yourself, why?) They obviously think a UK independent of Europe would take a lurch to the right.

Selfish Reasons

There is a local language school just over the bridge from the pub. I know one of the teachers and one of the directors and I even worked on their social programme briefly and disastrously. The school, with its regular turnover of foreign students, adds colour and vibrancy to the neighbourhood. A large section of the school's intake comes from EU member states and I think some of the teachers and students who come to be trained in English have some of the fees paid for by the EU - I wouldn't want a change in the relation between the UK and Europe to adversely affect their business.

Conclusion

Sorry folks, I'm afraid I have yet to make up my mind. This is a really complex issue and I hope that you all are giving it plenty of thought as well. I would like to hear your views - especially any selfish reasons of your own that may sway you either way. The bigger ideas are being explored in the press and have yet to move me. Maybe you can persuade me.

Strange Encounters at the Temple Bar

My two week stint in loco proprietoris at the pub I work in has come to an end. Last year, I had a glass beer bottle thrown at me. This year, the best the psychos and maniacs of Norwich could manage was a Polish 'businessman' who emptied three bags of belongings over the smoking area and, despite several polite requests, refused to clear the mess up. Not really a matter for the police, I eventually went out there with a bin liner and said anything he didn't want was going in the bin. He objected to this and we had a short discussion on the nature of possession which might otherwise have been interesting but I had a pub full of people to deal with as well. 

I began to put some of his rubbish in the bin liner and encourage him to put the more valuable items in his own bags. He screamed at me a little bit at which point half of the pub's pool team, the Temple Bar Hashtags - usually to be found lurking in the bottom bar discussing principles of spin - came barrelling out of the pub en masse to make sure there wasn't any trouble. Just how groups of drunk men think that barrelling out of the pub en masse is going to decrease the amount of trouble remains a mystery. But as long as they're on my side, I'm not going to discourage it.

Nobody was hurt. The Polish businessman, his bags quickly refilled by the hands of some willing volunteers, repaired to the carpark where he stood reciting European laws to anyone who cared to listen. He claimed to be waiting for a taxi, but it was a girl on foot that eventually showed up. "Are you going to take him home?" I asked her. "Only if he pay me." She replied (her third person s-deletion revealing her local roots). Three of the Temple Bar Hashtags, nobler men than I, took it upon themselves to make sure the young-looking girl didn't go anywhere with the disturbed Polish businessman who didn't have any money with him anyway. 

I locked the doors on another Monday Night and went to bed. I'm not usually scared at night alone in an ancient pub that is known to be haunted by the ghost of the landlord who hanged himself there in the late Nineteenth Century. 

In fact, I love the feeling of locking the doors and knowing its ten hours or so before I have to speak to another member of the public.

The Economics of the 'Lock-in'

I'm in charge of the pub for a couple of weeks while my boss is in Cuba. I don't know why I get left in charge when clearly everybody else has a better idea of how to run the place than I do. Take 'lock-ins'. Everybody loves a lock-in. The Landlord locks the doors and carries on serving drinks well after closing time. 

If I ran a pub that was licensed until 12.30am, I would only advertise that we were open until midnight. That way every night people would get to feel like they were in a lock-in, but I wouldn't have to break the law.

Lock-ins make sense for landlords, because they get to keep all the money. If I stay open another hour, I get about six quid after tax and national insurance contributions and student loan repayments are deducted. Plus, in the the unlikely event of a bust, I would lose my licence to sell alcohol. Clearly not worth my while. I much prefer a calm hour reading or an hour's sleep to six pounds and the chance to watch drunk people play pool badly.  

I don't explain this to anyone obviously. I just ring the bell at closing time and watch their incredulity when I refuse to serve them ten minutes later. This is the point where they explain that my boss would always definitely give them a drink at that hour. I am working on a facial expression that contains all the information in the above paragraph but I'm worried it looks a bit like my "I couldn't give a..." facial expression.

None of this matters tonight of course, because tonight is what they call in the East: Old Year's Night. And therefore anything could happen... as long as you remember to buy the staff a drink!

Plato, Deindividuation and the Christmas Jumper

SOME IMPORTANT BACKGROUND INFO ON MORALITY

Plato, as is usually the case, was onto something when he argued in The Republic that morality is not just a social construct. In the dialogue, Plato has Socrates repudiate Glaucon's assertion that anybody relieved of social constraints (in his example, by being in possession of a ring that conferred on its owner the power of invisibility) would no longer act morally. Socrates achieves this (8 books and a long digression into the workings of the imagined perfect state later) by demonstrating smugly that whilst societies have a social contract that we tend by and large to live by, this is not the basis for justice: the capacity for good and evil lies within ourselves. Pace Tolkien: the owner of the ring who chooses not to use it is not enslaved to his passions and therefore happier.  

MORE BACKGROUND STUFF

A couple of Millennia later, Twentieth Century psychologists were interested in the mental state of people who indulged in antisocial behaviour. Following on from the ideas of Gustave Le Bon, many speculated about the concept of deindividuation. This is a supposed state of mind that can cause an individual to act differently when they perceive that nobody can identify them. It was speculated that this state of deindividuation might be induced when an individual was wearing a mask or was part of a large crowd. It was claimed that the concept could explain the losses of personal responsibility (the kind lauded by Socrates) that lead to incidents such as looting and rioting by crowds made up of individuals who never exhibited such behaviour in other circumstances.

A QUICK ROUND-UP FOR THOSE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

So masks and crowds cause deindividuation - a state in which one does not feel responsible for one's actions. To this list, I would like to add a third factor: the Christmas Jumper.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHRISTMAS JUMPER

In the Nineties, the Christmas jumper was a laughable object. Contemporary sources such as Harry Potter and Bridget Jones's Diary exhibit the wearers of these items as either nerdily unaware of how uncool they are or coolly ashamed to be wearing

it to please mum.

In the early Twenty-first Century, people started wearing them ironically. Hipsters scoured second-hand shops to get their hands on authentically gaudy ones. Then the supermarkets realised they were missing a trick and suddenly they were everywhere

About four years ago, alongside the usual tinsel ties and santa hats, I started noticing Christmas jumpers adorning the torsos of some of the office party pubcrawls that all bartenders dread at this time of year. 

CONCLUSION

And the behaviour of these crowds has gotten much worse. I put it down to deindividuation caused by wearing a Christmas jumper. The Christmas jumper bestows on its wearer the anonymity of the festive season - pubcrawling into pubs they have never been in before and are unlikely to revisit enhances the effect - before you know it, you have a pub full of middle-aged businessmen twerking and asking junior employees inappropriate questions about what they like to do with their thumbs during sex.  

FOOTNOTE

During his digression about the perfect state in The Republic, Plato concludes that the state should be ruled by philosophers because they are the smartest guys around. This seems the tiniest bit self serving. I might as well argue that bartenders should run things because governments should serve the people and nobody has more experience serving the people than the bartenders. Actually that is a brilliant idea. My first decree: a ban on Christmas jumpers (tinsel ear-rings and elf boots still acceptable).

Merry Xmas!

To bomb or not to bomb?

Er... Not to bomb. That was easy.

I suppose it should no longer astonish me that the standard response to an atrocity such as that committed in Paris last month is to massively increase the budget of the military industrial complex that does so much to increase misery around the world. "There's been a horrific shooting in Paris? Quick we better buy some more bombs."  

How the hell is bombing Syria supposed to alleviate any of the problems of recent months? 

The Jihadists that radicalised the young men who went on the killing spree in Paris want the West to go to war. For them, a bombing campaign on a predominately Muslim country is a recruitment campaign. Dissatisfied young British men and women have already been slipping away by the hundreds to go and fight the Assad regime that has caused so much pain in Syria. Some of them have joined Isis. Some of them have joined other groups with different interests and ideals. The troops in Syria that are not with Assad and not with Isis are not a unified group following one command. Bombs are not the most discriminating of weapons and rely on accurate information coming from the ground. Who is to supply that information?

Something else is going on here. It is possible to see the whole bombing response as part of a broad neo-liberal agenda to move great swathes of public money into the hands of the privately owned arms manufacturing companies. But even seen in these cynical terms... it seems a spectacularly ill-advised way to proceed. Money means more to these people than morality, that much is obvious. But more than the safety of the streets of their own cities? Apparently so.

What about the other great crisis of Europe's near future? The number of migrants fleeing their war-torn country will not be reduced by contributing to the warfare that is tearing up the country from which the migrants are fleeing. 

MPs are debating now. You won't hear much about the neo-liberal agenda of the military industrial complex from that lot. Cameron will be making the moral case for war. Because wars can be moral now since Tony Blair said so in 1998. 

A Lift with The Dray

The dray manoeuvres into the car park of the Temple Bar twice a week. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons - both of these happen to be my shifts. So I have tried to cultivate a good relationship with the draymen. 

Traditionally, barstaff and draymen were always on good terms. In times past, barstaff would offer the draymen a pint in exchange for doing all the heavy lifting and ensuring that the pub got stock with long dates on it. However, over time, social mores changed and it became frowned upon (1) for staff to steal pints from their boss to donate to their colleagues in a related industry and (2) for people to drive Heavy Goods Vehicles after twelve pints of bitter top. These days the only thing a bartender can offer a drayman is the use of the toilet. The dray now lack incentive to do anything other than dump their stock in the cellar, explain that the machine is not working, use the toilet and depart. (The machine is a little electronic signature collection box that doesn't work - all draymen must carry one).

I think it a great shame that one of the great working partnerships of the industry has so soured and that bartenders now have to rack their own barrels on a Tuesday.

However, the draymen that deliver on a Thursday are very much of the old school. Happy to rack 'tubs' (a quick linguistic note: draymen refer to kegs and casks as ‘tubs’ but you must never do so as this is a drayman word and they will give you a funny look if you say it) and rotate stock without being asked. The Thursday draymen are not at all like the surly Tuesday draymen. Last week, they saw me coming out of Pye Bakery (more on this soon - I am sure you are anxious to hear my verdict on their sausage rolls) and held up the traffic on Heigham Street so that they could offer me a lift to work.

I was obviously quick to accept. I love riding in lorries but the opportunity doesn't arise that often. Until that morning, I hadn't been in the cab of a lorry for about twenty years. When I was a teenager living in a rural county and unable to drive (before I grew into an adult living in a rural county and unable to drive) my main method of getting around the vast uncyclable distances between villages in the Westcountry was to hitch-hike. Lorries were always the best lifts because the extra height would give you such a fantastic view of the countryside and because the seats were on springs.

I was pleased to note that the dray had sprung seats and we bounced our way up Earlham Road and into the Temple Car Park.

Gloomthreaders - 1st Review

It has long been an ambition of mine to write a children's fantasy novel. So you can imagine my gumption when an old school pal got in contact to say that he had written a children's fantasy novel and would I mind reviewing it on my blog. Dammit, that was my idea, we can't both be successful children's fantasy novelists. Then I remembered that each time I try to write my children's time-travel adventure book, snappily titled: The Dial's Shady Stealth, I never get past chapter three because the paradoxes get too involved. Whereas here, I was presented with a complete 300 page manuscript. Cap doffed, good work.

People like myself who enjoy wasting time thinking about such matters, usually divide fantasy into four categories: Other World, Magic Door, Intrusion and Liminal. Stephen Rollett's Gloomthreaders: The Unlight Weke occupies the blurred space where Intrusion and Magic Door fantasies overlap. A space that lovers of mid-20th Century children's fantasy will readily associate with Alan Garner.  

The 'real' world occupied by its central character Felicia Hart is being impinged upon by dark forces that seek to control the Unlight. To do so, they must discover the whereabouts of the eponymous Weke that the heroine's father was last seen setting off in search of.

Putting the 'read' into 'Gloomthreaders'

It is an essential trope of the children's fantasy novel that the child must be orphaned as soon as possible. Essential because it feeds the prospective reader's fears (what if my parents were missing/dead?) and dreams (if only my parents weren't here, I could do what I like!). So with Mother dead in mysterious circumstances some years earlier and Father disappeared, Felicia enlists the help of her friend Hugo to search for the Weke herself.

Felicia and her erstwhile father are not the only ones looking for the mysterious Weke. The Council of Solarius are also interested in its whereabouts, but are its members quite what they seem?

I was pleased to see that the broad theme of emergent trust was deftly dealt with in Gloomthreaders. During childhood, we trust implicitly but, as we leave that family bubble and encounter the larger world, we have to learn how to tell those who would help us from those who would harm us. Adult characters in children's fantasy assist us with this lesson. Mummy and Daddy aren't here, who should you trust? Rollett has a good understanding of this. In a Dickensian (or I suppose these days, more Rowlingian) way, the names are sometimes the clue to a person's nature. A bit of fun that begs to be subverted.

One character in Gloomthreaders is fond of saying: "We know nothing - only that on which light falls." Light has long been a metaphor for knowledge. Rollett embraces this association and expands on it in certain passages. Wittgenstein springs to mind: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. 

The novel imbues light with fantastical properties. Light can be Hard and used as a weapon. The opposite of Light is revealed not to be darkness - a mere absence. Instead we are presented with a true opposite: Unlight. This and other ideas (the fantastical creatures encountered and especially the Freeze - a mini-winter that occurs as a result of an alien planet's erratic orbit) that make up the core fantasy elements of the novel are elegantly combined with a realistic depiction of a child's moral outlook. Sometimes we do a thing because it is the right thing to do. Sometimes we act because we are frightened. Sometimes we have to act even though we wish we'd never got involved in the first place. Children's fantasy novelists who understand this (rather than getting embroiled in temporal paradoxes in chapter three) deserve acknowledgement...

...and sales, they also deserve sales. You can buy the book here.