Memento Tory

You knew we were born to be ruled

by somebody as special as you,

whatever they told you in school,

because why would you be born to rule

otherwise? Why, why else would you rise

from your lowly station of yore

and the place you were placed in before

to the house with a ten on its door?

So enjoy it, your ride down the Mall,

the cronies you get to install,

the nation at last in your grasp, in your thrall,

but recall

that as sure as you rise, you will fall.

As sure as you strut, you will crawl.

As sure as you're sure 

your might will endure

you're going to lose, one and all.

When Your Last Word Is Sorry

As you may have guessed from the last paragraph of my last entry, I spent most of yesterday on a twelve-hour Twitter ban. Usually in these situations I avoid Twitter, but I was periodically checking in yesterday because a well-loved figure from one of the corners of that site I occupy, Rory/Ghostface Kafka/@thatkafkadude had gone missing after posting some concerning messages to his account.  So periodically I would have a look at the app to see if there was any news. 

That news finally arrived when I checked Twitter this morning and it wasn’t good. Rory killed himself. His last tweet before he checked out was one word. That word was ‘sorry’. 

Which stuck with me for a simple reason: 'sorry' was the last word my mother spoke to me the night before she died. Looking back, it felt like she knew then. Like she knew that she was dying and was apologising for no longer being around to help me with my problems which, honestly, were nothing compared to her cancer but that was the kind of woman my mum was. Someone who cared about other people, who felt responsible for them, who had been raised to believe you should help others if you can. 

The fact her last word was ‘sorry’ breaks my heart, because I want to tell her she had nothing to apologise for. But it - and the fact that ‘sorry’ was also Rory’s last word - makes me angry. And the reason for that is that for many years, I worked in a job which was dressed up in a bunch of different ways but which basically amounted to saying ‘sorry’ hundreds of times a day to the absolute worst people in the world, and sitting silent and stoic as they verbally abused me. 

They always tell you at call centres that you should try and disassociate from the hatred you have hurled at you down the phone, but that’s bullshit. You can’t, not really. Human beings have evolved to react a certain way to other people raising their voices to us and all the mindfulness in the world doesn’t change that. But it sure puts a feelgood new-age cover on the slow decline into learned helplessness that call centre work inflicts on you. You can only sit and take it for so long when people abuse you before it starts taking a psychic toll. And the fact is that the bosses know this. They are well aware that they have employed you as an emotional punching bag to absorb the anger of the people who use the service they pretend to provide (because it is never the executives who provide the service itself, they just extract the profits). That you are there to soak up the shit customers will give the company about their own bad decisions. It is worth thinking about this: right now there exists an entire class of workers whose job it is to sit and take abuse and whose employers have erected an entire edifice of training and propaganda and acculturation to try and gaslight them into not knowing that fact. 

Of course, the workers are all too aware that this is exactly what we’re there for. The amount of money spent on internal propaganda in modern corporations is staggering but I’ve met very few people working in call centres who believe it. The meetings in which new edicts are handed down, videos screened, and bullshit awards presented by some management scumbag who uses these captive audiences to make up for the fact that in all other contexts, including his failing marriage, other people find him chronically unlikable, are valued not for their informational content but because they represent an hour away from the phones, away from the abuse, and the screens displaying the number of other people queueing up to abuse you.

And sure, they say you can terminate calls if you feel people are getting too abusive but terminate too many and it’s going to be brought up during your performance review. As is your manner in dealing with these customers if you’re anything less than disgustingly subservient. And so, as a result, one of the things you spend a lot of time doing in call centres is saying sorry. 

(Oh, and a special shout-out here to all the cuntstomers who react to those apologies with some variation on ‘well that doesn’t help me does it?’ I certainly don’t hope to one day find you in an alley and put you in a situation where I can piss all over your emotional responses - and, let’s be honest, your lovely posh clothes - to the same degree.)

To some extent, I’ve written about this before: what I call the ownership lie, the way in which power forces us to ‘own’ the problems created by the systems we are forced to work for, while the powerful themselves never take responsibility for a goddam thing. And this is where it ends up: with good people saying ‘sorry’ even when their bodies and minds can’t take it anymore, because we’ve been so socialised to think that is what we should say. 

Because our so-called ‘betters’ certainly aren’t socialised to do that. Look at the pervert who was barely forced out of office a few weeks ago, a man whose career history is more accurately described as a string of offences, any one of which would have seen an ordinary member of the public strung up and gutted in the tabloids - this man was allowed to be Prime Minister! ‘First among equals’! Well I suppose in a Parliament full of landlords, racists and rapists it makes sense to give that accolade to the most corrupt man in the building, but it doesn’t make it any less disgusting to have to be governed by a man who ought to have been strangled with his mother’s chord by a kind and grandmotherly midwife. 

(Does that last bit offend you? Do you think I’m being mean to lovable Boris? I’m glad. I intend to be mean to him. If someone had been meaner to that thick blonde cunt earlier in his career maybe so many good people wouldn’t be dead. Don’t expect an apology: you’ll grow old waiting to receive one from me.)

So I am angry this morning. I am angry that a good man is dead. I am still angry about the suffering my mother had to endure because the People Who Never Apologise have ran the NHS down to a point where it is barely functional so they can sell it to their disgusting spiv chums in the insurance firms, and I am angry that meant that her last stay in hospital was so unpleasant. I am angry that newspapers and TV regularly interview pampered, privileged little scions who are allowed to declare their mantra to be ‘never apologise, never explain’ because they’ve been taught from birth that apologies are for the little people. And I am angry that other people, who have internalised the ownership lie, who have not yet reached the level of sheer fucking disgust with this wretched comedy that I have, will read or see those interviews and feel an extra level of guilt when they are forced, by the circumstances of their job, to say sorry to another rich and triflingly inconvenienced piece of scum who in no way deserves an apology, because in the world the People Who Never Apologise have made the fact that you have to say sorry as part of your job becomes another stick to beat you with, another sign that you are less than they are. Another sign that we are little people. 

Fuck that. I am not going to tell you to stop apologising, because I know that if you’re reading this you probably aren’t one of the People Who Never Apologise (and if you are, fuck off and stop reading this. It’s not for you, and it will only get more unpleasant for you the more you keep reading because I deliberately make use of a number of devices to Keep Out Scum). 

What I am going to tell you to do is to start lying. The customers never believe our apologies anyway, they just want compensation and the feeling someone has had to crawl to them. So apologise as dishonestly as you can. Apologise in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. One thing I used to do was deliberately soften my voice when apologising to them, so I sounded like someone doing ASMR or phone sex. I found this really used to freak the fuckers out, especially when I hadn’t came out yet and was still answering calls under my deadname. That might not work for you, but find something. Find some saving gap of dishonesty you can dance in and tell these entitled bastards, metaphorically speaking, to go fuck themselves. 

If your inclinations run toward the occult end of things, there’s another thing I used to do that you could try. While customers were on the phone to me, giving me shit, I would take the letters of their name and make a little sigil out of them, on one of the scraps of paper we all kept around because you weren’t allowed to take written material off the floor. And then, when I was done with the call, I would put my pen against the palm heel of my hand and stab it through the scrap of paper, destroying the sigil I’d made of their name. Now obviously the esoteric intent of this is what they call malefica, but it also makes great therapy. If you’ve just had to spend ten minutes apologising to some mollycoddled upper class freak, it’s nice to have a single simple gesture you can make to show your utter contempt for them. 

And you are right to feel that contempt, by the way. There are too many of the People Who Never Apologise in this society, and that, one day, will need correcting. But while we wait and work towards that day of Épuration, nurture your contempt for them, feed your anger and let it sustain you. 

Because like Rory, and like my mother, you have nothing to apologise for. 

How do you meaningfully attack, in writing, a culture that is willing to commit genocide so people don’t feel weird about their boners when they masturbate to Olympic swimming?

This man wants you to know he is dedicated to protecting women's sports. Which he once watched for a whole three minutes during the last Olympics. 

It’s obvious to me that all spectator sport is a form of pornography. People relax and unwind by watching others use their bodies in a variety of ways. Consider how much skimpier and figure-hugging sports kit has gotten these days. Sure, the official explanation is couched in terms of ‘performance’, but it’s fooling no-one. It’s about showing off the goods. For the viewing audience. And some people in that viewing audience don’t want to wonder if the woman they’re jerking off to as she swims or runs or boxes might be trans, because then they’re going to feel weird about their boners. And we can’t have that, can we? 

And so a moral panic is created, and people’s lives are ruined, all to protect the erections of people who masturbate to televised sport. But you’ll never see that view articulated in one of the organs whose journalists rage daily against ‘cancel culture’ because, of course, as Nick Cohen’s career has taught us, the people who write for those papers are the same kind of wankers they pander to. They never put a hammer thrower on the front page during the Olympics, do they? But they sure loved running pictures of Kelly Holmes in her skimpy running knickers. 

Or indeed Penny Mordaunt in her swimsuit…it sucks to be called a pervert by a culture that is so relentlessly gagging for it, frankly. A culture I increasingly feel can only be summed up in one word: dirty. 

I don’t just mean that our culture is stained. I want you to imagine the word being spat at a policeman or a priest while the person spitting it is dragged away. A statement of moral outrage. Of utter condemnation. This culture has one thing on its mind and it’s disgusting, and those of us who have other things in mind are forced to see it all the time. In their ‘debates’ around sport, their relentless focus on trans peoples’ genitals, on the mechanics of how gay people have sex. In the way they talk about politicians like teenage girls ogling pictures of pop stars. I don’t read the newspapers these days because to read one is like taking a stroll through the psyche of a particularly pathetic sex case. It’s no surprise that’s what their readers turn into, if that’s what they get fed. 

No surprise too that as newspapers die their constituent elements seek desperately to metastasize into other media: Times Radio, GB News. The Daily Mail has been a printernet hermaphrodite for over a decade now, moralising on the front cover while using its online sidebar of shame to hoover up people who share its staff’s taste for pictures of fourteen year olds in bikinis. Twitter suits these old media operations down to the ground, and I suspect that TikTok probably does too (for one thing I gather the creator base for that network skews young and female, so the Mail can run lots of titillating content about it using the plausible deniability of moral outrage).  It’s an interesting question to imagine a social media site designed to be as unamenable as possible to the perverts gumming up legacy media. If you manage to invent one, maybe send me an invite? 

To return to a point buried in parentheses above, one thing which is particularly galling to see if you happen to be genuinely morally outraged is the way these people use pretended moral outrage as cover for their own prurience. Never forget that Mary Whitehouse was good friends with Jimmy Savile. There is a strain in this country’s culture which just loves to read about horrible things being done to children - provided you add a figleaf of condemnation or sympathy for the victims first. It’s why misery memoirs were so popular in this country, why JK Rowling (who really exemplifies this tendency in British culture better than anyone since Savile) spends so much time dwelling on poor little Harry’s abuse at the hands of the Dursleys before she introduces the reader to her boring, British public school version of magic. It goes back at least as far as Jack the Ripper and probably further still. It’s in our media’s DNA, this combination of censoriousness and pornomania. And obviously, like most of the worst thingsabout this country, it got absolutely turbo-charged by Thatcher (another Friend of Jimmy), whose speeches about‘Victorian Values’ were enthusiastically talked up and cheered for by the same papers that printed pictures of topless teens on Page Three. 

So of course the people this culture venerates as heroes and saints turn out to be nothing of the kind on the most cursory inspection, and the nearest thing to either that British politics has seen in years got absolutely monstered for the crime of very nearly getting elected and putting a stop to the merry-go-round. And it’s no surprise at all that, as they get close to putting all that unpleasantness behind them, our masters look around for someone they can scapegoat to distract from their own depredations and, not for the first time, they notice the queers. 

I can understand it, but I never can and never will accept it. I was raised to call out what was wrong, not to go along with it for personal advantage. I know from my own experience that most queers are more moral than anyone whose anilingual expertise has bought them a seat in the House of Lords. I know that nine times out of ten when a British journalist starts to moralise he wouldn’t want you looking at his hard drive (and the one journalist in ten who moralises with justification will never see print in a British publication). And so I try to survive without exploding in this world that sanctions liars, and I try to keep my expressions of rage restricted to the written word instead of just finding the nearest Tory and destroying their face, and occasionally I cop a Twitter ban for telling one of these mollycoddled masturbators that his dad gives good blowjobs. It’s not much of a life. But it’s all that’s available. 

If I search your newspaper’s archives,

I’ll find every op-ed where you moralise

about people like me. If I searched your garden,

would I find your buried hard drives?

I see you on my television,

telling everyone who’ll listen

that queers are groomers. How strange, 

though - your ex-wife won’t leave you alone with the children. 

One day I’ll pass you in the street 

and, hoping that I’ll be discreet,

you’ll try to pick me up. I’ll follow, but

where I leave your body? That’s a secret that I’ll keep.  

My Batman Birthday, the Doctor's Downfall, and Nostalgia

It's September 1989. A cold night. I know it is because I remember having to wear a jacket when I went out to play in the street with friends after watching an episode of Doctor Who. The Who serial this month is 'Battlefield', a story which mixes nuclear paranoia, Arthurian legend and the show's own peculiar brand of science fantasy and includes the revelation that at some point in his incredibly long life the Doctor is Merlin. I am still seeing the final cliffhanger frame of tonight's episode, the face of a terrifying alien/demon/BBC effects department triumph called The Destroyer in my head as I notice our street sign has been damaged, probably by a car, and absentmindedly kick it. 

I mean seriously, look at this dude

In my head I am recreating a frame from Frank Miller and David Mazuchelli's Batman: Year One, which I recently received as a birthday present due to my absolute obsession with Tim Burton's Batman adaptation of that year, but in the eyes of the elderly woman passing by I have clearly engaged in the wanton act of vandalism which has destroyed our respectable street sign, and I am harangued for my alleged crime until I decide I have had enough of her shit and go back inside. Maybe I should reread the new 2000AD so I can try and work out what the Hell is going on in Strontium Dog.: Simon Harrison's art looks cool but I have no idea what's going on. Or maybe I'll have a look through the HeroQuest quest book in anticipation of having the gang over tomorrow to run one of the scenarios. 

Twenty-eight years old, I was. 

Not really, obviously. I had in fact only just turned old enough to have seen the Burton Batman, the first film released in the UK under the new '12' certificate, and had in fact not yet been 12 when I'd seen the film that summer. It might seem a little quaint that there was concern that the events transpiring in Anton Furst's incredible Gotham City sets might be too frightening for young children, now that we're raising the first generation to have been exposed to those genuinely disturbing Elsa and Spider-Man YouTube vids, but you have to remember that Britain has always had a sizable contingent of people who worry about what's in children's media. These days those people endlessly moan online about things getting too 'woke' but in the nineties (and we are, here, in 1989, on the very cusp of the Long 90s - the Berlin Wall hasn't fallen yet, but it's teetering) they were convinced that a combination of latchkey parenting and Video Nasties was going to raise a generation of thugs. I know, right? I mean I don't know about you but I've hardly garrotted anyone, and I was definitely too young the first time I saw Robocop and Predator. Perhaps it was one of these video-addled superthugs the woman who freaked out at my display of Ninja martial arts thought she was confronting. 

Doctor Who itself had been mortally wounded by the human incarnation of this busybody tendency, Mary Whitehouse, before I had even been born, when the producer for what many consider the show's golden age, Philip Hinchcliffe, was sacked to appease the 'silent majority' (in fact, as those of us who've had to deal with terverts know only too well, a depressingly vocal minority) she supposedly represented after Whitehouse decided the nation's children had taken what would these days be called irreversible damage from seeing the Doctor apparently drowned at the end of the third instalment of the 1976 serial 'The Deadly Assassin'. Really, the Elizabeth Sandifer article linked here under the first mention of Whitehouse's name will tell you everything you need to know about that, but right now all you need to know is that 'Battlefield' came at the end of over a decade of Who stories being watched like a hawk for anything that would annoy the Whitehouse Brigade under subsequent producers. This baleful gaze was continuing to falter as culture grew decidedly more liberal (you'll have observed that all of Whitehouse's wrath couldn't stop my parents from letting me see Jesse Ventura call his mercenary chums 'a bunch of slack-jawed faggots' and advocate for the ability of chewing tobacco to turn men into charismatic megafauna) but it was a factor in the cancellation of the show, which would happen later that year. 

Mary Whitehouse thought kids were too stupid to realise Tom Baker is an actor and could hold his breath.

But why am I writing all this? Well, I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately, and engaging in a fair bit of it too - including a rewatch of the Hinchcliffe/Baker era. Nostalgia has a lot to do with grief - the earliest use of the word occurs in describing Swiss mercenaries pining for their home cantons during the many European wars of the 18th century. So it isn't surprising that in the wake of my mother's death I've turned backward in my viewing and reading of late, rewatching things (like the Jimmy McGovern/Paul Abbott-written ITV crime series Cracker, for example) that I haven't seen in years, looking at them almost for the first time and seeing how they hold up now. And, as part of my effort to just write more lately, it's reasonable to assume that - when I am not causing mischief in the Tory leadership election - I will be writing about some of these series, some of these books, some of these cultural artefacts I've been looking back at. And that will probably be here rather than on my Medium page because - as you will probably have worked out - I try to keep my Medium page for something close to the level of a published article and usually draft posts in Google Docs beforehand, whereas here I feel happier to take a more freeform approach of just starting somewhere and seeing where it takes me. 

It's July 2022. A hot day: record temperatures in parts of the country, which have already seen RAF Brize Norton suspend all flights because their runway's melted. Today I have had to tidy up my bathroom in preparation for a visit from my letting agents' maintenance man - a job I have been putting off, in my depression, for months but have been forced to do because the plug for my bathroom sink has unexpectedly jammed itself backwards halfway down the pipe and is refusing to emerge leaving me with, effectively, a bricked sink. Which I managed, largely because it was early enough when I started for the heat to be only oppressive rather than infernal, but it definitely left me deciding that it was the last physical thing I was doing today. Maintenance haven't turned up, so I guess I'm stuck waiting until they do. And while I wait I may as well watch 'The Robots of Death'. Though I do notice Jacob Geller has a new video about Zelda games up, so I might watch that first.  All of us, it seems, are taking a look at our pasts lately. 

I move like a sniper these days, and not in a good way

 

So earlier this week, I wrote a piece for my Medium account about playing Sniper Elite 5 when I learned that my mother had died.  In the process I draw a - perhaps somewhat stretched - analogy between the process of moving through maps in SE5 and the process of finding your way through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief. But what I want to write about here is something else which occurred to me about the ways in which my life has come to resemble one of Karl Fairburne's peregrinations across enemy territory, and that's something I alluded to in my second Medium article this past week, which is otherwise mostly about genitals: my recently acquired disability. 

Here's how I described the process of maneuvering about in the Sniper Elite series: 

The first thing you’re going to want to do at the start of a level is crouch: the next thing is to look through your binoculars. You will spend way more time looking through these than through your rifle’s scope, because they allow you to tag opponents, vehicles and other salient features of the environment. Only then, when you’re satisfied no-one has line-of-sight on you, can you think about moving — and even then, most of that will be at a crouch if not a crawl, hugging the shadows, staying behind cover and creeping into tall grass at every opportunity. Move, stop, scan, and move again. And, when an enemy comes between you and one of the mission’s objectives, a fourth step: kill.

And as soon as I finished typing that, I thought: well, shit. With the exception of crouching down, hiding in tall grass, and killin' Nazis (though as I observed in the Medium piece, someday soon it might be our duty to try and fit as much Nazi-killing into our schedule as possible), that kinda sounds like the approach I've been forced to take when walking anywhere these days. Let me explain.

During the first lockdown, I came down with what I thought of, at the time, as the worst 'flu I'd had in my damn life, and which I now think was probably a mild case of COVID-19. And one of the reasons I suspect it of being that is what happened to me after I recovered from my illness: simply put, I get out of breath a lot more easily these days, to the extent that, after a brief attempt at mounting a post-covid comeback, I stopped going to the gym, and began taking walks instead. And then even the walks started getting harder, to the extent that I began using a cane, which helped mitigate pain in my lower back and hips (gettin' old, kids: as much as it might be preferable to the alternative, it still fucking sucks). And then I began to have to stop during walks to take rests. And I began having to take rests sooner, and sooner, and sooner. To the extent that I can now only walk a few yards before getting out of breath, and have to rest frequently in the course of walking anywhere. 

And, because, especially currently, I hate, and have always hated, having to acknowledge the infirmity of my own body instead of enjoying its capacity to exhilarate, I have developed a habit of walking back from places. Not always all the way: the other week, after I had been into Newcastle to take a look at the RMT picket at Central Station (great turnout, at least one cute doggo, lots of passing motorists honking in support) I decided to walk back from Central Station to my usual bus stop for civicentric excursions, near Old Eldon Square. Not much of a walk, but I had made a crucial mistake: the route I had decided to follow took me up Pink Lane and along the length of Clayton Street, a route which, for long sessions, offered nothing on which to sit except iron traffic bollards and, for one terrible, extended stretch, didn't even offer those. 

By the time I hobbled into Burger King, bought a drink I can only describe as some kind of dehydrated slush (would not recommend) and collapsed into a chair I felt like I'd ran a marathon. Students of Newcastle's urban geography will of course have realised that by this point I was nowhere near the end of my planned walk, though fortunately the remainder of the route offered more municipal benches and plenty of opportunities for rest. 

Such students will also notice this is nowhere on the route described, but I needed a picture here to break things up. 

So you see, like Karl Fairburne, I progress over terrain in slow fragments, pausing frequently, and always scanning. But I'm not scanning for gun-toting Nazis - actually no, scratch that, I am paranoid enough and have led the kind of life which means one does, in fact, scan for gun-toting Nazis, as well as feds, spies of various descriptions and certain entities which do not in the strictest interpretation of the word actually exist, but in recent times all of these have taken a back seat to park benches, low walls, wide steps, bollards and anywhere else a fat sick old dyke can park her arse. 

As the odyssey detailed above makes clear, one of the things this state of affairs has made me acutely conscious of is the paucity of these opportunities even in our city centres, especially if one doesn't want to pay for the privilege with the purchase of a coffee or other beverage. This quite simply must change. I don't say this only for myself: I am, after all, not the only person in this city, never mind this country, never mind our pandemically-imperilled planet, who is finding it harder to get around. It cannot be repeated enough that we have all just experienced a mass disabling event. There are a lot more of us these days who do not do as well with walking as we used to, and if we are going to participate fully in the public sphere, we are going to need somewhere to sit down. 

Otherwise, who knows? Some of us are going to have to lie down somewhere sometime, and reach out to our indolent legislators with what Jim Morrison once called injurious vision. And then, once we've domed those bastards, we can track down the shit who invented that horrific iced Fanta drink. And actually, while we're on the subject of Fanta...

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed this! If you did, and want to show your appreciation, I'm always grateful for tips to my ko-fi page if you can spare the bread. If not, shares and all that sort of thing are good too. Comments, you know what I mean, etc, though if you're an asshole you'll just get deleted so don't be an arsehole. This sign-off bit has gone on longer than I intended. Peace!