'If you remember this you had an AWESOME childhood!' Boomer humour and trollstalgia

 So, one side effect of being kicked off Twitter is that I am spending a lot of time on Facebook. And Facebook is, to put it mildly, not the best platform to be spending a lot of time on if you are waging a war on nostalgia. 

Hit share if you agree. Hit share if you agree. Hit share if you agree.

You know the kind of thing I mean. Laments for the passing of the once-hard binmen, declarations that leaded petrol and cow-spine burgers never did their consumers no harm, D-Day landing craft labelled with millennial-disparaging captions - posted, naturally, by people born too late for Omaha Beach and too early for Falluja. And I curate my feed as best I can to keep this stuff out, and I still get it - usually related to music (terrible after a cut-off point around 2005, obviously) or Generation X apparently being physically unstoppable because our parents would give us a key to let ourselves in with when we got home from school so we could eat cereal and watch the ALF cartoon. If I was to poke around in the groups - especially the local ones - I would encounter a lot more of this stuff a lot more quickly. 

This isn't ordinary nostalgia - which, linguistically, means 'our pain'. The Patients Zero of the condition, when it was identified by the Romantics, yearned together to return to the Swiss landscapes they had left behind for mercenary service. Unlike their descendants on Facebook, they were facing actual combat in the morning, not just appreciating the fresh-faced beauty of US Army doughboy privates. This new gear isn't wistful or reflective - it's hectoring and truculent, brimming with the untutored bellicosity of the treat-deprived. It never did us no harm! Our childhoods ruled! Gen X kids can't be fucked with! YEAH! I'd like to see these Millennial Snowflakes storm Gallipoli! Churchill was a LEDGE, mate! Oi oi! 

I blame political correctness - not the concept itself, which never really existed, but the people who put about the idea that it did: because their mendacity, their eagerness to label simple human politeness as outrageous pandering (while ignoring, of course, the degree to which they were pandered to day after day), gave lazy, intellectually incurious people an extremely low-effort way to feel like they'd done something. The kind of posturing it enabled was an isolating, fundamentally masturbatory substitute for social intercourse - so of course it appealed greatly to the Boomers, especially those struggling to come to terms with the fact that turning on, tuning in, dropping out and squeedgeeing their third eye until they could see their first two in it didn't stop them voting for Reagan's tax cuts. 

Is it like hunting Pokemon Creatures?

These people aren't finding common ground with fellow beings longing for home, however promiscuous they might be about using the word 'our': Our Childhoods, Our Generation, Our Mams and Dads...they're using their false memories of the past to distinguish themselves from an imagined Other - one who is, of course, simultaneously so influential that they control the levers of power in society ('I might get cancelled for saying this...') and so weak they could easily be smashed if Our Brave Boys' Hands Weren't Tied. We shouldn't be too surprised - the first feature of ur-fascism is the cult of tradition, after all - even if that tradition is, apparently, drinking out of a hose like a damn dog. And they're wallowing in that nostalgia, sharing their moist, rubbery memories, precisely because it annoys that Other. What, you think you have it hard, living life at the end of the world with all the institutions that sheltered us so hollowed out they can't protect you? Well cry me a river Princess, postmen when I was a kid never pushed around gay little trolleys to protect their backs! They carried a sack and all died of spinal injuries! Like REAL men! 

It's not your grandad's nostalgia, this. This...is trollstalgia. 

It's not quite the same as KCACO but it is part of the complex. The nostalgia-industrial complex. The thing which in large parts of our culture has taken the place of culture. Forgotten in the endless commemoration of the Second World War is the 'Your Britain - Fight for it Now' campaign, for which artist Abram Games painted several posters telling Britons that a world of modernity - rectilinear flats, sheet-windowed public buildings, Health Centres like the one in Finsbury designed by Berthold Lubetkin - could be theirs for the taking once the war had been won. The generation that fought in the war knew what they wanted: clean dwellings with light and air, Doctors they didn't have to treat as a chiselling enemy, safe and cheerful places of education for their children, and a chance for them to take that learning and do more with it in their adult lives. These people had seen what a planned economy could achieve in terms of destruction and death - now they wanted that same sophistication put at the service of a better life instead. 

The Second World War trollstalgics gleefully meme about is a fiction. It's true that Churchill demanded Games' Finsbury Heatlth Centre poster be removed from an exhibition of wartime propaganda at Harrods in 1943 - but at least Games' picture actually went before the public. The patronising admonition of KCACO never saw the light of day until it was uncovered in Barter Books back in 2000, and didn't really start spreading in our culture like a mushroom cloud until at least 2005. KCACO itself isn't quite trollstalgia, though in its lightly parodic variants it can slip into it. But what it shares with trollstalgia is the impulse to wallow in false memory, to indulge fantasies about the past in an escape from sober reflection on the future. Far easier, after all, to proclaim that kids today all have it soft, than to consider they may have it hard in ways you never imagined. 

The Internet Will Always Be Shit Under Capitalism

 

Who can forget this classic moment?

So the first thing to say is, having looked at the options, Secrecy's Jurisdiction will probably, like England is the Enemy, be published through Kindle Direct, though initially as a physical pamphlet rather than a digital one. I know, I know, it's Amazon, but for my purposes it's by far the easiest way of getting the book out there. I plan to sell the majority of copies by hand at gigs etc anyway. Plus, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to being a little amused at the thought of the collection featuring the Jimmy-Savile-possessing-Kier-Starmer-to-shag-the-corpse-of-Maggie-Thatcher poem going out under Bezos' self-publishing imprint. Think of it as injecting a lethal dose of poison...

One side effect of this, however, was I found myself logged into Amazon on my laptop (instead of just my phone or my PlayStation) for the first time in a while, and it occurred to me this would give me a chance to do something I'd been planning to do: get some Sapphire & Steel reaction pics. Well, reaction GIFs, ideally, but I wouldn't be able to do that from Prime Video. Screenshots should be easy enough to get though, and I knew which ones I wanted: the scene in the final episode when one of the Transient Beings barges through a service station door, for which I could see a number of possibly amusing memetic contexts, and the scene in one of the later episodes of Assignment Five when Mulrine's secretary, after having been distracted by Sapphire's charm so that Steel can get information from her computers undetected, angrily exclaims 'That bitch!', which has a narrower range of uses but would absolutely be le jpeg juste in the right context. 

Some of you will already have known I was on a hiding to nothing here when I used the word 'screenshots' because you will have already tried this, but if not...well, you can see the results of my efforts at the top of this post. Because Amazon, you see, has introduced a copy protection system which blackscreens any attempt at screen recording - even something as simple as taking a screenshot. This is, frankly, incredibly wrong-headed: but the ways in which it is wrong-headed tell us a lot about the Internet and its discontents. 

Mr Shape's face has been removed to prevent piracy

It all comes back to something I mentioned in passing in a post back at the beginning of August: the Internet can never function properly in a capitalist society.  The Internet relies, fundamentally, on a sharing model, and has done since as soon as people were able to email each other their favourite passages from Gravity's Rainbow. But the companies that dominate the Internet are capitalist companies, rooted in a capitalist model of enclosure: putting a fence around something and charging people to use it. And the tension between these two mutual positions leads to ridiculous outcomes like not being able to take screenshots of a show I'm already paying an extra subscription to watch. 

The excuse for this, of course, is that the shows are copyrighted material. Somebody owns the rights to them, and by sharing a screenshot of Patricia Shakesby calling Joanna Lumley the b-word I am, in effect, robbing those rights-holders of an infinitesimal portion of the money they paid to acquire them. 

Which is absolute bollocks, of course. Leave aside that I derive no financial benefit from memeing - anyone likely to get the joke will already have seen Sapphire & Steel. Anyone who doesn't might, just possibly, be tempted to look up the show as the result of an explanation. Indeed, they might even be tempted to take out a BritBox subscription to watch it. 

Or they might be less of a mug than me and pirate the damn thing, and then they can take screenshots and make GIFs of it to their hearts' content, and share those around as freely as they like, with BritBox and Carlton media never seeing a view as a result. Because they might as well. Hell, I'm going to have to pirate the damn things to make those GIFs and I pay the bloody subscription! I am literally being forced into an act of piracy by a company's use of DRM software! Make it make sense!

Too right mate

There's been a lot of talk lately about piracy as an archival practice, spurred by news of Warner Bros consigning their recently-completed Batgirl movie to the vaults, as well as deleting a bunch of shows animators have worked on from HBO Max before some of those shows even premiered. And once again it seems likely that brute, bone-headed ideas of economics are responsible: 200 classic episodes of Sesame Street were also deleted from HBO Max, apparently to save money on paying residuals to those involved. One assumes some similar rationale lies behind the other deletions: evidently David Zaslav has decided Infinity Train and Uncle Grandpa won't attract enough subscriptions to make it worth his company rewarding writers, animators and voice actors fairly for their labour. It's the rentier way: squat right on top of a resource and give as little as possible to the people who produce it while charging the highest possible fee you can get away with to anyone who wants a taste. It's the same reason electricity companies in this country can get away with charging prices that are through the roof, the same reason our 'privatised' rail companies suck up millions in government subsidies each year, and, yes, the same reason I can't take a simple bloody screenshot of a show for which, as I say, I am paying a subscription to BritBox on top of my Amazon Prime subscription.

It is, and I don't want to come over all Stephanie Sterling here, but there is simply no other way to put it: the problem is capitalism. 

The problem is capitalism, and the pathetic narcissists that capitalism enables, grasping, acquisitive little creeps who think having the most pieces of paper makes them mummy daddy God's favourite special child, or who, like Zaslav, court the adulation of shareholders by showing they can swing their choppers about and make kids cry, brah. These jerks and their desperate addiction to trying to turn everything into a competition only they're allowed to win (and see the recent Rockhopper case for an example of just how far these tantrum-prone babies will go to get their way) are on a collision course with the guiding principle of the Internet's early evangelists, the dictum that information wants to be free. 

Information? Free? Not if these guys (and they are usually guys) can help it. Arguably the entire thrust of the corporate internet for over a decade has been about turning that idea on its head: trapping us all in walled social media gardens where we can be bombarded with adverts in order to try and talk to our friends - not that our friends will see most of our posts, because the algorithm has been tweaked to show us more and more adverts and 'recommended' posts from 'influencers' instead of the people we love. And streaming subscription services as a way to discourage us from just torrenting everything instead - until everyone decides they want their own streaming service to exclusively monetize their IP library, at which point setting sail once more upon the seven seas looks by far the simpler option. 

And it is going to be not just the simpler option, and not just the cheaper option, but pretty much the only option for a lot of people as the cost of living crisis starts to bite. When that happens, companies might regret paying their shills in the media to tell millennials to cut back on Netflix and save for a mortgage, because soon they'll have to do that just to keep paying their rent. And they're still going to want shows to watch, and guess where they're going to go for them? Back to the Bay, bay-bay. Because the only way to disincentivise piracy on the internet, a medium almost designed specifically to facilitate it, is to make the alternative to piracy easier to use. Including making it easier to share. Meme culture is so deeply ingrained now that people expect to be able to turn their media into memes, to recontextualise and juxtapose and edit as much as they may desire. It's what YouTube is built on, and, of course, as any YouTuber will tell you, dealing with copyright strikes is a PITA. Once again, an imperative of digital culture comes up against an imperative of corporate culture with profoundly irritating results. 

During the last election campaign, the same well-remunerated London dinner party attendees who dubbed Ed Miliband 'Red Ed' for suggesting there should be limits on how much the energy companies could charge (boy, guess we dodged a bullet there, huh?) had a lot of fun describing one of Jeremy Corbyn's policies as 'Broadband Communism'. The idea behind this was that the phrase was oxymoronic: contrasted with a sexy, futuristic idea such as broadband internet (you have always to remember that the British journalist is usually years, if not decades, behind most ordinary people in terms of what they consider sexy and futuristic), a stuffy and outmoded idea like communism sounded ridiculous. As usual, of course, they had it exactly the wrong way round. 'Broadband Communism' is not an oxymoron - it is, or at least, if governments didn't deliberately rig the market to help their corporate donors turn a profit, it would be - a tautology.

The usual argument against this is that piracy deprives creators of revenue. But the very studios these creators worked for are depriving them of revenue by keeping their shows off their platforms. And besides, as any artist who's looked at their Spotify royalties can tell you, the percentage of Da Money that goes to the person who actually creates the work is minuscule. The fact is that for most of us trying to make art these days, the current state of intellectual property law oppresses us far more through the restrictions it forces us to observe than it liberates us financially. And that's why I, personally, would like to see the whole thing scrapped. I would rather work as an artist in a world of Universal Basic Income and much more liberal copyright laws than gamble on one day writing something so popular I can live off the royalties and spend the rest of my life writing stories about a ridiculously-named detective who settles scores with thinly-disguised versions of the people who call me names on social media. For example. 

A world where the financial security of artists was taken care of through UBI, and their creative ambitions were enabled through less jealous protection of copyrights, fewer attempts to enclose and charge rents on what ought to be public domain, would be one where artists could create more freely, could engage in more meaningful dialogue with other works of art, could more easily access works of art they wished to see - and could add more new art to the world. Even if only in the form of a GIF of a secretary saying 'That bitch!'

Destination Unknown

Okay.

So, we need to talk

about how AEW's booking of Ruby Soho is

homophobic against me specifically,

especially having her lose

against Sammy and Tay, the tag team

representatives of heteronormativity,

because, as embarrassing as it may be

for a 45-year-old dyke to admit this,

Ruby Soho is the reason why I wear 

black lipstick,

and if I could find the shade she uses

I'd buy that exact shade too: I watch

her work and wonder if I can 

afford a new tattoo,

but every time I watch I only ever

seem to see her lose,

and I know you're busy, Tony,

but I'm pretty sure you watch the news

and we could really stand to see

a butch tattooed punk win a few. 

Me, I can take it, just about;

my country isn't Texas yet,

but kids in Texas watch your show

with binders hidden in their beds

from parents they're afraid to know,

on headphones plugged into their phones

(Bluetooth and shitty siblings

simply cannot be relied upon)

and when they close the window

on a match that Ruby hasn't won

to spare themselves another celebration

from the winning team, they close

their eyes and focus on

our queer pathetic dream:

to be clean, to be prone

without fear of discovery, in

less danger than most

and alone. 

Secrecy's Jurisdiction

So I now know my next project: creating some kind of art/ritual working that will act as a banishing of what I call the KCACO egregore. But in order to do that, there's a small bit of business I need to take care of first.

That bit of business is Secrecy's Jurisdiction, the follow-up to my 2020 pamphlet England is the Enemy, a howl of rage against Brexit, the victory of the Johnson administration, and the crushing defeat of the only politics that seemed like it might have a chance of saving us. Mere weeks after the publication of this magickal artefact the novel coronavirus changed the world forever, and rendered my state-of-the-nation polemic immediately outdated into the bargain. So I started again.

Secrecy's Jurisdiction will contain many of the poems I wrote in response to the polemic, and the increasingly paranoid tenor of the Johnson administration in the age of letting the bodies pile high. I say 'will contain' because one of the bits of business I need to take care of before swinging to work on the KCACO project is to go back through the manuscript and remove any poems which now seem more like they fit with what I'm currently doing. This will give Secrecy's Jurisdiction a stronger focus on its main concern, which is to provide a map of the paranoid subconscious of Pandemic Britain. In Secrecy's Jurisdiction, the Tory party commune, through various means, with the spirit of Jimmy Savile, which ultimately winds up possessing the body of JK Rowling, who is herself revealed as a longstanding agent of The Dark Forces Who Would Rule Humanity...

Obviously you would have to be some kind of paranoid madman to believe this is really how it happened. But that doesn't mean it isn't true. 

I haven't worked out exactly what format Secrecy's Jurisdiction will take yet. I would quite like it to be physical as well as digital: England is the Enemy's digital-only existence was kind of an accident of me publishing it two weeks before the Outside World would be declared off-limits, and I would quite like to get out and see you all at, you know, actual gigs and things again, and having a physical book to hawk is always a good excuse for doing that. Equally, while I quite like the cover design at the top of this entry, I don't want the book to look too slick - I want it to have a samizdat feel befitting of its subject matter. What I do know is it will contain 19 poems, every single one of which is guaranteed to infuriate the Daily Mail in some way. Which, in my view, is the best reason for writing.

And it will be out soon, and I will do some gigs to promote it, and all that sort of stuff, and if you buy a copy at one of those gigs I will sign it for you, you know how this works. 

And once that's done, I can get down to business. 

Yeah, well, you can keep your tweets, mate

So the first thing to say is, it looks like the motherfuckers finally succeeded in getting me perma-banned from Twitter, and, in what will no doubt be a blow to those who say rumours of Russian influence on that site are exaggerated, the straw that broke the camel's back was the proximity to each other of the words 'Putin' and 'cunt' in one of my tweets. To be honest I'm not that pressed about it - since I was forced to move permanently to the alt I had previously used only for tweeting while on psychedelics, I had found Twitter a straitened experience stripped of access to the followers and followees I had built up over my decade or so on the site, and was becoming more and more conscious only of its negative effects on my behaviour. I swapped the Today programme for Radio 3 when the deficiencies of the BBC's alleged 'news' content began driving me into a rage every morning (and I gave up on Radio 3 when it stopped doing programmes about obscure composers and began doing populist crap about film soundtracks), why couldn't I quit Twitter when it was clearly also making me mad in the mornings? Because like most victims of social media (and, assuming we somehow get out of this nostalgia trap in time to not all be wiped out by climate chaos, I think in decades to come we will realise the degree to which these platforms did exploit us, for profit - if loot boxes in videogames are a tactic engineered to prey on the neurodiverse, a digital drug which hacks directly into the brain's rewards system to incentivise the worst kinds of human behaviour is worse - has made us, in a very real sense, their victims) I was addicted to the dopamine hits. Well, being restricted to an alt for my last few months on that site seems to have functioned like a methadone program, because I find myself cured of my dependency. Arguably I was going to have to abandon the platform at some point anyway - as a product which metastasized into the culture about the same time as the KCACO egregore it's notable how much Twitter itself seems to still get hung up on the same arguments that were floating around the platform when it first came to prominence: trans rights, freeze peach, embarrassing 'tech' billionaires, incel shit - I swear if I see that sealion cartoon one more time I'll head to Fisherman's Wharf and start suplexing the cunts. 

Twitter itself - indeed arguably all social media - is an example of the disappointing technology of late capitalism which David Graeber nailed down in his essay 'On Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit'. Twitter was four years old when Graeber wrote that piece, and already showing its age. There is nothing technically all that impressive about Twitter as a platform. Indeed, the fact that in its earliest incarnation it aped the format of the text message, a form of communication which became popular with the spread of mobile phones at the start of the 21st century, shows that in a way Twitter had nostalgia baked into its DNA just as much as KCACO. Jon Stewart's oft-quoted description of the Internet as 'the world passing notes around a classroom' is often misquoted as being about Twitter (including by me before I checked the quote and hastily rewrote the start of that sentence), and in that context it actually nails two aspects of its retrograde nature: both its lack of technological sophistication and the fact it enables and rewards the kind of behaviour most of us probably ought to have left behind in school. I mean, not to let traditional media off the hook, but it's surely no coincidence that after less than a decade of this digital note-passing the US wound up with its first Mean Girl President. 

Actually another reason not to let traditional media off the hook is that their laziness is as much to blame for the outsize influence of Twitter on our culture as it is for the ubiquity of KCACO and its variants (indeed, arguably, meme culture thrives on laziness, which shouldn't be seen as a knock - coming up with original thoughts all the time is exhausting, which is why this blog attempts to avoid doing so as much as possible). Twitter satisfied the laziness of our modern media class in two ways: first and most obviously, because it was a simple and effective way of disseminating stories. It wasn't perfect, and you were still dependent to some extent on the whims of the algorithm, though if you had a paper or a broadcaster behind you you could be reasonably certain that algorithm would be having a train ran on it by a whole complex of your org's linked accounts. But the second and more insidious way in which Twitter satisfied the laziness of the London-based journo was that it very quickly became apparent that Twitter could itself be the news. Spats, crazes, The Discourse and, in recent years, the phenomenon of The Main Character: all were grist to the media's mill. And because our media is largely composed of the worst people in the world, it was inevitable that the way they would present these Twitter controversies would be harnessed to their hateful agenda: witness, for example, the way some half-human hack at the Daily Mail was shameless enough to wring literal inches of newsprint out of the earth-shattering revelation that Joanne Harris had liked a Midnight Society tweet taking the piss out of that self-important sexual sassenach JK Rowling. 

If the laziness of the media class is what enabled Twitter's rise, however, it is the overweening self-regard of that class which will probably be what destroys it. Nothing tells you how seriously you should take these people better than the lengths they will go to to have a special little badge by their username, and their apoplexy should their blue tick of approval be rescinded. For a group of people who claim to be Fearless Defenders of Free Speech they sure do seem to get extremely put out when someone criticises their position in language earthier than the sort you hear at the Spectator garden party. I don't think it's a coincidence that the really egregious abuses of Twitter's broken moderating system only began after the blue tick system was in place: as Twitter became, increasingly, just another media aggregator (and an increasingly poor one, at that), protecting the feelings of its 'high value' caste became ever more important. Whatever they may say, this is why I get kicked off while that weird nonce who runs Libs of TikTok is allowed to continue getting her jollies on the platform - because that freak, as much as she's a court case for abusing minors waiting to happen, gets views, and for media companies - which is what Twitter is now - views are what counts. The world is still passing notes in a classroom, but it is increasingly obvious Teacher has favourites, and some of us are getting detention for the same thing that nets others gold stars. 

Any teacher will tell you what eventually happens in that kind of classroom, and it never works out well for Teacher (indeed, Malcolm McDowell gives a pretty thorough demonstration in Lindsay Anderson's If....). It's risky, and potentially pompous, to scry trends in a way that justifies your own behaviour, but I see more and more people talking about leaving Twitter, whether through taking an active decision to quit or simply, like me, not being arsed to appeal a suspension. And why wouldn't we? Even the most immature of us (with the exception of most journalists, whose immaturity is indulged ad nauseam as long as it accords with the demands of the rentier class that pays their wages) eventually tire of playground arguments and tattle. Is my life in any way enriched by knowing about Bean Dad? Or Peach Mom? I'll miss the Midnight Society's tweets: they were funny, and skewered people who badly need skewering, which is exactly the reason the likes of the Mail hate them so much (you can please yourself as to how metaphorically you interpret my use of the word 'skewering' in the preceding sentence). But I trust my friends who still use the platform to send me links to anything on there that's worth seeing. And sure, I'll have to monitor the websites I habitually read a little more actively and not simply trust that Eruditorum Press or Tribune will tweet the links into my feed...but it's not like that isn't a way of using the Internet I got used to in the twelve or so years I was logging on before Twitter ever existed. 

No, the biggest problem I am going to face, and apologies in advance for doing the Hard Sell on those of you who've read this far (especially if you used to come here via Twitter and have instead had to find it via Google or your browser history), is actually in terms of promoting my work. Not having a vast right-wing media operation behind me, I rarely caused a massive stir on Twitter (excepting the occasions when I opted to use some melt or other as a demonstration of my world-class needling skills, which may, come to think of it, have something to do with me getting suspended), but it does seem that sharing posts on Twitter did usually help boost a post's numbers. This was most pronounced when, as with the post about Sapphire & Steel and Eric Idle's dead dad, they intersected with The Discourse in some way, but even posts like the one in which I wrote about going to Barter Books and being freaked out by the original KCACO poster would receive a numbers boost after I shared them on Twitter. Obviously, that path is no longer open to me, so I am going to have to ask those of you who are still reading these to share my posts for me. And don't think you just have to restrict yourself to Twitter! Feel free to share the goodness on Reddit or Instagram or Tumblr or whatever the cool kids are using these days, which obviously wouldn't be anything I'd know about because I still mentioned Tumblr in the first clause of this sentence. Heck, if you feel particularly strongly, don't let me stop you tacking up flyers on lampposts about this blog, or sneaking into your office on a weekend and logging into the site from every one of your work's computers. Or, I don't know, skywriting. The point is I Need You to help me wage my war on nostalgia by spreading the word about it (and while I'm putting myself over I should probably mention my Patreon and tip jar too). So if you could, that would be grand. 

Also: if you would usually have came here from Twitter and instead had to search for this blog manually, let me know in the comments! 

It's like fucking BAD WOLF

 

Meme Dump

 

The Sun Makers (1977)

Arc of Infinity (1983)

Image of the Fendahl (1977)

'Never take somebody else's Nostalgia!': Watchmen, liberal dreams and who gets to hijack the apocalypse

 Watchmen kind of hits different after one of your parents dies. 

I'm talking, of course, about the 2019 HBO series, not the Zack Snyder movie, or the DC Comics graphic novel created by Dave Gibbons and 'The Author'. You have to give Alan Moore props for an amazing lateral magical move there: his refusal to have his name on any of his published work he doesn't own has created an indelible link between his name and the concept of 'The Author' to the point where he becomes almost an archetype of authorship. Given that he has in the past mused on how the Creator of this universe might tip off 'readers' as to the identity of his self-insert character in a way which strongly suggests Moore himself is Jehovah's Mary-Sue, I'm not entirely sure that's coincidence. 

Moore was, after all, always fascinated by the idea of putting God in the picture. The superhero-as-god is something he returns to again and again in his work - arguably, Watchmen is not even his most successful exploration of the trope: Miracleman has the title character, an updating of Mick Anglo's British Captain Marvel rip-off, facing down human governments to outline his plan to build Utopia. In one memorable scene a character who is clearly Maggie Thatcher (though never named as such - a politeness also observed by the 2000AD strip Invasion! when Britain's new Volgan overlords execute a person bearing a startling resemblance to the then-Prime Minister on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, giving the shotgun-toting Bill Savage a casus belli for his one-man war against the occupation) tells the blue-suited ubermensch that they cannot allow him to interfere so directly in the workings of the market, only to have the god-among-mortals simply look her in the eye and ask 'Allow?' 

I'm Miracleman, bitch

At this point it has been established, in an episode described by Elizabeth Sandifer as the 'absolute conceptual limit' of the superhero battle, that a being like Miracleman is capable of carrying out atrocities on a scale which is quite literally beyond even the very worst that humans - including even Thatcher's best buddy, General Pinochet - can do. So that single word, 'allow?', is more terrifying than anything in Moore's Watchmen - but it isn't Moore's Watchmen I want to talk about in this piece - it's Damon Lindelof's. 

I wanted to watch Watchmen again because this blog has become about the war against nostalgia - as embodied by the image and complex of associations I call KCACO - and this is, in its own way, one of the concerns of Lindelof's series. On one level, you can see Lindelof's Watchmen as a reaction against Zack Snyder's thoroughly nostalgia-driven adaptation of the original graphic novel, an adaptation concerned more with slavish recreation of individual panels of Moore and Gibbons' work than engaging with its themes (Lindelof satirises this quality of Snyder's adaptation in the 'American Hero Story' show-within-a-show: the shot of Hooded Justice under interrogation, in particular, is framed, lit and colour-graded in such a way that it literally looks like one of Gibbons' panels, even though no such scene ever occurs in the original comic). By framing his version of Watchmen explicitly as a possible sequel to Moore's work, Lindelof frees himself from Snyder's concerns and is able to engage more fully with those themes - one of which, of course, is Nostalgia - the name of a range of perfume created and sold by Adrian 'Ozymandias' Veidt in the original novel, and, in the TV show, of a revolutionary (and quickly outlawed) drug developed by Lindelof's upgrade of Veidt's evil CEO, Lady Trieu. 

Girls to the front, Adrian

'Never take somebody else's Nostalgia' is a warning referring to the drug in this show, but it could also apply to the wildly inaccurate version of the past envisioned in 'American Hero Story', or the version the series' major antagonists, the Rorschach-masked Seventh Kavalry, are seeking to reimpose. When challenged on the presence of a Klan robe in a secret compartment in his wardrobe, Don Johnson's Chief Judd Crawford avers that it's a matter of 'heritage', not hate, though his interlocutor, an aging Hooded Justice who is extremely far from the version AHS's producers imagine, doesn't let him get away that easily, asking why he then hides his 'heritage'. 

Sandifer has argued, in her series Last War In Albion, that Watchmen, though written long before Moore's formal announcement that he had decided to pursue a magical career, can be viewed as a spell to bring about the end of the Cold War (given the damage wrought by neoliberalism since its victory, of course, one might question the degree to which this was necessarily a good thing). One laudable aspect of Lindelof's Watchmen is the way it turns the spotlight on aspects of America's history that the official narrative would rather downplay, most notably in its decision to locate the story's origin in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Indeed, Watchmen portrays a world in which Veidt's plan to create an apocalypse of his own to short-circuit nuclear Armageddon has led to a decisive victory over this piece of what Milan Kundera would call 'organised forgetting': the Tulsa of Lindelof's Watchmen has a gleaming family heritage centre in which black Americans who want to trace their connections to the Tulsa massacre can do so, guided through the process by a friendly hologram of United States Treasury Secretary Henry Louis Gates Jr. The scenes featuring Gates' hologram represented, in 2019, a near-orgasmic fantasy for liberal West Wing fans frustrated with the damn Cheeto in the White House. A lot of aspects of Lindelof's Watchmen can be traced to dissatisfaction with the Trump regime: though Robert Redford's run for President is mentioned in Moore and Gibbons' original text, the idea that he enjoys a similar multi-term reign to that of the Richard Nixon who could call in the Comedian to deal with Woodward and Bernstein is an invention of Lindelof's show, as is the right-leaning segment of the white population opting to drop out of society and live in 'Nixonvilles' (we see one example of a Nixonville in the show: Peteypedia, HBO's equivalent of the bonus material which fleshed out the world of Moore's Watchmen in between chapters, tells us there are more).

To his credit, Lindelof doesn't allow the liberal viewer to luxuriate in their fantasies for too long. 'Little Fear of Lightning', one of my personal favourite episodes of the series, follows the story of Wade 'Looking Glass' Tillman, one of Tulsa's masked cops and a survivor of '11/2', the date when Veidt, in the original text, succeeds in teleporting a giant apparently alien squid into the centre of Manhattan and kills millions in order to save billions by ending the Cold War. Traumatised by both this event and a sexual assault that precedes it by seconds (Wade later locates the perpetrator among the dead), he lives his life in fear of another 'dimensional incursion', until the Kavalry, as part of their plan, show Wade proof of Veidt's handiwork, in the form of his taped address to the incoming President Redford outlining his plans (unlike Miracleman, Ozymandias lacks the power to force his Utopia into being, a fact he is, as we see in a later episode, bitterly frustrated by). Wade is as traumatised by this revelation as he is by the original attack, despairingly asking his colleague Angela 'Sister Night' Abar, the series' main protagonist, 'is anything true?' before betraying her in a scene which sees Abar violate the taboo on taking another person's Nostalgia in a way which has major revelations for the plot of the show as a whole. 

What all the villains in Lindelof's Watchmen share is a desire to impose their own version of the past on the present in some way. Senator Keene, the secret leader of the Seventh Kavalry, wants to turn the clock back on the era of 'Redfordations' and white people having to say sorry and go back to an America which doesn't commemorate the Tulsa Massacre. Ozymandias wanted to build Utopia on the false history that New York was attacked by aliens instead of him. His daughter, Lady Trieu, clones her own mother and feeds her Nostalgia based on the memories of her original body, in an act which, Peteypedia suggests, may be one of revenge on her mother for the pressure she put on her as a child. And all of them scheme to achieve their ultimate goal by hijacking the apocalypse - Veidt by staging his own, and Trieu and Keene by seeking to co-opt the power of the one man who really does have the power to change the world - the supposedly long-absent Doctor Manhattan. Kill God, become God - that's an apocalypse, alright. A revelation. 

Senator Keene would like to remind you covid is still out there.

Of course, none succeeds. Keene winds up liquidated, Trieu is killed by frozen fish and Ozymandias, in another scene guaranteed to elicit fist-bumps from writers of Robert Mueller fanfic, is arrested by Looking Glass and FBI Agent Laurie Juspeczyk moments after triumphantly thwarting his daughter's plan. So far, so liberal: no one man should have all that power, to quote Kanye before he went weird and started hanging out with heavy metal rapists. But the series' last trick, as everyone who's seen the final episode in which it's implied Abar absorbs the power of Doctor Manhattan with his consent, is to ask: what if one woman had that power, and she was black? 

It is, of course, only implied because Lindelof's Watchmen ends in the same way as Moore's, with a last shot pregnant with possibility, on the threshold of revelation but tantalisingly far from over it (and also, for good measure, quotes Snyder by cutting from that threshold to a cover of a sixties rock classic, though for my money Snyder's choice of My Chemical Romance covering Dylan's 'Desolation Row' is a rare instance of the usually tin-eared Snyder picking the better tune). But like Moore's ending, it's only superficial possibility: just as the entire weight of the preceding plot dictates that Seymour's hand is going to pick up Rorschach's journal, we know that when Angela Abar's foot touches water she'll learn she can walk on it. 

The real question, of course, is: what's next? As Abar's grandfather, the original Hooded Justice, observes of Doctor Manhattan, 'he could have done more'. What kind of Utopia will be created by a superhero-as-god who doesn't look like a neo-Nazi fantasy? Lindelof chooses to leave this to our imagination. 

For purposes of my current project, however, Lindelof's Watchmen has two things to tell us: first of all, nostalgia is political, which we kind of already knew; but secondly, in order to break the death-grip of nostalgia one might have to end the world. That seems especially likely in times like these, when the only alternative to permanent retrospection seems to be a future in which, beyond a few tech billionaires who will enjoy a moment's luxury in their New Zealand bunkers before being decapitated by their Heads of Security, humanity dies out after decades of utter misery in Climate Hell. When you phrase things like that, KCACO almost seems preferable. Why fight for the future when the future's running out? 

Shove your broomsticks up your arse: KCACO, the London Riots and scabbing on the Fringe

No sooner do I identify KCACO as the problem, but we witness a startling example of it rearing its head in an extremely KCACO-permeable context - and, to judge by results, falling flat on its Blitz-spirited arse.

I speak, of course, of the fabled Fringe Litter Pick - a transparent attempt to try and oppose the Edinburgh bin strike by tapping in to the spirit that saw gentrifiers take to the streets in the days following the 2011 uprising in London and shove their broomsticks in the metaphorical faces of the impoverished youth of the very areas the broom-toters were in the process of turning into yet another craft beer Disneyland. Those young people had rioted in protest of the Met's racist policing and the Tories' austerity policies - which had been wrapped up, for the narrow (and narrowing) band of the middle and upper classes which both main parties in this country seem to regard as the only acceptable voters, in bolts of KCACO flummery about being 'all in this together'. And in the days following their collective howl of rage and despair, while the spooked-up weirdo currently in charge of running down the country's main supposedly left-wing party after it engaged in an excess of socialism prosecuted people to the full force of the law for the crime of looting sacks of basmati rice, they were forced to witness the further humiliation of brush-toting 'flashmobs' gathering in their streets and being feted by the same media that demonised those who had rioted. 'England riots: are brooms the symbol of the resistance?' gushed the BBC in one of their more cringeworthy anilingual interactions with their Tory masters. 

So you can see how the idea of rallying the ragtag army of stage school brats, nepo babies, tedious self-publicists and, worst of all, poets who infest the city of Edinburgh every August to counter the bin strike with a little light scabbing must have seemed like a PR winner. The papers would get to run lots of juicy photos of overrunning bins to criticise the strikers, and even more posters of quirky Fringe performers - perhaps even dolled up in their stage outfits, at least for the publicity shots - cheerfully wielding grabbers and depositing jolly little crisp packets in jolly little plastic refuse sacks. A narrative could be created of plucky little Hermiones and Fleabags coming together to resist the evil Stalinist Union Barons who are doing Putin's job for him by undermining good old Blighty. Indeed, a conspiratorially-minded individual might note the large amounts of media space given to earlier community litter-picking photo opportunities involving Ukrainian refugees and those fucking Womble cunts and wonder if the public was being softened up for a contingency. 

Such, no doubt, were the images which danced in the minds of our country's Tory press barons and BBC apparatchiks when they noticed 'Fringe Litter Pick' start cropping up as a topic on Twitter. What they got, however, was a picture of one living statue half-arsedly placing a piece of paper in a bin - and to make matters even worse, he was in mufti when he did it: 

Honestly, fair play to Kevin Powell - his deadpan deposit has managed to satirise this laughable attempt at propaganda better than most professional comedians ever could. You just know the BBC were looking for anything that looked even slightly more eye-catching, but aside from a bunch of high-vizzed, more traditional scab workers, there was nothing. No clowns, no mimes, no crusty jugglers - most stinging of all, no future Waller-Bridge's, buoyed up by family money very few Fringe acts could even dream of, to rebuke more left-leaning performers while at the same time titillating their Blimpish readership. Kevin's what you're getting, lads - deal with it. 

I could have told them it wouldn't work, because the Fringe is fucking exhausting. The last thing you want to do after a hard few hours' watching tourists shove the flyers you've proffered straight in the bin is pick up all the ones that missed. And the problem with relying on the Fringe aristocracy is they DGAF. Some of those bastards are rich enough not to have to do their own flyering - who worries about cleaning the streets when all you see of them is the taxi from your landlord relative's charming little flat in Portobello to the gig? And the actual Festival acts, the faces in various shades of gammon pink hawking thinly disguised romans à clef about their media colleagues or taking a wry look at the goings-on in Westminster, are hardly going to risk getting their well-manicured hands dirty. And besides, comedians just haven't had the cut-through since they all showed their arse about Corbyn. 

No, as far as the media is concerned the Big Fringe Litter Pick is a non-starter: not least because, as much as the media barons might patronisingly think performers are all empty-headed little prima donnas who'd flash their gash if they thought it might get their audience into double figures for one night of their run, we're not stupid. And while it might seem it's always the people whose parents' names are in blue on their Wikipedia page who make out like gangbusters at Fringe (well, them and the landlords, for whose benefit, in all honesty, the whole shindig really occurs), the fact is that a lot of performers would be doing well if they could afford to run their operation on a shoestring, and are driving themselves further into debts they'll have to pay off with precarious humiliating day jobs when the party's over. You're less likely to scab when you might wind up striking yourself. 

Assignment One: The Bookshop

 This sort of thing used to be easier for me. 

But that was before I caught the novel coronavirus in 2020 and developed some kind of post-viral fatigue syndrome that means, among other things, that if I travel on one day I have to 'budget' for the fact that will mean I'm going to be completely useless for at least the next day if not the next couple (which is why I didn't review this week's Dynamite for my Patreon blog. Dynamite and tonight's Rampage will be dealt with in a bumper post tomorrow.). 

I knew travelling to Alnwick would take it out of me. I just didn't know how much. Between the heat, my own poor health, whatever malevolent intelligence might have been at work at my destination, the inefficiency of Britain's privatised rail network and my decision to use this trip to start breaking in a pair of new shoes, which in hindsight seems almost a deliberate act of self-harm, it's fair to say my trip to Barter Books to view KCACO in the flesh nearly killed me. 

So this entry might be a little devoid of my usual flair, might be a little more pedestrian than normal, either too dry and just-the-facts-ma'am or unstructured and rambling, maybe a little shorter or baggier than normal, but that's because I spent most of yesterday asleep, my knees, back and ankles are punishing me every time I have the arrogance to try and walk from my bedroom to the kitchen fridge, and I have a matching pair of shoebite blisters on each instep which hurt even more than the ones on my ankles I used to get from wearing combat boots during my brief, misguided stint in the Territorials back in the 90s. What I'm saying is, to put it country simple, I'm fucking knackered. 

But there's still a story to tell. 

Alnwick: a picturesque town in Northumberland, most famous this century as one of the locations whose buildings were digitally cannibalised to make JK Rowling's bland, middle class idea of a magic school, a fact assiduously exploited by the current Duke of Northumberland, a man who though born to the purple possesses the aptitude for wringing every groat out of a particular piece of intellectual property of a thoroughbred spiv. Physical property, too: developers, railway companies, and even the National Gallery have all found themselves up against His Grace's near-insatiable desire for more gelt than he's already got. The only thing that makes me reasonably certain he doesn't own the land my destination occupied is that if KCACO had fallen into the Duke's hands he would have merchandised it far more aggressively than the Manleys, owners of Barter Books and the people who discovered the artefact way back in 2000 AD.

Not that the Manleys haven't merched it big time: the book trade is an unforgiving occupation at any level for all but the executive class, and the overheads on a building like the former Alnwick railway station, Barter Books' premises, are likely to be high, so they can be forgiven for deciding to supplement their book sales with a variety of KCACO tat: reproduction posters, of course, but also fridge magnets, postcards and mugs, examples of which adorn the tables in the Station Buffet, the building's on-site restaurant ran, a notice tells us, not as a franchise, but by bookshop staff. That's a noble intention, but I question the wisdom of it: the skills which make someone a good bookseller are not necessarily those that make a good waiter. And the staff are not helped by the fact that the Buffet is one of those order-at-the-counter-with-your-table-number operations, but the genius who designed the tables decided to make the numbers almost exactly the same colour as the tables themselves, with the result that when, towards the end of my visit, I decide to grab some scran, I have to embarrass myself by asking one of the waiters a question he no doubt gets asked multiple times a day, judging by his speed in pointing to the number. Of course, it's obvious when you see it. But until then...

I don't know if the Paradise Ice-Cream Parlour, a more recent addition to the building's 'offer', as retail types say, is a franchise: I opted not to go in after finding they didn't serve slush, only Jersey ice-cream at £2.10 a scoop (to judge from the girl outside I heard complaining about dropping £4.20 on a two-scoop cornet). Someone should tell the locals that in Spain they call slush granita, serve it in glasses like any other beverage instead of branded plastic, and flavour it with things like mint instead of just blue raspberry. Perhaps that would accord better with their class pretensions. 

it follows

Getting here has been a chore. Overhead line failures on the East Coast Main Line delayed my train to Alnmouth, meaning that it arrived overcrowded and I was forced to share a table seat - and I hate table seating on trains - with a family of obvious Potterphiles off to fill up the Duke's already-bulging coffers. And also forced to share the bus to Alnwick with them, though mercifully I get to debus earlier than they do. And now that I am here I feel surprisingly out of place. This isn't my first visit: back when I was married and presenting as male my wife and I used to come here often. But now I get the distinct impression I'm not wanted. Maybe it's my class position, maybe it's being visibly trans in a town getting fat on money from the JKK, maybe it's just the heat making me lairy. Or maybe the thing I came here to observe knows I'm sniffing around, and wants me off the premises. 

It has to be said that the premises are impressive. The former Alnwick railway station is one of those glorious Victorian sheds, much more impressive than the built-up halt at Alnmouth which does duty for it these days, and the Manleys have made it more impressive still with artistic additions, most notably the Authors Mural which greets you when you pass from the entrance into the main bulk of the building. A model train still cutely chuffs its way around the top of the shelves in this section, and the stock is as impressive as ever. I definitely recommend going, even in spite of the Hogwarthogs and obvious Tories. I even manage to find a book I've been looking for for a while: a physical copy of AHistory by Lance Parkin, an unauthorised diegetic history of Doctor Who - not the production of the show, but a timeline of events in the Whoniverse (or, as the title suggests, one attempt at such: Parkin is happy enough in his introduction to point out that any such endeavour is a fool's errand given the sprawling nature of that series). But I'm not here to buy books, or eat sausage and chips in the Buffet (the sausage is lovely; the chips are 'triple-cooked' but somehow still hard in the middle): I'm here for one reason. To see it. 

The KCACO artefact. Ground zero for the timebreak. In 2000, the image emerges from a box of books bought at auction by Stuart Manley. In 2005 it is listed as a quirky Christmas gift in a Guardian article. And, from about 2008 onwards, almost in tandem with or in reaction to the financial crisis, as Owen Hatherley records in his excellent The Ministry of Nostalgia, it metastasizes throughout the culture, becomes ubiquitous: Hatherley knows it's gone global when he sees a huge display of KCACO merchandise in the flagship branch of Polish department store Empik. And since it emerged, has our culture really changed? Our concerns, our controversies, our confrontations are still very much those of 2008. The craze for specialist gins which seemed to arise at the same time as the poster shows no signs of abating. The only answer our politicians give to our deepening crises is KCACO-friendly austerity, and exhortations to keep up the mythical 'Blitz Spirit' in the face of the pandemic, and now the climate crisis. Heck, what was Captain Tom but an avatar of KCACO, calmly carrying on around his garden while his acquisitive offspring put on a fiesta of pelf? 

Like Private Pearce in Assignment Two of Sapphire & Steel, KCACO exists in an orthogonal relationship to the war it's a metonym for. And it has trapped us in a false memory of that war. People did not, in fact, keep calm and carry on during the Blitz: they fought, they rioted, they looted, and in huge numbers they forced open the doors to the Tube tunnels so the authorities had no choice but to let them be turned into shelters by night. And the thing about false memories is the time in them gets thin, like air in a sealed room. And we're down to the dregs of it now...

And that's why KCACO, the show, is going to be, has to be, an exorcism. Inspired by The Indelicates' simlar exorcism of the Spirit of Savile on the excellent Juniverbrecher, my plan is to force KCACO, the entity released into our culture by the proliferation of its meme, to release its death grip on that culture, before we carry on all the way to our destruction. To rescue real history from those who would prefer a sanitised, unthreatening child-friendly version of it to the ugly reality. To smash down the doors of the nostalgia trap and take a deep, energising draught of the future. Because whatever that future is, whatever horrors lay in store, they're infinitely preferable to temporal suffocation, which is all that awaits us if we let ourselves be stuck in this false memory forever. 

 The next show is called KCACO.

It is an exorcism. 

Nowehere, Forever: Sapphire & Steel's last assignment, the trap of nostalgia, and hints of a way out

 

Having written more than I expected to about Sapphire & Steel, I suppose it's only natural that I should say something about it's unforgettable final serial, 'Assignment Six: The Trap'. 

(Readers will notice that I avoided any reference to the 'title' of 'Assignment Five' in my entry on it. This is because properly speaking, none of the episodes actually have titles: P.J. Hammond wanted each Assignment referred to only by its number. The later titles appended to these appear to have evolved from fandom: they were not included in the listings for episodes at the time of original transmission. Grant G at Fire-Breathing Dimetrodon Time cites a friend who discovered the earliest apparent instance of these titles in a fanzine called Time Screen, and rightly notes that the idea they're a fan creation explains why some of them are, well, a bit crap. The fan title for Assignment Five is 'Dr McDee Must Die!' and while that's an extremely good summary of the plot, it is extremely cheesy and in no way fits the tone of the show, sounding more like one of those films you may remember Troy McClure from. I have chosen to add the fan titles where I think they fit the serial in question, which I think works well for Assignments Two, Three and Six, inoffensively enough in Assignments One and Four, and extremely badly in the case of Assignment Five, hence my just following Hammond's nomenclature for that one. And to answer the question you're about to ask, I would simply follow the example set by Assignment Two and name each serial after its location, given that the claustrophobic focus on single locations [and the relatively elaborate sets this focus allowed the show to play with] is one of its trademarks. So: 'The Farmhouse', 'The Railway Station', 'The Capsule', 'The Photographer's Shop', 'Lord Mullrine's Party' and 'The Service Station', though I actually think 'The Trap' is a perfect title for the last assignment, and disagree with Grant that it gives away the twist - which, full disclosure, I am probably going to spoil in the course of this piece so, if you don't want the ending ruined, skip this entry.) 

The problem you run into writing about the final episode of Sapphire & Steel as a lefty blogger is that the big lad, Mark Steel, already got there first, in the introduction to Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, his 2014 essay collection from Zero Books. So to avoid treading too much on ground already covered by the late Vampire Castle dodger, I'm going to do one of my favourite things and cheat, by invoking a context Fisher can't, which is that on Tenor.com the gif at the start of this essay is labelled 'Social Distancing Social Distance GIF'. 

Mentioning Vampire Castle of course gives me an excuse to include a pic of the gang from State of Decay, watching which is a much better use of your time than rereading or relitigating that essay. 

Isn't that perfect? Especially given the weird resonances Assignment Five's viral apocalypse takes on in the aftermath of the novel coronavirus pandemic (which also imparted similar significance to Eldred and Rothwyn's capsular isolation in 'Assignment Three: The Creature's Revenge'). At some point during the lockdown, someone (a masking advocate? An Ivermectin-guzzler? We'll never know, but thanks rugsunshine, whoever you are: there are not nearly enough Sapphire & Steel gifs online) thought the perfect image to describe it was Sapphire and Steel gazing out of a curtained window, drifting through space, alone and, as Sapphire says, 'nowhere, forever'. 

It's a superb image, the perfect juxtaposition of the mysterious and the mundane which is the show's stock in trade. Watching it, I was struck by how much the window - supposedly that of a cafe in the 1940s, though we'll get to that in a moment - reminded me of those in the schools I had attended as a child. Whether you choose to interpret this as an indication that British design didn't advance much between 1948 and 1982, or that those postwar windows were surprisingly hard-wearing, or that there was so little money about the windows never got replaced, is up to you. The easiest explanation is that the producers just used a contemporary window because they didn't think there was much chance of viewers picking up on any potential differences. Remember that in 1982 HDTV and Tivo did not exist, so people couldn't pause programmes when a character's bookshelf appears on screen and look up all the books they couldn't possibly own because they hadn't yet been published. 

But to be honest, the provenance of the window itself doesn't matter that much because the location Sapphire and Steel find themselves trapped in is not a 1940s cafe. It is, in fact, as one of the duo's enemies in this serial points out, 'nowhere' - a false memory designed to trap them, eternally. A single period room, with Glen Miller on the radio and period-appropriate posters (what a shame that the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, so comprehensively anatomized by Owen Hatherley in The Ministry of Nostalgia, had not yet been rediscovered: that would have been a tasty anachronism) on the walls. It's a nice memory, a cosy, comfy memory - but you can never get out of that memory. 

This is, of course, the ultimate danger of nostalgia: what was a source of comfort (literal physical comfort in the case of the serial's roadside cafe/service station location: a place to take a comfort break, a rest stop) becomes a prison. If you want to imagine the future, imagine being trapped at Tebay Services. Forever. 

This. This is what caused the timebreak in our reality, I'm not joking about this. 

Actually, let's do something these entries have had a habit of doing (I was recording a bunch of them yesterday to make into videos for my YouTube channel, so I had a chance to notice patterns) and expand on something mentioned parenthetically earlier. The Keep Calm and Carry on poster caused a Sapphire and Steel-style timebreak in our world, and we have been living in a false reality ever since. The only question is whether the timebreak occurred in 2000, the year of the Millennium Dome and meeting up when we're all fully grown by that fountain down the road, when the poster was first rediscovered by Stuart and Mary Manley in Barter Books, Alnwick, or whether it occurred in 2005, when the poster became ubiquitous as a result of being featured in The Guardian. If you want my opinion, it's the latter: while it's nice to imagine that 9/11 was a false track we could skip our way out of with a timey-wimey two-step, I think if KCACO hadn't been allowed to publicly metastasize in the media the disturbances would have remained localised to Barter Books itself. Instead, Aisha - it got out. 

So, to paraphrase a trademark of a more recent show, it's time to ask a very germane question after this series of posts about nostalgia: what now?