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.