Oh won't you come on back to the War (on Nostalgia)?

 ...but I know what some of you are thinking. 'All this stuff about horror movies with Timelords in is fun but aren't you supposed to be engaged in some kind of War on Nostalgia, AJ? KCACO isn't going to exorcise itself, you know...'

And you're right, but don't forget that arriving at the realisation that undoing this knot of toxic nostalgia should be my current artistic focus was not a straightforward process. The idea of the KCACO poster's re-emergence having trapped us in some kind of weird timebreak was literally something which emerged here in the parentheses of what was simply intended to be a reflection on the final episode of Sapphire & Steel. Fittingly, an exploration of past media pointed to the dangers of cosy nostalgia. 

Well, something rather like that appears to have happened again, in that I seem to have hit on a key approach to how to fight it in the course of - well, writing about horror films with Doctor Who actors in them. One of the things that I notice whenever I log into this site to do another entry is the simple statistical fact that the first Timelords of Terror entry did significantly better than any of the subsequent ones, even taking into account that the first instalment of any series will usually do better than the others. And I think that's because that entry contains a genuine touch of magic, in the form of the long paragraph towards the end in which I imagine an alternate universe in which Andrew Cartmel replaces Eric Saward as Script Editor a couple of years early and is able to implement his fabled Masterplan in full, leading to Lungbarrow being made as television rather than a novel and a British public reassessing its commitment to reproductive futurism in the light of learning about looms. I got a bit carried away writing that bit, and not just because the medication started kicking in. It had that tuning fork ring of something significant, which I think was this: if the toxic nostalgia represented by KCACO has trapped us in a reality based on a false past in which the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster becomes part of our cultural memory of the Second World War despite never in fact getting beyond the design stage, one way to resist that toxic nostalgia is to rewrite the past deliberately based on the future that we want to live in. 

And if that feels appropriate, perhaps that's because in itself it represents an obvious development of the work done in Secrecy's Jurisdiction. It is the conceit of that work that it is an account of an alternate, shadow Britain, a twisted mirror of our most Normal of Islands' extremely rational and sensible politics. Admittedly this is largely because if I describe it as a 100% accurate description of what's really been going on I leave myself open to accusations of insanity or, worse, libel, but it's a place to start. And if you've been using this alternate universe approach for divinatory purposes, as a scrying mirror in which to arrive at truths about our current situation - why not adapt that approach to purposes of enchantment, instead? So one aspect of the KCACO project will be along these lines: poems written from the perspective of someone living in that better world where Prince Dai transitioned and dated Freddie Mercury, Britain became a Republic and the best Doctor Who story of all time, 'Jubilee', got the 'Power of the Doctor' treatment in 2003. A world where an old poster discovered in a bulk box of books bought at auction sold a few copies in Alnwick but never caught on. Hell, a world where His Dark Materials became a much bigger deal than those wizard nonce books, because a more sexually mature and open culture would realise you would have to have something deeply wrong with you to make the representatives of transformative power in your universe part of the same system that gave us Bash Camps. 

Maybe it's also because I went to Glasgow recently, and reread 1982, Janine, and am thinking a lot about Alasdair Gray's injunction to 'work as if you live in the early days of a better nation'. You can feel that way in Glasgow, but you can't in England these days, where every headline serves to remind you that we seem to have run out of road. And so, if there is to be any kind of national renewal, if we are to find some way of backing ourselves out of the nightmarish cul-de-sac we seem to have gotten ourselves into, that has to begin in the imagination, and it has to begin with something other than trollstalgic cliches about wartime grit or taking back control. And so in a way, you see, despite being the author of a book called England is the Enemy, the eventual goal of my project will be a more interesting, exciting country, one that no longer hides from but embraces the future. If Secrecy's Jurisdiction was about wrapping the corpse of Jimmy Savile like an albatross around the neck of the establishment that enabled him, the KCACO project is about kicking that establishment offstage once and for all and letting new dreams emerge from the margins, from the weirdos, from the stuff that isn't taken seriously.  It is, in fact, in a way which surprises me as much as anyone else, a kind of defence of the realm.