'A dirty, hoggish people'

How one, admittedly crazy-sounding, Latvian politician saw the British after witnessing planeload after planeload of stag parties puking, pissing, and shagging their way around Riga, behaviour which has prompted the city's mayor to issue a public warning asking all-male groups from the UK to up their game a bit.

I have rather mixed feelings about this. Stag parties are not my thing, and the only one I ever went on involved a bunch of us playing pool in a cottage in Blakeney, having a kick-around, rescuing two small children from the salt marshes (long story), eating some lasagne, then heading back to Norwich full of bracing sea air. I could, I think, manage the 'rugged outdoor activities followed by one big night out in a UK city'-type affair, but the decidedly 2000s practice of decamping en masse to Central Europe, drinking Dreher or Krusovice until it comes out of one's eyeballs, then visiting extremely expensive strip & clip joints leaves me cold. Spending ten months in Budapest's District Seven, effectively the hub of the city's nightlife, has allowed me to witness a lot of these parties at first hand, and they're pretty grim. On our street there's a well-patronised, well-regarded romkert (typically, a squat-like bar set up in a disused building, decorated with furniture collected in the biannual district chuck-out) called Szimplákert. Now, Szimplákert has become, to a degree, a victim of it's own success, and even makes it onto the pages of the typically unadventurous Lonely Planet bar listings, with the result that big groups of Brits - or those smart enough to realise that they're being massively overcharged in the shiny, Square Mile-type bars on Liszt Tér - wind up there. Cue parades of middle managers in polo shirts decorated with 'hilarious', often borderline homophobic slogans ('Budapest 2009 - Gay-vin's Stag Do!' was a recent favourite), yelling at the barmaids in English, and competing with the local winos to see who can leave the biggest patch of vomit on my doorstep for me to step in come Saturday morning.

The thing is, though, that I can't help but feel that the British are scapegoated somewhat. I've seen plenty of Germans, Scandinavians, and Russians behaving identically in District Seven, the difference being that the British only seem to act up when under the influence. When sober, most English people at least demonstrate a degree of embarrassment about their unwillingness to take the plunge with Hungarian, whereas I frequently see Germans snap at shop or café workers (in English or German) then descend into fits of mirth at their addressee's inability to respond. What price a guy from Szeged or Miskolc walking into a bar in Hamburg, rattling off an order in Hungarian, and expressing complete incredulity at his failure to be understood?

I've often asked my students, and people I meet around and about, what their stereotype of an English (or Scottish - they don't often differentiate) person is. Sample answers: 'a snob'; 'an alcoholic'; 'a football hooligan'. The latter I find intriguing - I would have gone along to see Újpest or Fradi by now were their stadiums not more or less given over to Drehered-up ultra groups (witness the behaviour of Újpest's 'boys' as they host cross-border rivals Steaua Bucharest in the Europa League a few weeks back): by way of comparison, I've very rarely felt intimidated either within or en route to any English ground. I do feel that the British, and in particular the English, are frequently asked to take the rap for forms of behaviour which are endemic throughout the whole of Europe. I admit that I feel safer walking around downtown Budapest at three in the morning than I do walking through Norwich's leafy suburbs anytime after eight, but I hardly think antisocial behaviour is a problem exclusive to the UK.

Pranked

The Guardian's April Fools Day joke this year took me approximately 0.000005 seconds to spot. It's pathetic. Unless that's actually true (I almost, almost, wouldn't put it past them) and 'Iran Offers to Help US in Afghanistan' is the real trick article...

March 2009: edited highlights

In lieu of an interesting new post (I've written 2,000 words of fiction, 500 words for a friend's website, and a long-ish lesson plan today), here's a rustle through the baggage of the Ides:

- The Spirit (n.) Film we saw and were enormously underwhelmed by. Samuel L. Jackson needs to sort it out, but not as much as Frank Miller does. I'm not sure the premise 'ghost flirts with women and Scarlett Johansson dresses up as Eva Braun' should have passed the 'Mr. Weinstein' pitching test.

- Walking (v.) Less of this in March, largely due to increased work commitments. The seasonally-affected Magyars have chinned up in the last week or two, according to my ambulatory researches, but I'm not covering five miles a day any more.

- Bankruptcy (n., abstract) Darlington FC have a month to find a buyer or they will cease to exist. Internet chat suggests that we'll have to pull together and reform as a 'Fans' Club' in the murky depths, where I would be - in all honesty - perfectly content.

- Politics (n.) Ferenc G. is gone but nobody seems to want his job. Corrupt, naive, and arrogant as Gyurcsány might have been, I feel rather sorry for him. When I saw him, he had stopped with his wife and daughter to buy some pre-cinema pic 'n' mix. Sights like this tend to humanise politics. In other 'humanising of politics' news, the godawful Jacqui Smith is all hot and bothered because her Guy Fawkes-a-like husband decided to get, well, hot and bothered on ministerial expenses. My inner schoolboy wants to use the phrase 'wank bank' here, and just has.

- Dream (n.) And a political one, at that. Last night I dreamt that I was crossing a big Budapesti boulevard with Gordon and Sarah Brown, and David and Samantha Cameron were crossing in the other direction.

- Clock change (n.) - 'Time-wasting bastard', more like.

- Badly-written (adj.) - I'm reading sci-fi novelist Brian Aldiss' autobiography at the moment. It's absolutely fascinating if you're interested in the currents of ideas which drove British postwar fiction. It's also terribly composed, and pays no attention to the potential tonal discrepancies between eulogistic descriptions of one's wife and throwaways like 'the water was gonad shrinking'. Full marks for attempts to posit a postwar avant-garde, though, even if this is mucked in with lengthy celebrations of (NO! NO! NO!) Kingsley Amis.

- Well-written (adj.) - I (re-)read Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction earlier this week. I need to write about the appropriation of the Sebaldian voice against Sebald's own arguments about style and kitsch. The decontextualisation of Sebald - only seven years after his death - is infuriating. For now I'll only remark on the wonderful Clive Scott's cautionary reminder, in his obituary for W.G.S., that the infinitely imitable nature of the style of a novel like Austerlitz was/ is a joke that flies in the face of the absolute alignment of form and content that Sebald achieved. For me, Sebald is a Beckett unashamed by the ultimate embededness of style within historical context. There is no superfluous melancholy in The Rings of Saturn; there is nothing whimsical or unearnedly peripatetic about Vertigo. Going back to On the Natural History of Destruction made me ask one or two severe questions of my thesis, I can tell you.

Anyway, that's for another day. I'm off to bed. Xx

Half-arsed, putting off going to work, news digest

HOT!




Ferenc Gyurcsany resigns as Hungarian PM, but not before deploying some ever-so-slightly emotionally manipulative language (he's such a Blairite). Actually, it all seems to be a ploy to prevent President Sólyom calling an early general election, but let's allow the almost completely unmourned (and, lest we forget, multi-millionaire 'socialist') Gyurcsany have his moment of spurious dignity. Here's a quick flashback of his career highlights:

Saudi 'terrorists' (Feri's cracking wheeze about the supposed extracurricular activities of the Saudi national football team.)

A moment of unguarded honesty brings a major European capital to a standstill.

OFF!



On the subject of people who can't be trusted to be left alone with a microphone for five minutes, Chris Moyles is in hot water again/ Chris Moyles has been a dick again/ Chris Moyles is still not funny.

I hate to say it, but I frequently feel as if Moyles is the embodiment of the noughties British zeitgeist.




THE PRESS!




And, carrying on the theme of zeitgeist-embodying loudmouths, The Damned United, Tom Hooper's adaptation of David Peace's novelisation of Brian Clough's scarcely believable 44 days in charge of Dirty Leeds (made more dirty by their being Moyles's team of choice) is out this weekend. The BBC's Pat Murphy interviews Martin O'Neill, manager of Aston Villa and former Clough underling, about it here. O'Neill is, as ever, an eloquent interviewee (he studied law at Queen's University prior to joining Forest, and is an avid amateur criminologist in his spare time), and I was surprised by the uncanny resemblance of his diction - close, spare, precise - to my dad's.

'Woman met alien near Norwich'

Yes, it's true. It's in the Evening News, so it must be.

Hillsborough 20th Anniversary

There's a piece in today's Observer about the Hillsborough Disaster. Twenty years on and countless eyewitness accounts later, this is still almost unbearably moving. It's shocking too - the anecdote about the policeman telling survivors not to use an advertising hoarding as a stretcher because they were 'vandalizing the stadium' took my breath away.

The tragedy, seen retrospectively, was a watershed in British politics. In its wake, it became unacceptable (or, for more cynical parties, inexpedient) to make Mail-like generalisations about the behavioural tendencies of large groups of people. The article makes it abundantly clear that the disaster was not attended to sufficiently because the police assumed that there had been crowd violence. And yet crowd trouble itself was less the result of a spontaneous desire to fight than it was a conduit for the frustrations of a Britain that was, successively, broke and dominated by an uninclusive monetarist attitude as it moved through the 1970s and 1980s. The old cliché that rave culture put the lid on hooliganism by providing a comparable, and yet nonviolent, outlet for the desire to be part of a mass movement is more true than the noun at the beginning of this sentence would have you believe: very few people were 'fighting just for the sake of fighting'.

If crimes tell us more than anything else about our culture, can disasters be said to do the same thing? Much ink has been used describing the links between the series of rail tragedies around the turn of the Millenium and the negligence of the Blairite government. Hillsborough, along with the Zeebrugge ferry sinking, are the totemic catastrophes of the Thatcher era. The latter resulted from the attitude that time is money: the boat's bow doors were not secured before departure, provoking the investigating judge to mention a 'disease of sloppiness'. The same carelessness was evident at Hillsborough, but there were clearly other complicating factors. Thatcher declared her intentions towards football supporters with her notorious ID card scheme and one club - Luton Town, owned by the commitedly neo-Tory David Evans - had already made moves to implement it. Fences were put up at the majority of grounds, as if the players, rather than opposing supporters, were the object of aggression. Travelling fans were locked in cramped football specials to ferry them to and from away games. There was little consideration shown for the large majority of fans who did not participate in disorder, and a blanket lack of willing to engage with the social problems that motivated those who did.

On the subject of social problems, the fact that the tragedy occurred in South Yorkshire is fairly unavoidable. Taylor's report bore out the suspicion that inept, inconsiderate policing was largely to blame for what happened. The S.Y. force in 1989 was staffed largely by veterans of the Miners' Strike, and the conflict had clearly imbued the organisation with a siege mentality. As the article, like many before it, shows, the police were utterly incapable of interpreting the events as anything but violence and disorder. By the time they performed the necessary measures, it was far, far too late.

The public response is all that remains in my memory from that day - I was only eight years old. I didn't find out about Kelvin MacKenzie's sociopathic line on it all until much later on. The Sun's reportage on Hillsborough is arguably the biggest misjudgment in British journalism since Rothermere's backing of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and the paper's sales on Merseyside are still significantly lower than in the rest of the United Kingdom. That MacKenzie has made sporadic attempts to defend his editorial choices that week tells us a lot about the ongoing pervasiveness of Thatcherism.

I began going to football the following year. The fences were still up at Feethams, but the attitudes surrounding football had already begun to change. Although I've seen them get unnecessarily baton-happy on a few occasions, the police are now generally responsible and cooperative when it comes to crowd management at football. More importantly, the popular and political determination that nothing of the sort should ever happen again is ongoing. Articles like this contribute to that will.

Me, last week:

Julie Myerson is right to say that our writing tells us much about ourselves that we don't already know.

Last week, what I didn't already know about myself was that I was writing a sentence about someone who was about to become extremely (in)famous indeed. It's come to a pretty pass when the literary affair of the year isn't the Sartre-Robbe Grillet debate, or even a spat between Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, but a kerfuffle over the self-indulgent 'mumoirs' (THAT IS MY NEOLOGISM TM TM TM COPYRIGHT IDST!!! Seriously, I just made 'mumoir' up. They might as well give me the royalties cheque now...) of an Islingtonite mother-of-three who can't get her head around the fact that her son smokes a bit of dope.

In all seriousness, I recognise that 'a bit of dope' actually does - contra the assertions of many of the smug hippies on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog - have the potential to derail one's life in potentially serious ways. This probably deserves qualifying by saying that something approaching the opposite is true for many individuals (cannabis can focus people just as it can distract them; not all users spend their entire life in a smoky room watching Harold and Kumar), and that those who are affected negatively by it are often negotiating less contingent stresses and strains. From what I've read about the Myersons, it seems that her son was ludicrously overpressured by parents who felt that they were doing anything but: from my teaching experience, I can say that Britain is overrun with teenagers who have had it banged into them that nothing but relentless, quantifiable achievement will do. This doesn't mean that kids are being encouraged to learn about things; it means that they are (implicitly) being pressed to learn by rote - wherever that's possible - so they can get the best grades/ the best job. IMO/ IME this is a specifically middle-class problem. There are lots and lots of potentially talented individuals for whom university becomes a self-destructive circle of mechanistic revision and joyless socialising, rather than an opportunity to, well, find out about what I remember Karl and I, in a flash of almost revolutionary wisdom, agreeing to term 'stuff'. It is all too rare to meet a student who says something like 'I picked English Lit/ History/ Classics because I find the subject bottomlessly interesting and, to tell you the truth, I don't give a fuck what grades I get because the studying is rewarding enough in its own right.' That's a pity, because they're invariably the ones who get the best results.

Anyway, despite not liking the idea of Jake, who I get the feeling is probably one of those pious weedheads who listen to Manu Chao, I am on his side. His mother is hacking out the typical Islingtonite route of building a literary career grounded on an erroneous belief that their own experience is somehow more vital and visceral than that of anyone else (what price the mother of a heroin addict from Burnley being given the opportunity to publish such a book?) and, on those terms alone, offends my most deeply-held principles. She's the new Wife in the North.

Oh, and my own parents? They are bloody good at 'no pressure', to the extent that not an eyelid was batted at my numerous C-grade GCSEs. In the most memorable example of 'no pressure' (as far as I'm concerned), my mum once semi-encouraged me to go to London for a play-off final when I had a four-hour exam in Norwich the next morning. True to form, I refused to go and spent the evening in the pub instead, but it was nice to be trusted to be able to do well even if I had gone to London. I get the feeling that the meddling committed by the Myersons of this world doesn't accomodate pre-exam play-off piss ups...

'In our hour of financial need'

The Guardian staples its colours to the mast: as hundreds of jobs go in the media, Farringdon expresses solidarity by paying Matthew Fort to optimise our pizza-buying experience. Well, as they say, if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem...

Let's just say Nero's tuning up again.

Disappointment

Am I the only one who was misled by the adjective in this article?

Actually, come to think of it, I probably was...

Petrolhead Propaganda

The Hungarians all laughed at me when I told them that I can't drive. It seemed wise not to get into an ethical debate about the subject.

On that note, here's the ever-reliable Evening News doing its part for the Norfolk drivers' lobby...

That link will stop working in a week or so, by the way: for future reference, the story is about a man with a phobia about speed cameras...

Michael O'Leary, I'm beginning to think, is the world's greatest satirist...

He's like some character in a Bill Hicks routine magnified by, well, a large number.

Edward Upward, RIP

I can't believe I didn't notice this for almost ten days, but Edward Upward, the last surviving member of the Auden Generation, has died aged 105. His early collaborations with Christopher Isherwood are some of the most interesting literary documents from the late twenties/ early thirties, and set the terms for how the developments of Surrealism were to be negotiated by English writers. His novel Journey to the Border is certainly worth reading if one is interested in the influence of Kafka on pre-1939 English fiction. Sad news.

Some things turn out well in the end...

The man responsible for the song with the greatest pop-sax break in the world ever, although - controversially - not responsible for the sax break itself, turns up after having been missing for a worrying amount of time.



Were I ever to write a novel intending to capture the essence of the British 1970s, that video probably contains all the research material I should need...

'Is that smoke I can smell? Quick, pass my fiddle.'

'Self-facilitating media node' Rio Ferdinand interviews embattled PM Gordon Brown about life, leadership, and Raith Rovers for the Observer Sport Monthly.

'We really do need to get people to dinner'

Priorities clearly straight in Davos, then.

Perhaps the WEF could have waited a few minutes more for their hors d'oeuvres in the context. Turkey calling Israel to account for itself might not be a geopolitical anomaly on the scale of, say, Britain doing the same to the United States, but it's still registers as surprising on the diplomatic barometer.

Is this true?

Study suggests Britons more bored and tired than the inhabitants of any other European nation.

Starting to sound my age...

...but my teachers used to do these kinds of things all the time, and we never thought it was weird. Actually, we used to think it was kind of funny. Some of our best teachers were dedicated chalk-throwing ranters who thought nothing of making you look like a fool if you weren't willing to work hard, or at least shut up and let other people get on with working.

This isn't a 'political correctness gone mad' argument, by the way...

Utterly Butterly

Apparently Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes want to make an 'intense sex film' together, and are contemplating a remake of legendary, and much mythologised, Marlon Brando vehicle Last Tango in Paris. Holding the groos and groans about the prospect of Tom & Katie getting sweaty on the big screen for a second, does anyone remember what happened to Cruise's career - and, more pertinently, marriage - last time he attempted to go down the 'intense sex film' road to gravitas?

Disclaimer - I actually really like Eyes Wide Shut, mostly because the emotional car crash that's so obviously occurring in the Cruise-Kidman orbit during it has rarely been captured so pertinently (if inadvertently) on camera before. Also, it's all elliptical and psychoanalytic and self-referential (but not in an annoying, Sophia Coppola-esque way), thus tickling my innate pretension gland.

Oo-err...

'Academia', 2008

I'm sure I'm not the only one in this circle of bloggers who thinks students should waste their time going to Bauhaus concerts, holding increasingly irrelevant debates about the precise alignment of their crypto-Marxist 'factions' in the students union, and quoting Heidegger loudly - and incorrectly - on the bus.* That isn't how they waste their time, though. They waste their time visiting incredibly tawdry city centre bars and 'posing like porn stars'...

Students, 2008.

* AKA 'I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes they had taught in the years between 1977-1990'.