Why I love Ken Livingstone (and the People's Book Prize)

Listen, Boris, I don’t want a bike. I want to be able to get from Lancaster Gate to St.Paul’s by underground, which is only 7 stops, without having to take out a mortgage on the house. What’s happened to tube fares? Time was, I could spend the day skipping round London on the tube and still have change from two farthings. Or at least still have change from a couple of £50 notes. Bring back Red Ken.

Oh, and the People’s Book Prize Do was fun in a slightly hysterical way. A sort of convergence under a lot of gilding, in which only the waiters seemed to be quite sure what they were doing.  My considered thoughts on it? Well, the goat’s cheese went surprisingly well with the smoked salmon – didn’t overwhelm it as I had feared, and the confit of duck with fig was excellent although I thought the dauphinoise potatoes a little too rich as an accompaniment. One spoonful of delicately wilted spinach does not add up to 5 a day, but overall, very good.

Oh yes, and there were some prizes. Which I did not win, although I was one of the three finalists for the Beryl Bainbridge award for first book, so I got to stand on stage and pretend not to feel an idiot.

And I got to race Frederick Forsyth for the toilets at the end. Not many people can say that.

Hang 'em high

Suddenly, the death penalty is back on the menu and as ever, a majority of people want it. I can understand why they want it, just as I can understand why people want to believe in life after death. It makes them feel better. It would make us a more barbaric society, but that wouldn’t matter to those who support the death penalty.

What else would it achieve? The death penalty could be regarded as a deterrent. Well, it is probably true that no one who has ever been executed has gone on to commit another crime. Would it act as a deterrent to those still only thinking about committing murder? If it did, US states that have abolished capital punishment would have higher murder rates than those that retain it. They don't. They have lower rates. No one commits a murder because the penalty is only life imprisonment and that’s okay. They commit murder, or rape, or burglary or speeding offences, because they don’t expect to get caught, so penalties are irrelevant.  It’s the likelihood of being caught that would make the difference.

But the majority of murders don’t involve rational calculation. They involve blind rage, panic or stupidity and the thought what might follow doesn’t come into it. Murderers can be calculating if they are terrorists, of course, but if their ultimate personal goal is martyrdom, I don’t see why we should use the machinery of the justice system to oblige them. Much more irritating to them to shoot them in the legs and cart them off to hospital.

There is the argument that the death penalty would satisfy ‘justice.’ An eye for an eye. The theory is that if someone takes a life, justice requires they should pay with their own. There’s a major flaw in this argument.  There’s a tin of baked beans at my local supermarket. Its price is on the shelf. If I am willing to pay that price, I am entitled to have the baked beans. It’s a matter of commerce. Life, death and murder don’t fit in this model. The price of murder is death? What if I am willing to pay with my own life? Does that entitle me to murder someone else? Murder can’t be paid for. It is beyond price.

There is the notion that the death penalty would bring closure to the survivors of the victim. Yes, I imagine that if someone I loved were murdered, in my grief and rage I would want the murderer hanged, drawn and quarter, boiled in oil, slow roasted, flayed alive, torn apart by horses. I would probably also want to be dead myself. Should the state kill the murderer in order to satisfy my desire for revenge and kill me to satisfy my suicidal urges? Or should it help me through both, back to something resembling sanity?

The only rational argument for capital punishment that might make any sort of logical sense is the argument that killing murderers would save time, space and money in comparison with keeping them in prison for years. Then save even more money by disposing of the old and disabled too.

No, there really is no rational argument for capital punishment, but that won’t stop people demanding it, because it would make them feel better. It would make them feel empowered in a world where bad things happen outside their control. To restrain someone, render him utterly helpless, even denying him the possibility of suicide, so that we can then, coldly and ceremonially, put him to death;  what greater sense of power can there be? As any serial killer can probably testify.

London Town

I am going to London.  When I was young, going to London meant an exciting train ride and a visit to the Tower and the Natural History museum. These days it means a nerve-racking drive and a chance to sell stuff. And this time, the stuff I am selling is myself. I am going to the People’s Book Prize award ceremony because, yes, my novel A Time For Silence has made it to the finals. Gulp. It is a black tie event and I’m hoping they’ll let me in even though I don’t possess a black tie. Or indeed any sort of tie.

It will be in Ave Maria Lane by St. Paul’s Cathedral. I find it wonderfully reassuring that Ave Maria Lane is still there. Having produced a dissertation on Mediaeval London when I was taking my history degree, I was convinced that I knew the streets of London like the back of my hand, and I was completely thrown when I actually visited the city and found that everything had changed. Apparently, there was this big fire in 1666, which demolished all the best bits. But not Ave Maria Lane!

Now it just remains to be seen whether I can get through the award ceremony without behaving like a rabbit caught in headlights. Watch this space.

And meanwhile, feel free to vote at http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/finalist.php

No compulsion. But please.

Wipe Out

I remember, I remember, the place where I was born.  I remember it in great detail, some of it in large blanket chunks, some in a rag bag of disconnected jigsaw pieces, but the memories are a part of me. I remember my old route to school, the post-war houses set round tatty greens and the multi-storey flats that were being built as I walked by.  I remember the Rough, a wilderness of nettles and hawthorn and sinister culverts, where we made dens, and the playing fields and the swings, and the copse under the railway arch where you could find wood anemones and wild strawberries.  I remember the walk to my aunt and uncle’s house, a mile away, past the parade of shops with the hardware store that stocked everything from fork handles to four candles, and the off-licence that sold Double Diamond and, to the very sophisticated, an occasional bottle of Hirondelle. I remember the billowing folds of aubrietia on the low walls in their garden, the china on display in their cabinet, the books on their shelves.  Somewhere in my memory is every crack in the pavement, every pane of glass, every tree root, every corner where the shadows fell.

Now I’ve been back to the place I left nearly 30 years ago.  It’s not the first time I’ve been back. The usual reason: a funeral.  It has always felt odd, going back, finding that a place has continued to exist without me, but I have never before felt so uncomfortable about the way the world that once fitted round me like a glove has been overlain by a layer of life that has nothing to do with me.  The old glove is still there, that’s the trouble.  Its seams are splitting and the lining’s ripped, but it is still recognisable as my old glove, under the entirely different mitten that has been plonked on top of it.  The multi-storey flats still stand, looking as if they wished they were scheduled for demolition, and maybe they are.  The culverts in what was the Rough are still there, lurking behind the brand new community centre that has replaced the hawthorn bushes.  The copse is still perched on the stream bank, marooned now beyond a brand new link road and roundabout.  The parade of shops still stands, but now they’re Indian restaurants and betting shops, and I have no idea where anyone goes to buy fork handles.  At my uncle’s house, the low walls still stand in the garden, but without the aubrietia.  There’s different china in the cabinet, and different books on the shelf, but the same table that I remember from 50 years ago.  Part of me wants to go nosing in and unearth as much as possible of the old, just as I remember it, but I think, on the whole, I would prefer, from now on, to return and find it all swept away, bulldozed into oblivion, demolished, remodelled and rebuilt, by the people who claim it now.  Then my former world can safely travel with me, as pure memory that no one else can trespass on and mess with.  What this means is that I am getting seriously old.  Bugger.

UKEUGB

So, if Cameron wins the next election, we shall have a referendum to establish whether we stay in Europe or flounce off on our own.  The new terms that Cameron wants to negotiate will probably keep a free market open for businesses and bankers, but will opt us out of the sort of EU rules that protect us common working plebs, but I don’t suppose we’ll have a chance to vote on whether we want the old or new terms.

But a referendum about staying in the EU might turn out to be pointless anyway, because we shall already have had the referendum on Scotland’s independence by then.  The president of the European Commission suggests  that if Scotland votes to go it alone, it will not automatically be a member of the EU, but will have to apply for membership as a brand new country.  If that does happen, surely the same will apply to whatever is left of the former U.K, because England isn’t a member of the EU in its own right either.  Nor is Wales.  Northern Ireland is a possible, perhaps, because the country that is a member of the EU is “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,’ so at least it gets a mention.  But Great Britain came into existence when the two former kingdoms of Scotland and England (which included Wales) were united in 1706.  If Scotland drops out, Great Britain will no longer exist, so neither will the U.K.  What we’ll be needing will be a referendum to decide whether we should apply to be allowed in to the EU.  And the EU might say no.  In fact, if I were them, I would.

Bang Bang

A woman likes guns.  She likes shooting them and she believes she’s going to need them to keep the world at bay, so she collects them, because she has a constitutional right to own them.  Her son takes them, kills her, several teachers and 20 primary school children.  If a boy is disturbed, inclined to suicide or violent outbursts, even if only for a brief drunken or confused moment in an otherwise sane and balanced life, the ready availability of guns makes a very nasty outcome depressingly inevitable.  The gun lobby in the USA responded to the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, by suggesting that the obvious solution is to have armed guards in schools.  Of course, the solution is more guns.

After the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, the British response was to make the private ownership of handguns illegal.  I like to think that the Firearms (Amendment) Acts of 1997 were not so much a piece of criminal legislation as a constitutional statement: We, the People, abjure any right to carry instruments that are designed purely for the purpose of harming other human beings.  It is impossible, as a Brit, to make any sense at all of people who believe that the constitutional right to own, carry, and shoot firearms provides a vital bulwark against the threat of tyranny.  Most sane people understand that the best bulwark against tyranny is the ballot, not the bullet.  Most sane people see that the stockpiling of guns by weirdo militias is an invitation to tyranny, not a bulwark against it.  Most sane people see that one person’s right to carry guns destroys everyone else’s right not to have to. Listening to the gun lobby’s response to the Newtown massacre, and hearing of the impossibility of anti-gun legislation in the USA, I begin to wonder if we occupy the same planet. 

And then a couple of unarmed members of staff in a school in California bravely talk a disturbed gunman out of carrying out another massacre and I think maybe there is hope for the sanity of the human race.

The true meaning of Christmas

It’s the 24^th December.  Sunrise, here at 52° North, was at 8.05 and sunset will be at 15.55.  Sorry, Christians, but that’s what Christmas is about.  It might be different in South Africa or Australia, or even in California and Florida, but here in Britain, this is very obviously the sad and sorry time of the year.  More than two thirds of the day are in darkness, with the sun abysmally low at noon and a good chance of lowering clouds and pouring rain to cut down the light even further. What do we have to look forward to in the coming weeks, but ice, snow, chill, rheumatism, transport snarl-ups and misery.  So it goes without saying that Christmas, conveniently parked next to the Winter solstice, is the one ‘Christian’ festival that a secular society has clung to, for reasons that have nothing to do with official religion.

Just as we have clung to the need for bonfires and fireworks to mark the onset of the dark, without really giving a toss about 17^th century terrorists trying to blow up Parliament, so we stick to an instinctive need to celebrate wildly and illogically in the very heart of darkness.  We want singing and noise, we want feasting and drunkenness, to cheer us up and, most of all, we want reassurance that this isn’t the onset of the end but a turning point, that from here on, the days are going to start getting just that little bit longer.  We want light: candles, and fairy lights on the Christmas tree if we no longer have the yule log blazing. We want families, to reassure us that we belong somewhere, even if we finish up snarling at each other.

Most of all, we want tradition.  We want ritual, the same thing, year after year, the same ritual food, even the sprouts that nobody likes and pudding that everyone is too stuffed to tackle.  We want the same songs, the choir boy singing Once in Royal, the same Slade and Bing.  We want to watch infants perform the same nativity plays really badly, and the same… well, things haven’t quite been the same since the loss of Morecombe and Wise, but there’s always the Midsomer Murders Christmas special.  It has to be the same, because then we know that it’s all one big cycle.  It comes around and it goes around. The light will come back, the days will be once again be long and warm and sunny.  Never mind that warm sunny days are as much a myth as snowy Christmases, it’s the thought that counts.  The carefully nurtured illusion.

We need Christmas when it is, how it is, because we’ve still got to get through January.  The mysterious birth of a baby fits beautifully with our need for the notion of new beginnings,  just as the vulgarity, the frantic shopping and the absurdly extravagant spending on unwanted gifts and pointless frills, fit with the lord of misrule in us all that is itching to come out and defy this full stop of the year.  We need to turn everything upside down, like we did last year and we will insist on doing next year.  I suppose even the inevitable sermons decrying our irreligious consumerism and imploring us to remember ‘the real meaning of Christmas’ is a part of the ritual we couldn’t possibly do without. Bring it on.