Velcro City Tourist Board

So, the last three weeks have been busy.

This is an understatement. Continue reading “A postcard from Chelsea”

When I was at college back in 1992, there was a guy in my tutor group who played trumpet and was bang into his classic funk – James Brown, Parliament, Funkadelic, all that stuff. I remember him explaining one of the core structural components of the genre, which applies to a lot of other musical forms as well, most notably anything dance-orientated: it is called, simply enough, “The One”.

The One is that moment where a whole bunch of repeating riffs and figures of different lengths – a one-bar bass hook, a four-bar drum pattern, an eight-bar bridge, a sixteen-bar solo – all reach their loop point at the same moment within the tune. The One is the sound of something cohering, of an emergent higher order. It’s the point in the tune where everything comes together, that single first-beat-of-a-bar where everything strikes together, the moment when even the most grooveless of listeners feel the urge to to move.

I think I just hit The One in my life.

Most of you already know that I’ve just started my Masters degree in Creative Writing; my first seminar is this evening, in fact. In the last year I’ve sold pieces of writing to magazines that I’ve been reading since before I even considered writing as a career choice; I’ve just started writing a proper column at LitReactor, and other commissions are fluttering around in my in-tray. But not only that: today also sees me starting a new job with a title so cool you’ll think I’m making it up. As of this morning, I’m a telecommuting employee of the University of Sheffield’s Civil Engineering department — a Research Assistant in the Future of Infrastructure.

I’ve put a post over at Futurismic that goes into a little more detail about the job and what it means to me. Here, I’m just going to remark on the weird way my life has suddenly cohered into something strange and exciting and new, like I finally found a path I never realised I was looking for. These moments of synchronicity aren’t without their negative threads, of course; my uncle died the weekend before last after a few years of declining into dementia, and thanks to the timing of my first seminar this evening, I’m missing the funeral. I don’t feel great about that; the guilt is compounded by the knowledge that funerals are horrible things to have to attend at the best of times*, and that this one occurs at the same place we buried my old man back in 2002. I wish I was going, but I’m also quite glad I’m not, while simultaneously resentful of that spark of personal relief. Such are the contradictions of the heart that keep us awake at night, I suppose.

One of the great novelistic fallacies of the human condition is born of our instinctive need to stitch a narrative out of the cloth of experience and chance. We often speak of fate, or simply feeling that something was meant to be, even though we know that nothing is determined, and that even history shifts its meaning depending on where you stand to look back at it. Caught in the fragmentary slice of silence before the bass bounces back to the root note and the horn section stabs out a fat major chord, I find myself glancing back and wondering how I got here from there. In some respects it seems almost beyond belief, a daft tall story that a teenaged me would have scoffed at; in other ways it seems like a fortunate yet inevitable confluence of all the things I’ve been doing for the last decade, if not my entire life. Both stories are equally valid; neither of them are strictly true. The truth is in the telling, maybe. Or in the reading, or the ending.

Either which way, the page turns; one chapter ends, another begins, and a new act begins to play out. In the orchestra pit, feet and fingers twitch in an anticipation of rhythm; the audience, small as it may be, waits patiently for events to unfold.

Let the beat drop; bring on The One.

[ * I've come to the conclusion that funerals are a little like placebos, in that an understanding of their true function lessens said function's effect. Funerals are for the living, not the dead; I don't need to be there to make peace with my own mortality, but I wish I could be there to support the rest of my family. And so it goes. ]

So, me and a bunch of musician buddies trundled down to Gunwharf last night to see Twenty, Cameron Crowe’s documentary celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Pearl Jam’s seminal album Ten.

It was pretty decent, though there was a general sense that it wasn’t quite what any of us were hoping it would be. With hindsight, however, it’s not entirely surprising that Twenty is a work of mild hagiography. For a start, Crowe was the guy behind the movie Singles, and a major booster for the Seattle scene in its infancy; secondly (and as highlighted by the film itself) Pearl Jam made the decision early in their career to say “no” to doing music industry stuff that they didn’t want to do or couldn’t maintain control over, so they were hardly going to sign up for deep surgery (let alone a hatchet-job) after twenty years of refusing to be dragged over the coals of music journalism. This way, they get to stand in the carefully stage-directed light of the two-decade anniversary of grunge, but on their own terms; a chance to tell the story in their own words, to own their own narrative to some extent.

A few snippets of period interview footage featuring one Kurt Cobain are a pointed reminder that said narrative control is denied to those whose pieces got taken off the gameboard: Twenty may be hagiographic in a folksy sort of way, but poor Kurt was elevated to an uneasy sainthood when the ink on Pearl Jam’s press buzz was still fresh, much like his own. The true tragedy of Cobain’s suicide is that he never got to show the world he’d licked his demons, and – by extension – the world itself. But the mythology of rock can’t pass up the easy meat of those who burn out rather than fading away, and Cobain will remain among its pantheon of pietà for as long as there’s money in selling his image, broken on the wheel of fame, a martyr to the alienation of a generation. Pearl Jam’s sainthood is different, a quieter litany of honesty and penitence; there is little mass-marketable glory in their refusal to participate in the music industry’s increasingly desperate circus of amplified personality and public pain.

That’s not to portray them as noble mendicants, of course; while they may not be living the Hollywood rock-star lifestyle, their survival as a band that continues to release new music and tours off the back of such must look enviable to today’s young musicians, and the contemporary interview footage suggests that none of them are living the hand-to-mouth grind of the fallen star. Pearl Jam have made what looks to be a comfortable living by doing things on their own terms, though lurking beneath the narrative surface of Twenty is the suggestion that it was not always an easy journey to make (and a persistent undercurrent of reminders that being a proper musician is just as much a job of work as any other artistic vocation). But with the exception of a few minutes taken to dwell on the tragedy at Roskilde and the personal aftermath of such (which, to be fair, would be hard to treat in greater depth without seeming tacky, self-aggrandising or both), the band’s post-Ticketmaster travails are painted with broad strokes, their second decade handwaved across the border with an alacrity born (one assumes) of Crowe knowing his target audience: the serious but unromantic business of a mature band writing new material and organising their own global tours lacks the tragic mystique of their origin story.

And so the lion’s share of the movie covers the formation of Mother Love Bone from the ashes of Green River, the tragic-but-inevitable death of frontman Andrew Wood, , the forming of the band that became Pearl Jam, and the gradual apotheosis of a shy and earnest Eddie Vedder, some handsome kid from beyond Seattle who sent in a demo tape featuring a voice to die for. Twenty‘s greatest triumph is perhaps the way it captures Vedder’s transition from promising young frontman to self-appointed voice-of-the-underdog; there’s an amazing bit of footage from an early Pearl Jam set in Vancouver (a support slot for Alice In Chains, if I remember correctly) where, midway through their set, Vedder witnesses the sort of heavy-handed security procedures that were a big feature of the era. After dropping a handful of lines from a song to mutter – over the mic, but almost more to himself than anyone else – about how fucked-up a thing it is for some bull-necked guy in a bomber jacket to beat some kid up for the sin of rocking out at a show, there’s a sudden shift; the to-this-point mellow and shy Vedder undergoes an astonishing phase change, the rapid and unexpected flourishing of righteous anger channelled almost immediately into his performance. It’s genuinely incredible; you can see the guy age maybe five years in a few seconds, and within the space of a few lines that earnest young man becomes the snarling channeller of inner turmoil whose frontmanship turned a skilled but otherwise unremarkable hard rock band into one of the pillars of a generational movement. That transformational trigger has its tragic echo in the Roskilde disaster; if you asked me to novelise Pearl Jam’s story, that would probably be the thematic spine I’d use to hold the work together. (It would be, unsurprisingly, a darker story than Crowe’s telling, though I like to think it would have a more transcendent ending as a result. What that says about my relationship to Pearl Jam’s music by comparison with Crowe’s is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I don’t know if it happens to everyone, but I find that reliving my youth through media output like this makes me feel very old. Naturally enough, a big part of that comes from seeing one’s teen heroes age twenty years within the compressed temporal frame of a few hours, going from daftly-dressed kids in their early twenties goofing off and having fun on noise-fuzzed camcorder footage or home-cloned VHS scrapings from MTV, to serious musicians in middle age, their eyes haunted sporadically by the ghosts of their pasts. (Though it should be noted, with a degree of envy mixed with admiration, that Vedder remains youthfully handsome and clear-skinned by comparison to his band-mates, despite still being a smoker, and his voice – spoken and sung alike – has become deeper and broader in terms of its range for a fairly minimal sacrifice in its raw power; a modest charm flows off the guy in waves, and – much as one of my friends said as we walked back into town in the drizzle – one likes to imagine him shrugging off formality and inviting you to “just call me Ed, man”.

But I think the real reason Twenty makes me feel old is because, in the terms of the outlook on life I had when the most important events it portrays took place, I am old – almost unimaginably so, in fact. It sounds laughably overdramatic and emo of me to say so, but when I was fifteen I really didn’t think I’d make it out of my twenties alive, let alone sane… and with that remembered alienation and restless nihilism still as fresh in my mind as they ever were (or so it feels), it’s hard to reconcile those feelings with the fact that I’m now the sort of person whose formative favourite bands have serious and worthy documentaries made about them. Twenty, then, says as much about how its audience have grown up and come to terms with the world as it says about the band’s own struggle to make peace with itself.

I guess I can live with that. (Like I get a choice, right?)

**

This is one of my favourite Pearl Jam tunes. Yes, I’m fully aware that it’s one of their most simple and obviously anthemic the-kids-are-all-right numbers, but frankly I don’t really care; it said what I felt at the time, I can still remember that feeling, and that’s enough for me. Pipe up with your own favourites in the comments, if you like.

“Will myself to find a home / a home within myself… “

Attention, writery types – allow me to draw your attention to LitReactor, which is a new project from the people who run ChuckPalahniuk.net. LitReactor is gonna be part online writer’s workshop, part book-geek community, part webzine. It launches at the turn of the month, but if you sign up now for the mailing list you’ll get an introductory e-compendium of writing tips from an assortment of luminaries including Neil Gaiman,  Brett Easton Ellis and (of course) your main man Chuck. Go take a look.

Oh yeah, and they’ve hired some limey called Paul to write their tech column.

Apart from a few chance encounters in mags and anthologies, this is my first condensed experience of Liz Williams in the short form, in a handsome (and rather genre-ambivalent) collection from NewCon Press. Nice font size and simple layout… though the fancy font for the story titles errs a little too far toward the unreadable for my taste. Your mileage, as the saying goes, may vary.

Now, I’ve not actually read any of Williams’ sf novels, either. She holds the very rare and dubious honour of being the only writer of what you might term ‘urban fantasy’ whose output in that bracket has captured and sustained my interest: I was sent a copy of one of the Inspector Chen novels for review a few years back, dipped my nose into it out of curiosity, and have read almost all of them since. They’re a great balance of dry humour and dramatic plotting, and a real pleasure to read.

A few of the stories here are set in Singapore 3, but neither Chen or his supporting cast make an appearance in these stand-alone tales, and the city is largely a convenient backdrop against which to set some spooky goings-on that draw on the Chinese occult pantheon; the vibrancy and depth-of-field of the novels is absent, but that’s not really a surprise or a complaint; short stories is short stories, after all. My favourite of these was probably “Mr Animation and the Wu Zhiang Zombies”, because I’m a sucker for a rock’n'roll underdog story played with just the right balance of respect and snark…

Williams draws on other occult traditions, far and near: “Who Pays” drops in on the all-but-out-of-business gateway to the Egyptian afterlife (and reveals it to have had still older and stranger origins than those we think we know); “Voivodoi” mashes up a genetically-modified near-future with the folk tale monsters of Central Asia; an embittered undine bites off more than she can chew when she tries to harness the unusual power of a hapless Victorian gent in “The Water Cure”, and that notorious opium eater Thomas De Quincey reveals a dark and untold aspect to his well-known tale in “Mr De Quincy and the Daughters of Madness”; “Blackthorn and Nettles” goes back to druidic traditions of ancient Britain, and “On Windhover Down” takes place in an alternate branch of English history where the transition between the old gods and their imported supercedents is not yet complete.

There’s a variety of tone throughout, though Williams tends toward a verbose narration in the first person (which may be a function of the dominance of [alt]-historical settings in this collection); there’s also a scale of severity or seriousness that runs from its peak in the stories set on the Mars of Williams’ Winterstrike novels (“The Age Of Ice”, “La Malcontenta”) down to the whimsical Whitby-and-Goths spook-story “All Fish and Dracula” (which was a smidgen too cute for my palate). The Winterstrike setting feels like it’ll be very much to my taste, though, so I’ll have to look those up when the opportunity arises.

What really leapt out at me, though, was the regularity with which Williams has her characters transition across the borders between “reality” and other dimensions – Hell, Faerie, altered states, the afterlife – and back again, and the way in which she views those transitions and transactions in much the same terms that we understand the borders between nation-states; the Other Side is always political, sometimes sexual (though not overtly so). The transitions always change the person who makes them, too; it’s those who hang back or tremble undecided on the borders who tend to get hurt the worst. Don’t hesitate in the face of change, of the other… I’m put in mind of Chris Beckett’s fiction, which – while stylistically very different – contains this same fascination with the transgression of boundaries, though Chris tends to focus on the apprehension and temptation of transition (and the tension that temptation creates when strung against the need for borders to be maintained and policed) rather than the transgressions themselves. An opportunity for some sort of comparative paper there, maybe.

As a final aside, it struck me that “Ikiryoh” poses the same ethical question as Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”: is the deliberately engineered suffering of a single unfortunate justifiable if it brings peace and plenty to the entire state? The problem is approached from a very different angle to LeGuin’s; this story is more story than parable, for a start, and the answer is left for the reader to decide for themselves (though Williams’ protagonist – itself, perhaps tellingly, a member of an engineered servitor underclass – seems to make her own choice before the story’s end). Indeed, the literary similarities are very few, but it was the chime of recognition that made me think it worth noting down; it’s one of those themes that always reaches out of a story and slaps me into stillness, and I think there’s a lesson for me -both literary and personal – in that jerk of clarity.

As with all the most important lessons, though, what is to be learned is not immediately apparent. Selah.

2011 continues its rollercoaster procession of highs and lows; this morning I heard that Colin Harvey passed away after suffering a massive stroke on Monday morning. He was fifty years old, and was just hitting his stride on a promising career as a novelist. Colin was a client of mine, and while I wouldn’t say I’d spent enough time with him in meatspace to really qualify as a friend, I hung out with him at a few convention dinners and other such shindigs; he was a wry and funny guy, always giving other writers a hand up, always paying it forwards. He’ll be much missed by a lot of people.

Rest easy, Colin. As a tattoo’d millionaire airline pilot once sung: only the good die young.

Public service announcement time, folks. Turns out that for various reasons my house will no longer have broadband connectivity as of tomorrow, and I currently have no idea how soon we’ll be getting it back.

No, I’m not very happy about this at all. In the name of diplomacy, however, I’m going to do the wise thing and not explain exactly why I’m so unhappy about it. This is just one of the costs of sharing a living space; sometimes decisions that affect you are beyond your control. Sometimes, you may feel that those decisions have been made foolishly, or for reasons which you would respond to very differently. At those times, one must simply suck it up and deal.

So, yeah; not like the posting schedule here is going to be affected much (what with there being no posting schedule to speak of), but other things may be backburnered by necessity, and this strikes me as the logical place to make a central announcement of such for non-business purposes. (Affected clients will be contacted directly, if any of you are reading.)

Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: Looks like the downtime may be limited to just a few days in a week or so’s time, which is a great relief. Thanks for all the offers of help; may still need to take a few of them up at some point.

How long’s it been since I did an FPB? Long enough that I know looking up the precise date isn’t worth doing, really, and I doubt it’ll ever go weekly again… but hey, never say never, right? Anyways, here’s Hilsea station at midnight or so, which is what I see while waiting for my train home after a late shift at my place of summer employment.

What else have I been up to? I’ve been up to ALL THE STUFF, most notably the 2011 SFF Masterclass, which – as always – was a weekend of pure high-grade literary brain-crack. I also got accepted onto the Masters degree in creative writing that I mentioned back in February, which I’m really looking forward to doing come October, around which time – all going well – I should have an interesting and stable new employment opportunity which will leave me enough time to study and write as well as leaving me enough money to pay the rent, buy food, all that jazz.

So, yeah, we’re in a far better place than we were last year, aren’t we? Mmm-hmm. Onwards, upwards, etcetera.

As far as residence is concerned, I’m still in the bay-windowed front room of a shared house in Southsea, which is suitably cheap for the summer’s scant income levels, but a bit tiny by comparison to my former domicile, a spacious if poorly-located Stockport garret. Half of my library (mostly the non-fic and special editions) is still at my mother’s place in deepest darkest East Yorkshire, but the other half is now out of the garage and back on the shelves in the middle room, which is a great relief; having all your books in boxes is a pretty similar sensation to being without a decent broadband connection, or at least it is for me.

But hey, the damn things just keep coming, thanks at least in part to Albert Road’s gaggle of second-hand book shops, but also to assorted publicists and publishers, and – most pleasurable of all – the arrival of my first ever contributor copies – Fables from the Fountain, remember? Course you do; they’re near the top right of this lot, which have gathered over the last couple of months:

That Masters course means I have reading lists to work on, of course, and this week has seen the first acquisitions of such, along with a few other goodies:

I’m too lazy to list and link ‘em all, I’m afraid, though even if I don’t revive FPB I intend to document new acquisitions on a more regular basis, if only so I can keep track of the damned things!

And I need to start posting reading notes here instead of letting them moulder in notebooks, too. Thinking up and writing down my “review” of The Universe Of Things, the latest Gwyneth Jones collection from Aqueduct (which I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest is more of a critique or analysis, especially given its 3,200 word length) took up an unprecedented amount of cognitive focus, and it’ll be nice to start attacking these piles with vigour… though I should really prioritise on reading Embassytown, as I’m writing a review of that as well. Worse problems to have, eh?

Right, anyway, enough of this – there’s stuff to be doing before the day is done. And then there’ll be the “go out, or stay in and try out that EVE trial account?” dilemma… oh Friday, how you embarrass us with your riches!

Have a good weekend yourselves, OK? Later.

As always, Alan Moore provides plenty of value for money in this interview at New Statesman. I’m pulling out this particular chunk primarily because it’s a nice way to remind myself I’m not the only person who thinks like this… though I’m sure there are plenty of folk who’d happily tell me that sharing my politics with a perpetually stoned post-modern pseudo-occultist and writer of comics isn’t anything to be proud of.

But you know what? Fuck those people. Take it away, Mister Moore:

I take this seriously, I don’t like to vote because I don’t believe in the democratic process, and I don’t believe that it is democracy. Democracy as I understand it is demos – the people shall rule. It doesn’t say anything about the elective representatives shall rule. I think in Dodgem Logic there was an option that got put forward that I would find preferable, which was the Athenian way.

Yes, you get summoned -

Yes, it’s by lottery, if there is a decision of national importance to be made, a jury or a parliament will be decided by lottery. They will hear both sides of the argument, they will vote, the jury will be dissolved. So there’s no way you can vote for extra privileges for MPs because you won’t be one. It’s more in your interests to vote for what is in the general interest of the broad population that you will be returning to.

So, I’m not saying that it’s a flawless idea but its maybe one of the ideas that we should start thinking about, because I really think that this is pretence of democracy at best.

Yeah, and a handful of marginal constituencies get to hold the balance of power.

Yeah, that’s it, also back when I was working with the Green Party in local politics back in the 80s, there was the idea of proportional representation, which would have meant that if the Green Party had got one per cent of the vote they’d would have had one per cent of the MPs.

And yes, if the British National Party, or the National Front as it was then, would have got one per cent of the vote you might have ended up with a National Front MP, but I could’ve gone along with that. That sounded like it would at least been fairer

But this AV thing is nothing to do with proportional representation [we spoke before the referendum]. It’s another way of organising the deck chairs on the Titanic. We do need something a lot more drastic than that. Yes, we need some alternative to our current system, that wasn’t it.

So, no, I don’t vote, I believe in direct political action. I mean, some friends of mine from Wales, where I bought a ruined farm about 15 years ago, one of them had gone over to Romania and seen the volunteer orphanage that was trying to help out people that they’d rescued from the state orphanages, which were horrifying, stuff that you wouldn’t want in your head.

And this guy who was an ex-Welsh rugby player with a face like someone had tried to put a fire out on it with a shovel, everything that you’d expect of a great, big former rugby hero. He was over there on business, he saw this going on, and he couldn’t live with not doing anything.

So he came home and got a bunch of liver-damaged, unemployable drunks from Wales to go out there with a couple of lorries and materials that he’d guilt-tripped business colleagues into donating, and they built an orphanage and a hospice within two weeks with electricity and water.

What I’m saying here is, if you look at the world and there’s something that you can’t live with or there’s something that you don’t agree with, don’t vote for someone who tells you that they’re going to put that right, because they’re not. They are trying to get you to vote for them, they will tell you anything in order to get you to vote for them.

The underlined passage is my own emphasis, and the main reason I wanted to reblog this here. Whenever I get into a discussion of anarchist models for democracy (and no, that’s not an oxymoron, as Moore demonstrates above), it’s always the most staunch defenders of democracy-as-she-is-played who tell me that the danger of letting everyone and anyone play the game is that you might get people with really dodgy views – views contrary to democracy itself, in fact – having a say in the political process.

To which I often say “yeah, so what?”

It’s not a response that wins me many new friends, thanks to the spurious logic trail that goes “Person X believes people with fascist viewpoints have as much right to have their voice heard as anyone else, therefore Person X tacitly supports fascism”. I do not support or even condone fascism, but I’m aware of the dichotomy in leftist politics that enshrines freedom of speech at the same time as trying to exclude opposing ideologies from the conversation. The intent is pure, but I think it’s actually counterproductive.

“But Paul, if you let the fascists speak, they’ll bamboozle stupid people into believing their poisonous lies!” Possibly so, yeah, but by silencing them you’re not just acting counter to your own espoused ideologies, but also giving them the additional persuasion-ammo of suppression (“come hear the truth that They don’t want you to hear!”).

Certainly in the contemporary UK political scene, fascist rhetoric is almost entirely based on this sense of exclusion-from-process, and it feeds on that vague sense of one’s privilege being eroded that gets stoked by tabloid media playing to the peanut gallery (“OMG so many brown people on benefits OMG the white working class male is a victim of reverse racism OMG!”). When it comes to fascism, I’m a strong believer in the old adage about “giving ‘em enough rope”; give a fascist the publicity he so craves, and he very quickly makes it plain that he’s in favour of things that the vast majority of people are actively repulsed by. Drive them underground, however, and they can manage their in-clique channels with greater fidelity. All politicians lie, but fascism requires the greatest level of deceit applied to the greatest percentage of the population; if you force them to communicate off the public radar, you forego the chance to publicly scrutinise – and critique – those communications.

Few things corrode untruth as quickly as wide exposure; I suspect a BNP MP in Westminster would be the worst possible advert for the party. Currently, for the vast majority of floating voter types, the BNP are a vague threat that lurks in Northern towns and the London boroughs that you don’t go shopping in, and as such are of little concern in anything other than the abstract – you know, “it could never happen here!”. Well, it could – and if it does, how will you recognise it when you see it? Indeed, if you’ve not been exposed to the sort of rhetoric used by fascist ideologues, you might find yourself falling for it while piously believing yourself to be a modern and progressive type of person. (UKIP, anyone?)

I think my problem with the counterargument is that it’s enshrined in a passionate commitment to protecting representative democracy, but it demonstrates a lack of faith in representative democracy’s ability to produce a fair government that actually represents the people in the way to which it pays perpetual lip service. Or, to put it another way: if you can’t trust representative democracy to improve people’s lives to such a degree that the majority of them will vote in ways that expand and advance that central conceptual remit, then there’s a pretty serious flaw in the system, and you’re admitting such by saying that not every voter can be trusted to vote correctly. “You’re free to elect the people who you feel best represent your views… um, but you mustn’t listen to those people.” See what I mean?

At this point someone usually points out that Hitler was legitimately elected in Germany, which is very true. It’s also a massive simplification of a very complex and turbulent period in German politics – not to mention the politics of the rest of the world – and conveniently overlooks the fact that the democratic process in Germany at the time had become fatally discredited in the eyes of much of its electorate. And yes, that’s exactly the same reason the duplicity of people like the BNP gets traction in the UK at the moment; as such, the rational response is not to pillory the fascists and fuel their persecution complexes, but to make the system more open, more accountable, more transparent. Fascism – and right-wing politics in general, if we’re going to talk in terms of that old binary – thrives on secrecy, on whispered reports of unverifiable injustices and shadowy conspiracies. Make it obvious that the lies are lies, and the lies lose their power. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and so on.

This is also why I have a very ambivalent relationship to legislating against hate speech, because that legislation is a tacit admission of hate speech’s power, amplifying its effect among those who already feel disenfranchised; the best solution to hate speech is true speech. And if anything, as much as the constant battle to [x]-101 people about issues that should really be canonical in an enlightened society is exhausting and tedious in the extreme, I think the anyone-can-say-anything scrum of the internet shows us that it works, albeit very slowly. Outsourcing that advocacy to representatives is tempting for exactly that reason – there are countless nicer things to be doing, after all – but by concentrating that power of advocacy in a limited number of hands, you’re assembling the scaffold of hierarchy along which authoritarianism will creep and grow.

If we’re too lazy to work for a better world, we have no one to blame but ourselves as that better world slips out of sight.

Which is why I am an anarchist.

Hey, Dad; long time.

Nearly a whole decade, in fact, and each successive slice of it slips by faster than the last, as both you and Mum always warned me it would. Time’s a river, so start paddling if you want to make it through the rapids, right?

Well, it took me a while to suss the truth of that; I’ve never been good at taking anyone’s word at face value without testing the hypothesis myself, have I? The irony here is that you taught me that methodology of life at the same time you tried to teach me that the rules are there for a reason. I think perhaps you blamed yourself for the latter never sticking, but – as rum a ride as it’s been, and promises still to be – I think you actually inculcated the more useful program into me after all. I wish I’d had a chance to apologise for making it so difficult an experience for both of us, though; you last saw me at my lowest ebb. That was maybe partly because you were at yours as well, but hey, we can’t go back and change it. Make your bed, then lay in it… and that’s another one of your favourites that’s stuck with me.

And you were right, the path I chose was a difficult one; it always will be, if you choose to cut your own way through the forest. But you couldn’t see that the paths on the old maps were getting rutted, haunted by brigands and hard-to-see predators; you passed that way a long time befoire I had the choice, and the landscape was very different by that point. At the time I was furious at you for giving me an obsolete map, and I realise now that I should have been more grateful for the fact you left me one at all. Your old man walked out on you before you were even born; perhaps that’s what enabled you to stick to your fatherly guns, a stubborn determination to be better than the example you’d had set for you. And while I still have no wish to become a parent myself (another disappointment, I know), I think maybe it was a matching level of stubbornness that had us lock horns over so much petty crap. Mum says I look more like you every year; I guess it’ll turn out that we’re more like each other than either of us ever wanted to think… which, as ironies go, could be much worse.

I miss you, y’know, though I don’t like to admit it – emotion is a private matter, right? Well, maybe not; I’ve been questioning that one a lot recently, and it’s not holding up well under interrogation. So here’s me admitting it, and saying sorry, and saying I love you.

Rest easy, you old bastard.

Your son, Paul.