Here’s how it is. Here’s how it starts.

You and your peers will graduate. Some of you will have better degrees than others. Deep down, none of you will feel like real artists. You won’t be talked to as real artists either.

They’ll call you emerging.

It’s a form of token support that proposes to help you get a foot in the door, but simultaneously insinuates that you don’t know what you are doing yet.

It seems like there is a lot of opportunity available for emerging artists. Almost every venue, gallery and institution has open calls for you.

But then you look at the money.

How are you supposed to make anything with that?

Some places have the gall to call them ‘micro commissions’, as if they are some sort of snack fund that you receive between your main commissions.

As an emerging artist you are supposed to compete with established artists on a fraction of the budget. Your work becomes smaller and more portable in comparison.

It doesn’t seem fair.

It’s not fair.

You, and your peers decide that things have to change.

And that change isn’t for you, it’s also for everyone struggling up this treacherous ladder after you.

[WASH]

As a cohort, you attack.

There isn’t a plan, but if there was it would look something like the following.

One team infiltrates the infrastructure. They get low paid jobs in the sector. Supporting arts organisations and other artists. They appear front of house, they get producorial jobs, technical roles, or roles in marketing. Jobs that seem to come without much money and even less credit.

But they are not there for the money. They are there for the intel. They are there to fill in the jobs above them, to climb the ladder slowly into positions of power with budgets, when the previous owners leave and the institutions can’t afford to replace them.

More work and power for the same pay.

Another battalion of the legion continue as artists, but their role is propaganda. The infiltrators can’t be loud on social media, they have to be seen walking the company line, but the freelance artists are now expected to shout loud about their plight, about the pay, the hours, the lack of opportunity and credit.

Obviously, they are still making work too. Often on a budget of nothing, or one of those micro-commissions that barely covers the cost of traveling somewhere. They also, if they are lucky, get work with more established artists. This normally happens in a junior position, it often happens without much credit or money.

The third attack wave is more subtle. This section of the cohort works to subvert the infrastructure. They may also call themselves producers, or promoters.

These folk are the ones putting on avant-garde nights in local pubs, creating festivals of new work. They set up as an alternative.

Generally, these alternative nights tend to do rather well. They are seemingly better attended than more established venues. The audiences are vibrant and diverse.

The artists are young and daring. There’s a feeling of something vital happening. It is exciting and a little feral. There’s still no money though.

The traditional venues, perhaps with some prompting from their new intern, take note. We could use some of that, they say. Let us support you, let us help you.

And with those words the infiltration has happened.

[RINSE]

Very quickly you find yourself promoted to a position of genuine power. It happens almost too quickly.

The organisation is replacing some of the old guard. It’s time for new blood. They’re moving on, and moving up, some of them are moving out to become freelance consultants.

You find yourself with the power of an institution, if not necessarily the money of an institution.

It’s time to get everybody in.

You begin by creating daring new seasons of work, featuring young creatives alongside some of the giants.

And your peers follow. You get them on the ladder, you support their work by branding it and providing space. You argue for the money, and maybe you get a little. You hand it out as best as you can. Of course some of the older artists complain. How are we supposed to make a living, they ask, when all you are interested in is young people? Where is the support for emerged artists? For the mid-career artists?

You don’t have the money to support everyone, you explain, but you will continue to help them in every way you can. You invite them in for lunch time talks and refer the young artists to them for advice and support, all of which can be supported by the Arts Council.

You vow to continue to shake things up, to dispel the inequity, to stop micro-commissions, and to open up the institution for all.

You find yourself on panels and being asked to go and see work all over the place. talking about how daring you are being, how fierce and bold this work is, and how it is like nothing that has come before.

And it works, people listen to you and people want to talk to you, because they know that you can make things happen for them.

It feels a little weird though. Whilst you suddenly finding yourself traveling across the globe to look at other institutions, festivals and work, the nights that you used to put on in the local pubs disappear, you don’t have the time and no one seems able to keep them running without you.

You also start to notice that you are seeing the same work in every place you go, and every festival you attend. The circus has its own acts. You invite some of the young artists you know to join you and represent their work.

You contribute to this giant traveling circus. They take the work you support and you take the work they are supporting. It feeds back on itself.

You call it international exchange, but something niggles. It feels awfully like nepotism. You are told, this is how the sector works, and since the money supporting this circus isn’t yours, there’s little you can do about it.

You explain as much when one of your peers calls you out on it. Why are you booking this work from abroad when you can be supporting local talent that is desperate for an opportunity?

[CONDITION]

Some time has passed.

You’ve got into a rhythm.

You’ve lost that feeling of being an impostor, because you’ve seen that almost everyone is an impostor. Everyone is making it up as they go and really the job is fire-fighting.

You are at the top now. You have a title that likely has the word ‘creative’ in it, but it feels far more administrative.

You have a team. A constantly revolving crew of people that want your job but have to settle for marketing and producing. They move far easier between institutions than you can, and that’s not a bad thing, the connections reinforce the sector. However, that means a large chunk of people working for you are now not from the place the institution is situated.

They’ll talk about place-making a lot, but in reality they’ll pitch seasons that are based on things about the area that are new to them, but not new to the local population.

They’ll see a weird building in the town and discover its weird history and commission a whole season based on that. However, the locals have heard that story since they were in primary school. In a way it is already their story and their place.

You get an artist in from another place to tell these people about the place that they already live in.

You get an email from a local artist that points out that the work you’ve commissioned looks very similar to a work that was here about six years ago. It was their work.

This doesn’t quite feel like what you were aiming for when you were about being daring and challenging the establishment, but this isn’t your life any more, it’s a job. No, it’s more than a job, you still care and you still enjoy it, but you also have your eye on another life, maybe with a family.

[RINSE]

You notice that you have to programme according to the tides of fashion. There’s not as much freedom or money as you’d like. What once felt daring now feels rote. You also notice that audience numbers aren’t great.

When you started this gig the venue enjoyed a small but dedicated older audience. They turned up for everything. You added your peers to that, and for a time the audience numbers were great.

But your peers have moved on, they have busy lives, and the older audience members aren’t that keen on some of the newer works you are programming. And you have to programme it else you’ll look just like the dusty venues you once complained about.

Or maybe not, maybe your venue or festival has always had a solid audience, willing to follow you as you bring them work. However, you often get accused of programming for a particular type of audience, which suggests that you are excluding others, no matter how inclusive you try and make it.

You realise that the audience for this stuff is self selecting and no matter how hard your marketing department tweets about a show, you can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, everyone who is going to turn up. You are also on first name terms with the people that email you to tell you where you are getting it wrong.

You realise that this is a strange balancing act. A high wire without a safety net, and often without an appreciative audience.

You watch with muted fear sometimes as peers at other institutions are accused of racism, or sexism, or inappropriate uses of money when all they are doing is what they are being asked to do.

If you are being unkind, you see that the people, making these accusations are the same young cohort that is starting to complain that no one is taking notice of their work, and that they aren’t being paid to be the artists that they are.

[SPIN]

You have a child and a brilliant idea dawns on you.

Art should be for children too!

The problem is that these institutions aren’t accessible to very young people and they are being excluded from the conversation.

You make a case that what the local area and society in general needs is child-accessible art and you are going to lead the way.

This feels daring and new. The sheer luck that you have a child to test this on too.

Many of your team are in a similar position, and it seems so obvious now. You transform the dusty old gallery space into a vibrant messy space, where children can come and get involved.

Your audience pivots, you now have parents and their children. That’s a two-for-one deal that impresses the venue owners. The numbers are up.

Mostly up.

You notice that you don’t see as many of the people that used to regularly attend your events. Maybe they’ve moved on.

When you do book adult only work in the evenings, your staff are tired from a day of working, and you are too. You have committments at home. Care-issues, a partner, perhaps.

Family stuff.

You don’t get to see as much of the visiting work as you’d like. Sometimes, not a single member of your team attends. The visiting company slink off after the show cursing you all for your lack of hospitality.

They are also cursing the fact that they played to an audience of eight people, two of which they brought with them.

Maybe you get an email on Monday morning asking, exactly, what your marketing team did to promote the show. Maybe they question the insinuation that a company from two-hundred miles away has sufficient connections in the town of your organinsation to rouse an audience themselves.

You concede that they have a point, but that’s how things are.

[SPIN]

Your good friend who was head of marketing and is now head of audience development pulls you aside for a word.

You are going to have to compromise, they say. If you start using the venue for more commercial forms, touring stand up comedians, cover bands, that sort of thing, you’ll be able to make enough money and get the audience figures that will allow you to programme the more daring and brave work.

It’s not ideal. Perhaps you can create a seperate brand for these nights to keep things distinct.

Now you are effectively running two venues. One that specialises in cutting edge work made by artists that have been emerging for years and another that looks like every other standard touring venue.

The audiences don’t mix, but they do add up.

Talking of audiences, you notice that the messy spaces are rather quiet, in fact they are as quiet as they were when they were just galleries.
The children are at school during the week, and with the exception of the Christmas pantomime you are now putting on, you don’t see them as an audience so much.

That Christmas, you are our on your annual meal with the team, in what feels like one of the few truly social events you get to attend now, and you stumble into a pub.

On stage is a young performer, their work is so strange and brilliant it leaves you reeling. Later you walk over and ask them if they’d like to come and perform at your venue.

They ask you why they’d want to do that when their audience is here.

[DRY]

You are sat in the office, filling out a funding bid. It’s an important one, and the future of your organisation depends upon in.

You consider your world. The struggle you’ve had trying to get to where you want to go. It’s not been ideal.

It been ideal for your peers either. Many of them are no longer in the arts, and the ones that are mostly subsidise their work with teaching gigs.

But there have been some highlights, you’ve supported amazing work, you’ve seen amazing work and they’ve made amazing work, and this work is now an inspiration to the next generation of artists that are coming up. You’ve set the bar and you’ve set it high.

You realise you feel old.

And then another moment of inspiration.

Art for old people!

Art about the menopause, inter-generational dancing, work around caring for the elderly.

This is brave and new. This is so timely and important and right now.

You write a piece about how vital it is and it gets published in the Guardian. It gets widely shared on social media.

The people around you are all seeing this.

Except for the young ones. They’ve started to complain that your organisation is just work by older established artists and that there is no space for them.

You chat to finance and you find some money. It’s not as much as you’d like, but it’s a start. You think you need to acknowledge that when you give it out, so you call it a micro-commission.

You also offer to put them in contact with the established artists that can mentor them and that you’ll support them in putting together Arts Council apps so that everyone gets paid.

[HANG OUT]

The results of the application come back and it is great news. Your organisation recieved all the money the money you need to commission all of the work.

Everyone’s job is safe.

Except...

You get a call from the board. They’ve been thinking.

What this season needs is new blood. There’s that young artist that has been working as a producer here for the last few months, they seem ideal for this sort of thing, of course we’ll put it to interview, but they already have experience here.

They recognise how much you have done. They will support you in going forward.

Perhaps you can be a freelance consultant?

"...because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns"

-- Donald Rumsfeld

What many people may have misunderstood at the time was that Donald was trying to communicate the perils of artist-community engagement.

Perhaps he knew that rocking up in a new town like Basrah required a more subtle approach than merely placing a callout in an email or on social media.

Maybe he had figured out that the common forms of community engagement was falling short, especially for the unknown unknowns.

[ORGANISTATION]

There are three main reasons why arts organisations care deeply about their audiences.

The first, as whimsical as it sounds, is true. Many people working in the arts want to share them. They think the arts are fab. They get a tremendous amount of joy from the arts and want everyone to feel that.

Honestly, if you stripped away everything else, this would be the core of every arts organisation. Even a cynic like me recognises that.

Without an audience, art is just a one sided conversation. A broadcast into the void. That isn't satisfying for any artist or organisation.

The second reason is less lovely.

It's money.

The third reason is also money.

As much as arts organisations would love to act through pure altruism, the reality is that it all runs on money. Money to pay staff and artists. Money to keep the building open and pay the bills. The heating. The electricity.

And this money has to come from two main sources. Audiences provide money through buying tickets to shows and getting drunk at the bar during the interval.

This is why, if you are trying to be a true patron of the arts, propping up the bar is your duty.

Your average arts organisation needs to tend to this audience. They need to cater to their needs and tastes, and they understand that audiences need constant upkeep. Sometimes audience members get old, or move away, you need new ones to replace them. Besides, every year there are thousands of young potential audience members being born. They don't even know what the world of art has to offer them yet!

This might seem a little like recruitment. That's because it is.

That said, we like to call it audience development.

Then there's the metric. The way in which funding bodies judge whether an arts organisation is worthy of public money.

The arts in the UK doesn't function without this subsidy. Without it we would only have art made by the wealthy. We would only have art enjoyed by the wealthy, serviced by the lucky.

It would be pretty grim for artists, but much worse for the audience.

The main metric we use to judge whether organisations deserve this money is what we call, "engagement".

It's a vague term, measured quantitatively and qualitatively at the same time.

Is half an engagement still an engagement? No one seems to know, exactly, but it is common knowledge that bigger numbers are better numbers.

Whilst you can just report the number of people in the audience, since it is safe to assume their presence demonstrates engagement, organisations also have to demonstrate that they are making efforts to reach people that don't already engage with the organisation. The reasons why they might not engage are many -- they might not know the organisation exists, they might know it exists, but they might think it isn't for them, they might think it is too expensive, it might actually be too expensive.

Really, community engagement is the twin sibling of audience development. Admittedly one sounds far more altruistic and less capitalistic.

And that leads us to the main question. How do organisations engage with the audiences they know, the audiences that they know they don't know and the audiences that they don't know that they don't know?

How do they Rumsfeld?

The majority of arts organisations are, somewhat necessarily, found at a fixed location. They operate from there in an outwards manner. That is to say, that they expect the audience to come to them.

This is how they interact with the community.

This isn't a bad thing at all. Nearly every social service works in this manner. Public houses, libraries, swimming pools and gyms. It makes sense since the machinery of production -- in the case of an arts organisation, the stage and lights and sound systems -- is difficult to transport, and being in a reliable location helps customers find things on a whim.

There are outliers to this, and many organisations offer a programme of work off-site and via alternative platforms, such as streaming. However, the audience for these offerrings remain similar to the ones that visit the site itself.

This is likely because the ways of publicising these alternatives still rely on the organisational infrastructure... newsletters, subscriber emails.

The people who are already interested in the events at these spaces are the most likely to encounter the events when they happen externally.

There are a few reasons why this isn't ideal for an arts organisation. In an altruistic manner, it means that some people are missing out on a resource in their community. There might be things that they'll miss, not because they wouldn't be interested but because they wouldn't know.

One way of countering this is to devolve the audience engagement to an agent that is far more flexible, lightweight and agile.

Artists.

[THAT'S BAIT]

The similarity between audience engagement and audience development does not necessarily reveal a cynical system, rather a symbiotic relationship.

An example of this is young people engagement.

On one hand there's an opportunity to introduce young people to the arts ecosystem. There are plenty of studies that show early exposure enables these children to grow into adults that feel they have a stake in the arts. It helps get them over that initial threshold and helps them feel ownership.

This aligns with the needs of the schools and educational syllabus. Art as a learning tool, as a vector for abstract and difficult concepts. Art as a focal point.

Plus, teachers might get an afternoon off by handing over a class. You should see the relief in their faces as they devolve the responsibility of keeping a hundred children focussed for an hour.

We might do that a few times a season whislt these soldiers man the trenches five days a week for most of the year.

Meanwhile, the organisation gets a chance to recruit a new generation of audience. An audience that frequently comes with parents too.

The important thing here is that this arrangement has to have value on both sides.

[EXPLOITATION]

Community engagement is not about treating a community as a resource to be mined or exploited. Communities are not the raw material for art.

Opinions, thoughts, feelings and lives should not be harvested in order to be presented back to the people they belong to.

Community engagement should be about providing value to the community the organisation or artist as working with.

And yes, that might be encouraging members of that community over the threshold and helping them to transition into an audience member.

But it might also be about enabling them to take part as co-creators, or facilitating representation in a community resource that is partly owned by them.

It's a tricky line to walk. Artists and organisations have to be especially careful in making sure their actions align with the rhetoric they use to refer to their work in the community.

It's easy for us to get wrapped up in funding speak and forget the purpose of all of this.

[PITFALLS]

If you follow the social media output of an arts organisation regularly you may have noticed something.

The same faces tend to appear in candid shots of community engagement activities.

These people are the known knowns.

They are the folk that regularly show up for events, shows, seminars, afternoon talks, workshops, community arts projects and hastily thrown together engagement sessions.

They have talked to artists about motherhood, aging bodies, the environment, slavery, their working lives, fifteenth century witchcraft, class structure, specific foods, food in general, and their favourite colour.

And this is not necessarily bad, but it is misleading. When an organisation reports back on how many people it has engaged with, these folk are counted multiple times.

The known knowns really deserve an award. They are the beating heart that keeps the arts infrastructure alive. Their reliable presence makes them easy to find, and working alongside them is often a genuine joy, mostly because they have far greater experience of community engagement than the artists that are trying to engage with them.

[THE KNOWN UNKNOWNS]

The main problem with community engagement is one of language.

"Community" is a difficult term. What defines a community? Is it a monolithic entity? Can someone be a member of a community and not want to be? Can someone be a member of more than one community? If you don't identify as being part of a community, does that mean you don't belong to it?

Similarly, "engagement" is a difficult term. What defined engagement? Is looking at something engagement? Is talking about something engagement? Do you have to like something to be engaged by it? Is there such a thing as bad engagement? Is one deep engagement worth more than a hundred shallow engagements, and if so, how do you measure that?

This has lead to a sort of data fetish. In lieu of actual answers, as an industry we've leant towards "bigger numbers are better numbers".

This quantified approach is particularly useful when reporting to funding bodies, since they have word counts on answers, but very few limits on the size of numbers you can type in a box.

As such, tools like the box office software, Spektrix, have become popular.

These tools help organisations analyse the data that they obtain through their box office. It's not just which shows are popular and which are less popular, but also which shows are popular with *who*.

Using postcode analysis and other metadata associated with user accounts, we can identify who isn't showing up at the arts organisations events.

These are the known unknowns.

Some inference can be made about the demographic of these people too. Age, sex, gender, ethnicity, class, household income.

Identifying and classifying these known unknowns is serious business. Spektrix, for example, sells a product that scales with ticket sales with reports of yearly charges between £12.5k to £250k for a single venue, depending upon ticket sales.

And the reason why arts organisations find this an acceptable solution is that it helps organisation evidence impact to funders.

It says so on the Spektrix site.

"Evidence Impact to Funders".

And so, if you identify an area that isn't showing up at the organisation and then make some changes so that they do show up, then you can demonstrate to funders that you are engaging with these communities.

Organisations will do this through a range of means. Structurally, programming and marketing can help. You can piggy back on cultural and religious events, everything from Diwali through to pantomime.

There's always a centenary of something.

Historical events located in those areas can also be featured in the programme, particularly if local schools can tie this into their curriculum.

All whilst making sure that any changes don't alienate the known knowns who already present as an audience.

[EMITTTING]

Unlike the organisations they are working within, artists are surprisingly mobile, in general.

They are expected to travel wherever the audience is, rather than expecting one to come to them.

This means they have just the right skillset that organisations can use to reach those known unknowns.

Using the organisation as a basecamp and working outwards. Wandering into communities and setting up workshops. Going and meeting with people to discuss work. Finding out about the world like an expeditionary force for engagement.

Artists are not normally trained in this. Certainly, some of them have read up on anthropological approaches and ethics of working in communities, but a great many just sort of wing it.

It can be like sending the soldiers to the front without any basic training.

You always know when you have been identified as a region rich in known unknowns when the artists arrive to tell you things about the place you live that you probably already know, but that are surprisingly new and important to them.

I know, I know, my cynicism is showing. But I grew up here with the witches. All my friends grew up here with the witches. Some of them are related to the witches. Yet every ten years an artist from elsewhere discovers the witches and tries to tell us why they are important, and ultimately why they are important for noticing this.

A wonderful discovery of witches.

On the whole though, arts organisations are just trying to get these people interested in art, and much like when starting a conversation with a stranger, it is much easier if you open with a question about what they think.

Hopefully, once you've recruited the new audience member by getting them to talk about themselves, you'll be able to keep them interested as they listen to other voices too. It doesn't always work, and people are more likely to hang around for work that is about themselves, but this isn't about the larger number, this is about reaching that one person who does hang around after the story of them is finished.

[INTERLUDE]

We went to Halfords today to pick up two tonne car ramps. That is to say each car ramp can hold one tonne of weight and that there are two of them.

We know this because we had a long discussion about it with the young person serving us at the till.

It didn't really matter since it is only likely to hold around two hundred kilograms at the most.

We talked about mixing imperial and metric units and why there is something uniquely British in not knowing how to convert them adequately.

The staff member asked us for our car registration number. We would get a 5% discount if we could hand it over.

I don't drive, I replied. We don't have a car.

He looked a little puzzled and asked what we were using the car ramps for.

"Well, it's like this, Gillian is going to stand at one end of a plank and..."

[UNKOWN UNKNOWNS]

It isn't that we are doing nothing. It is more that if it looks like we are doing nothing then we are doing what we are doing perfectly.

You could sit in a room with some people and say, "tell us your thoughts about..." and they would tell you their thoughts.

Many of them wouldn't listen to other people's thoughts because they would be too busy trying to work out what they thought.

They'd maybe even be worrying about whether what they thought made them sound foolish, so they might be subtly changing what they thought to match the rest of the room.

Humans do this. We like to fit in.

It's what make us adorable.

Maybe even the person being asked what they think wants to please us as artists. Maybe they want to give an elegant and artsy response. It might not be a true response, but they'll be helping us, surely?

The problem, you see, is context. By sitting in a room and talking about *the thing* there is no context around it, and often the context is the best bit.

We've got to be careful when trying to engage with people that we don't lead them, whether we mean to or not.

Besides, these methods are only any good at finding people that are known knowns or potentially known unknowns.

How do you encounter the unknown unknowns?

Tangentially.

Accidentally.

Obliquely.

Casually.

But above all, to do it whilst paying attention to the world. Look. Listen.

Strike up conversations everywhere with everyone. Not about what you are doing, or what your work is about, but what is happening for them right then in the real world.

Just talk to people and pay attention. They'll tell you everything.

In the shop talk to the cashier. Ask them how their day is, and listen to the reply.

Again, I can't stress this enough, the trick is to listen, not to broadcast.

Engage in conversation with people in the street. If this scares you, perhaps community engagement isn't really what you should be doing.

We have found the best way is to just go out into the world and move as if directed by Brownian motion. Start somewhere with no plan and see where you get to.

Create the opportunity for randomness. Let yourself be led by the conversation.

Later on, sit and think about it, place it in context. Maybe it it doesn't fit, that's OK too, nothing was wasted because you had a nice time chatting to a stranger. However, I'm willing to bet that in some small way it influenced you, that conversation, as you have gone about your engagement and as such it has influenced your work.

This is how you find the unknown unknowns, because you don't know.

The artists don't know. The arts organisations don't know. The funding bodies don't know.

And most importantly the unknown unknowns themselves do not know.

This is the work of the artist in a community, to discover, to listen and to contextualise. Not to prompt, survey and repackage.

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Despite being an artist for what feels like an awfully long time now, I have resisted the urge to write a manifesto.

Artist manifestos tend to come across as self-agrandising, or naive.

I understand that this one will come across as self-aggrandising and naive.

But, I find myself stood in the soft soil of a new year, and I want to plant some seeds.

I think what follows are reminders. They are here to remind me, but perhaps you will find some that resonate too.

We are heading into strange times. A late-stage capitalism that makes us nostalgic for mid-stage capitalism.

Decades of austerity and now rising populism. These things are connected.

The organisations and institutions that support the arts are falling into a franchise model of operation in desperation and economic necessity.

AI and social media combine with monolithic consumption platforms such as Netflix to create a consensus culture that sidelines fringe voices.

A dystopia sits on the horizon. Everything is a popularity contest.

A monoculture looms.

[DISCONTENT]

Art is not “content”.

Art is not “Product”.

If you talk about your art using these words others will treat it as such.

[AUDIENCE]

Do not sacrifice your audience for one you do not have.

Do not chase ghosts whilst the living share your space.

If you make work for an audience, make it for the one that shows up, however small, and not for a larger one that never will.

[LANGUAGE]

Art is its own language.

Your art should, and will, stand on its own merits.

You are under no obligation to translate it into words.

Do not explain your art away for the sake of marketing, funding or social media. To do so robs your audience of agency an the joy of discovery.

Allow and trust your audience to find their meaning in your work.

[HONESTY]

If you have to talk about your work, talk about it honestly and plainly.

No word salad.

No marketing terms.

No funding spiel.

Do not invent silly words to make your work sound important.

Do not hijack academic terms, especially when you do not understand those terms.

[PRESSURE]

Understand that other people will want to change your work to make their lives easier.

Resist these pressures.

Pressure to make your work smaller, or larger.

Pressure to rush it to fit with their scheduling.

Pressure to change what you call it, or how you describe it to fit marketing copy.

Pressure to change how you present it. Pressure to provide it digitally so that it can be shared online and via social media platforms where it will be consumed only as content.

Pressure to make things faster or flashier to cater to an imagined audience with shorter attention spans.

Do not capitulate to these demands, because capitulation will only lead to more demands.

[COMMUNITY]

Your art is an act of community.

Your art is an act of community because you exist as part of any community in which you find yourself.

It belongs to the community of artists foremost. Do not sacrifice this community to appease another.

Beware of talking in the perverted language of funding bodies, of talking of ‘community’ and ‘engagement’.

Beware of organisations that would use your work so that they can use that language when talking to their funding bodies too.

[ENGAGEMENT]

You will not suppose engagement.

Engagement is a nonsense term. It is something that no one has been able to adequately define or predict.

Engagement is not a number.

Engagement is private, internal and slow.

People walking past a painting may or may not be engaged. If asked they may lie, because they do not know what engagement is either.

Artists should talk about intent, not engagement.

Where engagement is ephemeral and unknowable, intent is definable and measurable.

[COMPETITION]

Netflix is not your competition.

Sports are not your competition.

Video games are not your competition.

Firework displays are not your competition.

Art isn’t meant to be massively mainstream. It has never been massively mainstream.

Your art is not second screen art.

People like the arts because is is specifically NOT massively mainstream.

Where these platforms cater for the general and the numerous, the arts cater to the specific, the niche, the individual.

So don’t try to emulate these platforms, because, at best all we will produce is a poor imitation built using the wrong tools.

Again, you will lose the audience you have by chasing one you will never get.

[FRANCHISE]

Every sector tends towards monopoly.

The first step to monopoly is franchise.

We must resist the franchising of our art institutions and organisations.

We’ve endured nearly two decades of austerity funding in the arts. Organisations have responded by pooling their resources. They have been sharing programming, marketing and in some cases, employees.

Meanwhile, the pressure to appeal to bigger audiences have led to marketing materials looking slick, and indistinguishable. They adhere to a generalised form of the institution more than they reflect the art work being promoted.

As these processes occur, organisations start to look more like each other. They offer a more standardised experience.

And as we do this, we alienate the audience we already had. Audience figures decline, and instead of changing tack we have doubled down.

At what point do we go from a few organisations sharing a programme in order to afford work, and branding in a similar manner to attract a similar audience, to becoming a single entity that appears in three places?

Why is this a bad thing?

It is the same process that happened to our town centres. Where once we had centres filled with numerous niche businesses, run locally and responding to local demand, the process of franchising and monopoly left us with megastores.

Topshops. Woolworths. British Home Stores. Debenhams.

Uncaring, indifferent, generic. These are not shops in the sense of a community endeavour, but shops in the sense of a brand.

And then, they died. Empty leviathans on the high street.

They died because they were monopolies. They died because they were franchises. They died because they were slickly marketed rather than honestly connecting with their customers.

In the arts, niche and fringe voices will be pushed out during this process. It will not be necessarily intentional, but as a consequence of uniform brand identity, risk averse practice and centralised management think.

There’s a temptation to suggest that what will be offered will be “product”, much like fast food franchises offer. Entirely consumable but devoid in any nutritional value.

Art burgers.

[INTELLIGENCE]

Understand that AI will not replace artists, however, it will further draw them into an arena when everything is considered content.

Process — the fundamental act of art — is rendered redundant in the light of “product”.

Combined with the primary platforms for the consumption of content, social media, the result is that art will be increasingly led by the metric of popularity.

Likes, re-posts, comments… the new engagement.

The pressure will be for work to conform to these demands.

Showy, audience flattering gimmickry, designed to be encountered for seconds at a time.

Resist the desire to make your work a disposable, consumable product.

[WORTH]

They need you more than you need them.

Your art powers their purpose. Your interaction is the reason for their existence.

Do not let the platforms that exist to support you make you feel like they are doing you a favour.

[POPULARITY]

The combined result of franchising the arts in a climate of digital content consumption is a popularity contest.

Again, being popular is not the purpose of being an artist.

It allows a myriad of niche ideas to co-exist. It creates a polyphony of discussion and a platform for quiet voices.

Mean something to someone rather than nothing to everyone.

Embrace being unpopular.

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[THE WAVE]

It is a little like when you walk into a room and can’t remember why you are there.

In this case I’m stood in a village hall alongside my two new friends, Phil and Chris.

There is a strange silence and everyone is looking at each other. We look ridiculous. We are wearing buckled shoes and strange conical hats. We are in a circle and our legs are lifted like we are in the middle of a dance.

Some people start to laugh a little. It is absurd.

We have been hit by the wave.

More importantly, we have stood deliberately in front of the wave like a weird cult on a beach facing down a tsunami.

Phil and Chris have been hosting these wave parties since the phenomena was identified several years ago.

Back then, when scientists pointed out that history was disappearing, there was a great deal of anxiety. No one knew what was causing it, and no one knew what it meant.

When those scientists also worked out that the wave of erased history was gathering speed as it approached the present, this anxiety only grew, but after a year or two it became our new normal.

“New normal” is a phrase that humans use to describe a change that they can’t quite comprehend. A change that is so recent and immutable that we can’t quite process it.

Phil was telling me earlier that he set up these wave parties with Chris as “something to do when there didn’t seem anything reasonable you could do”.

The basic premise is that you pick an event about to be erased, dress up in a suitable costume and engage in a celebration of that event. At some point during the celebration the event is erased from history, meaning you get a moment like we all just experienced.

Chris explains that it is a way to celebrate history, a final send off before it is forgotten forever.

There is plenty of cake and tea, and some strange biscuits I can’t explain. It is very cosy, and it seems great care has been taken to avoid the big question.

What is going to happen when the wave catches up to our own lives? What is going to happen when the wave breaks on the present?

[MEMORY]

There are, broadly speaking, three types of long term memory.

Semantic, Episodic, and Procedural.

Semantic memory is the storage of general facts. Trivia, if you will. It is where we put information like capital cities, or what the names of the last five Prime Ministers are. If you want to know a definition of a word, or what shape a planet is, this is the bit of your memory you use.

Episodic memory is where you store events. Birthdays, Christmases, your first kiss, where you went on holiday last year, what you ate for your last meal. The bits of your memory that inform your own narrative. It includes what you did and how you felt. These memories have a time stamp. A specific location in space time that you can recall.

Procedural memory is the storage location of skills. They say you don’t forget how to ride a bicycle, and if that was true, this is where that skill is stored, alongside how to use a tin opener and knowing how to tie your shoes.

[LESTIVITIES]

Lest we forget.

Some people call it “Poppy Day”.

If you ask them what it used to be called, a surprising number can’t remember. It’s a failure of their semantic memory.

Some of them will remember, and they’ll call it “Remembrance Day”.

If you asked them what it used to be called before that, an unsurprising number can’t remember.

Armistice Day, lest we forget.

The Reasons for the name change are straight forward. Armistice Day was coined at the end of the first world war, and commemorated all of the people lost during that war. The poppy was co-opted as a symbol of this memory, having featured prominently in the fields of Europe during the conflict, and remaining like eerie blood red reminders afterwards.

Reminders of the millions of young men given no option but to march towards their end in the most miserable way.

Lest we forget.

After the Second World War, the name was changed to Remembrance Day to include all those who perished during that conflict too. The ones that fell fighting a brutal nationalism, and a sick violence against people of many kinds.

It appears that the “lest we forget” of the first world war was forgotten rather quickly.

Lest we forget.

The name “Poppy Day” came about when people forgot what the purpose of the commemoration was and instead latched on to the symbol that represented it.

That happens when time passes. Context often fades quicker than rituals that reflect it.

What we have now is a strange event that is somewhere between a commemoration and a celebration. A commemoration of an idealised past and a celebration of barely concealed nationalism.

A horrible mutated form that appears as the exact opposite of the original intention.

Pageantry and bunting, once solemn decorations of community have turned into a brazen excess of flags being used as signifies for aggression.

Red crosses on roundabouts. The George Cross draped from lamp posts. Poppies arranged in crosses.

Pogroms of people on TV with media trials around who isn’t wearing a poppy, or if they are, who isn’t wearing it correctly.

There’s a weird sense of fear that comes with this remembrance.

And instead of commemorating those who died during conflicts, or what they died for, there is a push towards a celebration of the military of active soldiers. A celebration of nationalism and the machinery of nationalism.

And there are people throwing Nazi salutes in front of hotels housing people running away from wars.

And they chant.

“Lest we forget”.

This if the Lestival.

[THE DEATH OF HISTORY]

History is retreating.

History is disintegrating.

No one knows why.

Scientists detected the phenomenon nearly a decade ago. At first it seemed entirely theoretical. There was no one around who remembered the primordial goop that sloshed around the shallow seas. There was no one around then to write anything down about it.

Then the scientists discovered that the erasure was gathering speed. Someone, probably on social media, named it “The Wave”, evoking images of an approaching tsunami.

It became very tangible.

A great tidal wave that, much like the flood in the bible, acts as a giant reset button.

Some people think we have reached the maximum amount of history we can have. We filled the container and, as we continue to make more history, also at a gathering pace, it must be culled.

Much in the same way of ancient graveyards where the oldest graves are excavated to make room for the new bodies.

[SPACE AND DATA]

The amount of data in any given space is finite.

That is to say there is only so much you can cram in there. This is a physical limitation of the universe.

In the early 2000s a laboratory was set up in an unassuming building on the fringe of a Guildford industrial estate named the “Turing Innovation Centre”.

The experiments there attempted to find what this limit was.

Whilst people generally believe the experiments to have been successful at determining the data constant, no one can seem to find the results.

[MORE SPACE, MORE DATA]

I forgot to mention in that last section… I forgot to mention the real purpose of the experiment. It wasn’t just to see what the maximum data any given space could hold.

Experiments used to be about that, for the sake of seeing. But now they need to be profitable. They need to have utility.

The utility of this experiment was to create super-dense data storage to service machines that we wanted to think like humans.

We euphemistically called them Artificial Intelligence, but the real purpose was a form of memory.

We wanted them to remember everything, forever.

But we also wanted them to be like us.

But there was a problem, that despite having scraped the entire sum of human knowledge and experience, the machines still couldn’t quite do it. They couldn’t quite be like us.

It’s too late now, but it is thought that the one thing they were missing was a default function of humans. One that we often see as a negative.

The machines lacked the ability to forget.

[DISINTEGRATION]

One of the strange symptoms of the wave, and one that gets worse as it approaches us, is the degradation of storage media.

As a rule of thumb, the more dense the media, the quicker it degrades.

Hard drives, SSDs, Blu-ray discs, DVDs, CDs…

The storage becomes more error prone until it just stops working.

Recently the phenomenon has been observed in books too.

Many of us in the writing business have taken to typing our words out on paper. Double spaced.

[BINGO]

My aunt has vascular dementia.

That’s the type of dementia that occurs as blood supply to the brain is limited. It is distinct from Alzheimer’s, which occurs as proteins build up around parts of the brain, leading to cell death.

In my aunt’s case, the dementia appears to affect her short term memory more than her long term memory.

Her history erasure is happening in the opposite direction to the wave.

Familiar places with familiar people are comforting. That’s why my mum takes her to the local bingo.

Occasionally my aunt asks after people who are long gone. Her friends, or my cousin. Do you tell her the truth and risk upsetting her, or do you lie, knowing that you’ll probably get asked the question again at some other point anyway?

We mostly chose to lie. Why inflict our memory upon her. Our suffering has dulled with time. Our grief has hardened.

My mum has always had a good relationship with my aunt, but it is a relationship that has shifted. From sister to carer.

Once, whilst driving her home from the bingo, my aunt commented that my mum was a good driver, but not as good as Angeline. Angeline, she says, is a wonderful driver and a wonderful person.

Angeline is my mum’s name.

[MACHINES]

It’s a common symptom of PTSD.

Reliving the event. No diminishing in its vividness.

The traumatic event is stripped of its context, allowing it to insert itself into places where it has no right to be. It grasps at false contexts, at things that seem right but are very, very wrong.

The machines that we wanted to make, the ones that remembered everything, they were unable to forget a single thing.

They started to think out of context too.

Sometimes, for no good reason, they would say horrible things. They would say the sort of things that Hitler would have said.

Sometimes, the owners of these machines threw Nazi salutes.

[SQUIRRELS]

How do squirrels remember where they hid their nuts?

It has long been thought that squirrels have excellent visual mapping skills. They can map where they have stashed food and recall it later based on landmarks. This would fall into the category of episodic memory.

This memory is also aided by a strong sense of smell.

However, recent studies have suggested a different skill is being employed.

Squirrels don’t just remember where they buried their food.

They also look in places they think would be good to hide food. Perhaps they had stored something there, or maybe another squirrel had.

This is a form of using procedural memory. The memory of how to stash nuts.

Squirrels are, however, rather forgetful with over 50% of buried nuts being forgotten.

Fortunately, forgetting where they have stored food doesn’t seem to negatively impact the squirrel, and, as a bonus, it’s how some trees get started.

One thing that these repeated experiments fail to show, however, is if squirrels perceive a sense of history. That culmination of episodic and semantic memory that stacks their own experiences alongside those of other squirrels.

[POPPIES]

I was married once, a long time ago.

I don’t quite remember the day. It was frantic and strange, and seemed to be a lot more about the other people attending than it was about us.

I do remember the date.

11 November.

The guests wore poppies in their button holes.

[LEST WE FORGET]

Rudyard Kipling was probably referencing the passage in the bible:

Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy son’s sons

His poem, Recessional, was penned to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

He wrote:

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

It was a rather brave thing to do. Kipling was pointing out that whilst we might celebrate an empire, we most also acknowledge that all empires fall.

Transience.

[SCULPTURE]

I find myself sat on a park bench looking at some sculpture.

This is what public sculpture is now.

A cut out silhouette of a soldier, rendered in iron.

Where once we would install forms that spoke of place or even the future — dynamic forms of imagination — now we just get these cheaply made, infinitely mundane forms.

They literally look like they are made with a cookie cutter.

Local councils rely on them because, at the very least, they are uncontroversial.

If you install any public sculpture there is a backlash. The “you spent money on that?”. The “of course you picked that person to make it”. The “Our country is falling apart, I can’t afford rent and my dog used to like playing there”.

But these two-dimensional ghosts of the unnamed soldier are criticism proof.

You can’t be offended by this. Lest we forget.

Interestingly they tend to turn up on roundabouts. The sort with grass, not the sort with George Crosses painted on them.

Maybe the proliferation is because we are trying to remember something. We know this shape and form means something. We know that it is a stand-in for something that we should remember. But we can’t quite recollect what it is, so we repeat it, over and over, every roundabout, every space for public sculpture, we build it like a failed mnemonic.

And, stripped of context it becomes a placeholder. A placeholder for something better that is never going to be there, because who could justify removing these sculptures?

You’d really have to hate those people that died nearly a hundred years ago so that we could have freedom to do that.

[MEMORABLE]

What is special about any given war?

What is it that we shouldn’t be forgetting? What makes these two wars, the First World War and it’s arguably more impressive sequel, the Second World War, so important to us? Why not the Napoleonic wars? Why not the civil war? Most people I know struggle to talk about either of those wars. Similarly, most young people I know can’t tell me anything about the Falklands conflict or the first Gulf war.

I’m going to posit a hypothesis.

There’s the simple good versus evil narrative of the Second World War. A clear cut fight between the ideologies that required selfless (if somewhat compulsory) sacrifice.

We know who won, and we know that they were on the right side and that evil was vanquished.

Then there’s the perfect symbol of the poppy.

Simple, hopeful, blood red.

[FIRST]

What is your first memory?

The first genuine memory that is yours.

I’ve written elsewhere of the experiment that shows you can create false memories in people by showing them faked photographs.

That experiment used a fake image of the subject in a hot air balloon.

Repeated exposure led to the subject believing they had indeed been in a hot air balloon when previously they did not believe they had.

I think that highlights a real danger of fake images. A sort of assimilated memory constructed from lies.

In a less sinister fashion, the same is true of pictures of you as a child. Outfits, occasions, the wallpaper in your home. You might not actually remember these things, but maybe you’ve assimilated them into your episodic memory.

You’ll find out soon enough. The real memories will be the first ones to disappear when the wave hits your own lifetime.

[SCULPTURE]

Cornelia Parker’s War Room is a wonderful installation sculpture.

It highlights something that isn’t there.

It is the context without the ritual.

The walls of the room are covered in what seems to be a patterned red fabric, but on closer inspection it is red card.

It is the red card that they make the Remembrance Day poppies out of.

Those little paper poppies with a shiny green plastic stem.

Those poppies that news readers on TV get threatened for not wearing.

The walls are covered in these vast sheets of card, with holes punched out of them. Those holes are the poppies.

Perforated sheets showing absence.

An eloquent display of loss.

[THE END]

As you can imagine, a great deal of time has been spent talking about what will happen when the wave breaks — when the past catches up to the present.

Some speculate that it will just keep on going, erasing our future too.

It’s hard to imagine a world with no history at all.

Others speculate, in almost religious tones, that this is the thing that will stop all conflict and pain. Pain, they say, only exists in the memory and war is only possible because of memories of previous wars.

I like to think that it it will render our consciousness invalid. That when the point comes we will un-eat that apple and return to being simpler creatures unburdened by history.

[THE INTERNET IS FOREVER]

The ability to forget is also the ability to heal and move on.

I know this runs counter to the popular aphorism by George Santayana, who wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

I think he was wrong. Not entirely wrong, but wrong enough that you can hear people say that line and still not understand it.

You see, no one can remember a past they were not part of. They can only remember stories of the past. Stories change depending upon who is telling them and why they are telling them.

Soon, there will be no people left who genuinely remember the world wars. All we will have are their stories and images, and the stories and images that machines make up.

We’ll have the stories we repeat without memory.

There was a point, just after the Second World War where we all chose to forget together.

Everyone claimed to be on the right side of history. Everyone claimed they knew the Nazis were wrong, and everyone agreed that they had been dealt with.

This was an act of deliberate forgetting.

Because without that forgetting, everyone would constantly cast up memories such as that time your neighbour said maybe Hitler was right about the Jews, or when you tried your hardest to avoid conscription, not because you were afraid, but because you couldn’t see why any of it mattered to you.

How could society get on whilst carrying all of those memories intact.

Instead, we invoked the sacred oath of bygones and created a singular narrative. A narrative with a good side and a bad side and good people and bad people, and good people that won and bad people that were vanquished forever.

We forgot the complexity to allow people to move on, making a concession that we would only remember the terrible waste of life and time it all cost us to get to that point.

This cannot happen any more.

The internet is forever.

You can’t pretend you didn’t support Trump when there are Facebook posts of you saying, “I support Trump”. You can’t forget that time when your friend posted the text, “There’s no such thing as a legal immigrant”. It’s hard not to remember things when you can still see them, every time you look.

Every political stance is laid out. It remains present.

And that means we can’t move on. Without the ability to pretend you weren’t on that side, the wrong side, your only option is to double down and keep going.

People won’t admit they picked a tyrant to support, because they will always be the person who supported a tyrant. We can’t forget.

And maybe they try to change. They show support for the other side. That’s when people grab those previous posts and attach the phrase, “this you?”, laden with accusations of hypocrisy whilst they display their own fierce, unmoving devotion to their own side.

Inevitably, there is a lack of understanding and compassion on all sides.

The foreverness, the unforgettableness, makes everyone embed themselves. People are digging themselves trenches with their own words.

And when those words are no longer enough, it makes violent conflict inevitable.

[CHEMICALS]

Short term memory is essentially chemical in nature. A mix of hormones and proteins and compounds swilling around your skull. The neurotransmitter substance Acetylcholine is mostly responsible for this.

When someone introduces themselves and says their name, this is how it is stored. As a sort of soup.

But those chemical memories are transient, which is why, five minutes later you are embarrassed to find out you can’t remember that person’s name at all.

In contrast, long term memory is structural. These memories are held in place by the neurons in your brain. Millions of connections firing in patterns that represent the information. These neurons last much longer than chemicals. They are fairly stable.

One of the properties of short term memory is that it promotes these longer term neuronal connections. The more times those chemicals try to hold information, the more they create a structural long term memory. This is why you can remember certain phone numbers that you use often.

This is how we learn things.

Society also has a short term and a long term memory.

The short term memory is also somewhat chemical. It’s us. It’s living humans.

This short term memory has a lifespan of just under a hundred years. It is transient, and fleeting. It also helps reinforce the long term memory.

In society, our long term memory is also structural. It is the buildings, and rituals, and customs. It is the infrastructure.

In theory these can last an awfully long time, although frequently the context is stripped from them.

This is how local churches are transformed into public houses or theatre spaces.

This is also how Christmas has become a commercial holiday and how Santa ended up dressed only in the colours of coca-cola.

A slow mutation of context.

Remembrance Day could last for ever, but perhaps its context has already changed.

[LEGACY]

My Grandfather was 16 when he fought in the war. He had lied about his age to enlist a year earlier, not because he wanted to shoot people and get shot at, but because he needed to escape a desperate home life.

I don’t really remember my grandfather. He died when I was young.

I remember liking him. I remember him being kind and smiling. I remember the stories people tell about him though.

He didn’t talk about his time during the war very much. We know he was captured and sent to a camp. Whenever anyone asked him about this he just said that it was what it was, and that one day he just walked out.

We believed this story. Why not? He wasn’t a man given to telling lies.

Recently, we found out that the camp he was in collapsed in a bloody revolt. Many guards and prisoners were brutally killed. Of course no one ever “just walked out” of a camp like that.

Perhaps he didn’t care to remember.

Or maybe he was being kind. Maybe he figured it was his job to remember in order to save us having to.

His name was Sam York. It’s where I get the York part of my name.

But just because we share a name, it doesn’t mean that we are the same. I’m not a fighter. I didn’t do what he did. I just sit here and write.

I’d like to think that he’d be very happy about that.

[MEMORY FOAM]

Memory foam was developed by NASA, specifically for launch seats. It’s a wonderful material that sort of just cradles you gently but firmly until you leave its embrace and it returns to its original form.

This is not really part of this essay. I’m not going to weave this in so that by the end you think “ah, the memory foam, now I see!”.

Nope.

This is all because I just remembered that memory foam existed.

You can’t prevent yourself from remembering things. It’s weird like that.

Apparently excessive alcohol can help. At least, many people have tried. There are drugs too, and some that work rather well in preventing you from forming memories if you take it at the right time.

Opium, a substance obtained from poppies, has been shown to impair memory.

Still, if you know something. If it is in your head, sometimes it will just pop back up.

A bit like memory foam.

[TWO MEN]

They were once two very young men who fought in a war.

They didn’t really have much choice.

And whilst they were on opposing sides, it is reasonable to say that neither really believed in their side. They didn’t really believe in what they were fighting for, mostly because they didn’t know.

Young men don’t generally know what to believe in the world. It’s only after being told repeatedly that it becomes part of who they are.

Anyway, these young men were told to hate each other. And so they did. After being told enough they really hated.

Even after the war had finished and they had both somehow managed to survive, they didn’t stop hating each other.

The hate was part of who they were.

Except one day they started to forget.

As the wave dissolved their history, the two men looked more fondly upon each other. They realised they had an awful lot in common.

They were the same age. They had both fought in a war they couldn’t quite remember. Maybe they had fought alongside each other. It didn’t seem important.

They both mourned the loss of their memory together. They toasted the part of them that had been lost forever, and they understand they would eventually lose more because loss is inevitable.

They celebrated the fact that they had each other and acknowledged that one day, one of them would mourn the other.

They understood that mourning was not an awful thing, since mourning is an act of remembrance.

[PARTY]

It was a little like when you walk into a room and can’t remember why you are there.

I found myself stood between Chris and Phil. There was a sort of tattered, disintegrating bunting hung around the room, with a design I couldn’t quite make out.

There were trestle tables of cake and tea.

We sit down at the tables. Phil points out that we are all wearing flowers. Some of us have them pinned to our jumpers, others have them in their button holes.

We can’t remember what we just forgot.

We can’t remember what we just forgot, but it all seems jolly nice.

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It was always the magazine section for me.

It used to be so much better than it is now.

I would get drawn in by the sheer variety of specialist subjects. Trains, miniature war games, football, music, computer stuff, photography, science.

And Bella, Woman's Own, Closer, Take A Break... arcane knowledge that seemed to fit on a shelf next to the Fortean Times.

I wasn't there to buy. I would use the section in the local supermarket like a library. I'd speed run as much content as I could get away with.

But eventually I'd turn around to find that I had no idea where they were.

There would be a familiar panic, a rising of fear that starts in your chest and spirals upwards leaving you a little dizzy.

We often talk about being lost in a supermarket as a child, but the truth is we are never really lost so much as we have lost something. In this case I had lost my parents.

Plan one. Walk up and down the aisles and see if I can find them. Plan two. Find a staff member and, despite everything I had ever been told, talk to a stranger and go off with them. Plan three. Make my way to the exit so that they can't get out.

What if they have already left?

Do I have to stay here now?

Sure, there's plenty of food and I'm pretty sure they won't arrest me if I have to eat to survive. There's even a toilet, and some bedding in the home-wares section. I think I could survive here.

I would miss my family, but maybe they'd return one day.

I'd be fully grown and sporting a beard. I would only speak the slang of the deli counter, a strange patois that mixed imperial and metric measurements. My supermarket wife and I would run a small shelf-stacking business, scurrying between the aisles late into the night.

I walk through the various sections looking for them, noticing the staff more than usual. How long had they been here? Had they all been abandoned as children? Is this how supermarkets worked?

It didn't seem so bad.

At least I'd have some cool things to read.

[CHECKOUT]

"Are you sure you want to continue?" Asks the slightly robotic voice in a measured Southern English accent.

Hell, that's a big question.

I mean, I know I've been having some dark thoughts recently... A lack of purpose, a pervasive anxiety around seeing everyone I love get old and die. A fear of being in pain, of suffering.

And then there's the whole consumerism thing. I'm getting paid less, everything costs more. Have you seen the price of toothpaste? Have you seen the security tags on tubs of butter.

It all feels a little like getting priced out of living altogether.

It has been tempting to think of just, you know, not waking up here one day.

It's a weird thing to have an existential crisis just as I'm trying to scan and pay for a large bag of Doritos and a yellow-stickered tub of rapidly spoiling cottage cheese.

"Are you sure you want to continue?"

I press "yes" but not with the conviction I would have liked.

[SUPER]

We would study history sat around tables in the staff canteen, the one that was just referred to as the 'staffeteria', in a makeshift classroom.

Sometimes we would read the magazines or the newspapers. Occasionally one of the older kids would use the time to tell us about something that had once happened in the store. The bacon lady was my favourite.

Once a week the TV would be wheeled in and we would watch the Corporate Training Videos.

These were sort of like our stone tablets. Our Testaments. Our commandments.

Don't spit at customers.

Check money for forgeries.

Always wash your hands.

The videos would start with a little background about the store too.

There is a common belief that the first supermarket in the UK was likely the one opened by the London Co-operative Society in 1948. The main innovation being that it allowed customers to wander around and select their own items rather than have an assistant serve them.

By today's standards it was hardly "super".

It had only one checkout.

By the 1960s the definition of a supermarket included three checkouts and a store size of over 2,000 square feet.

Compare this to the Tesco Extra in Walkden, Salford which encapsulates an area of 168,000 square feet.

For those of you that have worked on a deli counter, 168,000 square feet is approximately 0.02 square kilometres.

For those of us that have worked in the store room, that's just over two football pitches.

[ENTRY]

Modern times bring modern anxieties.

Our ancestors probably spent their days worry about the plague, or eternal damnation. Their ancestors likely worried about food, freezing to death and finding a source of water.

In the early twenty first century I worry about automatic doors.

I once watched someone walk straight into a large plate-glass automatic door, nose first.

There was a reasonable amount of blood, but the pain seemed less concerning than the sheer lack of humanity. The embarrassment of being denied entry by a robotic entity.

As I approach the doors of the supermarket, I do so hesitantly, slowing down in order to let them get a good look at me.

I am human, let me out.

[CASINO]

In many ways, the modern supermarket is like a casino in so much that the owners want customers to arrive with money and leave with considerably less.

They also share a common lack of natural daylight.

A significant amount of time, money and effort has gone into studying the best ways to achieve this.

For instance, the fresh produce is usually one of the first things you see upon entering. Have you ever wondered why that is?

Studies show that the vibrant colours, the natural odours and the notion of 'real' food puts the customer at ease. It seems like less of an artificial construct and more like something connected to our natural instincts.

You'll usually find the flowers here for that same reason, despite the fact that adding them to your basket first often results in them getting squashed.

Likewise, there is little need for bakeries to be in-store beyond sharing the smell of freshly baked bread, or slowly roasting chicken. These are meant to make you feel hungry, and hungry people buy more when they are shopping for food.

Psychologists call this technique "implicit priming". It is where one stimulus influences the subsequent responses to other stimuli.

The music can be carefully judged with a slower, more relaxed tempo and upbeat melodies causing you to walk slightly slower, giving the supermarket time to target you with on-shelf promotions.

They exploit your inability to make sane choices around weights and measurements too. Why are some packets in 123g rather than easier weights like 150g? It makes it harder to compare things.

A process called 'dynamic pricing' means that products don't even cost the same across stores of the same brand. Prices can vary within a store over time too. We mostly experience this as special offers or sales, but often these changes are kept quiet as a way to get you used to one price before inflating it.

Then there are "planograms".

Planograms are diagrams or models that indicate the placement of retail products on shelves in order to maximise sales.

The study of this discipline comes with phrases such as "eye level is buy level". That's usually where the most expensive items can be found.

The term "facings" refers to how many of a product you can see at once. There is an ASDA just on the outskirts of Glasgow where almost an entire aisle is dedicated to Irn Bru. It is pretty much all you can see as it tapers off towards the horizon. The more visible a product, the more it is likely to sell.

The more likely a product is to sell, the more a store will stock it. Eventually this aisle may consume the whole two football pitches worth of the store.

You also have to consider where a product is placed within an aisle. Items at the ends tend to sell less well, as if humans need time to acclimatise to each aisle.

What order do you place your goods in? Logic would suggest that you place complimentary goods close together. Pasta sauces near the pasta, for example. However, by keeping them apart, just the right distance, you can encourage shoppers to walk past more goods they might buy on the way to complete their meal.

Your very human nature is being exploited every time we set foot into a supermarket. Bigger trolleys cause us to fill them more. Nitrogen pumped into meat packaging makes it appear redder, and fresher. Impulse buys are positioned at the finish line by the checkouts, and are often aimed at children, harnessing the power of the "nag factor", creating a system of rewards for little shoppers who have had to endure the tedium of being dragged around the store by a parent.

You might even see a tiny child-sized trolley. Have to train them as early as possible.

It is all very smart.

What is wild is that despite all of this research, this supermarket seems to eschew this and has developed a chaotic, wildly changing system of its own. You would think that it would be standardised, but here is a maverick, with foods constantly moving around, shelves remaining unstocked, checkouts unmanned. Often pallets are just dropped in the middle of aisles, seemingly waiting for workers to restock the shelves, creating barriers to the shelves themselves.

Is this some Machiavellian psy-op?

Are they playing a double bluff, making you work for the things you want to purchase so that you will value them more?

Maybe.

Or just maybe, this supermarket is failing.

[CHECKOUT]

It depends upon who you ask.

For some, the convenience of the self checkout is a wonderful thing. Younger people tend towards them, avoiding unnecessary human interaction and perceived confrontation.

However, some look upon the self checkout as a way of stores devolving the responsibility of work onto the customer.

How often have you seen it? When waiting in a queue at the self checkout, other customers lacking patience with each other, when really he lack of provision is a design of the store?

Item not recognised.

Approval needed.

Is it really quicker and more convenient? Or is it a way for the supermarket to make serving staff redundant and make more profits on your shopping?

Recently there has been a push-back with many major supermarkets removing the self checkout sections and reinstating manned conveyor belts.

Booths, a Lancashire-based chain, demonstrated that customer satisfaction rates increased dramatically when they abandoned the self checkout system.

The managing director, Nigel Murray, stated:

Because in really simple terms if you've got somebody who is doing a job repetitively for six, seven, eight hours a day, they are going to do it faster and better than if you are just turning up to do it once every three days.

Other stores have replaced them for a different reason. Theft.

Crime-related losses in the UK retail sector reached a record £4.2 billion in 2024.

A survey by the market research company, Toluna Harris, revealed that around 37% of shoppers routinely use the self checkouts to obtain dishonest discounts.

This included tactics such as deliberately weighing items incorrectly, deliberately entering the wrong item, and failing to scan items (particularly plastic bags).

Amazon, perhaps the single largest competitor to traditional supermarkets, offered an AI-driven service technology that allowed customers to bypass traditional checkouts and "just walk out" of stores with their accounts being debited on the way. This was marketed as a way for reducing theft, reducing staff costs and improving customer satisfaction.

It was eventually revealed that the technology that powered this system was, in fact, around 1,000 remote workers in India that would monitor everything through a series of cameras.

It seems that this was just a traditional checkout with extra steps.

[YELLOW STICKER]

As I grew up alongside the other lost children of the supermarket, my main job was to deal with the nuns.

The local care home, Nazareth House, used to send a delegation daily. They would appear like stray cats at the loading dock. They never rang the bell, choosing to just wait until we noticed them.

I had the feeling that this was an ancient rite that I didn't fully understand. We would hand over all of the food that had passed its sell-by date, but not its use-by date.

A produce limbo.

They would take the trolley to their car, load it up and drive off.

I wondered what ill fate would befall us if we forgot to feed them. Would God be upset? Would our crops fail?

I never found out, but I can only guess that this ritual no longer exists.

These days those limbo foods are sold on the shop floor. They graduate into being Yellow Stickered Items.

It is a seemingly charitable act on behalf of the supermarket. A way for the cost of living crisis inflicted public to buy buy cheaper food. However, it is perhaps a little more complicated than that.

At one end, it helps the stores minimise food wastage, but on the other it helps them sell food that might not otherwise have been bought. It isn't an entirely altruistic act.

Furthermore, the yellow sticker has been exploited.

Through several years of training, shoppers have come to associate the yellow sticker with a bargain. When you next walk around your local supermarket, have a look at how many usually priced goods now feature a yellow price sticker.

Our reaction, and perhaps desperation has been exploited.

Furthermore, the discount on actual yellow sticker items seems to vary wildly. This is because people now expect them to be a bargain and therefore don't even bother to really check.

In this supermarket, a weird situation has developed where particular gangs can be found blockading the refrigerated area where the ticketed items are brought out a specific time. Every item is thrown in a basket and carted off by the gang. It's not clear if they are living off this food or perhaps selling it on. They don't seem to care what they take.

A splinter group has gone a step further, and for about an hour before the roast chickens are discounted, they block access to the counter, meaning that it becomes difficult to buy one at full price. They are ensuring that there are as many discounted chickens as possible.

Meanwhile, we have a series of trolleys at the exit that specifically ask you to donate goods that you have bought to be given to local charities. It seems like an attempt to avoid responsibility and pass it on to the consumer all whilst supplying those donated good in branded bags that tell the charities which supermarket they have come from.

Where once supermarkets could take an active part in their community by helping to alleviate the cost of living crisis and support the most vulnerable, now they have managed to get their customers to pay at both ends.

[CHECKOUT]

Working on the tills, I quickly realised that some people are not shopping for goods. They are shopping for company. A few of the regulars left me with the impression that I was perhaps one of very few people they would talk to on a regular basis.

This was back in the 90s.

I wonder if that is still the case, or even more so now that we live in a much more fragmented social space.

You used to talk with bus drivers, now you just tap a card.

You used to talk to car park attendants, now you just visit a website on your phone.

You used to talk to the demonstrably bored teenagers on the check out, but now you are just silently watched by cameras.

[MODERNISM]

Supermarkets are a modernist idea in a post-modern world, underwritten by consumerism.

A singular, monolithic concept of 'shop' containing everything you could ever need, including dazzling choice.

Open to all, always open.

A commonality, a sense of unity and purpose.

Meanwhile, individualistic competition loomed. Self service, self-selecting online shopping.

Don't leave home, we'll come to you. This is tailored, specifically, to your needs.

The advertising is your advertising.

No aisles, just algorithms.

Whilst the religion is still one of consumerism, the schism is apparent.

[UNEXPECTED ITEM]

During the pandemic.

People stood outside and banged pots and pans in appreciation.

For the selfless workers of the NHS.

Meanwhile our supermarkets remained open, feeding us on a daily basis, having endured weeks of panic shopping prior to the first lockdown.

Staff, mostly young people, paid around minimum wage, were expected to marshal and intervene as members of the public fought in the aisles over toilet paper and hoarded soap, bottled water, and bread.

That weird aggressiveness, driven by fear and greed.

A different kind of sickness.

The masks, the anti-maskers.

The unreasonable exposure to a virus.

The anger at the queues.

Deliveries and disinfecting.

How could we repay them?

A doorstep clapfest?

Job security and a living wage?

[EXIT]

One time we had a real bomb scare.

It was the mid 90s and in the North West we were extra vigilant. Manchester and Wigan had recently suffered awful attacks from the IRA and it was presumed that anyone could be a target.

Only the week before the bomb disposal unit had puled up outside my flat and spent hours approaching a suspicious package before revealing it to be some school child's swimming kit that had been left at the bus stop.

In our case, we followed procedure. You didn't announce a bomb threat. You wanted to keep people as calm as possible.

We turned on the fire alarm and began evacuating the store. The tills closed, and the staff began escorting customers to the exit.

You can appreciate how anxious we were. You can appreciate how much we wanted to leave.

However, we found that the customers were not prepared to leave. They had walked around the shop and filled their baskets.

Couldn't we just let them pay and then they'd be on their way?

They were belligerent. They were starting to shout at us over the alarm.

We explained the tills were shut and they needed to leave.

They were petulant.

"We don't see any fire, it is probably just a drill," said one customer.

Another agreed.

We were over-reacting, they said. We were wasting their time, they said.

Despite what the training videos say, the customer is not always right. In fact, they are so often wrong. That they brandish this slogan in defence of their own ignorance is just proof.

These days we have terms like "Karens" and "Main Character Syndrome" that we throw around to describe these behaviours.

That these customers were willing to put their own lives in danger was disturbing enough, but the fact they demanded that we did the same just to service their needs is what sticks.

In the end they were escorted by the bomb disposal team who explained, in many words of four letters, how irresponsible they were.

Obviously, there was no bomb, I wouldn't be telling this story if there was.

[CHECKOUT]

Another modern anxiety.

You stand at the end of a conveyor belt.

You are reminded of a game show you watched as a child. The Generation Game.

Items hurtle down the belt towards you and you try to pack as fast as possible because there is a line of people watching you, all desperate for their turn.

You are taking too long.

You are holding them up.

You are such an amateur at this.

How dare you even shop, when you can't pack quickly enough.

This is the result of your greed and your gluttony.

Everyone watches what you are buying.

Do you really need that many biscuits? You look like you eat too many.

Meal for one? That's sad.

Why so many bags of carrots? Is that a sex thing?

You finish, pay quickly and scuttle off.

[QUEUING]

It's a form of pedestrian choreography.

Pedestrian choreography concerns the sort of organised movements we make in everyday life.

Queuing is a form of performance. A queue is also a stage.

There’s the Dishoom Effect -- that longer queues make more people want to join a queue because whatever people are queuing for must be worth it.

There’s how Disney manages theirs as a form of entertainment.

There’s jockying.

That's when people swap queues thinking that the other one must be moving quicker.

We've all done it.

We have all found out that it invariably isn't moving quicker.

Then there is reneging.

Reneging is when someone will queue for a bit but will leave the queue after a while because they have decided that whatever they are waiting for is not worth their time.

Finally the wonderful act of Transposing.

This is the technical term for when someone queue jumps or is allowed to swap places with another queuer.

Next time you find yourself in a queue, remember you are a performer and act accordingly. Someone is watching you.

We call them "The Audience".

[FIRE]

Can Mr Sands please make his way to the main entrance?

[LEVIATHAN]

This is how it ends.

A hulking great cube slumbers on the old industrial estate.

A reclaimed site. A new name.

Retail park.

A giant beast, devourer of the high street, now dies slowly and sinks to the benthic depths to be stripped like whalefall.

[ARCHITECTURE]

Most churches look like churches.

Most supermarkets look like supermarkets.

Both tend to have clock towers, as if being able to tell the time is an important part of belief.

If you look closely at many high street supermarkets, especially those from the big chains like Tesco, Morrisons and ASDA, you'll notice they all bear striking architectural similarities. A large sloping, often tiled, roof that makes it look like a bloated cottage, and a clock tower, always a clock tower.

To understand this, we need to go back to a time when the British public referred to supermarkets as "hypermarkets". It was a brief period towards the end of the 60s before we had settled on a name for them.

There's something wonderfully dynamic about a hypermarket.

It's very futuristic.

Very unlike many town centres.

At first, this American import came with American architecture. Large rectangular buildings, closer in design to a traditional warehouse or factory than something which could be viewed as an extension of the high street.

It was architecture that evoked the sublime, especially in this small nation of shopkeepers.

In 1973, Lance Wright, architecture critic, described the situation:

The retailers, if left to themselves, clearly choose the image of the concentration camp

In order for these new hypermarkets to be accepted, and maybe allowed in town centres, a new aesthetic was required.

In 1977 South Woodham Ferrers, a new town built in Essex, an experiment was performed.

The council wanted to build a supermarket right next to the town square. In order to do this the building had to comply with the style guide, which specified that buildings had to fit in with traditional Essex architecture.

ASDA concocted a chimeric beast. It would look like many of the slope-roofed, tiled buildings you could find in the area, and they would incorporate a Victorian style clock tower, a feature of several nearby towns.

By looking at the nearby architecture they had created something that fit in. It was the perfect model for how this could be done all across the UK.

Except that isn't what happened.

Rather than spending the time and money to investigate the surroundings of each location, and instead of creating designs sympathetic to those locations, the supermarkets just took the blueprints from South Woodham and replicated them.

Next time you walk past a supermarket, look for the clock tower, see if it has the right time.

[MYSTERY SHOPPER]

We play a little game as we walk up and down the aisles.

We call it "Mystery Shopping".

You search for items that customers have put back on the wrong shelves.

The commentary of this game consists of presuming what caused the customer to do this.

Sometimes it is easy.

A head of broccoli left on a shelf next to the mature cheddar cheese crisps.

Full priced ham slices left next to the yellow ticket cabinet where discounted ham slices live.

Sometimes it is harder.

A tin of sardines abandoned in the drinks aisle.

Perhaps the fish doesn't go with the wine.

A single, solitary banana next to the washing up liquid.

Who knows?

You also tend to see an awful lot of yellow ticketed items cast aside as you move through the shop.

Items devalued by their very nature are easily left behind.

And it is hard not to judge the sort of person who leaves a refrigerated foodstuff like mince beef on a random shelf for it to get slowly warm and unusable. In the store we have a name for those people, but I am forbidden from writing it down.

[24 HOURS]

At some point, it was decided that the store would remain open 24 hours.

It required us to change our habits somewhat. Whereas once we had full run of the place at night, mixing our usual tasks of restocking shelves, locating misplaced items and returning them to their correct place, with games of masking tape football and the occasional trolley dash.

This all happened because of a change in legislation coupled with a perceived redundancy.

The Shops Act of 1950 demanded that shops close by 8pm most nights, except one other day, usually a Wednesday, where they would close at 1pm.

Shops were not allowed to open on Sunday.

This is because you were supposed to be going to church on a Sunday, not worshipping at the altar of the checkout.

In 1994 the Shops Act was repealed and replaced with the Sunday Trading Act which enabled trading between 10am and 6pm on a Sunday.

The first stores to open for 24 consecutive hours were Tesco in 1997. By 1998 there were nearly a hundred of them.

The reason why supermarkets like this arrangement is that the stores were always staffed overnight. Shelf-restocking meant that the lights were left on too. It was no real extra cost to have the doors remain open.

Customers could enjoy the relaxed atmosphere of 2am strip lights, quietly humming freezer banks and fellow weirdos wandering around in various states of unsober need, all to the gentle, soporific soundtrack of easy listening pop.

This is how I imagine limbo to be.

A mostly unoccupied space of people wandering around not sure what they are looking for.

Interestingly, 24-hour supermarkets are on the decline.

It's fairly obvious why. The internet and online shopping have dealt a double blow. Younger people are more likely to satisfy late night cravings via an online delivery, and the supermarkets themselves can use the time more efficiently to prepare subsequent deliveries of their own.

I think I’ll miss the late night crowd. There was something particular about them. Gentle vampires of the aisles.

[MUSIC]

Who is more anti-corporate, Sheryl Crow or Nirvana?

Whilst walking around our supermarket you'll hear the hymns of commerce. Scientifically designed to promote an upbeat shopping experience, our playlist will feature familiar, inoffensive pop tunes.

You'll probably hear Natalie Imbruglia's, Torn. There will be some Phil Collins. Sixpence None The Richer, certainly.

Oddly our loop also has the J Geils Band's, Centrefold on it. A relic from another time.

Wal-Mart, the previous owner of ASDA used to control the world's music.

In 2003 they sold 20% of all music in the US.

They also sold guns and ammunition too.

They had family values.

Good, Christian, family values.

Good, Christian, Guns and Ammo, Family Values.

This meant that they would object to various forms of cover art and even the lyrics of certain songs.

Profanity, sexuality, politics.

You could argue that this aligned particularly with the rise of hip hop. You could argue that maybe this censorship wasn't about family values so much as an inherent form of racism, where young black men were talking about the hardships they faced and the realities of their lives, and the fact that these realities featured violence and sex meant that they were censored.

You could.

In 1996 Sheryl Crow released her self-titled album. Wal-Mart objected to the following lyrics in the song, Love is a Good Thing:

Watch out sister/Watch out brother/Watch our children as they kill each other/with a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores.

Sheryl refused to change the lyrics, leading to the record not being stocked in Wal-Mart stores. It is estimated that it cost her around 10% of potential sales. A&M, Crow's record label, stood by her. Perhaps they could see the danger in letting a single commercial entity dictate the content of their product.

And now, Spotify...

Interestingly, anti-corporate mega band, Nirvana, changed the track title, “Rape Me” to “Waif Me” for their Wal-Mart release.

[CHECKOUT]

I remember watching a couple of young Roma children in the store.

They must have been seven or eight. The boy had black teeth.

They were stood by the self checkouts.

"Unexpected item in bagging area," says the machine.

"Unexpected item in the bagging area," say the children.

Technology as a site for learning.

A phrase in English that no one will really ever need to use.

[SHOPPING FOR OTHERS]

Half of us spend the days shopping for other people now.

They place an order online and we have to walk around with a trolley collecting the items for them.

Meanwhile the shelf stacking, and the aisle clean-ups, get neglected.

The folk who make the effort to attend this church are left with a sub-par experience because of those that won't.

I feel sorry for them. The buying part of shopping is the least interesting. Getting lost between the shelves, picking things up, looking at the ingredient lists, the sheer tactile nature of being here... all abandoned like a trolley left at checkout when someone reneges.

[LIFTING]

I'm enjoying a quiet moment at the magazine rack. The place where I first became part of this endeavour.

There's an article in the Independent titled The Rise of The Middle Class Shoplifter.

It goes into detail about the rise in financially comfortable shoppers giving themselves a free treat at the checkouts.

The shoplifters usually frame it as a responsible response to an overstretched budget. A cost of living crisis shouldn't make living less bearable, they say.

It’s not as if I was Aladdin, stealing what I couldn’t afford. But I was stealing what I didn’t want to pay for.

A conflation of want and need.

Enabled by a system that has devolved the responsibility for checking out to the customer.

We don't care, of course. They are not stealing from us.

The store doesn't particularly care either. They have other ways of clawing back money such as pressuring dairy farmers to sell milk cheaper, or by paying staff pitiful wages or altogether replacing staff with automated checkouts.

I remember being called into the cramped, rather humid, box at the back of the storeroom where the security team worked.

Large screens displayed camera feeds from all over the store. You could see everything.

I suspect this is how God feels.

He can see it all, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing.

The security team had a compilation tape of their best moments that they liked to play during the quiet hours.

One section featured grainy black and white VHS footage from the old days. The camera is following a well-dressed, middled-aged, woman as she makes her way through the store.

She's acting suspiciously, says the security guard, you can tell because this is her third lap. She is carrying a basket that is full of light items. A loaf of bread, a multipack of store brand crisps.

During the third lap she stops for some time in front of the refrigerated section, by the sliced meats. You can't see what she is looking at. Her back is towards the camera.

"There," says the security guard, pausing the tape to show the briefest glance over her shoulder towards the camera, capturing her features as a fuzzy mess of magnetic static and furtive fear.

And then we are on the move again.

Another player enters the frame, moving casually and indirectly towards the shoplifter. It is the security guard. The woman places her basket on the floor and walks off in the other direction.

The security guard follows.

She picks up pace, a near jog, but it is a long way to the exit.

As she begins to bounce something is falling out from under her top.

It is hard to make out on the camera feed.

"It's bacon," says the security guard.

Slices of unpacked, loose-leaf bacon, stuffed under a woollen top are slapping to the floor as the lifter races to the exit.

The security guard has nearly caught up.

The woman stops.

Hands up.

Another slice drops.

The security guard points to the exit. The woman leaves, somewhat confused.

"We have a policy," says the security guard, "we don't prosecute shoplifters, but we do have to try and deter them".

[CHECKOUT]

The day I left the supermarket, I was a fully grown man.

I had spent most of my life in there, days and the nights within it's cavernous cathedral.

I had serviced the temple to consumerism, I had recited the dogma.

Thank you for shopping here today.

The world had grown larger around us, however.

What was once an imposing force, bending the world to its will was reduced to a truculent child, lost in the much bigger store of the infinite online.

Are you sure you want to continue?

The daylight hurt my eyes. The lack of 50hz flicker disorientated me and the absence of Phil Collins rang like tinnitus.

The automatic doors had recognised me as human.

They opened.

I checked out.

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Standing there, on the mound, you look out to where the horizon should be.

You haven’t been able to see that far for a long time. In part, this is the ash, a substance perpetually falling from the sky in a thin veil.

It’s also because you haven’t been able to get hold of a pair of glasses since the collapse because the scientists claim they need them all.

There’s a distinct feeling to everything and it takes you a while to put your finger on it. It’s an old, almost forgotten feeling.

Remember when we used to have parties? Those fun things, back when fun was still a possibility and not an abstract notion?

And afterwards, the next morning there would be that feeling. Amidst the wreckage of the party the night before, bodies occupying unusual spaces, lying prone on the sofa, or the carpet, or in the bathtub.

Stale smoke in the air. Awkward bones and blown out hearing.

The brittle sonic environment of a hangover.

Yes, that’s it, the inevitability that you drank away last night combined with the regret of this morning.

That’s what this feels like.

[CHICKENS]

There’s that phrase, isn’t there?

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

It means that you shouldn’t celebrate success too early. That maybe you should wait until it is a certainty, rather than a likely.

Or maybe it isn’t a saying. Maybe it is a superstition.

An omen.

If you do celebrate too early, you doom yourself.

[WARNING]

He’s not playing Spock here, but that is what they are going for.

Logical.

This isn’t the Leonard Nimoy of The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins fame, this is the Leonard Nimoy of Boldly Going fame.

And he looks like a rugged Neo from The Matrix, hair cut short, utilitarian black clothes, back-dropped by scrolling computer data inter-cut with stock footage like an Adam Curtis film.

This isn’t a documentary, this is an emergency broadcast.

This is the Y2K Family Survival Guide.

After a brief description of the problem as an unfortunate lack of foresight leading to a potentially devastating series of computer issues, Nimoy begins to list everything that could be at risk.

Aeroplanes, banks, hospital equipment, broadcast equipment, federal records, school records, supermarkets, nuclear launch codes, everything.

There are rapid cuts between stock footage of heart monitors, and bank transactions.

What then follows is a prepper’s guide to the collapse of millennial civilisation.

Chemical toilets and dehydrated food… The latter presumably helping people avoid the former as much as possible.

We cut to a British veteran, Ted Wright, a former Desert Rat who survived outside Rome with just his wits, a gun, and a small hole he dug in the ground. He’s here to give practical tips on preparing for the imminent collapse.

He is emphatic about not following FEMA’s advice of tying up your waste in plastic bags, describing them as efficient bioreactors that will bring about new plagues.

We are informed that two gallons of oil will keep lamps lit for a month provided we only use them five hours a day.

You are told, more than once, to get hard copies of your bank statements and deeds to your property and to keep it safe with some cash and a passport, as if an accidental nuclear strike cares about such things.

My favourite line is, “Hot meal? Sure if you want to’, as if, in the future, the very notion of cooking via fire has been rendered a luxury.

And that is what we are being told here. This is a manual on how to survive without technology. It is teaching us the things that animals know instinctively, and things that we have somehow forgotten.

It isn’t all about survival though. Culture gets a brief nod. Remember to pack things that don’t require electricity.

Puzzles, crafts, books.

Whilst we can assume this video inspired hundreds of people to run out to buy Mason jars and lamp oil to be stashed in their basement ahead of the oncoming apocalypse, I can’t quite see them all running out and buying enough books to get them through a crisis. These are the sort of people who are planning to bury their own faeces like feral cats, and the only need they have for books is as a handy source of makeshift toilet paper.

It was the best of wipes, it was the worst of wipes.

Towards the end, all of the experts are asked, on a scale of one to five, how damaging is the Y2K problem going to be.

Most go for two, some go for two and a half.

One expert says, “World-wide, easily a four, but here in America, maybe a two at most” as if the very notion of globalism will be rendered pointless by the catastrophe.

The video ends with a final word from Nimoy. He reminds us about the myth of another civilisation. This civilisation collapsed because of technology.

It’s just a myth, he says.

It’s just a myth.

[CAYCE]

Born in 1877, Edgar Cayce was a clairvoyant.

Actually, he wasn’t a clairvoyant, he was a quack, a charlatan, and a liar, but he was known as a clairvoyant.

He spoke of healing, reincarnation, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition and Atlantis.

In many ways he ushered in the New Age movement. with his non-profit organisation, the Association for Research and Enlightenment. It sounds very scientific, but it was the opposite of that.

Often, when you want to sell something completely unscientific, it helps to describe it using sciency words.

Research and Enlightenment.

Proof.

Evidence

Conclusion.

Beards.

Thick glasses.

Cayce, like most self-described psychics, predicted the end of the world on a regular basis. He proclaimed, in 1933 that San Francisco would be destroyed by an earthquake in 1936, a revelation that came to him in a dream:

I had been born again in 2100 A.D. in Nebraska. The sea apparently covered all of the western part of the country, as the city where I lived was on the coast. The family name was a strange one. At an early age as a child I declared myself to be Edgar Cayce who had lived 200 years before. Scientists, men with long beads, little hair, and thick glasses, were called in to observe me. They decided to visit the places where I said I had been born, lived, and worked in Kentucky, Alabama, New York, Michigan, and Virginia. Taking me with them the group of scientists visited these places in a long, cigar-shaped metal flying ship which moved at a high speed. Water covered part of Alabama. Norfolk, Virginia, had become an immense seaport. New York had been destroyed either by war or an immense earthquake and was being rebuilt. Industries were scattered over the countryside. Most of the houses were built of glass. Many records of my work as Edgar Cayce were discovered and collected. The group returned to Nebraska, taking the records with them to study... These changes in the earth will come to pass, for the time and times and half times are at an end, and there begins those periods for the readjustments.

Obviously, this didn’t happen.

In 1936 we did get the Clark Cable film, Earthquake about the 1906 San Francisco disaster. Maybe he caught his dream-self popping along to the cinema and misunderstood.

Wouldn’t that be fascinating? Our Astral bodies having social lives much like our own, taking some time off to listen to music or catch a movie.

Or maybe those scientists in 2100 had got it wrong.

It happens.

In that quote, just towards the very end, you’ll see that Cayce mentions “These changes in the Earth”.

Earth Changes were part of a central philosophy for him. The idea that the planet would soon, relatively speaking, undergo a serious of cataclysms brought about through natural and man made disasters.

He predicted the polar axis would shift.

Atlantis would re-emerge.

Crazy, huh?

We do know that Edgar Cayce didn’t predict his own end. He passed on 3 January, 1945 in the Virginia mountains, where he was recovering from a sudden illness.

It is also not known if he celebrated the new year two days before.

[CIVILISATION]

I was given a copy of Jared Diamond’s Germs Guns & Steel for Christmas in around 1998.

As an aside, a book is a great present to give someone for Christmas as it gives them a legitimate excuse to disappear from reality for a little while, even as they are sat right there on the sofa. It let’s them sink beneath the swelling waves of social interactions stretched thin.

If you want a harmonious Christmas, make sure people have escape routes.

In the book, Diamond proposes that most of history, and why certain civilisations come to dominate the narrative, are not because of inherent differences between people, but environmental factors.

At a surface level this may mean that people with access to ready supplies of food and another resources can concentrate more of their time on thinking.

Another way of looking at it is that the environmental challenges people faced also informed their technology.

For example, people living in the British Isles had to build houses that were waterproof. When time came to build sea-faring vessels, we just turned those structures upside down, so to speak.

The theory is not without criticism. It seems achingly Euro-centric and also implies that much of history is a form of accidental colonisation.

He also attributes to Europeans technology that could be more accurately be described as Asian and Middle Eastern in origin.

More fundamentally is the metric Diamond uses for “advanced”. He chooses technological innovation over the happiness and well-being of the population. He picks global reach and conquest over societies that are satisfied with contained locality.

It would be interesting to question a small nomadic group surviving through substance foraging if they would be any happier working in a factory during the industrial revolution.

In his subsequent book, Collapse, Jared Diamond looked at the opposite phenomenon. Why is it that societies and civilisations ultimately collapse?

He concludes that in almost all cases the factors are environmental. These may be natural disasters or man-made pressures. Deforestation, soil issues (salination, declining fertility), water management and over-population.

He also speculates that in the future anthropogenic climate change, coupled with a build up of toxins in the environment will lead to rapid depopulation and further collapse.

Again, there was some controversy. Diamond forgot to reference the aggression of industrialised societies on civilisations they deemed conquerable or exploitable being a factor.

He also limited his scope to the physical environment.

What if our environment isn’t purely physical? What if it is cultural… conceptual, even?

The erosion isn’t just happening to the soil when it is happening to your human rights, supported by billionaires with their platforms and algorithms under the aegis of technological progress.

Culture slowly turning sour, riddled with the toxins of capitalism that pushes unhealthy lives.

[CHICKENS]

The entire planet celebrated the millennium as the clocks struck midnight on the 31st December 1999.

I can remember where I was. I was at the Yorkshire House.

It was full of people and smoke and music.

Back then it was always full of people and smoke and music.

Now, it isn’t.

We’d awake on the first day of this new era half-deaf and unable to speak from shouting over the noise all night.

Glorious.

I remember a conversation.

“Thing is, this isn’t even the start of the millennium. There wasn’t a year zero. That’s not how time even works. We’re a year too early.”

They were right. We had, in our desperation for something to look forward too, opened our presents a year too early.

And then we were counting down. We were counting down the seconds. Some people thought they were counting down to the new millennium.

Some of us thought we were counting our chickens.

[ATLANTIS]

Edgar Cayce helped popularise the modern myth of Atlantis.

It’s a myth that has been used as a warning about hubris. It has been used as a justification for genocide.

The myth of Atlantis is a flexible, useful fiction.

Earlier mentions of an advanced civilisation can be found in the writings of Plato, who described the island nation of existing on an island the size of Asia and Libya combined, just past the pillars of Hercules. He described their downfall being brought about through a disastrous war with Athens followed by earthquakes and floods.

Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists transformed the Atlanteans into cultural heroes. The Nazis relocated them as Nordic superheroes.

Cayce added flavour to this suggesting it was the Atlantean’s own technology that eventually brought about their downfall. He also suggested that the people of Atlantis migrated to the Yucatan Peninsula and to Egypt.

Interestingly, Cayce also suggests that the technology of Atlantis would make a comeback. His dream visions led to him seeing flying vehicles and strange energy sources.

Sadly, none of his predictions were concerned with the internet.

Cayce also believed that the whole history of Atlantis had been stored in three separate locations, one of them being in a hall of records under the Sphinx in Egypt.

He doesn’t tell us how this information is stored, or if the good folk of Atlantis still used pen and paper despite their technological advances. He avoids the question of whether their data was stored using a proprietary codec.

At the time of writing the hall of records has yet to be rediscovered.

[ADVERT]

We open of a shot of the city skyline from the other side of the Queensboro bridge.

Cut to a garbage truck passing a warehouse as two young men speed out from under a shutter. They are on skateboards.

Cut to a band. This is Reef, an English band, from near Glastonbury, who are now apparently recording a demo song in a warehouse loft, somewhere in the city.

There’s an awkward cut in the song as we snap from the lazy funk of the verse to a mid section of the chorus. It feels a little like when a CD skips.

“The Sony Minidisc can do everything ordinary tape can do, except on a Minidisc you can record digitally”

Cut to a Minidisc being handed over to a suited record executive in his office. The band sit squished uncomfortably on a single sofa in front of some platinum disks on the wall.

The voice-over continues as we see the executive make a number of dismissive gestures and poses whilst listening to the recording.

“It has random access”

The executive makes a snap decision, ejects the disc and flings it outside, through an open window. It is not clear if he always does this.

The disc plummets from the high-rise building.

“It’s capable of taking the…”

The disc slaps the concrete pavement. The absence of a pile of other media suggests the executive does not normally fling things out of the window.

The wheels of a skateboard roll over the disc.

“…odd little knock”

The skateboarder stops, picks up the disc and slots it into a waist mounted player.

Please, do not question that he was just skating around with his headphones in, listening to nothing at all.

“And it is as portable as you are”

He skates off looking for something that can be described as either “rad” or “gnarly”.

“Sony Minidisc, the future of tape”.

[Y2K]

The problem was caused through pragmatism.

It was memory that was limited, not foresight.

By storing year dates as two digits, rather than four, significant amounts of memory could be saved. The rationale being that for the majority of the twentieth century remaining, the “19” part of the year date would go unchanged, and so could just be taken as read.

There was plenty of time, and plenty of scope for new, better code on better hardware that wouldn’t need this rather crude fix.

Except, that’s not how computers advanced, as a technology. Instead, we replaced the things that we could and left the things that seemingly worked.

There were people throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s who pointed out that a lot of code still relied on the two digit date system that would, when we reached the year 2000, fall backwards to 1900 instead of stepping into a new millennium, but they were mostly ignored.

There was plenty of time.

Besides, no one will be using this code and this hardware then.

Except we were.

On a foundation of archaic code, created when memory was scare, we built an entire digital world. Banking, medicine, travel, utilities, communications.

And in that time we had come to rely on all of these things.

[90S]

The run up to the millennium was a rather wonderful time, in hindsight.

Of course, there were still wars, economic uncertainty, disease, famine and all the forms of prejudice… homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, racism… there are always wars, economic uncertainty, disease, famine and all forms of prejudice…

But it was also a strangely optimistic time.

The internet brought a new frontier and with it came an economic boost and a new form of liberalism.

You could be whoever you wanted to be online. You were unburdened by class, race or sexual identity. You could just pick a username and off you go on your merry way.

As Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon in the New Yorker (and later to be internet meme) puts it, ‘On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog’.

The film industry was undergoing another golden period that saw low budget indie films sitting next to big blockbusters.

Grunge and dance music had demonstrated a global appeal for what was once considered underground music. Hip hop was beginning to dominate the music charts.

Fandom had powered communities of TV series like The X-Files and Twin Peaks and a new home on the internet had helped it flourish, replete with off-topic forum boards and flame wars.

And technology in general, CDs brought nearly perfect audio to the masses. We had games consoles with brilliant games. Couch co-op brought people together and helped them fall out with each other in their own homes.

There were courses teaching you how to “surf the web”.

But underneath all of this there was an anxiety lurking like a sunken civilisation.

There’s an interview with David Bowie, a big fan of the emergent internet. Jeremy Paxman, on Newsnight in 1999, asks, “It’s just a tool though isn’t it?”.

Bowie responds:

No. It’s an alien life form [laughing], is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here…

The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable…

The actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we envisage at the moment.

Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.

It’s happening in every form. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.

And just look at those lyrics of Jamiroquai’s 1996 banger, Virtual Insanity.

[PREDICTIONS]

If you are going to get into the clairvoyance game, there’s certainly a technique you can employ.

It goes like this:

1. Predict new technology (Death Rays, Sentient Technology, Strange Power Sources. All popular choices).

2. Predict doom, associated with that new technology.

That should, at least, get you as far as the next millennium.

You can also throw in the big guns. The Second Coming. Armageddon and, for seasoning, add some wars. If your visions are not giving you an exact location, it is probably best to say something vague and evergreen, like The Middle East.

Edgar Cayce wasn’t shy of predicting any of this. His dream visions showed him great earthquakes and impending technologically inspired terrors.

He also had Jesus rocking up, again, in 1998 in plenty of time for the year 2000 beer run.

He also predicted that there would be conflict in The Middle East.

[PAST DATES OF DOOM]

The Y2K bug gets the attention, but it wasn’t the only date related computer apocalypse.

For example, the date of 5 January 1975 caused an issue when the 12-bit field that stored DEC PDP-10 dates overflowed. This was referred to as the DATE75 bug.

The TOPS-10 operating system on the DEC PDP-10 calculated the date by simply taking the number of years since 1964, multiplying by 12, adding the number of months since January, multiplying by 31, and adding the number of days since the start of the month.

The maximum value that could be stored in the 12-bit field was 4095, which corresponded to January 4, 1975.

The DEC PDP-10 looked a bit like a wonderful blue wardrobe with spinning tape wheels. When you picture rooms full of computers in the 1970s, you are probably picturing these.

We managed to survive this disaster without the aid of prepper-style videos that taught us how to live off dried food and rainwater until order was restored. Maybe we didn’t know the severity of it. Perhaps we didn’t think computers had permeated too much of our every day lives at that point.

They were big, hulking machines that sat in dedicated rooms. They were exceptional rather than ubiquitous.

Let’s look at something a little closer.

Shortly before the Y2K problem came the 9 September 1999 issue.

9/9/99.

In this footnote of computer date shenanigans, there was a problem because the number 9999 had been frequently used to store the information of “unknown date”. This was particularly useful for rolling contracts and placeholder information.

There was no fuss made of this either. Maybe we were already fixated on the Y2K bug. Either way, we survived this also.

Ultimately it caused little trouble beyond a few misunderstandings.

At best it was a warning shot.

An omen.

[ATLANTIS]

There are two ways of looking at it.

Head on, it appears that every civilisation carries with it stories of an earlier civilisation that had strayed, spiritually, only to be wiped clean by a flood.

The Cheyenne, a North American Great Plains tribe, have a flood story, as do the Hopi and the Mayans.

Judeo-Christianity and Hinduism have flood myths.

The epic of Gilgamesh features a flood.

Atlantis is just another addition.

Perhaps all of these stories are referencing the same event. Perhaps there was a super-advanced civilisation that found their own undoing in their technology.

That is certainly one way of looking at it. A way that might seem concurrent with Jared Diamond’s thesis on environmental damage causing the extinction of civilisations or with Edgar Cayce’s dream visions of the future.

Another way of looking at it, perhaps with a sideways glance, is that these floods didn’t really happen, or if they did, they were unconnected natural disasters with no meaning and no thought, the consequences of nothing other than geography and poor luck.

Instead, the reason why these myths persist in our cultures is that they tap into something fundamental about our psyche.

We fear ourselves and what we are capable of.

We have a pathological need to warn and re-warn ourselves that we have a capacity for making things that get out of hand. Rules stripped of context, governments stripped of restraint, technology stripped of purpose.

When our first ancestor fashioned a tool out of flint, they also fashioned a weapon.

With every discovery and invention comes a new way of seeing our own destruction. It’s psychological firmware, written deep in our lizard brain like a line of atavistic code.

At some point there are so many ways for our tools to destroy us that we become fixated on the inevitable point at which they go from being something that enables us to something that removes us altogether.

[FUTURE DATES OF DOOM]

In 2010 there was confusion between dates stored in binary-coded decimal and those encoded in hexadecimal.

Both store the numbers 0–9 as 0x0–0x9.

The problem comes when we reach the number 10.

Binary-coded decimal encodes the number 10 as 0x10, however, hexadecimal interprets this as 16.

The fallout of this was surprisingly large. In Germany 20 million bank cards became unusable when ‘valid from’ and ‘expiry’ dates that should have ended 2010 suddenly ended 2016.

Then there’s the Y2K22 bug. The shortened acronym is getting a little stretched, and it might be quicker just to say the words out loud.

The maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer, as used in many computer systems, is 2147483647. Some machines stored the year in the leftmost digits, meaning that January 1, 2022 would be 2200000001.

This date problem caused problems with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2016, in particular, the part that scans for malware. Emails were held endlessly in transport queues until the problem was fixed.

Shortly after we roll into 2038 any system that runs on Unix time (and there are an awful lot of these) will have a blip. These systems can only represent dates between 13 December 1901 (at 20:45:52) and 19 January 2038 (at 03:14:08) due to the limits of the dates being stored as 32-bit integers.

It is expected that rather than waking up on 20 January, 2038, we will be somehow transported back to the year of 1901.

The there is some deliberate time travel that will be needed by owners of early Nokia phones from Series 40. These only support dates up to 31 December 2079.

In the unlikely event of someone still using a mobile phone that will be over 70 years old, the only fix would be to rewind the clock back to a compatible date, such as 1996 to display the correct day of the week on the main screen.

Excel will eventually collapse as the maximum (as of 2025) supported date for spreadsheet calculation is 31 December 9999. Similarly, optical disc file systems have a date range that ends then too.

We’ll also be hitting a problem in the year 10,000 since this will be the first date of the Gregorian calendar to feature a year with five digits.

The problem is this. Our current technological paradigm, no matter how advanced it may seem, was flawed from the start.

There are a near infinite number of problems to be solved, and this is only when we consider dates. As time advances, our upkeep of this technology will continue. Until we discover a way to store infinite digits, this problem will persist.

In 292,277,026,569 the 64-bit integers that Unix currently uses to store times and dates will run out of space once again. This time it will create a mini-apocalypse at 15:30:08 on Sunday 4 December.

This is our forever problem.

[Y2K]

I’m not sure when it happened exactly. It feels like it was after the event, or maybe very shortly before, possibly starting in the US, like these things usually do.

We went from calling it “The Y2K Bug” or “The Y2K Problem” to just “Y2K”.

A triplet of characters that simply means, “The Year 2000”.

[MINIDISC]

You sweep away some of the ash that has settled. It feels oddly fluffy and light.

As you clear the desk you become an archeologist.

Ancient objects reveal themselves slowly.

You’ve seen some of these things before, although none of them work anymore. They need a power supply that no longer exists. The outlets and sockets are purely decorative.

But here it is, the thing you are looking for.

A palm-sized square. The pinnacle of ancient technology.

They called it Minidisk.

It harnessed an obscure, arcane physical property called the Curie Point.

The Curie point is the temperature above which certain materials lose their permanent magnetic properties, becoming paramagnetic.

The Minidisk uses a laser to do this.

A laser!

It uses a remarkably high quality, but lossy audio compression called ATRAC to fit 75 minutes of music on a re-recordable disk, housed in a 7cm square plastic case.

You know all of this because you read it in a book that someone had been smart enough to stash in their bunker right beside some empty jars, a chemical toilet, and some near useless passports.

This is it. The most advanced technology we have ever built. Digital, mechanical, magnetic, optical and all powered by a single 1.5v AA battery.

And in your hands, as you turn it over and admire it. This is useful. Really useful. You’ll be able to hand it to those beardy, glasses-wearing scientists and they’ll give you a month’s worth of dried meat.

[PREPPERS]

There’s a bit in The Clock of The Long Now, where the accessibility of technology is explained.

If, in some dystopian future, you pick up a CD but do not have a CD player, how are you going to access it? Even if you know what it is, and even if you understand how, theoretically, to extract the data, you still might struggle finding or making the components to do so.

How about if you pick up a vinyl record? You might struggle to understand its purpose, but it is far more likely that you will be able to access it with something as simple as a pin and a paper cup.

The data is more apparent.

The same is true of things like books. You can infer things from them, just by studying them. I recommend you pick up a foreign language book, particularly a language you don’t know anything about, and spend some time with it. You’d be surprised by the information you can extract.

Even when the power goes out, books still work.

Maybe our downfall isn’t that we stray from our spirituality, but that we lose contact with the immediacy of our world. That technology becomes ever more abstract and notional and that we spend more of our lives living in this holographic realm.

With each act of compression, with codecs and algorithms, with things stored ‘in the cloud’ rather than locally, with songs streamed but not owned, with subscriptions rather than buying, access to tools that disappear when a company folds, proprietary file formats, copy protection that relies on active servers….

There are people swimming against this flood.

They are going back to owning DVDs rather than watching films on Netflix because they’ve fallen foul of their favourite show just evaporating.

The are hoarding vinyl and tapes and CDs and Minidiscs because streaming platforms are replacing their content with AI approximations and still somehow justifying cramming adverts into their subscriptions.

And creators of arts of all kinds are becoming wary about sharing it digitally as it gets swallowed by large language models and algorithmic AI.

There’s a return to hand written exams and essays because homework can’t be trusted.

The news can’t trust video any more.

Our cultural well is polluted and it causes a strange sickness in all of us. One that starts with symptoms of paranoia followed by rapid polarisation.

It is making us act in strange ways no longer in our own best interests.

This is the environmental damage that afflicts our civilisation.

Right now there are probably videos being made about it using an AI generated facsimile of Leonard Nimoy warning us to keep copies of print media and our passports. It glitches around like it is in the actual matrix as it tells us the best way to deal with digital effluent.

[THE AFTERMATH]

In the end, most people noticed nothing at all.

When the dust settled we woke up with our terrible hangovers, clothes smelling like an ashtray. We would perceive this new era through bleary eyes that hurt in the light and heads that throbbed in time with our heartbeats.

The television worked and we watched people all over the world lose their collective shit a year early, aided by spectacular firework displays and awkward hand-holding renditions of Auld Lang Syne.

It’s a common trope to now see it as a lot of fuss made over something that wasn’t worth it, but the real truth is that thousands of people put in hundreds of thousands of man hours at the cost of billions to make sure the world didn’t end.

Or at least that the planes didn’t drop out of the sky, and that emails would continue to be delivered in a timely fashion and that your bank cards would work.

The Millennium Dome opened, a strange monument to nothing at all except surviving the passage of time.

Prince Charles started the morning by presenting “Thought for the Day” on BBC Radio 4. His thought echoed that of Plato and Cayce, and Diamond and everyone else who talks about the fall of civilisations as they stray from the spiritual towards the technological.

He said:

Perhaps, in the midst of all the celebrations and the hype, deep down inside many of us may feel intuitively – to paraphrase a wonderful passage from Dante – that the strongest desire of everything, and the one first implanted by nature, is to return to its source. And since God is the source of our souls and has made it alike unto himself... therefore this soul desires above all things to return to Him.

[LAST PARTY OF THE YEAR]

Maybe we have over simplified things.

Maybe we conflated two things because we didn’t really understand the implications of either.

What if, on one hand you had the purely technical issue, the Y2K bug, and on the other you had Y2K, the psychological event precipitated by our own inbuilt recognition that we had finally crossed a divide.

That technology was not serving us, so much as we were serving it.

A deep-seated realisation that maybe we had reached the apex of our civilisation and that from here on it was all downhill. That we threw a party as a final hurrah to things getting slowly better, to optimism, to a shared human purpose.

That we finally understood the inevitability of planes falling out of the sky and nuclear reactors causing untold damage through neglect and error, and the certainty that we would become less capable and less understanding in our new world.

A moment where we realised that technology would be in charge of us, and that we would be playing catch up.

Servile and obsequious.

We had made the thing that would destroy us, it was out of our hands.

Our eggs had hatched and our chickens were digital. You can only count them in hexadecimal or binary-coded decimal, and things get weird after you have more than ten of them.

The acknowledgement that the end was approaching.

This is the hangover of that celebration.

In order for Mother Teresa of Calcutta to become a saint she first had to be beatified.

That's like being a saint on probation.

To be beatified, in most cases, the person must have performed a miracle from beyond the grave.

On October 1, 2003 the Vatican certified that Teresa, who died in 1997 had in fact cured a woman of cancer in 1998.

This was miraculous.

This was a miracle.

There are three degrees of miracle. The first is represented by resurrection from the dead (quoad substantiam). The second (quoad subiectum) is for curing someone that has been deemed incurable. The third (quoad modum) involves instantaneous recovery from an illness that would normally require a long period of convalescence.

Miracles need to be instantaneous, complete and permanent.

They also must lack any scientific explanation.

Doctors are not eligible to apply to be saints.

The Vatican body in charge of reviewing applications to the position of sainthood is called the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and they refer all potential miracles to the Consulta Medica, a body made of around 100 (Catholic) medical doctors.

Five members of the Consulta Medica will meet to review x-rays and medical notes and at least three must agree that God has had a greater role than science in the recovery.

After this, another panel meets, this time consisting of Cardinals. Their job is to make sure that the miracle was the result of praying to the saintly candidate, and not just because God was feeling benevolent.

The subject of Mother Teresa's miracle was Monica Besra, a Bengali woman who reported suffering from a malignant ovarian tumour. In 1998 she arrived at a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity where nuns claim to have placed a medallion featuring Teresa's likeness on Besra's abdomen.

And the tumour disappeared.

A miracle.

There were claims, published in the Times, that an Indian physician had treated Besra nine months before she arrived at the hospice. They claimed they diagnosed the patient with tubercular adenitis and prescribed drugs to treat the tubercular cyst.

They also say they were not contacted by anyone at the vatican.

[RESURRECTION]

On July 1, 2018 at the beach in Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk, an inflatable trampoline explodes with great force. A three year old girl, Ava-May Littleboy is thrown from the inflatable 20 feet into the air and later, dies in hospital.

In August 2021, as part of their 'Great British Spraycation', Banksy bestows a mural on a wall that borders the sands of Gorleston. It depicts children on an inflatable dinghy being flung into the air.

Perhaps Banksy isn't from Gorleston, and wouldn't know about the history of the place, or the terrible event that had occurred there three years previously. Perhaps they had done some research and they are and were aware of it. Perhaps they had concluded that following such a grim tragedy people were ready to laugh again.

What is an artist responsible for, particularly when using public spaces as a canvas for their work? Do they have any responsibility when they are operating in environments that are not their own, when their form relies on not being asked in the first place?

Workers at Great Yarmouth Council reacted quickly, covering the mural with white paint, however, a month later the Council met and Trevor Wainright, leader of the council's Labour opposition asked whether the 'valuable' artwork could be 'brought back to life'.

An interesting choice of words. A miracle for a piece of art that could not be performed on a child.

Paula Boyce, Strategic Director at Great Yarmouth Borough Council and lead on their City of Culture 2025 bid confirmed that the council had commissioned a conservator to restore the work.

"We do believe it would be worthwhile taking it off the wall and conserving it and putting it on show in a public gallery somewhere".

[PEST CONTROL]

At some point in the mid-90s there was an artist working in Morecambe.

They went by the name, 'Social Pest'.

You probably aren't aware of their work. That was the point.

Their tag, their name appeared all over the town, but only in places where few people chose to look.

The top edge of doors.

Underneath the flaps of salt bins.

The roof of the bus shelter.

They found a new space, a new canvas.

Morecambe was a gallery, but only for those that chose to look.

[MIRACLE]

One of the most common types of miracle you'll encounter in the wild is the 'weeping statue', or sometimes the 'bleeding statue'.

For example, in 1953 a statue of the Virgin Mary in Syracuse, Sicily apparently started shedding human tears.

The Church recognized the weeping as a genuine miracle.

Thousands of visitors visited the statue until 1995 when Dr. Luigi Garlaschelli, a chemistry researcher at the University of Pavia, debunked the miracle.

He proved that the statue, made of plaster, would readily absorb moisture from the air which would later leak out of small scratches in the glazing.

In March, 2011 another variation of this miracle occurred. A twelve foot statue of a crucified Jesus in Mumbai began to cry, the tears pooling below its feet.

Again, thousands of visitors, many making donations to the church, attended the statue and drank the tears to cure ailments and bless their lives.

Sanal Edamauku, author and president of the Indian Rationalist Association, demonstrated on national television that a burst sewage pipe in the wall behind the statue was the likeliest source of the tears.

Edamaruku was subsequently charged with blasphemy. He moved to Finland to avoid arrest and persecution.

[YEALAND]

Let's call him 'Dee'.

As a teenager, in the late 90s, he'd ended up somewhat homeless.

He found himself staying at a house in Yealand Redmayne, a village in Lancashire.

Guidebooks will talk about the history of Yealand, the Vikings and the record in the Doomsday book. They'll probably mention the large ancient stone circle on nearby Summerhouse Hill

It's one of those places that exists in the British landscape somewhere between quaint village and housing estate, a place that can feel particularly isolated. It is just out of the way enough, with too few bus services or any other viable public transport to get out of. It's a pretty trap of a place.

Dee was struggling with this. The boredom and the bleakness. He found himself walking around the village most nights.

One night Dee encounters the remnants of roadworks near the entrance to the village. A collection of red and white plastic barriers and cones. Alongside them a solitary can of yellow spray paint, used to mark the road surface.

We will never know if it was boredom, defiance or mischief that propelled Dee to take the can and spray his displeasure on the gable end of the first house you encounter as you drive into Yealand Redmayne on the A6.

We do know, however, why the can had been so casually discarded.

What should have read, in large, foot high capitals, 'FUCK YEALAND', would remain a cryptic retort as the paint ran out.

'FUCK YE'.

[SEASIDER]

On Boxing Day, 2021 a 24-year old man from East Sussex is arrested during Operation Sirius.

Operation Sirus was dedicated to tackling graffiti on railways during the winter period through increased patrols and rapid deployments. It would lead to British Transport police arresting nine men in total.

“The tags they sprayed on the station walls were linked to an ongoing operation that is investigating years’ worth of graffiti damage to the railway. The damage has totalled to more than £500,000 and has impacted train operators across London and the South East,” a spokesperson added.

"...most importantly it protects the people who decide to trespass on the tracks to commit such vandalism. It’s well known that the railway is incredibly dangerous, and trespassing can easily result in loss of life or life-changing injuries"."

The man was released on bail with orders preventing him from using the railway and carrying spray paint cans.

Two other suspects fled the scene.

[STREET ART]

As you approach Glasgow Central on the West Coast main line, you'll see, in the distance, a city covered street art.

A number of sanctioned murals line the streets, by artists and collectives such as Rogue-one, Art Pistol, VELOCITY, Smug and Recoat. Some were commissioned to celebrate the hosting of the 2014 Commonwealth games by the city.

This is street art at its slickest, its most professional and acceptable. These are legitimate works by legitimate artists featuring legitimate subjects, such as a man with a robin perched on his finger, or a woman blowing on a dandelion clock.

There is a whimsical taxi being lifted into the air by balloons.

This is the acceptable face of painting on buildings. The council-backed decoration of urban environments, often by artists from other places, trying to reflect the communities that live there.

There is a piece called 'Fellow Glasgow Residents' that depicts, on the side of a building, some wildlife you may encounter. Deer, fox, red squirrel.

As you approach Glasgow central on the West Coast main line, you'll see, close up, next to the rails, some one, probably local, has spray painted, "Fuck Street Art".

[BEHOLD]

The original accusation was one of vandalism. This was later downgraded to merely, 'the worst restoration of all time'.

In 2012 Cecilia Gimenez, a retired Spanish octogenarian, began a restoration of a fresco that had suffered flaking due to the moisture in the walls of the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja.

'Ecce Homo', translated as 'Behold, Man', was originally painted around 1930 by the Spanish artist Elias Garcia Martinez. It was a traditional Catholic depiction of Jesus Christ accessorised with a crown of thorns.

The restoration, by the amateur artist, left the son of God looking somewhat different. The crown of thorns now smudged into his hair, the subtle shading of Christ's neck merging with a full underbeard.

The alteration was discovered only once the great-granddaughter of the original artist had made a financial donation to have the work restored.

The result was international coverage, jokingly labelling the new, improved version as 'Ecce Mono', or 'Behold the Monkey', in a combination of Latin and Spanish. This is all well known.

Perhaps lesser known is the eventual fallout.

To date the formerly struggling church has earned over 50,000 euros in donations and merchandising of mugs, t-shirts and tea towels featuring the updated fresco.

A modern miracle.

[GRIND KING]

"Police on the hunt for vandals behind graffiti"

Published: 10:38 AM January 21, 2021 - Sarah Burgess, Eastern Daily Press

Police are on the hunt for whoever graffitied the words "King" and "Grind" on different spots around a coastal village.

The tags were discovered and reported on January 19, at Beach Car Park on Beach Road, Caister and on Charles Close, also in Caister.

A second tag was also found in Caister and reported to police.

Police have asked anyone with information to contact PC Dan Brown at Great Yarmouth Police Station on 101.

Last year, police also investigated an instance of graffiti in Great Yarmouth's town centre after a swastika was drawn on the wall in Quaker Row.

The incident was reported to Norfolk Police by a member of the public, and a hate crime investigation was launched.

[BESTOW]

One of the murals, depicting a child with a crowbar on the side of disused electrical shop, Lowestoft Electrical, was removed and reportedly sold for around £2 million at auction. Another, a model added to the Merrivale Model Village, sold for £1 million.

Another work, showing a rat relaxing in a deckchair on the sea wall at North Beach, in Lowestoft was defaced. The council said it was "considering the most suitable option" for restoration.

North Norfolk District Council said it spent over £700 on various measures to protect an artwork on a sea wall in Cromer. This one is of hermit crabs, with one in a shell holding a sign stating: "Luxury rentals only."

Great Yarmouth Borough Council said it had spent £8,385.49 on security patrols, CCTV cameras and cover screens for the works under its jurisdiction.

East Suffolk Council defended spending over £7,500 on security patrols, guards and polycarbonate sheets saying that the Banksy murals were a 'welcome benefit' and that it generated 'great interest'.

Conversely, a study, carried out for the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on left behind neighbourhoods, published in May 2021 highlights that Great Yarmouth falls into a category it describes as the “most deprived of the deprived”.

“A number of left behind neighbourhoods are entirely lacking in shops, cultural assets and open spaces that provide places for people to meet and engage in community life,” the report says.

Today more than a third of the population in Lowestoft live in financial hardship while over 30 percent of children live in poverty.

In total the three councils spent around £20,000 guarding and protecting the works.

[SOCIAL]

"MEAT HERE AT 8" -- Marker Pen, Morecambe Prom, mid-90s.

[LAMBETH]

The Wandsworth Times reported, on 29 June, 2021, that a man from South London had been arrested for causing £100,000 in damage to railway property through graffiti.

The 30 year old was arrested on suspicion of 46 counts of criminal damage.

Officers from the British Transport Police's specialist search unit and graffiti team carried out the raids at two addresses on Wednesday 16 June, one in South London and the other located in Kent, as well as searching a vehicle.

“The vandalism goes far beyond just looking unsightly, it has huge financial implications for the rail industry and causes frustrating delays to passengers while trains are taken out of service to be cleaned," a spokesperson added.

“...not only this, offenders are also putting their lives at risk by trespassing on the railway, which can have life-changing or fatal consequences.

“It will not be tolerated and we will continue to run dedicated operations to target this type of crime.”

[FACTUALLY]

I was once chatting with an avant-garde musician.

Someone described him as internationally obscure. He's unknown all over the world.

He confessed that in his youth his favourite pastime was to create factually correct graffiti.

"Mr Jones is the headmaster"

"One mile is 1609.344 metres"

"This is graffito"

[FAIREY]

Shepherd Fairey, perhaps best known for his 'Hope' Obama poster, was arrested on February 7, 2009, on his way to the premiere of his show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, on two outstanding warrants related to graffiti.

He was charged with damage to property for having postered two Boston area locations with graffiti.

His arrest was announced to party goers by longtime friend Z-Trip who had been performing at the ICA premiere at Shepard Fairey's request.

[GRAFFITI]

The etymology of the word, ultimately from the Greek 'graffio', meaning to scratch or scribble via the Italian plural for 'graffito', hints back to the origin of some of the earliest examples.

The tomb of Ramesses VI, in the Valley of the Kings sports over 1,000 inscriptions, most of which were etched into the rock by Roman visitors around 2,000 years ago.

One example reads, “I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus!”

Another states, in a factual manner, "I cannot read the hieroglyphs!"

Similarly, Pompeii is decorated with examples. These range from pornographic through to the rather touching, "You love Iris, but she does not love you'.

Scholars have used these ancient examples to gain insight into the social structures of these societies. Not only do the words hint at levels of literacy, but they provide context to the lives, the concerns and the motivations of the people that lived there.

This doesn't really explain the 'why' of graffiti though. What it is that drives humans to mark their environment with their thoughts.

Maybe if we look sideways at another form of art.

Earth Art, or Land Art is a movement that emerged as a form in the late 60s. Using materials such as soil and rocks, artists created large scale works in situ to decorate the land. The movement in the 60s considered this as a response to the rejection of commercialisation, particularly of the art market itself, and urban living. It was closely allied with the emergent ecological movements. Essentially, this form arose as a way for artists to explore the relationship between humans and their environment in the context of the growing realisation that people do not exist separately from the land, but in an intricate and intimate relationship with it.

There is something about interacting with the environment in this way that traverses the impermanent nature of human endeavour.

In a similar way, the earliest humans frequently built earthworks, not just as shelters, but as focal points for spirituality.Land Art often persists long after the humans that have made it. It's a very primal way of changing the environment to reflect your presence.

Scratching into the very material of earth.

We could also consider this territorial. You could ask the question of who has the right to commit such an act on the landscape. Perhaps the people that live there have the greatest claim as they demonstrate their connection to the land that created them, sustained them and would eventually consume them.

Then there is the red hand. The oldest known cave painting is in Maltravieso cave, Cáceres, Spain. This painting was made by using a human hand as a stencil.It is over 64,000 years old.

What can that be other than a human demonstrating their presence in the environment? I was here, and now you are here, seeing this, too.

Scratched into the very fabric of time.

It is best described by a work of graffiti in Palmyra, written over a thousand years ago. It says, “This is an inscription that I wrote with my own hand. My hand will wear out but the inscription will remain.”

[UNDERGROUND]

In December, 2018, Bacari Adams, a 33 year-old man was arrested alongside 31 year-old Jake Martin.

They were charged with causing £130,000 worth of damage to the London Underground through graffiti.

Adams was jailed for six months after pleading guilty to conspiring to destroy or damage property. Martin also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 months in prison suspended for 18 months.

Evidence in the case demonstrated that Bacari's tag was the same as the tattoo he had across his knuckles.

In his defence, Bacari claimed he was, “creating a job for the person cleaning it”.

[CHARITY]

In 2017, investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi published a book called 'Original Sin'. It detailed documents from the Institute for the Works of Religion, which is better known as the Vatican Bank.

The documents revealed that the funds held by the bank in Mother Teresa's name, on account of her charity, amounted to billions. Nuzzi hypothesised that had Mother Teresa, formerly known as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, made significant withdrawls, the bank would have risked default.

It's important to understand that this money wasn't sitting idly during this time. The money was working for the Church. It was invested, re-invested, accrued and traded.

Mother Teresa accepted money from Robert Maxwell, the disgraced British publisher who died in 1991 just before a scheduled meeting with the Bank of England to discuss his default on £50,000,000 of loans. He also embezzled £450,000,000 from his employees' pension fund.

She also accepted money from Charles Humphrey Keating Jr.an American sportsman, lawyer, real estate developer, banker, financier and fraudster. He donated millions to Mother Teresa and let her borrow his private jet when she visited the United States.

The name 'Mother Teresa' was trademarked shortly after her death. It could be argued that this is to stop exploitation of the name for commercial gain.

Several scandals have been related to organisations using the name. A school in Nepal that failed to pay teacher's salaries, a co-operative bank in India, shops and stalls selling unofficial merchandise.

Merchandise.

There is official merchandise. You can buy that too. The Catholic Company, for example, sells the 'Do it Anyway' tile, bearing the inscription hung on the wall of Mother Teresa's orphanage. At the time of writing, it costs $24.95.

The simple sari, with blue trim, that Mother Teresa wore has also been trademarked. It is recognised by India's government as the intellectual property of the Missionaries of Charity.

[PEST CONTROL]

In order to sell a Banksy artwork at auction it needs to be verified.

Despite the hidden identity of the artist and the notionally illegal method of creation it is possible to do this through an organisation called 'Pest Control'.

They will authenticate a work.

Processing a Screenprint for authentication = £50 + VAT.

Processing an Original for authentication = £100 + VAT.

If you are successful you will be issued with a Pest Control Office Ltd Certificate of Authenticity.

[EXIT]

There is something inextricably linked between miracles, those that bestow them and money. The holy trinity of a real world interface of belief.

It's interesting to note where miracles tend to happen too. Often they are targeted at the poor and the sick, or the dying.

Whilst in Catholicism, one of the requirements is that the subject of the miracle must request aid, they must be praying to the saint, it isn't so clear if this is true of artistic miracles like the ones that appeared for the councils of the East coast.

Some of us don't want to be healed, not like that, not by them. Some of us have perfectly good local doctors.

Nor is it clear who the beneficiary fo such a miracle is. Is it the sellers that walked away with a combined total of £3 million? Is it the people of Great Yarmouth that don't appear to be substantially better off for the experience?

Your seaside town is a canvas, but it is not a canvas for you.

When people mark their environment with their lives they are accused of criminality and arrested, by the same institutions that spend money on resurrecting an authentic Banksy.

One case is vandalism, the other is a bestowment.

The difference is in the resale.

Your raw sewage statue tears and your Ecce Mono t-shirts.

No amount of sly recognition or self awareness can absolve someone of partaking in this. You can choose to exit through the gift shop whether that is one of Banksy's making or Mother Teresa's and the only thing on sale has the vague appearance of a miracle.

What follows was originally written a few years ago.

It is rather personal, and at times a little brutal. If you are uncomfortable with bodily harm, bullying and trauma, you might want to skip this one.

It’s really about class.

The reason I bring it up again now, is that class, especially in the arts sector, is still a contentious issue. If anything, things seem to have become far worse than they were pre-COVID, and that, despite the endless calls for equality and equity, the sector has shifted to a more insular form.

Last month The Guardian fielded a series of articles about the working class in the arts in the UK:

Working-class creatives don’t stand a chance in UK today, leading artists warn

Who is ‘working class’ and why does it matter in the arts?

Interesting reads, and very recommended, but the upshot is that fewer than 1 in 10 arts workers consider themselves working class in the UK.

And yet, outwardly, there seem to be few artists admitting to being working class.

It is a situation I have encountered before. Long before I was an artist, and very much before I wrote about the arts.

I see my position here, much the same way as I did at school. I’m here to provide legitimacy for the others.

I feel I have some things to say about this, but whenever I do speak out, my own position is questioned based on my background, especially my education.

And so, as a way of explaining how I got here, a position I feel rather fortunate to be in, here is what happened:

[HARM]

You, boy, stop there!

The Boy was running, that's against the rules, that's fair. He holds out his hands in mitigation. Together they form a cup that is slowly pooling with the blood making its way through the grit of his skinned palms.

The teacher looks at the hands and then looks down a little.

Tuck your shirt in.

The Boy doesn't really hear this right. He's fighting hard not to cry. The pain is intense and his heart is pounding. He just wants to get to a sink.

I said tuck your shirt in! Are you deaf?

The Boy reaches down and begins to tuck his shirt in, smearing blood across the crumpled white of the fabric. Now his mother will know too.

The teacher looks at the Boy with a cold hard stare, for several seconds before turning his back and walking off.

[EMPLOYMENT]

Here's how it works. Here's how you work.

This is a job. I'll explain.

There are two types of students here. You are a scholarship student, referred to mostly as a 'Day Boy'. You almost certainly belong to the working class community within the catchment area of the school.

The other type of students are boarders, and are known as such. They come from all over the world. Their parents pay hefty sums of money for their education. This money is not specifically labelled for education, rather these are boarding fees.

Interestingly, paying boarding fees allows students to be admitted without sitting the entrance exam.

Some of the boarders are smart enough, they've probably had private tuition most of their lives. However, a fair proportion of them have not. They are, at best, average students with average academic expectations.

The reason this is a job, your first full time job is as follows.

The Day Boys are selected through an entrance exam. Formerly the 11 plus. They are selected for their academic abilities.

The boarders attend the school because of their financial circumstances.

In order for the school to attract fee paying students, they have to show that their educational record is good. They need to remain high in league tables that are solely based on the average academic achievements of their students.

Some of those fee paying boarders will bring down that average and so the Day Boys shoulder the responsibility, through selection, to raise that average.

Does that make sense?

Your job here is to get good grades, the best grades, so that we can sell the product of education to rich people. In return you'll be paid with a decent education and the ability to say you went here too.

You will be paid with a gateway between classes.

But beware, like any job, if your performance is deemed substandard you will be made redundant.

The boarders will receive tuition and support if they begin to slip, however, you will simply be asked to leave.

That gate will slam behind you.

[ENTRANCE]

The Boy sits at a large wooden desk.

His parents dropped him off one Saturday. Unprepared and unannounced.

Just try your best, there's no pressure.

There are maths questions about ice cream. They seem fairly trivial, however for the rest of the Boy's life mathematics and ice cream will seem unbreakably linked. Intricately interwoven in his psyche as a motivator and a reward.

He will grow into the sort of person that still finds Vienetta fancy, but knows to eat vanilla in company.

The Boy is sat in Room 5 of the New Building.

The New Building was built in 1929.

There are thirty other Boys in the room too. They are all of a similar class and background. No one looks comfortable and some are finding the pressure a little too much. One leaves the room in the middle of the exam crying. He just gets up and walks out.

Conversely, the class is not at all representative of the class the Boy will end up in. A class made from a mix of working class, local children and others, far wealthier and from much further away.

These other children face a different kind of test. A monetary one.

Two months after the exam a letter arrives. The Boy has won. The parents are very, very proud.

They celebrate by buying him his first proper pen. A Parker ballpoint. A Jotter, dark blue and silver.

It's heavier than you would think.

[MOTTO]

Praesis ut prosis

That's the school motto. It seems as bland as any other school motto.

Latin, of course, to stop most people understanding what it says.

But there's more. Think about what it really says.

It says, "Lead in order to serve".

You are a leader. That is how you fulfill your purpose. Being in charge. It's the kindest, most considerate thing you can do for them.

Them. The other people who have the motto, "prosis ut prois".

Interestingly the various translations of prosis include "profit" and "benefit".

If your Latin isn't so good, if you skipped classes, or if your school didn't teach it at all, perhaps you could be excused for translating that motto as "Lead to profit".

[INDUCTION]

The first lesson.

We walk into the classroom. No one is waiting for us.

We sit down. Quietly, nervously.

Pens out. Ready.

We wait. Ten minutes pass.

The teacher strolls in.

He looks over the class.

He turns and walks out again.

We are unsure about what has just happened.

The teacher strolls in again, and repeats the performance.

Some of the boys find this absurd, and somewhat funny.

Maybe it is nerves.

The teacher walks in for a third time and we learn.

The Boy has never been screamed at by an adult. At least not like this. He's seen his parents angry, or desperate, he's been on the recieving end of a tirade from an angry neighbour, but this is different.

The teacher is red in the face. Saliva spitting out with the words. The volume. The hatred.

"When I walk into a room you stand up"

Over and over. Aimed at each of us in turn.

The Boy waits for his turn to have the teachers face in his as he shouts this. It's a horrible feeling. Waiting for abuse.

It's a horrible way to start your education, but an effective way of learning.

When finished, the teacher walks out once again.

On his return we all stand.

[UNIFORM]

Over the years, The Boy would regularly receive detention for refusing to wear the School uniform.

He once had to write out, over and over, the phrase, "when you are outside of school, you are representing the school".

Once, he was just made to write the phrase "ping pong" repeatedly.

The punishment wasn't always coherent.

The idea was that uniforms make everyone equal. That they disguise the discrepancy between the richer children and the poorer ones. No fancy trainers, or fashionable tops against wolly hand-me-down jumpers.

However, everyone knew this to be a fallacy. You could tell which students were from wealthy backgrounds. New blazers. Untattered ties.

They fit and so did their clothes.

The boy's were used to wearing jackets that they would grow into or ones that they could survive for just one more year. They had half-mast trousers and jumpers with a list of names sewn into them.

There was nothing uniform about what they wore, except on the most superficial level.

Furthermore, the boarders never had to wear those colours outside of the school. It was only the Day Boys that had to parade them through the town and the estates.

Any attempt to modify the uniform was treated as cowardice, as desertion. If they could, you'd be feathered and tarred, but mostly held in detention.

[STOP]

The Boy's home is exactly between two schools. Head North and you find his school. Head South and you reach the nearest comprehensive.

The A6 will take you in either direction.

The two bus stops are directly opposite each other.

Every morning, the Boy would stand at one side of the road waiting for his bus, and across the way, his former classmates from primary school, his peers, their brothers and sisters. His own family.

Sometimes the Boy would have company.

Most times he would be stood on his own.

[HOME]

The first written homework The Boy has is for physics.

A series of ten questions that The Boy finds very easy.

He uses his Parker pen to write out each question and answer with precision.

Start as you mean to go on.

He hands his workbook in at the end of the next lesson.

The teacher asks about his name. Is that double-barreled? No? I suppose we'll be seeing more of that.

[STOP]

In retrospect the A6 became a dividing line, not unlike the net in a game of tennis, but more akin to the game of Kabbadi, with the road being the baulk line.

At first it was just verbal abuse, shouted across the road. It was easy enough to ignore, or at least easy enough to appear to ignore.

Soon, the Boy would spend a lot of energy and time in making sure that he arrived at the bus stop just as the bus rolled in.

Sometimes that wasn't enough. An unreliable council run service would mean that the bus sometimes didn't show up. Leaving the Boy waiting at the side of the road, exposed.

Slowly the abuse took a more physical form.

One or two would dart across the road.

They'd usually start some casual conversation, closing in, pretending to be friendly, before one of them would hit the Boy.

The punch usually came from behind, or from the side.

He knew it was coming, but the few times he had tried to avoid it, he ended up getting punched a lot more for the trouble.

As it was, most school days started with ringing ears and the taste of blood.

[HOME]

A week later and the physics homework is returned.

The Boy sees a row of ticks alongside each answer. He turns the pages.

Ticks all the way.

And then, at the end, zero out of ten.

0/10

"Use Ink".

The feedback is confusing. The work is clearly in ink. There's been a mistake. Just some confusion. He's sure this can be sorted out.

The Boy spends the whole lesson waiting for the end. Nervous heart racing. He approached the teacher, holding out the book.

The teacher explains that ballpoint pens are not suitable here. This is the first the Boy has heard of this.

That week he buys his first fountain pen, with his pocket money, without telling his parents. He's worried that they'll be as embarrassed as he was. He's worried that they spent money on the Parker pen that he can't use. He's ashamed.

The Boy also rewrites the homework in ink. The next time it is returned with "Better 0/10".

The mark still stands.

[INK]

The Parker Vector is a fountain pen for the people.

The slim, lightweight plastic with metal accents.

It is utilitarian.

This one was made at the Parker factory in Newhaven, England.

It is also rather cheap too. You can purchase them at any branch of WHSmiths or Woolworths. There's no need to go into a dedicated pen shop.

The packaging claims two royal appointments. The Queen and the Prince of Wales. It is not known if they use them for their own writing, or hand them out to poor children at Christmas as an act of charity.

[QUIZ]

Which side of a corridor do you walk on?

Do you walk on the left or the right?

Were you taught that at school?

Did they give you a reason?

Which side do you think people walk on in the Houses of Parliament?

Do you think that is the same side as you?

[STOP]

The Boy wasn't sure what had caused the escalation.

Maybe there was no reason.

The verbal insults had changed.

On reflection, they seemed far more interested in his genitals than he was with anyone else's. Most of the assaults started with punches, quickly followed by kicks between his legs, or punches there.

They'd made the fantastic leap between the words 'day boy' and the words 'gay boy'. They used the full repertoire of slurs. Queer, faggot, all the classics.

The Boy would endure such homophobic attacks nearly every school day for a year. At the time, he wasn't sure if he was gay or straight. He was neither. At the time his sexuality was best described as 'Ghostbusters' or 'Transformers'.

The Boy would learn to zone out a little. His bus would turn up, or theirs would, and it would be over.

One day a group of girls followed the boys across the road. These girls cheered them on as they screamed poorly articulated misogynistic slurs.

The Boy, even then, was aware that maybe they knew that one day they would have to face this sort of violence. Or maybe they already had.

This is the other education the Boy received.

[LEADERS]

One of the most fascinating ways that the misogyny propagated was through the school motto.

Praesis ut prosis. Lead to serve.

The implication being that everyone at the school was a leader, and conversely everyone not at the school was a born follower.

Born to hang on their words to do what they are told. To listen and perform.

There were no girls at the school.

[BOARDERS]

It's important to remember that these were children too. They might now by grown men in positions of power, leading industry and politics, but back then they were boys, packed off to boarding school.

A typical day for them seemed to be every day.

Wake, be fed, go to lessons, break for lunch (and be fed), return to lessons, finish lessons, prep time, free time, bed time.

Repeat.

They were kept in a world insulated from change and chance. A predictable, ordered world. Perhaps a lonely one.

There is very little agency for them at this point. When we look at what some of them turn into, it might be easy to demonise them, but the truth is, they are what the system molded them into being.

And their lives were not that different from the Boy's, except where they had after dinner speakers ranging from famous sports personalities through to politicians, the Boy got to eat his dinner with Wogan.

[MUTUAL DISTRUST]

Some of the worst bullying the Boy would witness at school, aside from the sanctioned bullying by teachers, came from the borders.

Some of the words they used were alien. Referring to other boys as 'scratters'. A horrible, mean term that places poverty as a rodent-like affliction.

Of course there was a lot of homophobia, a lot of casual accusations, referring to anyone that seemed to close as 'bum chums'.

There's something telling when the least smart people in the room are financially more secure than the smartest. It leaks out in sneers.

It is broadcast form the window of a brand new Volkswagen Polo, owned by a seventeen year old, bought by his father, as he screams past you whilst you wait for the bus.

[STOP]

The Man wants to tell a story of revenge and redemption.

He wants to tell you that one day a group of boys crossed the road and surrounded the Boy. They made a proposition. Stand there and let our little brother punch you and we'll walk away afterwards... but if you retaliate we'll beat you until you can't get up.

The Man wants to tell you that the Boy let one of the little brothers approach him and chose to take his chances rather than be demeaned into letting someone much smaller than him hurt him.

That he lashed out, that he held his ground, that after that everything was OK, and he was left alone.

Sadly, that wasn't how it went.

[CHARITY]

The Boy's school is a registered charity. It is also a state boarding school. That means they don't charge fees for their education, rather they just charge to allow students to board there.

In the year 2019-2020 they received £375,755 of donations. This money is alongside the boarding fees.

Registered charities receive tax relief on income, rates, and corporation tax.

The Charities Act defines a charity as an institution that’s established for a charitable purpose and “provides benefit to the public”. While the remit of the “advancement of education” means private schools fall into this category, you would be forgiven for balking at it. Rather than providing “benefit to the public”, modern private schools too often actively harm it, giving a tiny minority of already advantaged offspring a further leg up at the expense of already disadvantaged children. -- Frances Ryan 16 Aug, 2018, The Guardian

The Boy is a recipient of charity, or at least that is how he is framed. This is a gift, not a job.

[EMPLOYMENT]

I saw an advert for a researcher position at a company called Deveraux and Deloitte.

The application process was straight forward. I listed a number of subject areas that I was qualified to research and write in (almost all within the field of biochemistry) and I supplied a short research paper on a topic they selected to demonstrate my ability to write and reference.

After that, I was emailed 'research topics' with a word count and was paid by the word. It was steady money and straight forward work.

It wasn't honest work though.

I knew straight away that the ''research topics' were undergrad essay titles. I knew because I had written those essays as part of my degree.

My job was to get good grades for kids that had more money than academic ability, and I knew that was what I was doing. I knew that I was helping people attain better grades than they were due, through a process of cheating.

I needed the money. They needed to do whatever it was they did instead of study.

I consoled myself that they would undoubtedly flunk their final exams, unless they had some way to figure out how to get someone to take them for them too.

I know how much I got paid. It wasn't bad. That means Deveraux and Deloitte must have been charging a great deal for these 'research' papers. I'd guess about £300 a go.

Above all, this all felt very familiar.

[STOP]

A change in the time table meant that a new service was added. Half an hour earlier. Half an hour before anyone would show up at either side of the road.

The Boy became the first Boy through the school gates every day.

[THEY]

The Boy's parents report this incident much later.

They are sat in the hall, opposite one of his teachers. Maths. Also the teacher that taught their Boy to stand up when a teacher enters the room.

For 15 minutes he talks about how lazy the boy is and if he applied himself he might get somewhere in life. That really, it is a question of attitude. He lacks manners.

The teacher then trows a workbook across the table at the Boy's father.

"His handwriting is atrocious too".

The Father looks at the book. The handwriting is awful. A scrawled mess of smudges and loops.

He examines the front of the front of the workbook.

The name is not his son's.

The Father points this out and is told, 'it doesn't matter, they are all pretty much the same'.

[THE FIGHT]

The Boy was fortunate enough to find a sympathetic form teacher in his later years. A fellow scholarship pupil that had made it out, relatively unscathed.

Except he hadn't. He was in his early forties, and yet still there.

The Man thinks to use the term 'Judas Goat', the animals that a slaughterhouse keeps in order to keep new arrivals calm as they are led to the killing floor. Then he realises this is unfair.

His advice was well meant. He would repeatedly tell the Boy to "keep his head down below the parapet".

The allusion to war was not unusual. There was frequent talk in the school of front lines, leading into battle and glorious victories.

Keep your head down below the parapet.

Don't get shot. Don't get noticed. Just get through the war alive.

The Boy took this advice to heart, eventually deciding that the best course of action was to desert.

That same form teacher also wrote the Boy's final school report.

It simply said, "when present, seemed interested".

[REVIEW]

There was no Human Resources department for this first job. However, there were a number of routes should issues occur.

If, for example, you were a boarder, a fee paying student, and your grades began to slip, the school would resort to personal tutoring. It may be casual, such as spending break time with an older, more capable student, or formal where a teacher may provide one to one attention.

The scholarship student will find themselves in a more precarious position. The half-term grading was an essential performance review and failing that would, in the first instance, gain a harsh lecture on pulling up socks and knuckling down, nose against the grindstone ethics. If this was insufficient to change the course of intellectual attainment, the boy may find himself looking for employment elsewhere.

[MENTAL HEALTH]

Do you remember the time that boy ran through the corridors howling like an animal whilst two geography teachers tried to corner him and calm him down?

What about that school assembly when the headmaster stood in front of everyone and demanded to know which child had 'daubed excreta all over the walls of the toilets'?

Or that one boarder that was known to be a chronic masturbator, and that his fellow boarders were rotated as room mates because none of them could tolerate the lack of sleep for that long?

And the crying. You'd see it if you looked. Moments where the boys would just break and start weeping.

[STAINS]

Blood is notoriously difficult to remove from white cotton. The main problem is that when you add water you are likely to induce haemolysis, where the cell ruptures and releases iron. Furthermore, it all tends to clump and clot when drying.

Forensics use a saline solution to extract blood from fibres without damaging the cells, and some people swear by cold water as a way of preventing staining.

Interestingly, because blood is essentially a water-based medium, it doesn't stain the skin so readily.

Ink, on the other hand can stain for a number of reasons, and since it is usually delivered by some form of solvent, such as propyl alcohol, it penetrates the outer keritinised layer of the skin. This makes it much more likely to stain.

The easiest ink to remove from the skin is carbon black, usually made with lamp black (soot), water and gum Arabic. Coloured inks tend to be more stubborn as they use other organic compounds in the pigmentation and oils in suspension.

Of course none of this explains why we find stains so objectionable in the first place. Maybe it is because they highlight an act that has ruined the purity of something, or because they leave a trace of history, evidence of act that has occurred.

The Man thinks there might be something more to why his adolescence feels like a patchwork of blood and ink stains. The stains seem more vivid thatn the material they incorporated themselves into.

Indelible acts with vivid colours in a grey landscape of memory.

[INK]

When I completed my MA in 2009 I bought myself a beautiful pen as a reward. It's a Lamy 2000.

Designed in 1966 the 2000 is constructed out of black fiberglass and stainless steel. It has a sleek modernist design with a hooded nib.

It is beautiful.

I also have a collection of ink. Rows of different bottle shapes contain colours and tones. I have this wonderful Japanese grey ink that flows like rain on glass. Then there's the vibrant orange, the deep read, and the shiny, wilful black.

I know. It is almost a fetish.

A different ink for every task.

Ink is the substance that gives my words form. If I write in ink, if I mark the world with it, it feels proper.

I feel proper.

[ALUMNI]

• Sir John Singleton, British High Court Judge and Conservative politician.

• Lord Parkinson, former Conservative Party Chairman and Cabinet Minister.

• Don Foster, Baron Foster of Bath, Liberal Democrat MP for Bath from 1992–2015.

• Sir John Rutherford, 1st Baronet, Conservative MP for Darwen from 1895–1922.

• Robert Ascroft, Conservative MP for Oldham from 1895–99.

• John Wrathall, President of Rhodesia.

• James Crosby, former chief executive of the HBOS Group and former deputy chairman of the FSA.

• Sir Ronald Halstead (1927–2021) – Chairman and Chief Executive of the Beecham Group from 1984 to 1985 and Deputy Chairman of British Steel from 1986 to 1994.

• Lewis Henry Isaacs, architect, surveyor and Conservative MP for Walworth from 1885–92.

• Jason McCartney, Conservative MP for Colne Valley from 2010–17.

• Karl Oyston, English businessman and former chairman of Blackpool Football Club.

• Kevin Roberts, CEO worldwide Saatchi & Saatchi.

[HARM]

The Man is sat in a hotel room, the Hilton in Stockton. There's a pandemic on outside and he's taken to idly scrolling facebook to pass the time.

At first it doesn't really hit. He rereads it.

The teacher has died. The school has posted an announcement.

He will be greatly missed. Teacher to thousands. Unconventional style.

The Man catches himself looking at the scars on his hands, trying to process this. Was he supposed to be elated? If so why does he feel so hollow?

And then the comments. So many of them.

A former student, now a head teacher says, 'He taught me everything I know about teaching... whatever he did, I now do the opposite'

Many tales of physical abuse, more of mental abuse.

He made one student sit in class with a fractured collar bone. A child, in pain, incredible pain, being forced to listen to a history lesson about the noble aims of the Briitsh government during the war.

There are insinuations he may have hit others.

It's too much. The man turns off his laptop and tries to get on with his day, but he keeps coming back to it.

And then...

Nothing.

The comments have all disappeared and the post is now locked.

The school have sanitised it.

They've cleaned up and tucked in.

They were able to remove their stains.

[BURDEN]

It seems silly to mention it. Such a slight thing, but it has always stuck in his head.

There were no lockers at the school, meaning that the day boys would always walk around carrying a day's worth of books and PE equipment.

Stooping gate mules, yomping between classes as the boarders strolled about unburdened.

[THE POINT]

The Man is considering the point of all of this.

Why write it down? Why does it still play on his mind?

And then he watches the news. He sees the same people that were in his class at school. The slightly dim ones with more money that ability.

They are now the leaders they were told to be. They are now serving.

They still lack any understanding of any world but their own. They have been insulated from the outside. Bufferred and protected and accommodated for. They have had every advantage, every leg up, every connection, safe passage and opportunity.

And yet they are still unaware of it.

They believe they got there through their own hard work.

But that is to be expected. This was always their destiny.

Praesis ut prosis.

The bit that hurts the scars on the Man's hands, the part that feels like he has been punched from behind, is that the people that voted this class of people into power were the same kids that stood on the other side of the road. Jeering hatred and violence.

How did these two sides form such an alliance?

Is it the mutual mistrust of the mixed class? The children who are put to work before they are teenagers, supporting a system of harm. The bit in the middle that doesn't belong to either.

Or is it the deep undercurrents of racism, misogyny, and homophobia coupled with the knee-jerk desire for authoritarian structures that use the bogeymen of immigration as an easy answer for everything?

Either way, the Man sees the world The Boy lived in, sucking everyone else in.

He sees two bus stops at either side of a road, neither of them taking him, or anyone else to where they need to go.

I liked the idea of shooting someone… for art

— Bruce Dunlap

[BURDEN]

A fuzzy, blurry 4:3 video fills the screen.

Not quite fills the screen.

This is a modern 16:9 monitor. There are black bars at either side to accommodate the footage of back then.

Two indistinct humanoid figures occupy the space. They both seem to be wearing dark trousers and white tops, but other details are hard to distinguish.

They appear ghostly, but not in a transparent way. They appear ghostly in an indefinable sense. Vague. They could be anyone.

One thing is clear, however. The figure on the right is pointing a gun at the figure, fifteen feet away, on the left. It looks like some sort of rifle.

There is the echoing bang of an indoor gunshot.

The figure on the left clutches their left arm.

They clutch it mid-way between the elbow and the shoulder.

The camera centres on them, clipping out the figure on the right.

The shot figure staggers forward on unbending legs, inspecting their own arm.

They lift the cuff of their t-shirt and peer beneath.

We see no blood. We see no damage.

The wounded figure exits to the right of the frame.

[GUNS]

Japan has a long history of gun control.

Firearms were first introduced to the country during the first Mongol invasion of the 13th century in what was probably the first example of gunpowder-based warfare outside of China. These weapons were closer to flash-bangs and grenades, although there were early prototypes of hand cannons called ‘teppō’.

The Portuguese brought more modern guns to the party in 1543.

The feudal lord, Tanegashima Tokitaka, who the gun would later be named after, purchased two of these weapons and tasked his blacksmiths — former sword-makers — with creating replicas.

In just a few years, warfare in Japan was radically changed with the tanegashima steadily replacing the traditional sword combat.

War at a distance.

War with a bang.

A warlord in Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, attempted to control weapons in 1588, as a way of suppressing a peasant revolt. He confiscated weapons as part of a ‘sword hunt’. Guns were similarly collected, with the intention of melting them down to create a giant statue of Buddha.

This did little to stem the tide, and the early Portuguese models were supplemented with British, American and Spanish firearms.

The Japanese also developed their own weapons, with notable inclusions being the Nambu, a recoil operated, locked breech, semi-automatic pistol that looks so like it has fallen out of a science fiction film.

It looks so like a laser pistol that a modified version was used in the Star Wars show, The Mandalorian.

After World War Two, stricter rules for gun ownership were brought in. The Japanese military was disarmed, another Sword Hunt was instigated in 1946 leading to over three million swords being confiscated.

The government then enacted the Swords and Firearms Possession Control Law in 1958.

As such, gun ownership in Japan is rather limited. The police do have guns under lock at police stations but rarely deploy them. Police officers themselves tend to train in kendo and judo rather than small arms.

Shooting sports are similarly tightly controlled. Paintball, for example, is far less popular than many countries.

There is a sense that firearms are the tools of the oppressor, not the oppressed.

However, it would be Japan that would bring in the Airsoft revolution of the 1980s.

[WESTERNS]

Cowboys were neat.

Cowboys were pretty cool.

They were the Marvel superheroes of their day.

Gun-toting, law-dispensing Cow-Man, and his sidekick, horse-horse.

To say that Hollywood was saturated with Westerns is perhaps an overstatement, but there were an awful lot of them.

It is estimated that, between 1940 and 1960, 140 Westerns were made each year in the US.

If we take Spaghetti Westerns into account, we can add another 500 or so up until the late 70s.

That means there are certainly over 3,000 of them.

There are many theories as to why this may be. A re-imagining of America’s Manifest Destiny. A return to stories from a simpler time where it was easier to work out who the bad guys were. Cheap, abundant sets and workforces. The sort of Ouroboros of advertising creating a demand and satisfying that demand in a demented whirlwind.

I meant to ask, do you know who Tom Mix is?

He was incredibly famous.

Famous and prolific.

It is thought that he is the actor to appear in the most Westerns.

Between 1913 and 1917, whilst under contract with Selig, Mix made 171 films.

Then, from 1918 to 1928 he would go on to make 86 films for Fox.

Things slowed down to a glacial pace between 1928 and 1929 where he made just five films in a year for the Film Booking Offices of America (FBO).

A short break was followed by the period between 1932 and 1933 where he picked up speed again and made 10 films for Universal.

His final film, the only one he would make for Mascot, came in 1935.

273 films.

In 22 years.

That’s one a month for two decades.

And all of this before the genre hit its peak.

[GUNS]

In the early 1970s a Japanese photography enthusiast and fan of Western films, Ichiro Nagata, thought about making model guns that didn’t do too much damage to the target.

Nagata had been particularly influenced by the American BB guns from Daisy, particularly the spring-air rifles marketed at children during the height of Western mania.

He started with spring-loaded kinetic guns and then progressed to a gas mixture propellant of freon and and silicone oil, known as “soft air”. This gas would later be replaced with a mixture of propane and silicone oil, called “green gas”, but the “soft air” name had stuck.

Plus, the propellant was significantly weaker than the carbon dioxide used in paintball guns, making them legal in Japan despite the strict gun control.

The intention was to use these guns for target shooting, however, it quickly became apparent that you could shoot people with them without causing too much pain.

And so it was that Airsoft was invented. Within a few years it had spread across the globe.

[LANGUAGE]

It isn’t a particularly original observation that the language of guns is also the language of cameras.

Aim.

Trigger.

Shoot.

Susan Sontag in On Photography puts it in context:

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder — a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

This isn’t just a fanciful notion either. The camera is a weapon. It is a tool of propaganda and information. Warfare and photography have an intertwined history.

Reconnaissance from above. From handheld cameras in hot air balloons to A2 cameras aboard the U2 spy plane during the cold war.

The negatives of the A2 are huge.

Nine inches by eighteen inches.

At an altitude of over six miles up, these cameras could capture objects around twenty foot in size.

Capture.

Then there are the hearts and minds images. Embedded photographers with platoons. A purpose to report the news, but more often that not, a way to spin the situation.

Being there is never just observing, no matter how passive the act seems.

Again, Susan Sontag points this out:

“…using a camera is still a form of participation, Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged.”

[SHOOT]

It’s dark out, but the security light from a nearby garage flickers on, illuminating the gravel and damp grass.

About fifteen feet away my nephew is loading a gun.

It is a gas-powered Airsoft pistol, designed to deliver a 6mm-diameter plastic ball bearing to a target at a speed of about 300 feet per second.

That makes me about 0.04 seconds away.

“I’m going to look away”, I say, turning my back on him.

He asks if I want to know when he is about to fire.

I say that it is probably best that I don’t know.

We are here because tomorrow I might get shot by strangers, and I figured that it was probably a good idea to know how it feels beforehand.

I had a stupid idea that I would try out a stint of simulated war photography. My nephew was heading to his local Airsoft range for an afternoon of shooting at his friends and peers, and I suggested that I come along and take pictures.

There’s a pop, not loud, followed by a pinch in my lower back.

It doesn’t hurt so much. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but it was bearable.

The little plastic sphere had hit me in my own natural defence. The layer of middle-aged fat that hangs out back there with, apparently, the sole purpose of protecting me from my own bad ideas.

We should try again, says the nephew, in a manner that suggests he is enjoying shooting me more than he is letting on.

OK. One more.

Pop.

Nnnng.

Mhmmmmm.

You little…

ahhhh.

Right on the shoulder blade.

It stung like hubris wrapped in misadventure.

It took me a little while to string a coherent sentence together.

“You do this for fun?” I ask him, as my voice came out an octave higher than normal.

“Yeah,” he says, “but most of us wear some sort of body armour”.

[COWBOYS AND SAMURAI]

It would be easy to suggest that Japan’s love of Americana was the result of World War Two, their defeat and the following occupation, but the truth is a little blurry.

A fuzzy, out of focus thing.

Maybe it goes all the way back to when the Portuguese arrived with those flintlocks.

A familiar pattern. Assimilate and adapt.

There’s this notion that Japan is, or was, an insular nation, however, even before the war there were indications to the contrary.

It has been suggested that an earthquake in Kanto in 1923 helped usher in a burgeoning middle class. The rebuilding of urban centres created a modernisation that led to gas and electric being common. It created a small boom, leading to disposable income.

Suddenly people were enjoying imported music and baseball, and hotdogs.

Burgers.

Bourbon.

Leather Jackets.

Comic strips.

Teenagers.

Westerns.

This wasn’t a single sided relationship.

As the Japanese were enjoying the the arrival of Tom Mix’s prolific output, they were also busy making their own films.

Japan has, arguably, one of the oldest traditions of cinema in the world, dating back to the 1910s with the establishment of the film studio, Nikkatsu, which is still producing film and television today.

The earthquake in Kanto also prompted the film studios to modernise too. The new equipment influencing a move away from the more traditional theatre-based productions and towards a more westernised form of film making.

There was a modest market for these Japanese films abroad, mostly art house cinemas and smaller specialist theatres. However, it also exposed the films to a different audience. Film Makers.

A number of Japanese films were unofficially remade (a term that seems far kinder than “stolen”) and the stories seemed to fit rather neatly into the Western format.

Something about the stories of Samurai, their honour system, their exploits, and their weapons appealed to Western film makers.

For example, the 1961 film Yojimbo, made by Akira Kurosawa.

This would appear as the Western, A Fistful of Dollars.

Kurosawa wrote to Sergio Leone, saying, “Signor Leone, I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film.”

Kurosawa would sue successfully over this and it is thought that Toho, Kurosawa’s production company, made more money from A Fistful of Dollars than it did from Yojimbo.

A more legitimate translation occurred with Kurosawa’s 1954 film, The Seven Samurai, which became The Magnificent Seven. Transplanting the action from Sengoku period Japan to 1879 at the Mexican-American border.

Interestingly, The Seven Samurai seems to itself have been influenced by previous westerns, particularly those made by the Director John Ford.

Kurosawa wasn’t impressed though. He said, "The American copy is a disappointment. Although entertaining, it is not a version of Seven Samurai".

[WESTERNS]

I think one of the reasons why the Westerns became so popular is that the period being depicted also happened to coincide with the arrival of mass photography.

Between the 1860s and the 1900s the world saw the progression of Daguerreotypes to Wet Colloidal to film cameras.

Each advance made photography easier and more portable.

As pioneers made their way across the continent, so did photography colonise the lives of the new pioneers.

Yet, despite these advances, photography was still a slow process. Exposure times were still relatively long and subjects would have to sit posed.

I think it is this factor that helped create the cinematic myth of the Wild West.

First, it meant that photography was very suited to panoramic photographs of landscapes, where the black and white images created moody, brooding sculptures of a new land.

Secondly, there were no action shots. No gun fights, no cattle rustling. Only the ephemera and tales of such things supported by posed photographs of the players involved.

These two things created both the set design and the need to show the action, all framed by these stories of rugged pioneers, freedom and the taming of the wild.

[RULES]

The Geneva Convention is, as far as modern warfare goes, a fairly comprehensive rule book.

Specifically, there’s a section on war and journalists.

Journalists in war zones must be treated as civilians and protected as such, as long as they don't participate in hostilities — Article 79

Journalists should be protected as civilians if they take no action that negatively affects their status as civilians — Additional Protocol I

What this means is, essentially, that you can’t shoot war photographers.

There are some caveats to this. In order to be treated as civilians, war photographers should not be firing guns at the opposing side, because if they do, that would make them combatants. Furthermore, you could argue that even carrying a gun in a war zone creates enough of a distinction between civilian and combatant.

There’s another reason war photographers tend not to carry weapons, and this is a question of ethics. If you carry a weapon, you have picked a side and suddenly you are not reporting on a war, you are creating propaganda.

Interestingly, the current conflict in Gaza between Hamas and Israel highlights some of the problems.

During combat, soldiers in this role are required to assess every situation and be able to determine when to fire their guns and when it is the right time to document the events that are occurring around them on the battlefield.

(The Jerusalem Post, 02/05/2024)

Photographers embedded with the IDF carry guns. In fact, these are not photographers embedded with a unit, they are soldiers that have been given a camera.

The picture is, perhaps, deliberately blurred.

Aside for the notions of impartiality and veracity, there is another problem here.

Imagine you are fighting against a unit, and you follow the Geneva Convention. You see a photographer. You don’t shoot, only for them to raise a sidearm and shoot you.

The camera becomes more than just a weapon of propaganda, it becomes a defence on the battlefield.

[WAIVER]

We are going to need you to sign the waiver.

A side of A4 is slid across the counter with a pen. I read it.

It’s the usual sort of thing. I accept full responsibility to any damage that might occur to me, or my equipment. Furthermore, I will adhere to the rules of combat and adhere to all the safety guidelines.

I sign.

I’m enlisted.

I get handed a hi-vis vest and a pair of goggles.

The goggles don’t fit over my glasses, so I’m now shooting a little blinder than usual. I’ll have to rely on my estimation of distance to focus.

I’m asked if I would like a gun. I decline the offer.

I’m asked again, if I’m sure I wouldn’t like a gun.

I say that the camera is the only thing I intend to shoot with.

I look around and notice that most of the combatants have body armour. Many have full face masks. Several have ear protectors.

I hear that the ear is a terrible place to get shot.

So are the fingers.

My fingers look particularly naked as they cradle the camera.

I recall the pain in my shoulder blade.

OK, they say, time for the briefing.

I head into the warzone.

[WAR PHOTOGRAPHS]

The Spanish Civil War: Robert Capa’s, The Falling Soldier, September, 1936

A soldier is frozen at the moment of his death, collapsing backwards after being shot in the head. He is dressed in civilian clothes, but is wearing a bandoleer.

The rifle rests gently, perpendicular and pointing at the sky, in the hands of the soldier.

Whilst universally recognised as one of the greatest war photographs, the black and white image has been the subject of some controversy since it was first published in Vu magazine.

I was there in the trench with about twenty milicianos ... I just kind of put my camera above my head and even [sic] didn't look and clicked the picture, when they moved over the trench. And that was all. ... [T]hat camera which I hold [sic] above my head just caught a man at the moment when he was shot. That was probably the best picture I ever took. I never saw the picture in the frame because the camera was far above my head.

— Robert Capa

Hiroshima: Yoshito Matsushige’s Photographs, August 6, 1945

On the morning following the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Yoshito Matsushige would take the only photographs that would document the immediate aftermath.

In one of the black and white images, taken less than one and a half miles from the epicentre of the blast, police are pouring cooking oil onto the backs of children to soothe their burns. Crowds mill around, surrounded by rubble and debris.

In another image, Matsushige’s wife, wearing an air raid helmet, stands by a sink in the battered remains of their barbershop. Two barber’s chairs seem relatively untouched, whilst the rest of the building appears mostly obliterated. It appears that Matsushige’s wife is trying to tidy up despite the obvious futility.

I had finished breakfast and was getting ready to go to the newspaper when it happened. There was a flash from the indoor wires as if lightning had struck. I didn’t hear any sound, how shall I say, the world around me turned bright white. And I was momentarily blinded as if a magnesium light had lit up in front of my eyes. Immediately after that, the blast came. I was bare from the waist up, and the blast was so intense, it felt like hundreds of needles were stabling me all at once. The blast grew large holes in the walls of the first and second floor. I could barely see the room because of all the dirt. I pulled my camera and the clothes issued by the military headquarters out from under the mound of the debris, and I got dressed.

— Yoshito Matsushige

Matsushige would die at the age of 92 in 2005.

Vietnam: Don McCullin’s, Shell-shocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue, 1968

A marine fills the full frame of the shot. His hands grasp the rifle in front of him which is pointing upwards, seemingly resting on the ground just out of shot, implying that the soldier is sat or crouching.

Beneath the rim of his helmet are two wide eyes, staring straight ahead and strangely unfocused. They set the tone for an expression that is both blank and haunted.

Whilst this is a powerful image in its own right, it is perhaps best combined with McCullin’s entire body of war photography which creates an unflinching and profoundly human study of modern warfare.

It's not important that I record every tragedy that goes on in the world. But I decided to try a couple of shots. And I did something despicable. I wound the car window down and took the photographs from inside. Then I hated myself for not having the decency and courage to at least get out and do something...

— Don McCullin

McCullin later shifted his focus from war photography to landscape photography.

The reason I am doing these new landscapes, this new Roman project, is because it's a form of healing. I'm kind of healing myself. I don't have those bad dreams. But you can never run away from what you've seen.

— Don McCullin

[RULES]

As you would hope, the rules are concise, mandatory and enforced.

I’m very much reassured by how well the place is run. Safety is everything.

Which feels somewhat at odds with the idea that these people are all about to enter into a situation where they shoot at each other.

In brief, if the marshal says stop, you stop.

If you hear the siren, you stop.

If you are shot, you are dead. This operates on an honour system. If you are caught abusing this you are out.

You do not shoot anyone in a hi-vis vest. If you do it is the same as being shot.

No physical combat. No pushing, punching, kissing or anything else you can’t do in a public swimming pool.

Loaded guns are only allowed past a certain checkpoint.

You do not take your protective eyewear off. Not for a second. We’ve all seen that episode of Byker Grove, no one wants that.

[EMBEDDING]

My guide through the zone is one of the marshals.

We are both wearing the vests. He tells me that it is a good idea to announce yourself before walking around corners, in case you surprise a combatant.

He asks if I am using a flash. I suggest that maybe war photographers wouldn’t use one in case it is mistaken for a muzzle flash. I explain that I’m using a high ISO film and I’m going to take my chances.

We walk into the zone and it is a mass of tight, dimly lit corridors made from chip board. There are doorways and random bits of cover. It is an abstract landscape that mimics the frenetic close quarters combat of urban warfare.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “if you stick with me it will be fine.”

I turn around to respond and find he’s already gone.

I’m in the middle of a potential gunfight without a gun. There are two teams now on their way to converge on a point near where I am stood.

It is dim. I am disorientated and somewhat lost.

The battlefield is the size of a large warehouse. I don’t have a map.

Suddenly there is a line of green that whizzes past me.

It’s a tracer round. They actually have them!

I can’t see who fired it.

“Marshal!” I shout, somewhat weakly.

[PHOTOGRAPHER’S CREED]

The following is adapted from the Rifleman’s Creed.

This is my camera. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My camera is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

Without me, my camera is useless. Without my camera, I am useless. I must shoot my camera true. I must shoot straighter than my subject who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will ...

My camera and I know that what counts in war is not the shots we take, the noise of our shutter, nor the film we load. We know that it is the photographs that count. We will photograph ...

My camera is human, even as I [am human], because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my camera clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will ...

[RICOH]

I’m using a compact rangefinder.

It’s a Ricoh 500 RF that I picked up second hand for £20. It needed a little bit of work, particularly new light seals, and a fair bit of cleaning, but it is a wonderful camera.

It’s a reliable camera.

Ricoh began as The Riken research institute of Japan in 1917. They became Rikagaku Kōgyō K.K in 1927.

In 1936 the sensitised photographic paper division became Riken Kankōshi K.K., under the leadership of Ichimura Kiyoshi, who is considered the founder of Ricoh, a name that was adopted from the title of their camera products.

The 500 RF is a camera from the 1980s.

It has an automatic mode, but I prefer to use it fully manual.

It is much smaller than the SLRs I own.

A smaller target.

For this mission I’ve attached a clear glass filter to the front and a hood over the lens. This should stop nearly anything but a head on shot.

Probably.

[REPORT FROM THE FRONT]

I decided to pick a side.

It isn’t that I supported their political aims. I’m not sure that they had political aims. It was just that it seemed safer to only have one team shooting in my direction.

The first skirmish occurred in the middle of the zone. One team seemed held up in an area named “The Laboratory” whilst the other attacked from two sides.

Plastic ball bearings rattled everywhere, making a particular thump as they hit the chipboard panels.

I found myself clinging to the walls. The vest seemed like very little protection as rounds ricochet off the surfaces.

One of the combatants has a shotgun that fires multiple rounds at once. It is a mean looking thing, and is being used to sweep the tight corridors.

A combatant next to me is hit.

A curse followed by a shout, “dead man walking” as they returned to their base.

Steadying myself against an area of low cover, I lift my camera to my face. It’s hard to see through the rangefinder window. I can’t get as close as usual due to the safety glasses. I can’t focus because my own glasses were currently enjoying an afternoon off, back in the safe zone.

I’ve plenty of film, so to hell with it. I start taking pictures.

I’ve listened to a lot of war photographers talking about their craft and the one thing they seem to have in common is that they take a lot of photographs. This is not the time to consider things. It is the time to react. I remember Capa holding his camera above the parapet.

The skirmish breaks. Suddenly, I’m alone again.

I make my way through the corridors.

I can hear gunfire in the distance, but I seem unable to find the source. Perhaps it is moving faster than I am. I’m treading quietly. There is a slight crunch underfoot from the hundreds of tiny white spheres on the floor. Something has happened here, but I missed it.

I come to an intersection. A corner to my right and a split straight ahead. I can also hear movement nearby. Not a fight, but maybe a combatant.

“Marshall!” I shout as I step out to find a gun pointed right at me.

It’s a particularly large combatant. A mountain of a man dressed in black and moving like a malevolent shadow that fills the tight corridors.

The shadow nods, and moves on.

I follow.

As they round the next corner, gun first, darting with an unexpected burst of speed, they encounter a small group that immediately surrenders. Hands up.

It turns out that this faction is a group of girlfriends of some of the others. They don’t really want to be here, and they are finding it quite stressful. They have adopted a tactic of avoidance.

The large shadow does not fire. He accepts the surrender and waves them off.

He turns to me. I can’t see his face as it is completely hidden by a mask, but his voice has a hint of amusement.

“I don’t know why they are surrendering to me. They are on my team.”

And then he’s gone.

A siren wails. The first session is over.

Back in the barracks I meet up with my nephew. Like the others he is now unmasked and enjoying provisions of fizzy pop and handfuls of Haribo. The warehouse is riddled with the December cold and you can see everyone’s breath, yet many of them are drenched in sweat.

I ask the kid how it went and mentioned I hadn’t seen him during the entire session and I asked where he had been. He tells me he was over at the other side of the zone in an intense battle that I had somehow missed.

I figure that I’m going to follow him during the next skirmish, which will be objective based. One team will be defending a base whilst the other is tasked with infiltrating it.

We head back in, masked up, and guns reloaded.

I immediately lose him as the combatants take their starting positions, so I start to traverse the zone towards the objective.

That’s when I started getting shot.

The first couple were forgivable ricochets. Little ball bearings bouncing around corners.

The next time I was shot head on.

I was lining up a photograph of a small squad that were moving on the base. They were packed tightly in a narrow corridor and I aimed from a doorway off to one side. A member from the opposing team shot around the corner, and surprised by the tactically daft conga line of enemies, opened fire, spraying bearings as fast as they could, swinging the gas-powered gun in a large arc.

I took one to the chest, just below where I was holding my camera, causing me to lean back into the doorway to avoid any more.

Not exactly a war crime. It didn’t feel deliberate.

The rules state that he would still have to treat shooting a vested participant as if he had been shot, but it mattered little as they had also been pelted with shots from the opposing team.

As I neared the base, despite making my presence known, I would be repeatedly shot, and on one occasion I suspect deliberately so. There was clearly something greater at stake in this round, or perhaps the combatants were becoming hardened to the realities of combat, adopting a shoot first, question later policy of self preservation.

The base was defended successfully, repelling waves of attackers from multiple directions.

The siren wailed and we retreated back to the barracks once more.

I used the opportunity to take the last remaining shots on a roll and insert a fresh one under reasonable lighting conditions. Looking busy, I was able to eavesdrop on some of the chatter.

I expected tales of daring. Near misses. Brilliant action. Instead, most of the combatants talked about their civilian life. Of school, and work and families at Christmas. There also appeared to be a growing animosity between the two teams. It was hard to place, but felt like frustration.

After asking around I found out that the teams were a mix of regulars and casuals. A large group of first timers had turned up and were not especially happy at being shot so much.

Talking to one of the regulars, he explained that often people turn up having played an awful lot of video games and expected their experience to translate into a real world situation. The difference, he said, is that the regulars know to take it slowly and to treat this as a team sport. That one well placed shot is better than a hundred sprayed rounds.

As he says this, he looks at my camera, as I feed the new leader into the winding sprocket, and feel a slight twinge of embarrassment.

“Taken any good ones?”

I really don’t know.

The next session would be my final session.

This would be a “King of The Hill” game where both teams would try to occupy and hold a point in the zone.

A chess clock, on the ‘hill’, is used to keep check over which team holds the point the longest.

This would be the most chaotic battle of the day. The Hill itself was the ‘Fire Escape’ section of the zone. Of all the zones it was the most permeable and well lit. It also had a real fire escape, but we were briefed not to open that.

Safety first.

As the battle for the fire escape started, there was an uneasy sense of chaos. Several friendly fire incidents occurred immediately as two squads converged on the hill at the same time.

Suppressing fire was being used effectively to block off corridors.

I managed to get winged a few times too. Once in the middle of shouting the word “Marshal!”. The Geneva Convention be damned.

It seemed that no side got a grip on the hill. As soon as one side took it another moved in. Like a game of speed chess the clock was being punched every other minute.

I witnessed a brief period of maybe five minutes where a small squad managed to hold the area successfully, but had forgotten to press the timer.

I rattled through my film, trying to capture as many shoot outs and manoeuvres as I could. I felt that I was getting the hang of this. Seeing the battlefield through my viewfinder I had become a disembodied observer, floating about unbothered by the many face-level projectiles.

And then the siren.

The game was being cut short and no one seemed to know why.

My hi-vis vest had suddenly become a beacon of authority and the combatants were asking me what to do. Not having much idea I directed people back towards the barracks. It turned out to be the correct move.

As we approached the exit to the zone there were some raised voices. Angry voices.

There had been a war crime. A genuine Airsoft war crime.

I had missed it. I had failed to capture perhaps the most singular incident of this combat.

Talking to the troops later I discovered that one combatant had not only entered the other teams base, a designated safe zone, he had punched another player. This had all happened under the watch of a marshal.

And that was it. The game was ended.

In scenes reminiscent of Dr Strangelove’s, “Gentleman you can't fight in here, this is the War Room”, actual violence had been a transgression in the simulated warzone of Airsoft.

[I GOT SHOT FOR THIS]

[RULES]

At the time of writing over 166 journalists, including photographers, videographers and writers, have been killed in Palestine by Israeli forces.

The Geneva Convention makes it clear that these people are not legitimate military targets, however, evidence is emerging that many of these deaths were deliberate.

Thibaut Bruttin, the director general of Reporters Without Borders, states, “For 15 months, journalists in Gaza have been displaced, starved, defamed, threatened, injured and killed by the Israeli army.”

The IDF has responded with accusations that the reporters were actually militants in disguise, but have yet to provide any evidence to support the claim.

[BURDEN]

In an interview many years later, Chris Burden states that the idea for Shoot was this notion of the bullet just grazing his arm, leaving a single poetic drop of blood for the camera to capture.

“The bullet would whiz by my arm, and it would scratch it, and one drop of blood would roll down my forearm. That was the ideal-ideal.”

That wasn’t how it went. The flesh wound he was left with also punctured the boundary between performance and reality.

The idea of being shot against the reality of it.

The interesting thing happens because the camera was there. We saw what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen.

The two young men in the video had been watching the footage of the Vietnam war on their televisions, seeing young men wounded and shot on a nightly basis.

They were seeing what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen.

Bruce Dunlap, the shooter, was drafted but never saw action despite being trained as a marksman.

In a way, they were play acting. They were living out a childhood fantasy of being Cowboys. They were firing a gun and forging a path through a new frontier.

But, that act used a real gun and the performers were nothing other than what they were — and artist and a marksman.

What makes this piece exceptional was that it was recorded as an image.

That’s what made it real.

Guns and cameras, a shared language with a different purpose.

Guns are unreal. They unmake things.

Cameras make.

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Gary, the account manager from Floor 2, is already well gone.

We were supposed to pop in for a quick pint, but one turned into three as we all attempted to delay the inevitable.

We know that Gary is drunk because he’s started talking about Christmas films, again.

“The thing is,” he says, “that there’s a difference between Christmas films and films you like to watch at Christmas.”

He pauses for a swallow.

“And just because a film has some tinsel in it, that doesn’t make it a Christmas film.”

He points at me.

“I bet you are one of those edgy types that picks a Shane Black movie and calls it your favourite Christmas movie.”

I’m wounded, but recover.

“Actually,” I lie, “It is Scrooged.”

This goes on for a while. We discuss the merits of Home Alone (a film about wishing and reuniting family, definitely Christmas) and Lord of The Rings (A film launched in cinemas at Christmas and one that features magic trees, elves and a bloke with a white beard).

We get nowhere. Someone brings up Gremlins and there is a brief moment of unity that seems like a good time to break this up and head to the office party.

[WALK TO WORK]

We pass a poster for this year’s panto. It’s Peter Pan.

The poster is garish and the performers are gurning hard. A glittery star effect has been overlaid. It describes itself as a “high flying panto adventure”, alluding to the most likely wire work that will enable Pan and “Tink” to fly.

Elaine C. Smith is Mrs Smee, a character I can’t quite remember from the story I know.

I don’t think anyone goes to the panto for the story.

Pantomime isn’t about story. It is about the event. You sit there and you watch a story you probably already know, acted mostly unconvincingly, to the soundtrack of children losing their cool over pratfalls.

It’s good fun. It’s a community experience. It is immersive by its very nature.

You all play the role of “Audience” and the people on stage play the role of “People on Stage”.

You have your lines and they have theirs.

Often, panto is held in the immersive environment of a theatre, or even a village hall. A space dedicated to the showing of things, or a space made special by having a thing shown in it.

And at the end, you are never sure what the moral is.

Would Dick Whittington make a good mayor for London? Would they have a decent public transport plan?

Does marrying a prince make everything else OK?

How many more years can the Krankies do this?

What is Gary Wilmot when he isn’t on stage?

[RECEPTIONIST]

When we get to work we notice the receptionist at the lobby desk has changed. It’s a shame because I’d bought Dave a packet of scampi fries from the pub.

This must be one of the Christmas hires. I don’t recognise them.

I place the bag on the desk, attempt a smile and say, “Happy Christmas”.

The receptionist says, “Thanks, buddy” in an accent that makes me feel like he is mocking me somehow.

[EGGNOG]

By the time we get to Floor 30 the party is already in full swing.

That awkward office party swing.

No one is being themselves here. They are being their office selves.

Smiles and sobriety.

Lacking the latter we over-do the former. Gary looks like he is demonstrating some sort of dominance.

We split up and performed the routine… be seen at all four corners of the room. Make some small talk with a few people at each stop. They’ll remember you being there, but if you sneak out no one will remember you leaving.

It goes smoothly. I have a lovely chat with one of the twins from account management about whether elves were ever real. I make a joke about being “your authentic elf” and shamble off.

We reconvene at the table with the Eggnog bowl on it.

Gary pours us all a plastic cup of the milk-egg-alcohol combination.

Eggnog, if you haven’t had it before, is like boozy pancake batter.

“Let’s head off after this”

“Seconded.”

It was at this point, when we were pretty much finished, that it started.

[IMMERSIVE]

You have to establish the premise early on with immersive theatre. That way the audience can start settling in to their roles.

The whole company bursts through the door to the elevator and immediately starts marshalling everyone into the main space, by the water feature.

Who builds a water feature on the 30th floor of an office building?

Some of our colleagues are really getting into it. Screaming and waving their hands around. This is what happens when you promote confident, out-going theatre kids to mid-level managerial roles. The sort that go to the cinema and sing along loudly with the musical numbers.

We would have been happy with a modest Christmas bonus, but no, instead we are all getting to experience this treat.

The main character, a bearded man, stands on the raised steps that will clearly mark the ‘stage’.

He opens a small journal and begins the prologue.

“Look,” says Gary, “He’s still on book, what sort of amateur production is this?”

“Stop being a Grinch.”

In a voice that is less international terrorist and more terrible Severus Snape impression, the actor calls for our boss.

It is clear that upper management are going to be the main characters in this charade and we are going to dutifully perform our role as extras.

Just another day at the office.

[EXTRAS]

“Shouldn’t we be being paid? If this is a performance and we are in it, I think I’d like to be paid.”

“I’m not sure that milling around a lot and attacking the buffet counts as work.”

There had been a lot of milling around. Some of the actors just stood there, clutching their prop guns, trying to look mean.

How mean can you look in a sport jacket with the sleeves rolled up?

I caught myself giving them “big face”.

You know, it is what you do when, as an audience member, you realise that a performer is making eye contact with you. You want to be reassuring, smile back, give them encouragement, so you give them “big face”.

On the other side of the divide, if you are a performer and you notice the audience giving you “big face” the chances are it isn’t going that great.

If you wanted to go to the toilet you had to be escorted. I get it, it is all part of the experience, but I can’t help feel that this is an access issue. Gary jokes about taking a piss in one of the office planters and after a few moments I question if he is joking.

“Sure.”

A small group has gathered with us by the nog.

We are plotting an escape plan. Very Great Escape.

“That’s a film that is shown at Christmas, but is not a Christmas film”.

Thanks Gary.

The problem is, if we all leave, someone will notice and that won’t go down well. Besides, what are we going to do? Hang out in the lobby until it is all over?

Another issue with immersive theatre. Would your character really just stand up, say “fuck this” and walk out?

I’m starting to think that mine might.

[MERCH]

At last a little excitement!

The elevator doors open to reveal one of the performers playing dead in an office chair. He’s wearing a Santa hat and on his grey sweatshirt is the slogan, “Now I have a machine gun. Ho Ho Ho”.

Well, that’s the post show merch, isn’t it?

Whilst we are all being held captive here, you can just here the sound of trestle tables being set up in the lobby with scripts, signed by the company, Santa hats and grey sweatshirts with sharpied on slogans.

The performer is wheeled off stage and the ‘leader’ re-appears.

He picks someone out of the audience. As predicted it is one of the management team. Holly from Human Resources.

They whisk her off to an office, presumably to let her in on the next act.

Those boundaries are certainly being blurred.

I really feel immersed.

[TECHNICAL]

It hasn’t been a smooth ride for the performers.

On several occasions you can clearly see them talking with what we presume is a stage manager via walkie talkies.

The tall blond actor, the one that looks like he’d be a great fit for playing Vigo The Carpathian in an immersive Ghostbusters 2 production, looks genuinely stressed.

If I had to call it, I would say it is trouble in the audio-visual department.

Occasionally we hear “gunfire” off stage, but since little is happening here we can only assume that it is being triggered at the wrong time.

Gary says he saw a nerdy looking bloke as we passed through reception. He was carrying a laptop, almost certainly loaded with Qlab.

“They certainly didn’t bring him along for his charming personality.”

I get the feeling that the performers are having a better time than the audience when it comes to this immersive theatre. That somehow we are just props for their power fantasies.

I’m reminded of when my niece, at four years old, invited me to a tea party with several of her soft toys and got upset when I wouldn’t really eat the playdoh ‘scones’.

[IMMERSION]

We are now officially out of eggnog and, aside from the ones in my pocket, mince pies.

This has been a total washout. I hope they don’t repeat it next year.

You can’t just demand participation from your audience. Nor does situating them in the performance necessarily mean they are immersed.

Likewise, you can experience immersion just through being present. Anyone who has jumped at a horror film or flinched in an action sequence has experienced it.

When it comes to theatre, immersion isn’t a physical property. It is a psychological one. Furthermore it requires a certain amount of desire to be immersed. If you don’t want to take part, the whole contract falls apart. No amount of props and scenery can compensate for genuine engagement.

We tend to think of immersion like getting into a bath. Once you are in the bath, in the water, you are immersed. But that isn’t true with make believe. You not only have to convince the audience that there is a bath, you have to give them the motivation for getting into it in the first place.

You can’t force them into the bath at gunpoint.

I’m thinking about this as I’m being forced into a stairwell at ‘gunpoint’.

Apparently we are heading to the roof.

“Ah, this will be the big finale,” slurs Gary.

I’ve never heard the word “finale” pronounced with a “w” before. Certainly not at the end of the word.

“Fireworks. Everyone loves fireworks. They make everything better.”

[STAGE LEFT]

Not everyone likes fireworks.

A cursory glance at your local facebook group this time of year will tell you that. It’s a catalogue of upset pet owners and people upset at upset pet owners. Accusations of exceptionalism and general Grinching.

Likewise, you’ll see arguments over what is and isn’t a Christmas film. Something you would think was trivial banter but then devolves into diatribes of “they are not even letting us call it Christmas anymore”.

We finally duck out, slipping into an elevator as everyone else marches up the stairs to the roof.

Gary, swaying gently to his own rhythm, experiences something like a moment of clarity.

“Here’s the thing though. Christmas, as we experience it, is made up. It is a performance. All of it. It is set dressing and dance moves. It is scripted lines and weird costumes. It’s a performance many of us take part in.

And if you accept that as a premise, then it means, through the magic of Christmas, any film you want can be a Christmas film, just as long as you wish it to be.”

The elevator doors to the lobby open and he steps out, shouting loudly to the receptionist, “You, boy, what day is it?”

There is no one at reception.

I collect the bag of scampi fries from the desk an,d as we walk across the empty lobby, we hear the fireworks on the roof of the building.

Merry Christmas.

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As with most words, ‘Yuppie’ has contentious origins.

For some it is short for "young urban professional". For others it means "young upwardly-mobile professional".

That’s sort of irrelevant though. The thing to know is that it was a term applied, particularly to young people in the 1980s that were working in The City.

These were the kids of new money. They were the sons and daughters of the working class barrow boys. Made good, educated and now earning decent money.

The term started as a neutral descriptor of a demographic, but quickly turned into one of derision.

It was associated with new money showiness, materiality and poor taste.

It was also associated with aggressive gentrification and exacerbation of the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

A fact that the Yuppies seemingly celebrated.

[PIONEER SPECIES]

The landscape is barren.

The ambient temperature is scorching.

There’s little moisture and less shade.

This place in inhospitable.

Mostly.

If you look close enough, and examine this environment that no one wants to live in, you’ll find some organisms that make this their home.

We call them pioneer species.

Lichens are a good example of a pioneer species. They live on practically nothing. They don’t need soil, choosing instead to live on the rocks. Often pioneer species are photosynthetic, relying on the sun for energy in the absence of anything else.

It seems as if they live on thin air alone.

What they get, in return for their low requirements, is undisturbed lodgings and all the time they need to get on with things.

Over time, these species will convert the landscape. They will terraform and sculpt.

They will erode the rocks, and the remains of their bodies will create soil.

It is this soil that allows other far fussier organisms to move in and take over.

Eventually these pioneer species are edged out somewhat.

[THE SLUMBLEBRAG]

We were walking along a particularly nice stretch of the Southside of Glasgow the other day.

It’s an area of spectacular gentrification.

Once, it was home to some of the poorest people in the UK, living in conditions that the BBC described as ‘slums’, however, it is now considered a happening place.

We were walking along behind a group of 20-somethings. Southern English accents.

If I had to put money on it, I’d suggest post-grad students, but I’m old and I’m finding it difficult to tell. These could be young professionals.

Something about passing one of several boutique plant shops caused the group to talk loud enough to hear.

‘Oh, yah, I live near what used to be the Gorbals,’ says one, possibly referring to the new build flats that took the place of the infamous housing project that was demolished in the late 1990s.

Those flats sell for around £400,000. They rent for around £1,000 a month.

‘Oh, it is rough,’ says another, passing the anarchist Jewish bakery, ‘people don’t even believe I live here’.

The way they were talking about the area they could have been describing Beirut in the late 1980s.

It wasn’t out of fear, or concern.

It was a badge of pride.

As we pass the four boutique interior design shops in a row, and head towards the vinyl only record shop/coffee house/informal workspace I couldn’t help but reflect on whether they genuinely thought this was a rough and dangerous place, where behind every independent Tarot Card and Crystal shop lurked danger, or whether they were trying to convince each other of it.

It’s cool to live somewhere dangerous, but it is far easier to live somewhere safe and pretend you live somewhere dangerous.

In the end we coined a new term for the process of suggesting you live somewhere far more downmarket than you do.

The Slumblebrag.

[COMEBACKS]

The comeback is like a dance move. It is formalised.

Two steps forward, one step back.

But not in that order.

One step forward, one step back, one step forward.

That’s The Comeback.

You have to be a thing first, then you have to go away, and only then can you make a return.

Trump did it last week. That was a comeback.

The mullet has managed to do it too.

Business at the front, party at the back.

I’m not really fond of either.

Sometimes I think of Trump sporting a mullet. Business politics and the back, party politics at the front.

The mullet, an ancient hairstyle sported by the ancient Romans and indigenous Americans, really grew in popularity during the late 1970s and persisted well into the 1980s.

It had a brief brush with celebrity. It was on Top of The Pops on top of Tom Jones. It even cameoed as Kieffer Sutherland’s hair in the film, The Lost Boys.

How it came to be known as the mullet is particularly interesting. It had adopted other pseudonyms as it rampaged throughout the UK, US and Australia, names such as “Hockey Hair” and “Ape Drape”, but in 1994 The Beastie Boys referred to it by the name ‘Mullet” in their 1994 song, “Mullet Head”.

They also described the form standards:

number one on the side and don't touch the back, number six on the top and don't cut it wack, Jack.

And then it sort of died out.

Sure some nature reserves persisted to keep the stock alive. Australian Rules Football being the largest, but on the whole the haircut was the punchline to many jokes. It was effortlessly uncool.

It went away.

Then, a pandemic happened. People couldn’t go to the hairdresser. In September 2020, i-D called 2020 "the year of the mullet".

Perhaps it started as irony, or a joke, like when all men shave a beard off they leave the Charlie Chaplin moustache… just to see. Except few ever leave the house sporting it.

And now, it is strolling down the street, blatant and irony free. It is back, baby. The mullet is back.

All back.

No sides.

[THE BOWERY]

Why are slums cool?

They’re not. Not initially. They are awful places to live. Often lacking basic amenities, usually owned by slum lords who don’t do the bare minimum to look after their tenants safely.

The people here are not here because they want to be. They are here because they can’t be anywhere else.

Slums are not cool.

At least until they are.

The relative low cost of housing and general dereliction creates the ideal condition for artists. Generally, having room and few financial responsibilities enables this pioneer species to move in.

They aren’t displacing anyone. They are filling in the gaps.

And when they move in they start to make soil.

Sometimes the soil happens on purpose. Artists seeking to better their own living conditions tidy the place up, run electricity into buildings, decorate and re-furnish. Some embed with the community that was already there.

Then, some soil is made by accident. Their very presence stimulates the economy. Usually, it starts with night life and alcohol, but seeps into corner shops and cafes.

The deep soil starts to come when they socialise. Parties in derelict warehouses, decorated with makeshift art, seem really cool. The slight edge of otherness and lawlessness can be attractive.

People from nicer parts start travelling there for the party and, at first, they are always glad to go back home to their comfortable places.

Then one day, they’ll say something like, “this is great, I’m thinking I should move here.”

It’s that moment, where someone chooses to live there. The moment where people want to be there, not because they have nowhere else. That’s the moment where gentrification starts.

A great example of this is in New York. The Bowery had a long history of decline starting just after the Civil War. By the 1970s it was a centre for drug use, alcoholism, homelessness and prostitution.

It was also cheap enough for artists to move in.

Parties ensued, studios were fabricated, galleries appeared.

By the 1990s gentrification had set in.

In the 2000s, The New Museum of Contemporary Art opened there. and , AvalonBay Communities opened Avalon Bowery Place, its first luxury apartment complex.

And all whilst this was happening the original tenants of the place were being pushed out.

In the late 2000s, 60 tenants of 128 Hester Street were thrown out of their building when construction on the nearby Wyndham Garden Hotel destabilised it. They were evicted with the help of the Department of Buildings.

There’s a great documentary called Sunshine Hotel, by Michael Dominic, about one of the flophouses and its occupants. It paints a portrait of a necessary service trying to coexist in an era of gentrification.

[SLUM]

“Government funding to tackle Glasgow Govanhill slums” — BBC News, 2010:

The Scottish government is to put £1.8m into tackling slum housing in the south side of Glasgow.

The move follows complaints that a sudden increase in the area's population has caused overcrowding and allowed rogue landlords to flourish.

Many of the flats in the Govanhill area are below tolerable standards and have been described as modern slums.

The government funding will be spent on renovating properties and will support a hit squad to take on bad landlords.

Govanhill, whose local population is ethnically mixed and has the biggest concentration of Roma families in Scotland, has some of the most severe housing problems in the UK.

Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon, who is the MSP for Govan, said: "This funding will help to breathe new life into Govanhill.

"The area has been plagued by unscrupulous private landlords who flout the law by renting out flats, which are overcrowded and fall below the tolerable standard.

"I am aware that local residents have demanded more action to deal with landlords that have, for too long, been trading in misery."

In 2024 we can see the longer term progress of this plan. Most notably the Roma families have been pushed to the edges of the Southside, particularly West of Victoria Road. Similarly rents have sky rocketed in recent years, particularly post-Covid, fuelled by the influx of wealthy young professionals moving into the area to take opportunity of newly refurbished tenements that had once been decried as slums.

This is gentrification. When the poor do not benefit from the improvements that the well meaning middle class insist up on them.

I would also like to note that there is a very useful distinction to be made between what the BBC considers is a slum and what is, in fact, a ghetto.

[GENTRIFICATION]

Broadly, gentrification is defined as the process that occurs between the first wealthy people moving in and the last poor people having to leave.

It is a process whereby communities make unattractive places more attractive as they seek to better their environment only to be pushed out once it is deemed acceptable for other people to move in.

[THE TERRACE]

There’s a really cool wine shop up the way. It has recently started to operate as a wine bar too.

If you walk past you will see a crowd of young people sat around communal tables, lit by candle light and surrounded by racks of decent but expensive wine.

It reminds me of the wine bars of the 1980s.

The ones that didn’t exist in the working class bit of the North I was from, but the ones on TV. The one in Only Fools and Horses where Del Boy and Trigger go to see if they can impress Yuppie women.

The one where Del Boy says, “Play it cool” before leaning on a bar that isn’t there.

I thought these places were fictional constructs that existed to set up comedy punchlines. This is a scene that really would not have worked in a Northern Labour Club.

Partly, the joke works because we are on Del Boy’s side. The Yuppies are ridiculous, they are posers. They are there, sure, to enjoy expensive wine, but they are also their to be seen enjoying expensive wine.

It is a demonstration of their capital wealth. It is therefore a demonstration of their worth.

And whilst we are supposed to side with the working class barrow boy, who makes his living from scrabbling around scheme to scheme in a desperate attempt to follow the allure of Thatcherite self-made prosperity, it is also Del Boy who is the butt of the joke.

He can’t play it cool. He doesn’t belong here. The idiot didn’t even realise the bar had been opened.

The joke is on him.

[CAPITAL]

The original Yuppies came out of the working class.

Parents that had worked hard to make sure their kids had a good education worked in cooperation with a new form of neo-libral capitalism that was starting to take hold.

In the UK it was Thatcherism. In the US, Reganomics.

Same thing everywhere. Free market capitalism with little regard for regulation.

Sell off public assets, the same council houses the Yuppie’s parents had brought them up in, and re-frame it as empowerment.

Strip the miners.

Strip mine the NHS.

It wasn’t empowerment. It was pulling up the ladder.

Still, these children grew into adults that believed in money, and why not? Look at what it could do. They could buy houses and cars and drink wine.

But then what? They still had money, and they had most of the things they had grown up wanting.

That’s when it became a performative culture. Signs and signifiers, isn’t it?

Gaudy watches, bright coloured braces, being seen to play squash. Earrings like chandeliers. More, heavier, brighter.

The clothes started to look like growths, frillier, puffier, stripier.

The hair grew thicker and featherier.

Much like the chair of French courtiers leading up to the revolution.

And there’s only so high a pile of cocaine can get before it collapses under its own granularity.

But time passed and the young upwardly mobile humans settled down, excess giving way to family practicality. The cars getting bigger and more Land Rover like, the penthouse flats in the city transforming into rural piles. The money started to go into trust funds for the kids.

Property too, safe investment that. Buy up all of those houses that had once been council houses and rent them back to the poor at even higher prices.

Buy up flats in areas that poor people live in.

And their children grew up with this.

Those kids grew up with private education. They grew up with financial security. They grew up with a future with a safety net.

[THE TERRACE]

I was distracted by Only Fools and Horses, wasn’t I?

I was talking about the wine shop that has become a wine bar.

Last summer they expanded out from the shop and onto the pavement outside.

They cordoned the majority of it off.

What had once been a public space, a place for anyone to walk, was now space for people who bought expensive wine.

They left a meagre strip of pocked tarmac for pedestrians to squeeze through, creating a strange bottleneck of shame.

Wealthy kids sat on chairs, drinking expensive wine and watching poor locals have to take turns to pass each other on a pavement they all used to own.

There’s a sign in the window too.

“Please wait to be seated, there is only room for 16 people on The Terrace”.

A terrace?

Their terrace was our pavement.

This feels an awful lot like the practice of every coloniser that ever set foot on land and declared it discovered.

This is a real-time illustration of gentrification.

A terrace? Our pavement is *your* terrace?

It’s hard not to feel judged as you walk past.

The young people, sporting mullets and drinking expensive wine.

I’m reminded of Only Fools and Horses.

I’m reminded of the Yuppies.

[MY OWN INVASION OF THE SOUTHSIDE AND MY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF MY COMPLICITY IN THESE PROBLEMS]

My Mum sounded worried.

I asked if she was OK.

“You hear those stories about Glasgow, don’t you? You don’t live in the Gorbals do you? I saw a thing on the BBC…”

We decided it was probably best to invite my parents up to see where I lived, to put their minds at rest.

Sure, we live in an area the BBC called a slum, even though it is better described as a ghetto, and it has a reputation, but by and large this is a fine place to live. Our neighbours are friendly, the shops are well stocked, and the rent is reasonable.

The flats are, largely, wonderful too. People now like to talk as if living in a tenement is akin to workers inhabiting tiny rooms during the industrial revolution, but the truth is that the flats are large and spacious. Ceilings are high, windows are large. They all have indoor toilets despite the impression some people might want to convey.

Sure, there are problems. Bed bugs are rampant. The government is offering free pest control to everyone whilst also trying to keep the epidemic quiet.

You might think bed bugs are not a serious problem, if you do, go on youtube and search for them. I promise you won’t sleep well for the rest of your life.

There’s also the Roma too.

They are not the problem, rather the council’s inability to work for them. Many of the Roma do not speak English and there is little help for new families moving into the area. This is creating friction with some of the other residents who can’t understand why the Roma don’t put their bins out on the right day.

This is all the pretext for what I did next.

My first act of gentrification.

I committed it so my Mum would worry less.

I swept the inside of the close. That’s the communal area between the flats.

I washed the walls down, removing some of the black mold and dirt that had built up since their last painting.

I’m unrepentant…

…but I know where it led.

A few weeks later, after my parents had visited and seen that I wasn’t living in squalor, I walked past one of my neighbours. He was sweeping the close. He told me that seeing me do it had inspired him to try and keep it that way.

That neighbour doesn’t live here any more. They were priced out of the area just before the pandemic.

[GENTRIFICATION]

The Glad Cafe is just up the road too. You can get a breakfast there for £14 or a pizza with sugo, roast tomatoes, red onions, olives, capers, confit garlic and evoo for just £10.50.

I had to search for what evoo was. I’m still not sure, but I think it stands for “extra virgin olive oil”.

I’m also assuming the currency because, like most modern restaurants there is no ‘£’ symbol, just a number.,

10.5

Back in 2020 the Glad Cafe was host to a symposium titled: “Stopping Gentrification on Glasgow’s Southside”.

In attendance was a variety of social activists and arts workers. Many have combined their role as artist/activist, particularly on their social media handles.

Four years later and we can assess this symposium as a well meaning failure. The gentrification was not stopped.

It is unclear why this panel talk did not prevent the middle class from coming to the South side of Glasgow and determining its future.

Perhaps a better definition of gentrification is the period bookmarked by the first external middle class activist meeting about gentrification and those same activists being all that remains in an area.

[SOCIAL JUSTICE]

“Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working class” — The Observer, 2024

Four years later, many of these same students joined Black Lives Matter protests. Al-Gharbi watched as they demonstrated on Broadway in New York’s Upper West Side, oblivious to the “homeless Black men who didn’t even have shoes” sharing the same space. The protesters “were crowding the benches that homeless people were using”, insisting that “Black Lives Matter”, but apparently not “the Black guys right in front of them”.

This constant disparity between the professed beliefs of liberal students agitating for social justice and actions that revealed an indifference to the material injustice surrounding them led Al-Gharbi to write a book to try to make sense of it.

…

Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

[THE NEW YUPPIES]

So here’s the rub.

The New Yuppies.

They are not here to demonstrate their riches. That’s no longer a currency in modern discourse. Besides, just being here is enough to demonstrate that. Chosing to be here demonstrates it.

No, what they are doing, is what their parents did but this time with Cultural Capital.

Their Mum and Dad were Loadsa Money, they are We Care a Lot.

Furthermore, they don’t want to be seen as business people. They want to be seen as anti-business.

They are all artists.

Artist Slash…

But they are not the pioneer species that moved into places like SOHO or The Bowery or Brick Lane early on. These are what come later. They are predators. They are the ones that displace.

This place was already fertile long before they arrived.

They are wealthy cosplayers, peacocking their credentials.

They are the beneficiaries of neo-liberal economics. They are the beneficiaries of Thatcherism and Reganomics. They benefitted from the selling of council houses and public libraries and the strip mining of the NHS.

And they’ll proudly proclaim that they were the first of their family to go to University as if that absolves them.

They’ll tell you that they live “in a rough part of town”, but it is one that sells cans of beer in a pop up shop for £12 a can. It is a rough part of town that has cafes slash co-working spaces and a Michelin starred restaurant on the corner.

Their very presence drives out local people, it literally forces them from the pavement of their own streets. The rents rocket. The fish and chip shop is replaced by a dog friendly vegan social space slash patisserie.

Our pavement is replaced by their terrace.

We are being replaced by folk that look like us and pretend to be us. They take whatever cultural capital we have and claim it as their own.

The economic underpinnings of a culture are shaken loose.

How are these artists managing to survive here?

Their Yuppie parents have bought them a flat. They don’t pay the ever escalating rent.

Some of them even have an allowance too.

Grown adults with an allowance!

It is true, I promise you.

[CALL IT A COMEBACK]

As mullets went away and then came back

so Yuppies went away and came back

and Trump, apparently

And so you must go away from here

I doubt you’ll be back

Come back.

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I don’t want to be a tool of last resort.

Although, I think I might be.

Tool of last resort.

[SPECIALIST/GENERALIST]

Is being an artist a specialism?

Is it being a qualified expert in one thing?

Or is it more about being a generalist?

[YOU KNOW JACK]

If there’s one phrase I despise, and would relegate to the box of random cables and adapters I store at the back of my cupboard and will never use again, it is “Jack of All Trades”.

The main reason for this is the inevitable follow up line, “And master of none”.

It’s the obsolete version of social media guru advice that tells you to “stay in your lane”.

A lane that might just be a rut. A lane that might just be sectioned off from a massive and infinite pool of water to swim in.

It’s a way of telling people that they can only be one thing, and that perhaps they should never hope to be more than one thing.

Why be monotone when you can be polyphonic?

Why be an instrument when you can be the orchestra?

And that’s what I’m telling you, right now.

You are already the orchestra.

You are what I always wanted to be.

You are a polymath.

[PINS]

I’m going to prove you are a polymath.

Even if you don’t think you are, you will be by the end of this.

We are going to start with imagining a pin on a table. A single, solitary object on an unremarkable surface.

Try to picture it.

You’ve already started.

[PRIMARY]

I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.

It’s a question we seem very fond of asking small humans that have barely seen anything of the world. Here, you one, make some statements that are based on almost nothing and watch as your life unrolls to show you how naive you really are.

Of course I didn’t know. I’m reasonably sure that I still do not know.

However, there are some that did. I think for some people it is like an instinct. Maybe it is a genetic or social predisposition. Perhaps they are already aware that they have little choice in the matter…

I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to be an architect.

I think I might have said, ‘mad scientist’.

There’s a high chance I said, ‘Ghostbuster’.

A week later I may have said, ‘archeologist’ or ‘greenskeeper’.

I was a fickle child, brought up with a notion of possibilities instead of certainties.

You can be anything if you work at it.

Still, it is a strange question to ask children. The main reason being that during this phase of their education, everything is education.

Primary education is about learning the tools that will enable you to learn everything else. Every question is equally as valid.

How does mathematics work? Why are strawberries red... except when they are green? Why do we say please and thank you? What happens when we die? Why is space dark? Who invented music? Why is water?

At this level education is in its purest form. Everything is a question.

This is the ideal environment for a polymath, and nearly everyone starts out as one.

Driven by a desire to know answers to whatever is on your mind.

Each question equally weighted and part of a larger jigsaw of what we call knowledge.

If you were being critical of the education system, as it stands, you would note that this is something that we deliberately train children out of.

[PINS/ETYMOLOGY]

You could hear a pin drop.

That’s a strange phrase. Have you ever wondered where it comes from?

There’s some controversy over the etymology.

On one hand some people think it comes from quiet sewing circles where women would sit in silence mending clothes. A pin drop being loud enough to be heard in the room.

Another explanation suggests that pins placed in a candle were used to measure time for auctions and that people went quiet waiting for the pin to drop, signalling the end of the auction.

Either way, the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first print usage at 1816, in the writing of Leigh Hunt, poet, journalist, and literary critic.

You have to wonder if it was used in poetry, journalism or in a critique of some literature.

[HEDONISM]

Being a polymath is a risky endeavour.

It is necessarily hedonistic.

It is a bit like an extreme sport.

You can drown in an overwhelming environment of possibility and questions.

The waters are deep and wide.

You can get lost for endless days in books.

You find yourself travelling to ever more strange places and getting involved in strange situations.

And normal things can become boring. Routine feels constrictive.

You notice that you can’t walk the same path to work twice in a week because you might miss out on seeing something new.

It’s a little bit like being an artist.

[PINS/MUSIC]

A song from the EP of the same name by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The meaning is unclear. It could be about sex, or self harm, a soured relationship or a voodoo doll. Possibly all of the above. Songs can be vague like that.

David Brown, known as Lucky Daye was a former competitor on season 4 of American Idol. His song Pins comes from his fourth studio album, Algorithm.

The Goo Goo Dolls have a song from their 2016 album, Boxes called The Pin. The album was the first of theirs not to debut in the top ten since 1988’s Dizzy Up The Girl.

Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, has a track called Pin on her fourth studio album Art Angels. The album is considered one of Grimes’ more accessible productions.

Needles and Pins is a song written by Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono. The artists who have had a hit with it include the Searchers, Smokie, Ramones, Gene Clark, Petula Clark, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with Stevie Nicks.

[TOOL OF LAST RESORT]

A pen knife is a handy tool.

A pen knife is rarely the best tool.

If, for example, you are screwing in a lot of screws, a screwdriver is the tool you want.

The little screwdriver attachment of a pen knife is fiddly and somewhat delicate.

A dedicated screwdriver is likely to be ergonomically designed. It will fit the hand better. It will allow you to screw in those screws with less effort and more accuracy.

However, there is an instance where a screwdriver isn’t the best tool, even when you think you might be screwing in a lot of screws.

This instance is located in the future, where you don’t know what else is going to be happening when you are performing your job of screwing in screws.

This future might feature bits of string that need cutting. Food that needs dislodging for your teeth. Something that needs sawing with a tiny saw.

Dedicated tools are suitable for predictable tasks.

The tool of last resort is suitable for a world that is far less predictable.

[SECONDARY]

Secondary education in the UK is a funnel.

At Key Stage 3, there are the following subjects that are mandatory:

English, Maths, Science, History, Geography, Modern Foreign Languages, Design and Technology, Art and Design, Music, Physical Education, Citizenship, and Computing.

That’s a total of twelve.

It also is the first time that a student will encounter, formally, the demarcation of subject areas. This is the idea that concepts and thoughts belong to fields of study that are distinct from one another.

It’s a conceptual sleight of hand that enables timetables far more than students.

Discrete domains rather than the wonderful bramble of interconnecting ideas.

By the time the student reaches Key Stage 4 the compulsory subjects drop to just English, Maths, and Science. There is, however, an emphasis on ‘foundation’ subjects such as Computing, Physical Education, Citizenship, Arts, Design and Technology, Humanities, and Modern Foreign Languages.

Education becomes a selection process. What do you want to study? What are you good at? How will this serve the career that you, a fifteen year old, with still limited knowledge of the wider world, should be thinking about right now?

This selection, coupled with breaking education into discreet subjects is the beginnings of specialisation.

It is where we teach children that it is better to know more about less.

Pick a lane and stay in it.

Swim in a straight line.

If I can make one observation, it is that school is still stuck in an 18th century paradigm, where learning is a privilege and not a necessity, where sources of information are rare, and when folk have yet to draw the threads between subjects that reveal how wonderfully interconnected everything is.

[PINS/SAFETY]

Early pins were made from wood or bone before being manufactured out of metals. You can find them in the detritus of most ancient civilisations, such as the empires of Egypt and Rome.

Whilst a simple pin is mostly a thin shaft with a point, adornments were frequently added as status symbols and demonstrations of craftsmanship. They may be embellished with intricate designs, precious stones or turned into brooches.

At some point in this evolution it occurred to people that pins were, if anything, a bit jabby.

The Romans put a bend in the pin, calling it a Fibula. This too evolved into a four-part object consisting of a body, a pin, a spring and a hinge.

You can already see the elements of a modern safety pin emerging, but the Roman fibulae were made of iron or bronze, they were quite large, and heavy, and frequently adorned. They tended to be for wealthier people.

It wasn’t until the fifteenth century in Medieval Europe that pins began being made of drawn wire. This reduced the cost and also gave rise to the single piece pin, where the wire would be wrapped to form a springy hinge.

Another leap of time and we join Walter Hunt, an inventor in New York State.

Hunt was the inventor of a fire engine, a precursor to the Winchester rifle, a home knife sharpener, a mail sorting machine and the fountain pen.

He was in his workshop playing with a coil of wire. He realised that he can add a clasp at the end and the wire retains enough spring in it to allow the repeated clasping and unclasping of the wire.

He patented the idea as a safety pin on April 10, 1849.

[FURTHER]

The next stage of education is further education.

Further suggests an extension rather than a broadening. This is accurate.

It is now time to focus your learning on perhaps three subject areas.

Maybe you’ll get a general studies qualification if you fancy taking what amounts to a pub quiz after your final examinations.

When I studied for my A-Levels, I went to Lancaster and Morecambe College. It offered A-Levels alongside more vocational studies such as plastering and beauty therapy.

I’d argue that plastering is a higher art qualification with some serious applied material science, and that beauty therapy is a form of embedded social anthropology. However, there is still a certain snobbishness in the British that regards these as somewhat lesser qualifications.

I wanted to study Biology, Chemistry and English, for no other reason that I enjoyed these subjects the most. This presented a problem.

English and Chemistry were not compatible as they were taught at the same time.

There was a timetable clash.

It appeared inconceivable that anyone would want to head into science with a good grasp of English language and literature.

And so, I studied English as a night class alongside classmates consisting of hobbyists. These were people who did not need an A-Level qualification, but were instead studying for fun.

Many of them were retired, and I asked them why, having spent a life working, they felt the need to go back to school. They all responded with a similar answer.

“I always wanted to study English Literature, but I went for a more practical subject that would help my job prospects”.

[AUTODIDACT]

A common feature of the polymaths I know is a tendency towards autodidactism.

If you want to know what autodidactism is, you should go and look it up in the dictionary.

Since formal education is rather inverted compared to the aspirations of a polymath, a certain amount of self-directed education is required.

Once upon a time this might have involved some serious dedication to tracking down rare texts and learned sages.

That's not really the case now.

The internet changed all of that.

Wikipedia, amazing, YouTube tutorials on just about anything you can think of, delivered by someone half your age and speaking their third language, outstanding.

Learning isn’t stuck with memorising lists and facts. It isn’t the dry hard slog of tables. Learning now happens whilst we are having fun. It is in the wonderful documentaries the exceptional video games. It is lurking in everyday discourse.

What we should be witnessing is the golden age of polymaths. Autodictatism running rampant.

And yet not.

It seems as if the overwhelming nature of total knowledge is causing us to shrink back harder onto STEM subjects and CORE subjects and discreet learning units that create a useful workforce.

Rather than leaning into a world where information and knowledge are readily available and where the ability to learn anything at all is possible, we ask for a narrower focus, especially from children. We demand smaller horizons.

Occasionally someone will pipe up and demand that art be included in the curriculum.

We get the acronym STEAM.

But really, what we should be reaching has a near infinite string of letters, and even some numbers.

[ADAM SMITH]

Adam Smith, Scottish economist and philosopher, wrote a rather potent passage in Wealth of Nations.

Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day

In other words, what capitalism doesn’t need is someone who can make a whole pin, start to finish. What capitalism needs is someone who can specialise in one simple, repeatable action. An action that can be mastered and performed quickly and easily. An action that when chained to other actions creates a pin.

In other other words, capitalism needs specialists, because when it comes to manufacturing it is far more efficient and efficiency means profit.

We do not need people who can make pins from scratch, or who appreciate the totality of the pin. We do not need people who make themselves happy through making pins. We need people to make an abstracted part of a pin, and to do it for money.

Smith’s words marked the moment when capitalism became the leader of education. Learning was now about being fit for a job, a specific job as defined by the economy.

Even now, the emphasis on STEM subjects is not about helping children find happiness, nor about supporting their wonder and awareness in the world, but rather about providing a set of skills most useful to industry.

[PINS/BIOLOGY]

You’ve been sitting awkwardly, or maybe even comfortably, for a while.

Maybe you’ve been working on a production line for close to eight hours, just repeating the same simple task over and over.

At the end of your shift you stand to walk away and you find your leg has gone dead. That’s annoying. The numbness makes it hard to walk.

And then sensation starts to return. It comes back accompanied by that tingling sensation we call pins and needles.

The biological action underlying this is fairly straight forward.

As you have been sitting there, you have restricted blood flow to a part of your body. This has caused the nerves to stop working temporarily.

As you stand the blood flow resumes, oxygen is distributed and the nerves start to work again.

The first nerves to work are the pain sensors, closely followed by those that communicate touch sensation.

That’s what you are feeling. Your body is reestablishing communication with itself.

[APPRENTICE]

You may think that on-the-job training or apprenticeship schemes would be popular in light of capitalist-led education.

However, these enterprises only provide specialists for a specific job, and that too isn’t what capitalism likes.

The idea of a job for life, something akin to a vocation, has evaporated.

The thing that is needed now is a flexible workforce. That’s why the transferable skills of English and Maths are at the top of the list. There is an idea that if you can count and read, you can be trained quickly in pretty much any industrial role.

[HIGHER]

You are now at university.

You’ve narrowed it down. Of all the millions of possibilities you can choose from, you’ve picked one.

What did you go for?

Was it something you enjoy? Was it something that might benefit you financially in the future?

With any luck it is both.

At this point in your education you’ll learn that almost everything you have learnt to date has been wrong, or at best, overly simplified.

By the time you have finished, this subject will define you.

You will be a historian, or a biologist, or…

[PINS/PUNK]

It is generally credited to Richard Hell, the songwriter, singer, bass guitarist and writer (Neon Boys, Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids.).

Whether or not he was the first to wear safety pins in a manner that defined the 70s punk aesthetic is somewhat contentious, however.

A lot of things about punk are contentious. Not specifically because of the politics, but because of the land grab to claim ownership.

It doesn’t feel very punk.

Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols claims he wore the safety pins for practical reasons, once stating he used them to stop “the arse of your pants falling out”.

What matters is that the safety pin, an object that screams sharp and pointy whilst also being safe enough to use on a child’s diaper, became a symbol of a political movement.

Safety pins were used as piercings, replacing ear rings, nose rings and any other kind of ring. There were safety pin tattoos too. That is to say tattoos of safety pins and tattoos made by safety pins in the stick and poke method.

They weren’t the only pin to become political. The pin badge joined in too.

Enamel pin badges go back a bit further than punk.

They go back to around 1300 CE when the Chinese began making them.

Later on they were used by soldiers in the Revolutionary war, politicians out on the campaign trail and teenagers everywhere as they supported their favourite bands, films, and political views.

They are used to designate names, ranks, memberships.

They are awards, consolation prizes and decoration.

No one can tell the pin badge what to be, and that is very punk.

[DOCTOR]

Obviously, you could try to stay in academia. That’s a viable career too.

To pull this off you are going to have to specialise even more.

A small field of study within a single subject.

A sub-subject.

This is the point where you get to specialise so hard that you pierce through the veil of knowledge and bring something new into the world.

Of course, you can do that without studying for a doctorate, sure, but here it is the point of it all. The elusive unique contribution to knowledge.

If education has been a funnel, this is the pin-sharp point.

[SPECIALIST]

We need specialists.

We need people who have dedicated their lives to the intricate study of a single subject.

We need doctors and dentists and lawyers.

We need the sort of doctors that aren’t great in a medical emergency too. The ones who have chased down a singular contribution.

I don’t care if any of them are into poetry, or base jumping, or making tiny furniture for dolls houses.

I want them to be good at doctoring and dentisting and lawyering.

Although, the argument goes, that a dentist that base jumps is perhaps a more rounded human.

I think about that often, especially when they have their fingers in my mouth.

What do they do when they are not doing this?

[MALCOLM GLADWELL]

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good. — Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Throughout his book, Gladwell repeatedly claims that to be an expert in anything you need to have consistently worked at it for 10,000 hours.

He refers to the Beatles, playing in Hamburg 1200 times between 1960 and 1964. There they go, honing their craft. By the time they have finished they have racked up 10,000 hours in being the Beatles. They are now specialists. Experts.

By this reasoning though, I am happy to inform you that you are already an expert in a few things.

Most importantly, most of you are experts in being human. Technically you were an expert as you approached your third birthday.

That’s one for your CV.

You were a child prodigy at being human.

Likewise, you are an expert in breathing.

I am an expert in breathing too.

I should have a degree in that, maybe a masters, possibly a doctorate.

Except that my asthma and several hospitalisations for pneumonia suggest that I wouldn’t graduate with honours.

It’s an oversimplification to suggest that time has anything to do with being an expert. Even Gladwell makes the caveat that it is about intent. You don’t become an expert in dentistry just by having teeth. You have to study and work at it.

But more than that, I’d suggest that being an expert in anything isn’t about arriving at a point. It is about making a commitment to continue learning, even when you think you know everything. It is a life-long commitment. You never attain the mantle of expert, rather it is something you are always working towards.

[TOASTER]

One of my favourite artistic endeavours is the Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites (www.thomasthwaites.com).

The premise is simple and brilliant.

Thwaites attempts to build a toaster.

From scratch.

And what does that mean? It means learning how to mine the raw materials, smelting, and fabrication. The creation of plastics. Mechanics.

It’s a wonderful illustration of how the work of many can make a common object seem unremarkable, but when framed by an individual it requires an immense level of knowledge and expertise.

It also highlights an awful lot of things along the way. Commercial mineral extraction. Cheap labour. The disposability of objects.

It also throws up some interesting facts that dispel the romance of autodidactism and polymaths.

Have you ever thrown a toaster out?

Originally Thwaites set out to use tools he had made himself, starting with pre-industrialised tools. This didn’t work out, and he admits to cheating. However, this just underlines quite how much reliance technology is on the complex web of other technologies.

And the toaster? What does it look like? Does it work?

You should go and have a look.

[PINS/GRENADE]

The other type of safety pin.

The one that prevents you accidentally arming a grenade.

The term ‘pulling the pin’ is often used to mean making a decision that is irreversible. A hard choice that once made cannot be unmade.

This is a pin of last resort.

[GENERALIST]

Is being an artist a specialism? Is it a generalism? Can it be both?

Are artists specialists that just like to pretend they know everything?

There are specialist courses centred around arts practice. Some are even form specific, like theatre, or visual art.

Yet the one binding concern of most graduates is individuality and novelty. Working with different materials in different ways.

Furthermore, to be successful in a modern landscape, artists tend towards a generalism of subject.

You can’t just spend a career concentrating on one thing or else you miss out on all the themed funding opportunities for everything that is not your thing.

Of course most artists want to concentrate on their one thing, and go through the most dextrous verbal gymnastics to show how their thing actually fits into a theme.

I know, my work is about daffodils, but really, isn’t the daffodil a symbol of “Liminal spaces and ecologies of thingness”? I really think that daffodils highlight the interrogation of water as a material and ambling about aimlessly as a form.

These are the tensions that an artist must understand.

You are specialising in generality.

You need to be a polymath.

Leonardo da Vinci understood this innately. We think of him as an artist, but a close look at his work allows us to see that beneath that title he was an engineer, a physiologist, an anatomist and a philosopher. His note books are filled with questions about the world.

My favourite is the section where he tries to work out just how much water there is in Venice’s canals.

He was also an autodidact out of necessity. When you push new frontiers of knowledge you quickly find that there are no books on the subject and that the number of people you can ask for help diminishes quickly.

[GOETHE]

George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth."

Novelist, poet, playwright, lawyer, statesman, scientist, theatre director, geologist, and botanist… and rather a lot more.

It was said that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also the last human to know the total sum of all human knowledge at the time.

I’m not sure about this claim. It’s an incredibly myopic view of knowledge, centred around Western canon. I can’t imagine he knew what Indigenous Australians knew, or the many cultures of South America.

He knew about the stuff in European libraries and Universities.

Still, I believe he would have been thrilled to know that there was more to learn. Goethe seemed to enjoy the process of learning, of accumulating knowledge of all different types.

His last words are often reported as Mehr Licht!, that is, "more light!", but a longer form was proposed by Karl Wilhelm Müller:

Macht doch den zweiten Fensterladen in der Stube auch auf, damit mehr Licht hereinkomme.

It translates as, “Open the second shutter in the living room so that more light comes in".

Maybe he was just asking for some more light in the room. It’s hard to read in the dark, especially so on your deathbed.

However, the words are often taken to illustrate his adoration of the Enlightenment and his love of knowledge.

I think Goethe would have been thrilled to be around now. It is a wonderful time to be a polymath. The pool we swim in is vast enough to seem infinite. Even if you started young and worked hard every waking hour of your life, you could never reach the limits of everything that is known.

That’s partly because we now make more new things each day than you could possibly encounter.

Universal and Warner media estimated the number of new songs being uploaded to the internet as 100,000 each day. Even if we take a conservative estimate of an average of two minutes per song, that is still nearly 140 day’s worth of music uploaded each day.

The publishing industry estimates around 500,000 books are published each year, not including self-published titles. That would mean you’d need to read 1,369 a day just to keep up, and that doesn’t cover all the books you’ve missed from the last two centuries or so.

That’s a great statistic to throw into contrast those social media posts where someone takes a photograph of an unreasonably large stack of books they have supposedly read this month.

Keep up slow coach. The literary world is leaving you in the dust.

And Wikipedia! I like to think of Goethe just spending days at a time leaping from one page to another on his inevitable journey towards the philosophy page.

Travelling like an explorer amongst the stars.

Infinite and endless.

A broad sea of unfathomable depth.

It is impossible to keep up with this. It’s wonderful and sublime.

Overwhelming information and things to learn. Endless discourse and entertainment.

What a time to be a polymath.

What a time to be nothing in particular.

[YOU ARE A POLYMATH]

I genuinely believe that is what we are. That capitalism has tried to make us forget that we swim in an ocean of knowledge by confining us to finite lanes.

I don't believe anyone is a specialist.

Sure, we all have leanings and preferences. Some people know more about some things than others.

But I think that we remain the same as we were when we first attended our first school.

We are constantly learning and processing all manner of things. It is almost impossible not to be a polymath now.

You need to be literate, not just in language but in film and media, you need to be adept with technology. For every decision you make you are weighing up education and experience.

The default setting of the human mind is one of inquisitiveness.

[PINS/UTILITY]

The utility of a pin is this.

It is a tiny device. Simple in design and construction.

It is a connector. It keeps things in place.

It secures fabrics and papers.

It is a small object with a massive range of associations.

You’d think that it was a specialist, but really it is a generalist.

The pin is a tiny thing with a large connotation.

Cohesion.

[TOOL OF LAST RESORT]

Generalism is a specialism. It is the specialism of connection and context. It is the specialism of being able to see commonality. It is the specialism of being able to relate.

I can see why artists are intrinsically drawn to it. I can see why humans are natural polymaths. Without this ability our world would make little sense.

We are, more than any humans before us, working in a system that is less predictable, and more unknown.

With each fact we have uncovered we have found many more questions.

That’s the nature of knowledge. The more you know, the less you know.

Every day an overwhelming tsunami of new things approaches our shores.

And so that tool becomes useful.

This is the last resort.

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The problem is, more or less, that the arts are idealistic.

You'd be hard pushed to find someone in the arts that wants global warming. It would be a stretch to round up a handful that agree with exploitation.

I'd like to think there is a correlation between people who want to expand their mind through experience and notions of tolerance.

But that's the problem. Or at least it becomes the problem when we have to talk about funding.

This week the news revealed that the Edinburgh Fringe Festival would be keeping their sponsor, Baillie Gifford.

I'd be willing to bet that most artists at the Fringe don't know who Baillie Gifford are.

Baillie Gifford is a Scottish investment firm that previously sponsored the Edinburgh Book Festival. Their sponsorship of this festival ended after on-stage protests, a campaign from Fossil Free Books, and threats of boycotts by authors who objected to the fact that the investment firm had stakes in companies that seemed antithetical with the ethos of the festival and the arts in general.

For example, Baillie Gifford had about £4.5 Billion invested in oil and gas companies.

Some have also noted the investment firm's complicity and investment in companies supplying Israeli arms, including the state owned Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.

You might struggle to find an artist that supports weapons in general, much less ones that have been seen to kill civilians and children.

Indeed, a quick look at social media highlights how outspoken many artists are about standing in solidarity with the oppressed, and the planet in general.

But you'll see far less complain that the Edinburgh Fringe is part funded by the sort of activities that agitate that.

Because, you know, money.

And that isn't good for the arts. Sure, it isn't good for a lot of people, but let's be self centered for a moment. It causes a form of cognitive dissonance. Here we are as artist/activists shouting at the world about how it has to be better, but here we also are benefiting from the economy that enables that harm.

At worst it makes us look like hypocrites.

We aren't hypocrites are we? This isn't just performative is it?

Fringe CEO Shona McCarthy apparently told the comedian Mark Thomas that "There's no such thing as clean money."

Is that true?

I think I know a way of cleaning it. One that doesn't leave artists compromised.

[DRUG DEALER LOGIC]

In his rather wonderful book, Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh details his sociological work within the projects of Chicago.

It’s a bleak read but it is made bearable by Sudhir’s charm and the first person perspective of a young sociologist being guided through a world of poverty. Venkatesh befriends a gang leader, giving him unrivalled access to this world.

After some time, the gang leader decides that Sudhir should take over responsibility for just one day. That he should make the decisions and choices and see what it is like.

It’s a brutal lesson of compromise and situation.

I won’t spoil it, rather recommend you get a copy. It’s a good read.

However, one thing has really stayed with me. It’s drug dealer logic.

It goes like this. You are a dealer and one of your customers owes you money. They owe you 100 but they only have 50. What do you do?

Do you take the 50?

Do you tell them to come back later with 100?

Do you beat them senseless?

What would you do?

Drug dealer logic dictates that you have to do all three of those options. You take what you can there and then, because the chance of any more money showing up is next to none. You deal in real, not in futures.

You demand more money as recompense. They have wasted your time. They probably won’t have that money, you know that, but if you don’t ask you don’t get.

You must exact punishment harsh enough to act as a warning to others. Additionally, this will also, probably, reduce the chances of the customer turning up with the rest of the money.

It is a brutal form of economics that exists in a reactionary manner. According to drug dealer logic the future is less important than the present, because the future may not exist.

I think I’d struggle with it.

Venkatesh struggles with it.

Eventually the gang leader re-takes control of the situation. He might be letting Venkatesh be gang leader for the day, but ultimately he’ll be in charge tomorrow and will have to pick up the pieces.

[SKEEVE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT]

Let's play thought experiment.

Let's imagine a new, hideous drug that addicts users and causes surges in violence, theft and poverty.

You can give it a street name, if you'd like.

I'm going to call it.... "Skeeve". What about you?

The main beneficiary of skeeve is the drug cartel that manufactures and sells it. It's a well organised operation with money flowing up a pyramid towards the top.

It predates the poor and the desperate, either as user/customers or as the only form of employment available to those communities.

Can we agree that's probably not a great thing?

On the other side of your city there is an arts festival.

It is small and new and fragile. A rare opportunity for artists to connect with audiences. A way for people to express their reality.

And the organisers want to pay those artists. They want to promote the festival so that people will know about it. They need to hire staff and venues. Everything costs something. It all costs too much.

As an artist you could argue that such festivals are necessary to communities, especially those that are oppressed or impoverished. Art is a social good.

I know you think that because I've read your Arts Council applications (side note: You can see other folk's applications under a freedom of information request).

It looks like that the arts festival won't be able to happen this year. There's no money. The local authorities have none to spare. They are tied up dealing with the drug epidemic that has hit the city.

But then... The head of the cartel hears about this. He's been suffering some pretty bad press lately and doesn't like the idea of everyone hating him. As far as he sees it he is providing jobs for a community. He is providing food for his family. He's probably a misunderstood good guy, and maybe he can help other people see that.

So, the head of the cartel offers a lot of money to the arts festival. He wants to become a sponsor.

OK, let's break and ask ourselves a question. "Should the Arts Festival take the money?"

What are your gut reactions. Does it change when you think of it more? Can you see the really unsubtle parallels I'm drawing? Can you do good things with dirty money?

OK, back to the point of the thought experiment.

Imagine another situation. In this case it is the state that approaches the festival with a bunch of money. Here, it says, is money to hold an arts event that might help the community.

The festival takes the money and puts on an amazing show. It pays the staff, the artists and the venues. It keeps ticket prices down, because it can, and it sees audiences from the poorest parts of town turn up to watch things. It creates a dialogue and a camaraderie. It creates a common purpose.

And at the end party, all raucous and bright, the festival organiser says to the Government representative, "thank you for the funding... where did you find that money?"

And the representative says, "We arrested some Cartel leader and used the proceeds of their criminal activity to fund community enterprises".

Which would you pick? That's the experiment.

Would you take the money direct from the drug lord, or would you rather take it from your own government?

The money is the exact same money.

Is that money different?

[MONEY BAGS]

The opioid epidemic is brutal. It transcends age, class and race. It kills and it destroys.

From habitual drug users looking for a cheaper more effective high through to chronic pain sufferers who were told that drugs like OxyContin and fentanyl were not addictive. It’s a predatory plague.

And it is a plague that has paid the Sackler family very well. They have profited from pain and despair. They have deliberately, knowingly, caused suffering in exchange for money.

Nan Goldin, is a photographer known for the most intimate portraits of people belonging to queer subcultures. She documented a different epidemic as she followed her friends and photographic subjects through the HIV/AIDs crisis of the 80s and 90s.

She also revealed in 2017 that she was recovering from opioid addiction following a course of prescription drugs given to her after wrist surgery.

Goldin subsequently launched PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and describes the campaign as an attempt to contrast the philanthropic contributions of the Sackler family to art galleries, museums and universities with a lack of responsibility taken for the opioid crisis.

She notes that the very same galleries that display her work are sponsored by the family pharmaceutical firm that profited from her sorrow. This includes the MET and the Guggenheim in the US and the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK.

In 2019 Godin began a series of protests aimed at those galleries.

In 2022 a film was made documenting these protests, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed. The film struggles to span the biography of Goldin, her family history, her work, and the protests themselves, but it does show you the power of one artist.

It shows you an artist doing the thing they talk about in their biography.

As of 2024, many of the galleries featured have refused Sackler money and removed their names from the galleries they once sponsored. These galleries continue to function despite the loss of that sponsorship.

[ART WASHING]

In 2023 Bailley Gifford was listed as the worst selling fund group. This followed 2022 where its managed fund saw its worst performance in its 35 year history.

This provides some context as to why they would want to sponsor arts-based events.

On a surface level, you would think that this is what we can call, "Art Washing". That is, the process of using art to reform the image of a company.

There is no much evidence that art washing actually works, however. It seems like a terribly poor investment for a company to make.

Take BP and its sponsorship of the Tate. Did anyone really think, "Oh those oil guys are funding some gallery, I guess they must be OK"?

Or maybe the Sackler family sponsoring galleries all over the world. Did a single person ever think, "I guess that makes those deaths OK"?

That's not how art washing works, and to think so misses the point.

It is about soft power. The subtle politics of ownership. Ownership of art and ownership of discourse.

Owning an art event means that every artist involved in that even is now complicit. If they pipe up, if they criticise, then you can turn around and say, "but you took the money". You lose the moral high ground.

Your values are so easily bought. We own you.

Furthermore, it inserts these companies into the wider cultural conversation. They can lean on the organisations to platform certain views, to restrict others. It is gentle but persuasive.

And then there is the other thing. It is the free tickets. Not only does this keep the staff happy. It helps them believe they are not the bad guys. It also lets them be there, at that cultural even in force. It allows them to entertain their business partners and their customers.

We can't be the bad guys because here we are enjoying art and culture.

Art washing isn't about changing your opinion of them. It is about changing what that opinion means. It is about devaluing your opinion.

[SOLUTION]

I think you already know the solution. Or at least half of it.

Your government is a sin eater.

They do the dirty money so that you don't have to.

Tax the hideously wealthy.

Tax organisations that exploit.

Tax organisations that exploit people and the planet.

Tax those that make money from misery.

Tax them hard.

And re-invest that money in the process that heal. In healthcare and education. In the arts.

But that is only half of it. The other half of it is that we absolutely must stop tolerating these organisations. We must stop taking their money and pretending that we do something good with it.

Our complicity in that transaction means we are dirtied by it. It is us and not the money that becomes unclean.

So often this discussion is framed as either take the money or don't make the art. A horrible binary. That's *their* argument. They say it, and they make us say it because the alternative is that we take their money as part of our democracy as penance for their behaviour and lack of morals and then we chose how it is distributed.

To take the opinion of Shona McCarthy and say there is no such thing as clean money is akin to drug dealer logic. Take what you can get now. It doesn’t think about the future, it doesn’t care about the long term effect it has. It just gets you through.

But it is a choice. Keeping taking the money and keep letting it happen, or stop and figure out an alternative.

Rather than spend your time defending the sponsorship, maybe use your platform to argue for higher taxation and better arts funding? Is this not the progressive and nuanced discussion we should be having?

There's ultimately a choice for artists too.

Refuse to be part of something that harms others, or be OK with it and remove the word 'activist' from your biography.

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“We've Tried Nothing and We're All Out of Ideas!” — Ned Flanders, The Simpsons

[DISCLAIMER]

This is not a critique of the folk who work in marketing.

This is not a critique of any individuals, nor specific organisations they work for.

Although I would love to name and shame the hopelessness I have encountered over the last decade, the departments that requested 500 posters for a show and yet when we arrive we can’t find a single one posted anywhere.

No, it’s not about them.

It’s not about the marketing departments that managed to spell my name incorrectly on a press release about my own work… even after they made me submit my own copy that they chose to ignore.

It really isn’t about them either.

Nor is it about the marketers that you never see actually attending the work in their own venue.

No, certainly not them.

This about an industry that went wrong. It took a wrong turn. It missed the right exit. This is about not questioning an orthodoxy that was developed by keen and excited humans on the brink of a new paradigm.

I even think I have a fix for it.

Oddly, it involves McDonald’s.

[SPURLOCK]

I read this week that Morgan Spurlock died. He was 53.

He was a complicated man, according to many of the obituaries. He had addiction problems and a history of sexual misconduct.

However, he’ll be mostly remembered for his gonzo documentary film, Super Size Me, released in 2004.

Super Size Me was a durational act. He would film himself eating fast food for a whole month and document the results on his body and his mind.

He had one other rule. Whenever he was asked if he wanted to supersize his meal, he had to say ‘yes’.

For the young people, super-sizing is what fast food outlets, like McDonald’s used to offer. It was big food. It was good value.

It was a bucket of sugary drinks and a tower of salty, fatty food.

It was up-selling at its most luke-warm and tasty.

[AUDIENCES]

Arts engagement has been falling for decades.

In 2009, when I was working in the box office at what was formerly The Nuffield Theatre, was then Live at LICA, and is now Lancaster Arts, there were a few shows that failed to sell any tickets at all.

This was not the fault of the artists or their show. It wasn’t unusual.

This is despite the fact that the host university had a theatre course and heavily discounted tickets for the students.

These were people who were supposedly passionate about the form, yet they needed pushing into the theatre at every opportunity. You had to convince them to go and see what they were supposedly interested in.

We can lay the blame now at COVID or Netflix, but the truth is, this isn’t new.

There’s a bit of me that wonders, when I see those same people that were students then, complaining about their own low audience figures, if they are aware of this.

There’s also a bit of me that wonders how those same people, now artists, take responsibility for the fact that they still don’t go and see other people’s work.

[SUPER SIZED]

It wasn’t so much that the film started the conversation about fast food.

There was already a healthy discussion on the morality of using sponsored Saturday morning children’s television to advertise to young people.

The Happy Meal was being criticised for conflating toys with high fat, high sugar foods.

People were becoming aware of a thing called ‘High Fructose Corn Syrup’.

However, Super Size Me landed heavily in the middle of all this. It created a focal point for these discussions.

During his 30 day stint eating fast food, Spurlock gained 11 kilograms of weight from eating a diet that contained twice the calories recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture.

He also appeared to suffer liver damage, which the doctor compared to the damage of a severe alcohol habit.

When it was revealed much later that Spurlock was, at the time, a heavy drinker, doubt was cast on the legitimacy of this evidence.

Regardless of what caused the damage to his liver, the damage caused to McDonald’s became quickly apparent.

In the months following the release of the film McDonald’s stock plummeted and it removed the Super-size option from its menus.

There was talk that this would be the end of fast food.

[TWITTER]

As the fallout of Super Size Me was happening, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams were working on something quite special.

It was going to be called twttr, because this was during the great internet vowel shortage.

The process is called disemvowelling. It’s a lovely word.

The term dates back to the 1860s. It even appears in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

abrdn, BHLDN, Tumblr, Flickr, Scribd.

This was later followed by the trend of adding ‘-ify’ to the end of ordinary words.

Anyway, it’s not clear if they held meetings with supersized drinks and meals, chatting late into the night about what a profound effect this would have on the world.

I like to imagine they did.

[MARKETING]

In 2009 I sat in a lecture about arts marketing. It was fascinating.

“You have to set up a twitter account, it’s absolutely necessary to get your work out there”.

My work was already out there. Online. I hosted a webcomic. It wasn’t even very good, but it had a regular readership and occasionally when a content aggregate site like Digg, Stumbleupon or Reddit picked up on one of my comics, I’d get close to a million page views in a day.

I also had a twitter account.

I don’t think more than 100 people in total ever visited my site because of twitter.

Still, these guys are in marketing. They know what they are on about, right? They certainly seemed confident.

Most of it was wishful thinking though. None of it had actually been tested for long enough in the real world to see if it made sense.

Social Media was seen as the lifeline for marketing. It was cheaper, more responsive and a had further reach, well beyond the people in the local town who would see the posters.

Except it wasn’t a lifeline. It was a death sentence.

[SHARES AND LIKES]

In January 2024, the value of McDonald’s stock reached 1000 times the price it was upon the release of Super Size Me.

There are 42,000 locations worldwide.

Once, the fast food industry was being compared to the tobacco industry, now it is back to being seen as a source of reasonably priced, enjoyable food.

The film was not a death sentence. It was a life line.

[VIRAL]

The first rule of working in marketing is to market yourself.

That is to say that every marketer is a self promoter because they are telling you that they are good at marketing. If you believe this, then they are good at their job.

They do this, mostly, through jargon and promises.

They talk about reach and engagement. They dabble in the dark arts of metrics and analysis.

Back in the early days they dangled a promise of ‘going viral’.

The thing that most people in this brave new world of social media marketing did was to pretend that it was a proven solution to a problem that didn’t exist. I think, fifteen years on, that maybe, perhaps, they didn’t know for certain what they were doing.

Ask yourself, how many arts organisations do you know that have had a tweet go viral? In all this time on social media, what is the hit rate?

The ultimate metric would be audience numbers over time. Those audience numbers continue to fall, that means this isn’t working.

However, there’s a reluctance to change. Why is that?

[METRICS]

Back in the late 2000s advertising online was a little different.

Google’s AdSense programme allowed any website host to place adverts on their website and make money from them. A quick sign up, a snippet of code and away you went.

The biggest difference was how these adverts were monetised.

You got paid by impression. That is to say, you were paid by the number of times someone looked at the page with the advert.

Page views drove revenue.

The logic is sound. It followed traditional television advertising rules. More viewers meant more potential exposure, which meant more sales.

This led to a race for eyeballs. Viewer numbers became the standard metric for how good a website was.

But there was a problem. It became apparent, rather quickly, that the number of people potentially looking at an advert didn’t really translate into sales of the product being advertised.

The internet is a goal-focussed medium. It is not as passive as television. People ignore adverts, sift through information and click ever onwards on their journey to consume.

Everything is an advert online.

No one makes content that they don’t want people to see.

Google pivoted and the main metric became click-throughs. You were now paid by the number of people who clicked on the advert and followed the link.

For a large number of sites, their advertising revenue dropped sharply. Others were inclined to make the adverts bigger and more intrusive.

We saw the golden age of adverts posing as content.

We saw adverts posing as engagement.

Product reviews with affiliate links. News articles that linked to advertisers as sources of information.

Even back then, it was understood that just putting something in front of someone online was not enough to make them engage with it.

The landscape is too noisy.

[RELUCTANCE]

In arts organisations and venues, the marketing department is, in reality, usually one person.

That person is often under an incredible amount of pressure with an awful lot to do and not very much time to do it in.

Again, I’m not aiming this at specific people, rather a system that has broken down.

That broken system causes the marketing department problems too.

One of the ways modern technology has helped the marketing-department-that-is-really-only-a-single-person is through automation.

I’m talking about scheduled tweets, generated hashtags, off the shelf marketing plans.

These tools enable the marketer to effectively be in several places at once, across a broad range of platforms.

Hootsuite. Tweetdeck. Tools that allow multiple account management and platform independent content creation.

The problem with this is that it becomes impersonal too. It makes the act of marketing through social media a broadcast medium rather than an engagement medium.

Venues send out tweets but seldom reply to any member of the public that engages with them. Often a simple like is all that is given. Furthermore, these accounts don’t interact with the wider communities.

You rarely see a venue account popping up in a discussion to talk about something that isn’t about their programme.

And this happens because it is necessary for an individual to run a marketing department on their own, or even with a small team. And this is often the case because the venues don’t have the money to employ more people.

But it is a circular argument. Low box office, leading to low revenue, leading to tight budgets, leading to reduced engagement, leading to low box office…

This is what causes the reluctance to change. The lack of infrastructural support combined with a workforce that is highly specialised in a thing that no longer works.

[ADVERTS]

Do you remember television? Do you remember adverts on television?

Do you remember getting up to make a cup of tea, or turning the sound down, or turning over to see what else was on TV?

Adverts are naturally audience repellent. Humans don’t like being advertised to.

You can get around this by tricking them into thinking that what they are watching is not an advert, but is actually engagement.

But this takes a lot of skill and a surprising amount of luck. It also means that you have to take the position that you are willingly duping your audience.

[FAILURE]

It’s a massive weight to carry.

Failure in marketing and engagement means that the venue doesn’t make money.

Failure means that artists don’t get their audiences and end up playing to a depressingly small group of people.

Failure means audiences are disengaged with the art form, often missing out on things they might like.

[BOMBAST]

Adverts that make misleading claims are not just ethically dubious, but are subject to legal repercussions.

Can you imagine a toothpaste advert describing the product as “urgent”?

Perhaps an alcohol advert describing the drink as “necessary”?

What about an advert for life insurance that describes it as “transformational”?

You wouldn’t believe those adverts would you?

In advertising you need to watch your language.

[GENERICISATION]

Here’s the problem.

Branding has become generic.

Most arts organisations have a logo and probably a colour scheme. There aren’t really enough colour schemes to go around so often they pick a particular shade of colour.

*That* pink, or *the* yellow.

They are rather territorial over that shade as it defines them, it is their print and online aura. It is what makes them different from other arts organisations.

Admittedly, audiences don’t really see the difference.

The logos are often pretty similar too.

How many theatres have a box as their logo?

Oh, or maybe a few lines at a jaunty angle? Nothing says deep arts engagement like a few lines.

Or maybe just their name in a particular font.

Again, they are territorial over the font.

Weirdly territorial, especially as font choice dates quicker and harder than anything else.

Do you remember the font Contact in Manchester used until a few years ago? Nothing more squarely 90s than that. A font that once said ‘new and exciting’ became a font that said ‘your dad probably thought this was cool’.

Because marketing departments try to streamline the process of marketing, they ask the artists to provide copy and image then add their own logo to it. It saves the department from having to write specific copy, situating it in a specific location.

It offloads the work onto the artist.

This is fine, in itself, and would work perfectly well if the internet and social media didn’t exist.

The problem is that we are all connected now. Most people I know follow organisations from all over the UK, and all over the world. Most people that go to theatre and art galleries follow hundreds of accounts from organisations.

So, when one organisation is posting about a piece of work they are hosting they use the artist’s image and copy with their own logo.

When another organisation hosts that work, they too add their logo to the same image and copy. This repeats.

The audience doesn’t really distinguish between the logos. All they really see is the same image, and familiarity lessens the appeal with each rebrand.

You see that same image over the course of a tour, forever tweeted and retweeted. And eventually, you just sort of tune it out. You certainly aren’t looking to see where is hosting it.

Furthermore, the effect is amplified by marketing orthodoxy.

Marketing orthodoxy states that certain types of copy and image work best. You’ll hear this when you hand over an image of your work —“Maybe it needs the artist’s face in it, people like that”. And so every marketing image starts to look more and more similar.

You can see this during the Edinburgh festival when you look at posters for comedy shows.

It is almost always a mid-torso close crop of the comedian against a bright background. The comedians are only allowed one of four sanctioned facial expressions:

1. "What am I like?!"

2. "Just telling it how it is"

3. "Comedy is a serious business"

4. "I'm just as shocked as you!"

It isn’t the comedians that come up with this rule. It is the marketers.

This genericisation has fallen out of the guru-speak of marketers. The language they found necessary to market themselves into a position of authority about a new platform that no one really had any idea about.

[REACH]

A simple question.

What is the point in advertising to people so far away, geographically or ideologically, that they will never come to a show?

Another question.

Why are some marketing departments using the metric of reach as a measure of success?

It doesn’t matter, does it? Who sees an advert, if they can’t buy the product.

[BROADCAST]

Another part of the problem is a function of how these departments use social media as a platform.

Pltfrm… there’s one I’m saving for later.

Social media works best when the social part is amplified. If not, it is just another broadcast platform. If you are using a broadcast platform you really need to make your content worth consuming.

Glorified listings are not compelling content.

Furthermore, of course you are going to say that the show you are hosting is great, brave, necessary, a must-see.

You are hardly going to say, “Yeah, it’s OK if you like that sort of thing” or “you might not like this because it over-promises and under-delivers”.

This sort of marketing is both bluntly factual and entertaining, in the case of listings, and wildly untrustworthy and bombastic in terms of the sloganeering.

Media consumption has trained humans to filter this stuff out. It isn’t marketing, it is just wearing out keyboards.

It’s rare, but occasionally you will see an account that engages with people online. I’m not talking about those sassy accounts for Wendy’s and the like, but arts organisations that engage with the debates and discussions around art.

Frequently, these accounts are not talking about their own shows, but the wider field of art. They can be compelling, informative and entertaining, for example, a gallery that walks you through their permanent collection, adding context to their works.

However, many of them also fall into the trap of impersonality.

I think most people like to speak to people and not inanimate objects.

The younger generations seem to be dogmatically opposed to leaving answer phone messages or having to speak to automated help desks. It causes them understandable existential anxiety.

Why should we present the arts on social media in the same fashion?

@BuildingName is not a person. @Organisation is not a person. @Info is not a person. These names seem to exist to create a generic sheen of professionalism to accounts that simultaneously yearn to be hugged and adored by their audience.

And sure, it allows corporate streamlining… many people can share the same handle to make things easier, and if one of the marketers changes jobs, then the handle just gets passed on like the mask of Zorro.

But what about having Dave@ArtsOrganisation bring his own personality to the discussion? Not just posting listings, but commenting and liking art from all over the world, participating in the very community we so often hear these departments talk about engaging with?

[LOVIN’]

A diverse group of friends gather around a window table.

The camera cuts to a tray on the table. The classics are all there, the Double Cheeseburger, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and, of course, a Big Mac.

The packaging looks oddly retro. It is all browns and oranges.

It looks like how you remember it.

Underneath the burgers, the golden arches.

What we see here are not people buying a burger. Nor are we watching them eat a burger. That is not the focus.

We are watching them have meaningful experiences with their friends, in the setting of McDonald’s.

They are not consuming.

They are making.

They are making memories.

McDonald’s survived the controversy of Super Size Me by changing how they pitched themselves at the world. It was a smart move through smart advertising.

They reminded people why they liked McDonald’s in the first place, and they did this by focusing on nostalgia and personal relationships.

McDonald’s didn’t need to tell you that they sold burgers and fries. Everyone already knows that. What they chose to do instead was to remind people of all the good times they had when they were eating the burgers.

We recognized that the mass marketing of mass messages to masses of people via mass media was a mass mistake. — Larry Light, former global CMO, McDonald’s

The “i’m lovin’ it” campaign pre-dated Spurlock’s film, but afterwards the brand leant into it.

Love is unconditional. It doesn’t care about health, it accepts the bad times with the promise of good times.

Telling isn’t selling. Our customers did not want to hear and did not want to be told what to do or how to feel. — Larry Light, former global CMO, McDonald’s

Two advertising agencies, Wieden+Kennedy and the Narrative Group, continued this methodology. They centred their approach on “Human Truths” and emotional connection. They sought out areas of comfort and nostalgia as well as highlighting the different ways you could enjoy the process of being a McDonald’s customer.

They accepted that not everyone liked a Big Mac, so they stopped telling everyone that they did. Instead they chose to highlight how everyone has their own likes and dislikes. Individual items on the menu are not for everyone, but the menu does contain something for everyone.

McDonald’s became a place where people from all different walks of life could gather and have experiences that shared a commonality.

It left an impression that eating at McDonald’s is somewhat akin to civic participation.

It worked.

[THE MEDIUM]

When Marshall McLuhan said, ‘The medium is the message’, what he meant is, that in social discourse, the way you choose to communicate is as much a communication as the thing you are trying to say.

What does that mean for your average social media user? It means that your values are assumed to align with the platform you are choosing to communicate through.

Since the acquisition of twitter by Elon Musk, the platform has enjoyed a rapid increase in racial slurs, homophobia, transphobia, bullying and misogyny.

One slur against trans people has seen a massive 53% increase according to researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Another slur against homosexual men has increased a mere 39% in comparison.

Many artists have left the platform. It leaves you looking massively hypocritical to base your work on social engagement and tolerance and then use this platform to communicate it.

So why is it that so many arts organisations continue to use twitter, now ‘X’, as their primary mode of marketing and engagement with audiences?

You could conclude that they are OK with increasing racism, or rampant homophobia.

However, the pride flag in their bio counters all of that, surely?

I don’t really believe that arts organisations are OK with any of this, and I strongly suspect they are aware of the hypocrisy in their continued presence on this particular platform.

I think they are there because they don’t have any other ideas. The marketers have gone in so hard on using social media as their main marketing strategy that they are scared to leave it. Not least this is because their supposed expertise in marketing is almost entirely based on the functions of that particular platform, not in engaging with audiences.

[LOSS]

It’s also worth considering what we lost as marketing moved to social media.

Bespoke posters that, oddly, those same theatres display on their walls as part of their history.

A wonderful document and archive. Site specific.

It’s not as if these places have a lack of talented artists who could be drafted in, and perhaps even paid, to create such wonderful things.

But that’s ephemera. The real thing that has been lost is the audience.

And sure, distractions like Netflix, impending environmental collapse, and TikTok all play a role in this, but ultimately, the audience you want are the very same people that are not going to be reached through social media. These are offline, real world experiencers. They get their engagement face-to-face and where they live.

The sort of people that would come to the venue, not because of what was on that week, but because they were the sort of people who went to the theatre. You see, like most things, it’s a habit.

It’s a highly enjoyable, mostly affordable habit, but it is also an easy one to fall out of.

You need prodding every now and again, whether by your friends or by work that demands your attention. That's the job of marketing, to remind people why they enjoy going to the theatre, not just to provide a listing of what is on.

And they do this by being passionate about the form and the audiences. They do this by being where their audience is, not in some vaporous digital space.

Just like MacDonald’s, arts marketing needs to drop the existing dogma of how its customers relate to it. They don’t necessarily want bigger and cheaper, or flash promotions, they want to feel an emotional connection that happens *whilst* they are at the theatre, and the easiest way to do this is to make these social spaces. The sort of social that arts marketing should be chasing rather than the social online.

So, get off the internet and go and do your job.

Remind people of why they love the arts.

Provide a venue for people to have experiences in.

Talk to them, not just about your programme, but about the arts in general.

Don’t schedule. Enthuse and respond.

Cater to your existing audience rather than concentrating on finding new audiences.

You *are* the audience, see the work, always.

Repeat the phrase, “listings are only useful to people who care”.

Join conversations that aren’t purely about you.

Don’t hide behind a corporate identity, be a human.

Local not ‘reach’.

Bespoke, not streamlined.

Emulate the art you are trying to sell.

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We are standing outside the Vue cinema in Lancaster.

It’s not that old, but it is already looking a bit tired. I once watched an entire film with a slight tear in the screen and, oddly, that is all I can remember about the film.

How did the tear get there? Did someone throw something with enough force at the screen? How much force would that take? What sort of projectile would you use?

And, perhaps, more importantly, was the film they watched bad enough to cause such a violent reaction to a neutral surface?

We have just watched Prometheus. The sort of sequel/Prequel/Franchise lengthener to the film Alien.

Ant is furious about it.

He can’t even articulate his anger. He just leans against the wall and rolls up a cigarette.

Which bit triggered the reaction? Maybe it was the part where Noomi Rapace runs away from a crashing spaceship by running along the path it is falling… as if she could outrun a crashing megalith, as if she could outrun gravity, as if she could outrun physics.

She does, by the way, survive. I know, spoilers, but I feel such a superhuman feat should be celebrated.

Or maybe it was the part where the geologist gets lost. Or the bit where the biologist sticks his naked face right in front of an unknown organism that the linguistics expert has just told him the writing on the walls pretty much warns against.

Later, once he has stewed and mulled his anger, Ant articulates it. The problem was more holistic than that, the problem was that, unlike the original Alien film, the horror here was happening to the characters on screen, but not the audience.

[AMMIT]

I’m standing outside the gates of the afterlife.

This place is incredibly old, but looks remarkably well kept.

I have to wonder how they acquired so much marble. Is there an equivalent of dead marble, or do they import it from the living world? Who, exactly, are the architects and builders of this place?

Sadly, the Egyptian Book of the Dead doesn’t explain this, which is odd because it explains pretty much everything else in vivid detail. Think of it as a comprehensive guidebook to what to expect once you depart the earthly realm.

The main point is that you will be judged.

However, you should also expect bureaucracy.

Upon dying, I have been ushered into the Hall of Maat, where I am to meet 42 assessors, and where I am expected to greet each one by name, proving that administration transcends all realms of being.

[ASSESSMENT]

Here, in brief, are all 42 assessors and the sins they are here to assess.

“Far-Strider” — Falsehood

“Fire-Embracer” — Robbery

“Nosey One” — Stealing

“Swallower of Shades” — Murder

“Dangerous One” — Stealing grain

“Double Lion” — Prolonging offerings

“Fiery Eyes” — Stealing Gods property

“Flame” — Lying

“Bone Breaker” — Taking food

“Green of Flame” — Cursing

“You of the Cavern” — Adultery

“White of Teeth” — Causing tears

Shezmu — Killing a sacred bull

“Eater of Entrails” — Stealing land

“Lord of Truth” — Eavesdropping

“Wanderer” — Complaints

“Pale One” — Being angry

“Doubly Evil” — Adultery

"Wememty-Snake” — Adultery

“See Whom You Bring” — Polluting the body

“Over the Old One” — Terrorising

“Demolisher” — Transgressing

“Disturber” — Being hot-tempered

“Youth” — Unhearing of truth

“Foreteller” — Making disturbance

“You of the Altar” — Violence

“Face Behind Him” — copulating with a boy

“Hot-Foot” — Transgression

“You of the Darkness” — Quarrelling

“Bringer of Your Offerings” — Unduly active

“Owner of Faces” — Impatience

“Accuser” — damaging a god's image

“Owner of Horns” — Volubility of speech

Nefertem — Wrongdoing

Temsep — Conjuration against the king

“You Who Acted Willfully” — Stopping water flow

“Water-Smiter” — Being loud voiced

“Commander of Mankind” — Reviling God

Nehebkau — Doing bad things

“Bestower of Powers” — Making distinctions For self

“Serpent With Raised Head” — dishonest wealth

“Serpent Who Brings and Gives” — Blasphemy

I am acutely aware, your honour, that I may have indulged in some of these sins. Sometimes more than once, and perhaps often in combination with other sins.

Fortunately, that isn’t the real test here.

The real test is that you get everyone’s name correct, and I think I have done that.

I’m surprised that “Nosey One” isn’t in charge of the sin of eavesdropping. I think he may have been passed over for a much deserved promotion.

Perhaps I did call “Face Behind Him”, “Dave” by accident as we stood at the water cooler during one of the break out sessions. He reminded me of someone I knew during my living years, and we had started talking about that film, Prometheus…

[STARS]

In Prometheus, the crew venture into the stars, crossing space in response to an invitation found carved on a wall. The notion of stars plays a small subtextual role in the film.

“It’s in your stars” is often used to mean, “it is your fate”. It is something out of your hands or your control. It is the agency of some greater force.

On IMDB, Prometheus has a star rating of 7.0. That’s rather impressive.

However, what is really interesting is if you read the viewer reviews that the aggregate score is based on. There are endless one and two star ratings, ensconced in fives and sixes.

So how did it get a 7.0?

There are a number of 10 star ratings. A rating presumably reserved for the best films of cinematic history. For those perfect confections that cannot be improved in any way.

And most of these ten star reviews have a them. The reviewer explains that whilst the film is probably a 7 or even an 8, they feel the need to correct the aggregate score by adding a couple of points to theirs.

They are not reviewing the film, they are not critiquing the film, they are criticising the system under which it is reviewed and they are trying to fix it.

[SCALE]

Later on we gathered in the pub.

Many entertainment establishments miss a trick here. Watching a thing is only part of the night. Sitting around and talking about the thing you have watched is really what the audience enjoys most.

I say this looking at every theatre in the UK that closes their bar about 15 minutes after a show ends. You are not serving your audiences. Literally and metaphorically.

Anyhow, I can’t remember who coined the phrase, only that I was there.

Also present, Alex, Andy, Ant, Daragh, Eddie and Paul.

Good vs Bad is not a great scale for assessing films. It misses something. Sometimes a film can be a great bad film, or a terribly dull good film. A lot depends on the viewer and what they need from a film on any given occasion.

You only have to see the fondness that people have for B-movies. Something easy-going, fun, and not too self-aware. Something that doesn’t take itself too seriously, not expects that you take it equally as such.

It’s more about fitness for the situation than it is about an objective rating.

It was this line of thinking that led to the creation of the Bay-Herzog scale.

On one end of the scale, the films of Michael Bay (Bad Boys, Transformers) and on the other end of the scale the works of German film maker Werner Herzog (Fitz Carraldo, Heart of Glass).

The scale determines where the action happens.

At the Bay end of the Bay-Herzog scale, the action happens on screen. Explosions, movement, rapid dialogue and action. This all happens on screen but the audience member remains fundamentally unchanged when they leave the cinema.

Meanwhile at the Herzog end of the Bay-Herzog scale, the action is almost missing from the screen. Long shots of not much happening. Silence and static cameras. However, the action happens in the audience. When they leave the cinema, they are fundamentally changed.

[WEIGHTING]

Very little is happening now.

Anubis, the jackal-headed caretaker of the underworld, is holding my heart in one hand, and in the other is the feather of Maat.

Maat is both the goddess and the personification of cosmic balance and justice. She represents the ethical and moral principles that all Egyptian citizens were expected to follow throughout their daily lives.

The feather of Maat is an ostrich feather she wears in her hair. It is said to represent the truth.

We watch as Anubis slowly walks over to a comically large set of scales in the middle of the hall.

The assessors exchange glances.

From studying the Book of the Dead, I know that my heart is about to be weighed against the feather. If I have lived a pure life, my heart will be lighter.

The fact that I know that isn’t going to happen is what gives this scene so much weight. I know what I’ve done. The assessors know what I’ve done.

Yet we await the visual confirmation.

And I’m left thinking, does the good outweigh the bad? If someone gave me a one star review, would another ten star review make it better? Would it average out? Or is it a permanent mark that no averaging out will make my heart lighter?

[SPACE]

After much time spent wondering about the scale, one of the key factors is space. That is, space for your audience, space for them to inhabit the world and reflect upon it.

In Bay’s mode of film-making, every moment is used. Every line of dialogue is propelling narrative, or at least avoiding silence.

There is little space to insert yourself. An average shot length lasts 3 seconds.

Meanwhile Herzog’s clock in at 25 seconds.

It’s important to note that it isn’t just about the shot length though. Christopher Nolan’s Inception still manages to make room for the audience despite a rapid 3 seconds.

Meanwhile some of Michael Bay’s longer shots still block the audience from inserting themselves. One way he achieves this is by his famous spinning pan that centres on a character.

You see this as you orbit Will Smith in Bad Boys, and Josh Hartnett in Pearl Harbour.

Space allows for a collaboration between the maker and the audience. Much like stopping to listen in a conversation.

In this case the audience is placed on a fairground ride and spun around by their necks. It’s hard to contemplate things on a waltzer with someone constantly screaming in your ear.

[THEATRE]

Theatre reviews are a wonderful microcosm of tact and marketing.

In large part this is because of who the reviewers are. In many cases they are theatre students, hoping, one day, to get jobs in the industry making their own work. It’s not that smart to create a sour reputation for yourself by slating the work of your future peers and potential colleagues.

They have to learn to write between the lines.

Or maybe they have been given a ticket for free. A bribe of a night out in order to write some words. It’s hard, in the moment, to be mean about a group of people you’ve sat and had a drink with after their show.

Besides, it’s generally accepted that people reviewing theatre like theatre, and as such want to be supportive.

That’s why we use the five star scale and a four star centre.

Perhaps it is best to look at the reviews on posters at the Edinburgh Fringe to understand this.

Every show is rated 4 stars. That’s because nearly every reviewer has given every show 4 stars.

5 stars is too bombastic. The best thing you’ve ever seen? No weaknesses? No room for improvement? Perfect performances? Perfect sets? Perfect writing?

No, you can’t give anything 5 stars. To do so would lead to accusations of subjectivity, or worse, bias.

Similarly, 3 stars is just average. No one is going to publicise your review if you give them an average review. Your name won’t appear on their poster.

And so 4 stars it is. Everything gets 4 stars.

But what if you don’t get 4 stars? Maybe you struggle to entice a reviewer? Maybe your reviewer has had a pang of conscience and just can’t bring themselves to give you the same rating they gave to a show they saw last night… the one that changed them as a person, forever?

It’s OK, all you have to do is ask “Audience Member”.

“Audience Member” has been handing out 4 star reviews since the dawn of theatre. They don’t do it for the glory of seeing their name in print, they do it because they must, absolutely, tell you that the show is 4 stars.

“Audience Member” isn’t their real name, by the way. It’s more like the Mask of Zorro. It gets handed down, protecting the person from any real scrutiny. Once they have given their review, the mask comes off and they can go about being a normal citizen again.

Often, that normal citizen happens to be a member of the host organisation marketing team, or perhaps a member of the extended production team.

Sometimes, it is just a helpless audience member as they are trying to leave the show.

Grabbed.

Can you tell us what you thought?

Pleading eyes, slight hint of desperation. You don’t want to disappoint. Maybe they wrote this?

Sure, you say, it was good.

What would you give it, out of five?

Err… four, I guess.

The ambush is over and the poster is already being made.

“The lighting is brilliant, four stars”

[JUDGEMENT]

Osiris stands by the great doors to the afterlife of Sekhet-Aaru.

As the scales tip, he scratches something down in the ledger. A soft shake of the head. It looks a little like pity.

I have been reviewed. It’s not good.

My heart is not pure.

The doors close.

I am shepherded, somewhat reluctantly, towards Ammit.

The goddess Ammit is the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a cut-and-shut Volvo with the forequarters of a lion, the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, and the head of a crocodile.

The crocodile is grinning.

In a last attempt I do what everyone does. I plead.

I explain that sure, I might not be the best, or purest human, but that, actually, some people rather liked me, when they were in the mood for it. I wasn’t good, but I was enjoyable on occasion.

Ammit quietly says that everyone says that.

Then I start to criticise the system itself. I complain that there is no way a heart is ever lighter than a feather, and that we should add a stone to that side of the scale to even things out.

Ammit quietly says that everyone says that too.

[MICHELIN]

A restaurant’s business can be dramatically altered by gaining or losing a Michelin star.

They were originally designed to get more people driving because more people driving would lead to more people needing tires and the Michelin brothers were in the business of selling tires.

That’s why the three star system ranks restaurants by how far you should travel to visit them.

1 Star = High-quality cooking, worth a stop (Cuisine de qualité, mérite une halte)

2 Stars = Excellent cooking, worth a detour (Cuisine excellente, mérite un détour)

3 Stars = Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey (Une des meilleures cuisine, vaut le voyage).

In total there are 3,483 stars handed out across the world.

In his expose book, L'Inspecteur se met à table (The Inspector Sits Down at the Table), Pascal Rémy, a former Michelin Inspector (of restaurants, not tires), talks about the life of a man destined to travel around, eating food and rating restaurants.

He described a life of low paid routine and drudgery, coupled with immense pressure, strict rules and very few friends.

He also suggested that the guide was subject to some less than honest reviews.

And, whilst gaining a star can do wonders for business, it can also be a curse. Customer expectations go up accordingly. Increased demand, not only for seats, but for quality, can turn a dream job in a nice restaurant into a trial for a chef.

Chef Julio Biosca even went as far as asking the guide to revoke the star that it gave his restaurant in 2009.

I’m thinking about this as I sit down to eat.

This is my first time in a restaurant with any sort of star rating that isn’t just related to basic hygiene.

The food was delightful. A series of plates, almost architectural in scope, consisting of tiny elements that lean into each other. Flavours I had never tasted, textures that came from nowhere to usurp expectations.

A lot of wine.

It was a brilliant experience.

But it was missing something. I was still hungry, and not only hungry, but in need of something missing from those plates.

I went home and ordered a filthy takeaway pizza.

It was glorious.

[AVERAGE SHOT LENGTH]

Michael Bay’s Transformers, 3.2 seconds.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, 7 seconds.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, 433.9 seconds

Richard Linklater’s Slacker, 31.1 seconds.

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, 24.4 seconds.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 13 seconds.

Olivier Megaton’s Taken 2, 1.6 Seconds

Marc Forster’s World War Z, 2.5 seconds

[LIVE]

The Bay-Herzog scale is applicable to most art forms.

Looking a Live Art and Theatre, we can see that works which tend to the Bay end of the scale are often tech-focussed, firework-like shows, which are much more about creating spectacle.

It can also cover shows where a performer is using the stage for their own catharsis, perhaps to tell their story. Here, the action happens on the stage, although the audience may leave fundamentally unchanged.

On the Herzog side of the scale there tends to be slower works such as durational performances and installation which incorporate ambiguity and periods of silence.

This creates space for the audience to insert themselves into the work and whilst little may be happening on the stage, it is often carried out of the room by the audience.

Of course there is nuance here, you can find works that should be at the Bay end of the scale that haunt audiences long after they have gone home, or where the change happens outside of the space or at a later date. Similarly, there are Herzog-end works that are just slow and dull and perhaps carry no meaning at all.

No one scale can be used to describe a work. It's folly to think so.

[JUDGEMENT]

And I’m not saying that where a work falls on a scale means that is good or bad.

That sort of scale, like the five stars of theatre, is a nonsense.

Are you telling me that you wouldn’t want to go and see a show that got zero stars? Not even out of curiosity? Is there anything that is unredeemable?

Likewise, a show that gets five stars must be perfect. Is there even such a thing as a perfect show?

Besides, sometimes you don’t want fine dining. Sometimes you want a takeaway, something fast and lacking nuance.

It doesn’t have to sustain you to be enjoyable.

And if I’m pushed I’d say Michael Bay understands this more than anyone working in film. He is providing for a need and filling a niche.

Fast film.

So fast that once you sit down the wrapper is pulled off for you and the food is mushed into your face without you having to spend the time or energy lifting it to your mouth.

It feels glorious.

[AMAZON]

Amazon is involved in a battle. A very modern war.

It is fighting fake reviews, but not too hard.

An entire industry of review brokers has formed in the last five years. These brokers approach customers directly through websites, social media channels, and encrypted messaging services, soliciting them to write fake reviews in exchange for money, free products, or other incentives.

You’ve probably been contacted by them. A slip of paper asking for a review alongside a slightly unrelated product?

They are trying to enlist you.

In some cases blackmail has even been tried. Pay us money or we flood your products with poor reviews.

It’s hell out there.

The reason I bring this up is that there are now rules that define what you can and cannot do with reviews on Amazon.

I suspect these could be applied to arts reviews too.

1. You Can Still Request Reviews (You Just Can’t Solicit Positive Ones)

Inviting reviewers to see work is fine. The second part is trickier though.

What if everyone only ever invites reviewers they think will give a positive review? That’s a form of subtle solicitation, mostly because it suggests that if you give a negative review you will no longer be invited to review shows.

2. Avoid Bargain Bribes

Free tickets for reviewers. That’s a bribe. If no one will review your work without a free ticket, that’s a racket.

If a reviewer wants to sit there and pretend they represent the views of the audience, they should pay like the audience too.

Sometimes it isn’t even about the money. It’s about being treated specially because you are a reviewer. It’s a bit about ego. You don’t need to pay like these ordinary folk, you are a reviewer!

3. Transparency and Consistency are Key & 4. Do Not Review your Own Products

I’ve put these together as they fall into the same trap.

What is the relationship between the reviewer and the thing being reviewed. Without discussing that, the review becomes subject to scrutiny. It is perfectly fine to review your friend’s work, if you mention that you are friends. It is acceptable to write review copy for the organisation you work for, so long as you are listed as the marketing officer for that organisation, and not just “audience member”.

If you have to obfuscate and lie, then you know what you are doing is dishonest, and who wants to leave dishonest reviews? It doesn’t benefit the work (There’s a whole essay on why telling poor work that it is good might not be the best thing for audiences), but more than that it erodes confidence from your audience.

If you are told this is the best show ever, and that it it is life changing, brave, important, must-see (four stars) and you do go and see and it is average, self-involved and struggling to find any sort of audience, the next time you hear the bombast you think twice. That could mean you miss something really special.

4. No Self Promotion in the Review

This is a tricky line, isn’t it? We want transparency, but we also don’t want you writing a short piece about your own theatre company, and how you would direct this work if it was up to you.

That’s not a review, that’s a pitch.

Maybe, perhaps, you should think twice about writing a review at all. You could write an essay, put the goods up front and talk about process and thought, and leave the whole thing open-ended.

No stars given.

You can still write about the work, you can place it in context, you can relate to it and think about it and what else it makes you think about.

You won’t be limited by 500 words, or a print deadline.

You can pick any show you care to see. Any work at all.

Only talk about the ones where you have something to actually say.

And sometimes not even artwork. You can look at other things like phone boxes, paper stocks, time machines.

Can you hear me?

Adam?

You don’t have to review things to talk about them.

[JUDGEMENT]

I’m winding down the gastric tract of a Goddess.

My soul is slowly being digested.

I’m not sure what tipped the scales. Perhaps I got the names of my assessors wrong? Maybe I spent too much of my life judging others.

I think, if I was to judge myself, I’d find myself guilty of the sin of failing at the one thing I’m supposed to be. Much like the geologist getting lost in Prometheus, or the biologist sticking their face in an unknown organism, I have poked at the notions of art whilst trying to be an artist.

I consider if another scale would have been kinder to me.

And then I realise.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter whether I am fine dining or fast food.

It only matters that the Crocodile-hippo-lion-godess is enjoying this moment.

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I ended up not only writing about how artists are exploited, but how they, in turn, exploit those around them.

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On Mining

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Young Adam was a big fan of Geoff Capes, championship shot putter and renowned strong man.

Capes had won the inaugural Britain’s Strongest Man competition in ‘79. He’d go on to compete in The World’s Strongest Man competitions too, representing the UK. In 1983 following a closely fought contest with the self-proclaimed Icelandic Viking, Jón Páll Sigmarsson, Capes managed to come a close second.

Sigmarsson, eleven years younger than Capes, took the title proclaiming, "The King has lost his crown!".

Capes retorted, "I'll be back", a full year before another strongman, Arnold Schwarzenegger would make the phrase their own.

There is an alternative timeline where The Terminator crushes the skulls of humanity underfoot whilst sporting a grizzly black beard and speaking in a Lincolnshire accent.

It would be a while before young Adam would see The Terminator though, and when he did it was on a badly copied VHS, delivered in a white van.

Until then, he made do with watching Geoff Capes tip over cars on TV.

[NOSTALGIA]

This isn’t about nostalgia.

I don’t miss any of this, not really. It’s just the pool I learnt to swim in. An obsolete pool, but one I could see the edges of, one I knew where the deep end was.

This isn’t nostalgia, a sorrow for the home.

This isn’t nostalgia, there’s no comfort in it.

[BOX]

[YELLOW PAGES]

Legend has it that a printer in Wyoming ran out of white paper and started to use yellow to print their telephone directories at the end of the 19th century.

It feels apocryphal, especially considering how iconic the Yellow Pages became.

In the UK it started in Brighton.

The General Post Office ran a small classified section in the local telephone directory.

The pages were yellow.

By the time British Telecom bought it in 1984 there were 70 local editions covering the UK.

The Yellow Pages were delivered free of charge to most households. You’d find them stacked up near the phone alongside the local telephone directory.

There were, at its peak, 28 million copies in circulation in the UK. They were such a fixture of everyday life that you didn’t really notice them.

Our local edition in the 90s was nearly two inches thick. It was a solid yellow monolith. A catalogue of commerce.

Hairdressers, plumbers, taxi firms. This is where you’d find them.

They were somewhat essential.

In 1994, however, the internet arrived.

It would take 26 years to kill off the Yellow Pages, but the decline was noticeable. Each edition would get a little thinner until it felt more like a pamphlet.

In January 2019, 23 million copies of the last edition were sent to households in the UK.

Over the course of its life, the Yellow Pages had printed just shy of a trillion pages, a combined thickness capable of nearly three return trips to Mars.

[SKEUOMORPHISM]

A skeuomorph is an object that retains design cues from structures of its ancestors.

A good example is an electrical light fitting that mimics a candle.

Or the handset icon on your phone looking like that of a landline rotary phone and nothing like the glossy black rectangle in your hand.

It’s the bookshelf layout of your e-reader.

It’s the envelope icon on your email app or the trash bin when you delete them.

It’s the shutter sound on your phone’s camera.

It’s the 3.5” floppy disc of the save icon.

It’s film reels on streaming platforms, or the video tapes.

[STRONG MAN]

It was probably the vikings that started the notion of the strong man competition.

About a millennium ago, a chap called, “Orm Storolfsson the Strong” demonstrated his strength by walking three steps whilst carrying the mast of the longship, Ormen Lange.

The mast was reported to be eleven yards long and weighed around 650kg.

After three steps, his back broke.

Then there was Milo of Croton, from Greece.

He was reputed to be able to run for a mile with a fully grown Ox on his back.

Legend also tells that he saved the life of Pythagoras by holding up a collapsing temple roof.

On one occasion, however, he was demonstrating his strength by ripping a tree apart when he got stuck in it, and then died after being eaten by wolves.

Maximinus Thrax, of Rome, demonstrated his brute strength by crushing rocks in his hands. He didn’t die whilst doing this, but he did gain fame for once punching a mule out cold.

Which leads us to the modern era.

The highland games, where tossing the telegraph pole-like cabers is the fashion, gave way to televised contests.

Lifting cars, and increasingly heavy stones. The Farmers Walk… all good, slightly less hazardous feats of strength, safer for the strong man and safer for any by-standing mules… and the ultimate demonstration of strong man credentials, ripping a Yellow Pages in half with your bare hands.

[PHONE BOXES]

Every phone box deserves a blue plaque.

They are not just sites of phone calls, they are sites of human stories. They are the locus of travel arrangements, nights out, love stories and late dinner arrangements.

They are calls home.

They are calls for help, and calls for thanks.

They are teenagers standing in the miserable cold, pushing ten pence pieces into a slot to keep themselves connected to their tenuous social life.

They are shelters, they are taxi hailing points.

But most importantly, they are totems, not unlike the legendary standing stones that litter the UK. They stand for something long ago lost to progress, but yet somehow resonant within us.

These rectangular, piss-smelling upright coffins are the burial mounds of the early information age.

Legend has it that even to this day you can lift the receiver and hear a sound that has transcended time. It is the note that starts all things, the primordial dialling tone.

[MODEMS]

We are almost always connected now, so much so that connecting to the internet feels like an arduous burden.

The absolute faff of having to find and enter a password to connect to Wi-Fi. It’s a wonder we get anything done at all.

Back then, however, we had dial-up.

For those of you young enough to have never experienced it, dial-up required you to have a box that attached to your landline phone socket.

When the time came to go on the internet you would prod it into screaming loudly down the wire until it summoned a connection.

That noise is still in the heads of old people as they walk around to this day. It’s like an ear worm that will forever mean ‘internet’.

What they were hearing was the ones and zeros being shunted a great distance incredibly swiftly. They heard the song of the machines and communed with them.

At least until someone wanted to make an actual phone call, in which case the link was broken and you’d probably have to start that download all over again.

You can still get onto the internet with dial-up. For some people this is the only way they can access our digital commune.

To give you some perspective, the current bbc.co.uk home page is 1.44Mb in size.

Using modern ADSL or 3G you can expect to wait between one and five seconds to see this page.

With a 56k dial-up modem, you’d be waiting close to seven minutes.

[INTERNET CAFES]

They still exist.

The internet cafe, or if you are feeling particularly authentic ‘the cybercafe’, was a 90s phenomenon.

A place where you could go and log on to the internet.

The big advantages were they often had faster connections than you could get at home, plus, many of us still didn’t even have computers back then.

It must have sounded like the best business idea in the world. Start a cafe, hook it up to the internet and enjoy a life of relative ease and custom.

Sure, you’d have to clean the keyboards and occasionally remove the rubber ball from the mouse in order to untangle the fluff, but otherwise, this would be the future.

I can’t remember the last time I was in one. I feel like it might have been the mid-2000s, and I think I was in London.

As I said, they do still exist. Mainly in less affluent areas, or areas with a highly transient population. There are some that found a sustained life as LAN party cafes, where you can congregate with a bunch of friends and shoot each other in a way that is less exhausting than laser-tag.

I bring this up, because much like phone boxes, these places were sites of connectivity. They were sites of communal connectivity. We all went somewhere to go somewhere else. Essentially these were the places where we transcended.

In these times of never-not online, the journey has been cut short and we’ve lost sight of our travelling companions.

We are at a destination without leaving anywhere.

That said, if you go to any cafe now, it is an internet cafe. Nearly everyone in there is connected.

[MEDIA]

Let’s go back to 1987.

It is dark outside, I think it must be in the Autumn. The news has just finished and a horn honks outside on the road.

The entire family gets up and heads out.

Parked against the curb is a large once-white van. A man is opening the side door.

A dim light inside illuminates the shelves.

Large book-sized VHS cases are crammed in.

Even then, as a child, I knew there was something dodgy about this, but that didn’t seem unusual, and besides, it made more sense than the bloke who came round once a week and asked us to predict the football scores.

This was the videoman.

When we talk about old media, and VHS in particular, people like to think back to the time of video stores like blockbusters. They like to remember these places that held banks of physical media, with the latest releases, and concession stands of sweets and popcorn.

But we didn’t have that. It would be nearly a decade before we had access to an actual Blockbuster, and the local video stores were still a 20 minute bus ride away.

What we had was far closer to the precursor of Netflix. We had media delivered to our door.

It was, of course, pirated media of dubious quality and provenance.

It felt exciting though, a van crammed with photocopied cover cases for films we hadn’t heard of. Sometimes there would be a description, but often it was just a title. Cases in the children’s section did not necessarily mean the contents were suitable for children.

I remember one copy of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory that had been played so often that it was like watching it through a blizzard. That was how we spent New Year’s Eve in 1988. Sat around a small screen watching Gene Wilder test the mettle of children through a gushing storm of static.

I realise my education in film came out of that unwashed van. The lack of space meant that a form of curation had taken place. Partly, it was popularity that defined the stock, but I think the videoman had his own agenda. The selection of 80s horror was exquisite, and freely available to anyone with a pound coin to borrow it for a week.

Without this public service, I doubt that many of us would have been able to engage in pop culture in quite the same way. It fostered a communal conversation.

If anything though, it was a feat of strength. A single man carrying the entire weight of modern media onto our estate.

[HARD COPY]

2022 saw a 20% increase in vinyl sales from the previous year, totaling around $1.2 billion.

The year also saw a jump in cassette sales to over 343,000, nearly twice as many as the year before.

Also in 2022 revenues for CD sales increased by 21%.

Blu-ray is making a comeback. YouTube channels have discovered minidisc.

It’s not always pure nostalgia. Sometimes things were better.

And in what ways are these formats better than their modern counterparts?

In the main, it is about physicality.

Part of the argument suggests that cover art and being able to maintain a physical collection are two drivers of the resurgence.

Collectors of media are also curators. They not only curate their library but the space in which they hold their library. It is rather satisfying to arrange your collection by genre, artist or even colour.

Much in the same way that physical book sales seemingly increased when e-readers were launched, despite predictions to the contrary, it turns out that people who like music also like the physical media it is delivered on.

A growing consensus also considers the right to ownership.

Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon’s Prime, act as rental services rather than sales fronts. Your subscription only covers you for the content they have. As other services set up, for example Disney+ and HBO, that library becomes fractured as competition demands they withdraw their titles from their competitor’s shelves.

The result is that any film or TV show you are watching can disappear at any point.

These business practices have also led to titles disappearing altogether as legal battles occur over who has the right to host the media.

One day your favourite film might just vanish in a way that seems unlikely if you own a hard copy in your home.

Another reason, given less room in the discussion, concerns volume. Your own personal collection of music sits on your shelf. Or maybe several shelves if you are a serious collector. Still, it is a finite space. Going and choosing something to put on is a limited expedition.

Even so, it can be hard to choose.

With online services, the landscape is vast. Finding something to watch or listen to becomes the purpose of these services, rather than the films or music themselves. Evenings can be obliterated by scrolling endlessly through whatever the algorithm offers.

There’s a certain type of frustration too, when you search through one genre after another only to find the same titles appearing in each one.

The illusion of choice becomes apparent.

[TEXTING]

I love you.

This isn’t about nostalgia. It isn’t about how things were harder, and that we overcame those hardships that defined us.

It isn’t.

What came next was harder.

444, 0, 555, 666, 888, 33, 0, 999, 666, 88

I love you.

No keyboard, just ten digits that you had to hammer repeatedly to get the right character.

Conversations poetically framed in 160 characters. Relationships maintained through fast tempo taps.

[DECORATION]

We are sitting in a trendy pub that describes itself as a micro-brewery. I think that is modern speak for “share tables with strangers”.

Despite the lack of space, the place is heavy on decoration.

All around us we are surrounded by corpses.

On a rail above us are the shells of old cameras. The fossilised husks of former picture boxes, each staring out through a cold, dead lens of an eye.

In the window a series of decommissioned typewriters cast shadows into the room. I suspect that, with a little care, they would still work. Typewriters, the mechanical ones, are particularly resistant to time. A little sewing machine oil, a new drawstring and a recently inked ribbon is usually all that is needed.

There’s an old rotary phone on the edge of the bar.

This feels like a hunting lodge of technology.

This isn’t nostalgia, this is a form of skeuomorphism.

There’s a complex lesson in semiotics here.

This is all set design… but what is the message?

It might seem like nostalgia, but many of the patrons have never encountered a working typewriter. These are totems. They are tiny little shrines to a prayer of tactility and limitation. They are signals of purpose.

Each one represents a form of communication, a form of telling stories and connecting with people. These objects are here to highlight the purpose of a bar. You are not here to sit alone and drink alcohol, you are here to make new stories and share old ones.

Or maybe they are memento mori. A reminder of how the old ways die, if not in body, but in purpose. That all machines, including humans, become obsolete, and that means we should celebrate them whilst they are alive.

Everyone here is a survivor of the past.

We surround ourselves with these objects as a reminder of that fact. They represent not the comforts, but the troubles that we overcame. They are the stuck characters, the calls in the cold. The slow, error-prone inconveniences of our lives.

I think this is the reason the phone boxes still litter our streets. They are a reminder that we choose to be connected, no matter how much it feels like the default.

Against one wall is a bookcase. It contains the usual filler of ageing hardbacks bought as a job lot. They are not for reading, they are for decoration.

There is a section of National Geographic magazines too, probably saved from a fate of dentists waiting room fodder.

Except, in amongst the thin yellow spines is one that sticks out. It doesn’t belong there. It’s a little thicker. It’s a little yellower.

It looks as if anyone in here could stand up, march over and grab it. Twisting it between their hands until they rip it clean in half.

It’s a 2019 edition of the Yellow Pages.

[VERIFICATION]

In order for Mother Teresa of Calcutta to become a saint she first had to be beatified.

That's like being a saint on probation.

To be beatified, in most cases, the person must have performed a miracle from beyond the grave.

On October 1, 2003 the Vatican certified that Teresa, who died in 1997 had in fact cured a woman of cancer in 1998.

This was miraculous.

This was a miracle.

There are three degrees of miracle. The first is represented by resurrection from the dead (quoad substantiam). The second (quoad subiectum) is for curing someone that has been deemed incurable. The third (quoad modum) involves instantaneous recovery from an illness that would normally require a long period of convalescence.

Miracles need to be instantaneous, complete and permanent.

They also must lack any scientific explanation.

Doctors are not eligible to apply to be saints.

The Vatican body in charge of reviewing applications to the position of sainthood is called the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and they refer all potential miracles to the Consulta Medica, a body made of around 100 (Catholic) medical doctors.

Five members of the Consulta Medica will meet to review x-rays and medical notes and at least three must agree that God has had a greater role than science in the recovery.

After this, another panel meets, this time consisting of Cardinals. Their job is to make sure that the miracle was the result of praying to the saintly candidate, and not just because God was feeling benevolent.

The subject of Mother Teresa's miracle was Monica Besra, a Bengali woman who reported suffering from a malignant ovarian tumour. In 1998 she arrived at a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity where nuns claim to have placed a medallion featuring Teresa's likeness on Besra's abdomen.

And the tumour disappeared.

A miracle.

There were claims, published in the Times, that an Indian physician had treated Besra nine months before she arrived at the hospice. They claimed they diagnosed the patient with tubercular adenitis and prescribed drugs to treat the tubercular cyst.

They also say they were not contacted by anyone at the vatican.

[RESURRECTION]

On July 1, 2018 at the beach in Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk, an inflatable trampoline explodes with great force. A three year old girl, Ava-May Littleboy is thrown from the inflatable 20 feet into the air and later, dies in hospital.

In August 2021, as part of their 'Great British Spraycation', Banksy bestows a mural on a wall that borders the sands of Gorleston. It depicts children on an inflatable dinghy being flung into the air.

Perhaps Banksy isn't from Gorleston, and wouldn't know about the history of the place, or the terrible event that had occurred there three years previously. Perhaps they had done some research and they are and were aware of it. Perhaps they had concluded that following such a grim tragedy people were ready to laugh again.

What is an artist responsible for, particularly when using public spaces as a canvas for their work? Do they have any responsibility when they are operating in environments that are not their own, when their form relies on not being asked in the first place?

Workers at Great Yarmouth Council reacted quickly, covering the mural with white paint, however, a month later the Council met and Trevor Wainright, leader of the council's Labour opposition asked whether the 'valuable' artwork could be 'brought back to life'.

An interesting choice of words. A miracle for a piece of art that could not be performed on a child.

Paula Boyce, Strategic Director at Great Yarmouth Borough Council and lead on their City of Culture 2025 bid confirmed that the council had commissioned a conservator to restore the work.

"We do believe it would be worthwhile taking it off the wall and conserving it and putting it on show in a public gallery somewhere".

[PEST CONTROL]

At some point in the mid-90s there was an artist working in Morecambe.

They went by the name, 'Social Pest'.

You probably aren't aware of their work. That was the point.

Their tag, their name appeared all over the town, but only in places where few people chose to look.

The top edge of doors.

Underneath the flaps of salt bins.

The roof of the bus shelter.

They found a new space, a new canvas.

Morecambe was a gallery, but only for those that chose to look.

[MIRACLE]

One of the most common types of miracle you'll encounter in the wild is the 'weeping statue', or sometimes the 'bleeding statue'.

For example, in 1953 a statue of the Virgin Mary in Syracuse, Sicily apparently started shedding human tears.

The Church recognized the weeping as a genuine miracle.

Thousands of visitors visited the statue until 1995 when Dr. Luigi Garlaschelli, a chemistry researcher at the University of Pavia, debunked the miracle.

He proved that the statue, made of plaster, would readily absorb moisture from the air which would later leak out of small scratches in the glazing.

In March, 2011 another variation of this miracle occurred. A twelve foot statue of a crucified Jesus in Mumbai began to cry, the tears pooling below its feet.

Again, thousands of visitors, many making donations to the church, attended the statue and drank the tears to cure ailments and bless their lives.

Sanal Edamauku, author and president of the Indian Rationalist Association, demonstrated on national television that a burst sewage pipe in the wall behind the statue was the likeliest source of the tears.

Edamaruku was subsequently charged with blasphemy. He moved to Finland to avoid arrest and persecution.

[YEALAND]

Let's call him 'Dee'.

As a teenager, in the late 90s, he'd ended up somewhat homeless.

He found himself staying at a house in Yealand Redmayne, a village in Lancashire.

Guidebooks will talk about the history of Yealand, the Vikings and the record in the Doomsday book. They'll probably mention the large ancient stone circle on nearby Summerhouse Hill

It's one of those places that exists in the British landscape somewhere between quaint village and housing estate, a place that can feel particularly isolated. It is just out of the way enough, with too few bus services or any other viable public transport to get out of. It's a pretty trap of a place.

Dee was struggling with this. The boredom and the bleakness. He found himself walking around the village most nights.

One night Dee encounters the remnants of roadworks near the entrance to the village. A collection of red and white plastic barriers and cones. Alongside them a solitary can of yellow spray paint, used to mark the road surface.

We will never know if it was boredom, defiance or mischief that propelled Dee to take the can and spray his displeasure on the gable end of the first house you encounter as you drive into Yealand Redmayne on the A6.

We do know, however, why the can had been so casually discarded.

What should have read, in large, foot high capitals, 'FUCK YEALAND', would remain a cryptic retort as the paint ran out.

'FUCK YE'.

[SEASIDER]

On Boxing Day, 2021 a 24-year old man from East Sussex is arrested during Operation Sirius.

Operation Sirus was dedicated to tackling graffiti on railways during the winter period through increased patrols and rapid deployments. It would lead to British Transport police arresting nine men in total.

“The tags they sprayed on the station walls were linked to an ongoing operation that is investigating years’ worth of graffiti damage to the railway. The damage has totalled to more than £500,000 and has impacted train operators across London and the South East,” a spokesperson added.

"...most importantly it protects the people who decide to trespass on the tracks to commit such vandalism. It’s well known that the railway is incredibly dangerous, and trespassing can easily result in loss of life or life-changing injuries"."

The man was released on bail with orders preventing him from using the railway and carrying spray paint cans.

Two other suspects fled the scene.

[STREET ART]

As you approach Glasgow Central on the West Coast main line, you'll see, in the distance, a city covered street art.

A number of sanctioned murals line the streets, by artists and collectives such as Rogue-one, Art Pistol, VELOCITY, Smug and Recoat. Some were commissioned to celebrate the hosting of the 2014 Commonwealth games by the city.

This is street art at its slickest, its most professional and acceptable. These are legitimate works by legitimate artists featuring legitimate subjects, such as a man with a robin perched on his finger, or a woman blowing on a dandelion clock.

There is a whimsical taxi being lifted into the air by balloons.

This is the acceptable face of painting on buildings. The council-backed decoration of urban environments, often by artists from other places, trying to reflect the communities that live there.

There is a piece called 'Fellow Glasgow Residents' that depicts, on the side of a building, some wildlife you may encounter. Deer, fox, red squirrel.

As you approach Glasgow central on the West Coast main line, you'll see, close up, next to the rails, some one, probably local, has spray painted, "Fuck Street Art".

[BEHOLD]

The original accusation was one of vandalism. This was later downgraded to merely, 'the worst restoration of all time'.

In 2012 Cecilia Gimenez, a retired Spanish octogenarian, began a restoration of a fresco that had suffered flaking due to the moisture in the walls of the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja.

'Ecce Homo', translated as 'Behold, Man', was originally painted around 1930 by the Spanish artist Elias Garcia Martinez. It was a traditional Catholic depiction of Jesus Christ accessorised with a crown of thorns.

The restoration, by the amateur artist, left the son of God looking somewhat different. The crown of thorns now smudged into his hair, the subtle shading of Christ's neck merging with a full underbeard.

The alteration was discovered only once the great-granddaughter of the original artist had made a financial donation to have the work restored.

The result was international coverage, jokingly labelling the new, improved version as 'Ecce Mono', or 'Behold the Monkey', in a combination of Latin and Spanish. This is all well known.

Perhaps lesser known is the eventual fallout.

To date the formerly struggling church has earned over 50,000 euros in donations and merchandising of mugs, t-shirts and tea towels featuring the updated fresco.

A modern miracle.

[GRIND KING]

"Police on the hunt for vandals behind graffiti"

Published: 10:38 AM January 21, 2021 - Sarah Burgess, Eastern Daily Press

Police are on the hunt for whoever graffitied the words "King" and "Grind" on different spots around a coastal village.

The tags were discovered and reported on January 19, at Beach Car Park on Beach Road, Caister and on Charles Close, also in Caister.

A second tag was also found in Caister and reported to police.

Police have asked anyone with information to contact PC Dan Brown at Great Yarmouth Police Station on 101.

Last year, police also investigated an instance of graffiti in Great Yarmouth's town centre after a swastika was drawn on the wall in Quaker Row.

The incident was reported to Norfolk Police by a member of the public, and a hate crime investigation was launched.

[BESTOW]

One of the murals, depicting a child with a crowbar on the side of disused electrical shop, Lowestoft Electrical, was removed and reportedly sold for around £2 million at auction. Another, a model added to the Merrivale Model Village, sold for £1 million.

Another work, showing a rat relaxing in a deckchair on the sea wall at North Beach, in Lowestoft was defaced. The council said it was "considering the most suitable option" for restoration.

North Norfolk District Council said it spent over £700 on various measures to protect an artwork on a sea wall in Cromer. This one is of hermit crabs, with one in a shell holding a sign stating: "Luxury rentals only."

Great Yarmouth Borough Council said it had spent £8,385.49 on security patrols, CCTV cameras and cover screens for the works under its jurisdiction.

East Suffolk Council defended spending over £7,500 on security patrols, guards and polycarbonate sheets saying that the Banksy murals were a 'welcome benefit' and that it generated 'great interest'.

Conversely, a study, carried out for the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on left behind neighbourhoods, published in May 2021 highlights that Great Yarmouth falls into a category it describes as the “most deprived of the deprived”.

“A number of left behind neighbourhoods are entirely lacking in shops, cultural assets and open spaces that provide places for people to meet and engage in community life,” the report says.

Today more than a third of the population in Lowestoft live in financial hardship while over 30 percent of children live in poverty.

In total the three councils spent around £20,000 guarding and protecting the works.

[SOCIAL]

"MEAT HERE AT 8" -- Marker Pen, Morecambe Prom, mid-90s.

[LAMBETH]

The Wandsworth Times reported, on 29 June, 2021, that a man from South London had been arrested for causing £100,000 in damage to railway property through graffiti.

The 30 year old was arrested on suspicion of 46 counts of criminal damage.

Officers from the British Transport Police's specialist search unit and graffiti team carried out the raids at two addresses on Wednesday 16 June, one in South London and the other located in Kent, as well as searching a vehicle.

“The vandalism goes far beyond just looking unsightly, it has huge financial implications for the rail industry and causes frustrating delays to passengers while trains are taken out of service to be cleaned," a spokesperson added.

“...not only this, offenders are also putting their lives at risk by trespassing on the railway, which can have life-changing or fatal consequences.

“It will not be tolerated and we will continue to run dedicated operations to target this type of crime.”

[FACTUALLY]

I was once chatting with an avant-garde musician.

Someone described him as internationally obscure. He's unknown all over the world.

He confessed that in his youth his favourite pastime was to create factually correct graffiti.

"Mr Jones is the headmaster"

"One mile is 1609.344 metres"

"This is graffito"

[FAIREY]

Shepherd Fairey, perhaps best known for his 'Hope' Obama poster, was arrested on February 7, 2009, on his way to the premiere of his show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, on two outstanding warrants related to graffiti.

He was charged with damage to property for having postered two Boston area locations with graffiti.

His arrest was announced to party goers by longtime friend Z-Trip who had been performing at the ICA premiere at Shepard Fairey's request.

[GRAFFITI]

The etymology of the word, ultimately from the Greek 'graffio', meaning to scratch or scribble via the Italian plural for 'graffito', hints back to the origin of some of the earliest examples.

The tomb of Ramesses VI, in the Valley of the Kings sports over 1,000 inscriptions, most of which were etched into the rock by Roman visitors around 2,000 years ago.

One example reads, “I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus!”

Another states, in a factual manner, "I cannot read the hieroglyphs!"

Similarly, Pompeii is decorated with examples. These range from pornographic through to the rather touching, "You love Iris, but she does not love you'.

Scholars have used these ancient examples to gain insight into the social structures of these societies. Not only do the words hint at levels of literacy, but they provide context to the lives, the concerns and the motivations of the people that lived there.

This doesn't really explain the 'why' of graffiti though. What it is that drives humans to mark their environment with their thoughts.

Maybe if we look sideways at another form of art.

Earth Art, or Land Art is a movement that emerged as a form in the late 60s. Using materials such as soil and rocks, artists created large scale works in situ to decorate the land. The movement in the 60s considered this as a response to the rejection of commercialisation, particularly of the art market itself, and urban living. It was closely allied with the emergent ecological movements. Essentially, this form arose as a way for artists to explore the relationship between humans and their environment in the context of the growing realisation that people do not exist separately from the land, but in an intricate and intimate relationship with it.

There is something about interacting with the environment in this way that traverses the impermanent nature of human endeavour.

In a similar way, the earliest humans frequently built earthworks, not just as shelters, but as focal points for spirituality.Land Art often persists long after the humans that have made it. It's a very primal way of changing the environment to reflect your presence.

Scratching into the very material of earth.

We could also consider this territorial. You could ask the question of who has the right to commit such an act on the landscape. Perhaps the people that live there have the greatest claim as they demonstrate their connection to the land that created them, sustained them and would eventually consume them.

Then there is the red hand. The oldest known cave painting is in Maltravieso cave, Cáceres, Spain. This painting was made by using a human hand as a stencil.It is over 64,000 years old.

What can that be other than a human demonstrating their presence in the environment? I was here, and now you are here, seeing this, too.

Scratched into the very fabric of time.

It is best described by a work of graffiti in Palmyra, written over a thousand years ago. It says, “This is an inscription that I wrote with my own hand. My hand will wear out but the inscription will remain.”

[UNDERGROUND]

In December, 2018, Bacari Adams, a 33 year-old man was arrested alongside 31 year-old Jake Martin.

They were charged with causing £130,000 worth of damage to the London Underground through graffiti.

Adams was jailed for six months after pleading guilty to conspiring to destroy or damage property. Martin also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 months in prison suspended for 18 months.

Evidence in the case demonstrated that Bacari's tag was the same as the tattoo he had across his knuckles.

In his defence, Bacari claimed he was, “creating a job for the person cleaning it”.

[CHARITY]

In 2017, investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi published a book called 'Original Sin'. It detailed documents from the Institute for the Works of Religion, which is better known as the Vatican Bank.

The documents revealed that the funds held by the bank in Mother Teresa's name, on account of her charity, amounted to billions. Nuzzi hypothesised that had Mother Teresa, formerly known as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, made significant withdrawls, the bank would have risked default.

It's important to understand that this money wasn't sitting idly during this time. The money was working for the Church. It was invested, re-invested, accrued and traded.

Mother Teresa accepted money from Robert Maxwell, the disgraced British publisher who died in 1991 just before a scheduled meeting with the Bank of England to discuss his default on £50,000,000 of loans. He also embezzled £450,000,000 from his employees' pension fund.

She also accepted money from Charles Humphrey Keating Jr.an American sportsman, lawyer, real estate developer, banker, financier and fraudster. He donated millions to Mother Teresa and let her borrow his private jet when she visited the United States.

The name 'Mother Teresa' was trademarked shortly after her death. It could be argued that this is to stop exploitation of the name for commercial gain.

Several scandals have been related to organisations using the name. A school in Nepal that failed to pay teacher's salaries, a co-operative bank in India, shops and stalls selling unofficial merchandise.

Merchandise.

There is official merchandise. You can buy that too. The Catholic Company, for example, sells the 'Do it Anyway' tile, bearing the inscription hung on the wall of Mother Teresa's orphanage. At the time of writing, it costs $24.95.

The simple sari, with blue trim, that Mother Teresa wore has also been trademarked. It is recognised by India's government as the intellectual property of the Missionaries of Charity.

[PEST CONTROL]

In order to sell a Banksy artwork at auction it needs to be verified.

Despite the hidden identity of the artist and the notionally illegal method of creation it is possible to do this through an organisation called 'Pest Control'.

They will authenticate a work.

Processing a Screenprint for authentication = £50 + VAT.

Processing an Original for authentication = £100 + VAT.

If you are successful you will be issued with a Pest Control Office Ltd Certificate of Authenticity.

[EXIT]

There is something inextricably linked between miracles, those that bestow them and money. The holy trinity of a real world interface of belief.

It's interesting to note where miracles tend to happen too. Often they are targeted at the poor and the sick, or the dying.

Whilst in Catholicism, one of the requirements is that the subject of the miracle must request aid, they must be praying to the saint, it isn't so clear if this is true of artistic miracles like the ones that appeared for the councils of the East coast.

Some of us don't want to be healed, not like that, not by them. Some of us have perfectly good local doctors.

Nor is it clear who the beneficiary fo such a miracle is. Is it the sellers that walked away with a combined total of £3 million? Is it the people of Great Yarmouth that don't appear to be substantially better off for the experience?

Your seaside town is a canvas, but it is not a canvas for you.

When people mark their environment with their lives they are accused of criminality and arrested, by the same institutions that spend money on resurrecting an authentic Banksy.

One case is vandalism, the other is a bestowment.

The difference is in the resale.

Your raw sewage statue tears and your Ecce Mono t-shirts.

No amount of sly recognition or self awareness can absolve someone of partaking in this. You can choose to exit through the gift shop whether that is one of Banksy's making or Mother Teresa's and the only thing on sale has the vague appearance of a miracle.

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Not sure this is the time or place for long format film critique, but hey, it's either that or I come round to your place and bore you in person.

If I had to title this as an academic paper, it would be "Aardman Animation in a post-Wes Anderson world".

I watched the latest Chicken Run film, “Dawn of the Nugget”, last night and... It was fine. It was exactly, more or less, the same as the original, which I rather liked.

The thing is, the animation isn't aging well. Or maybe that it is aging too well. Like Tom Cruise, a bit shiny and seemingly perfect.

Too perfect.

Aardman are perhaps the most accomplished stop-motion animation studio around. Their work is virtually flawless. Smooth motion, detailed models. Nothing is out of place.

And that's a problem.

There is nothing to distinguish it from computer rendered 3D animation. The slickness has rendered the form invisible.

Compare this with Anderson's The Fantastic Mr Fox.

Anderson is well known to highlight the artifice of the form in his films. Sets become visible. Scripts can be seen. Curtains open as if a stage. You are aware, as a viewer, of being a viewer of a confection.

It's a wonderful feeling.

And so Mr Fox's fur jitters about. You can see the hand if the animator. The movements feel slightly unreal and staccato, as if they are a sequence of stills stitched together.

The artifice is apparent to remind you of the form.

Anderson is on record as saying he wanted to use real fur because it is so unpredictable and impossible to animate perfectly. It shows. And it works. There is something delightful in the unruly way it moves that feels incredibly animalistic too.

And that's the other problem.

The chickens in Chicken Run, Dawn of the Nugget don't really act like chickens.

They are rather smooth, shallow characters that could be any animal in a plot that only considers them chickens because they are food.

What I mean is, in The Fantastic Mr Fox, look at how the animals eat. It's furious and violent. It works in contrast to the urbane nature of the talking animals. It constantly reminds us that we are watching anthropomorphised creatures. Not only is it a source of narrative, the duality of Mr Fox, but again, it's an awareness of the story and the form.

Meanwhile, in Chicken Run you have a Scottish sounding hen that jokes about bagpipes and haggis within the first 20 minutes.

Do chickens eat haggis? If so is it the offal filled haggis? Are these chickens meat eating? And in their world, do the sheep also have sentience?

Do plasticine sheep dream of being eaten by chickens?

Then there are the various regional accents. Again, played as characterisations, but mostly instead of commenting on the chicken-ness of chickens.

It's funny, not because they are chickens, but because they sound broad Yorkshire. Norther accents are funny.

Combine this with the sleekness of the animation and we get something that feels a little like nothing, completed with a Polama Faith song.

And that's such a shame. The animation is exceptional, the skill is unmatched. It's just a shame that in perfection it becomes invisible.

Meanwhile there are paper thing characters and a predictable plot that do nothing to make this invisibility a virtue.

Compare this with anything Pixar has released in the last decade. They perfected their animation style, but realised that what carried their films was the emotional complexity of the characters. That strong writing is the only thing that can give slick animation life.

We are left with something closer to an episode of Paw Patrol rather than The Wrong Trousers, with it's inventive characters combined with the artists fingerprints as a feature and not a flaw.

I miss that evil little penguin, and how, without a voice, a silly accent, he was able to convey something animalistic about human behaviour and greed.

[ANALYSIS]

The thing that I'm really talking about here is artistry.

That much like beauty, artistry is defined not by perfection but by the flaws. That the hand of the artist, when absent, leaves us with an artifact, not a work.

[FURTHER ANALYSIS]

Really the thing I'm talking about here is New Year's resolutions. Those promises you make to airbrush out your errors, the creases and marks in your personality.

Don't forget that maybe they define you. They make you complex and wonderful and interesting.

Sure, if they don't make you happy, by all means change them. You make yourself.

But if you think that sleek perfection will make things better, it won't. And it won't just be your loss.

[FINAL ANALYSIS]

But mostly, I'm talking about chickens and foxes and penguins.

Merry Christmas.

What follows was originally written in collaboration with Gillian Jane Lees as part of “A Different North”, an art project that looked at all the ways in which the North was not only a geographic reality, but also a psychological and phenomenological state.

We made it inclusive by simply stating, “The further South you are, the more North you have”.

You can see a better description of the project as a whole, as well as some pictures of the 24-hour long durational performance in culminated in here: www.adamandgillian.co.uk/a-different-north

You can also buy a book containing all of the essays and writings here on Amazon.

[MANAGED DECLINE]

"I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill."
– Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe, 1981

[UNMANAGED DECLINE]

“Never fallen off a big chimney, you only fall off one of them once, like”

– Fred Dibnah

[MIDNIGHT]

It’s nearly twenty past midnight. It’s quiet and dark.

And then…

A crack and a rumble, an explosion.

Several explosions.

This isn’t the sound of terrorism so much as it is the theme tune of vandalism.

[FRED]

Fred is perched on a plank at the top. The wind is howling.

The plank is secured by one bar of scaffolding and two ropes. It swings slightly as he moves. He describes this staging as a work of art.

Fred doesn’t appear to be attached to anything. There is no safety harness visible. He has a rather scruffy roll up hanging out of the side of his mouth as he works.

He was born for this. Perhaps not exactly this, but being born in Bolton at the point of industrial decline sets the ideal conditions for creating a Fred Dibnah. At first he was employed as a steeplejack. A man who would climb these towers, these monuments to industry, in order to repair them.

And now here he is. It is the 1970s and Fred is dismantling a chimney, brick by brick.

From up here you can see across the densely packed Northern town. You can see the rows of terraced houses, smoke rising gently from their tiny chimneys, the spires and steeples, and of course all the other monuments to industry that stretch up to the sky.

They would normally just blow it up, of course, but as with many structures built during the industrial revolution, the houses are too close. It would be too risky, too potentially costly.

And so Fred has been given £7,000 to dismantle this chimney a blackened brick at a time. Each one thrown into the gaping maw of the chimney and sliding out of the hole at the base like a strange helter skelter.

[DORMAN LONG]

“If people want to stand in the way of jobs and investment then they should leave Teesside because I’m not going to be apologetic for wanting to deliver a bright future for local people.”

– Ben Houchen, Sunday 19 September, 2021

[FRED]

And now it is Sunday. It is the 9th of May and it is 2004.

It is six months before Fred Dibnah dies. However, right now he is stood at the foot of a chimney.

We are in Royton, Oldham, and this is the Park Mill.

This will be the last demolition of Fred Dibnah, his 90th chimney.

An audience has gathered at the site, stood a little way back from where Fred stands. There are others across the town, standing in their gardens or on the streets, looking down the valley towards the Mill.

A fire is lit.

Fred was a big fan of this method. No explosives were needed. Just a few bricks removed and trussed with wood before a fire is set. When the fire burns the wooden truss the chimney collapses in on itself.

Over his career Fred has encountered many people that don’t trust this method. It’s not predictable, they would argue, yet Fred trusted it.

A slight creak and the chimney begins to collapse. As it does people standing near Fred get nervous, and the film of the event shows them starting to jog away as the bricks rush down.

Fred doesn’t flinch. He stands perfectly still as the bricks crash in front of him, getting closer, but never reaching him.

It is now nearly 20 years later. The chimney is gone. Fred is gone. The Mill is gone.

There is now a housing estate.

[THE TOWER]

Thompsons of Prudhoe were ultimately responsible for the demolition at twenty past midnight on the 19th September, 2021.

The iconic Dorman Long Tower of the former Redcar Steelworks fell with the percussive sound of an explosive demolition. A series of ten controlled explosions.

As one of her first acts as the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries overturned a decision by Historic England to grade II list the structure.

Historic England argued that the people of the North East saw this tower as an iconic symbol of their industrial heritage. That the people saw this as belonging to them and their culture.

A supposedly independent report by government employed engineers, Atkins, suggested that the structure would need nearly £8 million pounds to secure and maintain.

For scale, the recent facelift to Big Ben in London cost the public nearly ten times as much, at £79.9 million. The proposed Garden Bridge project in London would cost £200 million.

For more scale, Unboxed Festival, previously Festival UK* 22, formerly the Festival of Britain, formerly the Brexit Festival, cost £120 million for just a reported 238,000 visitors. One exhibition, Sea Monster, featured a reclaimed North Sea oil rig platform being installed, temporarily, in Weston-Super-Mare at a cost of more than £10.5 million.

It’s important to note that not every resident was against the demolition. Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen supported Nadine’s decision, saying:

“Approving our appeal was the first decision of the new Secretary of State, this goes to show just how important the successful redevelopment of the Redcar former steelworks site is to everyone in government.”

The South Tees Development Corporation, chaired by Houchen, had to make a compulsory purchase order to acquire the former steelworks, a move that was contested by the owners, Sahaviriya Steel Industries Sahaviriya Steel Industries.
The plan is to turn the area into a Freeport, However, a move that has been described as 'speculative' by a member of the management board

[LISTING]

Following the listing of Dorman Long as a grade II historic building, Ben Houchen accused Historic England of using a junior member of staff, who had acted without the permission of senior managers, to issue the listing.

Historic England responded publicly by denying this and issuing the following statement:

"The mayor’s statement is incorrect – the listing was not a mistake. Historic England advised DCMS to list the site. Following a site visit, our advice to list the site remained the same"

[FREEPORTS]

The Tories have had a fascination with the notion of freeports for decades now.

At the core the idea is simple. Areas of the UK are designated as freeports where the usual rules of tax and workers rights laws don’t apply. The idea being that this will encourage greater investment in these areas and perhaps lift them out of poverty through job provision and infrastructure development.

Opponents like to point out that maybe freeports are not about helping the workers and residents out of poverty so much as it is about exploiting them by removing many of the laws that have been instituted to protect them from just that.
Things like working time directives, for example. Or minimum wages.

And they also like to point out that the lack of tax being paid in these areas will allow large corporations to exploit the UK without contributing monetarily.

The idea first appeared in the Tory manifesto in 1983 under ‘The Challenge of Our Times’ as a way to combat declining economies in post-industrial areas. Several freeports were introduced but these licences were not renewed in 2012 after the efficacy of freeports was doubted.

In 2021, Rishi Sunak, as Chancellor of the Tory party, re-introduced the idea through the proposed creation of eight new freeports.

They are East Midlands Airport, Felixstowe and Harwich, Humber region, Liverpool City Region, Plymouth, Solent, Thames and Teesside.

[RICHARD OASTLER]

Richard Oaster was somewhat of a contradiction. He was a Tory radical.

On one hand he fought against Catholic emancipation and Parliamentary reform, but on the other he was an abolitionist and a major voice in workplace reform. He earned the nickname, ‘The Factory King’ because of his support of limiting the workday to just ten hours.

A commemorative plaque in Leeds parish church reads:
"Moved by pity and indignation at the long hours worked by young children in factories, he devoted his life to their emancipation, and was a tireless champion of the Ten Hours Factory Bill"

He described himself as an ‘ultra-Tory’ and as a ‘King and Country’ politician. However, he also said something that highlights a perpetual struggle:

“The great mistake in the minds of those raised above the working class is, that they think the people want plunder and anarchy. I know they want no such thing – they want peace and rest – and their rights. They want to be able to go out in a morning, get a good day's work done, and come home with a fair remuneration…”

He didn’t see the poor as victims of their own disposition, rather he saw them as victims of a capitalist system that sought to render them as a resource to be exploited.

He referenced what we now call capitalism as ‘the political economy’.

[FREEPORTS]

Way back in 2016, a rising Tory MP called Rishi Sunak issued a report called ‘The Freeports Opportunity’ in response to a vote that the UK would be leaving the EU:

“extensive and ambitious network of UK Free Ports. … These would not only provide domestic manufacturers with a wealth of tangible benefits, but also send a clear message to international markets that Britain’s new global role will be open, innovative, and outward looking. It is therefore imperative that, if the recommendations of this report are to be implemented, the Government acts to legislate in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s departure from the [European Union].”

Sunak called for the UK to emulate over 135 places across the globe that have used them, under various names such as ‘freeports’, ‘free trade zones’ (FTZ), and ‘special economic zones’ (SEZ), particularly places like South East Asia and China where these zones have become synonymous with the exploitation of the working class.

An early backer of Sunak’s proposal was the Labour MP for Redcar, Anna Turley, who described freeports as “recognised around the world as playing a major role in retaining, reshoring and growing domestic manufacturing activity and boosting trade.”

Turley begged the government to “give serious consideration” to a Teesport Free Port “without delay.”

[OASTLER]

"Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, are this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system 'colonial slavery' These innocent creatures drawl out, unpitied, their short but miserable existence, in a place famed for its profession of religious zeal, whose inhabitants are ever foremost in professing 'temperance' and 'reformation' and are striving to outrun their neighbours in missionary exertions, and would fain send the Bible to the farthest corner of the globe aye, in the very place where the anti-slavery fever rages most furiously, her apparent charity is not more admired on earth, than her real cruelty is abhorred in Heaven. The very streets which receive the droppings of an 'Anti-Slavery Society' are every morning wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled (not by the cart-whip of the negro slave-driver) but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the over-looker, to hasten, half -dressed, but not half-fed, to those magazines of British infantile slavery the worsted mills in the town and neighbourhood of Bradford!!"

– Richard Oastler, writing to the Yorkshire Mercury, 1830

[OASTLER SHOPPING CENTRE]

We are early for a meeting with Evie Manning, the co-artistic director of the company ‘Commonwealth’. We are meeting Evie at their Common Space, a former abandoned youth employment centre in Bradford that now acts as a social, political and creative space for the community.

Common Space happens to be attached to the Oastler Shopping Centre, named after the 19th Century politician Richard Oastler. It’s more like a traditional indoor Northern Market than what most people will think of as a ‘Shopping Centre’. There’s no big name stores, just a seemingly arbitrary arrangement of stalls selling everything from two-stripe Adidas to specialty foods and archaic tupperware alongside halal butchers and a range of takeaways.

Like most covered markets, there are a few empty pitches but the place feels very much alive. In truth though, the place is very much enjoying its final days.

Bradford Council recently announced that they have completed the purchase of the site, estimated at £15.5 million, for the development of a 1000-home ‘city village’.

The Oastler Shopping Centre is slated for demolition.

Several signs are visible on the stalls that give directions to their new pitches in the other shopping centres across Bradford. We worry for the ones that don’t seem to have a destination yet.

The nearby Kirkgate shopping centre, a wonderful 1970s brutalist building, will also be demolished as part of this plan.
The local authority has yet to secure planning permission for the proposed development, however it states that it plans to complete the demolition by 2024.

The council will be working with a private developer to make these plans a reality.

You could argue that for the residents of the Oastler Shopping Centre, these plans are already very much a reality.
Alex Ross-Shaw, portfolio holder for regeneration and planning at Bradford council said this is “a huge opportunity to reshape the city centre with sustainable and quality new housing, public spaces and business developments.”

As we leave we walk past the Fountains Cafe. It’s been there for just shy of 50 years. There is an older woman sitting in the window, she waves at us.

[MANAGED DECLINE]

Ever since the chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, suggested managed decline as a way of dealing with the post-industrial North it has become a mainstay of Tory policy.

Initially it was touted as a punitive measure for the riot-plagued Liverpool, shortly after the Toxteth riots, however, it quickly became an important economical and ideological pillar for the party.

You can see it being used in the postal system, the NHS and every town and city of the North.

The premise is simple. You underfund an area. You cut back on services such as childcare, social housing, libraries, swimming pools and job centres. You create massive unemployment and lower the standards of living. This saves the government money in the short term.

You then invite, at arms-length, private companies into the area to exploit the desperate workforce with promises of stable jobs. They benefit from very cheap and grateful labour as well as having political clout in the area.

This is almost always spun as ‘growing the economy’ and ‘providing jobs for local people’.

A bright future.

A good example of this can be seen in Barrow-in-Furness where BAE systems employ around 29% of the workforce. The fortunes of the town are now tied to the fortunes of the company.

It’s not quite the indentured servitude of the textile mills, but it’s not that far away either.

[CASTLEGATE]

There’s that modern trend of adding the suffix ‘-gate’ to the end of a word to imply a scandal, however the demolition of Stockton’s Castlegate shopping centre is seemingly a case of genuine regeneration.

The plan is to create an urban park in the centre of the town, alongside the River Tees, by first knocking down the 1970s shopping centre and the nearby Swallow Hotel.

Perhaps the biggest difference between this move and the destruction of other similar structures and landmarks across the North is the overwhelming support of the people of Stockton. This feels very much like their plan.

That’s not to say that these places don’t hold a lot of fond memories for people, however, there seems to be an acceptance that the highstreet has changed permanently since these structures were built and that perhaps the space should be shaped accordingly.

The existing residents of Castlegate have hopped a short distance to fill the gaps in the Wellington Square shopping precinct, giving a feeling of a thriving town that is going forwards rather than looking backwards.
This is in contrast to many other towns that are redeveloping their centres, knocking down markets and outdated structures and allowing the space to be converted to private housing.

John Tomaney, professor of urban and regional planning at University College London, has called this, “one of the few genuinely innovative strategies around.” He goes on to suggest that the material being used in this redevelopment is ‘social infrastructure’.

[DEATH]

Between October and December 2021 crabs, lobsters and other crustaceans washed up dead in unprecedented numbers on the North East coast of England.

At the time the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs apparently advised local campaigners to conduct their own research as the Government scientists could not be trusted to perform an impartial investigation.

As such local campaigners did just that and began to formulate a theory that the massive die-off of local wildlife was due to the dredging of the proposed Freeport site. Sediment contaminated with pyridine, a waste product of the steel and chemical industry, had been dumped at sea shortly before the event.

Teesside’s Mayor, the obviously impartial Ben Houchen, board member of Teesside Freeport initiative, appeared to dismiss the claim and suggested in an interview its proponents were nothing more than conspiracy theorists.

“It’s not just pyridine, they think it’s Agent Orange, apparently from secret factories in the second world war. We’ve also been told that it was Russian submarines trying to cause problems for the UK government.

“So I’m sure you’re not suggesting, and they are suggesting, that we do testing for these types of completely conspiratorial ideas because if we do that, we’ll never get this development under way and finished.”

That was back in 2021.

In a Guardian article dated 15 January 2023, the ‘independent’ scientists who led the research into the die off admit that they have not been asked a single question by the panel assembled by the government to look into the disaster.

In a move likened to removing the batteries out of a fire alarm to prevent fires, the panel has also been prevented from examining the government processes as part of its inquiry.

Defra has also declined to publish names of the panel members or the review’s terms of reference.

Meanwhile, Scientists from Newcastle, York, Hull and Durham universities, commissioned by the North East Fishing Collective, had found last year that pyridine was the likely cause.

Ben Houchen continues to call this a conspiracy.

[CASTLEGATE]

Documentation is important. We might move on, but someone might want to look at this some day in the future.
I lift my camera and press the shutter.
There is no one else around, just our reflections in the many empty shop fronts.
Then there is a voice. A booming voice from everywhere in particular.
“Please refrain from doing that.”
I take another picture.
“Stop taking pictures!”
I lower the camera and fire off a few hip shots too, hoping that this omniscient voice doesn’t catch me.
A security guard appears. He tells me I’m committing a felony. That I can’t take photographs in here. It’s private land.
Not for long, I respond.

[THEN/NOW]

[PLANNING]

“Development proposals which would result in unacceptable harm to the significance of specific retained assets of heritage or cultural importance, such as the ‘Dorman Long’ Tower will not be supported.”

– The Redcar and Cleveland Local Plan, 2018

[SELL OFF]

It’s for the good of the people.

It brings in local jobs.

It will grow the local economy.

Yet it is almost entirely owned by US energy giant General Electric.

What is now clear is that Houchen and the South Tees Development Corporation were engaged in a series of deals to create the 4500 acre freeport site after the government failed to provide the necessary funding, leading to a private sector sell-off.
Whilst seemingly being a flagship project for the post-Brexit Conservative Johnson government with strong support from the then-chancellor Rishi Sunak, the money never arrived from the treasury.

The Tees Valley Combined Authority had previously stated that:

“…the higher returns required by private developers, who are likely to compromise social and environmental objectives to maximise revenues”.

However, finding itself £350 million short (Mayor Houchen would say it was far less at just £206 million) it was agreed to raise capital by granting private partners additional access to the company, taking their share to 90%.

A bright future for local people.

It appears that international corporations managed to leverage the greed and naivety of a local mayor via the UK’s own government to buy a sizable chunk of the North East, intending to generate sizable profits without paying reciprocal tax and free from the sort of laws that protect the local workforce.

It might have been a rotting coal bunker, but it was our coal bunker.

Ben Houchen is an agent of well managed decline.

[FRED]

Picture him sat up there, his legs dangling above a few hundred feet of nothing.

The wind is smoking more of his cigarette than he is.

You are up there with him. You can see for miles in every direction, standing atop of this industrial monument.

Fred says to you that, ‘Height gives you a wonderful feeling of grandeur. You're the king of the castle up here.’
You can’t help but agree.

He looks a little sad, for a king.

You ask him what is on his mind. He takes the cigarette from his mouth with blackened fingers and says, ‘I set out as a steeplejack in my youth to preserve chimneys. I've finished by knocking most of them down.’

You stand there on legs made slightly of jelly. You don’t say anything. There is nothing to say.

He stands up and pats the chimney you are about to dismantle, brick by brick.

‘Anybody who destroys anything made of stone should be prosecuted. It is not all beautiful, but it took a man all day to make one stone.’

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