And this was when I realised abruptly that as of that minute (impossible to say exactly which minute), I had finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. In fact, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the kind of person who said “actually” too much. I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car thinking about buttering toast – buttering raisin toast, even;: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat blimped forms of the raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.

It’s been good.

It’s nice when, for once, even if it’s only an accounting trick, a childish illusion, you get your time again. You can spend an hour looking back and lose no time at all. For sixty minutes, you live twice. Cats get nine whole lives, we get a magic hour which is snatched back six months later.

It’s fun, though, to pretend.

I’m the only one left.

I haven’t seen a human face for nine weeks.

Only one fate awaits.

And they earned it, bless ‘em.

Here I go.

Wish me luck.

Adios.

The door closes with a click, and silence, a hard, oppressive silence, settles over the space. There is no breeze in here, not a breath of air stirring. In the far corner of the room, a single stage light illuminates a brown leather sofa. Four claps ring out. They should echo – the walls are completely bare – but they don’t, they just sort of hang in the air. A reminder that nothing is truly finite, that everything leaves a trace of itself somewhere.

My walk is halting, my breathing shallow. With no warning, countless bulbs spring to life at once. Light floods the enormous space, and just ahead a figure lies prostrate on the ground.

I’ll be there for you…

The faint refrain seems to come from above, but has no discernible source. I walk over to the figure. Each second takes a lifetime, each breath and step a punitive weight of thought.

…when the rain starts to pour…

Floods. Torrents. The walls collapse. All is swirling blackness and cold, so very, very cold.

I break the surface, gasping, coughing, blinking. The lights are flickering, and soon go out altogeether.

I’ll be there for you…

If this place had a ceiling, I’d be there by now. I look up and see stars. Millions. More than I’ve ever seen before. Each one a pinprick imperfection in the fabric of time.

The water has stopped rising. There is nothing. Only the stars and canned laughter.

…like I’ve been there before…

I could be happy here.

I could stay.

It hasn’t been my day, my week, my month, or even my year, but……………

Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape. At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.

Let’s take woman A. Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him. Claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know.

I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion. Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you’re already in the sex game with them.

It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, “do you mind if I do it again?”. It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning. . .

I don’t believe either of those women, I don’t believe either of these stories.

Now… let me tell you about the time I went to the pub with George Galloway.

Once upon a time, I met George Galloway in a boozer for a few pints, as you do. “Would you like some lager?” I asked him. “Oh yes,” he replied. The z-list celeb circuit can be hard, and I felt good to be doing someone a good turn who may otherwise have been reduced to a second stint in the Big Brother House, a fate surely worse than death.

I walked up to the bar. “I would like 38 pints of lager,” I said to the esteemed barkeep.

“Nigh on twoscore of my finest carbonated fermentations?” he spluttered.

“Quite,” I replied. “My friend George Galloway and I are fair parched.” I slapped my debit card down on the bar.

“One for me, and 37 for you, George,” I said. How generous I am sometimes. He didn’t look as happy as someone about to get some free booze should have.

“You’d better drink them all up, too. I’ll make sure you do. After all, you did say you wanted lager, didn’t you George? I didn’t ask how many you wanted and now I expect you to drink as many as I choose to force you to drink. That’s how these things work.”

Even taken at its worst, and even if the allegations made subsequently were 100% true, and even though the pub CCTV caught the action in wonderful grainy black and white, what I did doesn’t constitute drowning. At least not drowning as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.

George met me, accompanied me to the pub, agreed to have some lager. Claimed he didn’t consent to being force-fed 37 pints of the stuff, but how was I to know that until he was being given the kiss of life by the pub chef? This is something which can happen, you know.

I mean, not everybody needs to be asked prior to each drink. Some people believe that when you go to the pub with somebody, agree to a pint or forty, you’re already in the drinking game with them.

It might have been really bad manners not to have paused between each pint I forcibly poured down his throat and said, “Do you mind if I do it again?” It might be really sordid and bad pub etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not drowning or you bankrupt the term drowning of all meaning…

The answer isn’t ‘The Falklands’ – that’s too simplistic.

Answers on a postcard, please.

time

I told someone

I loved

them.

“I think I’ve

accidentally

fallen in love with

you”

I said.

(I made it

a joke

to keep the tension

at bay.

It didn’t

work)

“Oh,” she said,

“I didn’t know

you felt like

that.”

“Wh-” I began.

“I thought,”

said she

“you just enjoyed

fucking

me.”

“Oh.”

The policy is dangerous and misguided.

The ResPublica report (found here) isn’t that long, and I read it this afternoon. I’ll try to break it down as much as possible.

The foreword contains the following quote:

This proposal seeks to address the failure of this great nation’s Social Contract between those who have and those who have not, it seeks to make small gains against the overwhelming tide of indifference and it seeks to reinforces [sic] that which works… This proposal is about continued public service, an approach not alien to the Armed Forces and attends to a clear and present social danger which if left will challenge the very fabric of civil society.

The purpose of the report is clear. These military academies are for poor kids – the introduction suggests:

The schools should be set up in each of the ten RFCA regions in England and Wales and located in those regions in areas with the greatest concentration of young people who are NEET (not in employment, education or training) or at risk of becoming NEET.

The justification for this focus is the riots that occurred in England in 2011. Again, quoting from the introduction:

Our proposal for a new model of schooling offers one policy solution to the social ills that became manifest at the time of the riots. Looking at the educational background of the young people who took part in the riots, two-thirds were classed as having some form of special educational need (compared to 21% for the national average); more than a third had been excluded from school during 2009-10.

Those people who took part in the riots, in other words, were not served well under the current education system. I recently went through that same system, and it is one that rewards rote-learning, discourages creative thinking and is, for the most part, dictatorial rather than interactive. One of my secondary school teachers asked our class (rhetorically, of course), “Look, do you want to learn about the subject, or do you want to pass the exam?” as though it was a simple binary choice. Introducing more discipline and longer school days with “obligatory extra-curricular hours [for] sporting and community activities” will not help kids already struggling.  I don’t agree with everything in this RSA lecture from Sir Ken Robinson, but it raises very interesting points. The ResPublica green paper does home in on a very real problem, namely that “tens of thousands of our young people are becoming hopelessly trapped by the lack of opportunity” – the problem for the educational establishment is that teenagers know this. Sir Ken notes,

When we [his generation] went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was that if you worked hard and did well… you would have a job.”

This is no longer the case. With youth unemployment in the UK above 20% this March (and worse in other parts of Europe, particularly the PIIGS countries), young people have realised that their future is bleak whether they try hard in school or not. One word crops up throughout the report – “aspiration.” It makes 8 appearances in the short 15 page document, but seems to restrict the aspirations of working class kids to joining the army, or at least subscribing to some vaguely defined “military ethos.”

The pivotal logical basis of the report is found across pages 7 and 8.

We believe that the riots were an expression of an economic, educational and cultural failure: the failure of an excessively unequal society, riddled with asset poverty and debt serfdom, welfare dependency and growing youth unemployment… In many ways, the riots were a ‘pay-off’ of a rentier state that has concentrated wealth and stripped millions of ordinary Britons of their capital, denying them a path to assets, ownership and trade. The share of liquid wealth for the bottom 50% of the population had fallen to 1% in 2003, eroding the path to prosperity for those at the bottom. Not surprisingly given these shocking figures, an O.E.C.D. survey in 2010 found that Britain has the highest correlation between parental income and outcomes for children, and therefore the lowest rate of social mobility in the developed world.

Anyone who’s ever played Monopoly can tell you that this is what happens when you allow rentiers to accumulate wealth unchecked. The problem, then, is Capitalism. Or, to use another term, it’s greed. Challenging this will see a change – not producing teenagers with “high levels of respect for authority” or “heightened aspirations”, whatever those may be.

General Lord Dannatt, former head of the army, asked recently, “given that the military has the unique opportunity to educate its own into the importance of a proper moral understanding – then perhaps the military community may have a wider contribution that it can make to the Nation?” – What proper moral understanding is this? What particular morals dictate the conduct of soldiers? None are suggested in the paper. The word “ethos” also appears 8 times in the report, but no concrete claims are made about this mythical ethos of the armed forces which can somehow benefit wider society.

What do the reforms boil down to? Well, basically, they say what teenagers need is discipline (not choice or actual meaningful prospects), a “military ethos” (which could mean quite literally anything you want it to) and that joining the armed forces is something poor kids should “aspire” to – they should look forward to being sent to die grisly deaths in the desert for rich people back home to make fistfuls of dollars.

This isn’t a vision for the future, it’s a fascist nightmare, and a policy Labour should never have touched with a bargepole.

Now, leaving aside the problematic aspect of defining a nation (or indeed any concept at once as fluid and difficult to define as a nation, let alone a millenia-old inhabited island that has in the last 100 years gone from proclaiming its ownership of a third of the world’s land mass to Scotland demanding a divorce) in a 45-minute test, I thought I’d help her out with some ideas for questions.

1. Name a British tradition that other nations have adopted and that has stood the test of time.

Example of an acceptable answer: ‘The concentration camp’ – while similar camps were used beforehand, notably in our proud American friends’ subjugation of the Native American people, the concentration camp was first used systematically during the Second Boer War, along with other interesting initiatives like poisoning water sources, to teach those bloody Boers a lesson in good, old-fashioned British freedom. During the war, over 26,000 women and children died in these camps!

2. What is the first verse of the national anthem?

Acceptable answer: ‘Why can’t we just have bloody Jerusalem?’ – in a recent survey, 94% of respondents gave this answer. 92% followed this with, “It’s political correctness gone mad!” before skulking off.

3. Quote any line from Hamlet’s famous speech.

Acceptable answer: ‘A cigar! A cigar! My kingdom for a cigar!’

4. Where does the Queen live?

Acceptable answer: ‘On the back of a £20 note, or on a fifty pence piece or whatever. Fuck her, she’s fucking German.’ Again, this was the overwhelming response from a recent survey.

5. (Multiple choice) When someone barges in front of you in a queue, the correct response is:

a) “Excuse me, this is a queue. Please take position at the back, as you have arrived later than other memebers of the queue.”

b) Tut, moan and roll your eyes, and sigh constantly, all the while shaking your head for the benefit of those behind you.

c) Demand to speak to an authority figure, threaten to call the police and generally lose your fucking shit.

Which answer did you choose? If you chose b), well done. You can stay. If you chose a), what are you, French? How rude. If you chose c), the country you’re looking for is called the United States. It can be reached via Heathrow Airport.

Smelly high-street cosmetics chain ‘Lush’ pulled a ‘naked’ campaign stunt (once in 2007, then again in 2008) billed as a ‘protest’ against packaging. Except it’s not a protest. It’s a marketing campaign. This is symptomatic of the way society functions.

I think this needs to be put in some kind of context. In these postmodern times, people increasingly experience brands as a method of expressing a certain aspect of themselves. This is tied into two things:

1) The postmodern experience is that of experiencing oneself as art

2) The consumerist experience is that of defining oneself by one’s purchases

So, it follows, the only way you can express yourself and your values to others is via consumer choices. The Lush ‘protest’ operates in this framework. It says, “Oppose x, buy y instead.” Of course, it also says, “Look at our attractive young employees’ bodies.” Nothing like a cheeky bit of nudity to get the papers involved.