Fear of flying

I was sort of relieved that Ann Liv Young didn’t turn up for her two Solo performances at the Battersea Arts Centre Burst season this week. Her reason for pulling out – one of the people involved has a fear of flying – might have occurred to her a bit sooner, given that she’s based in New York and Battersea is not only on the other side of the Atlantic but off the tube map. But hey, you can’t think of everything when you’re an artist.

Why relieved? Well, Young is the sort of artist whose performances involve a lot of nudity, noise, vulgarity, mess and what’s commonly referred to as ‘challenging your audience’ in the creative context, otherwise known as ‘making them squirm with embarrassment’ where I come from. Her most recent touring show, an adaptation of Snow White, involved her being given a good seeing to on stage by her Prince. With a dildo. And full penetration.

You have to be in the right frame of mind for this sort of performance if you’re a man. I suppose you have to if you’re a woman, too, but it’s easier for women. As on a nudist beach, no one suspects you of having sleazed in under false pretences – and even if you have, it’s somehow more acceptable in a female (we’re only talking London liberal circles here, of course), not to mention easier to hide your physical reactions if your body gets a bit carried away by it all.

Anyway, I didn’t have to navigate the dodgy interface between art and porn on this occasion (not that I’ve ever been entirely clear about the difference, although I do understand that wanking over Old Masters – in an art gallery at any rate – is a definite no-no). Instead, I had to make do with being blindfolded and tied up in a wheelchair (yes, yes, but it’s a different kind of eroticism) and putting myself at the mercy of five Belgians from the Ontroerend Goed theatre performance group (a pun that gets lost in translation, the name means, very roughly, ‘Feel Estate’).

‘The smile off your face’ was first performed in Britain at last year’s Edinburgh Festival. It’s described as ‘absolutely terrible, a dreadful experience … manipulation in every way’ in one comment on the Times Online theatre pages. The woman who went ahead of me looked as terrified by the prospect as the artist in Ann Liv Young’s company was by the thought of flying (the difference being, of course, that when you’re the person doing the paying for something, rather than the one being paid for it, you pull yourself together rather than pulling yourself out).

I don’t understand it. Being tied up (you should try it some time) is an exercise in giving up control, putting your trust in others (just make sure the ‘others’ are trustworthy). Being blindfolded, as well as heightening the other senses (sound, smell, taste and touch all feature in ‘Off your face’), breaks down some of the usual social barriers between strangers. You find yourself, having entrusted these people physically, beginning to trust them emotionally too. The enhanced intensity of the physical experience segues seamlessly into a more intense emotional one too. You may laugh, you may cry, you will come to understand the significance of ‘the smile off your face’. You may even come to share some of your deepest feelings with strangers whose faces you’ve not yet seen – though you will by then have smelt them and felt them and shared a dreamlike proximity to their sounds and other sensations. Manipulative? Of course it is, but then so is all theatre – manipulation by consent.

What you make of it, how far you enter the performers’ dream-state, is in large part up to you. I don’t want to say too much because it’s always best to experience these sorts of things with as few preconceptions and as open a heart as possible. But you can trust them (believe me, I’m a journalist). You will come to no harm.

In the strange safety that is sightlessness, I found myself answering the sometimes-deeply personal questions that were put to me by one of the performers. This included, as well as revealing some of what I think about love and beauty, telling her the biggest regret of my life. And no, I’m not going to share it with the rest of the world on here: if you want to know, you’ll have to get yourself tied up in a wheelchair and see if the woman from Ontroerend Goed will tell you.

'Death was the least she deserved'

It’s difficult to decide what is the most depressing aspect of one of the most depressing stories to come out of post-invasion Iraq. It’s bad enough that Abdel-Qader Ali murdered his 17-year-old daughter, Rand, after she became infatuated with a British soldier in Basra, by choking her with his foot on her throat. It’s worse that when Rand’s mother, Leila Hussein, called on her two sons to stop him, instead they joined in. It’s worse still that the Basra police held Abdel-Qader for barely a couple of hours, during which time they congratulated him for what he had done before letting him go.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ Abdel-Qader told an Iraqi journalist a couple of weeks later in an interview reported in the Observer on 11 May. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion.’

Perhaps the most depressing of all, however, was what Leila Hussein revealed about the man who killed their child. ‘Even now, I cannot believe my ex-husband was able to kill our daughter,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t a bad person. During our 24 years of marriage, he was never aggressive. But on that day, he was a different person.’

I don’t doubt it, any more than I doubt that the great majority of people who went along with the Nazis, or Stalinism, or slavery, or the Inquisition, weren’t, in essence, ‘bad people’. They were ordinary people led astray by bad ideas. And just as you can’t divorce the actions of Nazis, or Stalinists, or slave traders, or the Inquisition, from the ideologies that underpinned them, neither can you divorce the actions of Abdel-Qader Ali from the ideology that underpinned his killing of his own child. Certainty is the root of all evil – and you don’t get more certain than those who have faith that the hand of the divine can be found in their cruel and wicked deeds.

Nostalgia, squatting and 1968

Nostalgia was the order of the day at the ‘1968 and all that’ conference at London’s Conway Hall yesterday. Not so much ‘the fire next time’ as slippers by the fire. Here was some of the radical cream of ’68 reminiscing for the grandchildren with not much sense of a movement going anywhere in the present day.

Piers Corbyn’s talk on ‘Squatting and 1968’ caught the mood. ‘I was sent to assassinate you in 1975,’ one unreconstructed and oddly youthful-looking anarchist told him ‘in a spirit of friendship and joviality’ (it may have been ‘solidarity’ – it was too hot to hear properly). Piers, then in the International Marxist Group, used to polarise squatter opinion in much the way that Socialist Workers Party activists polarise people today. But his old talk of transitional demands and the international proletariat now just seems an anachronism - and he knows it. Piers kept to the reminiscences and the anecdotes (the police spies who were set to work collecting corrugate iron for barricades, pouring a bucket of water over the sheriff of London, cutting a deal with Ken Livingstone when he was first elected to the GLC). He said himself that the younger people in his audience – a good third of whom hadn’t even been born in 1968 – must feel as he used to when he was listening to his dad talking about the second world war.

Some of the ex-squatters who turned up sounded even more like that war generation. One woman spoke of how there used to be a saying among squatters that you were never more than two streets away from friends (i.e. another squat) in London. ‘I would walk down Commercial Road in east London in those days,’ she said, ‘wearing a thin summer dress and very little else, and I would feel completely safe.’ She didn’t add how the squatters always used to leave their back doors open and pop in and out of each other’s houses all day long borrowing cups of sugar when they needed them, but you get the picture.

What she was talking about, of course, was a sense of common cause and community. People were brought together in adversity through squatting, and through the struggles that have come to be identified with 1968, in the same way that an earlier generation of people were brought together, in greater adversity, during the 1939-45 war. It is one of the great tragedies of recent history – and one of the great failings of ’68 – that those different generations were too often so painfully divided from each other.

Lock me up with Doherty

Pete Doherty and Babyshambles are playing a special comeback gig to celebrate his release from jail at one of my favourite music venues, the Kentish Town Forum, on Tuesday. There are still tickets available at the time of writing, which at £22.50 are a fair bit cheaper than the last London gig Doherty did at Wembley Stadium towards the end of last year. Doherty off the smack and crack is one of the best live performers around (he’s not too bad on it either, though a mite less reliable), so catch him while he's straight. Be warned, though, if you’re over 21: his audience is one of the youngest around and the mosh pit will be full of 14-year-olds.

I’m going to have to miss the gig myself as I’m pre-booked to be blindfolded and tied up in a wheelchair that evening as part of the Battersea Arts Centre’s Burst season. Later, I’m mixing it with the New York performance weirdo Ann Liv Young (sorry, Ann, but the performance is a bit, well, weird) in her ‘high energy explosion of pop songs, movement and mess’. Part of it involves her smearing her naked self with chocolate (or is it ketchup? I forget). The Burst programme says it’s ‘a powerful, open honesty’; my daughter insists it’s soft porn. I’m easy either way.

I’m paying my political dues before my quick Burst of debauchery (there’s a month of it to come, with A Trashy Multi-Artform Bingo Blowout Party at the old town hall that is the Battersea Arts Centre tonight) by turning out for the ‘1968 and all that’ event at London’s Conway Hall today. And tomorrow I’ve got to be in Morden by 8am for the ‘6n6’ swim and run duathlon. Someone should have locked me up with Pete Doherty.

Please miss (for teachers everywhere)

This is one is for teacher's everywhere. My thanks to Melvyn, who sent it to me.

Did you hear about the teacher who was helping one of her primary pupils put on his boots? Even with her pulling and him pushing, the little boots still didn't want to go on.

Finally, when the second boot was on, the teacher had worked up a sweat. She almost cried when the little boy said, 'Please miss, they're on the wrong feet.' She looked and, sure enough, they were.

It wasn't any easier pulling the boots off than it was putting them on. The teacher managed to keep her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on, this time on the right feet.

The little boy then announced, 'These aren't my boots.' The teacher bit her tongue rather than get right in his face and scream, 'Why didn't you say so?' like she wanted to.

Once again she struggled to help him pull the ill-fitting boots off his little feet. No sooner had they got the boots off when he said, 'They're my brother's boots. My mum made me wear them.'

Now she didn't know if she should laugh or cry. She mustered up the little grace and courage she had left to wrestle the boots onto his feet again. Helping him into his coat, she asked, 'Now, where are your mittens?'

'I stuffed them in the toes of my boots,' he replied.

Class B criminals again

Oh dear, as if it wasn’t bad enough that we wasted all those nights damaging our lungs and laughing stupidly on the sofa, now most of my friends and I are Class B criminals again. Actually, most of us are Class A criminals because cannabis isn’t the only drug of choice that we’ve ingested over the years. Apart from anything else, there’s the little matter of magic mushrooms, which got listed alongside crack and heroin the year before last, forcing us all back onto ecstasy and other chemical substitutes for our entheogen experiences.

So now we’re back to where the Wooton Report kicked off in 1969, when its advice to classify cannabis as a class C drug and to make possession a non-arrestable offence went unheeded. Good old Gordon, whose government has set itself the target of getting something wrong at least once a week, has decided to emulate King Harold, formerly of that parish, in ignoring all the expert evidence (not to mention the fact that the number of cannabis consumers has fallen substantially across all age groups since David Blunkett reclassified it as Class C in 2004) and humping it back up to a B drug again.

So that’s up to five years and an unlimited fine for having a spliff, and up to 14 years and an unlimited fine for passing it on. And no excuse if you don’t inhale it yourself: it’s still 14 years for letting someone else do so where you live. (I’ve sent people out the back for the past ten years – can’t stand the smell of smoke in the house – but that doesn’t get me off the hook either.)

I can barely be bothered to marshal the arguments against prohibition and punishment when what you’re dealing with is a public health issue. And it hardly seems worth repeating the obvious point that all this stuff about skunk being so much stronger than the old-style weed is just, well, stuff and nonsense – the extra strength just means people smoke less of it, as they drink less brandy than beer.

I’m curious to know, though, why a Cabinet that was falling over each other not so long ago to say that, yes, they’d smoked a bit when they were younger, but gave up on it without the intervention of the boys in blue, thinks that the best way to deal with kids doing the same today is by criminalising them. Immoral in principle, unworkable in practice: the old adage is as true as ever.

Oh, and by the way, as I once read in Viz, if smoking is so bad for you, why does it cure salmon? Boom, boom!

Cliff Richard and the real spirit of '68

History isn’t always written by the winners. There’s an exhibition at the National Theatre at the moment that consists of photographs and newspaper front pages from 1968. While the photographs, in the main, tell the familiar story of a world in revolt, the newspaper cuttings serve as a reminder that for all that it has been the politics of the left in ’68 that have dominated the 40th anniversary media coverage (give or take the occasional nod towards Enoch Powell and his ‘river Tiber foaming with much blood’), you could paint a very different picture of what really happened in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, where the right fought back and the left didn’t win.

One of the front pages on display at the National features the huge demonstration in Paris on 30 May 1968 in support of the French president, Charles de Gaulle. It was quite likely the biggest demonstration of the year, not only in France but anywhere in the world. And of course it was De Gaulle who won a landslide victory in the election he called for the end of June. So there's at least a case to be made that '68 should be remembered not as the annus mirabilis of revolt but as the apogee of reaction.

I was set to thinking about this by the news that Cliff Richard is demanding that he be awarded the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest trophy retrospectively for his song ‘Congratulations’, which came second at the time. This follows a Spanish television documentary, which suggested that only a vote-rigging plot by the dictator Franco prevented Richard from winning.

The idea of Cliff Richard, of all people, being conspired against by a fascist dictator in the midst of all the turmoil of the time is just the sort of surreal snippet that would have appealed to the ‘Marxist, Groucho Tendency’ of ’68. So maybe it’s time to revisit a few other cultural phenomena from the year of ‘les évènements’ and see what else we ought to be marking in the anniversary commemorations. A couple of multiple-choice questions as starters for ten, then, to see how you shape up on your cultural studies.

What was Britain’s best-selling album of ’68?
a) The Sound of Music
b) The Beatles’ White Album
c) Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding

Which of these singles sold the most copies in 1968?
a) Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin
b) I Pretend by Des O’Connor
c) Lady Madonna by the Beatles

The answer, in both cases, is that their sales match the order in which they appear above.

Goodbye to Ken

London, my London, looked little different this morning, when I tried to shake off the mares of the night before (Bojo and the BNP at City Hall) in the Regent’s Park summer series 10k race. I did about as well as the Labour Party on Dismayday, leaden legs limping lumpenly to the finish line.

The sun was shining, the plane trees were fruiting, the bus lanes were still functioning, there was still the same myriad mix of people, united in our variety. This is the city I never dreamt I would stay in when I first arrived here from the provinces. And this is the city I have grown to love and call home.

For someone who likes nothing better than solitude and the wild open spaces, I have become curiously attached to this humming, heaving metropolis. It was only the other day that I was telling someone that when I go I want my ashes to be given to a turning tide on the riverside beach at a Waterloo sunset, when the golden sunlight reflects back from the river to the sky, from Westminster looking west to St Paul’s looking east.

It’s on this stretch of river that Ken Livingstone aimed the rockets from the old GLC’s final firework display towards the parliament of Maggie Thatcher. It seems like an eternity ago now that he so ired the Tory harridan that she abolished London-wide local government altogether. Tony Blair brought it back and when he tried to keep Ken out of it, it was Ken that gave New Labour its first bloody nose instead.

Livingstone wasn’t always the nicest man on London’s political map – no one who rises so high in politics ever can be. He only became leader of the GLC in 1981 by executing a putsch against the man who had led Labour to election victory within 24 hours of the polls closing. He could be rough, tough, sharp-tongued and abrasive. Accusing a Jewish reporter of behaving ‘like a concentration camp guard’ wasn’t the most politic of remarks; nor was his refusal to grit his teeth and apologise afterwards. He made lasting enemies, often unnecessarily, often in his own ranks. I was once on the receiving end of a hungover Ken’s caustic; I know what it feels like, I always voted Ken without illusions.

But London without him at its helm is a lessened city. His backing for minorities, his belief in diversity, hoisted a rainbow flag to which we could rally long before such opinions became mainstream; when to say something like ‘Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything’, as he did, was to invite political purgatory. To make the now obvious point that there would be no peace in Northern Ireland until you started talking to the ‘men of violence’ showed bravery at the time beyond the call of political duty.

When Thatcher and the hard-right Tories held sway over the government of Britain, when she spoke of the miners as the ‘enemy within’, or of people feeling ‘swamped’ by blacks and Asians, we could say of London, ‘Not here, not us’, and Livingstone would offer a different voice. When Blair took us to war under false pretences, and when that war brought bombers onto our tubes and buses, Livingstone led us in a different vision of London, what it is and what it represents.

London, despite everything, is a far, far better place to live than when I first arrived here when Ken was starting his climb up the greasy pole of politics. And many of the improvements of the past eight years – from the congestion charge and public transport to community policing and affordable housing – are down to Livingstone in particular.

I thought Boris Johnson was commendably gracious in his acceptance speech last night (when you’re a winner you can afford to be). But the best we can hope for from him is that he doesn’t mess up on what Livingstone has begun. It’s hard to imagine Bojo being so brave or imaginative in his own right. And the people who voted for him to give Gordon Brown a kicking, or because they want the right to drive and park where and when they like in London, or because they think Livingstone had become too arrogant, or because they think there are too many immigrants moving in, or because they’re sick to death of young yobboes, or because they’re worried about their mortgages, or because they think bendy buses are a disaster, or because they’re apoplectic about speed humps, or because they never see a police officer round where they live, or because they don’t like that new skyscraper, or because the neighbours play their music too loud – well, it will be interesting to see how Bojo deals with that ragbag of complainants now that he has to do something rather than simply join them.

As for the Evening Standard, how on earth are they going to fill their pages now that they’ve won their 30-year war on Ken?

Election analysis: they won, we lost

One of the joys of no longer being a full-time working political journalist (or activist, for that matter) is that I don't have to wait around for election results and then knock out what passes for sophisticated analysis. So I'm off out now to make the most of London avant le deluge. (Actually I've got a hot date with my daughter's cooking and the last two episodes of Heroes.)

For anyone passing this way who was hoping for that election analysis, here it is. They won, we lost. This is largely because they got more votes than we did.

White rabbits, acid and Boris Johnson

White rabbits. Here’s to a bountiful Beltane. I’m not feeling great at the moment. A night of magical thinking was followed by a night of simple nightmares. My lungs hurt, I’ve got what my daughter used to call a ‘flipping headache’ and we lost by about 38-3 at the Power League on the banks of the North Circular yesterday evening. It was pissing down with rain, unseasonally cold and someone had added an extra couple of feet to either side of our goal. I travelled back home shivering, unshowered and unchanged in sodden football shirt and shorts.

I listened to Liverpool succumb to Chelski on Five Live, edited a piece about healthy food and parents inspired to action by Jamie’s School Dinners and stuffed myself with comfort cake and chocolate. I took the ensuing sugar crash as a cue to go to bed, where I slept fitfully for all of, oh, 30 minutes before I woke with a start replaying the third Chelski goal – or was it the fifth one we conceded? – with my left foot.

I gave up counting sheep when I stopped wanting to be a shepherd. Now I count the number of times I wake up during the night. I got to 26 last night before the buses started over the speed humps and it was time to get up again.

In the meantime I’d dreamt of Basel and bicycles and acid and Albert Hofman, who died on the same day that I was about to start vortexing about death (like Hofman, I must have had a vorgefühl); and I was tripping with Ken Livingstone, who’d just lost the mayoral election to Bojo by one vote. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Ken that I’d not bothered to vote, or that Bojo had finished the acid, or that there were now Thatcher-headed hydras scouring the streets of London, seeking out bendy buses and turning them to stone.

Ken was crying, as he once made me (it’s a story for another time). ‘All I ever wanted was to be mayor of London,’ he sobbed. Albert Hofman came past on his bicycle again, saying ‘You should see the trees, he’s chopping them down.’ Syd Barrett said he’d written a song about it – the bicycle, not the trees. ‘You can sing it if you like,’ he said with a huge scarecrow grin, which turned into a tube tunnel. And then there was Bojo, being driven by Bob Crow, roaring towards us with his white locks flowing. Except they were no longer white, but scaly green, each one a snake’s head spitting venom, which wasn’t venom but a red liquid, which wasn’t liquid but a solid thread, which turned blue and dissolved as soon as you touched it.

And then I woke up and Ken hadn’t lost and Bojo hadn’t won and Syd Barrett had gone back to his book on the shelf and it had stopped raining and I realised it was May Day and I said ‘White Rabbits’ in the hope that it will bring London luck this election day. Nothing to do with acid at all.