Gutter politics

Forget about Barack Obama and John McCain for a moment. Politics will really hit the gutter in the US general election on 4 November in the form of Proposition R on the San Francisco ballot. The proposition, launched earlier this year by the 'Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco', has now been officially certified by the San Francisco Department of Elections, after obtaining almost double the number of signatories from voters needed to qualify for the ballot.

If passed, Proposition R will rename the city’s Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant as the George W Bush Sewage Plant. The new name would be adopted on 20 January 2009 at the same time that the new president is sworn in. Win or lose, supporters are planning a synchronised flush of San Francisco toilets to mark the moment at which Bush leaves office. Local Republicans, in a city where Bush won only 15.3 per cent of votes in 2004, say they are taking the piss.

Evensong in Leominster

I went to church while I was out and about this summer. That’s ‘to church’ rather than ‘to a church’, just to be clear about it. I do the latter quite a lot, checking out the architecture, browsing the gravestones. But apart from weddings and funerals I can’t remember the last time I went to a service.

It was evensong, Sunday, late August at St Peter and Paul’s, Leominster. It’s a big church that is almost as wide as it is long by virtue of having two naves. One is plain Norman (round arches, no decoration), the other high gothic (pointed arches, lots of adornment). You can sit in the middle and get an instant history lesson in the development of English church architecture.

It was pouring with rain, as it was almost everywhere this summer, and the roof (sadly neither Norman nor gothic, but a dull restoration) was leaking. The pews are gone and the hundreds of chairs that replaced them were empty. The service was taking place in the far corner, by the altar. Including the vicar and me (and since I sat at the back, I don’t really count), there were seven people present. One of those doubled up as the organist. If any of them were under 60, they’ve aged badly.

I stayed because, well, it seemed rude to leave, it was very wet indeed outside and Leominster really is a very lovely and interesting church. I paid special attention to the sermon to see what it might have to offer this minuscule gathering of the faithful in this place that would once have hosted many hundreds.

The vicar had taken as his lesson Matthew 15:21-28. Matthew relates how Jesus was asked for help by a woman – a Canaanite – whose daughter is possessed by a demon. First, Jesus ignores her. (‘But he answered her not a word’). Then his disciples ask him to get rid of her because she’s making a scene. (‘Send her away; for she crieth after us.’) So Jesus tells her he’s only here to help Jews (‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’). When she persists, he calls her a dog. (‘It is not meet to take the children [of God]’s bread and to cast it to dogs [like you].’) Only when she says that even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table does he finally relent and cure her daughter.

This is one of those disquieting passages from the bible in which people are required to jump through all manner of hoops to demonstrate their subservience before God, or in this case his son, deigns to be nice to them. But the vicar at Leominster made a reasonable stab at turning it into a lesson on our modern-day treatment of minorities, with special reference to Romanies in Italy, asylum seekers in Britain – and a drunk who’d recently tapped him for a couple of quid in his own churchyard.

From what he said, the vicar seemed a decent sort of man, and I don’t suppose there were many places on a wet and windy night in Leominster this summer where you’d have found someone wrestling with moral issues about what to do when a woman from an unpopular minority group starts screaming at you for help in the street. Do you, he asked the elderly few who made up his congregation, a) ignore her; b) tell her to bugger off; c) say you only give to your own kind; or d) call her names?

And, he also asked, if you decide to help her, do you need to be sure that her daughter really is possessed by a demon and she isn’t just spinning you a hard-luck yarn before you do so? Well?

The corporate vandals of Tinsley

There was something faintly satisfying about the fact that one of the Tinsley cooling towers refused to lie down and die after this morning’s 3am demolition job by the E On energy company. The 76-metre high towers, situated just 17 metres from the M1, were well known to anyone who has ever lived in, visited or passed by Sheffield. The ‘Angel of the North’ artist, Antony Gormley, called them ‘the Stonehenge of the carbon age’ and campaigners have battled to keep them as icons of our industrial heritage ever since E On made it clear it wanted them gone.

Those campaigners succeeded in getting the towers selected as one of seven sites for Channel 4’s forthcoming Big Art Project. (You can read more about the project, the Tinsley towers and much else which I am involved with as a writer, in my article ‘Public art and Perspex panels’ in the current issue of Red Pepper.) Today’s early-morning explosives brought down one of the towers but left part of the other still standing - like a single finger stuck up to the corporate vandals who blew it up.

Roll on 2012

Of course I know all the arguments about the cost, the human rights issues, the corporatism, the exploitation of athletic achievement for chauvinistic purposes. But there’s still something about the Olympics that shines through it all and when that gorgeous torch went out in the Beijing sky an hour or so ago, I felt more than a tinge of emotion about the whole affair.

I think, on balance, it was right that the Olympics went to China. I think it was right, too, that there were widespread protests, most notably as the Olympic flame made its way around the world from Greece to Beijing. I think that both the presence of the Games in China and the protests against them can only help the cause of liberalisation and democracy there.

Am I trying to have my sporting and political cake and eat it too? I don’t believe so.

There are few sporting, cultural or other events of any description, even in our globalised world, in which a commitment to contact, communication and friendship between nations is raised so high – and none in which it reaches so many people. When it happens, it’s worth cherishing, for all the flaws.

And the opportunity to see human beings performing at the very peak of physical achievement is a thing of absolute beauty. We may not be gods, but as a celebration of life it's right up there with invention, music, poetry, drama and the very best of human endeavour. Roll on London 2012.

Build the revolution, not muscle!

Back to London in time for the Olympic track and field programme. No offence to the cyclists, sailors, swimmers and shooters (I’ll return to the beach volleyball bum smackers on another occasion), but this is what really got the Greeks going to Mount Olympus two and a half millennia ago and it’s still the main attraction for spectators in 2008.

Not for Alex Callinicos of Socialist Worker, though, I notice. ‘Two weeks of corporate sponsored flag waving in honour of a bunch of muscle-bound dullards’ is how he describes the Olympics in the latest edition of his paper.

Actually, the Olympic flag waving is one of the few places in modern sport where the corporates are still kept at a polite distance. Strange though it may seem given the levels of sponsorship that do go into the Games, no corporate logos, images or advertising are permitted inside the venues or anywhere near the winners’ podiums.

Be that as it may, since when was being a ‘muscle-bound dullard’ worthy of the critical condemnation of one of the chief theoreticians of 21st-century Trotskyism? Did Callinicos have a traumatic childhood experience with bodybuilders in his native Zimbabwe? Is the SWP about to launch an Anti-Muscle League (interesting people only to apply)?

In case you were wondering ...

The absence of posts is because I’m currently wending my way through a grand tour of England (and, from tonight, Wales) in the wet. I’ve rain-tested the water-resistant qualities of just about every fabric known to man, been soaked to the skin so many times that my skin has started to dissolve and just wrung out my socks in readiness for a weekend of long-distance trail events.

Last weekend, the river Kent in full spate forced those of us competing in the CancerCare Cross Bay half marathon to turn back half way across Morecambe Bay (which meant subjecting ourselves to a five-mile sand-whipping as we ran back against the wind). Other highlights of my summer include performing one-man mountain rescue missions – of myself, among others – on the Scafell summit, and eating my way single-handedly through an entire barrel of the most disgustingly, sickeningly, sugary selection of sweets ever to have been consumed in one sitting. An achievement of truly Olympian proportions: watch out Wales, I will not leave without a medal.

The South Bank and 'Supergeordie'

Quality busking and street theatre, display hula-hooping and Parkour, pavement artists and sand sculptures, a Critical Mass bike ride and a Reclaim the Beach party, free foyer gigs in the Festival Hall and the National. And ten-quid tickets for some of the best theatre in Britain with seats going spare all summer.

I could live on the South Bank. In fact, I did live there for a week or two just before the 1987 election, when the Observer thought it would be mighty cool to have me and a photographer hang out with the rough sleepers and see how they viewed the forthcoming Third Election of Thatcher in Cardboard City.

I’d done it before (sleeping rough, squatting, that sort of thing), which was partly why the Observer asked me. So it was no big deal bedding down with the real dossers, especially knowing I could sneak off home to my cosy, recently-allocated housing association flat if the sleeping got too rough. The photographer wasn’t so keen on the prospect, though. Concerned about what might happen to his gear if he stayed out after bedtime, he’d head off back to Brighton each evening before the last train left (ludicrously early, then as now, so he’d be gone before most of the cardboard came out).

Down And Out in Paris and London it wasn’t. I’d drained my well of homelessness stories so dry after a decade of writing on the subject that in my eagerness to find a different angle I didn’t spot that the photographer and I were being brilliantly, gloriously had by one of the subjects of our reportage.

He called himself ‘Supergeordie’. A middle-aged, bull-necked, bulging-biceped ex-serviceman in a wheelchair, he claimed to have completed some unfeasible number of marathons as a disabled athlete but had only a super-sized cardboard box under the South Bank concrete to call home. Supergeordie was so brazen in his boasting, giant banners celebrating his athletic achievements and announcing the commencement of his next one – a round-Britain-by-wheelchair Britain charity fundraiser – that it seemed inconceivable that he was lying.

But he was. Or, let’s be charitable about this, as his doctor was when we heard from him subsequently, and say that he was fantasising. Either way, on the day that he was due to set off on his fundraiser, the day after our photo-reportage appeared in the paper, Supergeordie did a runner, leaving his assembled friends, supporters, well-wishers, television camera crews – and me – to hang around like big daft drips in a sauna.

I’d like to say that I’ve never been taken in by a con-artist or a sob-story since, but once bitten the sharks can smell the blood. Suffice to say that I can never be completely scathing about the people who fall for those Nigerian emails asking for their bank account details so that the sender can deposit a few million dollars in them.

As for the South Bank, which is where I started this little meander, Cardboard City is long gone – though the homeless, of course, are not. Sometimes, as I did this weekend, I wonder what happened to Supergeordie and his wheelchair and his fantasies. It would make a great play.

Barack Obama is a Muslim

I’ve lived my life one consonant short of being a dickhead, so I sympathise with Barack Obama’s problems over his name. If a simple misspelling could help the Republican cause this autumn, I’m sure Fox News would be happy to have him down as Osama as often as they can get away with it.

There are some in the Obama camp who believe there is a deliberate attempt to make people think their candidate is a Muslim. In a country where the arts of black propaganda managed to persuade a substantial number of voters last time around that a decorated war hero was a coward and a documented draft dodger a hero, this is far from incredible.

Media commentator Roy Greenslade gives an example in his blog today of what he says is ‘just one of the examples of the way in which the US media is helping to relay the “Obama is a Muslim” lie to American voters’. He describes as a ‘disgraceful oversight’ an MSNBC Live report that ran for 25 seconds with the caption ‘Obama Is a Muslim & He Will Not Win Because of That’ over a discussion about what people think of him in Baghdad. The caption was a ‘purported quote from an Iraqi engineer’, though you can tell from the ‘purported’ that Greenslade isn’t convinced.

There’s no doubt that branding Obama/Osama a Muslim, even subliminally, would cost him votes. Polls suggest that while being black is now less of a problem than being a woman, about as many people would vote for a Muslim in the US as for an atheist, which is as low as it gets before you start asking about crack heads and child molesters. But is there a concerted right-wing conspiracy – or, to put it more mildly, campaign – as some of Obama’s supporters are suggesting?

Well, there are certainly plenty of far-right anti-Obama people out there in the blogosphere who are doing their best to create one. Greenslade himself has attracted one or two. I am reliably informed that the following post in the comments section of his blog is not satire:

‘It's not a big lie – Obama bin Osama IS Muslim – probably a Wahabiest, as it were. He and his radical spouse first will award “reparations” to blacks – per capita annuities of many tens of thousands of dollars. Then they will begin slowly to institute Islam. How will they overcome a Christian congress? With their Democratic allies, basically an anti-American party, they will pack the supreme court with radicals who will then see to it than Islam becomes the state religion in all but name. Muslim countries will receive gobs of military assistance and other aid. Unbiased observers won't recognize America after the first two years of an Osama bin Obama administration. Be afraid, Europe. Be very afraid. We're in danger of becoming Muslim even before you achieve pure socialism and adherence to Allah.’

Pitmen Painters is back

Pitmen Painters transfers to the Littleton Theatre from 27 January 2009. Tickets go on public sale tomorrow (23 July). If you only go to the theatre once next year, make sure not to miss this. And don't dawdle - this will sell out fast.

Flog me with nettles

It’s a jungle out there. A wet summer has brought with it an explosion of growth and a plague of mosquitoes. Many more warm winters and malaria won’t be far behind.

Forget about biting insects for the time being, though. Global warming’s current seasonal aberration is eight-feet high nettles. I had to run through a field of the things yesterday as part of the 14th Fairlands Valley Challenge. The nettles aren’t meant to be part of the challenge, any more than the tree-like brambles that have grown up among them, trying to entangle and trip you, like some flesh-tearing triffids. It’s a trail marathon, not a rainforest survival test, and it’s in Hertfordshire, not the Congo.

I’ve never seen nettles like these in such size and number. I’ve heard tell of New Zealand’s Urtica ferox, 'ongaonga' to the locals, a tree nettle said to grow to five metres in height and capable of killing a fully-grown man with a single glance. But these fat-fruited, heavy-headed, hirsute stingers near Stevenage (can a nettle be hirsute? You wouldn’t ask if you’d seen them) were something new to me. And definitely not what you need at the 20-mile mark.

There is, apparently, a practice called urtication – flogging with nettles – which sounds very handy as a form of S&M gameplay, but is also supposed to be a longstanding folk-remedy for rheumatism. It’s based on the principle that by inducing wholesale inflammation of the skin you can provide short-term relief from rheumatic pain – presumably because the nettle stings hurt even more than the rheumatism.

This is the 'Stop your crying or I'll give you something to really cry about' theory of pain relief. There's nothing like breaking both elbows to take your mind off spraining your wrist. (Believe me, I've done it.) And there's nothing like running through a field of eight-feet high nettles to take your mind off the tiredness in your legs. It works for all of, oh, at least as long as it takes you to get out of the field.

A friend tells me that St Benedict, of Benedictine Order fame, used to strip off his clothes and roll about in nettles as a cure for ‘impure thoughts’. But I don’t suppose he was running a marathon at the time.