Hello and welcome to the Eyecatching Words podcast, your weekly aural (with an A) magazine with news, features and music from deep in the heart of the UK, as seen by a white privileged 65 year old Brit who tries not to be typical of his demographic.
As usual I will be taking a look at my personal week, dipping an anxious toe into the ice cold water that is the news of the world, and selectively looking through the batshit that modern life produces in abundance.
The three feature articles this week are: an extract from my journal from December 2020 bemoaning the failures of the British High Street in the year of pandemic; a look at the Generation Z concept of Delulu; and lastly some thoughts about the benefits and pitfalls of talking to strangers.
And finally the “dancing in the kitchen” playout this week is Me and Julio down by the school yard by Paul Simon.
So let’s kick off with a look at my week.
MY WEEK
One of the downsides of retirement is that when you are ill you are denied the pleasure of calling in sick and settling back in front of the TV with a smug feeling knowing you are getting paid for it. Not that I’m fond of being ill, and the head cold I’ve been suffering with this week is a real pain, one of the snottiest on record, and one which got in the way of my planned outings to Brighton and London.
We did venture out locally on Thursday, to the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley where we have been members for decades. We use it mainly as a park to walk in, as were are not serious gardeners, but on this occasion we discovered that they have a lending library which I joined. Expect these podcasts in future to be stuffed with obscure words such as mulch , cultivar and ericacious, and and the latin names for shrubs. My favourite so far is Prunella Vulgaris which sounds like the name of a character out of a short story by P.G. Worcester.
Going back to the library at Wisley, I took out a biography of Vita Sackville-West, a famous gardener whose property at Sissinghurst you can visit as it is now in the tender care of the National Trust. There wasn’t much gardening in the book but lots of salacious detail and anecdotes. Sackville-West was an icon of the Bloomsbury Group and basically a privileged Edwardian brat who had many love affairs, most famously with Virginia Woolf over a decade in the 1930s. On one occasion she dressed as a man and took a lesbian lover for an overnight stay in Orpington. I didn’t even know it was possible to stay in Orpington although my sister does a bit of air b’n’b there these days.
Sackville-West also had a cook who drank a cocktail of eau de cologne and gin. When supplies of eau de cologne were scarce during World War Two she got depressed and ran away. Who needs Monty Python when things like this happen in real life?
Our local village Christmas fair on Saturday afternoon was pleasant enough although predictable. There was a stall run by the local community fridge and we chatted to the people there as my wife is constantly on the lookout for voluntary work that I can do in my retirement.
The Christmas tree got decorated on Saturday. I have a couple of favourite tree ornaments which I look forward to hanging every year. One of these I call Santa Rabbi because he looks like a seventeenth century merger of Father Christmas and a Jewish priest, with a long and straggly beard, and flowing patchwork robes that Albus Dumbledore would not be unhappy with.
On Sunday we went into our local town centre just as a pro-Palestinian march was taking place. The problem with these demos is the range of opinions and the number of camp followers rather than people who have done their homework. As an example one of the organisers I spoke to said a two state solution was unworkable whereas one of the speakers said it was a must-do! At least there were no out and out anti-Semitic statements on view which we would have challenged. And for the record I think Israel should stop the war and withdraw and there should be an international peacekeeping force to keep order in Gaza and on the West Bank and to stop the Israeli fundamentalists from encroaching. Hamas should be suppressed and Netanyahu should resign. But it’s a bloody mess (literally) and today all we got was familiar tropes and no solutions.
THE WEEK IN THE WORLD
So let’s talk about the tragedy that is still unfolding at the Eastern end of the mediterranean. The fragile truce between Hamas and Israel broke on Friday and the IDF took up arms again with what seems like renewed vigour. Apparently three quarters of Gaza’s population, 1.5 million people, have been displaced. I find this almost unbelievable. That would be like the whole of Birmingham and Liverpool leaving their homes to seek safety elsewhere, their cities reduced mostly to rubble, the infrastructure of power, water and sewage largely destroyed. The numbers of non-combatant deaths is huge. I do not see how this can be allowed to continue.
Cop out 28 took place and as I predicted last week it has turned into little more than a marketing function for the end of the world show. But reading the reports of it was depressing because there is clearly no will to getting the job done. When someone like Alok Sharma ends up in tears because the statements coming out of the conference have been watered down so much, then you know you are in trouble.
Lot of famous deaths this week. Henry Kissinger. Shane McGowan. Alastair Darling. Glenys Kinnock. Sticky Vicky. Kissinger was another of the Jewish emigres whose family left Germany in the 1930s due to the emerging antisemitism when he was ten years old. He always retained his German accent even when conscripted into the army to fight against the country of his birth in his early twenties. I can’t imagine what that was like but he was by all accounts a fervent American Patriot with a morbid fear of the breakdown of society. Shane McGowan was rather the opposite. His life was chaotic and a mess but undoubtedly a talented one. He had the disadvantage of being born on Christmas Day 1957, just nine months before me. I never think sharing your birthday with Jesus works out well. Maybe that is why he was always trying to draw attention to himself. But there is doubt that he gave us one of the greatest Christmas songs of all time:
[Fairytale of New York extract]
Alastair Darling was a great “What might have been” in British politics as he shone in Gordon Brown’s cabinet then disappeared in the austerity years and operated only in the shadows, mentoring Rachel Reeves only recently on how to tackle the tories legacy of under-investment. As for Glenys Kinnock she was not just Neil Kinnock’s wife but a firebrand for justice in her own right.
Sticky Vicky, in a very long artistic career spanning five decades, was an unusual performer. Six million people are reported to have seen her stage act in Benidorm where she pulled surprising objects out of her vagina. Apparently she could shoot ping pong balls across the stage with a couple of contractions of the appropriate muscles, which I would have thought would have made her a natural for the national lottery. She died of uterine cancer which makes you wonder if she may have overdone it a bit, but on the other hand she lived to be eighty years old.
THE BATSHIT WEEK
This week we are going to play a game called choose your body part when describing the state of the nation. A think tank recently criticised tory economic policy saying it had given Britain a broken leg. Jeremy Hunt retorted saying it was more of a sprained ankle. So send me your views on which body part metaphor best describes the state of Britain today. For my part I think Jeremy has made a mistake in getting involved at all. He has now admitted there is something wrong but it is not as bad as other people think, so the field is wide open. Is the UK a lame duck or has it just got webbed feet?
This is not the first time limbs and things have crept into political discourse however. Decades ago The Guardian ran a competition to see who could get the most body parts into a Guardian headline. At that time the leader of the Labour opposition was Michael Foot, so the following letter places it firmly in the early nineteen eighties:
SIr,
Regarding your recent invitation to get as many body parts as possible into a Guardian headline I offer the following. Imagine if the leader of the Labour Party overheard that a trendy minister at the Ministry of Defence had been to see an exhibition of Japanese caskets. The headline would read thus: “Foot ‘ears hip arms body head eyes shin toe chests.”
Big news story in the batshit week was the learner driver who only passed the theory test at their sixtieth attempt. I’m surprised the record is that low to be honest but I do feel sorry for them. I would probably fail it a few times if I had to do it now.
Finally an article in the New York Times caught my eye as it referred to new drugs that could give your pet dog extra years of life. Scientists have already created longer-lived worms, flies and mice by tweaking key aging-related genes. Now an application has been made to the FDA in America to cheat doggy death with expensive pills which rich Americans would no doubt take up whatever the cost. The 64 thousand dollar question was articulated by Rebecca Walker, a philosopher and bioethicist at the University of North Carolina who asked “Is it in their best interest to live a little bit longer when there’s some risk to taking these drugs? Or is it really in the best interest of their owners, who are very attached to them?” The article glibly notes that dogs cannot give their consent. No really? But I’m sure I’ve seen episodes of Lassie where he does one paw for yes, two for no…
FEATURES
A day in the life: 1st December 2020 – A window on the world
Feeling flat about all the bad news from the retail sector today. They’ll have to start calling it the low street rather than the high street soon. These big names are a part of your personal history. I remember in 1981 when I was employed as a nursing assistant at the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell, an Australian guy I was working with called Tony came in dressed in a really nice shirt. He was a bit of a hunk anyway, the sort of Aussie who you can imagine strutting along Bondi with a board under his arm and throwing Joey Trebianni style lines at women from behind a wide mouthed grin. But clothes maketh the man and he looked pretty damn hot. “I found this place called Top Shop in London” he said. “Really nice stuff. You should check it out”. I was buying discounted t shirts and jeans in an old converted cinema on Denmark Hill at the time and having no joy in my relationships with women, something that the typical proto-incell male ego attributed to the way I dressed. I mean, it couldn’t be my actual body or any personality defect, surely?
My mate Roger, a flamboyant and cheeky Irishman who has spent the last thirty five years playing trombone in the Jools Holland band, got there first, and that weekend appeared at a party in a Top Shop striped coloured jacket which he carried off with swagger. I had to have one, but it just didn’t work. In John Ruskin Street where I lived the local youth hurled empty coke cans at me and yelled that I looked like Joseph in a cut down version of the multicoloured dreamcoat. But I still loved the shop, and remember fondly the skin tight white trousers and blue plastic shoes with white trim that (again) failed me in the dating game, but at least meant I was a loser in contemporary dress (this not long after Jo Brand, who I worked with at the time, called me “Man at C&A”, such was my lack of sartorial snap).
Fast forward a couple decades and I am sitting at the bottom of the escalator at Top Shop’s flagship store in Oxford Street. My teenage daughter is running wild on every level (literally) and I am physically and mentally exhausted. The turnover is startling; every minute hundreds of people were entering and exiting the store in a Dantesque vision of retail hell. It was like watching an infernal conveyor belt of stressed out consumers doomed to an eternity of shopping without ever dropping. The love affair was over. By now I was buying my trousers and shirts in Debenhams and internet shopping was something I had yet to discover.
I’m sorry where things have landed. Capitalism doesn’t really care and Top Shop is going the way of Thomas Cook, Woolworths, Allders, British Home Stores and the like. Tens of thousands of jobs on the line and a lot of memories. And Debenhams is on the rack too (no pun intended). Where will I buy my trousers now?
Someone needs to come up with a plan for the high street that realises that shopping isn’t just about shopping. It’s about connecting, about having coffee, about colourful window displays and bumping into friends, about sitting down and enjoying food, books and conversation, about fairy lights in winter and street performers in summer. We need to raise the quality of our shopping centres, get rid of the cars, and align the retail experience with the cultural and the environmental. We need to make shopping fun, sociable and much more artisanal – incentivise the unusual and the good. Local shopkeepers of the world unite, the high street has nothing to lose but its chains.
One thing this year has taught us is that staying indoors has its limits. We are sociable animals, not economic ones. We go shopping for the same reason that we go to galleries, cinemas and football matches – to see the world move around us and take us away from our own obsessive thought processes. The reason people like “window shopping” is because they need a window on the world, even if they don’t have much to spend.
Delulu
The concept of positive thinking has a long and chequered history, one in which it has been derided on the one hand for being nothing more than vacuous false confidence as opposed to the more generous view that it can lift an individual and carry them forward to new opportunities. Recently a new phrase has entered the lexicon of Generation Z: delulu. This means being optimistic and positive to the point of self delusion. But not in a bad way. Struggling with the concept? Let’s go back to basics and start with what characterises Generation Z. Born between 1996 and 2010 this is the modern young adult generation for whom life before the internet and social media is ancient history. To put it another way, they live mostly on line, making up 60 percent of Tik Tok’s billion users. But they are also the generation with the least positive outlook and the highest prevalence of mental illness of any generation in recent history, having grown up with everything from 9/11 to the climate crisis and Covid-19 in their short lives to date.
For a generation that is constantly worried about the state of the planet and the lack of opportunities in the years ahead, it is perhaps not surprising that that the idea of pursuing a dream irrespective of reality has taken hold. Clock this from Forbes magazine:
Originating within the sphere of social media, specifically TikTok, the buzzword “delulu” initially centered around dating—a strong belief that someone could be interested in you, even when all signs pointed elsewhere. Over time, it has evolved into a versatile mindset, with people applying it to various domains of life. It’s about faking confidence so convincingly that you can turn your aspirations into reality, even when the odds seem stacked against you. In many ways, “delulu” is an offshoot of the manifestation craze that has swept through social media in recent years. However, “delulu” takes the concept a step further by translating these manifestations into real-life actions, based on no real evidence whatsoever.
Perhaps this level of self delusion is only to be expected given that the alternative for a member of generation Z is to be psychologically crushed from the moment you wake up in the morning by the sheer oppressing weight of all the bad shit in the world. I mean let’s be honest. Reality these days doesn’t have a huge amount to recommend it. Being unrealistic or overly idealistic when it comes to dreaming about a good life for yourself just means you are happier tricking yourself into being positive. It’s all about positive affirmations and thinking, which are critical to happiness. Or as Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote:
Happy talkin’ talkin’, happy talk
Talk about things you’d like to do
You’ve got to have a dream
If you don’t have a dream
How you gonna make a dream come true?
Those are lyrics from the musical South Pacific which came out in 1958, proving that licensing yourself to follow a dream is not actually a new concept.
But delusional thinking is not limited to generation Z. Right now you are listening to a podcast produced by the most ordinary of sixty somethings who week-in, week-out has to convince himself that he can change the world, even a tiny little bit, by broadcasting his thoughts and opinions. Welcome to my world. Welcome to my own private version of delulu.
Talking to Strangers
The older I get the more uninhibited I am about talking to people. It’s not just me. Everywhere I go I have noticed that it is usually older people who initiate conversations in public places. Younger people tend to join in only when they have worked out whether you are drunk, mad or on drugs or not. The bad news for them is that getting older is a combination of all three of those things in terms of you not giving a fuck about what people think about you.
As younger generations live more and more of their life on line it can seem daunting to initiate a conversation. A third element is often needed to allow it to happen. Imagine this. You are in a queue in a shop when a man walks in dressed as a rabbit, stops in the middle of the shop and then says in a loud voice “damn. I’ve come out without my wallet” and marches off to the door in a huff. That is the perfect way to get a conversation going between strangers, focusing on a bizarre external event that everyone can safely comment on.
One of the reasons why we need this external element is that being talked to by strangers without any good reason is an inherently suspicious act. People are worried about violating a social norm, fearing that they won’t have anything to say, or being anxious about talking to someone from another group and being attacked for saying the wrong thing. Joe Keohane wrote a book called The Power of Strangers and concluded as follows:
“We miss a lot by being afraid of strangers. Talking to strangers – under the right conditions – is good for us, good for our neighborhoods, our towns and cities, our nations, and our world. Talking to strangers can teach you things, deepen you, make you a better citizen, a better thinker, and a better person. It’s a good way to live. But it’s more than that. In a rapidly changing, infinitely complex, furiously polarised world, it’s a way to survive.”
Research has been conducted on an international basis. The findings of these studies have been remarkably consistent: many people dread talking to strangers, but when they do, they tend to come away feeling good: happier, less lonely, more optimistic, more empathetic, and with a stronger sense of belonging to their communities. It actually makes them feel safer, providing ready affirmation that the people around them are well meaning. And incredibly that was true of London just as much as it was off small towns in America, despite the UK capital having a reputation for being unfriendly. So much so in fact that London resident Rachel Cunliffe wrote a whole article about it in the New Statesman:
It may be crowded and polluted and overpriced, but it is also teeming with life and home to every type of community you could dream of. Wherever you’re from, whatever you do, you can find your tribe here. We’re a city of subcultures, of neighbourhoods built around interests rather than geography. Board game cafés, church choirs, gay badminton teams, fetish clubs, book groups – and yes, vegan noodle bars too. Your local pub may turn out to have a weekly ukulele singalong night, or you might find a trance rave happening on Hampstead Heath. And wherever you go, there will be people there ready to welcome you, who don’t care what your accent is or what postcode you were born in but who are simply happy to have found one of their own.
Eyecatching 