The Book of Dave: in search of psycho-voltage

I've just finished reading Will Self's "The Book of Dave". In a nutshell, it's the story of Dave Rudman, an estranged, deranged and deluded London taxi driver who writes a cathartic, misogynistic thesis to his son. He buries the book, and centuries later it is discovered in a post-deluge age where it spawns a fanatical, fundamentalist religion.

Pretty much par for the course for Will Self, then, you might say. There are a staggering number of facets and ways to interpret this book. Readng a few reviews of the book, it is primarily seen as a biting satire of religions: the ease with which passing moods and memoirs of a few people in history can be magnified and mauled in the future. Self does this satire unnervingly well. Indeed, it strikes me that the more self-contained and fully-formed someone's thesis on life, the more extremist it probably is, because it will not have been honed and subjected to reasoning discourse. Had I written a long essay ten years ago entitled "People who will be first against the wall when I am king" (which, I assure you, I didn't) I can guarantee I'd now be mortified by it and desperate for it not to see the light of day. Of course, that makes this blog all the more worrying, because by the time I am mortified by it it will have been in the public realm for some time and there'll be no clawing it back.......

For me, though, the most striking quality of "The Book of Dave" is the way in which it creates two dramatically different versions of London. Few writers can have envisioned more different Londons than Self, as it his stock in trade, really. Yet the two (or more?) Londons here are so polarised: one is the personal, intimate memory-mapped city organised by the enlarged frontal lobe of a taxi driver's Knowlege; the other is a staggering landscape of an impersonal, dysfunctional authoritarian city-state painted with a big, hairy brush. The gradual swapping over of these two perspectives, so that we discover the personalities of the future and the authoritarian dysfunction of the present, is the real trick of this book. Thus it becomes a satire in the ancient classical tradition, as well as a homage to Dickensian social commentary on London.

A really interesting question for me is whether other cities or places could ever be such fertile territory. There are so many Londons, factual and fictional, but could there be so many Sheffields, England, or Bostons, Massachusetts, or Thursos, Scotland? I suspect that the big, old cities of the world, such as Barcelona, Moscow, Istanbul, could well compete with London on this, but not many others. I'd suggest that there are two crucial ingredients a place needs in order that it can exist more in the imagination than in the here and now:

it has to be physically too large for any visitor or inhabitant to ever feel they've really grasped its true extent (so any fiction within it is geographically plausible);

it needs a long enough, messy enough history that an equally long and messy future is assured (so any fiction is temporally plausible).

The taxi driver is one person whose geographical grasp of a huge city is likely to be better than most. You, like me, might be perplexed that taxi drivers in a medium-sized city like Sheffield often have a lesser knowledge of their patch than London cabbies, or even than many of their passengers. That it is so much less of a challenge probably makes it less worthy of knowing. On the other hand, we could speculate that a spatial Knowledge bigger than what is realistically knowable is what drives Dave Rudman mad.

In other words, a city so big that you can never really know it will drive you mad if you try, and knowing that it could drive you mad is what makes that city so different from smaller, knowable places. It has a kind of psychological voltage, which is what powers the imagination.

So, dearly beloved, we come to the bit where I pose a sustainability question. Received wisdom (and I often believe it myself) is that there is a natural size to settlements that lend themselves to being environmentally and socially sustainable. Too small, too dispersed and there are no economies of scale, not enough community. Too big, too dense and a settlement becomes unknowable, impersonal, antisocial, too hungry for natural resources.

But consider this: if that 'natural' size actually means a 'comfortable' size, might living in such a place reduce that psycho-voltage? Would the imagination and creativity of mankind suffer, and with it our ability to envision a sustainable future? Should we instead be seeking out the extremes - the teeming cities and the unending, open horizons, where unknowability fuels our minds? Is the unknown our friend, and comfort our enemy?

Happy New Year.

AW

The Santa Clause - an eternal mystery solved

I was in a teleconference yesterday where the conversation turned to the frustrating phenomenon of Christmas inertia. You know the problem: Christmas actually lasts approximately two days, and most people have about a week away from work, yet it is completely impossible to achieve anything work-related for a whole month, between 5th December and 4th January. How does this happen?

Then, realisation struck. We noticed that two crucial things happen during that month of crippling inactitvity:

1) public sector bodies (usually, though not this year, thanks to George Osborne) put out a huge raft of competitive tender invitations and then go off on leave, thereby condemning every consultant in the land to burning the midnight oil over Christmas, forgetting to do any Christmas shopping, falling out with loved ones, not being able to contact the potential client to discuss the tender, and resigning themselves to probably not winning the tender in any case;

2) Father Christmas miraculously breaks into every household in the world within about 20 hours*, to deliver gifts and raid the booze cabinet.

(* This calculation is based on the fact that midnight varies around the world by 12 hours and there is an average 8 hours of darkness, so if Father Christmas sets out at sundown from the dateline and travels west he has about 20 hours until the sun comes up again. This does not allow for the fact that he has to start AND finish in the north, where the night is longer, whilst nipping down to Australasia, Southern Africa and South America during their much shorter, summer nighttime. Nor does it consider whether he discriminates against predominantly Muslim countries, where people are less likely to be interested in Father Christmas and booze cabinets will be few and far between. I am not a mathematician and will not be held responsible for inaccuracies in this calculation.)

These two observations provide incontrovertible, empirical evidence that Father Christmas and the Government are colluding in the annual implementation of a cruel and cunning manipulation of time-energy. This works by stopping everyone - except consultants and Father Christmas - in their tracks, using a bizarre formula combining gravity and cryogenics. People continue to eat, drink and shop, but are otherwise completely immobilised and are unaware that time has ceased to pass. The energy embodied in their eating, drinking and shopping is syphoned off to fuel Father Christmas's mammoth fleet of hovercraft, which set out across the globe on a month long endeavour to distribute gifts and gather up booze. When this work is done, time restarts, people find themselves swamped in wrapping paper and family discord, and civil servants return to work to find reams of verbose tender submissions stopping up draughts in their offices.

The question is, does the fact that we have stumbled across the solution to this eternal mystery mean we can, or should, prevent from happening again?

No-one visiting Sheffield over the past year or so will have failed to notice the giant Ferris/hamster wheel rotating slowly at the top of Fargate (just across from the Town Hall). Despite being a hilly enough city that the top of the wheel is several hundred feet lower than the view from my garden, Sheffield dared not be left off the list of British cities hosting a big wheel. I never went on it, because for me it wasn't worth several pounds to spend a couple of minutes up amongst the city centre rooftops accompanied by a running commentary....but I'm sure some people enjoyed it.

Last week I noticed that the wheel was being dismantled, presumably to be reassembled in some other lucky town, or possibly a victim of the public sector cuts. ("Wheel latest victim of cuts" would be an amusing local newspaper headline.) This did not stir much emotion either way for me, though on balance I decided it would be nice to have the big space at the top of Fargate back.

Today, however, an altogether more bizarre structure has appeared in its place, similarly fenced off from reality. It is a cone, about 30 feet across at the base and as tall as the surrounding buildings, covered in coniferous leaves, with a doorway at the bottom labelled "Santa's Grotto". I looks a little as if someone has indulged in a controversial, pacifist art project to temporarily camouflage a war memorial.

Santa Claus troubles me at the best of times. I vividly remember concluding at five years of age that Father Christmas didn't exist: I'm not questioning that St Niklas of wherever, on whom the Father Christmas legend is based, existed in the past, but I think I always knew the modern, red-coat Santa was a fairytale. My parents didn't try to persuade me otherwise, though for those first few years I did wake to find a sack of goodies had arrived unannounced on Christmas night. Not long after I remember my grandma taking me to a Santa's grotto in the local shopping mall. Firstly it struck me as odd that a stranger in disguise should ask me what I would like for Christmas. I probably requested lego. Even more odd was that he then proceeded to give me something totally different from my request, namely a very shoddy plastic rifle. Why ask me what I wanted if he had no intention of giving it to me? Why give me something I didn't like, and which didn't do anything (it wasn't anything fun, like a water pistol, just a bit of black plastic in the shape of a rifle)? As I look back at this now, I wonder if he was one of these depressed, estranged fathers or out-of-work actors, bitter about the hand life had dealt him, who gave all the kids toy rifles and found great entertainment in the image of dozens of small children running riot in the shopping centre with plastic artillery, like some junior battle re-enactment society. In any case, he wasn't Father Christmas, he was a very naughty boy.

I guess my suspicion of Father Christmas also stems from the fact that, to me, it makes much more sense that gifts would be exchanged between people who know and like each other, rather than being distributed by some abstract benefactor. At school, regular moral assertions from the teachers that it was "better to give than to receive" sat uncomfortably alongside the annual ritual of writing letters to Santa. The flipside to this is, of course, charitable giving, where the giving is done as an abstract concept and the giver's reward is to bask in the glow of their own benificence.

Now, of course, all these mysteries are solved in one fell swoop. All the letter-writing rituals and folklore are part of the conspiracy to keep ordinary people occupied while the incredible time-energy-warp is under way. And Sheffield's giant Grotto structure is, in fact, a gravitational refraction beacon that has been erected, and disguised as an entertaining quasi-natural feature, to facilitate the sucking of energy out of people and into Father Christmas. If we were to take direct action, dismantle the Grotto, poke Father Christmas with a stick through the ticket booth window, and cut down drastically on our eating, drinking and shopping, we just might be able to wrestle December out of his evil grasp.

On the other hand, we could work on tender submissions whilst nibbling mince pies and sipping sherry.

AW.

The heady whiff of nostalgia

In the past two days, I've suddenly been caught up in a whirl of emails from old friends from my time as an architecture student in Newcastle. Some of us haven't seen each other for 15 years, but enough of us still know one or two others that it becomes a bit like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon - we each know someone who has contact details for people we considered to be long-lost. Now there's talk of a reunion, and I'm getting quite excited by the idea.

The odd thing is, I seem to have been already indulging in nostalgic thoughts for a few weeks. It probably started with tidying the attic and finding stashes of old photographs. The slightly demoralising thing about this was that, for a long time, I considered myself to be a serious photographer, so everywhere I went I took lots of artfully composed pictures of buildings, streetscapes, landscapes, animals, sunsets, interesting roadsigns....you get the drift; and yet it's the badly-lit, alcohol-laden group snapshots of friends that beckon to be kept and treasured. Just as well Facebook didn't exist back then, otherwise my profile might as well have been called "pictures of places I've been to that you might have been to too."

Nostalgia stepped up a gear last week when I paid a final visit to live music at The Grapes, in Sheffield. My own bands have played there many times and I've lost count of the number of times I've lost count of the number of beers I've drunk there of an evening. Live music at The Grapes has not so much been a victim of progress (it has managed to laugh in the face of progress) but of the mundane - a change in the personal circumstances of the owners. Whatever the reasons, a dark room above a slightly seedy pub has long been the best place to see live bands at their most up-close, their most exposed to the audience, and their most captivating. Absolutely everyone who ever played in a band since the 1980s has played The Grapes, and its passing is a very sad moment.

Then came all this reunion stuff. I've long been suspicious of reunions, seeing them as a dangerous mix of finding out how little you actually had in common with people, and competing with them for how successful you've each been in the interim. However, thanks to the modern age of email, social networking etc, we already know what we've all been up to and, hopefully, we're all content with what we've done and happy for the others. And, much more than that, our explosion of emails is full of instant humour and banter, so the ice will be well and truly destroyed by the time we meet. It probably helps that architecture was one of those very intense courses, where for several years we spent more time with these people than with our families, and now, 15 years later, it's still easy to recall an inflexion in a voice, a shared moment of mirth, midnight oil-burning equally suffered and relished.

But perhaps the strangest piece of this nostalgic interlude has been snow-induced. My local neighbourhood is quite high on a hill, and we are in the grip of the biggest pre-Christmas cold snap for about 30 years. We have 15" (nearly 40cm) of snow here, and it keeps on coming. It's wonderfully picturesque, and when I hear someone complaining that it's "horrendous" because they can't dig their car out, I want to subject them to violence. I want to say, for God's sake, unless you're really ill and need the kind of medical attention that this weather obstructs, or you're genuinely poor and can't heat your home, then this is the exact opposite of horrendous. It's a magical, escapist world, where you can skip work, marvel at the snowflakes, throw missiles at your neighbours with impunity and, in the case of the students who live next door to me, ski to lectures.

Walking along the middle of a main road normally in thrall to the cars and buses, and seeing other people do the same, dragging their shopping home on sledges, laughing, hearing a hubbub of conversations because there's no vehicular traffic to drown it out, noticing how frenetically busy the local shops are when no-one can drive to the supermarkets.....It's amazing: all that has to happen is that water falls out of the sky frozen, instead of liquid, and our world is transformed into a magical, picturesque, and virtually car-free idyll. Suddenly, the principal role of men in society is to dig paths through this frozen water to help out old ladies, and play icy games with children and neighbours.

Before I know it, I'm being nostalgic for a time before our time - a world I never knew, where this kind of sociable, communal behaviour was commonplace; where an ASBO was administered with the back of a hand and horse-drawn vehicles used the warmth of the horseshit to de-ice the roads. I'm actually remembering fondly a past that I never experienced, and which probably didn't happen. A past where literacy and good sanitation were bourgeois fripperies, and Britain was a world power.

All because of a drop in temperature. So that's the answer: supporting local shops and services, driving less, being a good neighbour. It doesn't require swathes of policy and public spending, and partnership delivery initiatives, or whatever they'll be called next week. It just requires a massive snow machine.

See you at the sustainability practitioners' reunion dinner. In Lapland.

AW.