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| Squash anyone? |
When
I see a beat up pair of shoes, a jacket or any old piece of tat laid
out on the roadside, my mind flips into Survivalist Mode. I become
one of that handful of folk left after the world's been devastated by
nuclear war. Because it's hard for us New Age Sewer Rats to get basic
stuff like food and clothing, anything we find becomes valuable. Even
that oversized pair of trainers - heels frayed, lace missing - could be life-savers. Struggling to shake myself free of this
morbid, sentimental fantasy, my eyes are drawn into the pathetic
vortex of tat.
Having
spent much of my late twenties on campaigns against nuclear weapons, I
suppose these Survivalist Tendencies comes from then. Not that it was
politically OK at that time to think anyone would get through an
atomic war and the nuclear winter that followed. In the Peace
Movement, the party line was pretty much against such talk, but I was
never one for conforming – even as a non-conformist peacenic, I
preferred to think my own thoughts. In fact, I never really believed
that humans would be so stupid as to actually destroy themselves
anyway.
I
held onto my private view whether I was talking with other
anti-nuclear campaigners or in banter with the opposition. I
believed it was because people like us were protesting that the
descent into total madness would be stopped. And whenever someone on
the right accused us of siding with the Warsaw Pact and - as they
frequently did - asked us why the Russians were not free to protest
as we were, I wouldn't be drawn. Too often, we relished the
eastern European TV camera crews that followed us around and took
more interest in us than the BBC or ITV. I felt the act of protesting
was not to persuade anyone that we were right and the other side were
wrong. I suppose it was an existentialist thing, a piece of theatre.
Nowadays, living
as an exile, I have to be objective in other
parts of my life - not able or willing to get too involved with local issues. And on a personal level, I take some
responsibilities more seriously than they deserve, and others I just
shirk; such as when I know it's time to lighten up, I might still turn moody
or bloody minded. Conversely, I can also let things slide and just
coast along while the coast is clear. As an exile, I can just say to
myself, So what? - as if I don't give a damn (though, of course, I do care). This is a kind of
objective corollary.
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| Scratch A-side |
As
a result, I believe in recycling ideas to no obvious, immediate end; read old books and review them as though they were
just out (click on, "Tatty Old Reads" above). To compose long narrative verses in outdated forms that hip Poetry Magz will but rarely accept. The act of
doing is all that counts. So, let's hear it for CND!
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