When Scotland’s independent

There’s a play by Shakespeare, his shortest tragedy, just a brief yarn for those who lack patience, all about quick promotion.  He had to make a living like everyone else.  We have to hold down a job.  Nowadays, to help employees bond, a paintballing session might be arranged.  The boss won’t normally hand out tickets to a play, not this one, anyway. 

In the theatre business, nobody ever refers to it by name.  It’s the Scottish Play.  You must know this already.  There’s a curse.  The witches, I suppose.  You’re dead if you type the word Macbeth.  

Are you still there?

Superstition, like nothing else, makes us careful.  You don’t want to spoil your own chances.  A wily ship’s cook won’t take a sieve on board.  But superstition can kill you, too.  You step off the footpath to avoid a ladder, and get hit by a bus.

However careful we are, the forest eventually catches up with us.  Michael Moore has just been sacked from his post as Scottish Secretary, I mean the Scottish Job.  Alistair Carmichael has got the poison haggis.

What will happen when the Scots are free

·         Glasgow will be officially foreign

·         The land border will make invasion simpler

·         Some unemployed foreign builders will be able to go home on foot

·         Fried Mars bars will become a European delicacy

·         Carol Ann Duffy will lose her job as Poet Laureate

·         Simon Armitage will replace her, so you won't see any difference

·        Andy Murray will still be the closest thing the English have to a tennis champion

Lucky nappies

I was working in a primary school when England lost a World Cup football match.  The children were miserable.  A teacher told them that they shouldn’t feel sad for themselves, but happy for all the children in Brazil.  They stared at her.   Maybe it was just me, but they didn’t seem to feel much better.  I suppose it’s not easy to imagine people on the other side of the world, or the other side of your own city, if you’ve hardly travelled three miles from home.  As to understanding how others feel, can you do it with the person next to you? 

The teacher meant well.  It was an ad hoc lesson in empathy.  It might have worked if she’d empathised with the children in front of her.  Teachers tend to come up with this line: the most important thing is not to win, but to participate.  Children don’t take this seriously.  All around them they see the emphasis which is placed on winning.  They know it’s the most important thing.  They can feel it.

The best way to deal with failure is to try to avoid it in the first place.  At school or university, if you’re not very clever or don’t want to waste time studying, there are still things you can do.  We heard this year that one in three students wears lucky exam underwear.  Think about that for a moment.  Lucky exam underwear.  One in three.  Surely, of all the articles of clothing worn by a human being, underwear is the most unlucky, at least from the clothing’s point of view.  Even socks, even my own socks, can’t feel so bad. 

For most of us, exam day is the worst day of the year.  We need to prepare for our biggest test.  Exam tips have always been popular, and we got them again this year – take a spare pen, for example.  Although this advice came from a pen manufacturer, it was still good.  We were told about the “stomach-churning angst” of exam day, and heard how over half of all candidates change their diet just before exams, gorging themselves on oily fish and fruit.  It’s not surprising, then, about the stomach.  Do take an extra pen, but nervous students might also need a change of lucky underwear. 

Of course, stress begins long before the first exam.  Nursery teachers in the UK are complaining that more and more children have to be toilet trained when they start school.  That’s right, four-year-olds.  While most parents are relieved to get the little beasties off their hands, so to speak, mothers still proudly pack their children off to school.  They still say things like: “Not too tight, is it, darling?”  Once they meant Jonny’s belt or Jenny’s shoe.  Now they’re pinning on a nappy.

Concerning the poet who was short-listed for a prize, then exposed as a plagiarist, but who might have escaped humiliation if he had discussed it with his mother before she developed Alzheimer’s

You probably skipped this news report.  It’s about poetry. CJ Allen once copied from another poet and has had to withdraw from the shortlist for this year’s Forward Prize.  In case we’ve forgotten what paperbacks look like, there's a photograph inside a bookshop.  A woman is facing the shelves.  No men around.  I can’t read the titles, but they won’t be poetry.  Poetry sections aren’t so crammed, and we prefer to browse detective fiction.  If she’s put something under her coat, or in that bulging bag of hers, I hope she remembers to pay.  We all know it’s wrong to steal.

Matthew Welton was the poet-victim.  He found out that Allen had pilfered his work.  Poets, by definition, read poetry, if only their own.  But Welton isn't just a poet.  He’s a literary Poirot.  Hearing Allen read some poems at a public event, Monsieur Welton recognised the words, and bought his rival’s books to check for plagiarism.  It was plentiful.

Poets have a special interest in poetry.  If the sole reason they buy it is to confirm  plagiarism, you can't expect the public to be queuing at the till.  There is one happy note.  When Allen viewed his royalty report and saw these sales appear, he must have felt the thrill which every author feels.

Prizes can raise a writer’s profile and increase sales.  Allen’s profile has certainly been raised.  We may as well believe him when he says his Forward poem is original.  The title must be his for a start: Explaining the Plot of ‘Blade Runner’ to my Mother who has Alzheimer’s.  You couldn’t copy it inadvertently, and you would never do it on purpose.

Poets are entitled to make mistakes, short of stealing other people’s work.  Note the missing comma in the Blade Runner title, before who, a slip which reveals that Allen has at least two mothers, one of whom has Alzheimer’s and one of whom has not, and probably hundreds more, matrons who replicate in perfect shape, but then decline, sniff once a year, or promptly pass away. 

The poem is not bad.  Two or three lines need cutting where he explains too much, but the informal style, the teasing, yet compassionate tone, and the coping-with-a-sick-parent theme are all in vogue at the moment.  Long titles are also fashionable.  I’m thinking of the recent, best-selling novel, The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared.  CJ Allen, the less-than-a-hundred-year-old man, whose exact age I don’t know because he’s not in Wikipedia, who pulled out of the prize and disappeared, must have thought he’d done everything right: ‘I didn’t copy this time, I thought up a long-winded title and I got some comments from Mum (the Alzheimer’s one).’ 

But he was shot down all the same.  He might just as well have called it: Explaining the plot of ‘Blade Runner’ to my mother who has Alzheimer’s, which she hasn’t always had, not when I was cribbing from Welton and she pretended not to notice, just waited for me to crucify myself.

Once upon a time we were convinced that short titles and long texts were more likely to sell.  But poets are a perverse lot.  Item: Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798, and Resolving to Leave Dorothy at Home in Future. Today we have CJ Allen, whose near-prize experience has yielded fewer than twenty lines and boasts a healthy title that can stand on its own eighteen feet like an opening verse.

CJ’s poem has received several ‘likes’ on the apoemaday website.  At first, I thought this was a laxative.  It's not just name.  Read the poetry.  Glance through the comments which readers have left, and you’ll find plenty of references to physical exertion, coitus, for example, and reproductive organs in the mouth, usually a male organ, and one mouth in particular.  I wonder what the others are saying, the people who don’t like the poem.

Fan fiction

It’s official.  The British are the laziest workers in Europe.  A recent study has shown that they ring in sick more than anyone else, excusing themselves with a range of fake illnesses. 

I suppose if you normally deceive people, you expect other people to do it to you.  When footballer Wayne Rooney rang in sick for two World Cup qualifying matches, accusations kicked around social media that he lacked commitment to the English cause.  He felt he had to prove that he was really injured, and posted on Facebook a photo of his bloodied head.  It was grim, but no doubt there are still people who are convinced that he should stop looking at himself in his bedroom, get back on the field and do what he is paid to do.  With fans like these, who needs an opposition? 

In attack or in defence, the power of social media is enormous.  A picture can be unforgettable.  The Arab Spring is blossoming nicely.  When it began, as despots fell around us, commentators noted with satisfaction the role played by social media in helping idealistic young people organise their protests.  At the same time, images from mobile phones were posted on the internet to show the true suffering of the population and so contradict the propaganda of the regime. 

In the UK, two summers ago, technology gave youngsters with other ideals an advantage over police in the so-called Blackberry riots.  You won’t, of course, bless mobile communication when your grip on the realm is being prised away, finger after finger, by teenagers with a hand-held device.  SLAP! Don’t mention the riots! 

But forget the bad guys. It’s far more embarrassing when the good guys shoot themselves, on film and in the foot, doing things you wish they had done in private or not at all.  I mean the footage of the Colonel, baited, butchered and bundled off to YouTube, the hell of endless hits, when rebels surrendered to the same urge that makes tourists snap each other and hunters screw their kill to the wall.  Although we loved getting rid of him, these antics gave us liberals a problem or two when they were uploaded onto VirtualPurgatory. 

For a start, those of us who queued up behind the righteous ones in the contest with Tyranny are now inconvenienced by images that are, at best, tasteless souvenirs and, at worst, proof that some, if not all, of the righteous ones are as bad as the devil they deposed, their vengeance is so calculated, their cruelty so deftly improvised. 

That’s not all.  Even though we regret that the photographer and his friends are intent on the murder of a human being; that they’re finding pleasure in his pain and humiliation – his true suffering, if you like – and clambering to record their involvement in it, we are nonetheless fascinated.  The jerkiness of the camera enhances the realism, and the horror; it seems we are holding the camera ourselves, we wonder if we could do the same things, and we feel guilty just for wondering. 

These moving images of one, helpless man shame us more than fifty stills of executed loyalists.  A rebel said there’s a Gaddafi inside everyone.  I’m a fan.  He can have a job in my next government. 

Behind a bush, in the wind: the boys from Brazil

The relationship between UK police and young Brazilian men does not make happy reading.

They shot and killed an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezez, at Stockwell tube station during a terror scare in 2005.  Opportunities to identify him were missed.  There was a police stake-out at his apartment, but he was not photographed when he started out on his fatal journey because the cameraman was having a piss.  An image of him, passed to police ‘Gold Command’ (I hope there’s no Bronze and Silver) would have confirmed straightaway that he was not the right man.  How many calls of nature have left a person dead?  

With David Miranda, again from Brazil, the police have now shot themselves in the foot.  We are supposed to believe that they just took it on themselves to detain him for nine hours on anti-terror laws.  No instruction from the Home Office.  No 10 just says it was ‘kept abreast’ of what was happening. Washington just says it was given a ‘heads-up.’ Trite metaphors, but this was the very choice which confronted police when the time came to shoot Menezez.  They chose the head in case he had strapped a bomb to his breast.

The material that David Miranda was carrying may have been obtained illegally, but it may also expose how organisations have been spying illegally on their own citizens.  The British government has portrayed the seized data as dangerous.  There is certainly a danger here to any organisation caught with its pants down.  Such embarrassment can be fatal.  However, it is in the public interest to know when government agencies break their own laws. 

Terror laws were used on this occasion to intimidate and stifle investigative journalists.  They are meant to be used randomly, but they targeted a particular individual.  Miranda was questioned about his ‘entire life.’  Once again we are talking about the entire life of a young Brazilian man.  Less than thirty years, but well beyond the span of a democratic government.

Nine hours can be a long time.  Still, there are vital parts in every investigation.  We wouldn’t want to let anyone down.  The police employed six agents. They rotated the questioning.  None of them had to wait more than ninety minutes for a piss.

Vive la France

It’s hard being the UK Foreign Secretary.  In times of crisis, to make life easier, the British normally let the French go first.  This summer, the French déploré the shooting of unarmed civilians in Egypt, then the British did; this week the French blâmé the Syrian government for gassing unarmed civilians, then the British did.

           It wasn’t always like this.  In Libya, the UK tried to get in first, and it was even more embarrassing.  However much Foreign Secretary Hague tried, he didn’t write the script.  From the start, he was coyote and roadrunner was French.  Remember, after the resolution on the no-fly zone, it was their air force, not the UK’s, that saved Benghazi from the armoured column rollicking towards it over the desert, engines backfiring, ammo belts flying like strings of detonating bangers.

          At the same time, the British parliament, that club of gentlemen, was still reassuring us – and Gaddafi – that no action could be taken “until after the Commons debate on Tuesday,” as if what they had in mind was no more urgent than choosing a brand of cigar.  The delay, of course, would have given the rat-catchers from Tripoli enough time to exterminate half of Benghazi.  Mais oui, the French got in first.

           The one time Britain did do something…  I hope you’ve forgotten the botched essay in the sand, the crack troops helicoptered in, only to be rounded up by a few, good-natured camel herders, when all that needed doing in the first place was to make a phone call ahead.  After this, the Foreign Secretary famously admitted that he was fed up with the world, although he perked up again when the war was won (by the US and Qatar), which highlights the common sense of not resigning after your first débâcle.

           Let the French go first, and ideally Mr Hague won’t get tired of Egypt and Syria, even when they kick sand in his face.  How many countries are there in the Middle East?   If he does despair again, let’s hope he doesn’t do so in public.

  

The power of naming

I know a boy called Ronni.  That’s short for Ronaldinho.  His parents came to the UK from Romania.  You probably don’t know the little fellow, but you may have heard of the famous Brazilian footballer they named him after.  That was in – fans have guessed – about 2005.  What happens when the famous footballer stops playing well, or hangs up his boots?  The kid gets stuck with the name.  Still, if the name happens to be longer than the career, you can always shorten it to something else. 

You’d think that naming your baby boy Messiah (another famous one) was a safe bet in America.  But a judge there wouldn’t allow it.  The parents rightly complained that there were already lots of other Messiahs around.  It would, in fact, be an excellent choice for several reasons.  For a start, the original Messiah is not likely to hang up his sandals any time soon.  And if the name does become a problem – again, unlikely, but you never know – there is Messi for short. 

Of course, the names of children tell us more about their parents’ aspirations than their own natural abilities. We name more than babies, though, and it can be embarrassing.  A TV viewer recently denounced The Railway Children, a film which has been a family favourite in Britain for decades, as it encouraged children to play on railway lines.  It was the first-ever complaint about the suitability of this film.  Whoever named and shamed it was generally derided, but this shows what can come from our zeal to protect.  The official response was no less ridiculous.  We were reassured that nowadays public access to railway lines is much more restricted, so the film is not dangerous.  So it was dangerous when it was made?

Then there’s the British Library user who found his access to a video of Hamlet blocked.  More red faces.  The official response?  New software was filtering out violent material which could harm children.  It just required a ‘tweak’ to fix.  Type that in.  Tweak number # ... allow … Hamlet.  Done. Given the nature of world literature, there’ll be a whole lot of tweaking going on.  (Rock ’n’ roll was dangerous, too, children.) 

Annoying ‘errors’ aren’t the only problem.  During this awkward time for the Library, there was never any opinion expressed or, I am sure, even secretly supposed, that Hamlet should be blocked by the filter.  Everyone assumed, like a fact of life, without the need for discussion, that it would be wrong to filter out this play.  Why?  Who decides what gets through, on what grounds, and what doesn’t?  What do we do about the dangerous works we have always enjoyed and even praised as classics, not to mention the things we aren’t so sure about? 

A British MP launched a career-boosting campaign to outlaw written child pornography.  Then he realised the need to deal with books like Lolita.  Another famous name.  A classic such as this would, he said, be excluded from the ban.  Really?  At one point in the novel, the narrator shares an orgasm with the 12-year-old girl who is sprawling on his testicles.

In the nineteenth century, Mr Thomas Bowdler tweaked the naughty bits out of Shakespeare’s plays to make them ‘suitable’ for women and, naturally, children.  You can now find him under B in the dictionary, a disparaging three-syllable verb, and a noun with –ism after it.  But he might be on the way back.  The Prime Minister has his own, vote-winning scheme for an internet pornography filter.  He’s going to cameronize the web.  Under C, that will be.

We can’t get away from names, can we?  But pay attention to the whole word, not just how it starts.  To boost sales, the now-defunct News of the World once had a crusade to name paedophiles, which led the public to attack the properties of paediatricians and other names that looked the same, as if anyone would advertise their criminal record, and this sort in particular, on a brass plaque on their gate.