#33 Dear Doctor

September 18, 2014

Never, never, never in doubt, Dr Paisley? Hard to believe, given what happened next.

Power sharing (never!), the tricolour over Belfast City Hall (never!), First Minister ofNorthern Ireland with Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness as your Deputy (never!).

In the unsettling calm of the wee small hours, Ulster’s Big Man must have found belief increasingly elusive.

On such a night, he may have heard his faith falling by the wayside; the sound of a silk sash slashed (as worn by his father serving a century ago in Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteer Force).

How else to explain the Protestant centurion no longer stentorian; the Sabbatarian, Presbyterian Moderator who became remarkably moderate?

For this was the conservative’s conservative, priding himself – no, that would be sinful – who made a point of never (never!) reading any book written after the year of his birth (1926).

But in recent years fighting talk directed at ungodly harlots, unnatural abominations, and the anti-Christ himself (Pope John Paul II), was reduced to a Corleone whisper – minus the menace.

How else to account for the unanimous paean to Ian in the days after his death aged 88 on Friday 12 September? Lost to the world and found to be a national treasure. Perhaps on a par with Joan Rivers: equally outspoken and ultimately harmless.

Paisley’s the name, of a life that became
Unexpectedly, appropriately decorative.

#32 Scottish Projections

September 9, 2014

‘Over four million individually addressed pieces of communication started going out last week.’

Responding to the surprise opinion poll (6 September) showing majority support for Scottish independence, Labour MP Douglas Alexander declared that Better Together had already increased its work rate. But the attempt to sound pro-active only revealedthe limitations of the ‘no’ campaign.

‘Individually addressed pieces of communication’ is an especially telling phrase. It tells tales of typefaces personalised to look like handwriting; it speaks of an address to 18-30s which eschews formal logic because digital natives are obviously too restless to follow it.

Hence ‘pieces of communication’ – format not specified; content equally imprecise.

Thus the full gamut of sub-Facebook friending in all its complex variations.

Variations, that is, on the same banal message – don’t take risks.

Enter First Minister Alex Salmond, jolly and jowly, pug-faced and a reputation for pugilism (political). At least he understands that faux is our deadliest foe. He knows what’s real in Scotland is unreal to the Westminster Village, and vice versa. But his yes to ‘independence’ is no more than a ‘no’ to unbearable lite-ness.

Suddenly former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown lands on stage like Salmond’s heavyweight brother. Marginalised because of previous prevarication (losing a UK general election because he didn’t call it in time), now doubly determined to be decisive, Brown is just enough of an outsider to play both Unionist part and Rejectionist role.

Safety first, notional nation, the idea of ‘home rule’: three projections in search of a people; no substance in any of them.

#31 Humanity Hotel

September 2, 2014

‘So their son can get the care…he needs’.

The TV reporter’s final line echoed the advice of Hampshire’s assistant chief constable – that Ashya King’s parents should return their five year old son to Southampton General Hospital, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer and for the severe after-effects of a successful operation to remove a brain tumour.

The way the reporter signed off – his intonation, the grain of his voice – invited ‘Amen’ at the end; as if godlike status is due to the ineffable combination of Police and theNHS.

Brett and Neghemeh King believe in a different god: they are Jehovah’s Witnesses who removed son Ashya from Southampton hospital and took him to their holiday home in Spain. They hoped to sell this property and use the funds to pay for proton beam treatment in Prague – cancer treatment currently unavailable in the UK, which Southampton doctors declared would be useless in Ashya’s case.

But the abduction of Ashya became a top priority – for police officers as well as journalists. His parents were arrested in Spain on Saturday evening and sent to prison. Ashya is now alone in a Spanish hospital.

Far from sacred, the behaviour of UK ‘healthcare professionals’ invites profanity. In a different case, the mother of a boy who was eventually granted NHS funds for proton beam treatment in Oklahoma, USA, reported ‘a bit of a carrot-dangling situation’ in which she was informed that her son might get the grant but funding would be refused if a younger patient came along. In Ashya’s case, Brett King says he was warned about an emergency protection order – his son being taken into care – if he continued to question his treatment; this despite disagreement among Southampton doctors over ‘the Milan protocol’ of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. read more

#30 The Substance of ‘J.F.’ versus Phenomenal ‘J.J.’

August 23, 2014

Two men in the desert, front of camera: J.F. in a prisoner’s orange overall, head shaved, kneeling, apparently penitent; J.J., knife in (left) hand, face covered, swathed in black from head to….ankle, where Grim Reaper garb gives way to non-apocalyptic desert boots.

How did they get there?

J.F., a 40-year-old, photogenic video-journalist – facial bones like the young Iggy Pop, previously said he was drawn to conflict zones because, unless someone gets up close, ‘we can’t understand the world, essentially’.

In video footage of a Q&A session at his old journalism school (Medill), he does that a lot – that is, he makes a strong statement, then softens the sound of it with an adverb – ‘essentially’; likewise, the ‘prayers and cigarettes, basically’, that got him through a previous period of incarceration (Libya 2011), also in the hands of unreliable captors (teenage Gaddafi loyalists), who shot and killed a South African photographer immediately before taking J.F. into custody.

Describing him as ‘motivated’, J.F.’s father later said of his late son that doing this important job ‘gave him energy’.

During his talk to staff and students at Medill (ignoring the Milky Bar Kid who at the first mention of violence, smirks at the girl in the adjacent seat), J.F. remarks upon the‘reach for humanity’ readily discernible among the people he was reporting on.

He reports being inspired by them, but did they also serve as his surrogates? It is valid to ask whether other people’s war zones (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria) became a theatre of self-validation for J.F. He admits that writing fiction failed to fulfil the romantic idea of himself as a writer (please note, a particular kind of young American invests theword ‘writer’ with a special sort of significance); so he turned to reality rather than questions of realism. read more

#29 Price of Travel

August 20, 2014

‘Tempted? You’re only human’.

When 35 Afghan migrants were considering whether to pay their way into Tilbury – theUK port downriver from London, their travel agent aka human trafficker may have mentioned the North Sea crossing from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge; but failed to inform them of the P&O website offering ‘up to £320 free spending money’ on selected cruises.

Having paid the price of a fortnight’s cruising – exclusive yet all-inclusive (there you go, P&O, you can have that tagline for free), the stowaways completed their journey in a sealed container on board the P&O cargo ferry Norstream; with no opportunity for ‘café hopping and boutique shopping’ en route.

Amateur footage shows 34 of them shortly after the container was prized open at 6.30am on Saturday, around 18 hours after they were sealed into it. Circled by Port ofTilbury personnel in high visibility vests (motto: ‘safety first’), mostly sitting on the floorof a dockside holding area (yellow arrows and industrial paint in the manner ofManchester’s Hacienda club); variously howling, mewling, having difficulty breathing – except for the teenage girl in red shalwar kameez, who is standing calmly to one side, holding on tight to a matching canvas school bag.

Their faces have been blurred beyond recognition. But it’s clear who owns the clip: ITN; and the fee for further use is £699.

Missing from the group photo is 40-year-old Meet Singh Kapoor, who was declared dead after his young son failed to wake him on arrival. Mr Kapoor entered Tilbury in one box and left in another.

Shortly afterwards, the surviving stowaways were dispersed to three different hospitals across Greater East London: one group was taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, London E1; another to the ‘university hospital’ in the post-war new town of Basildon; and a third group to Southend hospital. read more

#28 Big Pharma

August 11, 2014

Forget Jesus – the Resurrection goes by the name of Saa Sabas.

Sabas is a 41-year-old West African pharmacist who contracted what turned out to bethe Ebola virus while nursing his father, who may have been a former nurse in theFrench colonial army.

Unlike Sabas Snr, the son survived. Now nicknamed ‘Anti-Ebola’ and ‘the Revenant’ (who comes again), he volunteers to tell the tale to superstitious villagers as scared oftreatment centres as they are of the disease itself.

And why not? Although at 60 per cent the death rate of the current outbreak is lower than earlier episodes which topped 90 per cent, most incomers into Ebola isolation hospitals still go out through the morgue.

In this context, superstition need not be ‘ancient’; all it takes is a dodgy connection – entirely spurious but almost logical – between the likely demise of the hospitalised andthe medical procedures designed to improve their chances.

For example, nurses and doctors, during the one hour at a time in which they are allowed to work directly with Ebola patients, are swathed head-to-toe in prophylactic plastic – a straightforward measure to stop transmission of bodily fluid and so preventthe virus from spreading. But this might not be the only way it is seen by those on thereceiving end.

Yikes!, cried the emaciated man (10 kilos lost to high fever and dysentery), in between violent hiccups characteristic of the disease, either I strayed into a vintage episode ofDr Who or death is already occurring and I have climbed onto the set of my own autopsy. Dash it all but I should never have come to this terrible place!

(Of course, it is the hiccups – gulp! – which are making him talk like Billy Bunter.)

Thankfully, Saa Sabas was granted immunity from any such syllogism. Having worked at the pharmacy in Gueckedu hospital, medical procedure was in his blood as much asthe Ebola virus. When he fell ill only a few days after his father died, he immediately presented himself for diagnosis and treatment. read more

#27 The news as zombie apocalypse

August 4, 2014

(Andrew Calcutt is away in the sun this week – this is a guest post by Mark Beachill)

“Quick, on Radio 4. The news said there was a zombie apocalypse.”

My girlfriend has a fascination with all things zombie. Myself I’m too squeamish to watchThe Walking Dead with her. Had she misheard, imagined?

A quick search on Google News led me to the story of a traffic accident in the USA brought on when a parade(?) of people in zombie costumes mobbed a car and the driver, panicked, knocked over a passer-by.

“No! It was in the UK and it said zombie apocalypse.”

Back to Google News. It turned out the railway station announcer in Brighton had bizarrely declared a zombie apocalypse over the tannoy. This was his description of thetorrential downpour after several months’ rain fell in the space of an hour or so, floodingthe station. Even more bizarrely BBC Radio 4 picked it up for their hourly national newsbulletin.

When we get freakish weather nowadays it is not usually zombies that are invoked. More commonly the living are said to be out of control: reckless consumption brings energy use that warms the globe and increases the likelihood of “extreme weather events”.

The threat of ecological and meteorological catastrophe means consumption must be reined in, goes the argument. In less secular times the Biblical flood that put Noah on his ark – with God’s plan to cleanse past sins and start again – might have been invoked. Today it is through is our sins against Gaia through over-consumption that are said bring warning storms. So sure are the BBC, for example, that they now limit air-time for any with an alternative view or even an alternative solution.

But, weirdly enough, perhaps the zombie metaphor is not all too distant from theorthodox explanation. Contemporary zombies are a child of the 1970s, their endless hunger a metaphor for our endless consumption prompted by critiques of mindless consumerism that first emerged in the seventies. It was no coincidence that George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead, the film that re-launched the zombie, had most of its action set in a shopping mall. read more

#26 The Flesh Is Weak

July 27, 2014

Philip Cattan (65) is the judge accused of falling asleep during a rape case.

Presiding over the trial of a Manchester man accused of raping and sexually assaulting two girls under the age of 13, Cattan is said to have nodded off while the first of thealleged victims answered defence questions by videolink.

The trial had been going on for only a few days, but it is four and a half decades since Cattan was called to the bar – in 1970, the year Paul McCartney announced the break-up of the Beatles.

As a newly qualified barrister he may have felt he had Wings. Forty-four years later, Cattan is still touring the Northern Circuit – plying his trade as a criminal lawyer, working as a recorder (part-time judge).

Of course there is plenty of privilege in his day to day existence – wigs and gowns and ‘all rise’ and first class rail fare claimed as standard by the judiciary. But also plenty that is workaday – similar-sounding tales of cruelty, wantonness and people simply losing it, stretching out year after year, all having to be processed; subjected to the due process of law.

‘Due process’ means that people caught up in events leading to criminal proceedings – whether as defendants or witnesses, are accorded the process that is their due. Without this there is not even the possibility of justice (still less the actuality), since failure to observe due process amounts to a form of contempt for those involved.

On the other hand, observing the formality of the court serves to enter all those involved into the public domain – the place raised above personal existence where human failings are addressed in a duly impersonal way.

If he did fall asleep while his own court was in session, Recorder Cattan is to be upbraided for his offence against the requisite level of formality – the formalities which formulate the presence of the public. read more

#25 Not The Nine O’Clock News

July 21, 2014

Stretcher-bearers wading through wheat and behind them a field of sunflowers higher than the tallest man. A scene as seen previously in the paintings of Van Gogh – but now with real-life corpses instead of Vincent’s death-wish.

Yet it flies past me – the tragedy of 298 passengers and crew killed when a Malaysian Airlines airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine, presumably by the Russian backed rebels currently controlling the area (though this is still to be verified).

Plane downed over the Great Plain and I know I should be feeling their pain. But for reasons still to be verified, my anti-missile shields have gone up; nothing’s getting through to me – not some body’s holiday reading strewn across the blackened crash site nor the teddy bears of dead children nor the fact that some passengers were human-rights-types en route to an AIDS conference in Australia.

It’s because the casualties are being played for political purposes, I tell myself. It’s because the coverage is strictly one-dimensional, with ‘the vics’ used to indict ‘perp’ Putin, president of Russia.

Show the punters enough victims and there’ll be no disputin’ who did it – seems to bethe gist. Pile high the body bags to hide the praise previously heaped on ‘progressive’ Ukrainians who are pro-Europe and anti-Russia.

I prefer the local miners: outwith the painted ceilings of geo-politics, coming up from underground and searching dutifully for human flesh among the sunflowers; and their wives wearing socks and sandals, plump in cotton print dresses worn thin over many years.

These are the sensitive ones, I tell myself. Despite coarsened features, they are thecivilising influence. How different is their dignified respect for the dead – in contrast tothe prodding of corpses for political ends. read more

#24 Public Record, Private Lamentation

July 14, 2014

Young enough to be my son, a man cradles the corpse of his 10-year-old boy.

The man looks tenderly upon the boy’s body, which he is about to wash. Behind him, other family members are distraught; their noisy distress renders them incapable; he can hear how useless they are.But you are still with me while I do this in remembrance of you, the man might be saying.

Except he would not say it, could only think it. Except he cannot think of it, dare not address himself to what happened – and who even knows how it did? He can only do what – yes, really – what a man has to do.

In Baghdad the city morgue is full to capacity: bags of bodies stuffed into freezers, temperatures in the streets outside nudging 50 degrees; mortuary staff carrying on withthe stifling work of listing and labelling. Wherever possible, reconciling recent images – broken faces, busted bodies – with earlier photos of missing persons.

Sometimes the remains cannot be released to relatives until a DNA test has proved positive.

The woman in charge doesn’t know the numbers, although in reply to the reporter’s question she concedes there are many more sectarian killings than a year ago. She laughs but not out of cynicism or defiance or nervousness; it is only funny that someone would need to ask.

Otherwise untimely, in these extraordinary circumstances her laughter is appealing. It carries the half-thought – why would she need to think it through? – that carrying on is what she does in remembrance of normality.

Doing what she has to, Our Lady of the Morgue is proof positive of that public virtue – bureaucracy. She bags bodies because life unrecorded might never have been; except for family, there is nothing to say, either way.

Public and private, official records and a father’s grief. In the open valuation of human life, each of these matters as much as the other.

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