Immigration Satus

February 9, 2014

Neat hair, neat features, neatness itself; but immigration minister Mark Harper has resigned over the untidy business of his cleaner’s visa. She doesn’t have indefinite leave to remain and he’s the employer who really should have vetted her more carefully, being also the minister in charge of doubling the fine for failure to check; and the government immigration spokesman who sent the vans round last summer saying ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’.

Neat, neat, not-so-neat. Interviewed, he never misses a beat. I did this, I did that, I should apply a higher standard to my own behaviour. Therefore…..
No traction in his seamless voice. Smooth words from a Teflon talker. But if his ministerial career is remembered at all, it will be for the sticky end.

Meanwhile a young male giraffe called Marius was put down in Copenhagen Zoo this morning in an effort to prevent in-breeding among giraffes in captivity.

Photographed poking his head towards us, Marius the Lugubrious – except this is only us projecting human characteristics onto a dumb animal, now deceased.

When various zoos, including one in Doncaster, were keen to adopt Marius, there was never any concern about his immigration status.
Though the Copenhagen keepers cut up the corpse and fed it to the lions, in this regard Marius was afforded more humanity than Mark Harper’s cleaner.

On The Levels

February 8, 2014

Champagne waves spuming the sea wall and houses behind.

Dog down the street turns out to be a seal pup. But the floodwater’s not deep enough and it throws itself back into the pink-tinged harbour.

Sunset returns, now the clouds have broken; reflected by so much water, more glorious than ever.

Inland – if that’s the word – lush green acres outnumbered by limitless grey lagoons.

The expanse; and the expense.

Then a dry patch where builder Sam Notaro has defended his self-built £1m house with five foot earthworks. Red brick pile and a band of brown earth throw a ring of orange into the surrounding floodwater.

Prime minister David Cameron pronounced this ‘a biblical scene’ when he helicoptered into Somerset. But Cameron is no deus ex machina. His last-but-one predecessor famously didn’t do religion, and Cameron can’t do biblical.

Years of shirtsleeves, matter of fact; conversation not oration. Now Wellington boots and a warm fleece. Because Dave will always be on your level, OK?

Water’s rising but Cameron cannot find it in him to offer a moment of transcendence – the prime task of a Churchill; occasionally Tony Blair. Amidst the ‘biblical scene’ in which he is clearly only ankle deep, he fails to minister to the people of the Somerset Levels.

Drifters

February 2, 2014

Two days after he and his scratched-up fibreglass boat washed up on Ebon Atoll, there are no still no photographs of Mexican mariner Jose Ivan.

By his own account, Ivan was blown 8000 miles across the Pacific having set out from Mexico in September 2012, originally making for El Salvador. He survived 16 months afloat by catching fish and turtles with his bare hands, eating them raw and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain.

Not much bigger than a big boat, the outcrop of land he landed on is lower in the water than a passenger liner. There isn’t a phone signal, and the plane that flies in once a week is temporarily out action. Hence Ivan’s image is currently unavailable.

Having found him on the beach in a pair of raggedy underpants, his rescuers are resting and re-hydrating him in relative isolation. Without a selfie to upload – ‘this is me as Robinson Crusoe’ – his story makes mere radio instead of holding the front page.

Sixteen months of blue. Blue sky, blue sea, blue-sea-sky-blue. Like living in a Rothko.

Against that relentless background, memory and fantasy must have thickened. Clotted as closing-time conversation. Matted like your overgrown beard. Then died away, leaving days and days and days of dumb survival.

While you were surviving: an American president re-elected; civil war continues in Syria; London living off Olympic glory, slowly fading. The world which takes you back is little different from the one you accidentally left behind.
The dumb world you’ve come back to, has been adrift for some time.

(Failed) Theft of Spirituality

January 28, 2014

Unhloly heist. Sacrilegious swindle. Capillary crook. The New York Daily News reported the theft of a vial containing traces of the blood of Pope John Paul II (‘pontiff’s plasma’), as a kind of cartoon caper. Presumably to permit the paper’s readers – Guys and Dolls, Native New Yorkers – to live out their lives among the cast of characters in Damon Runyon’s low-life off-Broadway stories.

Containing a shred of cloth stained with the pope’s blood during the failed attempt to assassinate him in 1981, the vial was itself contained in an elaborate package or ‘reliquary’ – half- box, half-holy writ.

(Pope John Paul II died in 2005 to cries of Santo Subito – make him a saint now! He is due to be beatified at the end of April 2014.)

Not a vial but a river of blood between the two sides of the civil war in Syria, now facing each other for ‘peace talks’ in Switzerland. So much blood – leaving aside the not-so-well documented stories of people eating each other. So much certified blood it can’t be easy for them to stay in the same room together: the foreign minister who interrupts the UN secretary general interrupting him because he must, simply must finish his speech; and the opposition spokesman at pains to explain to waiting journalists that the government delegation is guilty of using confrontational language.

Overlooking the unruffled waters of Lake Geneva, at any moment the negotiating chamber may be flooded with blood – a tidal surge of it. The levels keep rising – then falling a little; rising and falling.

Rising into the air above St Peter’s Square two doves, released from the papal balcony by children accompanied by the new pope, were attacked by seagulls and a crow.

Pope Francis, the people’s pontiff, Time’s person of the year, man of his times, though still wearing those spectacles favoured by 1990s German chief execs. He is Papa to us all, allegedly. Raised above the square, he stands for all the Syrian fathers who have not been allowed to be Papa, whose children were ripped and torn out of their arms. read more

Hell On Ice

January 24, 2014

Old age doesn’t creep up. It rages over you like the flames which engulfed an old people’s home (Residence du Havre) in small town Canada (L’Isle-Verte, Quebec) on Wednesday night, leaving up to 31 dead.

Even Frankie Boyle couldn’t make it up: residents reliant on walking frames, washed-out shuffling things, overtaken by quickfire. See how they cannot run! Now they have run out of time.

Chief firefighter Yvon Charron described it as ‘a night from hell’. Away from the flames, the temperature dropped to 20 degrees below freezing. Pumped onto the fire to put it out, gallons of water turned to icy, witchy fingers.

Hell froze over. The world stood still. In our flaming youth we often saw it that way. We could afford to, with all that time hanging over us.

Mixed Messages

January 19, 2014

On Saturday night they queued outside St Andrew’s Church, Muirhouse, to attend a memorial service for Mikaeel Kular. Early that morning police found the three year old’s body in the woods next to his former home in Kirkcaldy.

The Kirkcaldy address makes you wonder why deaths like his don’t happen more often. Think of a caravan built of bricks with a Sky dish tacked on. In Newmarket the stables – houses for horses to live in – look more prepossessing.

Welcome to the pinched world of Kirkcaldy, part of the Ancient Kingdom of Fife….or Poundland, where masked robbers raid Glen [the] Bakers, making off in the delivery man’s van with cash from the till, his phone, and perhaps a pile of Scotch pies (salt content to rival the Dead Sea); and the local sign writers haven’t yet mastered the English language.

Back in Muirhouse on the north side of Edinburgh, again there’s little to stop us killing each other. Many of the postwar flats have already gone – the last bonkers tenant (‘no surrender’, ‘remember the Alamo’, ‘citizens’ republic of Pennywell Gardens’) was evicted in 2007. But the new housing stock seems to have the same pinched look built in. Is it something they add to the cement?

Then look again at the Saturday night queue. These people are more than the sum of their ‘built environment’. They are not tacky or tawdry. They don’t appear to be climbing on to the emotional bandwagon, either. Suffused with light, which happens to be coming from inside the church, they look like people who wanted to help find that boy and give him back his life. Now he’s been found dead, they’d like to give something back to each other.

Just don’t read the messages tacked to the teddy bears. read more

Oh, America

January 16, 2014

Dennis McGuire (53), who was put to death earlier today by the State of Ohio, ordered a last meal of roast beef, fried chicken, fried potatoes with onions, potato salad, toasted onion bagel with cream cheese, butter pecan ice cream and a Coke.

America, where death sits down at the diner alongside representatives of the Coca-Cola corporation. There’s no need for spicy food, everyone agrees, when you’re gonna have it fried.

That’s not what happened to McGuire: the electric chair is little used nowadays. Instead he was injected with a novel combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a morphine derivative. The State of Ohio has previously administered lethal injections of a barbiturate, pentobarbital. But Danish manufacturers Lundbeck have refused to supply the drug to the United States for use in executions.

America, is your Big Pharma so belittled – so much in decline – that you can’t come up with a new killer drug? Is this what you call R&D nowadays – trying out a new cocktail?

The drugs used on McGuire did not work well. Following the injection (do they rub their arms with alcohol to prevent infection?), his wife and grown-up children watched as he heaved, choked, snorted and gasped, suffering the effects of ‘air hunger’. After 10 minutes of this, McGuire remained still for a few minutes more before he was pronounced dead.

Still as the placid man with a light beard in the mugshot issued by the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Thrashing around as he and his heavily pregnant victim must have done, when he raped her and slashed her neck so that she bled to death in the woods where her body was found the following day.
America, the Big Country where executions are small and mean……and not very well executed.

On Trial

January 14, 2014

On his way in to Southwark Crown Court today to face charges of ‘historic’ indecent assault and sexual assault, former Radio 1 disc jockey Dave Lee Travis seems bemused by the sight of so many cameras. Having lived so long on the airwaves, perhaps he cannot stop himself associating media attention with professional success. Because being seen and heard – that’s-what-it’s-all-about, folks. Even though he knows they’re here this time to capture him at his lowest ebb.

Dave Lee Travis might have bumped into his old BBC stablemate Rolf Harris, also facing ‘historic’ charges at Southwark; except that Harris was allowed to use a side-entrance so that he could push his wheelchair-bound wife into the building.

Both men deny all charges.

‘DLT’, Travis’ radio moniker from the old days, sounded a lot like BLT: three fillings in just the one sandwich; proof that we don’t have to pinch pennies any more.

In those days, we took it that everyone should have the price of a BLT because DLT says so. Of course he never really did, but you could hear as much in his radio voice.

Nowadays our intrinsic self-worth is not so readily understood. You can hear as much in the spread of Operation Yewtree and the sexual assault trials sandwiched into Southwark Crown Court.

News In Brief

January 11, 2014

The barge slips across the River Styx to the Underworld. No, the barge which looks like a cargo container with the top-half sawn-off, is ferrying Syrian refugees across the Tigris to the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. Of those climbing out of the barge on the Iraqi side (one soldier tries checking them for entry, another hovers ineffectively), among the cheap shirts (men) and the women wrapped up in paisley peasant bundles, the refugee with the most unkempt hair and grizzled beard is not a wild man of the country. ‘Designer’ leather jacket, pulling airport-style luggage behind him, he could be the business man who had come back to his birthplace to retire; or perhaps the teacher from a war-torn village (one of many). Either way his old life isn’t there anymore. Assuming he reaches Baghdad 150 miles away, will he have another go….? Or burrow into his suitcase, living off leftovers for as long as he can make them last.

In the UK Tristram Hunt MP, newly appointed shadow spokesman for Education, has revealed Labour’s plans for a Teachers’ MOT. Teachers would have to apply for their licence to be renewed every few years, subject to satisfactory professional development. Hunt, himself a former lecturer, is bright-eyed and coiffed like a posh sixth-former. Strip back the mature jaw and tone down the full-square chin, and you’d take him for Head Boy, mugging something up for Speech Day on the Future of Our School. His rationale for the Teachers’ MOT is half-way between sixth-form vernacular and infantilised self-esteem-speak: ‘This is about believing that teachers have this enormous importance.’

PC Keith Wallis tried to make himself important, claiming he had witnessed Tory chief whip Andrew Mitchell slagging off police officers as plebs. Now he admits making it up. Watching Wallis on his way into court to plead guilty, you can well imagine what he hoped to gain. Thinning hair, moustache from another era, lower jaw bulging to the left – neat enough, but he looks like a man who’s still a PC at the age of 53. Then there’s the question of the way policemen wear a collar and tie and a suit with an executive overcoat on top. Somehow it always looks mutton. Perhaps the indelible stain of being plebeian. read more

Annual Folly

December 31, 2013

Her long dark hair splayed upwards and outwards. Just the hair, and it could be an advert. Her face turning away, scrunched up in pain. Not hairspray but pepper spray, aimed at the woman in a red dress protesting against the closure of a public park in the centre of Istanbul. The man with the king size aerosol, a Turkish police officer dressed head to toe in protective gear, shoots his stuff right at her. He has never been more intent; he will never look less intelligent.

In China a crowd with arms raised to acclaim the spectacular high tide on the Qinglang River (an annual event). Superstitious? In each and every instance their hands are joined above their heads, the better to hold camera phones. The all-important ritual of I-Was-There and This-Is-Me: characteristic customs of our age.

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