‘Oh God, My God, I am safe’, the Eritrean sings.
A fine voice and such good bones might make a model of him yet,
If strong enough for years of standing at the foot of Europe, waiting.

As the hazy cliffs of Sicily have jettisoned the threat of drowning,
Of ending up bagged up as salt-cured rag and bleached bone,
Now comes the more hazardous process, where process is the hazard
That has him under heel, grinds down good bones,
Sneers and sniffs at the magic dust of brave decisions.

The courage to get in the boat; or to jump ship – Brexit.
Bumptious bumpkins breaking Britain’s delicate brokerage.
Better, they felt, than being un-London and unloved.

Once in a lifetime, no going back. Already the brokers have begun again.
Two years’ talks and that’s just the start. Negotiation,
Negotiation, negotiation – that’s what they stand for, an end in itself.
So here we are, where there’s no there, there. The centre, cynically,
Need not break nor hold – only hold back the Eritreans.

A Soldier Featured In The Battle of the Somme, The First-Ever War Film, Looks Back At The Camera And The Generals Still Standing Behind It 100 Years Later

‘You lookin’ at me?’, his eyes are saying, his

Shoulders draped with a comrade’s shelled-out body.

Dead or alive I brought him with me, I’d miss

Him madly every night, never sleeping if he were left out there like nothing much.

Go back and use the earth as camouflage, you declare

Bury myself as good as, without saying it as such.

Must be the passage of time. Didn’t know you cared enough to sever

Self from interest; still less spare a thought for mine.

Nonetheless I will agree it’s better later than never.

But first do describe to me the rest of your century.

The one I missed because I died for nothing much.

Only tell me, since you started it, how did you end this purgatory?

Gargoyle, homunculus, the Gove’s not like the rest of us.

Shining face, pin-sharp eyes, mind as keen as Coke.

But where does he keep his adult appetites? Perhaps pocketed still in the fogey old suits he adopted at school.

Thirty years on, the unlikely prospect of Big Ideas for Grown-Ups framed by the Honourable Member for Manikin – howzat?

Tory leadership contender Michael Gove MP is out and proud to be an intellectual. Also, he seems to credit voters with a maturity that is denied them by many other public figures.

Speaking as he would be spoken to, thinking as he would wish to be thought of, Gove provides a personification of adulthood which poses a direct challenge to the Great Regression – 50 years of treating each other like children; leaving the individual infantilised and often only half-formed.

Ironic, then, that adulthood is being enacted by an apparently eternal schoolboy, aka the ‘pipsqueak’.

Or, to bring us back to the possibility of growing up, maybe it had to be someone who bypassed the adolescent rites of passage which successive generations since the 1960s have somehow made into a life’s work.

1. Warp Factor

Three bars bent out of shape – the last impression left by Hollywood actor Anton Yelchin (27), after his own car rolled back and trapped him between the wrought iron gate and a solid brick pillar at the entrance to his Studio City home.

The Los Angeles coroner confirmed ‘blunt trauma asphyxia’ as the cause of Yelchin’s death.

The Russian-born actor was best known for playing navigation officer Chekov in Star Trek, the 1960s TV series recently re-booted as a feature film franchise.

The vehicle found next to Yelchin’s body was a 2015 Grand Cherokee Jeep. Themodel had already been recalled by manufacturers Chrysler because of gear stick problems and ‘rollaway risk’.

The electronic gear-change lets drivers think they’ve gone to ‘park’ when really they are still in ‘neutral’.

In a kitsch coincidence Yelchin will appear from beyond the grave in a Star Trek movie entitled Star Trek Beyond. Finished a few weeks before his freak fatal accident, the film will boldly go on general release in July.

2. Tommy Gun

Tommy Mair (52), skinny, bony, pointy thing, better off sent to the Somme a hundred years ago (if you’d wish that on anyone). ’Stead of him pointing a gun at Jo Cox MP, allegedly.

I ask you, who in their right mind would stab and shoot and lastly shout ‘Britain First’? Reverse order, perverse logic; like as not he wasn’t in his right mind.

Day before, this man knocks on the door of Birstall Wellbeing Centre complaining that NHS treatment does nothing to alleviate his condition.

The condition of being epileptic, clinically depressed, hardly had a job and still living at your Nan’s 20 years after she passed on.

Best thing ever happened to me is being a volunteer gardener, he once said.

Come back tomorrow says the forty something lady offering ‘holistic therapies, Spiritual and Psychic guidance in a professional and relaxing environment’. read more

How come the script is mightier than the man?

Early on Friday 24th June 2016 it became clear that David Cameron had lost the UK referendum on EU membership, and at 8.15am he came to the podium in front of No 10 Downing Street to announce his resignation as prime minister.

Cameron brought with him not only his wife, Samantha, but also a loose-leaf binder – black, A4-size – in which the announcement he was about to make was written out for him in advance.

Whereas SamCam stood at a respectful distance from proceedings – positioned as a clearly visible presence, but the studio will have to cut to a different camera to get you in the frame, OK? – the Book of Dave took centre stage.

By his glances up and down towards the page, we knew he wasn’t improvising; this was no time for extemporising. Exactly as written, the speech was given. The prime minister’s words could almost have been voiced by an actor; indeed they were spoken by an actor – the prime minister himself.

Was it ever thus? Did they always come here ready to read out the one-I-made-earlier? I don’t believe they did.

Duly prepared, obvs. Minister, even the most accomplished public speaker would be unwise to dispense with notes sufficient to his intended remarks. But when exactly wasthe politician – statesman, even – reduced to the status of newsreader of news he is meant to be making?

Stock answer’s the media’s to blame. True that Downing Street is now an apron to theworld stage, a set-up for the cameras, where once it was…a street to call its own.

But it beggars belief that news itself dictates the script, the script, adherence to thescript. Today’s 24/7 news culture, not like yesteryear when journos were kind and gentle souls who’d overlook a minister’s unscripted gaffe – as if. read more

(1) Mike Ashley

Squire Mike Ashley helicopters in to the Sports Direct mega-warehouse in Shirebrook, Derbyshire….

Brookin Mike Ashley allus tookin the Mickski ’cos half of them in there are Polish and we’re all brookin idiots for pootin up with it but what the brookin else is there to brookin do but work f’rim in brookin Shirebrook?

Big Story: baby born in toilet abandoned as mother goes straight back to work fearing another strike on her employment record and afterwards the sack.

But headlines don’t tell half of it. Dickensian, Victorian, Scrooge, workhouse, Gradgrind – large scale descriptions are too grand to gauge the ugly, petty thing of present-day human resources practice.

Contract in to ‘zero hours’ and you can become less than that.  It’s a small world.

Hardly call them ‘workers’ because their current situation can’t carry the connotations. Thirty years ago the National Union of Mineworkers lost its last battle right here in ‘England’s Belfast’ where the entire population was split between miners clocking in at Shirebrook colliery and those out on strike (no, not managers marking your card; workers making a mark by withdrawing their labour).

Now no proof survives of any prior conviction; previous resonance no longer rings true.

A pleasant day’s walk from Shirebrook (you’ll need sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer), Chatsworth is the real house that Jane Austen re-named Pemberley for her novel Pride and Prejudice (1813). Approaching house and grounds for the first time, it occurred to Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet that she ‘had never seen a place where nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.’

Giving evidence before the Business Select Committee in Westminster last week, Mike Ashley appeared slightly awkward. He admitted far more than he needed to – that business of his business growing uncontrollably from dinghy to oil tanker. read more

There was a young man called Medhanie Whose ancestral name is Kidane. They mistook him for Mered Who littered the sea-bed With change from his travelling money.

You might not think that having light-brown skin like singer Smokey Robinson, corkscrew hair like footballer Roberto Baggio, and the same first name as the man they were actually looking for, would suffice to persuade Italy’s police that their prisoner was indeed Medhanie ‘The General’ Mered.

Perhaps the Polizia didn’t need much persuading – not if they were dummkopfs simply desperate to cop somebody.

In any event, the man arrested in Khartoum and extradited to Rome on Wednesday, now seems to have been correctly identified as Medhanie Kidane Berhe; not the‘kingpin people trafficker’, but a 29-year-old refugee from Eritrea.

The UK National Crime Agency, quick to declare its involvement in the arrest of Mered, has had less to say since the prisoner’s identify was called into question.

This is likely to be confirmed as a terrible case of mistaken ID. But is it any less terrible that the wrong man was a nonentity beforehand, and the best we can offer him is to become so again?

The wrong man is a refugee from war-torn Eritrea. Chances are this is not the first time he has been wronged. Eritrea is described as ‘war-torn’ as often as ‘horse-drawn’ comes before ‘carriage’. But who here has the capacity to care about what happens there? Frankly, Medhanie, we don’t give a damn.

And what of Medhanie Mered? The self-appointed ‘general’ who shackled and banged up refugees, allegedly, until their families found more money to move them on to thenext leg and the next trafficker.

Who laughed, reportedly, when told that more than 300 of his paying passengers had drowned after their boat capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa.

He’d had their money already; now the sea saved him the trouble of handling their landing.

Yet if we didn’t laugh, what else did the West do but fail this human cargo more discreetly?

(1)

China and the money out, money stolen, the biggest theft in the history of our great country, you say.

You say there are still more slitty eyes cutting out the heart of America, blood coming out of America’s wherever.

What’s a man gotta do? You’re on a surfing safari gonna shoot down those Japanese cars crashing in wave after wave like rollers on Malibu beach where the California girls with eyes of cornflower blue and hair like wheat-fields they never saw, don’t go any more.

Moloch, your opponents say, the monster eating America’s future. What if the future isthe orange monster, what could be worse? What could be worse? Meanwhile your people insist the wig’s on the other way: you’re the one to save the children and make America great again; and they want you for the part, they love you for the role because you speak perfect American.

You talk fast and loosely poetic in rhythms running from old Philip Marlowe on the West Coast before the Beach Boys, to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl of New York. Not that you saythe same things as the Beat hippie gay fat guy but yours is the same vernacular and it’s all to do with being in the moment – let’s levitate the Pentagon, remember? And each moment is unique so of course you are going to say different things because thedifferent situation demands it and it’s all about the situation (Not the moment? No, that was a moment ago).

You the ginger man playing it like Malcolm McLaren doing what Guy Debord always wanted to; leching and leering, too, as if your middle name is Benny Hill. The spectacle which started with the politic poetic rhetoric of liberal-baiting, red-hating Senator Eugene McCarthy and crossed over to the counterculture, has finally made it home – spectacularly.

How could America not love you? read more

‘One of our aircraft has failed to return’ – the language demands a suitably decorous response. From a nation of wonky-teeth men, and women with black lines drawn up the back of their legs: wartime pastiche of seamed stockings in desperately short supply.

No way of telling if it was the way they told it: keeping calm, carrying on, ‘your mother running about putting sandbags on incendiaries’, and years later her pointed remark to a teenage son on the brink of overreaching himself: ‘the pilots who never came back were only the same age as you, y’know?’

Quietly but vehemently; quite possibly prompted by closely guarded memory of lost first love.

Bearing in mind this far-off culture of understatement, I have to ask if recent reports of Flight MS804 seem grossly exaggerated. I mean all that footage of gurning – the twisted features of close relatives beside themselves in shock and awe (too early even to call it grief), when the EgyptAir plane failed to return to Cairo and news was first broadcast across airport offices and lounges.

Of course last week’s stricken faces were as old as the hills, and the hills were still there throughout All Our Yesterdays. But who decided to tell it this way? That is, through pictures of people sent briefly back to nature.

No, I shan’t say you might as well take pictures of them on the lavatory. But if we accept this wreckage as our common humanity – the collapsing faces of those needing time, the fullness of time, to re-assemble themselves as human beings, aren’t we assuming much the same as the people who blew up the plane*?

Better to re-write Wilfred Owen’s re-take of Horace, and message it to those journalists responsible for today’s mourn-porn: de morte decorum esse necesse est.

* Itself an assumption yet to be verified. read more