#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.

#23 Naming The Unnameable

July 6, 2014

Rolf, you dolt, you’ve put your own name on a par with ‘Adolf’ – never to be used again.

During six whole decades of showbiz, first there was ‘Rolf’, which really said: this person is permanently childish, bubbling over with didgeridoos and other party noises not far removed from whoopee cushions, including a jelly wobble version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and something else – the stylophone – that sounds like a singing birthday card; also, he may be 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 but he still draws and paints like a child prodigy.

Which is to say that he would not, could not ever have a boner because his didger ain’t old enough to do it.

…..followed by ‘Harris’, the second name which has always meant: actually, he’s a straight-down-the-line average guy who’s only pretending to be peculiarly infantile; no fear of stunted development cum sexual fetish on the part of this professional performer. In bed with his wife, he surely acts his age rather than his show size.

We don’t and probably won’t know why Rolf Harris committed the indecent assaults which eventually led to his conviction and the jail term of five years and nine months to which he was sentenced on 4 July 2014. But might it have something to do with a grown man playing a largely pre-pubescent role throughout his entire adult life?

This is not to excuse his actions; only to observe that the continual commute between an excessively childlike exterior and the interior life of a sexually mature adult, must have been a dangerously long stretch, with plenty of opportunity for personal failure and moral failing.

Since he became a children’s entertainer in the 1950s, Harris has been cast in a role categorised as pre-sexual, as noted in a Telegraph feature of 13 years ago:

“Rolf Harris…is, after all, a sexless being….the man who paints huge and wonderful pictures for wide-eyed children while making a comical panting noise, which to him doesn’t sound remotely like someone having an orgasm. He is a man so guileless and innocent and unsullied that he couldn’t see the smutty innuendo lurking within the title ofhis most famous, all time, blockbuster hit-single, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. Jakethe Peg was a man with an extra leg to Rolf – nothing more or less, nothing to giggle at. Smut and Rolf just don’t go together – smut and Rolf is an oxymoron.” read more

#22 Freak And Unique

July 1, 2014

Bug-eyed and mock-fiendish, leering at you like he’s just out of Bedlam.

In any number of archive photographs, the FAB Geezer famed for his crazed expression, enormous cigar and court jester hairdo, is cackling and calling to the guys’n’gals: don’t leave your disabled daughter/mother/sister alone with me.

Pantomime villain pantomimes villainy. Except in the case of Jimmy Savile, it was no panto. Unlike Glastonbury, allegedly, here there was less miming than meets the eye.

Hindsight proffers a more pertinent p-word. How perverted he was, it’s doubtful we’ll ever know precisely. You might say some of the latest reports could have been made up – porn-scenes in the mortuary, for example; but it’s difficult to imagine anyone simply imagining them.

Similarly, at first sight the depth of Savile’s private depravity seems impossibly distant from his public role: by appointment to viewers and listeners, purveyor of bite-sized, tea-time packages of zany antics and charitable work; counter culture processed as comfort food and compressed into that characteristic half-laugh, half-yodel.

Howzabout that, then?, Savile would conclude – a magician asking his audience to acknowledge his trickery. But was it a trick, with Savile dressed outlandishly to disguise the real freak underneath? Or did he dress like a freak because that’s what he was, and that’s what he wanted us to see.

Savile groomed the nation, said the police officer in charge of investigating his crimes, as if we were all victims of Sir Jimmy’s secret design. But Savile presented himself tothe whole world as a cartoon fiend. Short of phoning the police to confess, how could he have been more revealing?

(He even described the time spent shut up with the body of his late mother as ‘the best five days of my life.’) read more

#21 Hadi And The Had Nots

June 24, 2014

Mohammed Hadi is the Coventry Kid who went from West Midlands to Middle East, where he joined the Sunni insurgents fighting to establish the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Eighteen-year-old Hadi has been nicknamed ‘Osama Bin Bieber’ because, in the only photo made available to the press, he is a picture of absolute innocence. But unlike Justin Bieber, this Berber is thin lipped and bespectacled (for the record: more like Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley wearing big bins; and even an eighties-style jacket).

Almost overnight, Hadi and a handful of fellow travellers such as Cardiff’s Reyaad Khan (20) and Nasser Muthana (20), have been built up as the biggest threat to Britain’s national security: they are Public Enemies No 1, 2, and 3, allegedly.

But these wee boys are pantomime villains. When Khan and Muthana appeared in their now infamous ISIS recruitment video, they seemed to be hamming it up in accents as affected as doing the pimp roll or wearing pulled-down pants.

Me and my Kalashnikov, Yo! From Bling to the burqa, Yo! Iraq is the new black, Yo!

Although there was fighting talk of selflessness and self-sacrifice (dying for the cause), they were really doing a selfie – more narcissist than terrorist. Yet what was uploaded by a handful of adolescent wannabes is now being floated at face value by the British government.

Well done, boys. The great and the good are queuing up to thumbs-down your YouTube appearance. What’s not to (not) ‘like’!

The threat of teenager bombers – inflated as a tech start-up in the days of the dot.com boom, is called to conjure up ‘the public’, though this big idea has long been blown away.

Compared to earlier prospects held out to bright young things of previous generations, anti-adolescent-terrorism is surely less than compelling (even if set to be compulsory under the terms of Prevent, the politico-police strategy for countering extremism amongthe young). read more

#20 Keeping up with the Kardashians

June 16, 2014

Palm trees behind a stucco wall, waving in the breeze; out front the middle aged man who’s flagged down a TV camera in order to get his retaliation in first.

That man is Tony Blair, so the fronds waving to television viewers are likely to be Levantine, i.e. somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, in accordance with the former UK prime minister’s recent role as a ‘Middle East peace envoy’.

To camera, Blair is fronting his preferred account of the dismemberment of Iraq, in which a country now cut into pieces is not the legacy of the Anglo-American, Blair-Bush invasion of 2003; more a continuation of the current civil war in neighbouring Syria underpinned by age-old enmity between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

In newly established refugee camps, families who fled Iraq’s second city, Mosul, following the incursion of Sunni forces fighting for the self-proclaimed Islamic State ofIraq and Syria (ISIS), introduce relics of their erstwhile middle-class existence – blow-up children’s mattresses in Disney-style designs – into the minimal, clinical interiors furnished by international aid.

Back in Iraq, one of many men shown with hands above heads, being led into the desert to be shot by ISIS troops, is wearing a Nasri football shirt. He won’t mind missing the World Cup, then, since his hero failed to make the French team.

Of course the probable execution of Nasri-fan-man is not something to be so flippant about. But how else to react, without indulging in the latest emotional frisson contained in covering civil war as the new Walking Dead?

Similarly, with Cameron’s currently fashionable caution as objectionable as Blair’s previously popular interventionism (more than a decade ago when ‘WMD’ spelled What we Must Do), there is no proper, progressive place in the current round of position mongering. read more

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