Coming Unwrapped

There are many aspects to Christmas in films and adverts which annoy me. It's always snowing; everyone can sing carols perfectly; nobody wears the stupefied, semi-drunk expression so characteristic of Christmas Day; there's never a vegetarian alternative to a roasted turkey with stuffing up its arse. But one image in particular has an insurmountable gap from reality. The wrapping of the presents.

Picture the scene. There's generally a Caucasian mother and her two Caucasian children. Everyone is smiling. Oftentimes, everyone is laughing. They wrap their presents perfectly and with little effort. The paper is shiny. The bows are immaculate. It looks like fun.

Here's what is always missing from the scene:

a) the initial seventeen hour search for the end of the sellotape

b) the five hour searches for the new end of the sellotape after each strip is cut off

c) the moment when you fail to get the sellotape exactly parallel with the end of the paper, meaning half of it is wasted

d) the realisation that the section of paper you've cut off is just too small to cut the present properly

e) the times when the sellotape takes on a life of its own, whizzes through the air and sticks to your coffee table

f) the Dilemma of the Ends: do you stick them up as well (meaning the present is impossible to unwrap) or leave them flapping loose (meaning the present looks crap)

g) the cussing

Wrapping presents is never fun. Wrapping presents is grim work. It involves a medium designed to be written on and nothing else; and another which most of us have otherwise abandoned, for good reason, once we stopped trying to build Blue Peter models. It also requires the human race to evolve about five more hands apiece. I don't know who first devised this grisly concept. But I suspect it was somebody with the secret agenda of making us hate Christmas. (See also: late night shopping; jokes in crackers; Cliff Richard). In fact, I bet all Bah Humbugs, from Scrooge to the Grinch, were committed Yuletide-philes until they started to wrap their presents. I will develop this theory further in an essay entitled 'Twas The Night Before Christmas And All Through The House Not A Sound Could Be Heard Except The Tearing Of Paper And A Loud Swearword.'

The ASBO Chorus

Lying awake at 6am, having been wrenched from happy dreams by the dawn chorus, I decided – No, I'll be precise here. Staggering around in a sleep-deprived daze the next day, mind wandering at random, I decided the following. The dawn chorus is the equivalent of a night club. The attendees kick up a hell of a racket at anti-social hours in the hope of copulating.

I know what people say about bird song. I agree with them too. Bird song can be sublime, heavenly, enchanting. Nonetheless, it is all about bonking. Human tunes can be sublime, heavenly and enchanting too, and most of them are also to do with bonking. I've often wondered why a great majority of our songs are obsessed with love and the attending actions. Perhaps we are unconsciously just mimicking the birds.

We do so in very few other fields. It is frequently said that today's society is highly sexualised. Perhaps compared to the Victorian era; but next to the animal kingdom it is a wet Sunday in Grimsby. And the most debauched, libidinous societies in history cannot match up to, say, the average duck pond. Animals are motivated by two things only: food and sex. That's pretty much it. When they have eaten they want to breed. When they're not eating or breeding they're stopping others humping 'their' partners. They devise elaborate territorial patterns, intricate feathers or furs and, of course, beautiful songs – and it's all about sex. Whereas we have denigrated and marginalised it. A raft of new desires have been created. Sex is either shut into private compartments or defined as perverse.

I quite like the dawn chorus, when the damn thing isn't waking me at some ungodly time. (Dawn, I suppose). But it's amusing how a breed so prudish about sex has treated this shameless display of libido. It's seen as heavenly and put in the same twee category as a sunset or a teardrop. In fact it's a bunch of blokes sat in a hedge bellowing “Shag me! I'm great!” If humans tried it, the police would scoop them up quicker than you can say “Anti-social behaviour order.”

Name, Rank and Serial Number

I learned one interesting thing from the trial of Keith Owen, phoney egg retailer. Owen has just been convicted for what must be a very tempting crime. He sold eggs to supermarkets claiming they came from free range hens eating proper grain. In fact, of course, they were from battery creatures gorging chemicals. Owen was given three years in prison and forced to return his £3m profits. What I didn't learn, incidentally, was to whom he gave the money. The government, most likely. the supermarkets possibly. Almost certainly not the customers who paid mark-up prices for his eggs believing the originators bore the fripperies, like feathers and beaks, denied to caged hens.

But what I did learn was how the authorities try to prevent scams like Owen's. Every single egg in Britain is apparently stamped with a unique serial number. Every single egg. And if you have the right databases you can track down the farm where each was laid, the conditions, possibly even the actual mother. Looking at the three eggs left in my fridge, the numbers on two are too smudged to be legible. But here we are on the third: 1UK13714-B/B 18Mar. So with a few phone calls I might be able to find out which chicken squeezed this out of her nether regions.

I'm almost tempted to try. To write a letter of thanks, perhaps, if the egg is particularly good. Or one of complaint if it has annoying features like a thick inner skin, pointing out that the art of cooking eggs is a precise one and the slightest deviation can be disastrous. Maybe, though, I should be apologising to the poor hen, free range though she is. After all, when she laid this egg she must have thought she was giving birth to a son or daughter, the next in the new generation of her proud family. When in fact she was just supplying me with lunch. Not even that: part of a lunch. Together with another thwarted attempt at chicken procreation and some noodles, whose own hopes and dreams are unknown.

To London To See The Queen

Well, not exactly. To see my friend Cara actually, who may or may not enjoy being called a queen. And certainly not to see Queen: The Musical, though I enjoyed the bombastic Freddie Mercury statue which some lunatic has erected over the theatre doors. I had a very good day out, appreciating as ever London's beauties and architectural vainglory. A few points stuck out:

Our first stop was the British Museum; Cara's first visit, approximately my fifty first. We agreed it was a little like visiting a zoo. It's fantastic seeing the things inside; but the issue of whether they should be there, rather than their homelands, is troubling. The Egyptian rooms, with their monumental statues and columns, reveals looting on a colossal scale. But the heart of the debate is of course the Parthenon a.k.a the Elgin Marbles. The British Museum was considerate enough to give a short explanation of why Greece wants the exhibits back, and why the Museum is sticking onto them. For the first time, though, I noticed that the cards next to many of the headless statues declared “Head in Athens.” Is this part of a slow compromise? One decade all the heads are returned, the next all the left feet, and so on? Or did Lord Elgin do a hasty raid, unpack the bullion at home and realise he'd forgotten some small but important details?

Equally inevitable was our visit to the Tate Modern. Star exhibit is currently Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall. It is basically a vast crate, open at one end. You can go inside; but there are no windows and no lights. It gets darker and darker as you progress until all you can see are the pale faces of fellow explorers. Still you blunder on, expecting something to happen. So it does, when you collide into the far wall. The bunf says How It Is is an exploration of knowledge and uncertainty: do you walk into the unknown or retreat towards the familiar? Cara remarked that is shows modern art's immense capacity for suckering people into doing anything. Even walking through an unlit crate until you hit a wall. Other exhibits included a colossal dining table and chairs, and a film of a masked boxer hitting himself in the face then rubbing his genitals. For sheer entertainment, the Tate Modern is better than a day at the circus.

Less uplifting was the walk there. I generally savour the walk along the South Bank from Westminster Bridge to the Tate. There's a fine panorama of buildings across the Thames, some sublime (St Paul's, Somerset House), some grotesque (Portcullis House). The vessels on the river are nicely varied too, with restored navy ships like the HQS Wellington mixing with rusting dredgers and tugs. On the South Bank itself there are treats like Da Kidz Zone under the National Theatre, the graffiti-bedecked ghetto where hoodies try to do flips on their skateboards and fall over, a lot. But the number of Living Statues on the walk has got out of hand. There ought to be a law: only one pink-painted man per five hundred yards. And another: if you're a Living Statue then you're supposed to stand still. Instead, desperate as competition grows, they've started bouncing around and waving at passers-by; and what's the point in spray-painting yourself gold if you're going to do that? Still, I enjoyed the sand sculptures built on one of the Thames' tiny and filthy beaches. A monument to London's artists grabbing the ephemeral and totally bleeding pointless.

On the subject of Living Statues: walking part the Horse Guards Parade, we agreed that these guards had amongst the worst jobs in the world. Imagine having to spend all day totally motionless, not an expression your face, while all around you gurning yahoos prance about photographing themselves next to you. Though The Horse Guards, I thought, have it better than the Beefeaters. At least they can dream of the day when their horse gets restive and kicks some tourist in the knackers. Cara said she couldn't do the job without music, and we decided that their helmets should be redesigned with ear flaps, to conceal the headphones. Still, we conceded, they don't have to actually do anything. They aren't even guarding the buildings any more. Anywhere these toy soldiers are standing to attention with their pikes and sabres, the actual security men will be lurking nearby, submachine guns at the ready. That's the charm of London.

Venus & Olympia

The nude has a long history in Western art. Rampant in ancient Greek and Roman times, it resurfaced in the late fifteenth century. This is fairly surprising considering the restrictions of society at the time. Women's bodies especially were rigidly controlled by religious doctrine. Displaying an ounce more of flesh than was permitted could bring severe punishment. Sex and nudity might have flourished in the unregulated morass of folk tales and ballads. Paintings, though, were censored and often directly commissioned by the church. Priests could condemn a painting for the crime of depicting Biblical characters as real people. (As if believing that anyone in the Bible could actually exist). Yet look what they permitted. The bush, the willy, the whole full-frontal panorama which today would bring immediate banishment to the late-night schedules. There were rules, of course. The nude had to be young, pleasing to the eye. Most of all, she (and it was usually a she) had to be distant. Not contemporary, certainly not Biblical. The reappearance of the nude was part of the Renaissance and she was supposed to remain in the fantasy world of Greek and Roman legends.

The history of the nude is not entirely honerable. The best painters could make her an immediate and plausible figures, allowing the mythical settings to fade into irrelevance. The increasing perfection of the portraits and the meticulous attention to detail was linked to the Renaissance interest in biology. And there is a sensuousness in some works which empowers rather than degrades the subjects. Yet the nude is still invariably part of the old male creator-female formula, with all the corresponding power relations. Rather a lot of artists have taken advantage. A great many nude paintings – and the oeuvre of William Etty springs to mind here – are basically porn. Not always soft porn either. The arch façade of the nude has been used to excuse rape (those unfortunate Sabine women in many works), paedophilia (some of Balthus' dodgier moments) mutilation and snuff. At its crudest, the genre was a painter hiring a local prostitute to pose as Diana and boinking her in the studio afterwards.

Titian may have hired a prostitute too and may even have boinked her. Otherwise, though, his Venus of Urbino is unimpeachable. The mythological title is an irrelevance given to please the censors. This is simply a vivid study of a beautiful young woman. His Venus reclines on a couch, every part of her body a brilliant portrayal of comfort. Her legs cross easily, her heads leans back towards the pillow and her golden hair splays across her shoulders, offsetting her soft pink skin. In the background an older woman is watching a girl rummaging in a chest. An ordinary domestic scene, and its mundaneness emphasises the natural sense of Venus' pose. She has simply dressed as she chose and sees no reason to be embarrassed when we stare in.

Yet the eroticism of the painting can't be denied either. Make what you will of the expression on her placid face – the faintest of smiles, possibly a hint of an invitation? Regardless, our gaze is drawn towards her left hand. On the surface she is just discreetly covering up her private parts. Her fingers are curling inwards, however. Maybe, just maybe, the Venus is starting to masturbate herself. This hint, lying in almost the very centre of the painting, epitomises the whole feel of the work. It is a masterpiece of subtle sensuality; a celebration of a woman perfectly in control of her body, able to present it without humiliating either herself or the viewer. The next two nudes I came across as I flicked through my art books – Francois Boucher's Miss Louise O'Murphy, a courtesan presenting her fat arse for the taking, and Corregio's Jupiter and Io, a woman being raped by a cloud, for God's sake – confirmed how rare a truly erotic nude is.

Three centuries after Titian, the conventions for the nude were still intact. They were especially important to the conservative Royal Salon in France, to whom Manet submitted his Olympia. Olympia was, superficially at least, a deliberate copy of Venus of Urbino – a naked young woman reclining on a couch. But the details which Manet changed and his treatment of the subject make this a very different painting.

Olympia lies as stiffly as Titian's Venus is graceful. One hand clutches a dead bouquet of flowers. A black servant woman is presenting her with a fresh bunch. They give colour to what is almost a monochrome image but they are garish and rather unappealing. An unfriendly black cat arches its back at us; a perennial image of evil. The servant's race is also significant. In the nineteenth century black women were a symbol of, amongst other things, unchecked sexuality; witness the exaggerated buttocks of the Hottentot Venus. And no 'proper' lady at the time would have had a black woman as a personal servant. All the details build a horrible suspicion. This Olympia is not a goddess, she is not even a courtesan. Manet has not just used a prostitute as his model, he has made her his subject. She is a common hooker and the flowers are from her latest john.

And look how she has been painted. Her body is rather scrawny, her pose awkward, her skin pallid and unhealthy. Her eyes are empty and dead. None of the tricks used to portray the third dimension are employed here. She is flat and unnatural, barely more than a blob of paint. In fact, nothing at all has been done to give Olympia beauty, none of the schemes which normally wrap the nude with a spurious respectability. If her vacant expression says anything at all it is: “Tits! That's what you came for, isn't it? Well, here they are. Tits!” There they are, as erotic as a torn-out page of 'Jugs' magazine stuck to a wet pavement in January.

We find it hard now to understand the controversy which Olympia evoked, all the caricatures and criticisms and pure hatred. It wasn't because Olympia was a bare body. It was because she was nothing else. As Gilles Neret said in his excellent book, “Olympia was not a nude; she was naked.” Manet blatantly broke the rules for the nude. Worst than that, he was mocking them. In giving his prostitute the name of a goddess and the pose of a Old Master's beauty, he was implying that all nudes were nothing better than his. Simple porn, the product and satisfaction of male lust. If I was a member of the Royal Salon I would have been outraged too.

Nudes still exist in art today. Thankfully, they very rarely pose as nymphs or goddesses; and they don't have to be Beauty personified. Their bodies have been stretched, distorted, made almost demonic (most memorably in Picasso's Three Dancers). And other women other than the young and perfect are depicted. The most famous in recent years is Lucien Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, an overweight middle-aged woman presenting herself. The Impressionists dramatically widened the possibilities of art. Manet was their leader; and though Olympia is hardly an Impressionist painting, it has all the movement's daring and invention. With a single painting Manet overturned a centuries-old tradition. Flat, awkward Olympia became the future. For all her beauty, the Venus of Urbino belongs to a remote past.

What Nick Thinks

Nice to see that our mutual friend, Nick Griffin, will be attending the Copenhagen conference. Not to help save the world, of course. The BNP leader denies that it needs saving. The evidence for climate change, he states, “is somewhat dodgy.” It is an argument also taken by another noted humanitarian, George W Bush. Never mind that by now the scientific evidence for the devastating impact of carbon burning, deforestation, water, ground and air pollution and the rest of the gang is pretty incontrovertible. If a single report asserts otherwise then certain people can challenge the science. As if any yahoo cannot do a dubious study, pull out some random numbers and conclude anything in a report. Griffin's party claims that his presence at Copenhagen will show the BNP “is not only interested in race and immigration.” Well, it will certainly do that. Griffin is apparently not only wrong about race and immigration. He is wrong about the environment too.

In fact, I'd like to know what he believes about everything. The BNP should publish a vast database of his views on their ever-entertaining website. What Nick Thinks. After all, in this world of complex moral issues and contrasting beliefs it is often hard to make up one's mind about issues. This could help. See What Nick Thinks – be it about the Iranian nuclear program, the Schleswig-Holstein dispute or the eternal black socks v. white socks debate. Then take the diametrically opposing stance and there's a very good chance you will be right.

Enough To Make A Lionheart Laugh

Also on the subject of ancient kings of England (and yes, I have been reading those Guardian supplements which were probably aimed at children). Richard I died in the siege of Chalus-Chabrol, owned by a rebellious subject, when shot through the shoulder bow a crossbow bolt. The wound didn't kill him instantly, but later became gangrenous and finished the job. Apparently the Lionheart had dropped his guard to break out laughing at the sight of an enemy crossbowman using a frying pan as a makeshift shield. Said archer then promptly shot him.

It makes me wonder how often humour was used as a weapon in warfare. Especially medieval warfare, which was somewhat less disciplined. When we laugh, after all, we are not entirely in command of our bodies. Sometimes we are brought giggling to a virtual collapse. And soldiers often have a fairly basic sense of humour. Were there cases of red noses being worn, fake breasts or (aptly for the times) foam arrows through the head? Did regiments march into battle chanting “The boy stood on the burning deck, His pockets full of crackers...”? Perhaps Richard's slayer intended using his utensil as weapon as well as shield in a full comic routine. There is surely nothing more hysterical than the sight of a soldier scaling a castle wall and being whopped over the head by a frying pan. It could have brought the whole army to its knees.

After the siege succeeded, the crossbowman was executed. I don't know if it happened in suitably ironic manner; egg whisks and wooden spoons being inserted in various orifices, that sort of thing. Probably better that we don't know.

The Tide Of History

In the early eleventh century Canute, king of England, took his throne to the beach at Bosham, West Sussex. The tide was coming in. Canute ordered it to stop. The tide appeared not to hear. Canute repeated his command many times but eventually had to retreat because his feet were getting wet.

Canute's intention was supposedly to prove a point to his overly sycophantic courtiers. He was then one of the most powerful men in the world. Not only had he united England, not an easy task in the eleventh century, he had welded it to Norway, Denmark and part of Sweden to build an impressive northern empire. His courtiers were very aware of this and their flattery was grating on Canute's nerves. After all, even he was still controlled by higher powers. God was God and he, Canute, was still just a man. So stop mixing us up, Aelthwan of Glostobchick and the rest of you.

What Canute inadvertently demonstrated was that he was also subject to another force. This is the capricious beast of popular history. Because while we have all heard the story of Canute and the waves, we don't always remember that he knew what he was doing. The version that springs first into the mind is that Canute the Great really did believe he controlled the sea. He got an unpleasant shock when the tide disobeyed him. And so he is relegated into the same zany category as the Roman Emperor Caligula, who took an army to the English Channel, ordered them to what the water with their swords for a while and declared himself Conqueror of Neptune.

We like to cut them down to size, these great figures of the past. Very often the most effective way is to take a single damning fact and wrap it around them like a shroud. Alfred burnt the cakes; Catherine the Great shagged a horse; George III was off his head; Victoria had a face like a slapped arse; and so on. Sometimes it can be a simple as a name. Alfonso the Slobberer could have united or conquered as much as he wanted but that isn't going to be the vision conjured up. Said 'facts' might be exaggerated, distorted or simply invented but that doesn't matter. Proper historians can disprove them over and over again but the stories remain with us. The process might be illogical but it is probably healthy. Disrespect or past rulers encourages irreverence towards current ones; something which cannot happen enough. And we see how they are already being distorted and reduced. John Major stood on a soap box and nobbed Edwina Curry (though not simultaneously); Bill Clinton let That Woman do Those Things to him; George W Bush talked like an intoxicated monkey; Tony Blair just grinned and grinned and grinned. These are the images which our children will learn, unless something more lurid is found. Blair fretted over his legacy in the last years of his rule. Someone should have told him: it's out of your control, Tone.

Canute may not have gone to Bosham at all. It could have happened at Southampton. Or, most likely, not at all. Perhaps he got to the beach, found it was already high tide and just said what would have happened if he tried bossing it around. Or the whole thing could have been fabricated. Possibly by a courtier asserting his king's wisdom; thus continuing the flattery which the parable was intended to banish. It really doesn't matter. Nor, in the end, does the fact that we remember it backwards. Because it just makes a better story, a mad king getting his come-comeuppance; rather than a smart-arse king doing the not-exactly-difficult trick of outwitting his courtiers.

Coniston - 31/7/09

Well, the day which seemed unlikely earlier in the week, when it was bucketing it down and I was coming down with cold: Scafell Pike with Christine and Gav. The morning was bright and even Christine remained resolute, despite this being her first mountain for about seven years. There was a horrendously long drive and Gav's style betrays a man who watches too many episodes of Top Gear. But it was worth it when Wasdale came into view. I'd forgotten how forlorn and beautiful the valley is. It's dominated by huge mountains, the most ostentatious being the rocky faces of Great Gable. Half the valley floor is swallowed by the bleak Wast Water; the other section is a labyrinthine of dry stone walls. (Surely the product of a benign but naïve EU grant.) And acting like a lighthouse is the white walls of the Wasdale Arms. (“Home of the world's biggest liar” though they didn't say who.) We parked near the pub and began on a path snaking up the flank of Great Gable. Across the valley, Scafell Pike was looking increasingly impressive; great buttresses of crags with the peak, well, peeking up behind, two gulleys scouring deep wounds into the hillside. Wast Water soon opened up behind us and, finally, the distant gleam of the sea. The path was nicely varied too. A gently rising track; a rather nasty slog across shale; and a good semi-scramble up to the pass of Sty Head. This gave us our first great view of overlapping fuck-off mountains; and if a man is tired of views of overlapping fuck-off mountains, he is tired of life. The route also became unclear here, partly because we had three generations of wayfinders. There was Gav's chilling GPS system. There was Christine's slightly more subjective reading of the OS map. And there was Wainwright offering highly useful advice like “Many good men get lost here.” Eventually we located our path, the Corridor Route which traversed under the cliffs of Great End back along Wasdale. It gave us some good views of Great Gable, which has weird patches of red rock near the top mitigating its grey flanks. Crossed those gulleys, which seemed as impressive at close hand, eating our lunch in one. Hit another pass and, for the first time, the wind. Not the truly malicious wind which tried blowing me off Coniston Old Man but definitely a breeze nonetheless. The way was becoming increasingly crowded, with all routes converging into one. There were a few drop-outs though, and I can't really blame them. The final summit ascent was a bit grim. In fact it was a dreary five hundred foot slog over broken rock, a 'Frodo's trek through Mordor' with additional wind. At least, to my amazement, there was no cloud. We saw Scotland and the Solway Firth, we saw the sea and Sellafield. And finally we reached the summit and saw the world. Well, not really – the light was too bad even for the Isle of Man – but there were some outstanding panoramas of the Lakes at its best. Enjoyed the sights for as long as the gale would permit, then dropped down into the pass of Mickledore. We gaped at a man climbing Scafell by Lord's Rake, an apparently vertical scar of shale. Then we found our way down was almost as bad. It began as an apparent dried stream bed, then widened into a sort of unofficial scree run. The descent finally became gentler but was on one of those god-awful constructed paths, made of stone slabs which are really slippery in the wet. And so, before you could say “This was almost my favourite walk ever”, it started to rain. A lot, for quite a long time. We slogged on for a time, crossing a rushing stream with some difficulty. (All those rocks, bags of extra rocks by the wayside, and they didn't even make any steppy-stones.) Weather and ground seemed to work in tandem on this walk, however. As soon as the track became a proper path again, curling around a hillside back towards the car park, the rain stopped. So we got back to the car feeling knackered but happy. And I achieved my two objectives for the holiday: one day climbing Scafell Pike, one day tramping the hills alone like a miserable old get. And if there's been a large 'pretty good, considering...' factor to this holiday, it was nonetheless still pretty good. The house wasn't perfect – dad was on the phone to the unfortunate landlord this evening pointing out its many imperfections – but it was good enough. Still, I note our plan for future holidays is to get back to Patterdale and Broad How as quickly as possible.

Coniston - 30/7/09

OK weather for once so we had a kind of Super Strolls Thursday. First drove up to Tarn Hows, at the top of the Coniston valley. As mum said, it's a kind of mini-Lake District, a little wooded valley with an artificial lake. The best feature are the looming mountains of the actual Lake District all around. We took the inevitable walk around the lake, about two miles all told, with Christine setting Lorna a nature spotting test to distract her from her many – possible apocryphal – stitches. Sadly there wasn't all that much nature to see, with even ducks shunning the lake like it was poison. It started to rain as lunchtime approached, in a rather predictable way. But then it stopped and we got to have a picnic outside the car for once, in a spot with a very good view of Cumbria's Dead Sea. By now the girls were set on the Beatrix Potter Experience. Me, Bill, mum and dad, not wanting to experience that in any circumstances, split off from them. We weren't sure what we did want to do, but after lengthy discussion stayed at Tarn Hows for another stroll. This one was downhill through the woods, alongside another noisy and tempestuous beck. Unfortunately the path was a bit too Alpine for Bill so we soon had to turn back. I darted along a bit further until I got in sight of a road, seeing en route another decent little waterfall. Next we drove over the top into Langdale. This looked more like a proper Lakes valley to my eyes; Coniston is OK but it's a bit too borderland and civilised. Langdale has tiny slate villages, high hills on both sides and, at the head, the rocky and towering Langdale Peaks. We stopped about halfway down and strolled down a path supposedly leading alongside Eltenwater. It actually did everything it could to avoid the lake, though capitulated about three quarters of the way along to give us a trademark water-and-mountains view to photograph. Had tea at a weird café-cum-grocery-cum-outdoors centre, and got home just in time for our usual meal out. This was at the Red Lion, a small and lively pub just down the lane. Pub food too, which meant it was decently priced and concentrated on actually tasting nice, and a “folks from round here” landlord straight from Central Casting. He even had a West Country accent, which was a bit odd. Mum and dad insisted on breaking into a churchyard on the way back, but otherwise a good evening.

Coniston - 29/7/09

Mum and dad went off to Walney Island today to get attacked by gulls, which is apparently something they enjoy. The rest of us, noting it was bloody raining again, headed to Barrow for the Docks Museum. Originally one of those “ho ho, let's go to the Docks Museum, that must be almost as interesting as the Pencil Museum” deals, it was now our only feasible wet-weather option left. And it turned out to be pretty good. Though small – it was free – it was lively and informative, and fortunately about Barrow itself rather than just docks. The town flew up out of nothing in the nineteenth century when mineral mining in the Lakes took off and the railways opened up the Cumbrian coast. It also turned its hand to building ships and, more recently, nuclear submarines. But it's been in hard times for a long while, getting bombed to shit in WWII and contracting dramatically due to economics. The museum was also quite defensive about Barrow being a bit of a dump. Certainly, from the bits we saw, it seems largely composed of bleak industrial estates. The weather had cleared up by the time we left, so we decided to head for the nearby zoo. Now, I'm never entirely sure about zoos. The best ones, I think, are like Barrow Zoo, which lets some animals wander all over the place as if they own it. We mocked the signs at the entrance warning us of the wild lemurs. But there the buggers were, scampering all over the playground. In another area emus were wandering leisurely across the path. Otherwise the primates were the star attraction: the spider monkeys scampering over the raised walkway, the gibbon casually making a heart-stopping drop to a branch twenty feet below. Best of all, a monkey lying on a giant tortoise; and giving us a glare which clearly said “Well? Why shouldn't I lie on giant tortoises?” Less impressive were the lions (asleep, as always) and the tiger feeding session, which was a twenty minute lecture followed by a five second glimpse of a tiger eating a chicken. Anyway, the girls enjoyed themselves, and Gemma got a cuddly lemur to compliment Emily's gibbon which she wears everywhere as a sort of rucksack. Lorna has a dinosaur egg but it's not hatched yet, and I'm a bit worried what will happen when it does.

Coniston - 28/7/09

Well, the cold has arrived at least. And the rain's back, varying from drizzle to torrent all day. Throw in a tendency of everyone to lose everything and you've got something called 'not exactly a perfect day.' Started with yet another trip to Coniston, this time with some plan to go on the steam launch. But a storm was a-brewing, allegedly, so we had to settle on yet another walk around the village. Said storm never arrived but a lot more downpours did, so it was basically a morning of diving into shops to keep dry. Had packups in the cars, then drove around Coniston Water to the home of the man who looms over the parts almost as tall as Beatrix Potter: John Ruskin. He was buried in Coniston itself, and intended his house on the lake to be one of those Arcadias for thought and enquiry. Apparently it worked so well that late in his life he had to move out of his main bedroom because it kept giving him too many inspirations and doing his head in. I don't know much about Ruskin but apparently he was one of those Renaissance men who dabbled in everything. This included designing some wallpaper and a zither for his house. And very nice they were too. It was an interesting house, the design done more for originality than showing off piles of riches. But it did have an over-reliance on thumping great views of Coniston Water; good in the first room, less so by the seventh or eighth. We went around the grounds afterwards, which proved to be a great maze of zig-zagging paths up and down the hillside. The kids had fun scooting along them doing some nature quiz, the rest of us enjoyed some very weird plants and the rare phenomenon of not getting rained on. Had tea at a converted stable after a 14 hour wait, drove part of the way home, drove back again when dad thought he'd left his Visa card behind (it later turned up in an unexplored part of his wallet), finally managed to drive home. Not a bad day but, as I said, not exactly perfect; and at dinner we indulged in a spot of “At Broad Howe” (the perfect house in Patterdale we'd been for the last three years) “things are better.”

Coniston - 27/7/09

Rapid change of plans today. The forecast said the rest of the week will be monsoons, basically. So I decided to get a day's walking done while it was only raining occasionally. Scrounged a lift off Gav to Coniston and set off on the same lane as yesterday. Well, actually I set off on a different lane initially, but all my walks begin in confusion. Crossed the stream on an extremely old and quaint miner's bridge and took a path climbing up the hillside out of Coppermines Valley. Got wet on the lane with the shelter of the trees; got absolutely drenched in another shower on the exposed hillside. The top of my target, Coniston Old Man, was resolutely covered in clouds and I did start doubting my decision. Soon reached the remnants of the old mines, a few interesting derelict buildings but a hell of a lot of spoil heaps too. And what with the parties shrieking up and down the mountain, I was soon agreeing with Wainwright on all points. A reliable sign of old age, I'm told. There were some views as I got higher, allowing me to witness every other part of the country save mine bathed in sunshine. And they vanished as I broke the cloud barrier. Slogged through increasingly grim country; got lost, thankfully surrounded by people getting equally lost so I felt less silly; passed some spots which I'm sure would have yielded spectacular views if, you know. The summit offered uplifting sights of a party of gets taking the only shelter from the phenomenal wind which appeared from nowhere. It now has my fags and lighter, which I dropped in a protracted moment of confusion. The sensible thing would have been to just go back. So I set off on the ridge path, thankfully well marked by cairns, towards Swirl How. And it was odd – the wind, the isolation and the total lack of visibility, or indeed point, somehow made it enjoyable. This feeling rather vanished when I was hit by a shower with drops the strength of a hailstorm. But gradually, grudgingly, the cloud started to lift. Eventually I was getting more views of Coniston; still in sunshine, the bastard. Even better was the sight of the Real Lake District on the other side, a mass of looming peaks. Swirl How was another trudge up but the descent was fun, a semi-scramble down something called Prison Ridge or thereabouts. The pass below was where I originally intended to begin the descent. But that isn't how my walks work and the peak ahead, Weatherlam, looked too inviting. It turned to to be a bit further than I thought but there were even better views, the cloud having lifted from the top of all the peaks. Including the Old Man, but never mind. Descended on a path which simply vanished half way through. You could see where to get to but there were some sharp drops with apparently no safe way down, and all around the hillside there were people staring at it with quizzical expressions. Finally got down, reaching a path curling back to Coppermines Valley and safety. A surprisingly good walk by the end. Less hearteningly, I've got both a bugger of a cold and a seizure on the way.

Coniston - 26/7/09

Clichés, clichés. Chucking it down with rain this morning – and I mean real, torrential, start-gathering-two-of-every-animal rain. So this morning the only trip was back to that tourist hot-spot, the supermarket at Ulverstone. Emily and Gemma, incidentally, are turning into right little buggers. They piss about, you tell them not to and they just laugh at you. And I'm babysitting them in a couple of week's time. Anyway, we had one of Christine's trademark enormous buffet lunches, by which time the rain had stopped. There was even a few hints of sun at times. With the Harvey girls repeatedly chanting “Aquarium! Aquarium!” (a place were you can stroke a sting ray, apparently, as if you'd want to) me, mum and dad struck out on our own. Drove along a typical Lakes road – windy, hilly and full of sheep – for a time alongside Coniston Water and finally reached Coniston itself. I swore I'd been here last year but apparently it was an almost identical Lake District town. Namely, fully of walkers and tourists, built in the odd local style of dark stone walls and slate roofs, and overshadowed by a great fuck-off hillside. We started walking along a little lane running alongside an understandably full and roaring stream. There were little waterfalls all along the stream, but I still think the tiny hydroelectric dam at the top was a bit optimistic; it might power two light bulbs but no more. Beyond this, the gorge suddenly opened into Coppermines Valley. This would once have been a standard beauty spot; a wide, shallow river at the bottom, little rocky nodules on the flanks and, at the head, the looming mass of the Coniston Old Man range. But they weren't joking when they named the valley. This used to be a thriving industrial centre. The old mine buildings have been converted into holiday homes and a YHA, but there's still two thumping great spoil heaps in the centre and yawning holes in many cliff faces. Wainwright spit acid at all this, of course, but I think it gives the valley some character. We walked along for a while, dad trying to locate a boulder he climbed on when he was 14. We did eventually see it, but it was laughing at us on the far horizon so we just turned around and went back. The insect problem has been solved by fly paper, temporarily turning this house into a series of hanging graveyards. And how stupid are flies anyway? When they see a strip of paper festooned with corpses of their cousins, why don't they think “This is something to avoid”?

Coniston - 25/7/09

So once again it's the Lake District for us. Which has become the new Scotland, which in turn has become the new Cornwall, I guess, which... anyway. The poignant note on this holiday, of course, is that Granddad is no longer with us. An ever-present on these family trips and, for that matter, the one who paid for them all.

Picked up my my parents this morning at the rather decadent time of 10.00. A new route was devised which mainly involved crawling along really slow roads and getting stuck for about half an hour in Harrogate – not a good place to get stuck in any circumstances. We eventually made it up to the Dales, which looked very nice in the clear sunshine. Stopped at a Little Chef which amazed us by not being awful, saw a bunch of cows standing in a lake as a sort of protest, passed a factory specialising in 'wound management' (i.e. plasters). Finally saw the Lakes in the distance and then, after an age, got out of bloody Yorkshire. Had lunch on a tiny road halfway up a hillside with more mountains in the distance – and that's been the theme of the day. We're not at Patterdale this year, right in the heart of the Lakes. We're on the edge, in an area officially known as 'kind of near Coniston', and the 360 degree view of the peaks which Patterdale enjoys is more like 20 degrees. We're also travelling back in time somewhat; the villages we passed through seem to have been preserved in the 1960's without the help of a Sunday evening TV show. Stopped at Ulverstone, the nearest town of any significance, for shopping, drove alone a rather good estuary for a while, made several turns up increasingly narrow and windy lanes and finally found the house, despite the best intentions of the designers. It was allegedly once a vicarage and the Ye Olde aspect is being pushed mightily. Open fireplaces, creaking roof beams, a bath suite that seems to have been pinched wholescale from the Castle Museum and legions of flies in the pantry-cum-kitchen. For once everyone didn't arrive at once. We were here miles before the others, allowing me to pinch the only bedroom with that 20 degree view – of the Coniston range, incidentally. My stepbrother Gav and his kids finally arrived, having got repeatedly lost on the way here. A bit later came my sister Christine and Uncle Bill, who's got a week's pass from psychiatric hospital. And he must have felt he was back there again after I spent a lot of time running after my nieces Emily and Gemma, all of us screaming. Though I'm glad to say the elder girl, Lorna, seems to be cultivating a more restrained, bookish persona. Only another seven years or so and she'll be ready for full teenage angst.

Nature Is Closed For The Forseeable Future

Legislation That Seems To Have Been Inspired By An Episode Of The Simpsons Part 512: Arnie 'I'm As Stupid As I Look And That Takes Some Doing' Schwarzenegger has come up with a new solution to California's budget deficit. That's the budget deficit he was elected to solve and which has now grown to $26bn. He's proposing to shut down virtually all California's national parks. Terminate them, if you will.

Now, I'm a little shaky on the American national parks, but I gather that they're not quite like the British ones. They're the only rural places where people are allowed to wander freely, the rest being private farmland with no rights of way. Arnie is basically wanting to close nature.

Two thoughts come to mind. One is that Californians are going to get really fat. Even fatter than they are now. That's what happens when you deny people the chance to exercise. So if obesity starts to suddenly rocket, for once McDonald's Ginormous Size Burgers (or whatever) won't be to blame. It will be Arnie and his superbly chiselled body. The other thought: how do you shut down nature anyway? I guess there are two possible things Arnie could do. He could simply fire all the park rangers, close down the information centres and let the areas become wildernesses again, free to man and beast. Or he could put whopping great fences around them all and shoot anyone trying to get in. Arnie is a member of the Republican Party. Which option do you think he'll choose?

Some of the many criticism of the plans say they are short sighted on economic grounds. Closing the parks will stem a revenue stream for the state, however meagre. Unfortunately I think Arnie is less myopic than people suspect. He will be left with a great deal of land doing nothing, costly to police but much of it in spectacular locations. How soon before he starts accepting bids from developers looking to build yet more Exclusive Executive Housing? And even if California decides in the future that it can reopen the parks, the sold land will be lost forever. A plan worthy of C. Montgomery Burns himself.

Yet Another Gate

So that's this week's Grand Villains sorted out. The group who excite days of inflammatory headlines, public – i.e. media – outrage, chin-stroking analysis and calls for regulation, castigation and annihilation. I'm surprised there's anybody left. After expense-fiddling politicians, greedy bankers, crooked TV companies, women in burkhas, children in hoods, worshippers of Islam and (time after time) asylum seekers comes... the print media. The ones who always lead these moral panics. There's a whiff of the French Revolution here, the original persecutors ending up on the guillotine themselves. Though it's rather less bloody, of course, and much, much duller.

Basically, the claims go, the News of the World hired a legion of Philip Marlowes to bug and burgle assorted public figures. Then, when the figures found out, it paid them thumping out-of-court settlements to stop the cases coming to light. Which they have now anyway, largely thanks to the hush money paid to PFA head Gordon Taylor. The BBC has been gleefully leading with the story, probably still sore from the kicking which the NotW gave it over the phone-in scandal and the Queen docu-fiasco. The motive of the Guardian, which broke the story, is slightly different. “Murdoch's £1m bill for hiding dirty tricks” bellows the headline, and phrases like “Murdoch executives” and “Murdoch company” appear throughout. Nobody has yet profited by going after Rupe, as Setanta has just discovered, but the Guardian clearly thinks it worth another shot.

What stands out, as is so often the case, is the absurdity of it all. Gordon Taylor is one of the few high-profile union leaders left and so a hate figure for the NotW. There was conceivably an effort being made to destroy him. A couple of politicians, Tessa Jowell and John Prescott, were also bugged. But so were two agents, Sky Andrews and the egregious Max Clifford. The paper wasn't conducting an investigation into the secret mechanism of Britain here. It wanted gossip and tittle-tattle. Surely it could have just made all that up, as it usually does? Instead, though, it paid a lot of money to private investigators and a lot more to camouflage their actions. Even with Murdoch's funds to draw upon, this is a shocking waste for an industry supposedly in crisis. There is also similarities to the great scandals of the 1990's. From Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Archer, what got them was not the original act but what they later did to hide that act. If everyone wasn't so damn cautious all the time there would be a lot more happiness around.

Anyway, the journalists have been exposed by the journalists. We know how it works now. More papers will probably be pulled into the miasma. The whole industry will don a hair shirt and promise to reform itself. A great many self-righteous articles will appear; Gordon Brown will fire off some pompous sound bites and maybe appoint someone like Alan Yentob as Journalism Tsar. And then the next Grand Villains will appear. Personally I'm hoping for the novelists. They're too smug by half. And they must have done something. Everyone has; which is why these calls of outrage are always so shrill. Get your torches, you vengeful mob, and head off to Bloomsbury.

Rome 16/9/08

Well, the Galleria Borghese is one thing I'm destined not to do. Yesterday, like everywhere else, it was closed. Today I climbed up from Plaza del Popola, past the amazing viewpoint over the city and the disturbing beggar who sits on the stairs. Had a pleasant stroll through the Villa Borghese, once a private estate and now a public park. One highlight was the Piaza di Siena, a large oval space where you'd expect a lake or a lawn. Instead there's just a load of packed earth. To add extra surreal touches, parrots were squealing in the trees overhead. Finally got to the gallery to see a sign saying, full, advance tickets only. How can a gallery be closed? Especially this one, it's huge. So had to got to the Gallery of Modern Art elsewhere in the park. It was OK, if rather dominated by some bloke whose one idea was that large means good. There was some interesting pieces behind him, though, particularly from the Italian wave of Impressionists.

Meandered back to Popola afterwards and popped into Santa Maria dei Miracoli, one of the churches which frames Via del Corso. It was a nice, unpretentious little place, another rotunda with refreshingly subdued decoration. I then tried once more to navigate to the Trevi Fountain.
Eventually managed it this time, after losing my way and temper occasionally, and got a surprise. I was expecting, well, just a fountain. Instead it's a huge structure taking up the whole façade of a substantial building. A fountain does form part of it, but is almost incidental. You'd definitely call it baroque, you might easily call it hideous, but it certainly tries hard. Then went another backstreet way back to what I call the Dogs Bollocks of Rome, noting en route an alley which decided it had to have four covered bridges over it. Had lunch on a wall overlooking Trajan's Markets, Trajan's Column, Trajan's Anything Else. If it's Trajan's, as a rule, it's good.

Unable to stop myself I then took a farewell look at the Forum. I said it all earlier, so will just add: the place seems just as astonishing in later views. Then went into the Capitoline Museum. This was allegedly the first proper museum in the world, built in the Renaissance to house Roman relics. The first floor especially is fantastic. Part is housed in an ancient Roman temple, so the air of antiquity is enhanced by ancient brick barrel arched ceilings. There's also galleries overlooking the Forum and Palatine, giving me yet more farewell views of them.. The Renaissance rooms are almost overwhelming, each wall covered in a huge mural which illustrates part of Roman history. They have the famous bronze she-wolf, with its two suckling twins unfortunately added in later times. There's also the huge Marcus Aurelius statue, once housed in the Piazza del Campidoglio until they noticed it was falling apart. A lot of Renaissance paintings are upstairs, which reminded me that one can quickly grow bored of Renaissance paintings. They certainly didn't skimp on the paint though; one canvas must have needed a cherry picker to complete. Fantastic museum, despite the excessively snotty staff.

Afterwards I made a brief call to the Mametine, the old Roman prison. There's just two rooms open, an entrance chamber and a cell underground. It had the grim, claustrophobic air of all old dungeons, with added clamminess to the air. St Peter once allegedly nutted the wall, causing a fountain to miraculously spring up; after long in there I'd have been doing the same. (The headbutt, if not the miracle). Then popped into another church, where the presence of a single genuine worshipper eventually cleared the premises of all tourists. And then there was more wandering of back streets. Rome is a great place for it, with picturesque old buildings lining remarkably clean alleyways. The only trouble is that even here you're at risk of being run over by crazed scooters. The few pedestrian 'streets' are not so much alleys as cracks. Visited another church – if you're low on funds you tend to dive into any open church doors you see – this one a bit more Catholic. A daffy Bernini statue stood up front, and I'm not sure of the old lunatic designed the building itself but he might as well have done. Garish, and over-decorated again, with some beautiful paintings adorning the walls of the many side chapels. Nice to see some stained glass for once. Less sure about what seemed to be the waxed corpse of a past bishop underneath an alter.

Later on I managed to visit the Piazza Navona without it bringing on any seizures. It stands on the site of an old Roman arena and still has the contours, being a huge, sweeping rectangle. Three fountains decorate it. Sadly the central one, apparently the best, was under scaffolding. This, however, was one of the few examples I saw of the alleged Roman custom of keeping all their sites closed for perpetual maintenance. Walked back along the underused Tiber, got another look at the wonderful Sonte Sant Angelo bridge and found a novel way to get lost; following a city wall when I should have been following the Vatican's defences. And that was more or less it. I'm rather aware that each day on this vacation was slightly worst than the previous one. Nonetheless, they had a hell of a high point to descend from. Wonderful place.

How To Not Exist

In the absense of any interest in writing new posts lately, here's the opening paragraphs from an old novel I'm clearly not going to finish.

The building where they worked was hidden. The building where they worked had been ordered to not exist.
And this was a difficult feat. Because the building where they worked lay in the most famous segment of Marston. And Marston itself had considerable renown amongst the sterner class of tourist. The building was – or should have been – part of the vista which epitomised the city. The scene which appeared by default in the brochures and leaflets, which summed up what Marston offered its visitors. A sort of composite history, not confined to any one period but incorporating elements from many epochs so long as they were twee and vaguely authentic. An image of history generally given captions beginning with "Merrie" or "Ye Olde."

To the left was the station, a mass of gently curving girders emanating an inexplicable beauty. Equally bizarrely it was one of the largest stations in the land, in a city emphatically not one of the biggest; although it was chiefly full of people trying to go somewhere other than Marston. Stretching out ahead, almost beyond the reach of the eye, tumbling gently down a slight incline, were the city walls. The ersatz city walls, rebuilt by the Victorians, and so given a sombre perfection free of the miserable terror which inspired the original set. Standing, just to continue the jumble of authenticity and propaganda, on tall, functional grass banks which became a beautiful speckled pattern of daffodils every spring. The walls ended at a broad lazy river which was bridged by fussy Edwardian iron. And beyond that, the cathedral. The vast temple, so beautiful that it is hideous and vice versa. The creation of an ancient society which could do nothing well except create vast temples, doggedly rebuilt after the many occasions it had burnt or fallen down. The cause of the city, really, and certainly the donor of its entirely undeserved label of 'city.' The cathedral which waited haughtily for the tiny settlement around it to grow as magnificent as it was. Which waited in vain, even when industrial sprawls elsewhere accidentally shrivelled their own cathedrals into toys; which seemed at times to be considering moving to a more fitting location but finally accepted its role as a very large rock in a small pond. A cathedral still dominating a city which was not a city and which no longer believed in God.

And to the right of the famous panorama? What could you see there? Well, you would have to actually stand there to find out. The vision to the right did not exist in any of the pamphlets. There would always be a careful positioning of the cameras, the focus obstinately fixed onto the centre-left of the horizon. More recently, too, a drag of the mouse and a click of the crop emblem to eliminate any lingering traces. The building standing to the right was a pariah, a solitary outcast. It should not, could not exist.

Dark brown concrete. That was the building's final audacious touch which had made it special. That won the awards on its birth in the 1960's, when hideous architecture was as prized as free love, and which would ensure its revilement forever after. There were many other things bad about the building, of course. The unapologetic bulk of it, standing seven floors high in a mainly double-story town. The asymmetrical sprawl of the place, leaving people uncertain as to whether it was a complex or a single structure; and if the latter, why it bothered being so since this clearly did no good. One of the tallest towers was stuck sort of middle-left, the other some way to the right. Around them were a host of meandering annexes which looked like careless later additions though the building was actually designed as a whole. There was a central courtyard… Or rather, there was a courtyard, with the main reception hiding deferentially in one corner. It may have been in the centre or it may not have been. Nobody was certain where that was or where most of the edges were either.

All this was impressive. Likewise the decision to use concrete, the most belligerently ugly building material ever invented by mankind. And to leave the great walls free of any decoration which might soften their impact just a little. But dark brown concrete? So that, on gloomy mornings, the building squatted like a collapsing star, threatening to pull all the light and facile beauty of Marston into its hideous flanks? That was genius of a sort. It deserved awards. It deserved to not exist.

The timid main reception area, Sushma discovered, was really just a clearing house. Visitors only arrived to receive directions to the smaller receptions of the various companies hidden inside the building which did not exist. These directions were almost always wrong because internally there was no logic either. Few of the companies occupied a single, clearly defined space. They owned little clusters scattered hither and thither. Their territories frequently shifted, like medieval dukedoms in the midst of a convoluted war of religion. Their receptions drifted according to the vagaries of battle and were only ever a desk behind a door. The companies were happy with this state, content, to remain as invisible as their host. They were not the sort to build beautiful headquarters in prime locations, to worry about market penetration and brand diversification. They were small firms selling specialised goods and services which most people had never heard of, would need a long lecture about before they understood them and would buy even then. And the firms simply wished to continue selling their wares to the small cadre of connoisseurs who had always bought them. Such companies seemed the antitheses of modern capitalism. In fact, from one perspective, they represented the system in its most perfect form. They did not sell dreams or lifestyles. They just made money.

Costoq Rail was the largest of them. In the old days when vital services were still nationalised it had technically been part of the state. Always an odd part, however, and lying remarkably far from actual government. It was a self-contained consultancy unit which did small, fiddly things to small, fiddly parts of the railway track. No senior manager had ever learnt whether any of the actions carried out were entirely necessary. However, as they affected huge metal objects which travelled at something approaching the speed of sound, some prudence was considered necessary. The consultancy somehow split from the rest of the railway infrastructure units in the chaos which followed the government's decision to privatise all its essential functions and so leave itself with nothing useful to do at all. The consultants continued doing exactly the same things, only now charged much more for them as they were working for a separate entity. Several years later they were swallowed up by Costoq International, a vague conglomerate going through a phase of 'market diversification.' Namely, swallowing up companies in sectors where they did not belong. So the Permanent Way Design Consultancy became Costoq Rail; thus exchanging a name which none of its employees could say to one which they could not spell. That, so far, had been the only change effected by the takeover.

Or almost the only one. Sushma, who had pulled the above information from the company website after her agency told her about the job, discerned signs of corporate modernity pushing at the old railway mentality. The fact that there was actually a website, for one. Many small engineering firms still jeered at such fripperies. A degree of effort had been made with the reception area too. There was a huge day-glo orange board behind the desk boasting the new company name and logo; which, like most corporate motifs, seemed a product of a junior art class. The website was simply a digital version of the leaflets, however. Both tried reaching out to the public with a few photographs of men in hard hats smiling awkwardly. Then they flung themselves into esoteric descriptions of complicated actions conducted on rail tracks in unfashionable parts of the countryside. And the reception was really just another desk behind a door. Manning it was a genial, elderly lady who greeted the sporadic visitors as if they arriving for a bridge morning, threw occasional homilies at the impatiently waiting Sushma and tried to master Minesweeper the rest of the time.

The room itself was testament that open plan does not automatically result in light and air. Almost all illumination came from the humming tubes set in the dispiritingly low ceilings. Most of the carpet was nasty dark blue. Random strips of nasty dark green and red intervened, as if somebody had decided to redecorate and then ran out of materials or motivation. The stale, chilly air was filled with drones of antiquated computers, the squeals of dying printers. And the chatter of sleepy workers easing into a Monday morning, female voices discussing cruel television programmes, male ones dissecting unjust football results.

With A Bang And A Whimper

I got terrified of nuclear war in my early teens. Oddly enough, it was Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes video, the one with Reagan and Chernenko wrestling, which sparked it off. For some reason, the sight of two fat, elderly men grunting together in a ring really brought home the threat. For years afterwards I listened trembling for the sound of air raid sirens. I didn't ask if York still had any air raid sirens, which it almost certainly didn't. I just assumed I would hear them. When I though I did one morning, I got a hell of a fright. It just turned out to be one of the new US-style police sirens. They might have warned me.

It was a good period to have nuclear fears, I learned later. In the mid 1980's the Cold War was hotter than any time since the early 60's. All my generation lacked were our equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Or so I thought until watching Channel 4's excellent documentary 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse last night. It turned out we had one after all. They just never told anyone.

The program meticulously plotted the events which created the atmosphere of 1983. Reagan helped start it, of course. After his election he behaved like any unbalanced old gentleman let out of the home, swaggering over the place stroking himself and introducing useful concepts like 'good' and 'evil' into international diplomacy. He ordered missiles to be built which were bigger, faster and painted in the colours of his own penis. He also started the 'Star Wars' program, a plan to shoot down missiles from space. This terrified the USSR as it would totally negate their nuclear deterrent and leave them helpless. The Soviet leadership, if anything even more elderly and senile than Reagan, retreated into full paranoia. Under the quivering command of Andropov, a man I only recall from an unfunny gangrene joke, they ordered their spies to actively search for signs that the West was planning war.

Unfortunately, their intelligence was terrible and ours was little better. Soviet spies performed tricks like count how many lights were on at the Ministry of Defence each night. If a lot were burning, one British commander pointed out, it usually meant the cleaners were hoovering the floors. The spies took it as a sign that our leaders were in there, plotting domination and cackling. We had a single double agent who could actually tell us what the Soviet politburo were thinking. We seemed to meet with him for half an hour once every other month. And staffed by moral absolutists on both sides, the notion of the governments actually talking to each other had become laughable.

In 1983 America invaded Grenada largely to prove they could. The USSR shot down a domestic Korean plane which was simply lost and was already heading out of Soviet air space. And one night a Russian monitoring station received a message from its spy satellite. Five missiles had been launched from America, one after another. The base commander override the message, reasoning that if missiles came they would come 14,000 all at once. He was right to assume a malfunction. The satellite computer had confused missiles with clouds, as one does. But a less stubborn or sensible man might have panicked and started the sequence which led to 'retaliation.' Suddenly the lyrics of Nina's 99 Red Balloons seem slightly less ludicrous.

And in this climate, NATO chose to hold huge war games called Operation Able Archer in west Germany. War games were common enough. They mocked up the conditions of nuclear attack, mainly to test communications between bases. In 1941, though, Nazi Germany had invaded the USSR initially under the guise of war games. 42 years later, the Kremlin decided was being repeated, though not as farce. Intercepted messages between NATO bases were treated as actual orders. The Soviet nuclear bases, submarines and bombers were put on red alert. The West noted these preparations but just chuckled, assuming rival war games. They continued taking Able Archer to its conclusion. As they did, Andropov's finger crept closer and closer to the red button. And then…

Then Able Archer simply ended. The Soviet generals, one assumes, simply dithered long enough to realise their mistake. They all went home again, presumably avoiding each other's faces. The next time the West met their double agent, they found out what had almost happened and got the shock of their lives. Even Reagan decided it was wise to start talking with the enemy again.

That's how our civilisation almost ended though. In a swamp of paranoia, miscommunication, incompetence and macho posturing. With both a bang and a whimper of "Eh? What?" I'm glad of the escape but you have to admit, it would have been fitting.