Welcome on board
First up, welcome to the blog. I hope you like it. It's supposed to be funny, mostly, though this entry just happens to be incredibly po-faced. The title for the blog is from a song I love by Jubilee Allstars, and the motto comes from a song-title by Joan of Arc (perhaps fittingly, the song itself is enormously underwhelming.)
When I first planned this blog, just over a week ago, my main worry was finding enough material to keep it alive. As it turns out, material wasn't really my problem. All Saturday, while I was trying out templates and typefaces, I had to shut the window to drown out the world's largest charity concert taking place in the park across the road. It was harder to ignore the consumately tweedy crowds coming down Victoria Wednesday at lunchtime wearing London 2012 rosettes (though, by the set of them, it could have read 1912, and they could just as easily have been celebrating the Titanic's maiden voyage and the resolution of the first Balkan war). And then came Thursday 7th and all the fear and shock and pain that followed... But I'm still reluctant to put any of this on the blog. It's not like I've actually witnessed anything of note, and there are enough people out there telling important stories about these days, stories which matter, stories which make a difference. But still, I can't help thinking that Samuel Pepys would have managed to squeeze a couple of decent chapters out of a week like that.
As it happens, I have little new to say about Thursday and Friday, mainly because I spent both days and nights stuck at work. My abiding memory of Thursday 7th was the weather. It really was a dog of a day. Every so often you'd look out the window and think: they're bombing London- AND it's raining. I work on a main artery into the city centre, and occasionally columns of bedraggled Londoners evacuated from a train or tube station would march past, like a sodden commuter army in retreat.
Since I returned to London on Monday I've been trying to get a feel for how life here has changed. This is not, and never will be, a touchy-feely city, but there is a growing amount of consideration on display. It also seems like there are a lot more emergency vehicles about- mostly plain clothes police whizzing about in unmarked cars. You're very aware of all the localised security alerts and incidents that don't make it onto the news. I got off the tube at Westminster this evening, to find that the Houses of Parliament had been evacuated in the middle of a garden party. All the guests, including a slew of Jilly Cooper lookalikes, Norman Lamont and, bizarrely enough, Paul Daniels, waited with the Italian backpackers on the path outside, wearing fixed smiles but not quite sure whether they needed to keep talking to each other outside the party paradigm. After a while, an elderly man appeared on a balcony and waved delightedly to the guests: he was wearing some kind of ceremonial dress, but it was difficult to tell at this distance whether he was an Usher or a Lord. He pointed to his watch and performed an outsized shrug, then traced a huge question mark in the air with his hand. The guests had stopped paying attention, but a nice couple from Wisconsin gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up, and he seemed happy enough with that.
So, what happens now? Is it time to draw lessons from Thursday yet? Or am I crossing an invisible picket line? Because I'm all set with the sweeping generalisations over here. For a start, the whole stoic thing. Up to last week, I had completely misunderstood the concept of the British stiff upper lip. A diet of Noel Coward movies had convinced me that the famous British doughtiness was merely a side-effect of a particularly stunted emotional life. But what I and Coward missed was the vital social function of stoicism. Being sanguine in the face of emergency is an act of enormous civic generosity. Calm spreads as quickly as panic, for exactly the same reason: it's very easy to remain cool when everyone around you is acting as if nothing extraordinary has happened. Also, and this is something I'd never imagined, staying calm can be fun. Andrew Sullivan places British stoicism on a par with British humour; I'd argue that the two are more closely related than you'd think. A chat with friends in the pub becomes a competition about who can display the least concern for life and limb. Sometimes it feels as if the whole city is participating in a particularly deadpan Monty Python sketch. We're practically winking at each other as we ignore the Sky News bulletins playing in front of our faces and talk about tennis and the Lions tour and Darren Clarke, of all people.
A final impression is that by placing bombs on the underground, the terrorists completely misread the role of the tube in the life of the city- its attraction and its strangeness. Terror asserts its power by taking comfortable places and making them suddenly threatening- but no-one is ever really comfortable on the tube in the first place. As a strategy for propagating fear, targeting the tube is just about as effective as planting bombs in dentists' waiting rooms. The risk of a bomb becomes just another one of the portfolio of risks you take on board when entering the tube (discomfort, heat, vermin, muggers, accidents, delays), and weigh up against its enormous convenience. Terror aims to destroy innocence, but tube travellers aren't innocents; they're pragmatists from the word go. Also, when calculating the effects of the bomb I don't think you can ignore the cussed affection this city has for its underground. Without getting all Iain Sinclair on you, the tube is no ordinary transport network; plenty of people see it as the id of the city, its catacombs, its great big dirty secret. You can see it at its plainest in the blogosphere- I can't think of a blog about London that doesn't secretly fancy itself as a blog about the tube. People here have been obsessing over, arguing with, complaining about and projecting onto the underground for more than 150 years, and it would take a bigger man than Bin Laden to interfere with that relationship.
When I first planned this blog, just over a week ago, my main worry was finding enough material to keep it alive. As it turns out, material wasn't really my problem. All Saturday, while I was trying out templates and typefaces, I had to shut the window to drown out the world's largest charity concert taking place in the park across the road. It was harder to ignore the consumately tweedy crowds coming down Victoria Wednesday at lunchtime wearing London 2012 rosettes (though, by the set of them, it could have read 1912, and they could just as easily have been celebrating the Titanic's maiden voyage and the resolution of the first Balkan war). And then came Thursday 7th and all the fear and shock and pain that followed... But I'm still reluctant to put any of this on the blog. It's not like I've actually witnessed anything of note, and there are enough people out there telling important stories about these days, stories which matter, stories which make a difference. But still, I can't help thinking that Samuel Pepys would have managed to squeeze a couple of decent chapters out of a week like that.
As it happens, I have little new to say about Thursday and Friday, mainly because I spent both days and nights stuck at work. My abiding memory of Thursday 7th was the weather. It really was a dog of a day. Every so often you'd look out the window and think: they're bombing London- AND it's raining. I work on a main artery into the city centre, and occasionally columns of bedraggled Londoners evacuated from a train or tube station would march past, like a sodden commuter army in retreat.
Since I returned to London on Monday I've been trying to get a feel for how life here has changed. This is not, and never will be, a touchy-feely city, but there is a growing amount of consideration on display. It also seems like there are a lot more emergency vehicles about- mostly plain clothes police whizzing about in unmarked cars. You're very aware of all the localised security alerts and incidents that don't make it onto the news. I got off the tube at Westminster this evening, to find that the Houses of Parliament had been evacuated in the middle of a garden party. All the guests, including a slew of Jilly Cooper lookalikes, Norman Lamont and, bizarrely enough, Paul Daniels, waited with the Italian backpackers on the path outside, wearing fixed smiles but not quite sure whether they needed to keep talking to each other outside the party paradigm. After a while, an elderly man appeared on a balcony and waved delightedly to the guests: he was wearing some kind of ceremonial dress, but it was difficult to tell at this distance whether he was an Usher or a Lord. He pointed to his watch and performed an outsized shrug, then traced a huge question mark in the air with his hand. The guests had stopped paying attention, but a nice couple from Wisconsin gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up, and he seemed happy enough with that.
So, what happens now? Is it time to draw lessons from Thursday yet? Or am I crossing an invisible picket line? Because I'm all set with the sweeping generalisations over here. For a start, the whole stoic thing. Up to last week, I had completely misunderstood the concept of the British stiff upper lip. A diet of Noel Coward movies had convinced me that the famous British doughtiness was merely a side-effect of a particularly stunted emotional life. But what I and Coward missed was the vital social function of stoicism. Being sanguine in the face of emergency is an act of enormous civic generosity. Calm spreads as quickly as panic, for exactly the same reason: it's very easy to remain cool when everyone around you is acting as if nothing extraordinary has happened. Also, and this is something I'd never imagined, staying calm can be fun. Andrew Sullivan places British stoicism on a par with British humour; I'd argue that the two are more closely related than you'd think. A chat with friends in the pub becomes a competition about who can display the least concern for life and limb. Sometimes it feels as if the whole city is participating in a particularly deadpan Monty Python sketch. We're practically winking at each other as we ignore the Sky News bulletins playing in front of our faces and talk about tennis and the Lions tour and Darren Clarke, of all people.
A final impression is that by placing bombs on the underground, the terrorists completely misread the role of the tube in the life of the city- its attraction and its strangeness. Terror asserts its power by taking comfortable places and making them suddenly threatening- but no-one is ever really comfortable on the tube in the first place. As a strategy for propagating fear, targeting the tube is just about as effective as planting bombs in dentists' waiting rooms. The risk of a bomb becomes just another one of the portfolio of risks you take on board when entering the tube (discomfort, heat, vermin, muggers, accidents, delays), and weigh up against its enormous convenience. Terror aims to destroy innocence, but tube travellers aren't innocents; they're pragmatists from the word go. Also, when calculating the effects of the bomb I don't think you can ignore the cussed affection this city has for its underground. Without getting all Iain Sinclair on you, the tube is no ordinary transport network; plenty of people see it as the id of the city, its catacombs, its great big dirty secret. You can see it at its plainest in the blogosphere- I can't think of a blog about London that doesn't secretly fancy itself as a blog about the tube. People here have been obsessing over, arguing with, complaining about and projecting onto the underground for more than 150 years, and it would take a bigger man than Bin Laden to interfere with that relationship.
posted by Ben Good at 12:05 am
1 Comments:
Ah, thanks Diana for coming over and for the comments, that's too kind. That was my idea for it, a kind of chill out room annexed to the hiphopdon'tstop dancefloor of BSD. If there's any fiction or sketches you or the other drivers want to post here, just mail us; might even try to do guest blogger weeks once this is bedded down.
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