December 2016 / January 2017
Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today
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Opinion & Comment
MARIUS BRILL’S
MEMEING OF LIFE Meme: An element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another...
Christmas Ghosts
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Illustrations © Alice Stallard. alicestallard.com
s this year grinds to an end, you’re not alone in thinking “thank fuck for that.” It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that 2016 has been one of the crappest in recent history. Now, when the media traditionally do their rundowns of the year, all they can show is the world’s run down. It’s been a car crash year, whether it’s the whitelash rise of Farage and Trump, the deaths of icons from Bowie and Cohen to Wood and Wogan and even the Brazilian football team, or just because Inferno, one of the most ludicrous films in history, was released. It seems the unpalatable prospered and the good died. Now is the time to think of them. The dead have a history of being summoned up as the year draws to its end. The Christmas ghost story is a meme that stretches back much further than Dickens’ Christmas Carol. A quarter of a century before Shakespeare wrote his Winter’s Tale, it was already a tradition for
Barnabus in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589) who says, “Now I remember those old women’s words, Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales, And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night.” It’s no coincidence that James Joyce’s The Dead is set at a Christmas time gathering. In my own family it is Uncle Edgar who lives with the dead and loves to tell stories of our ghosts. He’s a fanatic for family trees and history, but then there’s not much to do out in the steppes of Norfolk where he lives, where the earth is steel hard in winter, the air is so cold just breathing in hurts and breathing out creates a fog thicker than Katie Hopkins. From his front window you can see for miles over the frozen levels, each tree a craze of lines in the flat December daylight. Every other Christmas we schlep up to his house, a pretty converted vicarage with timber beams and a roaring fireplace beneath a mantelpiece hung with paperchains and festooned with Christmas cards mostly addressed to “Dear Valued Customer”. And every year there’s some relative he has discovered in the annals whom he reckons could just be a Royal bastard but more usually,
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December 2016 / January 2017
Opinion & Comment with a bloodline chockful of cads and bounders, was a right royal bastard. Edgar lives alone but he always invites his mate Steve to Christmas. Steve’s a single dad with a tiny daughter called Emily who is the proud product of parental overcompensation. ‘Spoilt’, is too slight a term, like slightly off milk; Emily is the full Petri dish of bubonic fungal growth. Last year she was dragging around one of the most expensive dolls known to humanity, an “American Girl” almost as big as her. The sort that have such realistic eyes you will them to blink. But Emily had absolutely no sense of value. The doll was clearly pretty new when I saw it but she had already smashed the right side of its face, the head was cracked and deformed. She didn’t care. I had come up ahead of the rest of the family to help Edgar with the dinner and avoid having to go with the rest of my family “last minute” gift shopping. Emily answered the door and sneered at my Tesco shopping bags. “Where are the presents?” “Nice to see you too.” Inside, I pulled my frost bitten muddy shoes off and traipsed the shopping bags to the kitchen. Emily stayed in the front hall, heaving her doll on to a chair. I put the food away while she gave her American Girl a gruesomely detailed lecture on road safety. Edgar came in. “I thought I heard someone.” He gave me a hug. “You’re the first then?” “Came to help with the food.” “Plenty of time for that.” We went through to his living room where the fire was already roaring. We drank and chatted as the light faded outside and Edgar told the story of a distant cousin of my great grandfather who had been a very successful medium when Spiritualism was all the rage. Recently he’d found an old newspaper clipping about a spirit visitation she had conjured up but I never got to hear his ghost story because it was then the rest of my family turned up, setting off a maelstrom of voices and activity. It was just before dinner when my youngest asked about Steve, who still hadn’t come down. “Oh,” Edgar sighed, “he’s, he’s not coming.” I wondered for a moment if something bad had happened; that was why he was looking after Emily. “Emily, you know Emily,” Edgar said. We all nodded. “Last week she had an accident. Just outside here. He pointed at the dark window and we all looked up for a moment to see our reflections in the black glass. “Playing with a doll. Run over. By a van. Crushed her skull. Steve’s just not up to anything. She was his life.” “But...” I started looking around for Emily. I ran to the front hall. The doll was still there on the chair by the door. The head crushed, the plastic skull cracked, the glass eyes staring.
Who wants to be a billionaire?
DUDLEY SUTTON’S I WISH I HAD WRITTEN THAT
By Peter Burden
Those of the World’s population who like to apply a little intelligent analysis to current affairs were left deeply flummoxed by the extraordinary decision taken by the American electorate on November 8th. Their choice of the Great Pussy Pouncer for President was, for many in both the US and in Britain, frankly incomprehensible. It’s hard to say who comparable over here might have generated the same blend of mirth, incredulity and dismay. There are a few candidates, for sure, although none of them could ever have been nominated here, let alone voted in as Premier. Or could they? For who could have guessed that 38% of the British people would vote to commit national hara kiri by leaving Europe? Imagine any of our home-grown billionaires proposing themselves for President as Mr Chump did: Sir Philip Green, for example, or the TV Reality Show Star, Lord Sugar (the obvious comparison), and several others who might have had a go. Sir Richard Branson, if he weren’t English, would love to be President; or Sirs Dave and Fred Barclay (on a twin ticket), or the world’s polluter in chief, Bernie Ecclestone, or David Beckham (though he’s worth only half a bill and someone would have to revoice his speeches). Then there’s the distinguished social reformer, Mike Ashley (who, like the Pussy Pouncer, enjoys speaking frankly), or, more likely, Richard Desmond, or even the Pouncer’s new best friend, Nigel, the infamous Anglo-Oik. These are all absurd options, of course; however we have been warned not only by the American electorate but also, more distressingly, by our own that strange things can happen in this era of collective, hideously ill-informed global anti-establishmentism. The sense of unreality this has created has been heightened in Britain by the complete disappearance of our former premier and architect of the tragically ill-structured referendum that has allowed a minority of the British people to bundle us all out of Europe. Now, of course, every commentator in the universe has been trying to fathom how the always preposterous prospect of ‘President’ Trump has become a reality. This conundrum has become even more bizarre now that he seems to be backtracking on most of the extravagant and more ridiculous pledges he made to the US people in the course of his campaign. This series of u-turns and voltefaces over Obamacare, the Mexican Wall or banging up Hillary for her
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THEY'RE FETCHING IN IVY AND HOLLY By Charles Causley 'They're fetching in ivy and holly And putting it this way and that. I simply can't think of the reason,' Said Si-Si the Siamese cat. 'They're pinning up lanterns and streamers. There's mistletoe over the door. They've brought in a tree from the garden. I do wish I knew what it's for. 'It's covered with little glass candles That go on and off without stop. They've put it to stand in a corner And tied up a fairy on top. 'They're stringing bright cars by the dozen And letting them hang in a row. Some people outside in the roadway Are singing a song in the snow. obscure misdeeds suggest that the Pussy Pouncer simply conjured up promises which he knew he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep simply because he judged that just enough of the American people wanted to hear them. More bizarrely, though, it seems likely that they knew they were being lied to; and they didn’t mind, for they and us, and most of the advanced world are so used to being lied to that we are inured to it. For decades now the advertising industry which plays a potent and nefarious role in shaping prevailing culture has extravagantly and persistently lied to its audiences, and it’s as if we’ve come to expect it. A simple example of the effectiveness of a well-turned lie was the marketing of Le Piat d’Or, a branded French wine of pedestrian quality in a distinctive bottle that appeared in Britain in the 1980s. It was cleverly promoted by enticing TV commercials featuring French folk as stereotypical as those in Peter Mayle’s cliché-ridden Year in Provence. The big lie was that ‘Les Francais adore le Piat d’Or’. The truth was that the French did not adore Le Piat d’Or because they’d never seen or heard of it. It seems likely that a lot of the punters who went out in hordes to buy it from the supermarkets didn’t really believe the lie, but appreciated that they were being deceived in a charming and seductive way. In the same way, there are legions of ageing men who are happy to believe that a certain ‘men’s’ hair dye “only targets the grey.” Impossible, of course, but the lie clearly has great appeal for some of our top entertainers, like Sir Cliff, and Sir Mick, who looked even more vain and foolish when their colleague, Sir
Tom abandoned the whole charade and became his far more wholesome, grizzled old self again. There was an echo of this mendacity in our own recent referendum during which the xenophobes and little Englanders were happy to believe untruths put about by the Brexiters, because they were untruths that resonated with their own prejudices. In other words, whether you are an advertiser selling hair-dye that will miraculously reverse the ageing process, or a politician peddling a self-serving policy masquerading as a benefit to a large chunk of the electorate, you may lie with impunity, provided that you are using attractive, comforting, user-friendly inexactitudes. Politicians have always lied; we know and understand that, and while the anti-establishmentists want a new set of politicians like Farage and Trump, they also want them to carry on that particular political tradition. And as a seasoned American huxter with the morals of city hoodlum, the President Elect is probably as good a liar as you could find anywhere in the world.
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'I saw all the children write letters And - I'm not at all sure this was wise They posted each one up the chimney. I couldn't believe my own eyes. 'What on earth, in the middle of winter, Does the family think that it's at? Won't somebody please come and tell me?' Said Si-Si the Siamese cat.
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