The escape from London (a photo essay)

Ahoy!

After a few serious blogs I thought I would try to write something about London (which is after all the point of this blog.) With the sun in the sky and a lazy Sunday to fill I decided that it was time to escape. Well not to escape as such, only to get as close to escaping as you can within the confines of the city.

One of the gloomy side effects of living outside city centre is that you come to rely on buses a lot more than most. With this in mind I hopped on my favourite bus of all, the trusty and reliable 210 that runs every 10 minutes from Brent Cross to Hampstead Heath and then onwards to Finsbury Park.

As I got off at Hampstead Heath I was greeted with the fabulous view below:

Hampstead Heath entrance

At 790 acres Hampstead Heath is the largest of London’s parks. Sadly its role in public consciousness is now as much about George Michael’s antics as it is about serenity. If you ignore the scandals and take the time to explore then it’s far nicer than many give it credit for.

Kony 2012 – idealism or cynicism?

Political campaigning as we know has been changed this week by the emergence of the latest viral phenomenon. Within the space of less than a week Kony 2012 has taken over the internet, with almost 70 million views at the time of writing.

The film is a 30 minute  long manifesto with the goal of bringing to justice one of the greatest criminals in the world today. Kony himself is one of the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, a theocratic army that has based its campaigns of violence on medieval interpretation of the Ten Commandments. The film itself is produced by Invisible Children, an admirable group of activists and campaigners that among other things want to eradicate the evil of child soldiers.

In marketing terms they have created one of the most important films for a generation. They have used it to launch a high profile campaign which is being built around a day of action of April 20^th. The idea is that through raising awareness and facilitating large scale campaigns they can bring about positive change by lobbying western governments to demand the arrest of Joseph Kony himself.

The campaign is based around the idea of the public being able to influence world leaders and others. This in itself is important as it is the lifeblood of all campaigning and communications. In order to do this a petition has been launched, which also comes with the option of letting signatories directly email ‘culturemakers’, a host of world figures that include figures as diverse as Bill Clinton and Jay-Z.

So how could anybody be against this?

Well that’s where it gets tricky.

The campaign is not simply an awareness raising campaign, although raising awareness is important to its end goal. The website itself defines the campaign goals as:

1) That Joseph Kony is known as the World’s Worst War Criminal.

2) That the U.S. military advisers support the Ugandan Army until Kony has been captured and the LRA has been completely disarmed. They need to follow through all the way and finish what they have started.

I don’t think many people would object to the first part of the equation (although I would dare say that there possibly are greater war criminals, but that feels too much like splitting distasteful hairs.)

The second part of the equation is the tricky part.

As the film itself acknowledges Kony is no longer in Uganda, he’s actually most probably in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This makes the task significantly more difficult. In effect the film makers are lobbying powerful governments to help one nation’s dictatorship to go into another nation to arrest a war criminal and have him tried at the International Criminal Court.

The first thing to say is that Uganda is not a nation that is known for promoting human rights, and has a government that have been criticised by a lot of leading NGOs for their treatment of their own people. Having reigned unopposed since 1986 the government are lacking any democratic legitimacy, and as many of you will be aware there have been recent moves on their part to have homosexuals killed for existing. The peaceful rhetoric of the film is actually already being countered by the Ugandans who have declared that they want Kony “dead or alive.” Kony’s death would be no bother to me whatsoever, but it suggests that, at least in the view of the unelected Ugandan Defence Minister, the notion of the International Criminal Court being able to solve the matter is fanciful.

Even more to the point, the idea of allowing the Ugandan army unrestrained access to Congo is rigged with difficulties, not least because of the role that the Ugandan government have played in the exploitation of resources in Congo. This problem is only compounded by the serious allegations that the very people who are hunting Kony are committing their own atrocities at the same time. Furthermore in 2005 the International Court of Justice found Uganda guilty for violating the principles of non-use of force in international relations and of non-intervention. All of this suggests that relations between the two nations are complicated to say the least.

The idea of the west helping to capture Kony is not new, as CBS have pointed out, since 2008, the U.S. has spent approximately $500 million helping to strengthen the Ugandan Army in its battle against the LRA. Through further aligning themselves with the Ugandan dictatorship they risk legitimising Kony in the eyes of a continent that has every right to be dubious of western motives. The US Africa Command (who are leading their operations in Uganda) cites its third key objective as being to “ensure U.S. access to and through Africa in support of global requirements” which sounds faintly like the language of imperialism, are we really to expect these same generals and same self-interested forces who have already helped to inflict untold misery on the people of the Middle East to intervene in Africa and maintain a permanent presence without causing further bloodshed?

All of this is possible, and maybe it is the least bad option. My natural cynicism tells me otherwise, although I would be glad to be wrong.

In the interests of being even handed you can find the defence of the campaign against similar allegations by clicking here.

The Iron Lady shows no rust…

What better way to begin 2012 than to take a trip back in time with the soon to be award winning movie ‘The Iron Lady’?

In so many ways it feels like we are already back in the 1980s (a Royal Wedding, a Tory government, am embattled ‘left wing’ Labour leader and trouble in the Falklands) yet the recent sensation of seeing Thatcher’s face stuck all over buses is not one that I like.

In order to really evaluate the film one has to try to de-politicise it, in a sense this is easier than you would expect on the grounds that the film is neither a glorification nor a hatchet job. The narrative is presented as the memories of a lonely old woman in mourning as opposed to a more formulaic biography, this means that it begins with the Brighton bombing and represents large chunks of her life as time-saving montages. As a result the flow of the film is far faster than I was expecting and relieves it of the need to make political calculations in it’s content, as it’s unlikely that the human costs of her policies are what dominates her mind today (if they ever did.)

A number of reviews have suggested that the film ‘humanises’ Thatcher, as if to suggest that it does for her what Downfall did for Hitler, on the face of it this is true , although I like to think that many people don’t buy into the cartoon image of her as a steely old monster to begin with. The end result is that the emotional points of the film are well constructed and rather sad, I’m not referring to the silly stuff like her last days in government, I’m referring to the human moments, like when she is coming to terms with the loss of a loved one, something that anyone can sympathise with whether the person in mourning is a pleasant individual or not. One measurement of the strengths of the film was the crying face of the woman behind me as the end-credits rolled, what surprised me was that throughout the trailers before it her conversation showed that she was certainly no Tory!!!

Like any biopic movie it is impossible to fully divorce your feeling from the film and your feelings towards the man or woman being portrayed, and for the record I believe that her domestic policies crippled communities and destroyed the lives of millions. The fact that the victims have been all but brushed out of history is in a sense reflected by fact that so few of the evaluations of her legacy have focused on what she did to towns like Glenrothes, boroughs like Hackney and great cities like Glasgow.

This point was well illustrated a couple of weeks ago when I was fortunate enough to see the astounding Billy Elliott at the theatre. There is a very powerful scene inthe mucical in which Billy’s brother shouts at him that if the miners strike failed ‘then no one in this village will have a job and nor will anyone in the next village or the village after that’ as he was saying this I heard a Home Counties toff a few rows behind saying to his girlfriend ‘what nonsense, that could never happen’…

And with that anecdote I would conclude that the film is powerful, it’s well produced, well acted and worthy of a lot of praise, yet it is only a small part of the legacy of a woman who reshaped Britain in some of the most controversial ways possible. The Iron Lady herself is almost certainly nearing the end of her life, and although important voices may have been muted the debate on who she was and the things she is far from finished.

Peace, love and a happy 2012

Andrew

John Terry will be having a crappy Christmas

Ahoy!

Throughout his illustrious career John (seen above being kicked in the face by an opponent) has courted controversy, whether it was for mocking Americans on 9/11, cheating on his team mates wife or selling illegal tours of the Chelsea training ground for £10k. The tours couldn’t have been for the money though, Terry has quite enough of that, this was evident 4 years ago when he opted to pay a £60 fee so that he could park in a disabled space, rather than paying 50p an hour to park across the road.

John has always lacked positive role-models, this was evident from the time his father got caught trying to deal cocaine to a NOTW journalist and when his mother and mother-in-law got caught shoplifting £8000 worth of goods from Tescos. While i’m highlighting family scandals it’s worth noting that Paul Terry, John Terry’s less talented brother, got caught doing the same thing with a team mates wife, only that was closely followed by said team-mate killing himself.

So why is this time any different? Well this time Terry has run out of get out of jail free cards. This time he is accused of racist behaviour against an opponent, the video of the incident can be found here. Quite what will happen if he is found guilty is hard to predict, last week the FA set a precedent by fining Luis Saurez £40,000 and banning him for 8 games for using racist language against another player, but this time the police are involved so it could be more, and presumably after his trial the FA will throw the book at him. Furthermore, although the Chelsea manager has come out in Terry’s defence, it looks inevitable that if he’s found guilty then he’ll be stripped of the England captaincy.

Football has changed a lot since John Barnes had bananas thrown at him in the 1980s, although it’s always bubbling under, whether it is Ron Atkinson being caught saying the N word on TV or the head of FIFA saying racism could just be shrugged off. In Scotland the racism takes a particularly anti Irish/ sectarian tone and it’s not unusual to see supporters of one club singing “the famine’s over why don’t you go home” towards Irish players.

No doubt the usual suspects will keep banging on about how football is getting ‘too PC’, but if it means that black players are no longer having bananas thrown at them then I think any inconvenience caused to racists is a price worth paying. There are also generational differences on display when people discuss it, and I think it was that factor which was on show when Alan Hansen used the word ‘coloured’ twice while he was discussing the problem, in contrast Jimmy Hill seems to see racism in football as banter and compared players using the N word to people saying he has a big chin…

I could go on, but the key point is that football is changing for the better, even if it means John Terry is going to be having a crappy Christmas

Merry Christmas

Andrew

Roman Polanski – The thinking man’s Gary Glitter?

“She is a double victim: My victim, and a victim of the press.”

Truer words have rarely been uttered, it’s a pity that the crime being reffered to is one that has gone unpunished now for over 30 years. The quote is from Roman Polankski and he is describing a 13 year old girl that he raped.

The case itself isn’t very complicated, in 1977 Polanski coerced a 13 year old girl into posing topless for photos, then he got her drunk, drugged her and then raped her. He was arrested for it shortly afterwards. There were six original charges and five of them were due to be dismissed as part of a plea bargin. The remaining charge that stood was for ‘unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor’, Polanski accepted the charge. When it looked like the judge was going to opt to punish the defendent with jail time he escaped America and hasn’t been back since.

One thing that has always baffled me has been why so many of the supposedly educated artistic community have lined up to defend his despicable conduct for so long. Otherwise respectable people like Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, Penelope Cruz, Johnny Depp and Woody Allen have routinely defended Polanski on no greater basis than the fact that he has made some good films. These supposedly intellectual people appear to be saying that different laws should apply to artists than those that apply to your or I, how far does this defence go? Would they apply the same logic to every artist, or just to their friend?  The other defence appears to be that it was a long time ago, which in theory is a valid point, until you consider that the logical conclusion of this is that all unsolved cases should just be thrown out because they were in the past, it also has to be pointed out that this is not a new issue, he was initially charged in 1978. So blinkered are the defendants that Whoopi Goldberg did her feminist credentials a great disservice by suggesting that there was a difference between Polanski’s form of rape (which is apparantly ok) and the more serious concept of  “rape rape”, you can see the video here.

Should the same logic be applied to other celebrity criminals? If that’s the case then it’s a good thing that the judge in Gary Glitter’s trial didn’t have a soft spot for Rock n Roll Christmas…

The fact is that he isn’t just accused of a serious crime, he has admitted to committing a serious crime. I’m not saying that he should be seen hanging from a lamppost, but he also shouldn’t be seen cavorting around award ceremonies and being able to avoid paying for his crimes on the basis of his wealth and his connections, would the same generosity be shown towards him if he wasn’t an award-winning film maker? Somehow I doubt it?

The conviction rates for sexual crimes are incredibly low to begin with, the justice system and the media ensure that they become a trial of the victim rather than the criminal, with that in mind it seems to me that if Polanski really wants to show the humanity that he hints at in the above quote then he should get on the first flight to the USA and let himself stand trial for the violent crime that he inflicted on a 13 year old girl. It wouldn’t go any way towards erasing what happened but it would show that he means what he says and it would hopefully give the thousands of teenage girls who are abused every year and have the strength to report their abusers a little bit of hope that the depraved men who do it to them won’t go unpunished either.

Andrew

An ode to REM

Ahoy!

Today is a sad day for pop culture. After 31 years together REM have announced that they are splitting up. During that time they have produced 15 albums, hundreds of songs and a lot of great memories for people the world over. REM were always more than just a thinking man’s U2; they were also sincere, honest and cerebral, at the same time they were always bouncy, vibrant and innovative.

They were also the first band I ever really loved. I would have been 14 when I first listened to Automatic for the People and since then they have been a permanent feature of my life. I remember buying 3 of the last 4 albums on their day of release, and in the case of the one I didn’t buy I downloaded it. Since that first listen I must have played Automatic for the People about 100 times, it was their creative highpoint and undoubtedly one of the greatest albums ever made.

When I think of REM now I’ll think of the various memories I have of what I was doing when I was listening to them; whether it was the time I spent before university, my times as a student or my times in London. Music and culture underpin who we are and help turn us into the people we become. The important part about REM wasn’t just the songs, it was also the values they espoused and the fact that they produced something that was so much greater than just another mainstream pop act. For w ehile they were the biggest band in the world, and they are one of few bands who have done that in recent times without selling out in order to do so.

Their first album, Murmur was a fantastic album, but it is barely recognisable as the work of the same band that sang Losing my Religion, Everybody Hurts and Shiny Happy People. As a band they kept on expanding and developing their sound, even though at points towards the end they had arguably stretched it too far. One of the more frustrating elements of their split is that their last album, Collapse Into Now, was the best music they had produced for a decade. If nothing else it means that they have parted on a good note, it would seem somewhat wrong if their last ever song was the horrendous ‘I want to be a DJ’ from the all too often bland and mediocre Accelerate album.

Without wishing to sound melodramatic I can’t help but feel that a line has been drawn under the pop culture of my youth. There are other bands that I have loved just as much, but they had all split before I was born; such as The Beatles or The Smiths. There have also been other bands that I have fallen for since; like Tegan and Sara and Belle and Sebastian, but REM were the ones who really lead me to love rock music. There was a point when I knew all of the lyrics to almost every REM song (including some B-sides) and could recite the track listings from all of their albums without a second of thought, that may have changed since but the afternoons spent in Avalanche Records and other Indi music shops will stay with me for a long time.

I’m now listening to Talk About the Passion from their debut album and nostalgically thinking back to the numberous days that have been spent enjoying their back catalouge.

With that in mind I have uploaded a few of their songs, there are three in total, all from different stages of their long and distinguished career, enjoy

 

 

 

Peace and love

Andrew

The most bizzare shopping experience in the world – welcome to M&M World

Ahoy!

I’m sure that I’m not the only person in the world who is partial to M&Ms, in fact I know that I’m not, they’re sold to millions of people across over 100 different countries. They’re perfectly nice chocolates and as I’m typing this I’m starting to wish that I had some.

However that doesn’t mean that I would ever buy an M&M T-shirt, or an M&M bedspread and I can say now that I will never buy an M&M electric guitar. However, it does turn out that if I ever wanted any of these things there is finally a shop where I can buy them…

M&Ms World in Leicester Square has to be seen to be believed, it’s 17,500 square foot of pointless merchandise. The furnishing alone must have cost millions, that’s before you take into account the astronomical cost of staffing one of the most expensive locations in Britain. The launch itself was as star studded as most film premiers and saw visits and performances from Alexandra Burke and JLS, as well as a jovial Boris Johnson

The whole experience of visiting feels pretty disconcerting, it feels like you’ve walked into a parallel version of the world in which everything has become pointless. The colour scheme is bright to the point of being disgusting and the interior is an oustanding achievement in the field of  vulgarity. The shop is more like a live in theatre than a shopping experience, there’s a small part of me that almost admires the imagination that has gone into fitting it out with a mixture of memorabilia that includes a gigantic custom-made London Bus and an M&M friendly remake of Abbey Road…

I’m also not 100% sure who the target market are. Who are the people who are willing to spend £20 on a pair of M&Ms boxer shorts during a recession? There are obviously enough of them because the store is always packed. It’s also more than likely that it will become a permanent feature of London’s city centre, because although I highly doubt that it’ll ever be a profitable operation but it’s all one big international branding exercise and any losses can easily be underwritten by their billionaire owners.

Regardless of the slightly surreal and borderline sinister tone of the experience it’s certainly an interesting addition to what was already the tackiest part of London…

See you soon

Andrew

 

Panic on the streets of London…

Ahoy

To tell you the truth my area hasn’t really been affected, there were skirmishes in Brent Cross but that was about it, on the other hand other people I know had looting and violence on their doorsteps. The rioting has certainly gone further than anyone would have predicted, with fires making people homeless in some parts of the city and a man in Croydon having died after being shot last night.

The response today has been to take a lot of precautions. As I left work today at 6.45pm almost every pub, restaurant and shop seemed to have closed for the night. The shops were heavily guarded though, there are 16,000 police on the streets tonight, that’s more than double what there were last night. Despite the feeling of perpetual danger there has been little in the way of any commotion tonight, although there’s a good case to say that’s in no small part because of the extravagant police presence.

One of the big issues that has been dragged out into the spotlight has been the relationship between the Mets and the people they are employed to protect. In my last blog I listed a host of high-profile Met failures and the IPCC conclusions suggest that we can add the shooting of  Mark Duggan to it.

There is no question that the Mets need to be reorganised from top to bottom, if for no other reason than the fact that people simply do not trust them. However, they are only one part of the of the reason that the streets are safer tonight, another one of them is that the ‘big society’ has sprung into action and local residents have worked hard to clean up and improve their own areas.

Needless to say the continent of common sense that is otherwise known as LBC has been filled up by people calling for the army to be called into London. This is misguided for at least 100 reasons, one of which is that they’re already pretty well-stretched abroad and the other even more important one is that it sends a horrendous precedent if we see the military driving around in a capital city, no matter how nice they try to look.

One problem is that these calls represent a great deal of people, although the Daily Express are almost certainly on the wrong side of hysterical when they suggest the figure is 92%. At the other end of the spectrum is Darcus Howe, who compares refers to the riots as an ‘insurrection of the masses of the people’ and compares them to the uprising in Syria. This is also misguided for equally obvious reasons.

The immediate question is what will happen when there aren’t 16,000 police on the streets, will order magically be restored? I expect not, these aren’t riots about political grievances, they’re riots that are being done by people who have been taking advantage of the fact the police are overstretched. That’s not to say that there isn’t a political context, but I’m not going to attempt to give an in-depth analysis about the impact of social marginalisation in a blog entry that is already far too long.

The basic point is that the immediate priority has to be to re-establish order in the communities that have been affected. In the medium term the priority has to be to reform the Mets and ensure that the police officers who shot Mark Duggan are taken to justice, just like the rioters. In the long-term the most important questions are about the kind of London we want to live in.

Peace and love

Andrew

p.s. A significantly better blog than mine has recently been launched by my friend Craig who has recently departed Scotland’s sunny shores for a life in Sweden, please do read him here

Scenes from a riot

The last few days in London have been eventful to say the least.

Due to a spot of flat hunting in neighbouring Walthamstow I spent some time this afternoon in Tottenham seeing the legacy of last night’s riots. The police presence was as big as any I’ve seen since the G8 summit was in Scotland six years ago. The entire high street was cut off by a line of riot vans and television cameras, with the live updates being filmed every 15 minutes being arguably the best source of information. I’m not sure how many people were listening though, a trip into the local supermarket to try to buy a local paper was like a visit to the rumour mill as we kept overhearing people muttering quietly about what the police had done.

The burnt out car pictured above was the first sign we saw from the riots. As we approached the police line the there was a definite tension in the air. In the eyes of many this is just another sign of how far removed the Mets are from the communities they’re supposed to be protecting. This joins a long list of high-profile failures; including the whole Lawrence case, Macpherson Report, Menzies shooting and subsequent cover up, the death of Ian Tomlinson and subsequent whitewash, the brain damage done to Alfie Meadows, the video of a protester being dragged out of their wheelchair, the probable collaboration with the NOTW and all of the bungled attempts to stop ‘terrorists’ which have resulted in innocent homes being broken into. A major part of the problem is that the Metropolitan police simply don’t have the moral authority they need to do their jobs effectively, the main reason they don’t have it is because they have simply not earned it.

Like any riot the victims were the local community. Although I wouldn’t condone it I could understand the rationale of rioters only attacking police symbols and vehicles, however the local shops, post offices, buses and even homes are nothing to do with the police and have as usual provided the collateral damage for a scene they played no part in. The damage done to the shops and homes will take a few weeks to fix and repair, but the damage done to community relations will take a lot longer. There are hundreds of communities in London alone that have simmilar demographics to Tottenham and the worst part is that with the rioting having moved to nearby Enfield and Wallthenstow then it’s clear this isn’t going to be an isolated event.

A long London stroll (with pictures)

Ahoy

As you can see from this wonderfully taken photo (courtesy of myself) there was barely a cloud in the sky as London hit the heavy heights of  32 degrees. With that in mind it was time to see a different side of London. I met up with Milan and hopped on the boat (boats in London are brilliant and are the topic of my next blog) and went out to the O2 arena, which was overrun by ‘Gleeks’ and other excitable types (there was a Glee live show on). From there it’s meant to be a 2 mile walk into Greenwich centre, although this is a tad misleading as the ‘cycling and pedestrian route’ has been diverted to the point that it couldn’t be less convenient… Greenwich is a beautiful part of London, more akin to a small town than a city borough, as you can see from the photo (not taken by me) below.

Greenwich is one of my favourite parts of London, it’s home to the Maritime museum (which is actually a little bit boring) a stunning university campus and a world-class observatory (which Riada took me to on my birthday) it’s a quaint beautiful little place that barely’t feels at all like London. Anyway the walk was a good one so we continued. By this point we hadn’t quite factored in that it was the hottest day of the year and we had another 6 miles before we were back in city centre.

One of the key problems with South East London is that the transport links are fairly poor, there are no Undergrounds so you’re left with buses and overground, which to be fair are usually fine but London is a city that gets you used to being able to get around extremely quickly.

I hadn’t really seen the London docklands before, as you can see from the photo below they’re a lot more continental than the normal impresison you get of London

There were a whole host of nice looking pubs and it was very quiet, somewhat out of my price range though!!!

In a way this path sums up the contrasting images of modern London, we began at the consumerist haven of the O2 arena, we passed through the multiple building sites which are the modern symbol of regeneration and we passed through Greenwich (which has the nice traditions of old but one of the most ambitious regeneration plans of any borough). After Greenwich the walk becomes very quiet and the riverside pathways fill up with old couples catching the sun and traditional old ale houses. Across the river you can see the new yuppy yachts and the brand new houses, these are towered over by the towers of Canary Wharf, as seen in the photo (taken by me) below.

After six more miles we finally reached Tower Bridge (the one everyone thinks is London Bridge) and the fine and inviting sight of the Grapes Bar where a thoroughly rewarding pint was had.

It was a nice day though and a reminder that even in a city of seven million people there is a lot of diversity and even some nice quiet areas.

Peace and love

Andrew