Kakistocracy II:It'll End In Tiers.

Do you hate Britain so much that you think Boris Johnson is the best person to lead it? Do you have such low expectations of your country that you believe Priti Patel is the best qualified person to be Home Secretary? Or Dominic Raab Foreign Secretary? Or, for that matter, do you truly think Britain is well served having someone like Matt Hancock employed as Health Secretary, Gavin Williamson as Secretary of State for Education, or Grant Shapps in charge of transport? 

Can you honestly say that Robert Jenrick is a reliable and trustworthy Secretary of State for Housing, that Oliver Dowden deserves to be in charge of culture or that Michael Gove is best placed to serve as Minister for the Cabinet Office, Chanceller of the Duchy of Lancaster? Can you honestly say you even know what the fuck the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Chanceller of the Duchy of Lancaster even fucking means? And on the subject of bullshit job titles for cronies does anyone have any idea what the Lord President of the Council, Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg actually does except pontificate vaguely and sanctimoniously on subjects he has neither experience of nor expertise in?

Of course you don't think they're the best people. Most likely you think they're among the worst but, in some cases, you may equivocate. You may throw out the tired old canard that 'they're only doing their best' (they're absolutely not), that 'nobody else could handle this any better' (demonstrably untrue as even the most cursory perusal of the Covid-19 death statistics proves), or you may prefer to make up untruths about Keir Starmer or pretend Jeremy Corbyn is still in charge of the Labour party and have a moan about that. In that you'll at least be joined by some of the more regressive elements of the leftist movement. Those who prefer to be pure in opposition rather than to ever to get down to the hard work of governing and, this is key, occasionally making difficult compromises.

In a recent debate with a friend as to whether the Johnson administration was wantonly cruel or simply incompetent we agreed the best adjective to describe them would be the one that meets those two somewhere in the middle:- negligent. Johnson and his cabinet of cronies and toadies don't want your parents or grandparents to die. They aren't doing anything to try to make that happen. But, on the other hand, they're certainly not doing much to try to stop it from happening.

They simply don't care if they die or not. They don't care about others at all. They care only about their own survival and their own power and for that to continue they have to convince us of the lie that (a) they're doing their best at a difficult time and (b) they're not to blame and we are. Both of those premises is half true. Sure, it's a difficult time and sure, the public are at fault. But they're not at fault for flaunting Covid rules (apart from the very small minority of people who are), they're at fault for voting in, with a huge majority, a shamelessly amoral, bullying, and lying government. The experiment with government by kakistocracy is, predictably, fast becoming a disaster and as we move, slowly yet inexorably, into a second stage of lockdown that is abundantly clear to all but those who seek to absolve their own blame for voting this shower of shit in in the first place.

As the first lockdown eased and people understandably visited families and friends again, went back to work, and (urged on by the government's own Eat Out To  Help Out scheme) headed out to restaurants and pubs to both help out the economy and to get their social lives back. People appreciated being able to do this and though many of us were at different stages of returning to normality, and virtually nobody started acting is if we were completely in the clear, we all understood that we needed to be cautious, we needed to take care, and that the chances of a second wave of some sort were highly likely.

We did our bit and we needed the government to do their bit. If not why do we even have a government? We needed them to develop a working (working, not world beating) track and trace system, we needed them to do as they said they would and follow the science, we needed them to tell the truth, and we needed them to build bridges instead of create divisions.

They did none of those things. Instead they pissed away the summer months limbering up for various culture wars, refusing to appear on Newsnight - the national broadcaster's most important and insightful (not to say least partial) news programme, and telling people like the fictional Fatima who heads up this piece that she should forget her dreams of following her passion and go to work 'in cyber'. Get a real job you feckless idlers and pull your heads out of the clouds.

Nevermind that the cultural sector contributes over £200,000,000,000 to the UK economy (more than 10% of it), the Johnson administration don't like musicians, artists, actors, and ballet dancers for one simple reason. Many of them don't support Johnson and speak out often about just how much they don't. As we've seen this week when Johnson threatened withdrawal of support to regional mayors who didn't sing from the same hymn sheet as him, this is a prime minister who values loyalty above all else. A thin skinned, very little, man who won't even entertain the idea of a person, no matter how talented, telling him he's wrong - as he almost always is - on everything.

Though the disastrous handling of coronavirus has been the most deadly strategy of Johnson's error strewn and calamitous stewardship of the country we shouldn't forget the upcoming disaster of no deal Brexit, something Johnson promised/lied on many many occasions couldn't happen and something we're now awaiting. As a huge lorry park is built in Kent and ideas for passports for lorry drivers entering that county is mooted by our maladministration we can laugh at petitions to have it named The Nigel Farage Lorry Park (though Farage's Garage has a better ring to it) in honour of the man who did the most to make it happen (to misquote Field of Dreams:- "if you build it, they will come") we should share a thought for how wise it is to potentially disrupt the delivery of vital medication at the height of the worst global pandemic for over a century.  

Covid will kill many more people and it will further erode our economy but with Brexit, especially a no deal Brexit on its side, we can be assured that we will feel the pain of Covid deeper and for longer than most other countries except those others who have burdened themselves with similarly populist, divisive, hateful, and lying leaders. Step forward Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil,  Narendra Modi of India, and the most bigly of them all - Donald Trump of the USA.

In China there's a saying that goes "same same but different" and that fits for this group of spoilers and cultural vandals. We know, and read, enough about Trump, Modi has encouraged religious violence in a country that can ill afford to risk it, and Bolsonaro's denial of the risks of coronavirus has risked the health of his nation as sure as his greenlighting of the deforestation of the Amazon hastens a future climate crisis that will make Covid-19 look like a fun day out at Alton Towers.

Johnson's own populism is, when first encountered, a strange beast. A difficult one to get your head around. It's a strange kind of authoritarianism he exerts. In some ways, he seems incredibly liberal, lax even - negligently so. But in other ways, in binding the strings behind the major institutions that operate within Britain and keep it a decent liberal society, he is bordering on oligarchic levels of control. The threat, for that's what it is, to kneecap the BBC is something you'd expect from a dictatorship not a democracy. Or at least a mock-democracy like, for example, Russia.

Putin poisons his real rivals and inserts puppets as pretend rivals, puppets who essentially support him but act as opponents to give the impression of democracy. Johnson's not resorted to poisoning yet, though arranging to have journalists beaten up is not below him, but with the announcement of minor actor and dreadful singer Laurence Fox and his new Reclaim 'culture war' party the Tories are already in the position of funding a supposed opponent. 

Recently, threats to install former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre as the head of Ofcom and the former Spectator and Daily Telegraph editor as chairman of the BBC were made. Dacre has long campaigned against the BBC and its 'cultural Marxism' and Moore has boasted that he never watches television and believes the license fee should be abolished. Moore, also, once employed Boris Johnson as a 'journalist' (where his forte was fabricating stories and quotes) and recently received a peerage from Johnson's government making him Baron Moore of Etchingham and, under his stewardship, our cultural programming would be exactly that - a barren moor. 

Moore ruled himself out of taking the BBC job amid rumours of demands that the wages for the position should be trebled to accommodate him but whether or not Moore or Dacre take up these jobs is not important. What's important is that the government are seen flexing their muscles, putting the frighteners on the BBC and threatening the corporation's impartiality - something that is already under serious question by many.

People complain, long and often, about Laura Kuennsberg and her supposed bias towards Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party (though over one hundred Tories wrote to the BBC to complain she wasn't being nice enough to him) but programmes like Newsnight and Panorama still regularly speak truth to power and without them we dumb down the populace even further and make them eager consumers of yet more government lies and propaganda. To undermine the BBC and replace it with a state mouthpiece similar to that of North Korea is not for the benefit of anyone living in the country and entirely to the benefit of those that are running it. When Hugh Grant tweets "coffin. nail. UK" he's exaggerating. But not much.

Even Jeremy Clarkson, nobody's idea of a bleeding heart liberal or social justice warrior, said he'd rather drive his 'Lambo' off a cliff than see Moore as head of the BBC. It's an appointment that would make as much sense as employing Gary Glitter as your babysitter.

Johnson is appointing members of his own fan club, highly unqualified and morally bankrupt ones at that, to hugely influential positions of power and paying them, enormously handsomely, with our, taxpayer's, money to do his bidding for him. This is a trick straight out of the Trump playbook as many of Johnson's tricks are. The trick is easy to see, it's hiding in plain sight, but there are still plenty of people, idiots, in this country who can't see the sleight of hand this dodgy and discredited stage magician employs.

Other ideas mooted, seemingly with the final solution being to reduce the UK to a one party state though as likely to reduce the UK to a one nation state, include barring schools from teaching any line of thought that doesn't support a capitalist agenda. As if the idea of thinking that life is about anything other than amassing large amounts of money and then stockpiling it like a greedy dragon is somehow morally abhorrent. Are these people that grew up being taught and believing that life is simply a huge game of Monopoly and the winner is the person who dies with most money in the bank?

What happened to love, friendship, spending quality time with your family? I'm yet to attend a funeral where everyone gathered to discuss and celebrate the healthy state of the deceased's bank balance. In fact most of the funerals I've attended, and sadly there have been too many, have been made bearable by the presence of friends and family and the most touching moments have often come in the form of poetry recitals and, even more so, music. When Rishi Sunak suggests struggling musicians should retrain and get new jobs (in 'cyber' or in Tesco it matters not) he's showing us what an ideal Toryworld looks like. One without music, one without theatre, and one without art. 

Football can continue but only as a business, not as a passion. Our situation moves on from being an endless culture war into a war against culture itself. Owen Jones recently wrote a brilliant article about how the Tories have been taking lessons from Viktor Orban, the hard right authoritarian leader of Hungary. Orban, and his ruling Fidesz party, have rewritten the school curriculum so that it promotes their brand of nationalism, they've gagged teachers who have spoken out about this, and they've curtailed state media from reporting negatively about it.

Jones goes on to make the very real point that these culture wars are "a means of stigmatising the struggle of minorities for rights and acceptance", they're a tactic "to distract from the Tories’ catastrophic handling of the pandemic", and they also, helpfully for the Tories, "force Labour on to political ground that polarises its natural supporters" and while that's all worrying and troublesome enough that's not where culture wars, division, and authoritarian regimes tend to end up. That place is even more frightening and there are warnings in 20c European history that nobody should even need reminding about.

When you think about it Boris Johnson's, Michael Gove's, Priti Patel's, and Gavin Williamson's complete incompetence in doing the job and total negligence in even caring about that is almost a relief. Or it would be were it not so serious and life threatening to many. The handling of the pandemic hasn't improved. It's got worse. Sixteen thousand positive Covid results disappeared because of a faulty Excel spreadsheet and the mayors of Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Sheffield have all spoken out to say they received no contact whatsoever from central government regarding serious new lockdown restrictions that have been placed on those cities.

In the words of Keir Starmer:- "It was an act of gross irresponsibility for anonymous Government sources to tell a few newspapers on Thursday about plans to impose further restrictions on millions of people. They did so without any detail, without any consultation and without any statement from the Prime Minister."

The Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford reports a similar scenario and goes as far as saying Johnson's disastrous stewardship of the UK is strengthening the case for Welsh independence. In Scotland, a second referendum would no doubt be won by the SNP and the end of the UK would be certain. As long as Johnson and the Tories stay in power the end of the UK is certain. It's no surprise that Johnson should punish voters in Scotland for not voting for him in sufficient numbers but he's even showing contempt for his new 'red wall' voters.

It's no surprise. He treats everyone with contempt. His wives, his lovers, his children, his MPs, his political foes, and, ultimately, the nation, its health, and its economy. His lies about Covid-19 and the government reaction have undoubtedly hugely increased the UK death toll and his lies about Brexit will do the same for the economy and the nation's mental health.

The "easiest deal in history" (Liam Fox), the promised sunlit uplands where everything goes our way and German automobile manufactures bend over backwards to sell us their cars, turns out to not be so easy at all. A late relitigation of even the parts of the deal the government had agreed and signed up to was probably the final nail in that particular coffin and now Boris Johnson, the man who once boasted "there is no plan for no deal because we're going to get a great deal" is telling the country to prepare for a no deal Brexit and, as outlined earlier, Farage's Garage is being prepared in Kent so immigrants who sneak into the country in the back of trucks can perish there along with your vital medical supplies.

Despite my continuing, and increased, anger with this shitshow of a government I've actually been okay recently. Quite content for the most part really. Since I last wrote one of these Kakistocracy blogs at the end of September I've been on two great walks (a leg of the Capital Ring from Greenford to Hendon and a TADS trek from Theydon Bois to Epping), I've been out for a couple of meals with my nephew and new landlord Daniel (to The Pelican in Pamber Heath for margherita pizza with extra jalapenos and to The Berkshire Arms in Midgham for lemon and coriander halloumi wth chips), I've attended online events with the London Fortean Society and SELFS, and I've even been back to an art gallery (for the first time in over seven months) with my friend Vicki, I've done a couple of Kahoot quizzes over Zoom, and I've caught up with Shep, Adam, Teresa, Carole, Dylan, and Tom for a few cheeky beers in a socially distanced pub.

 

 

Which you have to specify these days despite that being obvious or some Internet warrior goes berserk. Because of people having more time, being more stressed, Facebook and Twitter haven't been the best places to hang out of late - which is a shame as during the start of lockdown I found great solace in issuing music challenges and running down a reggae top 100 as well as sharing my Isolation blogs on there.

 

But, hey, things change and not just on the Internet. I'm spending my weekends (currently three days long and hopefully they'll stay so) back in London (four days a week working in Brimpton Common in Berkshire) which has entered tier two lockdown so I can only visit indoor places with those I live with (nobody, at least when I'm London) or those in my social bubble (again - nobody) but I'm not finding it that difficult and I certainly won't be getting jealous or writing nasty comments about people elsewhere in the country who are able to get out and do more, or different, things than I can.

 

I'll save my ire for the government, I'm using this enforced home time to catch up on some television, listen to lots of music, and to try and write better quality blogs and more of them. Today I should be on a London by Foot walk that would have taken us from Strawberry Hill to Acton via Horace Walpole's gothic mansion, along an idyllic and Arcadian stretch of the Thames, and through the parks of Syon and Gunnersbury. I'd have loved to organised and partaken of that and I'd have loved to see my friends and join them for beer and curry but it's had to be postponed for perfectly understandable reasons and when it happens, hopefully the corresponding weekend next year, it will feel all the more special for knowing how precarious and fragile both our freedom and health is.

 

I know that, you know that, and even the government knows that. The problem is they don't care. I'll continue to point that out - even if they lock me in a store cupboard!

 

Are You Scared To Get Happy?:Elizabeth Price @ Artangel.

Seven months and nine days. That's how long it'd been since I last stepped foot in an art gallery (on March 1st this year I went to see Young Bomberg and the Old Masters at the National Gallery) and it may well be the same amount of time before I visit one again or, with these new Covid-19 restrictions, until I visit one again in the company of friends. 

So last Saturday's trip to see the video art of 2012 Turner Prize winner and former Talulah Gosh member Elizabeth Price in an unnamed gallery on Borough Road between Borough and Elephant and Castle tube stations may prove to be something of a strange blip in a year that's hardly been short of quirk, strangeness, and, despite those in power doing the best to make it not so, charm. If it was a blip it was, thankfully, a quite delightful blip although much of that was down to the company (I went with my friend Vicki) than it was the art.

That's not to say the art was bad. It certainly wasn't. I liked it and Vicki liked it even more. It's just that much as I love and appreciate art now as much as ever, it's not been art that I've missed most in this crazy year. I've missed friends and being in the actual presence of those friends (rather than looking at them from a Zoom call - an experience Whitney Houston may have described as been 'not right but it's okay) shooting the shit, putting the world to rights, and doing our darndest to drink a pub dry.

A mission we, thankfully, failed abysmally at even if we did spend five hours in the pub and just thirty minutes in the gallery. That's not because we rushed round. It's because that's how long the video art was and though our tickets permitted us to stay for a second screening neither of us felt we'd benefit much from that and we'd not seen each other for months and had lots of catching up to do. I thank Elizabeth Price for her art but I also thank her for enabling a get together that likely won't be repeated now until 2021.

The art itself took a while to get going and it took me even longer to get into the swing of it. It was my first time in a gallery wearing a mask and though the air conditioning rendered that completely unproblematic it was still odd to have to maintain social distancing in an arts space. Quite nice really. How many times have you been trying to look at the finer points of, say, a Lucian Freud painting when some oik has shoved in front of you to take a photo? How many times, on the other hand, may you (or I) have been that oik?

In a dark square room three of the four walls were adorned with large screens and on to these were projected three films that played concurrently. Sometimes they jarred with each other, sometimes they played nicely off, and with, each other, and sometimes they appeared as if blissfully unaware of each other's existence. Never did they make a great deal of narrative sense but almost always they were intriguing enough to keep one watching.

Under the umbrella title of SLOW DANS the three films were titled The Teacher, Felt Tip, and Kohl with the first of those three taking up the larger central screen. The Teacher showed slowly morphing and revolving images of patterned dresses worn, I think, by crude mannequins and graphics resembling Rorschach tests or even lava lamps.

Kohl mostly fixated on an image of gently swaying monochrome fronds but was occasionally interspersed with some intentionally retrofuturistic computer generated fonts about superstitions and various other subjects that never really amounted to more than the sum of its parts even though the upside down photographs of disused collieries rendered in stark primary colours were aesthetically pleasing. 

Felt Tip also borrowed the schtick of fetishised fonts but overlaid them on to visions of a computer in a dark room, its rear light providing the focus as surely as a fading taillight on a US highway or a Buffalo Tom tune. A vaguely stentorian narration told of the history of the neck tie and a fairly decent electronic soundtrack gave us a chance to tap a toe and an assistant to come over and have a word in Vicki's ear for taking a photo using a flash.

And that was it. All done. A pleasant, enjoyable, but hardly earth shattering experience and one that, in more normal times, may have hardly been worth writing a blog about it but in these times, these 'during' times, felt like a glass of cold fresh water after a long walk in a desert. The drinks in The Three Stags pub in Kennington afterwards weren't cold water but they went down equally as well as the art and so thoroughly did Vicki and I put the world to right afterwards that it was quite a surprise to wake up and find that Covid-19 is still about and that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are still in power. There will always be diseases and complete and utter cunts in the world (though putting them in charge of countries is just reckless) and it's easy to get bogged down in that. It's good, sometimes, often even, to remember there are things to be positive about. One of those things is art and the human desire and capacity towards creation and another one of things is, of course, friendship. Thanks to Elizabeth Price and thanks, even more, to Vicki.

Lie Back And Think Of Atlantis:Monkeying Around With Mermaids.

By any sane metric, attending three lectures about mermaids in an eighteen month period is too many. Two too many kind people would say. Three too many would be the cry of more harsh critics. Following Sophia Kingshill's Mermaids:Fish, Flesh or Fowl for the London Fortean Society at The Miller in May last year and a SELFS evening in The Old King's Head near London Bridge this February (back in the days when these events could still take place in pubs) I was online, for obvious reasons - and in Tadley lying on a bed with a glass of water instead of in London behind my desk with a bottle of San Miguel, for Merpeople:A Human History with Vaughn Scribner. I'm not obsessed with mermaids. I just like these evenings. I find them interesting.

With the video conference set up by the helpful and brilliant Conway Hall, Vaughn Zoomed into our rooms from Arkansas where he works as Associate Professor at the University of Central Arkansas and, once he'd done a quick - and understandable - plug for his books - he's written about early American taverns and the history of slavery in the West Indies, he told us how he fell into researching mermaids, how he doesn't believe they exist, and yet how interesting he finds belief in them. A belief that forms the basis of his main thesis:- that to understand merpeople (mermaids, mermen, and even merbishops) is to gain a better understanding of the most mysterious, dangerous, and capricious creature that exists on Earth. The human being.  

Vaughn's interest in merpeople was first piqued when he came across the story of the 17c Englishman John Josselyn who, on his travels in Virginia, is said to have had his arm gnawed off by a merman who crawled out of the water and into Josselyn's canoe. Josselyn was the author of 1671's New England's Rarities, discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country so it could be claimed that he had a vested interest in creating an interesting, or wholly untrue, back story to help shift his book. 

But he's far from the only person to report sightings of merpeople around that time. Though ancient South African cave drawings of merpeople exist and the concept of mermaids predate the invention of Christianity (there are images made in 8c BC Iraq and Homer's tales of mermaids on the Odyssey are possibly two or three centuries older than that) and even run concurrent with it in depictions on Roman funerary plaques it seems the heyday of mermaid belief began with Columbus arriving in the new world.

Before then merpeople could be find in many Christian buildings of Britain and Europe (York Minster, Westminster Cathedral, and Exeter Cathedral being prime examples) and many of them appear to be based on the Christian belief, or fear, of women being promiscuous. Many were depicted with their two tails spread wide open to receive, the original Starbucks logo featured just such a mermaid, and it seems that this was an early Christian tactic to try and discourage women's ownership of their own sexuality. As if to say to women, or mermaids, don't get involved. Just lie back and think of Atlantis.

Around the medieval period ideas began to congeal around mermaid identity. Mermen, who'd previously shared an equal billing, were edged aside in favour of topless, sexualised women at a time when such imagery, certainly in the cases of actual women and not ones that were half-fish, would have been incredibly rare and highly taboo in Christian churches.

The few mermen and merbishops that were depicted were conservatively attired but the mermaids had it all hanging out. As with Sophia Kingshill's not dissimilar talk on this subject, it seems that the male church leaders were having it both ways. They were able to paint an image of sexually available women/mermaids that they could, simultaneously, fantasise over and admonish for supposed moral laxity. Imagine the thoughts of guilt that would resonate in the head of a randy young priest who'd just drained his balls over a cold stone mermaid adorning a pew of a remote rural chapel.

Not everyone was so aroused by mermaids. In 1493, Columbus claimed to have encountered one on his travels and complained that she was not as beautiful as the rumours had it and, it seems, he had hoped. Those long Atlantic crossings can do things to a man. Forty years later the Spanish novelist and historian Diego Hurtado de Mendoza's ardour was equally dampened when he claimed to witness a mermaid leaping around like a "monkey with reason". 

Moving into the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries the map of mermaid sightings expanded to include the modern day countries of Cuba, Canada, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Portugal, Norway, Brazil, and Eritrea. The fact that China and Japan do not appear on this map suggests the colonial powers simply took the legend of the mermaid with them as they expanded their empires into Africa, the Americas, and parts of Asia. 

The map, essentially, was one of colonialism more than it was one of mermaids (people expected to see mermaids on their travels - so they did see them - the movement of water can play tricks on the mind) but maps, conversely, became the natural home of merpeople who'd soon start appearing on them representing the far reaches of the oceans much as the legend 'HERE BE DRAGONS' may represent unchartered terrain on land. Were these simple illustrations to jazz up otherwise potentially dull maps or was there a deeper reason for the mermaid inclusion? Vauhghn believed the truth was a bit of both.

This was a time when to claim you'd encountered a mermaid was almost the mark of an educated man, to not have seen one would be akin to not having listened to Pet Sounds, read Nietzsche, or watched Game of Thrones - you'd be rendered rather infra dig, and so desperate was the famous Swedish botanist and pioneer of binomial nomenclature Carl Linnaeus to see one he spent much of his life in fruitless pursuit of tail. The invention of modern taxonomy, it seems, was something of a booby prize.

The rise in the popularity of mermaids was also the start of the end for them too. At least as a serious scientific endeavour. The late eighteenth century craze for collecting mermaid skeletons may have easily separated the curious and unwashed from their money as crowds gathered to gawp but more serious minded critics were easily able to debunk these crude hybrid specimens. Scientists could easily identify a skeleton torso of a fish as that of a fish and the skeleton skull of a monkey to which it'd been attached as that of a monkey.

To begin with there plenty who preferred to believe and almost every cabinet of curiosities worth its salt wasn't complete without a mermaid skeleton and then popular racial theories, not far short of eugenics, were applied to mermaids of different skin colours. Intersectionality was a hot topic in the world of the mermaids, some of whom (despite not being real) suffered both sexism and racism, long before the American civil rights advocate and philosopher Kimberle Williams Crenshaw coined the term in 1989.

The boom for 'circus mermaids' continued and took an Orientalist direction as the Japanese idea of a mermaid was foisted on to willing Western audiences by Captain Eades who exhibited a supposed Japanese mermaid in London in 1822 and PT Barnum who took the very same mermaid on an American tour twenty years later. 

The differing reactions said more about that twenty year gap than they did about the differing levels of gullibility between American and British audiences. Eades wowed the crowd but Barnum's tour took place on the cusp of the Age of Science and Reason and found a much more cynical if no less receptive audience. Mermaids would soon move away from science and find new homes in the spheres of culture and creativity while still maintaining a second, nicely furnished, place in the land of capitalism.

The Australian swimmer and vaudeville star Annette Kellerman became famous for being one of the first women to ever wear a one piece bathing costume and for being the first major star to ever appear nude in a Hollywood production (1916's A Daughter of the Gods). Some called her the 'perfect woman' but she was also, to others, the perfect mermaid as she fine tuned an act she'd developed in Melbourne as a child into a regular screen appearance as a mermaid. Sometimes swimming among crocodiles.

This was the precursor to films like Ron Howard's Splash with Daryl Hannah as well as lesser known mermaid flicks like 1948's Mr Peabody And The Mermaid, 1999's Sabrina Down Under (a Sabrina the Teenage Witch spin off), and 1965's Beach Blanket Bingo with Linda Evans as Sugar Kane and the Norwegian actress Marta Kristen as a mermaid called Lorelei. Mermaids even cropped up in the Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises.

Nobody really believed mermaids were real anymore but that didn't stop them using their sexuality to shift product, be it ropy sounding b-movies or mass produced coffee. A Q&A took in subjects as diverse as Plato, the LGBTQ+ community's adoption of mermaid culture, Queen Elizabeth I, Disney's Little Mermaid, selkies, the National Gallery, Fishmonger's Hall, Zennor in Cornwall, sheela-na-gigs, Middle Temple, and the patriarchy but the gist of the talk, one Vaughn veered from often but always found his way back to, was that we instil our own hopes and shortcomings on these fantastical hybrids and though, for the most part, these days, we prefer to imagine aliens or lost civilisations when conjuring parallels to humanity and telling stories about ourselves that sometimes aren't easy, mermaids, at least in our invention and treatment of them, are really not so different to us after all. In a previous blog I wrote how 'mermaids are doing it for themselves' but the truth is they're not. They're doing 'it' for us. Linnaeus, I'm joining you.

TADS#39:Theydon Bois to Epping (or Stations of the Crass).

"From God to local bobby, in home and street and school, they've got your name and number while you've just got their rule. We've got to look for methods to undermine those powers. It's time to change the tables. The future must be ours" - Big A Little A, Crass.

 

Growing up in Tadley in the seventies and eighties, punk was big - and no punk band was bigger than Crass. A noisy, poetic, artistic, subversive anarcho-punk syndicate who lived in a large country house in Essex and whose records sold in droves but never made the pop charts. Stickers on the sleeves would demand you pay no more than 49p or 99p and when you pulled the gatefold sleeves open there would be edgy artwork and lengthy lectures about animal rights, the military-industrial complex, and the morally bankrupt, though sadly still dominant, worldview of Thatcherism.

Crass, along with others, helped show me the path away from capitalism. Away from thinking that life should be judged by how much money, how many possessions, a person has. Life was more than a game of Monopoly. The point of it was to live it, to experience it - not use it to amass a huge pile of gold coins and a large house and family you'd never see because you're forever in the office.

Of course, things are a little more nuanced than that but Crass, and - again - others, at least showed there was another way of doing things. I still listen to some of their records now and I still like most of their message but it had never occurred to me, until late last year, to visit their former HQ, Dial House in North Weald Bassett. When I sat down to draw up the 2020 TADS timetable (one I could have no idea just how much it would be disrupted) I popped it in for October, we like to do an edgelands walk that month, and then sat about devising a walk around it. Knowing that a brief look at a house would not, on its own, entice many others out.

The week running up to yesterday's Stations of the Crass walk saw some pretty bad weather, a lot of rain that looked like it had no intention of stopping by Saturday so it's perhaps not a surprise that Rachael dropped out the night before and then Shep, Teresa, and Kathy on the morning of the walk. None of them blamed the weather and all had perfectly valid reasons (and nobody should ever feel obliged to attend anyway) but if they had said they just didn't fancy getting drenched I wouldn't have blamed them.

 

It turned out that Pam, Adam, and myself weren't so bothered about the rain and even convinced ourselves, rightly it turned out, that it wouldn't be too bad and wouldn't last all day. I'd set off from Honor Oak Park at roughly 8am, taken a rail replacement service bus to New Cross Gate, the Overground to Whitechapel, the District Line to Mile End, and, finally, the Central Line out to Theydon Bois. A place I'd previously visited to go paintballing on my friend Tony's stag day. It being Tony's birthday weekend, a revisit seemed appopriate.

I was the first to arrive in Theydon Bois and popped in a shop to grab a Guardian (in Essex!?) and a packet of Bobby's salt'n'vinegar Spirals (which would appear and then disappear quite quickly early in the walk) before crossing over to the delightful Bonhomie to wait for Pam and Adam, who both arrived promptly, and enjoy a lovely breakfast of scrambled egg and baked beans on toast. It was a fancier joint than the greasy spoons we tend to frequent but service was friendly, my food was tasty, and Pam's avocados looked pretty good too. We managed to resist the temptation of a breakfast mojito or pina colada.

 

Fed, watered, and having caught up with each other's news (family and work are the gifts that keep giving on that score), we headed out for one of the most poorly attended TADS walk in TADS history. Which was a shame as it was, as TADS, our first ever time in Essex.

What the walk lacked in quantity of attendees however it made up for in quality. Both Adam and Pam (and, eventually, myself) were well up for a day's walking and we were soon joined by a fox as we passed over a bridge across the Central Line and a bunny rabbit in the field that the bridge took us down into. It wasn't the last bunny rabbit of the day and as the afternoon dragged on it would be joined with cats, cows, and horses a plenty.

Theydon Bois is a pleasant if unremarkable place. Disappointingly Bois is pronounced 'boyce' or 'boys' and not 'bwah' as many of us had assumed in the past. It's named for the de Bosco family who held the manor in the 12/13c and it was only when the Great Eastern Railway built the line out to Ongar that the spelling was formalised. A clerk of Epping Parish Council, a Mr John Windas, had some basic knowledge of the French language and suggested B-O-I-S and that it remains.

It's not a thrilling place. Annual highlights are said to include a donkey derby and an open garden day and the main sight is the Avenue of Trees, some distance from the station on Loughton Road, which features, you guessed it, an avenue of trees planted in the 1830s to celebrate Victoria's ascent to the throne.

It didn't seem worth a detour as we had a decent length walk ahead of us anyway. Passing through some soggy but picturesque fields and with the roar of both the M11 and the M25 in the distance we soon reached an underpass beneath the aforesaid of those motorways and not only was it dark but the floor was covered in a puddle for the entirety of its length.

I went first and got my inappropriate footwear, trainers, soaked and then my socks and feet too. They'd remain squelchy for the next hour or so and when I got home at the end of the day my poor little tootsies absolutely honked. Pam passed through quietly and uneventfully and Adam took the dramatic measure of removing both his boots and socks and wading through.

 

The underpass brought us out, via fast flowing muddy streams, into a field of nonchalant horses and past the 13c Anglican church of All Saints and into the village of Theydon Garnon (Theydon is believed to mean 'valley where thatch grows' and Garnon derives from a family called Gernon.

We reached reasonably evocative fingerposts, passed through a small industrial estate with a desk facing a skip looking like a metaphor for the depressing nature of office life, and turned left and passed under a thankfully much drier underpass beneath the M25.

 

Here we met with open fields on one side and thick forest to the other. One anaemic slug crossed our path and a long straight stretch brought us to a T junction and a lengthy though not problematic section along quiet country lanes, remarkable to think we'd not long left a tube station and we were already among small country hamlets and homely cottages.

Some of the cottages were beautiful, others more ostentatious than anything, but all of the nature, though not as spectacular as our recent visit to the Wye Valley, was aesthetically pleasing. Gently rolling hills, dewy green fields, and slightly slippy muddy ploughed fields. One of which we'd soon be passing through, finally away from the road, until we reached the small settlement of Toot Hill and its Green Man pub.

Adam, who was a bit ahead at this point, informed us we should rush as they were playing Come On Eileen but we missed that. The pub was nice though. Outdoor seats were either wet from the rain or already taken so we took a seat inside and the barmaid brought us an IPA (Pam), a London Glory (me), and a Moretti (Adam). We supped them beneath an image of Goodfellas and they went down so well, and the service was so friendly, we had seconds. Pam switching to gin and presenting me with a brilliant late birthday present, a kind of tube map for walkers that shows how many of London's green spaces link up. It will surely become a valuable research tool.

 

Leaving The Green Man, and stopping - again - briefly - to admire another fingerpost and ponder what Bobbingworth and Stanford Rivers might be like, it wasn't long before we'd left Toot Hill  and The Green Man and I quickly remembered to inform my fellow walkers that Toot Hill was the former home of Olly Murs and that The Green Man burned down in 1896 and was rebuilt in 1907.

On quiet Mill Lane, an overexcited dog gave us all a smile and we soon reached a brutalist water tower and I pondered the idea of organising a rustic/rural brutalist walk. Everyone knows about the brutalist buildings of large cities but less attention is paid to just how many iconic examples of brutalism populate the countryside, not least in places like the Essex edgelands.

 

At the water tower we took a ninety degree right angle turn and headed north, beneath a photogenic railway bridge, to Dial House itself. The reason for the walk. I had expected to be a little disappointed, it is just a house after all, but found myself strangely excited by the 16c homestead that has served as the home of the writer Primrose McConnell (whose 1883 tome, The Agricultural Notebook, is a standard reference book for the European farming industry) and, from 1967 onwards, to a self-substaining anarchist-pacifist house that, as I established earlier, was the home of Crass from 1977 to 1984. 

 

To this day it still hosts avant-garde jazz movements and founders of free festivals though when we arrived it was pretty quiet. It seemed as if nobody was in so we took a few photos, admired the wooden sculptures and signs (one written in a very Crass font) that decorated the exterior of the grounds and peered into the large and labyrinthine gardens themselves. We were pleased to see free apples and pears being given away, Pam tucked into a pear, but less impressed with the Amazon delivery waiting on the doorstop in direct contravention of Dial House's instructions to leave parcels in a box at the gate and possibly also of the entire ethics behind Crass and Dial House.

Ah well, they do say never meet your heroes and if I didn't meet Penny Rimbaud of Steve Ignorant I did get to see the place I most associate with them and it had felt good to do so even if, even now, I'm still wondering what was in that Amazon parcel.

Neighbouring Dial House is a sprawling farm. Cattle wandered over to check us out, a scrawny black cat too, and the hay had been stacked up in a way that was highly pleasing to both Pam and my own artistic sensibilities. 

From here a path of cracked concrete surrounded by shrub and bushes took us, now with the sun shining, along to the edge of the North Weald Redoubt, a regular sight of ghost spottings which, due to it sadly being in private hands, we could only look at from the paths.

Even that didn't work for us. All we saw was a few concrete boulders which, Adam believed - and the ditches dug next to them seemed to confirm, have been put there to stop travellers settling on the flat common ground that there's so much of. North Weald Redbout's full name is the North Weald London Mobilisation Centre and it's one of the more substantial parts of a series of defensive positions that stretch seventy-two miles and were built to protect London from invasion by the French who had, at the time of its building, been modernising their army following defeat at Waterloo.

It's hard to work out why the French would come into London from a northern outpost like Epping. Perhaps when I read the book Strange Labyrinth by Will Ashon, a gift from my lovely friend Jack for my birthday this year, there will be something about it in there.

 

 

 

After stopping to lark around with some fine nags, one of whom Adam named Buttercup and seemed to develop quite a crush on, we continued along the path and stopped briefly to talk to a local dog walker who remarked how keen he was to see ramblers in the area, told us about preservation schemes he'd been involved in, and ended our chat by boasting that he'd that morning received a refund from Ryanair!

We were now on the edge of, and we were soon in, North Weald Bassett itself and just as the rain started up, quite heavy at one point, we hit The King's Head pub, the oldest in the area and a very pleasant, and timely, pit stop. Adam and myself had a lager, Pam a gin, and we admired the needlepoint on the walls and the Tudor architectural quirks while our conversation took us down memory lane recalling our friends ex-partners and deciding which ones we'd liked and which ones we'd not been so keen on. A proper little gossip basically.

 

I'd have been tempted, quite easily, by yet another two pint mistake but smarter heads prevailed and with the rain now stopped that was the right decision. We soon left North Weald Bassett and our path took us through some long and rather lovely wooded trails, the sun beginning to set and imbuing the surprisingly pastoral scene with a highly pleasing golden glow.

This path took us, eventually and pleasantly, over the M11 (with spectacular views of the shadowy skyscrapers of London on the horizon) and into the pleasant suburban village of Coopersale. It was hard to believe we were only one mile away from a tube station.

I'd planned a stop for a pint at The Garnon Bushes in Coopersale and it looked, despite the large screen showing football, a nice pub but Adam wanted to get home early and said he'd prefer to push on to Epping and have a curry (and another beer) rather than do a pub stop. With Pam in accordance I was outnumbered (again) but that wasn't a bad thing. The Garnon Bushes was nice to look at. We don't necessarily have to go in EVERY pub we pass.

 

The area around Coopersale and Garnon Bushes has been used, historically, for farming wheat, barley, and beans and is home to the flat church of St Alban the Martyr. It's got a pleasant, relaxed, and not too stuffy suburban vibe and it looks like it'd be a good place to live. It was an easy place to walk through. A couple of suburban side streets led to a diagonal path that passed over the now disused tube line from Epping to Ongar and out on to a playing field, where we had a blast of 54-46 Was My Number and Pressure Drop, to mark the passing of reggae legend Toots Hibbert, and soon enough into the centre of Epping.

 

Twinned with Epping in Baden-Wurttemberg (capital:Stuttgart) in 1981, Epping began as a small community of scattered farms and developed into a small town overnight stop for stagecoaches and mail coaches coming to London from Norwich, Cambridge, and Bury St Edmunds. It's actually quite small and its notoriety most likely stems from being on the end of a tube line and, far more so, the much larger forest which, one day, we should explore in far greater depth.

 

Notables associated with Epping include Dave Gahan, Nick Berry, Glenn Hoddle, Rod Stewart, Bradley Walsh, Jessie Wallace (Kat Slater in Eastenders), Lisa Snowdon, Sheridan Smith, Philip Hammond, Griff Rhys Jones, and Winston Churchill who was MP for Epping between 1924 and 1945. You'll not be surprised to learn that Epping, as with every other part of Essex, is still in Tory hands. With those MPs including Priti Patel, Mark Francois, Bernard Jenkin, and James Cleverly it makes me think that, despite it being very beautiful, I'd never want to live there.

 

To eat there is fine though. Back in 2014 Shep and myself walked from Snaresbrook to Epping in some kind of forerunner to what would become TADS and we ended up in Zaikaa. We ended up there again. In lieu of Shep's absence I had a paneer shashlik and a cheese and chilli nan washed down with a brace of Cobras (no Bangla), Adam had a veggie dansak, and Pam stir-fried spinach and sweet pumpkin with garlic and coriander.

 

It wasn't exceptional but it was decent and it went down well after a reasonably long day's walking (33,779 steps notched up by phone) and the conversation was as interesting and funny as ever. Adam shot off early so Pam and I took a leisurely stroll to Epping tube station. I hopped off at Mile End, and via Whitechapel, Peckham Rye, and, eventually, the 363 bus I was home just before midnight. The smell of my feet will not linger in the mind as long as the memories of a walk that, despite all indicators - weather, people dropping out, Covid - turned out to be a rather special little day out.

 

Thanks to Pam and Adam for the snappage and the mappage and most of all, as ever, the great company on a walk that may have started out wet and unpromising but soon proved, again - as ever, to be a wonderful pick me up. Where next Columbus?