what we've got

Penguins Stopped Play

[Spoilers ahead] I’ve just finished Harry Thompson‘s ‘Penguins Stopped Play‘, a book about cricket and travel, in that order. Most of you will like one and not the other of these two subjects (no prizes for guessing which). But, as with so many things that are lovingly made, intelligently crafted and passionately expressed it has a significance beyond its deceptively simple approach. In this case, it is as much about what it means to live than an account of a team of amateur cricketers who decide to play a match in every continent. This is partly because Thompson died shortly after finishing the book, at only 45.

I knew before reading the book that Thompson had died and I suppose I had some kind of mawkish interest in what happened to someone so young, an age I’m approaching. I found it almost impossible to pick it up and not turn to the final pages, where he writes without sentiment (but with a touching metaphor of the slip fielders lining up waiting to catch him) about his inoperable cancer. In a final chapter his wife briefly writes about his death and funeral. She hears the thunk of a cricket ball land in his coffin, dropped there by the members of the team he captained: entirely appropriate, she tells us, as she had already placed a bat in his hands.

But rather than sadness in the pages that preceded those I found a joyous affirmation of someone living as they wanted, fulfilling their passion, squeezing some of the zest from life. The death of one of the book’s many colourful characters, a beloved cricketer who passes at the batman’s crease just as he is about to score his hundred, foreshadows Thompson’s own life cut lamentably short. And inevitably, as the pages thin out and stop, we turn attention upon ourselves and our loved ones and remember, too, that our lives will end. And as we do, we remind ourselves of how we should try to make our lives as happy, loving and passionate as we can, just as Thompson appears to in this unlikely book about cricket and travel, in that order.

For me, Thompson has become one of those writers you want to call by their first name, as if you know them. Thanks, Harry.

Watched the news lately, picked up a newspaper? Then it’s likely you’ll be at least tempted into being afraid, if not downright hide-behind-the-sofa, peek-from-under-the-cushion terrified.

Here’s what you do to overcome the fear in the media. The first is listen to Doug Stanhope. He seems to know something about fear (the audio is not suitable for work so put your headphones on).

When you’re done with Doug read this analysis of how fear works by Tom Engelhardt, along with some statistical analysis (especially if you’re American – I’m not – but the principle applies elsewhere, too).

And if you’re still a little unconvinced, then watch Adam Curtis’ superb dissection of the ways that governments and organisations use fear to try to control me and you, in his documentary The Power of Nightmares.

And by then – well, you may have stopped worrying and learn to love the calm.

Were Lish's edits justified?

Raymond Carver never liked being called a literary minimalist but he was one, at least under the editorial knife of his sometime editor, Gordon Lish. Beginners, Carver’s posthumous collection of the unedited stories that were first published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a heavily edited form in 1981, goes some way to renegotiating that label.

Because Carver didn’t like the term, it doesn’t mean the stories are any better now that Beginners restores them to their original, less-minimalist state. As you might expect, comparing the new volume with the old we find that some stories are better, some remain largely the same, but some are worse without the would-be villainous hand of Lish.

I hesitate to say Carver didn’t solely produce his own best work. It goes against many of those conventions we hold dear about genius, creativity and authorship in general and about what we – and I, as a scholar of Carver’s work* – believe and trust in particular. Such a claim is best demonstrated through example, so I’m going to do that here.

Much has been said about Carver and Lish and the overall different effect of reading both versions, but I’m going to show how it works in detail through a close comparative reading of the opening passages of a less well celebrated story. In What We Talk About… (WWTA) it is called ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’; in Beginners (B) it is called ‘Want to See Something?’

Here’s the opening from WWTA:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I heard that. I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

And here’s the opening from B:

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I had heard that. I tried to wake cliff, but he was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars, easy enough to imagine a face there – eye sockets, nose, even the lips.

I’m going to go through it, picking up the most significant changes. Here’s the first line again:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. (WWTA)

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. (B)

The minimalist enterprise was concerned with paring down sentences by removing words, phrases and so on. This is a good example of that in action. In the minimalist version, the word ‘unlatch’ is removed. The effect is to remove certainty and introduce ambiguity: we know the gate has made a sound but we don’t know why. In some cases, this is preferable and you might argue that knowing the gate had become unlatched is more sinister and troubling than simply hearing the gate. Typically, though, minimalist writers won’t tell you want to think and you can see that even a single word can reveal a specific and clear meaning. This example shows how the minimalist aesthetic invites the reader to participate in the interpretation of the story because there is a paucity of detail: something is missing, so the reader must provide it.

Moving on. Here’s the next significant difference between the texts:

I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. (WWTA)

I tried to wake cliff, but he was passed out. (B)

This example illustrates how small changes in the text affect the ways in which the rhythm of reading works. In the minimalist example from WWTA, the causative ‘but’ is removed and the sentence is divided. It creates a stopping effect, slows the reading down, and in the context of this passage (and story) underscores the feeling of sudden wakefulness or nervous attention. There’s no smooth transition to support from her partner; Cliff (his name itself suggestive of large immovability) remains defiantly unaware of her ordeal. How the story is read, the pace and flow of the text, helps with the minimalist effect.

Here’s the next line:

A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city (WWTA)

A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city (B)

The minimalist technique depended upon inference, elision and ambiguity, so giving the reader too clear a didactic nod would undermine this approach. Typically you find this working in the absence of any kind of interior monologue or access to feelings in many minimalist stories (and in particular, those of Hemingway). Here the effect is the same but more subtle. I like to think that minimalists often describe scenes with the kind of objectivity you find in a photograph. In the example above, the moon was ‘big’ and was ‘laid’ over the mountains that ‘went around’ the city. All of this is detached observation without much of a hint at evaluation.

Carver's minimalist masterpiece

Compare this with the same ‘big’ moon that ‘hung’ over mountains that ‘surrounded’ the city. Both the terms ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ are evaluative and don’t sit with their feet inside the hard-minimalist camp (to coin a phrase). For example, the word ‘surrounded’ suggests a kind of siege, which is analogous to how she feels being trapped in her room while. In this case this single word, even though it’s not hard-minimalism, works well to be evocative without overdoing it. (And if you think that’s reading too much into it, then you’re not reading carefully enough – this is what good writers do in general and minimalist ones in particular.) Similarly, the omission of detail in the moon’s face in the first example is typical of the way that minimalist pared back the detail of their writing to hint at more than they told the reader outright.

Now, we know that nothing – including a photograph – is purely innocent, so we might like to say these aspire to this detached, objective condition at such times. But the effect, paradoxically, is very far from detachment. This is the case because often it’s the accumulation of small details working together that create the minimalist approach and its effect. And working together, the ambiguity of being non-specific about which way the gate is opening; the staccato reading of longer sentences divided into smaller, single-clause barbs; and the taming of evaluative adjectives such as ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ all work together to pare back the interpretative clues readers have at their disposal, and which invite the reader to find much more in the story than the words printed on the page.

When thinking about the inevitable question about which story (and approach) was better, it depends on how you like your literature. In a crude metaphor, if you’re the kind of person who likes loose ends at the end of the film, who doesn’t enjoy being spoon-fed or manipulated into a precise way of reading a film, if you like the film to make you think a bit, then you might like and appreciate the kind of minimalist writing that made – and sustains – Carver’s acclaim, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Recently, we’ve become increasingly interested in working in collaboration (following ideas such as ‘collective journalism’ or ‘crowd sourcing‘) but we’re not accustomed to thinking of our most prized writing as being written by what we might pejoratively call a ‘committee’. In many other cases, we still adhere to an outmoded version of creativity springing from an individual mind, perhaps more or less troubled and tossed upon the whimsy of genius, sat in isolation, wrestling with no one other than his or her muse. But as this example illustrates, in a stark harsh light, how far this myth fails to capture the reality of writing, and how writers and editors may work together to create more than the sum of their individual talents.

*I’ve written a PhD on literary minimalism, of which Carver occupies a third (alongside Ernest Hemingway and Frederick Bartheleme). You can read the introduction here.

What does it mean to be French?

The French have began a process of reflecting on their national identity by asking what it means to be French in the 21st century. Ostensibly this is happening as a result of recent perceived issues with parts of the population that are felt to have not integrated into French society, at least as some see it. But it also appears uniquely French itself, in that it represents another way in which the French undergo a perpetual (it seems) analysis of their language and culture, their politics and ideologies, their people and beliefs.

A strength of a society (and its individuals) is calculated in its ability to accept and respond to criticism, to solicit it even. Inevitably, the Grand débat sur l’identité nationale (The Debate on National Identity) will attract criticism of the French. One thorny issue that appears frequently when considering French identity is the perceived conservative attitude to its language and culture.

The BBC’s ‘From our own correspondent’ outlines this single, but significant element, by expressing it as a desire of the French to embrace their own culture jealously, even at the expense of others:

The French collude in the over-praising for two reasons, one good, one bad. The good reason is that they are genuinely fond of their culture. [...] One realises after a while that the French view their [celebrities] almost as members of the family. They enjoy going to see them in the same way they enjoy catching up with the latest family gossip.

The bad reason is that it is all about self-protection. Succumbing to sycophancy, after all, is a way of reassuring oneself that all is good in the world, when clearly it is not.

As an outsider and relative newcomer to the country, I’ve yet to form a picture of what it means to be French, but I’m learning a great deal (it wouldn’t be fair, either, since I wear rose-tinted spectacles having fallen for the place). I probably never will satisfy a complete conclusion but what I can say is that the national debate on what it means to be French appears to me a clear-eyed approach to learning more, good and bad, about itself.

And when you point such a focus elsewhere, it’s only a matter of time before the focus rests on you, and rightly so. I’m from the UK, so I wonder: what does it mean to be British? And by extension, what does it mean to be me, or be you, and where you’re from?

Updike wrote enough to know better

I admire Martin Amis’ candid review of John Updike’s final collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears. Amis celebrates Updike’s influence by himself writing well, with the clear-eyed and unsentimental insight that Updike brought to many of his novels and short stories.

Accordingly, Amis doesn’t flinch from the notion that Updike had lost some of his powers in this final collection, his last following his death earlier this year. At the beginning of the review Amis suggests a reading test, to see if one can spot the error of Updike’s ways:

The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing – one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.

Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.

The minor flaw is the proximity of prior and prime. This gives us a dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides, are etymological half-siblings, and should never be left alone together without many intercessionary chaperones. And the major flaw? The first sentence ends with the words “his land”; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov – who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.

Leaving aside the improbability of confirming a ‘literary ear’ based upon a single short reading, Amis is wrong when describing the repeated phrase ‘his land’ as a ‘major flaw’. It’s my view that Updike almost certainly intended the repetition in order to reinforce the complex notion of what it meant for Craig Martin to own ‘his land’. Even from this short extract we feel the land, once owned by others and now owned by Craig Martin, has in turn began owning him: the repetition is a nag that persists despite him ignoring it. More broadly, reconnecting with ‘his land’ is a longing made desperate by the emphasis that repetition brings, an arrow aimed wide at how things ought to be. It’s too rich in meaning to be left to error.

The use of repetition in literature in general, and the American short story in particular, was likely well known to Updike. Ernest Hemingway pioneered its use within his richly multi-valent, minimalist prose. The beginning of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ shows the extent to which Hemingway would adapt repetition to create meaning beyond his seemingly innocent prose style (full text here):

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

There are several words repeated, in one case within a single sentence: ‘baggage’, variations of ‘burnt’, ‘the ground’ and so on. The overall effect is created through a thickening of the overlapping but discontinuous phrases, a weaving of the strands of repetition into a rope that tightens into a knot as the passage ends: the town of Seney had been ‘burned off the ground’.

Hemingway’s story was first published in 1925, yet it’s lessons have not been forgotten. Within this context, and alongside my tentative groping towards its potentially rich effect in the story, Updike’s vice seems more a virtue.

(Picture credit: from SapphireBlue’s Flickr photostream)

Men and women, I should say

How did people emigrate before the web? With difficulty, surely. It’s been useful for almost every step and some of our move would have been impossible I feel without it, at least in the time we had. Of course, underpinning all the technology were two people filling boxes, completing forms, driving miles and pulling the levers and pressing the buttons. But the web has been outstandingly useful for several particular reasons. Here’s a quick fire list in no particular order – I’m certain I’ve left some things out – but like Kane’s gang (as if you’ve forgotten!) it’s what we’ve got:

Interviewed for job online. Without Jennie getting a job for the UN none of this would have happened. In her application she sent all documents online; underwent a test that was performed over the net; was interviewed via web-based video conferencing; and finally sent the medical / admin documents in PDF form to Kuala Lumpar for processing.

Google Docs for a to-do/resources list. This was invaluable and still is. It’s not as complex as something like specific to-do collaborative tools like RemembertheMilk, but it worked beautifully. Simple crossing things out with strikethrough was enough to say they’ve been done. We also collected resources, figures, phone numbers and so on here and worked on independently and together.

Synchronising weblinks using FoxMarks. We independently found various links as we browsed the web, hungry for a fix on our new country. I set up all computers with the favourites tool Foxmarks, regardless of operating system, to synchronise the links we dropped into a ‘Moving on’ folder in our browser. Worked well when Google Docs (eventually) became swamped. Sometimes we used Delicious, but not as often as I thought we would.

Sign-up service for moving. There are a handful of agencies online who make it easier to move by you entering some details and they doing some work for you, like letting the gas company know you need a meter reading and so on. We used these with partial success – sometimes the manual way is best.

Royal Mail’s redirection service. We have mail redirected and using this service meant we didn’t need to trundle down to the post office and take our identity documents, they check details online. We’d need the legs for the thousands of times we climbed the ladder to the loft to pack its contents.

Skype telephony. We bought a UK online number, so our friends and family in the UK would only need to call a local (to them) phone number. Skype has worked really well so far and since we’re not settled for a few months, goes where we go. It also works nicely on my iPhone, which saves us a fortune. We were able to stay in touch with our regi (estate agent) easily and without incurring further mobile phone costs.

Keeping the social network alive. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, this blog – all are things we use to share our experiences here and keep in contact with others. This is important when you’re away from home, and I’ve found it really useful to have some sense of continuity in terms of who I’m speaking with (especially when discussing the cricket, which is only available online here via the BBC’s wonderful TMS – this feels like I’ve never left!).

Transferring money. We now have to work with several currencies – US dollar, Swiss francs, Euro and GB sterling – and so being able to transfer them quickly online (and often without charge) helped us enormously. Of course, this isn’t just something you need when you move. What’s more, currency conversion rates online are always up-to-date.

Checking in online when flying. You’ve used this already, maybe, but printing out a boarding pass for flying seems novel still, and helped get things going when we were a rush: Jennie flew to Geneva and back the same day to secure our place in France.

Google chat. Sometimes email isn’t enough, and you need to make decisions through synchronous discussion. Google’s online chat, via GoogleMail, was vital for the hundreds of discussions we had when not together.

Removal quotes online. You enter your details and you get quotes from multiple removal companies. This helps get the best price of course, and is also a necessary part of claiming for expenses.

Google Maps and Google Earth. Knowing where you’re going to live and its local amenities used to something you needed to find out when you turn up. And although it’s still a thrill to find new restaurants and bars, knowing where the bank or petrol station is not so much fun. What’s more, we used Google Maps to find directions. If only it plugged into…

Satellite navigation. We bought a TomTom One XL, and this has the advantage of connecting to the web and downloading changes that users have made to the maps. In short, it corrects the errors that sat navs are annoyingly prone to, especially in areas under construction. Worked like a dream, although I wouldn’t say that it’s perfect even now.

It has helped me learn a new language. There is an embarrassment of excellent online resources for learning French. Some of the best are About.com‘s guide (with the inaptly named – for a grammarian at least – Laura Lawless); and the BBC comes up trumps again. Although not an online app per se, Genius (for the Mac, free download) helped with remembering verbs.

The web helped us find a place to live. We searched a variety of sites to find somewhere temporary in Geneva, and later, more permanent in France. In the case of the temporary accommodation, the website came with an interactive 3D tour of the apartment. Whilst this is pretty advanced I admit, all the websites we used to find a home had pictures. The difference was that we could save time and money using this process.

Hi-resolution floor plans. Houses in many European countries – alas, but excluding the UK it seems – come with detailed architectural plans, even those you just plan to rent. They locate plug sockets, light switches and so on and give precise details of every measurement both interior and exterior. Not sure if your sofa is going to fit? The plans will help tell you. These took seconds to send over email and illustrate how the communication between people in different countries is made so much easier.

Shopping. Inevitably we had to buy several things, oddments which we’d never got before or those things we needed to replace and pack. Ikea figured heavily in equipping our new place. Their website – intuitive, well-organised and with clear illustrations, it’s a good example of how we saved hours browsing online rather than visiting stores. What’s more, it provides real-time stock levels, is an example of how you can use the web to plan your deliveries or visits.

Freecycle. Even if you’re moving up the road you’ll still have a lot of stuff you’ll want to recycle. We used Freecycle online to invite people to collect some of the stuff we didn’t need or couldn’t find room for. They came in the night and collected, as if whisked away by recycling fairies, without us even knowing.

It would be no surprise to learn that one of the first things we did in Geneva was buy a 3G USB dongle to get us online (expensive but very fast).

Do you only use these things when emigrating? No, we use them now for a variety of reasons. It’s only together that they make sense as vital tools for moving country. Did we still print stuff out? Sure we did. Somewhere we’ve got a file with print outs of architectural plans, photos and the like. But this was as much as habit and security than anything: some lay untouched and unread. Is there anything I’ve missed – I expect so – even as I write I think of all the music and podcasts I’ve downloaded, some of which are about Geneva, or local news programmes and such. And booking tickets and… well, all those things we use the web for all of the time.

Now, if the BBC can get iPlayer available outside of the UK I’d pay the licence fee happily…

I had root canal therapy yesterday without anesthetic. That’s right. Read it again if you have to, suck up exactly what that means. Root canal therapy without anesthetic. If you’re squeamish, don’t read on.

The reason I had no pain relief was, the dentist told me, that he needed to know when it hurt so he could stop. He pushes thin needles into your root canal, you see, and if he goes in willy-nilly because I don’t feel a thing, he could push too far. When the anesthetic wears off, I’d certainly feel it then. I thought it was a good idea then, and I think so now: my dentist is an excellent one, and I trust him completely.

So he said – I’m going to do six things – and most of those left me reeling in sharp, breath-taking but happily short-lived agony . His was a countdown to pain, the relief felt at one completed annihilated by the anticipation of the next. Needless to say I grabbed his arm and begged him to stop. I have never, I am certain, felt pain like it. Now I know how The Marathon Man felt.

There are some events in life, small moments, that makes us almost instinctively repeat a phrase or gesture. Often these rituals are funny ones. So, for example, when I press my foot on the pedal of the rubbish bin and the metal lid makes a clang – I feel a knee-jerk reaction to exclaim: “The Emperor has arrived!”, as if the sound of the bin were nothing less than the emperor’s gong.

Today I feel I’ve added another one. Whenever I go to the dentist again, I know I’ll feel an almost uncontrollable urge to say: “Is it safe?”

If you haven’t already seen the speech of Daniel Hannan – a hitherto little-known Conversative MEP – attacking Gordon Brown’s economic regeneration policy (and more), you’re in for a treat. It’s a wonderful piece of rhetoric, whether you support Hannan and the growing list of Brown’s detractors, or the Labour Government, or neither. Even Gordon Brown laughed – a nervous laugh, I think, since it’s deadly serious – and every effective. It earned its applause. Here it is.

There are two notable things about Daniel Hannan’s speech. The first is that it wasn’t picked up by the mainstream media in the UK – that is, the news channels and cultural affairs programmes – until it became an internet phenomenon on YouTube. It’s certainly not the first time this has happened, but it’s a major development because the mass media is now reporting on an internet meme. The net got their first. Long live the net.

The second point is that its success largely depends on creating an extended metaphor which is, unlike many of the attempts made by the mainstream media to describe the economic crisis, is successful. Its success depends upon the application of a conventional trope – the idea of failure as represented by a sinking ship – but skewed to address the particularities of this sinking ship – that is, the UK economy.

It’s so inventive, in fact, that it was most likely prepared for the occasion. This is at odds with the delivery, which seems natural and restrained. If it sounds churlish to suggest it was written and therefore of lesser value, then this is not the intention. Rather, I mean the very opposite: it is carefully hewn yet passionately delivered, artificial – as it were – and perfectly natural. (I’m assuming here, I don’t know for sure.)

There is a touch of the ad hominem about it – a last bastion of the fraud, the uncertain – and would appeal to those who instinctively find Brown wooden at the best of times. But after watching Hannan’s attack on Brown in the context of the division in Europe over whether it’s right to spend your way out of a recession, it feels like it has distilled a moment in the history of attempting to overcome what threatens to be a damaging economic slump.

Adam Curtis

Whilst reading Surowiecki, Leadbeater et al it’s easy to get carried away with the notion that the crowd is, overall, smarter than the individual. It’s an impressively pithy idea that’s sometimes counter-intuitive, and so sticks easily in our minds, despite these writers and others reminding us that it’s not always the case.

An antidote to crowd wisdom can be found in the work of the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. He has made several films on a variety of themes including the role of psychology in The Century of the Self; the use of Cold War theory in modern economics in The Trap; and the uses of fear to control countries of people in perhaps his most notable series of films, The Power of Nightmares. All of these films are freely available on the net, including on YouTube.

Despite the different themes, Curtis has an underlying thread which runs throughout his films: the deliberate manipulation of large numbers of people by the very few. In The Century of the Self, those people are American consumers in a free market, controlled by, amongst others, the father of public relations Edward Bernays.

Edward Bernays

Bernays was a significant character in twentieth century economics whose influence remains pervasive. Building on the Freudian approach that the subconscious powerfully sought to satisfy its base desires, he believed he could tap into that process to make people think they needed his product.

When cigarette manufacturers approached him complaining not enough women were smoking, he used a psychological mechanism common in women to increase sales. In 1950s American smoking was a male activity, especially in public, and taboo to women on the whole. Recognising the recent influence advances in women’s suffrage, Bernays hit upon the idea that cigarettes could represent ‘Torches of Freedom‘, a protest at male dominance. Women would smoke because they were free to, because they were now emancipated and powerful.

Bernays had several dozen well-dressed, young women smoke at The New York City parade in 1929 in front of carefully assembled newspaper photographers. As a direct result sales of cigarettes to women soared and there was a rise in the number of women smoking in public. The success was attributed to a wholesale change in perceptions of the cigarette as a male domain to one that represented a powerful need: freedom of expression. It was one of the most successful campaigns of all time, and still is used as an examplar for those interested in PR.

What this tells us is that the crowd can be manipulated by a single person with an influential idea. In order to achieve this, the crowd has been reduced to one common element – in this case their attitude towards smoking – which is then subverted through control of their shared belief system and psychological processes. By allowing themselves to be manipulated the crowd were unwise. Curtis cites several more examples, from the pervasive influence of religion on millions of believers to modern politicians – in The Power of Nightmares – controlling whole countries, continents even, through a force equally as powerful as the desire to consume: fear.

Gradually, and as these kinds of example of mass manipulation become more explicit and understood, we’ve become more sceptical about how politicians and public relations work. It’s hard to imagine Bernays’ stunt working now in quite the same way. But without the perceived and recorded influence of the few over the many there would be no advertising, no public relations and no unnecessary and ubiquitous consumption. When this is at odds with the authentic requirements of the people, you and me included, it’s evidence of the unwisdom of the crowd.

They say you should never go back, but I was dismayed to find my old alma mater (a phrase you’d never hear around those parts) had become dishevelled, unkempt. Some of windows of Sir Frank Markham School were smashed and boarded up; a hideous bright blue paint slapped on to cover the graffiti and damage; and, worse, it was covered in high fences, more a prison camp, it appears, than place for learning and making friends.

The balcony of Woughton Campus

And what a school it once was! I was sporty and smart-ish, so I fell into both camps and enjoyed my time there. The campus was clean and new and, compared to the North London home that I had left to live in Milton Keynes, full of green spaces and fresh air.

A field to you, the scene of footballing triumphs for me

But seeing them again – well, those spaces that had witnessed some of my most pivotal teenage moments now felt desecrated. Although I was powerless to stop the memories from washing over me, it felt a mistake to sully them with an atmosphere that I’d rather forget. Maybe it’s me – the field where we once played football every lunchtime looked bare and uncared for and the wall – where we’d meet – seemed smaller than before, less imposing.

A new Academy nearby, still a building site but with construction well under way, puts my old school in the shade, quite literally; and metaphorically, too, since it’s hard to imagine how young people can be happy and learn in such an environment. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m just being old and sentimental and being old I shouldn’t be surprise that things change, and sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.