Author Archives: Peter Scott

This is Legacy

16th July 2012

In 2007, a group of us attempted to walk the circumference of the Olympic Park in Stratford. It was surrounded by a blue fence, the colour of the off-licence plastic bags strewn across the canal towpath and main roads of the route. ‘Demolish, Dig, Design’, promised lurid posters, their priorities clearly signalled. Peeking over the fence, the park looked to be in ‘demolish’ mode. In 2012, we tried again.  (more…)

Rage

9th March 2012

I never used to get angry. Though there were, certainly, days when a certain thing, perhaps this thing or perhaps that other thing, might have piqued me like a mosquito. Of course there were. I’d be riled temporarily by a queue, say, or a moment of clumsiness. Dropping a plate would do it, or breaking a glass, or waiting too long for someone to reverse into a parking space; any of the daily calamities to which people are prone could, in the right circumstances, raise a hint of ire. But these were fleeting moments. Small flashpoints. Bacon said the best remedy for anger is ‘to win time’, and that I could reliably do, stepping away, sometimes physically, from the cause of my distress until it had passed. I was quiescent, equanimous, serene.  (more…)

Cambridge

21st February 2012


‘radiant with bovine life’ (E.M. Forster)

‘It’s raining but I don’t believe it’s raining’ (G.E. Moore)

 

                     i

Docks, nettles, self-sown
   sycamores, willows
thunderstruck by their own
  brilliance, sap-boiled,
boughs gone scissor-handed.  

 The cow is there, now.
Do not move suddenly
      or she’ll scare. 

Scrutinise the lining
   of flies. First thistles
then she tongues down a slip
  of overhanging willow.  

 She is there.
                              ~

     A woman sleeps rough
by the chained punts, money-spiders
    criss-crossing her back.
                              ~

Attempting steps down
  from Fellows’ Court,
the poet, grand old man,
 white-haired with stick.
                             ~

                 The living image of my mother
whispers to her companion:
                  ‘I like walking full stop.’

High summer’s over.
                    The great elms motionless,
yellow blotches on their leaves.

                   I’m there – in the meadow –
I have proved it to myself.

 

             ii

I’m not down some
grey-muzzled road
off the old Kite

nor chalked up
with REFRESHMENTS
and ICES beneath

a pyramid
of canned peas
there since rationing

nor standing any week-day
dusk by a temporary
bus stop on Pound Hill

nor head-down
over the drop handlebars
of some five-gear

Gentleman’s Racer
sporting tweeds
and cycle-clips

nor behind a crack-pot
hollyhock by spiked black
railings past the U.L.

but simply blistering off
in globules
that have collected

according to the laws
of surface tension
on the bonnet

of a permit-holder’s Polo
under paving-stone-
cracking sycamores 

down Grange Road
contemplating that turn
up to the Maltings

 

                               iii

What rough beast…
                                Jon Tipple in ‘The Granta’
all randy laughter, Eraserhead hair,
         fingering shrapnel from the till,
                       collaring a chilled draught Guinness. 

Love’s bitter mystery…
                                     The trace of down
on an arm can do it. T-bone, fillet, rump.
         ‘Green leaf or mixed, dressing for the salad, sir ?’
                        Grant me an old man’s frenzy.

 What else have I to spur me into song ?                                                                                                                                     Ah, there, across
the mill pond towards the new Pizzeria,
          those punters with the pole playing silly buggers
                   right next to that swan. 

 

                                      iv

Ground Floor between Fiction and Poetry.
The second time in as many days. It comes at me.
The smell from where she sits between Travel
and Crime is enough to make browsers wrinkle
features in ‘what is that ?’ disgust. She stinks.

Because clothes for sleeping rough, layer upon
layer, are being walked in, underneath the visible
leather-sheen great-coat and cap. Auschwitz ?
That liberation shot at the wire ?  No, here, beneath
the 3 For 2 CD offers in the Borders Summer Sale.

The truth is, she impregnates every last page of verse:
the entire Carcanet list, the brand new Armitage,
the Collected Muldoon, the Selected O’Hara, the new
Billy Childish, 101 Poems That Will Change Your Life --
you name it. We all track on by, join a queue

to pay by plastic. She exits into Market Square, freeing
up from under the cap her long streak-grey hair,
making her way beyond us. I keep finding her
days later, unremitting, unbearable still, in page
after page of Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti.

 

                                  v 

                             I’d made it -- broken the back
of Anna Karenina on a three day week
of eight hour shifts, barely conscious
of the world out there: the lines at Grunwick,
the National Front, the exiled Shah. All done
in top floor digs on the Lensfield Road, a room
with a view over a carpark and a criminal
Edwardian fire escape. Oliver’s army was here
to stay. Talk over the chicken chow mein
was of ‘narodnost’, commitment to the cause.

Then to the place of labour: working flat out
on bed or floor, a production line of borstal specials
and Maxwell House brews from the communal tin.                                     

Snow drifted through
                                   the second night;
an easterly wind jittering the string
of the primitive extractor fan. History
was one vast steppe. By dawn, water
at Hobson’s Choice was laminated in ice.

My classic set in Linotype Pilgrim fell apart
at the death– individual leaves came away
in my hands from the creased black spine.
The only thing to stick was an image of Kitty
and Levin under the Milky Way before the run
of blank sheets you get at the very end.

 

               vi

a place to graze the eye
   note the levels
   here a shimmer  
of springtime buds    

      downstream
 the glaze of mist 

you point out to me
  carved in stone
     a bird stilled
  for centuries       

        its crest
on a college wall       

but quiet now
   from a lilac bush
badly in need
   of cutting back 

        a robin
ups and leaves 

   for Coe Fen
      Lammas
 on to the place
where rivers join 

     Paradise
         is it

 

                         vii 

A stone wyvern –
                                   weighed a ton.

Midnight prank there come dawn.
Snow dusted the college lawn.
We knelt, shaking.
                                      Then it was done.

 

Peter Carpenter has a New and Selected Poems forthcoming from Smith/Doorstop in 2012, following five previous collections. He is a regular essayist and reviewer for London Magazine and The North. He was Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Reading during 2007-08, was made a Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick in 2000, and has taught at Tonbridge School since 1992. He co-directs Worple Press.

Too Much Like Hard Work

9th January 2012

When I was very young, the best footballer in the world – probably the best ever – played for my local team. My first set of colouring pencils bore his name; they were the only ones you could buy. Throughout the 80s, statues of the Madonna were gradually removed from their alcoves on street corners all over Napoli and replaced with busts of her near-namesake. Football in Italy is played on a Sunday, and while I would attend the Anglican church with my family and wait for them to drink tea with their expat friends, a far less genteel, but more religious, ceremony would be going on outside. What seemed like the entire population of this most chaotic and downtrodden of cities would clog the streets leading to the Stadio San Paolo, leaning on their car horns in a raucous, polyphonic hymn to their little god. Everyone was having a great time, not least of all el Diego himself; by the end of the decade, the high life was taking its toll, and he began the long and sad descent into addiction and obesity. I never saw him play.

By the time Maradona retired from the game in 1997, there was another fat footballer in my life: an unfit, big-nosed Guernseyman by the name of Matthew le Tissier. This time I didn’t miss out. I’d get down to The Dell early on Saturday afternoons just to be sure. The team would be warming up near the centre circle, stretching, running and passing, but le Tissier would leave them to it. He would wander off to about 35 yards from goal, his ideal range, and get the reserve keeper to pop him balls to hit on the half-volley – and in they would go, again and again, with miraculous grace, power and accuracy. Bang! Top corner. Bang! In off the bar. Bang! In off the post. The first team goalie just stood on his line and waved them in. That was it. Le God’s warm-up was over, and off he would stroll to the dressing room for a bag of crisps and a Coke before kick-off.

Anyone with a passing interest in English football remembers the outrageous goals with which le Tissier kept lowly Southampton FC in the Premiership year after year. There’s the flicked-up free kick against Wimbledon, the casual missile in the autumn sunshine at Highfield Road, and of course Goal of the Season 1994-5, under the floodlights at Ewood Park, when he receives the ball on the halfway line and turns a defender one way, then the other, before unleashing a euphoric, parabolic firework of a shot into the top corner from staggering distance. The Blackburn fans can’t help but applaud.

Now that the romance of football has been squeezed out of it by dodgy oligarchs, Arab oil money, dieticians, spit-roasts and John Terry, we can be forgiven for looking back at le Tissier with nostalgia. He was the last great amateur player (in its original sense, that is: a lover of the game) in an age of encroaching professionalism and seriousness. He played against the best in the world and embarrassed them effortlessly. But something rankles with me about his reputation. While lauded on the one hand for his flair, he is condemned on the other for being lazy and lacking ambition. If only he’d made the most of his talent, they say. He could have moved to bigger clubs for more money. He could have made it at international level. Maradona’s problem was that he played too hard; Le Tissier’s, apparently, was that he didn’t work hard enough.

To subscribe to this opinion is to misunderstand the true nature of his achievements. There are sensible and rather dull rebuttals to the criticisms above, one being that as a player le Tissier thrived in a free role, providing the creative magic while his teammates did all the running and tackling. This is certainly how he saw himself. In his autobiography he warns Wayne Rooney not to become a ‘victim of his own work-rate’, advising him to ‘stop running around so much – it worked for me’. But there is a more important point. Le Tissier’s greatness lay in how he expressed himself on the pitch. He played with joy, humour and nonchalance, and never took it too seriously. This is the kind of guy he was. Hard work did not suit his game, because it wasn’t in his nature. The Greeks, who knew a bit about the relationship between athletic prowess and the life well-lived, had a word for this: eudaimonia, or fulfilment of character. Le Tissier fulfilled himself by doing what he loved. He became at once what he had always been and also what he was destined to become. What greater ambition could there be? Everything else followed. He had great friends in his teammates and won the admiration and respect of a whole community. If he achieved all that without breaking sweat, then so much the better for him.

We can’t all be like le Tissier. Most of us must, like his teammates, work hard to achieve anything, even if we are doing what we love. But we should see his eudaimonic fulfilment as an aspiration. Le Tissier’s critics are right: he didn’t make the most of his talent. He made the best of it. To ‘make the most’ of something is to derive the maximum return from it, to squeeze out a profit. Le Tissier could have moved clubs for far more money, uprooted his family, left his friends and fans behind, played in a team that didn’t let him thrive as much and ended up sitting on the bench: rich, unhappy and unfulfilled.

Hard work is an unavoidable reality for most people in the world. But capitalism, with its mantra that enough is never enough, has disguised it a virtuous quality rather than a slavish quantity: we barely notice when ‘hard-working’ is smuggled in alongside ‘honest’ or ‘decent’, as though somehow these things go hand in hand. There is nothing virtuous about an adherence to the grindstone. I am sure the bankers who presided over the demise of the global economic system worked hard, along with the corporate lawyers who busted a gut to save them money and the accountants who fiddled their figures long into the night. And there is nothing admirable either about those suffering the worst effects of free market capitalism’s inherent violence and injustice – those millions for whom hard, dehumanising work is less a way of life than a life sentence. Hard work for its own sake, without fulfilment, is without merit; if anything it deserves pity.

The ideology of hard work has seeped insidiously into our thought and language. Take its near-synonym, industry. If you can find a way of making a profit, you can call it an industry. This is an instance of convenient unspeak; instead of declaring that they profit from manipulating reputations, or persuading people to buy things they don’t need, or unfairly influencing the democratic process, the relevant corporations can simply say that they are part of the PR/advertising/lobbying industry. As long as it’s called an industry, with its connotations of people beavering away obediently and generating profits, no-one needs to think about the effect of their work on the rest of world or on themselves.

The idea that hard work is something we should knuckle down to unthinkingly is also encapsulated in the concept of the ‘work/life balance’, another feint of language designed to sugar the corporate pill. Several things are lurking within this distinction. If work can somehow be cordoned off from the rest of life it enables us to abnegate responsibility for it, to put it in a shameful box and not think too hard about its consequences. There is also the vain hope that, by separating work from life, it somehow won’t affect who we are and what we become, despite the fact it’s how we spend the majority of our adult lives. And then there’s the disturbing inference that working doesn’t quite qualify in the same category as living, that it’s an animal or undead state which sits below life in all of its fullness. Much as we try and separate it, hard work affects us, making us permanently tired, docile and unimaginative, fit only to spend the rest of our time in a numb, recuperative state that doesn’t deserve the name of life either: going on package holidays, watching mindless TV, and waiting to spending our hard-won pensions doing more of the same.

The urge to compete and win, to generate profit, to wield capital, to exploit, dominate and control: this is why work must, apparently, be hard. Competition is a natural instinct which has driven huge advances in knowledge, but I doubt it has lessened the misery of the human race as a whole. Hard work sounds unpleasant to me. Should we aim to spend the majority of our waking hours doing something unpleasant? What about fulfilling work, or good work, or just enough work so as to leave enough time for the other facets of our lives? We are more than selfish and rapacious primates; we are the only species to have developed the faculty of wonder, the ability to appreciate beauty, the facility for creativity and imagination, and, most revolutionary of all, the capacity to love. In love, there is no profit margin. You get back what you give.

Talents are often called gifts, but they are gifts to be given, not received. Le Tissier gave his and received fulfilment in equal measure; he did not seek to profit. As an amateur, a lover of the game, he understood that love obeys a cosmic equation. Like Wayne Rooney, we risk becoming victims of our own hard work. Sometimes we should stop running about, wander off from the centre circle and take some pot shots from 35 yards. We should aim to become lovers of the game.

What’s Hecuba to Him?

The trouble with telling if those mourners at Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were faking it is that real grief can look so damn fake. It is too sudden, too forced, too messy. There are not enough tears, too many. They are too composed, not composed enough. To those who witness a person  grieving, the emotional response is always discomforting and never in proportion to its cause. When they are on the telly we scoff, and when they are our friends we pull them to our chests to avoid seeing their faces, feeling a wet stain spread across our new jumper. Perhaps, as Martin Amis has said about sex, some things are so 'irreducibly personal' we cannot countenance them, let alone describe them sufficiently.

Critics in the media have picked up on recent scenes of unwarranted public grief as a troubling modern phenomenon. Mourning sickness. Grief porn. Whatever you call it, the unabashed reaction to the death of celebrities produces contagion and scorn in equal measure. Ever since the first flowers starting showing up outside Kensington Palace’s gates in 1997, these showy displays of grief have caused consternation. 'Tasteless sentimentalism that is out of place', said The Times’ Daniel Finkelstein of the mounting tributes after Princess Diana’s death. 'Stimulus by proxy,' wrote Carol Sarler, 'voyeuristically piggy-backing upon that which might otherwise be deemed personal and private.' Women clutched jars of Marmite along the route of Jade Goody’s funeral procession; men returned to the spot where they’d slept out for the latest iPhone to light candles for Steve Jobs; but it is an ersatz emotion, the critics argue, based on people’s own emotional needs and not any real rapport with the dead. At best, this neurosis replaces the fingering of rosary beads, the liturgies and mass of organised religion. At its worst, it is phoney and attention-seeking.

Fame may provide false relationships (we have all walked up to an actor from The Bill in the supermarket and said hello in the firm belief they are an acquaintance of ours), but it also plays an important part in how we see ourselves as individuals. It may be going too far, as recent research does, to say that reading the latest gossip about slebs helps us come to terms with our own mortality, but, whether the latest dispatches of despots or Big Brother runners up, they allow us to indulge and deny our fantasies in the safety of someone else’s life. Reading stories about the famous, or watching a cortège pass, lets us navigate our own longing and fear of being more than part of a crowd. When they die, we are shocked, upset, as if surprised by an unexpected ending, an unwelcome twist to a plot we were quite enjoying.

In 2009 my childhood hero died. I was grown up, grown out of it, and groped for reasons why I felt so upset. I had met him once – remembered the smell of his aftershave, the play of a smile under Botox – but we had nothing in common. He was an international superstar. I worked in a bookshop in Surrey. He grew up in poverty as a child in the American mid-West. I worked in a bookshop in Surrey. Hard work and a shining talent led to him scaling unprecedented heights of fame, success, and, eventually, notoriety. I, on the other hand, worked in a bookshop in Surrey.

People gave me their condolences, which was strange enough. Stranger still I thanked them, with only a half-glimpsed thought for his mother thousands of miles away. What act was I playing? What kind of phoney was I?

The trouble is, the appropriate and proportionate response suggested by phrases such as 'private', 'personal' and 'out of place' is not always manifest. I watched the TV coverage in silence. I wore my fan t-shirt on the bus to work. I hesitated at the sight of a pile of flowers creeping up the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. I watched jealously as fans sobbed and hugged each other. They had no trouble expressing themselves, 'in a fiction, in a dream of passion', as Hamlet said of the actor so moved by his account of Hecuba that he wept, whereas inside I was a blank.

A year after the London bombings, a BBC journalist spoke to a woman at the site of one of the explosions. 'We came here to bring flowers,' she said. 'It’s a silly thing really, but you don’t feel you can do anything else.' These words say something about the helplessness of those moved by something that happened to other people. Such simple rituals are often misinterpreted; they are meant not only to confer significance on the dead, but perform a social function for those left behind. Ceremonies of public mourning have existed throughout history to acknowledge a collective injury in this way, to blur the distinction between individuals, and begin to know, on a conscious level, the loss endured. The flowers, or candles, even the Marmite jars, are a poor attempt to bridge the gap between what they feel and what those affected must feel.

The contours of a public life run smooth and distinct. They lack the troubling nuance of people close to you: that irritating habit, the time they said that thing. We trace our own lives over their dips and arcs, but this is not mere titillation. Our experiences tauten and emerge in high relief as they stretch to meet those pegged out by more celebrated lives. Martin Amis and anyone who has read entries to The Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award knows that something 'irreducibly personal' risks pornography when it is described, but describe it we must. Taking something personal and rendering it universal is the work of fiction and art, and promotes the witness – the reader, the voyeur, the fan – from audience to actor. It is safe, risk-free; and eventually we learn how that process might work backwards, when it happens to someone close to us, to ourselves even.

Faced with the certainty of his own mortality, Shakespeare’s Richard II gives up and sits down, imploring his remaining followers to 'tell sad stories of the death of kings'. There may be many kings, but 'death' is singular. They all have it coming. And, in the tradition of tragic heroes, they have the most to lose. Our heroes must start special to be laid low, and so it follows that if they are laid low, they must have been special. This balancing and counterbalancing work is what we all engage in when confronted with death and loss. To convey what we have lost, we must weight its value.

Eventually a public memorial did it for me. His celebrity friends broke down mid-tribute, the camera cut to a shot of messages piling up outside the theatre he first played in New York, the gaudy gold coffin, a single white glove. This symbolic trash signified something incomprehensibly important, and spoke to me in a language I couldn't quite understand. I felt it had something to say to me about my life, and though I had no idea what, its very presence demonstrated that it was shared, and I wept for a man I did not know.

Feelings of grief are not indexed by how well we know a person, any more than they are by how 'important' that person is perceived to be. Our response to death reflects most of all upon ourselves, our ability to discern specialness in others, to insist in the face of unseeing and indiscriminate destruction that 'attention must be paid', like Linda, the wife of that nobody Willy Loman. Death produces feelings that are not defined by our relationship with the deceased, but how their story speaks to us collectively as well as personally. It is the cultural implication, the universality, that reduces us to blubbering wrecks and confounds our sense of propriety.

Our consternation at public displays of grief reflects a gap between actual and perceived feelings that cannot be closed and must be acknowledged. 'I don’t feel what they’re feeling,' we think, 'so they, or I, must be wrong.' Public grief should allow us to register that gap: to be part of the crowd, and to stand apart.

I do not want to suggest the people of North Korea are experiencing a normal reaction to the loss of a leader, and that their public grief is anything but state-enforced mourning. There are many specific reasons someone might want to be 'lost in a crowd' in North Korea right now. We should, however, acknowledge that the desire to prostrate oneself, to stand in awe before someone else, to stop and sit and listen to stories, is simultaneously a desire to elevate oneself. It is something we share with the North Koreans.

Celebrity worship gives hope to the longing that we, like our idols, are unimpeachably significant – and at the same time, reveals its sadness and absurdity. What we all seek in our heroes and our art, our pornography too, is not likeness or proximity, but a way of constantly disassembling and reassembling a hierarchy, with our own blank selves at its centre.

Bloodlust on Safari

Funny the things one learns. I had always assumed that life in South Africa meant monkeys in the driveway and hippos in the pool, in the way that we, back in England, get squirrels on the fence and the odd badger on the lawn – only bigger. But no, it seems I was wrong. And so here I am; it is 7am, it is bloody freezing and apparently, I'm still in Africa. Specifically I'm in 'the bush', a long, long way from the city now, to finally see some animals, or 'game'. I'm on a game reserve, you see – so there should be game here. You know, the Big Five: Lion, Elephant, Buffalo, Leopard and Rhino. I mean, I'll settle for four out of five – even three. But it is 7am and it is bloody freezing - some game this is turning out to be.

Yes, I've seen the impala – lovely aren't they? Really very similar to our 'deer'. No, I'm here to see some real animals if that's alright, and it's – as I think I mentioned – bloody freezing, so if we could get a move on I'd really appreciate it.  Ha! Wildebeest are the 'McDonalds of the Bush'!  Are they really? How funny – I'd really like to see that proven. Now, if possible. And isn't it supposed to be hot? I've seen the Attenborough documentaries with the lions. I've seen those lions hunting, running, leaping and roaring, all in shimmering heat, practically wiping their lion sweat off of their lion brows. I am so cold I'm not surprised there aren't any lions. If I was a lion right now I would be asking for the money back on my fur.

It's been over an hour and our guide and tracker, Michael, insists that those paw prints running along the path are 'fresh tracks' and that 'lion is close'.  'Be very careful', he declaims in suitably ominous tones. 'If the lion sees you step out of this vehicle she will snap your neck, rip out your lungs and drink your blood.' Great, I think. I spot the rifle propped casually in the well of the passenger seat – surely out of Michael's reach? Should I volunteer to man it for him? We're in an open vehicle after all – nothing to separate us from the lion's maw. And I'm really the only one who's made any effort with the camouflage; all olive greens and browns. Yes madam, that pink North Face jacket might be keeping you snug but I look the part and if anybody's going to stand out as a candy-floss snack for a passing carnivore it sure as hell ain't me. Now perhaps somebody wouldn't mind stepping out and testing our guide's warning? Anything would be preferable to this torpor. Anybody...?

Susan Sontag writes of how on safari these days 'the gun has been replaced by the camera'. The photograph is the trophy most of us take home now – the 'shot' far less deadly. That vital sense of needing to be protected from nature is gone. In the modern world it is far more that Nature needs protection from us. The arrogance of our age denies us an elemental response; to feel the blood run cold. Of course I'm conscious of the importance of preservation, but there is an odd urge that replaces the sedate satisfaction of merely seeing and 'snapping', that wants to feel at the very least a need for protection, as opposed to the need for another layer. I knew I should have worn that extra jumper.

It strikes me that deep down a part of me isn't here to see wildlife at all. I'm here to see wild death. I can see these animals any day of the week in London Zoo, lolling and snoozing. And yes, the odd glimpse of them quite a long way from a cage – despite this reserve actually being just one enormous cage – is certainly better for the photos and I'm sure if they actually turned up they might enjoy the leg-stretch that this area provides. Good to get the country air in the lungs before being packed off to inhale the Primrose Hill exhaust fumes.

No, the difference out here is that all these animals do, apparently, coexist, rub up alongside each other, chomp the same grass, pad the same pathways and evade the same tourists. And once you've seen the animals, ticked them off your list and got the snaps, you actually start wanting to see them do something - something wild. The potential here is to see a predator actually predate, actually stalk something and drive its claws into the back of some unsuspecting idiot prey, which would fall in a bloody heap then to be mauled and devoured. You rarely get that sort of a display near St Johns Wood.

We return to camp, having seen a horde of herbivores, and are left to ponder until our evening drive. We must take care, we are told again, when walking between the main lodge and our tents: there are no fences and the animals can wander freely in and out. Ah! Some danger! Finally!

By animals, they seem to mean baboons. Admittedly baboons are pretty terrifying-looking apes and I wouldn't want to share a Twix with one; they make a noise like something out of science-fiction and the colour of their behinds adds to the sense that these are 'made-up' animals and that the bush has got you hallucinating. The greatest danger here is that a fearless and fearsome baboon will sniff out said Twix, burst into your tent and shred your bags and personal effects until it has devoured everything to its satisfaction. But I too am edible – and there are plenty of edible creatures roaming around out there – the opportunity of a good, gory feast is all around and yet everyone seems quite content watching a cheeky monkey steal into the lodge's reception and pinch a biscuit.

Dusk falls and we set out once again – freezing once again – but this time, at least, prepared. Wrapped more as if for hiking in Norway, we bump along the well-worn tracks silently, either defeated by the dullness of this morning's sortie or hushed in anticipation of the night's offerings. Michael, the guide, is uncharacteristically quiet, but you get the sense that he knows far more than he lets on, that he is discreetly mocking our desire to see. Tonight he gives away a frisson, which is strangely warming. 

After some time we grind up a steep incline to a more wooded area, drift-slide round a sandy bend, at which point Michael shuts off the engine and lights and we are plunged not only into darkness but deep into the cacophony of the bush night chorus; cicadas rhythmically underthrumming the irregular grunts and howls soaring up into the clear and starry night. A dark, dramatic finger is raised from the driver's seat, 'Ssh! Can you hear it?'. There is a noise above the others, or rather well muffled underneath them, that he waits for us to single out; a panting, groaning, crunching.  It is close. 

As quietly as he can Michael starts up the vehicle, lights still off, and rolls us a few feet further into the trees and stops again. Again the finger. Again we wait, still. Suddenly, as if rehearsed, the lights of the jeep beam up to reveal a lone female lion in the scrub, face first in the day-old carcass of a wildebeest. At first it looks like one creature – the body of a lion with a bloodied, lifeless, dark-horned head. The light does not distract her but in her own time she pulls up to tear at flesh and reveals her red-stained killers mask, the eyes catching and beaming back an animal fire of pure bright green-white. The smell now wafting over from the feast is strong and revolting – like a sun-baked, abandoned butcher's counter –  how we didn't smell this from the camp several miles away is a mystery – but it is not this that causes the breathless silence. It is the most awesome sight – the most visceral gorging – pure muscle and bone in slow, methodical grind. The sound of the mouth, of the satisfied stomach – an amplified gourmand's guttural delight – the potent cloud of rotting meat – this noir scene, bright lit against the pitch-dark backdrop of night – is both thrilling and oddly calming. It makes sense. The blood makes sense.

Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking You’re Thinking?

For this trick you will need: two children, aged three and four respectively; mini felt-tip pens; an empty tube of Smarties. Put the pens into the Smarties tube, close the lid, and find the four year-old.

‘What do you think will be inside this tube?’ 

‘Smarties.’

‘Let’s look.’ (Show the child the inside of the tube, and watch their disappointed face as they realise there are no Smarties to be had).

‘Oh. Pens.’

‘Let’s close the tube again. If I showed this to your friend, what do you think they would think was inside the tube?’

‘Smarties.’

Obvious? Now try again, this time with the three year-old. Same tube, same disappointment. But when you ask them what their friend would expect to be inside the tube, they will invariably answer

‘Pens.’

To uncover the secret behind this developmental magic trick, it’s important to understand ‘theory of mind’. A good first definition is Ori Friedman and Alan Leslie’s: they explain it as ‘the ability to recognise and reason about people’s mental states’. In other words, theory of mind allows us to understand that other people have independent thoughts, and to infer what these thoughts may be. Let’s first consider the four-year-old. Anyone encountering a rattling tube emblazoned with ‘Smarties’ on the outside will expect it to contain chocolate. But the child knows that there are actually pens inside the tube, and in order to pass the test they have to recognise that different people have different thoughts: not all children know what they know. The three-year-old is not so capable. They expect Smarties at the start, but think their friends will expect pens at the end. This mistake is rooted in their inability to use theory of mind. Because they know that there are pens in the tube, they reason that everyone knows. This failure to understand others’ false-belief is considered evidence that theory of mind has not yet developed: tasks such as this one were first designed in the early eighties by Heinz Wimmer and Joseph Perner for exactly this purpose.

The importance of theory of mind reaches far beyond confectionery. It is crucial for social success, largely because of its role in empathy: in order to relate to other people, we must first be able to recognise their thoughts and emotions. Of course, just because we have theory of mind, it doesn’t mean we always use it well. Incredulity at another’s ignorance or different opinion is not worlds apart from a three-year-old insisting everyone knows there are pens inside a Smarties tube. We easily forget former ignorance, and overestimate how much our own thoughts and emotions are visible to others. It is nonetheless true that we use theory of mind constantly and automatically, and that without it human interaction would be fundamentally altered.

Theory of mind is not just significant for its role in social cohesion. It may clarify and confound in real life, but it is also the backbone of much literature, theatre and film, and its relationship with fiction is worth exploring. As reader or audience, we often find ourselves willing participants in theory of mind games, albeit far from a research lab. The psychologist Martin Doherty opens his book on social cognition with an extract from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as evidence of our natural mentalising ability:  

'Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed on her [...] that he should look at her because he disliked her, was still more strange.'

This extract is an odd showcase of theory of mind aptitude: Lizzie gets it wrong (hence the titular prejudice). Austen’s novel repeatedly turns to such mistakes, for example in the Bennet family’s failure to recognize Wickham’s true intentions. But it does more than take theory of mind as a theme: it also demands some fairly complicated mental state reasoning from the reader. When reading these words, we are thinking about what Darcy is thinking, and what Lizzie is thinking Darcy is thinking (and, perhaps, what Austen is thinking about what Lizzie is thinking Darcy is thinking). In psychological terms, this is second-order false-belief reasoning, which we are first able to carry out at around seven years old.

In the world of fiction, it’s not just 19th century novels that play around with theory of mind. Most of us will remember our childhood selves shouting gleefully, high on sugar and audience participation, ‘he’s behind you!’ at a Yule-time panto.

‘Oh no he isn’t!’

‘Oh yes he is!’

The delight in this exchange is rooted in the glorious age where theory of mind and suspension of disbelief meet: a child who sees that the hero doesn’t know where the villain is (while the child does), and can accept that this is really true (rather than carping that the actor knows exactly where the villain is because they’ve been doing the same sketch twice a day for the last month). The balance may have tipped toward cynicism by adulthood, but the power felt by the child who realises they know something the hero doesn’t is immense, and generated entirely by their theory of mind. 

One man’s pantomime tedium is another’s dramatic irony. A more grown-up instance can be found at the end of Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo finds an apparently dead Juliet and kills himself seconds before she wakes up from a rather implausible coma. We know she’s not dead; we might be shouting it at the stage if we weren’t hushed by decorum. Shakespeare makes it even worse for us, as Romeo himself observes Juliet’s flushed features even as he despairs in her death: ‘beauty’s ensign yet / Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks / And death’s pale flag is not advanced there’. ‘Of course it’s not’, we cry inwardly, ‘she’s not dead.’ Dramatic irony indeed, and entirely reliant on our theory of mind: we understand that despite our knowledge, and despite the evidence before him, Romeo really thinks Juliet’s dead. Worse, his false-belief will kill him. This raises another interesting way in which literature plays with theory of mind: it allows false-belief to persist longer than we would ever let it in real life.

Theory of mind also engages us in literature when we find ourselves in a position of ignorance rather than knowledge. Take crime fiction. Agatha Christie ensures that we spend her novels in a dance of suspicion, distrusting everything everyone says and looking for evidence of their true thoughts. Writers love to mislead, especially through unreliable narrators. We think through their thoughts, missing truths that seem blindingly obvious when they eventually emerge (consider Fight Club). Different characters present us with incompatible realities (such as in the novel Waterland, or Infinite Jest), or try to make justifiable a way of thinking that is socially unacceptable, and alien to our own (Humbert Humbert, in Lolita). Theory of mind involves constant reasoning about someone’s mental state, but first person narration hurls us directly into a mind, a dubious luxury we’re never afforded in reality.

Nothing here is novel. We know what dramatic irony is, have heard many times of the unreliable narrator. But it’s appealing to think how far theory of mind is embedded in fiction: in its plots, and also in our reading and response. Even, really, in how fiction is used to make sense of theory of mind: so many of the ways psychologists and philosophers look at it involve story-telling. As an example, let’s return to false-belief tasks. A popular one involves the tale of Sally and Anne, told through cartoons, puppets or narration. Sally puts her marble in a basket for safe-keeping, and leaves the room. Anne, left behind, takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in a box. The child is asked where Sally will look for her marble when she comes back into the room. It takes theory of mind to answer ‘in the basket’, just as it takes theory of mind to understand that Romeo thinks Juliet is dead. Both characters remind us that when people are ‘off-stage’ they carry around with them beliefs that they have acquired in the past, which may or may not be true, and which may or may not be the same as our own.

What does all this mean for people who don’t pass the Smarties task, or who never fully acquire theory of mind? I wonder what the three-year-olds are thinking at the panto.

Galanthus

It takes a galanthophile to know the difference between Galanthus alpinus and Galanthus reginae-olegae, between Galanthus koeianus and Galanthus krasnovii. Galanthus, literally ‘milk flower’, is the Greek-derived Latin name for snowdrop, and though I love snowdrops, I am not a galanthophile. I know what a snowdrop looks like, its honeyish smell, how it feels when I bend to press one of its skin-thin petals between my fingers. I know that a snowdrop is not only itself but also what is to come: crocuses, daffodils, spring, summer. But a galanthophile is not made from such woolly knowledge as this. A true galanthophile knows instead, or rather in addition, the names and appearances of the 20 different snowdrop species. A true galanthophile might even have memorized the 500 or so cultivars of the flower recorded in Snowdrops: A Monograph of Cultivated Galanthus (2001). Bound in green cloth and crammed with photographs and diagrams, Snowdrops: A Monograph includes a section on famous snowdrop-growers of the past and is rather sweetly dedicated ‘to all galanthophiles’. As comprehensive as it is eccentric, the work is an essential reference for anyone with more than a passing interest in snowdrops. Among galanthophiles, it is known as ‘the Bible’.

In their introduction, the authors of Snowdrops: A Monograph note that the number of snowdrop-breeders – and with them, the number of snowdrop varieties – has greatly increased in the last fifty years. But the snowdrop has held a special place in the popular and literary imagination for far longer than half a century. It’s easy to see why, for there’s something strange and humbling in the way that this fragile flower is the first to appear after winter, pushing through earth made hard and unyielding from several months’ frost while bigger and brighter blooms wait underground. Of the cluster of Romantic sonnets on the snowdrop, two by Wordsworth stand out, in which he praises the ‘modest grace’ of this ‘venturous harbinger of Spring’ and admires the

Frail snowdrops that together cling
And nod their helmets, smitten by the wing
Of many a furious whirl-blast sweeping by.

Such sentiments would have been familiar to nineteenth-century readers. In floriography, the elaborate Victorian flower-code, snowdrops represent hope, consolation and purity. Other times and cultures have held up the snowdrop as a symbol of determination, renewal, courage, aspiration and faithfulness: impressively weighty virtues for such a delicate flower.

Forty years after Wordsworth’s sonnets, Hans Christian Andersen, already famous for fairytales such as ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling’, wrote a story called ‘The Snowdrop’. In this story, the little white flower is too impatient to rest underground until the sun is strong, and with a cry of:

I feel a tingling and a tickling. I must stretch myself; I must extend myself. I must open up; I must come and wave good morning to the summer… !

He bursts through the earth and unfolds himself, head ‘bowed … in happiness and humility’. 

Interest in snowdrops is nothing new, but what is new is the way in which it has become big business. The last few years have seen an explosion in snowdrop sales, both online and in specially-held snowdrop auctions. Internet forums buzz with growing tips; lectures by eminent botanists sell out within hours. Once you become aware of this snowdrop-mania, it’s difficult to avoid, especially in early spring when almost every newspaper I open seems to invite me to join a snowdrop walking or cycling tour, in the Cotswolds, in the Highlands, in Ireland, Holland, Belgium.

Despite their enthusiasm, these advertisements are not aimed at galanthophiles, for they typically lump all snowdrops together, making no mention of different species or varieties. Most of the gardens, woodlands and estates open to the public during the snowdrop season feature Galanthus nivalis, the common snowdrop. Nivalis is of little interest to the galanthophile, who seeks the rarest, the newest, the most extraordinary bulbs. The best way to find these is to attend the Galanthus Gala, held every February since 1997, where all manner of snowdrops are displayed and sold. Not that you or I would be likely to notice the difference between rare specimens and the most common: often the only way to distinguish between varieties is by counting the number of tiny green lines on the flower’s inside, the part a casual observer never sees. As Joe Sharman, founder of the Gala, admits, galanthophilia is a ‘seriously obsessive’ business. And while you can buy 50 nivalis bulbs for £10 on the internet, at the Gala it’s not uncommon for rarer bulbs to fetch up to £150 each. On eBay, the prices are even higher. Last spring, a cultivar of Galanthus plicatus pushed its way into national newspapers when a single bulb sold for £357, outstripping the previous record by nearly a hundred pounds. Underestimate the might of Wordsworth’s ‘frail snowdrop’ at your peril.

In a Radio 4 documentary entitled ‘Snowdrop Mania’, attendees at the 2010 Gala described the auction to interviewer Kerry ten Kate as ‘a macho thing, to outbid each other’. The snowdrop seemed lost in the bidding process, as if the bidders might as well have been competing for stamps, toy cars, coronation china or cheese labels. Furthermore, the high sums involved have dragged the snowdrop into a world of crime and secrecy, with cases of theft, of rare specimens seized from gardens in the dead of night. As a result, the world of galanthophilia is changing, becoming less communal, more exclusive. Joe Sharman no longer leaves his gardens without arranging security for his favourite snowdrops, and confesses to having on occasion pulled the heads off flowers in order to prevent them from being recognised; John Grimshaw, one of the authors of Snowdrops: A Monograph of Cultivated Galanthus, is secretive about where and how he keeps his flowers, refusing to tell fellow galanthophiles where he’s based or to let them see his prize bulbs. 

I will admit that I find something unpleasant about all this, about the whole circus of galanthophilia. I do not want to look at a snowdrop and think only of its price, its rarity, the financial value of the green lines tucked away inside. Even learning the Latin names seems to make the flowers a little less themselves, a little more something to be bought and sold and catalogued. When I was a child, my mother used to buy an orange fruit, waxy on the outside and with brown leaves like withered petals, a fruit that was more interesting, more delicious, because I did not know its name. There is a kind of magic in not knowing, and especially in not knowing the names of things: I like to think that it makes us know better the things themselves, away from the web of language. At the same time, I am well aware that what I imagine to be my love of ‘the thing itself’ is at least partly a love of my own ignorance, of the rare absence of language. As soon as I discovered the name of the mysterious orange fruit (the persimmon, otherwise Sharon fruit; Latin Diospyros kaki), I lost interest; its taste became sickly, its texture a disconcerting mix of mush and fibre. As a good student of literature, schooled in Saussure, Derrida, Lacan, I ought to know that there’s no such thing as ‘the thing itself’: our world is made through language, or the lack of it, and misty sentiment about the essence of a snowdrop is the shallowest kind of nature-worship.

Still, I can’t help but feel it’s a pity for a flower, and especially one as unassuming-looking as the snowdrop, to be caught in the macho posturing, market forces and secrecy that make up the world of galanthophilia. Unsurprisingly, people have compared the snowdrop’s sudden popularity to tulip mania, the seventeenth-century craze that started in Holland and swept through Europe, with tulip bulbs selling for the modern equivalent of several thousand pounds.  

But the tulip is an altogether different flower from the snowdrop. Tulips are stark, unapologetic, sexy; a clenched fist, a pout, a kiss. They are the kind of flower that seems to invite drama, excess, words like ‘fever’, ‘mania’, ‘obsession’. You can hold an armful of tulips, never an armful of snowdrops. The difference between the two flowers is present in their very names: who can say the word tulip without thinking of two lips, without his or her own two lips pouting in a kiss? ‘Snowdrop’ suggests melting, falling, disappearance; linguistically at least, it’s surely cousin to the shrinking violet. Tulips, like snowdrops, have a particular signification in floriography (red, a declaration of love; yellow, hopeless love), but unlike snowdrops, such signification has not permeated popular culture. Perhaps tulips are simply too bold, too visually striking, to be bent into metaphorical meanings or human virtues. 

Not so the more malleable snowdrop, which, in its ability to accommodate any number of diverse associations, reveals a capaciousness at odds with its physical size. In spring I am reminded of this capaciousness every day, as I walk along a river whose banks are clumped with snowdrops, pristine in January but by late February starting to look a little ragged. Seeing them, I think of Galanthus nivalis, common snowdrop, sold for next to nothing on the internet, scorned by galanthophiles. I think of Wordsworth, of lessening frost, of fairytales and the new year. I think of the Northern Hemisphere slowly edging its way into sunlight.  Further along, there will be crocuses.

The Red Headed League

‘Every shade of color they were - straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay; but, as Spaulding said, there were not many who had the real vivid flame-colored tint.’ (‘The Red-Headed League,’ Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891)

In one of Conan Doyle’s shorter ‘Sherlock’ stories, Watson arrives to see Holmes and finds him talking to a ‘stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair’ called Mr Jabez Wilson. Wilson relates how he recently noticed a job advertised on generous terms at an organization called ‘The Red Headed League,’ for which ‘all red-headed men who are sound in body and mind and above the age of twenty-one years, are eligible.’ He applied and got the job, apparently because he had the reddest hair of any applicant. But the advertisement was in fact a scam: with Wilson’s regular offices vacant, the confidence tricksters used them to dig a tunnel to the bank next door. It doesn’t take long for Holmes to see that the key to the case is Wilson’s vanity. Elementary you might say.

I remember first reading ‘The Red Headed League’ at the age of twelve and not finding it very convincing. I still don’t. There’s something so unlikely about any redhead, particularly a male one, not smelling a rat here. At that age I was very careful not to even stand close to another redhead, let alone form an association with them. In part this was to avoid the obvious visual, but I also feared the more subtle insinuation that somehow redheads need each other’s support against a hostile world. Surely the whole point about being redheaded, I puzzled, is that there is no such thing as a ‘red headed league’?

I've always attached irrational significance to people with whom I share certain features. I’ll think: oh, that person is left-handed or was born in February. But while I have a list of famous left-handers from whom I derive an obscure pride, I don’t have any ginger role models. It is telling that, beyond Conan Doyle’s story, I know next to nothing about the history of red hair. A cursory dip doesn’t make for pretty reading. It starts at the beginning, and I don’t even mean The Bible, but Gilgamesh. Redheaded she-demon Lilith, essentially a more evil and sexually-charged prototype of Eve, traps men in an eternal purgatory between arousal and satisfaction. But that is not to draw focus from The Bible, which I would hazard is the most scurrilously anti-ginger document of all time. As an appetiser: it is a widespread belief that God chose to mark Cain as a murderer for all time by giving him red hair; gullible Esau, cheated out of his inheritance by his younger brother Jacob, almost becomes another ginger fratricide. And there are others. Such as, oh, Judas. Put it this way: wherever there is a Daddy’s boy with long brown locks, you’ll find a copper top counterpart, itching to betray him.

Many of my English literary heroes line up to stick the boot in: the red beard of Chaucer’s Miller, ‘like any sow or fox,’ tells us all we need to know about this notorious rogue. In As You Like It, Rosalind has to overcome her misgivings about Orlando's hair that is of ‘the dissembling colour.’ How depressingly familiar. An irascible Dryden derides bookseller Jacob Tonson’s ‘Judas-coloured hair.’ And I suppose Conan Doyle is getting in on the act, although he’s got the wrong end of the stereotype.

But anyone with red hair knows that the stereotype is not quite as simple as this. Lilith is no Judas. Boudicca is no Shylock. The distinction crystallizes around the question of nomenclature. I won’t call myself a ‘redhead.’ A redhead is Jessica Rabbit, Julianne Moore, Joan from Mad Men for goodness sake, Redhead captures the seductive, sometimes dangerous, and exclusively feminine aspects of the melanocortin receptor gene MCR1. ‘Ginger’ is the scrappy little brother, fighting with the boys from across the road. Ginger is Ron Weasley, Chris Evans, or Just William’s metonymic pal. These are tendencies, admittedly. Certain girls are undeniably ‘ginger,’ though if there’s a man who could describe himself as a redhead I’ve yet to meet him. Mostly it’s obvious, but a few are hard to pin down. Rebekah Brooks springs to mind: redhead or ginger? Perhaps when the Boudicca of the red tops was toppled, she was relegated from one to the other. About myself, my preference is to say I have red hair, while using ‘ginger’ often enough to persuade others that I don’t mind being called it (I do). It’s the synecdoche that you want to avoid, the definition of the whole by the part.

Whatever you call it, there is infinite variety: the merest murmur in a head of sandy blond in certain lights heats up to a strawberry blond, flashing over at the thermonuclear core of ginger, before oxidising to a burnt orange, cooling into copper and fading into auburn. I’m at the coppery end of the spectrum. This makes me undeniably ginger, but also thankful that it’s not worse. In a sense I can relax in the knowledge that I could never claim not to be ginger. There’s an uneasy point somewhere around ‘strawberry blond’ that can easily breed defensiveness. And then there’s the red beard brigade: some sheepish, some oddly proud.

'You suit red hair,' some will say encouragingly. Others, particularly men for some reason, will confide that their mother has red hair. They’ll ask, 'Are your family all ginger?' My response, that no one else in my family has red hair, makes me feel as though I’m assuring them that it’s not infectious. That’s the guiding metaphor: living with a condition. It’s very much how I think of it. Of course it’s much easier than it was. Compared to how it used to be it’s a walk in the park. I can go for days without really thinking about it. But then I’ll find myself sitting in a pool of particularly acrid fluorescent light and remember. Or I’ll notice a carrot top making a spectacle of themselves somewhere in the public eye and wish they’d disappear from view.

There have always been a disproportionate number of ginger politicians. I suppose living in the vague Hibernocracy that we do, we should expect as much. There’s also the inside track on dogged self-reliance - showing the bastards - that comes with the territory. There are Churchill and Thatcher, of course, but also Cook, Kinnock, Kennedy, and now Danny Alexander. I find Danny Alexander tough, and I say that as a member of an even more exclusive and despised club than gingers: Lib Dem voters who approve of the coalition. Could Alexander ever be leadership material? Is there a point at which there might be concerned mumbling, as there was about the blind David Blunkett, about his suitability for high office? Sure, there were some objections to Harriet Harman’s description of him as a ‘ginger rodent.’ It was the first time the consensus was unequivocally with the ginger nuts. But I’d wager that this was no watershed. I have a sneaking suspicion it had more to do with how people feel about the unpopular (and dully brunette) Harman, than about equal treatment for redheads. I’m sure ditzy blond Boris Johnson would have got away with it.

More disquieting than a Ginger Media Moment of this kind is the freckly spectre that accompanies it: the Ginger Solidarity Group. With a name such as ‘Seeing Red,’ they emerge, slathered in factor 50 and squinting into the glare, to say that, frankly, it’s just another form of racism. I have always found this excruciating. It’s the thin end of a very embarrassing wedge, which conjures images of, maybe twenty years down the line, something like a Ginger Council of Great Britian, with Blairite-style Community Leaders. Nicholas Witchell, perhaps. Anne Robinson, I would imagine. Ron Weasley as patron. I don’t want there to be ginger politics, and if there has to be then I don’t want to be a part of it.

If you choose the quiet life - up in the hills, along the dirt track - they’ll mostly leave you alone. But whatever precautions you take, you will always be vulnerable to the newspaper stories. Every few months or so I am Tasered by a headline, most recently The Daily Telegraph’s 'Sperm Bank Turns Down Red Heads.' According to the head of Greece-based ‘Global Sperm Bank’ Cyros, supply of ginger sperm is massively outstripping demand. However you put it, and no one is putting it too tactfully, it’s hard to avoid the implication: no one wants the product. Apart from the Irish apparently. Another excited report claimed that scientists had cracked a conundrum: why, given that red hair is self-evidently so unattractive, had the gene not died out long ago? Well, apparently men find redheaded women vulnerable, and therefore want to protect and impregnate them. Where this leaves redheaded men I’m not quite sure: stuck in an endlessly perpetuated genetic cul-de-sac I suppose. I would feel sorry for them if they weren’t so ginger.

The Telegraph article was the ‘most read’ on the site. It’s a schadenfreude-rich story, for sure, but there’s something else going on. Because redheadedness is not a skin colour, not quite an ethnicity, it is just on the side of being acceptable to talk about in this way. I would hazard that you wouldn’t read in a national paper how many white women have asked for the sperm of black men, though it would certainly make for a piece people might want to read. There’s no public interest defence for an article of this kind. It does sting rather, particularly given that redheads have a lower pain threshold. I’ve never donated sperm, but I’d rather be quietly ushered to one side at the clinic than be humiliated in public, even if it did mean going to Greece.

In the course of my recent ginger education, I was surprised to learn that, in the Middle Ages, anti-ginger sentiment became closely bound up with anti Semitism. Judas’ red hair was inherited by Shylock. I found it strange: while there are some red headed Jews, surely there aren’t enough to make red hair a defining derogatory feature? But there’s a clue here. In the final analysis it’s not really about hair at all, but about a community’s urge to define itself in opposition to outsiders, a convenient group of whom there are enough to notice, but not enough to truly be a threat. I have begun to feel that, rather than maintaining an honourable resistance to being co-opted by an embarrassing group, I’m really being rather cowardly in my rejection of my pilary identity. From this day forward, I resolve to be ginger and proud of it, and not instinctively avoid sitting next to fellow ginger nuts on the bus to avoid the ‘Duracell’ quips. Conan Doyle was onto something: a Red Headed League is exactly what the world needs, with Kinnock as our leader, shouting, 'We’re alright! We’re alright! We’re alright!'

Chasing Shadows

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act 

(‘The Hollow Men’, T.S. Eliot, 1925)

Boxers are liars. They have to be, eventually. They lie about their condition, for promotion, about their intentions, about their bodies and about their reflexes. They lie about punches, about which ones will hurt and which are just for show, about which are diversions and which the real deal. They lie about injuries, about cuts, about bruises, about their hands and about their guts. And eventually, they all, nearly, end up lying on canvas, unwitting art. (more…)