Tag: politics

a pressing necessity: International Women’s Day 2026

Firstly, the title comes from this short essay by one of my favourite historical figures, Rosa Luxemburg; it’s worth a read.

one of my favourite works of art by anyone ever; Monika Geilsdorf’s 1976 self-portrait

If anything demonstrates that half of the human race is in need of a special day to celebrate their achievements and raise awareness of the challenges they face, it’s the ongoing existence and high profile of International Women’s Day. I’m not here just to criticise it, so bear with me.

In a way it seems deeply patronising (not an accidental use of the word) that it even exists, since the celebration of IWD is in itself a sign that the patriarchy is in obnoxiously good health. Seems paradoxical, but look at the contrast between not just the profile of, but the nature of IWD, compared to International Men’s Day, which contrary to the belief of the frothing-at-the-mouth men on the misogynist fringe does exist (19 November), highlights the background that it exists against.

International Women’s Day commemorates the (ongoing) fight for Women’s rights, raises awareness of issues surrounding gender inequality and is a celebration of the achievements of women throughout the ages. International Men’s Day raises awareness of issues like suicide, self-harm, violence, homelessness etc; it’s a good thing, but it’s a much smaller and very different thing. Both international days are – necessarily – framed in the same way. The bad things that women have faced and continue to face – violent death, mutilation, violence, political, religious and social disenfranchisement – are the product of societies where women have been and in many ways continue to be second class citizens; the power structures they struggle with and against are overwhelmingly male and male-dominated. The problems that Men’s day raises, likewise come from men’s struggles to exist within that same socio-political/religious framework. The fact that I’ve spent half a paragraph about Women’s Day writing about Men’s Day is ironic but it’s also systemic.

Does that mean that IWD is a bad thing? Clearly not. There are women who, for a variety of reasons choose to denounce or simply opt out of the whole idea of it – as is their right – but the position of women has not improved so much over the past quarter century that the inequalities are merely historical, as seemed possible to envision around the end of the 1980s. And while the achievements of women in almost every field are acknowledged more now than ever, they are, depending on which sphere they take place in, often still seen as special cases; ‘women artists,’ ‘female plumbers’ etc, whereas terms from my childhood like ‘male nurse’ seem comically inappropriate (which isn’t to say that some people don’t still use them; but usually men, and for reactionary reasons).

There’s also a valid argument that celebrating womens/mens days simply reinforces a binary that is merely a symptom of the old-fashioned, patriarchal system. It’s kind of undeniable; the name alone, International Women’s Day supposes “women” as a monolith. One of my favourite artists is the Surrealist Claude Cahun (born Lucie Schwob), whose work is often (by me, too) promoted as part of IWD celebrations of female artists, despite the artist’s unambiguous statement from Disavowals (1928) that “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” To ignore someone’s own personal identity in order to celebrate something about themselves that they specifically denied feels like a strange kind of tribute.
Nonetheless, nobody, not even Claude Cahun, denied that women do exist and that they have been and are (okay some people do loudly deny this bit) oppressed and subject to systemic inequalities.

the great Hungarian artist Mihály Biró’s 1925 poster for International Women’s Day

What’s often overlooked now too is that International Women’s Day was historically – though not consistently – a socialist celebration. See here for an excellent exploration of its radical origins. Working Women’s Day – the date 8th March was chosen by Lenin, fact fans – was originally tied to issues of Workers’ Rights and the fight for equality more widely, but even in the Soviet Union the image softened over the years until eventually it –  ironically – came to celebrate women in traditional roles (mothers, wives) rather than revolutionary ones. Which is lame; but it’s easy to see why that link has eroded. The struggle for Women’s liberation was initially, and throughout its radical period in the 60s and 70s seen as analogous to the working class struggle – where women occupied a kind of working class, that is subordinate, position even within the working class. The gradual (but of course never total) amelioration of the rights of workers made aspects of the radicalism of the past feel dated and possibly unnecessary, though that is less true than it sometimes seems. Also, not all women were or are working class anyway, and class distinctions of that kind are not universal in every society in the world, but women’s marginalisation almost is.

Madonna: “Erotica” (1992) dir Fabien Baron: not my mother’s feminism

Plus, people and perceptions change. My mother was a working class ‘Women’s Lib,’ Spare Rib-reading feminist of the 60s/70s, but although her views on Women’s liberation never really changed, from the 80s onwards she became puritanical in a way that now seems, to her children’s generation, a bit sexist, oddly. For example, she couldn’t see someone like Madonna (the popular entertainer, not the mother of Christ) and her ilk, however apparently empowered, as anything other than a manifestation of the retrograde desires of men, and she would probably have agreed with Morrissey that make-up is a lie, or even gone further to suggest that it’s a lie established by the patriarchy to keep women in their place. It’s a point of view, I suppose; but it’s also one that polices the image that women choose to project for themselves and so seems fundamentally anti-progressive, though I understand the logic of it.

Similarly, there are people who bemoan the loss of the ‘Class War’ aspect IWD, which I again understand, because I do think capitalism & patriarchy are bad and harmful to humanity in general and women in particular. But as a ‘working class’ male I also kind of reject it. Identifying with the system that labels you seems fundamentally unhelpful to me. I am ‘working class’ because that is the caste system established by a capitalist power structure, just as I would have been ‘peasant class’ centuries ago in a feudal society. Embracing that class identity seems far less attractive than altering society until its labels have no meaning anymore.

A fairer version of capitalism may not be the ultimate aim, but it would at least be a good thing. Marx’s ideal – I have a lot of time and affection for Marx, but I think he was often wrong, or at least that 21st century problems do not call for 19th century solutions – that inequality reaches crisis point so that revolution becomes a necessity feels to me very much like the apocalyptic thinking of those who want to immerse the world in war to bring about the second coming of Christ. The problem is – as we see, now, with war – that people, perhaps even generations of people, have to actually live their whole lives during that ‘crisis point’ which can continue, depending on the strength of the overarching system, almost indefinitely. Misery now, reward later is the self-serving bullshit the Christian church8 has been selling for 2000 years, I don’t think society is improved by adopting a well-meaning socialist version of it. Surely the life of even a single person is more important than the fulfilment of an ideology? Agree to disagree perhaps.

Which again has taken this away from International Women’s Day. When one is talking about half of the human race any kind of generalisation is bound to be wrong, but solidarity with people who are forced to struggle for equality as human beings within systems designed to keep them in a subordinate role never is.

It may be – especially in the social media age – that celebrations like International Women’s Day come under the banner of Bread and Circuses that the satirist Juvenal noted Imperial Rome offered to the people in lieu of the political power they held in the days of the old Republic. So should we get rid of them? No, would be my answer – quite the opposite, we should expand on them, turn them into actual holidays, raise awareness of every grievance that people have under a grossly unequal political system. If the ruling class of the Capitalist/Tech Oligarchy are offering circuses (where is the bread though?) to placate the people and keep them docile, then the very least their subjects can do to exert their will is to take over the circuses and to remake them in their own image, loud and unignorable.

Ah well, never mind, maybe soon there will be an International Humans Day where the (male) technocratic overlords agree to turn off AI for a day or something to show false solidarity with the rest of us. I won’t hold my breath though.

To end on something more positive, I’ve evangelised elsewhere about art history as a subject (here’s my one-line reason why everyone should study it; Art History is not just about the past, it encompasses everything that’s important about the present; politics, religion, gender, philosophy, personal, national and local identity – and studying the subject and freeing it from its historical assumptions and biases only makes it deeper and richer; plus you get to study fascinating, powerful and beautiful products of the human mind and body, too). Over the past decade or so the place of female artists within that history – and the profiles of individual women artists – has been explored more than ever before so that, although we are not yet at a point where women artists and male artists (and neither) just become ‘artists’ it’s no longer as unthinkable as that would have been when I studied art history 20 years ago.

On a less exulted note, when I first started posting things on Instagram around a decade ago, books like Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette, Katie Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men (2022), Eiderdown Books’ superb Modern Women Artists series, Phaidon’s Great Women Artists (2019) and (my favourite) Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters (2023) didn’t yet exist.

Some of my favourite artists – Jenny Saville, Hannah Höch, Gabriele Münter– were women and, like most female artists they made works that on one level transcend gender, as I think all great art does, but were also formed from an unmistakably female point of view (just as I would say Picasso’s art is unmistakably male). Female artists were, in short, making art that only female artists could make, (I’d actually go further and say that all great artists regardless of gender make art that only that individual can make, but that doesn’t change the basic point).

I found, and it’s still true, about art in general and not only – though especially – by women, that the more you look, the more you find and so when I started regularly posting art by female artists, most of whom were new to me, I began keeping a kind of database of artists and their birthdays. So here it is, in simplified form. There are many, many omissions (especially of sculptors – not so much my thing – and contemporary artists, whose birthdays are often not so easy to find) and it will always be a work in progress, but I think it’s worth sharing here anyway (and in birthday order, so you can see if you share your birthday with a fantastic artist; why not?) Happy International Women’s Day!.

JANUARY

Children with Burning Torches (1920s) by Tina Bauer-Pezellen, an artist I love but can never find much information about

Selma Gubin born 01-Jan 1905
Rita Kernn-Larsen born 01-Jan 1904
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye born 01-Jan 1977
Selma Plawneek-des Coudres born 02-Jan 1883
Slava Raskaj born 02-Jan 1877
Sylvi Kunnas born 03-Jan 1903
Maruja Mallo born 05-Jan 1902
Margaret Modlin born 05-Jan 1927
Madame Yevonde born 05-Jan 1893
Ruth Gikow born 06-Jan 1915
Sanja Ivekovic born 06-Jan 1949
Franciska Clausen born 07-Jan 1899
Fahrelnissa Zeid born 07-Jan 1901
Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski born 08-Jan 1870
Alida Jantina Pott born 08-Jan 1888
Julie Wolfthorn born 08-Jan 1864
Tina Bauer-Pezellen born 09-Jan 1897
Annemarie Heinrich born 09-Jan 1912
Maxa Nordau born 10-Jan 1897
Nora Heysen born 11-Jan 1911
Marcia Marcus born 11-Jan 1928
Rosalba Carriera born 12-Jan 1673
Hannah Hirsch-Pauli born 13-Jan 1864
Lilla Cabot Perry born 13-Jan 1848
Alice Pike Barney born 14-Jan 1857
Berthe Morisot born 14-Jan 1841
Eve Sonneman born 14-Jan 1946
Louise Blair Daura born 15-Jan 1905
Sabine Lepsius born 15-Jan 1864
Gerta Overbeck born 16-Jan 1898
Teddy Røwde born 16-Jan 1911
Alexandra Ekster born 18-Jan 1882
Cindy Sherman born 19-Jan 1954
Marianne Stokes born 19-Jan 1855
Sophie Tauber-Arp born 19-Jan 1889
Leyly Matine-Daftary born 19-Jan 1937
Maxine Albro born 20-Jan 1893
Hertha Spielberg born 21-Jan 1890
Annemarie Jacob born 22-Jan 1891
Kiki Kogelnik born 22-Jan 1935
Maria Luiko born 25-Jan 1904
Emilie von Hallavanya born 26-Jan 1874
Katarzyna Kobro born 26-Jan 1898
Yva (Else Ernestine Neulander-Simon) born 26-Jan 1900
Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange born 27-Jan 1877
Maria Tlusty born 27-Jan 1901
Bertha Muller born 28-Jan 1848
Alice Neel born 28-Jan 1900
Elisabeth Büchsel born 29-Jan 1867
Anna Susanna Fries born 30-Jan 1827
Teresa Feoderovna Ries born 30-Jan 1874
Amrita Sher-Gil born 30-Jan 1913
Masa Feszty born 31-Jan 1894
Elena Liessner-Blomberg born 31-Jan 1897
Cornelia Macintyre Foley born 31-Jan 1909

FEBRUARY

Anita Rée – self portrait (1930)

Doris Lee born 01-Feb 1905
Kris Torne born 01-Feb 1867
Sybil Atteck born 03-Feb 1911
Helen Forbes born 03-Feb 1891
Henriette Petit born 03-Feb 1894
Katherine Read born 03-Feb 1723
Georgina de Albuquerque born 04-Feb 1885
Marthe Hirt born 04-Feb 1890
Minna Köhler-Roeber born 04-Feb 1883
Ksenia Boguslavskaya born 05-Feb 1892
Jeanne Bieruma Oosting born 05-Feb 1898
Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen born 06-Feb 1886
Arte Topalian born 06-Feb 1906
Kaete Lassen born 07-Feb 1880
Paula Modersohn-Becker born 08-Feb 1876
Anita Ree born 09-Feb 1885
Celia Calderon born 10-Feb 1921
Eva Frankfurther born 10-Feb 1930
Dorte Clara Wolff (Dodo) born 10-Feb 1907
Annelise Kretschmer born 11-Feb 1903
Léa Lafugie born 11-Feb 1890
Kate Diehn-Bitt born 12-Feb 1900
Marie Vassilieff born 12-Feb 1884
Marta Hegemann born 14-Feb 1894
Marie Vorobieff (Marevna) born 14-Feb 1892
Dora de la Torre born 14-Feb 1924
Mary Adshead born 15-Feb 1904
Grethe Jurgens born 15-Feb 1899
Gertrude Abercrombie born 17-Feb 1909
Greta Hällfors-Sipilä born 19-Feb 1899
Hazel Janicki born 19-Feb 1918
Gabriele Munter born 19-Feb 1877
Else Berg born 19-Feb 1877
Maria von Heider-Schweinitz born 20-Feb 1894
Lía Correa Morales born 20-Feb 1893
Grace Carpenter Hudson born 21-Feb 1865
Delhy Tejero born 22-Feb 1904
Gundula Schulze Eldowy born 23-Feb 1954
Martha Cunz born 24-Feb 1876
Alice Bailly born 25-Feb 1872
Broncia Koller-Pinnell born 25-Feb 1863
Hilde Hamann born 26-Feb 1898
Alexandra Povorina born 26-Feb 1885
Annie Swynnerton born 26-Feb 1844
Teresa Condeminas i Soler born 27-Feb 1905
Eva-Maria Bergmann born 28-Feb 1941
Julia Thecla born 28-Feb 1896

MARCH

Maria Slavona – Houses in Montmarte (1898)

Marcelle Cahn born 01-Mar 1895
Erika Streit born 01-Mar 1910
Lola Cueto born 02-Mar 1897
Agda Holst born 02-Mar 1886
Judith Alpi born 03-Mar 1893
Gussy Hippold-Ahnert born 03-Mar 1910
Anne Ratkowski born 03-Mar 1903
Ellen Emmet Rand born 04-Mar 1875
Charmion Von Wiegand born 04-Mar 1896
Gertrude Fehr born 05-Mar 1895
Clara Ledesma Terrazas born 05-Mar 1924
Maria Blanchard born 06-Mar 1881
Pauline Boty born 06-Mar 1938
Maria Uhden born 06-Mar 1892
Marisa Roesset Velasco born 06-Mar 1904
Aenne Biermann born 08-Mar 1898
Constance Mayer born 09-Mar 1774
Annalize Pilasik born 10-Mar 1903
Rita Angus born 12-Mar 1908
Zofia Atteslander born 12-Mar 1874
Elaine De Kooning born 12-Mar 1918
Marie Eberhard born 12-Mar 1897
Idelle Weber born 12-Mar 1932
Lizzy Ansingh born 13-Mar 1875
Andree Bosquet born 13-Mar 1900
Diane Arbus born 14-Mar 1923
Annemarie von Jakimow-Kruse born 14-Mar 1889
Maria Slavona born 14-Mar 1865
Mary Pratt born 15-Mar 1935
Gerda Wegener born 15-Mar 1886
Maria Austria born 19-Mar 1915
Marie Ellenrieder born 20-Mar 1791
Renee Sintenis born 20-Mar 1888
Alix Ayme born 21-Mar 1894
Greta Kempton born 22-Mar 1901
Lea Grundig born 23-Mar 1906
Marie Howet born 24-Mar 1897
Charley Toorop born 24-Mar 1891
Petrona Viera born 24-Mar 1895
Therese Debains born 25-Mar 1897
Johanna Kampmann-Freund born 25-Mar 1888
Käthe Loewenthal born 27-Mar 1878
Elga Sesemann born 28-Mar 1922
Dora Carrington born 29-Mar 1893
Cecile Walton born 29-Mar 1891
Helene Riedel born 30-Mar 1901

APRIL

Karin Luts – The Artist (1937)

Gertrude Bohnert born 02-Apr 1908
Emilie Charmy born 02-Apr 1878
Stella Snead born 02-Apr 1910
Hermine Aichenegg born 03-Apr 1915
Francesca woodman born 03-Apr 1958
Constance Marie Charpentier born 04-Apr 1767
Ruth Smith born 05-Apr 1913
Leonora Carrington born 06-Apr 1917
Jeanne Hebuterne born 06-Apr 1898
Kata Kalivoda born 06-Apr 1877
Hilde Rubinstein born 07-Apr 1904
Lilly Steiner born 07-Apr 1884
Annemirl Bauer born 10-Apr 1939
Gunvor Gronvik born 10-Apr 1912
Frances Foy born 11-Apr 1890
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard born 11-Apr 1749
Maggie Laubser born 14-Apr 1886
Olga Boznanska born 15-Apr 1865
Elizabeth Catlett born 15-Apr 1915
Princess Elisabeth Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy born 15-Apr 1863
Laura Alma-Tadema born 16-Apr 1852
Inji Efflatoun born 16-Apr 1924
Charlotte Salomon born 16-Apr 1917
Hermine David born 19-Apr 1886
Eva Gonzales born 19-Apr 1849
Dod Procter born 21-Apr 1890
Raquel Forner born 22-Apr 1902
Ottilie Roederstein born 22-Apr 1859
Lee Miller born 23-Apr 1907
Christine Bacheler Nisbet born 24-Apr 1902
Lyubov Popova born 24-Apr 1889
Bridget Riley born 24-Apr 1931
Mary Brandt (Perez) born 25-Apr 1917
Mela Muter born 26-Apr 1876
Doro Ording born 26-Apr 1901
Nathalie Kraemer born 28-Apr 1891
Else Fischer-Hansen born 29-Apr 1905
Mainie Jellett born 29-Apr 1897
Karin Luts born 29-Apr 1904
Ruth Meier born 29-Apr 1888
Juana Romani born 30-Apr 1867
Thea Schleusner born 30-Apr 1879
Joronn Sitje born 30-Apr 1897

MAY

June Beer – Woman in Red (self portrait), 1984

Cecilia Beaux born 01-May 1855
Romaine Brooks born 01-May 1874
Elsa Thoresen born 01-May 1906
Eva Aeppli born 02-May 1925
Peggy Bacon born 02-May 1895
Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy born 02-May 1952
Brigitte Fugmann born 03-May 1948
Stina Forssell born 03-May 1906
Geta Bratescu born 04-May 1926
Sylvia Pankhurst born 05-May 1882
Celeste Woss y Gil born 05-May 1891
Lucie Citti Ferreira born 06-May 1911
Suzy Freylinghuysen born 07-May 1911
Marion Gilmore born 07-May 1909
Dore Meyer-Vax born 08-May 1908
Felicita Pauluka born 08-May 1925
Paula Gans born 09-May 1883
Stanislawa de Karlowska born 09-May 1876
Hanna Klose-Greger born 09-May 1892
Grete Stern born 09-May 1904
Frida Konstantin born 10-May 1884
Helene von Taussig born 10-May 1879
Eva Schulze Knabe born 11-May 1907
Ilske Schwimmer born 11-May 1915
Monika Brachmann born 12-May 1944
Paula Lauenstein born 12-May 1898
Charlotte Wankel born 12-May 1888
Sara Afonso/Affonso born 13-May 1899
Louise Seidler born 15-May 1786
Stella Bowen born 16-May 1893
Tamara de Lempicka born 16-May 1898
Laura Wheeler Waring born 16-May 1887
Bele Bachem born 17-May 1916
June Beer born 17-May 1935
Martha Bernstein born 17-May 1874
Kati Horna born 19-May 1912
Clara von Rappard born 19-May 1857
Ellen Auerbach born 20-May 1906
Lily Furedi born 20-May 1896
Margret Hofheinz-Döring born 20-May 1910
Maria Hiller-Foell born 21-May 1880
Marisol Escobar born 22-May 1930
Erszebet Korb born 22-May 1889
Julia Diaz born 23-May 1917
Charlotte Berend-Corinth born 25-May 1880
Anita Magsaysay-Ho born 25-May 1914
Vally Wieselthier born 25-May 1895
Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka born 26-May 1873
Amelie Lundahl born -May 1850
Heidi Vogel born 27-May 1951
Anna De Weert born 27-May 1867
Anna-Eva Bergman born 29-May 1909
Marlow Moss born 29-May 1889
Vanessa Bell born 30-May 1879
Audrey Flack born 30-May 1931
Magdalena Mira Mena born 30-May 1859
Carmen Herrera born 31-May 1915
Mireya Lafuente born 31-May 1905
Hilla von Rebay born 31-May 1890

JUNE

Biruta Baumane – Group Portrait (1969)

Vera Nilsson born 01-Jun 1888
Lotte B Prechner born 01-Jun 1877
Greta Gerell born 02-Jun 1898
Louise Amans born 05-Jun 1850
Winifred Knights born 05-Jun 1899
Biruta Baumane born 06-Jun 1922
Ricarda Jacobi born 07-Jun 1923
Laura Rodig born 07-Jun 1901
Alice Rahon born 08-Jun 1904
Montserrat Gudiol born 09-Jun 1933
Oda Krohg born 11-Jun 1860
Priscilla Warren Roberts born 13-Jun 1916
Pan Yuliang born 14-Jun 1895
Agnes Tait born 14-Jun 1894
Erna Lincke born 15-Jun 1899
Edith Meyer von Kamptz born 15-Jun 1884
Fritzi Brod born 16-Jun 1900
Henriette Browne born 16-Jun 1829
Irma Lang-Scheer born 17-Jun 1901
Margarete Kubicka born 20-Jun 1891
Emilia Bertole born 21-Jun 1896
Gwen John born 22-Jun 1876
Wangechi Mutu born 22-Jun 1972
Hilde Rakebrand born 22-Jun 1901
Olga Rozanowa born 22-Jun 1886
Madge Tennent born 22-Jun 1889
Lilo Raymond born 23-Jun 1922
Elena Shegal born 23-Jun 1924
Meraud Guinness born 24-Jun 1904
Helen Lundeberg born 24-Jun 1908
Alice Frey born 25-Jun 1895
Kay Sage born 25-Jun 1898
Vilma Eckl born 26-Jun 1892
Coba Ritsema born 26-Jun 1876
Helene Perdriat born 27-Jun 1889
Catherine Yarrow born 27-Jun 1904
Ali Goubitz born 28-Jun 1904
Florence Henri born 28-Jun 1893
Nan Youngman born 28-Jun 1906
Hannelore Neumann-Tachilzik born 29-Jun 1939

JULY

Prudence Heward – Portrait of an unknown Woman c.1920s

Herminia Arrate born 01-Jul 1896
Elizabeth Lochrie born 01-Jul 1890
Prudence Heward born 02-Jul 1896
Lydia Mei born 02-Jul 1896
Rahel Szalit-Marcus born 02-Jul 1894
Georgina Klitgaard born 03-Jul 1893
Petra Flemming born 06-Jul 1944
Frida Kahlo born 06-Jul 1907
Unica Zurn born 06-Jul 1916
Artemisia Gentileschi born 08-Jul 1593
Kathe Kollwitz born 08-Jul 1867
Carmen Mondragon (Nahui Olin) born 08-Jul 1894
Maria Tupper Hunneus born 09-Jul 1893
Helene Schjerfbeck born 10-Jul 1862
Luise Kornsand born 11-Jul 1876
Bertina Lopes born 11-Jul 1924
Ruth Starr Rose born 12-Jul 1887
Honore Desmond Sharrer born 12-Jul 1920
Helene Arnau born 13-Jul 1870
Alice Brasse-Forstmann born 13-Jul 1903
Elena Huerta Muzquiz born 15-Jul 1908
Giselle Kuster born 15-Jul 1911
Berenice Abbott born 17-Jul 1898
Marie Petiet born 20-Jul 1854
Marta Astfalck-Vietz born 21-Jul 1901
Greta Freist born 21-Jul 1904
Maral Rahmanzadeh born 23-Jul 1916
Anna Dorothea Therbusch born 23-Jul 1721
Wanda Wulz born 25-Jul 1903
Alba Calderon (de Gil) born 27-Jul 1908
Nelly van Doesburg born 27-Jul 1899
Sofia Bassi born 28-Jul 1913
Mathilda Rotkirch born 28-Jul 1813
Anna Stainer-Knittel born 28-Jul 1841
Grace Pailthorpe born 29-Jul 1883
Bettina Shaw-Lawrence born 29-Jul 1921
Friedl Dicker-Brandeis born 30-Jul 1898
Maria Szantho born 31-Jul 1897
Doris Zinkeisen born 31-Jul 1897

AUGUST

Macena Barton – Salome (1930s?)

Rachel Baes born 01-Aug 1912
Ida Gerhardi born 02-Aug 1862
Gretel Haas-Gerber born 02-Aug 1903
Maria Wiik born 03-Aug 1853
Laura Knight born 04-Aug 1877
Hedda Sterne born 04-Aug 1910
Edith Dettmann born 04-Aug 1898
Margit Graber born 05-Aug 1895
Irene Rice Pereira born 05-Aug 1902
Macena Barton born 07-Aug 1901
Maria Caspar-Filser born 07-Aug 1878
Lili Orszag born 08-Aug 1926
Tove Jansson born 09-Aug 1914
Eliane de Meuse born 09-Aug 1899
Cornelia Paczka-Wagner born 09-Aug 1864
Rogi Andre born 10-Aug 1900
Margret Bilger born 12-Aug 1904
Marianne Fieglhuber-Gutscher born 12-Aug 1889
Nola Hatterman born 12-Aug 1899
Ernestine von Kirchsberg born 12-Aug 1857
Helene Roth born 12-Aug 1887
Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein) born 13-Aug 1895
Xenia Cage born 15-Aug 1913
Marie Goth born 15-Aug 1887
Zsuzsi Robos born 15-Aug 1929
Tamara Natalie Madden born 16-Aug 1975
Käthe Ephraim Marcus born 16-Aug 1892
Gunnvor Advocaat born 17-Aug 1912
Gudrun Petersdorff born 17-Aug 1955
Anna Ancher born 18-Aug 1859
Kyra Markham born 18-Aug 1891
Florine Stettheimer born 19-Aug 1871
Lette Valeska born 20-Aug 1885
Hedwig Holtz-Sommer born 22-Aug 1901
Agnes Lawrence Pelton born 22-Aug 1881
Ebba Carstensen born 23-Aug 1885
Agnes Cleve born 23-Aug 1876
Hannah Frank born 23-Aug 1908
Mariette Lydis born 24-Aug 1887
Henriette Paula Häberlin born 25-Aug 1882
Dorothea Tanning born 25-Aug 1910
Fanny Rabel born 27-Aug 1922
Olga Costa born 28-Aug 1913
Else Lohmann born 29-Aug 1897
Sughra Rababi born 29-Aug 1922
Martha Schrag born 29-Aug 1870
Anna Zinkeisen born 29-Aug 1901
Siri Deckert born 30-Aug 1888
Leonor Fini born 30-Aug 1907
Amy Sherald born 30-Aug 1973
Ida Kerkovius born 31-Aug 1879

SEPTEMBER

Toyen – The Message of the Forest (1936)

Adriana Bisi Fabbri born 01-Sep 1881
Mario Miguel Mollari 01-Sep 1930
Hilda Rix Nicholas born 01-Sep 1884
Augusta Roszmann born 01-Sep 1859
Mina Carlson-Bredberg born 02-Sep 1857
Else Meidner born 02-Sep 1901
Elin Danielson-Gambogi born 03-Sep 1861
Helene Funke born 03-Sep 1869
Lis Bertram-Ehmsen born 05-Sep 1897
Piti (Francis) Bartolozzi born 06-Sep 1908
Marie-Gabrielle Capet born 06-Sep 1761
Rosa Rolanda born 06-Sep 1896
Hanna Bekker vom Rath born 07-Sep 1893
Maria Lassnig born 08-Sep 1919
Mimi Parent born 08-Sep 1924
Anna Walinska born 08-Sep 1906
Aurora Reyes Flores born 09-Sep 1908
Consuelo Remedios González del Bianco born 10-Sep 1911
Marianne von Werefkin born 10-Sep 1860
Bona di Mandiargues born 12-Sep 1926
Nan Goldin born 12-Sep 1953
Lili Pancu born 13-Sep 1908
Eva Cederström born 15-Sep 1909
Hope Gangloff born 15-Sep 1974
Rosalie Gwathmey born 15-Sep 1908
Cordelia Urueta Sierra born 16-Sep 1908
Alla Horska born 18-Sep 1929
Maud Sulter born 19-Sep 1960
Hilda Belcher born 20-Sep 1881
Denise Bellon born 20-Sep 1902
Genevieve Springston Lynch born 20-Sep 1891
Else Hagen born 21-Sep 1914
Toyen born 21-Sep 1902
Anne Winterer born 21-Sep 1894
Hansl Bock born 22-Sep 1893
Irena Rüther-Rabinowicz born 22-Sep 1900
Esphyr Slobodkina born 22-Sep 1908
Suzanne Van Damme born 22-Sep 1901
Suzanne Valadon born 23-Sep 1865
Maina-Miriam Munsky born 24-Sep 1943
Tilsa Tsuchiya 24-Sep 1928
Marguerite Zorach born 25-Sep 1887
Suzi Gablik born 26-Sep 1934
Arcangela Paladini born 29-Sep 1596

OCTOBER

Penny Slinger – I Hear What You Say (1973)

Marianne Brandt born 01-Oct 1893
Alice Prin (Kiki de Montparnasse) born 02-Oct 1901
Elisabeth Sophie Cheron born 03-Oct 1648
Kathleen Walne born 03-Oct 1915
Ester Ellqvist born 04-Oct 1880
Ellen Thesleff born 05-Oct 1869
Graciela Aranis born 06-Oct 1908
Meret Oppenheim born 06-Oct 1913
Nina Arbore born 08-Oct 1889
Elise Ransonnet-Villez born 08-Oct 1843
Faith Ringgold born 08-Oct 1930
Louise Rösler born -Oct 1907
Ithell Colquhoun born 09-Oct 1906
Zelia Salgado born 10-Oct 1904
Linda Kogel born 11-Oct 1861
Grete Csaki-Copony born 12-Oct 1893
Paula Deppe born 12-Oct 1886
Nadezhda Petrovic born 12-Oct 1873
Ruth Bernhard born 14-Oct 1905
Vilma Vrbova born 14-Oct 1905
Minna Citron born 15-Oct 1896
Lilly Hildebrandt born 16-Oct 1887
Elisabeth Chaplin born 17-Oct 1890
Cata Dujšin-Ribar born 17-Oct 1897
Agnes van den Brandeler born 18-Oct 1918
Jeanne Mandello born 18-Oct 1907
Bettina von Arnim born 19-Oct 1940
Jacqueline Marval born 19-Oct 1866
Ottilie Reylaender born 19-Oct 1882
Else-Christie Kielland born 20-Oct 1903
Gustava Engels von Veith born 20-Oct 1879
Penny Slinger born 21-Oct 1947
Lygia Clark born 23-Oct 1920
Rina Lazo (Wasem) born 23-Oct 1923
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky born 24-Oct 1906
Claude Cahun born 25-Oct 1894
Katalin Ladik born 25-Oct 1942
Ruth Light Braun born 26-Oct 1906 2003 oa
Marthe Donas born 26-Oct 1885 1967 oa
Bep Rietveld born 26-Oct 1913 1999 oa
Blanche-Augustine Camus born 27-Oct 1884
Julie Hagen-Schwarz born 27-Oct 1824
Sigrid Hjerten born 27-Oct 1885
Mary Moser born 27-Oct 1744
Paraskeva Clark born 28-Oct 1898
Bertha Müller born 28-Oct 1848
Alice Lex-Nerlinger born 29-Oct 1893
Louise Abbema born 30-Oct 1853
Maria Izquierdo born 30-Oct 1902
Angelika Kauffmann born 30-Oct 1741
Erna Schmidt-Carroll born 30-Oct 1896
Marie-Laure de Noailles born 31-Oct 1902
Marie Laurencin born 31-Oct 1883
Jóhanna Kristín Yngvadóttir born 31-Oct 1953

NOVEMBER

Débora Arango – Justice (c.1944)

Hannah Hoch born 01-Nov 1889
Hedwig Woermann born 01-Nov 1879
Venny Soldan-Brofeldt born 02-Nov 1863
Lois Mailou Jones born 03-Nov 1905
Lilias Torrance Newton born 03-Nov 1896
Charlotte Buresova born 04-Nov 1904
Elena Luksch-Makowsky born 04-Nov 1878
Milena Pavlovic-Barili born 05-Nov 1909
Ann Brockman born 06-Nov 1899
Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn born 07-Nov 1898
Sonja Kovačić – Tajčević born 07-Nov 1894
Angeles Santos Torroella born 07-Nov 1911
Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones born 08-Nov 1885
Emmy Bridgwater born 10-Nov 1906 1999 oa
Lisette Model born 10-Nov 1901
Debora Arango born 11-Nov 1907
Carry Hess born 11-Nov 1889
Magda Langenstraß-Uhlig born 11-Nov 1888
Mary Kessell born 13-Nov 1914
Ekaterina Savova-Nenova born 13-Nov 1901
Sonia Delaunay born 14-Nov 1885
Julie Manet born 14-Nov 1878
Tina Blau born 15-Nov 1845
Miriam Schapiro born 15-Nov 1923
Elisa Counis born 16-Nov 1812
Katharina Sieverding born 16-Nov 1944
Louise Dahl-Wolfe born 19-Nov 1895
Lily Harmon born 19-Nov 1912
Marianne Breslauer born 20-Nov 1909
Angelika Hoerle born 20-Nov 1899
Germaine Krull born 20-Nov 1897
Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann born 21-Nov 1819
Jeanne Mammen born 21-Nov 1890
Dora Maar born 22-Nov 1907
Bridget Bate Tichenor born 22-Nov 1917
Else Hertzer born 24-Nov 1884
Mary Foote born 25-Nov 1872
Sara Shamma born 26-Nov 1975
Audrey Buller born 27-Nov 1902
Gretchen Wohlwill born 27-Nov 1878
Mabel Alvarez born 28-Nov 1891
Hedwig Marquardt born 28-Nov 1884
Else Wex-Cleemann born 29-Nov 1890
Fridel Dethleffs-Edelmann born 30-Nov 1899

DECEMBER

Alison Watt – Alabaster (1998)

Eileen Agar born 01-Dec 1899
Jenny Mucchi-Wiegemann born 01-Dec 1895
Emilie Mediz-Pelikan born 02-Dec 1861
Marion Adnams born 03-Dec 1898
Dorte Helm born 03-Dec 1898
Grace English born 04-Dec 1891
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler born 04-Dec 1899
Louise Catherine Breslau born 06-Dec 1856
Margaret Brundage born 09-Dec 1900
Louise de Hem born 10-Dec 1866
Zinaida Serebriakova born 10-Dec 1884
Olga Terri born 10-Dec 1916
Irène Zurkinden born 11-Dec 1909
Alison Watt born 11-Dec 1965 alive
Ragnhild Keyser born 12-Dec 1889
Emily Carr born 13-Dec 1871
Alice Sommer born 13-Dec 1898
Aino Bach born 14-Dec 1901
Remedios Varo born 16-Dec 1908
Bertha Wegmann born 16-Dec 1846
Suze Robertson born 17-Dec 1855
Jane Graverol born 18-Dec 1905
Ewa Kierska born 18-Dec 1923
Lucie Cousturier born 19-Dec 1876
Therese Schwartze born 20-Dec 1851
Trude Fleischmann born 22-Dec 1895
Margit Anna born 23-Dec 1913
Luvena Buchanan Vysekal born 23-Dec 1873
Alma del Banco born 24-Dec 1862
Sigrid Maria Schauman born 24-Dec 1877
Dorothy Johnstone born 25-Dec 1892
Ragnhild Kaarbo born 26-Dec 1889
Stella Steyne born 26-Dec 1907
Augusta von Zitzewitz born 26-Dec 1880
Annott (Jacobi) born 27-Dec 1894
Aisha Galimbaeva born 29-Dec 1917
Adela ber Vukić born 30-Dec 1888
Lucile Blanch born 31-Dec 1895
Beatrice Mandelman born 31-Dec 1912

Self-Portrait in the Studio (1579), by Lavinia Fontana, generally considered to be the first professional female artist

turning rebellion into money

Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Handmaid’s Tale and V for Vendetta are among the most uncomfortably prescient works of dystopian fiction, but I think the one that most precisely captures the tenor and atmosphere of the present time is more modest: a humorous two-part comic strip story from 1980, written by V creator, novelist and (ex-)comics legend Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell etc) and drawn by the great Steve Dillon. While Karl Marx may not have been wrong in his often-quoted observation* that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, Alan Moore recognised, like Camus before him, that whatever history is, and whatever the future may be, the present tends to exist in a pretty much perpetual state of tragi-farce.

*The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

The Moore/Dillon story came with the ominous title Final Solution and appeared in one of 2000AD comic’s regular features, a more or less standalone, twist-ending, Twilight Zone/Tales of the Unexpected-like series called Future Shocks. In Final Solution, Moore and Dillon depict a crime-riddled future (not unlike that in 2000AD’s most famous strip, Judge Dredd) in which the ‘world’s smartest man,’ Abelard Snazz, President of the “Think Inc” corporation envisions, with the aid of a ‘think drink,’ a technological remedy for society’s ills. Obviously, the idea of a genius tech billionaire with a silly name who takes drugs in order to fuel his genius is far-fetched, but the story unfolds in a way that seemed far sillier when I read it as a child than it does now.

Snazz decides (pre-empting the Robocop franchise’s comedy-villain ED-209) that the answer to the crime problem is super-efficient police robots. And so it proves. The only problem is that the robots are too efficient and although the immediate crime problem is solved, there’s no way to turn the robots off and so they become ever more draconian in their crime-stopping. Ultimately they themselves begin to have a negative impact on society and in a particularly memorable and silly panel, a news anchor is arrested live on air for breaking the ‘laws of good taste’ with his clothing choice.

Steve Dillon (art) Alan Moore (script) from 2000AD, 1980

Snazz is again approached to come up with ideas and this time his solution is robot criminals to keep the robot police busy. Predictably it again works too well and so many humans are injured in the resulting crossfire that he comes up with ‘innocent bystander’ robots to take their place. In the end, the earth is overrun with robots fighting each other and humanity has to leave for another planet. On the journey out, Snazz has a vision of a new robot planet and in the last panel he and his sycophantic robot butler Edwin are thrown out of the spacecraft and Snazz has one final vision; “I see… empty air cylinders! I see… oxygen starvation! I see… a slow and painful death! What do you think, Edwin?” and the punchline; “You’re a genius, master!” It’s funny.

Cautionary tales – any tales really – being products of the time they are imagined in, Alan Moore wrote about robots, which in 1980 were one of the most obvious projections of an expected future. Unusually, but both ironically and logically, Hollywood was more on the money* in its choice of future villains: “The Company” (the Weyland Corporation, or for proper nerds, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation), the Tyrell Corporation, Cyberdyne Systems, Omni Consumer Products, Rekall. These are very different institutions from Huxley’s envisioned ‘World State’ or Orwell’s ‘The Party’ or Atwood’s ‘Gilead’ or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘The One State.’ In the first half of the 20th century the most repressive and authoritarian regimes, fascist and communist alike, seemed like the plausible future; and both made corporations subordinate to the state and in fact absorbed them into the state. What the writers of early 20th century dystopias couldn’t have foreseen is that as consumer culture accelerated it became far more attractive for states (even to a surprising extent quasi-communist ones like China) to make themselves attractive to corporations in a kind of mutual enrichment scheme.

*phrase used accidentally but pertinently

And, wishing to make themselves equally attractive to the state, corporations therefore begin (or began; this is where we are now) to adopt the state’s ideas and ideologies. Qualitatively and atmosphere-wise it’s a very different existence from life under totalitarianism, but for the masses – i.e. for everyone who isn’t a member of government or in the upper echelons of a huge corporation – some of the effects of being the subject of a repressive authoritarian state and a technocratic, consumerist-oriented one are surprisingly similar.

Mac & Me (1988) the most shamelessly cynical of all consumerist E.T. cash-ins; loveable alien named after a burger escapes evil government & befriends crippled boy

Classic authoritarians diminish the individuality of their subject citizens, often manufacturing laws limiting personal freedom in order to do so. The prohibition of identities, clothes, religions, media, internet access, issuing ever more precise definitions of what are to be considered societal norms of behaviour and gender roles are all steps towards an ideal state, from the point of view of its ruler. Totalitarian regimes prefer states to be peopled by those as paranoid as they are; obedient dogmatists, spies and informers; people whose lives are devoted to serving and upholding the state and the status quo and whose secret ambitions, if they have any, are most likely to revolve around joining those at the top and sharing in their almost unlimited power.

Clearly, that’s not how corporations work. But at the same time, in apparently tailoring their products more and more towards the individual – so that the customer feels catered to and begins to identify with this social media app, that phone, those brands – what they really end up doing is tailoring the public towards their products, in order to sell them more of those products and related products. And because the world of consumerism is competitive, the winning product is the one with the biggest fanbase. Looked at from the opposite direction, what this means is that the more your life as a consumer mirrors the lives of other consumers, the easier and more lucrative it is for the corporation to sell you their products. To begin with, people just used YouTube or Tiktok for entertainment; now there are people who identify with the product and ‘YouTuber’ and ‘Tiktoker’ are terms in that grey area where a profession becomes an identity.

Equilibrium – the illegitimate child of Brave New World and the Matrix – note the perfect standard-issue summary of the bleak future that awaits & its suggested remedy

In the novels and films alluded to above, the heroic reaction to a totalitarian state or an all-powerful corporation is much the same – to rebel, to be an individual, an outsider, a non-conformist; someone who refuses to fit in their box and passively accept what they are given. But there’s a double irony here; firstly, because those rebelling-against-totalitarianism stories were popular, they were taken up by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, so that one of the defining parts of popular culture in the Western ‘free world’ has been celebrations of the victory of the individual over the faceless tyranny of the state, i.e. something that was never at that time a real worry for its audience. The second irony is that in celebrating the individuality of the heroic protagonist, what we end up with are endless, similar identikit heroes and heroines and endless variations on the same recycled stories, so that from Brave New World we end up with Logan’s Run (1976) and Equilibrium (2002) and The Island (2005) and so on, and on.

And that’s just mentioning single films: what’s notable about the Hollywood versions of these cautionary tales is that, if they are successful they become franchises; what Ripley, Sarah Connor, Murphy/Robocop, even Deckard in Blade Runner – whether or not he’s a Replicant – ultimately do is to sell the public more stories about themselves, or people like themselves.* At that point, rebelling against the all-powerful corporation becomes a trope – worse, a formula –  and it stops being about non-conformity in any meaningful way and is just another way to feed the same money machine, until that story wears out and has to be put on hold for a while. In that sense only, Hollywood is at the forefront of the recycling industry; no lucrative idea is ever fully forgotten and no franchise abandoned without one eye on a possible future reboot. As I write this, another Tron sequel -in its original 1982 form the story of the struggle of the warm, human individual against the cold and faceless computer world – is struggling to find an audience.

* The visual style of Blade Runner, even more than its story has informed whole swathes of dystopian cinema, but fiction too; reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep its depiction of the near future is far less like Blade Runner than the works of later writers like William Gibson or almost any science fiction author since the 80s whose works belong to the near future or parallel versions of the present

Turning rebellion into money is a phrase pre-loaded with irony (yes, I get sick of mentioning irony, but it seems to be the air we breathe). I borrowed the phrase (which I’ve seen fairly recently on t-shirts and so forth) from the lyrics to the Clash’s classic 1978 single (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, in which Joe Strummer was sneering at the Jam’s perceived commercial stance. The phrase was brought up a lot in 1991 when the Clash’s 1982 single Should I Stay or Should I Go was successfully rereleased after being licensed for a Levi’s jeans commercial. That corporate cash is hard to turn down, it seems.

Like RoboCop and Mad Max? Then why not check out R.O.T.O.R.? (there are good reasons)

The current real world version of the corporate menace is not Replicants or state-applied repressed emotions but Artificial Intelligence (not the Spielberg/Kubrick movie). This morning I read something about how AI is not a therapist or a friend, it’s a mirror. There is definitely some truth in that, insofar as it trains itself based on its interactions with people – but more than a mirror, it’s quite important to remember that ultimately it’s a product. Interacting with it tells it’s makers what you like, just as in the past renting Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter* told Paramount Pictures or Vestron Video or whoever what you liked or – at least would accept in the name of entertainment. Finding out what you like, working out how you think, in order to sell you more of itself.

* Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) was the fourth film in the series, but hardly the final chapter – five more followed in the original series before the franchise was (briefly) laid to rest, then resurrected, in a team-up, then rebooted

Part 4 – better than Part 3 but possibly not as good as Part 6 – but it has Crispin Glover in it so it’s not all bad

It’s funny; everybody knows who the key figureheads in ‘big tech’ are – its Abelard Snazzes. Everybody knows that they are the richest men in the world and that they have political influence and that they have begun to shape their companies in response to political pressure. Things being as they are and the Western world being in an ever-accelerating self-devouring capitalist culture, it’s rarely political pressure in the form of rules or directives, but more often financial persuasion and near-money laundering; tax breaks flow in one direction and ‘donations’ (bribes) in the other.

Everybody knows that these Snazz-figures made and maintain their fortunes from the tech business. So really, everyone knows – whether they choose to think about it or not – that when these men present their most ubiquitous products – be it AI bots or online tools or social media apps – free of charge, that they can’t really be free. I’m not dramatic enough (or spiritual enough) to suggest we are selling our souls, but some kind of payment is being made. And even if those tech-lords never seem convincingly genius-like, you have to hand it to them – the 1980s may have been the consumer decade, but lonely 80s teenagers never confided their problems and insecurities in a Sony Walkman, or shared their most cherished dreams with a Rubik’s cube, and they never asked a Big Mac for dating advice.

 

some kind of loss

I remember when Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show was released, much of the publicity focussed on the idea that a relatively everyday scandal – the discovery in 1957-8 that a popular TV quiz show was rigged – marked the loss of the USA’s innocence. At the time, 20-year-old me could not have been more scornful. The idea that the innocence, whatever that meant, of 160+ million American citizens had somehow survived the relatively recent dropping of two atom bombs on civilians, the uncovering of the Holocaust, the filmed and widely publicised Nuremberg Trials, ongoing racial segregation and lynchings (Emmett Till, the last lynching victim recorded by the Tuskegee Institute – though not the last lynching, by a long way – was murdered aged 14 just three years earlier), the fighting of a war in Korea under the pretence of a ‘police action’ and the rise of and eventual disgust with McCarthyism; had survived all that, but that the scales then dropped from their eyes and the foundations of their way of life began to crumble when it turned out that the things they were offered as entertainment turned out to just be entertainment and not some kind of bastion of morality and fairness seemed laughable at best.

Quiz Show (1994)

I can still see my younger self’s point of view; it doesn’t take much consideration to realise that innocence, whether on a personal or a societal level, is a dangerous fetish. And innocence itself is less often a real state and more often an illusion or chimera – or just a point of view. It’s at best a slippery concept, whose opposite can be either guilt, corruption or just experience, none of which are precisely the same thing. The final verse of Philip Larkin’s 1964 poem MCMXIV about the outbreak of World War One half a century earlier, is justly famous and has a kind of intuitive truth to it:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin, ‘MCMXIV’, The Whitsun Weddings, Faber & Faber, 1964, p.28

enlistees in London at the outbreak of WW1 (Imperial War Museum)

Truth, because we know now (and Larkin knew then) what the young men lining up to enlist in the army in 1914 didn’t; that they were about to enter a modern world entirely different from the late Victorian one that they had grown up in. But illusion too, because the horrific brutality of WW1 was new only insofar as the people facing the onslaught of modern weaponry were white. There is the scale of it too; but though tanks, explosive shells and machine guns firing 500-600 rounds per minute created unprecedented levels of slaughter, the question of whether two sides using such weapons against each other is ‘worse’ than people armed with guns attacking people armed with spears or swords or bows and arrows is one that doesn’t seem worth answering. It’s probably not un-worse at least.

Even leaving aside the Imperialism of the WW1 combatants and the fact that they voluntarily signed up for it, the innocence of the Britain that the enlistees were queuing up to leave was dubious at best. The previous few years had been marked by the fight for women’s suffrage with the brutalities and indignities wilfully inflicted on suffragettes by the authorities, not to mention (the usual) grotesque levels of poverty and inequality; there is more than one reason that so many young men were keen to join the army.

Even on a smaller and more localised scale, early 20th century Britain was full of strangely archaic, Tintin-like episodes that also seem to have a quaint kind of innocence now which they definitely didn’t have at the time and wouldn’t have had if experienced first hand; Latvian anarchists, terrorism, gang violence, the Siege of Sidney Street. And these kinds of things were happening all over Europe: the First World War didn’t come out of nowhere.

In a famous riposte to George Orwell on the subject of weekly magazines for boys, Frank Richards, the author of the Billy Bunter series wrote,

Probably I am older than Mr Orwell: and I can tell him the world went very well then [in 1910]. It was not been improved by the Great War, the General Strike, the outbreak of sex-chatter, by make-up or lipstick, by the present discontents [World War Two], or by Mr Orwell’s thoughts upon the present discontents!”

(Frank Richards responds – Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1: An Age Like This (Penguin, 1970 p.532).

Fair enough, but when Frank Richards (real name Charles Hamilton) was 12 years old, the British Empire was at its height and Jack the Ripper was murdering prostitutes in London. Probably his parents were children during the period when Chartist protesters were being killed by the army, and their parents would have been alive during the period of Napoleonic Wars and the Peterloo Massacre. Which doesn’t make the First World War any less horrific, but you might as well say the sinking of the Titanic caused the loss of Britain’s innocence.

Advertisement for an account of the Peterloo Massacre

But I’m no better. Even though I wouldn’t use the phrase ‘loss of innocence,’ to me it seems like the world has never felt quite the same since 9/11. I’d be fooling myself if I said things were in any real sense better beforehand, and as with WW1, the events of that day didn’t come out of nowhere and it was as much a culmination as it was a beginning. But still, there’s a certain kind of low-level dread that emerged (in me at least) then and which, since then, always seems to be within easy reach.

That dread came to the fore again in 2004 when the photos of the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were released and then again in the early 2010s with the violent rise of the Islamic State and the series of filmed beheadings of westerners that appeared online and on the news, and the murder of Lee Rigby in London. But it’s not a feeling that’s exclusive to Middle East-related matters, and it recurs like a migraine; every white supremacist rally, every attack on a mosque or synagogue, every time the media normalises far-right politics, every new announcement of US government policy brings with it a hint of that particular combination of heavy misery and pit-of-the-stomach dread.

Thomas Hoepker’s notorious 2001 photo of nonchalant 9/11 witnesses

Were things ‘better’ before 9/11? It depends on what you mean and who you are. For me, I was a teenager living in a peaceful and relatively prosperous country, so my specific worries, even the ones that felt existentially soul-crushing at the time, were probably pretty trivial. And it wasn’t entirely a new sensation; I remember feeling apprehensive and angry in the run up to the Gulf War in 1990, and before every general election, but that anxiety didn’t really linger in my day to day teenage life.

echhh

The same year that Quiz Show was released I remember watching the unfolding of the story of Fred and Rosemary West’s murders on breakfast TV for several days in a row with a sense of outraged horror, but it for me at least it didn’t have the lasting, polluting effect of 9/11. I remember watching with actual disbelief (I think the only time I’ve experienced that emotion, apart from seeing 9/11 itself on the news) when breakfast TV broke the story of Princess Diana’s death and then with irritated disbelief in the days (or weeks?) that followed, at Britain’s reaction to it. Again, that was a different thing. In 1910, when the world ‘went very well,’ Paris flooded, the French government massacred protesters in Côte d’Ivoire, Albania revolted against Ottoman rule and Boutros Ghali was assassinated in Cairo, while in Britain King Edward VII died and George V was crowned, Dr Crippen murdered his wife and was caught and executed, 300 Suffragettes fought with police outside of Parliament and Captain Scott set off on the British Antarctic Expedition; but Frank Richards was a successful author who had established two very weekly papers for children for which he wrote humorous stories; probably life seemed pretty good.

This isn’t nostalgia, exactly. In middle age, when their time is poisoned by yet unforeseen anxieties, will the teenagers of today look back wistfully at a period when there were still Palestinian people living (however precariously) in Palestine, or when the weather was mostly hot at one predictable time of year and cold in another and think of it as a better world they once knew, or just a different one? Who knows. At the moment, just catching up with the news every morning feels more and more like doomscrolling and the headlines feel increasingly like “The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing.”

Around the time of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the internet was just beginning to be a normal presence in almost everybody’s home, long before it was something they carried in their pockets and their hands. Since then, everyone has access to everything and, in the words of British heavy metal stalwarts Saxon, innocence is no excuse. Or at least it’s a willed, deliberate choice. But maybe it always was. Is innocence anything to aspire to outside of a court case anyway? I don’t know.

A conversation from Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, but one that was recently removed from some American schools, presumably to preserve some kind of innocence, springs to mind;

“Many younger Germans have had it up to HERE with Holocaust stories. These things happened before they were even born. Why should THEY feel guilty?”

“Who am I to say? But a lot of the corporations that flourished in Nazi Germany are richer than ever. I dunno… Maybe EVERYONE has to feel guilty. EVERYONE! FOREVER!

Art Spiegelman: Maus A Survivor’s Tale (The Complete Maus, Penguin Books, 2003 p.202)

 

I went back to rockville

Between me thinking about writing something about what home and belonging means and actually starting to do it, it’s become a far more topical subject than I expected, which seems to be how these things go these days.

the outskirts of Neskaupstaður, Iceland

The initial impulse to write it came from several unconnected things; some photos I took in Iceland over a decade ago; the lyrics to the R.E.M. song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville;” a beautifully evocative description of a rundown railway station in a dusty, remote part of Austria-Hungary in the 1900s. That description felt especially poignant because Austria-Hungary is a country (and the Habsburg Empire an Empire) that no longer exists, but which must have felt permanent in its day and which people in the 1900s felt just as patriotic and loyal towards or just as ambivalent about as people now do towards the constituent parts of the United Kingdom or/and the UK itself. But all of that has retreated into the distance a little because as I write this, up and down the country – even in this little corner of rural Scotland – people are engaged in a protest of sorts. Unusually for a protest, it takes the form of doing something which has always been entirely acceptable to do and which no one has ever tried to discourage the protesters from doing; hanging up flags.

The seal matrix of Bishop William de Lamberton from the 1290s, the oldest extant physical use of the Saltire in Scotland

The flags that have made it onto the news – especially from the recent, ironically-named “Unite the Kingdom” right-wing rally in London, are mostly St George’s cross (the flag of England), interspersed with Union flags. In this village the flag fliers tend, naturally to instead display the Saltire/St Andrew’s cross (the flag of Scotland, reputedly the oldest national flag in Europe – which if its semi-mythical origins are correct actually predates the Kingdom of Scotland itself by a couple of centuries) and the Union flag.

Flags are, by design, simple and very easy to identify, but they are also kind of a blunt instrument when it comes to signalling. Other people in this area have been displaying the Saltire and the medieval Scottish flag (the Royal Banner; a rampant red lion on a yellow ground) with no Union flag. I presume this is some kind of anti-unionist/nationalist counter-protest but I may be wrong; to be sure I’d have to ask the flag fliers, and who wants to do that? Whatever else they are, national flags tend not to be especially inviting, particularly when displayed in their country of origin. Nearby I’ve also seen – in a more obvious counter-protest – people displaying Palestinian and Pride flags.

carved wooden ceiling boss of a unicorn carrying the Saltire from Linlithgow Palace, c.1617

It’s a regularly remarked-on (and ultimately meaningless) irony that the historical St George was a Turkish man of Palestinian descent, but less remarked on (though similarly meaningless in this context) that St Andrew, who the saltire represents, was born in what is modern day (Israel-occupied) Syria. Lions (though not red ones) are native to sub-Saharan Africa and India. And yet, for the people waving, wearing, hanging, painting or generally displaying the flags, these symbols of Syrian and Turkish-Palestinian saints and these African/Indian mammals (1 for Scotland, 3 for England, though confusingly the English ones were historically referred to as leopards, which scans less well for a football song lyric) are symbols, I presume, of home. And therefore the people displaying them for patriotic, political or intimidating purposes mostly don’t care what their origins are, which is fair enough. It’s my home too, but although I have no special feelings about the flags of Scotland or the UK, seeing them all over the place, rather than just on official buildings or big hotels is oddly alienating, just like seeing the stars and stripes on every other street on a trip to the USA was.

The flags of your nation, displayed in that nation, tell you two things; firstly, where you are – which you already know – and secondly, that somebody wants you to be very aware of where you are, which you still already know. Theoretically, people display flags for themselves and not for anybody else, but a flag by its nature is a signal and for most of the time, the person who flies it outside their home or paints it on the street or on some historical landmark, or puts a sticker on a bus shelter can’t see it, but anyone passing by can.

Because so many of the people involved in the current protests are xenophobic (not really derogatory; many of them are explicitly saying they are protesting against “migrants”. “I belong here,” is not a protest; and anyway nobody is disputing it. “You don’t belong here” is mostly what the protest is about) there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of symbols our flags are and what, beside dead saints, they represent. Obviously, flags themselves aren’t racist, or at least are only as racist as the people displaying them. There are possibly a few exceptions; most obviously, I feel like any Jewish or Romany person has the right to feel victimised if someone is displaying a black swastika in white circle on red ground; I wouldn’t think it was outlandishly sensitive if an African-American person felt offended by someone waving a Confederate flag at them. Still, it’s strange the extent to which seeing the flag of your country everywhere makes that country feel like a different place from the one you grew up in.

But home is a strange thing anyway and ‘feeling at home’ in the comfortable sense of being where you are supposed to be, in the place that it feels natural to be, isn’t universal; clearly the protesters don’t feel it or they wouldn’t be protesting.

Philip Larkin in 1943 by Bruce Montgomery, looking like he should be on a Smiths album cover

The poet Philip Larkin – often seen as a definitively (I refuse to use the word ‘quintessentially’) English figure and sometimes derided as a ‘Little Englander,’ made some interesting observations about home that demonstrate how one-dimensional that (otherwise not unfair) assessment of him is. In The Importance of Elsewhere (1955), he argues (well, it’s a poem, not an argument; anyway, he says) that feeling lonely and out of place is a normal, appropriate and even a comforting response to being in alien surroundings (specifically Belfast) – “Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,/Insisting so on difference, made me welcome.” The strangeness of the place itself “went/ To prove me separate, not unworkable.” On the other hand, feeling lonely and out of place in the place you come from and where you theoretically do belong does the opposite; and it possibly says unpleasant things about the place itself, too.

Larkin was right; for himself at least and therefore it’s not surprising to find that a slightly earlier poem (Places, Loved Ones, 1954) begins “No, I have never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground / Here I shall stay…..” A few years later, he obliquely questioned whether the idea of home is even desirable at all, since ‘belonging’ to anything can only ever be transitory – “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go” (Home is so Sad, 1958). Eventually and unexpectedly, he did find that place where he could say this is, etc, etc – which turned out to be Hull. He celebrated the city in a 1961 poem called Here – the title is surely a self-referential one, looking back to that fourth line of Places, Loved Ones, quoted above, Here is one of Larkin’s very few poems of belonging, but inevitably he celebrates the town for what would normally be considered its negative traits; inaccessibility, neglect and, if not actual unfriendliness, then at least a distant kind of reserve; “Here is unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” He really was the Morrissey of 20th century English poetry.

Coventry was where Larkin came from, but though he wrote about it several times, it was never in the sense of feeling at home there. But if “feeling at home” means some kind of existential peace and contentment, there’s no real reason why that you should have any particular connection with the place you’re originally from, unless you happened to have an idyllic childhood. Equally, there’s no special reason why where you currently live should be where you feel at home, unless you are contented there like, presumably, the angry people with their flags and paint. But if they really love their country they certainly hide it well, not just because of their anger, but also how they treat the place and the mess they leave behind; they really do protest too much.

Morrissey with the American singer Phranc in 1992 by the great Kevin Cummins. Moz really is an unlikely right-winger

I’m loath to mention Morrissey again but a short side note seems relevant. For all his apparently xenophobic Englishness, Morrissey doesn’t (in common with many xenophobic, wealthy ‘patriots’) love England enough to actually live there. But to be fair, he rarely claims to love it at all; Morrissey is, thankfully, far more Larkin than Farage. The question of his (unusually complex but now undeniable) right-leaning politics goes back a long way, but when in 1992 he released the album Your Arsenal and alarm bells rang in the NME offices at the title of the song “The National Front Disco“, those NME scribes did him a disservice. He’s not foolish or racist enough to write a song actually glorifying the NF, though the song is definitely and maybe deliberately an uncomfortable one. In the lyrics he puts his finger (sympathetically or otherwise; it’s impossible to say) on the mentality of the kind of people currently waving placards telling foreigners to get out of “are country” (wish I was making that up). “There’s a country, you don’t live there / But one day you would like to / And if you show them what you’re made of / Then you might do.” That is really the essence of the march that happened last week in London and the smaller versions of it across the UK, including, dismayingly, one in Falkirk (one likes to think Scotland is above that kind of thing but realistically nowhere is, people being what they are).

‘Home’ is only on the most mundane level the place where you live, and the less mundane ideas of home are far more mysterious and often very personal. Without wishing to delve much into etymology, ‘home’ is a concept which even in its basic form as a noun (The place where a person or animal dwells, as the OED slightly creepily puts it) includes meanings that I don’t think I was aware of; “figurative. With reference to the grave or one’s state after death. Frequently with preceding adjective; ‘long home‘.” Apparently ‘long home’ was a common usage in Old English – and if you don’t belong in your grave then where do you belong? The long home is where the heart is; which makes me think of the last line of Wuthering Heights – surely one of the most beautiful endings to any deeply unpleasant novel:

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847

And then there’s home as in ‘too close to home,’ ‘coming home to roost,’ ‘the Home Office’, a point being ‘driven home,’ ‘home truths,’ ‘Home Rule,’ ‘make yourself at home’ (I have vague memories of a comedian or comedy character introducing their act by saying something like ‘Make yourself at home. Unless you’re in a hotel in which case make yourself in a hotel.‘ Vic Reeves? Alan Partridge? No idea).

Relatedly, belonging is a strange, unpredictable and entirely personal sensation. Larkin seems not to have felt he belonged anywhere until he found somewhere suitably impersonal and forbidding. Morrissey seems to thrive as an eternal outsider in Los Angeles, though it’s hard to think of anyone who seems more like an embodiment of Manchester. Belonging (I don’t say this self-pityingly, I’m comfortable with it) isn’t a feeling I’ve felt especially often and when I have it’s been at random times and sometimes in unexpected and unlikely places. Just recently, out walking in the area where I live and where I mostly grew up, I had one aspect of belonging; the exact kind of weather I obscurely feel most at home in; mild, grey, windless, with a low, quilted-looking heavy sky that didn’t quite threaten rain and let no ray of sunshine through. I like muggy weather and have never yet met anyone else who does. It’s kind of the other side of Larkin’s The Importance of Elsewhere – if not feeling at home ‘at home’ makes you unworkable (as he puts it), maybe the conditions that you feel the most at home in equally say something, possibly something unflattering, about you? Enjoying blue skies and sunshine (which I do too, although less so) just seems more positive somehow.

Baudelaire looking effortlessly cool & French in 1862 by Félix Nadar

Clearly for the protesters, ‘belonging’ is as much about people – a homogenous group of people – as it is about place. That’s the opposite of the vague kind of belonging that I sometimes identify with, the kind of thing expressed (very romantically) by Charles Baudelaire when he writes about ‘the flâneur’ in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). “To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart of the world, and yet hidden from the world […] The spectator is a prince who rejoices everywhere in his incognito. … The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electrical energy. One might compare him, also, to a mirror, immense as that crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness which, with its every movement, conveys the multiplicity of life, and the grace in motion of every element of that life.” Well, I rarely feel as enthusiastic as that, and I generally don’t like being in a crowd with a specific purpose, even a benign one like the audience at a concert. But on the other hand, though I rarely feel at home anywhere, I never feel like my home has been stolen or invaded, and I don’t feel threatened because I see or hear people who are different from me. So that’s nice.

Xenophobia is kind of stranger than misanthropy, which is at least understandable, because human beings can be destructive and unpleasant like no other species. But although humanity has apparently infinite variety on the personal level, that variety, though it seems to terrify some people, is on every other level, extremely limited. However many names we choose to give this geographical (rather than political) area; the British Isles, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Northern Europe – the population is, -whichever newcomers may arrive, and wherever they arrive from – pretty homogenous, because the human race is pretty homogenous. I was interested to hear my vague gut feeling given scientific validity by the archaeologist Dr Helen Geake (on the Time Team podcast of 9th September this year.) In response to a question about the diversity of the population of Anglo-Saxon England (following the discovery of a skeleton with African ancestry in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery) she said, “I’m not wanting to say ethnically diverse, partly because […] there’s so little genetic variability between humans that I don’t think we have anything like ethnicities or races or whatever. I just don’t think that makes any sense when you look at the science. I think it’s more of a diversity of appearance and origin.” When you consider the inter-species variation between, say a lion (since I mentioned them before) and a housecat, or a chihuahua and a Saint Bernard, it’s clear that the gradations between human beings are far more subtle. And when it comes to people you feel an affinity with, you’re as likely to feel at home (that expression seems stranger the more you consider it) with someone you met by chance recently (or even met virtually online), as with someone you’ve known since you were a child. Interestingly (there’s a euphemism!) I read just this morning that a “Race Science Institute – ie debunked Nazi bullshit – funded by one of the world’s richest men is currently trying to be influential in UK politics.

mouldy football pitch by the fjord, Neskaupstaður, eastern Iceland, around 4.30 am

Randomly – although it’s the thing that made me think about writing all this in the first place – I don’t think I’ve ever had that ‘at home’ feeling more strongly than I did when walking in the outskirts of a small town in Iceland at 4.30 am one July, during a night where the ‘midnight sun’ felt more like perpetual dusk. Why should that be? I have no idea. The conditions were right I suppose – not unlike the flat grey day mentioned earlier. Iceland is very beautiful but although this stretch of road ran alongside a fjord at some points, it mostly wasn’t something so picturesque that you’d put it on a postcard. It featured details as apparently uninspiring (but weirdly loveable to me) as a mouldering football pitch and a school or some kind of municipal building. At one point there was a boat on a platform, which did give more of that sense of ‘elsewhere’. What did ‘at home’ feel like? You know it when you feel it I suppose – a kind of vaguely melancholy contentment that may partly have come from having had a few drinks plus 24 hours or so without sleep; it was comfortable and it didn’t feel like exhaustion.

that mildewed football pitch in more detail

If I tried to express that feeling to some of the protesters, quite possibly they’d say something like “If you like it so much why don’t you go and live there” (British people have a long history of telling people if they don’t like the country they can just leave, and yet they rarely feel like they themselves should leave if they don’t like the country). It occurs to me now that when racists, xenophobes or (popular current euphemism) “concerned citizens” scream at people to go back where they came from, when they wrap themselves in the flags of their own country and wield their national identity at people, what they are doing may partly be asserting how they feel about their home, but what they really want is for everyone they oppose to not feel at home. And when, at the best of times, ‘feeling at home’ is a fleeting and precarious emotion, that’s kind of a shitty thing to do.

a plea for comparative rudeness

I had already started writing this, but about half an hour ago the point I want to make was violently reinforced for me. I was waiting at the counter in a café, a radio was on in the background. A senior political figure was being interviewed – not a member of the current government but an elderly-sounding member of the House of Lords who was a veteran of the diplomatic service, I didn’t catch his name. Before I demonise him too much, I should point out that, even if he did represent the British government, he would have no real power over the situations he was invited on the air to discuss. In a way, that actually makes it worse, because it means he is in a position where he can openly speak his mind and presumably, this was his mind.

George Grosz – The Pillars of Society (1926)

He was asked about two situations that are more similar than is often portrayed in the media, though one is significantly bloodier. That is, two invasions which are really attempted annexations or land-grabs by political leaders with ideological agendas. In the political discourse on the left you hear a lot about how differently the invasions of Ukraine and Palestine are being treated by the political and media establishments (and to a degree the British public), but although there is truth in that, to be fair to the interviewee, he barely differentiated between the two.

When asked about the latest meeting between the Presidents of the United States of America and Russia to discuss the fate of Ukraine – just writing that highlights the essential absurdity of it – the interviewee was reasonable, measured, but oddly wry. While he was clearly concerned about Ukraine and the plight of the Ukrainian people, the general tenor of his response was a kind of verbal shrug. The dryly amused ‘what-can-you-do-with-these-guys?’ tone characterises the way that many of the more serious figures in the British political and media spheres engage with the current administration of the USA and, to a lesser extent (because there’s no need to pretend that he’s an ally) with the government of Vladimir Putin. Moving on to Israel/Palestine/Gaza there was, similarly, some concern about the people currently being attacked, plus the expected bit of ‘what about Hamas?’ waffle, which I don’t think was disingenuous in this case, as it so often is. Because from the point of view of a career diplomat, there is a question about what happens with Hamas after the slaughter stops. It’s a problem that’s been made a much worse and much more unavoidable by Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-publicised funding of Hamas which essentially neutralised any chance of a moderate Palestinian government – but regardless of how they got there, it’s not a situation that will suddenly be resolved, whichever way (to put it coldly) the invasion of Gaza works out.

But when asked about Netanyahu himself – and it’s worth remembering what his reputation and status were before October 7th 2023 – and the current Israeli policy, that shrug returned; ‘what-can-you-do-with-these-guys?’ Well, it’s doubtful that a British diplomat, or even a member of the British government can do much to influence someone like Netanyahu – at least not while he has the backing of the US government – but one thing they can do and should do with any rogue politician from any country is to stop acting as if behaving in a consistent, predictable, true-to-character way is the same thing as behaving in an acceptable way. Given that the UN does have rules, guidelines and standards of conduct, acting as though the leaders of some of its nations are unfathomable forces of nature rather than political figures who make conscious policy choices is not helpful, either to the world or to the UN itself, which is only as effective as world leaders make it.

John Heartfield – The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man asks for Big Gifts (1932) A photomontage made while Hitler was wooing the 1930s equivalent of big tech companies to fund his ideological aims

It would of course be nice if our political/media figures were bluntly critical of despots and would-be authoritarians – but if not, they could at least stop being indulgent towards them or nice about them. There are people who think that diplomacy is, by its nature damaging and wrong, but though it certainly can be, I believe in it, when used appropriately. It’s hard not to believe in it, if like me you grew up during the final phases of the Cold War. That decades of aggressive brinkmanship and paranoia should have ended peacefully with virtually no bloodshed (at least between the major players in the cold war) was a barely-credible relief at the time and, given the mental state and emotional temperature of world leaders in the 21st century, it now seems almost miraculous. That resolution really is a testament to the leaders, and particularly Mikhail Gorbachev, whose sober unflappability wasn’t shared by many politicians then, and doesn’t even seem to be a desired trait among the political class now. There are many times and many situations where sober, reflective diplomacy are desirable.

Conversely, when faced with the actions of hysterical, erratic, devious and capricious idiots or their cynical, opportunistic enablers and hangers-on, or coolly calculating monomaniacs, the kind of reasonable, statesmanlike professional on the radio this morning is at an immediate disadvantage. Acting according to the norms of your profession with people who have no respect for those norms is pointless at best. Even then, that doesn’t negate the whole profession of diplomacy; when meeting with powerful, impetuous morons, being calm and professional is a given and, for many reasons it’s the right thing to do. But to go further than that – to act like the terrified child who wants to appease the bully, or the substitute teacher who wants the scary kids to think they are cool – is a mistake that politicians, unless they happen to be in the final twilight of their careers, will live to regret.

Wyndham Lewis’s 1934 portrait of the highly principled left-wing diplomat Sir Stafford Cripps, originally one of a pair of portraits, the other (now lost) being the leader of the British Union of Fascists Sir Oswald Moseley

Wherever there are tyrants, authoritarians and powerful reactionaries, there is never any shortage of people willing – even against their own interests – to defend and promote them. But we are currently at a strange point in history where these people are so brazen and shamelessly open about their own actions that media commentators and politicians – occasionally with no special vested interest (but often with a financial one) – who do see the shame in those actions are willing to make claims on the behalf of their idols which go beyond any statement made by the perpetrators themselves. I would expect this to be a right-wing problem, because I’m a prejudiced left-winger, but it seems to be more of an ideological problem than one that is specific to either end of the spectrum.

And so, even though on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin himself gave a long speech on Russian TV, where he ranted at length about historical grievances, denied Ukraine’s right to exist at all and talked about restoring the old Russian Empire, never once mentioning NATO, British commentators on both the left and right have repeatedly attempted to justify Putin’s actions with reference to the perceived threat to Russia’s borders posed by NATO expansionism and so forth. It doesn’t seem that Putin has asked them to legitimise his actions – he doesn’t seem to think his actions need justifying at all, beyond the simple fact that he thinks Russia should own Ukraine – so why embarrass yourself by making claims on his behalf?

Similarly, members of the Israeli government have been blunt about their desire to remove the Palestinian people from Gaza one way or another. Those of us with memories going back a few months may even remember discussion, involving the US government, about turning the area into a resort. There are photos online of members of the IDF standing in ruins holding the banners of real estate companies, there are videos shared by IDF fighters where they laugh as they rake through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women in their deserted houses, where they joke about using children for target practice.  As the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has discussed, it’s not like these kinds of debates on what to do with Palestine are new or unusual. So why would any western politician or media spokesperson feel the need to frame the situation as a war between two equal states, or talk endlessly about the hostages that the Israeli government seems not to care about?

In lieu of holding Netanyahu’s administration to the standards expected of every other member of the UN, we are instead constantly asked what about Hamas? Well, no doubt they have their own gloating social media presence, glorifying their inhuman acts, but they aren’t an everyday part of normal, Western social media and however much the Israeli government likes to frame all criticism of themselves as antisemitic Hamas propaganda, I haven’t so far seen a single mainstream politician online or on TV criticise Israeli policy without also condemning Hamas and calling for the freeing of those Israeli hostages. That those hostages are important and should be prioritised should go without saying, just as the fact that almost everyone living in a Western democracy is fundamentally opposed to a repressive theocratic organisation like Hamas should go without saying; and yet it has to be stated again and again because of the way the events – in reality it can barely be categorised as a conflict, let alone a war – are being presented.

So, yes, there is definitely a time for diplomacy – it’s both necessary and desirable when negotiating the different cultures, belief systems, nationalities and identities that make up the modern world. And while it would be nice – a relief even – to hear a senior British politician not just commenting on or blandly ‘condemning’ the words or actions of any rogue regime, whether our supposed allies or not, nor just or urging them to change their ways – but launching a scathing tirade against them, taking legal action in international courts and cutting all unnecessary ties with them, nobody can realistically expect that, It’s just not how politics work. But, as our successive governments have managed to coexist for decades alongside ideologically opposed countries like China or North Korea without the constant threat of war and without feeling the need to openly pander to and flatter their leaders, then it shouldn’t be too much to ask that they do the same with governments whose values are not supposed to be so far removed from our own.

Speaking as a citizen of the UK, if the core values of our country really are what we say they are – democracy, tolerance, compassion and all that – then at some point, coming up against the opposite, diplomacy should only go so far.

————————————————————————–

Postscript: on the day I started writing the final version of this, I heard that radio interview. This morning, as I finished it I saw three news stories that all made this mild call for bluntness seem worse than ineffectual: in one, the Israeli government had targeted and wiped out an entire Al Jazeera news crew. Typically, the UK news talks about ‘collateral damage,’ but IDF spokespeople have talked proudly about removing “Hamas terrorist” Anas al-Sharif, who neither they nor anybody else believes was a Hamas terrorist, because he demonstrably wasn’t.

In the USA, the President, while deflecting questions (again) about the files relating to a dead paedophile that was once a friend of his, is talking openly about forcibly removing city administrations to ‘re-establish law and order’ in areas which seemed to have had no special law and order issues until he created or declared them.

Finally, I was watching footage of an old blind man, a woman in her eighties and an elderly military veteran being arrested by the police for holding placards at a peaceful protest while, elsewhere in the UK the police impassively watched a mob of people screaming racist abuse at a hotel where refugees from war zones are being housed, and stood casually by as the leader of an admittedly moribund political party danced around and made Nazi salutes. There is no single correct response to these events, but empty diplomacy from the country’s leaders has nothing to offer in any of them.

 

a victory over ourselves – versions of 1984 in 2025

Remembering 1984 as someone who was a child then, I find that although the clocks didn’t strike thirteen as in the novel, the year – as encapsulated by two specific and very different but not unconnected childhood memories, as we’ll see – is almost as alien nowadays as Orwell’s Airstrip One. Of course, I know far more now about both 1984 and Nineteen Eighty-Four than I did at the time, but I was aware – thanks mostly I think to John Craven’s Newsround – of the big, defining events of the year.

Surely the greatest ever cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Stuart Hughes, for the 1990 Heinemann New Windmills edition

I knew, for instance about the Miners’ Strike and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, but they didn’t have anything like the same impact on me personally as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I remember Zola Budd tripping or whatever it was at the Olympics and Prince Harry being born, but they weren’t as important to me as Strontium Dog or Judge Dredd. Even Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood made a bigger impression on me than most of the big news events of the year, despite the fact that I didn’t like it. My favourite TV show that year was probably Grange Hill – and here we go.

Grange Hill – essentially a kids’ soap opera set in a big comprehensive high school in London – ran for 30 years and I recently discovered that the era of it that I remember most fondly – the series’ that ran from 1983-6 – is available on YouTube. When I eventually went to high school later in the 80s, my first impression of the school was that it was just like Grange Hill, and now I find that despite the silliness and melodrama, Grange Hill still reflects the reality, the look and the texture of my high school experience in the 80s with surprising accuracy.

Grange Hill”s 5th formers in 1984 (back: Stewpot & Glenroy, front: Suzanne & Mr McGuffy)

But anyway, watching old Grange Hill episodes out of nostalgia, I was struck by how good it seems in the context of the 2020s, despite the obvious shortcomings of being made for children. Check out this scene from series seven, episode five, written by Margaret Simpson and which aired in January of 1984. Among typical story arcs about headlice and bullying, the Fifth form class (17 year olds getting towards the end of their time at school) get the opportunity to attend a mock UN conference with representatives from other schools. In a discussion about that, the following exchange occurs between Mr McGuffy (Fraser Cains) and his pupils Suzanne Ross (Susan Tully), Christopher “Stewpot” Stewart (Mark Burdis), Claire Scott (Paula-Ann Bland) and Glenroy (seemingly of no last name) (Steven Woodcock). It’s worth noting that this was the year before Live Aid.

Suzanne: [re. the UN]:"It's about as effective as the school council."

Mr McGuffy: "Oh well I wouldn't quite say that. The UN does some excellent work - UNESCO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Peacekeeping force..."   [...]

Claire: "What's the conference gonna be about?"


Mr McGuffy: "The world food problem. There was a real UN conference on this topic ten years ago..”

Glenroy: "Didn't solve much then, did they? Millions of people still starvin'"

Stewpot: ”Yeah that's cos they ain't got no political clout to do anything about it though, ain't it"

Glenroy: ”Naw man, it's because the rich countries keep them that way”

Suzanne: “The only chance a poor country's got is if it's got something we want”

Glenroy: “That's right - they got something the West wants and they'd better watch out because the West starts to mess with their government."

Mr McGuffy: "Well it's clear from what you've all said so far that you're interested in the sort of issues that will be discussed that weekend..."
Suzanne & Claire, 1984

It’s not an exaggeration to say that that is a more mature political discussion than is often heard on Question Time in 2025. Interestingly, it’s not an argument between left and right as such, but between standard, humanitarian and more radical left-wing viewpoints. Needless to say, if it was presented on a TV show that’s popular with ten year-olds nowadays, a certain demographic would be foaming at the mouth about the BBC indoctrinating the young with “wokeness.” But as a kid this sort of discussion didn’t at all mar my enjoyment of the show, Naturally there’s also a lot of comedic stuff in the series about stink bombs and money-making schemes, but one of the reasons that Grange Hill remained popular (and watchable for 8 year-olds and 15 year-olds alike) for so many years was that it refused to talk down to its audience.

The way the writers tackled the obvious big themes – racism, sexism, parents getting divorced, bullying, gangs, sex education etc – are impressive despite being quite broad, especially when the younger pupils are the focus of the storyline, but what makes a bigger impression on me now is the background to it all. It’s a little sad – though true to Thatcher’s Britain – to see through all this period the older pupils’ low-level fretting about unemployment and whether it’s worth being in school at all.

And maybe they were right. In 1984, when Suzanne and Stewpot were 17, a fellow Londoner who could, in a parallel universe, have been in the year above them at Grange Hill was the 18-year-old model Samantha Fox. That year, she was The Sun newspaper’s “Page 3 Girl of the Year.” She had debuted as a topless model for the paper aged 16, which is far more mind-boggling to a nostalgic middle-aged viewer of Grange Hill than it would have been to me at the time. Presumably, some parts of the anti-woke lobby would not mind Sam’s modelling as much as they would mind the Grange Hill kids’ political awareness, but who knows?

Sam Fox in (approximately) Grange Hill mode c.1986, not sure who took it

Naturally, the intended audience for Page 3 wasn’t Primary School children – but everybody knew who Sam Fox was and in the pre-internet, 4-channel TV world of 80s Britain, she had a level of fame far beyond that of any porn star 40 years later (arguments about whether or not Page 3 was porn are brain-numbingly stupid, so I won’t go there; and anyway, I don’t use porn as a derogatory term).

Whatever; Sam (she’ll always be “Sam” to people who grew up in the 80s) and her Page 3 peers made occasional accidental appearances in the classroom, to general hilarity, when the class was spreading old newspapers on our desks to prepare for art classes. It was also pretty standard then to see the “Page Three Stunnas” (as I think The Sun put it) blowing around the playground or covering a fish supper. It was nothing like growing up with the internet, but in its own way the 80s was an era of gratuitous nudity.

a nice Yugoslav edition of 1984 from 1984

Meanwhile, on Page Three of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith – who is, shockingly, a few years younger than I am now – is trying to look back on his own childhood to discern whether things were always as they are now:

“But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) P.3 – New Windmill edition, 1990

By contrast, some of the roots of 2025 are plain to see in 1984, despite the revolution of the internet that happened halfway between then and now. As the opposing poles of the Grange Hill kids and The Sun demonstrate, there were already tensions in British society which would never so far be resolved, but they would come to some kind of semi-conclusion at the end of the Thatcher era when when ‘Political Correctness,’ the chimerical predecessor of the equally chimerical ‘Woke’ began to work in its unpredictable (but I think mostly positive) ways.

Most obviously, Page 3 became ever more controversial and was toned down (no nipples) and then vanished from the tabloids altogether for a while (though in the 90s the appearance of “lads’ mags” which mainstreamed soft porn made the death of Page 3 kind of a pyrrhic victory.) More complicatedly, the kind of confrontational storylines about topics like racism that happened in kids shows in the 80s became a little more squeamish, to the point where (for entirely understandable reasons) racist bullies on kids’ shows would rarely use actual racist language and then barely appear at all, replaced by positivity in the shape of more inclusive casting and writing. Nice and I think genuinely positive in a way, but it began to look pretty quaint quite quickly as soon as the internet with its love of edgy polarisation and tolerance of any kind of extremism really took off.

a very 1984-looking edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1984

So, that was part of the 1984 that I remember; what Orwell would have made of any of it I don’t know. It wasn’t his nineteen eighty-four, which might have pleased him. For me, it all looks kind of extreme and problematic, but also refreshingly straightforward, though I’m sure I only think so because I was a child then and lived through it unscathed. It’s all very Gen-X isn’t it?

notes in may

May-appropriate art: William Roberts – Bank Holiday in the Park (1923)

This is just what it says*: I intend to post something at least once a month but in lieu of any finished articles, here are various notes I made during May that never got developed into anything more substantial, some of which will probably seem mysterious if read later, since I don’t think I’ll bother to explain the context.

*tragically, that title is a kind of pun though

 

 

“Let them eat space travel”

***

Publishing light-hearted articles that debate about whether AI deserves “human rights,” while not covering the erosion of actual human rights because you don’t want to be ‘political’ is political.

***

The pressure to make politicians and news agencies use the word “genocide” to describe the Israeli government’s attacks on Gaza is understandable (because, by the normal definition of the word as it’s used, they are committing genocide: the crime of intentionally destroying part or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, by killing people or by other methods Cambridge Dictionary) but it’s also kind of self defeating. The focus on the word that represents their actions, rather than the actions themselves creates an instant response which, given the nature of genocide, should be horror, but is more often dismissal; “Genocide? Oh, you’re one of those ‘Free Palestine’ people.” A more important question to ask politicians and the media is possibly, if what is being done to the people of Gaza isn’t genocide, is it therefore somehow okay? Would any non-psychopath presented with an estimated death toll as high as 62,000 Palestinian people since October 7th 2023 think “oh well, it’s a lot but at least it isn’t genocide“? The word is important for moral, legal and factual reasons, but at this point it seems, crazy though it is, more likely to distract from the reality that we are seeing every day, than to really bring it home.

***

Arthur Wright – May Day in Town (1974)

Even if the climate emergency is allowed to escalate with no serious attempt to alter it for another decade (which would be, or just as likely, will be, disastrous), it would still be infinitely easier to prevent the Earth from becoming an uninhabitable and Mars-like wasteland than it would to make Mars into a habitable and Earth-like home – especially for any meaningful number of people. Those who are most determined that colonising Mars is a good idea are essentially not serious people, or at least are not serious about the future of mankind. ‘Conquering new worlds’ is just a fun, romantic and escapist idea that appeals more than looking after the world we have; it’s a typical expression of the political right’s obsession with the welfare of imaginary future people as opposed to the welfare of actual human beings who exist.

Just MIT confirming that the problem with solar energy is there’s not enough profit in it

***

It’s becoming ever more obvious that the UK has a media problem. For a decade now, a particular politician (don’t even want to type his name) with a consistent track record of being unpopular and not winning elections – whose party (or parties) so far haven’t come third or even fourth in a general election – has been foisted on the public to the point where he’s an inescapable presence in British culture. He’s on TV, in newspapers and online on all of the major news outlets, every day, far more than the leader of the official opposition, let alone the leaders of the third and fourth largest parties in the country.

By this point, this obsession has seriously started to shape public discourse. It’s fuelled essentially by fact that the small group of very wealthy people in charge of the traditional media are his peers – they support him and his views because they belong to the same millionaire class and milieu. This was the group that made Brexit happen, portraying it as a movement of ‘the people’ when the real impetus for it was the fact that the EU was closing tax loopholes for the millionaire class.

We are now in the Stalinist phase of Brexit (a funny idea, since its adherents are virulently anti-communist) where the only people who have benefitted from Brexit and continue to benefit from it are that ruling class (who still don’t want to pay taxes). As ‘the people’ inevitably fall out of love with Brexit, since it’s damaged the economy, made foreign holidays more difficult and expensive and basically failed to provide any material gains, let alone a raise in the standard of living in the UK, the Brexit ideology becomes stronger and more corrosive, emotive and unhinged. Basically, the media can’t make people satisfied with having less. but it can try to make them angry, and to direct their anger.

The media’s obsession with the views of the man who has become the figurehead for Brexit distracts from the actual views of the public, but naturally it affects them too. Not surprisingly, constant positive coverage of the man and his colleagues has made he and his party more successful – but, after a decade not much more successful, really, given how inescapable his presence has become. But every little increase in popularity is fed into the circular narrative and framed as an unstoppable rise, as if that rise wasn’t essentially being created by those reporting on it. But really, as with Brexit itself, it’s mostly about money.

All of which raises questions; firstly and most importantly, what can be done about it? The readership of even the most popular newspapers isn’t especially big now, but those newspapers are also major presences on social media and on TV. Most importantly (and quite bizarrely, when you think about it) the major TV broadcasters in the UK still look to newspapers to gauge the political zeitgeist, rather than the other way around (or, rather than both TV and newspapers looking to the internet, which would be more accurate but probably not better). The obvious response is to boycott the newspapers and/or TV, but for as long as Parliament still looks to the press barons to find out the mood of the public, that can only remove the governing of the country even further from the lives and opinions of the people.

A more positive answer would be to promote alternative politics through what media is available; but again that can only work up to a point, because if politicians are still in thrall to the same old newspapers and broadcasters then, again, Parliament becomes even more of a closed-off, cannibalistic circuit, isolated from popular opinion except when a general election comes around.

Complaining to one’s MP is probably the most sensible thing to do, but unless they happen to be one of the five MPs currently representing the media’s chosen party in Parliament, then they almost certainly agree with you and don’t know what to do about it either. And yet surely it can’t be an insurmountable problem?

A less important, but more heart-breaking question is a hypothetical one; what would the country be like now if the media was obsessed with a party with a progressive political agenda (the Green Party for instance, are actually more popular than ever, and despite a few cranks and weirdos, mostly a positive force)? What if, instead of spending a decade spreading intolerance, division, hatred, racism etc so that a few millionaire businessmen could pay less tax, they had been had been pushing ideas of equality and environmentalism into the culture? Money is at the heart of it all really, and this frustrating situation actually led to me taking the unusual (for me) and pointless step of writing an email to the Prime Minister that he will never have read, part of which said;

Surely one of the most effective way to neutralise the poisonous rhetoric of the far right is not to pursue its populist talking points, but to materially improve the lives of the people of the UK?  In the last general election – less than a year ago – a vote for Labour was for most people a vote for change, not for more of the same. If Britain wanted divisive rhetoric, attacking migrants and minorities, there were far more obvious people to vote for.

William Collins – May Day (1811 – 12)

So anyway; hopefully June is better.

bathroom blade runners – who polices the toilet police?

The prejudice against transgender people in the UK has, after years of furious lobbying, reached the level of a moral panic, and thanks to the pressure of the lobbyists (and perhaps even more, the money behind them) transphobia is now essentially written into British law. It feels like bad form to quote oneself, but four years ago I wrote “The unstated aim [of a moral panic] is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy … And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.” That’s true here. The stated aim of the pressure groups – and now, the legislation – is to protect women, ostensibly from male violence, but not only does the law not do that, it actually reinforces the status quo, where crimes against women are often overlooked and always inadequately policed.

It’s a policy that doesn’t try to benefit anybody, not even those who have rabidly pursued it – but, indirectly it benefits the very group it purports to punish; male abusers of women.

Claude Cahun in 1928 – “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me”

At its core there’s a fundamental irony embedded into the moral panic about trans people. The heart of the issue is that there are people who simply don’t want trans people – primarily but not only, trans women – to exist at all. But in trying to wish trans people out of existence, what the transphobes are really doing is insisting on their presence, heightening it (and simultaneously using trans people as a way of defining their own “normal” identities too) and of course punishing them for their continued existence.

The idea of trans people just existing and being accepted as the people they are, obviously isn’t any kind of threat to society. But then, choosing an invisible ‘enemy within’ has always been the (essentially deflecting) agenda of paranoid reactionaries and is such a familiar trope that there’s really no need to list the atrocities these kinds of policies have led to throughout history. Under normal circumstances, the trans women and trans men vilified by activists and politicians are just women and men; the woman who works in your office, the man at the supermarket checkout, a teacher, a librarian, a lifeguard; you perhaps. But when looked at through the eyes of the paranoid bigot, that very unobtrusiveness becomes sinister; someone ‘posing as’ a lifeguard or ‘infiltrating’ a school to pursue their malevolent agenda.

The worst thing about a law that denies the identity of a group of people is, naturally, the impact it has on those people – but it also does nothing to address the problems it’s disingenuously put forward to solve. Male violence against women, wherever it happens, is a serious problem in British society. And yet at every stage – from early displays of ‘light-hearted’ misogyny and harassment among children and teenagers to actual physical assault – society and the law tend not to take it seriously, with the result that crimes are under-reported and under-prosecuted and punishments are often laughably mild. At the same time though, harassment and assault et cetera already are criminal offenses, and they don’t become any more criminal, or any better policed, by persecuting a minority group. In fact, the opposite is true, since the focus on trans women as potential aggressors takes the focus away from the people who are overwhelmingly, the perpetrators of violence against women – cisgender men. It’s essentially misogynistic and threatens the very safety of the women it pretends to protect.

the late cis-gender, heterosexual musician Vinnie Chas in 1989 – which toilet should Vinnie have used?

It’s perhaps important to point out that the Supreme Court’s ruling states that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex at birth, so that only those born female are recognized as women under the Equality Act. It’s simplistic (human biology isn’t) and it doesn’t mention bathrooms at all. But the toilet is central to the ideology of ‘gender critical’ activists. Policing who uses which bathroom is a bizarre preoccupation of the anti-trans lobby, but it’s indicative of the generally perverse and in one sense unserious nature of their obsession with trans people. That being so, public toilets have ended up being a key battleground in the debate around trans rights in Britain.

The question of how ‘correct’ toilet usage is enforced throws up the immediate problem of who polices it and what the criteria are for using a gender-specific toilet. It’s not enough to say, as the Supreme Court ruling implies, that women’s bathrooms are for those who are biologically female from birth, because in many cases there’s no obvious way, short of an invasive genital inspection, of working that out – and there shouldn’t be. In any kind of free and democratic society, the way someone presents themselves, the way they dress, or the hairstyle and aesthetic they adopt – in short, their identity – is nobody else’s business unless they explicitly make it so, and setting up some kind of ‘toilet police’ can only increase the harassment of women, both trans and cis.

The kind of concern I expressed above often leads to accusations of hysteria, but just this week, the prominent anti-trans campaigner Maya Forstater explicitly said this: “Not being allowed into the mens by rule does not mean you have the right to go into the ladies. That may seem unfair, but these are life choices people make. If you make extreme efforts to look like a man, don’t be surprised if you are denied entrance to the ladies.” It’s hard to know where to start with this venomous nonsense. But for a start, what does “extreme efforts to look like a man” entail? What is ‘looking like a man’ anyway? Which man? These fools come across like Mary Whitehouse wringing her hands over Boy George’s appearance on Top of the Pops 40 years ago.

The Beautiful Boy (2003) by genuine TERF Germaine Greer; but is this boy manly enough to use the Gents?

For some women, regardless of their gender at birth or their sexual orientation, just having a short haircut or choosing to wear trousers is enough for some people to accuse them of looking like men, regardless of what their intentions were when choosing a haircut or getting dressed that morning. The idea of not being ‘allowed’ into one or other toilet surely also entails some kind of enforcement. There are so few public toilets in the UK with human attendants that presumably, existing bathroom staff can’t expected to take on the duty of somehow determining who is an acceptable ‘customer’, but someone will have to, if it’s not just empty rhetoric – which it may well be. It also creates a genuine possibility of toilet vigilantism, which sounds hilarious, until you really think about it. And what qualifies someone to be a toilet police officer or bathroom blade runner anyway? Is there a recognition test they need to pass? Will there be gender-determining questionnaires or apps, or inspections?

The British cis-gender, 100% female artist ‘Gluck’ (Hannah Gluckstein) a century ago in 1925 – which toilet should she have used?

Presumably until now there have been no laws dictating who can use which bathroom and yet, men (including trans men) tend to use the men’s and women (including trans women) tend to use the women’s, without any resulting fuss. Somebody who lurks in any bathroom with the intention of assaulting someone is already breaking, or planning to break the law and nothing about this legislation seems likely to deter those few people determined enough to do such a thing. What seems far more likely is that people innocently needing to use public toilets – and it’s not something most people do except in the direst need – will face some kind of additional unpleasantness, especially if their physique and appearance isn’t one that fits within a standard, traditional gender norm.

TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is a useful shorthand term for people like Forstater and JK Rowling, but it also gives them a validity that they don’t deserve, because difficult to see any kind of feminism, either radical or orthodox, in a policy that requires women to conform to a specific kind of approved appearance to be accepted in female-only spaces. I would like to be able to substitute the term ‘right-wingers’ for TERFs, but in fact this whole issue reinforces my growing feeling that the ‘left’ and ‘right’ binary is no longer useful when looking at political and cultural issues. I am definitely left-wing, but then so, one would hope, is the Communist Party of Britain, which publicly supports the Supreme Court’s ruling. But I shouldn’t be surprised, because the mistake I – and many people, it seems – make is assuming that communism is left-wing. If I really examine what I mean by ‘left-wing’ I find that the correct word would be the much abused and misunderstood one, ‘liberal.’ And, as no less than V.I. Lenin went to great pains to explain in 1920’s charmingly-titled pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, there’s nothing inherently liberal or democratic about communism. It’s easy to forget that, because left vs. right feels so logical, but history proves the point – if left-wing meant what people think it means, and communism was left-wing, then the Hitler-Stalin Pact would have been completely unthinkable. Whereas, looking at both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR it seems not only logical but inevitable.

Uncle Vlad’s toxic 1920 pamphlet

Hitler and Stalin’s ideologies diverged in many, quite fundamental ways, but at heart, both were about power – who has it, and who is subject to it and can be coerced by it. And as citizens of the kind of society that wants to police who uses its toilets, we might want to consider that.

But even though an attack on the trans community is an attack on the freedom and individuality all of of us, and even with all of the serious issues and implications involved, from the corruptibility of British politicians to the possible dystopian outcomes for our society, the most important point by far is to remember that this is happening now, and that the explicit target is a small community that includes some of the UK’s most vulnerable people. It’s evil and it’s indefensible, but it’s not irreversible – so those who object should make their voices heard.

of comfort no man speak

Everybody has their comforts, but after trying to analyse some of my own to see why they should be comforting I’ve pretty much come up with nothing, or at least nothing really to add to what I wrote a few years ago; “comforting because it can be a relief to have one’s brain stimulated by something other than worrying about external events.” But that has nothing to do with what it is that makes the specific things comforting. Like many people, I have a small group of books and films and TV shows and so on that I can read or watch or listen to at almost any time, without having to be in the mood for them, and which I would classify as ‘comforting.’ They aren’t necessarily my favourite things, and they definitely weren’t all designed to give comfort, but obscurely they do. But what does that mean or signify? I’ve already said I don’t know, so it’s not exactly a cliffhanger of a question, but let’s see how I got here at least.

I’ve rewritten this part so many times: but in a way that’s apposite. I started writing it at the beginning of a new year, while wars continued to rage in Sudan and Ukraine and something even less noble than a war continued to unfold in Gaza, and as the world prepared for an only partly precedented new, oligarchical (I think at this point that’s the least I can call it) US government. Writing this now, just a few months later, events have unfolded somewhat worse than might have been expected. Those wars still continue and despite signs to the contrary, the situation in Gaza seems if anything bleaker than before. That US administration began the year by talking about taking territory from what had been allies, supporting neo-Nazi and similar political groups across the world, celebrating high profile sex offenders and violent criminals while pretending to care about the victims of sex offenders and violent criminals, and has gone downhill from there.

In the original draft of this article I predicted that this Presidential term would be an even more farcical horrorshow (not in the Clockwork Orange/Nadsat sense, although Alex and his Droogs might well enjoy this bit of the 2020s; I suppose what I mean is ‘horror show’) than the same president’s previous one, and since it already feels like the longest presidency of my lifetime I guess I was right. So, between the news and the way it never stops coming (hard to remember, but pre-internet ‘the news’ genuinely wasn’t so relentless or inescapable, although events presumably happened at the same rate) it’s important to find comfort somewhere. The obvious, big caveat is that one has to be in a somewhat privileged position to be able to find comfort in the first place. There are people all over the world – including here in the UK – who can only find it, if at all, in things like prayer or philosophy; but regardless, not being so dragged down by current events that you can’t function is kind of important however privileged you are, and even those who find the whole idea of ‘self-love’ inimical have to find comfort somewhere.

But where? And anyway, what does comfort even mean? Well, everyone knows what it means, but though as a word it seems fluffy and soft (Comfort fabric softener, the American word “comforter” referring to a quilt), it actually comes from the Latin “com-fortis” meaning something like “forceful strength” – but let’s not get bogged down in etymology again.

But wherever you find it, the effect of comfort has a mysterious relationship to the things that actually offer us support or soothe our grief and mental distress. Which is not obvious; normally if you desire a specific reaction (laughter, fear, excitement) you turn to a particular source. If you want to laugh, you turn to something funny, which is obviously subjective but never mind. Sticking to books, because I can – for me lots of things would work, if I want to be amused, Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell, Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books and, less obviously, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson always raise a smile or a laugh. Conversely, if you want to be scared or disgusted (in itself a strange and obscure desire, but a common one), you’d probably turn to horror, let’s say HP Lovecraft, Stephen King’s IT or, less generic but not so different, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. But as you might have guessed if you’ve read anything else on this website, I’d probably list all of those books among my ‘comfort reads.’

not my comfort reads

But whatever I am reading, I’m not alone; people want ‘comfort reads’ and indeed there is a kind of comfort industry these days. Over the years it’s developed from poetry anthologies and books of inspirational quotes to more twee versions of the same thing. I think of books of the Chicken Soup for the Soul kind (I don’t think I made that up; if I recall my mother owned a little book of that title, full of ‘words of wisdom’ and comforting quotes) as a 90s phenomenon, but that might be wrong. But at some point that evolved into the more widespread ‘mindfulness’ industry (colouring books, crochet, apps, etc). Marketing-wise there have been phenomena like hygge (as far as I’ve seen books of the Chicken Soup type, but with more crossover into other areas, as with mindfulness) and, in Scotland at least, hygge rebranded, aggravatingly, as ‘coorie.’ In this context ‘coorie’ is a similar concept to ‘hygge’ but that’s not really how I’ve been used to hearing the word used through my life, so something like ‘A Little Book of Coorie‘ just doesn’t sound right. But maybe a book of hygge doesn’t either, if you grew up with that word?

People take comfort in pretty much anything that distracts them, so often the best kind of comfort is being active; walking, running, working or eating, and I understand that; nothing keeps you in the moment or prevents brooding like focusing on what you’re doing. But, unless you’re in a warzone or something, it’s when you aren’t busy that the world seems the most oppressive, and while running may keep you occupied, which can be comforting, it isn’t ‘comfortable’ (for me) in the usual sense of the word. Personally, the things I do for comfort are most likely to be the same things I write about most often, because I like them; reading, listening to music, watching films or TV.

Comfort reading, comfort viewing, comfort listening are all familiar ideas, and at first I assumed that the core of what makes them comforting must be their familiarity. And familiarity presumably does have a role to play – I probably wouldn’t turn to a book I knew nothing about for comfort, though I might read something new by an author I already like. Familiarity, though it might be – thinking of my own comfort reads – the only essential ingredient for something to qualify as comforting, is in itself a neutral quality at best and definitely not automatically comforting. But even when things are comforting, does that mean they have anything in common with each other, other that the circular fact of their comforting quality? Okay, it’s getting very annoying writing (and reading) the word comforting now.

Many of the books that I’d call my all-time favourites don’t pass the comfort test; that is, I have to be in the mood for them. I love how diverse and stimulating books like Dawn Ades’ Writings on Art and Anti-Art and Harold Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object are, but although I can dip into them at almost any time, reading an article isn’t the same as reading a book. There are not many novels I like better than The Revenge for Love or The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis. They are funny and clever and mean-spirited in a way that I love and I’ve read them several times and will probably read them again; but I never turn to Lewis for comfort. He would probably be glad not to be a ‘comfort read,’ that has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with the content of his books. Some of my ‘comfort reads’ are obvious, and in analysing them I can come up with a list of plausible points that make them comforting, but others less so.

random selection of comfort reads

In that obvious category are books I read when I was young, but that I can still happily read as an adult. There is an element of nostalgia in that I’m sure, and nostalgia is a complicated kind of comfort. I first read The Lord of the Rings in my early teens but, as I’ve written elsewhere, I had previously had it read to me as a child, so I feel like I’ve always known it. Obviously that is comforting in itself, but there’s also the fact that it is an escapist fantasy; magical and ultimately uplifting, albeit in a bittersweet way. The same goes for my favourites of Michael Moorcock’s heroic fantasy series. I read the Corum, Hawkmoon and Elric series’ (and various other bits of the Eternal Champion cycle) in my teens and though Moorcock is almost entirely different from Tolkien, the same factors (escapist fantasy, heroic, magical etc) apply.

Even the Robert Westall books I read and loved as a kid, though they (The Watch House, The Scarecrows, The Devil on the Road, The Wind Eye, the Machine Gunners, Fathom Five) are often horrific, have the comforting quality that anything has if you loved it when you were 11. Not that the books stay the same; as an adult they are, surprisingly, just as creepy as I remembered, but I also notice things I didn’t notice then. Something too mild to be called misogyny, but a little uncomfortable nonetheless and, more impressively, characters that I loved and identified with now seem like horrible little brats, which I think is actually quite clever. But that sense of identification, even with a horrible little brat, has a kind of comfort in it, possibly.

The same thing happens with (mentioned in too many other things on this site) IT. A genuinely nasty horror novel about a shapeshifting alien that pretends to be a clown and kills and eats children doesn’t at first glance seem like it should be comforting. But if you read it when you were thirteen and identified with the kids rather than the monster, why wouldn’t it be? Having all kinds of horrible adventures with your friends is quite appealing as a child and having them vicariously via a book is the next best thing, or actually a better or at least less perilous one.

But those are books I read during or before adolescence and so the comforting quality comes to them naturally, or so it seems. The same might be true of my favourite Shakespeare plays, which I first read during probably the most intensely unhappy part of my adolescence – but in a weird, counterintuitive way, that adds to the sense of nostalgia.

Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books are kind of in a category of their own. When I read the first one, Adrian was 13 and I would have been 11. And then, I read the second a year or so later, but the others just randomly through the years. I’m not sure I was even aware of them when they were first published, but the ones where Adrian is an adult are just as funny but also significantly more painful. It’s a strange thing to read about the adult life of a character you “knew” when you were both unhappy children. Although she had a huge amount of acclaim and success during her life, I’m still not sure Townsend gets quite the credit she’s due for making Adrian Mole a real person. Laughing at a nerdy teenager’s difficult adolescence and his cancer treatment as a still-unhappy middle-aged adult is a real imaginative and empathic achievement. Still; the comfort there could be in the familiar, not just the character but the world he inhabits. Adrian is, reading him as an adult (and as he becomes an adult) surprisingly nuanced; even though he’s uptight and conservative and in a way a little Englander and terminally unreliable as a teenager and loses none of those traits as an adult, you somehow know that you can count on him not to be a Nazi or misogynist, no small thing in this day and age.

But if Frodo and Elric and Adrian Mole are characters who I knew from childhood or adolescence, what about A Clockwork Orange, which I first read and immediately loved in my early 20s and which, despite the (complicatedly) happy ending could hardly be called uplifting? Or The Catcher in the Rye, which again I didn’t read until my 20s and have been glad ever since that I didn’t “do” it at school as so many people did. Those books have a lot in common with Adrian Mole, in the sense that they are first-person narratives by troubled teenagers. Not that Alex is “troubled” in the Adrian/Holden Caulfield sense. But maybe it’s that sense of a ‘voice’ that’s comforting? If so, what does that say about the fact that Crash by JG Ballard or worse, American Psycho is also a comfort read for me?

I read both of those novels in my 20s too, and immediately liked them, though not in the same way as The Catcher in the Rye. To this day, when I read that book, part of me responds to it in the identifying sense; that part of me will probably always feel like Holden Caulfield, even though I didn’t do the things he did or worry about ‘phonies’ as a teenager. I loved Crash from the first time I read the opening paragraphs but although there must be some sense of identification (it immediately felt like one of ‘my’ books) and although I have a lot of affection for Ballard as he comes across in interviews, I don’t find myself reflected in the text, thankfully. Same (even more thankfully) with American Psycho – Patrick Bateman is an engaging, very annoying narrator (more Holden than Alex, interestingly) and I find that as with Alex in A Clockwork Orange his voice feels oddly effortless for me to read. Patrick isn’t as nice(!) or as funny or clever as Alex, but still, there’s something about his neurotic observations and hilariously tedious lists that’s – I don’t know, not soothing to read, exactly, but easy to read. Or something. Hmm.

But if Alex, Adrian, Holden and Patrick feel real, what about actual real people? I didn’t read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice until I was in my early 30s, but it quickly became a book that I can pick up and enjoy it at any time. And yet, though there is a kind of overall narrative arc and even a sort of happy ending, that isn’t really the main appeal; and in this case it isn’t familiarity either. It’s episodic and easy to dip into (Jon Ronson’s books have that too and so do George Orwell’s Essays and Journalism and Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters, which is another comfort read from my 20s) The culture of Japan that Adelstein documents as a young reporter has an alien kind of melancholy that is somehow hugely appealing even when it’s tragic. Another true (or at least fact-based) comfort read, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I only read in my 40s after meaning to read it ever since high school, has no business whatsoever being comforting. So why is it? I’m not getting any closer to an answer.

Predictability presumably has a role to play; as mentioned above, I wouldn’t read a book for the first time as ‘a comfort read’ and even though I said I might read a familiar author that way, it suddenly occurs to me that that is only half true. I would read Stephen King for comfort, but I can think of at least two of his books where the comfort has been undone because the story went off in a direction that I didn’t want it to. That should be a positive thing; predictability, even in genre fiction which is by definition generic to some extent, is the enemy of readability and the last thing you want is to lose interest in a thriller. I’ve never been able to enjoy whodunnit type thrillers for some reason; my mother loved them and they – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Sue Grafton, even Dick Francis, were her comfort reads. Maybe they are too close to puzzles for my taste? Not sure.

So to summarise; well-loved stories? Sometimes comforting. Identifiable-with characters? Sometimes comforting. Authorial voices? This may be the only unifying factor in all the books I’ve listed and yet it still seems a nebulous kind of trait and Robert Westall has little in common with Sue Townsend or Bret Easton Ellis, or (etc, etc). So instead of an actual conclusion, I’ll end with a funny, sad and comforting quote from a very silly, funny but in some ways comforting book; Harry Harrison’s 1965 satirical farce Bill, the Galactic Hero. The book is in lots of ways horrific; Bill, an innocent farm boy, finds himself swept up into the space corps and a series of ridiculous and perilous adventures. The ending of the book is both funny and very bitter, but rewinding to an earlier scene where Bill has lost his left arm in combat but had a new one – a right arm, which belonged to his best friend, grafted on:

He wished he could talk to some of his old buddies, then remembered that they were all dead and his spirits dropped further. He tried to cheer himself up but could think of nothing to be cheery about until he discovered that he could shake hands with himself. This made him feel a little better. He lay back on the pillows and shook hands with himself until he fell asleep.

Harry Harrison, Bill the Galactic Hero, p.62 (Victor Gollancz, 1965)

a dream itself is but a shadow

Sigmund Freud c.1885, with Freudian facial hair

Whether you agree with Sigmund Freud that “the dream proves to be the first of a series of abnormal psychic formations” or that “one who cannot explain the origin of the dream pictures will strive in vain to understand [the] phobias, the obsessive and delusional ideas and likewise their therapeutic importance,” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913 translated by A.A. Brill) or not, dreams are a regular feature of human life regardless of culture, language, age etc, and so can’t be entirely without significance. I could go on about dreams at length like I did about honey in this previous post but I won’t – they are too pervasive in popular culture – just everywhere in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture; in books, and plays and art and films and songs (Dreams they complicate/complement my life, as Michael Stipe wrote). Dreams are everywhere, so that’s enough of that.

But what about daydreams? If dreams arrive uninvited from the unconscious or subconscious mind, then surely the things we think about, or dwell on, more-or-less deliberately are even more important? “Dwell on” is an interesting phrase – to dwell is “to live in a place or in a particular way” BUT the word ‘dwell’ also has a fascinating history that makes it seem like exactly the right word in this situation. From the Old English dwellan “to lead into error, deceive, mislead,” from Proto-Germanic dwaljana “to delay, hesitate” and related to dwelian “to be led into error, go wrong in belief or judgment” etc, etc, according to etymonline.com : I’ll put the whole of this in a footnote* because I think it’s fascinating. But the key point is that at some time in the medieval period its largely negative connotations disappeared and to “delay” become modified to mean “to stay.” But I like to think the old meaning of the word lingers in the subtext like dreams in the subconscious.

I could say something similar about my own use of the word “deliberately” above (“Things we dwell on … deliberately”) and even more so the phrase I nearly used instead, which was “on purpose” – but then this would become a ridiculously long and convoluted piece of writing, so that’s enough etymology for now.

The human mind is a powerful thing, even for those of us who don’t believe in telekinesis or remote viewing or ‘psychic powers’ in the explicitly paranormal sense. After all, your mind controls everything you think and nearly everything you do, to the point where separating the mind from the body, as western culture tends to do, becomes almost untenable. The euphemism “unresponsive wakefulness syndrome” has gained some traction in recent years because the dysphemism (had to look that word up, thought there must be an opposite) “persistent vegetative state” is something we fear and because of that fear, the loss of self, or as we perceive it, of humanity offends us. As fiction frequently demonstrates, despite the evidence it’s preferable for most of us to believe that even in that “vegetative” state, dreams of some kind must continue; because as human beings we are fully our mind in a way that we are only occasionally fully our body. One of the fears connected to the loss of self is that we lose the ability to choose what to think about, which is intriguing because that takes us again into the (might as well use the pompous word) realm of dreams.

The Danish actress Asta Nielsen as Hamlet in 1921

My favourite Shakespeare quote is the last line from this scene in Hamlet (Act 2 Scene 2)

Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and
dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” seems to deny any possibility of objective morality, but its logic is undeniable. After all, you or I may think that [insert one of thousands of examples from current politics and world events] is ‘wrong’, but if [individual in position of power] doesn’t think so, and does the wrong thing, even if all of the worst possible outcomes stem from it, the most you can say is that you, and people who agree with you, think it was wrong. Hitler almost certainly believed as he went to the grave that he was a martyr who had failed in his grand plan only because of the betrayal and duplicity of others. I think that’s wrong, you hopefully think that’s wrong, even “history” (currently) thinks that’s wrong, but none of that matters to Hitler in his bunker in 1945, any more than Rosencrantz & Guildenstern finding Denmark to be a nice place if only their old friend Hamlet could regain his usual good humour makes any difference to Hamlet.

Anyway, onto daydreams or reveries (the latter is a nice word that feels a bit pretentious to say). The dictionary definitions of these words are mostly positive – a series of pleasant thoughts about something you would prefer to be doing or something you would like to achieve in the future. A state of abstracted musing. A loose or irregular train of thought occurring in musing or mediation; deep musing. There’s a school of thought that has been around for a long time but seems even more prevalent today, which values daydreams as not just ‘idle thoughts’, but as affirmations. Anyone who has tried to change their life through hypnosis or various kinds of therapy will find that daydreaming and visualising are supposed to be important aspects of your journey to a better you. In a way all of these self-help gurus, lifestyle coaches and therapists are saying the same thing; as Oscar Hammerstein put it, “You got to have a dream, If you don’t have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true?” But is making your dreams, even your daydreams, come true necessarily a good thing?

patriotic vapour trails spotted this winter

I seem to remember once reading that if you can focus all of your attention on something for 15 seconds you’ll remember it forever. Whether or not that’s true, every time I see a vapour trail in an otherwise blue sky, I have the same combination of thought and image* which must date from the age of 9 or 10 or so. I realise that people telling you their dreams is boring (or so people say, I never find it to be so), but you don’t have to keep reading.

I can see the fluffy, white trail against the hot, pale blue sky (it’s summer, the sun is incandescent and there are no clouds) and as my eye follows it from its fraying, fading tail to its source, I can see the nose cone of the ‘plane’ glinting in the sun, black or red and metallic. It looks slow, leisurely even, but the object is travelling at hundreds of miles an hour. I know there’s no pilot inside that warm, clean shell (I can imagine feeling its heat, like putting your hand on the bonnet or roof of a car parked in direct sunshine; only there are rivets studding the surface of this machine). I’m shading my eyes with my hand, watching its somehow benign-looking progress, but I know that it’s on its way to the nearby airforce base and that other missiles are simultaneously flying towards other bases and major cities and soon, everything I can see and feel will be vapourised and cease to exist.

I had this daydream many times as a child, I have no idea how long it lasted but I can remember the clarity of it and its metallic taste incredibly clearly. Did I want it to happen? Definitely not. Was I scared? No, although I remember an almost physical sense of shaking it off afterwards. Did I think it would happen? It’s hard to remember; maybe – but I wouldn’t have been alone in that if so. But anyway, the interesting point to me is that this wasn’t a dream that required sleep or the surrender of the conscious mind to the unconscious – I was presumably doing it “on purpose”, although what that purpose was I have no idea; nothing very nice anyway.

Childhood hero: Charles M Schulz’s Charlie Brown

Probably most of us carry around a few daydreams with us, most I’m sure far more pleasant than that one. I can remember a few from my adolescence that were almost tangible then and still feel that way now (I would swear that I can remember what a particular person’s cheek felt like against my fingertips though I definitely didn’t ever touch it. As my childhood role model, Charlie Brown would say, “Augh!” Charles M. Schulz clearly knew about these things and still felt them vividly as an adult (as, more problematically, did Egon Schiele, subject of my previous article; but let’s not go into that).

Most of the daydreams we keep with us into adulthood (or create in adulthood) are probably nicer baggage to carry around than the vapour trail one, unless you’re one of those people who fantasises about smashing people’s heads in with an iron bar. Iron feels right, but why? Who has such a thing as an iron bar? Wouldn’t brass do the job just as well and lead even better? Violent daydreams are almost inevitable during the teenage/school years, but they are hopefully fleeting.

But thinking about your daydreams is odd. They are, like your thoughts and dreams, yours and nobody else’s, but where they come from in their detail seems almost as obscure as night-dreams. Perhaps Freud would know. I have a couple of daydreams that have been lurking around for decades, but while I don’t believe in telekinesis or even the current obsession with affirmations and ‘manifesting,’ apparently I must be a bit superstitious; because if I wrote them down they might not come true innit?

 

*Old English dwellan “to lead into error, deceive, mislead,” related to dwelian “to be led into error, go wrong in belief or judgment,” from Proto-Germanic *dwaljana “to delay, hesitate,” *dwelana “go astray” (source also of Old Norse dvelja “to retard, delay,” Danish dvæle “to linger, dwell,” Swedish dväljas “to dwell, reside;” Middle Dutch dwellen “to stun, perplex;” Old High German twellen “to hinder, delay”) from PIE *dhwel-, extended form of root *dheu- (1) “dust, cloud, vapor, smoke” (also forming words with the related notions of “defective perception or wits”).

The apparent sense evolution in Middle English was through “to procrastinate, delay, be tardy in coming” (late 12c.), to “linger, remain, stay, sojourn,” to “make a home, abide as a permanent resident” (mid-14c.). From late 14c. as “remain (in a certain condition or status),” as in phrase dwell upon “keep the attention fixed on.” Related: Dwelled; dwelt (for which see went); dwells.

It had a noun form in Old English, gedweola “error, heresy, madness.” Also compare Middle English dwale “deception, trickery,” from Old English dwala or from a Scandinavian cognate (such as Danish dvale “trance, stupor, stupefaction”); dwale survived into late Middle English as “a sleeping potion, narcotic drink, deadly nightshade.”

* there is another thought: “first you look so strong/then you fade away” but it’s a line from a song and came later and failed to replace the earlier thought