Time at the Bar

"Last orders!"

Dirty Martinis all round. Tonight they're on the house. 

Many of you will be familiar with this bar and its literary-themed conversations, but for those who've joined us for the venue's final evening, here's a short history of the opening and the closing of The Neon Sapphire.

Thinking needs to stop for writing to begin. Thinking is for editing.

Coffee aids the production of documents, but alcohol arrests thought and turns any old biro into The Red Pen. The state of mind in which my cursive print races itself to the end of every line, and I marvel at the results while working my way through a bottle of Bulleit, is a virtual lounge of cool blue light I prefer to any manifest bar. It's a twenty four-hour licensed venue named The Neon Sapphire, and I've been as likely to be confronted with challenges to my choices here as I was to be congratulated for them by peers. There are no straw men to be set up and knocked aside in a venue such as this, host as it has been to literary Titans. In here you stand your ground when you have evidence for your opinion, or else you shut up and listen with humility to those who know better; you take notes and allow expert testimonies to change you in ways you didn't want, didn't believe you could be, but find that you're happy with when they do.

I discovered this writers' venue and its iridescent signwork only when I decided that it was time to try writing about writing, and learning very quickly that this pursuit becomes easier when you're drinking and writing about writing. @TheNeonSapphire became a neat social media handle because I wanted this phase in my Red-Shoed tango with the Printed Word to involve and be challenged by other people slave to the siren song of the blank page. The pieces I produced during this period (October 2017 to June 2018) took the form of blog posts whose links were offered to the world on Twitter, and the subject of each essay was chosen in no order and by no discipline other than to write about whatever novel, author, point of orthography or grammar, inspiration, or issue with self-publishing and self-promotion fascinated or bothered me at the time.

Sadly, but for the very flattering and very brief exchanges with Glenn Albrecht, Richard King, Eric Idle, and with Margarita Pracatan (sharing our admiration of Clive James), very few of the people who followed me during this period (a maximum of only around 1400 in early 2018, reduced to 870 at the time of writing as my Twitter presence became jaded) chose to engage in agreement or debate with my on-line musings. This was certainly due to my poor judgement since I always hoped that conversation would be instigated on Twitter and then move on to occur in The Neon Sapphire itself, commodiously hosted by Blogger where my essays were presented, rather than via Tweets. My interests, and the literary world they view in awe, are too expansive to be expressed or summarised in 140 characters or less, which of course is the whole point of Twitter, and I suppose which is what appeals to its more committed users.

The project might have kept me interested a little longer if it had received a little more engagement, even if it had been only literary-minded trolls who replied to my posts with the kind of self-righteous rage for which social media allows an outlet. “Chekov's Gun? A libtard leftist like you would've banned it! Fuck off back to the #EULiberalElite! #2ndAmendment!”

And it was just this kind of mindless invective that began to invade and dominate the more thoughtful and respectful debate at The Neon Sapphire. Simplistic prejudice expressed as inviolable, jack-booted “fact” from both ends of the political spectrum wishes only to trample conversation, not nurture or learn from it. Every tweet I read containing the phrase “I'm not racist but...” or “Let that sink in,” or some virture-signalling parable involving a 4-year-old child spouting crystalline emetic judgement, further proved to me that, while it's easy to avoid engagement with this toxic form, it's impossible to ignore it. Despite following people who describe creative pursuits in their Twitter bio, my tweet feed seemed constantly filled with shouty fools whose view of the political world is populated only by either “Nazis!” or “Communists!” I'm sure that these people are an on-line minority as they are in the off-line world, but they certainly seem louder than everyone else, and my cheerfully inebriated discussion with an Australian professor about ecological neologisms suddenly seemed timid, if not irrelevant, when held alongside the capitalised banalities of thugs.

Of course, discussion of this issue would itself have been an appropriate subject for an essay penned at the bar of The Neon Sapphire, but it would have felt like watching the medium begin to eat itself and then choke on the bitterness. No, I prefer to accept the advent of this change in on-line climate as my cue to close the doors of the venue, drink a final Dirty Martini with regulars such as yourself, reflect on the time we've enjoyed holding forth at this very bar, pretentiously summarise the whole period as A Literary Phase, and then preserve the place in the condition of its all-too-brief heyday.

So I have produced a collection called Notes from The Neon Sapphire, (link below) and you won't be surprised when I tell you that it contains every Note from The Neon Sapphire, while our glasses contain inspiration and enthusiasm for whatever we entertain next.

Here's to your very good health. 

"Time at the bar!" 

 M.C. Netley Marsh, August 2020

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08GG2SX3P/

Clive James

When the student is ready, we've heard it said, the master will appear.

A reasonable response might be to ask, But what if that master is an omniscient polymath, and the wide-eyed acolyte is paralysed by the fear of never matching up?

Perfection is no inspiration at all.

When the master I didn't realise I was ready for appeared in 1989, conjuring himself from within the pages of his Unreliable Memoirs like an aphoristic djinn, his effect on me was an urge to snap every pen and pencil in my bedsit and go outside to beat up some nerds. I had enjoyed scribbling my thoughts since I'd been old enough to do so. At the age of 16 I had even begun to wonder if I might become good at it. But how could an uneducated teenage labourer hope to acquire a little skill with the English language when it was clearly too late? There was none to spare: Clive James had acquired it all.

The confidence to take one tentative step into his realm returned only when I realised that Clive James the poet, the essayist, the critic, the journalist, the novelist, all round prose stylist and insatiable cultural omnivore was also the same tubby, balding Clive James with a talpine squint seen on television in the 1980s and 90s, usually taking the piss out of Japanese people as they were lowered into vats of cockroaches. My master was human after all; or he was at least adept at appearing as such, which, for this insecure apprentice, was just encouragement enough.


No, Clive James never was a teacher at Millbrook Secondary School in Southampton. Nonetheless, he has been teaching anyone who cares to read and learn ever since the 1970s. He was there for me when I left school and then my childhood home, which had offered selected works from a few fields of study, to enter the world beyond, which offered everything. Clive James presented informed reinterpretation of the little I thought I knew, followed by introductions to entirely new cultural realms. A not particularly clever child, but always an intensely curious one, I found my early introduction to full-time unskilled work a good reason to spend my free hours filling in the blanks. Yet in reference sections of the library, in the History and Classics sections of bookshops, and in cafes where you went for a coffee rather than a breakfast of fried pig, I was a working-class immigrant. So I knew I had found the Virgil to guide me through this world of big words, and even bigger thoughts, when I discovered the first volume of autobiography by a pathfinder: a man who had turned the perspective of working-class immigrant into an entertaining media persona and a “mandarin yet demotic” literary style.

Reading James's writing is effortless. Writing about James's writing is extremely difficult. This is the most difficult subject I've ever attempted. Even to commit to it seems like an arrogant suggestion that my own powers of critique could be worthy of his. They are not. But it is a self-contradiction to describe someone as inspirational while moaning that they make you want to raise your game. I hope that my descriptive abilities are at least equal to my own thoughts and feelings regarding the effect that Clive James has had on me because, for thirty years, he has been teaching me how I might go about expressing both.

Attempting to share appreciation of my hero's work with friends or colleagues has proven frustrating for all concerned. James himself has written repeatedly about the “velvet shackles of a reputation”. For the graduate of both Sydney and Cambridge Universities to become the writer and host of an extremely popular TV chat show, and a weekend programme that offered footage of Japanese gameshow contestants being tortured in ways that even my maternal grandfather (who faced Bushido-era demons in Burma) could not have dreamed up, was to risk his already enviable reputation as a man of letters. Sadly, very few devotees of Clive James on Television knew that he had such a potent reputation to dilute. This remains true, despite the craftsmanship and cultural insights on show in his popular travel programmes. As I remember the Postcard documentaries, they seemed to offer the antidote to the standard Wicker's World format of televised travelogues, illuminating and rebranding places in the world that had previously seemed dark and dangerous, but which suddenly seemed inviting after some eloquent appreciation and gentle ridicule by Clive James.

That people recently asked “Who?” when I talked about reading his translation of The Divine Comedy, followed up with, “I remember only the Australian Clive James who danced with Kylie on telly,” did not surprise me. Despite his indefatigable decades of poetry, journalism and criticism, it was James's televisual output that made him a household name. Having your own show on TV remains the statement of greatest achievement in popular esteem, though it might not seem so if your brain is as big as Clive James's, which Clive James's happens to be. He cheerfully admits to wanting it both ways, but it seems to me that his grace of movement in varying cultural depths is simply something else about the man to admire. To express scholarly insight into areas of artistic, historical and political interest considered difficult by many, and do so in a conversational prose, all the while applying the same intellect to an entertainment format which, at it's very best, should look as though it requires very little wit, and provoke applause from people who extol the virtue of possessing none, is a rare achievement indeed.

The common voice discussing uncommon subjects is an exceptionally strong handhold for the newcomer seeking a reassuring grip on scary new subjects. Throw in wry humour, memorable aperçus, and a failure by the author to exclude his own eyebrow-waggling ego, and he pulls off the trick of reassuring readers who lack a classical education – or, in fact, any formal learning beyond GCSE or A-Level – that tweed-clad stuffiness is not the only way of discussing serious subjects.

To my knowledge, Clive James has avoided the question of reconciliation between perceptions of popular and 'highbrow' culture by pretending that there never was a rift to begin with. As he records in May Week Was in June, "Croce had made me feel better about being unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between high art and popular art... [They] were united to the extent that they were inspired. Within the unity conferred by inspiration, all categories were illusory." If the erstwhile Flash of Lightning was able to develop an articulate appreciation of Florentine sculptors, then clearly there is something universally relatable within culture at every altitude of brow that speaks directly to us as human beings, not only as dukes or dunny men, and which does not require the intercession of St. Catz.


James achieves this with a consistency of style in all aspects of his oeuvre. The wit and somehow self-effacing arrogance are ever present. When writing on subjects less serious than the lethal tyrannies of the 20^th Century, James's printed ego allows him to relate to the smouldering charisma, athleticism and sexual prowess of movie stars and sporting legends. He could have been either or both of those things, but, you know, he didn't wanna. And so, having levelled the playing field between himself and the god-like focus of his essay, James is at liberty to express with distilled brevity and addictive wit what other critics fail to communicate with endless pages of dry description. His opening sentence is usually a 'Welcome' mat on the way into a subject, settling us into a stance of comfortable ease as we contemplate the next line, leaving us all the more surprised when James pulls the rug out from beneath our feet at end of the paragraph, bringing us to the floor either suffocating with laughter at one of his comical similes evoking the previous description, or else prostrate in shock at an incisive and invariably quotable summation of his argument.

 

There never was much to the assumption that a sentence is only ever read diachronically from left to right with never a backward glance: the eye doesn't work that way and neither does prose. But there is still something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets to the end of it, should be intelligible by the time he does, and that if he has been forced to begin again he has been hoodwinked into helping the writer do the writing. Readers of Gibbon don't just help: they join a chain gang, and the chain gang is in a salt mine, and the salt mine is reached after a long trip by galley, during which they are never excused the feel of the oar or the snap of the lash.

–Cultural Amnesia, P.265

And James is never ignorant of the comic possibilities of placing the higher register in juxtaposition with the vernacular.

The dunny man, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his tragedy, had not yet risen to his feet. Needless to say, the contents of the pan had been fully divulged. All the stuff had come out.

–Unreliable Memoirs, P.48

 

James's prose still tends towards the aphoristic when discussing more serious subjects, though the end-of-paragraph zingers leave the reader reeling rather than laughing, and his on-page persona mutates from the humorous showman brightening cheerier texts into a comforting authority of conviction. The man has done his homework, so he will not weaken the force of his argument by suggesting that maybe, possibly, this is what someone might have been thinking when they acted as they did. No, he will assert that "Hitler needed no telling that there were a lot of brilliant Jews from whom German-speaking culture had gained lustre. That was what he was afraid of: of a bacillus being called clever, and of the phosphorescence of decay being hailed as illumination."

It is this self-assurance for which James seems most often criticised, and self-deluding arrogance certainly is the comedy catalyst for each of his setbacks throughout his memoirs. Since he can't stifle his ego, he flaunts it. But the word ego is so frequently treated as a pejorative that it seems necessary to repeat that the discursive tool of stamping each page so indelibly with this persona is exactly that: a stylistic device. The man away from pen and paper may well be a narcissist, but he is too deliberate a writer to include anything in his work that is not being employed to get his reader on side, or to illustrate a point. And anyone who knows James's work well enough to criticise him for the number of words he employs talking about himself should not need reminding that he has used many, many more words detailing his thoroughly qualified appreciation of other people.


Though passionate on every subject, James's work contains an ever-fruitful seam of advocacy for the defence of humanism, liberal democracy, and simultaneous admiration for anyone who has ever spoken publicly against the totalitarian regime in which they lived (and were executed. His Cultural Amnesia is dedicated to the memory of Sophie Scholl.) He names and acclaims 20^th Century masters of language such as Karl Kraus, George Orwell, Albert Camus, and others who were usually the first to identify the true intentions of demagogues and future tyrants by decoding their speeches. It is Clive James's great fear that the experiences and wisdom of people who were silenced by having their brains stamped out by jackboots will be forgotten, allowing us to make the same mistakes that darkened the 20^th Century make the 21^st Century darker still.

And this fear is expressed no more eloquently than in his Hilter's Unwitting Exculpator, an endlessly compelling and still relevant review of Daniel J. Goldhagan's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996, Alfred A.Knopf). The text is a masterclass in essay construction, bearing as it does the combined loads of its weighty subject, James's unbounded knowledge, a devastating yet civilised refutation of Goldhagan's thesis, and jaw-dropping examples of the music the English language can achieve when conducted by a maestro.

Reviewing James's Cultural Amnesia, Christopher Hitchens described it as “an account of how an educator has himself been self-educated”. To raise James' autodidacticism as praise, or even at all, doesn't seem to be saying very much, unless we believe that people learn everything they know only during their years of formal education. Syllabi are the jumping off points for learning: nobody achieves a first-class degree by quoting lecturers back at themselves. (James admits that he treated the syllabus at Cambridge as an indication of what he shouldn't be reading.) Hitchens' compliment must be in the breadth of James's knowledge, since self-education is so often sweetened into unpalatability by cherry-picking. Which is just as well considering how high James sets the bar for his peers, and therefore for himself: “Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic always: if your judgement doesn't bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn't start.” And “A good critic knows about movies," James wrote, "because he knows about the world.”

Of course, it might be suggested that James's canon represents a handy bluffer's guide. If we read what he's writing then we need not read what he's reviewing – except that James's critiques are simply too effusive to be anything other than an incentive to read everything.


Clive James was diagnosed with leukemia in April 2011. In June 2012 he described himself as “near the end”. In 2015 he upgraded his condition to “embarrassed” because he was still alive. As I type this sentence on the 6^th May 2018, I believe that alive-but-embarrassed-about-it may continue to be the state of things for my ailing Virgil, which I am happy about, though I lament the reduction in the volume of his output. In the past few years he has produced a weekly column entitled “Reports of my Death...” for The Guardian, and a volume of essays reviewing the DVD boxsets he has binge-watched whilst ill. But my hope of seeing a sixth volume of his memoirs is fading, and I know we'll never see another collection of essays to rival The Meaning of Recognition or Even As We Speak, which is why I have been keen to compose these lines before we learn that his TV-viewing days have come to an end. Clive James once wrote Requiem, a piece devoted to his grief following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I found it unreadable. I don't doubt the sincerity of the emotion that inspired it – indeed, James's bleak mood must have been the reason for such a poorly judged piece – but I am keen to avoid making a similar mistake. Sentimentality spoils any attempt at serious appreciation. But since it was Clive James's literary enthusiasm that ignited, and has so generously fuelled, my own, it will be entirely sentimental feelings that I experience on the day I see his obituary, which is why I will end now with a final expression of gratitude for my mentor.
Clive James has lived, appreciated and written with an intensity that will not be contained by the span his of years. His legacy will be to provide us all with reading for life.

Considering this, and acknowledging the influence he will continue to have on my own attempts to appreciate the world as acutely and as articulately as he does, I will always consider reports of Clive James's death to have been greatly exaggerated.

      I serve the joy-spring of the language. Let
      Me pass, therefore. I am not finished yet
      –Night-Walker's Song         

 

© Mark Crutchfield, May 2018

 

 

 

 

Joseph's Case

Joseph's Case

'Excuse me. My friend fancies you.'

'Brilliant. That's what ten-year-olds say.'

'Her, over there: she fancies you.'

'Thank you.'

'Don't pretend you haven't noticed. You've been looking at us.'

'I might have been looking past you.'

'At the wall? You finished your coffee ages ago but you're still here.'

'I've been reading this book. Time flies with a good book. I'm just sitting here outside my favourite cafe in the sunshine with good coffee and good reading.'

'And looking at us.'

The impasse was acknowledged.

'OK, I was looking,' he said. 'But I was looking at you.'

A pause. 'Oh?' She sat down beside the man, letting her shoulder bag slide to the ground between them. She thought about it. She reached a conclusion and offered him a hand. 'Sophie.'

The hand was accepted. 'Joseph.'

'You weren't looking at my friend?'

'Oh no.' Joseph met Sophie's gaze and contrived a glare of narrow-eyed menace. 'I'm an assassin on a case. Your ex-boyfriend has put out a contract on your life for ten grand.'

'You're a hit man?' Sophie's gaze flickered between Joseph's eyes and the black briefcase standing upright against his chair.

A nod. 'But that doesn't make me a bad person.'

'You've made me nervous.'

Joseph shrugged. 'You approached me.'

'Tell me you're not going to shoot me.'

'I'll lose ten thousand pounds.'

'But you're not going to kill me.'

A pause. 'No. I can't now.' He removed his sunglasses. 'Talking to you has transformed you from a target into a human being. And the more I look at you, the more I like you. It's a professional hazard.'

'You're not really a hit man.'

A shrug.

'So what's in the briefcase?'

'A gun: Browning semi-automatic.'

Sophie smiled and relaxed into her chair. 'More likely your sad bachelor's lunch and a porn mag. You're full of shit.'

Joseph raised his eyebrows. 'But by the time we leave here I'm going to have asked you to go out with me, so if I can paint the darkest picture of myself, make you fear me, doubt me, think the worst and yet still get you to say yes, I think we'll stand a good chance together.'

'Fucking arrogant.'

'Isn't it? Another fault. But self-confidence might be hereditary. Our kids will inherit it.'

'Kids!'

'And they'll be great-looking, too. I'm gorgeous, you're stunning: our wedding photos will be works of art.'

'Who do you think you are?'

'You're free to walk away the moment I offend you.'

Sophie and Joseph sat looking at each other over his empty coffee cup for almost a minute. 'What do you hope to achieve by being so forward?'

'A lifetime of married bliss with you. Failing that, a one-night stand.'

'Do you think I respect such blunt honesty?'

'You mean you believe me?'

'Shouldn't I?'

'Why not? Then again, why? At least you won't hold any illusions about me. If you expect the worst, I can only impress.'

'You're a strange man, Joseph.'

'And you're still sitting at my table, Sophie.'

'How do you know about my ex-boyfriend?'

'Every woman has an ex-boyfriend.'

'Ah,' Sophie nodded. 'Mind games.'

'All part of the charm.'

'An introduction like this would lead to a turbulent relationship, which could only end badly.'

Joseph frowned. 'How else do relationships end? They don't end because they're going well. But our relationship would be one of the all-time classic romances.'

'I might meet somebody else.'

'I'd break his neck.'

'You're the jealous type?'

'The most insecure man you'll ever meet.'

'Still trying to make me think the worst of you?'

'Is it working?'

'In a way, but perhaps not in the way you expect. What if I like the wrong kind of man?'

'He can't be wrong if he's right for you.'

'You're no cliché, but sometimes a woman wants hearts and flowers.'

Joseph did not immediately reply. He delayed his next act long enough to avoid betraying that he had been awaiting such an opening. He opened his briefcase just wide enough to reach into it and retrieve a single red rose, which he offered to Sophie across the table. 'I think you good, gifted, lovely; a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you – and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.'

Sophie opened her mouth as she accepted the rose, but no words came for a few moments. But then, 'You cheesy cunt.'

'I don't think Mr Rochester could ever have predicted that response, but it was still worth memorising for. I always liked Bronte.'

'I'm almost impressed. How often have you tried this? And why were you carrying the rose?'

'Never before. I buy a fresh red rose every morning, hoping I will meet my true love that day.'

'Really?'

'Nah. I try this line on different birds every day, darlin', and I nicked the flower from a cemetery.'

Sophie wrinkled her nose and shook her head. 'Doesn't suit you.'

'Oh?' Joseph tried to sound offended. 'And what would suit me?'

Sophie leaned forward. 'I think I'd suit you.'

'Are you sure? I pick my nose, which isn't my worst habit.'

'Warts and all – if you'll allow the same for me.'

'You have warts? I'm having second thoughts. I'm very shallow.'

'When do you want to meet?'

'We've already met. Let's just stand up and leave together now – except that your friend is still sitting over there, and she thinks you're match-making for her.'

Sophie forced a serious expression and shook her head. 'She's not really my friend. That's the other police officer working on a case with me.'

Suspicion. 'What case?'

'Yours.'

'It's always been a fantasy of mine to be chatted up by a pretty copper.'

'Doesn't sound unlikely for a man who carries roses and guns around in his briefcase.'

'Well, sweet child of mine, whether we believe each other or not, we can't trust each other. Either we are what we both say we are, or we're both liars.'

'This is insane.'

'Yeah,' Joseph grinned. 'Ain't it cool?'

'We could leave separately.'

'That might mean the end of our relationship before it's even started. It'll give us both the chance to entertain doubt, bottle out and disappear without a trace.'

'I don't think so. We should choose a place and time to meet,' Sophie suggested. 'And if we don't find each other there, we'll just put it down to experience and say it wasn't meant to be.'

'But if we both turn up?'

'The we kiss, and our lives will never be the same again.'

'Agreed. The marina?'

'All right. In one hour.'

Joseph and Sophie nodded at each other.

Sophie rose from her seat but suddenly stumbled forward. Joseph reflexively reached out and prevented a fall. There was a moment's awkward entanglement before Sophie recovered and, in her embarrassment, hurried away. She spoke briefly with her friend, and then the women left at a hurried pace that left Joseph wondering. Though not for long. As soon as the pair were out of sight, he lifted onto the table the bag he had briefly kept below sight. Sophie's bag. He opened it and studied the contents with a look of troubled concentration. Then he lowered the bag and began laughing.

Joseph glanced at his watch and reached down for his briefcase. His laughter ceased abruptly.

 

A short walk from the coffee shop, Sophie slid into the passenger seat of a white BMW, her friend the driver's side. The pair did not speak as they drove away. Sophie settled a briefcase on her lap. Joseph's case. She flipped open the clasps and surveyed the contents with a look of horror.

'Well?' asked the driver. 'Is it what you expected?'

Sophie replied, 'Yes. But not what I'd hoped.'

Sophie stared out of her window for a few moments, gazing at the shops and people they passed. She looked at her watch, and then lifted one hand to its opposite shoulder in search of her bag.  

 

 

© Copyright Mark Crutchfield

  

 

Armageddon Music

 

Armageddon Music

 

 

The world began to end, but the songs playing in the heads of its witnesses were the only sign. Like the first cough of tuberculosis, the music wasn’t much of a warning.

 

At 07:06, as Gaynor walked to work through Olive Mount Park, BBC Radio 6 fell silent forever. She'd been enjoying Shaun Keaveney through the earpieces of her mobile phone, but FM-quality white noise replaced the DJ, along with everything else broadcast by the stations Gaynor had in her pre-sets. All except Airwave FM, which seemed to be broadcasting static as a faint background to Gustav Holst’s Opus 32 (2), The Planets. Not that she knew what it was called or who it was by; she knew only that it didn’t belong on Airwave’s Throbbing Twenty-Four-Hour Erogenous Zone.

So Gaynor pulled out the earplugs, though she froze in mid-step when the orchestra grew instantly clearer and louder. Several other early morning walkers in the hilltop park also slowed or halted, perfectly mimicking Gaynor’s head movements like meerkats as they attempted to pinpoint the source of the music. Eventually, everyone in the park, and then everyone in the city around it, was united by a shared revelation as their gaze came to rest on the smouldering sphere of the brightening dawn.

The music emanated from the sunrise.

Of course, many people dismissed the sound as a publicity stunt by some shop or business in the commercial centre to the east. They gave the matter no more thought as they strode on to their jobs, colleges, homes, schools or early-opening coffee shops, except to wonder how anyone got permission to play such loud music so early in the day.

But Gaynor remained standing in the glow of the sunrise, content under the soporific spell of Holst's Venus, The Bringer of Peace. Her composure wasn’t even challenged when she heard speech emitted from the earpieces hung about her shoulders. She lifted them and discerned the words, '...national crisis broadcast. A state of emergency has been declared, and your elected officials have relinquished government to the Exigent Management Agency until further notice. The EMA has announced martial law, with immediate effect. You are advised to seek shelter. Do not burden yourself with elderly or immobile persons, you cannot help them now...'

Despite this clear indication that Homo Sapiens’ dominion over the Earth was coming to an end, Gaynor did not feel compelled to walk any further than to the nearest park bench, where she sat down and studied the view of the city. She didn’t know how long it would take before she saw signs of being under martial law, or even what being under martial law really meant, though she suspected that it would involve soldiers. But quite where the army was going to materialise from, Gaynor couldn’t guess. The brightening panorama of the city betrayed no sign of rapid militarisation, or even of waking up to a state of emergency at all.

‘What do you think it’s going to be?’

‘What?’ Gaynor warily eyed an approaching postman.

‘The end. Plague? Thousand-foot tidal wave? Nuclear holocaust? Meteor strike?’ He thought about it a little more and smiled. 'Alien invasion? Zombie attack?'

Gaynor shrugged. ‘I’m more worried about the martial law.’

The postman unslung the red bag from his shoulder and span on the spot for the momentum to hurl it away downhill. It disappeared with a fluttering trail of letters. ‘Can I sit here?’

Gaynor shuffled to her end of the bench and nodded cautiously at the other. Somewhere in his late thirties, Gaynor judged him to be a few years older than herself and - relative to their circumstance - probably harmless.

The postman acknowledged her wary glance and sat down. ‘It’s all right, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m not one of those people who said they’d grab the nearest girl and fuck like there’s no tomorrow if the world ended.’ He pulled his own mobile phone and earplugs from his pocket and lobbed them away after the bag of post. ‘Not the sort of thing you plan for, is it?’

Gaynor nodded thoughtfully, noticing that the music from the east became a little louder as the sun rose and brightened. ‘Strange how everyone’s so calm, isn’t it?’

‘What’s strange is someone sticking on this record so loud just as the world’s going tits up. I never thought I’d get liquidised listening to Tease Me.’

Gaynor spent some time considering that statement, quietly surveying the park and the dozen or so other people present, who had all taken seats on benches or the driest-looking patches of grass, displaying no more fear or panic than that felt by Gaynor or her new friend.

‘I’m, uh, getting music – but it’s not from a stereo,’ Gaynor decided quietly, confidently. ‘I think the world’s giving us one last song before we’re minced.’

The postman’s smile developed a knowing edge. ‘You’re more religious than me.’

‘No, I’m really not,’ Gaynor replied. ‘It’s just that you and I can hear different songs, so it can’t be someone’s radio we’re listening to.’

‘You can’t hear Tease Me?’

‘No. I don’t know the name of what I can hear,’ Gaynor admitted, gazing into the sunlight, ‘but it sounds like an angel wrote it.’

‘Great,’ the postman sulked. ‘You get a lullaby from the heavenly host, I get Chaka Demus and Pliers. You know, it’d be interesting to find out how long we have left.’

Gaynor gave it some thought, but decided, ‘No, it wouldn’t. We might have only until the end of the song.’

Gaynor would discover the accuracy of her guess in a little over two minutes time. She was also correct in asserting that the music was not being broadcast by any human agency. Of course, she never would know for certain why every human in the world heard a different song during the final few minutes of their life, although Gaynor did stumble over the answer every time she wondered why she, and every other creature on the planet, was able to face its looming extinction with such light-hearted resignation.

Gaynor was offered Holst's Venus for the same reason that her companion received Tease Me. The same reason explained why the woman sitting on a nearby bench, who had been walking to her last day as a solicitor’s secretary before retiring from work, found herself retiring from life itself with the varying tempo of Salva Mea by Faithless as a soundtrack. And why Olive Mount Park’s famous old doomsayer, who harangued passers-by everyday with the warning, ‘Repent, ye pedlars of filth! Ye Godless maggots, ye fornicators! For ye all are puppets with Satan your master, and ignore at your peril Mark, chapter 13, verse 35, when he says “Watch therefore – for you do not know when the master of the house will come”!’ was so calmly able to light his final roll-up and hum along to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s Fire.

A number 84 bus stopped on the nearby road and ejected a man whistling the cello refrain of Cloudbusting by Kate Bush. A paper boy on a BMX swerved to avoid him, but he did not apologise because, at that moment, he noticed that the sun seemed to transmitting a song which, had he been older, he would have recognized as the Electric Light Orchestra’s Believe Me Now. And an elderly man beside him, leaning on a gatepost for support, dropped his gaze from the sunrise to the pavement in disappointment, guessing that instead of having something by Nat King Cole played at his funeral as he’d always hoped, his passing would instead be marked with Fifty-fifty Clown by the Cocteau Twins.

The idling bus changed its route number to 57 and rumbled away.

‘That guy’s whistling Pink Floyd,’ the postman pointed at a passing man.

‘Comfortably Numb?’ Gaynor guessed.

‘He looks it.’

‘We all do,’ Gaynor observed. ‘Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps the universe knows the best songs to stop us all panicking.’

‘Maybe we each get the song that was playing during our happiest moment. Or the song that says most about you.’

‘Or perhaps every single brain has a song that perfectly matches its wavelength. To you, Chaka Demus and Pliers is like a lullaby to a baby.’

‘I feel like I should argue with you about that, but I can't be bothered,’ the postman frowned. ‘So you’re probably right. Course, if I was a planet piping in music to distract the life-forms I was about to pulverize, I’d have a sense of humour about it and make sure someone got REM’s It’s The End of the World as We Know It.’

Gaynor appreciated her companion’s banter as the air around them seemed to warm rapidly, and an oppressive droning reached them from the city below. The old air-raid sirens had been turned on and were cranking themselves up to an antique wail of monotonous warning. ‘Yeah, or Apocalypse Please by Muse. Shame we don’t have longer. We could have made a fortune peddling compilation albums called Now That’s What I Call Armageddon Music.’

‘Or Songs to Watch Mushroom Clouds By.’

The banshee-cry of the sirens from below was now loud enough to compete with the music from above, and the sun seemed to be losing its strength.

‘Well, I think we’re coming to it now,’ said the postman. ‘Sounds like we’re near the end of our swan songs.’

‘Good luck,’ Gaynor replied, rising from the bench and offering the man her hand. ‘I know we all had a different song to finish with, but I suppose we’ll all get the same end.’

‘However it comes, I hope yours is painless,’ the postman replied with feeling.

The Planets' movement began to fade from the thickening air, which now contained the tension of a static charge. Other sounds became prominent instead. Gaynor heard the roar of innumerable distant aircraft, and the sound of what must have been thousands of car alarms reached them from every direction.

A number 3 bus braked sharply as the sun began to dim. A bus on route 2 swerved to avoid it, hit the park gates and came to a brutal stop. Its display flickered for a moment and then reset itself to the number 1.

‘Any regrets?’ The postman asked.

‘Yes, one,' Gaynor said. 'That I haven’t done what I always said I’d do if the world ended.’

The postman scanned the thrumming crimson sky. ‘You might still have time. What was it?’

‘To grab the nearest stranger and fuck like there’s no tomorrow.’

 

 

© Mark Crutchfield



Solastalgia

My usual joy at discovering a new word was recently bittersweet. Solastalgia is a formidable and necessary neologism, though it grants a name to an emotion with which I'd rather not be familiar.

The word was defined in 2003 (see the links below), "Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change", lead-authored by Glenn Albrecht, as "a new concept developed to give greater meaning and clarity to environmentally induced distress... As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home."

That my weekly bouts of melancholy have now been pathologised and labelled highlights the definition as a common experience, worthy of diagnosis, which isn't comforting. Before now, I simply described this feeling as "Oh, no: even more of the view from Glastonbury Tor has disappeared beneath industrial space since yesterday". But it seems that a sufficiently high percentage of the global population is so familiar with this feeling that it deserves its own word, comprised of the Latin for comfort (solacium) and the Greek root for pain (-algia).

The priority concern of the study by Albrecht et al is the distress experienced by people witnessing the kind of environmental changes that recently prompted the announcement of the Anthropocene: the geological age in which humans define the greatest changes to the land surfaces, waters, skies and climate system of the Earth. Mortified as I am by this global crossing of the Rubicon, it occurs to me that most people with cause to be wistful about changes to their local environment are less likely to have been affected by the kinds of heavy industry observed by Albrecht. The "Solastalgia" study particularly details the sense of loss experienced by people living within a (quarried) stone's throw of large-scale open-cut mining, which is a rapacious mauling of the landscape I can barely imagine, never mind consider occurring within the green borders of my home city. But I feel compelled to speak for all the folk in the world who, like me – though mercifully not traumatised to the same extent as tribespeople of the Amazon rainforest, who've seen their homes transformed by industrial logging into a nuclear winter of endless devastation – still know the heartbreak of disappearing green space, even if it is due to development considered useful or beneficial to society and infrastructure.

Due to the exponential expansion demanded by the economic system in which we toil, and of course the UK's constant need for affordable housing, a fact of most people's lives has become the loss of their natural local environment. The wild meadow that hosted most of your childhood play is now the site of a factory that produces novelty plastic dog poo; the stream where you saw your first kingfisher now flows through a concrete subterranean channel beneath a housing development And, as though this weren't enough, the cruel aftermath for those distraught by the change is discovering that the new roads in the estate are named after the flora and fauna that used to flourish there. You had your first kiss where 37 Squashed Badger Road now stands, and the hazel thicket from which you watched the sun set after your hide-and-seeking friends gave up is now Uprooted Greenery Drive.

I wouldn't be any more or less upset about these irreversible changes if the pristine meadow and its tangled fringes had been dynamited for lead-ore extraction. When the place you think of as home is gone, regardless of the manner of its removal, it is gone.

Had it been coined earlier, solastalgia would have been a useful word to introduce to Jimmy Copper in 1951 during his recorded interview with the BBC, in which he discussed his grief regarding changes to the downs of his Sussex home. He talks of his younger days spent working as a shepherd, recalling the "grace and beauty" of the chalk hills in those days, and then his voice cracks with emotion when he observes that, since then, those downs have become a sea of "'ouses, 'ouses, 'ouses."

There can't be many people left in the world who aren't able to tell a similar story.

The Anthropocene may mark the age in which Wordsworth's heartfelt stanza loses its truth.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her, he declared in 1798. But she may well betray us soon, paved over and toxic, simply unable to support the species that broke its own heart by killing her.

© Mark Crutchfield, 2017

http://panjournal.net/issues
/3
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10398560701701288

Three Fingers in The Red Eye of The Retail Robocracy

 

Surprising post in blogging area. Approval needed.

__________________

I need a drink.

There's a Pricelow Express closer than the pub I was aiming for. I'm sure it'll stock the type of drink I like. I'm the kind of person who enjoys intoxicating liquors from the exclusive range known as anything.

 

I'm assaulted by a tacky, instrumental cover of Paul Weller's You Do Something To Me as I walk in to the store. Unless I protest by pushing over rows of shelves to start a lethal domino rally, all I can do is shudder and add this tune to the long list of muzak-tainted songs I can never listen to again.

 

I pick up a bottle of Jura and head for the checkouts, though it seems that the staff have been eaten by computers. People used to be paid to serve customers, but now customers pay to serve themselves. I approach one of the machines, which starts telling me what to do as soon as I touch the word START on its screen. It doesn't like my reply of YES when it asks if I'm using my own bag. "Surprising item in bagging area" is not a sentence, and even as a fragment it's bizarre. I'd be surprised to see a hand-grenade or a dildo in the bagging area of a self-service checkout, but not a bag. I'm annoyed that the machine has described the bag, which I already told it I was going to use, as "surprising", and I'm doubly annoyed by the robot cashier's insistence that my man-bag be no heavier than a flimsy plastic carrier bag. But it is, so the machine assumes I'm stealing something.

 

I stretch my minimal patience for these human-replacing tyrants by calmly lifting surprising item from bagging area and scanning the bottle of whiskey, which I've now opened and drunk from. The machine demands "Approval needed" before I can pay. But, if an impatient customer swigging booze from an unpaid-for bottle can't draw the attention of a human employee, then I don't think that this machine's dim red light is going to.

 

I consider smashing the barcode scanner with the chewing gum rack to see if I can make the self-service machine die slowly, singing "Daisy, Daisy" as it fades. Quieter and more satisfying, though, is to turn and walk out of the inconvenience store with a free bottle of decent whiskey.

 

"Approval needed."

It might be. But it's not getting mine.

 

 

 © Mark Crutchfield  

  

"Oh, I know I shouldn't..." but it's Impreza Bukkake.

This evening I've exchanged the cosy fluorescence of The Neon Sapphire for a seat at the bar of the 5-star Prima Hotel near London Heathrow Airport. I've arranged a celebrity interview to share exclusively with you, my generous readers, so don't go back to browsing memes on Twitter just yet. Like millions of others, you're probably a fan of my subject.

He's hot off a private jet from the States. His agent has already prepped me with a list of taboo subjects that will result in an instant walk-out if breached, and I'm contractually obliged to type up this conversation for blog publication as soon as possible so that my subject can maintain his claim of having "One finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, and another one up your bum!"

Yes, my friends, it's Impreza Bukkake.

IB: Ooh! Insightful delightful, Crutchless!

MC: It's Crutchfield, thanks.

IB: Totes and whatevs, Scribbles!

MC: Mr Bukkake, it's been several years since the so-called "Celebrity Sabbath Massacre" in Dorset: what's life been like for you since then?

IB: Oh my Lazarus god! What you askin', mother-hubbard? You mean you ain't been livin' in the Twit-sphere to keep track o' my nut-crackin' ass? Pout! I got more Tweet than a budgie on speed! Aha! The Prez has been all over, on under, left round, out down and right up it! Shimmer!

MC: I'm glad to hear that. I'm sorry I missed your Twitter posts. I have to admit that I thought your presence on social media might have dwindled somewhat following negative press about the explosion at your Temple Studio celebration.

IB: Ouch, Crutch Face! Ouch! You is off the schnizzle! Ain't nothin' dwindlin' about this swollen slab of sexy sleb! Mint! Like, even goat-herders in Mongolistan know that sales of Impreza Bukkake's third album just went off the scale! Breaking the 300,000-downloads threshold left me stunned and paralysed – and that's what this artist calls going plati-numb! Champagne pop!

Then there's my Celebrity Juice appearances: five times now, so when Keith Lemon finally kicks that talentless munter Boobawilly off the show, he's promised to make me Team Captain. Grin! That bite o' the big time cost me only two handy jobs, which I planned to give that ginger prick anyway – and to think it cost Gino Di Scampi a colon-bashin just to get the 'And' credit–  grazie! What the fuckles will it be like havin' Bukkake and Lemon top-billin' on the same stage?! Oh my extropervertin' god! Aha!

And don't forget my consultancy for the Nigel Trump campaign. I just got back from the U.K. of A, and O.M. republican G, you won't believe the pile o' crispy dollar that freaky guy pays a dude to attend his Kicking-Black-Guys-Out-The-White-House party! Hooo-eeee! And this Prez would've even done it for, like, no pence, cuz billionaires like him totally care about the little guy in the street. No, not Midget Mike on Harley Street! If that faker can afford George trainers, he can stop begging and get on proper benefits! Lazy prick! No, Trump cares about everyday guys (like what I ain't anymore since I bought Enya's old place in the Cotswolds): people like you, and the people what reads you, cuz you all K to the N to the OW that we need to make them Frenchicans build a wall, like, right across the Texan Channel, stoppin' all them Dorito-crunchin' bean-farters and starvin' brown people from sad countries comin' over here causin' global warmin', buyin' up all our Old El Paso Vajita kits, and takin' honest jobs off the Pakis and Polish guys what was here first! It's time for the average white guy to have some say in the world for a change! Can I get an Amen?! Back at ya, bitches!

MC: Thank you. But since you're a man who rose to fame and wealth by being someone most people could relate to, thanks to your own working class roots and Saturday night, reality-TV appeal, might it be fair to suggest that your opinions seem surprisingly right wing?

IB: Did you just accuse me of working, Cuntfield? Well let me correct you, sausage: there ain't no class in that! N.O!

MC: Apologies. But still, are you not afraid that talking this way might be construed as a knee-jerk fear or dislike of foreigners?

IB: O.M. xenophobic G! You asking that of moi?

MC: Well, yes.

IB: Then you'd better ask all the millions of other people what voted for Trumpy Brexit, Mr Questions, cuz I is just one voter, and I don't even vote, cuz, like, one vote don't make no difference, and Yours Awesomely gets paid for showing up. He don't turn out for free, capiche?

MC: Loud and clear. On another topic, I hear that “Ooh, I know I Shouldn't..." The Authorised Biography of Impreza Bukkake by Adrian Morgan was remaindered six months after publication due to poor sales. How did that make you feel?

IB: O.M. pulpy G! If remaindered means "Taken off the shelves cuz Waterstones couldn't handle the crowds", or "Bukkake fans is too busy doin' brainy shit to be fuckin' readin'", then yeah, Paxman, it was. Issue, much?

MC: Media speculation suggested that your very public disagreement with the journalist known only as Girl Mercury might have hurt book sales.

IB: Oh, retch, Crutchy, retch! The can of punch-in-the-pussy I opened on that inter-fuckin-lectual didn't have no effect on Joe Pubic except to make him go out and buy my records and start a government petition to make me Head Judge on X-Factor's Got Talent! I gots the chops for that. I look at Honey G and see the same passion and potential I saw in the mirror when I was a fuckin' no-body, like her, and I needs to be biggin' that shit up, uh-yeh! No, you want issues? Then quote this: I is gunna be the poison-tipped, atomic-warhead revenge-meister against the cunt what started #ImprezaBukkakeLooksLikeRylanClark! Sulk! That mincin' cockless twat copied me, motherfuckers, and there's a © 2014 to prove it, so you can all suck my niblets! And another righteous rumble you can be headlinin' is your favourite Prez knocking the hot pants off Little Mix in The Great British Rake Off last month! Choice! Them bitches got no business toppin' music charts when they can't even clear leaves off a lawn – own it!

O.M. Funky G! by Impreza Bukkake is available on Reality Arena Records now.

“Ooh, I know I Shouldn't..." The Authorised Biography of Impreza Bukkake by Adrian Morgan is featured in

The Last Best Gift: Eye Witnesses to The Celebrity Sabbath Massacre by Mark Crutchfield, available for download at

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Best-Gift-Witnesses-Celebrity-ebook/dp/B00U16RIBW/

© Mark Crutchfield

The Road to Kuti's Pier: A Modern History of Southampton

The dawn of the modern era saw writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Arthur Ransome and P.G Wodehouse, amongst others, indulging in pre-emptive literary nostalgia, as though they had already perceived the shadow of future war and wanted to write in a way that would define the 1930s as a British golden age. Even Malcolm Durbrayn, the only writer from Southampton that anyone has ever heard of (who, as a lifelong fan of Oscar Wilde, was famous for approaching customs officials at the ferry port and announcing, “I have nothing to declare but the five bottles of gin in my luggage”), realised that events occurring in Europe throughout the Thirties weren't helping to found the securest future. His first and only novel, a rural idyll concerning witty, cider-fuelled yeomen and monocled, champagne-addled aristocracy, was not particularly successful when published in 1934, mostly due its title; but Durbrayn felt sure that he would be vindicated by history when he decided to call the book Enjoy The Prosperity And Gentle Social Intrigue While It Lasts Because We’re In For Six Years Of Slaughter and Atrocity Quite Soon.   

The philosophical community, however, was not so prescient. In 1936 the Southampton-born philosopher, Stanley Gizzard, famous at the time for attempting (and failing) to reconcile Socrates’ Theory of Forms with Mr Kipling’s Lattice-Pastry Matrix, convened a philosophical summit called The Meeting Of Celtic Minds, inviting Bertrand Russell of Wales, Ayers Dottle of Scotland, and Plat O’Chips from Ireland, to represent their peoples in a week-long discussion of Man’s near-future. Despite wide media coverage of the European rise of Fascism, international trends towards aggressive expansionism, and recent events like the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Night of the Long Knives, and the Catholic Church’s support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Stanley Gizzard viewed the next couple of decades optimistically, considering this to be the perfect time to initiate The Modern Age of Reason, Happiness, and Emancipation from the Tyranny of Deities and Dictators.

The philosophers’ first step toward this goal was to consider the experimental refounding of Southampton as a city free of religion and hypocritical moral dogma. Social taboos with roots in religious doctrine were to be overturned in favour of libertarian freedom. Fresh from founding the philosophical Beacon Hill School, Bertrand Russell suggested a less negative view of people who worked on Sundays. Stanley Gizzard suggested legalising homosexuality. Plat O’Chips encouraged a less judgemental view of masturbation. Stanley Gizzard then added that he thought incest should be legal too. Ayers Dottle expressed an interest in seeing people feel less guilty about the use of contraception, and then Stanley Gizzard wondered aloud whether the public acceptance of homosexual incest might be a bit too much to expect at this stage.

When Stanley Gizzard’s brother began attending the summit halfway through the week, the other philosophers were initially happy with his presence. He was useful to have around, often able to help lower the group’s stress level during heated debates by making the tea, preparing snacks, or giving shoulder and foot rubs. But then, in an unexpected fit of pique, Gizzard suddenly demanded that his brother leave when he started offering the other philosophers bathing assistance.

Eventually, after four long days of intellectual grappling, the philosophers felt almost ready to announce their intention to transform Southampton into a Hampshire utopia of the highest ideals, founded on the fairest democratic principles of laissez-faire government, in which even a few of the city’s less hysterical women would be allowed a vote. (Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamyatin visited briefly to suggest an experimental dystopia, but the Celtic Minds just avoided eye contact with them and quietly puffed their pipes until the novelists went away.) And Bertrand Russell’s interest in wresting the freedom of human thought from the confines of theism, deism and faith-based dogma was to be the foundation upon which the group would build their new Extraordinarily Fair and Democratic Republic of Sharing and Equality.

But Bertrand Russell unexpectedly left the Meeting of Celtic Minds in disgust, excusing himself by muttering something about going off to disprove the Doctrine of Internal Relations, when Stanley Gizzard declared that the Southampton of this new Enlightenment should appoint a single man to lead its council as figurehead. Plat O’Chips and Ayers Dottle soon followed Russell along the Avenue out of Southampton when Gizzard suggested a list of privileges for this lucky new Mayor, which included criminal immunity, tax exemption, jus primae noctis, and the instalment of any one sibling as City Treasurer. And then Gizzard himself made a one-way journey along the road out of town at the will of his neighbours when, after assuming leadership of the Extraordinarily Fair and Democratic Republic of Sharing and Equality by default, he called a press conference to publicly declare himself Ultimate Lord High King Uber-Kaiser Numero Uno For Life.  

 

With the end of the decade came war, and Southampton became famous as the town with the lowest number of soldiers killed – or even wounded – in enemy engagement. However, the emerging myth of the indestructible Hampshire super soldier was dispelled when it was also revealed that Southampton contributed the fewest number of servicemen to the armed forces. This was partly due to the townsfolk’s endemic obesity, but mostly due to the fact that the majority of the city’s male population disappeared overnight on 2^nd September 1939 (although the Southampton census recorded a surprise doubling of the female populace that year). And when army recruiters began lifting the skirts of the city’s suspiciously swarthy women, the few hundred men (and several surprised ladies) who were conscripted, and the few who survived basic training, were returned barely a fortnight later under court martial for mass desertion.

But whatever percentage of its population Southampton saved in soldiers' lives was lost several times over through civilian fatalities during countless nights of bombing by the Luftwaffe. It was not until after the war that examination of the decisions made by local authorities during the six-year conflict unearthed reasons for the city’s catastrophic levels of damage.

The first and most obvious cause was the Hide In Plain Sight With No Blackout During Air Raids policy, implemented when one the city’s councillors walked into a wall one dark night (although the councillor’s wife felt that this policy wouldn’t help because the light had been on when he did it). An added clause decreed that, during nights of particularly heavy bombing, the city’s lights would be left on in a specific pattern that spelt “Fuck you, Fritz!” when viewed from above.

The second reason for the successful German devastation of Southampton was the appointment of a man named Otto Von Heil Deutschland to the position of Managing Director at the Ordnance Survey, which had moved its cartography team to new offices in Southampton in 1938. The Ordnance Survey’s maps were world-famous for their accuracy and detail, and a secret new headquarters in Hampshire was considered essential to preventing infiltration by hungry Nazi spies. Recruitment of the team’s new manager by Southampton's local government was delayed for a couple of days when one or two local people said they thought Otto Von Heil Deutschland had “shifty eyes”; but everyone was reassured when Otto declared, “Ich bin as English as Sauerkraut, Southampton untermensch!” followed by several minutes of maniacal laughter.

The mystery of how Ordnance Survey maps of Southampton and its strategically important docks ended up in the hands of the Luftwaffe, leading to the most accurate, and most devastatingly ironic, carpet-bombing ever recorded, was not solved (or even considered) until 1994, when Southampton historians concluded that Winston Churchill must have been a spy all along. But then, in 1995, better historians from somewhere else revealed the surprising true identity of Otto Von Heil Deutschland as a German spy deep under cover. It is not known what happened to Otto after the war, but when the historians visited his former address, a house in Northam named Lebensraum, during their research, its elderly occupant denied anyone access to the house with a sharp “Nein!”

 

Post-war recovery in Southampton was hampered by almost a decade of near poverty when the local Communist Party enjoyed landslide election victories nine years in a row. The Marxists claimed that their successes were due entirely to the popularity of their economic policies, though a few of the city’s deeper thinkers began to suspect that the way in which the Communists had listed themselves on the ballot paper, as the Naked Nubiles Will Pleasure You And Give You Money If You Vote For Us Party, might have helped them maintain power.

So, beginning to realise that Southampton seemed almost incapable of governing itself due to the ill-luck suffered by successive councils (a run of misfortune first documented in the Fourteenth Century, when the city fathers began recommending that people should keep black rats in their pockets as good-luck charms during outbreaks of the plague), government of Southampton was divided between the Winchester and Bournemouth City Councils from 1955 to 1999. The scheme seemed to work well, with Southampton eventually showing slightly lower levels of unemployment, school truancy, violent crime, industrial accidents, human trafficking, famine, piracy, incest, prostitution, genetic mutation, ethnic cleansing, spontaneous human combustion, leprosy, fetish-related deaths, under-age pregnancies, political assassination, slavery, zombie-infestations, housework-related amputations and ritual sacrifice.

But the years of external government had helped introduce residents of Southampton to knowledge of the outside world, and when dozens of the city’s denizens (instantly recognisable by their smell and unique feeding habits) began appearing in other Hampshire towns, self-government was restored to Southampton at the start of the new millennium – but only upon the acceptance of two conditions. Firstly, that anyone seen travelling further than five miles from their home in Southampton would be instantly recalled; secondly, that everyone born in the city would be tagged and monitored, thereby preventing any Southampton resident from ever leaving the city again.

© Mark Crutchfield