Soured Beets

I was going to spend my lunch writing this thing about culture, and cultural imperialism, and how it's important to notice it's not just the things you don't like which are trampling over native cultures, but we had a load of beetroot in the fridge so I decided to make some sour beets instead.

Recipe

• Grate
• Salt
• Jar
• Leave

We had a couple of turnips knocking around so I stuck those in too. Fight the power.

Wife away for the weekend. Part 1.

Cartoons!

For those of you who remember my bursts of cartooning in 2004, 2007 and 2010, I've tracked them all down from various sites and stuck them on a Tumblr.

Several are no good, but together they form an autobiography of sorts so I've kept them in.

Any new ones I do will go there (and, most likely, here).

Jah Jah Holiday #2: Chipy (sic) chips

Jah Jah enjoying his holiday!

The importance of a non-London specificity

Right. This post is not bemoaning the lack of non-London set drama. This is about specificity.

Everyone has a mental map of London, even if they've never been there (the Gherkin and banks are over there, theatres are somewhere else, the museums and parks and Buckingham Palace). Everyone in Britain has seen thousands of images of London, and, crucially, they have been labelled LONDON.

This is what London looks like.

The problem with the rest of England is that its images are seen, but they are rarely tagged to place.

There was an article about this in the LRB the other month. France is much better at giving its provincial towns identity. Here stories are either in London, or in a hazy non-London.

19th-century literature could represent life outside London only with vague gestures of generalisation, as if the naming or describing of actual towns in the provinces fell under a pudeur scarcely less than that obscuring sex... Middlemarch is the title of a great novel, but the town itself is an abstraction, whose relation to the Coventry at which scholars try to peer behind it is notional. Was ‘Coketown’ – one of Dickens’s few excursion outside London – based on Preston, as some believe? It hardly matters.North and South? Skirts drawn up around Manchester, set in ‘Milton’. In Hardy, the faux-archaism of ‘Wessex’ and its cod-toponyms – Casterbridge, Melchester, Christminster and the rest…
Even in modern times… Amis’s Lucky Jim tippexed Swansea, and Lodge’s ‘Rummidge’ trilogy could not bring itself to name Birmingham. The persistence of the convention speaks volumes for the low standing of urban life outside the capital, novels risking loss of audience if they speak too openly of a particular city, as unlikely to be of much interest to anyone outside it.

When you start thinking of more examples you can't stop. Lot of things have been filmed in Bradford (e.g. Billy Liar), very few are set there. A Kind of Loving is set in "a Lancashire town". Not Preston, not Blackburn, not Burnley. Just "The North". The Nottingham-ness of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a big part of the book, considerably played down for the film. Even J.B. Priestley, Bradford's foremost literary son, talks of the amalgamous Bruddersford.

"The North" (actually Accrington)

Why I think this is important! 

Specificity confers legitimacy. Despite its complexity London is simply easier to visualise than anywhere else in the UK. Because of this (I theorise), and leaving economic considerations to one side, people are more likely to move there after university because they can picture themselves there. It becomes the only feasible destination for internal migration.

It's also subtly easier to support investment projects like Crossrail or a new airport as we can imagine what it might look like and how it'd fit in to our existing mental model. Consider a Crossrail which went from Liverpool to Hull. The national mental image would be something like:

Liverpool: Beatles -> Warrington… rugby league? -> Manchester… football/Oasis -> West Yorkshire… don't know -> Bradford: curry -> Leeds… don't they have a Harvey Nichols? -> Hull… Who knows anything about Hull? 

Without a strong mental picture it's a hard idea to get behind. Once these cities had football teams to represent them. With the globalisation of the Premiership these teams have become international brands who happen to have head offices these towns and cities.

And you know, the images we're missing don't even have to be positive. The Olympics is one thing, but deprivation in Tower Hamlets, gangsters, riots - it all adds to a solid idea of "LONDON" and an unvoiced suspicion that London is the only place which is actually, you know, real.

A nice counter example is Happy Valley. We watched the first episode last night. It was pretty good! The best thing about it was its accuracy. This wasn't "Yorkshire" it was the Upper Calder Valley. Things happened in Sowerby Bridge. Todmorden got a shout out. Until recently we lived in that valley, before moving 15 miles east to Bradford. We've never regretted that move, but last night the images on the TV, just because they were images on a TV, started to tug at me. Suddenly the place felt more real, just from being reflected in culture.

Hebden Bridge

I started to miss the place, even though it was portrayed as a picturesque hotbed of junkies and drunks. As I say, the best thing about it was its accuracy.

Kids' films and the forces of counterrevolution

The following contains spoilers for old children's films. Not to be read by four year olds. 

Now I have children I think more about children's films. You know, they're harsher than you'd expect. 

Many have an element of something magical and wonderful coming in and making a child's life great. Hooray! However, this greatness is rarely allowed to last. Usually the wonderful thing will leave, and the child is returned to a regular life, with nothing but memories. Booo! 

Generally the wonderful thing -- a monster, alien, animal or magic thing -- is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a device to teach the protagonist (or, often, the parents of the protagonist) something about living life. (Loosen up, Dad, stop taking work so seriously.) 

Harry: Manic Pixie Dream Girl

However, unlike in films for grown-ups, the protagonist is not allowed to stay with the life-enhancing sprite. 

The plot of a mainstream romantic comedy is, and watch the self-conscious way I phrase the following so as not so sound sexist: girl and boy meet, girl and boy have a lot of fun, girl and boy have troubles, usually a misunderstanding, and are torn asunder, girl and boy get back together. The end. Everyone's happy. 

Compare with E.T. Boy meets Alien, boy and Alien have a lot of fun, boy loses alien, boy gets alien back. The End? No! Not the end. Boy loses alien again. THE END. Tears all round. 

E.T. is not a mismatched couple making good. E.T. himself is not a manic pixie dream girl (or "magical negro") as he has his own motivations and goals, and from them, internal conflicts. This is not romantic comedy but romantic tragedy. This is Brief Encounter, not Maid in Manhattan. 

Now, what's so bad about a happy ending? Is this simply that it is narratively expedient to put the world back the way you found it? Do more permanent changes in the imaginary world get in the way of suspending disbelief? 

Or this instead a deep conservatism? You can have your fun but ultimately you have to give up on the strange and fantastic and fit back into a world whose social relations remain intact. You have your memories, now work hard at school, get a proper job, get married, have children, vote: these are the messages of Batteries Not Included and Flight of the Navigator.

The kids never end up with the girl. We must wave farewell to Mary Poppins. She's done her job teaching parents to pay a bit more attention to the kids, and these are apparently all the lessons they need. Her goal is not permanent revolution, it is not breaking down the structures of bourgeois society and the family. Her actions underpin conventional living, as the welfare state underpins capitalism. Think what chaos she could cause if she stuck around! But no, she needs to go and make another upper middle class family that bit happier. Her magic is not for slum kids. 

Capitalist foot soldier

UPDATE! Just thought this might be why Roald Dahl so popular with children and still frowned on by adults. In his stories the world and its social relations are permanently changed. Nasty parental figures don't learn, they are killed! Children ascend to power, and not fairy tale power, which is often about reclaiming a 'natural' place in the hierarchy (lost princesses coming home etc), but new power.