Apocalypse now and then

NUCLEAR war across the northern hemisphere has left most of the world uninhabitable and most of its people dead. In Australia, life goes on – but the deadly radioactive clouds are coming, blown on unpredictable but unstoppable winds.
No, of course that’s not true. If it was, I wouldn’t be here to write it and you wouldn’t be here to read it.
But when Nevil Shute used that scenario as the basis for his novel On The Beach it must have seemed horribly plausible.
Published in 1957, the book was set in the not-distant future of 1963. When in 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the world close to nuclear war, those who had read Shute’s work must have thought he was frighteningly prescient.
In 1956 another book had described a different end to the world as we know it.
A new virus has attacked rice crops in Asia, causing massive famine. Now a mutation has appeared which infects wheat and barley.
If it isn’t stopped – and there seems no way to stop it – the Western world will quickly starve too. Already Britain and Europe are descending into violent anarchy…
This is the story of John Christopher’s horrific vision The Death of Grass. It’s often bracketed with the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham, which appeared about the same time.
Wyndham’s books are a cracking good read, and his description of society breaking down is generally good. But it takes a stretch of imagination to believe in triffids – deadly walking plants – or the Kraken, deadly alien beings from outer space.
The disaster at the heart of The Death of Grass, though, is all too believable.
Scientific predictions suggest now that such an event is highly possible. Which is why it makes perfect sense that Penguin has just re-issued Christopher’s book as a Modern Classic.
One of the biggest arguments against genetically modified crops is that if most of the world’s grain is of just one strain, it would only take one strain of virus to kill the whole lot off.
In the farms of the world right now there is more grain being grown to feed more people than ever before. And fewer strains than ever before.
An article in this month’s issue of the respected journal Scientific American is headed: “Could food shortages bring down civilisation?”
The answer given by the writer, leading US environmentalist Lester R Brown, is a clear “Yes”.
His argument boils down to these key points:

• Water shortages, soil loss and global warming are placing increasing limits on food production.
• Food scarcity and rising food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos.
• “Failed states” export disease, terrorism, drugs, weapons and refugees – and a series of government collapses could threaten the world order.

Plausible? Horribly. And only one of an overwhelming, even baffling, cocktail of deadly threats scientists tell us we face.
One warning suggests sea levels could rise enough this century to flood most major cities, including London (and, incidentally, most of Suffolk). Imagine the chaos that would bring, not just in the flooded areas, but in the shrinking portion of habitable land. That’s one thing Wyndham may have got right in The Kraken Wakes.
We are, as Frazer in Dad’s Army had it, all doomed. Or are we?
The sheer range of predicted catastrophes may be the broadest since the Book of Revelation – but humanity seems always to have lived with a strong sense of its own imminent downfall.
When I was growing up it was the Bomb. In the 1950s if it wasn’t the death of grass or triffids it was little green men or The Blob.
In the 1930s, as historian Richard Overy details in his new book The Morbid Age, people were increasingly worried about a coming war they feared would bring civilisation to an end.
As we know now, they weren’t entirely wrong.
As 1939 approached, the Jews of Europe lived in a state of gradually increasing trepidation. But they went on with their daily lives until the day the horror became total, escape impossible.
Even when it might have been possible to escape, most didn’t.
It seems there’s a gap which the human mind cannot bridge. A gap between rumour, fear and belief that allows the unthinkable to remain literally that.
You might imagine the worst, but you can’t really believe it until it is no longer escapable.
Such was the feeling of impending doom pre-war. And such, perhaps, is the mood of impending environmental catastrophe today.
At one level, we believe at least some of the predictions of horror. At another, we get on with our daily lives as if nothing could possibly go wrong.
Perhaps all the doom-mongering is simply natural human paranoia – these days given credibility by science, where once it was religion.
On the other hand, just because you’re paranoid…

Harmony in black, white & colour

RIDING through east London on a train the other day I had one of those wish-I-had-a-camera-handy moments. If I’d been quick enough, the picture would have been worth at least 1,000 words.
Instead of writing this column I could just have printed the picture and let it speak for itself.
On a public tennis court four schoolgirls were playing a game of doubles. On one side of the net, in shorts and T-shirts, were a blonde girl and one who might have been Chinese. On the other was a girl with long braided hair and brightly-coloured Caribbean-style clothes. Her partner was all in black from head to foot, only her eyes showing in the now familiar Muslim manner.
I did wonder for a moment how the Muslim girl could move effectively in such restrictive attire.
I did marvel that her parents should send her to school so concealed yet allow her to play openly with girls whose different cultures were on display in bare limbs.
But the obvious enjoyment all four were having in the game made it a most striking image of what is – or could be – good in our society. It was a happy and a hopeful scene.
There can be few issues more emotionally charged in this country – and likely to get more so – than that of immigration.
Most of that emotion is heated, irrational and based on ignorance. If only we could all mix as those tennis-playing girls were, with pleasure and at least a chance of understanding.
We’re a mongrel race, we British. It’s our strength. If you doubt that, just consider our language.
English has always been happy to accept new words and make them its own. As a country, that’s generally been our tendency – and our strength – too.
This little land is a melting-pot of people, cultures, ideas and lifestyles and all the better for that.
And I mean a melting-pot. Multi-culturalism, so-called, is fine as long as we are all happy to enjoy, learn from and share each others’ cultures.
Cutting ourselves off in enclaves of this culture or that, without sharing or learning from each other, is where danger lies.
If we allow our cities to become segmented into sectors defined by national or religious groups – a black area, a Muslim area, a Polish area – we risk alienation, distrust, misunderstanding, fear.
The old adage about having nothing to fear but fear itself seems applicable. But it doesn’t take account of where fear comes from – ignorance.
If only we could all get together on the same tennis court. Or even just in each others’ supermarkets and at each others’ dining-tables.


Bordering on the un-British

IF I have a complaint against someone, I can’t threaten their reputation by telling you about it here. Not, at least, until the matter has gone through all the relevant court procedures.
The law of libel places a restriction on freedom of speech that can be frustrating at times. But it exists for a good reason.
The protection it offers against the damaging effects of rumour is a powerful restraint on journalists. But not, apparently, on official organisations such as the UK Border Agency.
The agency, which came into being in its present form only last year, is responsible for controlling immigration.
In its own words: “The Agency was formed in April 2008 to improve the United Kingdom’s security through stronger border protection while welcoming legitimate travellers and trade.”
Note the use of that emotive buzzword “security”. And just how welcoming is “welcoming”?
In its first nine months the agency issued civil penalties against 21 Suffolk businesses. You may have read about some of them in these pages.
The agency is very keen on telling the local media about its successes in uncovering evidence of illegal workers in mainly Chinese and Indian or Bangladeshi restaurants.
Of those 21, however, two were cancelled and another five resulted in reduced fines once the businesses concerned had a chance to appeal.
I am grateful to Paul Simon of Hadleigh for gaining these figures under the Freedom of Information Act and alerting me to them.
As Paul says: “It is very unfair that the UK Border Agency appears to be so trigger-happy in issuing immediate information about its raids even before a business has a chance to invoke the appeals procedure.
“Given this country’s sense of fair play, it borders on the un-British to name and shame companies in this way – even though one in every three cases was either totally exonerated or was able to produce sufficient evidence for fines to be reduced.
“In these tough economic times it seems especially unfair that the reputation of some Suffolk businesses may be damaged by a government body in advance of the full facts being uncovered.”
Just so. I couldn’t do it – quite rightly – so why should they?

New (and old) poems online

Departing from the usual, this is not a newspaper column, but a piece of shameless self-promotion: new poems of mine have appeared online in both Stride and Shadowtrain - and now in Great Works too; at the same time I've just put PDFs of much of my earlier poetry up on my own site.
You can find all these things by clicking on the links in the righthand column - or here:

Great Works

Shadowtrain

Stride

The News Pages etc (poems 1978-85)

You can also find a splendid (and very kind) appreciation of my long-ago editing of the sadly shortlived mag Molly Bloom on Alan Baker's excellent Litterbug blog.

OK, chest-beating over. For now :-)

No more Sex, Death on the wane

IT was, by any standards, one of the great Test matches. Four blistering August days in the long hot summer of 1976 and a line-up of all-time greats on both sides.
Even the umpires, Bill Alley and Dickie Bird, have a kind of legendary status.
England opener Dennis Amiss, returning to the international scene at age 34, made a double-century – and still ended up losing. On the other side Viv Richards, ten years younger and with most of his greatness yet to come, struck a mighty 291.
It contributed to a huge West Indies first-innings total of 687 for eight declared. Having made a respectable 435 in reply, England ended up being asked to repeat exactly that score to win.
They fell short by 232 runs as Michael Holding returned the astonishing match figures of 14 wickets for 149. And all with a day to spare.
And why is that amazing game of cricket chiefly remembered? Not for any of those feats I’ve just listed, but for one moment of radio commentary.
Brian Johnston may have remarked: “The bowler’s Roberts, the batsman’s Knott.” If he did it might have been mildly amusing, but no one would have remembered for more than a minute.
But with Holding bowling to Peter Willey, Johnners’s comment became an instant classic. (Willey, curiously, was the only England batsman in that Oval Test not to lose his wicket to Holding.)
Names can be such a source of amusement. A source which may be under threat if we are to believe a very odd report by Richard Webber of King’s College, London.
For his survey, Webber compared data from 2008 with the British census of 1881. And he found that the instances of people with “amusing names” had fallen by up to 75 per cent.
And if it’s OK for a geography professor to play around with funny names, it’s good enough for me.
Apparently there were just 785 people in Britain last year called Cock, as against 3,211 in 1881. The number of people called Balls fell in that period from 2,904 to 1,299.
The number of people named Smellie decreased by 70 per cent, Dafts by 51pc, Gotobeds by 42pc, Shufflebottoms by 40pc and Cockshotts by 34pc.
Best of all, you might think, the number of Deaths fell by almost half. And all that in a period when the population of Britain roughly doubled…
Professor Webber doesn’t mention it, but I’m pretty sure the surname Sex disappeared completely during that time.
So what happened to all the Smellies, Cocks – and Sexes? Were they more likely than the rest of us to meet Death? Or less likely to breed?
There may, I suppose, be a slight element of the latter, which I’ll come to in a moment. But really, Webber seems to be stating the obvious when he explains: “If the number goes down it’s either because they changed their names or they emigrated.
“In many cases, people probably changed their surnames as they came to be regarded as in bad taste.”
Which, I believe, is why the last Mr Sex resorted to Deed Poll.
Back in about 1900, Mr and Mrs Bottom of Durham obviously felt they couldn’t do anything about their name – but did they really have to call their daughter Ophelia?
The poor girl got stuck with it too – she was a spinster of about 80 when I encountered her. And I couldn’t help wondering whether she’d have grown up differently, perhaps had more luck finding a husband, if she’d been plain Jane Smith. Or even Jane Bottom.
We all know of people whose names provoke a laugh. And they don’t have to be the obvious Ivors or Ivans.
Hazel is a lovely name for a girl. Unless your surname happens to be Knutt.
What could possibly be wrong with the name Jenny? Or Taylor? But put them together and some wiseacre is sure to corrupt it to ‘genitalia’ – as an old friend of mine found to her constant annoyance when she was at school.
You could draw the moral that you can’t be too careful when choosing names. Or maybe that kids will find something to pick on whatever you do.
My experience as a writer of sports headlines for the News of the World tells me that you can make some sort of pun out of almost any name. And if you can make a rude one, you can be sure some schoolkid has beaten you to it.
In some ways, I found the obvious “jokes” on my surname that followed me around at school a relief from the unkinder personal comments that provoked other nicknames. (No, I’m not going to tell you what they were.)
I don’t know whether my friends Dykes, Huggins and Haw felt the same. Or Peter Willey.

Google knows what you're up to

“LOOK, look, that bloke on the bike – I’ve got an anorak that colour, and a saddlebag like that – do you think it’s me?”
Well yes, Mark, it might be.
“And look, that’s my house. And there’s my neighbour’s car. And there’s my broken bit of drainpipe. But I fixed that ages ago, so they must have taken the picture last summer.”
Well yes, that’ll be why the trees are all in leaf and the chestnuts in blossom. And frankly, I don’t care much, beyond the mild interest of seeing what sort of street you live in.
This was a genuine conversation – one of a few like that I’ve already witnessed or taken part in. I reckon there must have been many thousands of them taking place in offices all up and down the land these past few weeks.
Even in places such as Ipswich, where the camera cars have been seen but the pics aren’t up yet, the chatrooms and messageboards have been full of it. Google must be delighted with their investment.
For now. How long, I wonder, before the novelty of Street View wears off?
Google Maps are great. The ability to hover over satellite pictures of almost anywhere on Earth, with identifying labels if you want, is fun and can be useful.
Finding somewhere on a map, then zooming in on a single street, a single house, in photo view, has helped me a few times to find my way.
And there are some brilliant surprises. Like being able to peer down, in remarkable detail, on the eerily deserted streets and buildings of Chernobyl.
Or getting a close view of the so-called Boneyard in Tucson, Arizona, where more than 4,000 out-of-service US military aircraft are mothballed in case they’re ever needed again. Close enough to clearly identify each plane.
Not that there is any spying potential in this. The online photos are not exactly a live view. The Tucson golf course where Aussie Geoff Ogilvy won the recent World Matchplay title still appears as a patch of desert scrub.
And I’m not sure there’s really much spying potential, either, in the new generation, Street View.
A bit of mild passing fun, perhaps, in spotting yourself on your bike. And maybe a tiny embarrassment potential for the cheating wife or husband caught where they shouldn’t be.
But, realistically, your chances of being spotted “in the flesh” are vastly greater than any risk of being caught months later when Google gets its snaps online.
No, I wouldn’t worry too much – or get too excited – about down-your-street Googling. Its very openness prevents it being much danger to anyone.
I’m much more concerned about the CCTV cameras that track our every move in real time – without us ever getting to see what they see.
And, incidentally, the rights of ordinary folk like me who are apt to be hounded by security guards, or even the police, if we merely turn up on the street with a camera.
But technology does pose very serious risks to our liberty and privacy.
The government’s hare-brained ID cards scheme; its bid to copy all our emails; its computerised tracking of car registration-plates via “safety” cameras; its burgeoning databases of everything from our tax records to our DNA. It all adds up to an array of state snooping the Soviets could only dream of.
And then there’s Google. Once just a nifty search engine, it’s now bigger than most governments. And potentially even better informed.
Most of us make use of some of its services. So it can tell what web pages we look at, how often and for how long.
It can tell what we buy – what books and records we like, what services we subscribe to. All, of course, in the aim of targeting you with the right advertising. Which you may regard as a good thing, at least in part.
But you can tell quite a bit about someone’s political views, for example, from knowing the books they read. They might know, if they care to look, that I recently re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And then if you use Google as your diary… your roaming email service… to post your private thoughts in a blog… to store your family photos, maybe your private documents…
It can now even track your movements – or at least the movements of your mobile phone. If you want it to. Or, perhaps, if government or security services want it to?
That may not happen now. But it can, so it will.
And of course Google now knows what maps you look at, which streets you choose to take a virtual walk down.
OK, Google “takes your security seriously”. It should. Its whole enormous business depends on being trusted.
And let’s face it, we love it. But can we guarantee it will always deserve our love?
Because all that information could add up to an awful lot of power for whoever gets their hands on it.
And remember – Winston Smith ended up loving Big Brother.

UN-justified attack on my human rights

UNWIELDY, certainly. Ineffective, often. But always, surely, on the side of the good guys. In fact, the United Nations ARE the good guys. Aren't they?
The UN was set up right after the Second World War to ensure such a thing never happened again.
Its 192 member countries include every generally recognised independent state in the world apart from (bizarrely perhaps) the Vatican.
You might think a club of which everybody is a member (well, OK, everyone except the Pope) might be a pretty useless club.
And certainly the UN has never succeeded in its glorious stated aim of stopping war. In its 64-year history so far there has not been a single day when someone hasn’t been at war somewhere.
Indeed, the country where the UN has its HQ (the USA, of course) has been involved in more wars in that time than most – though never on its own soil.
But still, there has not (yet) been another "big one", another World War. For which the UN may perhaps take some of the credit. (And let's conveniently forget here, as most people usually do, that the two Congo wars of 1996-2003 involved eight countries and killed 5.4million people. That's pretty big, and despite the official end six years ago the fighting and dying are still going on.)
The UN, though, has things other than war on its agenda too.
There’s the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, the World Health Organisation, the UN Environment Programme and the Food Programme. Big, important stuff.
And then there’s the UN Human Rights Council. That's surely pretty important too.
Of course, the countries that torture their citizens - and sometimes each others’ - that deny women equal legal status to men, that carry out legal murder by injection, electric chair or stoning, are all UN members.
But at least the Human Rights Council is working on that. Isn't it?
Actually, what the HRC was working on last week was freedom of speech. Not guaranteeing it. Not even encouraging it. Trying to stop it. As it does routinely, year after year.
The council's 47 elected member states voted by 23 to 11, with 13 abstentions, to urge all countries in the world to pass laws making "defamation of religion" illegal.
If they got their way, I might never again be allowed to assert my non-belief in God.
It could be a serious problem for astronomers, particle physicists, geneticists, geologists and others whose discoveries conflict with old Bible tales.
Followed to its logical conclusion, it could plunge the world into a 1984, Big Brother scenario. If the truth conflicts with the official fantasy, it's the fantasy that's right – the truth is not just wrong, but illegal. This column would certainly be illegal.
Of course, I'm not expecting such a law to be passed. Not all over the world. Not here in Britain (though some of the Blair government's madder excesses weren't that far from it).
But the very fact that such a resolution was passed by a UN council gives dangerous international "authority" to those madcap governments that do want to squash all opposition to their particular religious lunacies.
Condemnation of the resolution has come from many quarters including the World Jewish Congress and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church – neither of them noted for their opposition to religion. Still more honourable are the protests lodged by the American Islamic Congress and the Muslim Council of Canada.
Honourable because the motion was put by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. And while on the surface it sets out to protect all religions from criticism, the wording goes on to make it quite clear what they really mean.
It says: "Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism."
Yes, it frequently is – often wrongly. But not always wrongly. And this is a case in point.
Because what we have here is the Human Rights Council voting to try to take away my human rights. On behalf of the world's most powerful Muslims.

Sex and the City lawyer

A FORMER City lawyer has launched a claim in the High Court that could set a very interesting precedent for all of us.
Patrick Raggett is suing the governors of his old school, and the Jesuit society which ran it, for £5million.
He claims his career was wrecked by sexual abuse at the hands of one priest during his time at Preston Catholic College in Lancashire.
The supposedly offending priest is now deceased, which gets one or other of them off the hook.
Mr Raggett says that after leaving school in 1976 he started to gamble, got into debt and underperformed at university. He had difficulty in forming relationships, drank excessively and took drugs.
All this I am prepared to believe. I know a lot of people you could say all that about. Some of it (the bit about "underperforming" anyway) you could say about me.
So who should we all sue?
Our old schools for failing to prepare us adequately to excel in later life?
Our parents ditto?
That old bloke who used to look at us funny when we got on the school bus?
What about the games teacher whose shortsightedness kept him from picking me for the school football team? He is obviously to blame for my failure to embark upon a playing career that might have led… well, anywhere.
A few starring games at left-back at the age of 14 and who knows – maybe, like Neil Warnock, I’d "still" be a Premier League manager now.
Perhaps I could also sue all those potential employers who unaccountably failed to see what a brilliant job I'd have done for them.
Then there's the question of how much we set our claim at. Why stop at a paltry £5m?
In my case, obviously, if I'd lived up to childhood promise and fulfilled my writing ambition, I'd be out-earning JK Rowling by now.
Of course, I doubt my old school (any or even all of them) could afford that much. But perhaps it's worth a try.
Now, all right, maybe I am getting silly now. But not as silly, it seems to me, as Mr Raggett. After all, I'm only indulging my fantasies in print – while he seems to think the world really does owe him a living. And a pretty decent one too.
I'm not denying that he may have been interfered with at school. I wouldn't know, would I?
And I'm certainly not saying it's OK for priests, teachers or anyone to do to children the sorts of things Mr Raggett apparently claims were done to him.
It's up to the High Court, with presumably a lot more evidence than I'll ever see, to decide what, if anything, that might have been.
But if he really wants to lay blame for all his own personal inadequacies at the door of one (conveniently dead) priest, he'll have to be pretty convincing. And there is one huge problem there.
He says himself he only realised he had been sexually abused three decades later "during a Sunday lunch with friends". Some Sunday lunch that must have been.
One does wonder what exactly his friends might have been telling him.
His whole claim is based on memories that have recently "surfaced". And you don't have to be an expert on Freud or psychoanalysis to know how dodgy "recovered memories" can be.
I once had a friend who blamed the breakdown of her already very bizarre marriage on having been abused by her father when she very young.
Yet she knew nothing of this supposed abuse until the memory was "recovered" with the help of a psychiatrist.
"Recovered" or "created", that is the question. A question neither I, the psychiatrist – nor my friend – will ever truly know the answer to, if we are honest.
In the meantime, has she been helped to "recover"? Or has her elderly dad been scurrilously smeared and her relationship with him ruined for the sake of a fashionable fiction?
As for Mr Raggett, is his recovered memory worth £5m – or should he, rather, be paying the school for enabling him to become a City lawyer at all?
He told the court: "My employment record is so far away from what it should have been. To know what one could have been and not be anything remotely approaching that is very painful."
I know the truth of that second sentence very well myself. I'm sure of lot of people reading this will have nodded at it too.
So should we all find someone to sue? Or should we learn to accept the blatant truth that life ain't fair? Count the blessings we do have.
And maybe, just maybe, take some responsibility ourselves for our own lives instead of playing victim and looking for someone to blame.

• For legal reasons, this post did not appear as my column in the Ipswich Evening Star.