Fechez le vache

It seems a lifetime ago now, but after scary-cool Droo on Saturday we jumped into the car with my parents and drove down to Portsmouth, in such good time we had to wait an hour to be allowed on the ferry.

There were lots of some flavour of classic car about, with smartish people driving. By the time we got aboard and up into the bar, these smart types had morphed into fat, smoking people in England tops. Such is the reliance these days on CGI.

Arrived at something ungodly in Caen next morning, woken to classical music which got ever more insistent. With time just to wolf a coffee, we found the car again and rode out on the D84 (also, I explained to my delighted fellow passengers, the name of a nifty robot in Old School Dr Who).

Took all day driving, with lots of chatter in the car, some expert navigating and spying along the roadside the yellow broom flowers that gave the Kings Plantagenet their name. Via the ring-roads of Nantes, Rennes, Noites and Bordeaux we made our way to the small town of Allemans-du-Dropt, where my great-auntie lives.

I’ve not been back since my early teens, so it was odd how much the town was in two-thirds scale of my memory. It was at once familiar and entirely foreign. Took the Dr into the church to see the frescoes, which include devils eating what look like children because they’d got funny ideas about perspective. After lashings of red wine we were dead asleep by ten.

Our first port of call early next morning was to a local winery where the Dr was brave before a wolf-like dog, and I got teased for having shivers whenever local cocks crew. Think I have an excuse what with being attacked by the ghastly things at the age of three.

Made up for this horror with a sampling of the booze – red going down a little heavy in that heat and so early. Offered to help carry the booze-cruise purchases back to the car, which really just gave me the excuse to see the cellars, the bottles of lovely stuff disappearing off into the dark, and to stroke fondly at the great oak barrels of the next batch.

Having dropped off this first instalment, we pootled up to the pretty 12th century church at Monteton, built incorporating the few bits of stone they found around the place that suggest much earlier Christians. The place seems mostly run (and kept going) by the local English community.

Then it was into Eymet for lunch, and a look round the rather lovely bastide (a fortified town in the middle ages, which served the French well during the 100 Years War). I suddenly had a flash of memory, being made to have icecream there in the street, so a picture could be taken. There were picturesque turrets and a cloistered market with places to eat in the shade. The Dr had nettle pasta.

Our next stop was the chateau at Duras (fab pictures at the site) which I remembered so fondly. It’s been much done up since my last visit, but the smoke-stack tower was just as commanding as ever. I don’t remember the staircase up to the 360° view being so steep, so narrow, or going on so long. But I remember scraping my knees to sit up on the ledge in the guard room, half of the way up. Which made me realise what a different size I must be these days.

We took photos of the long-pegged-together timber roof to impress a friend into that sort of thing, and marvelled at the sign which told of a 14th century owner who’d married the Marchioness of Goth. We spoke filth to each other in the whispering gallery, amid hordes of screaming schoolkids who’d rather missed the point.

The Dr was again appalled at the state of original objects on display, suffering in the sunlight, warped under the drawing pins that held them up. We moved swiftly on, and in the bar across the square had beer and gossip and Japan 1-nil up.

We were back in time for dinner with some of the great-aunt’s friends, and retired late. Pottered round to one of the friends next morning to use their pool while they did the gardening. Normally, we’d have gone swimming in the Castelgaillard lake near Duras, but run-off from the local farms has stopped the swimming on pain on nasty skin problems. Am rather bothered about that: having happy memories of failing to windsurf, and of meeting a bloke I’d later see in the background of Silver Nemesis, and of being told off for not looking after the baby brother.

Then to the Chateau at Biron, which was on an even grander, madder scale than Duras, and we struggled to imagine its grand, terraced garden which would have been raised at least 100 feet from the ground and stretched for miles, had the revolution not got in the way. The family’s coat of arms and the faces on the tombs had been chiselled off, suggesting what the locals thought. The gory torture chamber is not original, but leftover from the filming of Les Visiteurs. Or possibly, since I thought I would have remembered such grisly fun from last time, the more recent English-language remake.

The Dr liked the cheery skulls on one tomb in the chapel, which also boasted a very fine carving of Lazarus being raised from the dead. She also found a black and white cat to play with – although it promptly had a poo at us, and was then careering about the roof chasing lizards.

Then to Montpazier for ice creams, and to explore another bastide with shops under the market’s cloisters. I bought a hat which the Dr said was very hippy. Think this is a good thing.

Arrived back at Allemans to change, and to take the auntie out for authentic French nosh in Miramont. There was a lot of it; I couldn’t finish the fourth course. Learnt to eat soup the French way: grating a clump of garlic into roasted bread – which has a surface like sandpaper if cooked the right way. Then, drop the bread into the soup and cover in grated cheese. And eat.

Also had brie, and then a pruney coq au vin – to serve the scrawny, vicious buggers right. Had to go for a walk later to see off some of the corpulence.

This morning we bought more wine – and watched the local postman helping himself to a good glass in exchange for a letter. The first white we tried at the Domaine de Laulan was sharp and uninspiring – not a patch on the previous year’s vintage which my parents have been drinking since their last trip. The bloke selling it explained the bottle had come straight from the fridge and was too cold. And sure enough, a minute’s breathing later it tasted like nectar. Again I played mule and helped load up the car.

And that was it. A bit of lunch and long, hot journey into Bordeaux for our flight back (the Dr and my seats in the car will be taken up by the booze). A couple of tips for Bordeaux airport: there’s only one shop on the far side of the handbag scanners, and the coffee bar doesn’t sell wine.

Quick flight, quick train journey and home to the cat, and post, and work, and all the new stuff about Benny.

Thou speakest bollocks

The title of this post comes from Withnail & I’s deleted Scene 60, in which there’s a swordfight (no, really). It’s one of many marvels to be found in the screenplay, which also includes some notes about the real bloke that Withnail’s based on.

“[Viv’s] nicknames were ‘the spine’ and ‘crime’. I don’t know where the first came from, but the latter predicated on his ability to spend all day in the pub, and always with discretion navigate his turn to buy a drink. ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’ But none of us cared because his company was worth the price. Viv was into literature, Keats and Beaudelaire, and turned me on to both these great poets. Plus the funniest book I’ve ever read, the great A Rebours, is one of the two novels Marwood shoves into his suitcase at the end of the film.”

Bruce Robinson, Introduction to Withnail and I – the screenplay, p. viii.

A Rebours (or, “Against Nature” as it’s published in English) is a hugely self-indulgent French decadent novel first published in 1884. It influenced the fin de siecle of Oscar Wilde, and is referred to in A Picture of Dorian Gray as “the strangest book he had ever read”. It remained something of a cult hit ever after, and was especially cool in the 1960s. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition cites Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography where she’d ask her dates if they’d read A Rebours.

“And if he said yes you’d fuck.”

Marianne Faithfull, Faithfull, p.100, cited in ‘Introduction’ by Patrick McGuinness, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against nature (a rebours), p. xv.

After a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll that eats up too much of his inheritance, the aristocratic Des Esseintes retires to a small house and solitary life of thought and indulgence. We glimpse his put-upon servants, cabbie and doctor, and there are fleeting accounts of his exes and parents, but mostly it’s Des Esseintes’s views on life, subject by subject.

A chapter will list, for example, his heroes and villains of prose, while another might address poetry, the classics, music, perfume, painting, religion… The general opinion is that anything other people like is rubbish. His former favourites can be ruined just by their becoming popular.

I knew a bloke once who railed against the sheep at university who all had the same Oasis album on their shelves, next to their identical Tarantino posters. But there’s a balance to be struck between a sneery snobbishness against anything just because it’s popular and a desire to find new stuff, new perspectives, which challenge the conventional.

Des Esseintes’s wants to flout fashion and taste, and spends his time being willfully difficult. McGuinness points out that a more literal English translation of the title is “stubbornly against the tide” – in exactly the way that King Canute wasn’t.

Des Esseintes is not a character you’d want to emulate – weedy, sickly, cynical and silly – though that’s exactly what Withnail is doing. That said, the book’s often very funny. The absurd jewel-encrusting of a turtle, or an excitable trip out of town that doesn’t quite work out, are both reminiscent of the dour tomfoolery of the film.

It’s a bitter attack on the plebeian hideousness of life. It’s wild, free-wheeling, rude and very strange. Funny, yes, but funny peculiar.

Off to see my auntie now, in a quiet backwater of France (though – hooray for the Internet! - there’s a detailed site about the river valley in question). Back Wednesday.

Impliedly and hoverports

Are two words I learnt yesterday. Something at work was said to be “impliedly defined” and I hazarded that this might be bollocks. Word certainly didn’t like the term, and scribbled under the first bit in angry red zigzag.

Google threw back “about 986,000” finds for it (in an impressive 0.17 seconds), but a cursory glance suggests these are mostly people wanting to know if this bastard is really a word?

Yes, reply those shackled to the right of legalese to obfuscate (or, those who think it’s okay for lawyers to make things complicated). For example:

“I have a great deal of sympathy with the hon. Lady's comments on seemingly cumbersome words such as “impliedly''. However, lawyers tell me that, over the years, those words acquire a meaning that all lawyers understand in the context of Acts of Parliament and Bills before Parliament. Although she is worried about the cumbersome and alienating nature of the prose, “impliedly'' achieves something in the text. If we did not keep it, we would have to list every possible purpose in the agreements reached with other countries, which would almost certainly result in their being revisited often. Fraud, international or otherwise, evolves and changes over time. As one loophole closes, others may open and other ways of defrauding the system are created. The language we use in our Acts of Parliament seeks to put a stop to such practices and to keep up with that evolution.”

Angela Eagle on the Social Security Fraud Bill [Lords], Official ReportCommons Standing Committee A, 9/4/01.

So, er, international fraud would get away with new tricks if a law said “definition is implied” or that something “implies definition”?

The “lawyers tell me” suggests the hon. Angela Eagle doesn’t agree herself, and its being a word “that all lawyers understand” just means it’s jargon. A colleague unkindly suggests that it is in lawyer’s interests to make things unwieldy for the layperson. I have every respect for the nuance of meaning, and it’s on the basis I question the term. It’s longer, it’s more complicated, and really quite bright people don’t know what it means.

Not being a lawyer (or that bright) I’d still hazard it’s bollocks. And googling also turned up the equally silly “implicative”.

Meanwhile, a “hoverport” is a port for a hovercraft, rather than a port that hovers. Bit disappointed about that one.

Mod cons

“Many different styles can be characterised as Modernist, but they shared certain underlying principles: a rejection of history and applied ornament; a preference for abstraction; and a belief that design and technology could transform society.”

Information board at the V&A's Modernism exhibition, June 2006.

The huge exhibition (until 23 July) makes clear that Modernism emerged as a rejection of terrible things past, advocating a new, post-world-war order. Much of it derives from friendly, leftie ideas about social equality: better housing for the poor, workplaces that ease the burden on the worker. But there’s a great difference between equality and the sort of uniformity these grand designs impose.

Some things are great fun – I liked the kooky teapots and saucers – and the foldaway furniture makes the most of confined accommodation. But the great blocks of housing in concrete and glass are just ugly and oppressive, fitting people into neatly wrought boxes.

Despite the elegant socialite in the foreground of JJP Oud’s “Municpal Housing” (1931-2), it reminded me of Victorian models of the panoptic prison system – where individual identity is subsumed by the institution.

There’s also little softness or comfort in the models. With my lower back beginning to protest at all the time spent hunched at computers, I didn’t think the various takes on chair looked that supportive.

Having lived in a concrete block, I know how impractical an austere little living chamber is to keep warm and damp-free, and how quickly the weather and vegetation can make the crisp lines and bright facades look old and dour and forsaken.

Actually, the insistence on abstract lines and blocks rather than the “natural” (for all there’s a section on Modernism’s observation of the natural world) could suggest a rejection of the squidgy, mucky sort of existence we actually live.

It’s a world of firmness and phallic projection into space, which I can see might be liberating after decimation by world war and flu. Though not denying the genuine social ills the Modernists tried to put right, there’s something disturbing about artists and engineers organising people’s lives on such a scale.

The Dr made the point (after a few beers) that you could show the same Modernist-built housing estates now as their builders did the Victorian slums, and make the same points about deprivation and despair. The buildings are not solutions to the problem: the communities in question are still places money is not directed.

There was something a bit sinister about the projected health and dynamism of this new generation of people. A fun bit of film about nudey ladies doing exercise swiftly moved on to mass-participation stretches and Triumph of the Will.

The totalitarian edge to Modernism is its rejection of the past: the arrogance of defining the bright future, once and for all.

Those laughing, nudey girls are part of a rejection of the “wrong kinds of body” – which led to the singling out of “corrupting” racial, political and sexual elements. The dehumanising power of abstraction made the 20th century’s mass killing machine all the easier.

Though this may just be our being wise after the event, Modernism is sinister because we know where the ideology led. It’s an interesting, comprehensive display and analysis of a major social and political movement. Intellectually vibrant, ambitious and bold, but really not very comforting.

Happy-slapping hoodies with ASBOs and ringtones

Have proofed "Incongruous details", which will now be published in July. Also looked over something else related, but you'll have to wait and see.

Have talked before about the importance of details, especially in this freelancing lark. On Monday, learned colleagues were wondering why ASBOs are always "slapped" on offending chavs, and which red-eyed, red-topped newspaper had first called it that.

"It's slapped because it's a knee-jerk reaction," said one colleague. But I don't think you can slap with your knees.

Details are important in stories, and my late grandfather once suggested a very clever thing which I then wangled into an essay. He was asking about my filthy love of sci-fi, a millieu he'd never got.

("Most of it seems pretty appalling rubbish," he said. Which is pretty much my view, too.)

He did admit, however, to a filthy love of a good detective story - and recommended me Dashiell Hammett, for which I shall always be grateful. And he knew that some people just don't get detective stuff.

I said it was odd that a) science-fiction and detective stories both began around the same time (some people even argue they were invented by the same odd bloke), and b) that if you don't get into them at about the age of 11, then you never really do.

"Hmm," my grandfather said, or words to that effect. "Perhaps that's because they're both about spotting details in the stories to build up a picture of the world. In a detective story, you're looking for clues about who committed the crime and how. In science fiction, clues tell you how the world itself works. If you never learnt to decode these kinds of story, you'll always be locked out."

Which I think is very true. In sci-fi, the laying down of clues is called world-building. Some writers like to spell it all out, so Orwell's 1984 (yes, of course it's sci-fi) has a whole great chapter on exactly how his dystopia came about and on the etymology of Newspeak. It's a not very subtle infodump - though its political acumen lifts it above the usual sci-fi bollocks where someone explains how "My culture is unlike yours, Earthman. We believe in Honour, and do not use contractions."

The subtler stuff is more tricky to pull off. A classic example (I think it's cited in Bob Shaw's book on writing sci-fi) is a fleeting reference to the doors of a house "dialescing" rather than just opening. That doors open in a strange, sci-fi way tells us we're on a strange, sci-fi world where we shouldn't trust any of the normal, everyday things we take for granted. It doesn't need to be a plot point, it's just part of the furniture.

My favourite for this kind of thing is Cold Comfort Farm.

Put your teeth back in; yes, it's sci-fi. It's written in the 1930s and set in the 50s, after some horrific world war. The well-to-do fly bi-planes everywhere as they might do their motorcars, and public telephone boxes are fitted with TV screens. The number of people I've pointed this out to... Even those who've read the thing several times, and never once noticed the details.

(Why it's sci-fi - what its sf-ness achieves - is one for another post, and I should probably reread the thing anyway.)

I laughed at the Doctor knowing in School Reunion all about happy-slapping hoodies. In a couple of years when the terms have all dated, the line will mean something slightly different. The Doctor's not up with ver kids, he just knows his history.

Late-developing and fairies

"At age fourteen, by a process of osmosis, of dirty jokes, whispered secrets and filthy ballads, Tristan learned of sex. When he was fifteen he hurt his arm falling from the apple tree outside Mr Thomas Forester's house: more specifically from the apple tree outside Miss Victoria Forester's bedroom window. To Tristan's regret, he had caught no more than a pink and tantalising glimpse of Victoria, who was his sister's age and, without any doubt, the most beautiful girl for a hundred miles around."

Neil Gaiman, Stardust, p. 29.

Knocked through this very quickly and pleasurably, patting myself on the back for noting various references to what Grimm fairy-tales I've read (the Dr got both books for Christmas). Gaiman's got the feel, the strangeness and the Freudian undertones (glimpses of vivid sex and brutality) spot on, though his morality is more fathomable and consistent.

It's also much more plotty, and longer as one sustained story than the Grimm stuff. It could have been far longer in fact, but Gaiman glosses over digressionary adventures in a sentence, teasing us with details from his fairy-tale world without having to get all indulgently epic about it.

Tristan wants to impress Victoria, and to get rid of him she says she'll do anything if he'll fetch her the star they've just watched falling. Tristan sets off, but the star fell on the far side of the Wall that keeps out the lands of Faerie. He's not the only one who wants the fallen star. And she's not best pleased either.

Tristan's a bit late in discovering girls at 14, isn't he? Though I guess they didn't have James Bond films in the 1830s. And in the prologue for (the never written) "Wall", there's a girl who comes on for the first time at 13. Which - and I admit not to being an authority on the subject - seems a bit late. Perhaps both characters hold onto their innocence later than most because of their connection to Faerie.

The fairy world is a real and fascinating place, which also reminded me of Little, Big and Strange and Norrell, and bits of CS Lewis. The ending made me think of Arwen from Lord of the Rings. And I'm aware that all of these are helping themselves from older mythologies which I should really get round to reading one day.

As with Clarke's book, it's set in the 19th century and mixes the period costume we know with fanciful fairy-tale world - grounding the made-up with familiar history. Since we feel we know something of the parochial life of Victorian small towns, it makes everything more credible and real.

It's a little predictable, and sometimes the revelations are a bit too spelt out. We don't need Victoria, for example, to explain how there's two Monday's this week. And though it's simply told, wryly funny and charming, it's also odd and spooky and really not one for children.

Not that they wouldn't enjoy it, I just think they'd miss what it's really about. It's not about a childish world of make believe, but that we (ourselves as adults and as modern society) have left that childish world behind.

Related stuff, if you're bovvered:

• On Anansi Boys
• On Gaiman in London, November 2005
• Interview with Dave McKean

Hoons

This crime-fighting story amused me.

It's kind enough to explain what "daggy" means, but not "hoons". I
assume it's short for hooligans. And it's my new favourite word.

Bare naked ladies

Went to the exhibition of Michelangelo’s sketches at the British Museum (until 25 June) which was really rather busy. In between getting shoved and stepped on by the myriad other punters, saw some really fascinating stuff.

Even the most dashed-off outline shows a world of technical skill. The bloke was just 21 when he carved the Pieta I’d been so impressed with in Rome. Git.

Interesting to see different constructions and arrangements for familiar pieces. The sketches are useful because they give an insight into technique – and there’s a pretty fab computer wossname showing how the sketches make up the Sistine Ceiling.

His work is based on very close observation of models, though he’s happy to take liberties for artistic effect. The exhibition points out that Adam in the Sistine Ceiling (and the South Bank Show title sequence) couldn’t really lounge like that without breaking his pelvis. And the iconic David’s hands are too big.

I think it was my A-level art teacher who said this was ‘cos Mike was showing off he could do hands. Some chums who can’t catch say it could mean something else.

The Dr and her chums got giggly about the apple-like lumps that did not look like real boobies. This was not an artist taken to scrutinising nude ladies – a sharp contrast from the feminine curves in the Picasso Museum just over a week ago. No, the women look like men with bits stuck onto them. (But see also my expert analysis of the contemporary Tintoretto).

The implicit sexuality is referred to in the exhibition, but I felt they’d played down the salacious detail so as not to damage the master’s reputation. There’s a short notice which effectively says, “It wasn’t really gayness. It was sort of expected at the time to shaft young boys.”

Across the entrance hall, the Warren Cup offers an insight into “Sex and society in Ancient Greece and Rome”, and the Dr was busy taking notes. I know exhibitions are meant to be neutral, dispassionate and objective, but I felt something was lost in this abstraction. The exhibits are cold and long-dead, though they’re insights into people’s busy, passionate and mucky lives.

(Note the picture of the cup on the website is tastefully positioned so you can’t see any boys shagging.)

Went to a rather good party on Saturday night and was sat at the front for Dr Who. Bloody hell, that was a bit exciting. Other’s have already spoken of the Firefly influence (which even the Dr spotted, bless her), and my first question to those in the know was, “Go on then, is it Sutekh?”

They told me, God damn them. But you’ll have to wait and see. 

Playground economics

I am formulating a theory that the economy works a bit like kids in the schoolyard.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the kids compare notes on what presents they're expecting, and to start off these predictions are pretty reasonable. A remote control K9, maybe. A book of short trips. The obligatory satsuma.

The predictions are based on tangible evidence - what they got last year, how much their parents are likely to spend, what they've actually asked for.

Slowly, though, the competition grows. A new Playstation wossname, or a bike, or something else a bit more costly. The kid who starts it merely wants to claim, "My parents really love me" - it's less about greed as about confidence.

But that makes everyone else feel a bit rubbish, so they're saying that they'll be getting something similar. An X-box or a go-kart... It's important at school that you don't lose face.

No one wants to go too far too quickly for fear of being caught bullshitting. But the bluff continues with its own inertia; real, achievable gains slowly warping into dreams. Anyone a bit flash, a bit bolshy, is likely to increase everyone's stakes.

But it can't go on forever. If no one says "Balls!" at any point, if they don't escape the cycle, then it's all brought crashing down anyway by the reality of Christmas Day. Targets are only partially met. They might not even have got all of their original, paltry wants.

And who is to blame for this calamitous shortfall? The kids comparing notes that first day back at school know exactly where the error lies.

Their parents simply failed to deliver. If only they could sack them.

Blair, the party and reasons for going to war

“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.”

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p. 137.

No, this is E. Blair, not T. Had read this while doing my A-levels and took it to Spain to reread. How’s that for diligent?

It’s a vivid, action-packed adventure yarn, as Orwell joins up with the POUM to fight the fascists. The language is straight-forward and simple (not stupid).

Julian Symons makes the point in his introduction that the kind of warfare Orwell describes had changed little since World War One. It’s a sharply observed and detailed account – from memory too, as his notes had been continually nicked or burnt. It’s concise, action-packed and male.

He’s casually brusque about the hardships and I’m not sure whether that’s English reserve or an inability to deal with the emotional. His 1984 is similarly grubby and brutal, and just as sparse on love.

“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.”

Ibid., p. 51.

We only rarely get any hint of how the events affect Orwell himself (or his wife – I’d be fascinated to know what she thought about it all). He’s a bit surly and he could do with more cigarettes, that’s about it.

The factions involved in the Spanish civil war are notoriously complicated, and Orwell keeps the topic for an appendix chapter he says we needn’t even read. I tried to, got about midway and realised I’d not retained any of it. You really just need know that there were all sorts of different anti-fascist groups all getting at one another, a bit like in Life of Brian.

It’s odd to read all this and Orwell’s 1937 predictions about what would happen next when we know about the world war to come. You keep wanting to shout, “Look out behind you!”

It’s interesting to hear of the Russians “sabotaging” the communist revolution in Spain so as not to bother their new-forged diplomatic and trade links with other European counties. And the European neighbours are also keen not to intervene for fear of antagonising Hitler.

Not included, though referred to in the introduction, is Orwell’s 1942 essay looking back on the war. Nor is there anything to let us know what happened to all the people mentioned. Peter Davison (no, not that one) provides a note on the text which mentions how Jorge Kopp might have introduced the second edition. We’d last heard of Kopp languishing in a Spanish jail while the Orwells fled the country – and all the indications are that he won’t be seen again.

Symons’s introduction suggests how near / far Orwell was in his predictions. He also refers to both Raymond Carr and Hugh Thomas sniping at Orwell’s partisan views, though he (Symons) says that neither give specifics on where they think he’s wrong. I’d have liked some kind of afterword to tie all that stuff up.

Confused feelings created by relative's sudden and unexpected beauty

“When Helen saw a movie in which the happy ending was that the super-intelligent working-class girl received the letter telling her she’d been accepted for the swanky academy, she always wondered whether that really was a happy ending. The likely outcome of the girl getting her education would be that in the future even if she loved her parents dearly she wouldn’t be able to stop herself being bored and petulant with them and though she struggled against it she wouldn’t be able to resist finding her home town tedious, tiny and peculiar.”

Alexei Sayle, The Weeping Women Hotel, pp. 147-8.

Finished this while on the plane out to Malaga, and as those who replied to my thoughts on Sayle’s Overtaken advised, it’s really rather special.

A strange and vivid opening chapter in the first person sees a battered, shell-shocked woman escaping something terrible. We then backtrack to follow the story of fat, ugly Harriet as she tries to change her life while her pretty, mean sister Helen finds her own unravelling. Right up until the end, we’re not sure which sister it is who’s headed for the opening chapter.

It’s funny and sharp and moving throughout, with brilliant observations and turns of phrase. Sayle throws in so many details and oddments that though the final section is him merely knocking down the pins he’s already set up, you still can’t guess which way things will turn.

He’s savage about Martin Amis’s dancing, and what Neo from the Matrix must be like as a neighbour. There’s a nice line on psychiatrists all being screwy themselves, but not sectioning each other out of professional courtesy. I kept interrupting the Dr’s own much more pious reading to point out particularly choice bits.

We care about Harriet in a way I didn’t feel for Overtaken’s Kelvin. As a result it’s a much more absorbing and satisfying novel. Am sitting on my hands to not spoil it any further. But look you, read the bloody thing.

In other news: the Dr came to a momentous decision yesterday which I’ll speak more of in about a month. I’ve spent the day busy editing things which are yet to be announced, and reintroducing myself to the gym.

Read something I wrote about The Great Escape, and this deluded fellow thinks I’m a hero for services rendered half a lifetime ago. And not, as it happens, by me.

Post #249

Tomorrow this blog is a whole year old, and I’m still not quite sure why I bother. But anyhoo…

Didn’t quite fit into the bus to Granada, so arrived feeling sore and a bit cranky. We dumped bags and headed to the cathedral. In the adjoining Capilla Real we got to see the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella, who were so happy about winning the town from the Moors in 1492 that they stumped up the cash for Columbus to get lost.

A narrow staircase let you peak at the metal coffins of the dead king and queen. I was reminded of Nimbos telling me about King James, similarly sealed in a lead box. The airtight seal meant he didn’t crumble away to dust as is normal with dead folk, and a later investigation of the coffin found he'd dissolved into soup. I will avoid the tasteless gag about Scotch broth.

Two other odd things about this high Catholic chapel. First, behind the altar is a ceiling-high collection of scenes from the Bible, all done in gaudy 3D. There’s Jesus chatting to some woman, and a priest looking suitably devout.

Oh, and there’s Herod handing over the head of St John the Baptist to Salome (whose mum wanted it for reasons not entirely explained in the Good Book). And between them kneels the remainder of John, captured just as he topples forward so we get an eyeful of his hewn and spurting neck.

The Dr reminded me that public executions would have been a regular part of life at the time this thing was commissioned, so the graphic detail wouldn’t have been quite so shocking.

Secondly, the music playing eerily through the chapel was one of the less-obviously sci-fi tunes from the Bladerunner soundtrack. Guess that Vangelis also did the tunes for that 1492 movie, but even so it was a bit odd. Half expected them to follow it up with some sombre Paddy Kingsland. But they didn’t.

Next day, we dared climb all the way up to the Alhambra. This was partly due to a huge underestimation on my part about how steep it would be (oops) and the still becrutched Dr had to hang on to my arm most of the way (double oops). But we did get a good understanding of the place’s defensive position, as well as seeing a nice bit of stream and garden.

It really is a very beautiful place, and we cooed our way round the Nasrid palace. Again, it’s full of small, interlocking spaces arranged round water features and rooms for contemplation. The Arabic written into the intricate plasterwork everywhere suggests the decorators were fully literate, and there are all kinds of theories about the mathematical and astronomical significance of the décor.

Every now and then there are rather feeble bits of masonry done by later, Christian hands – there’s an especially galling ceiling of Ferdinand and Isabella’s heraldry which just seems vulgar compared to the modest skill all around it. The Dr explained how the Christian conquest included burning all the Moorish books and manuscripts, learning from the classical age that the West was only just beginning to realise the worth of.

The place was a lot more crowded than when I’d been eight years ago, and I marvelled at the inanities from other visitors. They pointed out to each other what were windows and what ceilings, and which of the pools included “goldfish”.

At least our enlightened countrymen have stopped nicking bits – an awful lot of the Alhambra’s finery resides in the British Museum and V&A.

On Monday we headed back to Malaga by cab – a luxury that gave us time to see the cathedral. I grasped enough Spanish to discuss with the cab driver Granada’s programme of roadworks, Brazil’s chances in the world cup and the myriad virtues of Liverpool. At least I think that’s what it was about.

And then home yesterday to the cold and a cat largely unimpressed to see us, plus all kinds of work things to be done. Did a bit of them, then had wine and Saturday’s Dr Who care of Nimbos. Dreamt of faceless people in cages.

Nos embarrechemos

Or something. Whetever the Spanish is for "we are drunk".

Hello from hot, sweaty Malaga bus station. We have just missed a bus to Granada, and so here I am killing the time before the next one.

Had a nice time yesterday, starting off at the Picasso Museum. Having established in one room that Picasso was bored with just drawing stuff well before he was out of his teens, we followed his bosom fixation through various stylistic developments. His experiment with form seems to have been so you could look front-on at a naked lady, and still see all of her bum.

The Dr was especially taken with the classically influenced stuff. There was some splendid hasty sketches of satyrs and fauns larking about, all with delightfully smiley faces. We bought a poster.

Also liked the more realistic one of the Minotaur hunched over some bird. Looked like an Eddie Campbell drawing, I thought.

Then we went to the Moorish castle on the hill, which the Dr explored valiantly, even with her crutch. It´s a beautiful place, all done in shallow red bricks and using any bits of antiquity they had to hand. So orphaned Roman columns support the arches, stuff like that.

It´s so beautiful, with small courtyards and spaces running into each other, and water babling peacably throughout, that you could almost miss the carefully constructed defensive purpose. Every turn of the entrance is well covered, with handy hidey holes and nooks for soldiers to squeeze into.

The views are also spectacular, and would have been even better in the days before the high-rise blocks and cement factory on the water´s edge.

I´d be quite happy being on guard duty in a place like that.

After some very nice paella and a kip, we headed to a fantastically high-Catholic church for the wedding, admiring the Madame Tussauds-like dioramas of various nuns and saints. I´d never seen a donkey done quite so majestically.

Wedding went on into the very wee hours, and I got the cerveza all to myself. Left about 3 as the dancing got going, and had about four hours sleep before we got turfed from our very plush hotel. Now got four hours on a bus. Bah.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll

"Is all my brain and body need..."

Off to Spain 'cos someone who's almost family is getting hitched. And as we hurry ourselves out the door, it strikes me as odd where Dr Who thought'd make a good date with Rose.

When you buy flowers or take her for pizza, you at least make the subtext implicit.

"Das ist gut! C'est fantastique!
Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!"

Two world wars and one world cup

The football is coming and with it the usual silliness about how we used to be an Empire and had some wins last century.

"We are unique among nations in our ignorance about our own history," raved Rob Newman last month.

"How curious, for example, that the first world war is never taught in our schools as an invasion of Iraq ... I am sure many of you, like me, have never been entirely satisfied with the standard explanation we were given at secondary school for the causes and origins of the [war] - the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. I mean, no one is that popular."

Rob Newman, "History of Oil".

Yes, that took me a bit by surprise, too.

Now Newman's rant about oil isn't the first thing you'd pair up with AN Wilson, but I've been reading "After the Victorians". Newman, for example, doesn't seem maniacally obsessed with linking everything that happened in the first 50 years of the 20th century to the worries of the Church of England. And he's less reverent of poets and paintings.

Yet both muddle up history and culture since 1900 to show a) that stuff we were taught at school is more interlinked and cross-pollinating than maybe the conventional packaging of history in syllabuses and documentaries makes out, and b) that it very much informs the world we live in now.

Because of that, what are not necessarily new or unspoken-of-previously ideas about the history we take for granted become all the more radical.

Newman goes on to explain the threat posed by the Baghdad-Berlin railway - an extension of the Orient Express from Constantinople down into what was then Persia - in the years leading up to the war. This would give Germany access to Britain's monopoly of oilfields, at a time when Western powers were becoming dependent on oil. Until that point, Germany had no oil reserves of its own. And Wilson agrees:

"If it did not grab the public imagination as a major threat, the railway obsessed the diplomats and politicians. They knew that access to the oilfields of Persia and to India were vital to [British] interests ... In the very debate in the House of Commons after the assassination of the archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, having offered his personal sympathy ... began almost immediately to speak of those things which most concerned British interests in a coming war. He said barely a word about France or Belgium. He used the question of a back-bencher to allow him to revert to oil concessions in Persia and whether two brigades would be enough to protect them."

AN Wilson, "After the Victorians", pp. 135-6.

The first division of British troops deployed in the war was sent, according to Newman, to Basra not Belgium. He argues that we only hear of the war poets from the muddy trenches, though Wilson reminds us that Rupert Brooke fought in Gallipoli, died in Skyros, and wrote to the then Prime Minister's daughter about his classical fancies come alive.

Wilson avoids any too obvious linkings of Iraq then and now. He's more interested in India than the oil - the railway affected trade routes as well as black gold, and Wilson's book is most interested in the break up of the territories Empress Victoria had lauded over. That imperial collapse is because of the real victors of the 20th century:

"The USA did well out of the [first world] war. Every country in Europe emerged from the war financially ruined. The United States, however, was immeasurably enriched, not least by European debts owing to various US institutions, to the tune of £2,000 million."

Ibid, p. 202.

He then argues that the collapse of the Empire wasn't just the result of the second world war, but a condition of the US joining the fray. There is an argument (though it's not one Wilson argues) that the world wars were the same war between the old imperial powers, just with a bit of an intermission. Certainly the situation in 1939 can be seen to have come about because of flaws in the 1918 settlements. Still, Wilson's especially damning of our "allies" the US and USSR using the second world war in Europe to further their own horrific expansionist ends.

Unlike any war previously, the second world war did not end in peace and order, but a cold war fought between two super-bullies and their affiliated lapdogs. Stalin killed millions, including many who'd been prisoners and/or enemies of the Nazis. But they too suffered an imperial collapse before the end of the century.

The US are even worse than us on their own history. The Dr and I visited the National Air and Space Museum in Dulles while on our honeymoon two years ago. Hanging from the ceiling amid various bi-planes and spacecraft was an innocuous little flyer called Enola Gay. The small plaque gave some idea of the engine capacity, but nothing at all about its famous flight on 6 August 1945, where its one kookily-named bomb killed an estimated 138,890 people - and that not including the after effects.

"The overwhelming view of those who actually knew about the atomic bomb, and its effect upon human lives, was that its use was an obscenity, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Szilard were all utterly opposed. It took tremendous lies, of a Goebbelsesque scale of magnitude, to persuade two or three generations that instead of being gratuitous mass murder, the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were almost benign - first, because they avoided the supposed deaths of half a million American troops (the estimated number of casualties had America conquered Japan by an invasion of infantry - a pretext utterly ruled out by the brevity of the time lapse between the dropping of the two weapons); and secondly, because it was better the weapon should be in the hands of the Good Guys rather than truly wicked people such as Hitler or Stalin. Both these views, enlivened with a dash of Bible Christianity, helped to put the President's mind at rest as he meditated upon it all in his diary."

Ibid, pp 472-3.

The implication is that the US dropped the bombs not to have Japan surrender - they'd been attempting to surrender anyhow - but to show Stalin who was boss in the new world order. And they left off many German industralists from facing the noose at Nuremberg because a strong West German economy would be another raspberry blown at Russia.

"All the just war, good cause, humanitarian arguments, they begin to unravel if ever a war is seen to be part of a continuous foreign policy that has remained absolutely consistent for decades. In the 95 years since Mesopotamian oil was first struck ... Britain has been at war with or occupying Iraq for 45 of them."

Newman, ibid.

Wilson is keen to stress that for all we carpet-bombed German civilians, we were still Better Guys than the Nazis, and life was far better with our "win" than had Hitler succeeded. But we weren't entirely the Good Goys we like to think - and still aren't. The Nazi elite were tried for 'planning and waging an aggressive war' - forcing a brutally consistent strategic and economic agenda in defiance of international laws.

Yes, technically we won both wars, but at an incredible cost - financially, politically - and effectively surrendered all our former power and influence to our cousins across the pond. At least we've got the world cup.

Which we won once. Forty years ago.

A period in which the Germans have won it twice, and been runner's up four times.

Put that light out

"As the story goes, Mr. Guerrier, on an otherwise uneventful day, seated himself on a small barrel, then absentmindedly tapped out the live embers from his pipe against it. Unfortunately, the "small barrel" was a keg of gun powder which, in combination with the aforementioned live embers, fatally distributed Mr. Guerrier over quite a substantial area!"

Robert L Munkres, "Tales of Old Fort Laramie".

I like "fatally distributed".

Love and war

Someone recently voiced the old chestnut that we're most technologically innovative as a species during time of war. Of course, the immediate threat of death rather focuses the mind, but there's more to it than that.

You see, you could argue that this means it's human nature to see the worst in everything, to see any potential tool first-off as a weapon.

For example, our understanding of germs and bacteria was just in its infancy - and penicillin still decades away - when mustard gas was being mass-produced for the battlefield. There were scientists testing the affects of atomic bombs even before they realised you'd need better protection than paper-overshoes.

It's the weapons first, then the dreams of atomic motorbikes and travellators that might make life more fun, or the accidental discovery of a mould that cures disease.

The counter-argument, though, is that it's not destruction that motivates us. Man does what he has always done to get by since his days on the savannah - used those tools available to him to give any slight advantage in protecting himself and his family. Those okaying the use of mustard gas or the A-bomb did so, they said, to save lives.

So it is not hate that technology thrives on, but love.

This is a fake

Went to see the Da Vinci Code this afternoon, cos it was raining and we couldn't think of anything else. The Dr was laughing by the end.

Do mind the spoilers.

In fact, it probably won't make any sense unless you've seen the film.

And even then, not a lot.

There are a handful of things that irritated me:

It's not very clever
We're talking about a multi-million bestseller, so it's got to have been accessible in the first place. But this huge secret that the greatest scholars of the past millennia have kept safe, and which the church and various crackpot millionairres are desperate to locate, is hidden behind a few word games and anagrams no more complex than anything you'd find in a weekly puzzle magazine.

Don't believe me? It takes Tom Hanks a couple of days to crack it all.

Oh, there are nods to research and history, and there is a bit where Hanks says he needs a library. We'll ignore the fact that he's in central London and the best library he can think of is in Chelsea, forgetting that he's nearer one containing all the books ever published. The big fool. He doesn't go to the library anyway because he gets his answer by googling with a mobile.

What really bothers is the idea that any given symbol stands for one particular thing. It's what you get in puzzle magazines because it makes it easier for the person solving the puzzle. But symbols can mean all sorts of things. For example, depending on context, the sun can mean: male, light, summer, heat, day, fire, royalty, time, that the tennis will be okay...

Since symbols can mean different things, there are all sorts of readings to be made. Maybe Leonardo did mean something particular by not putting any wine glasses in his Last Supper. Maybe he just didn't want people thinking it was one of those sorts of party.

Likewise, "paganism" isn't just one religion. It describes many different kinds of religion, both historically and now. That the Romans had such a pantheistic view allowed them to embrace all kinds of beliefs. So claiming the pentacle as a specific emblem of a specific kind of religion is to reduce everything down to something simple and plot-convenient.

Anyway, it's not a pentacle, because the "pent" bit means it'd have five points, not six. And that would rather overturn a fundamental part of the solution, wouldn't it?

Don't trust authority
It would be Leonardo, wouldn't it? Not Masaccio or Fra Angelico, or anyone else slightly less well known. And the clues are in Leo's more famous paintings, too. That's helpful. And Isaac Newton was in on it too. And you always knew the police and the church were up to no good, didn't you?

Thing is, it does make a very good case against religion. The lecture on the early church is not just pretty much verifiable, it's the most damaging to those who take doctrine very seriously. Many of the most crucial bits of dogma were agreed in committees and/or by killing anyone who disagreed. Applying historical scrutiny to the church collapses the absolutes, and also begs questions about why the church isn't more about what Jesus actually said...

But the film's keen not to get at the church too much. At first it looks like all of Christianity's in on the plot. Then it's just the Catholics. No, then it's Opus Dei. No, then it's just an unofficial splinter group who's efforts are so not what the rest of the church would approve of that they'll be excommunicated if they're caught. And no, it's not even them. It's just Alfred Molina running the show.

But no, he's just the mug of someone else, who's really just trying to bring down the church...

So by the end of the film it's rather as if there's isn't some great big conspiracy because it's all unravelled. That policeman didn't mean to beat up that innocent air traffic bloke. He just thought Jesus wanted him to do it, and now he knows better.

What really bothered me was that it fails to deal with what faith actually means to people. The baddie albino is taking his faith too far, it seems. Tom Hanks used to believe when he was in trouble, and now having established that Jesus had a wife and kids he believes in him all the more... Er, why?

Because the truly sensational thing about Jesus having a family is that it makes him more of an ordinary bloke. He's more like us, and less like a superhero. What he said and did suddenly relates much more to our own everyday lives. His best mate was jealous of his wife, for example. And (like the couple in Ever Decreasing Circles) the Jesuses dined out in matching clothes.

But the Da Vinci Code isn't interested in ordinary people and how faith affects them. We don't know anything about Hanks or Tatou that's not revealed to be part of the plot. Compare them to the characters in The Second Coming, where everything is about the affect on ordinary people, and God reveals his majesty at the football and down the pub.

All you need is blood
Himmler was very taken by the Holy Grail mythology, and the history of the teutonic knights. Jesus's 500x great-granddaughter will have had her blood somewhat diluted over the millennia. And she's no more special than the monarchy rules by divine right.

There's some sport made that she might have inherited healing powers in her fingertips, but can't (yet) walk on water. But of course the film can't say anything definitively because that proof would deny the faith so necessary for the final shot of the film.

What is Tom Hanks actually doing? Praying to the husband of the dead woman he's just found? Because discovering the bloke had a kid suddenly restores all his faith?

And what's Audrey Tatou going to do now? Surely she needs to have babies to continue the all-important line. So is she destined for frolicksome rituals like she caught her "grandfather" at? Did you see the look of them villagers she's staying with?

Rather her than me... 

Must keep control

“In any month in the USA, more people are killed than on 9/11 … In any year in Israel, more than 10 times more deaths will occur from road traffic accidents than in the worst year of suicide bombings during this recent intifada—a terrible statistic. With this sort of record, it might be argued that a sign of development in a country is its number of road traffic accidents.”

Baroness Tonge, Official Report, House of Lords, 15 May 2006, Col. 92.

Some advice I had when learning to drive, a frightening number of years ago: everyone else is a homicidal maniac who wants you to crash into them.

That’s not just other drivers. When passing parked cars, look out for the dimwit opening his door into you. Expect horses and bicycles to weave out into the road, even when they know you’re overtaking. And pedestrians will leap out from any cover at all, just for the look on your face.

It’s this paranoia that makes driving hard work, but also keeps you safe. It’s got nothing to do with how coolly you drive at 120 mph. It’s about how elegantly you cope when things all go wrong.

It’s not how brilliant a driver you are, but how horrifying everyone else is.

This is actually the real skill in anything. A chef is not just someone who can follow a recipe, it’s someone who can manage a kitchen and deal with stuff going whoops. No, that doesn’t mean just swearing at skivvies.

The trick, even when the cooker’s blown up, the food’s been trodden into the floor and you’ve forgotten to stock up on cornflower, is for the dining person not even to be aware that anything’s other than peachy.

The skilful surgeon can sort out sudden gushing. The manager can deal with deadlines being brought forward. The passengers of a skilful driver won’t even notice the changing of gears.

It’s about care and planning and experience. It’s about being in control whatever’s hurled your way.

Tradespersons will often give you some sense of authority by offering options to choose from. “I can use sticky tape for free,” a plumber might tell you, “but it’ll leak poo again soon enough. I can unblock the pipe for about fifty quid, but it’s still gonna stink in the summer. Or, for the cost of a van and deposit, you could move house to somewhere not built above the intercept sewer.”

This specialist knowledge comes from actually doing the job. A doctor will know more about your sore throat than you could look up in five minutes’ googling. A chef will know the best way to cut asparagus (cutting with the back end of the knife, keeping the point always on the chopping board and acting like a pivot).

I know more about grammar from four years of freelancing than from four years of reading English at universities. Writing is a similar skill. It’s not just that you can plonk words down on a page (no, really). You have to be selfless enough to heed editorial criticism and self-confident enough to know when it’s wrong. You have to be in control of your stuff.

You don’t go to a plumber or dentist because they’ll tell you what you want to hear, nor because they look good in photos. You want someone with the skill, integrity, experience and ability who can sort the shit out.

Politics, though, is doing its own thing. Politics, though, is Not The Same. You should vote not for the prettiest or funniest option, but for the one you trust to best make the difficult decisions.

Yet an unfortunate side effect of the democratic process is that it can make voting a popularity contest. Which means even the biggest politicians aren’t actually in control.

Professional politicians are keen not to say anything unpopular. So they’re keen on environmental issues so long as they keep their posh cars. Anyway, when we don’t keep buying new cars, lots of people lose their jobs.

They’re keen on renewable energies, but nuclear power stations are less costly to invest in. They like tough new laws on terror, but nuclear power stations are also an obvious target.

These are difficult, complex issues which can’t be summed up in a soundbite. Any decision has far-reaching consequences for all kinds of different groups.

One thing politicians like to do is show “strength”. Someone’s bothering our islands of sheep? We’ll have won a war with them in a fortnight. We’ve lost thousands of people we should have deported? Well now we’ll deport every one of them, even if that means sending them to their deaths.

A chicken’s got the sniffles in Norfolk? Exterminate all poultry everywhere!

It’s like smacking a leaky pipe or a sore tooth with a mallet, just to be seen to be doing something.

Strength is not the same as control, no matter what dictators tell you. Being strong on crime or refugees isn’t a solution, it’s a reaction. It’s attacking the symptoms not the cause. The system of releasing foreign prisoners needs fixing, not just to be ignored.

When you’re in the driving seat you want to put your foot down. It’s a thrill to wield that power, and it’s what they do in movies.

But giving into that temptation is not good driving. It’s not merely reckless, it kills.

My squid

This was originally a fanzine article, back when that was the only way to foist my blatherings on anyone. Then it went on my old site. And now, a bit rewritten, it be here. But Scottie did ask.

The Dr has a thing about Darth Vader. She cries at the end of Return of the Jedi when he [spoiler] dies – and actually starts crying midway through the Ewok battle, just because she knows what’s coming. Quite freaked me the first time that happened. She ran away from meeting Dave Prowse once, too.

The thing about Vader is he’s tall, dressed in black and you impose your own emotions on his blank mask of a face. The Star Wars prequels have entirely changed what we thought was going on in there. The moody stares he gives in the original movies now suggest less “I’m very cross!” as “I’m very conflicted…”

There’s also his voice. Of all the fret about casting for the prequels, one thing was made clear - James Earl Jones’s husky, gravely tones would be back. How could it not be him?

It's staggering that Jones was a last-minute casting back in 1977. Originally, Orson Welles was front-runner to do all that heavy breathing. He was a name of the same generation as Dr Peter Cushing and smiley Alec Guinness, and there'd then be three established “names” to support newcomers Ford, Fisher and Hamill.

Now there’s two stories why Welles got dropped. One goes that his voice was just too recognisable. Which is odd, because that’d surely be the same for both Cushing and Guinness.

Alternatively, there’s the rise in racial consciousness that had led to the boycotting of films in the mid 1970s which failed to feature - let alone represent - black actors and/or characters. Writer/director George Lucas was in post-production on a film with an entirely white cast.

Vader, therefore, got voiced by a black actor. An established, award-winning actor with a fantastic voice. And, in time for the sequels, Han's rogueish but redeemable chum, Lando, was cobbled together.

(Orson Welles later did voices for other hokey sci-fi. His last film role was as the voice of a, er, planet in the Transformers movie.)

So what's this got to do with Ackbar - fishy fellow from Return of the Jedi? (That answer your question, Scottie?) Well, the reasoning behind the boycotting was that cinema was pretty much ignoring black people. Sure, Poitier was working, and there were no end of bit parts as noble savages and hoodlums going. But that wasn’t really good enough.

Science-fiction, for all its claims of being a progressive, thought-evolving, looking-to-the-better-future-earnestly happening, was just as guilty as everyone else of excluding and misrepresenting racial groups. And since SF was making all the pious claims about visions of the future, the continual prejudice was all the less forgivable.

2001 - A Space Odyssey, for example, may well be a hugely impressive, convincingly “realistic” (whatever that might mean when you're talking about fiction, let alone SF) bit of cinema. Yet, now the real year 2001 is old history, one of the most jarring things they got “wrong” is that it's not only the space programme that’s exclusively populated by whites. So, it seems, is the whole Earth.

There were efforts made: the Planet of the Apes films have been seen by many as dealing with civil rights, and in Soylent Green Charlton Heston works for a black man.

Star Trek's Uhura might now seem a mini-skirted honey who answered the white man's telephone, but for the late '60s her position of “equality” was terribly broad-minded. Her character and position wasn't seen as sexist or demeaning - she was a black character with a role to play. She was a role model. Even Martin Luther King said so.

(She snogs Kirk at one point, the first inter-racial kiss on US television. It was so shocking it wasn’t shown in the UK for decades.)

But despite these small steps, the consensus in SF had always been that SF heroes are white, Beautiful People, governed by white Beautiful People - albeit older and beardier ones. Ugliness, off-whiteness and anything that even vaguely hints at “the foreign” is not merely relegated to the status of alien, but is seen to be determinedly “evil alien”. Just ask that Ming The Merciless – Darth Vader's cultural forefather. (He had a bolshy daughter that pirates fell in love with, too.)

So when a bright scarlet fish-person with boggly great eyes takes the role of highest serving officer in the rebel fleet, things are pretty bloody cool.

Ackbar gets his name from the 16th century mogul, a dynamic military leader. “Allah akbar” means “God is great”, and since “Allah” is the God bit, Ackbar then is great. This is another example of Lucas’s anthropologically mythic resonance. Or his riding rough-shod over other people’s cultures.

So Ackbar is the man. Sure, an old bloke with a beard and some whiney woman in a cape (the hallmarks of any civilised authority) may have talked us through the plan, but it's Ackbar who takes the troops out. It’s him who must make the most difficult decision in the whole series of films - whether to run the trap that they all end up in, or run away never to return.

Beard and whiney woman wouldn't have stood a chance, but Ackbar does the rebel alliance proud.

And who pilots the Millennium Falcon while our regular cast of Beautiful people are playing with the teddy bears? It's our pal Lando, and accompanied by some really frightening looker of a co-pilot. Oh, and the evil Emperor's a white guy.

Further reading

• Admiral Ackbar on Starwars.com
• Ackbar for President!
• Admiral Ackbar on Wikipedia
• There's also discussion of the racial prejudices in Return of the Jedi in Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy