If proof were ever needed that the Americans are barking, it has to be the recent controversy over the hobby life of wannabe Congressman Rich Iott (pronounced like Idiot, only the 'd' is silent). In the spare time he has from being a politician he's a re-enactor who portrays, among other things, an SS officer of Division Wiking.
Senior Republican figures sought to distance themselves from Rich, who has been doing what he does for some years now, unsung and unremarked, and was bewildered and reduced to half-apologetically, half-defiantly stating that he did not mean "any disrespect to anyone" in the US military.
Rich – alias Reinhard Pferdmann, added: "Never, in any of my re-enacting of military history, have I meant any disrespect to anyone who served in our military or anyone who has been affected by the tragedy of war, especially the Jewish community.
"Historical re-enacting is a hobby enjoyed by millions of men and women around the world. I have been involved in historical re-enacting from many different eras since I was in college."
Tame historians popped up out of the woodwork for their five minutes of fame. Charles Sydnor, retired history professor who wrote a book about the SS Death's Head division and Professor Rob Citino, of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, have been the most vociferous. No, I haven't heard of either of them before either.
Worringly, some of the 'historians' have not only had a go at Rich and his fellow SS Wiking re-enactors – but re-enactment in general. One or two have voiced the opinion that the pursuit is misinformed and non-historical; and at least one has asked the pertinent question: why don't they reenact US soldiers?
Well, of course, they do. From WWI, WWII, The US Civil War, the Vietnam War and even – a bit spookier and more unacceptable, to me at least, than Rich's SS predilections – some who reenact the US Marines in Iraq.
At least the uniforms and equipment are easier to get, I suppose, than the SS Wiking ones. Or the ones used by other WWII German forces re-enactors, some of whom I have shared a field with, and exchanged interesting conversations and fascinating facts.
You'll never see it on the glossy ads for perfume or sharp suits, but the reason the Nazis looked so good was that their uniforms were made by – Hugo Boss. Using forced labour from concentration camps.
But let's not forget that, like every story, there are two sides to a war – in some case, both sides included US soldiers. Do Confederate re-enactors offend black sensibilities by the same connotation that SS re-enactors offend the Jewish community? Does anyone try to prevent portrayals of Confederates? Let's see what southern Republican senators have to say about that.
And is it more acceptable to have folk dressing up as Norse Vikings, arch-pagan slaughterers of their day, than the SS butchers of the 20th century?
In others words – when is it right to airbrush history so that no-one is offended?
And I would rather have Rich Iott, uniformed and jackbooted and bewildered wee man that he is, on my dinner-guest list than the other guy in the picture from his website. Rich is the one second on the right – but who is the dork in a kilt and the top half of an RAF uniform? What is HE reenacting – His Majesty's Royal Scottish Flying Corps?
Even he is preferable, however, to the current crop of US Republicans – like the one who has questioned the civil rights legislation in the 1960s, or the one who admits to having dabblings in witchcraft, and also suggested that – try getting your head round this one… scientists were implanting full human brains into mice.
Or, in his case, vice versa.
These are the same Republicans who led the demands for Scotland's MSPs to travel to their offices to face a grilling over the Megrahi affair. Who demanded UK MPs turn up for a grilling over the BP oil spill. Who, in general, behave as if the entire world is an unruly classroom whose pupils must report the headmaster's office immediately.
Here's a tip for such characters: go forth and re-enact someone retiring from public life. Get a nice acceptable suit from Hugo Boss and find a new job using the skills accumulated over years in the US Senate. Banking, perhaps.
Well, there it is – Largs has celebrated it’s 30th anniversary Viking Festival and it is all over. The swords are sheathed, the sails are furled, the beer is drunk and the longship burned at what is the last show of the season for Glasgow Vikings and a fitting finale for the Oathsworn.
Last gasp of a frenetic year for me as regards the Vikings, with loads of re-enactment gigs in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada, so I am glad to be able to take a breather.
However, Largs was unissable this year, not only because I live here and hardly have an excuse, byt because the paperback of The Prow Beast came out in August, marking the last act of four books detailing the adventures of Orm Bearslayer. Largs seemed an apt place for me to hoist a horn of mead to the lads – and move on.
Largs, you see, is set in 1263, scene of the battle which saw the sunset of the Vikings as they fled the Scottish mainland never to return. And, a mere thirty-four years later a charismatic leader led the Scots in rebellion – the age of Wallace had arrived, followed not long afterwards by the age of Bruce.
Currently, I am in the middle of editing the first of the three books I have planned on the Scottish Wars. Called The Lion Wakes, it covers the events of 1297 and ends just after the Battle of Falkirk.
Yet it appears – and thank you all for it – that fans of the Oathsworn are not ready to let the crew simply slip into the oblivion of history and, yes, I WILL return to them at some point in the future – once I have managed to get my head out of a bucket full of Bruce and Wallace.
More immediately, I am headed for Manchester in October (17th) to take part in the Historical Novel Society conference.
Hope to see some of you there, asking all the questions I know you have waiting for me.
Back from Gimli, Manitoba – spare a thought for that town of Icelandic ex-pats. They thought it was a good idea to name this New World enclave after the Old Norse for heaven – but who knew Tolkien would come along and force them to live up the rear-end of a grumpy dwarf?
For all that, the folk of Gimli are unfailingly cheerful and welcoming and I had a great time, both with the Canadian arm of the Vikings and the folk who came to listen to my lectures – though I suspect the latter had a great deal to do with the air-conditioned theatre and 36 degrees of humid heat.
My thanks to the Gimli Vikings, particularly the Sons of Fenrir (A-hoo) whose enthusiasm is like watching a Labrador with two tails and a juicy bone. To Warren and Nicole, my hosts for almost three weeks. To Fish, the only other Scot (though he now lives in Toronto) for joining in some decent Braid and having a laugh at the faces of the uncomprehending. To the giant dragonflies, for eating all the sodding mosquitoes which plagued our lives. To my wife, who has been abandoned for most of two months this year and put up with it with scarcely a murmur – I owe her Big Time. To many others, to numerous to mention.
The memories I take from it include:
The endlessly repeated ‘Welcome to the village’ speech, which is now engraved on the inside of my skull in fiery runes.
The sheer volume of enthusiastic visitors, none of them – it appears – Canadian. Those who weren’t Icelandic were Scots (though they had lived all their lives in Canada). If they had given me a dollar every time one announced direct descent from Wallace I would be extremely rich.
The warmth of everyone concerned, particularly the Vikings. They all wanted their copies of my books signed, laughed at my jokes and generally made me feel like a celeb, so that now I can’t wait to go back.
I'm just back from a tour of Scandinavia which was a bit of an epic – five countries, four currencies and weather that wavered from blasting sunshine to howling blizzard. I am about to head off to Canada, so this blog is by way of a brief impression of some of the highlights – more pics and thoughts will appear later.
The trip was a long, hard drive to Haugesund, starting – for me – with a drive to Harwich to catch the ferry with around 15 others and sundry vehicles. That took us to Denmark and we drove from there through Sweden into Norway, to the Viking encampment at Bukkoy in time for their annual Big Weekend. Then we drove all the way back again, with leisure to try a June snowfight in the mountains when ran into the unseasonal blizzard. We also visited some of the best Viking sites around – the Trelleborg forts, the recreated villages of Foteviken and Ribe, plus the museum and archaelogical dig at Jelling.
I was impressed by the archaeologists at Jelling, who had just uncovered a new Trelleborg fort thought to be the royal palace of Harald Bluetooth and were delighted to share the info and joy with a pile of English and one Scot. I am assured by the British bonekickers I know that this politeness is because, unlike their UK counterparts, they have state funding and bags of time. Still, it was refreshing.
I was also impressed by the Scandinavian kids. A strange mix – on the one hand, there are nine to twelve-year olds who seem to be like the ones I remember in my own childhood, still into cuddly toys and politeness. (British kids of the same age are wearing makeup, smoking, drinking, swearing and knifing each other.) On the other hand, they are not childish at all...
I am sitting in the longhouse after a night of gale and rain, watching my socks don’t burn on the open log fire, staring at the flames. There is a little eight year-old called Amelia, whom I met no more than an hour ago because she called out the only words of English she knew, ‘Santa Claus’, and made us both laugh. Now she climbs on to the bench beside me, takes a corner of my cloak and wraps it round her, then settles into the crook of my arm. We sit in companiable silence, listening to Gustav the skald tell Viking kid stories in Norwegian, which only she understands. Amelia’s parents are trying to sort out their flooded tent, so she has been left in the longhouse, in the care of perfect strangers. She picks up a stick, calls something to another perfect stranger, who hauls out a bloody great sharp knife and hands it to her without a word. Amelia starts to whittle a stick and no-one blinks an eye.
That would not happen here – none of it, for fear of what might happen to Amelia when she encountered knives, strangers with knives or strangers with Santa Claus beards.
Another for instance – I am in Roskilde, which is a ship museum and a huge teaching aid for schools. A bunch of kids are taking part in a fun seminar by the resident woodcrafter, who is showing them how the Vikings could make parts for their ships using only a stick and an axe. She hands out sticks and axes and the kids set to, while I am hearing every Health and Safety officer I have ever known have a coronary.
The realization comes to me only later: these kids are brought up carefully and without fear. I arrive back in the UK to kids either shepherded everywhere by their worried parents, or left to run feral; and I mourn.
Other positive impressions include the working recreation of Ribe, the Buck House of Viking re-enactment, complete with farmed crops, livestock and the longest, most breathtaking longhouse I have ever seen.
I know that this is the heritage of the Scandinavians – but how come they are funded to make this, keep it and get the volunteers to staff it when this country can’t do anything like it for any historical age it considers its heritage?
Normally, I couldn’t give tinker’s for Niall Ferguson, telegenic presenter of financial histories, serial grump and author of such gripping yarns as Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business, German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927 and Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. Catchy – though I am sure they are page-turners for readers of the Financial Times.
Never met the man, probably would find him a decent dinner companion, but he comes to the feast with a couple of flaws which I might have to battle to get over.
One is my own prejudice – he is educated at posh Glasgow Academy and Oxford and now teaches at Harvard. I have met a few similarly blessed academics in my time and almost every one has been a tosser. However, this is only a small personal sample and I am sure if I widened my experience of them I would be reassured.
The other is that he is that worst of all clever men – an arrogant argument waiting to happen. He has a brilliant non-objective idea and it becomes a truth that will not suffer contradiction. He has argued with financial experts here and in the US, historians worldwide, and his wife presumably, since he has moved out of the marital home and now has a glamorous Somali on his arm.
Recently we found him pontificating at the Hay on Wye festival. It seems he no longer reads historical fiction because such works 'contaminate historical understanding'. Likewise he warns against historians inferring beyond the written record 'or else this takes you into the realm of romantic fiction, a world I shall never enter.'
Well, we've been here before. Tom Devine v wee Neil Oliver. David Starkey v everyone who doesn’t think Henry VIII is the centre of the universe.
Ferguson, though, is the sort you want to shout at to ‘gie’s peace, ya wee nyaff’. Not because he is talking total pish, but because he does it like a drunk in a Glasgow pub, stumbling over everyone’s feet and accusing them of spilling his pint. It does not help that he has that smug ba’ face which is so Glasgow and so frequently smacked.
But let’s consider only his most recent point. Is this the Ferguson who wrote The Pity of War (modestly subtitled Explaining World War One) and packed it full of enough ‘what-ifs’ to make Harry Turtledove blush? Who reached the conclusion, as a result, that Britain should never have fought in it, allowing Germany to win? Who champions ‘counterfactual history’? Which is different from revisionist or alternate history – how?
The Pity is the only one of his books I have been prompted to read, simply because it had some of the best fiction ideas since Winston Churchill put forward the possible result of Robert E. Lee winning at Gettysburg. I guarantee someone will have snaffled the basic premise of The Pity Of War in a couple of years and used it as the basis of a rollicking good Dan Brown yarn.
It might even, I suspect, be Niall Ferguson himself. I mean, what is ‘counterfactual history’? Could it be – careful now... historical fiction?
Most writers struggle with their craft in silence – but not Hunter Steele, author and publisher. He and his wife have launched a legal action against a building firm responsible for "clouding his intellect" by keeping a generator switched on overnight, adjacent to his home in Errol, Perthshire, for nearly five months.
The former creative writing teacher at the University and Glasgow, who has several novels to his name, is seeking compensation of £5000, after telling a court that the low rumble of the machine prevented him from "composing new text of originality and value".
"I am an author and publisher," Mr Steele, 60, added in his court writ. "I require a clear head, unclouded intellect to compose text of originality and value.”
I don’t normally have a pop at other writers – the profession is hard enough without dog eating dog. But still… Hunter Steele lists sleep deprivation, chronic fatigue, depression, headaches, dizziness, a racing heartbeat and nausea – my God, it is a wonder the man only wants five grand. Within three months he had to change his working practices to cope, with he and his partner spending hours double-checking each other's work.
Which raises the question: why did he wait five months? Had I been suffering this badly, I would have sabotaged the bloody generator if it hadn’t been switched off by Day Two. I can’t have the Oathsworn woolly-minded, by Odin!
And, please, give me a break about ‘clouded judgment’ and the inability to create anything meaningful with the background noise equivalent of an idling taxi. Tell it to the Great War poets. Tell it, even, to JK Rowling, who did the first Harry Potter book in a public cafe, ringing till, slurping lattes, the lot. Even I have managed to compose the author’s note for The White Raven on a stop-start train journey from London, with two quarrelling weans in the next window seat.
But he is right – there are times when words just fail you. This is one of them.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest – Nick Evered bought a house in Peterborough which had once been a hermitage. It came with a daud of old carved stone, pictured above. After eight years Nick decided to to sell it and made arrangements through Bonhams. The auction house experts were delighted to reveal it as Anglo-Saxon, a carving devoted to the first female hermit, St Pega, whose hermitage, circa 716AD, was the site of Nick’s home.
So what is the Peakirk Cross, as it is known, doing in a saleroom, from where it could vanish anywhere in the world – even disappear from public view? Bonhams established it was not part of the listed building, which would have prevented the sale. The Treasure Act is resolute when it comes to all the glitter of the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire hoard… but does not care a jot for slab of limestone.
The stone had a guide price of £7000 to £9000 before the Church of England warned Bonhams: "We consider the legal status of this piece to be unclear" and it was removed from its scheduled auction. No one has said whether a sale was completed or what will happen to the Peakirk Cross next. So much for the Viking belief that things written in stone were valued enough to be venerated – watch out for the old carved cross near you.
Lastly, it seems the Oathsworn are crossing boundaries in more ways than one. Despite having no sorcery, only swords, they have become doyens of the fantasy world and I am quietly delighted. Thanks for the nice thoughts, Conan guys.
Picture this... the Vikings have a training night and a new, eager and enthusiastic recruit turns up, wanting to be trained in the Way of the Warrior. She is 17 and a girl – no problem, we are an equal-opportunity outfit when it comes to hitting people with big lumps of metal. She is trained by Skeggi, who is young, male, personable and skilled. For several weeks they spar. By week four, the inevitable has happened and they have copped off and are now An Item.
Altogether now? Awwww.
Wrong. Under the Independent Safeguarding Authority scheme, Skeggi is now guilty of having taking advantage of a young vulnerable (under-18) in his role as a teacher. He could be Vetted and Barred.
I know of the ISA because of my work with schools and because some of my colleagues are children’s authors. Me, they and many part-time workers who coach sport, or entertain or teach after-school music and drama will be affected. Like Philip Pullman and Antony Horowitz, they may decide to boycott it, or just chuck the whole thing up simply because they are insulted by the idea that they must prove to the ISA that they are not a paedophile.
I am already subject to a CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) check, which is a snapshot of the one time I do the check. At that point, it will reveal if I have any dodgy police record and, since it has to be renewed, is a reasonable guide to my criminality or otherwise. The ISA, which comes into force this year, is a new overlay, post-Soham, which not only delves into your criminal record, but other aspects of your ‘lifestyle’, as revealed by anyone who cares to comment. So, if someone declares that that there Robert Low is dodgy character with a huge beard who hangs out with other dodgy beards and has been seen with a sword, it is possible that the Vetting and Barring people might throw me out of the Brownies.
Nor do they have to inform you. The website confortingly reassures us that anyone who may be barred will be told in advance and, "we will share with them all the information on which we rely". However, a sentence in the original inquiry recommendation says, “the police, as now, would be able to identify intelligence which on no account should be disclosed to the applicant”. Like, presumably, who bad-mouthed you. When asked the ISA press spokesman conceded that chief police officers “would have discretion”. So actually the website lied: people wouldn't necessarily be given all the information and, of course, the one under surveillance would not even know that he/she didn’t get it all.
I wouldn’t mind so much being lost if it actually achieved anything. But it won’t. The current CRB check is only for those who work unsupervised with kids; the group of Vikings who take a masterclass in the Dark Ages are always with a teacher. The ISA rules that anyone who spends less than three days in any one month with the same group of kids will not need the ISA form filled in.
I am always being asked for a CRB form, because schools are under pressure to overcompensate, just in case it all goes wrong and they are left liable. In the current climate of fear and suspicion that has taken root in our society over the last decade, covering your own ass from InjuryLawyers.org or the blasting of the press is much more important than anything else. The ISA – at £64 a pop for those employed in working with kids or vulnerable adults – WILL be asked for.
What this increasingly surveilled society is doing to relations between adults and children and to the children themselves, will only become apparent somewhere down the line, but it won’t be pleasant. I mean, it is still a chilling mystery to me that ContactPoint, the children's database which allows access to the details of every child in England and Wales to hundred of thousands of officials, yet not to parents, came about without any fuss. What were they thinking of to allow the such a sinister and ultimately pointless apparatus to be set up?
Now we have biometrics and band CCTV systems enabling teachers to monitor pupils through the day and, in some instances watch, them in the changing rooms and classroom.
At Notre Dame school in Norwich, they are using CCTV to monitor pupils in the lavatory block. A school in Bedfordshire recently banned parents from attending sports day to guard against paedophiles. The man in charge of the event, Paul Blunt, from the East Bedfordshire Schools Sports Partnership, was quoted as saying: “If we let parents into the school they would have been free to roam the grounds. All unsupervised adults must be kept away from children. An unsavoury character could have come in and we just can't put the children in the event or the students at the host school at risk like that."
A moment should occur in every child's life, when he or she meets an adult from outside the family group, one who takes an interest in them as a person and has something to offer in their development, both in career and life. This is the Teacher or Coach who inspires, the Children’s Writer who captures their imagination and encapsulates their feelings. People you look back on with awe and affection for, without their influence, however brief, your life may well have been less.
Now these contacts are to be policed with a suspicion that implies to the child that every adult who has not been checked is a potential abuser. Philip Pullman last week said of the new law, which he likened to the infamous Clause 28: “It seems to be fuelled by the same combination of prurience, sexual fear and cold political calculation.”
It doesn’t help the case against the ISA and CRB, of course, when a well-known children’s author is actually found out to be a paedophile 40 years on – but the rigorous attempts to stamp out all risk simply places faith in systems and procedures that - frankly - have not earned it. Vanessa George was CRB-checked and would have been ISA-cleared, too.
Bottom line – a suspicious looking, long-haired character with an obvious Middle Eastern caste to his features and some flowing robes and sandals would not only fail to get into the US because he has a Mexican name, but Jesus would also be unable to suffer any little children to come unto him – unless he had a CRB clearance or had filled in an ISA form.
It is launch day for The Prow Beast, last of the Oathsworn books for the present, and so a time of mixed feelings for me – but new fields beckon, in more ways than one.
As we Dark Age reenactors get ready for another season, I look forward to the inevitable fund of stories, events and just plain silliness that keeps me going all winter. Some of it I can even use in my writing – but none of that belongs to the Society for Creative Anachronism.
My wife, whenever I rant about the SCA, gives a short bark of scornful laughter and points out that people who roll about in chainmail in a muddy field are in no position to get snooty about anyone. Particular if said chainmail roller is a silly auld pensioner. And she is right. The world of re-enactment is a broad church with pews for everyone, and I know you should not diss anyone else doing it - yada-yada-yada …
But still.
Those who know me seldom mention theSCA, since it almost always results in the response: ‘Don’t get me started’. Here’s the science bit – the Society for Creative Anachronism is a mainly US-based Living History (the term is a serving suggestion) group of reenactors who specialise in creating the Middle Ages as seen through the eyes of a California teenager at a hippie fraternity party.
We have author Diana Paxson to thank, in part, for this, since she helped found it – and there is as good a warning for historical novelists to take a step back from immersing themselves too fully in what they do. Even me. Ms Paxson, to those ignorant of her work, is an author of non-fiction in the fields of Heathenism and Neopaganism. She also co-wrote the Avalon series with Marion Zimmer Bradley (who coined the phrase SCA) and eventually took over sole writing duties when Bradley died.
On May Day 1966, as a right-on protest about the 20th century and everything in it, Diana and some like-minded pals held a Grand Tournament, where the participants wore motorcyle helmets, fencing masks, and usually some semblance of a costume, then beat each other up with plywood swords, padded maces, and even a fencing foil. It ended in a parade with everyone singing Greensleeves.
Had I been there, all hair and spots and off my face, I would have joined in and loved it. Man. But not today. I have matured, if not exactly grown up, while the SCA hasn’t. It is still an extended hippie student dress-up party. They can have the most elaborate, historically accurate costumes and machine-stitch them, or wear chronologically-challenging trainers and spectacles – but since they almost always perform only for themselves, their glaring historical inaccuracy scarcely matters.
Not all are like this, I hasten to add – but the ones who want to do it right tend to quit and start educating curious and questioning audiences in their historical field instead.
But the SCA is so huge in the US that most folk think they are what Living History is all about – it has become the 300lb gorilla of reenactment in America and it would be better not to look it directly in the eye. These are people with a Board of Directors and a department of Media Relations. They have Corporate Policies and a College of Arms to award people titles and heraldic coats-of-arms. And take them away if they transgress.
Every summer, they hold a two-week-long "war" in rural Pennsylvania called Pennsic, which attracts over 10,000 attendees from around the world. Even for reenactors, it has to be said that some of the good folk of the SCA seem to have two very small brains – the forebrain, which is lost, and the hindbrain, which is wandering about looking for it.
So here we go – the highlights of SCA Pennsic 2009, as alleged by ‘insiders’:
DUMB:
In a stand-up, drag-out battle – with bamboo swords wrapped in silver duct tape - a knight collapsed in spectacular style. Which surprised his opponent because, thanks to their excessive armour and non-steel weapons, you can beat the bejasus out of each other all day and inflict no injury. However, there was this brave knight, not only down but completely out after a minor body blow. Brought round, he revealed his appendix had been removed just last weekend, and he was still "stapled shut" from surgery, but thought it okay to go on the field and fight. For the record, since my colleagues and I use real steel weapons, we tend to notice the hurt, sick and lame, and stop them injuring themselves by being the species Darwin forgot.
DUMBER:
A woman was taken to the camp's medical facility with heat exhaustion verging on heat stroke. Attempts to lower her temperature failed. Finally the medics, in desperation, removed her beautifully constructed clothing (easily done – it may well have had a zip) to apply ice. Beneath her elaborate historic dress, they found that she was swaddled neck to ankles in plastic wrap. Don’t ask. Weight loss? Anti-rape device? Who knows – but removing it saved her life. For the record … no-one in The Vikings is both so fat AND so desperate as to resort to that. Just don’t. Okay.
DUMBERER’S DUMBER BROTHER:
You can never rely on the weather, but I have to boast here that our Vikings can light a fire in a puddle using flint and tinder. At Pennsic, when the damp weather made it hard to get a campfire started, a bold knight suggested using a capful of pure petrol, what the Americans call ‘white gas’. His squire (yes, some poor slobs can be persuaded to be gofers for the established) heard ‘cupful’ and poured on two – I suspect this pair were re-enacting Don Quixote and Sancho Panaza. Of course, the wet wood and the petrol only produced a lot of evil fuming so the knight, reportedly a real-life munitions expert (I can only presume blind luck has helped him retain all his limbs so far) declared that it had to be ‘defused’. One match, a 14-foot column of hot fire later and the black mushroom cloud could be seen a mile away. A theatre is evacuated to general panic.
Oh thank you, thank you, SCA – this will keep me chuckling even through the worst abuses of telly nights where the highlight is Strictly.
Here’s a final March thought for you, and nothing to do with books or writing: Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was given 90 days to live by the medical experts who convinced Kenny McAskill to free him. That was seven months ago. Megrahi is now on Docetaxel, a drug which, on average, extends the survival rate for prostate cancer to 12 months. This means that Kenny McAskill faces the very real possibility of Megrahi still being alive on the first anniversary of his release. More to the point, I and every other Scot will have to face it as well. Still – I am certain that the nice Mr al-Megrahi is just dying to sort this out for us.
As someone once memorably said, we are condemned to repeat history because no-one was paying attention first time round. My own version of this is that some of us are condemned to repeat the bleeding’ obvious as if they had discovered it the first time round.
Like Aleks Krotoski, fragrant presenter of The Virtual Revolution series which started recently. She is, no doubt of it, well qualified on the subject, ticks all the interview boxes and wafts through the procedure with the air of someone quite used to travelling the info superhighway, complete with obligatory cool shades and laptop. She is also bouncingly enthusiastic on the subject of the history of the Internet, like every pup I every saw encountering snow for the first time.
Where, she asked breathlessly, is it going? Is it a force for good or a curse?
Well, I am as qualified to answer, since I was in at the start of it and would be lost without it today. Anyone with half a brain cell is, in fact, qualified to answer. Those were exactly the same questions being asked in the days when I struggled to learn HTML and program web pages from scratch. The conclusion then was the same as now – the same as any question asked of a technological advance in history.
Depends on how you use it.
I bet Ugg the Neanderthal had deep, philosophical discussions on the nature of flint and, if he cave-painted the notes of it somewhere, I wish we had discovered them, since Aleks would have learned that flint can be used to make fire, be worked carefully into useful tool – or simply picked up as a bloody great rock to bash in the head of your neighbour. Every invention starts off as something and invariably ends up as something else not envisaged. Like the Labour Party.
Same with the WWW – but who knew about porn? The trouble with all futurists is that they are about as accurate as the Met Office. I mean, I remember tuning in assiduously to Tomorrow’s World week after week and I am still waiting for my personal flying car and my hovershoes. I remember the broadcast about the first home computer, which was a typewriter and a bogroll of paper. One day, enthused the owner, a businessman called Rex Malik, every home will have one of these and his then four-year-old son agreed. I wonder where the kid is now?
What I don’t remember is Judith Hann or James Burke announcing blithely that, by 2010, I would be getting email adverts for the likes of Slaggy Sue – click and WANK NOW. Or that I would end up surfing when I am, in fact, sitting typing in front of a screen, with not a wave in sight.
I say this in the light of the iPad, Apple’s new revolution. I am still not sure what it is only that, with all the money Apple have to throw about, they might have picked some marketing men who would come up with a name that made it sound a lot less like a feminine hygiene product. That and worked out that key bullet points for any new product launch are:
1. what it does;
2. how much it costs.
Neither of which were mentioned (although we later discovered the starting price will be $499). I am still trying to work out what iPad is and why everyone I meet enthusiastically declares that it will revolutionise the world of publishing. I have since taken as close a look as I can without actually having one and, as far as I can see, it is a fat phone-a-like that has gone deaf. I say phone-a-like because you can’t actually use it as a phone straight out of the box. And it isn’t a computer either, because it runs on iPhone OS which has 140,000 of those wee doowhickeries called ‘apps’ though the ones for the iPhone OS are best described as applets because they do virtually sod-all. As you would expect for a phone. There are, as yet, no iPad applications.
So what have we got? A very large iPhone that has no telephone features built-in. A big LCD screen. The ability to access iBooks in colour. And nice icons – once you have a degree in Egyptology you can handle computer icons nae problem. I am convinced that half the hieroglyphs on the pyramids are instructions on how to access My Network Places.
It remains to be seen what the iPad does to my profession but I have a re-branding suggestion, in keeping with the current standard set by Apple marketers and cunningly utilising the name of Apple’s boss.
Books, it has to be said, are the satsumas of my elder years. In my youth, that woolly sock of a Christmas morning always held a couple of toy cars, a half-crown (ask yer grandma) and a large daud of Satsuma, presumably because the orange had been the one thing missing from my parents’ diet for all of the war years and it was considered a true gift, unlike now.
Nowadays, books have replaced the satsuma as a true gift and, given what I do for a living, everyone latches on to that as their present of choice. I am not complaining, since I love them like a good satsuma; and my pick of this year’s favourites include Frankie Boyle’s autobiography and the Book of Genesis, as drawn and envisaged by Robert Crumb (ask yer granda).
You can see that my tastes are catholic. There are few books that I will not read or that truly annoy me – Mein Kampf is an obvious example of the latter, but at least you know where you are with this straight-up warning from the psycho with the Charlie Chaplin moustache. As you do with the Protocols Of The Elders Of Sion, which was originally spelled ‘Zion’ and thus hailed by every anti-Semite in the land as proof of a Jewish plot to take over the world. Then someone spotted the mistake and it became a Masonic/Illuminati plot to take over the world. Now it is almost certainly a vicious hoax and probably set to be Dan Brown’s next ripoff – sorry, best-seller. No-one with any sense takes either of them seriously – though Mr Schickelgruber’s effort was reviewed by someone who panned The Whale Road on Amazon with the opener ‘I agree with a lot of this’, which tells you all you need to know about book and reviewer.
But the books which start raising my blood pressure are the borderline ones, the grey areas which lead you straight to the place where, if you have any sanity at all, you stop with an exclamation of ‘Uh-oh’, gather up Toto and start looking for the M1 back to Kansas. These are recommended by a huge number of seemingly literate, educated and sane people.
The Battlefield Earth SF series, for example, which L Ron Hubbard (anyone notice the strange resemblance he has to Mike Myers’ Doctor Evil?) parleyed into Scientology. Another is Altas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
It is difficult for folk outside the US to appreciate the influence of Ayn Rand on Americans. Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, as she was originally named, was born in Russia in 1905 and her family lost just about everything in the Revolution, something which imbued her with a deep seated hate for anything smacking of socialism. In 1926 she legged it from the Soviets to the US and tried to make her way as Hollywood writer. It took her 17 years - until The Fountainhead in 1943 - before her philosophical and political thoughts began to crystallise and she found a wide audience. Her 1957 magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, went on to become, according to some, the "second most influential book in America, after The Bible".
Like L Ron, it was not enough for Ayn Rand to write a new Bible. There had to be a new religion – Objectivism, a strange cult. Take capitalism in all its splendour and greed – the sort described as laissez-faire, which, crudely put, simply means ‘unregulated’. Turn it into an ideological creed while sucking the masses out of it, stir in some half-baked worship of the Superman, add a dash of bitterness, ego-mania and contempt for average, allegedly small-minded human beings. There you have it: Objectivism, a name that belongs alongside ‘Fighting For Peace’ as a concept and was the first – though not the last – indication I have had that Americans have trouble recognising re-branded Fascism when it is presented to them. A manifesto for those ‘supermen’ with the ideas and the power on how to lord it over the rest of us? The rich and powerful do not need a thick booklet on how to be arseholes.
I rant about Atlas Shrugged not only because it has been re-hailed by today’s coffee-table book set, in this time of economic crisis and dystopean society, as a work of genius; but because rumour has it that Hollywood, after 35 years of flirting with it, is picking it up as the Next Big Thing. Yes, this tale of capitalist supermen rising to the top over the useless masses who flounder in ignorance and economic breakdown, is getting the Randall Wallace treatment, according to reports. Him who did Braveheart and is undaunted at Atlas Shrugged having taken so long to come to Hollywood’s attention simply because it was considered unfilmable.
Lionsgate, it is rumoured, have decided it is filmable. And that Randall will direct today’s perfect couple, Angelina and Brad, in it. Since Braveheart, flawed in so many ways I cannot count, has so influenced my own country, from Mel Gibson statues purporting to be Wallace to an entire generation who believe in saltire face paint, I can only say, as regards Atlas Shrugged The Movie: God help us all.
Meanwhile – back in the sane world of books, I have to register my disappointment at not having been handed a gift-wrapped copy of Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’Romaniand Osservasioni sopra la Lettre de M. Marriette by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. This is less to do with the fact that my friends are totally unsuspecting of my attraction to 18th century theoretical treatises on Roman architecture than the £10,650 price tag.
I am also lacking Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, a two-volume set from 1866 and 1872, illustrated by John Tenniel. At a grand less than the above, you’d think SOMEONE might have thought of it. Or a set of Dickens for under £8000. Or – because I am a lover of SF – a complete set of first-editions of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy (£5695) or a first edition, signed, of Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (£6098).
Yes – Borders may be shut, but books are still selling and I am indebted to my friends at Abebooks for the above – and for making me curse at having failed to hang on to my seven first-off-the-press volumes of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series... now worth just under nine grand.