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Millennium Dom

 

From the Cyprus Mail

 

Spin doctor Dominic Cummings, the Svengali to Boris Johnson’s Trilby, the Rasputin to Johnson’s Tsarina Alexandra, the organ-grinder to Johnson’s dancing monkey, the puppet-master to Johnson’s, well, puppet, has become Britain’s Most Hated Man.

 

That’s because everyone in Britain now knows that Cummings didn’t just break the coronavirus-lockdown rules that he himself helped draw up for the population, but pulverised them.  The Gollum-like governmental advisor apparently believed that rules exist only for plebs and he, as a superior being, had a divine right to flout them.  In late March he drove his wife and child 260 miles from London to his parents’ farm near Durham in northeast England, while his missus was displaying coronavirus symptoms.  He developed symptoms soon after.  Also, while in the northeast, he drove 30 miles to local tourist attraction Barnard Castle, an action he subsequently justified by claiming he’d done it to check if he could drive safely even though the virus was affecting his eyesight.  I guess that’s the equivalent of a brain surgeon performing an operation to check if the palsy he’s been suffering from isn’t making his hands shake too much.

 

I should say not quite everyone in Britain is baying for Cummings’s blood, for I’ve noticed a few right-wing folks complaining on social media that Cummings has been the victim of a stitch-up by Britain’s hideous lefty mainstream press.  Such people regard Cummings as the Messiah, thanks to him being Campaign Director of the Vote Leave movement in 2015-16 and playing a major role in getting Britain out of the European Union.  According to them, the lefty newspapers that have it in for poor Dom include that notoriously socialistic organ, the Daily Mail.  Looking at the state of the comments posted by those fulminating right-wingers, I just hope they cancel their subscriptions to the Daily Mail and invest the money they’ve saved in taking punctuation courses where they learn how to use apostrophes correctly.

 

Anyway, reading the screeds of print written about Cummings in the past week, I’ve been reminded that Cummings first made a name for himself during a little-remembered episode in recent British political history.  It happened shortly after the advent of the new millennium, in a part of the world where I was living.  I’m talking about the referendum on setting up a regional assembly in northeast England, held in 2004.

 

Soon after Tony Blair’s New Labour government arrived in power in the late 1990s, devolution was implemented in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom, with the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd and Northern Irish Assembly.  This left England as the only part of the UK without devolved government, which caused some awkward anomalies.  How, for example, could Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish politicians turn up at the British parliament and vote on issues affecting the English population, when English politicians weren’t allowed to attend the three devolved parliaments and have a say on equivalent issues affecting the populations there, like health and law enforcement, entrusted to those parliaments under the devolution settlement?

 

The Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Act of 2003 was meant to restore constitutional balance.  It was envisioned that, eventually, eight regional assemblies would operate across England.  As England had a population five times the size of that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, a patchwork of small English assemblies would ensure that too much power wasn’t concentrated in a single, huge English assembly.  And the first English region to get the chance to approve the establishment of its own assembly was northeast England, which had an all-postal ballot on the matter on November 4th, 2004.

 

Cynics would say that the northeast was given first say because it seemed highly likely to do what the government wanted it to do.  It was deeply pro-Labour at the time and contained Tony Blair’s constituency, Sedgefield.  Also, it seemed the English region with the strongest local identity – a place that’d want its own assembly making decisions on its behalf rather than having decisions imposed on it from faraway London.  At the time I was living in the northeast’s biggest city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and, without wishing to confuse the city with the region, I have to say the Geordies of Newcastle did seem a complete race apart.

 

I’d spent most of my youth in Scotland, where devolution had been a burning political issue for a generation.  There’d been a referendum about establishing a Scottish parliament back in 1979 and a majority had voted in favour of it.  Due to some disgraceful rule-bending by the Labour government of the time, though, it was decreed that the majority wasn’t big enough and the parliament wasn’t delivered.  Soon after came the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which massively reshaped the economy and culture of the UK in the 1980s.  Most people in Scotland didn’t vote for Thatcher but the existing constitutional set-up left her free to do what she wanted with the place – a sorry state of affairs that resulted in the nadir of the Poll Tax, imposed solely on Scotland in 1989 as an experiment to see how it was likely to go down in the rest of the UK.  A great ‘what-if’ of Scottish political history is how a Scottish parliament, if one had been created at the end of the 1970s, might have stood up to Thatcher.  I certainly can’t imagine things being any worse than they were.  Anyway, it seemed to me a no-brainer that people in northeast England should get their own assembly in 2004.

 

However, in the run-up to the referendum, I realised my devolutionary enthusiasm wasn’t mirrored in the Geordies and north-easterners around me.  This was largely due to the influence of the anti-assembly campaign North East Says No, chaired by local businessman John Elliot and with a certain Durham-born, Oxford-educated character called Dominic Cummings as one of its prime movers.  The anti-assembly campaign whipped up resentment against the proposed establishment.  It warned that an assembly would be an unnecessary extra layer of government, diverting yet more public money into the pockets of yet more politicians – and diverting it away from areas that really needed it, like health.  “More doctors,” declared one of its ads, “not politicians.”  Actually, that sounds familiar.  Didn’t Dom peddle a similar message in a more recent political campaign?  Although in Newcastle in 2004 I didn’t see it emblazoned on the side of a bus.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

It didn’t help the assembly’s cause that the senior politician entrusted with overseeing its creation was deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who famously had not one but two princely Jaguar motor cars at his beck and call and generally wasn’t known for his frugality.

 

Cummings’s anti-assembly message certainly got through.  With hindsight it was scary how many left-wing, liberal-minded people I knew in Newcastle, who’d normally have detested everything Cummings stood for, unconsciously parroted his rhetoric.  I remember in my workplace a Russian woman, who had British citizenship and the right to participate in the referendum but wasn’t too clued-up on local politics, asking a colleague for advice on how to vote.  The colleague, a Guardian-reading progressive if ever there was one, promptly told her the assembly was a nonsense and to vote against it.  Meanwhile, my best mate in Newcastle, also no right-winger, dismissed the proposed assembly as a ‘white elephant’ designed to ‘line politicians’ pockets’.

 

It didn’t surprise me, then, when Prescott and company lost the referendum and a majority voted against the assembly’s establishment.  It did surprise me how emphatic that majority was – of those who bothered to vote, 78% voted against it.  And that wasn’t only the prospect of a north-eastern assembly killed stone dead, but the prospect of any future devolution in England generally.  No politician would touch the project after that whipping.  Dominic Cummings had secured his first and, alas, not his last big victory.

 

Although Newcastle is pictured by some as a drunken hellhole where ghastly nightclubs are pillaged by stag and hen parties clad in little more than jockstraps and G-strings while freezing easterly gales howl around them from the North Sea – an image that admittedly isn’t wide of the mark if you venture into the city’s Bigg Market district on a Friday or Saturday night – I thought it was a great city.  I thoroughly enjoyed my time there during the first half of the noughties.  It had some great pubs (away from the Bigg Market), a good live music scene, decent shops and easy access to libraries and galleries.  You could generally find whatever it was that floated your boat, be it antiques markets or creative writing groups or comedy shows or whatever.  And I loved how you were mere minutes away from some of the most scenic landscapes in England.  And the Geordies were great company.  Indeed, I would have stayed for longer if the money I was earning in my job there hadn’t been so crap.

 

Looking back, though, I was probably lucky that I left Newcastle when I did and avoided the years of austerity that were inflicted on it by David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010 onwards.  The newspaper reports I’ve read about what happened to Newcastle make grim reading – slabs of money hacked off its budget every year, a total of some 300 million pounds lost by 2019, with a resulting cull of libraries, youth clubs and children’s centres and a general neglect of public services.  Even the city’s lollipop men and ladies weren’t spared – their numbers declined from 64 to seven in the space of five years.  Would a north-eastern assembly have been able to protect the city against some of this savagery?  Like the hypothetical 1980s Scottish parliament and Margaret Thatcher, I doubt if it would have made things any worse.

 

 

Incidentally, I think the missed opportunity of the English regional assemblies will contribute eventually to the breakup of the United Kingdom.  Occasional senior Labour politicians – Gordon Brown especially – still talk up the prospect of a federal UK as a way to keep Scotland British.  With their parliament nestling amid a bunch of similar-sized English ones where power is equally distributed, the Scots, the theory goes, will neither feel neglected nor get ideas above their station.  They’ll accept they’re fairly treated and accept their lot as happy Brits.  That might be true in an alternative universe, but it isn’t going to happen in this universe.  There won’t be a properly federal UK because people in England, as 2004 proved, aren’t interested.  And with so much power entrusted to dolts like Boris Johnson in London, I can’t see the Scots putting up with the existing constitutional status quo for much longer.

 

Modern right-wingers adore Dominic Cummings for what he’s supposedly done to restore British sovereignty.  But he’s actually done more than most to crock the whole concept of Britain.  Thanks in part to his exploits, including those in 2004, Britain as a union of four nations is doomed.  Dom-ed, in fact.

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Est-ce qu’on vous sert?

 

© Penguin Classics

 

Anyone born at a similar time to me, and in a similar part of the world, and who therefore grew up watching 1970s British television, will have difficulty reading a novel about a department store without being reminded of the saucy British TV sitcom Are You Being Served?, created and written by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, broadcast from 1972 to 1985 and, yes, set in a department store in contemporary London.

 

Even though the novel in question is the classic French one The Ladies’ Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames) written by Émile Zola, published in 1883 and set in Paris, I’m afraid that while I read it I kept hearing in my head Ronnie Hazelhurst’s theme song from Are You Being Served?  This was a simple but maddeningly relentless number wherein a lift-girl talks over the non-stop chiming and chattering of a cash register: “Ground floor, perfumery / Stationery and leather goods / Wigs and haberdashery / Kitchenware and food / Going uu-uup…!”  I’ve heard people claim that the Are You Being Served? theme invented rap music, but maybe that’s pushing it a bit.

 

Anyway, on a more serious note…  I admire Émile Zola because of his variety.  He didn’t confine himself to writing about one particular section of society but gave each of his novels a different and distinctive focus.  For example, Nana (1880) is set in Paris’s theatrical world while Germinal (1885) is set in a mining community in northern France.  The Beast in Man (1890) deals with workers on the French railways while The Debacle deals with soldiers fighting and civilians caught up in the Franco-Prussian War.  Thus, his body of work becomes a massive, fictionalised document of French life in the mid-to-late 19th century.

 

With The Ladies’ Delight, Zola turns his attention to retailing industry and the changes it was undergoing at that time.  He tells the story largely through the eyes of young woman, Denise Baudu, who arrives in Paris from the provinces in the 1860s and finds work as a saleswoman at a booming department store, the titular Au Bonheur des Dames.

 

Denise’s job at the store is troubled from the start.  By working there, she incurs the displeasure of her only Parisian relatives, her uncle Baudu and his family, whose little draper’s shop has the misfortune of being across the street from Au Bonheur des Dames and is quickly being put out of business by it.  She comes to the capital with her two younger brothers, teenaged Jean and little Pépé, and Jean – with an irresponsibility typical of many of Zola’s male characters – is soon sponging off her while she barely earns enough to keep Pépé fed, clothed and in school and keep herself alive.  In fact, she almost doesn’t get employed at Au Bonheur des Dames at all.  On the day she applies for a job, the general overseer Bourdoncle rejects her for being ‘too ugly’.  But he’s overruled by the store’s owner, Octave Mouret, who hires the rustic-looking and waif-like Denise on a whim.

 

Nor does Denise – gentle, principled and clean-living – prosper in the licentious and back-biting environment of Au Bonheur des Dames.  The intensity of her workmates’ carnal obsessions is matched only by their determination to shin their way up the promotional ladder, usually by plotting against and undermining whoever’s immediately above them.  She’s eventually dismissed and finds a new job with Robineau, a one-time buyer at the store who was himself elbowed out and has now taken over a shop selling silk garments.  But Robineau’s business is unable to compete against the remorselessly growing, evermore popular establishment he once worked for, and he’s soon forced to let Denise go.  However, she manages to get back onto Au Bonheur des Dames’ payroll and this time she gains the ear of her boss, Mouret.  Though she’s naïve, Denise has excellent common sense and an unerring instinct for knowing what the public wants.  The advice she gives Mouret about how best to treat his customers, and his employees, leads to her rapid promotion.  Meanwhile, the cynical, worldly-wise Mouret starts to find himself unaccountably attracted to her…

 

From wikipedia.org

 

As well as relating the ups and downs of Denise’s career in and outside Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola describes Mouret’s efforts to expand his business and reel in more customers.  His activities include becoming the beau of society widow Madame Desforges, in order to get access to the super-powerful Baron Hartmann, who’s another of Madame Desforges’ lovers.  (Well, these folks are French.)  If he can secure Hartmann’s financial and political backing, Mouret believes he can grow Au Bonheur des Dames until it encompasses an entire city block.  Mouret’s romancing of Madame Desforges, and the flirting and flattering he does with the wealthy ladies who make up her social circle, become a metaphor for the seduction of Paris’s female shoppers that his store is performing on a commercial level.

 

However, it’s the novel’s third strand that’s the most powerful.  This describes the impact that Au Bonheur des Dames has upon the traditional shopkeepers who specialise in one particular type of good and are unlucky enough to share a neighbourhood with it.  The store begins by ruining the drapers but, as it gets bigger and Mouret creates more departments and sells a wider range of products, it also threatens the local furriers, glovers, hatters and so on.  Mouret even encroaches on the business of an old man called Bourras who looks ‘like an Old Testament prophet’ and makes and sells umbrellas and walking sticks.  Bourras’s decrepit shop occupies a sliver of one of the street-fronts that Mouret is expanding his premises along.  The old man refuses to sell and move out, so that his shop ends up with Au Bonheur des Dames on either side of it and resembles a ‘wart’ in its grand façade.

 

Denise’s Uncle Baudu not only loses his draper’s business but also his daughter Geneviève to the store.  Geneviève’s fiancé abandons her after becoming infatuated with a coquettish salesgirl working across the street, and the broken-hearted Geneviève wastes away and dies.  Her funeral provides the novel with its most effective scene.  The mourners include all the shopkeepers who’ve had their trade pulverised by Au Bonheur des Dames and they’re obliged to follow the coffin past the building that’s the source of their misery.  Old Bourras laments, “Oh, we’re a pretty sight; a fine cortege of carcasses we make for the dear child!  It must be odd, for people watching this line of bankrupts going past.  And it seems that the clean-out is continuing.  The scoundrels are opening departments for flowers, for fashions, for perfumes, for shoes, and who knows what else?”

 

While Zola doesn’t hold back in depicting Au Bonheur des Dames as a rapacious monster, his imagination is clearly besotted with the place as well.  He devotes many pages to describing it.  It’s variously likened to ‘an awakening beehive’, ‘an enormous fairground display’, ‘a sumptuous pasha’s tent’, ‘a cathedral of modern trade, light yet solid, designed for a congregation of lady customers’, ‘a monumental gallery’, ‘an enormous carnival’, ‘a vast, many-coloured architectural pile with gold highlights’, ‘a boreal vista’, ‘a great love nest’, ‘a white chapel’ and ‘a dream heaven, a window into the dazzling whiteness of a paradise.’  Whenever you think Zola has finished writing about its appearance, he has Mouret give the premises another upgrade and off he goes on another flurry of description.

 

In my mind’s eye, I found myself embellishing the store’s architecture and décor with flourishes of Art Nouveau.  I visualised the building as resembling some grand project designed by an Art Nouveau artist like Alphonso Mucha, Koloman Moser or Eugène Grasset.  But that would be wrong, since the novel’s 1860s setting precedes the Art Nouveau movement by at least 20 years and those artists would have been youngsters at the time.

 

From alphonsemucha.org

 

The Ladies’ Delight isn’t one of Zola’s best books.  His lengthy descriptions become tiresome.  This is especially true towards the end, when the reader is impatient to see how the various plot strands will be resolved and when those descriptions just seem to get in the way.  Also an issue is the characterisation.  Denise seems too innocent to be true, especially when there’s such a rogue’s gallery of schemers, chancers and letches inhabiting the store around her.  Correspondingly, it seems unlikely that somebody like Mouret could fall for her, even briefly – let alone become obsessed with her, to the point where he loses interest in everything else, including his business, as he does later.  (Predictably, the virtuous Denise rebuffs all his advances, which only leaves him more smitten with her.)

 

Enterprises launched by characters in Zola’s books tend to overreach themselves and come crashing down, both small-scale ones like Gervaise’s laundry business in L’Assommoir (1877) and grand ones like the title character’s theatrical career in Nana.  But that doesn’t happen to Mouret’s store in The Ladies’ Delight.  It simply continues to grow – the cash-register from Ronnie Hazelhurst’s Are You Being Served? theme was clinking particularly loudly in my head during those scenes where Zola describes the cashiers struggling to count and gather up and lock away Mouret’s ever-swelling profits.  In the absence of Mouret getting his financial come-uppance, I suppose Zola felt obliged to give him a romantic come-uppance instead, which is where he deploys Denise.  But as a plot device it doesn’t feel plausible.

 

The Ladies’ Delight is effective, though, when it chronicles how the new store tramples all over the businesses of the old-style traders and leaves a trail of bankruptcies in its wake.  It’s ironic to reflect that in 2020 the same department store would probably be a much-loved historical landmark.  It’d be regarded as an important, if vulnerable, part of its city’s commercial heritage.  Fearful that modern online traders like Amazon might trample all over its business, citizens would be calling on the government to subsidise it and keep it propped up.

 

Yes, this youthful monster of 19th century capitalism would now be regarded as, potentially, an elderly victim of 21st century capitalism.  The French saying ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose‘ isn’t quite true.

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Begin again

 

© Decca Records

 

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan,

He grew whiskers on his chin-e-gan.

Up came the wind and blew them in again,

Poor old Michael Finnegan.

Begin again.

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan…

 

So runs a particularly disturbing children’s rhyme / song I remember from my boyhood.  It’s disturbing because it’s never-ending.  You sing those 27 words about poor old Michael Finnegan and the whiskers on his chin-e-gan, then you say, ‘Begin again’, and off you go again, repeating the same verse into infinity – or until you and / or your listeners go insane.  And I recall kids in the playground at my primary school who had nothing better to do but test their own endurance, and test other people’s endurance, by singing Michael Finnegan for as long as they could.  I even seem to recall the Irish singer Val Doonican, that knitwear and rocking-chair-loving easy-listening troubadour who had his own show on BBC TV from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s and who was much admired by ‘ladies of a certain age’, performing it on television one evening.   Wow.  Val Doonican singing Michael Finnegan over and over again, for all eternity.  That sounds like a very specialised version of hell.

 

Anyway, like Michael Finnegan’s whiskers, I’m afraid this blog has had to begin again.  In recent weeks it had been hacked into a couple of times.  Despite the efforts of the technical support people at the webhosting company, it was no longer possible to restore the site from back-up – too many longstanding files had been infected, leaving the door open for future hacking.  So, reluctantly, I agreed to have the site eviscerated of its files so that I could set it up again with a clean sheet.  That’s why it’s in the highly functional, impersonal-looking state it’s in at the moment, but hopefully I will be able to improve its appearance when I have time.

 

It’s a shame this happened, as the blog had been puffing along fairly happily since 2012 and I had posted over 750 entries, which of course are all down now.  I have, however, saved the majority of those past entries as Word files and I will hopefully repost some of the more interesting ones over the weeks and months to come.  (Obviously, though, there’s no point in reposting many of them as they were strictly ‘of their time’ – my ruminations about Tunisian politics after the revolution of 2011, written while I was living in Tunisia, for example; or my pontifications about Scottish politics in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.)

 

Meanwhile, to hold the fort, here are some updates on pieces of writing I have recently had published, under my various pseudonyms, with links to where to find them.

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

Published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield (the name I use for horror fiction and dark stuff generally):

 

  • My short story The Four-Legged Friend should be appearing in the June 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. Its home page is here.
  • My short story The Away Day was published in the March 2020 edition of Schlock! Webzine. A kindle edition of this issue can be downloaded here.
  • My short story New Town Tours has been included in the new collection Midnight Street Anthology 4: Strange Days, published by Midnight Street Press.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.  Also, you can find a clip of me (as Jim Mountfield) talking about and reading an excerpt from New Town Tours here.  Yes, I know the clip looks and sounds like it was recorded through a wet towel inside a portaloo, but I’ve been under a Covid-19-inspired curfew for the past two months and I didn’t have access to proper recording equipment.
  • Witch Hazel, a short story I had published in the February 2020 edition of The Horror Zine, can still be accessed here. It also appears in the Spring 2020 hard-copy edition of The Horror Zine, which can be purchased here.
  • The Lights, a longer short story with a Christmas theme, is still available to read on the December 2019 / January 2020 edition of Aphelion webzine, here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Published under the pseudonym Rab Foster (the name I use for fantasy fiction):

 

  • Closing Time at the Speckled Wolf, a short story I had published in Aphelion webzine 14 months ago, was listed in its final edition of 2019 as one of the webzine’s best stories of the year. It can be accessed here.
  • My short story The World Builder was the featured story in the Halloween 2019 edition of Blood Moon Rising magazine and is still available here.

 

And published under my real and very boring name Ian Smith:

 

  • My short story The Yellow Brick Road was published in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Sri Lankan literary magazine Write. Unfortunate timing meant that the issue went on sale just a few days before the Sri Lankan authorities announced an ongoing curfew in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.  However, there are signs that the curfew is now being eased slightly, and as far as I know, copies of Write are available at the Barefoot Shop at 704 Galle Road, Colombo, which has definitely been open in recent days.
  • Finally, my flash-fiction story Ferg’s Bike appeared last month on Write’s social media platforms. The first page of it can be accessed on Facebook here and the second page here.

 

© Midnight Street Press

 

And that’s everything for now.  Hopefully, normal service will, as they say, be resumed as soon as possible.