The track is all there is these days, though I keep looking at the scenery out the window…

Five years ago is the date on which my poem 'Two Days Before the Fall of Kabul' takes place — a poem about going for a medical test just hours after a pet budgie died, and the attendant feelings of fragility and of both bodily and emotional vulnerability. I've thought a lot about how that title might look like me co-opting other people's suffering to lament a small-scale loss — a trendy nod to current events — but that week for me was completely overshadowed by what was happening and above all by my sense of kinship with the Afghan women — who, you know, could be any of us. I was in a total fury of rage over the complete dereliction of accountability by the country I am still, after all, a citizen of — which had spent twenty years promising the people of Afghanistan that they would keep them safe, no matter what happened, and then signally failed to do that. Ditto the country I’ve chosen, all this time, to live in. Both at once. I was in a misery that week, in a state of dread, to which my liver scan and my dead bird acted as objective correlatives.

Day after tomorrow, Saturday, will be the 15th of August, the anniversary of the day the Taliban swept into a Kabul that was somehow, unaccountably, still, completely unprepared for what then happened. The result was a humanitarian atrocity that still continues, and in fact has merely deepened until, today. That was the day I titled my poem; before that it was just ‘The Fall of Kabul’. Too big, too overarching, too abstract. Small bird, small moment in time, but still the big dread.

And today, this morning, having not thought about that poem at all in years, I opened my New York Times daily newsletter and read:

Um… I’m not a military historian, but is this really an honest or useful depiction of what happened?

Here’s a very quick recap:

• Throughout its long occupation of Afghanistan the US and European allies promised — I’m going to put this in bold italics — promised — to protect the countless interpreters, drivers, other staff who worked with or for the allied forces, and also all Afghan women. The US occupation made it possible during all that time for a whole generation of women & girls to pursue education and careers — even high-level, publicly visible careers — safe in the knowledge that the US had undertaken to keep them protected.

• 29 February, 2020: Donald Trump and the Taliban signed an ‘agreement for bringing peace to Afghanistan’, ie the Treaty of Doha, laying out an end to the US occupation.

• This immediately weakened the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), who were not included in the negotiations.

• 1 May 2021: date US & Western allies to be out of Afghanistan

• March-June 2020: Taliban carries out over 5,000 separate attacks all over Afghanistan, killing thousands, including ANSF & civilians, including women & children, and kidnaps 60 civilians in one go. June contains the single bloodiest week by the Taliban in the history of the whole war.

• 20 January 2021: Joe Biden’s inauguration as President — so it’s his kettle of fish now.

• 14 April 2021: Can you believe it!! Two weeks to go! Biden says Oh no we haz changed our mindz and will withdraw troops by the totally neutral & ungoading date 11 September, the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

• 1 May 2021: beginning of major insurgence by Taliban. Civilians are volunteering with the by-now-useless ANSF.

• 8 July 2021: Biden says No, sorry, wait! 31 August, what was I thinking? 31 August!

• Also 8 July: Biden Press Conference, lifted from Wikipedia:
  
  …US President Joe Biden speaking to reporters in a press conference, said that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is not inevitable, stating, “the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped—as well-equipped as any army in the world—and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban”. Biden said that the US intelligence community had not assessed that the Afghan government would likely collapse. When asked about whether there were parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, the President replied:

  “None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is—you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy—six, if I’m not mistaken. The Taliban is not the south—the North Vietnamese army. They’re not—they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

  Biden added that “...the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”.^[313]

• 6 August: Taliban begins move through Afghanistan, capturing provincial capitals. Everyone can see what is happening and their progress is charted every day on the news, almost mile by mile, as they head for Kabul.

• 15 August. President Ashraf Ghani flees the country. The Taliban marches into Kabul, as predicted for months by the BBC and others, and takes over.

• As it turns out, no plans have really been made, the visas issued to vulnerable Afghans are patchy & the process is completely inadequate, many of the vulnerable staff are in remote regions with no transportation, and there’s no system in place for evacuation. Weeks and months have been wasted by, I’m going to say it, Western supremacy, ignorance, and complacency. Men who worked for us are being dragged out of their houses and shot. Women are hiding in cellars with their children. Biden is saying the Afghans must sort out their own country.

• 15 August onwards: TOTAL MAYHEM.

  
  

  Here’s a BBC account of the chaos of the withdrawal

During that week, I saw a retired British Army Brigadier-General on the news, crying in grief and rage and shame, banging his fists on the table and repeating over and over, ‘We promised! We promised to keep them safe, we PROMISED’.

That was the week — the week in which the people who had helped us for twenty years were literally trying to cling to the undercarriages of airplanes as they took off — in which the British response was mainly presented in the media via a privately funded pet shelter rescue — which our doughty, or was that just doughy, Prime Minister, actually misrepresented to Parliament as having been done under his auspices. And in a plane which, thanks to the British chaos, was allowed to be empty of the 250 people it had space for.

Cut to the future:

We all, I hope, know what conditions are like for ALL women in Afghanistan now. They are unbelievably heroic but they have no rights at all. No rights to education or a career; for a while they could be midwives but I think even that is hard now, and of course women may not be treated by a male doctor, so young women are dying in childbirth. Women can’t travel even for vital medical reasons without a male relative, and I’ve read numerous stories about women with no male relative having to go somewhere… Full chador at all times, of course. Forced marriages, rapes, torture… Infractions may result in horrors inflicted on male relatives. No voice, literally. Even inside their own homes, women in Afghanistan may not speak or sing in any way that might be heard from outside.

Here’s an article by Human Rights First about the aftermath.

American and UK timeline, into the future:

• 20 January 2025: Trump inaugurated again.

• Trump scraps the US Refugee Admissions Programme, stopping people getting in and also stopping help for people newly arrived.

• 12 May, 2025: Dept of Homeland Security revokes Temporary Protected Status for Afghans in the US, putting them at risk of deportation.

• 4 June 2025: Trump’s travel ban affects nationals of 12 countries, including Afghanistan.

• 1 July 2025: the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, which helps Afghans who worked with us to relocate to the UK, is closed to new applications.

• 4 June 2026: the UK, clamping down on immigration BAMN, suspends student visas for students from Camaroon, Myanmar, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Apparently there have been people from these countries absconding from their studies and becoming illegal immigrants. There is a programme called Chevening which supports ‘exceptional’ students to come here and study at post-graduate level and we have refused to make an allowance for those students. Yes, we have. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, in the Guardian:
  
  “…taking the unprecedented decision to refuse visas for those nationals seeking to exploit our generosity”.
  …
  

  A Home Office spokesperson said: “Study routes are being widely abused, creating a back door to claim asylum into this country. That is why we are taking unprecedented action to suspend routes from four countries.

  “We cannot allow exceptions to study routes to prevent further abuse across our migration system.”
  
  Not even exceptions from a country where they aren’t even allowed to speak, and where we helped to create the situation!

Here’s the Guardian article

Some things you can do:

One petition for Afghan women to be allowed to study here

Another petition for Afghan women to be allowed to study here

Subscribe to the Afghan-women-led Rukshana Media, based in the UK

Subscribe to the Afghan-women-led Zan Times, based in Canada

Watch the European, English-language miniseries ‘Kabul’ on BBC iPlayer (or, apparently, on Lionsgate Play)

(Also: I should say, my first introduction to the existence of ‘Troy, the movie’, months before it came out, was a newspaper photograph of Brad Pitt, in costume as Achilles, talking on his mobile phone. It struck me as so hilarious that I cut it out and blutacked it to my computer monitor, where it stayed for months. Then it was on the fridge. I don’t know where it is now, and I really thought I had scanned it in, but if iI did so it was in such a hurry that I didn’t title it, because I now can’t find it. Pity. What an artefact.)

Anyway, here’s the poem:

The Sack of Troy

When Achilles, I mean Brad Pitt, gets killed
by Orlando Bloom, we laugh like drains.
Don’t worry, he says. It’ll be okay.
He’s calm behind a bronze-age suntan.
Then Paris, in the secret tunnel:
You there! What’s your name, boy?
Boy:Aeneas.
Well, take this sword, Aeneas —
as long as one of our people has it,
there will always be a Troy!
Aeneas exits, sword in hand.
Matty, watching too, leans in —
‘Aw, fank ya, mate!’
Before this, though,
Achilles — spattered with manly mud,
after battle, his captive ‘wife’
watching through narrowed eyes as he washes.
I’ll let you in on a little secret
they didn’t teach in your precious temple!
See, I know more about the gods
than you may think you do: I’ve MET them.
He ripples his jaw and flicks his hair,
his yellow hair.
Briseis sneers,
I’ve known a lot of men like you.
Brad looks casually interested. Soldiers?
She’s moral. War is NOT the answer!
Matty’s crunching on his popcorn.
The scene in the hut as Hector’s body
lies in the dust outside the door
is brilliant. Briseis petulantly
crying — he was my cousin, you know —
which is, like so much more, debatable.

Em goes: ‘Achilles is such a girl’.

But later, when the temple statues fall
they topple drastically, immortally,
holding stone draperies close at their sides;
it’s somehow Priam, not Peter O’Toole,
who dies for Ilium while the city burns
whose smoke casts a pall on vast Olympus.

And when the camera pans out over
Brad Pitt — spread out on the turf,
the arrow sticking out of his heel
like Hermes’ winged boots (or maybe
one of those ones you get in joke shops),
— and Matty and the boys are laughing
(and maybe it helps that he’s stopped talking) —
suddenly it’s Achilles himself
lying dead and exposed. Part oaf, part god.

Well, that was a pretty intense fourth of July weekend! I say intense — we reach for adjectives, don’t we, and they almost always come up wanting. What was this weekend like? It was like a lot of things. What stands out the most for me was that photograph of the girl on theMetro surrounded by masked-up cyborg-looking white supremacists. Or the photos of them marching through otherwise-empty streets of Washington DC, in their weirdly incongruous chinos. Click here to see them showing off for the camera making big muscle arms like a bunch of 12-year-olds.

The whole thing for me just had a weird air of malignant emptiness.

As it happens, I had written a poem to commemorate the event itself, and I was still working on that poem till lunchtime on the day of the 4th. The final push to the finish line!

I’ve never been much of a one for the whole 4th of July hoopla, the parade, the cookout, the flags, the public displays of patriotism. I’m not great around flags. I don’t always love crowds. And I worry when everybody thinks the same thing. I had very conflicting attitudes to the parade when when I was a kid — I thought I hated brass bands! (It was Chet Baker who finally reclaimed the trumpet for me and made me feel what a beautiful and soulful instrument it is.) The real problem I had was more with the marching in step. What I wanted was to know more about Sacajawea. I could feel the ghosts of the former residents all around me, but that’s maybe for a different day.

Anyway this whole 4th of July problem kind of took care of itself when I decamped to London, because it just isn’t an issue over here.

Until this year.

Well, let’s backtrack a year to that horrific week after 20 Jan 2025 — all those executive orders, flying like confetti from the tiny hands, pens jettisoned like little jets into the adoring crowds, executive orders written by the monsters Thiel and Miller…

The brilliant political poetry website New Boots and Pantisocracies (with its punning title riffing on the Ian Dury album) started a special inauguration project, wherein they invited people to write a poem about their executive order of choice. I started about five poems about different executive orders, but to be honest my shock was so great that I just ground to a halt without finishing any of them.

Instead, I dived into a side project of trying to extricate myself completely from Google — the first major company to voluntarily scrap its equality policies when Trump called for DEI to be eliminated. In the end, this utopian quest would teach me all I needed to know about the power of the behemoth by which we’ve been captured: that extrication is impossible, because we are in the belly of the Beast, and that it’s stupid to try, because Google doesn’t want to let you out, and Apple won’t let former Google material in, and because every single productivity app uses Google’s calendar and/or some other Google feature; it’s embedded absolutely everywhere. And so many clients want to do everything in Google Docs. Over that six months my whole online infrastructure sort of collapsed, I lost loads of emails, and it was an insane time-suck, and of course here we are.

This effort at least enabled me to feel like I was doing something purposeful without having to engage too actively with the enormities that were parading before us, even though they were unignorable, even from 3,000 miles away. The open horror of it, and the normalising of it by the press, and the inescapable truth that the history of the US has been replete with the precursors of all this, the warning signs, the unfinished business, the — well, do I need to rehearse them? I’ve been rehearsing them all weekend on a million ill-advised Facebook threads, like some kind of expiation… But even with all those ghosts also haunting, the ignominy of this year and a half — and the situation it finds us in right now — have been and are of an exponentially different order.

All this time, one of those poems, the one that had been the most promising draft, stayed in my head. I knew all along that when the time came I was going to have to finish it. The time was going to be now — the 250th anniversary of 4 July, I mean July 4th. The executive order in question is number 14189, with particular attention to:

Sec. 3. National Garden of American Heroes. (a) Executive Order 13934 of July 3, 2020 (Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes) and Executive Order 13978 of January 18, 2021 (Building the National Garden of American Heroes) are reinstated as they were prior to issuance of Executive Order 14029 of May 14, 2021.

What a monstrous idea! A Trumpite ‘National Garden of Heroes’! But visual af, something you could actually work with, like a piece of fabric

The poem presented itself immediately in the form of an updated ‘Masque of Anarchy’; Shelley is, I think, our greatest poet of political fury. And it had to be left to the last minute, because it was going to need to be as topical as that poem is, which he wrote in a white heat after the Peterloo Massacre.

The long and short of it (after all this preamble) is that I did it! Not that I make any claims to the greatness of the original.

I gave it a long subtitle, more of a nod to the 1776 origins of the day than to Shelley, but c’est la vie:

…on the Anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence by a Band of the Most Free-Thinking and Scientific Deists Ever to Enter Politics; and Upon the Occasion of History’s Most Venal and Power-Crazed Miscreant Having Promised the Nation a Memorial Garden of Heroes, in Celebration of its Most August First Quarter-Millennium of Incorporation, Whereas Upon the Day of This Anniversary We See Instead the Nation’s First House Razed and in Ruins, Abutted by a Stagnant Memorial Reflecting Pool and That its Garden Hath Been Destroyed by Said Scoundrel Oligarch.

Here’s a small extract from the poem:

FANFARE:
The Orange Nightmare comes,
flanked by traitors with knives and guns,
that grimace of malfeasance hardened
on the faces of the rabble he’s pardoned.

Last year’s mage of mayhem primeval
is held aloft by the venal and the evil:
Elon’s left but he’s siphoning money
to the few, even now, from the broken many.

And you can read the rest here.

Within a day or two of that awful morning I was watching something on the news — a vox pop — and a man in the street (no need to describe him, sadly you can probably picture him) suddenly leapt forward and accosted two Asian people walking past, jabbing his finger in their faces, screaming hoarse & frothing: ‘WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? WE VOTED YOU OUT!!’

Et cetera.

Aside from the street where lots of German people lived having every single car’s tyres slashed, and the tapas places with rocks through the window, it’s my most vivid single memory of that week. It was a terrifying time because no one knew where it would stop. And of course there was no immediate cataclysm, just that things got gradually worse over a drearily long stretch of time, and kept getting worse.

And here we are. We’re surrounded by that man now — not in that he’s most of us, but that he’s in every street. In the street where I live now (because everything has changed since then, and instead of dear old multicultural Hackney I now live in a little town where those men feel very free to say whatever they want), they were stringing up Union Jack bunting last year and chanting ‘Sieg heil’. Their hatred has spread from foreigners to anyone who disagrees with them, and thanks to the prevailing winds, they are being validated in this every day.

So the world is just different. We’ve lost our insoucience — at least, I’ve lost mine for sure. Everything that happens now is State of the Nation. Two things I’ve seen in the past couple of days have struck with really extra poignancy, as reminders of what life used to be like.

One was a Substack post, in which my longtime fellow poet-blogger Jeremy Noel-Tod has shared an extraordinary text in full: Dylan Thomas’ ‘fifteen-minute radio postcard’ from the 1951 Festival of Britain for the BBC Welsh Home Service. Just by sharing this utterly delightful thing, ‘a prose rhapsody far more verbally vivid and inventive than it needed to be’, Jeremy has given us all a present — a gift, anyway, wrapped with a big bow, and maybe the image of an idealised present. Something to aim for.

For the first time ever, reading it, I really wish I could have gone to the Festival of Britain. I want to have seen that. What really comes through in Dylan’s description — and in the others fascinatingly quoted in the post — is the sheer optimistic expansiveness of it all, all eyes on the future, the excitement of international culture making everything bigger, in a miraculous peacetime, and the trust that this is what will happen.

It’s just gorgeous. Here’s a smallish extract:

“And other visitors begin, of course, at the end. They are the people without whom the exhibition could not exist, nor the country it trombones and floats in with its lions and unicorns made of ears of wheat, its birds that sing to the push of a button, its flaming water, and its raspberry fountains. They are the suspicious people over whose eyes no coloured Festival wool can possibly be pulled, the great undiddleable; they are the women who “will not queue on any account” and who smuggle in dyspeptic dogs; the strangely calculating men who think that the last pavilion must be first because it is number twenty-two; the people who believe they are somewhere else, and never find out they are not; sharp people who have been there before, who know the ropes, who chuckle to their country cousins: “You get double your money’s worth this way”; vaguely persecuted people, always losing their gloves, who know that the only way they could ever get around would be to begin at the end, which they do not want to; people of militant individuality who proclaim their right, as Englishmen, to look at the damfool place however they willynilly will; people nervously affected by all such occasions, who want to know only, “Where’s the place?”; timid people who want to be as far from the skylon as possible, because “you never know”; foreigners, who have been directed this way by a school of irresponsible wits; glassy benighted men who are trying to remember they must see something of the exhibition to remember before they go home and try to describe it to their families; young people, hand-in-love, who will giggle at whatever they see, at a goldfish in a pond, a model of the Queen Elizabeth, or a flint hammer; people too bored to yawn, long and rich as borzois, who, before they have seen it, have seen better shows in Copenhagen and San Francisco; eccentric people: men with their deerstalker caps tied with rope to their lapels, who carry dried nut sandwiches and little containers of yoghurt in hairy green knapsacks labelled “glass with care”; fat, flustered women in as many layers of coats as an onion or a cab-driver, hunting in a fever through fifty fluffed pockets to find a lost packet of bird-seed they are going to give to the parrots who are not there; old scaly sneezing men, born of lizards in a snuff-bin, who read, wherever they go, from books in tiny print, and who never look up, even at the tureen-lid of the just-tethered dome or the shining skylon, the skygoing nylon, the cylindrical leg-of-the future jetting, almost, to the exhibition of stars; real eccentrics: people who have come to the South Bank to study the growth and development of Britain from the Iron Age till now.”

Do read Jeremy’s whole post.

And the second was this. Picture our modern, Year 2026, far-right foot-soldiers marching through a crowded town on a Saturday market day — shoving women, threatening elderly people, shouting about ‘lefty scum’ and ‘small boats’ with a megaphone and drum and seas of flags, and a special guest in the person of Paul Golding, leader of the fascist group Britain First. These people like making Nazi salutes. After the march ends — across town, down by the hostel where under-18 asylum seekers are housed (the teenagers these men gratuitously refer to en masse as ‘rapists’) — the ringleaders circle back and keep going, in more relaxed mode, swashing drunkenly down the high street with a ghetto blaster playing all their favourite songs. All of which are football-crowd songs; maybe that’s the only music they know. They’re not very alive to messaging, for a bunch of virulent Muslim-haters, because the most triumphant song they play is this. They clearly haven’t seen the video:

And it was the disjuncture between that day in November and this video at sent me into tears yesterday, when I came across it on Facebook — shared by one of the most joyful people in it. 1998 feels an awfully long time ago.

I know ‘the day after the Brexit referendum’ might feel possibly a little bit random, for ‘the day when everything changed’. You could say 9/11, or the day Cameron & Osborne got elected, or the 2011 cuts, or the 2011 riots (some connection shurely?) — but on that day in 2016 something that had felt fixable finally just broke.

Happy tenth anniversary.

I woke up too early this morning, as I usually do: not ready to get up yet. I’ve fallen into a habit of doing stupid things like the New York Times puzzles — spelling Bee, Wordle — on the justification that they can be done quickly. When I was a kid it was a truism that ‘doing the crossword puzzle’ would ‘keep your mind active’, but I do these puzzles for the opposite reason, to still my overactive mind.

But there comes a point where they seem to be not so much stilling it as whacking it with dullness till it’s half dead. In the past week or so I’ve discovered a much worse one, Shuffalo, in the New Yorker, which unlike the other two is actually hard, and can take ages, and it puts me into a slightly bad mood; it’s not following the rules for engagement. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: ‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity’.

Time is the slippery thing, of course. Or the sticky thing. Or the wooden thing that blocks everything. Or the deceptive surface that you fall into, or the accordion, expanding and contracting faster and faster, whose music you can never keep up with…

Anyway, it wasn’t time to get up yet so I put on an audiobook. I have an audiobook of Walden narrated by a man who sounds plausibly like how you can imagine Thoreau might have sounded, ish, and I’ve been thinking about him again recently (though the quote about time didn’t come to me this morning, it only came to me just now as I was describing my annoyance with word puzzles), so I put it on.

And drifted off to sleep. That was nice. I had a dream I was talking on the phone to a friend I haven’t spoken to in ages, someone with quite an intense writing style, and in our conversation he was being very amusing, using archaic language to great effect with anecdote after anecdote — and also would not shut up and let me get a word in edgeways. It felt realistic, let’s just say! He was talking about the brown thrasher, one of my favourite American birds, calling it an ‘amateur Paganini’, and describing an immense feeling of freedom, and also (with a cocked eyebrow) a civic safety.

He said:
‘… That music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons—for I sometimes made a day of it—like a mote in the eye, or in heaven’s eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air[…]’

And then there was this. I think I was beginning to wake up by this point, and realising it wasn’t a phone call:
‘On gala days the town [indistinct] echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of [indistinct] music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, [indistinct] as if a puffball had burst; […] It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the [indistinct] hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared.

I felt proud to know that the liberties [indistinct] were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future’.

Well, I woke up and of course it wasn’t my friend Joe at all, it was Thoreau — a different kind of friend, also exactly the kind of person I like — telling me (in the voice of some narrator) his chapter, ‘The Bean Field’. What woke me up properly, I think, was my perception (missing all the political content in my blissful sleep) that Thoreau’s feeling of safety in the future — that his security in the environment itself to continue — was something we have lost. I don’t know of a serious writer who could write such a thing today.

It made me realise how much of that quicksand stuff time has passed between me and him, how lost his Concord, Mass is, and how much danger we and our little brown-thrasher Paganinis are in.

Awake, I did that very 2026 thing, and looked at my phone. It’s the microcosmic experience of time, isn’t it. Our own little particle. And my particular phone reminded me that in my own ‘liberty’ (using the term in its medieval sense to mean a particular place, which one is free to enjoy freely) of London itself, today is a day when all is not well — when (and now those indistinct words are clearly visible in print) “there [is] a military turnout of which I was ignorant, [and] I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash…”

In other words, today is the day of the far-right ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march on London. I say ‘on London’ because this overweening hate does not originate within London. Londoners come from everywhere, they are everybody, they are all of us. Yaxley-Lennon, to use his real name, isn’t a Londoner. He isn’t anything. But hundreds of thousands are following him to march through London’s streets with a pick-n-mix of complaints that could lend plausible deniability to anything he gets accused of; some are chanting ‘Starmer out’, for instance, which just sounds like most of my leftwing friends. And even the vilest anti-Muslim agitators are convinced they’re ‘not racist’, because ‘it’s a religion’. Everything is mixed up these days, and the only sure thing is the hate that flows freely in all directions — racist hate being funded by the global kleptocracy, and the equally venomous hate against the racists and the kleptocracy being for free.

I’m here in Kent without the physical energy (for a very post-2020 reason) even to do the bean-hoeing Thoreau describes, let alone go up on a train and spend the entire day marching and chanting in an alternately euphoric and hostile crowd of hundreds of thousands, but what I can do is parse out some of the subtexts in Thoreau. Because the ability to parse out subtexts seems more important now that we’re losing it.

I can already hear the objections the people I know right now can quite rightly raise against this text, calling its writer a ‘settler’, a ‘coloniser’, or even a ‘racist’. But Thoreau is polemicising in his book on living in a cabin by Walden Pond, just as much as anyone nowadays is polemicising. The book is a brilliant anti-capitalist screed, written in the cradle of the birthplace of rampant capitalism, at the time of the westward spread of the US territories, and amid growing unrest due to the continuing slavery. Thoreau’s time on Walden Pond was in the mid-19840s, and the book Walden was published in 1854, seven years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and five years before the abolitionist John Brown’s ill-fated raid on the armoury at Harper’s Ferry. He himself was a passionate abolitionist, and was a stop on the Underground Railroad (though presumably not in his cabin on the pond’; that’s a different project).

And his bucolic idyll was taking place in the bosom of the most rarified progressive intellectual community in the still-nascent US.

The bits in my quoted passages marked ‘indistinct’ are political references that went over my sleeping head, and brought focus in a rereading when I’d woken up.

Here’s that bit ‘Joe’ told me in my dream in full:

‘On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the ‘trainers’. It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared.

I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.

When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish—for why should we always stand for trifles?—and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the village. This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it’.

Don’t you love that image of the town as a vast bellows, with the houses inflating and deflating? My first point, for anyone who misses it, is that Thoreau is being very ironic about the military ardour. And he absolutely doesn’t want to ‘spit a Mexican’.

His years on Walden Pond coincided with the Mexican-American War, which started in 1845 when the US ‘annexed’ (i.e., stole) Texas — a war Thoreau unambiguously opposed, and wrote about in his famous essay ‘On Civil Disobedience’:

‘Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless’.

Note the arch tone of Thoreau’s voice, here, and how the trumpet sings merely of ‘fame’ and not honour. Look at how he uses he uses the heavily ironic, archaic word ‘chivalry’ to mean dispatching (which I know we wouldn’t, now) a garden pest. (There’s a passage a few pages on where he describes being at war with the woodchucks for his beans, but even there he doesn’t mention killing them.)

When he says, ‘Why should we always stand for trifles?’ it’s as if he could see Donald Trump coming, with that monotonous litany of infinitesimal slights he tells everyone other countries have been inflicting on the US ‘for years’. Trump would certainly have called Mexico ‘not giving us their country’ a slight.

‘These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine’, Thoreau writes — presciently, it almost seems reading it now. Today, that’s not so far away. Palestine currently feels as close to us now as those villagers across the fields were to Thoreau. In fact, there’s also a pro-Palestine march in London today, competing with Tommy Ten-Names for the streets. (And there’s a counterprotest to the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ one too, that friends of mine are on. There are 4,000 police officers trying to contain all this. Many times the number of villagers in Concord, Mass, in the 1850s.) But although Thoreau isn’t writing about Palestine as we currently understand it — how could he, when the situation Palestine is in now was nowhere near existing in 1850 — he immediately shows us he’s on ‘the right side’, which matters very much in the 21st century, with its obsession with binaries, by saying, ‘and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon’.

Crusaders have been a prominent feature in the iconography of the Christo-fascist far right in the past year or so, with Tommyboy flagshaggers up and down the land posting AI-generated memes of themselves dressed in a fond reimagining of Templar outfits, with rippling muscles heavily at odds with their badly tattooed and beerbellied forms. Protecting are women and children, and rescuing English-born kittens. Thoreau’s crusaders take the form of ‘a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops’ — another arched eyebrow, another picturesque understatement. And all this is encapsulated in the final sentence of two halves, one expressing the villager's’ delight and one his own observation: ‘This was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it’.

Sometimes one time does seem to bend up, or down, like Madeleine L’Engle’s tesseract, to meet another. Just touch it gently and let the energy pass along. Let us hope today passes as peacefully as Thoreau’s bean-hoeing.

Love to all.

Just some quick thoughts as I prep my ten-book poetry workshop marathon for the weekend. I can’t help looking out at the world every so often.

This whole ‘She was blocking the road, she deserved what she got’ — ‘She disobeyed the commands of a law enforcement officer’ — ‘She FAFO’ — ‘She had no business being at a protest, she should have been home with her fatherless child’ — ‘paid activist’ — ‘ran him over’ — '

The comments are terrible! Hundreds of them, thousands of them, everywhere — and from English people! (Of course some of them are bots — another vexed question.) I’m unclear as to whether the rank and file of British citizens realise how close this stuff is coming to being imposed here, what a thread we’re hanging by, what a knife-edge, what a turn of a steering wheel — the hate is everywhere and the judgement, and in particular what is troubling me is explosion of comments like the above, like a volcano eruption of bile, pouring through the brains of our neighbours & out into the streets —

I know, I know. We’ve had all this same bile from people outraged about a tin of soup being poured on the glass covering a painting, about people blocking roads to protest against the actual destruction of our entire planet. I know. We seem to vastly [sic] prefer the petty. Maybe blocking the road for four minutes is the worst thing you could do.

Here in Faversham and elsewhere in the country there’s been a lot of talk in recent months about ‘British values’, in the wake of the flagging jamboree that was ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ — Hoist the Petard, more like. Competitive flag-loving going on all over, ‘how dare they claim to be the patriotic ones', ‘we’ll show them how much we love our flag’ — Billy Bragg made his little inclusive England flag… Sorry, this is really rough, I’m not worrying about sentences — second-worst thing you could do. ‘Protect Are Women and Children’.

I’m not into flags, they leave me cold. Including Billy Bragg’s one. Fellow-feeling isn’t about flags any more than it’s about skin colour. Or eating the same food, though a curry certainly is the same food. (& in America a taco is.) And British values can’t be something that just resides in traditional middle-class Home Counties English culture, the cuppa, the Christmas carols on a snowy morning, the faithful hound by the fire. I’m not sure this vexed question can ever really be answered, unless we were to posit that the quintessential British value is a certain irreverence, a disrespect for authority — and that goes back way past Wat Tyler, or John Ball.

This isn’t feeling anything like the country that gave us — in pretty much the least-PC examples I can think of — ‘Porridge’, or ‘Only Fools and Horses’, or ‘Minder’! Or even the Doctor.

And I have just the ticket! No, I mean I literally do.

Ten books, ten poets, two mornings — what that amounts to I’m offering you is a deep dive into the ten books shortlisted for the UK’s biggest award for poetry, the TS Eliot Prize — started by the big man himself, and still going strong, bringing poets and poetry into the light and giving up something to talk about in the dull weeks of January.

Poetry — poems — are where we humans go, in every culture and across the expanse of time, to get something out. Or in. A true account. An escape from the draining need to explain everything. To make music out of words, even out of word salad. Poetry may famously ‘make nothing happen’ (though right after that line, Auden wrote, ‘It is a way of happening, a mouth’) — but it is also the news. THE news.

Poetry is where we go both to explain what’s happening, and to discover it. To explore meaning itself , what ‘meaning’ means — is it in the dictionary, in the sound, in combinations of sounds? Is it in the general Zeitgeist? Does it come from the interplay of different poems, different poets, the living and the dead? The read and the unread? Is meaning the actual crash that happens when you mash poetry up to other forms of understanding?

Or maybe poems are simply a way of playing?

Well! Come along and let’s talk about it. This workshop has been running for about 16 years now and every year the conversation happens again and we get some poems into our mouths.

We begin by agreeing that there’s no such thing as ‘best’; many books just as wonderful as these ten have been published this year and have not made it onto this shortlist. We know this. And knowing it frees us up to consider these ten as a snapshot, as a way in, as a path lined with tea lights leading through a wooded park.

Do you like poetry, or miss it from school, and you’d love to start reading it but you’re not sure where to jump in? Or do you write it, or study it, but find it hard to keep up? Or just love reading as much as you can? Any of these is a good way to get into this weekend workshop.

You don’t need to have read, or even heard of, any of the books — or the poets — in the image above. I’ll have made giant handouts. It’s all there to discover! By the end of the second morning, everyone will have a firm favourite, or three firm favourites, perhaps a firm anti-favourite (which might be someone else’s number one), and several other ideas about what or whom you’d like to follow up.

It’ll be just in time for the annual reading of all ten poets at the Southbank Centre on the 18th.

And then the next evening, we’ll find out who the winner is.

So how does it all work? We meet on Zoom, from 10am-1.30pm (with a break) for two mornings. You get a big handout from me the evening before each session covering five of the books, and then we meet in the Zoom room and read and chat and see what we think. It’s always huge fun.

Drop me a line to find out more or to join the sessions. If money is a critical issue, please let me know. There are some concessions available.

Hope to see you then!

On the Second Day of Christmas, we flop around the flat in our pj’s getting used to the miracle… Little Nylah has just finished a wonderfully coloured-in drawing made with the Spirograph she was given yesterday; her dad is in a Zoom meeting in the next room. I’ve just eaten a mince pie and being honest am feeling pretty dizzy. I’ll move slowly this afternoon. There are no leftovers because we ate Christmas dinner elsewhere (and it wasn’t even turkey!). The cats are restless. There are still festive phone calls to make, but I don’t feel like talking. And the sun is shining into this room through the scaffolding that’s been out there for months (no Christmas miracle there). Maybe later I’ll move slowly to the corner shop; this may be the one week of the year when time stands still but we’ll be needing something for supper!

I hope everyone reading this is spending this week somewhere peaceful and reasonably pleasant, whichever holiday you do or don’t celebrate. 🎄✨

I think this is her: uncorroborated. Thanks to John Clegg for finding the photograph.

Eloise was reciting poems, and in the middle of one poem, Davenport tells us, her memory flagged. “She apologized profusely, for the poem, as she explained, was immensely popular back home.” A hand went up, and a young sergeant offered to recite the poem. Here is what (in, as Davenport reminds us, “the hideously ravaged orchards and strafed woods of the valley of the Ourcq, where the fields were cratered and strewn with coils of barbed wire, fields that reeked of cordite and carrion”) the soldier recited:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Eloise Robinson was surprised and impressed that he should know it. “Well, ma’am,” he told her. “I guess I wrote it.”

Joyce Kilmer was killed by a German sniper less than two months later, only three months before the Armistice. His most famous poem had been published in Poetry (Chicago) in 1913. Here is how he changed in four years:

Eloise was also a poet with poems published in Poetry. She was sending columns about her experiences back to the magazine. She wrote that August: “I wish I might tell you of my visit to the French front, and how for two nights I slept in a ‘cave’ with seven Frenchmen and had a hundred bombs dropped on me. Not directly on top, of course. The nearest hit just in front of the house. And for five days and nights after that I was taking chocolate to advance batteries, to men who can never leave their guns.

Eloise was a rising poet at that time, with a good university education and smart women writers as mentors. She wrote short stories as well, and published them in Harper’s. All her bios mention her forthcoming first poetry collection. I’ve done a lot of research on Eloise since I first wrote the blog post the beginning of this piece comes from, and what I now know is that she was a war poet, just as much as any soldier was.

And that the war destroyed her poetry career. Her book never came out. The small handful of published poems she produced after she returned home are stitched through with the trauma she couldn’t seem to get over. I’m extrapolating, of course — but two sisters, who had also been on the same programme as Eloise, threw themselves overboard on the way home.

On this Remembrance Sunday, as Faversham where I live now fills up with ex-servicemen, 1940s tanks, dignitaries of the Royal British Legion, and members of the fascist-connected far right demonstrating their respectfulness and patriotism, I’ve come back up to the old Nonconformist haven of Stoke Newington for a talk in the refurbished Abney Park Chapel. The subject is the writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who lived here 230 years ago (and the talk was given by professor Norma Clarke; more on this later I hope). Mrs Barbauld was, among other things, a fervent anti-slavery campaigner, and also wrote about the closing down of liberal Enlightenment freedoms in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and during the Napoleonic wars — wars that impoverished the country and get in an era of repression that extended right through the 19th century. It all feels horribly familiar now.

Here’s a caricature I like: ‘Don Dismallo Running the Literary Gantlet’. Anna Laetitia Barbauld third from left, with a joke about the school she ran. It shows Edmund Burke dressed as a jester, being whipped by the liberal writers after writing his famous pamphlet against the French Revolution — or rather, about the political left’s reaction to it, and the liberal mindset the whole country had adopted. In the wake of Burke’s pamphlet, let’s just say, writers and publishers started going to prison, and Tom Paine had to do a midnight flit.

On the bus from King’s Cross to Stoke Newington I got to talking with two elderly people — a man with a prominent poppy brooch, and his tiny 88-year-old mother, who was wearing a crocheted poppy pinned to the front of her coat. She told me the story of the night her house was hit in the Blitz; her mother was in hospital, they were with her dad, and when the bomb hit, she grabbed her baby sister from the cot and had no idea what was happening. She said that ‘afterwards we were taken to a big place’ — and then, sadly, I had to get off the bus.

Those flagshaggers (that is the idiom; to quote the reform Party leader of Kent County Council, ‘Suck it up!’), as they were stringing up my street with Union Jack bunting, they were chanting ‘Sieg heil’. They have fantasies about the Crusades, and talk openly about a ‘holy war’ against Muslims. The problem with patriotic regalia is that is appeals so much, and so dangerously, to exactly the wrong sort of people.

That’s a lot to think about, isn’t it. Soldiers, the front line, the continuation of culture which of course is the thing that literally keeps us going (and has done for the past 40,000 years). Brave women going off to the front line bringing the succour of culture with them. (Cyril Connolly told a story about a soldier who subscribed to Horizon magazine at the Front, and whose story he accepted for publication — from the Front. The young man was dead before the issue came out. They found a copy of Horizon inside his jacket.) Kids grabbing baby sisters from cots. Mums lying in hospitals beds, helplessly learning that a bomb just landed in their street. Dads. Stoke Newington itself had one of the worst air raid disasters of the war, when a block of flats in the High Street collapsed into its basement, where hundreds of people were sheltering. 160 dead at a stroke. This neighbourhood was also the target of the first Zeppelin strike of the First World War.

I read earlier today on social media today that there’s an anthology of the War Poets with an introduction by a historian who was offended by the way poets treated poppies a symbol for blood shed. This seems incomprehensible; I’ve always just thought that’s what the symbolism was.

What a mishmash of a post! This whole thing is a jumper you can unravel endlessly, or else it’s a blossom that unfolds and unfolds and unfolds, or it’s just an abyss we stare into every year and still don’t know what to make of it. I’m deliberately not mentioning any current military events in this post; we all know what they are, and it’s clear that humanity has learned and will learn nothing. We are marching ourselves down the road to ruin. Poetry, and trees and flowers and stories and jokes and satirical caricatures, may be what it’s all for — but they can’t save us. Never forget. The dead in the bomb shelter, the dead in the fields where the poppies grew, the dead in any of the places I’m not mentioning, the collateral damage sitting right now in an asylum hostel near you, the brave women who suffer in all wars started by men, Mrs Barbauld and the Dissenters of my part of London, Eloise Robinson and Joyce Kilmer, and this: just ‘Never Again’.

Here is one of Eloise’s poems:

The Sad Trees

The white oak and the ash and fir

And every tree has stood

And drooped his leaves, and did not stir

All day long in the wood,

Nor move his branches on the air

When night came up the road.

They have no way they can forget

The tall young trees of France;

There is the drip of something wet,

They do not laugh nor dance.

They keep in mind the hickory,

The hawthorne and the pine,

The hazel and the poplar tree

That go down in a line,

How they go stepping quietly

In white moonshine,

And make no murmur as they go,

The white pine and the red,

And take their footsteps small and slow

Among brown husks of dead.

They know the birch has given his white

Young body to be slain;

The golden larch, all day and night,

Upon his face has lain;

The olives cannot stand upright,

Their shoes let in the rain.

They think of how the willows have

Been beaten to their knees,

And scyamores that were so brave

Are scarred, grim ghosts of trees.

They gravely name the tamarack,

And whisper when they tell

Of aspens who brought nothing back

But bodies, out of hell.

All day the sad trees did not wink

Their shining leaves nor dance;

They were remembering, I think,

The tall young trees of France.

Eloise Robinson Muchmore

Hello from my bed, where I’m sitting with my laptop, my head literally a foot below the slope of the roof. This is an old building; I’m in essentially a converted Elizabethan garret. A couple of feet away some bird that’s nesting in the eaves is making an insistent tapping or knocking sound; I often hear scufflings in there. Outside, though, the tiny pedestrianised medieval street is quiet: just a few hushed sounds of human activity are echoing up to here on this early October morning…

I often think about all the things this little spot has seen and heard and experienced over the centuries. The building I’m living in isn’t even the oldest within 200 metres or so; that will be the Yarn Dispensary, the knitting shop, built in 1240. The pub across my ‘road’ (more like a brick-paved lane) bears a sign mentioning the year 1698, which is when the company — Shepherd Neame, England’s oldest extant brewery — was founded. But even that turns out to be about 300 years after the building was built, and about 150 years after the brewery was in fact started, as a family concern, in Tudor times.

Today is Thursday. On Sunday, for the second time in exactly a month, a group of extremist white-nationalist protesters draped in England flags, Union Jacks (yes, I know: ‘they only call it a Jack at sea’), and flags of the ultra-far-right British Movement and Britain First will gather in the town. For the second time, and empowered by a growing wave of fascism from the United States, plus its backwash from the Continent, these local flies in the ointment are going to meet at the Post Office and march about a mile and a half or so to the hostel for unaccompanied teenage asylum seekers that they’ve been raging against for months: harassing staff, rattling the gate, demanding to see proof of the inmates’ ages, sitting outside in parked cars.

Unlike last month, they will not be met at the Post Office by hundreds of ordinary townspeople standing against fascistic values. They’ll be alone in the Sunday-morning hush of the deserted Market Square; the antiques market (first Sunday of every month, if you’re interested) is postponed till next week. They’ll have no one’s energy but their own to feed on.

We’re learning as we go. Last month was ugly. Although our nascent group, the newly formed Faversham Against Racism, spoke to the police every day in the week before the protest, the police didn’t appear until just before the time advertised for the far right to begin their march. That gave the soi-disant ‘peaceful’ (yet more apparently coked to the gills) cosplay Crusaders plenty of time for spitting, squaring up to people, aggressively singing satirical little songs about lefties, screaming in our faces, grabbing placards & threatening people, and pushing a 79-year-old woman acting as steward to the ground.

So, decked in super-hero Crusader-fantasy flag-capes, Union Jack T shirts, Make Britain Great Again caps and so on, and all by themselves, they will march to the asylum hostel chanting about how the teenagers therein are really ‘grown men in their late 20s’ and ‘rapists’, how ‘leftys’ [sic] are all ‘nonces’, and that they themselves are ‘protecting women and girls’ and ‘children’ — despite the facts that around half of all people arrested at these far-right protests have criminal records for domestic violence, and that no one in Faversham has been sexually assaulted by an asylum seeker.

But things have moved on since last month. ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, which has seen most of England covered with England flags & scrawled over with red St George Crosses on every white surface in the public arena (I saw one on a fibreglass sculpture of a sheep) has begun to run out of steam. Faversham Against Racism’s ‘flag ninjas’ have got most of the flags down, and this time they haven’t been replaced. Town after town has had one of these protests, and in all the ones I’ve heard about, the far right protest has been thoroughly outnumbered by counter-protesters defending the right to seek asylum, defending the contribution of immigrants to the country, defending equality in law and religious freedom — in fact, defending the very ‘freedom of speech’ these banner-bedecked thugs claim solely for themselves. Last month we outnumbered them two to one. Margate and Folkestone outnumbered them by more than that over this past weekend and in Newcastle the other day there were apparently 300 of them and 3,000 of us. In Margate it all came down to this:

(This is the whole anti-immigration protest leaving, with their purple UKIP banner. Just behind the photographer stood literally hundreds of counter-protesters waving them off. Including one dressed as a unicorn.)

Kent, of course, has long been at the front line of all this turmoil. I have a little saying — ‘Everything is site-specific’ — that I use to remind myself that nothing can be taken for granted, nothing is forever. No piece of furniture is ever guaranteed to fit into the next place you’ll live in; it’s all provisional, it’s all dependent on local features. Kent is at the front line of English Exceptionalism — or at least that part of it that’s born of English paranoia. Dover — the major port ‘the full extent’ of whose importance to UK trade the Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab ‘hadn’t quite realised’ during our negotiations with the EU — is here, of course. Dover the town, the beach, is where the small dinghies land once they’ve made it from from France. And of course Dover the cliff is an unofficial national symbol, bluebirds or no. Further inland, Ashford was torn up to become basically a giant lorry park and goods-inward processing centre after Brexit. Kent was the county with all the tailbacks, the pollution, the trapped European truck drivers with nowhere to stop, eat or piss....

The Kentish coast is home to the Cinque Ports — a 950-year-old federation of towns that were required to provide ships and men to the British Navy, and protection to the country, in return for favours and privileges from the Crown. Faversham, six miles in from the coast, is a Cinque Port Town. What this means, militarily, historically and psychologically, is that Faversham has always been on the front line.

For several centuries Faversham’s main industry, besides brewing, was gunpowder. It shaped everything; even the distinctive openwork spire of St Mary’s church was rebuilt in the 18th century specifically to withstand explosions. There is a brick wall surrounding the hillside where the allotments are, which used to be a gunpowder works; that wall was built to protect neighbouring houses from the frequent explosions. In 1916 there was a cataclysmic explosion a mile or so away, at another gunpowder works. They were making shells for the Somme, the place was working at full tilt, there were bags of saltpetre and so on stacked all over the place — and some spark escaped. 108 people were killed — well, 108 people were identified, some by body parts. They were buried in a mass grave in the town cemetery, and afterwards the records were sealed for 80 years. There is a gripping and surprisingly beautiful book about it, called The Great Explosion, by Brian Dillon.

One thing that made a big impression on me in the first weeks after I arrived here was a plaque on a long, low ‘cottage’ on the edge of the duckpond (itself on the edge of the allotments), which says that it was originally an armoury. In it were stored the weapons with which the workers at the gunpowder mill were expected to defend the works if Napoleon’s army should invade. Just around the corner from it, opposite the pond and the edge of the gunpowder works, there is a little row of tiny white clapboard cottages built in around 1780 to house gunpowder workers. At the time I was staying — perching uneasily — in one of these cottages, owned by a friend. A neighbour told me that the windows of these cottages would regularly be blown in when there was some explosion or other; once I knew that, I couldn’t stop thinking of the women who had lived in that house, their husbands and maybe older sons working across the way in the gunpowder works. On a sunny morning, maybe, there’s an enormous bang. The front room is a shower of glass splinters, the baby is crying — maybe bleeding — the bigger kids have to be sent out back, and she doesn’t know if her husband or sixteen-year-old boy is alive or dead, but has to clean up the glass and tend to the baby, and wait to hear the news.

Three weeks after I arrived it was the centenary of Armistice Day. I thought I’d go to church — an occasion, and an opportunity to get to know the town a little bit. There was a service in a small chapel that ended on the dot at 11am, and the bell of St Mary’s began to ring, far above us. It was strangely moving to reflect that that very bell had rung for that very reason exactly 100 years ago, on the dot, in that very place. But the main service half an hour later was another story. The church filled with many troops of cadets in uniform, and their leaders in uniform carrying large patriotic banners. One after another filed in and took their seats, clearly well rehearsed.

Sitting there fresh from Dissenter Central in northeast London I was shocked: 100 years ago these kids would’ve been next up for the slaughter, their big brothers already dead or maimed. The Mayor in gold chain gave a hearty speech from the pulpit: patriotism, duty, sacrifice... The long sermon made many mentions of ‘sacrifice’ and young people ‘giving their lives’ or ‘paying the highest price’, but there was no hint of the First World War wasting a generation, or being a terrible pointless international act of self-destruction — facts on which I had thought every history book and classroom lesson was agreed. Listening, it sounded as if we were supposed to be proud of it.

And then, to cap it all, the hymn was ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’! I’d never been asked to sing this song before, and reading the words —

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

— I choked. Couldn’t do it. I grew up singing Woody Guthrie songs. If we’re talking about ‘heritage’ and ‘belonging’, it felt like my 400 years of Welsh Nonconformist minister forebears were glaring hard at me for being in this church of the military Establishment in the first place: ‘What are you even doing there??’

After the service I went to a coffee shop with my laptop (for some reason I had my laptop with me). There was a new interactive map launched that day by the University of Lancaster, where you could enter any address in the UK and it would tell you if anyone from that address lost their life in the Great War. (It is still there but seems to have lost this function; I wasted hours yesterday trying to get it to work again or find one that would, to no avail). Sitting there with my flat white I began with the first address I had ever lived in in London — the then-very-depressed Thorpedale Road in Finsbury Park — and entered every single one I could remember until I got to the address of the little white-boarded cottage by the pond. And THEN I got to a casualty. Gunner xxx. The son of the family, I assume, and I can’t even remember their name now.

But here she was: my woman again. What a hard life she’d had. This time her son wasn’t just across the road, he was far away, killed by the very explosives that perhaps he knew how to make. Explosives that were written into his blood.

Kent also has a bit of a reputation, of course, for being pugnacious, insular, chippy (and, well, frankly, racist) — for not liking outsiders, for rejecting outsiderism. I felt like I learned a hell of a lot about it that day, three weeks after washing up by accident, a sort of asylum seeker myself, taking refuge in a church. A refugee from the appalling gentrification of London, our modern Enclosures.

Everything is site-specific, and the history of England plays out over and over again on a loop, on this little patch of island. Kent is an old, old, old part of England. The books and maps all say Faversham ‘goes back to the Romans’, but they only came and conquered what was already here. You can still feel the energy of what was lost, wiped out by those patriarchal, militaristic, imperial Romans. The lore itself may be lost, but you can feel it in the huge sweep of the sky, in the mighty presence of birds, in the swish of long grass, in the mud of the tidal creek. Charles Dickens appreciated this energy and captured it in Pip and Magwitch, desperate out in the marshes, and even in Miss Havisham, driven crazy by betrayal. There are spirits of this land, gods and goddesses perhaps, whose names are lost to us, so thoroughly were they vanquished 2,000 years ago by those comparatively modern men with weapons.

These current Men of Kent, or rather Kentish Men (again, it depends where you are), of the movement now colloquially known as ‘flagshaggers’ perhaps embody in their xenophobia the traces of the original resistance against that Roman energy — and a payback as well for the old demands of the Cinque Ports and all that gunpowder. They have reliably supplied the country with rebellion, I mean cannon fodder, from the days of the Second Crusade and before. From Wat ‘Don’t Fuck with Me’ Tyler, through Jack ‘You’ve Gotta Be Kidding’ Cade, to the Battle of Maidstone, fought in a violent thunderstorm in 1648, when the Royalist Kent resisters finally emerged defeated from St Faith’s chapel in the dark of midnight… If these people have a John Ball behind them, it’s the Christian Nationalist evangelists of the US. ‘Stondeth Togidre in Godes Name’ they are not saying. If they have a ‘King Charles in exile’, it’s just Nigel the Neo-Nazi in his always-too-new clothes, watching the sea for dinghies and planning how to remove our civil rights while letting the rabble do his dirty work for him.

So what happened? Our 21st century anti-Muslim activists n flag-drag now play their fantasy game of being Crusaders, forgetting who they really were in that story. Do they actually think you get power by fighting against the only people in society more powerless than you? Or do these guys imagine they’re leading some kind of Peasants’ Revolt de nos jours? Here we are, arrived (we like to think) in more peaceable, more diplomatic times, and these aggressive, racist crypto-fascist (call it by its name) protesters have forgotten how to fight against their actual oppressors, and instead have allowed themselves to be mercilessly preyed upon by the same people who marched them off to die in their tens of thousands 900 years ago in their precious Second Crusade. Plus ça change. And Faversham’s local Britain First ringleader has taken to posting admiringly about Andrew Tate; there goes his shtick about ‘protecting women and children’. It was always a lie anyway.

We can’t just besiege them in a chapel until they see reason and walk out. (And seen through the lens of 2025, the poetry of that event lies in the fact that St Faith’s was a Huguenot chapel.) In their inchoate yet time-honoured rage, a fight is the only thing they respect, but another Cable Street isn’t what they’re going to get here, with our assembled pleasant & responsible townspeople, with our little choir singing protest songs in harmony. The challenge we face now is to convince the electorate of the true story of what is being done to us— all of us — without the bloody fight these people seem to want.

Speaking of France, I’m thinking again of that line about my old friend the early unitarian Dr Richard Price in Newington Green. Most of England, along with Dr Price and his circle, rejoiced when the Bastille fell in July 1789. It wasn’t just the ‘radicalised’ few; it was a general sense of optimism, a breath of fresh air, the hope of a better future and more self-determination for ordinary people. After his wife died, according to Wikipedia some years ago, ‘The French Revolution alone could cheer him’. (And I put that into a poem. Because that’s how I roll).

But word eventually reached England that the fall of the Bastille had actually been pretty brutal. And it was followed in due course by the enormities of 1791, and the Terror, and the result in England was a total clampdown on free speech & free thought. Writers and publishers went to prison. The floodgates went up, the portcullis came down, and the authoritarian Napoleonic years began. Circle back to the beginning of this essay.

[N.b., the bulk of this article was written and edited before today’s horrific Yom Kippur killing of two innocent people in a synagogue in Manchester. This is a national catastrophe, and it is already being made much of by white supremacist groups. It falls outside the scope of this little essay, except insofar as this group of rabid anti-Muslims will utilise it for propaganda.]

Across the Green from that stands the oldest extant terrace of houses in London, built in 1658, in one of which—number 54 Newington Green—her mentor, Dr Richard Price, Welsh moral philosopher and preacher at the meeting house, lived from 1758. (Don’t you love how Vermeer it looks?)

Hackney was an important Dissenting community in the 17th and 18th centuries, being outside the city proper, and as a result of this it was a hotbed of the new Enlightenment thinking: Unitarianism, Methodism, and other kinds of ‘Christianity on the rational plan’, as Dr Price put it in a letter to Benjamin Franklin. He was a hugely important thinker—in religion, politics and even insurance, which he developed as a way to help ordinary people protect themselves. His actuarial tables were still in use a century after his death. His friends were the people who were making things happen. Visitors to him in Newington Green included Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. In St Paul’s Churchyard in London he frequented the bookshop of Joseph Johnson, who gave an open-house dinner once a week, where attendees included pretty much every Dissenting intellectual or artist of the time, including Henry Fuseli, Joseph Priestley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Thomas Paine, and even the young William Blake. (Barbauld’s husband had preceded Price as the preacher at Newington Green, and she was an important writer, a leader of the Bluestocking movement . There’s a Barbauld Road off Albion Road in Stoke Newington; I prefer to think it’s named after her.)

Anyway, here I was, and it was nice to be back.

Timing, they say, is the secret of comedy. On July 4th, the 249th anniversary of that day when Jefferson, Franklin and Adams signed their famous indictment of a King, declaring independence and vowing to establish a democratic republic, Donald Trump signed into law his ‘One Big Beautiful [sic] Bill’. This 900-page document, with its obfuscations, elisions, buried clauses, euphemisms and omissions, will do much to make of Trump a ‘King’—or at any rate a despot. A dictator, in modern parlance. Little bits of wording in almost everything he publishes now place him above and beyond the protections any of his minions are empowered to apply to the rule of law.

It will create unprecedented tax breaks for the hugely wealthy, an unprecedented budget deficit, and a budget for ICE & his big border control plan that is four times more than the federal law enforcement agencies combined; they’re talking about recruiting 10,000 more ICE officers. Environmental protections axed, sell-offs of public land in the pipeline. We all know, or should know by now, what Project 2025 is all about. And this Big Brutal Bill enshrines much of it.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her daily newsletter on the 5th:

From 1981 to 2021, tax cuts moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, and Penn Wharton projects the top 10% of households will receive about 80% of the total value of this law, too. Those in the top 20% of earners can expect to see nearly $13,000 a year from the bill, while those in the bottom 20% of households will lose about $885 in 2030 as the pieces of the law take effect.

Past tax cuts have also driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt, and like them, this law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year.

This was also the week when the horrific ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ concentration camp, built in just eight days, was unveiled, with Trump’s people posing in it, gloating, wearing celebratory bits of merch. I had a glimpse one day of a truly disgusting little video animation of cartoon alligators in red maga hats, dancing and singing, but clicked away too quickly, by reflex, to save it or look for its source. Just as well. It’s hard to know where to even put something like this in your brain.

Further, by the time Trump was triumphantly signing his Bill on Friday the 4th, scores of people in Kerr County, Texas—including many children from a summer camp—were dead in huge flash floods that had overwhelmed people in the early hours, pouring water at a rate faster than Niagara Falls onto little rural communities. People had been given no warning, because the majority-red county government, with its majority-red voters, had felt that a warning system with sirens and so on was too expensive.

It feels like an augury.

Meanwhile, the Big Bill, practically bigger than the ‘small state’ it creates, hiding cuts behind various ‘tax breaks’ on things like Social Security and tips, will deprive millions of people of their Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and other benefits they rely on for life & limb.

With the democratic revolution going up in smoke on a significant anniversary, it felt even nicer for a moment to be here, nestled in its cradle. And to walk past Dr Price’s house and see that whoever lives there now has filled the downstairs window with printed sheets containing quotes from his writings — for instance, his 1776 pamphlet, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, which was hugely influential on both the US and the French Revolutions, and on the US Constitution.

And now, a poem. I may as well, right? This post is already long.

There are three Richard Prices: a poet, whom I know, and Dr Price, whom I kind of know, and also a crime novelist in New York. That last came as a surprise to me, one day years ago, and I looked him up on Wikipedia and wrote a little poem. It appears in my second collection, Egg Printing Explained, and it’s called…

Richard Price

Richard Price was born in 1723.
Richard Price is an American crime novelist.
Richard Price was born in 1966.
Richard Price is a screenwriter.
He was the son of a dissenting minister.
He is the youngest Informationist.
His books explain the world: it’s gritty; urban.
He tends to work in etiolated form.
Educated at a dissenting academy in London,
Price became chaplain and companion
to a Mr Streatfield, at Stoke Newington.
He has written eight novels, one turned
into a movie by Spike Lee: free agency
of man, the unity and immateriality
of our immaterial human soul,
materialism and necessity. His sequence
Earliest Spring Yet: love, so necessity.
Yet oh, his volume of sermons gained the ear
of Lord Shelburne. Richard Price is known
for humour, suspense, dialogue, characterisations:
an honorary Doctor of Divinity. His Appeal
to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt:
‘a sort of hocus-pocus machinery’,
consequently unsound. He tends to work
in a sequential form. The Declaration
of Independence, it is said, depended
greatly on the influence of his pamphlet:
two Doctors of Laws together one year at Yale,
one with wooden teeth, one unsound.
He was brought up in Brooklyn. Glasgow. Glamorgan.
He was the co-editor of Verse; despite taking
the most opposite possible view of metaphysics
and morals, they shared the credits on the screenplay.
Happiness is the only end of Providence
conceivable by us, he said. The only end
conceivable by us. But it depends
on a rectitude wholly outdated, even secret.
Virtue always tends to happiness
in its most perfect form, tends to it
as to the sick, sweats it out, bleeds it.
He sees it as a poultice, or a sequence.
Price is Head of Modern British Collections.
He has written for The New York Times,
Rolling Stone and other publications.
His later years were clouded by dejection.
Richard Price largely worked in sequins.
The French Revolution alone could cheer him.

.

Ahhh. Criticism! The air is so clear here!

In 1914, in the first editorial in her avant-garde literary magazine The Little Review, Margaret C Anderson wrote: “... criticism as an art has not flourished in this country. We live too swiftly to have time to be appreciative; and criticism, after all, has only one synonym: appreciation.”

I agree with this, and it also makes me laugh; once, coming out of a movie, my sister said to me, “Oh God Kate, why do you have to criticise everything!? Can’t you ever just enjoy it?” Of course I can, and this is how I enjoy it.

In ‘Marx Duck & the boneyard’, the first editorial column of his brand-new magazine, The Little Review, Tristram Fane Saunders writes, “We are not The Little Review (b. 1914, d. 1292) nor were we meant to be. But if a ghost haunts our pages, we hope it’s Margaret C Anderson, the radical editor who made that magazine a safe haven for anarchists, feminists, Dadaists, Ulysses and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven*. Her standards were exacting; once, when she felt submissions hadn’t been strong enough, she printed a dozen blank pages. We can’t match her brilliance but we admire her maverick attitude.”

Here is Margaret, on the left, with her partner Jane Heap, co-founder of The Little Review. A pleasing note is that she seems to have worn much the same style of hat all her life, from the 1880s to the 1950s.

Our new Little Yellow Review, 2025-style, measuring just 14.7x10.5cm, lives up to its nnominative determinism — it's designed to fit into just about any pocket — including, I believe Tristram said, for the flat-chested among you, a shirt pocket. A truly portable poetry mag! And he's also avoided that horrible common pitfall of too-heavy paper (why in the name of skyrocketing postage costs is any mag, or small press, still using that too-heavy paper? It's horrible anyway.) The Little Review is a really lovely object.

There is one rule for submissions: any poem you send in must be accompanied by some prose. Because our review culture is also — still — in a doldrum. Marked by cliquishness, almost straight-up PR, hatchet jobs or unashamedly ill-informed appreciations (‘I’ve never read any of this poet’s previous work, so here is my experience of reading this book’), it seems to be largely the province of people who are new on the scene (while not knowing everybody yet may make their job easier, not having read everybody yet does, I think, have a downward impact on some of the content).

Anyway, Tristram writes, “Too many magazines are dull. Boredom is the enemy; as Baudelaire wrote, it wants to ‘make the earth a shambles / and swallow the world in a yawn’.

We would much rather be wrong than dull.

And when we are wrong, we’d like you to set us straight.”

So! A conversation! A breath of fresh air!

I know he means this, too. Tristram did write something not too long ago that I really disagreed with, and there was a storm in a teacup over tthis certain business. And he did actually ask me to write something for him, a response, but I didn’t do it. I may yet, or I may write something different. It is time to get my toe back into the water. There is an art to this stuff.

Oh, and my one criticism: I think the gutter needs to be increased a bit, next issue.

The launch, for those of you lucky enough to be in Cambridge, will be in Heffers on 19 June from 6-7pm.

* NOTE: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven makes Dame Edith Sitwell look like your school librarian.

Today is the second 50501 protest day in the United States. Today is the day after the 250th anniversary of the famous midnight ride made by the American colonial actvist, Paul Revere, to alert the countryfolk of Massachusetts
to an imminent invasion of the town of Concord by British troops, which signified the start of the War of Independence.

I grew up from earliest childhood knowing this story, much of which is contained in the poem below by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Revere is a hero of the American Revolution. “One if by land, two if by sea!” I’m sure we used to play games based on this. The threat to freedom on that night in 1776 was very real — and the fightback by the townspeople of Concord represents the exact meaning of the phrase ‘right to bear arms’ in the 2nd amendment of the US Constitution.

Today the threat to not just American, but world freedom is even greater than anything Paul Revere could have conceived of. People in the 18th century could have no concept of anything like that CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador, or of gratuitously rounding people up off the street and sending them to a huge torture facility for the rest of their lives.

Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary ideas man, believed in “a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations.” I see this principle as having a bearing on the current forced and unlawful deportations with no due process or warning. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was not even allowed one all to tell his wife he had been detained. It’s as if, the minute you are in ICE’s hands, they think they have made you have simply cease to exist.

Jefferson also said this: “I was for extending the rights of suffrage (or in other words the rights of a citizen) to all who had a permanent intention of living in the country…. whoever intends to live in a country must wish that country well, and has a natural right of assisting in the preservation of it…”

Of course, this kind of shit is why MAGA hates him so much.

Today is also the day before the 20th of April, about which there’s a widespread rumour circulating, that Trump will declare martial law. It’s more than a conspiracy theory, but so far it’s also less than a fact or a fait accompli.

On 20 January, Day One, Trump made a proclamation (Proclamation 10886) declaring a national emergency at the southern U.S. border. It begins: “America’s sovereignty is under attack. Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans…”

The proclamation gives 90 days from that date for a decision to be made whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would give Trump owers akin to martial law, though he never mentioned that phrase in his executive order. And 90 days from the ‘inauguration’ is tomorrow, 20 April. (It’s also Hitler’s birthday, but that’s by the bye.)

Right now we don’t know whether this rumour is scaremongering (though it is founded in an actual strategic deduction; though in truth Trump has declared half a baker’s dozen of ‘national emergencies’ in these three months), or whether it’s one if by land, two if by sea — or maybe even something else. How many lanterns for the huge, extensive and still largely unknown crimes DOGE has been getting up to with all the data they’ve stolen from within the US government’s systems? Let’s be conservative and call it three.

So today, April 19, sandwiched in between an inspirational historic day and an anxiety-producing future one, is a THREE-LANTERN emergency.

There are at least 400 protests organised in the US today to raise the alarm to your fellow townspeople — if you’ve been dithering, please look it up, get a friend with you and go to one!

A word about safety: No one who feels vulnerable to ICE should be going, and if you do go, please cover your face and don’t wear distinctive clothing by which you can be recognised. Cover tattoos. I know many people of colour are feeling this isn’t their fight, and that they will disproportionately pay the price — just as they’ve always disproportionately paid the price — and this really needs to be respected. All the more reason for everyone who isn’t in the line of fire — if white privilege is good for one thing it’s this — to just get the hell out there and FLOOD THE STREETS WITH RIGHTEOUS, NONVIOLENT RAGE.

Maybe you can chant some lines from this:

Paul Revere’s Ride

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

Then he said “Good night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,—
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!

A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders, that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Poets! This is our department.

In fact, first they came for Diversity & Inclusion, and started sacking senior Black government employees and then deleting high-achieving African Americans from dozens of government-adjacent websites. That was before anything else. So it was a dead cert that when they did come for museums they’d want to start with the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I read in the wee hours of this morning that the Director of the NMAAHC has been put on indefinite leave. The Director who is also the poet, Kevin Young — in fact, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, Kevin Young.

I started writing a Facebook post about it at about 4.30, but it got big, so I saved it in my notes app to make a Substack post out of, and finally went back to sleep. Today’s been a total crash; I’ve spent 90% of it in bed; and this evening, up for a bit before going back to bed, I find my lovely nascent post has been eaten. So I’ll try to recreate it, but it might be a bit rough.

So Young has been suspended since 18 March — as Artnet reports, since ‘two weeks before President Trump’s March 28 Executive Order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, that targets funding for museums and programs at the Smithsonian Institution that he deems have “promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” The NMAAHC’s consideration of slavery, Jim Crow, ongoing discrimination against Black people, and other difficult subjects doubtless brought the institution into the new administration’s crosshairs’.

As a poet, Kevin Young was shortlisted here in the UK for his 2021 collection Stones. It’s a beautiful book, dealing quietly and unfussily, in calm, almost still tercets, with these small matters of death, loss and the ongoingness of life — of ancestors, older relatives, toddlers, fireflies, cows, fields, graves, birds in trees… It’s not the book you might expect from such a cosmopolitan man, but there we are. Everyone has their deep roots somewhere, and Young’s are in a rural Louisiana that now feels — at least to me, from here and now, even where bits of it feel familiar — like some kind of a dream —

Lead me from this
yard of bones
these houses of stone

to the wooden home
where my mother
got herself born—

later torn down
& turned to fire—
I remember well

the ground that shone
four feet below
through its raised, holey floor.

(from ‘Skeleton Key’)

As it happened, Young’s collection was pipped to the post that year by Joelle Taylor’s equally admirable, and homegrown, C*nto, but I’d also have been content if he’d won. Quiet as his poems are, and deceptively simple and qotidian in that way of eg Williams or even Frost (who surely played a huge confidence trick on the middlebrow public, who seemed to consider him as some genial poetry grandpa!), they go in and stay. Written in, as Marianne Moore put it in her poem ‘England’, ‘plain American that cats and dogs can read’. I was reading his book in the bath and at one point was so overcome that I dropped it in — only the second book in a lifetime of bath reading. I did take it with me to the awards ceremony to ask him to sign it, and had to present him with this water-damaged copy and explain that a water-damaged book is a book that’s been loved…

Young’s poetry is wholly congruent with his work at the African American History museum, and the work he did before that at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I haven’t been to the NMAAHC, and I wish I had been. It means a lot that it’s there. It’s inspiring to go to, for instance, the Jamestown Colony site as I did in 2019, and read that the three equal influences that created American culture are the Europeans, the Native Americans, and the West Africans. (No one ever said this when I was growing up!) And then go to the Chrysler Art Gallery in Norfolk, VA, and find it packed full of incredible, beautful, inventive and daring work by contemporary African American artists — which was thrilling, and new to me, and just an incredible thing to see. On this side of the Atlantic, this new ability to be real about race and the past shows in things like David Olusoga’s documentaries for the BBC — especially the one about all the people who were paid compensation when slaveery was abolished. It showed how slave-owning, as a respectable and reliable investment, was threaded through all of British society — not just the great rich families, but also genteel-poor widows, schoolteachers, even clergymen. We need to be able to talk about this.

The NMAAHC attracted the ire of Trump and others in 2020 ‘for commentary on its “Talking About Race” portal, which, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, marshaled more than 100 multimedia tools, including videos, scholarly articles, and exercises to help educators, parents, and others develop the language to have productive conversations about “one of the nation’s most challenging topics,” according to a press release’. Among other things it discussed White culture as being a specific thing, rather than as the main thing; not as some kind of holder of ‘normality’ where other cultures were somehow deviants from.

I don’t know. I find this new understanding so freeing! The BLM protests were the only thing that gave me any real hope or joy during the lockdown. Horrific as the information often is, knowledge is power and the very freedom of it is exhilarating. Like opening the curtains at least, spring cleaning, getting rid of all the cobwebs. It is horrific watching this group of yahoos try to destroy what so many people have worked so hard for, and that we will all benefit from.

Yes, all of us. As James Baldwin said:

I’m writing this, too, just a couple of days after Senator Cory Booker’s historic filibuster, in which he spoke for 25-hours telling (at least in the bits that I saw) stories of Civil Rights leaders, of life as a Black American, and the fact that he is even now only the fourth person of colour to be elected a Senator in the US. His 24-hour protest against the Trump government was so personal — the previous record had been set in 1957 by the white supremacist Senator Strom Thurmond’s loathsome 24-hour attempt to stop the Civil Rights Act from passing. As Booker said (& I paraphrase), ‘I’m not standing here now because of what he did. I’m here despite it’. He also said, ‘The power of the people is greater than the people in power’. It’s a rallying call for people of colour everywhere, not just in the US, and for all of us.

‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.

Shelley said this and it is true. Kevin Young surely knows it too, and his book — this one book that was gently dropped like a stone into the pond of British poetry, and indeed into my own bath — is like a little magic capsule that brings us some of that culture — the slamming screen doors, dogs lying under the porch, dirty outdoor-playing children being scrubbed clean in the bath, ‘the grey circling the drain’ (from the very clever poem, ‘Joy’). The smell of the dusty heat, the calm knowledge of — well, of just knowing things are so. He legislates for the stories to be told, the snapshots saved, the artefacts to be labelled.

The museum itself isn’t shut; Trump’s mob aren’t (yet) doing anything that overtly crude. They’ve just removed the guy who’s been doing this story-telling and, as it were, unofficial legislating for fresh air and freedom.

Here are four pillars of the NMAAHC’s mission:

1. It provides an opportunity for those who are interested in African American culture to explore and revel in this history through interactive exhibitions
   

2. It helps all Americans see how their stories, their histories, and their cultures are shaped and informed by global influences
   

3. It explores what it means to be an American and share how American values like resiliency, optimism, and spirituality are reflected in African American history and culture
   

4. It serves as a place of collaboration that reaches beyond Washington, D.C. to engage new audiences and to work with the myriad of museums and educational institutions that have explored and preserved this important history well before this museum was created.

This, then, is the manifesto of what Trump and Co say must be destroyed. We know this.

And we’re the poets. So we know what our job is.

“Till the end
we sing
into the wind.”

(from ‘Dolor’)

Just quickly, as I’m due at a knitting circle in 15 minutes and not dressed yet:

Cory Booker’s great, historic, record-breaking Senate filibuster speech isdevolving in some circles into a discussion not about what he said — and that’s a lot, over 25 hours! — but about his lapel pins. One, the flag. That’s de rigueur, exactly like if you were a news pretender in the UK ot wearing a poppy in early November. Second, the yellow ribbon. That’s for returning the Israeli hostages.

According to Ori Hanan Weisberg — an American-Israeli writer/translator/novelist and activist, and Facebook friend of mine — Booker put it on halfway through his filibuster on being told that one of the hostage, Edan Alexander, comes from New Jersey, the state hie’s a senator of. Weisberg writes: ‘…And I wonder how many of his New Jersey constituents have family in Gaza.'

The whole US system of government is a neoliberal capitalist system & bloated — not with Social Security workers, National Parks staff or scientists, but with lobbyists, corruption, quid pro quo and, especially under Trump/Musk with their deplorable memecoins, dark money. Of course the US's support for Israel's insanely continuing annihilation of Gaza is shameful, totally. I still don’t understand Biden’s adherence to that.

Of course the Democrats are part of this system, have become enmeshed in it & have lost their way. The fought a very poor fight for the past — well, in particular, four years, since January 6, 2020 — and they’ve lost access, for some reason, to the simple words and actions that would help them. There’s always a secret elixir, word, dagger, magic pin to puncture the hot air, but then of course the person wielding it has to be ‘pure in word and deed’. It’s a conundrum. Even Abraham Lincoln couldn’t claim to be that. We’re all mortal and imperfect.

So losing their way out of the briar wood doesn't mean there's no honest intent there at all. Exactly the contrary: they're snagged & caught in the brambles without the help they could have counted on —

— but no, wait, that metaphor is ageing, wrinkling and shrivelling right under my fingertips. The whole notion of ‘purity’ is a big part of what has got us into this mess. Personally I hadn't even noticed Cory Booker’s badges, I was so transfixed by his presence there & by his speech — I think none at all would have been better. This kind of performative gesture, that everyone has to do to show they’re a member of the group, is just tiring. It’s one of the most enervating forces at the moment, actually. Down with groups! Everyone policing everyone else’s little gestures or words, assuming that if you haven’t flown the right banner or used the right filter or said the right ‘open sesame’ word, you’re ‘part of the problem’ — regardless of what you have said, written or done.

Ori writes, in his Facebook post this morning: ‘I belong to and affiliate with and am implicated in many iterations of 'us'. But the most important one, the one I implore everyone I can to join, is the 'us' of those who adhere to 'us AND them'. That's the side I take. Those are the people I stand with, whoever and wherever they are. That's the side we must take. That's the side of kindness and justice and humanity and possibility and beauty and security and safety and prosperity. I disavow and oppose the 'us' of those who adhere to 'us OR them'.

Nobody outside the US would ever call the Democratic Party left wing, I certainly agree with that — for instance, there is nothing whatsoever 'inherently ‘socialist’ (in the pejorative US sense, which is based on ignorance) about the idea that a government by, of and for the people shoUld use some of their taxes for medical care. This absence of a working left has always necessitated a kind of numbing suspension of disbelief, when engaging on any level with US politics. the fiction is that basic decency is in fact ‘progressive’. And I’ll add that not only was there no Gaza lapel pin, there was no rainbow, no trans flag, and there was certainly never going to be an ERA pin. Does anyone these days even know what that is? No, because the ERA Amendment has still never been passed.

I said for many years that all this — this fiction, this pretence at being well rounded, the whole ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich’ mentality — was why I had left the US, by the way. That’s only partly true, and leaving was as much a happenstance in one way as it was anything else. Until I had kids with an English dad I thought I might go back. But it is true, the whole political discourse there is even now skewed by Cold War propaganda, various shibboleths — guns, God, the Wild West, the romance of the Confederacy, no-go topics, & American exceptionalism generally. I felt scarred by the very live legacies of Vietnam, Watergate, the Civil Rights movement & McCarthyism, as well as the whole entire slavery and race legacy. There were plenty of cars even in NY or CT with Confederate flags on them then, and still are.

And I’ve been called ‘anti-American’ enough times for feeling this way, and even the last time I was back I was told I ‘do nothing but trash America’, when in fact all I’d trashed was the corporate food industry, and the reversal of Roe v Wade, and said it should be illegal to be a billionaire. All of which I’d equally say in Germany or Timbuktu. Talk about tiring!

But you know, it's all so HUGE, so complex and intractable, & the Democrats seemed to me when I was very young like just another part of the terrible machine. And they are.

BUT. I’m grown up now. For one thing, the Dems are what we've got. Right now, on the ground. We're lucky the machine has them in it.

And for another, because that mechanism is what we got, therefore many very good people do go to work in it. Putting their energy into trying to change the system from within. I can't fault any single person for working for change — none of us on our own can effect real change, so each of us must put our energy where we feel we can do the most. And some of them are doing brilliant work. Who can fault Al Green for his work recently, as a good and courageous constituency politician? Who can fault Chris Murphy or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortz, or Bernie Sanders, or Melanie Stansbury, or Yvette Clarke, just off the top of my head?

What was it Cory Booker said? 'The power of the people is greater than the people in power', or something. We have to believe him. He's earned his right to say that; he spoke for hours about the Civil Rights movement & the principles that guided people like Dr King & the late Selma activist & lawyer, then senator, John Lewis, & the fact that he, Cory Booker, is only the fourth African-American senator ever elected.

He stood up and spoke for twenty five hours because his constituents had been asking him to do something. Something different, something that would get attention. Something they could be proud of. The famous filibuster that he beat the record of was that of Strom Thurmond, a senator & former goernor of North Carolina under Jim Crow who spoke in 1957 to try to halt the Civil Rights Act, and who has a room in the Senate named after him. But Booker said (& I'm quoting from memory), 'I'm not speaking today because of him, I'm speaking despite him'. Which literally he was.

As a member of one of the principal groups the white-supremacist Trump/Musk machine is already actively trying to erase, speaking on behalf of everyone in the same position & of ordinary people, speaking inclusively and with a message of strength, solidarity & hope, for 25 hours straight, Cory Booker did the right thing for his constituents — those who voted for him, and those who didn’t, and those who voted for Trump ad are now full of fear. They wanted him to give them some hope. He did what he could, and thus what he had to. It was a very fine, courageous, inspiring thing.

What will it change? A friend asked me that this morning. Well, it's inspired an awful lot of people, including me. What it changes is the fact that Democrats haven’t been doing this. People are worried and scared because they’ve been ‘invisible’ (notwithstanding the fine activities of those I’ve mentioned, and many more). This 25-hour, record-breaking speech will be remembered, and quoted, and told as stories in many families, I am sure of that. It has given hope.And it was some of the most moving oratory I’ve ever heard.

Ori Hanan Eeisberg ends his Facebook post with a quote from Cicero: ‘Amissis melius quam abdicans’, or: ‘Losing is better than abdicating’.

Sen Cory Booker hasn’t abdicated!

And this is long and I’m going to go knit now.

Sorry to post twice in only three days; if your inboxes are like mine they’re in daily pain from the weight of Substack-based emails… But once again I commend dear old London on top trolling!

Another Facebook thread about Teslas yesterday, in which one prominent commenter specifically conflated 1: desiring Musk's downfall with 2: approving of vandalising the Tesla cars of people who bought them several years ago 'in good faith'. This commenter again used the language 'virtue-signalling' and the even worse 'self-rightous posing' — while simultaneously claiming to 'dislike Musk as much as anyone else'.

NOT REALLY, I said. To some of us, the mere thought of owning one of his cars makes us feel physically sick.

People are already dying because of Musk's actions. We know they are dying in faraway places where their medication or food has been abruptly stopped, and if they’re not dying yet int he US, it stand to reason that they will. It will be suicide, or the elderly not receiving their Social Security because of his rule changes, or some other banal agency-related cause. These aren’t the kind of data the US will be collecting or sharing, of course.

The unqualified and very unelected psychopath is throwing taxpayers' money away by the billions, asset-stripping the country, hacking into everyone's financial data, and committing other crimes right left and centre, openly enriching himself while he trashes everything — all the while referring to us, the people, as 'non-player characters' — a gaming term that basically means ciphers, just there to be picked off.

Whatever your own opinion of vandalism is, numerous firebombing, gunfire and Molotov cocktail attacks on Tesla dealerships and charging stations in the US make it very clear indeed how the fury against him is growing. This is neither 'virtue-signal' nor 'posture'. It's pure rage.

The satirical website The God Podcast clarifies it for anyone who may still think you can look in some way neutral while driving around in one of his cars: "The idea that he is the victim here is ludicrous. He hath sown the wind with his words and deeds. Now he is clearly reaping the consequences. People don’t just HATE him. They REVILE him…and he earned every last bit of it."

'God' also reminds us that 94% of Germans say they will never buy a Tesla, and that Germany's Tesla 'gigafactory' could be seized if he is found guilty of using X, and his support for the far-right AfD party, to meddle in the German electon. "Tesla stock has fallen 55% since December, with another 15% wiped out on Monday alone."

THIS is the main tool at our disposal with which to oppose Musk’s enormities and send a big fat message to Trump, Putin and whoever else is looking, while we're at it.

This weekend there will be protests — that’s protests, not firebombs! — at Tesla dealerships in London, Leeds, Manchester & Winchester. Sign up to the TeslaTakedown campaign website for info on these and other practical and non-vandalisatic ways you can protest.

Also, if you for some reason think this is a purely American issue, that you have no skin in the game — you have indeed, and the fight against Musk’s technofascism* needs to begin in earnest here as well.
Just consider these two facts:

1: Musk wants to bankroll the extreme right in this country, either Nigel Farage's Reform Party (which got one vote in seven last July, on its first outing) or, on the days when he thinks Farage is too far left, some new 'party' formed by Tommy Robinson. There will be a Parliamentary debate on how — & even whether — to make it impossible for him to do this, on 31 March. We need to get it across to our elected representatives how dangerous this would be for all of us, for the country as a whole and even for democracy (which however warped it may be at present is still better than totalitarian chaos).

2: According to Carole Cadwalladr (who broke the Cambridge Analytica story & knows as much as any living person about these particular transnational networks; was very aggressively sued by the slimy Arron Banks; and has had all manner of death threats etc over the years), Keir Starmer is apparently talking to Musk about making a deal for his British AI development programme, with which he thinks he will make the UK a player on the 21st century field.

Do we really want to hand Musk the keys to all our data too? And maybe even more disastrously, to our code??

I'm not in London and I'm not up to a big protest event. But we can all do what we CAN. Sign up to TeslaTakedown, at least.

Sous les pavés, la plage!

*And do click that link, and then read HCR’s Feb 5 piece that she mentions. Especially the middle bit.

Getting away from the ubiquitous Only Subject for a moment, a friend on Facebook posted earlier yesterday about going to visit the wonderful Brunswick Centre in Russell Square, and his thread sparked off the usual mild controversy that arises whenever someone says they like any Brutalist structure. So naturallythe usual little sub-chat developed about Balfron & Trellick Towers, Ernő Goldfinger’s famous Brutalist sisters of East and West London. As it happens, I have a little history with Balfron — a much littler history than I'd like to have, because I love the place.

<Cue picture going wibbly like being underwater; the protagonist is in a reverie…>

Once upon a time, after my marriage broke up, just before the Millennium (after nine years of pushing a succession of increasingly broken, child-laden buggies), my first proper foray back into paid work was as a publicity officer for Tower Hamlets Council’s then Housing Directorate. You can tell it was a different time, because I was able to sort of just fall into this job, almost by accident; it was all ad hoc in a way nothing seems to be any more.

It was based in a strange, rickety two-storey office block with sick building syndrome on the Isle of Dogs, and my chief responsibility was to produce and write a Housing Page in the council’s award-winning (and now defunct) weekly free newspaper, East End Life. This was a new workstream, negotiated on the basis that Housing, the largest directorate, paid more money to the newspaper than any other, and wanted to be able to promulgate its policies, programmes, etc.

As I say, I hadn’t worked in an actual job for nine years, and that had been in a bookshop. I’d never worked in housing, I’d never worked in a local authority, and I’d never worked on a newspaper. And there was nobody there who understood how this stuff worked, so I had to work it out on my own and just come up with the goods. I was in the so-called Quality Team, which everyone else hated because of the name; they thought the Quality Team thought it was better than everybody else. That’s another long story, and quite a funny one, in an unfunny way. But because of my role I did have links to the the central press office, the photographers, and East End Life itself (though they disliked me because I had been foisted on them), who were all situated in Town Hall — then a big new-build monstrosity with the quixotic name of Mulberry Place — a monolithic sort of fortress-like lump. (The new LBTH town hall is in a much more suitable and beautiful old building in Whitechapel Road, and is actually owned by the council, which is a good start, isn’t it?)

All these teams were quite high up in the building. And from where the photographers sat, the huge windows faced directly over Balfron Tower. Staring right in its lovely face. At certain times in the afternoon, at certain times of year, you’d look out the window and the sun would have reached some exact point where it shone somehow both on and through the building — where it lit the windows and even seemed to light the concrete, drawing out some latent warmth in its colour which only shows at those times — and the whole structure would turn to magic, music, poetry.

I could write a book about that job, and my next one as communications manager on the Ocean (Estate, Stepney) New Deal for Communities. So stressful, so exhausting, so endlessly educational. Seven years of dirty coalface politics: office, local, and even national, once George Galloway got involved as MP. My time there seemed to cast a light, or a shadow, on almost every crisis Britain was then, or is now, facing. It nearly gave me several nervous breakdowns and I’m more grateful than I can express for it. I knew I was never going to have anything like it again. Much of Tower Hamlets now is unrecognisable from then, too, as the big money’s moved in…

Back then I was living in Hackney Central, in a one-bedroom flat luckily rented from friends, with my three kids (who also spent roughly half their time with their dad in Stoke Newington, where they also still went to school). The job only worked at all because I had flexi-time. When they were at their dad’s I worked about 8.30-6.30, and when they were with me I would take them on the bus to school for 9am (half an hour), then grab a coffee at the little cafe next door and get the bus back down to Hackney Central, and then a 277 to Canary Wharf, where I’d get the DLR for the last bit. I’d arrive at the office at 10am, starving and winded — two hours door-to-door on a good day — and at 4pm I’d begin the reverse journey, which would take longer because I had to pick them all up from whoever’s houses they were playing at — and then get them home, make dinner, do the laundry, and get everyone sorted and into bed.

At the weekend I’d I’d go to bed when they did at 9 o’clock and wake up around twelve hours later to the sound of CBBC. I did this for years. When they were at their dad’s place I would be out as much as possible, because to be honest it just freaked me the fuck out having them not be there. So I did a lot of drinking with colleagues after work in the pub, which was also an education, after nine years cleaning the kitchen and reading bedtime stories with just the one o’clock club for a social life. My job involved speaking to local residents, youth clubs, care facilities, homeless projects, housing officers, all over the borough — I knew it was access I’d never have again. It was East End Immersion. According to the guy who sold the advertising, my page was the most-read page in East End Life.

Back to the building, a background note. Balfron Tower was built, and its grounds meticulously landscaped, in the mid-1960s as part of a modern and beautiful council housing estate, also including Goldfinger’s low-rise block, Carradale House. It enacted a generous and utopian view of what council housing could and should be. The flats inside were designed for livability and for an actual quality of life. The balconies have built-in spaces for planting flowers. The windows are big. The rooms aren’t huge but they are nice, cosy, and lead off each other in interesting ways, up or down a step, not just adjacent boxes. It feels solid. Even the original light switches were beautiful.

At the time I was working there it was mostly still occupied by council tenants. Poplar was a depressed area and hard to get to, and Balfron Tower was sandwiched in between Chrisp Street Market (then pretty down-at-heel) and the A12 approach to the never-pictureque Blackwall Tunnel; it seemed like it would always be the same. No one would want to live next to that motorway, and the area was so poor it was literally impossible to imagine it any other way. Just up the road there were Bengali families living in temporary housing inside the old fire station.

A year or so after I joined the council, a rare right-to-buy flat in Balfron Tower came up for sale, listed at £37,900. Oh my God. I thought about it — I thought about it so hard — I tried to imagine getting the kids up to school, then back for work, how could I manipulate my hours — £38,000 was only about twice my salary even then! I mean, it would need work. I obsessed over it for weeks, talked to friends, could it work. Could it? But.

But.

But one: I had no money for any sort of deposit at all. I had left my husband with £10 in my pocket and by that measure I was doing very well indeed, but it was abolutely payday to payday.

But two: at that time, no bank would have wanted to give you a mortgage on that property. Especially without the deposit. And I was on a six-month contract that just kept getting renewed — for borrowing purposes that was tantamount to having no job at all. This was one of the catalysts to me pushing the management with all my might and main, to get made permanent. Which worked, but that’s another story.

But three: I was in the middle of a custody drama, and living on the edge of civilisation next to a motorway by the Blackwall Tunnel would probably lose me the kids altogether.

But finally: actually, even in a best-case scenario, no way could I get them from Poplar up to Stoke Newington on puboic transport and me back to the Isle of Dogs in time for work, and then do it again in the evening. Even if I could, that would be really unfair on them, and the whole point of my life back then was to achieve maximum stability. Stability, calm, routine. If just for the kids.

But I still think about that flat. It lives somewhere within me.

Cut to about 2014: I no longer work in Tower Hamlets; in fact, I no longer have a job at all because my 12-year restarted career in the not-for-profits has ended with the Tory cuts in 2011: the so-called Bonfire of the Quangos. The kids are bigger, I have a lot more free time, and I’m in a relationship. The guy I’m in a relationship with, David, is a photographer with a big interest in London’s history and its fabric — and that fabric is changing, rapidly, so there’s a lot to photograph. He starts a beautiful blog called The London Column, to reflect on this and also the various histories that formed the contemporary city.

in 2013-4 Balfron Tower was emptied of its residents in preparation for a major refurbishment. By the way, when council tenants or leaseholders are moved out of their homes, in the jargon it’s called 'being decanted’. So the residents, some of whom may even have been there since it was built, were decanted from their homes. Like being water, just tipped out.

Pretty Carradale House had already been done, and when David said he wanted to go have a look around, I was all for it. The day we went was really perfect, a gorgeous sunny day, and Balfron looked more beautiful than ever. Its lettering, its landscaped gardens, even frankly its half-century-old slight dowdiness. Poplar had popped; there was trendy street art everywhere, Nathan Barley hipsters roamed around, and you just knew that despite mendacious promises to the contrary those council residents were never going to see the inside of that building again. Even I, who never got to live there, felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend.

David wrote it up in this post in The London Column, where you can also see his photographs.

There’s more, too. The real crux of this post is a story from my Tower Hamlets days that expands on the connection of Balfron in the East with her sister Trellick in the West — these two slightly bohemian grand dames who’ve outlived their more optimistic time — and Balfron’s caretaker, Jock, a man whose story also encapsulates the social changes we’ve been living through — at that time, the only caretaker the building had ever had in all those years. I loved him, too. I wrote it all up for The London Column. Click on the image if you prefer, to be taken there.

(I’d love to be able to show you a photograph of Jock, by the way, and I’m sure there was one with the interview I did with him for East End Life, but unfortunately that’s in a storage unit; the lever arch file my East End Life articles are in is practically bigger than my desk, in this little flat!)

N.B., neither this account nor the one I wrote 11 years ago mentions the inauthentic new windows the developers put in, or the fact that they changed floor layouts in the flats, thus destroying the building’s integrity. Nobody knew in 2014 that they were going to do that. But here’s the piece from the C20 Society deriding the decisions. So really in that way, it was a goodbye.

Next post will be about current enormities.

I've just written a 1,424-word comment on a Facebook thread. It's flooded me with endorphins! So I'm going to share it with you (apologies if you’ve already seen it in one or even both of those places.)

The context was a man wondering why a 'female' he saw in an interview would say she had issues with being told she wasn't living up to social expectations re eg babies, marriage etc. She was 35; she should realise it's not the 1950s any more and that she's 'free'.

A friend (male; thanks C) commented, referencing Roe v Wade being overturned, and the OP said that's different because it's in the US, not here. So I wrote:

To quote Olympia Dukakis in 'Moonstruck', what you don't know is a lot!

Women are still, in many areas of life, a minority. There are significant power imbalances. This is GLOBAL. Believe it or not, as a global minority, we do actually take notice of what happens to women in other places. Because it always happens at the hands of that global power-majority, MEN.

Men in Afghanistan, for instance, have oppressed women so badly that now they are prisoners inside their own bodies — not even allowed to sing or speak in their own house, if it can be heard from outside. And guess what? It was the US and UK withdrawing from Afghanistan and letting the Taliban come rushing back that did it. And botching their (our) promise to keep Afghan women safe, whatever happened.

American and British men consigned the Afghan women to this fate. Do you actually think women here didn't feel that??? By the time I was about 8 years old I knew there were little girls like me, living in parts of the world where little girls weren't allowed to make choices or play freely or decide what they wanted to do when they grew up, or even wear what they wanted. I knew I was lucky and articulated it that way to myself. What were you thinking about when you were 8?

And what happens in the US tends to sort of set the tone. Roe v Wade being overturned marked a step-change in the affairs of European women too, because it legitimises in law the desire to control women bodily that many MEN always harbour — just at a time when the far right is on the rise almost everywhere. WOMEN know ourselves to be at RISK from this.

Just the other year, here in the UK, a 20yo uni student was made pregnant by her abusive boyfriend, and in desperation she took some morning-after pills — after the legal deadline for taking them. I don't know how long after the legal deadline. She went to prison for two years. In fact, she was told she had to plead guilty, because if she hadn't, she would have been charged with 'destruction of a child' and would probably have been sentenced to life.

So for that crime of being with an abusive arsehole of a partner (not at all unusual, btw; they never seem abusive when you're getting together with them, it comes out later, and at least one in four of us experiences domestic violence in our time; almost all the women I know have), she was denied the right even to try to defend herself.

Tell me a story of a time when that happened to a man. In the UK, under the rule of law.

Even now the law still requires a doctor to sign that it's for the mother's 'health', that the pregnancy is a medical threat to her.

Remember when Ireland made abortion legal? Maybe you don't. But Irish women flew home from all over the world, just to vote in that referendum. From everywhere they were, they spent hundreds or even thousands of pounds just to go back and vote on this momentous issue. I hope you realise that English women were sitting in tears, watching the news footage of these women arriving back in Ireland, so joyful and hopeful, and we cried again when the law was passed and it became legal. No more Ann Lovetts.

Maybe you missed the huge tide of rage that exploded when Texas passed its famous law, in 2022. No abortion for any reason. And prison for anyone found guilty of helping a woman get an abortion for any reason whatsoever. Even treating an ectopic pregnancy counts as an 'abortion' to these animals.

There was a piece just last month in an advice column in the Washington Post, where a woman in a no-abortion state got pregnant and it was an ectopic pregnancy - which, just in case anyone doesn't know it, will pretty much kill you. Slowly and very painfully, of sepsis probably. She went into hospital and they didn't treat her — didn't operate — until the very last minute. She now wants to move to another state before trying for another baby. This seems perfectly sensible, right? She wrote the letter because her husband thinks she's 'overreacting'.

You think we don't bloody well feel affected by Roe v Wade?

Nigel Farage has announced he wants to put it on the table now, by the way. Here. He can do that, because one voter in seven voted for his disgusting little Reform Party last July. A referendum in the UK on abortion rights.vWhich in practice also means a referendum on women’s right to healthcare if and when they, we, get pregnant. Yes.

And for the record, even aside from this issue, it’s the little stuff! Ordinary everyday things are designed for people the size of men, not women: countertops, seatbelts, airbags, chairs & tables, hanging straps in the tube. We are constantly putting up with things being just that bit harder for us than they are for men. For YOU.

And btw, a huge plank in Trump's plan, Project 2025, is to get women back into the home, having babies, not working. (It's not just Trump, of course; a whole raft of rich, powerful, successful, womanhating men wrote that enormous document. And there are MANY more behind them.) You hear all this news of corporations rushing to scrap 'DEI'? Diversity, equality & inclusion? That includes WOMEN. Us. I mean, hell, we only got the vote in Switzerland in something like 1971! My grandmother came of voting age only a handful of years after it became legal. Think of that.

And Trump has just made it easier to get IVF, just at the time when other rights are disappearing. He made the announcement with a truly nauseating speech about 'American families', which comes straight from you-know-which playbook. 'Why haven't you had a baby yet' once again becomes a matter of patriotism.
So yeah.

That AND the pressure women are put under to be fertile, to be NICE, to be quiet, not to take up space, to just get on with it... We're supposed to make ourselves pretty — this is emphatically not a minor matter for teenage girls — we're supposed to be polite, and we're also supposed to do two-thirds of the domestic labour and make it look like we aren't.

Studies show that if a third of people in a room are women, people think it's half. If half the people in a room are women, people think it's most. If women talk half as much as men, men think they're talking more. Women are interrupted by men in meetings. Women are contradicted by men.

I live in a flat; every time I've ever lived above or next door to a couple, it's HIS voice I hear droning on at great length all the time, with shorter bursts of hers, till he cuts in again.

Women even find it harder to get prescribed with pain medication!! We're told it's psychosomatic. Why? Because women's bodies aren't even studied as much as men's. Try getting a diagnoses of endometriosis. Oh, and try living with the pain of endometriosis for YEARS, going to work, raising your kids, having sex with your husband, pretending you're fine, while being told it must be in your head. A woman in pain is no trouble to the medical establishment. And double the odds if she's a black woman.

I myself once walked around with undiagnosed gallstones for eleven years. I went to doctors, was told it was IBS (you see: ‘psychological’) or that it was nothing. I went to a reflexologist & when I had a massive episode two days after every session, was told, 'Better out than in'. I went for blood tests & was told I was 'fine'. I was told I was so unnaturally exhausted and kept getting ill for a week at a time 'because I was a working mother'. In the end, I collapsed — ended up in hospital with a massive blood infection, turned bright yellow, had surgery, still didn't recover, kept being told I 'should be fine now', and lost six months of work that year. My immune system was completely shot from fighting off infections and blockages for eleven whole years, and I was working and raising kids the whole time. It was an eminent herbalist in the end who explained all this to me, and gave me some stuff that helped me slowly get better — but I was never quite the same after that business.

I hope even this brief explanation gives you a better understanding of how women ACTUALLY occupy the world. 'Free'? In your dreams, buddy.


[N.b., there is so much I left out: about the impossibility of childcare, discrimination in the workplace against women who do have children, etc etc. I know. As I quipped to a friend, ‘You could write a whole book about this stuff!’]

Anyway, happy International Women’s Day + 3.

Onward and upward! Or at least, you know, through it.

I guess the question now is, ‘What isn’t happening?’ The takeover of the free world by a couple of villains straight out of Rocky & Bullwinkle, and the paralysis which I think affected every attentive citizen (of anywhere) in that first week, the relentless barrage — it felt like ‘Groundhog Day,’ that film my kids and I watched abotu a million times when they were growing up, in which one day takes about a hundred years to get through, one lesson takes a lifetime to get right.

On Friday 1st Feb I gained an objective correlative in the form of a norovirus; that is, if I hadn’t already been chucking my guts up every twenty minutes for hours on end, I might have had to anyway.

And the next day was Groundhog Day. It’s like life is just following art around at the moment.

I’ve been unable to reconstruct a timeline of all the newsbombs that dropped on us that first two weeks — not even Wikipedia has it (though in trying to find it I’ve learned a lot about what we’ve been ignoring in Somalia) — so if any of you reading this knows of one, please do let me know?

We were all reeling, I know that; & I feel as if those few days were when we were (or I was) specifically reeling over Musk and his gang of evil children taking over the US Treasury. It’s all new; it’s the first time I’ve ever particularly cared one way or the other about the US Treasury. I thought I was much more concerned about people, but then the Treasury never seemed under any kind of threat before. And also, it is about people. They’re spying on us.

Also on Friday 1st Feb I received word that my Aunt B, now an unbelievable 96, is in end-of-life care in the nursing home she’s been in since 2013 (some readers may remember that brutal period, which tore several chunks out of me). I was too ill even to ring the nursing home so I rang my eldest (I’m doing my best to turn him into the head of the family, lol) and got him to call them. We also realised we had to get there to see her pronto.

Norovirus turning out to be much worse than a normal stomach bug, and Em’s work being ‘mental’ all week, this couldn’t happen for a whole week. So on this past Friday, the day when it was freezing cold, pouring with freezing rain and blowing an icy gale, I took my little wheelie case, and the posh umbrella I had bought in similar weather — a distress purchase in more than one sense — two days after Roddy Lumsden died, and hauled myself up to town, to meet Emil at the care home at 4pm.

The day itself?

I’d left my Kindle behind. I had brought my knitting with me, but it’s a pair of socks with a colourwork panel in a pattern I haven’t quite figured out yet, so that was out of the question. My hands and brain were both shaking. Fortunately I had to return some items at a shop in that big fancy corporate-property-masquerading-as-public-space area behind King’s Cross, called Søstrene Grene (another prize for anyone who can tell me how to say it), a sort of slightly more twee answer to IKEA (& they have nice dishes; I needed bowls). They turn out to have a really very nice little crafty/knitting/sewing section. So I bought a ball of perfectly sweet pink cotton and a pair of dirt-cheap but surprisingly pleasant little wooden fixed-cable needles (I actually really like them), thinking I could just do a little garter-stitch dishcloth, without having to look at what I was doing or think about it. Just hands-busy. I’m sick to death of those rank microfibre cloths & every other commercially available counter-top-wiping solution.

Did the return; bought the better-sized bowls; went back out like Nanook of the North, already feeling completely done in, leaning on the suitcase handle, unable to see out my glasses. Back down to King’s X to the bus, wheelie case, umbrella & now Pret bag in hand, rain lashing — my umbrella blew inside-out twice — picture me by that outdoor Pret shouting Fuck off! Fuck OFF! — and such a crowd at the bus stop I knew I’d never be able to get on the bus, let alone eat my sandwich or drink my decaf oat latte. (Yeah, that’s what it’s come to.) By this time I was running late.

Oh and also: I had done a genius thing, and switched to a smaller, cross-body type handbag for the day, which was great. And in changing bags I had managed to forget two things: my bank card, and my phone charger. I’d spent the whole train ride to town merrily doing this-n-that on my phone. Then in the rain relying on eg the map to find exactly where the store was, and TfL to make sure I got the best route to lower Clapton. They gave me a shit route, of course, but it did help me to remember the good one. But by the time I’d paid at Pret and got to the bus I was down to something scary like 6% battery and it seemed to be disappearing like water poured out of jug.

I know. I’m burying the lede under a mountain of stress.

I thought, I’m just going to have to get a cab, so I started walking up Pentonville Road to get out of the bus-stop madness. Pentonville Rd, though, is a mess of double red lines, and roadworks, and bus stops out of service, and there were no cabs going up there at all. Trudge, trudge. Two thirds up there was a bus stop open, and a 73 stopped at it, & I got on (closing my poor misshapen umbrella, which will now be played by Charles Laughton in the movie of its life), and only two stops later I actually got a seat. Ish. Essex Road was practically nonmoving, but at some point things emptied out a bit, and & I was able to open the Pret bag at last. As I did so it fell completely to bits, soaked. Ate the food. Drank the coffee. Rolled up the sodden paper and put it into the empty cup, balanced it on the wheelie case, took out the knitting, and began to cast on.

By the time I got to Balls Pond Road to get the 38 I was rushing round the corner to the stop, my phone on 2%, just hold on, hold on, hold on… thinking, if I had to I could walk from here, it will all be fine… Em knows I’m late.

The 38 came. I had just enough battery left to tap in, and text him saying, If you pass one of those phone shops cd you get me a lightning cable. The bus was empty so I sat down and just knitted. Calm pink cotton & those cute little cheap starter needles that frankly seem just as good as my expensive ones. Rain on the pavement. Balls Pond Rd, Dalston Junction, Dalston Lane, Graham Road, Marie Lloyd’s old house, our old bus stop, Hackney Central, Amhurst Rd, the good old Mess Cafe, Clarence Rd, St John’s Hackney, the swimming pool, Lower Clapton Rd, the Round Chapel, Clapton Girls’ Academy.

Em was waiting for me at the bus stop.

Aunt B has been unresponsive for years now, bedbound since before that, and long ago ceased knowing who I was, or really noticing if you were there with her. First it was distressing to her; then it was distressing to both of us; and finally it was only distressing for me. For a brief while the kids and I had taken her beautiful little dog, Charley — a Spitz, rehomed with wonderful friends — but that was distressing mostly to Charley, who wasn’t getting the reaction she expected from Aunt B. The past few years I’ve been seeing Aunt B by video link when the Hackney social worker does her inspections; I’m a person on an iPad screen.

Care home. New, revamped reception area since we’ve been there, which has been much too long. Sign in. Floor number. Room number. There’s Aunt B.

The whole story of how it went is very long, & personal, with many significant moments, and also very overwhelming. Suffice to say that on Friday Emil & I learned (well — we learned on Saturday, when my mother told me about it) that there is a thing called Terminal Lucidity, in which people who are dying, even people with advanced dementia after a decade of physical destruction of their brain, can suddenly ‘come back’ — a little bit or completely, for a few seconds or a few hours — in what seems an actual miracle, to be present and conscious again with their family. Nobody knows how it happens or how it even can.

For this amazing visit Aunt B was responsive, very much so in the ways open to her, and even in some ways that shouldn’t be physically possible for her. It was like a dream, and we held her hands and talked to her, called her Aunt B over and over and over again, told her about all the family one by one, by name, mentioned all their names repeatedly, and how much they love her, and told her how much she would love our little Nylah. I swear she smiled when we told her that. She gripped our hands with strength, breathed the word ‘YES’ — both of us saw and heard it — and at one point she opened her eyes all the way, they were practically round, and looked straight into mine for at least two or three minutes straight. It was like suddenly finding yourself in Narnia.

We didn’t like to mention Trump, visitors from the future that we were, but when the nurse came in with a tray of puréed food and we were chatting, I recounted the story of when Aunt B was in hospital with a UTI, and a doctor was asking her all those questions — count backwards, etc — and when he said, ‘Do you know who the president of the United States is?’ Aunt B had opened her eyes, shot her arm with index finger pointing straight up in the air — like she was trying out for ‘Hamilton’ — and cried triumphantly, BARACK O BAMAAA!

And as I told the story to the nurse, Aunt B in her bed wriggled a bit with visible pleasure.

PS: It was in this same week that I’ve discovered that Max Wallis is going to publish in his brilliant new poetry journal, ‘The Aftershock Review’, a long poem I wrote in Aunt B’s voice. It tells the story of the time she discharged herself from Charing Cross Hospital (about two hours after that Barack Obama moment), and tried to walk home to the far end of Chiswick. I’d stayed till after midnight to make sure she was going to be safely there all night, by the way.

It took me years to get this poem right, its voice right — it includes many lines that are direct quotes from Aunt B’s account of it the following day — and it’s titled after John Clare, ‘A Walk out of Hammersmith’. I’ve sent it to several places with no luck, so this feels both synchronicitous and significant. My cup really is running over.

PPS: I often find a playlist in my head telling me the story of where we’re at. I don’t remember very many of' this week’s songs, but they have included The End of the World as We Know It, Love Isn’t Always on Time, and Moon River.

I don’t even know where to start.

It's getting darker every day. Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust Memorial Day, and still so many people are failing to draw the direct line from there to where we are now. I don’t know the name of the bias — it must have one — but so many people seem to think it ‘can’t be fascism’, because ‘fascism doesn’t’ — or ‘can’t’ — happen here’. It certainly can.

Trump came in on Monday and rescinded 78 executive orders signed by President Biden. Since then he has signed 35 himself, though it seems like more — a firehose, as Dan Rather put it on his Substack.

ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) has been given quotas for arrests. This means they can’t be lenient, and they probably can’t be too picky either. It means they will be arresting documented people too, just to fill their quotas. Remember the so-called ‘Muslim travel ban’, the first time round? Innocent people returning from, say, a short business trip were having their green cards taken away. It’s burned onto my mind. The end of Birthright Citizenship is unconstitutional and will be strongly contested. But it augurs total chaos and yet more families ripped apart, even small children and parents. There have already been some extremely distressing photographs published.

Anyone who gives succour to undocumented immigrants, hiding them or helping them, will be treated as a criminal: ‘This includes public officials and elected mayors and governors’. It’s time to be asking ourselves: ‘What would I do?’ Or ‘What could I do?’

Funding for all overseas medical aid programmes has been ‘suspended’ — including AIDS medication. Potential ramifications around virus mutations if blocs of people miss their treatment are both serious and international.

Meetings, peer reviews, travel, communication and training funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been cancelled. NIH is the world’s major biomedical research funder.

All Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are halted; Dept of Labour staff who headed these initiatives have been put on paid leave, and staff have been given ten days to report on anyone they suspect of sneaking DEI criteria into a job specification by ‘vague language’. From the official press release:

Notable actions the Department has taken include:

• Dissolution of the Department’s Diversity & Inclusion Council, effective immediately;

  • […] President Trump has rescinded the Executive Orders that guide the Council and issued a new Executive Order, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” that terminates groups like the Diversity & Inclusion Council. DEI documents issued and related actions taken by the Council have been withdrawn.

• Dissolution of the Employee Engagement Diversity Equity Inclusion Accessibility Council (EEDIAC) within the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), effective immediately […]

• Cancellation of ongoing DEI training and service contracts which total over $2.6 million;

• Withdrawal of the Department’s Equity Action Plan;

• Placement of career Department staff tasked with implementing the previous administration’s DEI initiatives on paid administrative leave; and

• Identification for removal of over 200 web pages from the Department’s website that housed DEI resources and encouraged schools and institutions of higher education to promote or endorse harmful [sic] ideological programs.

All this just reminds me how in the Cultural Revolution you could be shot for wearing glasses.

There is hardly a family in the US who will be unaffected by all this in some way. Disability funding. University degrees. Jobs. Trans rights (eg in the military, or even to a passport). There are already doctors refusing to treat women for routine matters in case there’s a miscarriage and they get blamed for an abortion. Just pray not to have an ectopic pregnancy.

The Holocaust was about Jews — and also the Roma, and people with mental health conditions, and disabled people, LGBTQ people, the neurodivergent, socialists, writers, artists, intellectuals, religious leaders who stood up for their beliefs (celebrate Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, with her shaking voice in that pulpit), and people who looked at someone funny on the wrong day. Have we actually forgotten this? I know it’s too late — so many people who are at grave risk thought it was better not to vote for Kamala than to vote effectively against Trump’s cabal — but we need to remember again, and fast.

Of course everyone knows the Jan 6 marauders have been released, many of them talking openly about mayhem. Trump’s militia. We’ve already seen how useful these stooges are to Trump; like any other Mob boss he can just speak a word, and they will go out for him and do it while he keeps his little hands clean.

The KKK has also been openly leafleting in Kentucky, by the way.

And now after all of this Trump is talking openly about ‘just cleaning out’ Gaza, describing it in his property developer voice as ‘a demolition site’, and working on Jordan and Egypt to take the remaining Gazans. We know from previous remarks that Trump’s odious son-in-law has already had his eye on Gaza’s ‘beachfront properties’ — and then there’s the natural gas. There’s a killing to be made.

And that’s the point.

And I haven’t even mentioned all the other stuff, of which there’s plenty.

The thing is, nothing they are doing is something that they have’t previously said they would do. There should be no surprises at this stage. We were told, we were shown, we were (some of us) talking about it. And being told how stupid and overexcitable we were. Nazism didn’t begin with concentration camps. It began with Hitler first talking for many years about exactly what he wanted to do, and then dismantling Germany’ democracy in 53 days. It isn’t just a bogeyman from the old movies. It’s never gone away, and right now they are all on the rise.

I think of all those lovely young American voters, surrounded by all the lines they’d drawn in the sand, who were too pure on their little patches of ground to vote the anti-fash ticket — because ‘Kamala is a genocidal maniac’. (You want maniac? You want genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass take-over? You got it now, kids.) And of course, looking at that list above, many of the gentle leftists who couldn’t stomach the Democrats are hugely at risk from Trump, Musk, Vance, Kennedy, Miller, and the rest. May we all live and learn. See what’s in front of you. Today, please.