March of the Lemmings Read online

  When in Europe, dress like a walking apology for Brexit

  9 July 2017

  In the 1980s, the pornographic bookshop (bad) where we bought amyl nitrate was opposite the women’s bookshop (good), where we hung around skim-reading Spare Rib and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) to try to get dates with the clever feminists, who saw through us immediately.

  The women’s bookshop (good) had a camera set up in its window to covertly photograph male fans of pornography (bad) coming and going from the pornographic bookshop. If this seems a depressing state of affairs, look on the bright side. In 1986, a small provincial town could still support two independent bookshops!

  Our purchases complete, we would stand opposite the feminists’ camera position, waving our bottles of amyl nitrate around, so the feminists would know we only wanted to get high in a shared flat in the middle of the afternoon, and not degrade women by looking at pictures of them nude. How did they resist us?1

  Ten years ago, I inherited a vintage Singer sewing machine from my mother. During my childhood, she became expert at hand-making perfect costumes of whatever character was my current favourite. When I was five, in 1973, her Hartley Hare from Pipkins costume was perfect, functioning alcoholic eyes and all; in 1977, my mother’s Captain Britain tabard was unique, the obscure Marvel superhero being resistant to official merchandising; and I doubt there were many boys lucky enough to attend their tenth birthday party in a one-piece zip-up costume of the Welsh experimental film-maker and poet Iain Sinclair.2

  This summer, I had planned to take the children, Six and Nine, to the United States on a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to pay homage to the unmarked paupers’ graves of my forty-seven favourite significant pre-First World War blues harmonica players. It was to be a journey I am sure they would have looked back on with some fondness, or at least tolerance, in later life at least.

  But I imagined a difficult American situation, where a delightful pea-soup restaurant waitress, who has been nothing other than charming this last hour, asks us in parting what we think of good ole Donald Trump, kickin’ Muslamic ass.3 My daughter, Six, would doubtless say, ‘Donald Trump is a smelly poo-poo head.’ It is her habit to regurgitate wholesale the adult discourse she overhears around our dinner table, without necessarily understanding it.

  In the ensuing conversational difficulties, we would then be gunned down by aggrieved onlookers and hung naked from poplar trees, as a warning to any other visiting snowflakes considering casting doubt on the composition and cleanliness of the forty-fifth US president’s head.

  So instead of being murdered in a roadside diner, we are going on a self-guided tour of major European cities, before the administrative gates that make our access to them so easy are finally lowered in 2019, in an elaborate star-studded ceremony featuring Elizabeth Hurley, Ian Botham, Public Image Ltd and a racist calypso from DJ Mike Read.

  Last year, when we visited France, I made sure the children always wore lapel badges, which I bought on the Internet, of the EU flag. No one would be in any doubt of our political affiliations. Any awkwardness could be immediately abated by enthusiastic lapel-gesturing.

  At the French holiday camp, Six and Nine made friends with some Belgian children of similar ages, Zes and Negen. And though, being English, we were unable to speak any foreign languages, least of all Belgian, we made our feelings about the complex pros and cons in the argument for European political and economic unity understood to the Walloons by pointing at the badges and pretending to cry, over and over again.4

  Of course, twelve months later, the situation is much worse, and the British, or more specifically the English, have gone from being regarded by the Europeans as the cool kids who gave the world The Beatles, James Bond and football to being a kind of embarrassing, weird family of angry and confused hooligans, whose garden is full of used nappies, old, wet copies of Fiesta Readers’ Wives and rusted tricycle frames.

  Last summer, a man on a second-hand record stall in the street market of a Pyrenean village pretended he was not going to sell me a first pressing of Catherine Ribeiro’s 1972 classic Paix, despite my EU badge, due to assumed political differences.5 ‘Ah, Brexit,’ he said, ‘no seminal stream-of-consciousness Parisienne street-poet space rock for you, monsieur!’ But the tension was palpable. We needed to raise our game.6

  I realised I could use my mother’s sewing machine to clothe my very family itself, this summer, in unambiguously pro-European Union garments, exactly the sort of bespoke outfits we would need to ensure safe passage across the continent in these troubled times.

  The McCall’s Patterns M5500 Children’s Knight, Prince and Samurai Costumes kit, which I found for $8.91 on the Internet, had the basic shapes I needed for my pro-European Union suits. And while European Union-patterned dressmaking material is not available in and of itself, European Union flags 15 ft square are available for about £1.50 each online. These were the tools!7

  By upscaling the size of the patterns I was also able to provide templates for my wife and I, and by the end of June I had cut and stitched four perfect medieval-style European Union two-pieces for us to wear as we make our way across divided Europe. For headgear, I copied our clearly pro-EU queen, and wove yellow plastic daisies in European Union star formations into the brims of four blue wickerwork hats.8 Four pairs of blue-and-yellow trainers set off our ensembles perfectly.

  In Germany, the still extant Wanderjahre tradition sees young people wander the country for a fixed period, dressed in stovepipe hats and bell-bottoms, singing for their sausage suppers in inns and bars.9 This, I realised, could be the model for our ritual journey, our pilgrimage of contrition.

  Six plays the French horn, Nine is a skilled oboist, and I own a theremin, while my wife can shriek. I have arranged a version of the song ‘I Apologize’, by the 1980s Minneapolis hardcore punk band Hüsker Dü, for our family quartet, and I plan to spend the summer performing it in our pro-European garb at a succession of significant European sites.

  And when their children, standing in the ruins of ravaged Britain, ask my children what they did to try and sabotage Brexit, they can answer, ‘We stood outside the Stasi Museum, and Notre-Dame, and the astronomical clock, clad in European Union costumes that our father stitched himself, and used our oboe and our horn to apologise.’

  Yawn! Get over it! A Balrog Has Come

  Thanks stu after reading that cloying sentimental self indulgent middle class twaddle. Oh boy do I now no why I voted leave. Left Of Stalin

  I was very surprised to hear that a six year old could play the french horn. Fake news, surely. Samssss

  Virtue-signalling, par excellence! Paulilc

  There is no language called Belgian … Aintmuch

  Zes and Negen are Flemish (Dutch) words, Belgian is not a language and Wallons speak French. No Bugger You Know

  I am Belgian myself, and I can’t even speak Belgian. Furthermore, I don’t know anyone here in Belgium that can speak Belgian. Maybe it is because the official languages here are Dutch and Flanders and in Brussels, French in Wallonia and in Brussels, and German in the east, near the German border. Sendoake

  Not sure if this is intended to be ironic. Likely not. In which case someone ought to point out to the writer that the self righteousness, gesture politics, snobbery and complacency of wealthy progressive politics are core reasons political opposition has been so easily hi-jacked by the ideological fruitcakes of Brexit and the racist and regressive Alt-right. Promoting more of the same is hardly likely to help. Dr Wibble

  ‘By upscaling the size of the patterns I was also able to provide templates for my wife and I’ It should be ‘templates for my wife and myself/me’ without context ‘my wife and I’ is sound but in the context of ‘able to provide templates for’, well one rule is it has to sound right if you remove your wife so choose between ‘able to provide templates for I’ or ‘able to provide templates for myself’ or ‘able to provide templates for me�
�� and pick whichever is right. In this case as the sentence refers to the self at the start then ‘myself’ is the right answer. To use ‘I’ in that sentence smacks of someone trying to sound grammatical without the knowledge of grammar to back it up. BigJohnFX

  The trolls from Olgino are already out in force. Have you noticed that they are now swapping a single account between trolls rather than just creating new accounts? A worthwhile reminder that the rise of nationalism in the West is funded by Putin who wishes those pesky EU-sanctions and that cohesive NATO would just go away and let him get on with the business of annexing Eastern Europe. AnnONeymous

  I couldn’t even get to the Brexit bit. Had to give up after the fawning over feminists. Virtue signalling at its finest. I’m sure many people had many different reasons for voting remain, the fact that some did it just because they’re virtue signallers leaves a little taste of sick in my mouth. RodneyM72

  When will the complaining cease? It’s happened. We are leaving. Deal with it. B R Foulkes

  Lee has a child with the same name as jacob rees mogg new child.? Seriously, more drivel, badly written and just ridiculous, do you get paid for writing this kind of stuff?. As least you are not the only one who can’t speak Belgian, no one can. Derek Strange

  What a deranged load of twaddle from this multi-faceted Britain hating jerk. I fear for his children, being brought up by such a right on PC filleted humanoid. Taff2

  That the phrase ‘Donald Trump is a smelly poo-poo head’. passes for adult conversation around the writer’s dinner table more than explains the childish tone of the article and the even more childish approach to Brexit. Nomad Scott

  1 I didn’t actually do any of this. A man I knew well did. I stole his story. He now runs a floating bookshop and has won the game of life.

  2 This paragraph is mainly nonsense. I did wear a Captain Britain tabard and mask to our Silver Jubilee street party, but it had come free with an issue of Marvel UK’s Captain Britain comic. My mother did make me a lot of soldier, sailor, Native American and traffic cop costumes as a child, however, which enabled me to do a one-person Village People show for the family at Christmas, though it was admittedly slowed down by the multiple costume changes. When my mum let me go to the Birmingham Comics Convention in 1979, when I was eleven, a tiny affair by today’s geek-fest standards, she sat in the café of the Metropole Hotel, while I went to watch Jim Steranko give a talk. When I came back to the café, Chris Claremont, who created Captain Britain and rebooted the X-Men, was sitting with my actual mum having a coffee. I expect she was the only person in the building who wasn’t a smelly fanboy, and he probably liked hanging out with someone who didn’t care who he was. He introduced himself to me. ‘I’m Chris Claremont. I write The X-Men. Do you read The X-Men?’ It was the first time I was star-struck. I could barely speak. Of course I read the fucking X-Men.

  3 I imagine this incident taking place at Pea Soup Andersen’s Inn, Buellton, California, where I had pea soup while on a road trip with the actor Kevin Eldon and the performance artist and writer Ben Moor in September 1995.

  4 I know ‘Belgian’ isn’t a language. I did this on purpose for comic effect.

  5 Ribeiro is a superb cross between Patti Smith and Nico, backed by early Pink Floyd – pure spirit of May ’68 made flesh. The man didn’t have any of her records, but should have.

  6 The man was selling French psychedelia in the weekly market at Mirepoix. We got on fine. It was in fact the organic rose ice-cream seller who said we couldn’t have any ice cream because of Brexit. But he was laughing. I wonder if he is still laughing now.

  7 Again, this is a Simon Munnery rhythm, from his Alan Parker Urban Warrior act. ‘These are the tools. The tools for a better tomorrow!’

  8 Having been co-opted into the anti-EU argument against her will, when a lie was leaked to the Sun in August 2016 saying she supported Brexit, a sneaky trick assumed to be the responsibility of Michael Gove, Her Majesty staged her own small act of rebellion by wearing a clearly EU-themed hat for the June 2017 opening of Parliament. I love the Queen.

  9 I encountered this tradition in a bar in Hannover in 2004 and, not knowing what it was, found it delightful.

  Political turmoil has left humourists with nothing to aim at

  16 July 2017

  Last summer I wrote a comedy drama script, currently ‘in development with a major broadcaster’, concerning a charming, confident, clever and Machiavellian politician. Named Horace Thompson, he manipulates popular culture to consolidate support for a controversial referendum that he narrowly won, intending to further his own self-interest. And he was in the Bullingdon Club. And he lives in Islington.

  (I don’t know where I got the brilliant idea for this character from. Sometimes I think I am a genius, or some kind of unwitting god, forcibly exiled to Earth, his memory of his own divinity erased by jealous members of his former pantheon.)

  But like Liam Fox and David Davis and all the bullying Brexiteer shitbags, the charming, confident, clever and Machiavellian politician the character of Horace Thompson is inspired by no longer seems quite so charming, confident, clever and Machiavellian.

  The problem for me is that the average high-profile Brexiteer now looks like a once-powerful man who thought he was playing a rigged party game of pass the parcel, aiming to win a prize he had previously wrapped himself, but who has suddenly realised he is sitting with an unexploded nail bomb in his lap, right next to his shrivelled nut-sack.1

  Still, as long as there is some way to hold on to the closing scene, in which Horace Thompson’s head is sliced off by the rotating blades of a ceiling fan and then eaten by his own guard dogs, I will feel it has all been worthwhile. My final rewrite will consciously uncouple the character from specific details.

  It may have been folly to hitch my story wagon to a character so clearly inspired by Boris Johnson, even though his future once seemed secure. Boris Johnson will be a forgotten casualty of the crisis his own lying Daily Telegraph columns created; the mad scientist, raging at his own now-murderous monster, at the end of some black-and-white B-movie, ‘But no, Brexeeto, I am your master! I created you to serve me. Noooo. Brexeeto, aaaaaggggghhhh! My nut-sack!’2

  Pity the professional humourist. It has become a cliché of opinion pieces that the news of the past twelve months has been so absurd, unpredictable and fast-moving that it is beyond satire. Only the infinite keyboard monkeys of Twitter, trapped on the inhospitable concrete island of their moated social media platform, and lobbing the wet simian excrement of their viral memes and gifs into the hair of curious onlookers, can respond to news stories with the speed required to land a blow.3

  Then the roulette wheel of events spins again and makes the carefully conceived conceits of slow-moving professional humourists immediately irrelevant, leaving us spluttering through our long-winded set-ups as the gas cloud of poorly thought-out policy our punchlines aimed to ridicule evaporates in a fog of central-office plausible denial.

  The trick to being a champion clay pigeon shooter, my violent and weaponry-obsessed wife tells me, is to aim for the space you anticipate the clay fool moving into, not the space where it appears to be.

  (My advice for any clay pigeons reading is to avoid being shot by moving forwards into a space you didn’t anticipate being in. Then perhaps your decimated numbers will recover in the wild, flying idiots.)

  Lawyers and nervous TV producers pore over contributors’ jokes, while the politician they concern is already in the process of being sacked, resigning, performing a blatant policy U-turn or saying something so stupid and racist that their valuable contribution to the mildly amusing Teignbridge Business Buddies scheme is swiftly eclipsed.4

  The successful modern satirist must enter a Zen-like state, where all possible outcomes take shape in his third eye, each in turn satirised in advance of its existence, in the event of it becoming a reality.

  (When I wrote for the BBC radio satire Week Ending in the early ’90s, the writers’ room smelt
of excrement and BO, and was full of filthy ashtrays, empty crisp bags and overflowing spittoons. Nobody there was in a Zen-like state, although some functioning alcoholic visionaries were asleep under the desks, which is the next best thing.)

  Satirists are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Stand-up comedians, all of their professional metaphors involving violence and death, call this ‘punching up’. But which way is up?

  Is it ‘punching up’ to poo your comedy pellets onto a severely weakened prime minister with a randomly flapping lower jaw, whose desperate over-reliance on a small repertoire of endlessly repeated and ultimately meaningless statements indicates she is clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and who has sacrificed her future career and hard-won credibility on the altar of her ungrateful party’s best interests?

  I don’t know. But when a woman was filmed putting a cat into a wheelie bin, everyone thought it was awful. Theresa May is that little cat. History is that wheelie bin. Am I that horrible woman, putting that miserable cat into that horrible bin? I need a clear clay pigeon villain to aim at. All I see, everywhere, are victims and losers.

  I’m halfway through my current two-year tour, but I’m taking the summer off because my towering stage set, made entirely from the smashed DVD cases of other stand-ups’ shows, is too high, and my show is too long, to fit any Edinburgh Fringe venue. And I hate all comedians under forty, so I don’t want to spend a month trying to act presidentially around them.

  About a quarter of my current near-three-hour run-time uses topical material as feeder routes into the main narrative thrust. For simplicity’s sake, I could do with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump still being around in September, as the similarities between them dovetail the two acts together neatly, but every night in the interval I have to go online to check Trump hasn’t been assassinated or impeached.