March of the Lemmings Read online

  My only other Russian experience was a fever dream, frozen in the few winter weeks between the death of my mother and the birth of my daughter.6 In the dying days of December 2010, I was with my three-year-old son on a train travelling through the falling snow from London to Worcester. I had to visit my bereaved stepfather, my wife at home in the painful throes of a problematic pregnancy.

  Coincidentally, my friend the poet John Hegley was in the same carriage, I remember, and we said goodbye and good luck at Oxford, where the train surrendered to rapidly worsening weather, and the railway company bundled us into optimistic black cabs to take us towards our respective onward destinations.

  My son and I found ourselves sharing our cab ride through the suddenly Siberian Cotswolds with a groomed Russian businessman and his younger English companion, a glamorous, cut-glass woman who said she worked ‘in fashion’. They were on their way to a party at a country house in Worcestershire, swaddled in designer coats that mocked our cagoules, their eyes darkly ringed, their demeanours distracted. The pair seemed to have nothing in common with one another and no shared frame of reference. They were not delighted by the sudden beautiful world beyond the window. They did not hold each other’s cold hands in hot wonder.

  I tried to make small talk. The fashion woman could not elaborate on her fashion-job criteria, and they both looked away from us, out of the windows in different directions, as the snow fell hard and thick upon the darkening wolds. It came out that I was a comedian, but they did not find this especially interesting; nor were they engaged by my eloquent and delightful infant, whose cherubic curls and indefatigable innocence created an angelic counterpoint to the black mood of the taxi’s interior.

  I asked the Russian what he thought of gay rights at home, and of Putin, whom I found newly comical, as he had recently been photographed wrestling a bear naked while shooting an assault rifle. Or something. The Russian explained forcefully that I needed to understand that there was a vodka-fuelled crisis of manhood in Russia, and that Putin was selflessly providing a role model to inspire the men of the nation. The discussion was closed.7

  To me the pair seemed shrouded in shame, as if they had committed a crime, the presence of a chirruping child magnifying their corruption. I think the kid saved me from going under that evening – a psychic lifebuoy. They were my own devils, come for me, I think. That black cab was my blues crossroads.

  At Worcester Shrub Hill, the taxi’s elastic limit, our farewells were not fond. I left the silent couple awaiting collection, halogen-lit in the falling flakes, and my little boy and I struggled onward through the drifts into the shadow of the Malvern Hills.

  I will never forget our odd quartet’s awkward three-hour black-cab journey in that snow-shrouded English twilight, an iconic British brand traversing the worsening terrain, a global darkness drawing in behind it. But the Russian was just passing through. The land and its people were a playground for him.

  And I often think of the quiet woman, Komarovsky’s Lara reimagined. I hope that fashion thing worked out for her.

  You are another of Putin’s useful idiots. Borderguard

  What a load of old twaddle – Putin would love this article! Enfield Chappie

  Well done Stewart, bit better writing in this article than recently; Keep it up. Tom Woody

  You actually write very well when you stop dicking around. You should drop the comedy thing – it’s not really working out, is it – and write ful time instead. I believe the Guardian are looking for a jazz columnist. BuyDogHasDohDose

  Stay focused? This article is a series of words drunkenly walking out off a bar late at night, in ever more danger of tipping off the pavement onto the road whilst waiting for the taxi he forces us to read about. JerMacDon

  I got as far as the word remoaner. that was enough. the world is full of assholes. European Observer

  Lee is a fool, our enemies are Johnson, May, Fox, Davies etc the Brexit Faragists in the Tory party. They are the real enemies of the people, together with their press barons who report more fake news than ‘Pravda’ ever did. The Tory Faragists are leading us to economic and social disaster unless this Brexit stupidity is stopped in its tracks. Putin knows the we are led by a bunch of dim-wits and has been exploiting the situation. 47Andrew

  What a load of tosh. If cooperation, Richer nations helping the poorer members, interdependence, peace, prosperity, a larger political and trade bargaining voice and freedom of movement make people an enemy of Stewart Lee, then may I suggest that he buys a bigger notebook for the names, for he can add mine right away. As a Comedian his jokes aimed at the remain side will fall on deaf ears in Dundee where the pragmatic Scottish people are polling at 68% remain about now and will have the last say on Brexit soon. May I suggest when he does his last gig at the Royal Festival Hall in London he stays down there with all the other Brexit Bampots intent on breaking up the Union of Great Britain. InternationalMusic

  I’m sure apologists for Stalin wrote in much the same jocular vein as they commended the latest tractor production figures, or dismissed reports of gulags and mass murder. Putin’s killers still stalk our streets armed with state developed poisons, the threats and military overflight’s continue, weapons development continues apace. Is it all just for a bit of a laugh? Liberclown

  Europa. Every second third word. Europa. Also Sprach Zarathustra, Proliferating across the earth. ManUpTree

  This site was absolutely swamped with badly spelt, anti-EU comments for weeks before the referendum. It was completely impossible to have a normal conversation on here, and it felt exactly like an organised propaganda effort. As soon as the result was announced, they all disappeared, and it went back to normal. The difference was huge and totally obvious. It’s very clear to me that some group with significant means was manipulating the online conversation to insert coordinated pro-Leave messages and drown out pro-Remain messages. Someone has the data trail for all this, and sooner or later it’s all going to come out. What we’ve heard so far is only the tip of the iceberg. TruthSay3R

  The Russian and his partner in the taxi just wanted to be left alone I think. Telling that they weren’t aware you were a comedian. Lansing

  Ah yes, I am remembering black taxi ride with Lara on way to party when all I want do is touch her and there is English comedy man with smirk asking me questions instead of talking with his boy. Often I am wondering what is happening to this poor Stuart Little boy and if father still making clever joke about Russia. Edwina666

  Poor English call girl. Stuck with a tedious Russian client and an impertinent stranger who wished to discuss ‘what the Russian what he thought of gay rights at home’, a topic which many, even here, find similarly tedious. Mind you, she doesn’t seem to have had much of a sense of humour to enjoy this comedy to culture clash. Fakecharitybuster

  Not only buying up our houses but these Russians are also buying up our women. Where are these Brexiteers when we need them? Chashurley

  They were bored by you. Fancy that. Many comics can be amusing for an hour or two, but it takes months to write the material. Without that material they can be as dull as the rest of us. MarcAdams

  Someone trying to make small talk with complete strangers on a journey can be really annoying. Then you want these strangers to be amazed by your career. Did you tell them how much money you had too! No wonder they looked out of the window hoping you would shut up. Pinball1170

  No wonder that Russian man acted like that if you offered such stupid topics of the small talk. IvaNotTerrible

  I do like the image of the strange and slightly disturbing Russians forced to share a small space with the strange and slightly disturbing Stewart Lee, whilst travelling through a frozen landscape. However, I suspect the rest of the piece, tedious and convoluted as it is, has been banged out at speed on a laptop in a depressing hotel room. Alastai

  I asked the Russian what he thought of gay rights at home – Yet another reason I would hate to be stuck in a train with Stewart Lee. Facing an
interrogation about ones political correct potentials. Wonder how many people have had to pay a £50 fine to break that alarm so they can avoid him? SAuszy

  ‘It came out that I was a comedian but they did not find this especially interesting;’, having read to the end I would concur. Initalyperora

  A Stewart Lee piece about Brexit. I haven’t read one of those since last week. Phewwords

  I don’t know what purpose this story has. Nor do I understand why comments remain open on this but not on Andrew Rawnsley. DrSHWilson

  Putin is cold. He is sensible. He is safe. He will not start a nuclear war. Putin is the safe bet. So let us hope the polls are right and Putin wins today’s election. This election is special. 7th (the perfect number, religious) Presidential election. On the 18th March 2014 the treaty allowing for Russian takeover of Crimea was signed. 2018 is a special year for Russia, FIFA 2018 WC. Best Regards,/Per. Per in Sweden

  I don’t think there’s any need to worry about the polls, comrade. :) Robofish

  This is an ‘opinion article’ based on fancy words and expressions, little substance, a lot of blaming and characterising others and splitting … i am unclea why the Guardian chose to publish it. Asteri11

  What garbage article I hope the Guardian didn’t pay for it. Bluesinbrussels

  Probably the most stupid and ridiculous piece of writing since the universe began. DrChris

  1 The Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury. A blameless British woman, Dawn Sturgess, subsequently died from exposure to the same batch. Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga and Dr Alexander Mishkin were thought to be responsible. Putin’s trained killers’ flimsy alibis openly mocked the international community’s anxieties, and the deceased, all part of his brilliant strategy of organised chaos and confusion. How he must love Brexit.

  2 Boris Johnson had a limerick about the president of Turkey having sex with a goat published in the Spectator.

  3 I am very lucky that the Observer allows me to write such deliberately poorly constructed sentences.

  4 Oil-money loyalist, sacked that week as Secretary of State by Trump for criticising him.

  5 Nikolai Glushkov, former deputy director of Aeroflot, critic of Putin.

  6 This story is entirely true as written. The strangeness of the experience has haunted me since, and it was years before I even twigged what was actually going on. I could piss out these meaningful, moving vignettes in my sleep – and you’d love that, wouldn’t you? – but I prefer instead to continue a personal vendetta against the very idea of a newspaper column.

  7 I now understand why a Russian wouldn’t do anything other than praise Putin when quizzed by a stranger with whom he found himself on a long-distance cab journey. He must have wondered who the hell I was.

  The racists won. So are they happy now?

  29 April 2018

  I feel sorry for Theresa May. And that Rudd one, who looks like she is wearing a rubber Halloween mask based on her own face. What if, because you were all going on about how great UKIP were, and how Nigel Farage was only saying what people had been thinking all along, and all these people coming over here, May and Rudd thought you wanted them to be racist too, like you are? And so back in 2013, to please you, they did some racism, and wrote racist stuff on racist vans and drove them around, laughing.1

  And in so doing, May furthered the creation of the Hostile Environment, which sounds like an irradiated wasteland where teenage Amazons get sent to die in The Hunger Games. May probably wasn’t really all that racist herself, and only did the racism because she thought you wanted it, you racists.2

  And now look what’s happened. Last week, Mrs May spilt a massive silver tureen of hot sticky racism right into the laps of diners at the Commonwealth Heads of Government slap-up supper, leaving the poor old Queen to get down on her knees between Andrew Holness’s3 Jamaican knees and sponge up all the racist mess herself: ‘Never mind, Theresa, it’s probably best if I do it. You’ve done enough.’4

  When the royal family, their 1930s Nazi sympathies now walled up in a sealed room at Windsor Castle, are your secret weapon for papering over the racist cracks, you know you’re in trouble. But Prince Philip’s embarrassing colonialist gaffes of old now seem like the charming handmade racist woodcuts of a delightful artisanal bigot, compared with the mechanised Model T Ford production-line racism of the current government. May’s industrialised prejudice, a vast Amazon.com of nastiness, aimed to put the corner-shop, snug-bar UKIP supporter out of business. And suddenly, small-time racists everywhere are nostalgic for the days before racism went mainstream.

  Franz Kafka’s novels of bureaucracy gone mad have given us the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’, without which it would be impossible to describe the experience of being billed as two slightly different addressees at essentially the same address by British Gas; and then, when threatened with the bailiffs for not paying the bill of an addressee who didn’t exist, finding the best way out of the situation was to pretend on the phone to be an old, confused pensioner who had forgotten his own name, while your wife pretends to be his carer, who doesn’t speak English as a first language. There was no 12b Shanley Road. It was ‘Basement flat, 12 Shanley Road’. And I am not eighty-four and senile. My wife is not Latvian.5

  But this was not my most Kafkaesque situation. In Prague last summer, having booked four tickets online to visit the Kafka Museum, and then finding they had been issued with the name Kafka on them instead of Lee, the guide advised us to pretend to be the Kafka family named on the ticket, to save time, and to satirise administrative incompetence as a celebration of dead Kafka himself.6 How we laughed. The children, three and six, could not have enjoyed their tour of the dimly lit literary tomb, with its morbidly fading handwritten letters and projected images of death, more.

  An American family called Kafka arrived soon after us, visiting their distant relatives’ home town, and were denied entry as their tickets bore our name, until the guide came out and advised them to pretend to be us.7 This was undoubtedly the most Kafkaesque situation any of us had ever been in, and we all had a good laugh about it in the café afterwards, before becoming fixated on the absurdity of existence and crawling away on our bellies to die. To die like dogs.8

  In Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque novel The Trial, which no one has ever read, the protagonist, Danny K, makes a complaint about two arresting officers, whose treatment of him – eating his breakfast and trying to steal his clothes – he felt was unfair. The next day, Danny opens a store cupboard at work, to find the officers being flogged for his benefit, but far more violently than he would have hoped. Danny protests, but the flogger explains that K had set wheels in motion.

  Likewise, it now appears you didn’t want May and Rudd to be too racist after all, and now there’s all this unpleasantness – old guys homeless and living in storage units, and old ladies told to pack their bags, and no medical treatment for pensioners who paid in for decades. But that wasn’t what you wanted at all, was it, you racists?

  Deporting and depriving those nice old black people who have been here for ever was wrong. And when they came for that Canadian dinner lady in Wolverhampton, who was actually white, and told her to go home, as life in Britain was about to become ‘increasingly difficult’ for her, that was definitely too much.

  How could someone who had lived in Wolverhampton for forty-seven years, breathing toxic smog, dancing to Slade and eating only faggots and peas,9 be expected to readjust to the land of clean mountain air, the thoughtful roots rock of the Tragically Hip10 and light and fluffy blueberry muffins? It is inhumane.

  No, it wasn’t the dinner lady and the nice black family from the electrical shop who had to go. It was the other foreigners. The bad ones, who scrounge and steal and are lazy. Not the ones that were like people you knew, harmless tropical fish caught in a dragnet sweeping for sharks. It’s the anonymous parade of frightening brown faces on that Vote Leave poster. They’re
the bad ones.

  Tough British cheddar. You stoked this hate volcano, racists. And now it has exploded all over your front garden and melted your Ford Focus.11 Is this what you wanted?

  How come as hominem attacks on women’s appearances are just fine if they come out of the mouth of a lefty darling? You’ve got all of UKIP, Brexit and Windrush to play with Stewart, and one of your openers is to criticise Rudd’s face? Try harder. Girlstuff

  Besides this article being utter bullcrap conflating bureaucratic incompetence with racism I’m disgusted that a fully paid up Social Justice Warrior would be so misogynistic to shame Amber Rudd by mocking her for her looks. You should be ashamed of yourself. Hardboiledchicken

  May I quote Hardboiledchicken back at yourself from an April 11th comment? ‘Hopefully’, you wrote, ‘in a few more years there will be a backlash against this culture of taking offense at everything. The outliers are these entitled snowflakes who see racism and sexism everywhere, if they had there way comedy wouldn’t be funny anymore.’ So are you an entitled snowflake or just a hypocrite? HarryHardy

  ‘Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque novel The Trial, which no one has ever read.’ Excuse me? I have read it. I read it on an unheated train journey back from Morecambe, where the employer I had been prosecuting for underpaying his staff had just got off by proving that they were illegal workers, a situation he had himself ensured by lying on the form he had filled in for their entry to the UK about them all being recruited as chefs then employing them as waiters. Somehow, Kafka’s much vaunted surrealism didn’t quite work for me that day. IMSpardagus

  ‘And so back in 2013, to please you, they did some racism’, ‘lived in Wolverhampton for forty-seven years, breathing toxic smog, dancing to Slade and eating only faggots and peas’, ‘exploded all over your front garden and melted your Ford Focus’. Smug, condescending, middle-class, public schoolboy much? QuietRich