Over the years I’d been to many outdoor
concerts, from Stones in the Park (1967) through Dylan/Clapton,/UB40 at
Blackbushe Airport (1978) to Paul Simon’s
Gracelands revival (2012), not to
mention Subo at Bannockburn (I made that up), but never a festival. So, 4 years
ago I figured I should cross that off my bucket list by taking my youngest to
Latitude, at the bargain price of £500 for 4 days, all in. it would just be
like a very long outdoor concert + camping (i.e serial squalor, of landfill
proportions). I could do that. And so it turned out: Nice crowd, lots of
families, a bit like CND Aldermaston
marches only without the snow and the exercise. OK, so there’s a certain amount
of Guardiana to tolerate: fifty shades of Green, cycling and recycling, salad
sandwiches and tofuburgers, which is a good thing, for other people, but bacon
and sausages are the first items on my camping shopping list. There seemed to
be quite a number of teenage boys who were definitely a work in progress,
yearning for the huge number of teenage girls that are just that much further
ahead on the evolutionary scale. And the girls are all in uniform: hard to
describe exactly, I don’t have the vocabulary, but think denim shorts that are
very short indeed, and some kind of t-shirt or top, and a little trilby or
bowler with a garland of small flowers, garnered from the shop, not gathered
from the hedgerow. It looks like Topshop
meets Indie, or the Boy George production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And then were a few old hippies, some of whom
were in Period Costume (the same clothes they wore in 1967); I thought they’d
disappeared in a smoke of puff around 1975. Their newly-minted offspring are
carbon(free) copies. The girls dance/skip instead of walking, like in infant
school, while the guys concentrate on growing a sparse beard. Sweet though.
The music’s fine, but you can hear it from
everywhere so you might as well do something else at the same time. I particularly
liked First Aid Kit, and Lily Allen but she would have been better if she could
stop herself from giggling and making inane comments between songs. She’s great
but just a bit self-indulgent. Damon Allbran was a waste of space. My 1959 group
was better than him, despite having to share one guitar. Chrissie Hynde was
Chrissie Hynde but I like Chrissie Hynde, so that was OK. HAIM were good but
don’t really ring my bell (they’d probably shoot themselves if they did) and
did far too much posey rock-talk between numbers. Better to do what you do well
than strike rockstar attitudes, or attempt knowing humour.
I
watched a lot of stand-up and thought Trevor Noah and Katherine Ryan were great
and Josh Widdecombe is better live than on TV. I’ve warmed to him now I’ve seen
that he makes me look as tall as Peter Crouch. The other stand-ups call him The
Hobbit, which is wrong on a number of levels, but if such kind, restrained and
sensitive souls as them are moved to cruelty, he must be minute. And so it
transpires. Though head and shoulders above Warwick Davis.
Pleasant surprise: flock of colour-washed
sheep, unless they were wearing sweaters. Anyway, nice subtle Liberty print
colours. Also the simply vast number of tents stretching off to the horizons,
all packed tightly together, looking like an invasion of giant interplanetary
woodlice, having a feeding frenzy. Poor Southwold, just up the road, shortly to
be consumed by creatures like biblical locusts. What have they done to deserve
this? I’m coming to that.
I’m not going to dish the dirt on my
daughter’s main misdemeanour at Latitude. Just see if you can put together the
following elements into a credible story:
23.00 hrs, Damon Allbran gig. Forked
lightning, thunderous thunder, torrential rain, old man soaked to skin and
beyond, somebody misses meeting time, no texts or phone calls, Missing Persons
alerted, two hour search, fairly high levels of anxiety, resolution to keep
child on a long lead in future or some of those play-reins for toddlers. Jury
still out on execution or eviction. (here’s a clue: I was not the Missing
Person).
Wrote this in Southwold, lovely old seaside
town just down the road from Festival. I was there for some R&R after the rigours of Find the Lady the previous night. It’s the place with the palette of
brightly painted beach huts you see on postcards and posters. It has everything you want: a pier, a
lighthouse, putting green, cannons (probably pointed at Brussels) and
immaculately-painted houses, as though there’s a local ordinance requiring
annual repainting or stoning to death, your choice. The beach is pebble, though
it was probably once sand, and has been covered with stone to prevent unseemly
noisy games and other kinds of enjoyment.
But what would stop me from living here is the frantic level of social
life and activity that would just cause burnout in a matter of months. For
example: on the way in I saw signs for for The Model Railway exhibition, the
Suffolk day dog show and the Maize Maze (don’t ask, but surely a huge number of
corn cobs must be involved), and the very intriguing Pea Festival. All this on
the same day. This is particularly concerning when you realise that the average
age of the population is 79.5 and not up to that level of excitement. Maybe
they don’t have individual care-homes, it’s a care-town.
There is a Costa with wi-fi but it doesn’t feel quite right: fibre optic
broadband and Southwold feels like Kim Kardashian trying to do Shakespeare. They
are out of time, they don’t mix. I saw two elderly residents looking in the
window of the Costa, with crooked fingers and synchronised scowls, shocking
themselves pointing out young people doing imaginary drug deals and sexual
things.
Southwold
has no supermarket, retail park, cinema, night club and I forgot to mention, no
black people, brown people, other Asian people, no Polish or Russian people
(other nationalities are not available), no Polish delicatessen, Greek
restaurant or kebab. Southwold has completely missed out on the multicultural
society, perhaps not by accident. I didn’t actually see any burning crosses on
front lawns but then I didn’t venture into the badlands. Southwold is beautiful and boring. It’s bland
UKIPland. Where people reassure themselves
and each other that they share the same fears, of immigrants. Immigrants like
my grandparents, who came for a better life, not benefits, and in return
contributed a doctor, two pharmacists and two teachers to the society. And
immigrants like those dodgy Poles and unreliable West Indians whose fathers laid
down their lives fighting for the Allies in the War, with great distinction.
And what, ironically, was that conflict all about? Wasn’t it something about
racism, and prejudice and preventing the persecution of racial, national,
religious minorities? We were trying to rid Europe of those sores, not spread
them. Of course, most UKIP members are not Nazis. But keep a lookout for the
KuKipKlan. I believe Nick Griffin of the BNP came from here. Surprise.
The killing of Rashan Charles in Hackney, apparently while under police 'restraint' (surely the most ironic term in contemporary usage) is not the first of its kind, nor is it likely to be the last. The following piece from last year has been recycled because of its current relevance.
"Hands Up!
Apparently, the universal signal of surrender, of passivity, and, more
pertinently, of ‘I’m unarmed and even if I were carrying a weapon I couldn’t
reach it with my hands in the air – is no longer operative, no longer a
guarantee of the person’s safety. Tulsa Policemen ignored the fact that Terence Crutcher did this, offered no resistance, or threat, and shot him anyway. Let’s
not mince words, they murdered him in cold blood. Why? Who knows?
Within
institutions whose officers are armed, whether civil or military, there will
always be those who are drawn to the idea of legitimised violence, who are
drawn to the idea of wielding power over the lives or deaths of others, with
the blessing of the State. Some of those may be psychopaths. Others will be
classic authoritarians with a high investment in the status quo and the
maintenance of different groups in their ‘proper’ place in society. Others
still, will be racist bigots, either for reasons of these personality factors
or more often because they have been raised by more or less racist parents in communities
where racism is the norm.
We have
formerly given our police forces the benefit of the doubt: that these officers
are outnumbered by ordinary decent officers, doing public service, often under
great difficulties, with courage and responsibility. The murder of Terence Crutcher and the increasing number of shootings of black people in the US and
the UK, not to mention the highly suspicious deaths in police custody, from
Sean Rigg onwards, will perhaps be some kind of watershed. Video of a passive, unthreatening, unarmed black man with his arms up, being killed for no reason: it’s way
beyond outrageous, it is utterly obscene.
By the same token, while much less serious, the clip of the policeman’s
frenzied attack on the British black guy’s car windscreen when he wouldn’t get
out, shows an officer who has completely lost it. It seems very unlikely that
the victim would still be in one piece if he had emerged from the car into the officer’s red
mist.
It is time
to end the mealy-mouthed apologies and specious rationalisations of Chief
Constables and PRs wheeled in to smooth things over with the public: ‘the
officer thought the man had a gun; thought he constituted a threat’.
Evidence? Evidence of arms, evidence of intent not anxious surmise, so shoot
first just to be on the safe side.
Any one of
these awful incidents may be explained away. But cumulatively they add up to a
picture of policemen on both sides of the Atlantic literally ‘jumping the gun’,
through prejudice, through fear, or simply a knee-jerk, reflex reaction that is
becoming more and more common, the first not the last resort. If you or I do serious wrong, we go to jail.
It is looking as though the police effectively have a special immunity, and it
is only when that privilege is removed and policemen are jailed for these
killings that any notion of justice – and public confidence - will be restored, or the killings stopped.
