Procrastinating with Perry Iles, author of A Dictionary of Linguistic Absurdities
A
world become one, salads and sun, only a fool would say that.
With those lyrics, Steely Dan closed the
door on the hippie dream in the very early seventies. It was probably a retort
to Altamont and the Manson Family. But at the
same time, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were opening another door and
politely ushering us into the future of rock and roll. None of this California
The future is odd; you can never predict
where it’s going to go, because like most human and earthly laws it’s governed
by pure chance and luck. But the trouble with the future is that it very
rapidly becomes the past, and because of the random nature of chaos a lot of
predictions wind up sounding really stupid. I once read an article from about
20 years ago which said with all confidence that these new-fangled DVD things
would be soon be called “Davids”. It’s obvious why, but somehow the collective
human consciousness didn’t make that linguistic shortcut and it would sound ridiculous
to suddenly start watching pornographic davids, unless you were Victoria
Beckham perhaps. Or Elton John. Another thing predicted with great confidence
was nuclear powered cars. School buses made of glass and powered by sparks and
hydrogen would probably have been safer, but the Ford Motor Company in 1958
invested money, time and effort and came up with the Ford Nucleon, a concept
car with its own onboard nuclear reactor in which you could drive your children
to school extremely carefully. Now I’m no fan of the Toyota Prius or the Nissan
Insipid or whatever those cars are that run on the breath of fluffy bunnies and
fairy-dust, because their construction factories and shipping costs have taken
up vast swathes of rain forest, giving them a carbon footprint the size of
Wales that everyone conveniently ignores and resulting in a very ugly car which
only Sting or Bono would drive. Buying a second-hand diesel Range Rover is a much
greener option, but if humans are arrogant enough to think they can permanently
change the environment of an entire planet they should stand in the middle of
Siberia for a week to gain a proper perspective on how important they are
before trying to predict how hot it will be in 2050 because of Jeremy Clarkson.
But given the choice between a Ford Nucleon and a Toyota Prius I’d probably opt
for the latter, because I like my daughter and I don’t want to see her grow
another head or have her face rot off.
Many people write about the future. Often
they do so to showcase their own views on the present and offer up a dystopia
that will of course happen if nobody listens to their thinly disguised
metaphors. One thing that we can be sure of is that the past will repeat itself
because humans are stupid creatures who refuse to learn very much, so you’re on
pretty safe ground if you want to write a science fiction novel based on
concentration camps in the Cillit Bang Nebula or ethnic cleansing on the moon
or the subjugation of women in the fifth dimension, but if you want to write a
futuristic novel based on your own ideas of what the future might hold, you
have to be a pretty imaginative fantasist.
Which brings me in a circumambulatory
fashion to David Mitchell and Cloud Atlas,
for two reasons. First because it’s a very good book indeed, which describes the
future in a way that doesn’t grab the reader by the scruff of the neck and say
“See! Look what will happen if you don’t listen to my genius-level idealistic
bollocks!”, and secondly because it features a place called Great Chesterford,
where I used to live. Better still, it features the village station, in which I
had some fairly uproarious times involving alcohol, barmaids and occasional
narcotics in the 1980s. You don’t often expect to go to a station in order to
get drunk and/or stoned, and it was of course also possible to catch trains there,
but in the late seventies British Rail, or whoever ran our railway system in
those nationalized days, sold the building at a knockdown price and it was
bought by some people who turned it into a bar and restaurant and became
friends of mine over the course of a few years of incipient alcoholism. I was
married at the time and frankly I wasn’t a very nice fellow in those days, so
let’s just say that it all ended badly, there were tears before bedtime and
some people got hurt and leave it at that because that isn’t what I’m going to
write about. But the thing was that the station building actually straddled the
county line between Essex and Cambridgeshire, and neither county’s police force
wanted jurisdiction over it, so they just left it alone. The result was that it
knew no such thing as closing time and often stayed open until everyone either
passed out or went home. The restaurant was good one, based on Spanish dishes
and the Spanish sense of time which meant that people would call in for
something to eat at midnight and stay until they were too drunk to stand
up.
A friend of mine once popped down there for
a lunchtime drink on Sunday and didn’t get home until Wednesday evening. His
wife wouldn’t let him in so he went and bought a bunch of flowers and fed them
through the letterbox one at a time until she forgave him. It took quite a lot
of flowers. We were younger then, and didn’t care about the future and what it
might bring. I used to go to racecourses with Doug, the owner. We’d take his
dog so the police wouldn’t breathalyse us. It was Doug’s contention that the
police never breathalysed anyone with a dog in the car, because they’d not only
have to arrest the driver, they’d have to wake up the dog handlers and get them
to open the pound to house the dog until the driver was sober enough to go home.
That was evidently too much hassle. So when Doug rather predictably got banned
for a year he employed me as his driver and we would zip around the country in
his Mercedes dressed in suits and car-coats pretending to act like George Cole
and Dennis Waterman off of Minder. In
reality I cashed the family allowance and lost it on the horses and came home uproariously
pissed and the person I was married to at the time was not pleased with me.
But of course, while I was being a
middle-class rebel there were other things going on in the world beyond. The
reason the restaurant specialized in Spanish food was that the cook and part
owner was Spanish. She was fiery, tempestuous and highly strung. Let’s call her
Manuela. She was married to a publisher in the nearest town who was fluent in
Spanish and they had three beautiful daughters who were fluent in both
languages and in Catalan too. The publisher had as his main client the Argentinean
education system, part of the Argentine government, and he and Manuela would
often wine and dine their British representatives in the restaurant. He published
atlases for the Argentineans, and it was obviously a lucrative business. Their
standard of living was high and their beautiful daughters were all in private
education, and he’d bought Manuela half of the business to run with Doug, whose
Mercedes I was driving from one racecourse to another by then.
So, it was the early 1980s and everything
was going along quite nicely until that Thatcher woman decided to shore up her popularity
by killing some South Americans. Doug and I, thundering between Cheltenham and Chepstow racecourses wearing our carcoats,
listening to Dire Straits on the 8-track and drinking from the bottle, thought
this a splendid idea. Manuela, Spanish and married to a Cambridge
It made little difference to us in our
quiet, drunken Essex/Cambridgeshire backwater. The troop ships arrived in
Argentina, everyone thought that Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding was hippie bollocks and we carried on listening to
Dire Straits. Manuela’s husband kept on talking with his Argentinean counterparts
in Buenos Aires Falkland
Islands were referred to as Las
Islas Malvinas, and he kept getting paid by the Argentineans. Then of
course, the Argies started to fight back. On the day HMS Sheffield was blown to
bits by exocets and some bombs we’d sold them once, Manuela came running
through from the kitchen again with her cleaver, laughing and yelling “We keel
you! We seenk your fuckeen sheep! We weening now!” She did a little dance and
ran back into the kitchen, and that night the food was especially tender and
the portions larger than normal. Over the next few days the Argentineans did
lots more damage and Manuela did a lot more shouting and dancing and it looked
as if we might have to retreat. Margaret Thatcher single-handedly held the
nation’s resolve through the crisis and sent in the SAS to fight some teenage
conscripts, with predictable results.
And of course the intelligence services and
the press got to work stirring things up and perpetuating a little more hatred
– an easy task, because we’re people, it’s what we do best. The Sun or the News
of the World or some such scurrilous little amoral redtop got hold of the fact
that Manuela’s husband had a lucrative contract with the Argentine school
system and was therefore of course supporting their ideological struggle to
retain las Islas Malvinas. Communications
were supposed to be cut. “I just phone them up,” he said, “I publish books for
them, they give me money; that’s how capitalism works, go ask the Prime
Minister. Her son probably sold them the weapons they blew our soldiers up with
anyway.” That explanation didn’t work for the paper’s readership. He was a
traitor in our midst and his wife was suddenly Argentinean, and not from Barcelona
I wandered down to the bar for a drink one
day shortly after all this. There were three black Rovers with tinted windows
parked outside. I went to go in and was stopped by someone in a suit. “They’re
shut” he said. I went home again. They were shut all day, but reopened the following
evening. Doug and Manuela and Manuela’s husband had been thoroughly questioned
by MI5 officials. The school atlas contract was no more, the restaurant was
very quiet over the next few weeks. I phoned the bar one day, I can’t remember
why, and heard double-clicks when Doug answered and a funny burring noise after
I’d hung up. They were tapping the phone. So, of course, being almost
permanently drunk I told some other people and we started phoning the bar when
we knew there was no one there so we could leave obscure messages on the
answerphone:
This
is the Station Restaurant and Bar, please leave your message after the tone:
“Grandmother says the butterflies have
landed. I repeat, Grandmother says the butterflies have landed…”
“…the moon will be blue on the fourteenth.
I repeat, blue on the fourteenth…”
…and so on. We stopped in the end. It was
only funny for a short while. Manuela’s husband’s business suffered, the
restaurant’s popularity diminished, Britain won the war, Thatcher got
re-elected, a couple more years ticked by and I began to hallucinate
occasionally and do stuff I couldn’t remember doing. The person I was married
to decided she didn’t want to be married to me any more and I can’t blame her.
I stopped wearing carcoats, going racing or listening to Dire Straits. I
started a diet that consisted mainly of lager and amphetamines and marijuana
and began to think that horse-racing was not really that enjoyable and that Sonic
Youth and the Ramones were much more fun to listen to than Dire Straits. The
drink took Doug. Before the restaurant closed he slept through the winter in
one of the upstairs rooms, woke with frost on his covers from his own breath
and started his days with whisky-and-milk and Marlboro while his Mercedes
rusted outside in the rain. Then the bailiffs called and he went to Suffolk
What of the future? The events I’ve
described here took place thirty years ago. I expect that in thirty years’ time
I’ll be dead too, but only fools or geniuses should predict. I’m glad I have no
window to the future, because I’m scared shitless of the questions I might ask
it about my daughter or my wife and the answers I might want to erase from my
mind afterwards but would instead be forced to live with. Or questions about
the world, which continues to be run by charlatans, thieves and crooks – or at
best those gifted with the powers of self-delusion. I’ll leave such suppositions
to the professional tale-spinners, because the real world has enough power to
frighten without predicting worse things. We try to buttress ourselves against
the future, in the same way we buttress ourselves against death by clinging to
ancient fairytales. But there is no God and we are his prophets, as Cormac
McCarthy once said, and I’ll sign off with another of his quotes…
People
were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow
wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.
