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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This tends not to get much of a look-in, either here or generally, so when I spotted this from my Medium library, I thought I would put a few up from there interspersed hopefully with some other stuff if anyone feels the need.
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I Rave, You Rave, She Raved September 3, 2024
It’s Britain, it’s the1980’s. Punk is over, disco is middle aged and glam is an acquired taste. Nobody knew what the hell to do. So somebody set up a sound system in a disused warehouse on a rundown industrial estate and put the word out via the local pirate radio station.
A few dozen people turned up on Saturday night, took ecstasy and bopped till Sunday morning. They did it again the next weekend at a different warehouse when several hundred turned up. Soon these ‘raves’ were everywhere.
Each weekend thousands (not millions, but getting on that way) were bopping till the cows and they went home. A good time was had by all — and it was practically free. Britain was where it was at again. The government (prop: Margaret Hilda Thatcher) did not approve.
“Police commissioner, break up these ‘raves’. They are a menace to civilised society.â€
“Yes, ma’am.â€
“Home Secretary, what are you doing about these radio stations? I want them shut down.â€
“Yes, sir.â€
| The radio stations were already illegal thanks to Tony Benn. What a pair of blue meanies they made. |
The raves continued unabated. People were instructed to be at the A417/B502 roundabout where they would be told where to go. It was even better than before since now there was a Keystone Cops chase before the main feature.
Which was unaffected. “Sorry, Chief Super, but what do you want us to do? If we pull the plug we’ll have a thousand angry people milling around. We’ll have a riot on our hands and there’s only me and Sergeant Hanley here.â€
Mrs Thatcher knew what to do.
She outlawed raves (though you will search in vain for mention of the word in the legislation).
The police knew what to do.
They arrested the organisers after everyone had gone home.
The courts knew what to do.
The organisers went to prison for several years.
The kids didn’t know what to do. The raves were over and, gentle reader, that is still the situation today here in the sceptered isle.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Do you know how the Indian and Chinese takeaway industry got started in Britain? They didn't exist for the simple reason nobody wanted to sit around waiting for their meals to be cooked and then taking them home to eat.
Fish & chips, pie and mash, jellied eels were fine, they were already made and you could eat them on the way home. And have a sit-down meat and two veg when you got there
| Then the Chancellor of the Exchequer slapped VAT on restaurant meals (what the posh ate) but not on takeaways (wot the poor et). |
So every Indian and Chinese restaurant in the land set up a little nook with a notice 'Take away your favourite meal. Please to remain seated, someone will be with you shortly.' (Sorry, I can't do the accent). Nobody much did. The restaurateurs didn't want their custom and treated everyone as a tiresome bother. They only wanted to diddle the Chancellor out of a bit of VAT by exaggerating the scale of it.
The Chancellor got wise soon enough but some canny Indians and Chinese noticed some Brits were prepared to wait. And since they were all working in Indian and Chinese restaurants for slave wages and would never be able to set up on their own, they rented rundown shops with a bit of space in the back and started selling Indian and Chinese takeaways.
The restaurants were bywords for slow service but these new brooms became dab hands in doing it all in minutes so they were soon the dominant force in the trade. I don't know anyone who would prefer to eat expensively surrounded by strangers and flock wallpaper rather than the same thing cheaply surrounded by... well, in my case, the goldfish and the budgie.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Social and political history come together in the sex scandal. At the time it all seems like politics ("He'll have to go") but as the years go by we recognise that they are really benchmarks to decide what is and what is not presently acceptable in a bewilderingly changing world. It's not something you can vote on.
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Hold the front page Apr 5, 2023
Hold the whole damn paper!
I was more than ordinarily in despair when my two information staples, Channel 4 News and Al-Jazeera’s evening bulletin, devoted their entire fifty-minute running times to the arrival of Donald Trump in New York for his arraignment on Stormy Daniels charges.
This normally only happens when a popular British monarch has just died or, if it’s a New York story, when a notable landmark is destroyed by terrorists flying planes into it. To clear the schedules not for a trial, not for a verdict, but for an arraignment was not just bizarre, it was political.
The liberal news media seem to have added a new watchword to the one we already knew about: (1) if it shows the right in a poor light, move it up the news agenda, (2) if it shows Donald Trump in a poor light, throw away the agenda.
I get all this, I accept all this. The liberal news media are way better than anything else on offer so I don’t have much choice. But even so throwing out every principle of news values for this piece of political tomfoolery was a new low.
Everyone is quite aware Trump is not going to jail, everyone understands perfectly well that rehashing it all makes not a ha’pporth of difference to him being adopted in 2024, so what’s it really all about? That I can’t figure but I’ve got a feeling I’m going to have to get used to it. My God, when Stormy takes the stand it’ll push Aliens Have Landed into the “and now for other news†bit before the weather.
What both liberals and conservatives forget is that we social anthropologists are people too. Put on a show for us by all means but, please, keep it real.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Although history is primarily seen through political, economic or sociological lenses, life is not really about those things. It's about what we do in our leisure hours. These get short shrift from historians who like to think they are above such things. Here's an example of the kind of thing they should, in part, be concentrating on.
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Pub Quizzes R Us June 19, 2023
1n 2020 more than half of all UK pubs had a regular quiz
Britain’s chief contribution to the advance of humanity — discounting the nation state, liberal democracy and the industrial revolution — is the pub quiz. That’s four more than France, in case they’re counting. Not that France has pubs, they have ‘bars’ where men (women aren’t allowed) sit silently ruminating on why they have to drink aniseed-flavoured alcohol.
The British avoid spending more time with their family by spending it with their pub quiz team. Often the same thing, British families get along famously when they’re spending more time with each other at the pub. We're a nation of latchkey kids.
Surprisingly for a polymath, I am not myself much good at quizzes. But the British in general are. People for whom I have the utmost intellectual contempt (I’m French like that) turn out to be positive cornucopias about things I am only dimly aware of.
| “Which two elements did Marie Curie discover?†|
Radium, you can figure; Polonium you can guess; these people know it better than she did. Quizzers have to know so much chemistry they could have done it for GCSE if only they had sat the exam round a pub table.
That’s entry level for a place in the average pub team. Unless you’re the ‘soaps man’ (often women) with a Talmudic knowledge of Emmerdale and the love lives of ex-Neighbours. I can’t even remember when I last watched a soap. Or used it according to some people (often women). “Maybe not, sweetheart, but feel that brain.â€
The British are responsible for most of the world’s competitive leisure pursuits of which pub quizzes is but the most recent. Virtually all modern sports were either invented by or codified at British public schools in the nineteenth century.
The Americans are second, a good way behind, being only sub-Britons. That’s why running races are held at peculiar distances like 400, 800 and 1500 metres. It’s the nearest foreigners can get to a quarter, a half or a full mile.
The French came in even further behind but were good at setting up world bodies to organise it all, while we were engrossed in, say, the Oxford and Cambridge boat race on the River Thames.
Imagine! Disgusting little oiks in south London playgrounds tearing lumps out of one another, not for being Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians or Earthmen versus Martians, but on the basis of choosing one set of dreaming spires over another. Dream on.
It was no better when you got older. To me, ‘international’ meant England versus Scotland. The USA, if anything, is even more parochial, leaving it to the International Olympic Committee to sort out un-Americans playing American games. Dream team.
But the Pub Quiz has only reached, say, 1890 in its general impact on the world zeitgeist. Way behind darts and snooker. We haven’t even got organised crime involved yet. It’ll probably be an Olympic sport in 2032 (to be held, I understand, in Kyiv) so mug up on those chemicals. “I don’t mind if I do. Is it Moroccan?â€
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Migration is getting all the headlines and, if thought about in the round, is the prime cause of history. Yet it doesn't feature much in history. It is referred to but is not considered an 'event' in the same way wars, revolutions et al are. Here are some musings on it.
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The New Klondyke October 2, 2023
Once more the toiling masses are on the move
The weird thing about ‘gold rushes’ is that perfectly ordinary people suddenly head out across hundreds, thousands of miles of inhospitable terrain in order to suffer, in all probability
| bitter disappointment when they get there. |
They know the score but they still do it, in their tens, hundreds of thousands. Why? Because they’ve heard there’s a bonanza ready and waiting to be plucked and they might just be a lucky plucker. Gold fever can infect anyone discontented with their present lot and with a modicum of wanderlust.
Why am I telling you this yawnworthy news of yesteryear? It is because tens, hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same thing right now and it is causing a great deal more grief for many more people than gold strikes in out of the way places ever did.
| It’s called the refugee crisis. |
Now you might think you can spot one or two critical differences between North Americans crossing the Rockies in 1849 and Latin Americans crossing the Darien Gap in 2023 but, if so, you would be in danger of making a category error. You might easily have fallen victim to ‘victim culture’, the propensity to see the world through the lens of people for whom you feel sorry. This is the obverse of wearing rose-tinted spectacles and is
| equally destructive of good sense. |
If you want to see what real refugees look like, go to Chad (Sudanese) or Bangladesh (Rohingya) or Poland (Ukrainians). They are there because someone was trying to kill them (o.n.o.). Nobody is trying to kill Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
They may have godawful governments — or in Haiti’s case no government — but they are not places you just gotta get out of, or else. Yes, you might want to get the hell out but you don’t live there and you have more elevated standards. That is what’s causing the problem
| They are dying to exchange their standards for yours. |
If you take the trouble to look, you will see these particular teeming masses are not ‘the poor’ of Venezuela, Haiti or Nicaragua. They seem quite well fed for instance, on the chubby side many of them. They must all have had the wherewithal to pay people smugglers to get them through the tough bits and to keep body and soul alive during the rest of their tortuous journeyings.
Ironically — as California, Alaska, Canada and Australia discovered — they are just the kind of people any self-respecting but underdeveloped neck of the woods would pay to come. Except you may have spotted at least one critical difference between North America c. 1849 and North America c. 2023.
| One welcomed the new arrivals with open arms, the other is not doing so. |
This makes all the difference. The newcomers must present a harrowing account if they want to be let in. Being poor is not sufficient, it makes them economic migrants not refugees. Gold diggers not asylum-seekers. So, if I were you, I would not judge their suitability on the basis of their sob stories. You’ll sob your heart out for every last one of them. Me too, they come from the kind of places I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
But if we do, we’ll both be sobbing until kingdom come because the world has billions of people who would move mountains to exchange their lives for ours. To the point when we will have exchanged ours for theirs. Billions of people will do that to you. So unless you are prepared to discriminate between sob stories
| prepare to share your home with strangers. |
In the absence of trial-by-tears, some exclusionary principle will have to be adopted. It cannot be related to ethnicity, that is one of those aforementioned ‘elevated standards’, so trial-by-origin is out. That doesn’t leave much. It will perforce have to be rough and ready. Broad brush, if you will. Maybe something like this:
* Refuse entry to those with children. Anybody who has hazarded their loved ones’ lives by bringing them along on such a dangerous quest is not the kind of responsible citizen any neighbourhood is looking for.
* Refuse entry to those without children. They should return home and fill in the app. That’s what we do in our neighbourhoods.
* The rest can be welcomed with open arms.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I often wonder why I always end up on the fascistic side of the migration debate since on a personal level I benefit unreservedly from large scale immigration. It is, I hope, the AE-ist in me that resiles on two fronts:
1. The obvious fact that whatever benefits immigrants bring to a country has no effect on the country thoroughly hating them. Sooner or later the country will speak out. And we all know what that means, i.e. we don't know what that will mean.
2. The wilful refusal of liberal decision-makers to address the main issue: race. We do not mind immigrants per se, we mind black people. Whatever colour they are.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Another big gap in the history books is strikes. Occasionally a big set piece will get the full treatment. In Britain, the dockworkers strike of 1889 and the miners coming out in 1982 form the bookends of industrial action-as-politics.
It is surely not the effect of strikes that make them so unhistory-worthy--they can be far more dislocatory than minor wars--but the difficulty of placing them in the overall 'moral message of the past'. Do we sympathise with the workers' plight or are we vexed at the inconvenience caused to the rest of us? Here's an account of one such that made the news, but won't make it into the history books.
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Picketing With The Stars July 22, 2023
The Hollywood strike continues to throw up oddities. And I don’t mean throwing up while watching oddities doing unaccustomed party pieces. Here’s a few I spotted yesterday on the rushes:
1. The news channels were giving a ton of favourable coverage to the little guy on the picket line railing against those ghastly media moguls whooping it up in their Hollywood hideaways. Ya gotta know your audience, am I right or am I right? Except, lest we forget, the news channels are owned by the media moguls. Are they right or are they right?
2. The little guys on the picket line (mostly women I couldn’t help noticing) were complaining about AI and CG and other stuff none of us understand. So everyone kept strictly to the line made famous by hansom cab drivers. “We demand pay rises because new technology is making us obsolete.†Giddy up!
3. The moguls weren’t far behind in the weirdness of their own AI demands. “All we wanna do is to stick 'em in front of a blue screen for half an hour, shoot them from every angle, then they can go home and put their feet up. We’re left with whatever’s in the can to make of it what we will. In perpetuity. Look, if they’ve got gripes, we’ll pay ’em for a full half a day not just the half hour." That’s Hollywood. Too generous by half.
Listen up, moguls. Actors might speak other people’s words but their likenesses are all their own. In perpetuity. Or anyway until the worms of Forest Lawn have acquired the rights. Ya gotta pay to play, big shots, and if you don’t, us worms in the back stalls will get even bigger shots to tan your residuals.
4. For a wrap, we got bags of impassioned liberté, égalité and fraternité. The moguls were getting fifty million a year so the rank and file are sure as hell entitled to a measly few extra bucks in their pay packets. Maybe so — moguls make me vomit too — but their pay is a drop in the ocean and doesn’t mean diddly except to alimony lawyers. On the other hand, paying a few dollars more to the rank and file of the entertainment industry means the rank and file everywhere else are going to have to pay extra to watch, and it all adds up.
That’s socialism, folks!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Two things you will rarely find in history books is (a) local norms of what you can and can't eat and (b) international norms of what you can and can't eat. Here's a story of what happens when they collide.
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“Another skylark, madam?†December 10, 2023
| Ambelopoulia is a controversial dish of grilled, fried, pickled or boiled songbirds Wikipedia |
Controversial because two million migratory songbirds using Cyprus as a stopover between Europe and Africa get slaughtered every year to satisfy the demand.
This is illegal under EU laws but every country is offered an exemption ‘for folk cruelty’ when they apply for membership (we got one for fox-hunting). Cyprus did not apply for an exemption for song-bird hunting — presumably for PR reasons — but the practice was made illegal under domestic legislation.
This has had only a limited effect because hunting and ambelopoulia are national passions in Cyprus, vide this exchange heard on a BBC Radio 4 environmental programme
BBC environmentalist: Does the Cyprus government have any intention of doing anything about the ambelopoulia trade?
Minister for Wildlife: No.
BBC environmentalist: Would this have anything to do with all those trophies of animal heads I can see on the wall behind you?
Minister for Wildlife: We do try but it’s a question of priorities.
Our BBC reporter informed us mournfully that it wasn’t too bad when the Cypriots used branches with glue to trap the birds but nowadays ‘mist nets’ are employed on a lavish scale and it has become a zillion dollar industry. If you want to have a go yourself
* erect a mist net in a likely spot
* disentangle any songbird caught
* bite it in the neck
* throw it in a bucket
* until you have enough for a nice bowl of ambelopoulia.
We weren’t told precisely what happens to the great many non-migratory, non-songbirds that get caught up in the nets but we were assured that, on Cyprus, the peewits and the cuckoos no longer peewit and cuckoo with their old gay abandon.
But the BBC wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a British angle…
Many of the largest mist nets, the ones used year after year, are on British sovereign bases’ land because Cypriot environmentalists find it difficult to get access so they can blow the whistle. The British have problems of their own. “Mist nets are the devil of a job to see, even for trained pilots.†“Look, wing commander, over there. Those men with buckets.â€
Nor can much be done about Turkish Cyprus where they catch songbirds with parallel enthusiasm but only for the export ambelopoulia trade. You try killing a robin using halal methods. It’s not easy.
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