Postcard from Tower Bridge
With every day that passes I find my outlook on life (and I suppose what must be life’s inlook on me) seems to alter. It smoothes and elongates, breathes like a Jane Birkin backing vocal – invigorated but calm. I half expected this, I have to say. I never envisaged my youthful rants against the system and disdain for everything blue would ever see me evolve into a capitalist carpet-biter, a la Ben Elton, but still my vitriol has become a kind of tweed-jacketed constructive criticism. I no longer want to put heads on spikes along Tower Bridge, I am more inclined to suck up a tear and want to draw a sketchy diagram of what everybody is doing wrong. And I’m not even thirty yet; how retiring am I going to be when I hit an age when I actually do wear tweed jackets? Far from chaining myself to trees, I am more likely to plant new ones when nobody is looking. Forever. On and on.
Why would this be? I have done a lot of shouting and pike skewering in the past – I could be burned out. Or perhaps I have just played the white man’s course (maybe even played through on a few holes) and realised that shouting loses you the respect of the people you hate. And god, don’t we all just want to be loved?
Unfortunately, I actually think that as we get older we begin to realise the complexity of the subjects that stir our passions, and more often than not, passion does not allow for as many levels as need to be traversed. Going into politics with a blazing passion is like trying to sample the chocolate stall at the French Market whilst riding on the back of a bull; there are some delights there you are going to want to get involved with in future, but you’re going to get covered in sticky crap from head to toe and maybe even end up on your arse. Passion can die with age. I don’t think that is a bad thing.
When I was younger and first feeling the hairs stand up on the back of my neck at the thought of social injustices, I viewed politics in a simple, charmingly aggressive way. Left: good, Right: bad. That was about it. It had other stages; the far left was what happened when good people got carried away and everything got a little bit too much for them, like the Red Army and Castro. The far Right was what happened when the people on the right finally owned up to their true feelings, shed all social and political etiquette and just squatted down to act like the evil dogs they really are. With a deep political understanding like this, I hear you cry, how did I not become the political editor for the Daily Mail? I must have been out when they called.
Now, however, I understand that being on the Right does not only mean you hate the poor and the foreigner, but you also support small government and the rights of the experts to decide what is best. I have a great deal of regard for this line of thought. I now understand that if you are on the Left you not only genuinely care for the rights of humankind and generally disregard all of the inherently racist barriers that governments of a previous age have built, but you are also quite likely to be in favour of colossal taxes. Not so fond of that bit. So you see, whereas I used to wipe the blood from my hands with Tory rosettes, I would find it difficult to urinate on Thatcher’s charred remains whilst muttering, “bearing in mind this is not for the fact that you were in favour of Local Health Boards deciding what it was best to spend their money on rather than Westminster.” There just aren’t enough black and white areas for me to raise my voice. (Although I suppose you could say there are plenty of black areas, just not all that much white and a hell of a lot of dark, dark grey).
That is not to say that the bastards have won. I just have to spend the next couple of decades sitting back and taking this all in with a level head before deciding just how evil the powers that be are. (Republicans and Thatcherites aside – that doesn’t need an awful lot of thought).