Why can’t we believe we went to the moon?

Good story, bad story

Not having gone to the moon is a great story. It is, sorry, an even better story than having actually gone to the moon. It has conflict, deceit, complex characters with shades of grey and uncertain allegiances. It has paranoia, deceit, and some amazing villains. Also, it feels naughty. It feels oppositional, like some kind of resistance to official narratives. It speaks to our deep unease about the world. It’s got just the right structure of feeling for the early 21st century.

But first of all, it is a cracking story.

1. The Moon Landing: a shit story

   1. A documentary about how we built a rocket and went to space and everyone is ace

   2. We want to go to the moon because we want to become what we are truly capable of and it’s a triumph of the human spirit

   3. We build a spaceship.

   4. Pretty much no-one dies except people no-one has heard of.

   5. We go to the moon.

   6. Everyone is ace.

      We stop going to the moon.

1. The Kubrick Fake: a great story

   1. A dystopian science fiction film and cold war genre piece about the complex intermingling of art, media and political reality, which asks questions about truth, reality, and the power of politicians and the media over reality itself.  The Kubrick Fake is a dark fantasy about a complex global game of cat and mouse, played out through the character of one of our generation’s most mysterious and complex geniuses.

   2. We want to go to the moon.

   3. We want to beat the Russians in a worldwide game of simmering spycraft and mutual hostility

   4. We can’t go to the moon.

   5. We enlist the help of a magnificent Machiavellian genius known for his complex symbolism and secrecy

   6. We film the moon landing, hidden away from view in the deepest California desert, with people who are sworn to secrecy and will take that secret to their graves. 

   7. We pretend we went to the moon. The whole world watches.

   8. People are threatened into secrecy, and among the most famous, heroic, people of the 20th century have to live in secrecy for the rest of their lives, knowing they hold the key to a lie. 

   9. Did they make a sacrifice of truth for their country, or did they give up the truth and their integrity for a global power game?

   10. Kubrick makes reference to this throughout his career, having become a total hermit, and it is the key to unlocking the rest of his cryptic cinematic oeuvre.

   11. The secret is there to be discovered and is only now being revealed.

   12. The whole of reality is fiction, a bit like the Matrix but with beards and the CIA.

Which movie would you want to see? Which story would have you spellbound by a campfire, or an iPad, in the middle of the night? I’ve got a movie-boner for the latter one. Indeed, they sort of made it, it’s called Capricorn One, and it’s brilliant. Even without Stanley Kubrick, it is much, much better than First Man, although that movie starred Ryan Gosling, whom I would watch, um, eat soup, or do his tax return, or peel potatoes, for hours, without complaint, all the time with an uncontrollable urge to eat bananas.

In this battle of the stories, Stanley Kubrick is a neck-snapping 2013 Superman to Neil Armstrong’s cuddly and comic-book coloured 1978. Or even, dare we say, Kubrick is Batman to Armstrong’s Superman? The latter’s tale is so genuinely good, so upstanding, and straightforward, that in these days of determined moral ambiguity, and tortured, conflicted adepts and heroes, it seems just, well, boring. The moon landings conspiracy theory is a new ‘darker’ take on the story, a bit like a recent DC movies take on a friendly old superhero. In fact, I suspect the Moon Landings are Marvel movies, and the Faked Moon Landings are DC. (But much better. )

The stories that stick 

The stories that stick are often the stories that are most ‘compelling’, not necessarily the most factual. They may indeed speak of a ‘deeper’ truth. We only need to look at (cough) a few world religions to see that. They ‘stick’ especially when they enter a climate of wider beliefs. Conspiracy theories are a very natural, if factually misguided, response to what is actually happening in the world.  That’s because people are being duped, they are being misled by much of the media, they are being exploited by politicians who are able to change the whole of reality for their evil and greed-driven gains and the military-industrial complex, or whatever it is now. Just not by someone faking a moon landing. 

Mostly, the realities are far from sexy or interesting - but the stories dramatise them in such a way that they are. They find connections that aren’t there, when the stories themselves are already unbelievable. The finding of Dr David Kelly dead on Harrowdown Hill certainly did look pretty suspicious. But the story of a quiet academic, unused to a public spotlight, whose whole career was based on his professional integrity and trust by the powerful, killing himself with pills and a knife is tragic and much less exciting (we might say, prurient) than him being done in directly by mysterious forces. Not least, it may be rather less uncomfortable for the media if he was done away by ‘mysterious forces’ as opposed to hounded to death by the media and scapegoated by the powerful. Given there was a battle between the media (especially the BBC) and the politicians about who was responsible (see the Hutton Report), it’s no wonder some media sources liked to stoke the more conspiratorial and spy-movie side of the story.

Meanwhile, looking in David Kelly’s eyes, in the back of a car, flash bulbs popping in his tired face, you can easily see a broken man who has dedicated his life to disarmament and peace, who now feels his life may be over and his work undone. Perhaps the tragedy is less sexy then the mystery - but it is no less morally abhorrent.  

Then there is a sexed up dossier drawn from someone’s student thesis designed to take us to war with Iraq and make lots of money for Halliburton. In fact this whole mess had some great characters, and some pretty grotesquely evil and self-serving people involved, who make great villains. (Indeed, my partner used to call Tony Blair, in the latter part of his reign when he was looking rather, ahem, tired, ‘Skeletor’.) But much of the story was essentially someone googling then cut-and-pasting a word document and hitting print for Blair, then Colin Powell. Pretty astounding, but much less spectacular than the conspiracy theory of the CIA piloting planes into the WTC to create a war in Iraq. The evil masterminds often don’t need to make such spectacular interventions - for example, in that case, you could just wait for it to happen. Extremists had already bombed the WTC once. Admittedly, you could hardly make it up. Dick Cheney’s trajectory in Vice made this quite clear: you respond to opportunities, often in a remarkably linear way (mirrored by the structure of the film).

Structures of feeling

To me, conspiracy theories are a strong expression of what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’ - a prevailing shaping factor in, and expression of, lived experience driven by the mood, conditions, ideas, and ideology of the worlds we inhabit. Homologies in stories and shapes represent the ‘structures of feeling’ of the times, we might say - and they do so in the day to day storytelling of the world, as much as in art per se. 

SoF is a famously nebulous concept which sort of ‘feels right’, rather than being something you can nail down. When I was a research student, I poo-pooed it because it seemed so nebulous, and lacked the apparent philosophical rigour of other later critical theories (it was Judith Butler all the way at that stage). Once I had spent some time in the world and realised how nebulous pretty much everything is, I felt much better disposed towards it. There’s a good explanation here: 

‘Structure of feeling refers to the different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history. It appears in the gap between the official discourse of policy and regulations, the popular response to official discourse and its appropriation in literary and other cultural texts. Williams uses the term feeling rather than thought to signal that what is at stake may not yet be articulated in a fully worked-out form, but has rather to be inferred by reading between the lines. If the term is vague it is because it is used to name something that can really only be regarded as a trajectory. It is this later formulation that is most widely known.’ Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory

That means that the stories we produce, and also, the stories we most like to consume, will be those which match to some of those prevailing ‘structures’ and the feelings they produce. Much as they will also shape those structures and feelings. (Note for the Gramscians out there, he does make it clear that there are multiple ‘feelings’ and ‘structures’ at any one time. Just as certain ideologies come into being, and there are counter-ideologies, or slightly different, tangential ones, or entirely resistant ones, there are often multiple structures and feelings we inhabit and create.) 

Note also that certain genres of story, and types, and themes, will have particular affinities with certain structures of feeling - the processual crime TV series for example, the 19th century detective story (see DA Miller’s The Novel and the Police), the twilight-of-the-gods superhero comics of the 90s (eg. The Dark Knight Returns), all of these speak to certain structures of feeling of their times, and may speak precisely against other prevailing structures of feeling of the time. For example, compare the latter with the rah-rah-rah heroism and jingoism of Reagan era media, or yuppie or corporate culture.

Anyway, not only does the faked moon landing story have a genre and narrative structure which has a narrative complexity we associate with the more complex storytelling of the late 20th and early 21st century. (An obsession with moral ambiguity, ‘darkness’ and secrecy, an almost Hollywood structuring of three acts, reversal, characters in conflict, and the rest). It also speaks of a structured and structuring ‘feeling.’ It’s the feeling, perhaps, that the media, business, and politicians, are screwing us blind. This story is about subversion of democracy, the powerlessness of the populace in the face of their unaccountable masters, the flexible and malleable nature of reality in an age of total mediation, and paranoia - in a world where, make no mistake, they really are out to get you.

The Aesthetics of the Moon Landing: Is that it?

It’s well rehearsed by now that the moon landings don’t appear possible because of the vast technological advances we’ve made since. This is almost the opposite of Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic: that shiny, tinfoil, scaffolded box landing on a distant planet is just, well, ridiculous. It turns out that any sufficiently unadvanced technology looks like…. a lie.  

Meanwhile, the images are so iconic and overcirculated that they take on a quality of the unreal. What becomes mythic and legendary becomes somehow de-realised. The images have been seen so many times they have become somehow estranged to us, like saying a word over and over until it no longer seems right. (Try saying moon landing over and over again for a minute.) Or similarly, that strange feeling one gets when watching Marilyn Monroe on screen: it’s a real person, but somehow, it feels uncanny, unconvincing that this was a flesh and blood person, when she has become her image, her mythology, a legend. 

But most of all, I think the problem is this: the moon is a rather simple, bland, uninspiring place that could be quite easily mocked up in a studio. Something that momentous shouldn’t look like a sandpit with blackout curtains behind it and an admittedly beautifully made globe dangling. It’s as if we arrived on the moon and said, ‘Is that it?’ Because there was not even so much as a pre-existing alien race, Nazi stragglers, or an overpriced gift shop.

We are used to momentous stories being spectacular, especially when they are represented to us on film. For all that it may have seemed spectacular at the time - and I must say that I am gobsmacked by the beauty of films like For All Mankind - film of the moon landings could seem, for all their momentousness, remarkably workaday given the constant inflation of our visual expectations. In the same way we laugh now at the uploading of a virus via a USB stick to the alien ship in Independence Day, or the flashing buttons of the original Star Trek - as if that could possibly be considered high technology! - we laugh at the tin-pot tech of the space race. But that judgment doesn’t work in this case. It turns out crappy out of date special effects can actually get you to the moon and back.

As special effects and cinematography  have advanced, we expect the technological to look even more impressive when it achieves the wondrous. When a space ship takes off it does a triple pirouette, the sky explodes, and an alien creature grasps at the horizon. It’s designed to the nth degree. We expect holographic interfaces on our spaceships. We expect fully designed Cameronian 3D worlds of our planets and planetoids.

The moon, meanwhile, looks like a bit like the cat’s litter tray, or even the gravel pit in Surrey that was used for every Doctor Who alien planet for 25 years. The visual momentousness of what is claimed to Man’s greatest achievement doesn’t quite live up to  the moment itself. Indeed, like Neil Armstrong’s stumbling over his words (give the guy a break - he was stepping onto the surface of another planet and probably wondering, not only if he would get back alive, but also, whether the ground would swallow him up…..), the whole thing seems much less amazing than we would have expected. Indeed, it was much less mind-blowing than Kubrick’s 2001 a year before. (Perhaps Stanley was up to something after all: ‘Follow that, NASA.’)

The Aesthetics of the Moon: The Documentary Real

That is one aesthetic problem, but there is another, and in a strange way, it’s almost the opposite. I think it can be both, and indeed, could depend on your audience. When you’re looking at potential discourses of realism, alongside the sense of sheer impact of spectacle, there is also a tradition, over the last 50 years, that documentary realism is accompanied by a gritty, grainy, imperfect aesthetic. Indeed, the moon landings helped to create that.

There was a cinematic/ visual move towards towards hand-held cameras and low quality visuals in social realist and documentary reportage film-making. The use of super-8 and similar non-professional cinematic tools to signify a deeper connection to everyday reality, and to a sense of the emotional, or experienced ‘real’. And then there is the referential adoption in modern-day deliberate degradations of visual media - eg. the found footage genre, and the cultural-memory and degraded aesthetics of hauntological texts). At this stage, to give something a sense of reality, it needs to be degraded, inexpertly filmed, accidental, in the sense that it holds some of the textual ‘excesses’ that produce what Barthes called a ‘reality effect’ in the artefacts of its production, like quivering VHS lines, snowy screens, or badly framed shots. 

Consider this famously shaky film of Bigfoot. I always consider this one of my favourite films, because I imagine Sasquatch is just on his way back from Tesco with his shopping and wondering why that naked monkey is filming him. Anyway, the shakiness and low quality of the film is part of its allure and its slightly uncanny sense of reality. Now consider this stabilised version. Obviously, make your own judgments, but to me, the sense of reality disappears considerably. I’m not sure the Sasquatch looks any less convincing in itself, I think it’s that the reality effect melts away once the artefacts of production disappear. (Confession: nonetheless, I’m a bit of a Bigfoot fan and would like to believe this one; sorry.)

If I told you I had seen and taken an image of Bigfoot like this, you would probably laugh me out of court. It would be the very image, with the clarity that everyone has asked for, to prove Bigfoot’s reality, wouldn’t it? (Or let’s imagine it’s one of someone standing next to such a perfectly rendered creature in the forest.) And yet, would you believe it? We’re often up against competing discourses of the real when it comes to aesthetics.

Looking back at footage of the original moon landing as it was broadcast on TV, I think there was a sense at the time that this was the image of the momentous, and the aesthetic of absolute authenticity - which, alongside on-site reportage from war zones and so on (especially in and after Vietnam), has become standard. This aesthetic has only continued to be a guarantor of authenticity over time. The moon landing broadcast is pretty much the ground-zero of the documentary (and hence, pseudo-documentary) authenticity effect. The original grey and white, low-contrast, flickering image, rock-bottom grade video transmitted over a quarter of a million miles, is the definitive low-fi capture of an uncanny moment.

It’s worth noting that the framing, with exposed space in the right side, and a staircase entering from the left, comes with a cinematic aesthetic of its own - gothic staircases, flitting half-obscured faceless figures, and a mise-en-scene that suggests a hidden viewer - with space for a killer to enter from behind….

Indeed, someone made a found footage movie in 2011 which pretty much relies on this. (It’s called Apollo 18, and it’s nowhere near as good as Capricorn One, sadly.)

Since then, we have seen better and better versions of media from the moon and the landings. Indeed, there is now a spectacular 4k remaster of the whole thing. Unf. So, since the original broadcast, the film has become colour, the images less shaky, and while never reaching the heights of a full Christopher Nolan 4k remaster of 2001 A Space Odyssey, it certainly has less of the sense of the photo-journalistic reality effect than the earliest footage. The photographs, meanwhile, are spellbindingly perfect, their clarity incredible. Certainly we don’t have such a luxury for Bigfoot.

There are definitely two opposing ideas and aesthetics of the real and the unreal, and the authentic and inauthentic here. If we’re feeling distrustful, we can easily say ‘it looks too good to be true’ - the photographs and better parts of the colour film. Or indeed, we can say ‘it looks so fuzzy/ underwhelming, it could be anything’ - the fuzzy live video, or the accidental glares and wavering flags. Or indeed, we could be so used to seeing the pseudo-documentary aesthetic, that this has lost some of its reality effect.

The intertextual world around us gives us cues as to what we should expect aesthetically, but our ideology - and perhaps, our structure of feeling, will affect how we feel about this. If we can’t trust the media, or reality, or ‘them’, then we can read the reality and aesthetics of stories, the texts that produce and reflect them, according to our own responses - and structures of feeling - around 21st century mediatised truth. We’re always balancing out these discourses of authenticity and realism in our responses to texts and images. But we will tend to read them according to what we feel. 

Can we really be over the moon?

So finally, much as a great deal of this comes from a sense of distrust of those in power, I think there is something else. I would hardly be the first person to note that, for some of us, there is a sense of collective cultural disappointment which we can’t quite countenance. I think we can’t believe that, having achieved such a thing, we we would never go back, and that we would not go further.

Space travel, the space age, and idea of ever-increasing frontiers, especially for Americans, was at one point pushed so hard, was made so central to a sense of identity, technology, of achievement. It was, after all, the Final Frontier. So, no wonder that there is a collective sense of disbelief that we could have abandoned what was once considered progress. I think people don’t want to believe that the future happened - but we left it behind.

In my darker moments, I think that too is something of a structure of feeling - based as much on our collective experience, fully articulated or otherwise, of the political, social, and economic climate we now inhabit.

Moon Movies

The absolute tits of moon movies. Try not to gasp.

2001: A Space Odyssey: Suck it, Armstrong.

Ron Howard could make a motorway pile-up you were actually involved in boring. It is a special gift. But this one is less painful than his other ones. But they never get to the moon. Shit, spoiler - sorry.

Massive Nuclear Explosion… Moon torn out of orbit…. Say no more. Worth it for Barbara Bain’s hair alone.

Moon is one of those sci-fi movies that ticks all the spectacle boxes (not least with eye-candy Sam Rockwell), manages to be real science fiction, exciting and moving all at the same time. Duncan Jones’ next film, Source Code, does the same.

Iron Sky is a terrible, terrible film - not even camp, just terrible. But hey, you can’t fault it for a compelling popcorn movie concept. Meanwhile, note here the pseudo-documentary reportage start.

Ryan Gosling is in this film. That is all.

Oh and also, great sixties outfits. Shallow, moi?

My obsession with the real, the authentic, and the fantastical, means I will always have a special place in my heart for such avowedly, marvellously, theatrical and sound-stage-bound productions like this. Plus DYNAMATION! How much cooler is this spaceship, and how much fun do marauding man-size insects look? Give me this film now. This also sticks with the long tradition of HG Wells movies making much better films than they are books.

The men have their pants on. And not a single one of them is Ryan Gosling. Pointless.

Actually, I suppose this is the absolute tits of moon movies.

Coffee and Other Small Things

I need a lot to get me through the door of my workplace, around an hour and 10 minutes away from my home. It is not a particularly terrible workplace, but it is a workplace, and therefore, notwithstanding, terrible. Like all workplaces, it is essentially a cage for grown-up humans, but a cage which, by any zookeeper’s standards, would be considered inhumane, overcrowded, and potentially unsanitary. 

You wouldn’t take 15 (similarly-sized) Sumatran orang-utans, or spectacled bears, and put them at 0.75 metre square desks in a glass fronted office in Hoxton in July, with half a toilet and a water tap four floors down. But, apparently, this is what what we have decided is acceptable for human beings. Admittedly there are Friday donuts, but apart from that and semi-private toilet facilities, we aren’t gaining that much. 

Meanwhile, as I discovered upon the occasion of my last visit to London Zoo, at least the incarcerated monkeys get to rub their genitals. But apparently, even that is off limits now, or so HR told me last week. 

With such an unappetising prospect ahead, something needs to get me out of bed and across London in the morning. So the walk, train, walk to work must be divided into three coffees. Sticking with the zoological analogies, imagine the classic evolutionary diagram of transformation from slithering beast through knuckle dragging gorilla, to spear carrying cave dweller and finally, upright human. That is my daily journey, aided by coffee. Admittedly, most mornings I stop just before I get to the fully human stage, and also, unlike in the diagram, I tend to wear pants. Again, thanks a bunch, HR.

Coffee, and most of all, the ritual of coffee actually gets me out of bed. It is the only thing I can promise myself in the day that is close enough to feel worth it, and not like some distant and unachievable end to my pain at the end of the day. My partner tells me he often finally gets out of bed because he knows that the sooner he gets up and goes to work, the sooner he can go back to sleep. (Hearing that was when I first knew it was true love.) 

So we both leave the house together, usually arguing about where to go on holiday or what to do at the weekend, complaining about the hours that await, and sometimes fantasising about new jobs, or new lives, before realising that all is futile. 

Anyway, my first coffee is in my home neighbourhood, Catford. I like my coffee like I like my men: short, brutal, and with a powerful aroma. Finding the right espresso is important. Fortunately, there are options.

Catford has two Costa coffees, and I dare say they make up around 60% of the local economy not otherwise devoted to fried chicken, kebabs, gambling, or heroin. The most recently opened is a somewhat palatial venue that stretches what feels like fifteen miles down the dual carriageway of the high street. An annex of Eastern Europe, it’s full of attractive young gentlemen in leather jackets, gulping black coffees and smoking cigarettes in huddles at the outside tables; meanwhile, inside, groups of young Polish mothers in down coats look tired, and angrily shove push chairs. 

My original morning coffee fix came from the more intimate Costa on the Broadway. However, I was at an extremely wild New Year’s Eve party with some of the staff a couple of years ago, and some shit, as the young ones say, went down. After smiling awkwardly at each other in the mornings for a few days after, I decided to switch location. 

Coffee #1

This is perhaps why I prefer to go to the greasy spoon for my first double espresso of the morning, for which I have around 7 minutes set aside. It’s run by a handsome, relaxed, but aloof middle-aged Egyptian gentleman. A friendly English woman sorts the orders, knows everyone, and has been known to say things like (to a local drunk who came in asking for another cup of tea) ’It’s lager that’s your problem, love, not tea.’ Every single day she sees us coming, gets the coffees done, lines them up side by side on the counter, and says softly, ‘Allll right guys.’ 

The trauma of the train is next. The chittering Euroteens heading for the language schools, and commuters heading for their first stroke (that’s me), pile on, seethe and jostle. Meanwhile, the same woman every morning manages to find a seat by sheer will and desperation, and will then get out small bottles from her handbag, proceeding to massage perfumed unguents into her long-nailed hands, her eyes focused on the middle distance.  Sometimes there is a small, anxious cocker spaniel who barks in terror if anyone tries to talk to her. She speaks for all of us.

Jostling, seething and shunting

As we pull into Cannon street, we look out over Tower Bridge. There are a few of us who always stand sideways, and look deliberately, longingly, out at the view. I see a few deep breaths, and pauses for reflection. I sometimes suspect that, like me, this is why some of my fellow commuters are still in London. For me, there is always a moment of excitement, born of my 10 year old self, and a sense of pride and delight at my escape from the bleak North: I cannot believe I actually live in London. As we exit the train, and as I queue to leave the platform, I think the same thing, as my 43 year old self, and for different reasons. 

London Bridge. Tower bridge lost in fog. (Charcoal on paper.)

Cannon Street station is, like most London stations, completely inappropriate for the job it was built to do. With its white dirty plastic walls, leading to faux marble, it reminds me of a monumental mausoleum if it were run by a 1980s Local Authority. It is without natural light, apart from a patch of glass so dirty, and so obstructed by wire netting, that the sky looks more like an ill-repaired LED screen. 

Coffee #2

After queuing to get through the gates, it’s time for another double espresso - it has been at least 35 minutes and I need to keep my buzz. There is a tiny booth Caffè Nero at Cannon Street station. Today, as I approach, a young Italian man leaning on the counter blows a torrent of heavy snot into a branded napkin, throws it, clang, in the bin, snorks, and then barks an echoing, wet-chested cough into his bare hand. He looks at me and nods, ‘Yes please,’ and picks up a takeaway cup with his coughing hand. I’m too tired to argue. 

Burrowing through the rivulets and crawlspaces of the City, past the Bank of England, down the drainage channel of Princes Street, up the many-scaffolded shaft of Moorgate, I’m face to neck-nape with hunched heads over mobile devices, half-shuffling, nonetheless at some speed. 

Coffee #3

Crossing the empty space of London Wall,  I’m at coffee number three, the least remarkable, but most needed: this is my last chance to transform myself before I hit the office.  At the Costa next to the tube, a series of hand signals between me and the small, circular-spectacled Indian girl at the coffee machine begin before I enter the shop, and have become a moment of intimate, daily, ritual. She produces a double espresso with exactly the right ratio of water to coffee.

After a series of gyms, after-work bars, and at least eight branches of Pret a Manger, the City yields to Hoxton, and the scowling commuter pedestrians yield to aggressive cyclists with cameras on their heads, no doubt to capture their sense of triumph when they get to scream at a pedestrian. They, for sure, do not yield.

After crossing a truly terrifying contraflow, and stuffing a banana in my face from a Sainsbury’s local (a saving of 35 pence on purchasing one at Costa), I am approaching the office, along a street of tattoo parlours, a bespoke hat shop, 3 chicken shops and a pizzeria, a vegan cycling workshop cafe which specialises in humiliating its customers for their lack of detailed knowledge about derailleurs, and more scaffolding. 

At the office, the glass door always looks somehow sharp, fragile but dangerous. It offers a highly unwelcome chance to see my skull-like face, all hollow sockets, eye bags, and greenish flesh. I take a deep breath, type in the code, and walk through. 

In that moment I am thinking how I hate every single moment, making plans for how I will one day escape. As I walk up the stairs, over the grey carpets, I am begging not to meet anyone, but at least one Millennial will pass me with a bowl and spoon in hand, and greet me with a spray of muesli. I say a sunny hello, wiping my face.  

Coffees past

When I last changed job, I had to leave my coffee guy of 5 years. It was at New Cross, one of the classic interstial stations, with a vast vista across South East London, past the megabeast rubbish burning tower, over one of the largest snarls of rail signalling, and the jumping off point of the Ginger Line. 

The tiny coffee hut there was run by a friendly middle aged Algerian man, whose name I never learned, and a younger, Moroccan man from Fez, whom I originally befriended to stop him short changing me every single day. I didn’t know his name either, but in my head, I called him Fez. We talked about weather, which led to global warming, holiday destinations, and why I should definitely go to Fez. When I went on holiday, he would ask where I had been with some concern (still not Fez). When I was especially unhappy, I would stop off there for a coffee on the way home too, for a knowing smile, more weather, and just to feel more human. I felt genuinely guilty when I changed my route to work for a new job, and still wonder how he and the owner are doing. I remember his prayer mat, his tiny heater which ‘did nothing’ In the winter, and the even tinier fan, which ‘made it worse’ in the summer.

Without my small rituals I couldn’t do life. I need small things that are mine, the same, reliable, good. I like the different people. I like the fact that over the course of years of mornings, you learn about people, build relationships built on hand-signals, knowledge of coffee type, simple transactions, which are nonetheless relationships of preference, and very brief moments of human intimacy. 

I realised recently that I don’t really like the taste of espresso. So I suppose that must not be the point.

Bank of England

I hurry past the Bank of England’s face every morning. As I walk past it today, it’s standing astride two roads, slightly wedge-shaped, and from the front, looks like a seething, lumpen animal squatting on its haunches, about to pounce. It wouldn’t be nimble or quick, but with that kind of heft, it wouldn’t need to be. The columns look like the bars in a muzzle, or perhaps the grille of Hannibal Lecter’s mask.

Meanwhile, behind it, in what’s is anything but an accident of planning, surges the mirror-plated megacock of the latest skyscraper.

In front of me, police escort bikes, cars and vans which have today blocked off the street.

The cars are all sinister black, shining preternaturally. Meanwhile, people transport vans are parked across all the lanes of traffic. They’re guarded by City of London Police in body armour, with machine guns.

They’re shielding a large delegation of Chinese people in identical black suits who are filing into the back of a luxury hotel. 

The City of London police have their own uniforms, with gold and brown trimmings and a strange red checkerboard pattern on the helmet. City of London is of course pretty much a law, and city, and an island to itself, much like the Vatican. However, City Police outfits are less fun than their Vatican counterparts. That said, they are more functional, and the automatic guns would do a quicker job than a pike. They do look similarly ersatz and ridiculous, although it’s hard to top multicoloured bloomers if we’re honest.

As I’m standing there, a lone, elderly black traffic warden approaches each of the people-transport vans and gives them a ticket for parking on double yellow lines. The police watch him impassively.

The Chinese delegation passes him and nods with gratitude, assuming he is doing them a great service. He watches them with a broad grin, and nods back cordially.

Travel, Tourism, and ‘Trendy Colonialism’

I’m in Palermo. I’m looking for somewhere to have a drink. I’ve wandered down back alleys trying to find somewhere quiet and hidden from the main drag. I want it to be full of people, but they have to be ‘real’ people. Yes, it has to be locals; it has to be authentic. When I arrive I want people to assume I’m one of them, to barely notice me. Even better… they might notice me and somehow approve.

I find just the place, and pick a table. A tiny square, candles on the tables, a low hum of conversation, chic people. I’ve arrived. I order a Negroni, to be one with the locals. Never mind the recent trend, I’m a long time Negroni fan. Cut me, and I bleed Campari. I sit for a moment and breathe in the authentic charm.

I look up and see a poster. ‘Tourism = Trendy Colonialism’, it says. ‘Go back where you came from.’

Oh right.

First thought: it’s a bit galling given the number of bloody Italian teenagers slurping their way through McFlurrys in Trafalgar square. Certainly I’ve often wished they weren’t there, but the least you could expect, coming from one of the most touristed places on the planet, is a bit of hospitality in return.

Then I hear English voices braying at the table next to me. And who can deny the sense of horror when you hear a mother-tongued voice in a foreign land. When you realise you are (whisper it) not alone?

Worse, there is an asymmetrical bob haircut, beards, Negronis.

Granted, my days of the asymmetrical bob, or any hair option, are long gone, but here I am with a beard, and, well - the rest. I feel deeply affronted, deeply confronted. Deeply ashamed. And slightly tiddly from the Negroni.

Why do I feel this way, or rather, so many ways?

The Shame of the Tourist

Maybe I should have expected a place that has been invaded and colonised as often as Sicily would be sensitive about such things - or perhaps, conversely, I might have imagined that it would be more relaxed? Just another wave - orange, over-sunned Germans, and pink, freckled Englishers, rather than Saracen hordes.

But it is indeed an alarming feeling to see the place you love overwhelmed, not by migration, but by visitors who frankly are often not considerate guests, or in any way invested in the place. I lived in central historic Edinburgh, then in seaside paradise Brighton, a brief while in tour central on the South Island in New Zealand, and then London. So I know a thing or two about what it feels like to not be able to walk down your street because of eighteen European teenagers walking arm in arm, or get on your commuter train because apparently 8am is the perfect time to take 80 Japanese students into central London. I know what it feels like to watch something real turn into an imitation of itself for tourists, like the authentic London singalong in the favourite pub that slowly became a tourist and hipster hangout. Of course, I was one of the first hipsters, and in all of those places, originally one of the tourists. Trendy colonialism.

Mass tourism does suck. Bruges is getting it. London might. It is a real problem, I am under no illusions. But I’m interested here in the subjective experience of the tourist and traveller - okay, let’s be honest, my experience.

The Planet is not Lonely

The first person in my family to go to university, I arrived in Edinburgh and met my first real middle class people. Bear with me, this is relevant. They were strange and frightening and terribly well scrubbed, and I wanted to be them, not to mention, bonk them. They had a confidence I could never muster.

And they did a thing called ‘travelling’. When I said, ‘Are you going on holiday,’ they would look bemused and say, ‘No, I’m going travelling.’ That sounded very strange. I learned more: there were often beads involved, and a special guide book that was much larger, and more sparsely illustrated, than the Berlitz guide to the Costa Brava I had treasured as a child in my first trip abroad with my Mum and Dad. My grandma went to Blackpool every year (I loved Blackpool!). My (Great) Auntie Sheila and Uncle John were the first package tourists to go to Franco’s Spain, and moved on from there to a wide range of Mediterranean destinations and never looked back - every year waxing lyrical about the grub and their adventures. We weren’t clueless yokels, and we wanted to get around too.

Anyway, a friend at university, on whom I also had a massive crush, had to explain to me the difference between being a tourist and a traveller. I honestly can’t quite remember what is was now, except that it seemed to be further away, longer, and something I couldn’t afford to do. There was a thing called backpacking, and a thing called a ‘gap year’. (Until then, I thought it was called unemployment.)

The special guide book was, of course, called the ‘Lonely Planet’, and indeed, they hoped to go to parts of the planet that were ‘lonely.’ They were there mostly to ‘find themselves’, and did so mostly by finding each other, drinking like fish and fucking like animals, and buying small pieces of multicoloured string to tie around their ankles.

The special book about being lonely, I discovered, was a strange one in many ways - it seemed to want everywhere to be dangerous. It seemed to think that telling thousands of people about hidden places would help meet their overwhelming need to be alone. It wasn’t ‘mass’ tourism though - it was still an elite practice.

Why did they want the planet to be lonely? Perhaps because, for such a necessarily social activity, tourism - or perhaps, even ‘travelling’ - has so often been bound up with the pursuit of the enrichment of the inner-life of the individual. And perhaps, most of all, we want an intimate and personal experience of the geographical other.

The perfect image

Here I am, seeking out the photograph without other people in it - in some ancient attraction, redolent in guidebook images (the Lonely Planet, usually) of the spiritual and solitary. And yet, I am suddenly face to armpit with a thousand sweaty sunblocked suckers like me. I stand with camera at the ready, finger primed to capture the split second when the Sunday magazine view reveals itself. Unspoiled by someone in a cheap sun hat, a strappy summer dress, a tropical print sarong, or a Superdry t-shirt.

Often, I’m checking my photographs before I even leave. I have created a record of my solitary personal experience: the window arched view over gardens without a girl in a Next thong; the glittering altar without a man with a priapic camera lens poking into your holy of holies.

It’s not ‘nobody’, of course. I will make any number of exception ms for a tanned boy on a Vespa in Italy. An elderly nun, stooped with age and holiness, scores maximum points. I have captured a native. That is authentic. It’s my intimate experience. In a bustling, chaotic crowd in Palermo, my images are full of people, but I am going out of my way to ensure I don’t get the strappy dresses and sandals and baseball caps and cargo shorts.

I vividly remember an American girl screaming hysterically in Granada’s Alhambra: ‘PLEASE I just have ONE MORE PICTURE to take. PLEASE Could you just LET ME TAKE IT??’ Everyone was taken aback, but she certainly spoke for the mood of the room, not that most people could understand what she was saying.

And I think this is partly why some decry ‘mass tourism’ - its destructive power is considerable, but so is its potential to deconstruct the artifice of indivduality so central to our modern bourgeois ideas of what ‘authentic’ travel is about. Sometimes what is called ‘mass tourism’ is also just a sign that the cultural vanguard have moved on.

Exotic and authentic

As I said at the beginning, I want to blend in. I can’t. And I probably ‘shouldn’t’. It seems like a sort of bad faith, and an inability to accept my own place in the world. That desire is itself desperately bourgeois - an urge towards authenticity, and a need to show I am as cultured as the place I am visiting. Like the grand tourists, faced with the authentic culture of the exotic, I want to be found a native, a lost son, to return home transformed - and not just by the skin peeling off my nose. How could I become the exotic, not just see it?

I will never be good enough. I will never be ‘wanted’ by the other. I can never be exotic or authentic. Indeed, how can you be both exotic, and at one with the other - that is, domesticated? Once you go genuinely native, it’s no longer exotic. The ‘other’ is no longer ‘other’.

My first adult trip abroad, I went to Madrid. Immediately, all I wanted was to live there, to be one with the place. Not speaking a word of Spanish, to the extent that when I asked for coffee with milk, I had to mime horns and say ‘moo’, this was unlikely to happen. And indeed, it never did.

On one filthy hot, dusty afternoon, when everyone else was having a siesta (surely the greatest invention known to any culture), typically, I was awake and abroad during the hottest part of the day.

Seeking shade, I found an entrance into a cave-like bar, deep under ground, magically, and unusually, aire acondizionado. I followed the staircase into the darkness, to find a large space full of sofas and Spaniards sprawled out like happy perros, dozing in the cool, occasionally stirring to scratch an itch or sip a granita.

I went to the bar, and tried to order in embarrassing Spanish. The waitress seemed deeply hostile, more so even than the average young Spanish woman listening to me murder her language in the name of cultural ‘learning’.

Eventually, as I hit linguistic roadblock after roadblock, she gave a dramatic, hard sigh. In a lofty BBC English accent she said ‘What do you want?’

I ordered a beer, and, delighted to have perhaps found an inroad, perhaps a teacher, an insider, I asked her if she was English.

Yes.

Do you live here?

Yes.

It’s a great place isn’t it?, I gushed, my eyes wide and tail wagging.

She sighed her final ‘Yes’, looked furtively to either side, and disappeared into the kitchen, slamming the door. She wouldn’t come out again, even for the other people wanting drinks.

Making my peace

As a tourist, I carry guilt and shame with me like an extra large wheeled trolley, always aware that I am running over the feet of half the world. I’m part of the disneyfication of cities, as much as I am part of the gentrification of where I live.

So what to do? Deep down I still believe that travel ‘broadens the mind’. Well, it’s broadened my mind anyway.

I stopped believing that for a while, when I was told it wasn’t right to think it by an angry right on student. ‘What does broaden the mind actually mean?’ In this context, I think it means acknowledging, seeking to understand, seeking to connect with, seeking to trace the contours of, cultural and geographical otherness.

‘Geographical otherness’, she said, PAH! Well, I must say I did have that coming.

But understanding different cultures, I was brought up to believe that was admirable. And I do feel a bit cheated that one of many great reversals of the cultural trappings of social mobility - essentially, the middle classes pulling up the cultural drawbridges as soon as possible - came after I had started to travel, and of course, when it become more available to ‘socially mobile’ working class people. The prevailing ideology now was that tourism was destroying the world, and we were exploiters, not explorers.

Even more so, we were forced to ask, why should the world suffer my presence - not to mention my carbon footprint - to expand my own tiny mind, in the name of my own ‘learning’? Strangely, the people asking this were usually well-travelled lifestyle journalists, some self-styled trustafarian student freedom fighters in Che t-shirts who just stayed a bit longer in one place, or academics who zipped between international conferences. And they had usually picked these ideas up from travel on someone else’s dime. Which made it all okay - for them.

And now, the more I see of the world, the politics, and its xenophobic horrors and extremisms, the more I think we need travel. I pine for the international cosmopolitanism and its hopeful promises - which surely are not entirely outweighed by the destructive pressures of globalisation and mass travel?

But how do we decide who deserves to travel; who deserves to ‘broaden the mind’? And indeed, who most desperately needs it?

I’m tired of traveller guilt and bad faith, in the face, indeed, of my own bad faith. I don’t want to stop learning, so I have to make my peace with it. And yes, I’m happy to ‘check my privilege’ - but 50 years ago, the idea of anyone from my background seeing the world was unthinkable.

I have to come clean and be honest with myself, though. I can make all the high minded and ethical arguments I like, but once I have travel, I can’t do anything but cling on to it. It’s not quite middle class entitlement - with a typical streak of bright yellow shame - it’s more a sense of holding on to something that feels so valuable, and, generationally, even politically, hard-won. And valuable. I can’t just go back where I came from, or indeed, let go of my wheely-case.

Watch your feet.

[As if by magic, here’s what the Daily Mash says…..]

My 20 years of contributions to international relations

I do a special line in language blunders. I’m thinking of producing a sort of Greatest Hits of narrowly avoiding getting smacked in the mouth in foreign countries. There are more, but here’s a taster.

1. Enjoying a fondue in a charming left bank cafe á Paris, I asked a sophisticated, aristocratic, bohemian, female cafe owner ‘how did your pussy get so big?’ when commenting on her huge tabby cat. Her look of abject horror suggested she was going to punch me. In that instant, I realised what I had done, and had no alternative but to style it out. After the longest 10 seconds in history, she said with a forced smile ‘Il est garçon’ necked her glass of red wine, turned on her heel and walked away. Her son served us for the rest of the evening.

2. Asking someone where the Wehrmacht was, in Berlin while looking for a Christmas Weinachtsmarkt.

3. My partner asking someone for ‘after-play’ in a gay restaurant in Germany (nachspiele), rather than dessert (nachspiese). This was explained to us as ‘Furspiele - Sex - Nachspiele’. This was much more than a linguistic revelation, as neither of us had heard of ‘after-play’ anyway.

4. That said, their menu proposed an ‘Inhabitant of Hamburg’ as a main course, so frankly we were all in it up to our necks.

In general my problem with language is that I’m always willing to give things a go. I can get a long way with hand gestures, a few bits of vocabulary, and context. But there’s only so far that will take you - i.e. potentially to jail.

What’s Opera, Doc?

So here I am in the Teatro Massimo. The second largest opera house in Europe, and the largest in Italy, I am told repeatedly. 

We catch a guided tour, in English, which turns out to be not quite English, and also mostly Italian. I find myself zoning out when the Italian is spoken to the extent that when the English kicks in again, I don’t notice. 

Two elderly middle class English women in open-toed plastic sandals flip-flop ahead of us, and seem to have the same problem, although they’re making no bones about it. They complain loudly throughout the Italian parts, as if any speech not in English is not really speaking at all, just annoying ambient noise. As they climb the stairs, they start a conversation about the superiority of the Albert Hall. 

A young Asian man is also struggling with language. He complains bitterly that he can’t take photographs, while the guide repeatedly explains that he can if he doesn’t use a flash. He sulks and stomps, all the while watching everyone else take photographs. He even complains to the people taking photographs that he is not allowed to take photographs. He stands in the amphitheatre in which there is a live rehearsal, drinking from a plastic water bottle which he then chooses to crumple up loudly. The singers stop and stare at him and he stares back blankly. He slurps an ice cream throughout the tour and complains repeatedly that there is nowhere to put his ice cream container. Eventually, the guide patiently takes it from him and disappears behind the scenes to dispose of it. I wonder if she also punches a cushion and silently screams obscenities.

Meanwhile an American in an Australian hat, the skin folds of his neck smeared with thick stripes of white sunblock, repeatedly disappears, and is  each time to be found trying a different locked door. He darts with excitement towards it, hand outstretched to handle, pumps it repeatedly, and when foiled, shakes it harder. Then he moves on to the next door. 

At the back stand two stuck up, pole up the ass English homosexuals. Oh wait, that’s us.

We hang back and try not to kill our fellow tourists, trying to blend into the scenery in our English way, by bumbling apologetically and following every rule, silently judging. But silence is not assent. I shoot a stony British stare here and there, making a good show of our national pastime of passive aggression. 

Of course we are secretly jealous of people who try locked doors, eat ice creams, and stomp with sulky abandon. We seethe instead. We grimace and eye roll. We write blogs criticising foreigners.

The guide tells us a story about the curse of the opera house - a ghost who pushes people on the steps. For a moment, her glazed, robotic delivery gives way to a smile that seems almost wistful. I suspect the ghost is that of a tour guide. 

Kill the wabbit

So that’s the wildlife, but what of the scenery? Well, the auditorium is huge, and for me, more redolent of popular cultural associations than anything else. Rather than the opera itself, I just think of the images and texts it inspires. There’s the totemic image: sitting in front of the gigantic opulence of a stage, forced perspective, overtly constructed grandeur and artifice, and the silhouettes of heads in front of it, fronds of hair illuminated by reflected stage light. While there’s Walter Sickert and Toulouse Laurrec, there is most of all The Godfather Part III, The Man Who Knew Too Much, the post war version of The 39 Steps.

But most of all, there is the Rabbit of Seville and What’s Opera Doc. This, my friends, is where they killed the wabbit.

As the saying doesn’t quite go, you can take a pleb to high culture but you can’t make him stop thinking of Bugs Bunny cartoons.