This morning, having got back to Budapest after several weeks away, I decided to ignore unpacking and sorting out and instead to go for a stroll.
After crossing the river, I headed down toward the beautifully restored area called the Várkert or Castle Garden, rescued by the Hungarian government as part of its Hauszmann programme, (which, mysteriously, the opposition parties plan to cancel if they win power, because they regard it as harking back to the Fascist horrors of the second world war; I don’t understand this rationale, given that the buildings and other structures in question date from an earlier century, well before the second or even the first world wars.)
Anyway, as I drew near to the Várkert I spotted a huddle of people with cameras and microphones surrounding a figure at whom they were yelling questions. Curiosity got the better of me and so I joined the crowd. The figure at its centre was speaking French and I soon realised that this was none other than Marion Maréchal, niece of Marine le Pen and now, it seems, involved with Eric Zemmour and the Union des Droites.
Mark Latham, an erratic Australian politician, once said that politics is showbiz for ugly people. What he ought to have added is that, on the rare occasions that a beautiful person wanders into politics, they dazzle even more effectively than they might on the silver screen. This was the secret, I believe, to Barack Obama's meteoric rise to become President of the United States. He'd hardly done anything politically, no one really had a clue what his plan was - if there was one. The great thing about him was that he looked absolutely gorgeous.
In Notes on the Death of Culture Mario Vargas Llosa wrote, "Today images have primacy over ideas." If he is correct - and I think he is - then strategists on the right in politics need to nominate Ms Maréchal as a presidential candidate very swiftly. Who cares what she believes in; after just a glance, a majority of the male population of France will surely be keen to put their tick in her box (on the voting paper, I mean, of course, you smutty minded person):
If you encounter the word "privilege" used as a verb in a piece of writing, stop reading immediately. When "privilege" is used as a verb, it is a clear indication that you are dealing with a narcissist whose mind is full of clap trap, (most of it probably derived - although the author may be too dim to realise the fact themselves - from Marxism).
It is a waste of time to persist in such circumstances.
Here is an example of the kind of thing I mean, taken from the letters page of a recent issue of the New Yorker:
I went to the theatre again, (!!!!). I was staying in Kent and my younger daughter and I took a train from Tunbridge Wells up to London. The play I went to see was called Bach and Sons and if you want to know what I thought about it, I wrote about it here.
On the train home, I witnessed a slice of the other kind of theatre that I missed during the months of lockdown - the theatre of other people.
On the seat opposite me was a worn woman in her mid thirties with blonde hair growing out at the roots. She spent the whole journey on her telephone. Her voice was what used to be described as Sloane, and, after explaining that her work has said that from October she has to come in two days a week and so she has made sure to arrange things so that hers are the days when they often go straight to drinks and don't do any work (!?!), she settled down to listening to the person at the other end of the line, who I gathered was called Laura.
I made this deduction, because the woman opposite me spent the rest of the journey saying the same thing, over and over and over and over again, and it was this:
"Oh my god, Laura."
"Oh my god, Laura, oh my god, Laura, oh my god, Laura, oh my god."
It was quite soothing after a bit.
It was the bass line, or the counterpoint, to the bellowing - I think it’s called banter now? - of a group of young men across the aisle.
In my childhood, the majority of male English youth had somehow been made to understand that in packs they can be frightening to women, that their loud boasting can sound alarmingly like aggressive shouting, that guffawing about degrading drunken episodes and tales about having been, (almost constantly for the last few days apparently), on the turps, as they described it, are unpleasant to hear and should not be proudly broadcast at top volume in a train carriage full of strangers, especially female strangers.
But we are all equal now, thank you, feminism. Women don’t need to be respected, nor their sensibilities spared.
“There's nothing worse than when you get to a restaurant and you're so pissed you're not hungry,” boomed one, adding with a mixture of romance and chivalry, (hem hem), “It was worth it later though, because she was, like, gagging for it.”
Fnarr, fnarr.
He isn’t going to call her again, by the way, because she’s well-annoying.
Then one of them began to tell a story of something that had happened that had made him angry - and clearly was still making him angry. It concerned a woman who had had the audacity to suggest that he and his mate Mikey ought not to be playing on the equipment in a children's playground.
The man telling this story was tall. He had an air of arrogant, barely controlled irritability. In other words, he was like many, many young English men just now.
I was impressed at the bravery of the woman in his story. I am very scared of violence and scuttle away from the merest hint of it; I am much too cowardly to confront a potentially violent man.
The furious scorn he expressed as he told his story alarmed me. This young man was still in a state of affronted rage days after the incident. This is how his story went:
'When we were in Cardiff, there was this playground, and there was a climbing frame in it that wasn't that high. We, like, started to climb it, and I said to Mikey, "I'll race you to the top".
And then there's this woman that's there with a kid, and she goes, "You do realise this is for kids", and Mikie goes, like, "We're big kids anyway, so let it be", and she starts getting vexed and says, "No, I won't let it be. You could hurt my son", and we're, like, "What?" and she's, like, "My son - you could fall on him and then what?", and we're, like, "Yeah but we didn't", and she was, like, "Yeah, but you shouldn't go on it, because it's for kids", and we were, like, "Where does it say that it's forbidden for adults to go on it?", and we're literally, like, "What - like, what are you on about?", and she starts screaming at us, and I burst out laughing.
I'm literally, like, crying with laughter, and I literally went, like, "Get your nose out of our business," and her son's standing there, like, "Mum, stop, please, stop." I mean, realistically, like, teach your kids not to go under someone who's climbing, and then they won't get hurt. She just started to go off, when all she had to say to her son was, "Don't go under anyone climbing, and then you won't get hurt."'
This still makes me seethe, days afterwards. The entitlement, the refusal to admit he was in the wrong, the lack of respect, the rudeness, the insistence that everything should be arranged exactly as this man wanted it, the lack of courtesy or empathy or thoughtfulness or kindness.
What are we coming to?
A little further away sat two young men and a stunningly beautiful, unsmiling girl whose face was made up so exquisitely that she looked like a Kabuki actor or a china doll. They all remained silent throughout the journey, except when the girl made an effort and, raising her very heavily lashed eyelids, asked, "Shall we order some Nando's when we get back?" When she received no response, she tried again: "What about a little dinner?" she suggested, "It would be nice to do a little dinner. Shall we go out for a little dinner?" There was no reply.
Anomie seems to be spreading as fast as any virus in our decadent, post-Christian world, and there seems to be no obvious vaccine, since Christian virtues seem to be despised by the majority of young people.
Still, I suppose we haven't yet reached the depths that this video seems to suggest are being plumbed in Philadelphia. When I first looked at the clip, I thought I was watching some kind of theatrical performance, and I'm still uncertain if it's real. I hope it isn't.
Is there anything more I need to say? Is this not a miracle after so many months in which theatres were out-of-bounds? Even I, eschewer of noisy punctuation, believe an exclamation mark is justified.
And how was it? It was grand, as they say in Ireland, where I have spent quite a bit of time lately (more of that anon). I admit that there is one good thing about having your rights taken away from you, being curtailed in your activities by government fiat - and that is getting them back.
My word, you value things, once you've missed them for a bit.
The play was Oleanna by David Mamet. The production I saw started its life in Bath and is now at the Arts Theatre in London. If you want to know more about it, I've written a post about it here. If you just want to know whether it's any good and worth going to, the two actors are magificent, the director has approached the text with great intelligence; in other words, I believe it is.
Partly to see our children, partly just because we feel we must stay in perpetual movement while our masters allow us - (who knows what the pesky, power grabbing halfwits will come up with in the way of rights-depriving rules by autumn [for me at least, a major consequence of this whole two years of panic/pandemic is an urgent awareness that at any time and at extremely short notice we may find that our movements are arbitrarily restricted and that therefore hay must be made while the sun shines* {footnote no.1}]) - we have been travelling a lot lately. I've already gushedabout the excitement of our first burst of travel since travel was fairly thoroughly stopped for unimportant people some two years ago.
What I forgot to say was how interesting our travels have been, how seeing the world gets the mind bouncing with questions and ideas.
For instance, in Rovinj, I kept looking at the architecture and wondering how, given that it was individually unremarkable, it managed collectively to be lovely. Here is the town seen from the water:
No single building here is "making a statement". None seeks to stand out from its neighbours. No gigantic ego has gone to the drawing board and thought to themselves, "I'm going to make people notice me by building something that draws attention to itself, even if only because it jars visually with everything around it and its scale makes people feel insignificant. I'm going to build it from mass produced slabs that allow no other individual to express their craftsmanship, using metals that scar the earth in the process of their extraction and plastics that pollute the air in their manufacture* {footnote no. 2}.
The same was true of much of Udine, an Italian city we stopped in before reaching Rovinj - and where it wasn't true there, I blame the fact that the poor sods had an earthquake in the 1970s, in the aftermath of which no doubt they had egotistical architects queuing up round the block with their cement trucks and container loads of steel-framed mirrored glass facading.
It is also true of the old centres of many, many European towns where so often there is no one building that is especially striking but the collective result is harmonious and very pleasant to see.
Of course, some people would say that Rovinj has been ruined by tourism, but I doubt it could have been protected from the ravages of modern architects had it not been so hugely attractive in its untouched form for tourists. Furthermore, having been to the town almost thirty years ago, when there was no tourism to speak of, I have to admit that tourism has actually, somehow, made it more attractive. Indeed, when we got home and pulled out the photograph album and looked at the pictures we had taken of Rovinj on our first visit all those years ago, we saw that we had actually been in many of the same streets and squares as we were this time, but although the infrastructure was the same, they were drab, lacking in the liveliness that people bring with them.
Although wherever you look on the waterfront now they are flogging all sorts of tawdry rubbish, I have to admit it all feels much more fun. Mind you, according to a waiter, the influx of people only lasts for a few months, during which, according to him, the town's population swells from 8,000 to 80,000 (apparently this year they haven't yet reached those levels, which surprised us as it seemed quite crowded - "Yes", he explained, "but in a normal year, the walk beside the water isn't just packed; it's so packed that there are actually people falling into the sea." )
And now we come to romanticism - mine, idiotic, what a surprise. In the winter months, the waiter told us, the place is empty, deserted, nothing is open, no one does anything. "You're all inside doing on-line university courses?" I asked, imagining the residents of Rovinj becoming experts on Aristotle and the Wars of the Roses. "No", he said, "Netflix. Just Netflix, Netflix, Netflix."
I mentioned despair too, didn't I? Well that was in Udine. On our last night, we wandered into a sweet restaurant in a side street, with a large garden out the back. There were quite a lot of people already there enjoying themselves - most fascinating among them a group of eight beautifully groomed young women who were celebrating a birthday. They had persuaded three young men to join them, but those young men hadn't bothered to make half the effort the girls had in dressing themselves and trying to look splendid, nor did they find it necessary to engage in conversation with anyone but their fellow males. While the girls pouted and posed, draping around each other lovingly as they snapped selfies that might have been suitable had they been setting up an online brothel and needing to tout themselves, the men stood about looking sheepish.
Anyway, the fellow who ran the restaurant was brilliant at his job and the food was delicious and the wine good and not ferociously marked up. At the end of the evening, we chatted with him, asking how long he thought the compulsory masks indoors rule would last in Italy, and how things were going. His face crumpled as he spoke of how hard things had been and how hard they were continuing to be. The tables in that garden had seemed remarkably far apart but of course we hadn't realised that they were compulsorily two and a half metres from each other, which meant a third of his custom had vanished - and of course there had been no custom at all for months and months and months. When he talked of the day's news, which had included a warning from the government of possible reimposition of lockdown in September or October, it was clear that for him this would mean total despair.
When I first read about the virus, when a doctor friend started sending me messages warning me that something really bad was coming, I remember staying up late reading reports that showed frightening scenes in China and later in hospitals in Northern Italy. I now think of myself back then as extremely naive. I genuinely believed that we were all in imminent danger of dropping like flies in the street and that the world had to be urgently shut down. I regret being so foolish. Perhaps there was back then an argument for a brief period of curtailment of some activity until the risk the virus posed was understood. But very rapidly it became clear that the risk, while it definitely existed, did not justify the level of reaction that governments imposed.
Too bad. At a time when everywhere in the West we have the most unimpressive second-rate people in living memory serving as our representatives, those representatives decided that they would take over our lives. They decided that we could not be trusted. Instead of giving us responsibility, providing us with information and trusting each of us to assess our own risk and the risk we posed to others so that we could make up our own minds about how to behave decently, they began imposing rules and then, having discovered how much they enjoyed the exercise of power, they added more and then yet more {*Footnote no. 3}. In the blink of an eye, they began whisking away rights that I never imagined for an instant they would dream of tampering with{*Footnote no. 4}. Without asking, they sacrificed so much, in an attempt to stop an illness that has a horrible outcome in a very small percentage of people. They ignored other physical illnesses and quite unnecessarily deprived the young of education and everyone of social interaction - as if life is worth living when we are isolated beings. Furthermore, if Laura Dodsworth is to be believed, they used some undemocratic psychological methods to keep the bulk of the populace so frightened that they did not object.
I hang my head in shame at my own frightened stupidity at the start. I now think that in our response to this new form of coronavirus we have made a mistake that will loom as large in our history as the decision to wreck Europe by launching the 1914-18 war. It was sparked by fear and I now recognise that, although in a very different context, Roosevelt was absolutely right in his inauguration speech when he said: "Let me assert my firm belief that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyses."
It is too late, the damage has been done now - but for the sake of everyone, including that nice restaurant owner in Udine and all those in a similar position, barely surviving mentally or economically, we must not allow any more lockdowns or other extreme and, (the data strongly indicates), unsuccessful measures. We have to take back freedom, even if it means mass civil disobedience. We have exceptionally poor leaders in almost every country in the western world, and we are at a really dangerous moment. None of us wants to be a robot polisher.
Footnote no. 1 - As I am writing this in Ireland where the sun appears to scarcely ever shine, (which suits me, to be honest), this is on every level a metaphorical remark.
Footnote no. 2 - Incidentally, which fat bastard had the bright idea of going round Ireland persuading people to remove their old window frames and replace them not with nice new wooden ones precisely like those originally there but with plastic coated metal ones that probably are made in China and, yes, are so practical because they last forever, but a.) deprive skilled people of the pleasure of making nice windows; b.) blight the landscape - surely beauty counts for something; and c.) make buildings look as if someone has gone around and poked out their eyes.
Footnote no. 3 - I will still never understand how it could have been justifiable in Britain to allow care home workers to go into care homes to work provided they were tested three times a week but the same regular testing regime was not extended to any care home resident's spouse or closest relative or friend; if it was okay for the workers to come in under that testing regime, how could it possibly not have been just as okay for a resident's visitor to submit to that testing regime and also come in? And don't get me started on funerals. Or women giving birth alone.
Footnote no. 4 - In the United Kingdom, I suspect that also at play was an impulse from somewhere or someone (or possibly - surely not - quite a number of people?) to make several quid - Exhibit A: PCR test costs.
My husband decided to look at the concert of three Mozart symphonies that was played in the Albert Hall this week, and broadcast by the BBC. The performance was splendid but the British nation's broadcaster decided that at the interval it was time for their daily "hot topic" - in this case, 'is there such a thing as "genius", that is: are there really people who are superlatively brilliant in their areas of activity, leaving most of us in the also-ran category, or is "genius" just a white male construct?'
Leaving aside the ridiculous claim made by one of the participants in the discussion that Beethoven wasn't as much of a genius as Mozart, (at least she acknowledged that genius is a thing), the BBC had the temerity to argue that David Bowie and Prince were generally considered to be geniuses - (if, of course, one accepts the term at all) - on a par with Mozart. The presenter also appeared to despise the idea that there might be such a thing as "the divine" from which inspiration for works of genius may emanate. I would suggest to him that our inability to create works of beauty since the majority decided to ditch a belief in the divine rather argues that there might be something up there after all.
The whole "hot topic" event made me feel, yet again, intensely disappointed by the government broadcaster - and also enraged by them. The discussion was confected nonsense; the first and second parts of the concert clearly demonstrated that genius exists and that Mozart was a genius. If anyone else is capable of creating music that is so beautiful that it gives the impression of having arrived from a better place, they are unarguably a genius. In other words, if anyone reading this can match Mozart's achievement, I unhesitatingly award them the same title. Otherwise, no, forget it - equality of achievement is not something we can engineer, any more than equality of looks.
No doubt someone will decide it is against copyright to have this video up here, in which case - or anyway, once I have enough time, I will transcribe the bilge that is spoken in the course of this vapid insult to viewers.
