20 Bido Lito! <strong>September</strong> <strong>2011</strong> Rants/Comment The Glass Pasty Battle cry from the Cultural Abyss Post Riots Battle cry from the Cultural Abyss Post Riots “Tough on Gerard Depardieu, tough party, car keys still dangling, always on the causes of Gerard Depardieu” the bridesmaid, never the bride. As I peer out through the cracks of broken Readers! As the nights start to Britain and survey the aftermath my draw in and autumnal showers stain ears are still ringing with the sound our memory of a short lived summer, of be-hooded youths violently texting we found ourselves off stage left and abusing both Blackberrys and in Britain’s orgy of looting. Back up social media. Two things, as regular vocals and tambourine, we were readers will be aware, that are close Linda McCartney in Wings. to my pastry encased heart. As I scribble this inarticulate drivel from my makeshift Toxteth bomb Why Pasty? shelter, hemmed in under a DIY wasp’s We search in vain for answers like nest of fibre glass, broken bottles a LIPA kid for authenticity, fumble for and the burnt purple bin juice of a clichés about a decaying moral fabric, neighbour’s wheelie bin, I can’t help inappropriate policing, cuts, greed, feeling sorry for those other great expenses, phone hacking, political cities that missed out on the action, correctness, twitter, stop and search, Sheffield, Leicester and er .. Preston. national service or even hip-hop Yes, like the fat one at a swinger’s and the bling culture. Forget your Nik Glover high minded notions about mass unemployment, rising inflation and a divided society of have and have nots, look no further than one man, a man who embodies the very spirit of rebellion and revolt that brought this fair isle to its knees:- Gerard Depardieu A history of provocateurs such as De Sade, Celine, Camus and Cantona, its fair to say the French have brought us many great rebels through the ages but step aside mere mortals, enter:- Le Conc. Depardieu’s Aviation Urination Violation The Gallic heartthrob was reprimanded on board a flight from Paris to Dublin this month for peeing into a bottle as the plane was about to take off, hemmed in by stringent seat belt procedures, the star of The Three Musketeers and Bergerac whipped out his Jean Pierre Thomas and relieved himself in front of a gobsmacked cabin crew. However once other disgruntled passengers got a whiff of that garlic like urine they too wanted a piece of the action and an orgy of mindless urination ensued causing major delays and bringing air traffic to a near standstill. That’s how easy it can spread gentle readers! I for one think we should bring back national service for Gerard Depardieu or at least ban him from all forms of social media. When peace is finally restored I will return to my study search through my DVD collection and then proceed to burn my copy of Green Card with anti-ageing heroine Andie McDowell, yes I’ll miss it but lessons need to be learnt. Keep a clean nose and stay in school …. I was going to write something about the recent looting that has broken out across the nation, but it’s all too dispiriting. Instead, I’ll write about a <strong>15</strong>th Century Lantern Cross. If you travel almost as far South and West as you can in England, leaving the motorways behind and striking out towards Land’s End, pass Falmouth and negotiate the mess of lagoons and forest-banded beaches westwards. An island lies off the coast, achievable via a narrow, frequently deluged sea wall. From the mottled summit of St Michael’s Mount, Marazion town stretches out to the North. Tramp your way around the island’s neck and you can watch the Channel shipping lanes to the South. The clutter of buildings which crown the tiny island have been constantly added to and supplanted over a thousand years of development. If you dig away the mediaeval and the Victorian you would read the faintest ley lines of Iron Age settlement. Humans have lived here on and off since the dawn of civilisation. The castle keep and slate-roofed chapel rest at the end of a winding path of jagged flagstones; the halfburied boulders that litter the grounds are given folkish names, ‘The Giant’s Tooth’, ‘Odin’s Finger’. They are useful reminders of the decades around the first millennium when the victory of Christian over pagan was nothing like assured. The lantern cross is from a much later, more confident age of Christendom. Erected in the <strong>15</strong>th century, it stands just over the threshold of the chapel, and is roughly the size of an old post box, with the head of a Victorian London lamppost, and a scene depicted on each of its four faces. Facing West, the Virgin and Child; East, John and Mary at the Crucifixion; South, an Ecclesiast, possibly the mount’s prior; North, Edward the Confessor. What we tend to forget as one generation passes into another is that the things that impacted on us, the tides of prejudice, oppression, great discoveries, technological advance, famous criminal or political events, disasters; each is only preserved by media, and in the minds of those who lived through them. There is no genetic pool of human experience, and the son does not automatically inherit the wisdom of the father. The media image, like theatre, is an imperfect mirror. It does not reflect the moment exactly. Freud called it ‘afterwardsness’, the distortion of a memory in the act of recollection, and it prejudices every belief system and inspires every act of violence outside polar bear attacks. It is the responsibility of everyone older than the London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester looters to show them that the world they live in, of state support for all, healthcare free at the point of service, and relative luxury, is not an opportunitystripped wasteland, nor an endlessly flowering benefactor, but the result of thousands of years of climbing, and can be lost as easily as balance by an ill-timed step. www.bidolito.co.uk
A6 Bold St Fest Front 02.pdf 18/8/11 19:40:35 ’
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