Neighbours from hell: the soap opera

After a hard day’s work, it can be quite relaxing to slump on the sofa and watch a soap, particularly if it’s written with wit and acted with talent.

It’s quite another matter to be caught up living in one starring our neighbour.

I’ll call her Hailey. That’s because I think it’s her name, though I’m not sure: she’s never felt it necessary to introduce herself though we’ve lived side by side for the best part of a year. Sometimes the worst part.

I admire people with a lively taste for music, particularly if that includes performance. Sadly, it’s less easy if the performance mode of choice is karaoke and the choice is made some time after midnight. And the performance only stops when the serious partying starts. And the partying stops at 10:00.

I don’t know what Hailey and her friends are on, but it must be potent stuff. Not even when I was her age could I have kept going that long unaided, and at that intensity. Impressive.

She doesn’t just sing. She and her friends enjoy lively conversation too. The subject matter, and we can tell because they’re not bashfully discreet about the tones in which they discuss this engrossing theme, seems to be procreation. At least, they do seem to keep telling each other to go forth and multiply. They also like to emphasise their statements, and it’s wonderful to need only one word to do that. That's what I call economy. So whether they’re declaring someone else’s statement to be true (occasionally), offensive (rather more often) or rubbish (the most common case), it’s always the ‘fucking’ variety of that attribute.

Fortunately, the overnight partying doesn’t happen that often – once a week or fortnight – but when it does, it’s certainly memorable. Particularly when we’re working the following day.

Hailey lives with her five-year old daughter. Quite often, a boyfriend (not the father of the daughter) comes round and they tell each other home truths – emphatically – and occasionally fling crockery at each other. At other times, the father of the daughter (not a boyfriend) comes round to take her out or drop her back. With both men, she talks a lot about fucking, to the point that I wish she’d get on and do some, if only because it might tire her out and shut her up.

We’ve met the little girl a few times too. She likes to stick her head over the back fence and chat with us if we’re in the garden. Why, she even apologised to us for her mother’s noisiness, which made her seem quite charming. Then, however, we noticed her throwing stones at a neighbour’s greenhouse, and reaching with a stick into our garden to beat cabbages or lettuces, not a treatment calculated to help them flourish. It occurred to me that I was witnessing a curious form of inheritance, entirely independent of genetics: an essentially pleasant girl rapidly turning into a pest as exasperating as her mother.

Not hard to understand why. Her father brought her home yesterday. They were chatting away happily until Hailey emerged.

’Have you got some money for my mother?’ she asked.

’Oh, shit, I forgot.’

I could hear this all through the open window through which I was enjoying our glorious weather. Or had been.

’Well, are you going to have the money in the morning?’

I wasn’t really listening, but it was as though the conversation was happening in my living room. I concluded that her ex-boyfriend still had some kind of debt to her mother and was having trouble paying it off.

’Sorry, I can’t, I won’t have the time.’

And that’s when we got the explosion. No build up, no increasingly intense warning signs, just a sudden vitriolic outburst.

’Oh, for fuck’s sake, you’re fucking hopeless,’ Hailey screamed and there was a yelp from the little girl, ‘you’ve no fucking idea, you’re a useless fuck.’

He still wasn’t saying anything, even though the last bit was obviously wrong: the little girl was there to prove it.

’Just fuck off, will you just fuck off, I don’t want you anywhere near the fucking place any more.’

There was another little protest from the girl, ignored by the mother, but then one from the father, which wasn’t.

’Just fucking shutup. Just fucking fuck off. And never fucking come back.’

And there I heard a most odd noise, like the sound of an open hand on flesh. Was she slapping him round the face? I’ll never know because, though I moved over to the window, too curious about the living soap opera to ignore it any longer, she was already moving back to the house, little girl clutched by the hand, while he had run several steps down the street.

She hadn’t finished admonishing him though.

’Just fucking clear off. You make all this fucking noise in front of the neighbours. Outside my fucking house.’

That did seem unfair. He’d barely said a word. But he made up for it once she’d closed the door and he was relatively safe from further attack. He addressed a few choice apothegms at the house.

’You’ve always been a fucking bitch,’ he wittily informed her. Though he may have said ‘witch’. I hope so: we have a female dog who is infinitely superior to Hailey.

A fascinating experience all round. But the most fascinating aspect of all is that this is Luton, the home town of the anti-immigrant English Defence League. I’ve heard their supporters many times, and funnily enough they express themselves with exactly the same mastery of language, charm in expression and delicacy in accent as our neighbour and her entourage.

The EDL in Luton.
They expect us to prefer them as neighbours?

So here’s my question to them: what makes you think people like you are preferable to a few quietly spoken, courteous and hardworking arrivals from the Indian subcontinent or Eastern Europe? 

What on earth could give you that idea?

Persecuting the Irish: icon of our times

Noble, that’s the word for the Colegio de los Irlandeses, now part of the prestigious university of Alcalà de Henares near Madrid. 

Quiet, understated but self-assured, it is a fitting tribute to the offer of Spain to the persecuted Catholics of Ireland, to a refuge where they could safely study within the tenets of their faith.

Colegio de los Irlandeses, Alcalà de Henares

Makes you wonder what the ancestors of today’s Brits were up to, oppressing Irish Catholics. What good did it do them? Today Ireland is still Catholic and, what’s more, it’s independent of Britain. All that pain and suffering Britain imposed, and it gave neither nation anything benefit at all. You’d think we might learn.

The truth, of course, is that some people did very well out of the arrangement. A tiny number of people, but they were powerful. The holders of great fortunes in Ireland, particularly in the form of land, were doing just fine and saw no reason to loosen the reins. On the contrary, they felt they were absolutely entitled to see the army doing whatever it took to put down anyone uppity enough to question their right to enjoy what they, and their ancestors, had always enjoyed.

Meanwhile, in Spain the founding of the College had nothing to with preserving liberty from persecution. Far from it. Spain itself was more than happy to do its full share of persecution. Protestants: burn them. Moors, Jews: drive them out. And if they don’t go: burn them. Just like the Mayflower pilgrims, Spanish Catholics weren’t out to obtain religious freedom, just the freedom of their own religion to persecute anyone who belonged to a different one.

And in just the same way, a handful of people did very well out of the arrangement: the owners of the great fortunes, in Spain, Latin America or anywhere else controlled by force of Spanish arms, were convinced that this was right and proper and the preservation of their way of life was a divinely ordained duty.

That’s what makes the College in Alcalà so eloquent a monument. So eloquent today, I mean.

When a couple of crazed, misfit Muslims, who can’t distinguish between an act of political courage and a simple piece of barbarism, hack to pieces a British soldier in Woolwich they are perpetuating the attitudes that drove Britain to impose its will by force on the Irish. Or Spanish Catholics to force the conversion of Spanish Jews. Or Pakistani Sunnis to murder Pakistani Shiites. Or orthodox Jews to deny the right of Jewish women to pray like their male counterparts at the Wailing Wall.

What they are perpetuating is the mindset of anyone who is so sure of being right that it justifies inflicting suffering or even death on those who disagree.

That goes just as much for those, in the English Defence League and outside, who’ve reacted to the Woolwich murders with violence against Muslims and their institutions. Less obviously, it also applies to organisations that don’t themselves promote violence, like the United Kingdom Independence Party. They may not actively condone persecution, but by their attacks on immigration, they sustain the belief that a nation is better for being homogeneous.

Homogeneity was what all those persecuting powers, driving out Muslims, Jews, Catholics or Protestants were trying to do, too. Looking back on their attempts in the past, as I did when I saw the Colegio de los Irlandeses, I had to ask myself ‘why did they bother?’

Though, seeing how many people seem to be rallying to the banner of intolerance again today, perhaps the question ought to be, ‘why do they still bother now?’

Terror and the words we speak

Often the responses to a terror attack is even more notable than the attack itself. As are the words in which they are expressed.

‘I spoke to him for more than five minutes,’ said a woman who approached one of the killers in yesterday’s fatal, meat-cleaver attack on a soldier in Woolwich, South London. ‘I asked him why he had done what he had done.’

Quietly confronting an armed killer

The man she was talking to was still carrying the cleaver and he was bespattered with his victim’s blood. Despite that she showed exemplary courage, as well as calm good sense in asking the one question which really matters and to which we shall never get an adequate answer.

The Prime Minister has also spoken out, repeatedly, and each time has reiterated how ‘shocking’ he finds the event. Well, I think most of us agree. But does it need to be said so often? The aim of terrorists is to terrorise us. Perhaps fewer references to being shocked might give them less of a sense of success.

Much more appealing were the words of a Sikh from the neighbourhood interviewed on the radio this morning. He had been upset by the reaction of the extreme right English Defence League, who within hours were calling demonstrations to demand the return of their streets to them: the attackers were Muslims and therefore from a culture the EDL perceives as alien and to be driven out. The Sikh underlined the fact that though he was Indian, he wasn’t Muslim, and he’d been brought up on those streets – they were his just as much as they were the EDL’s.

What other words did the EDL come up with? Its leader proclaimed ‘They’re chopping our soldiers’ heads off. This is Islam. That’s what we’ve seen today.’

As it happens, no-one had his head chopped off, though apparently the attackers did try to decapitate their victim. But that was one victim. Notice how one soldier has become ‘soldiers’? So a one-off gruesome event is converted, by simple pluralisation, into part of a series of attacks. And then instead of being attributed to two profoundly misled Muslims, it’s attributed to the whole of Islam, even though community leaders up and down the country have denounced the atrocity. That, sadly, did not stop a couple of Mosques being attacked.

The men suspected of killing the soldier have been caught. They seem certain to be convicted of a vile murder and will doubtless spend most or even all of the rest of their lives in gaol. Let’s take that as the right way of dealing with the attack. Let’s not use that crime to fuel an Islamophobic campaign, whose target is one of our most law-abiding communities. Let’s not use it to stoke up the fires of anti-immigrant hatred that are already generating far more than enough heat.

After all, let’s go back to the lady who spoke so calmly to the attackers. Many in Woolwich reacted well to the murder, confronting the men calmly and with courage, and they have been saluted for it. But her case is particularly intriguing.

Her name was Ingrid Loyau-Kennet. The papers took delight in describing her as a ‘British Mum’, but I think the Britishness comes with the ‘Kennet’ part of her name. She explained in a radio interview this morning that she'd been travelling home from France when she made her stop in Woolwich, and both the accent in which she told us the story and the ‘Loyau’ in her name suggest that her roots are French.

That cool courage, in other words, was displayed by one of those immigrants so frequently denounced by the likes of the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Defence League. And the French have automatic right of residence here thanks to that maligned organisation, the European Union. That’s the union UKIP and the EDL, and many in the Conservative Party, would like us to leave.

She, unlike the Prime Minister or the far right, found the behaviour and the words that were right when confronted with yesterday's horror. For my part, I’d be delighted if we could get a few more Loyau-Kennets here, from France, from Germany, from Poland, from Bulgaria. And I’d be more than happy to send a few EDL and UKIP leaders back the other way in exchange.

But that would be terribly unfair to the countries that had to accept them.

Eastern food in a Western dish

I’m very grateful to Bob Patterson, a good friend though we’ve only ever met on line, for pointing out that the latest New Yorker contains an article focused on Luton, where I live. It’s not often that so august a journal turns its attention to this humble town (to be honest, it isn’t that common that it catches the eye even of far less worthy publications, such as the Sun or the Times). And when the prestigious journal is transatlantic, well the least I can do is take a look.

As it happens, the article – England, their England by Lauren Collins – is less about Luton than about the movement it spawned, the English Defence League, and the Moslem community of the town against which the EDL first directed its wrath. It also mentioned one of the more shameful acts of our present Prime Minister, who really does little quite as well as shamelessness, when he denounced multiculturalism at a speech he gave to a conference in Munich last February. He probably thought this was a bit of a vote-winner and a great way of aligning himself with the increasing Islamophobia around Europe, sparking minaret or Burka bans.

In what Collins rightly calls an ‘unseemly coincidence’, Cameron gave his speech just when the EDL was preparing to march through Luton, precisely to denounce multiculturalism.

Having seen some EDL members on a train to Luton, it’s not clear to me that they’re ready to grasp multiculturalism. I can understand why they’d be keen on mono-culturalism – it didn’t strike me that they had learned to cope with even that much – in fact the only culture they seemed to have any affinity to would be the kind you might find adorning a Petri dish in a lab somewhere. This lot took up a lot of space on the train, metaphorically but also physically. They had also taken steps to keep the level of blood in their alcohol streams within reasonable bounds, and they expressed themselves in a language of astonishing richness – every third word or so seemed to be concerned with procreation or bodily waste.

At first glance, it’s a little difficult to understand the bad press that multiculturalism has been getting all round Europe recently. After all, its basic proposition is that people of different faiths or races should be able to get on with each other without either forcing any of them to change fundamentally or spilling any of each other’s blood. I can’t quite see why that shouldn’t be rather a good thing. Being against it feels a bit like telling a new beauty queen that ‘actually, world peace isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

In any case, since last Friday in Norway it feels as though it’s Geert Wilders in Holland, Nicolas Sarkozy in France and, yes, David Cameron in England who need to do a bit of explaining. Anders Breivik has shown just how far you can go when you start getting really passionate about your opposition to multiculturalism. Not that any of those politicians would back the action he took – but they might like to reflect on whether their stance doesn’t give some kind of endorsement to the views he holds and encourages those who share their more extreme forms.

Where anti-multiculturalism can take us

As for me, well I’m just going to stick with my attachment to multiculturalism.

To me, multiculturalism is the woman I saw in London the other day, in black Moslem dress from head to – well, actually not quite to toe. The dress stopped just above the ankles so we could all admire the elegant pale blue leather and cork creations she was wearing on her feet, with their three inch heels. The Islamic extremist would denounce her for the display of flesh and fashion, the EDL for the headscarf. The multiculturalist just smiles at the contradictions.

To me, multiculturalism is the cricket team that occupies the best ground in Luton – ‘Luton Town and Indians’. ‘Indians’? Most of the ‘Indians’ in Luton actually have their roots in Pakistan. Did they play for the old ‘Luton Indians’ club? And some years ago it merged with Luton Town. For her article, Lauren Collins interviewed Abdul Kadeer Baksh, who leads the Luton Islamic Centre’s vigorous campaign against Moslem extremism. Responding to the EDL’s taunts he told her, ‘when they say we don’t integrate, they mean we don’t assimilate.’ Well, quite – and why should they assimilate? Surely I can cope with not being the same as my neighbour? To be honest, I’ve had neighbours I’d hate to resemble, but that doesn’t stop me living next door to them. ‘Luton Town and Indians’ – in that preservation of both names, don’t we have a wonderful illustration of integrations without assimilation?

And finally, to me multiculturalism is my wife going into a butcher’s in Bury Park, the ‘Indian’ area, to buy halal chicken last week. The butcher’s astonished response was ‘Why?’ And Danielle had the best possible answer: ‘because we have friends from Pakistan coming round for a meal.’ The friends wanted a typical European dish, so Danielle roasted chicken for them (though by its quality it was nothing like typical). Western cooking for Moslem friends required halal meat.

You know, Cameron, it wasn’t that hard. It didn’t require us to compromise any principles. And we all had a great time.

Remind me – just what is it that you, Wilders, Sarkozy – and Breivik – have against multiculturalism?

It isn't always the show that matters

So what happened at the theatrical event of the decade?

By popular demand, I return to a subject that I've allowed to drift off the radar in the last couple of weeks, that of the ‘adult pantomime’ Danielle and I attended, Alison Wonderbra.

Note that as an established blogger – in terms of sheer volume at least (I reached the 300 mark last month) – I now feel entitled to indulge in some journalistic licence. ‘Popular demand’ in this instance means that one of my sons once said to me ‘oh, by the way, that pantomime – was it any good?’ More of a request than a demand, perhaps, but at least he is quite popular.

It was an evening that made up in dynamism for what it lacked in subtlety, which meant it was spectacularly dynamic, as there was a lot of making up to be done.

The liveliness didn't just start with the show but was clear even before the curtain went up: there was music playing when we arrived and women dancing to it between the rows of seats. In fact, that rather set the tone of the evening. If you're not familiar with the cultural heights scaled in Britain over the last twenty years or so, you may not have seen the hordes of hen party revellers that regularly invade our town centres or our airports (from which they set off to inflict themselves on places like Prague who wonder in bemusement what hit them, as they clear up the mess next day). They’re noisy, boisterous and drunken, but unlike the male equivalent, stag parties, they generally remain quite good-humoured and more amusing than frightening.

The atmosphere at the pantomime was like that. You can take drinks into the auditorium and the audience seized the opportunity to do so. It was also predominantly female, I guess two-thirds women in large groups, calling to each other from row to row, and obviously out to enjoy themselves as much as they possibly could. Just like hen parties, except that the age range was wider.

The show itself was humorous, if that’s the word for something which depends principally on references to parts of the anatomy and the various uses to which they can be put, the joke being little more than the fact that these things are not generally mentioned on a public stage. There was quite a lot of heckling from  the audience, rather like what happens at a stand-up comedy show, and it's perhaps a measure of the subtlety of the evening that one particularly forceful actress quipped wittily in response to some abuse, ‘if I’d wanted to hear from an arsehole, I’d have farted.’

Yes, I think that pretty well sums up the literary qualities of entertainment.

So it was an experience where the pleasure came not so much from watching the stage as from watching the audience.

There has been a lot of talk in this country in recent years about the fate of the white working class, the feeling being that it tends to be ignored by a society more concerned with its wealthiest sections or with minorities that attract more attention from the media.

Well, the audience was exclusively white, astonishing in heavily multi-ethnic Luton. And the working class was heavily represented. So it was fascinating that the show, in so far as it made many points at all, was explicitly liberationist on gender issues: the Alison of the title is a young woman being brutalised by a macho boyfriend; at the end she decides to throw him over and go off with White Rabbit (yes, yes, there are allusions to the Lewis Carroll story) who is performed by another woman. This assertion of the legitimacy of gay love was greeted with shouts of approval and applause by the audience, something that would have been unthinkable even two or three decades ago.

It was only a couple of weeks later that the English Defence League, self-proclaimed champions of the white working class, marched through Luton in a calculated but unsuccessful attempt to provoke the ethnic minority community. The atmosphere of tolerance and good humour at the pantomime felt like a great antidote to the toxic emanations of the march. If the alternative is the EDL, I’d choose Alison Wonderbra any day of the week.

In fact, the atmosphere of warmth and friendliness of the evening reminded me of great evenings I spent years ago, when I was living in a Yorkshire mining village, and the height of the week was a Ceilidh evening at the local working men's club. The Castle Club in Conisbrough had that same easy, gentle and generous cordiality.

The Labour Party, to which I belong, was originally built by the white working class. Today, that class is itself a minority. Labour needs to find a way to bring it back in and integrate it with the other minorities that, at its best, it defends and from which it draws its support. Because if  Labour doesn’t speak for it the racists will.

The EDL: give me Alison Wonderbra any day

Easy to write that, but it's basically a call to action, isn't it? To myself. Not one I've done anything about so far, like actually attending a Labour Party meeting. Still I've had the thought, and a good thought's a good starting point, don't you agree?

At any rate, a good though's a lot more than I was expecting to get from Alison Wonderbra.

Luton's version of the Cairo spirit

The eyes of the world these days are on Tahrir Square in Cairo. But when it comes to protest, that’s not the only place where people have been taking to the streets recently. We’ve had our own moments of excitement in Luton too.

From mid-morning last Saturday, there was no way to drive into the centre of town. Shops, sports centres, public places generally had shut, on police advice. And the police themselves were swarming like bees. From fourteen forces around the country they came, in their coaches and their lorries, and they gathered in our little town, imposing in their determination and their displays of hardware. I particularly liked the horses. There were whole truckloads of them and they poured through the streets in impressive numbers.

Eat your hearts out, Mounties.
The cavalry patrols the Luton streets

What was the cause of all this frenetic activity, rumoured to have cost £800,000?

The English Defence League was marching through our streets. Now the name suggests something innocuous, doesn’t it? Perhaps an organisation dedicated to protecting the language of Shakespeare, or the tradition of long summer evenings watching cricket while drinking warm beer.

Not so: this is an organisation as concerned with rights as those mass movements in Cairo. Except that in the case of the EDL, they want to take rights away rather than demand they be granted. They don’t like immigrants, you see, by which they principally mean that they don’t like people whose skin colour is darker than is usual among Anglo-Saxons (a previous wave of immigrants, accepted far more readily in this country, because they arrived with swords and axes). 

It gets particularly bad if people who have the gall to have the wrong skin colour also insist on adhering to Islam. This is a definite no-no to the EDL, who would rather they felt under no special obligation even to remain in the country.

Since Luton has rather more such people than many other places – a small minority, of course, but a bigger one than in most English cities, with nearly one in five residents being descended from South Asian immigrants – the EDL felt that it would be good to get their message out here, where they could cause maximum offence without having to walk very far. 

Unite Against Fascism organised a counter demonstration.

And the police were there, closing roads and shutting shops, to avoid any serious damage being done.

In the end 1500 EDL people showed up and 900 counter-demonstrators. By 4:00 it was all over. We’d spent the day in London, so apart from having to catch our train from a different station, we barely noticed the event.

But, hey, at a time when we’re talking about those great protest movements bursting out all over the Middle East, let’s not forget that we had our own little incident too. Nice if it had been about increasing freedom for all instead of reducing it for a minority, but you can’t have everything.

At least the police did their job properly, if expensively. Perhaps we ought just to be thankful for such small mercies.