Where am I?

Your diary for today is full, back to back meetings in various locations across the city. You have no chance of getting from A to B and be on time so either have to spend your day repeatedly apologising for being late or see your diary as a rough guide and make the best of it. It's all somewhat abstract especially in estimating how long it will take to hold a conversation for which no one participant owns the outcome. But we play the game. Observe the ceremonies. We know the start time is more important than the end. We're pinching the wind too. If we're close to reaching agreement then it's better to stretch out the meeting and gain a result than slavishly adhere to the schedule, pause the conversation in some hope that it can be resumed in the future. Priorities are being juggled. All those spinning plates need to be kept in motion. You have someone looking after your diary and it transforms into something you're slightly removed from to the point where, embarrassingly you need briefing as to its contents. It can change dynamically whilst you're out and about. You have to monitor the calendar on your phone to see what's changing during the day. Instant messages are firing in, keeping your phone vibrating against your thigh to the point phantom spasms have you checking it constantly. All within a constant background noise of email. Waves and waves of direct or copied in messages often short, terse and passively aggressive or long papers showing signs of weeks of drafting and refinement. All of them are seemingly ignorant that email is asynchronous, one way traffic even if polite convention invites the necessity of reply. When are you supposed to be replying if you spend all day “doing meetings”? On top of this many messages come in that aren't from people. System to system confirmations, updates, warnings, alerts, requests for approval in labyrinthine bureaucratic processes - all contributing to hiding the signal from the noise, the information you must react to asap or “things” will get worse. Your last meeting has over run but you let it as it was about money. The person who runs your diary walks you out if the building telling you about stuff going on in the team that you can't ignore. You stride out across town to make up time. After chancing it at numerous road junctions you arrive at a hotel, scan the list of meetings on the electronic wall and fail to see yours. You look at your phone and see the meeting is still there in your calendar. An inefficient number of clicks later and you dig out the details. You're supposed to be in a different hotel, similarly named but across town, ironically quite close to the office you were last in. This is out of character. Is something going on? Are you trying to do too much and not focussing on the details? Is this a canary in the mine for stress or a momentary aberration? Is this the start of a steady descent for which the end game is you found staggering across a traffic island at night, drunk, slurred of speech, irregularly attired, shouting at passing cars? Has the process been underway for some time? You look at your phone as you walk at pace, retracing your steps. It is littered with instant messages asking “where are you”.  You reach the hotel, navigate the layout, not even pausing to question why the conference suites are in the third floor. You enter the room and there's a packed room of people sat round a long table. You’re directed to a set aside seat and realise quickly that you're not just making up the numbers in this session. You're one of two people leading on a narrative. You confess to idiocy before they can and start talking. The day continues. The pattern repeats, days become weeks then months then quarters. Sitting on a pretty painted horse on a carousel as it spins round and round can be dizzying, the stimuli addictive. We wish for it to speed up, to enforce the facade of the working day, of work, of life.

I'm Walking Here

I’m walking. My journey takes me through the streets of Leeds, through the university, on to studentland and the gig that’s been in my diary for a couple of months.  It’s also inevitably a walk through memory lane. The concrete stark lines of red route are now immersed in a tangle of new buildings. Academia is a growing business it seems. Somewhere between evening and night the campus is quiet. Only the obsessed and dedicated remain in the large sports centre. Considering the size of the campus there are only a few lost souls scuttering across it. Me hopefully giving off my best “I am not a rapist” vibes as we cross the sparsely lit pathways.  

Crossing Clarendon Road is to time warp both to the back to back slum housing of the city’s dark industrial past and my own youth, now some decades ago. The houses are still present, a mix of poorly maintained student flat conversions and in a change since my days an influx of Asian immigrants. There's a quite large new mosque rising above the terraces, kebab houses and  gelato cafes.  As the road drops down hill I note the off-licence that I once had a thunderbird wine fueled adventure is now an estate agents and I lament the switch from drunken idiocy to modern short term economics. The very next house doesn't have its curtains fully drawn and I glimpse inside. Despite being on the ground floor it's a bedroom and the wall visible to me is a sea of pictures. Some personal photographs, some art and many from the news. It could have been my student flat. I felt an immediate connection to the area, the ethos. A lightning strike to the gut.

My day has started in London. Adrift in The City, glass temples and a hurried, disengaged populus. The office I was in for the day was achingly Google, all cafes, open plan microdesks and personal cloisters, alcoves with a pew and a humble bench that through the clear collapsible door you could observe the worship of macbooks and mammon. After a day in this chrome bubble, role playing being at work I raced north by train. From a day pretending to be the vice president of operations I found myself sat in a bar that was culturally dissonant. During the last general election this was one of Jeremy Corbyn's stop offs where he gave a speech to a huge crowd and the connection between him and the youth vote became very clear.  This evening's bar population is more distributed, at least in age but there's a strong counter culture feel. No one is wearing branded clothes. Conversations aren't straying into comparing the latest Audi to its BMW competitor. My friend is already in the bar and better still he's got me a pint in. He's on fine form, playfully banging the table with the palm of his hand whilst articulating frustrations of work, all ideas carpets and digital catapults. We tangentially do politics. Nowadays it's too much for casual conversation, even if you're both on the same side. My friend spots some of the band stood at the bar which gives us a strong hint that we can get another pint in. The conversation flows. I'm blissfully happy.

A relaxed drink or so later and it's time to scuttle into the new room that's been built to host bands. This is mostly the reason why Mogwai are playing such a small venue, to celebrate its opening. The room isn't large but is packed. The few hundred present are crammed in, edging for position to catch a view of the stage. We stand at the side, conveniently close to the bar. Mogwai take to the stage and with somewhat less fanfare than one might expect from say a Taylor Swift gig, pick up their instruments and start playing. More lightning bolts to the gut. I've followed the band for the last 18 years with admiration and fondness. They've never been subject to a level of obsession that I've attached to say Godspeed you! Black Emperor, Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead but they've always been “there”, intrinsically recognisable from album to album but at the same time exploring reinvention along the way. Tonight they are amazing. Tracks are taken from across their back catalogue and whether brand new or a decade old are received with near rapture by the crowd. Singing, posturing, an act - there is none. Bar the odd muted thank you there is next to no interaction with the crowd. There's just the music. An intense hour later and with an apology over there not being an encore due to the drummer being injured the band quietly exit the  stage. We’re left in a state of euphoria. Not only at the performance we've just shared but also in witnessing one of the best beards seen outside of the merchant navy. The old stagers remove hearing protectors and although the band were loud, unlike their earlier days not punishingly so. We all file begin to file outside, back into the outside world, of delayed trains, missed deadlines, urgent meetings, the social media is all disaster porn as Hurricane Irma tracks through the Carribean, England splutter through their world cup qualifying campaign, Jacob Rees-Mogg draws attention to himself, using religion to articulate hate….  We head into the night. Into darkness.

Alternatively.....

You’ve got to give respect to the multiverse if only for keeping its bases covered.  Consider this one, close by, almost next door.  A column of black limousines slowly parade down crowded streets.  There are protestors but they’re held back blocks away.  Democracy was last November, not today.  The president elect steps out of his car surrounded by secret service agents.  Donald Trump is about cement his place in history.  Yes Donald Trump.  I told you it was a close by universe.  The ones with Ellen, Michael Cera or Hilary Trump taking to the stage...those universes are further away, more improbable than in our cluster.  There are no bullets in the air, be they from China, the Liberal Elite or a Central American immigrant.  They’re for other universes too.  In this one, the differences are almost imperceptible.

After President Trump makes his pledges, believing them as he repeats the words, reads out someone else's speech trying for the reaching out to all America schtick for probably the last time he sits down and takes in the show.  Beyonce was busy.  As was Britney. Hell even LMFAO wouldn’t reform.  With only the slightest of pauses Metallica take to the stage and kick off with something from their latest album.

In the name of desperation

In the name of wretched pain

The crowd are restless. It's been two minutes and they're not still not great. The tensions, the issues, the politics - those that caused them to vote, to stand in the cold January air wanting the lies in their heart to remain undisturbed. They were back.

In the name of all creation

Gone insane

Fists are flying. Who invited “them” to a KKK rally? There are sirens in the distance. Tear gas grenades pop. Water cannon pumps start up. Safety catches are clicked off, both along the avenue and across the nation. TV lenses focus in.

Were so fucked

Shit outta luck

Hardwired to self destruct

Welcome to 2017.  Welcome to the year it all comes true.  When we’ll build walls, both real and conceptual.  When something means something.  When climate change is a hoax.  When not buying into disintegration if off message.  Welcome.

Wikipedia defines the phrase “pissing contest” as a “metaphor used figuratively to characterise ego-driven battling in a pejorative or facetious manner that is often considered vulgar”. How quaint. How 2016. This year of no rules, our new deal, means that the phrase now refers to when someone pays prostitutes to urinate onto a hotel bed linked to someone you hate. Is it fake news? It’s 2017. It doesn't matter.   Meanwhile, beyond the locker room jokes and carefully worded euphemisms on news broadcasts a more concerning narrative as to the extent of Russian influence over the incoming US President is conveniently brushed passed and focus can return to what dresses were worn by who at the global globe awards. Is it La La Land’s year? Very much so. And for the film too.

Back over our side of the pond the talk has been similarly lascivious if with some local end of the pier tawdriness.  Do you want it hard or soft? Slow and thoughtful or fast and brutal? When do we want it? Brexit that is. Pin-up for the undead and unashamed unelected Prime Minister, Theresa May finally, long after confirming that brexit means brexit and it should be red, white and blue in colour delivered a speech to announce the Government’s position. Like the trade unionists she despises we’re going to be out, out, out. Goodbye single market. Farewell european court of justice.  So long customs union.  It’s also hello to free trade apparently through a new negotiation with the EU.  From Europe there was predictably responses ranging from bemusement to outright derision.  The argument seems to be stuck at the level that BMW don’t want their UK car sales to fall whilst to allow free trade without free movement just for us risks fracturing the whole union.   We’ll have years of negotiations, neither side will get what it wants but both will claim victory.  Similar to other high profile divorces, but less likely to appear on the front cover of magazines in supermarket checkouts.  There’s already been some hints of negotiation stances, one being that if we don’t get what we want we’ll turn the UK into a colder version of Panama and become a tax haven for all morally flexible corporations, ie all of them.  When our opening gambit is a drive to the bottom the next steps appear to be bringing back feudalism, worshiping rocks and burning anyone from outside the village.

There’s a live feed on youtube from the international space station.  It glides above us, beaming down calming images of the expanses of land and sea that we call home.  Of course eventually its orbit will decay, with most of it burning up in the atmosphere whilst the odd fragment will strike our cold planet, long dead from a nuclear exchange triggered over a mistranslation involving the words “tiny hands”.  Hello 2017.  What’s next?