An ode to Hampden Park
The spuggies were singing at Hampden Park this morning. They were called sparrows when I was a kid, and they were everywhere. Every bush and tree went cheep! cheep! Every sudden movement by humans was answered by the whir of a hundred sparrows taking flight.
A generation ago
But my daughter grew up in the era of Johnny Briggs, and he called them ‘spuggies’ so they became spuggies in our house.
There aren’t so many now, but there are places still where cheep! cheep! fills the air.
Another generation ago
When I was a kid, they told us at school that modern technology was coming to save us from boring work. They showed us pictures of play parks and tennis courts in between blocks of flats, and said we’d have lots of leisure time and be able to retire at 50. I figured the play parks and tennis courts wouldn’t be compulsory, so I’d go and live somewhere nice and have fun.
When they asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I was puzzled. They seemed to mean all that stuff they called work. I preferred, as Ali Sparkes gloriously calls it, mucking about in the woods. The people I could see around me seemed to be pretty much alright (I learned more about this illusion later) so when it occurred to me to do something useful, I distributed leaflets for animal charities.
Living with imminent death
Growing up was a serious business in the 60s and 70s, though. The politicians never seemed to figure out that the consequences of the Cold War, their regular promises that we could be blown up by Evil Russians at any moment, had anything to do with our generation’s disinterest in the futures they were selling us.
There was an Iron Curtain down the middle of Europe, because of the Evil Russians. What evidence did we have they were evil? I wasn’t sure, but we did watch them cheating on the sport on the telly, putting people who didn’t look like women to us in women’s sports. The telly never told us that when they were older, those testosterone-raddled young women from Russia and Eastern Europe worked out what was wrong with what had happened to them, and went to the Olympic Committee and offered to give their medals back.
I only found out about that recently but I saw a chink of light before then, the beginnings of the discovery that there were evil people – politicians, for example, perhaps desensitized by all those kill-lists they sign off, but that there weren’t evil peoples – I have no idea when I saw it, except that I saw it on a black-and-white telly, so quite a long time ago. It was Noam Chomsky, explaining what cognitive dissonance was. He used the Iron Curtain as an example. He said we in the west know the Russians are an evil, suspicious people because they fortify their borders, quite convinced that we innocents in the west are about to attack them. He said we in the west know that’s a silly, paranoid idea that proves the Russians are evil. He said we also know, if we studied history at school (which pretty much everyone did, back then) that our countries have in fact repeatedly attacked Russia from the west. He said that if we put those two ideas together, we’d see that one of them needs revising – so we didn’t put them together. That’s cognitive dissonance.
Then, voices from my own country started to break through – the Greenham Common women, for example, pointing out that perhaps it’s all these missiles we’re pointing at Russia that make the Russians think we might attack them at any moment. Then, things began to change and over the course of a couple of decades, the mainstream narrative replaced Russia first with Islamicist terrorists, then with China.
But you know, each time they change the identity of the Evil Empire, more of us go ‘hang on a minute…’
For the last few years, they’ve been working on getting back to where they started when I was a kid. Russia is the Evil one again. That’s why they were so keen for us to take in Ukrainian refugees (Jamie Driscoll’s excellent social media piece over the weekend reminded me of this): “Tens of thousands of British people did open their homes to Ukrainian refugees. By July 2024, 54% of all UK refugees were Ukrainian.”
I don’t know if the government encouraging Ukrainian refugees to come here convinced many people that Russia is the Evil One again. I can see that it convinced some people but my town is a City of Sanctuary – we meet people who’ve managed to escape to the UK from all sorts of places and, when not blinded by government lies, people welcome refugees no matter where they’ve had to run from. We understand that the reason those cold, wet, terrified people we pull out of the small boats when they wash up on our beach are rarely Ukrainian. It’s because the government gives safe passage to Ukrainian refugees, because they’re part of the government narrative. The rest have to take their chances to cross the channel.
Imminent death revisited
But now, it’s ramping up worse even than during the Cold War. We raise our eyes from a year of videos from Gaza, and they’re telling us we want to fight the Russians. I find myself back where I was as a kid, saying I’m not interested in the future they’re selling us. I listen to the people who come back from Gaza and tell us more about what US and UK weapons do to people. I see our government lining up the “battle tested” weapons they own – the ones Israel tried out on Palestinians – some are for crowd control, some are for riot control, and some are for the war they seem determined to persuade us we want to have with Russia.
I don’t want to, do you? Nothing against Ukrainians (except the ones who burn down Trade Union offices, tie gypsy kids to lamp-posts, or fire missiles deep into Russia), it’s just that I refuse to join in a war. I do my best to keep up with the boycotts and the protests (learned in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, they will work against Israel, too). Obviously, not joining in the war when it comes home won’t stop them killing you or I, but nor would joining in. They’re just two ways to get killed. The only thing that might help us is trying to stop the war.
Meantime, I try to keep my work useful, human-friendly, and pleasant for me, as it’s clear I’m never going to be allowed to retire.
MacBeth
I daresay Michael Gove was at least a little bit hoping that forcing everyone to learn Shakespeare would take the kids’ minds off all the nasty, socialist, stop-the-war stuff teachers were teaching a few decades back. I think though, he underestimated today’s teenagers. Admittedly, I mostly teach kids who’ve dropped out of school, unconvinced by the futures they’re being offered, but I am impressed how many of them notice that the first bout of killing in MacBeth is state-sanctioned – is in fact a requirement, that MacBeth and Banquo are praised for.
Perhaps if they hadn’t just experienced a close-up, bloody battle, Mr and Mrs MacBeth would not have been so quick to see murder as a solution to their problem.
The kids notice what I, who did not learn much Shakespeare at school, had to be told by my dad (who was a prison welfare officer). He told me why most lifers are in prison. He told me it’s not that some people kill because they are dangerous people. It’s that some people are troubled – by poverty, mental illness, or being wrapped up in lies – and troubled people sometimes kill – and then they are dangerous, because those who have killed have learned to see killing as a possible solution to problems. And so we put them in prison.
Unless they are government-sanctioned killers.
Killing as a solution to problems is, as MacBeth found out, a hard lesson to unlearn.
Nor do the kids need me to tell them that the witches are channelling XR and Just Stop Oil, invoking the forces of nature, enraging the bosses by showing them it’s the murderous track of their own minds that’s bringing double, double, toil and trouble down upon us.
Teaching is a useful, human-friendly and pleasant way of spending one’s not-allowed-to-retirement.
Spuggies
I also like helping to produce and distribute books from which more people might learn about how killing is a bad solution to problems. It so happens that when I visit the nearest book-distribution warehouse to my home, I have to pass through Hampden Park station which is in a pleasant, tree-lined place where you get to hear the cheep! cheep! of quite a lot of spuggies, which is why, although I’ve been twanging with horror on behalf of the Palestinian people for over a year, and although I feel imminent destruction now hovering over us here, I’m relatively happy today.
The train I needed was delayed by half an hour but it was sunny, the sky was a glorious blue and I went to our friendly café, got a cup of tea, and sat and listened to the spuggies while I thought about the wonderful book I’d just notified the distributors about, that I’m really enjoying telling you that I will tell you about very soon.
No, I can’t imagine what it’s like living in the hell that the US, the UK and Israel have created in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon, and I don’t suppose you can imagine it either but if, like me, you grew up in the Cold War, you will be familiar with this threat of looming destruction that our war-mongering politicians have just re-launched upon us, so I know how to get on and do something useful, and enjoy the little wonderfulnesses that remain to us – like a treeful of spuggies going cheep! cheep!
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Kay
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Kay Green 