Why rubbish dumps and landfills are magical, Raven did not know. Since childhood he’d relished any trip to the tip. The curves, seagulls, tatty characters lurking to scavenge. One could be literary - God forbid - and link it to individual then societal collapse. But there's a purity in seeing so much discarded, covered over, awaiting festering bioprocesses and gas.
Anyone who's cleared a parental home starts with visits to charity shops then - as the scale of their possessions overwhelms - resorts to dumping stuff undifferentiated, desperate to be done.
How often he’d sat in queues on the Wilton Road, Salisbury, laden down, crawling forward to disgorge his parents' books, pictures, letters, ornaments, photo albums - even clothes. And now he was in a skip looking up into outer purity, entropy doing its job. He just had to wait...
Destined for landfill in the indigo dawn of suburban morning. He'd not even felt any jolting as his nocturnal abode was loaded onto a lorry. Fast asleep, until the A34 congestion awakened him to traffic chaos.
Have you encountered the atavistic types who work on municipal dumps? Eyes alert for items of discarded value, speedy links to supply lines for stolen copper, lead roofing and knackered radiators.
Raven hopped out unseen - or so he thought. But those on the adjacent site were ever vigilant, chained dogs announcing his arrival in the underbelly of by-passed Oxfordshire. Before he could scarper, he'd been bagged and dragged into some static caravan. Seated in the steamy atmosphere were a couple of obvious Shiremen, beaming contentedly at an enormous tea-pot.
He'd read Ballard and imagined some nightmarish confinement, in a rewrite of Concrete Island. Or life as a white-slave from the English diaspora, traded between building crews and Bulgarian gangs traversing the south-east.
'Does he fancy a brew?'
'A boy like this wants his skinny latte!'
He was handed an enamel mug swirling with two tablespoons of sugar. Drinking sweetened tea was no more possible for Raven than if salt and vinegar got added.
The closest thatch-head jumped up and opened his gob. The other Shireman eagerly poured the sickly stuff in.
'Now we're all friends,' cackled Shireman One. 'You'll need that sugar for energy, with what we've got planned.'
All his life, Raven had been expecting the bedrock of middle-class comfort and security to collapse beneath him. Now he felt relieved.
Perhaps the only hope lay in sudden violence. Or maybe the tea was drugged...
He was back in his Garden City childhood, vague poverty on the estates with underpasses to Shoplands and Harlands shopping precincts.
Socialism then didn't involve pandemic-fear and inculcation of mental-health collapse. Crime wasn't normalised and used for social control.
Such blinding insight! As always too late and no one to share this with.
He could remember it all. There was his primary school, dazzling plate glass and lawns to run down at lunchtime. A viaduct alongside, carrying the London line from Kings Cross. Council flats seen through the 70s heatwaves, all nylon, sideburns and heavy smokers.
Most of his teachers were decent old-style lefties, committed to fairness rather than indoctrinating children. But he remembered one who obsessed about overpopulation, the new ice age and nuclear testing in the Pacific. And shopping was different somehow; not as dominant and more expensive. Let's face it, the old elites were less ruthless than today's rootless 'experts' with worthless degrees who live online...
'Do you like your rubies?'
Don't let some left-liberal fool you into pitying travellers and their 'lives of poverty'. There's wealth a plenty, gold and gemstone opulence on open display when you get inside.
'Take a look at Dave's!'
An enormous star ruby - flanked by what seemed D-colour Marquise cut diamonds - winked at Raven. The grin on Shireman Two was pure gold.
'Surely that's not a find from the tip?'
Roars of appreciative laughter. The cultural shifts were exhausting, his separation of internal and external worlds had collapsed.
He was led into a comfortable bedroom then lowered onto a huge double-bed. Drugged mental overwriting followed. Reverie and review, Raven rationalising his rejection of delusions of 'being on the right side of history'. Reification through retelling events from his lonely twenties, Liza-style abandonments on streets of falling sleet, maybe composing his own Notes from Underground?
Diversity was England’s state religion, ruthlessly enforced, tolerating no dissent or human failing. No pity, individuals crushed in brutal demonstrations of worthiness. Pity, the emotion one cannot fake. Still there - if it somehow survived - in England’s Christian faith.
People walking their dogs at night, waiting at bus stops. Any of them mattered more than ideology. Raven hallucinated, reciting, semi-conscious next to a recycling site.
The only Christian left in the west
lives at small expense in a hidden flat
above squealing lorry wheels and brake lights.
He gave up sending himself Christmas cards
years ago - they were always being pinched -
not malicious but curiosity
in neighbours who prayed five times every day.
The country was bursting with believers
agreeing online in those empty realms
from which he served a lifetime's banishment.
The head of his church and its worshippers
he’d dismissed as secular heretics,
so he said to the doctor, complaining
that people always seemed to barge into
him in the city’s streets which now all stank
constantly of marijuana without
any believable explanation.
He'd stood still today alongside All Souls
and been floored by an aromatic reek.
Surely it wasn't being smoked in there?
Infinite complete trivialities
required competitive claims of belief.
He preferred exile beyond the gas-fired
kebab burners lining the Cowley Road.
Alone one Sunday night he sat sad and
crying for what had vanished from his world
behind twinkling lights of traffic flashing
red then blue and constant sirens circling.
They'd not be coming for him to be sure:
vaccine coronaries were so common now.
Simplicity was everything he had.
Any demands for diversity caused
him anxiety or sudden madness.
People assumed he hid a shameful past.
All he'd done through life was open his mouth
but out came the truth on all that he felt;
inside lurked monsters demanding exit.
Language could disguise them as ideas
then he'd stare in surprise at the tearing
those creatures delivered without caring.
He'd gone unnoticed by the crowds chasing
credit up and down. The office party
jockeys lubricated yet still fearful
that a wrong word spelt instant damnation.
Sex was in fact everywhere yet rationed.
The one advantage in age was pissed girls
beaming at this blurred stricken vision of
Father Christmas penned by Dostoevsky.
Poor Liza - ‘apropos of the wet snow’ -
vanished but perhaps she got saved somehow.
Maybe if we understood the logic of dreams, we’d never want to go to sleep - or wake up again.
Next, Raven was manically narrating a Youtube channel, trawling around council estates overrun with recent immigrants, exploring the wreckage of utopian dystopias, garden cities, new towns:
What stories do they tell themselves on
why they moved to this country and who
they are, when even a street here makes
a difference and identity is everything?
I know the lies from economics, claiming
the English can never do anything.
Perhaps it's true we're overrun and
I wish so many hadn't come.
I didn't want to feel abroad,
sitting alienated by violent
jabbering on buses, harsh
elbows, hints of aggression.
Poets never say this though
it's not a poem, thank Christ.
New towns and garden cities are now despised but
a young child could go to Wimpy on the day before
starting secondary school and be on the verge of
newness in drab browns and oranges that weren't
dated then because you didn't know the decade you
were in and neither affluence nor want were felt as
judgements but lived through to say so now gets me
shot I just see Woolco and new shops the glass safe
yet to read about it today would say my parents and
others thought the country was doomed with money
evaporating and worries worse than old trains but
it doesn't seem so bad it's known what was true
plus the separateness gave us enough space
maybe this now plays somewhere just the same.
If I went back to those fields of childhood
would I know anything there? Of course not,
they don't exist anymore – although I'm
sure the old stretches of barbed wire wildness,
with horses no one seems to own or ride,
will still reach down to that chalk river with
its rubble banks and bridges unnoticed
by anyone but me. Worn stones under
which I caught Miller's thumbs or sticklebacks?
Still there for children from schools in summer
to know on those day that last forever,
before online worlds take them off nowhere.
It’s a fact; middle-class people talk too much.
I’m one, but checked by this old git who lives in my memory.
My first encounter was in Welwyn Garden City’s biscuit-brick cinema, aged about eight. The film was that colossal bore - Disney’s Fantasia - my interest finally awakened in the dinosaur fight.
I proceeded to narrate the exact characteristics of Tyrannosaurus and whoever he was devouring, for the benefit of an entire auditorium.
A nicotine-stained relic looked at me, an ex-spiv relocated from Stepney to the council estates by Nabisco’s.
‘Turn the volume down mate.’
How he lurks in the mind!
That ever-present policeman in peripheral vision, class rejoinder, vigilante of bourgeois incontinence.
Shame-faced I have fled cheerful public houses and desolate suburban trains, legging it through twilit council estates with their lurking bovver boys.
Just last week he resurfaced in my local as I was discoursing on Oxford’s traffic.
One word too many and he pounced.
‘Turn the volume down mate.’
I was forced out to meet a grisly fate.
Lastly, he was watching a documentary on Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The location was Gloucester yet - annoyingly - no solution was offered in the laconic commentary, although some link was made to a wicked uncle, whose dukedom was with the famous and now ruined city:
It would be crass to say they fell as a hard rain, yet glittering, bouncing - sometimes shattering - the diamonds descended without warning on Tredworth, the most depressing of many such areas in Gloucester.
Perhaps they came from Jupiter, where such storms are common? Most people assumed it was summer hail. If this famous place had ever coruscated with gems, they were now found only in its magnificent Gothic cathedral; a treasure hemmed in by drug use, boarded-up shops and feral kids on bikes.
Most people that is but Jasper, who understood the riches strewn amongst the overgrown gardens, junkie parks and vandalised cars. He'd been named after a drug-addled choirmaster and possible murderer, in a similarly decaying cathedral city on the other side of England.
Years earlier, two notorious serial killers had buried most of the locals under patios, in torture-cellars or bedraggled Cotswold fields. The few survivors staggered through the town - it cannot be called a city - blinking in surprise and clutching cans.
Its most famous local resident was in fact buried in the cathedral, rumoured to have had a sizzling poker shoved up his arse.
Middle-class relocators took one look at the place and screeched off, desperate for Cheltenham or Tewkesbury. A few mistakenly moved to Cinderford, where certain unspeakable midnight rites are still practised in the public houses. The Forest of Dean hides their ashes - a reminder that left-liberalism can be dangerous folly.
Jasper gathered up his crop in a Lidl bag and went online. But prices in the wholesale diamond market had recently collapsed. Perhaps he could flog his booty in the Quays street-food market?
'Things can only get better!' was booming from a festival stage as he entered this site of gentrification..
*
'Surprised by such luxury?' A cheerful voice jolted Raven awake.
Sat in the corner was a hallucinatory figure in JJB sportswear. He handed Raven travel brochures and property listings for exotic locations.
'When fools like you holiday in Southwold or north Norfolk, our Shiremen friends next door are booking cruises and buying second homes on the Costas or in Thailand. Gary Glitter started out with a market stall in Banbury and finished up there - on death row, as it happens.'
What was Professor Sports Direct suggesting? But he kept his mouth shut, keen for more monologues worthy of Ballard or Houellebecq.
'Covid vaccine spike proteins lobotomising the middle class. All good - their houses have never been easier to burgle. First visit as delivery driver, strike up a friendship, pop back to sledge-hammer their patio doors in the small hours.'
Raven thought uneasily of his own back garden.
'Don't worry, anything worth taking from yours is long gone. Ask the cleaners - they gave us the keys.'
He now understood how his Botley home had transitioned into a stark abode worthy of some Nordic noir thriller.
(follows from: https://www.freespeechbacklash.com/article/rebellion)