Monday 7th May, 1984: Wimbledon 1, Gillingham 3
Telling stories is telling lies. I submit the piece about the Red Action march that took place before the Bolton game to The Gooner. Much to my surprise and delight, they seem to like it and might even put it up on the Online version. In his emailed reply, Kevin Whitcher, the man who is so recklessly about to place the good reputation of his excellent publication on the line, points out a minor flaw in the article, one that he says he'll correct with an editorial aside. I've only misheard the chant that's given my article its title. My fellow gooners were not singing 'roll away', but 'we're on the way'. "It's from Paint your Wagons", Kevin adds, almost apologetically. You know: "I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me..." He must feel as if he's just been communicating with a tree himself.
This is the most glaring of the several errors I have made and far outsrips the other gaffes and goofs that have been committed to paper or sent spinning through the ether. I've attributed to Chelsea an FA Cup they didn't win and to Andorra a draw they did not earn. As if that weren't enough, I somehow manage to confuse a player we didn't even buy (Willy Sagnol) with one we did (Bacary Sagna). Oh, that last one's been amended in the text; now there's only the recording of my voice saying Sagnol when I'm talking about Sagna echoing tinnily in a couple of pairs of ears around the globe to bear witness to that inadvertent lie. Like some chiselling soviet apparatchik, I've personally overseen the erasure of that particular affront to the Ministry of Truth. The face of the "unperson" Sagnol has been chipped from the manhole cover of history; there is no longer any conflict with the official version of events.
They used to do that - chip people's names and faces and so on off the manhole covers or lamposts or whatever it was that they had previously adorned - in the former soviet bloc. A friend of mine saw them doing it in Albania. If you went to that country in the 1960s, they'd trim your hair at the border if it fell below the line of your collar. Even your hair could not be trusted if you came there from the west. All true, all part of a history that is itself no more; only the witnesses to it as it happened remain, the ones who watched as the faces and the names were one by one removed. That's one game the soviets did lose; and history, as we know, belongs only to the victors.
You can trace it all back to Heroditus, I suppose. To some he was the "father of history", to others "the father of lies"; you may even wonder if there is really any distinction to be made at all. But there needs to be, doesn't there? Otherwise, it all goes a bit 1984.
1984. I need to test a memory of that year as I experienced it, not as Orwell imagined it in his book. I've not long left Wimbledon School of Art having failed to complete the foundation course I'd enrolled for in autumn 1983. I'm now working at Space Studios, a rehearsal and recording space (although that makes it sound considerably grander than it really was) under the railway arches at the tip of Twickenham Green. If my memory can be trusted, I'm sat there one weekday evening with Eddie Taylor, a friend from art school who has stayed on to finish the course I dropped out of to work here. We're listening to a game on the radio. Wimbledon are playing for a place in the first division. They've made their way up through the leagues from the Conference in successive season, so this, for them, is quite a big game.
Eddie is actually a gooner - and not a lapsed one as I still am back then. He goes to Plough Lane when he's not at Highbury watching the Arsenal with his surreal and madcap Dad. He may even be sat there unbeknownst to me, somewhere in the Emirates tonight for the Slavia Prague game; sat somewhere among the sixty thousand or so, older, wiser but wearing that same red and white scarf.
So, that's the memory; the two of us sitting in a sack cloth walled bunker, a spaghetti soup of microphone and guitar leads at our feet, listening to the radio as the Dons strain to reach the top flight accompanied by the muted throb and plod of an aspiring bass guitar. But did it really happen? Can I trust that prole memory of mine?
Well, almost. I look to see what the official record says. Wimbledon are indeed promoted; only not to the first division but from old Divisions 3 to 2, having come up from Division 4 the season before that. On Saturday May 5th, a crowd of 22,580 turns up at Brammal Lane to see Wimbledon beat promotion rivals Sheffield United 2-0. A win at home to Gillingham two days later is all they need to clinch the second spot and win promotion to Division 2. That's the game I listen to with Eddie as the timeless tom-toms roll. Wimbledon lose 3-1 but they go up anyway as the Blades lose at Bolton that same evening; once again, 2-0. Nigel Winterburn, who'll go on to be serve with distinction at Arsenal and score a glory goal at Chelsea on the way to the double in 1998, is in this Wimbledon side. The team score 97 goals in the campaign that sees them to the second flight and the club receives a cheque from Capital Radio for £25,000, their reward for being the highest scoring of all the London sides. So perhaps not all hope is lost on the memory front.
* * *
I'm chatting with another Eddie; the chap who drives the minibus that takes me to my work (you have to credit Tesco; there's absolutely *no* expense spared when it comes to getting their criminally underpaid staff to the picking fields first thing in the morning...) Poor old Eddie's a Tottenham Hotspurs fan - has been since just after the second World War. He fell in love with them when he saw them play Brentford at Griffin Park and has been lumbered with them ever since. We share a wince at last night's calamity; a 3-1 defeat up at Newcastle that leaves them in the bottom three. Eddie knew they'd lose. He's what my Dad would have called "Old School", is Eddie. That's not "Old Skool" in the modern, R & B sense, but in the sense of being - well, there is other way to put it really - old school. There must be a lot of games swimming around in that head of his. I wonder if he can still trust his memory?
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read extracts from his diary of the 2007-08 season, "The Road to Moscow"!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
Prole Memory...
Orwell didn't watch the Arsenal play the Dynamo at the Lane that foggy day in 1945. He gets his Tribune gen from a friend or reads the papers, maybe listens on the wireless. He's told about the altercation between players by 'someone who was there'. The fog is fairly well reported and there is even a book about the Moscow Dynamos' contentious British tour if anyone would like to find out more. But otherwise, that piece was fiction, a story, or if we're being scrupulous, a lie. A pleasing confluence of the imagined and the experienced, perhaps, but nonetheless a lie.
It's conjecture, and of the spurious kind at that, but I have a feeling Orwell would have felt uncomfortable stood there puffing Victories on the terraces, surrounded by cloth caps. Crowds are funny things for writers, who are ever aiming, don't forget, for some detachment; trying not to get caught up in all the fuss. But Orwell, with appropriate contrariness, would have loved them too.
In his book, On Living in an Old Country, Patrick Wright assesses Orwell's attitude to the masses; 'the proles' as they become in 1984. They come to represent for Orwell, through his protagonist Winston Smith, 'the last of surviving humanity'. That may sound rather grand, but with their washing lines and nick-nack shops and softly sung lullabies belonging to another age, the proles have something that even the monolithic stomping jackboot of the Ingsoc party machine can't control, debase or manipulate. Somehow persisting on the periphery of the mediated and proscribed world of the party elite, 'these people for whom daily life still has a shred of cultural integrity' go about their business; hanging their washing out and singing their plaintive songs. Not much of a life, perhaps, but they do at least have access to something comforting and dangerous that is otherwise denied; the past.
Prole memory may well fall short of consciously adopted and publicly shared values, but it has recognisable character none the less. It works in the experiential terms of everyday life and this gives it a richness which is superior to anything offered by either the rigged Party histories or the abstracted historical 'truths' sought by Winston Smith.
The proles are 'not loyal to a party, or a country, or an idea, they [are] loyal to one another'. 'Prole memory'. I like the sound of that.
It's that world of the particular, the personal preference that Orwell celebrates. These unofficial activities represent a 'culture that is truly native' to Britain:
the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea'.
Picture postcards, penny dreadfuls, clubs, societies and everyone, it seems, who has a garden tends it carefully and lovingly. Then there's our perpetual backward lookingness, our 'obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance'. These precious things may be 'mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms' but that can't disguise the essential 'gentleness of English civilization'. It may only be 'half a loaf', Orwell concludes in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, but that's better than 'no bread at all'.
It's a quaint view, perhaps. There's also a rather dated tendency in a lot of the writing of that time to confuse Britain and England; something you'd find a lot harder to do now. But regardless of precisely which part of the British Isles he was referring to, there's something ever less recognisable about the place Orwell wrote about. Strange then, that he can still induce a shudder when he says something like; 'the English are in the process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, co-ordinated'. We were. Perhaps we still are. Then he'll say something timeless in a voice older and steadier than Watt Tyler's or John Lydon's that makes the perversity contained in the description of him as a Tory anarchist sound truly radical and challenging:
the common people must live to some extent against the existing order.
And you wish that they did, you wish that they would. He's criticised by modern Marxists for not having been a proper socialist, someone who never quite escaped the ideological entrapments of his privileged upbringing. But how much better than this can the fundamental realities of inequality be expressed?:
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house.
Add to that a handful of mobile phones and a widescreen TV and ask yourself, has that underlying situation really changed all that much? Indeed, it's been the dubious achievement of English socialism - the Ingsoc that we actually arrived at here - to have increased rather than reduced the gulf between those 'very few hands' in whom financial power rests and the rest of us. Things have changed alright, but has it really been for the better?
But then, unless you had something to contrast your own experience with, you wouldn't really know, would you? 'The past is subversive', says Anthony Burgess, 'in the sense that it opposes pragmatic values to doctrinaire ones. The human and not the abstract'. So 1979 was better than 2007, perhaps, because you had the Boomtown Rats instead of Westlife; or because you could go to see a game of football and stand on terracing if you wanted to; or you could glide into a public space without the need for somebody to rummage through your hand baggage. With time, the personal does indeed become political, just as surely as youth is wasted on the young.
I had my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark
What made it special
Made it dangerous
What made it special, made it dangerous. One of the tropes of the mechanized age is that repetition reduces meaning; just look at the effect of Warhol's franking machine technique on the grinning masks of all those Jackies and Marilyns and you soon get the idea. Specialness begins to reside less in the artifact - the prized 78 or 45, the vintage programme, all of which were churned out in their tens of thousands - and more, as David Bowie has described it, in the space between the viewer and the viewed. This process metastasizes when we reach the digital realm. Where you once had shelves of books, stacks of LPs to tell you who you are or those you'll leave behind who you were, now all you need is your little black box. Your own personal flight recorder, its blue lights flicker as it quietly hums and chomps away at bits and gigabytes; this whirring, ventilating life support machine the only proof that you're alive or that you ever lived. We are fast becoming proles, if there was ever a time we weren't. Technocratic prole, the boot that comes to smash your face will need only stomp the memories of your hard disc, not those cushioned in the casing of your skull.
Episodes 5 and 6 of The Road to Moscow now available to listen to...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read extracts from his diary of the 2007-08 season, "The Road to Moscow"!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
It's conjecture, and of the spurious kind at that, but I have a feeling Orwell would have felt uncomfortable stood there puffing Victories on the terraces, surrounded by cloth caps. Crowds are funny things for writers, who are ever aiming, don't forget, for some detachment; trying not to get caught up in all the fuss. But Orwell, with appropriate contrariness, would have loved them too.
In his book, On Living in an Old Country, Patrick Wright assesses Orwell's attitude to the masses; 'the proles' as they become in 1984. They come to represent for Orwell, through his protagonist Winston Smith, 'the last of surviving humanity'. That may sound rather grand, but with their washing lines and nick-nack shops and softly sung lullabies belonging to another age, the proles have something that even the monolithic stomping jackboot of the Ingsoc party machine can't control, debase or manipulate. Somehow persisting on the periphery of the mediated and proscribed world of the party elite, 'these people for whom daily life still has a shred of cultural integrity' go about their business; hanging their washing out and singing their plaintive songs. Not much of a life, perhaps, but they do at least have access to something comforting and dangerous that is otherwise denied; the past.
Prole memory may well fall short of consciously adopted and publicly shared values, but it has recognisable character none the less. It works in the experiential terms of everyday life and this gives it a richness which is superior to anything offered by either the rigged Party histories or the abstracted historical 'truths' sought by Winston Smith.
The proles are 'not loyal to a party, or a country, or an idea, they [are] loyal to one another'. 'Prole memory'. I like the sound of that.
It's that world of the particular, the personal preference that Orwell celebrates. These unofficial activities represent a 'culture that is truly native' to Britain:
the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea'.
Picture postcards, penny dreadfuls, clubs, societies and everyone, it seems, who has a garden tends it carefully and lovingly. Then there's our perpetual backward lookingness, our 'obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance'. These precious things may be 'mixed up with barbarities and anachronisms' but that can't disguise the essential 'gentleness of English civilization'. It may only be 'half a loaf', Orwell concludes in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, but that's better than 'no bread at all'.
It's a quaint view, perhaps. There's also a rather dated tendency in a lot of the writing of that time to confuse Britain and England; something you'd find a lot harder to do now. But regardless of precisely which part of the British Isles he was referring to, there's something ever less recognisable about the place Orwell wrote about. Strange then, that he can still induce a shudder when he says something like; 'the English are in the process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, co-ordinated'. We were. Perhaps we still are. Then he'll say something timeless in a voice older and steadier than Watt Tyler's or John Lydon's that makes the perversity contained in the description of him as a Tory anarchist sound truly radical and challenging:
the common people must live to some extent against the existing order.
And you wish that they did, you wish that they would. He's criticised by modern Marxists for not having been a proper socialist, someone who never quite escaped the ideological entrapments of his privileged upbringing. But how much better than this can the fundamental realities of inequality be expressed?:
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house.
Add to that a handful of mobile phones and a widescreen TV and ask yourself, has that underlying situation really changed all that much? Indeed, it's been the dubious achievement of English socialism - the Ingsoc that we actually arrived at here - to have increased rather than reduced the gulf between those 'very few hands' in whom financial power rests and the rest of us. Things have changed alright, but has it really been for the better?
But then, unless you had something to contrast your own experience with, you wouldn't really know, would you? 'The past is subversive', says Anthony Burgess, 'in the sense that it opposes pragmatic values to doctrinaire ones. The human and not the abstract'. So 1979 was better than 2007, perhaps, because you had the Boomtown Rats instead of Westlife; or because you could go to see a game of football and stand on terracing if you wanted to; or you could glide into a public space without the need for somebody to rummage through your hand baggage. With time, the personal does indeed become political, just as surely as youth is wasted on the young.
I had my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark
What made it special
Made it dangerous
What made it special, made it dangerous. One of the tropes of the mechanized age is that repetition reduces meaning; just look at the effect of Warhol's franking machine technique on the grinning masks of all those Jackies and Marilyns and you soon get the idea. Specialness begins to reside less in the artifact - the prized 78 or 45, the vintage programme, all of which were churned out in their tens of thousands - and more, as David Bowie has described it, in the space between the viewer and the viewed. This process metastasizes when we reach the digital realm. Where you once had shelves of books, stacks of LPs to tell you who you are or those you'll leave behind who you were, now all you need is your little black box. Your own personal flight recorder, its blue lights flicker as it quietly hums and chomps away at bits and gigabytes; this whirring, ventilating life support machine the only proof that you're alive or that you ever lived. We are fast becoming proles, if there was ever a time we weren't. Technocratic prole, the boot that comes to smash your face will need only stomp the memories of your hard disc, not those cushioned in the casing of your skull.
Episodes 5 and 6 of The Road to Moscow now available to listen to...
L.U.V. on y'all,
Bob
Hear Bob read extracts from his diary of the 2007-08 season, "The Road to Moscow"!!
Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!
Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!
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