Nice

They’re telling us one Brit is injured. Old joke. Not the Nine O’Clock News. Pretty much the Clown’s first act as Foreign Secretary has been to confirm it. He says he thinks there will be ministerial meetings.

A bank did a series of adverts a while back. The patronising kind. Social responsibility, citizenship, all that crap, skills gap. They got some actor playing a former jobseeker to go on about how you shouldn’t say ‘um’ in an interview. The key thing is to seem definite. I’ve worked sales jobs where they tell you that. Be definite. Don’t equivocate, even at the cost of being exposed in a lie. Say you will do it even if it’s not procedure, even if it isn’t really possible. Take ownership.

The Clown says he thinks there will be ministerial meetings. He thinks.

I mean evidence he thinks at all’s in short supply, God knows. But one law for them, eh? He thinks.

Give Blair and Livingstone their dues, they’d get out in front of this. Blair would use it to justify bombing Iraq or, let’s not be so two-thousand-and-late, Syria. But at least they’d not say might, at least not in the sense of contingent. Even the Pigfucker wouldn’t.

The Clown. The Nanny. The Pigfucker. Politics as a Guy Ritchie movie. Tragedy, then farce. 

A truck. Like in Glasgow. The Clown says they can’t confirm it’s terrorism. We all know what that means. No-one’s worked out what colour the driver is. If he’s white then it’s just mental illness. We all know how that goes. They killed a man with a robot in Dallas but they say terrorism’s brown. 

The live feed updates. The truck driver lives in Les Abbatoirs. Grim detail. I sense halal gags forming in certain sub-editors’ minds. There’ll be jokes this lunchtime in a certain kind of pub, a certain kind of well-off white man being told by his colleagues he’s wicked, indulgently. Lovely.

I went to a bar in Soho with my ex once. This was maybe ten years ago? Even then, Soho was dying, turning into a Big Gay Dick Disneyland. We were in an okay place, bit gastropubby, not a bit authentic but they had a beer we liked. A few tables away from us there was a bunch of Young Things and one of them said, in the kind of voice that immediately let you know he was an actor (and not a very good one), ‘Oh, he’s a fucking CUNT!’ and the gang around him laughed. I looked at Rachel, and just said ‘Some cunts don’t know how to swear.’ He was using the word like a tourist. Probably never grew up with people who used it for real.

When did I grow up? When did I become who I am now? These past weeks, this past month specifically, I feel my age like a physical thing. I don’t mean just that things are harder, although God knows they are. I mean that I feel like I’ve seen enough. I feel like I know how this goes. I’ve been through two Clintons and I’ve been through Bush and Blair. I’ve seen third party candidates get talked up: Perot, Nader, Jill Stein. I’ve lain on a lumpy bed in a shitty Parisian guest house room listening to American students alternately fucking and raging against a Bush victory.

I remember when rumours spread in the office, about New York and planes. 

I was trying to teach a class when we found out about the Tube and Russell Square. I had a gig in the evening. I remember sitting in the Cluny reading a Metro or a Chronicle from earlier that day in which the bombs were written up as gas explosions. It was possible then to be wrong for as much as an hour. No such comfort today.

The Cluny, the Metro. Around for so long now. Has the Metro lasted longer than Today did? It seems like it has. Imagine telling kids today there was a time when a full colour newspaper was big fucking news.

It’s kind of worth thinking about. Why do you need colour photos? Newspapers aren’t the television news. Maybe monochrome pics would add gravitas. And they’d keep down printing costs. Assuming that market forces haven’t actually made it more expensive to do monochrome newsprint, which wouldn’t surprise me. I never took much notice of that aspect of the business. Copy’s everything to writers. I still hate having to find my own photos, having to work out the copyrights. Searching Getty. But it stands to reason, black and white is cheaper than full colour, right? Some things still have to be true.

Inadequate Responses to the Crisis, #94: launch a hipster newspaper.

They’d go mad for it in cereal cafés.

The Whale Tooth at Whitby. The Esplanade. Where do they come from? Old paths. Concrete submarines, that walk in Plymouth by the sea. A hotel out of Lovecraft. A café and bookshop in Bournemouth. A man struggling to reel a tiny fish on Boscombe Pier. Do memories have weight? And why arrive unbidden?

The driver has been identified as a thirty-one year old French Tunisian.

It’s terrorism, then. 

An American died. Two. A dad and his son. The networks will be all over this now, for definite. Trump will say something. The Guaranteed Outrage Machine will spin up once again. There’ll be so many hot takes. I’m sick of this world.

I’m tired, increasingly. Sometimes I think I’m dying. Sometimes I wish I was.

The country of Albert Camus.

I wonder what the LRB will say. The dainty left, with books and cake, a nuanced take on Corbyn. History’s still happening, whatever Francis said. And history sucks.

One damn thing after another. One foot in front of the other. One word typed after another. The feed updates. The ticker tape rolls on. There is now only ellipsis and catastrophe. And endless shots of doors. And speculation. In all senses of the world.

We all feel we’re sick of this game, but there’s no time to learn another. Anyway, we’ve played this game before. It’s called Chicken. The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You think maybe it won’t stop. You start to move.

But it’s too late.