[This text was written the night of 11th December 2019]
Mood in advance of tomorrow – judgement in Alfie’s case expected, general election, forecast rain – dystopian, fatalistic, thinking about Edmund Burke, Margaret Thatcher, the English countryside I grew up in, the conservatism of the country, its separations and splits, its fractures and perennial class war, its blood sports, its interminable legal processes, its indifference to food, its grimy, seedy sex, its pasty bodies, its love of surveillance, the weaponised blithe spirit, the masochistic attachment to mediocrity, to greyness, to bedsits, mould, damp, bread, cruelty, moss, rabbit holes, rabbit pie, rabbits with mixy, white rabbits and Welsh rarebit.
And riots, protests, police, clashes in every century, every decade, the persistence of anarchism, of undercover police using the birth certificates of dead children, sex and kids with spied-upon activists, infiltration, suspicion, monitoring, paranoia, allotments, polyester trousers, useless nipples, beards and junk food-wrappers on buses, condoms in crisp packets, pigeons with rotting feet, rubble, homelessness, nurses bringing you a cheese sandwich, the endless idea that we are not slaves, when everything about this miserable country makes you an addict, an anxiety misty miasma of moping melancholy without passion.
The weak sun, the indifferent grass, the gentle animals, periodically piled up and burned as we feed them to each other and they get ill, the periodic outbreaks of collective joy! Revelling in the land – THIRD SUMMER OF LOVE NEXT YEAR 2020 – Mark’s Acid Communism for real, putting your fucking phone away, giving someone you don’t know a hug, going outside, enclosures, rebellions, King Mob, Luddites, gleeful technophobia, disrespect for order – if you’re not slaves we’re not either! – misrule, mischief, naughtiness, jesters and carnivals, fires and May Day and Brownies and elves and pixies and sprites and all the woodland creatures showing you where the mushrooms are, stealing your stuff, Green Men, Mummers, long barrows and megaliths, forests and enchantment, never going home.
And the Great British affects: moaning, complaining, to each his own allotment of misery, your banal Battenberg cake, your trifling concerns, your judgement of the enjoyment of others, orgasming meekly to petty envy, artificial doily net curtain, thighs spread out like plucked chickens, nighties and white vests, shirts tucked into Y-fronts, your broken teeth like gravestones, weak gravy, beer with washing-up liquid foam, your uncircumcised penis, erections without the sun, skipping stone pebbles, latrines for seagulls, chips forever, the grinding feeling that rationing never ended and will never end because we enjoy it and we think we’re the fox but really we’re the hounds, and everything we do will bring us more hunts and more men in red coats, and there will always be more hedges to jump over and more brambles to prick us, and our Corbyn trouser presses will keep us in dandelions and weeds and we’ll survive in the fields, and austerity will last forever and ever until the heat death of the universe which we will be too afraid to understand, mimsy-pimsy sceptical to the end, conditioned never to feel too much, to dwell only in thoughts sent out in packages to the boarding school of our hearts.
VOTE LABOUR!!!!!! Choose Britain’s space race! The invasion of Mars! Free hot tubs for every squirrel! For football on every screen 25 hours a day! For a Lord in every house! For plumbing that sings your name, for untaxed windows and witch-hunts and saggy tits and milky toast and a mug with your first boyfriend’s name on it! For a lifetime sitting in a comfy chair eating toffees and failing to complete the crossword! For out-of-town shopping centres selling plastic tomatoes! For prison cells and army barracks and cold school toilets! For potholes and arses and lard! For the future of work! The dignity of the human spirit! The gentle elevation of inoffensive green hills! The mist of a dogwalker’s breath! For traffic wardens and pavements and a Bag for Life! Taste the Difference, open the carboot, park your car and look at the lacklustre waves, eat your sandwich, with your milquetoast misery and your fear of the medium-sized other….VOTE JOY! VOTE HAPPINESS!
Nina Power 