Julian Assange, Pussy Riot and the sacred art of fence-sitting

When it comes to the subject of Julian Assange, it appears that agnosticism is not an option, at least not in polite society. But I really don’t know whether he should be deported to Sweden or spirited to Ecuador or asked to stay on in London for the moment in case England’s batting line-up needs further bolstering. Pundits of impeccably leftist credentials such as Owen Jones and Cath Elliott have snapped at soi-disant liberals whose support for Assange appears to trump any sympathy for the women who accuse him of raping them. I certainly see their point, but A-HA! say the conspiracy theorists, this is why St Julian’s opponents have framed him as a sex offender: they know it will cause divisions among his instinctive defenders, whereas an accusation of, say, bank robbery (the offence that the South African secret services tried to pin on Peter Hain) wouldn’t be taken as seriously. Had Assange been accused of something else, would Jones or Elliott have been so eager to distance themselves? And, for that matter, if he had been accused of saying something rude about Islam, would George Galloway now be so steadfast in his defence? Rape is a heinous crime and accusations of rape need to be taken seriously; even in democracies, there are some people in positions of power who are prepared to use underhand means to silence those who oppose them. Neither of those is a particularly outrageous point of view, but right now it seems to be difficult to hold both of them at once.

I’m less conflicted about the case of Pussy Riot, the Russian punks who were sentenced yesterday. Modern Russia is a corrupt, dysfunctional plutocracy and the fact that Putin has managed to get the hierarchy of the Orthodox church onside just adds a thick layer of mumbo-jumbo and a dash of misogyny to the ghastly cocktail. The three women should not be in prison. But (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), they were fully aware of who they were going to upset and what was liable to happen when they made their protest inside the cathedral in February; otherwise there would have been little point in doing it. Let’s be honest, if the verdict had come through yesterday and they’d been found not guilty and Putin apologised for the misunderstanding and said he loved their records actually, their righteously, rightfully indignant supporters around the world would probably have felt a little let down. Like Eliot’s Thomas Becket, they were seeking martyrdom and Putin, the clown, has handed it to them. I’m not entirely sure what Assange is after, or whether the weird dialectic created by his opponents and supporters will hand it to him or not. Adding to the confusion is that the three defendants in Moscow come across as fun, feisty broads with whom you’d like to have a pint; Assange seems to be a pompous dick. Which shouldn’t matter, but it does.

And there’s another paradox. Pussy Riot were caught bang to rights. We may not like the law they broke, but it’s pretty clear that they broke it. Even if Assange were to stand trial in Sweden, no verdict would satisfy everyone and the conspiracy theories and other grumbles would persist. Perversely, the legal process in Russia has been far more transparent than what’s happening with Assange in the nominally free and open West.

I vow to thee my pasty

Well, the Olympics has got all some of us feeling terribly British and flaggity-wavery all of a sudden, but one or two people apparently want to widdle on the flame. I’m not just talking about Alex Salmond and his Scolympians (which sounds to me like a species of alien mollusc), but also the head of the tourist body Visit Cornwall, who wants to avoid references to England in any promotional material for the county. Sorry, make that duchy – the word “county” is also verboten. Cornwall is just Cornwall, and that’s where people should go. The fact that they’ll have to go through Devon to get there is but a minor inconvenience.

This does help to remind us that the entity we define as the United Kingdom is a fairly recent invention, and in a political sense only really goes back to 1707, with the Act of Union between England and Scotland. Since then, Ireland has joined the party and then (mostly) left it again, so the current map of the United Kingdom is less than 100 years old; when UKIP’s tosspot-in-chief Nigel Farage dismissed Belgium as “an artificial construction” I wondered why he thinks that couldn’t be applied to the entity he so zealously seeks to release from the bonds of Euroserfdom. Even if we cleave to the notion that England – as distinct from the UK – is a valid concept, we have to accept that for plenty of people a regional or civic loyalty trumps any fealty to nation or country. This is true in Cornwall, Liverpool and also Yorkshire, where they’ve been calculating how many medals they’d have taken if the county had entered the Olympics as a separate entity. I now find that when I’m outside the UK and someone asks where I come from, my immediate response is usually “London”.

I’d guess that every country – barring a few small, relatively homogeneous island or city states – has areas that attract this sort of local loyalty, whether or not they’re actively yearning for independence. National citizenship is simply an administrative necessity, rather than an expression of an emotional bond. I’ve been to New York and Barcelona, for example, but I know damn well that doesn’t mean that I’ve been to the USA or Spain. Are there any real Italians, or are they at heart Venetians and Sicilians and so on? Home is not necessarily where your passport says it is.

The Olympic opening ceremony: being Boyled

(The following thoughts are pretty much a synthesis of about 14 different conversations I’ve been having on various online media over the past few hours. As such, they are probably neither original nor coherent. You have been warned.)

I was a bit torn a few weeks ago when the news came that the test for prospective UK citizens will contain more questions about history. On the one hand, this is something I can only applaud, because it’s impossible to understand what makes a country or culture tick without knowing how it came to be where it is. But when you get to the nitty-gritty of which bits of history should be included, things become more complex. Nelson and Wellington and Churchill, fair enough; but what about the Putney Debates, the Rebecca Riots and the Tolpuddle Martyrs? The Jarrow Crusade and the Battle of Cable Street? Too political you say? But Churchill wasn’t?

You see, even if you agree on the basic facts, there are always multiple histories, parallel, interweaving, depending on the emphasis you choose to place on those facts. And in that spirit I bloody loved Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the Olympic Games. His was a people’s history of the UK, Blake rather than Kipling, suffragettes rather than Beefeaters, Dizzee Rascal, not the Last Night of the bloody Proms. And the CND badge and the Brookside lesbians and, of course, the glorious in-your-face-Cameron salute to the NHS. Anything that provokes Telegraph readers into splenetic online rants about the evils of multiculturalism has to be good value.

But hang on a moment. Was it really as cheeky and subversive as it seemed? Boyle wanted to make a story about revolutions but rather than Hegelian dialectic we got phallic chimneys appearing from the ersatz countryside as the industrial revolution brought pollution and capitalism to the countryside, turning everything dark and satanic. And yet Brunel and his top-hatted, bewhiskered chums were still presented as the good guys, forging the modern age and beginning a continuum that leads inexorably to a benign Tim Berners-Lee at his desk. Take that, greens and lefties alike. And there was still Elgar and there was still James Bond, purveyor of thick ears to assorted dangerous foreign types. And yes, there was still the Queen, even if she didn’t appear to be enjoying it as much as she’d revelled in that strange boaty jamboree last month.

Baudrillard would have argued that we’re simply blinded by the razzmatazz and spectacle of the whole thing, that obscures and eventually supplants the reality, including historical reality. And sure, there were lots of fireworks. But there’s also a sense that the very real spirit of subversion and nonconformism and sheer bloody-mindedness in British history has been appropriated; what Debord and the Situationists called recuperation. Yes, there were bits of the Stones and Bowie and the Sex Pistols and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, music that shocked and disturbed when it came out. But punk rockers became a posse of outsized marionettes, far more funny than scary. It all came through the door marked HERITAGE.

This is the problem when a nation decides to build its post-imperial identity around irony and self-deprecation, where the worst sin is to take oneself too seriously. To be truly subversive, to truly shock, Boyle would have had to come up with something utterly po-faced and self-important. A bit like the Beijing gig four years ago, in fact.

Maybe that at least would have made the Queen crack a smile.

The return of the neezled gobslotch

Now that mass media ensures most of us speak some variant of estuary, it’s hard to believe that less than 200 years ago, people from different parts of England would have had immense trouble understanding each other. Old House Books have republished a rather magnificent work from 1839 by one William Holloway, in which he sought to record examples of regional dialect, partly because he was aware that social upheavals would soon make English more homogeneous. Retitled Telling Dildrams and Talking Whiff-Whaff, with an introduction by the big daddy of modern linguistics David Crystal, it’s clearly a project of amateur enthusiasm rather than diligent scholarship on Holloway’s part. The author himself seems baffled by some of the definitions and derivations – “I never heard the word” he protests under the entry for punger, a Kent/Sussex term for a crab – and his grasp of the subject is also stronger for some parts of the country than others. But that doesn’t really matter, as the book will offer hours of delight to anyone who revels in the vast daftness of the English language.

Some of the entries are simply synonyms for words and concepts that are still familiar, but they deserve to be revived because they sound so magnificent. Just roll a couple of these round your mouth: clinkabell (icicle); flurch (abundance); grobble (to make holes); neezled (slightly intoxicated); rumgumptious (pompous); trollibags (tripe); aren’t they so much better than the words we use now? Others (askew, butter-fingered, dumpy, mug for a face, sack meaning dismissal) would require no explanation to a modern reader, so appear to have made the tricky transition from obscure regional dialect to standard usage since Holloway’s time. Handy insults abound, whether you’re confronted with a fudgy (“a little fat person”), a gobslotch (“such a one being apt to gobble his food”) or a loll-poop (“a sluggish, sedentary lounger”). But there are others where even the definition will leave the modern reader demanding a little more clarification: copper-clouts are glossed as “a kind of spatter-dashes, worn on the small of the leg”, loblolly is “any odd mixture of spoon-meat” and a cow-jockey is “a beast jobber”.

The last may sound a bit hog-grubbing (“swinishly sordid”), but early Victorian sensibilities demand that the sorts of words for which 12-year-old boys used to trawl dictionaries are absent. Where any sort of improper behaviour is under consideration, the good Mr Holloway is careful to highlight his own stern disapproval. A dolly-tripe, a mawks, a rubbacrock, a sosse-brangle and a trub are variously defined as sluts and slatterns while mending-the-muck-heap is 

A coarse, vulgar, romping bout; where, if one falls down others fall over, till there is a promiscuous heap of either, or of both sexes, of course not always very delicate nor very decent.

which sounds pretty good to me. In fact, a number of words that we might expect to be indelicate turn out to be entirely innocent: crap is “a smart, sudden sound”; a pissmote is just an ant; to poo is to pull or pluck; and a shag is variously a cormorant, a blackguard or a humble piece of bread and cheese.

The whole collection brings to mind those writers who were adept at creating words that sounded crazy but plausible; it could be a concordance for Lear and Carroll, Joyce and Dahl, maybe even Rambling Syd Rumpo. So don’t be a pollrumptious grizzle-demundy. Just get yourself a copy of this lexicographic gape-seed and let’s see some of these words back in action. Otherwise I’ll become frampled and may even hit you with my plunt.

PS: And here’s some more fun with funny words. Hat tip to Samira Ahmed.

The Queen’s Birthday Honours: Armando Iannucci and the bees

I don’t actually have a problem with the basic idea of a state handing out shiny nicknacks to reward its citizens for their various deeds of good-eggery. It gives a certain coherence to that vague concept of being a national treasure; official recognition to the fact that, on the whole, the British people think David Attenborough or Judi Dench are not only talented in their respective fields, but also the sort of folk you wouldn’t mind having a pint with.

What does irk me is the hierarchy of the system. When Jenny Agutter found out she’d got an OBE, might her shiny happiness have been a little scuffed by the knowledge that Kate Winslet has a CBE, which is a more prestigious decoration? How do these distinctions arise? Winslet has an Oscar, which Agutter doesn’t, so maybe that counts for something. But Kenneth Branagh doesn’t have an Oscar, and he got a knighthood, which is one louder than a CBE. Meanwhile, the government has reinstated the BEM (British Empire Medal), supposedly as a metal-and-ribbon manifestation of their Big Society catchphrase, to include long-serving lollipop ladies and milkmen and the like. But why couldn’t those people just be given MBEs, the next step down from the O? Or would that have upset white-collar recipients of that order, local government officials and Rotary chairmen and the like, who are quite happy to be seen as less wonderful than Jenny Agutter, but still want to be maintain their distinction from the people who clean their drains? But of course, we’re not allowed to mention social class, are we?

The latest round of gong-giving has thrown up one intriguing little controversy; not, as is normally the case, about the refusal of an honour, but about an acceptance. Armando Iannucci, deadpan kebabber of the powerful and their foibles, has been awarded an OBE. Alastair Campbell, supposedly the model for the monstrous Malcolm Tucker, suggested via Twitter that this was inappropriate. And then it really kicked off.

For what it’s worth, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Campbell. Iannucci is a satirist and should occupy the role of a court jester, tolerated with gritted teeth by the establishment but never quite welcomed into its bosom – at least not until his best and most ferocious days are behind him. As it stands, all his OBE signifies is that someone in the depths of that establishment considers his achievements to be less impressive than those of Richard Stilgoe or Tessa Jowell, but at the same time more worthwhile than those of one Geoffrey Hopkinson, an 84-year-old beekeeper. I hope that makes him feel good.

Jubilee, schmubilee

When it comes to the crunch, I just don’t care. I’d be quite relaxed if the British monarchy were to resign en masse, but I wouldn’t want to see guillotines in Grosvenor Square. I see the institution as something akin to subsidised opera: in principle it makes no sense, but it keeps a few strange, posh people out of mischief for what is, in the grand scheme of things, not that much money. There are more important battles to be fought, surely.

The difference is, of course, that opera is a minority pursuit, while a majority of Britons want us to stay happy and glorious. But do they really? They lurve the Queen, but don’t much fancy Charles, and would rather the succession skip a generation to the husband of the sister of the woman with the famous arse. But monarchy doesn’t happen that way; the whole point of it is that you get what you’re given. If the genetic tombola deemed that the next monarch would be Prince Andrew or Princess Michael of Kent or the second corgi from the left or Wee Jimmy Krankie, that’s what would happen, opinion polls be damned. Which suggests that people want a monarchy but can’t be bothered to exercise the intellectual curiosity needed to understand how it really works. Monarchy doesn’t have the democratic impulse of Britain’s Got Talent, but like all manifestations of celebrity culture, it demands a certain suspension of credulity.

Still, as I say, I’m fairly laid back about the whole thing. There’s a temptation to play the Smiths or the Sex Pistols or even McCarthy very loud, but ultimately what would be the point? If you’re doing something Jubilesque over this weekend; maybe trying to break the world record for lying in a bowl of slightly-off Coronation chicken; or watching Gary Barlow galumphing around on the roof of Buck House, desperately wanting a knighthood but stopping short of actually offering a sacrifice of his firstborn to the sovereign; or just making the same joke about the word “bunting” over and over and over again; then I hope you have a nice time of it.

As long as you remember that when you turn 86, they won’t come to your party.