Europe: pub landlords and a desperate dearth of carrots

Can you make people love Europe? The question immediately generates two more: Which people? What Europe? There are many answers and therefore no real, safe, surefire, mathematical solution to this riddle. 

But if your aim is for people to develop an intense dislike for it, coupled with episodes of catatonic ennui about the whole matter, then congratulations to both the pro and anti-EU camps for collaborating so effectively towards this goal. 

Two pieces I read recently,  about the somewhat mirroring challenges of the EU and Scottish independence referendums, highlight the dilemmas at play. 

Ruth Wishart argues, in my view very persuasively, in The Observer that the faltering Better Together campaign needs to find some carrots to go with the sticks. Threatening people with the uncertainty of some unspecified horrific apocalypse if they ever leave only works so far and is never as attractive as showing them that it is really in their interest to stay because the future can be bright and exciting inside the Union. As one person commented on the thread below the piece :"A campaign slogan of 'you're too wee, too poor and too stupid to cope' never had much going for it in the empathy stake."

Which gets me to Chris Huhne's Guardian piece,  full of interesting polling data but so strident in tone it made my teeth hurt. I share Huhne's premise, summed up in the title: Ukip are the party 'of a better yesterday', of undeliverable promises based on a rose tinted narrative of a past that will never return and was actually not so great in the first place. But sneering at 'insecurity and nostalgia' won't do the second part of the trick: offer a vision of a better tomorrow inside the EU for the people who feel left behind.

To get through to potential UKIP voters I think it is essential to turn a common saying upside down.  Play the man by all means: Nigel Farage is a big boy, he can take and is well overdue some ribbing, some not-so-gentle reminding of the intellectual dishonesty of his party and its elected representatives. Just think of their rhetorical despairing of the EU budget while drinking deeply from its trough, their colour-by-number manifestos, their purporting to stand up for everyday folks against big business provided they are not women and/or low paid workers or in fact anyone who doesn't run a pub whilst chain-smoking, basically. Play the man, as I say, but never, ever kick his potential electorate like a ball - too poor and dumb and uneducated to know what's good for them. This is not just horribly patronising but self-defeating too.

Sticks only work so far, particularly with the safety and familiarity of the idea of the nation state pulling the other way, the comforting illusion that your leaders can get back to being 'in charge' as if the world and all its challenges and structures weren't  global anyway. You need the carrot of a vision of Europe that is worth partaking in. It's tricky because there are many different, often contrasting reasons why Europe has created real value for businesses, more freedom and a better quality of life for its citizens and - at times, though not so much recently - a sense of purpose.

Here, for what it is worth, is why I grew to love Europe, warts and all, idiotic bureaucracy and some disastrous decisions notwithstanding. It starts with my father.

As a small boy, who had to flee the industrial town of Leghorn at the height of the war to seek refuge in the Sienna countryside, my father saw the dusty tanks of the defeated German troops file past his village one way and jubilant (and often marauding) Allies contingents come up the other way. The need to stop European countries ever going to war with each other is as ingrained in him as the love of sweets, which American soldiers apparently lavished on him on accounts of his unbelievably cuteness.

When I left Genoa University in 1989 to finish my studies in Edinburgh, safe in the knowledge that by 1992 my degree would be recognised throughout the then EEC, I didn't need complex graphs and charts to explain to me why a single market of goods, people, capitals and services, work in progress though it was and- incredibly - still is, was a good idea.

And after a few short years of undrinkable coffee and dodgy salad cream I noticed with relish that Italy had followed me up there: not in the shape of hordes of unwashed immigrant zombies but in the ready availability of every conceivable culinary ingredient, brand of clothing, and even the odd, wildly optimistic given the as yet un-integrated weather, Vespa scooter. Brits, not just the posh, well travelled ones, could have a little taste of the Mediterranean life.

In those first few years if I was ever nostalgic for  'home' I really had to conjure it up, Proustian style, at the bottom of a coffee cup. Flights were punishingly expensive and I could barely afford to fly back once or twice a year - casual mini-breaks in Rome or Madrid really would have seemed the stuff of science fiction. But they didn't come up with better planes, you see, just a better market for the industry to evolve in through genuine competition.

I am proud of the fact that we Europeans, a collection of peoples who have exchanged ideas and  knowledge, created art and beaten the shit out of each other for millennia can calmly establish, through the rules of access to the Single Market, and with not a cannon in sight, that we want our products safe, of a high standard and not made through slave labour or at the expense of ecological disaster.

Later on in life I, and any of my British neighbors who may wish to, will be free (as things stand) to retire back in Italy, safe in the knowledge that the local health service will look after me, despite my not ever having paid a penny towards it.

Finally, as a woman, I can think of fewer worse fates than having Farage and his braying chums in charge or able to influence any policies at all, at home or internationally, as my chances of becoming a chain-smoking pub landlord, unconcerned with maternity leave, anti-trafficking laws and all that - what do they call it? - red tape, are vanishingly small.

Npower, I salute you....

From the desk of Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband

Letter to Gareth Pickles, Customer Services Director, Npower
 

Dear Goreth Packles,

Thank you for you illoterate litter of 15^th March, shown on the left, in which you congratulate yourself for having learned how to spell my wife’s name.  
 
It’s really, really impressive it only took her 20 minutes on the phone to teach one of your staff to do to this.

However, the effect is somewhat spoiled by the fact that in the same letter you manage to misspell my name, twice, in entertainingly inconsistent ways.

Evidently Npower has decided it’s no longer enough to fleece its customers.  Now it’s essential to actively troll them in their own homes for that extra special personal touch.

  

Gireth, I salute you.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Tom Runnacles (that’s RUNNACLES)

Great news: I love you!

Dear Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband, 

it has come to my attention that, as of tomorrow, we will have been blissfully and legally happy for 6 years.

To reward your loyalty to our joint enterprise I'm sending you a 'My hot wife loves me' coupon, for you to redeem in a variety of male conversations about hot chicks.

I trust you'll enjoy your coupon and will keep loving me for many long years to come.

Your Hot Wife

PS:  Before you start, no the picture *does not* make you look like a giant green slug.

And anyway, it's a good picture of me, which is the whole point of the voucher.

Happiness: daffodils and fire engines.

I wanted to share this sudden insight I had last night about the human condition, before: 

1) I realise how meaningless it possibly is or,

2) that it only applies to my human condition or worse,

3) before some confused, elderly Ukip reader stumbles upon this blog by mistake and unmasks me as not 'proper human, just Italian'.

I came back home from a long, complex, unresolved kind of a day, deep in thought about how unable I have been for some time to see my way through whatever the next stage if my life is.

On my doorstep I found this:

I immediately recognised it as a gift from my next door neighbour, for whom I had done a minuscule favour but at a time of slight crisis. The drawing is by her son, whose repertoire of fire engines is truly inexhaustible.

My heart opened up, totally involuntarily, like a mouth in a yawn, and I though: the ability to feel happiness - give or take dramatic events such wars and family deaths- must be part optimism, part the ability to accept consolation.

That's all I wanted to say. I warned you it was probably silly.


,

This Facebook Life

Do your FB postings reflect your life? I bet they do not. Take me: I spent the last week sullenly applying for yet more jobs and battling a flare-up of back pain with floor exercises (but mainly with food, if I'm honest). But you wouldn't know by looking at my FB output, which has been the usual placid stream of editorials about the EU or feminist articles I've linked to, polite comments on friends pages, maybe a shared cartoon or other visual joke or two.

I'm writing about this because I have noticed a number of friends posting prefab little films about their own 'Facebook story'. The first I came across was vaguely moving: oh, look at so and so ten years ago; yep, I remember the wedding, oh and that was the photo we took in Paris etc, all accompanied by some vaguely soulful muzak.

By the fourth such advertorial it seemed clear that FB is not just using its own customers to advertise itself but is offering this as a service to them. It's selling them back their last decade as a mathematical algorithm, which is all FB think we all are. I don't fault them for trying, I fault us for falling for this Coca-Cola ad version of our own lives, which we have not even curated ourselves.

So back to the initial question. FB has lulled us into the illusion that we could document our lives through it, through the sharing of stuff, of photos and gags and links and likes with a greater and greater, more and more amorphous community of friends. Well, kind of. These fragments of ours aren't a coherent and honest narrative of us, aren't us.

We are still deeply human despite the changing digital landscape we move in; we remain fleshy and encumbered and slow and un-insightful. We haven't caught up with Fb, we're still lagging behind, unable to optimise. Despite FB's near messianic arrival ten years ago, praise be the Internet Gods, we have carried on living life as a first draft: we do not know, will never know what the life-changing events are until after,often long after they have happened. We do continue to make sense of our lives in retrospect, in dreams, in memories, in desires, in a gazillion ways and means that are not documentable, shareable, curate-able, scrapbookable, especially  by computers. 

As for my last ten years, it was meeting my husband, not marrying him, that changed my life, and no picture exist of the first event whereas the second is extensively documented. It wasn't the leaving do that mattered, jolly pictures notwithstanding, but the decision to leave the BBC. There's a gazillion missing pictures of, and shared jokes and meals between, my sister and me, because the last ten years we have continued to be mostly absences in each other's life. And do not get me started about the books I haven't written, and the ones still in drawers somewhere.

FB wouldn't know about that. For it we all exist on the same digital plain where time is always now, geographical distance is meaningless and the existence of FB itself is the biggest feature of the last decade of our lives.

Nice try. Close, damn close, but no cigar. And frankly they could have chosen less irritating, if vaguely soulful, muzak.

Publishing and other cons

I’ve just spent all day at a really inspiring and eye-opening seminar on self publishing, one of many masterclasses run by the Guardian in a desperate (but I have to admit stylish) bid to stay afloat whilst still flogging a cultural product rather than – say – mineral water.

Like with an AA meeting, showing up took courage and came at the end of a long process of self-examination, as well as indicating the intention to turn over a new leaf. So here we go....

My name is paolabi and I am a writer. I have written (and re-written several times) two novels, a travelogue/memoir and a play. I have spent my 20s and 30s locked away in a room (after hours at the day job) working conscientiously and happily at my craft. Many people I know love my writing. I cannot vouch for any people I do not know because they won't have had any chance to see my work .
 
Over time I have had any confidence, enthusiasm and eventually love for the writing itself  beaten out of me by the traditional publishing process. This starts with the gamble of finding and retaining an agent. He or she then becomes your sole gateway to publishers, determining all the different ways in which you and your book have to change to be deemed even theoretically acceptable by famous and powerful houses. Those will be completely obsessed (depending on the year) with strippers’ biographies, cookery books, Nazi spy stories or incest memoirs.  In the late 90’s I was urged to be more ‘like Bridget Jones’. I’m sure today I’d be chastised for the lack of S&M in my copy.
 
The lucky, lucky bastards I spent my youth utterly envying, the bright young things who were allowed to write literary fiction and have it published un-cretinized, now languish on an income of £600 a year, juggling many part time jobs and visits to the food bank.
 
For every JK Rowling (and let’s not forget the ten publishers who passed over her manuscript) there are thousands of writers starving because of the measly royalties, the lack of any marketing or distribution efforts, the glacial lead times.  
 
What they do get is the affirmation of being deemed a writer (in the ten minutes they are in print and in the shops) by virtue of sporting the logo of cultural institutions that would really prefer even crassier strippers’ bios and even darker incest memoirs.
 
The final irony is that the industry is now trying to muscle in on the self-publishing racket by buying up companies that offer dubious publishing services, where money is made not through the selling of books but the fleecing of would-be published authors via devious practices I cannot be arsed to fully lawyer up but take my word for it.
 
The spread of online publishing has also greatly lessened the stigma of the ‘vanity publishing’ tag. You don’t pay thousands to someone to publish your worthless, badly written book. You can upload your ebook for next to no cost and Amazon pays you royalties of between 40 and 70 pc on whatever you can shift. The reader out there decides, not some pissed up executive after a very liquid lunch.
 
So who will buy that book of yours, once you’ve uploaded it on Amazon Kindle?
Who knows. All I know is that if one person unconnected to me were to download one copy that would already represent a 100 per cent increase on my sales on a book that is currently not published at all on accounts of not being sufficiently about ‘ a pole-dancing Bridget Jones who exorcises the demons of horrific child abuse through cooking’.
 
As for any difference in prestige and authenticity between traditional and independent publishing it’s now becoming as moot a point as with meeting your partner online or ‘in the real world’. It’s not the process, it’s the outcome.
 
By all means stick with the domestic abuser who swept you off your feet at the school disco 20 years ago. I married the brilliant, mild mannered, younger man I met in my 30s on a dating site – go ahead and pity me, why don’t you?

Captain Europe finds a home

 
 I begin this 2014 still on somewhat uncertain ground professionally, so it's with a certain amount of nostalgia mixed with pride (and a teeny-bit of retrospective horror) that I share with you the chapter of my memoir which describes the gloriously random beginning of my 17-year journalism career.

Captain Europe had been the name of my anonymous (and incomprehensible) satirical column for the Edinburgh University student newspaper (Student). But the term presciently described what became a theme in my professional life : because of my foreignness and initial uselessness I was put to work on something 'international' and forgotten about. And then, like a miracle, news, foreign news, found me.

The chapter is a sober, honest, warts-and-all assessment of my inclinations and talents and sheer bloody good luck. Reader, I'm not a natural born reporter, due to my shyness and instinctive dislike for, I don't know how to put this, new stuff happening.

Read how I coped with journalism school, dodged reporting on Lady Diana's death. Read about the complex hierarchies and epic power struggles in the wild animal kingdom that is a newspaper newsroom, in an era where - younger readers avert your eyes now - there was no internet and Google and stuff, just highly fallible people and paper files full of cuttings.

As this account was written more than ten years ago, when a thing called journalism still recognisably existed as separate from entertainment and when newspapers were not generally considered an endangered species yet, I didn't even reflect upon the multitude of technological changes that have occurred since that first day at the European Newspaper.

It's a memory preserved in aspic, of a time unaware if its own growing irrelevance. It deals mainly with human types and human emotions, not systems and methods. It is not an historical document in any way. I hope you like it.