From pagan rituals to the Queen’s speech: the more things change …
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Version 0 of 1. Sometime between quitting drinking two months ago and the evening of the general election, I developed the ability to travel through time. Or rather, it appears that time has developed the ability to travel through me. That said, if you remember when 70s donkey-jacket socialism dissolved in the acid of 80s Thatcherism, then the instinctive forward shambling of Labour’s collapsed front bench, like the dead husks of Italian B-movie zombie shoppers still shuffling towards the mall on muscle memory alone, certainly has a chilling element of deja vu. I am old enough to remember the last time Labour looked this broken, before Blair swooped down upon its expiring body, a predatory sexual opportunist with a pick-up artist manual in his manbag, sniffing a vulnerable, drunken divorcee in a Holiday Inn bar, his temporarily unencumbered ring finger toying with the olive on her plastic cocktail stick. “Honey, I know how to make you feel wanted again.” But it isn’t merely the chemical misfiling of old memories in my brain’s in-tray that makes me wonder which way I’m travelling through the time stream. Twice in the last six weeks I have experienced the sense of an actual temporal shift in my immediate surroundings. In the sunlit remnants of Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire, one morning last month, a nave of hooded monks rose briefly from the turf before me and then faded permanently from view, like ghostly Liberal Democrats, their dry mouths chewing inedible hats as history dismissed them. And last Wednesday afternoon, at the ruined Roman temple of an ancient river spirit in the Forest of Dean, mumbling votive supplicants holding effigies of limbs they wanted mended moved momentarily around me, towards an ambivalent deity and his dog servants across a mosaic pavement, long since moved to a museum, now doubtless volunteer-operated on a greatly reduced budget. I appreciate that these events were merely malfunctions prompted by the chemical rebalancing of my consciousness, but these days the implausible past seems more vivid than the impossible present. If reality were a broken TV set, I’d be beyond turning it on and off at the mains, banging it hard with the flat of my hand instead, hoping the picture would somehow look familiar once more. Leaving the still resonant rites of pagan Lydney behind me, I drove back along the Severn to watch parliament open on the news. An old woman with a hat of shimmering jewels, the human embodiment of a fragmenting nation, crossed her capital in a coach of gold, Selene’s moon chariot, trailed by plumed horsemen, half Sandhurst, half flamingo. The gem-encrusted Empress’s entry to the airtight decision chamber was announced by an emissary in pantyhose, who banged his rod upon an opera-house toilet cubicle door, an aroused and aggressive transvestite drunk, home late from the support group, his keys mislaid. Sat upon Demeter’s golden throne of indifference, Madam Allotrope Hat droningly intoned a speech dictated to her by her captors, the sexless plutocrats on the right of the house. This impregnable dynastic cabal’s ancestral wealth was built on Norman bequests, received for betraying the ancient Britons, establishing ongoing precedents. The pedigree bloods sat opposite the people’s other representatives, powerless straw men strategically placed to enact impotently the now empty ritual of imagined opposition; deflating beachball heads with Art Attack googly eyes, tied at the neck to the collars of dead men’s charity castoffs, stuffed with shredded manifestos in an illusion of substance, awaiting the oncoming bonfire of their values. Everyone in the chamber appeared to be in character, fulfilling various symbolic roles, from Diamondhead herself to the flower-draped southbound Scots, playing the part of a poorly rehearsed Greek chorus, ignoring the conductor, cacophonously crashing its cues. And there was the sin-eating scapegoat of Little Clegg, who was supposed to have dragged himself off into the desert to die, to dissolve the transgressions of his people inside his own rotting carcass, but had instead the temerity to return, and vomit up all the undigested sin again, in front of his indifferent former partners, burying their barely noticing nostrils in scented nosegays. Even Ed Miliband, absent from the TV coverage, appeared not as himself, but as a corporeal cloud of shame, hanging suspended above the proceedings like a stupendous cotton wool fart. His would-be successors tried not to gag with revulsion, even as they blundered for faint words with which to praise him, at once not untrue, and yet not unkind, while dreaming of alternative realities, in which his clearly more capable brother had brought home the bacon sandwich unbitten. Only Michael Gove, The Lawgiver, appeared unapologetically as himself. He arrived to play his part in the pantomime clad in an enormous black velvet oven glove inlaid with mysterious runes, accepting from treasure-haired Nerthus his mission to eradicate the Rights Of Humans. Like the orangutan science-priest in Planet of the Apes, Gove believes these humans to be some kind of inferior species, who have been getting away with their mischief for far too long, and who have now to be dealt with, before they further spoil the crops and foul the drinking water. Analysis of all this cryptic mummery was provided by the BBC’s chief political journalist Nick Robinson, himself an increasingly representative figure. Having undergone successful lung tumour surgery before the election, his recovering voice currently a whisper, Robinson now stands for the Conservative government’s, and the new culture secretary’s, vision of the BBC itself. The BBC news nowadays is a barely audible miniature portable television set, standing on a stone sideboard, its insight drowned out by the honking of guests at a private kitchen supper in a private Chipping Norton cellar. And yet the possibility that this voice might one day still be allowed to squeak on, under reduced circumstances, continues cruelly to be entertained. For now. I thought of the rituals of Nodens in that forest glade, which my apparent madness had granted me a glimpse of that afternoon. And I laughed at the great god Pan, as his great green masquerades dissolved into parliamentary procedures. I looked from Nodens to the news and Nick Robinson, and from the news and Nick Robinson back to Nodens again. And Nodens, even in despoiled statue form at the gates of Lydney Park garden, his nose smashed off, his face caved in, seemed somehow more convincing. Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew plays the Edinburgh festival fringe in August; see stewartlee.co.uk |