Marc Nash's Blog, page 31

Social Housing & London Property Prices

Mrs Thatcher made them an offer many couldn't refuse. Who wouldn't want to be a property owner, having their own house rather than being beholden to the local authorities to house you? And so in the 1980s the stock of social housing was at a stroke decimated as lots of people took up the opportunity for buying their Council House at a 30% discounted rate from its market value.

We'll pass over the misery of the quixotic rise and fall of interest rates and the point at which the sale value of their house was actually lower than the value of their mortgage, the dread phrase 'negative equity'. What if these new property owners had no inkling that they were exposed to the rise and fall of investments in the world of accumulation and speculation? That they'd had no education whatsoever for this sudden elevation to rentier capitalism that they'd been invited into.

London, due to its prohibitive property prices and rental costs is a de facto City-State. If you're not already a Londoner with one foot on the property ladder, you've got no chance of becoming one unless you have a big cache of cash. Labour's "Mansion tax", a tax on property's valued at over one million pounds, would fall largely on London compared with the rest of the country.

I was born and bred a Londoner. By sheer luck of when I was born, it was still just possible to get on the London property ladder. When I was in my final year of University and knowing I would be returning to my home city to live and work, I started scoping areas I might like to live in. In the Easter holidays of my final year, I looked at property prices in an area called Tufnell Park in North London. It was an overflow area for Kentish Town which had all been bought up, since it in turn was an overflow area for Camden Town which was a hugely desirable area and whose property prices had rocketed up. (Now all of London is an overflow area for some other borough in the city). Even as I walked the streets of N19, there was a huge amount of activity converting houses into flats so that developers doubled their money on their investment in purchasing the house. When I graduated 5 months later, the average price of flats in the area had already increased by fifty thousand pounds from when I'd first looked. I was already priced out.

In the end, me and my fiancee bought an ex-council flat in Kilburn. The original council tenant had bought it for seventy thousand pounds and quickly sold it on to us for one hundred and ten thousand. a nice quick forty grand profit. None of which the Council would see to be able to reinvest in replacement social housing. We lived there for five years until the birth of our twins meant we had to move to a bigger place. We sold for one hundred and sixty-seven thousand. Today, some 15 years later, my wife informed me our old flat there had sold for over half a million pounds.

Now imagine if the local council had been able to retain a share in all its properties like that one, so that each time they were sold on, the council would receive some money. Then there would be far less of a housing crisis in London and more available social housing through reinvesting the money. But no, local government was stripped of its assets for ideological reasons as Mrs Thatcher went to war with them.

It's ironic that for such a rich city, London has become a city of the Left. The Conservative held seats are pretty much banished to the leafy suburbs, with the exception of the two most central and desirable areas. Labour are predicted to make further inroads into London in the upcoming election. Maybe because it's London for all its wealth has a conscience about those who have been excluded through exorbitant property prices and the lack of viable social housing.

Dreams - a Music chart

Well if it's good enough for Shakey (William, not Stevens) then it must be a subject rich for the arts. here's a music chart of Dream themed songs (but not David Essex's "Silver Dream Racer")


1) Sonic Youth - "I Dreamed I Dream"

An early SY song this, before their layered sound had really started to cohere. But it's still brooding with menace and the husband and wife swapped vocals is really effective. Kim Gordon's book "Girl in A Band" has just come out. She was anything but that in Sonic Youth.



2) London Underground - "Dreams Are Better"

Spacy, dubby soundscape does conjure up a dreamy sensibility.



3) Mamas And Papas - "California Dreaming"

Infinitely prefer this version than the Beach Boys, even prepared to overlook the fashion faux pas.



4) The Fall - "Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul"

If you're going to include a Fall song in any music themed chart, chances are Mark E Smith's sensibilities are going to cut against the grain of the theme and sure enough, here the Hip Priest warbles his disapproval of the Wigan Casino's soul capital reputation.



5) Gang of Four - "We Live As We Dream Alone"

A quote from Joseph Conrad and I always want to put a comma after the 'Dream' and before the 'Alone'. Talking of fashion faux pas... Still one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands.



6) Fire Engines - "Big Gold Dream"

Here's a band that somehow haven't featured in a chart of mine before even though I really like them. The perspective is very odd here, the band look like tall thin giants compared to the dancers in the front.



7) Magik Markers - "Bad Dream"

I only discovered this band relatively recently and their album "Boss" has gone into my all-time top 20. Usually wig-out noise merchants, this shows an alarming degree of disturbia through a much lighter touch. Fabulous.



8) Pauline Murray & the Invisible Girls - "Dream Sequence 1"

Pauline Murray sounding just like she did when fronting punk band Penetration, though with more poppy backing than the thrash 3 chords of punk.



9) New Order - "Dreams Never End'

Fascinating track that shows the partial emergence of the New Order sound from that of Joy Division, but still with its roots very much traceable. They all look so tentative here.



10) Suicide - "Dream Baby Dream"

If there was ever a soundtrack of nightmares, Alan Vega provided it.



11) Eurythmics - "Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This"

I wasn't really a fan of the 80s, most of my favourite bands expired in the early 80s. I always associate this song with the grim politics of the era. A kind of corporate sponsored vision of nightmarishness.



12) Supertramp - "Dreamer"

Before punk came along, I used to listen to stuff like this. Thank god for punk I say. These days this sounds like   to me. Crime of the century? That this type of music held sway for so long.



13) Television - The Dream's Dream"

This was probably around a similar time to the Supertramp and represented a precursor of punk and new wave that swept away the old rock dinosaurs. But these guys could still play their instruments, apart from Richard Hell obviously!



14) Nas - "Sweet Dreams"

I like Nas, but he really needs to get himself a decent artistic director to make his videos. they're all the same and universally awful.



15) Chemical Brothers - "Dream On"

They're called the Chemical Brothers for a reason. Spacemen 3 would have killed for this song.



16) Electric Prunes - "I had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)"

Dressed like choirboys yet their sound was a distortion, fuzzed up glorious romp.



17) Tricky - "Bad Dreams"

And we're back with the paranoia latent in dreams. or not so latent in this case. Tricky regarded all life as a bad dream.




18) Lil Kim - "Dreams"

Oh do get on with it! Once she's 43 seconds in it really locks in to a remorselessly mean vibe.



19) The Bug - "Thief Of Dreams"

Dubstep is supposedly an edgy dreamy urban soundscape and The Bug is all that and more. But the vocalist in this spins a terrifying narrative that is anything but dream like.



20) Minutemen - 'Dream Told By Moto"

Or the 4 minute warning till the bomb drops... no dream this for us in the 80s, we really had these thoughts and anxieties.

Breaking Up - Friday Flash

“… connection… Frustrating…” 
“What?… hear me… …out?”
“Difficult… trying… very…”
“… not enough… and… bars”
“… signal… You… … lousy…”
“Can’t fight… You… there?”
“… forget… us… bother…”
“… give… chance… might”
“…my… back… Unforgivable”
“Time…”
“… later…”
“Actually… meaning…”
“… much too…”
“Static… both… …”
“Oath?”
“… said ‘growth’…”
“Let’s… clear…”
“This…”
“Pointless… … ring… back”
“… waste… …precious…”
“… breaking up…”
“Sorry…?”

“Dumped”

Assassin's Veto - Friday Flash

We condemn their killing, but when you stir the hornet’s nest…
We condemn their murder, but they were fully aware of the risks
We condemn the lethal violence visited upon them, but some sacred cows are non-negotiable
We condemn the beheadings, but they knew the likely consequences
We condemn the journalists' executions, but such are the occupational hazards of covering wars
We condemn the cartoonists’ massacre, but they simply went too far
We condemn the bombing of the theatre, but the play was inflammatory
We condemn the hounding of that author to death, but he remorselessly refused to show restraint

We condemn the rapes, but if they dressed that provocatively what did they expect?

Triptychs Cover Reveal

Writers often get asked where they get their ideas from. And if like me you write short stories and flash fiction, you have to come up with a whole host of ideas to feed all your stories. I get most of my ideas just by keeping my eyes open in daily life, especially when commuting and observing my fellow passengers; or from items on the news.

But when I was approached to become part of the Mind's Eye third collection of stories all in response to photos, that was a bit different for me. Because I'd had no prior relationship with the image I was presented with, I had to react to someone else's artistic sensibilities, that being the person who took the photo. (Mind's Eye 1 and Mind's Eye 2)

Even more interestingly, the participating writers were sharing the same images. The collection is called "Triptychs" because each image will have three different stories from three different writers. I haven't seen the stories yet, so I'm really excited to see what the other writers did with the images I was asked to create from.

Before I give the cover reveal for this collection and before I show the two images I was asked to riff off, I just want to give the blurb for the whole project:


Now this notion of three different angles on the same image is exactly what I love doing in my flash. I've always described it as like turning a gemstone to reflect the light in different ways from all its facets. In such a way I believe you can show all the subtleties and nuances of things in a way that is very condensed and compact, unlike in a novel when things like character perspective may limit just how many different angles you can show, or the effect is diluted through the sheer length of the story.

So, now the two images I was asked to create stories from.

 

credit: Martin David Porter                  credit: Helle Gade

Now, one was an absolute breeze, I was struck by an idea instantly (can you guess which one?) But the other, well I was racking my brains for months on end. The setting sun was the instant one, such a beautiful image. The only teaser I'll give you is the title, "Cloud Animals". But the teapot on a barge with some swans swimming by... Man I was struggling with that, as those who know me I tend not to write pastorals! And eventually that was my way into a story, to try and come up with something utterly opposite the tone of stillness and grace conjured up by the image. So I did! Don't think the title is much of a clue for this one, but it's called "Water Fugue In C-Minor". "Cloud Animals" is a flash story at under 1,000 words. "Water Fugue..." is a short story at 2,350 words.



So that only leaves the cover reveal for this inspiring project. I give you - "Triptychs"





Available soon from usual book outlets

Eyes In The Back Of His Hands

My blind lover reached out to light upon me. I stayed as still and as silent as I could, suspending my breath so as to provide him with no cues. I coveted the way he foraged to locate me. Without sound and motion, he zeroed in on my heat. The temperature of my blood. The cadence of my heart, audible only to him. Watching him search only further raised it, pulsing like a beacon. Thus we mutely reinforced one another’s avidity. In time, though our anticipatory senses had in actuality dismantled all incremental chronology between us, he attained the monolith of me. He clasped my face in his hand, gently dabbed his fingers to triangulate my mouth, before bombardiering his own lips to mine.

My eyeless lover did more than cup, contain and compass me. He carved me and hewed me from my block. His expert, unjudgemental hands moved to plot me, each a deliberate motion reforming the configuration of me. Wilfully I shifted and writhed so that my flesh would never settle in the same aspect. Making each handhold of my body a fresh exposure. My contours scaled and duly honoured, not as some milepost or waystation, but a sacred destination in and of itself. Even with my eyes open, tracking his parabolas over my skin, I could not feel myself as he graved me. As he raised the siege of me. 


My sightless lover became my eyes for me. For in no other possible way could I grasp my own outlines. My eyes were shut as he revealed me to myself. I enveloped his hands with mine and let him guide me over the unknown terrain of me. 

Stuffed Shirt

My new wife laid my freshly ironed shirt on the newly made bed. She had folded the sleeves to lie on the shirt's body, cuff resting on cuff, rather than stretched out to the sides.


Like a supplicant


Like a meditative


Like a straitjacket


Like a burial shroud


Like a police chalk outline that had been filled in


I bought drip-dry shirts from then on in...

The Sky Fell In - Friday Flash

Ninety foot high said the plans. An imperial measure for an imperial edifice. It would dwarf and dominate everything else around it. For the natives built only low-lying buildings, with open roofs save for some cursory vines and tendrils. Perhaps they liked to gaze out upon the stars. Well the large silver cross anticipated atop the spire would give them a new Polaris to orient their path through the firmament. Thus would we would colonise the heavens too. Change the trajectories of their imagination, raise their zenith beyond the earthbound limits of tree-tops where they currently resided through fruit-gathering quests.They watched us fell their trees with indifference. They cooed at our technologies for cutting and shaping wood. They chattered and pointed as the timber was hoisted into place, as if they were architectural students. But they fled the moment the frames began to soar over the roofs of their huts. We awoke the next morning to find that the sky had fallen in. Or at least it was unobstructed by any of our wooden beams erected the previous day. They lay in a heap on the sun-baked dirt. We checked the joists and tenons for faulty installation but found them all to be sound. We could only surmise that for whatever reason the natives had pulled them down in the night.We restored our work and as we left for the day, we set guards to protect our labour. In the morning we confronted the same sight, only with our guards fast asleep having been drugged with blowdarts. Some of our number wanted to punish some as an example and a deterrent, but others countered they did not want the church baptised in blood. So we carried on erecting the roof by day and seeing it toppled under darkness at night. No matter how many sentries we posted, with how many lit balefires, they were rendered helpless through attacks cloaked by the tree canopy. Their low level interdiction overpowered our holy ones. We halted the casting of the silver cross and instead arranged for the precious metal to be shipped home as a secular tribute.

What makes a Jihadist? - Sunday sample

London Mayor Boris Johnson, who has never hidden his ambitions to be Britain's Prime Minister some day, this week shared his analysis of the psyche of homegrown Jihadis. Claiming the evidence of psychological profiling, he pronounces Jihadists to be losers rejected by women and "obsessed with pornography". While the psychosexual makeup is a contributory element of the overall mindset, it's worth pointing out that many Western Muslims regard our societies as over-sexualised, with what they deem as pornography being far to prevalent within society.
In my novel "Not In My Name", I give what i hope, is a rather more detailed and sophisticated analysis of the journey to radicalism undertaken by Jihadis. It's not enough to just put it down to "brainwashing", you need to understand what processes are employed in order to tackle it. Here is a sample from my novel.

"The bottom line sees the human spirit remarkably tenacious at preserving itself. The body is stockpiled with a whole battery of reflexes to resist its own cessation and death. Its default setting is for life. So mental illness aside, the only way for this to be overridden, is by brainwashing. An abstergent, yielding a blank screen upon which any message can be projected. Including graduation from a human being, into a human bomb. The knack, is to change the bomber’s desires from embracing life, into a hankering after death. 

Interview after interview, I was presented with similar, reedily intoned versions of how this was brought about. One strand had them sat drooling at the feet of some hierophant in a madrassa, as he categorically untangles the frayed threads of life, while they scratch their carpet-fluff beards and nod accordance. I’ll tell you something, if I was promised myriad virgins in the Afterlife, I’d probably enlist myself. Blissfully blow myself to Kingdom Come. Presumably, it’s one virgin to tend each bit of the body atomised by high-explosive. Of course, rather than nubile women, why couldn’t it equally be the ghosts of the 72 camels slain for Fatima’s wedding? That’s the drawback with numerical symbolism. It’s open to double counting. 

Alternatively, they paraded before a paramilitary hawk, sharpening the recruit’s claws on his steel gauntlet. The logic he advances, is that the mission should be beyond fear, for no other soldier has such certainty of whether he will return alive or dead from his next action. Whereas the suicide bomber knows to the precise minute. What a boon.

By whichever method, these fellows are striking a deal with their egos. They don’t shut them off, rather they believe they are swapping a pretty squalid life not for death, but for another, improved life up in the clouds. A literal leap of faith. Trouble is, when their heads are blown upwards off their body towards Heaven, sure as hell it hurtles back down to earth under the prosaic ministrations of gravity. Does each bomber actually possess the finer shades of understanding, exactly what the Holy Text suggests is in store for them? Ultimately, they remain just teenagers on the most extreme and ugly of promises. And as to the secularist bombers, they too are left in no uncertain terms that they will become pin-up poster boys on the walls of Gaza and Baghdad. This is the poor man’s version of celebrity. A pension from Iran or Syria will see that their family is well provided for, a sort of posthumous dower. Or a divorce settlement.

When one of the plump-bellied commanders or hierophants squeezes into a belt, rather than a whey-faced waif; when one of those educated-in-the-universities-of-their-foes strategists puts his own body on the line, then I’ll afford them credence that they’re not just exploiting and manipulating these bomb mules. Winding up the key of taut and tutored desperation in their backs and setting them off towards mayhem. See, the thing with successful missions as the Japanese kamikazes demonstrated, is that you cull your elite talent. No such thing as a suicide veteran. You need a constant stream of fresh volunteers. But unlike Iraq, where Jihadists are crossing over the borders all the time, Palestine is sealed off. So the quality of the bomber pool declines. They started sending children and simpletons. I saw them in the prisons too, though I didn’t abuse them any further by requesting to interview them. Even those with the slightest sympathy for the strength of will of the suicide bomber, ought to be repulsed by this abasement. Bad strategic decision.

So I return to these prompters, these whisperers from offstage. The puppet master, pedlars of death. What these men do so successfully, is to take the everyday currency of death in their blighted land and raise it to the ultimate value. The reward they offer, confirmed as instantly as a scratch-card, is the status of martyr. They market death as a lifestyle. Conferring an off the peg posterity. Of soldier; freedom fighter; liberator; hero; martyr; patriot; bomber. When life circumstances have prevented the volunteer from being secure in the roles of lover, father, son, worker, provider, man of leisure. Such appeals strike at the very core of anxiety and neurosis. Become a sapper rather than merely sapped.

These manipulators, these programmers, are marketing geniuses. For being able to turn death around like that and make it an attractive option. An aspirational choice. They ought to be employed in Soho and Madison Avenue, having their work plastered across giant hoardings and on TV. Then they’d be earning enough money to send back to revive their homeland economy. But these mavens of destruction would presumably baulk at the job title of ‘Creative Director’."

 Available on Amazon Kindle

War songs - 15 songs with a war theme

1) Pere Ubu - "30 Seconds Over Tokyo"
A song about the dropping of a nuclear bomb, even though neither of the two that were dropped were over Tokyo. Still, unnerving sounds for an uncomfortable track.



2) Mickey Dread - "World War Three"
I grew up in an era when we did talk about the possibility of a third world war with due seriousness and dread. But somehow, when transposed in a reggae idiom, it doesn't quite seem as apocalyptic.



3) DOA - "War In The East"
White man reggae, so yes the threat and menace are back in it. Still I like the almost jaunty rise in timbre of the line "War only brings destruction".



4) Dead Kennedys - "Chemical Warfare"
So you steal some chemical agent and who do you target with it? Only the Country Club Sunday golfers!



5) Minutemen - "Dream Told By Moto"
Yes we really did think about what would you do with the 4 minutes left of life before the bombs hit. And this seemed to be the unfailing response. Typical male perspective, 4 minutes being sufficient.



6) The Pogues - "The Battle Of Brisbane"
In which Shane Macgowan accompanies himself by beating a tin tray against his head.



7) The Clash - "Washington Bullets"
The Clash sing about Latin American politics, of the American government's interdiction against anything faintly Marxist on the continent and the murky world of drugs, guns and money deals.



8) Fund-a-mental - "Sbrebrenica Massacre"
From an album called "All is War", one of the angriest albums you will ever hear as they catalogue the West's campaigns against Muslim states. This is haunting.



9) Black Sabbath - "War Pigs"
Ozzy and Co po-faced for once rather than camping it up.



10) Flipper - "Sacrifice"
There is something primal and primeval about Flipper's basic sound and that seems to fit perfectly for this song.




11) Rage Against The Machine - "Killing In The Name Of"
I was never really into them, so this is about the only one of their songs I know and that really only from the crowdbombing campaign to get it to the Christmas Number One instead of some TV Talent show dreck.



12) Gang Of Four - "Armalite Rifle"
This was only ever a B-Side on a single, but demonstrates their political aesthetic which informed all their early songs.



13) Stiff Little Fingers - "Wasted Life"
The band from which I was the most spoiled for choice for songs about war, hardly surprising that they came from Belfast, but they managed throughout it all to remain pretty non-aligned, quite an achievement in that community torn by strife.



14) Ian Brown - "Illegal Attacks"
Ian Brown the spokesman for Britain's illegal invasion of Iraq with America, based on a fictitious report into Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons capability. It's a long way from Madchester's non-stop party vibe.



15) Discharge - "Visions of War"
Discharge, the band that would be invited to soundtrack the apocalypse.