There You Go

THERE YOU GO

It’s all going terribly well, isn’t it?

What we in Britain call a heatwave (but which will, as the climate gets more and more pissed off, become known as an agreeably mild summer) has gone to the heads of a number of our countrypeople. Out of respect for ABC’s Terms and Conditions, I shall not go into detail about my views on the riots popping up all over the place, or the people on social media who organise them. I shall just admit to being perplexed as to why the appropriate reaction to an unimaginable tragedy is to wreck the place and terrorise the inhabitants. But there you go, I guess I’m just old-fashioned.

I’m enjoying the Olympics, although I was in two minds about the opening ceremony. Some of it was rather splendid, some just a wee bit baffling. All Olympic ceremonies are a bit baffling to foreign eyes. In 2012 I wondered what non-Brits would make of the part where loads of kids bounced up and down on beds while joyful nurses danced around them. These days, of course, a paean to the NHS would consist of rows of people with very few teeth left clutching their phones and crying as they tried to make a GP appointment, while a large clock continually struck 8am. Equally mystifying, but maybe a little more accurate.

Viewing the telly pictures from Paris, I didn’t initially get the significance of a row of people sitting behind a table while a large blue chap lounged amid a flower arrangement. Later I read this was a reference to the Greek Festival of Dionysius, blue chap being the god himself. OK. It would probably have looked better without the teeming rain, but it was very French, a nice nod to the originators of the Olympics, full marks for effort.

Although apparently not. It was, according to some, a degenerate and blasphemous piss-take of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.  It had trans people in it and everything. Not the painting, the Olympic tableau, although some people have advanced the idea that Leonardo himself played games with gender identity, both in his paintings and his life. But I read that on the internet, so it’s probably a conspiracy theory.

I’m an atheist so I couldn’t give a monkey’s, but I do understand that if you are a person of faith you might find it offensive. Maybe the organisers should have seen this coming and repositioned it so there was no possibility of misunderstanding. Or if, perish the thought, it was indeed a piss-take, maybe the organisers should have had the courage of their convictions and referred complainants to France’s strict policies on keeping religion out of anything vaguely official. After all, they’re very keen to quote said policies when forbidding women to wear the hijab in public. As it was, they denied it was a piss-take but apologised anyway and seemed generally flustered. Obviously the chap who designed the whole event then received internet death threats, with instructions to burn in hell alongside his family, pets, next-door-neighbours and the bloke who collects his bins, but there you go. That’ll teach him to have ideas.

I genuinely don’t for one minute think that a majority of Christians condone such viciousness. It will be the usual suspects, most of them probably people whose faith, if they actually have any, is for show, for shouting, for that terrible modern term ‘weaponising’ against all things [ALERT: THE FOLLOWING WORD MAY UPSET, ALARM, OFFEND, CHANGE SEXUAL ORIENTATION/GENDER IDENTIFICATION, OR CAUSE THE END OF WESTERN CIVILISATION] woke.

As if all this wasn’t disconcerting enough, the actor Amanda Abbington has gone to the police after receiving an internet threat to murder her while she’s on stage. This is in addition to the threats to rape her daughter and kill her son. In case you don’t know, Ms Abbington has gone public with allegations about her treatment on the entertainment show Strictly Come Dancing. I’m not sure quite why this is grounds to murder and/or mutilate her and her family, but there you go. It’s a while before the next season of Strictly starts, so I suppose people have got to do something to fill their time.

I don’t really do social media, except for shoving the occasional picture of the cat on Facebook, although that may be about to change (my social media use, not the cat pictures, after all, my cat’s the cutest feline in the universe, apart from yours, so you say). I’ve just finished the first draft of my first novel, and my son and his partner are determined I should have a website and a ‘social media strategy’ for when this jumble of words eventually gets sent out into the world. Son’s partner is the computer expert, and she’s gratifyingly enthusiastic about the project. I have pointed out that I don’t at the moment have a proper book to wave around, but apparently it’s about building something-or-other so someone-or-other may be vaguely interested when whatever-it-is finally emerges.

I really can’t understand why son and partner sometimes look at me as if they’re ready to bang their heads against a particularly chunky brick wall.

They’re very keen for me to use the internet to make money out of my writing. I told them I was more likely to meet a hippopotamus pushing its trolley round Sainsbury’s than I was to make money out of writing. Son looked interested and asked if this was the outline of an absurdist plot for my next money-making writing project. I said, "You know how you as an actor feel when you've done five auditions in a row at your own expense and got nothing except a bigger overdraft? That's flogging books, chum, except writers do it every day and can't rely on panto to get through Christmas."

But there you go. We make our creative beds, and then lie on them wondering why we can’t be good at something useful.

I’m actually rather terrified of the internet. Not of nice places like ABC Tales or my very small coterie of friends on Facebook, but the big internet Out There. Son’s partner tells me I will have to do X and Instagram. “Why?” “So people can follow you.” “Nobody knows me. Why would they follow me?” Son’s partner takes a deep breath and calls upon her native Swedish equanimity. “The idea is you follow them, so they get to know you and then they follow you.” “How do I know who to follow?” Son’s partner’s expressive eyes scan the available brick walls.

A couple of decades ago, when I got our first family computer, I was much taken with the chance to play draughts online. This seemed like a jolly thing to do. I liked the idea that I could be playing draughts with someone on the other side of the world, or maybe someone famous, or just another single mum who’d found a precious moment to explore the joys of her new tech toy. I had a couple of games with people who said ‘Hello’ and ‘Thanks for the game’ or whatever, so the ‘chat’ function also seemed like a good thing. I was so bloody naïve I’d even put my own obviously female first name in it. The inevitable happened and the next time I played draughts online the ‘chat’ thing flooded with vicious sexual insults, threats and, ridiculously, invites to meet whoever this was for A Good Raping Like You Obviously Need, You Cunt. I sat staring at this, and then I burst into tears. I felt stupid and frightened. Then I told myself this was just an aberration, this person couldn’t know where I was so there was no actual threat and why should I stop doing something I enjoyed because of some unidentified idiot? The next time I went on it I turned off my end of the ‘chat’ function but I couldn’t ‘unsee’ the other person’s, and this time whoever the new person was called me every name under the sun and moon for not switching on my chat. I clicked off online draughts and never again played another ‘live’ game, of any kind, on the internet.

This was twenty-something years ago, when the internet was just a baby, taking its first steps. I’ve never forgotten how it made me feel. It’s extremely unlikely anyone would be sufficiently interested in anything I say to bother issuing a death threat, but I wonder if I want to be part of social media world, where things a million times worse than my online draughts experience are the norm.

There have always been vicious people, horrible people, abusive and threatening people. There’s always been rampant misogynists who for some reason hate women so much they will not rest until they have destroyed, physically or mentally or both, as many women as they possibly can. It’s a lifelong quest for many. There have always been racists, and people who will manipulate other people’s pain for their own political ends. But they’ve never before been able to come into your home day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. They’ve never been able to reach, and motivate, thousands of people with a few clicks on a keyboard.

So far it’s been a chaotic, sad, frightening summer, in Britain and pretty much everywhere else. I struggled to find pleasure in my usual go-to summer joy of Wimbledon. Tennis is the only sport I ever played relatively seriously and the only one I know anything about. My daughter and I did watch the final of the football Euros, just to show willing. We drank wine, ate crisps and passed opinions on a sport we know nothing about, as you do. Last night she came round and we watched Olympics, drinking wine, eating crisps and passing opinions on a variety of sports we know nothing about. Soon it will be the Paralympics, and we will do exactly the same. We have an agreement not to talk about the day’s news on these occasions, because that makes us furious and deeply melancholy. And then I feel guilty because turning away from the news is the first step towards letting the eejits win. But there you go. If you keep on forever listening, and watching, and chasing newsprint, you’ll end up as mad as the eejits. Sometimes, if you are able, it is good to watch two people knocking a ball over a net, or twenty-two people kicking a ball up and down a field, or lots of people doing lots of different things that you don’t understand but which bring a joy that infects even your own crabby self. (Except dressage. I draw the line at dressage. The other day I saw a beautiful, majestic horse being made to tiptoe around to the music of Barry Manilow. By everything that makes life beautiful, give it Beethoven’s Fifth, or Motorhead’s Ace of Spades, but do not insult this glorious creature by asking it to dance to Barry Manilow.)

 Hold on to whatever protects you from eejits, take care of yourself and other people, and mind how you go.

Picture author's own. No relevance at all to the piece, but maybe an explanation of why I never get to write that money-making masterpiece. And yes, that is cat hair on the laptop case. And everywhere else.