Vacuum . The End Issue.

the vacuum

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The End

the vacuum

the vacuum

by jason mills

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s Darwin observed, groups of animals living in remote places eventually take on unique characteristics, leading to the creation of a distinct species. This theory came to mind when, finding myself at a loose end on a trip to Co. Cork many years ago, I decided to venture out to a little island off Ireland’s southern tip. I’m not sure exactly what I had expected to find there but I was at an even looser end between the time of the boats arrival and the next departure back to the mainland several hours later. The experience of wandering aimlessly around such a barren outpost was akin to a prolonged episode of League of Gentlemen in Gaelic, but without the humour. Perhaps the fact that its name, Cape Clear, sounds like ‘Keep Clear’ in a culchie accent should have served as a prior warning.

Of course, in the context of the truly remote places of the world, this was virtually a teeming metropolis. Some places have traditionally been thought of as being so physically distant or inaccessible that they have assumed a place in metaphorical speech (such as Timbuktu or Outer Mongolia), but even these have now become stopping points for a new breed of intrepid and affluent young global adventurers. Nowdays in order to really isolate yourself you’d have to head for one of the tiny islands stranded between continents in the middle of vast oceans.

Probably the most famous of secluded islands is Easter Island (or Rapa Nui to give it its proper name), a triangular speck of land in the South Pacific, 3,515 miles west of Chile.

Archeologists estimate that the island was first settled by Polynesian seafarers around the 5th century and that its population may have reached 10,000-15,000 at its peak approximately a thousand years later. However, when the first European explorers arrived in 1722, what had once been a complex and flourishing society was in serious decline. The main reason for this can be attributed to the islanders’ favourite pastime of constructing moai; large stone statues carved from compressed volcanic ash (almost a thousand of these dot the island today). As time went on the statues became more grandiose, leading to speculation of an escalating spiral of one-upmanship as rival clans attempted to surpass each other in displays of power and wealth. However, in order to move the statues to selected ceremonial spaces it was necessary to roll them along on felled trees, which were also needed to provide wood for

boats, houses and fire. The accumulative effect of this was complete deforestation, collapse of

the ecosystem, outright war over the remaining meagre resources, and eventually cannibalism.

It is not known exactly why this particular activity was undertaken with such reckless abandonment, and with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that a slightly more pragmatic approach was called for. Indeed, well-meaning environmentalists are always keen to point out that what happened on Easter Island is a microcosm of our current trajectory towards ecological disaster in pursuit of material gains.

Britain has always had something of a fetish for colonising islands, and distance has never been a deterrent. One of its dependencies, Tristan da Cunha, is the place which is officially the furthest from any other piece of populated land on earth. It is the only inhabited part of a volcanic island group situated roughly half way between Africa and South America. The island was discovered by a Portuguese navigator in 1506 but he was unable to land due to the 2,000ft cliffs which stretch around most of the coastline (it still has no harbour so ships have to dock out to sea). It was finally settled in the early 19th century and is currently home to 276 people who are said

to be generally pleasant and accommodating, if a little inbred (they share just 7 surnames).

Famously, potatoes used to be the currency and they were not replaced by money until the latter part of the 20th century; the price of a copy of the Tristan Times newspaper during the 1940’s was ‘3 cigarettes or 4 large potatoes’.

The man who had founded the newspaper left Tristan in 1943 but later made an attempt to draw outside attention to the island by designing stamps with their value expressed in potatoes as well as sterling. Although only a limited number of these were actually used by residents for their mail, this also means that they are now extremely rare and much sought after by collectors. Tristan, however, has moved with the times and now even has an (albeit expensive) internet service available via satellite.

Earlier this year it was given its own postcode to facilitate the delivery of goods ordered online, although obviously you wouldn’t need to be in too much of a hurry for them.

Of course, it is always handy to have a few rocky outposts at your disposal in case you have some prisoners or slaves who are getting under your feet back home. Another overseas British territory, St. Helena (Tristan da Cunha’s nearest inhabited neighbour), is fa-

Of course, it is always handy to have a few rocky outposts at your disposal in case you have some prisoners or slaves who are getting under your feet back home.

mous for being the place where Napoleon was sent into exile after his capture in 1815.

Having had his request to be sent back to Elba (a mere 20 miles from Italy) politely declined, he was instead shipped off here, 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa and 1,800 from Brazil in the South Atlantic where there was little chance of him causing any more mischief.

Although he was allowed to move around the island freely (a modest 47 sq. miles) he had to be accompanied by an English officer at all times and became increasingly depressed by his predicament. With no hope of a return to Europe he spent his last years leading a reclusive existence working on his memoirs before dying in 1821 at the age of 52. The remains

the vacuum

living there must be like being trapped upstairs on a DUP election bus for your entire life and being forced to marry and have children with one of the other passengers.

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of the fortifications built to guard Napoleon and prevent him from being rescued are still apparent on the island today, although the fact that it is only visited four times a year from the UK by a Royal Mail Ship is obviously a bit of a blow to the tourist industry. Don’t let that put you off though, because once you disembark from your 15 day journey there you will apparently find today’s indigenous population of around 6,000 people to be very welcoming and hospitable.

Unfortunately, the same can hardly be said for their British subject counterparts on Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, several thousand

miles from the nearest hospital, supermarket and secondary school on the New Zealand mainland. The current population of just 48 people (the peak having been 233 in the 1930’s) is descended from the mutineers of the HMS Bounty who in 1790 revolted against their tyrannical captain and headed for the island with some Tahitian women and slaves in tow. As the island was incorrectly marked on naval maps it was extremely difficult to locate and made for a perfect hiding place. The population has always been deeply insular and religious, with alcohol, dancing and shows of public affection forbidden by law. Indeed, the experience of

living there must be like being trapped upstairs on a DUP election bus for your entire life and being forced to marry and have children with one of the other passengers.

Then in 1999, in a kind of sordid inversion of The Wicker Man, a policewoman temporarily assigned to the island uncovered a string of allegations of sexual offences against minors stretching back 40 years. In the years since then, seven men (half the male population of the island) including the Mayor have been convicted of charges of rape and indecent assault against girls as young as seven. However, even the women the residents of Pitcairn (or perhaps it should be more appropriately renamed the Paedoph Isles) have striven to defend the behaviour, claiming that underage sex is simply

a way of life there (one Councillor is alleged to have told an investigator ‘the age of consent has always been twelve and it doesn’t hurt them’). Despite having been found guilty of the charges, the men’s sentences are currently suspended while an appeal court considers their claims that British sovereignty over them is unconstitutional and that they were unaware that British legislation (including the 1956 Sexual Offences Act) applied to them.

We have always been fascinated by the way in which societies form and develop outside what we consider to be normal cultural parameters. Popular culture is littered with examples from Robinson Crusoe, through Lord of the Flies and more recent cases like The Beach and Bruce Parry’s BBC2 Tribe series. Even ‘reality’ television is related to this trend, albeit in an egocentric, commercially-driven format.

Although perhaps if celebrities or would-be-celebrities feel that they wish to continue indulging in such anthropological pursuits then the resulting shows could be tailored for greater authenticity in future. An indefinite period of time on a small piece of volcanic rock would certainly determine who really has the greatest instincts for survival, and I’m sure shows such as Celebrity Cannibal Challenge or You’re My Wife Now would do wonders for ratings figures. To make recruitment slightly easier the titles and true nature of the programmes could simply been concealed within the small print; in their eagerness to get themselves noticed it is unlikely that any of the contestants ever actually read their contracts properly anyway.

the vacuum

by neal alexander

Last Words What follows is a transcript made from a Dictaphone tape belonging to the late Sam Malone, which was discovered amongst the abandoned ruins of the former city of Belfast.

Soon I shall be quite dead after all. Blood or something like it is pounding in my ears and my vision has narrowed to a few spangles of light in a pall of dark. From the shattered window I could once overlook Donegall Square and its riot of twisted masonry.

The City Hall’s yawning open maw. Now, though, I have only this. Whatever it is.

Dark certainly, and cold; but far from quiet, very far. All night the sirens sound, but there’s no response. How could there be, not that the people have left? For all I know, I may be the last. The Last Man. Strange how disaster accommodates itself to cliché.

Strange also that I now feel the need to talk – if only to myself. So I’ll tell the story over - the old metaphysical yarn, the one that never ends – about how we got to here.

Which is, finally, the End. I have a script, as we in the profession always do. I will not read from it. It offers an objective account. The ‘human angle’ on a human tragedy of ‘unprecedented scale’.

There are brief interviews with witnesses on the scene. There are in-depth analyses of the government’s slow response. In the script, which does not exist, I am robustly critical of administrative failures, but not overly zealous in laying blame. I express manly emotion that is entirely understandable under the circumstances. I weep. I generalise and use the phrase ‘human nature’.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in this.

Still, I will not read it.

The End began, as it does, on a Monday or a Tuesday with the usual flock of commuters winging into the city from the hinterlands. Rosebushes and clipped lawns.

A faint smell of slurry in the air. Late into the office, I was nursing a hangover and at first had little interest in the breaking news. The city, it seemed, had finally begun to dismantle itself piece by piece. Deep

faultlines were opening up along central thoroughfares, chewing up pavements and toppling buildings; in the inner city, whole streets had folded in on themselves; and by the waterfront, a chunk of industrial estate was sinking slowly into the Lough. No doubt there was widespread panic, no doubt there were lives lost. For me, there was a Story and I dragged a reluctant cameraman everywhere in my wake. I am not sorry.

On the second day, things remained as they were before, with the city thrown into unfamiliar patterns and shapes. Soup kitchens began to crop up on street corners, attracting all manner of relics and survivors.

I interviewed many of them mercilessly.

‘How does it feel to have lost everything?’

‘Who are you searching for?’ ‘What are you going to do?’ I made them cry if I could. For the camera. Then, some time after noon, when the wind had changed, a strange rain fell. It fell in thick green droplets on car windscreens and tiled roofs, on treetops and marble statues, and each droplet was a small, wet explosion. A rain of frogs: God’s curse on the Egyptians.

On the third morning, the city awoke to find itself mantled in snow. The water pipes were frozen solid, and the Farset had burst through the jagged remnants of High Street in a fountain of silvery ice. A winter wonderland in the time of spring. Soon, the city was filled with Baptist ministers, with Seventh Day Adventists and Lutheran assemblies who spoke the Truth. The Truth was administered through megaphones, but the ungodly city failed to listen. Wrapped in its white blanket, it did not heed God’s warnings.

On the fourth day the snow had gone, receded in the night like a bashful bridegroom. The citizens once again took to the streets, where they stood in huddled groups talking, looking for a sign. It came in the form of a fist-sized lump of rock which had spun its way from the edges of space.

A little after lunch-time, from an overcast sky, the meteorite fell to earth. It breached the green copper roof of the City Hall a little off-centre, demolishing the offices and

Every member of the City Council perished, excepting the redoubtable Sammy Wilson who, on leaving his house that morning for work, was run over by a laundry van in the road. He will be sadly missed. committee rooms in its inevitable path. The rubble stacked itself into straggling piles.

Every member of the City Council perished, excepting the redoubtable Sammy Wilson who, on leaving his house that morning for work, was run over by a laundry van in the road. He will be sadly missed.

On the fifth day we entered the eye of the storm. Nothing happened; no divine wind blew. But something snapped all the same. Neighbours and co-workers began to look on each other not just with anxiety, but in hatred and blind fear. Random acts of violence broke out across the city. A frumpy typist disembowelled her manager with a paper-clip; teenagers spiked a human head on the railings surrounding what used to be City Hall; a man was seen savaging a dog in the Botanical Gardens. From this very window in the old Library, where I had taken to hiding from the mobs in the street,

I watched a pensioner hacking at the leg of a corpse. The shelves of the supermarkets were still half-full.

On the sixth day we woke in darkness thick enough to be felt. A great, humming emptiness. The blood began to pound in my ears, and a chill settled over the city. A mass exodus from the city began. Perhaps if they could get as far as Lisburn, people thought, then they would be safe. For myself, I preferred to stay. To listen to the sounds the city made in its blindness, in its panic.

Lisburn, in any case, is the sort of hell I would not willingly enter. Far better this one. My cameraman had deserted me on the fourth day, so I found myself alone. Living on the dry pages of old books. Scuttling like a woodlouse along the aisles of bookcases.

In the evening, reports reached me that the Resurrection had begun in Smithfield cemetery. I was hardly surprised.

It is now the seventh day of God’s wrath and I have talked myself tired. The story I have told seems not mine. I do not recognise it. I will play it back and try to remember the person I was back then, just a moment ago. It’s no use. The blood is pounding in my ears in a rhythm that insists on … something. I feel a premonition. Of what? The End. The city is going and I am going with it.

Down the. The dark is total now. No light, and sounds are.

The ground shakes, or I do. It’s.

There is no sense. … scattered all round.

Here, now.

A passageway. A light.

The city in ruins. the End.

the vacuum

by david regis

Nearly Finished: lessons from the chess endgame 555555555555055555555555555

“Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.”

Samuel Beckett, Endgame Sometimes, after the initial emergence of the armies onto the field and their first battles, there is not yet a checkmate, nor even a likely winner. Perhaps the Queens have been swapped, and some other pieces also exchanged, and the forces available to each side are equal, or approximately so; then we enter a new phase, the endgame. The armies have each suffered too many losses for there to be the possibility of a direct attack on the king, but the game can still be won. The goal now is to recruit extra troops, by promoting a pawn to a Queen; perhaps a pawn can already see a route through to the touchdown, but more usually the side with the advantage must adopt a slower approach, jockeying for position and seeking to create a combination of threats that cannot all be met at once.

“If you have any doubt what to study, study endgames. Openings teach you openings.

Endings teach you chess.”

Stephan Gerzadowicz, Thinker’s Chess.

“Well, hmmm, endgames, yes, they are important, Yaaaaawwwwnnnnn!”

Norbert Friedrich The normal values of chess are transformed in the endgame. Pawns that may be cheerfully offered in a gambit in the opening phase are now carefully shepherded. The King, who until now has been hiding fretfully in his castle while the fearsome Queens stalk the board, now ventures out and takes a full share of the battle, being more effective in the attack, it is said, than a Bishop or a Knight. Formerly, speed and accuracy were essential to success, but now, there is no need for hurry.

The endgame is often deprecated by club players, who often regard an exchange of queens with a shrug and the expectation of an early trip to the bar. But this neglect and disdain is unjustified. In some respects the endgame is chess in its pure form. It’s a long way from any help from prepared moves in opening books, a long way from the thud-and-blunder of the middlegame. The simplified positions of the endgame allow for much deeper analysis, more exact judgements, a greater role for logic. There are chess endgame studies, a branch of chess where composed endgame positions show the full potential of the chess pieces in carefully contrived set pieces of analytical geometry, and show the beauty inherent in the rules of chess in a way that a routine tournament game may not. It is also the phase where the differences between players of different levels are said to be seen most sharply.

“In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.”

Jose Raul Capablanca, World Champion 1921-1927

I haven’t exaggerated. Don Jose literally pushed the pieces around the board without making moves. He just put them in fresh positions where he thought they were needed.”

“Suddenly everything became clear. The correct scheme of things had been set up and now the win was easy. We were delighted by Capablanca’s mastery...”

-- Alexander Kotov, Think Like a Grandmaster “Whether this advantage is decisive or not does not interest Capablanca. He simply wins the ending! That’s why he is Capablanca!”

Max Euwe, World Champion 1935-37

“A characteristic of this kind of endgame is the switching of the attack from wing to wing. This is not a random thing. The broad pattern of this game is that White (Capablanca) first draws Black’s (Kupchik’s) King and Rook over to defend the Queen’s-side; Black’s King’s-side is then less well-defended; so White switches his attack to the King’s-side; in trying to defend himself there too, Black becomes disorganised; White finishes with a two-pronged attack on both wings.”

David Hooper The rules of chess limit the longest game that is possible. A draw can be claimed if 50 moves (50 each by White and by Black) are made without a pawn being moved or a piece being taken. So, the longest chess game theoretically possible is 5949 moves, but in fact the longest game actually played was a mere 269 moves, contested between Nikolic and Arsovic at Belgrade in 1989. This monster is quite the exception; most games, even games featuring an endgame phase, reach some sort of decision long before then.

The greatest player of chess endgames was also perhaps the greatest ever player of chess, a Cuban genius called José Capablanca, World Champion from 19211927. He learned the game at four years old by watching his father play, and revealed his grasp of the game by laughing when he saw an illegal move made. His claim to understand how to play was at once challenged, and he promptly won the game. He was a truly natural player; someone once said, “chess was his mother tongue”. Some like it hot... Capablanca was always supernaturally cool. His play has been variously described as deft, subtle, accurate, intuitive. How did Capablanca approach the endgame? His naturally calm and elegant style was ideally suited to this phase of the game. He was never in a hurry; he seemed always immediately to understand what to do, always in control; he played quickly and confidently, making moves that seemed quiet and even slow, but which collectively were irresistible. “ Suddenly Capablanca came into the room.

Learning the reason for the dispute the Cuban bent down to the position, said ‘Si, si,’ and suddenly redistributed the pieces all over the board to show what the correct formation was for the side trying to win.

The things that came so easily to Capablanca come rather harder to the rest of us but are to be sought after – perhaps not just in the realm of chess. Capablanca not only understood how to play the chess but also the man.

From a grasp of the overall position comes a plan, and the plan can be implemented in a number of steps... Perhaps the steps must be taken in a particular order, and at once, but more often there is time to play slowly.

One can feint, delay, undo and then repeat manoeuvres... The psychological difficulties inherent in defending a slightly inferior position against an opponent who is in no hurry to press matters should never be underestimated. The books on the chess endgame may emphasise theoretical considerations, technical recipes that some players repeat like magic charms: “in an endgame with just kings and a rook each with a rook’s pawn for one side, the game is drawn if the pawn has advanced to the seventh rank, but may be won if the pawn is no further than the sixth...”. Theoretically marginal positions account for a small proportion of endgames actually played. The practical endgame is more often decided by judgement and character than a prior consultation with a book of spells.

There are players who specialise in the endgame; then comes the phase where they renew their focus, and new opportunities to play for a win present themselves.

Perhaps the position is equal, but likewise, we believe, is the start position of a game of chess, and that is worth playing: so, let us play some more chess, and I will play better than you... This type of game is sometimes disparagingly referred to as an “endgame grind”, but this doesn’t give proper respect to the skill that professional players bring to garnering points late in a session. They can find ways of making life difficult for their opponents even in the most placid of positions, their pieces drift into slightly better places, you find your options becoming more and more restricted until finally you die of asphyxiation or lash out through boredom or frustration. If you want to win tournaments, particularly the unforgiving “weekend Swiss”, every possible half-point must be harvested; there are no prizes for conceding draws against undistinguished opposition.

The killer instinct of a top player is never more clearly shown than in the endgame: it is the instinct of a cat with a mouse. Simon Webb once wrote about playing a “dead drawn” position against Tony Miles in this

sort of mood: he described being in turn puzzled, frustrated, impatient... he lost. “... I was surprised to see that Capablanca did not initiate any active manoeuvres and instead adopted a waiting game. In the end, his opponent (Ragozin) made an imprecise move, the Cuban won a second Pawn and soon the game.” “’Why didn’t you try to convert your material advantage straight away?’ I ventured to ask the great chess virtuoso. He smiled indulgently: ‘It was more practical to wait’.”

Mikhail Botvinnik, World Champion 1948-63 “It was night. I went home and put my old house clothes on and set the chessmen out and mixed a drink and played over another Capablanca. It went fifty-nine moves. Beautiful, cold, remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability.

When it was done I listened at the open window for a while and smelled the night. Then I carried my glass out to the sink sipping it and looking at my face in the mirror.

‘You and Capablanca,’ I said.”

Raymond CHANDLER, The High Window, final sentences.

What can we learn from chess? Lessons from life, perhaps, but also lessons about ourselves. Shallowness, muddle-headedness, vagueness, haste, unfounded hopes and fears; all are rapidly exposed and punished on the chess board. Benjamin Franklin wrote how chess can teach us “foresight, circumspection, and caution”; EM Forster regarded the chessboard as “a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life”, and these two sides of the coin are surely both true. Poker is said to reveal personality, but how much more starkly does the game of chess, where nothing is hidden, in the end.

Games and ideas referred to in this article can be found at chessb.demonweb. co.uk/chessweb/vacuum Samuel Beckett’s Endgame can be read at samuel-beckett.net/endgame.html

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interviewed by ruth graham

FIRED! EMPLOYMENT ENDINGS I WAS SACKED: UNFAIR DISMISSAL

I WAS SACKED FOR STEALING THE MEAT

I had a job with Brown Brothers in the 70s. They used to be just off the Ormeau Road, where the Chinese Supermarket is now. They’re still around today but they were quite a big firm in those days. They were car parts distributors but they also sold things like Italian washing machines and Czech gramophones – in those days all you got in the washing machine line was Hotpoint, so these cheap Italian makes that Brown’s sold were quite unusual.

Anyway, I was about 17 at the time and fairly chirpy about Trade Unions. As Brown’s didn’t encourage Trade Union membership among their staff, I immediately stood out and I think that was the real reason I was sacked. It was all over some money from the till going missing but I wasn’t even working when it happened … It happened on a Saturday which was my day off and I was meant to be in on the Monday morning but I slept in. When I did arrive, I was accused of stealing money from the till which was ridiculous because I hadn’t even been there.

It wasn’t a brilliant job but I wasn’t ready to leave it. I got on well with the rest of the men and was enjoying the camaraderie.

There was no arguing with the boss even though it was fairly obvious that I hadn’t done it. It would have been very difficult to steal anything from the till because everything was written down in duplicate and checked.

When I went to the job centre afterwards to let them know I would be signing on the dole again, they knew all about the firm and said that it was always happening. Usually you had to wait a while before you got your dole if you had been sacked, but in this case, I got mine more or less immediately.

When I was young I never seemed to bother about the jobs I was doing and I seemed to get the sack quite a few times. I remember the first job I had was stacking supermarket shelves and the manager caught me with my mouth full of sweets and docked my pay for it.

My second job was in a butcher’s shop.

Me and another guy used to help ourselves to some of the meat when we were cleaning up after work, but we got greedy. On this occasion we wrapped up huge packages of meat – mine must have been about 20lbs of Sirloin Steaks – and to keep them fresh we put them in the fridge with our names on them so that we knew which was which.

Er … we forgot all about them. There was nothing we could really say when the boss pulled us up about it the next day. Our names were clearly written on the packages and no convincing excuses came to mind.

We were both sacked.

Martin Carter

Gary Shaw

I WAS SACKED BUT I WAS PROVOKED I was working as Head Chef in the Slieve Donard Hotel and there was this Bar Manager who was a bit above himself and acted like he ran the whole place. One Sunday morning, he swanned into the kitchen and accused me of stealing wine from the bar. The night before, I had needed

some extra wine for cooking and had asked the Assistant Manager to change the kitchen tab from 1 bottle to 3.

Anyway, he comes in shouting “You’re a thieving bastard!” “What did I steal then?” I said. “You stole wine from the bar.” I asked him if he had checked the book and he just snapped “Not in the book – you’re a thieving bastard.” He thought he was a bit of a hard man, but by now I was feeling fairly insulted so I grabbed him by the back of the neck, kicked his ass and shoved him out of the kitchen.

He started to provoke me then – you could see right into the kitchen from the bar and he was waltzing up and down going, “Thieving bastard! Thieving bastard!

Thieving bastard!” By this time, the overall Manager had come back and he said “Right you two, if you have any problems, you better sort them out in your own time.” As soon as he had gone though, this guy started taunting me again. I punched him right under the chin and he landed against the bar … this was in front of a restaurant full of people on a Sunday afternoon, by the way.

I was getting stuck into him when I realised my trousers were sliding down … I had on chef’s trousers tied around the waist with nothing on underneath. I was so furious though that I just let them slide … So there I was, kicking the bar manager with my cock hanging out and three or four barmen trying to pull me off … in a restaurant full of Sunday diners. I found out later that the hotel owner’s daughter was in the restaurant and saw everything …..

Dermot

THEY WERE NEARLY SACKED FOR BEDWETTING

When I worked at the Sullom Voe Construction Camp as a chambermaid, men were sacked on quite a regular basis for bedwetting. They got two written warnings and then they were out. Bedwetting was very common at Sullom Voe, due to the amount of drink taken – wages were high and you had thousands of men living in celllike portocabins - away from home - in one of the most remote areas in Shetland. There was a massive Entertainments block with a couple of bars and a big cabaret / disco area and the drink was very cheap.

It was up to the chambermaids to report wet beds and I went through a personal crisis every time I came across one. It was disgusting if your hand brushed against a soggy sheet first thing in the morning but I did feel sorry for the men at the same time.

I don’t think I ever reported any but you were in big trouble if you tried to cover up.

When a room was vacated at the end of the monthly shift, the whole room was stripped and checked by the supervisor. If a mattress was stained then it had to be thrown out and the supervisor would question the chambermaid allocated to that room. Denials were suspiciously noted and I can remember hard blue eyes sizing me up as I mumbled about never noticing anything untoward about that bed before.

Sometimes you got big boxes of chocolates and crumpled fivers from relieved bedwetters who tried to control their bladders in gratitude and kept their jobs for a bit longer.

Ruth Graham

I WAS SACKED BUT BOUNCED BACK I was sacked for about four days from London Transport. I’d been having too

S

bombed out many days off without filling in their forms – I didn’t know you had to fill them in – just one of these things where you have a hangover and phone in sick and I thought that was ok, til they sacked me. The trade union came on board though and managed to get me reinstated after four days. I had to agree that I would come into work on time every day for the next six months. If I didn’t then I would lose my job. I did it though, with the help of the union. They used to phone me up every morning to make sure I was up and ready, “Terry, it’s six o clock … are you awake.” I was like a pilot case for them because it was the first time they’d negotiated a deal like that and wanted to make sure it worked.

Terry McKeown

I THOUGHT I WAS SACKED BUT I WASN’T I thought I was sacked once …. I was working at a college part time and you never know if you would still be employed from one year to the next. You just had to weigh in at the beginning of the term, start teaching and hope for the best.

Everyone in the college was talking about cutbacks, particularly in relation to the part-time lecturers. I was sure my job was at risk and being pregnant didn’t help.

Nearly everyone knew I was pregnant but I thought if I could disguise it for just a bit longer then I might have more chance of keeping my job, so I wore this big blue scarf

in attempt to hide it and got everyone to start talking about how much weight I was putting on …. references to cream buns and chips followed me around for quite some time.

Anyway, I was called in one day and thought, “this is it … I’m getting binned.”

I had my big blue scarf strategically positioned over my bump and sat there listening to them telling me about ‘no guarantees’… ‘climate of cutbacks’ …. ‘but there may be work’ …. I thought they were trying to break it to me gently and was convinced that I was no longer employed.

I thought I’d been binned for about four days then I heard that I still had my job. My hours were cut a bit but I was still employed. So, I hung on to my job then I put in for maternity leave .. came back afterwards and promptly got another job.

His experiences of redundancy and suspension involved the union as well as the employer. Kevin was a senior trade union rep and, along with group of shop stewards, he took on the union while they were in dispute with Bombardier-Shorts. The end result was suspension from the union and then the redundancy came up giving Shorts the opportunity to get rid of them without the protection of the union.

This is his story: “When I started in Shorts in 1983, it was a state owned company and then in 1989 it was privatised and sold to Bombardier: a Canadian multi-national company.

Bombardier paid thirty-three million for the company and in return they were given one billion pounds to restructure and write off debts which had been there from the 60s: debts which the Government had never written off.

Bombardier were never really interested in all the different parts – they started selling off sections like the missile system, the plant we had in Bournemouth and the plant we had in the Isle of Man. All of this was done very stealthily: they gave assurances to the Government that they wouldn’t sell them off but they broke these assurances.

Shorts had always survived in Belfast because we took on work from other aircraft companies so that when there were dips in production in one contract we would have other work to keep people employed.

Bombardier decided to change that way of working and concentrated entirely on their own products. This wiped out the other contract work. The tactic behind that was that they could ask for more public money by threatening job losses.

In 1997 - 98 they decided that they would move Design Engineering over to Montreal and we got into an industrial dispute over this. They threatened redun-

dancies with the alternative option of jobs in Canada. We were the last union, along with the T&G to take them on because by that stage, the other unions had realised that you don’t rock the boat with Bombardier.

We lobbied all the political parties and we took a half-day stoppage and an overtime ban along with various other threats of industrial action. We even used John de Chastelain …. The PUP found out that de Chastelain was a personal friend of the head of human resources at Bombardier so during the Decommissioning talks, Billy Hutchison raised the issue of Shorts. De Chastelain wrote two letters to Bombardier about it - we were at them from all directions. This annoyed the boys at the top and they ended up flying the Head of Bombardier over to Belfast to sort things out.

They backed off to keep things out of the spotlight and agreed to keep the key departments and gave us a minimum manpower agreement for each department.

They knew that if they attempted to reduce these numbers, we would go straight to the media.

At that point, we had them, but in the early to mid nineties we had a change in the union: a new leadership came in which was very close to Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair and they thought that to get the Labour Party elected they had to make sure that the trade unions behaved. So our union, which had been a very democratic union, changed. Joe Bowers, who was our paid official, came under a lot of pressure for being forthright and a number of officials were put out of their jobs. We took the leadership on about this. We would put through motions at conferences and win, but the leadership were basically walking away and ignoring the decisions.

Because of the viciousness of the disputes in ’98, Shorts got in touch with the General Secretary of the union, Roger Lyons, complaining about Joe and ourselves, saying that we were causing all sorts of problems that could threaten work in the future. We were defending Design Engineering at that point. In 1998, the General Secretary was in secret communications with the employer. We eventually

the vacuum november 05 Published by Factotum Dog gone.

112-114 Donegall Street Belfast BT1 2GX [e] info@factotum.org.uk www.factotum.org.uk

SHORT CHANGE Ruth Graham spoke to Kevin Doherty from the Belfast Centre for the Unemployed about redundancies, suspensions, Bombardier-Shorts and Amicus (previously MSF – now merged with AAEU to form Amicus).

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got hold of these communications through a clerical error. Anyway, what happened was that the union accused myself and the other senior rep of ‘actions that were undermining the trade union’ and they suspended us from our positions.

Bombardier used September 11th as an opportunity and predicted that there would be a downturn in aircraft sales. This never actually affected us but they announced a large redundancy. There were six unions in Shorts. We had eighteen shop stewards in our union and twelve of us were selected for redundancy. In all the other unions there was only one shop steward selected for redundancy.

So, they made us redundant and we took out a case for interim relief. If the tribunal believes that a shop steward has been victimised or dismissed because of his trade union activities, they can force an employer to keep them on their books until the full case is heard. The union was supposed to provide a certificate to say that we were shop stewards and it didn’t do that so the case fell. We went through the tribunal but the official from the union didn’t even turn up. They had got rid of Joe Bowers by that stage and they had another official who was compliant with the employer and he just didn’t show up.

We lost our interim relief cases and when it came to the unfair dismissal cases, the company paid money to keep the key people quiet. Because we were a group, some people wanted to accept the money and others wanted to fight. We were caught out because the money was on the table, but only if we all accepted it. Those of us who wanted to raise the politics of it couldn’t do so.

We still have one opportunity, as there are still some cases to be held from the shop stewards who were not in the key positions.

They have been waiting since January 2002 for their cases for unfair dismissal to be held. Bombardier are doing everything they can to stop these cases coming up because they know that we are involved in representing some of these people and they know we’ll bring everything into the spotlight again.”

Editors & Design Stephen Hackett Richard West Reviews Editor Fionola Merideth Illustrations Duncan Ross Web editor Stephen Hull Distribution Manager Jason Mills Advertising Stephen Hackett To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 90330893 or email info@factotum.org.uk Print run: 15,000 Distribution: Greater Belfast and Dublin The Vacuum welcomes and encourages correspondance.

Write to the above address or email letters@factotum.org.uk All copyright remains with the authors.

Printer: Bangor Spectator

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capital idea by dan jewesbury

the end of capitalism If the ‘ending’ of capitalism is seen as a vaguely desirable thing by a very large and disparate group of people, then the means by which it should be ended, and what it should be replaced with, are the source of just as much disagreement. Moreover, the precise nature of capitalism, what it actually is in the first place, is no less contentious: is it a philosophy, an ideology, or simply a set of prior conditions for specific economic activity? Before considering the desirability of ‘ending’ capitalism, or whether this is even possible, we would need to establish some sort of idea of what it is we want to get rid of (and, just to be clear, this is not something I’m setting out to achieve in the next nine hundred words).

In Britain, the origins of capitalism can be traced back at least to the English Civil War (which Marxist historian Christopher Hill memorably theorised as the first of the great bourgeois revolutions). Capitalism, as an economic system, is inextricably related in its genesis with the Enlightenment project as a whole, that is to say with the privileging of the individual above the historical or traditional power of the state (underwritten by the church). Capitalism, then, is a rational system, and within classical Marxist teleology the bourgeois, capitalist state is seen as a necessary stage along the way to the dictatorship of the proletariat, for it is through capitalism that vested interest and hereditary privilege is ended.

If we want to end capitalism, presumably it’s because we have identified the inequalities on which it is based, and we envisage some fairer system of administration and distribution. Capitalism rests on certain basic economic principles: amongst the most essential, we could identify surplus value, overproduction and the gradual ‘bourgeoisification’ of the proletariat. Of the first two, much has been written by Marxist economists. Capitalism is essentially wasteful since it depends on excess production, and on profit, rather than on need.

Environmentalists argue that capitalism is unsustainable because markets must continually grow in order to maintain a steady rate of profit, and thus finite resources must, eventually, be exhausted. The third principle is also related to growth, but this time to the growth of the consumer class: if markets must continually expand, then the number of goods produced will increase and the number of potential consumers, accordingly, must rise in parallel. For this to happen, the proletariat must have disposable income, and quality of living, measured in purely economistic terms, has to improve continually. The problem, of course, is that as the proletariat become ‘embourgeoisifed’ (one of the most ridiculous words to have been produced by twentieth-century sociology), and as, at the same time, the mode of production shifts from an industrial to a post-industrial base, so the domestic proletariat disappears altogether. Everyone, it

would seem, is middle class now. We no longer produce any of our own goods, since they can be sourced for next to nothing from the developing world, from the labour of the global proletariat. The thing is, there is a limit to how far capitalism can expand, since the world itself is actually not expanding: what do we do when no-one wants to produce any more?

Orthodox Marxists, adhering to a determinist view of history, have typically viewed the end of capitalism as inevitable.

But if capitalism is not simply a uniform, fully-formed economic system imposed on society from without, but rather a gradually evolved set of principles straddling economics, politics, philosophy and religion, and furthermore if it has evolved so radically that the same word can describe both 19th century colonialism and 21st century globalised neoliberalism, can we really envisage it ever ending? Might it not be the case that, however markets decline, populations rise up and resources deplete, however the system is modified and ameliorated, the dispensation that we have in a hundred years time is just another stage of capitalism, as yet unthinkable, unimaginable?

Coming from a self-proclaimed socialist this is obviously heresy. The idea of gradual improvement of capitalism, rather than violent overthrow / immediate emancipation / everlasting happiness and feeling good, is routinely described as pure self-indulgence when faced with the continuing legitimised despotism and brutal venality of Western governments. But maybe we should take a closer look.

First of all, isn’t the Marxist idea of the necessity of a capitalist phase of modernisation and industrialisation itself an accommodation with capitalism? Lenin swung both ways on this one: he argued, opportunistically, that Russia could bypass the capitalist phase altogether, but when the emergent Socialist Republic was under pressure from the Western powers he authorised a certain amount of marketisation, realising that without it the Revolution would be defeated before it had even begun. It’s interesting to note the ironic comparison with contemporary neoliberalism, which argues that developing countries need not go through a stage of industrialisation, but can pass immediately into the globalised service economy, with the aid of a little humanitarian warmongering here and there (has war replaced modernisation for neoliberals, maybe?).

But more important than all of this is the idea of what we actually want to achieve politically, how we even define ‘politics’, and how we conceptualise ourselves within ‘history’. Intimately bound up within this is the question of how we value humanity itself: as an abstract good, something to which we leave some kind of ‘legacy’, or as an urgent, immediate, pressing concern now. Whether or not capitalism is something

that we can ‘end’, the idea that we should devote all our energies to that at the expense of making a more habitable and humane society in the present is clearly ridiculous.

History is not a unified or fluid narrative; it’s composed of the shards of individual experience, the bits and pieces of memory and emotion which do not make up a whole, and which are, ultimately, meaningless. It is this meaningless human experience that we must learn to value for itself, rather than trying to fit it into some anti-human teleology. We could arguably go further and say that there is no system to speak of, no global economics (neoliberalism rescinds all controls over markets, so that all finance becomes intangible and specula-

tive). There is just the market, an abstraction, a self-fulfilling and self-sustaining means of extracting profit from individuals.

Capitalism, with all its high-minded ideals of ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ has never been achieved – in the same way that tired old communists, sick of defending the cause after 1956, 1968, 1989, used to say that ‘socialism has never been given a chance’.

It’s time to shed our historical determinism once and for all and live in the present. The end of capitalism would be signalled by the emergence of new publics that do not need overthrow it, because they simply learn to bypass it altogether. And that is utopianism.

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by david lewis THE NEWS AT TEN THIRTY FINAL EDITION : 6/6/06 fire and brimstone, but is Swansea centurion Gladys Fisk dismayed?

LONDON STUDIOS - STUDIO 1 MCDONALD CU CAMERA 1 Thank you for watching the final edition of the news at ten thirty.

FLASH STILL OF GLADYS Not a bit of it. For today Gladys celebrated her 106th birthday in style, with a bottle of her favourite pineapple Bacardi Breezer.

MCDONALD VO INSERT VT OF RECENT NEWS EVENTS

INSERT VT OF NURSING HOME

VO Over the past few months our news teams have covered war, plague, famine and death.

VO / CARY NEILL Nursing home staff joined with the oldest woman in Wales to help her blow out 106 candles.

From the breaking of the seven seals to the Whore of Babylon’s dramatic fall from grace, we have been first with news and reaction.

Gladys Fisk puts her longevity down to a healthy phobia of clergymen and summer holidays in Rhyll...

MCDONALD CU CAMERA 1 Proud to have kept our viewers in the picture.

And impending doom holds no fear for Gladys. ‘I’ve seen off worse than the apocalypse,’ she said. ‘I lived through the war. What can God do that Hitler didn’t try first?’ This is Cary Neill in Swansea.

The scenes of death and destruction have been unprecedented.

MCDONALD VO INSERT VT 2 Stars falling from the sky, fires sweeping across the world’s forests, volcanic eruptions, sinking ships, dying sea creatures, and locusts darkening the face of the sun.

MCDONALD CU CAMERA 1 Yet among the darkness there have been rays of light.

(BEAT) MCDONALD CU Who could forget the dog that did maths?

FLASH STILL OF DOG

the full fare.

Or the couple who gave their daughter 139 names because they couldn’t decide what to call her?

MCDONALD CU CAMERA 2 Now when time is short, and each second with your loved ones precious, remember these moments of sunshine.

Or Sefton the police horse, FLASH STILL OF HORSE badly injured in an IRA bomb, who we met up with again in happy retirement, two years after the atrocity.

And our viewers’ favourite – the story of Sweep the hamster, who was given FLASH STILL OF BUS a bus pass after a driver charged its owner

Stories that have warmed the hearts and lifted the spirits of millions during even the greatest sorrow.

And finally...

By this time tomorrow judgement day will have arrived and the earth will be a lake of

STUDIO MCDONALD CU CAMERA 1 Gladys Fisk, 106 years young today and still not ready to meet her maker.

(BEAT) MCDONALD CU CAMERA 2 Goodbye.

Good luck.

And goodnight.

CUE CLOSING TITLES FADE TO BLACK

THE FACTOTUM CHOIR The Factotum choir rehearses at 6.30pm on alternate wednesday nights in catalyst arts gallery, The next practice will take place on wednesday30th november.

All are welcome to come and join in, no talent or experience of collective singing is required. The choir will learn outdated political songs, corporate songs and other unfashionable or objectionable repetoire.

Catalyst arts is in the city centre at 5 College Court, Belfast.

It is in an alley parallel to queen street. If you have trouble locating it phone 90330893 or Catalyst arts on 90313303.

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RUSSIA AT THE END

By Sarah Fishburn Roberts She’s a gargantuan, redoubtable giantess.

She borders fourteen countries and spans eleven time zones. She has 37,653 kilometres of coastline and a population of over 143 million people. Her territories extend across 17,075,200 square kilometres.

Russia is the largest country in the world.

I recently spent a year travelling the length and breadth of this formidable Motherland.

Like everyone, my journey began in Moscow, these days as sophisticated and poised a city as any other and only three hours flight away from the UK. Moscow’s urbanity was seductive, but it was the vision of Russia’s distant horizons, her neglected frontiers, that lured me away from the capital almost immediately.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish traveller and author, considered Russia’s immensity disconcerting. “The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is not created for such measurelessness. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house.”

Russia is not a country of such comforting dimensions. A perfunctory glance at any map will reveal clusters of towns spiralling out of the epicentres of Moscow and St Petersburg and a jagged line of cities clinging to the horizontal trajectory of the Trans-Siberian Railway that stretches across the entire country from east to west. The central splodge of Siberia and the entire of the Russian Far East remains blank. You might just see one solitary town on Russia’s Far Eastern shores, the only one that’s big enough to merit being labelled. It is Magadan; ten hours flight from Moscow, built on the bones of dead prisoners and home to the most brutal penal colonies in

the whole of Russia.

So what’s to be found in a town that’s situated at the end of the world’s biggest landmass?

When you leave Magadan’s crumbling airport terminal you are immediately greeted by what looks like a crashed Aeroflot plane wedged in the grassy hill before you and a sign proclaiming, “Welcome to Magadan; the golden heart of Russia!” This is somewhat perplexing. The town was purpose built in order to house enslaved

So what’s to be found in a town that’s situated at the end of the world’s biggest landmass?

labourers and political prisoners before they were sent to the remote Kolyma camps to mine gold for fourteen hours a day. It was the marshalling point for some of the most brutal gulags and penal colonies in Russia. The thought of Magadan as golden hearted in any metaphorical sense is too much to contemplate. Even taken literally, the epitaph is depressing. Magadan may be Russia’s main gold resource, but it’s not at the heart of anything. It’s at the far end of several thousand miles of uninhab-

ited tundra, taiga and forest. Desperate and depressed prisoners, arriving in the swampy settlement in the 1930s called it ‘the gateway to hell’ and later, the more informed arrivals of the forties and fifties simply muttered: “Kolyma means death.”

Kolyma is to Russia what Auschwitz is to Germany, a central symbol not just of localised suffering in one particular area, but emblematising human tragedy on an enormous scale. Estimates vary, but the most conservative suggests that at least

www.regenocide.com

picures by simon roberts

three million people died in the Dalstroy camp regime in Kolyma. The real figure is likely to be closer to six million. This north-easterly region of the Soviet Empire was and still is, spectacularly inhospitable, its inaccessibility and unimaginably low temperatures (up to minus 60 degrees Celsius) leading it to be regarded almost as a separate entity as it gained an otherworldly, mythological status. Some called it simply ‘the land of white death.’

These days, Magadan is an archetypal new-ish Russian town. It spawns disintegrating Soviet tower blocks, wide, mucky roads, overgrown pathways and cracked paving slabs. Packs of lean stray dogs populate the large wastelands between blocks. Broken red climbing frames and rusting steel swings constitute children’s communal playing areas; odd assortments of household linen hang on lines that are strung up between these spidery tentacles: faded orange blankets, greying underpants, tattered bath mats. The west of the town opens onto the Nagaeva Bay, a metallic strip of water that leads out eventually onto the Sea of Okhotsk. There’s only one road in and out of Magadan. It’s impassable in winter and there’s scant transport in summer, so your only feasible option is to fly, although a few hardy travelling souls have made much of the perils of the overland journey from Magadan to Yakutsk.

The light must be disconcerting in winter, a murky, coastal colourlessness; in summer, it seemed too bright, bouncing off the pavements and casting its glare on every crater in the road, every leaning fence and rubbish dump. Strange to think, too, that the decrepit airport was my way out, a magical portal, which was afforded more importance than it deserved.

But happy news! Twenty-first century Magadan reveals a tenacious blitheness of spirit that one has to admire. Still fixated on Magadan’s gloomy past, I arrived envisaging the scores of cowed prisoners building the docks and breakwaters for Magadan’s new port, constructing government buildings, prisons, factories and roads of the 1930s. Contemporary citizens of Magadan are, thankfully, considerably more buoyant about their surroundings. “Magadan – our favourite town!” chirped numerous street hoardings celebrating sixty-five years of the town’s existence. Each slogan was accompanied by a brightly coloured photograph of one of the town’s key landmarks: Prospect Lenina, the city park, the radio tower, all featuring happy and healthy families strolling contentedly through Magadan’s concrete pastures. A special edition local

There’s only one road in and out of Magadan. It’s impassable in winter and there’s scant transport in summer, so your only feasible option is to fly, newspaper carried the same slogan, “Our favourite town!” as a headline. It was all most unsettling because Magadan is, on the whole, a complete dump. It’s ugly. It’s forlorn and bedraggled. It offers all the aesthetic sophistication of a long-forgotten war zone; bombed out, hollow, neglected.

Yet the most obvious paradox of all, in the midst of all these ‘hurrah for the founding of Magadan’ festivities, was that there was no mention of why or how the town was founded, of its murky inception. Plus, since most of the town’s inhabitants had nothing to compare it to, never having ventured beyond its icy shores, how could they declare so wholeheartedly that it is their favourite town?

The enthusiastic locals were unfazed by these pedantic objections. Ewan McGregor had recently passed through on his trip “The Long Way Round” and was quoted in a local rag as saying that he loved Magadan; it was a fabulous place with cool people living in it. Flush with the thrill of the new, I stopped people on the street, not the most comprehensive research method admittedly, and asked them what was so great about Magadan and, unfairly, if they wanted to leave. “I was born here, why would I move?” many of them said, puzzled.

“Everything I need is here, everything is accessible,” said another. “We have an excellent theatre, cinema, university,” others replied, producing a perfect list of laudable amenities, the kind of amenities that every wholesome town should have; good schools,

a youth club, a local museum. They cited good friendship networks, neighbourly support. I began to feel confused. I supposed they were on to something. Each answer was laden with childlike sincerity and an alarming lack of cynicism. Then a young, fashionable girl said, “I mean, look, it’s a beautiful place!”

The other comments I could fathom, this last one I could not. Certainly, Evgenia Ginzburg, released in 1947, exclaimed, “how it had grown, and how handsome it had become during my seven years’ absence, our Magadan,” although she did have the presence of mind to recognise her delight may have something to do with the years of hard labour and suffering she had just endured in one of Kolyma’s most remote camps.

There is a monument to those that died in the gulags. It's called the Face of Sorrows. Young people climb the hill to it and set up their barbeques at its foot. They eat their kebabs and gulp back their beer looking over the town, hazy through the smoke of the electricity plant, as someone carelessly strums a guitar. The main street, formerly called Ulitisa Berzin, after Edward Berzin, the first director of Kolyma and its Dalstroy organisation, cuts like a knife

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through the centre of the panorama. Today's Magadanians walk on the bones of the dead "lagerniks". I took the same road, heading towards the sea and sat in my favourite café, a small, square tin hut crammed with drunken Russians that were singing and dancing in the tiny space in the middle of the room. My new friend, the waitress, was also there, giving me a last kebab on the house, before falling over in the melee, all fishnet tights and peroxide hair. After nearly a week there, I had, against the odds, grown rather fond of Magadan. The locals were great. You could get used to the architectural desolation. It was just the mind-bending remoteness of the place that was irreconcilable.

So, now you know what’s at the end of Russia’s enormous domain. Not exactly a top holiday destination, but it’s good to know that it’s possible to come back from the brink unscathed.

salmonflaps

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achingly chic guest-list.’

‘All things Russian have replaced the nowdefunct Boho. Forget the nouveau glitz [sic] of modern Russia; here we are talking about the old Imperial country… Skins, velvet even fur will be everywhere. For a more subtle effect use cuffs, muffs, scarves, hats and wraps to make the point.’

PRAVDA a 'reception room' in a 'non-flagged area', then you, too, can learn from this magazine how to speak like a cock-smoker and spit with a lisp words which will make your cat break its arse laughing. Witness:

eXclusive: Irish Style Defined

By Stephen Mullan

The people behind this magazine are tasteless untouchables writing the unspeakably unreadable, and it stinks. Reading it brought me back to that eternal conundrum: why can’t everybody be like me and want to ride me? I went to a Solipsist(s) Anonymous meeting last week and, after taking a brief roll-call, I all agreed that it’s because everybody who isn’t me is a nobody. But nobodies come in different forms: the nobodies who know they’re nobody, the nobodies who think they are somebody, and, finally, the nobodies who want to be the nobodies who think they are somebody. There are also nobodies who make unwarranted, universe-sweeping generalisations about everybody, apparently, but nobody anybody knows is like that. eXclusive: Irish Style Defined is all about nobodies who think they are somebody and is aimed at nobodies who want to be nobodies who think they are somebody.

The archetype of the former is Zoe Salmon, former law student (of course), former Miss Northern Ireland (really, how hard can that be?) and current former of puppet theatres on Blue Peter (an avant-garde televisual communiqué on how to make working class kids feel even more shit: – ‘Ma, do we have sticky-back plastic?’

– ‘Wha? You watchin’ Mrs Next-Door’s TV? Eat your dripping, ye wee shite.’)

Zoe Salmon – or ‘Salmonflaps’, as showbiz insiders don’t call her – is a truly remarkable specimen of a species of local fish peculiar to Northern Ireland. These strange fish have elongated bodies and their limbs are very fin; they have tiny cerebrums;

they are carnivorous, but they don’t have scales (they don’t eat enough to warrant them); and although they are bony fish, they’re invertebrates, lacking backbone. eXclusive details how such fish spring, dive, frisk and spiral to their destination in life, leaping over the obstacles of coming from Northern Ireland, forging past the Scylla of immersed sectarianism and the Charybdis of an annoying accent, swimming against

the current of their own inadequacies, and roving on the turning tide of British antiIrish sentiment to success and stardom, ho! There, she blows. Such star fish are true heroines, and, in Northern Ireland, a heroine is the opium of the people.

Now I’m a greenish marmoset swinging on the scaffolds of East Belfast, steel-riveted with Protestantism, where men work hard, drink hard, and beat their wives… hard.

Therefore, I receive through my letter box only lonely summonses and fireworks. But if you have ‘a postcode as chic as the title’ you will be ‘carefully selected’ to receive eXclusive: Irish Style Defined free in the post. So, if you live in a house, sorry, 'property', with

‘The clever ethnic mix of exotic world music, chic staff and sexy interiors appealed to an

you, too, can learn from this magazine how to speak like a cocksmoker and spit with a lisp words which will make your cat break its arse laughing.

What point? I wasn’t sure, so, feeling suitably excluded, I foraged through various eXclusive articles: ‘Natural Style: How Not to be a Fashion Victim [their emphasis]’; ‘Lynda Bryans: New Look, New Goals’; ‘North Down’s Very Own White House’ and ‘Belfast Coolest Couples’ (‘individually they are cool, but together they are dynamite’).

Aside from applying make-up using the old custard-pie-in-face technique, the point, I think, is, in eXclusive’s words, to look or to be ‘luxurious’, ‘stylish’, ‘in vogue’, ‘fashionable’, ‘very ultra modern’, ‘the ultimate’ or ‘chic.’

The point is to be cool. Cool: the capricious, homogenising, ethereal tyrant, whose compartmentalised and price-tagged manifestations are to be worshipped, purchased and discarded on cue in queue by us, the gullible fools, so that we can with convenience shirk our existential responsibility to take possession of ourselves and mould our own self-images. In Cool’s fascist – though fashionable – state, we pretend that we are identical to our roles, and we no longer make our own choices: we surrender our freedom to the will of the leader. But Cool, of course, is just a puppet tyrant fashioned by queer, exotic myth-making puppeteers, who stumble around on non-existent metaphysical stilts; if they look down, they’ll fall, cartoonishly. But if they do plummet from up on high, they’ll fall on bales of money because the puppeteers, as ever, are the businessmen.

Most of the articles in eXclusive seem to have been written by, or in collaboration with, the magazine’s sponsors, who, though they may be in arrears in the intelligence department, still know how to make a fast buck by casting their nets about in the stinky seaweedy sea of media sharks, money-grabbing octopi, fat catfish, wriggly eels, sea squirts, plastic sturgeons, mullets, pubic crabs, media perches, shellfish bastards, turtle wankers and the ambitious amphibious. eXclusive wants us to swim with these fishes. I’d rather sleep with them.

Put that in your salmon, and smoke it.

postcard heaven

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MY BEEF

By Cian Smyth

Whenever anyone asks what your beef is, one of the immediate questions you ask yourself after your blood simmers down from a feature-length rant, is “Could I really, no, really, be that intolerant?” My beef? I may as well have been cornered in an alley by some drunken thug imagining I offended him. His broken bottle would jab at the air, cutting the shape of a question mark, a stab at your defences as he completes with a full stop in your stomach and you, left there, expected to respond with some sort of opinion. Do I have any opinion at all? Now, the blood pressure would rise again as a list of grievances would vomit onto the pavement instigating a strong motivation to go postal and waste the mo-fo.

I’m not a cynic, nor a pessimist, I would have thought. A stoic? Probably not either.

The first six years of this century have supposedly beaten the, usually monikered 'fag,' stoics into a pulp - the chief abuser being the questioning thug in the alley. Apparently, and according to The Guardian, we are now in the age of the ubersexual. The age of Bush, Blair and battles for ‘freedom’ has led us to some vehement finger-pointing. This whole

debate reminds me, and suggests the potentially great philosophical stature, of William Shatner and Henry Rollins’ spoken word track I CAN’T GET BEHIND THAT. After much ranting about the environment, student drivers, advertising, oil and the misuse of the English language, one conclusion is: 'I can’t get behind the Gods, who are more vengeful, angry and dangerous if you don’t believe in them! Why can’t all these Gods just get along? I mean they’re omnipotent, omnipresent … What’s the problem?'

It is a very flippant and trite suggestion that works for the masses and, as such, I’ll continue - the fact that many today believe they are fighting for freedom and that the same people tend to hate anyone, confusingly, known as a freedom fighter is quite a mixed message – don’t you just hate that? 'Peace?

The left-wing? The tolerant?' The masses are asked every day. 'How passive and uninteresting are they?'

'What about the men who say “Do as I do.

Believe in what I am going to say or I am

OBSCURE OBJECT

By Gerald Dawe

I used to keep things. Not many things but enough of them to stash away in large used envelopes and small wooden boxes that I’d inherited along the way. Not exactly a treasure ‘trove’ but a secret cache of incidentals.

My prefect and house monitor badge from Orangefield Boys School; my rugby jersey; my Boy Scout belt and Queen’s Badge (78th Duncairn, to the initiated). Badges from the Belfast Campaign for Peace in Vietnam and a neat Young Socialist badge. Shirt studs. A bar of red wax for letter-sealing. Italic inknibs. A Guinness label from P J Carroll’s bar of Smithfield (no longer there) from the last night a gang of us foregathered in the late sixties; Guinness labels from The Harbour Bar, Portrush and J O’Boyle, Coleraine, from mis-spent student days (and nights) at the University of Ulster in the early seventies.

A WIMPY sticker from the hard hat I wore when I worked one summer as a pipe-fitter’s mate (I kid you not), building an oil rig in

Nigg Bay, east Scotland. (No fun that). My great grandfather’s founder’s Membership card for the Ireland Junior Football League, 1900. My grandmother’s opera glasses.

Nothing really meaningful or valuable, to be honest, flotsam and jetsam. My health insurance card, circa. 1969. A farewell card from the staff when I worked for a brief spell as a librarian in the Fine Arts department of the Central Library in Belfast.

The rubber bullet a kid sold to a departing journalist in 1973 in Mc Glade’s excellent upstairs bar - the journalist was so drunk he left it behind: ‘heart mysteries there’.

Some formal photographs of my grandparents and great grandparents; indeed one of my great, great, grandmother - a terrifying-looking sonofabitch - and a clutch of unreadably teenage letters from the sister of a friend, along with photographs of girls outside a railway station on their way from or to a time and place I can’t for the life of

the Rollins

the Shatner

going to KILL you! I can’t get behind that!'

The truth is that there really isn’t anything very sexual bout the uber either.

Non-consenting violence by our uber-thug in the alley isn’t particularly sexy at all. Yet, the fact that I decided to respond to this thug’s question would suggest that I am or would be turned on by the things I hate. This isn’t a particularly shocking revelation given many of the sexual peccadilloes the human race espouses but it is particularly confusing if you’re trying to figure out whether I am some questioning, over-active thug of a top or a non-plussed, over-passive stoic of a bottom.

That’s what it always comes down to in the end: war, philosophy, intelligence, anger and so on but, wait a minute, are you a top or a bottom when it comes to these issues? Maybe a bit of both, I love a good rant, me. It can only be healthy, de-stresses the system. It makes me feel virile, intelligent, actively trying to adapt the frustrating to the useful.

This is all beginning to sound a bit uneven, a bit hypocritical, unbalanced, a bit for and against, both top and bottom! Mixed messages and confusing signs like someone who smiles

while they are crying – what’s that all about?

Or, someone common as muck speaking with an affected accent, or those who ask you to leave a bar at closing time to go to the nightclub above only not to be let in because you’re too drunk, wasn’t that the point? A special mention too, to those in this world who had the misfortune of not being tolerated and yet give in to the ignorance of being intolerant themselves. Mixed messages, all of them – again, don’t you just hate that? The list could go on and on, involving bureaucrats, phonies, sell-outs, name-droppers, opinionated idiots et cetera et cetera. In fact, I may not want to consider myself a cynic, a pessimist or a stoic but I am probably all of the above, both a top and a bottom, and I could easily be accused of any of the identities in the list mentioned beforehand too. The only conclusion possible, then, is that I hate myself and, therefore, I am just turned on by my own opinions and by being ME? Now, that’s intolerable, that’s perverted, I can’t get behind any of THAT!

me remember; only a name, Sharon.

I say I used to keep things because I more or less stopped years ago gathering the random emblems that come along.

The world’s so full of stuff anyway it’s hard to keep up with instant significance when really it takes time for things to take on lasting unexplicated meaning.( Is that what nostalgia really means?) Though there is one exception to this abstinence; postcards.

From early days, traversing here and there, I used to send postcards home. I’m not sure when or where this came from but it led, over twenty or thirty years, to friends responding. Some pointedly drawing attention to the postcard’s image - a reproduction of art, a photographic shot, a quirky visual comment, a retro John Hinde or such like. Others contain a greeting, a query, an update, without any reference to the image on the other side. An enigmatic ploy. Anyway, I have a couple of hundred of these postcards. Indeed the other day when I was ‘doing out’ the little room at the top of the house, shifting through these cards (afternoons drifting by, ‘missing the good weather’) I was thinking about what makes them so fascinating.

Postcards are sonnets. They require no preamble. They pose questions about information and compression; they tell a lot about how people see the places they are in, temporarily in the main, passing through, on holiday.

Postcards reveal true feelings, even behind the cliches. They are sentimental when sentiment isn’t ordinarily expressed.

They are ceremonial, like shaking hands - which, now that I think of it, is becoming a thing of the past, like men smoking pipes and women wearing hats. Postcards

are city-things too. They are dramas of the self: friendships, regret, love notes, reminders, thank-you’s. Postcards are not about commiseration or condolence; they are about hope and fun; leisure and pleasure, promised or deferred. Footnotes, not headlines.

When I saw all of them which I had kept - global images, famous reproductions, photographs, the following story came to mind, told to me by a very dear old friend.

A native North American, setting out on his journey across the Alaskan tundra, was photographed. Presented with the photograph he looked at it but declined to take it with him as a keepsake. ‘But why not?’ asked the perplexed photographer. ‘My box is full’, replied the stoical, pragmatic nomadic traveler, pointing at the box of personal belongings on his sledge, before heading into the white night. There’s a lesson there, somewhere, about possessions, about our objects of desire.

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by paul moore

HAPPY ENDINGS? One major problem with going to the cinema is that it is impossible to dispel the awareness that it will involve a great deal of intellectual effort and attention, an out-pouring of emotional empathy and (presuming it is a ‘good’ film) a cocktail of psychological response and all this for an ending that is almost sure to be predictable.

Not all of this can be blamed directly on the film industry. The Russian theorist Vladimir Propp spent his life researching folk tales and fables of the ‘common people’ and came to the conclusion that every story told or written had the same basic components. In essence these involved a happy family which is thrown into disarray by a catastrophic event imposed from outside their environment. The key figure in the family (always male by the way) is then forced to leave the family and go on some kind of journey during which time he is tested by a range of misfortunes which turn him into a heroic individual. He then returns to the bosom of his adoring (but now dysfunctional) family and is redeemed by a beautiful damsel whereupon the family is reconstituted and they all live happily ever after.

Now clearly we don’t get told about Propp at school because this would mean that it would be a waste of valuable time reading anything ever again but in relation to the film industry it would be useful knowledge since we would not then pay our entrance fee and buy our popcorn expecting to see or hear anything original.

In fact it might even be worth suggesting that the movie industry is doing us a favour since if we were to be confronted with endings that undermined this folk knowledge that has been passed down through years of storytelling and folk songs with fifty interminable verses and no tune then the very fabric of our society would be torn asunder and we would be cast into the world to tilt at imaginary windmills before returning hero-like to the bosom of an adoring family, marrying a local girl and opening a video lending shop. (That all sounds vaguely familiar!)

In a contemporary context Propp’s thesis can best be seen, with a few qualifications, in science fiction films. Granted, when he suggested sending the hero off to fight demons he probably didn’t have Alien or Terminator in mind and he certainly couldn’t have predicted the fact that the ending would be left open. The ‘open’ ending is ostensibly there to compliment a knowing audience in that it allows it to formulate a resolution in keeping with their view of the preceding two hours. This is of course short-hand for the industry leaving an opportunity for a follow up. Never in the history of Proppism have so few Bruce Willises, Arnies and Weavers

fought so few bad guys in order to feed the world of the cash cow that is the sequel.

The alternative to asking the audience to supply the ending is to play safe and go for the happy ending. Despite its apparent disappearance in recent years there is nothing wrong with a happy ending. It is somehow comforting to know that as the Von Trapp family trudge through the musical hills, or Jimmy Stewart makes his way at noon onto the main street with just an apron and a loaded pistol that all will indeed be well. The happy ending allows for a period of weeping and gnashing of teeth but ultimately reassures our belief in the basic goodness of humanity and the world in which we live.

This is unfortunate since, as anyone who has watched The Godfather knows, this is not actually the case. Those who know it is not the case fall into the trap, however, of merely supplying an overwhelmingly sad ending.

The supreme example of the sad ending is The Bridges of Madison County, a film so unremittingly miserable that by its end the viewer longs to be the horse’s head that finds its way under the satin sheets in The Godfather.

Kidnap or hostage movies are particularly frustrating in relation to endings.

It is difficult to get involved with the trials of the hostage when one knows that in a couple of hours time, after all the phone calls and

intermediaries have failed, a muscle-bound thickhead will crawl through a ventilation system for twenty minutes while the camera keeps switching to the hostage who is now attached to a bomb with a clock on the front reading twenty-two minutes and counting after which there will be a major explosive conflagration through which Mr Muscles and the hostage(s) will emerge unscathed. No one ever seems to think it necessary to ask how it is that every building ever designed in the USA, however large, always has a ventilation shaft that takes twenty minutes to traverse.

It has to be admitted, of course, that some films have to have predictable endings. It would be somewhat disconcerting to make Titanic and not have the ship sink despite the fact that all audiences know that Celine Dion’s voice would have shattered any iceberg at a distance of two hundred miles!

Similarly it would just have been downright churlish for Mel Gibson to have released a The Passion of Christ where the leading man failed to find his way to the cross or take up his bed and walk three days later although Mel’s present state of religious fervour might have prompted him to think he knew better and fiddle about with the Greatest Story Ever Told. The argument is that in these cases the ending doesn’t matter it is the unfolding narrative that matters but in essence watching one of these films is like watching a compilation made up of poor film endings.

They are designed specifically for those who cannot cope with the fear that a friend might tell them how a movie they have not seen ends.

There have been one or two brave attempts to find an ending that is not predictable. These have included having two endings (The French Lieutenant’s Woman), putting the ending at the beginning of the film (Pulp Fiction) or simply killing everyone who makes an appearance on screen however minor (any spaghetti western).

But none of these have managed to break the mould that demands that every odd couple will eventually get together, every grumpy detective will have a heart of gold and a hidden trauma, every lost cartoon cat will find its mother and any character that is black or gay will stand a good chance of being either a gangster or a drug dealer.

But lest this sounds cynical in any way I will end on a positive note. If you have not seen it search out a copy of Vanishing Point. I could tell you more but then I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. But rest assured, Propp it ain’t!

oil over Sleepwalking Into the Future By James Howard Kunstler A few years back, Vice-president Dick Cheney famously remarked that the American way of life was 'non-negotiable.'

By this I took him to mean the suburban American Dream, replete with its easymotoring trappings, wide-open McSpaces, and Blue Light Special venues of hyperconsumption. Now that we have entered the period of hardship that I call the Long Emergency, the tragic quality of Mr. Cheney’s utterance is becoming apparent.

And given our unwillingness to pay attention to a gathering crisis centered around energy resources, reality is about to negotiate things for us.

As I write, Hurricane Katrina has left New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast shredded. The infrastructure of our Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas operations is badly damaged, just when the world is close to (or possibly passing) its all-time maximum production peak and global oil demand is starting to exceed the global supply. The foundered oil rigs, broken pipelines, battered refineries, and flooded tank farms around the Gulf are exacerbating our predicament. The result is plain to see in gasoline prices above $3.00 and natural gas futures approaching $12 per unit (1000 cubic feet). As we slide into the cold part of the year, Americans will be squeezed financially between the rock of gasoline prices and the hard place of heating bills far higher than they were as recently as 2003. More people may freeze to death in the Midwest this winter than it turns out were killed by the great Hurricane.

Even without Katrina, the implications of so-called 'Peak Oil' for our way of life are profound and daunting — and in keeping with Mr. Cheney’s dictum, we have been sedulously ignoring them. The quality of our public discussion reflects this. For instance, nothing would have a more positive impact on our inordinate thirst for oil than restoring the US passenger rail system. It is a vastly more efficient way to move people, especially the medium distances between big cities, and it has many other advantages. We have a railroad system now that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. The fact that no national political figure of either major party is even talking about this shows how unserious we are.

What little public discussion there is on the gathering energy crisis groans with misunderstandings and delusions. The most common one is that the magic of 'the market' will rescue us from resource scarcity, specifically in the form of new technology. This wishful notion assumes that technology is identical to energy, that the two things are

interchangeable, that one can be substituted for the other. Ironically, where the oil industry is concerned, the chief effect of improved technology over the past two decades has been the more efficient depletion of existing oil fields, not the discovery of new oil.

Another popular delusion is the idea that better gas mileage will rescue us — that if only we all drove hybrids and compact cars instead of SUVs, we could continue enjoying the drive-in utopia indefinitely. The truth is that our problem is not the type of cars we run on our freeways but our desperate dependency on cars of any size and shape.

Even the environmental community is stuck on this notion. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been working up a super highmileage “hypercar” for a decade — oblivious to the fact that it only promotes further car dependency.

At the heart of our leadership vacuum on these issues lies the paradox that our economy is now largely based on the tragic replication of ever more suburban sprawl, along with the accessorizing and servicing of it, plus associated activities such as realestate sales, mortgage creation, and the tradable instruments spun off of mortgages to fuel the derivatives racket. Subtract these things from the US economy and there is not much left besides hair-cutting, fried chicken, and open heart surgery.

It is tragic because it produces an infrastructure for daily life with no future. The suburban sprawl economy can be described with precision as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It entails a powerful psychology of previous investment that does not permit us to think about changing, or reforming, or letting go of these massive misinvestments.

But the fundamental equation of economic life is changing anyway. The global energy crisis is for real. The future will require us to make other arrangements whether we like it or not. Negotiations are underway and we can either come to the table or continue sleepwalking in our dark raptures of sentimental exceptionalism.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.

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a bit vaudevile Funeral Parlour Open Night Dominic Healy and Sons, Falls Road, Belfast.

REVIEWS

CAFE VAUDEVILLE. FUNERAL PARLOUR OPEN NIGHT. VICTORIA SQ. BILLBOARDS. THIS HUMAN SEASON. WORLD TOILET SUMMIT. HIPPOS IN THE SHOWER.

Café Vaudeville Between the two of us, my friend and I have seen the inside of some dives over the years, including Belfast’s old shebeen scene. Many of the watering holes we quenched our thirsts in, not by any means in each other’s company, were the type where you had to wipe your feet on the way out in case you soiled the pavements.

Sometimes family could tell the location of an evening’s ‘swally’ by the potency of the stench of alcohol and tobacco smoke that had permeated into the clothing. So it was with a sense of wonderment that we disembarked from our pirate taxi in Chichester Street. We have few qualms about travelling in such things. After all, Chichester Street is a part of the city we know better for its proximity to the courts, where our attendance was more often than not obligatory. This time, fortunately, the cells beneath the courthouse were not our destination but the newest addition to the Belfast night scene, Arthur Street’s Café Vaudeville.

Both of us were suitably attired for the evening without overdoing it. Belfast city centre likes to think of itself as a site of culture and those wearing the everyday apparel of people who ‘live’ in estates rather than ‘reside’ in Cultra, often find themselves shown the door before they get though it. The one concession is to be addressed as ‘sir’; 'No trainers or jeans sir, sorry.’ Looking as sorry as undertakers who love business; being dead is all part of the polite façade.

As we hastened down a darkened Arthur Street looking out for this new ‘over the top’ hot spot, the presence of two bouncers signalled to us that our quest had been fulfilled. We stepped inside without either doorman looking at us as they would something that had just fallen off their shoes. Quite a few of those within sported jeans. The clientele had not been sufficiently built up yet to allow any self-styled Cerberus and friends the luxury of refusing potential customers.

The building which houses Café Vaudeville is the old First Trust Bank. The bar man told me this as I discreetly tried to find out more about the place, catch someone in an unguarded moment when they might disclose that the manageress is a ‘bitch’ or the manager a cocaine snorting ‘pig.’ Indiscretions were few last Wednesday.

A place apart, the interior layout of Café Vaudeville is what struck me immediately.

It wasn’t staircase speckled yet nevertheless had sufficient lack of centre to remind me of Dutch artist M. C. Escher’s perpetual

staircase concept. Where exactly the place began and ended seemed a mystery. Each part of the building was designed and furnished differently. At the table in front of us where ten people sat enjoying a meal, the chairs were a mish-mash of makes with no attempt to coordinate. Floor patterns changed as rapidly as the feet moved. TV screens offered scenes from the silent movie era. The most visually prominent interior work were the red chandeliers and ceiling lighting, surrounded by what my friend thought was some Italian decorating. Trees sat inside the place. I had experienced nothing like it although my drinking buddy (in a swipe at its supposedly Parisian style) confessed to having seen something similar, but only in Bologna.

It’s not without its spatial downside.

The most irritating aspect on this score is the position of the toilets. For men it is a climb of four flights of stairs. Perhaps it is deliberately designed to get customers to fork out the money for the champagne in the country’s ‘first Bollinger bar’, for which they can pay more but consume less volume-wise than they would were they to drink pints. We were having none of it. The trees would always prove convenient if the toilet seemed too far away.

Bar staff initially seemed a bit standoffish. Trying to get served was a difficulty.

They looked on us in the manner which suggests that they didn’t really expect us to have money. A bit of obvious irritation on our part quickly reminded them that our cash didn’t come from the Northern Bank and was as good as any body else’s in the place. Within an hour other staff had taken over. They appreciated that customers came in to drink, not to case the place.

At £2.75 a pint the Café Vaudeville is unlikely to entice punters in from Belfast’s estates. The consolation that it pulls a great pint of Guinness is negated by the fact that many other premises do likewise.

We peeked at the menu but declined to sample the culinary delights on offer, which are itemised online at http://www. cafevaudeville.com/. As the night moved on, there was nobody left dining but, trusting we had not reached an inebriation aided double vision, the crowd drinking at the bar had seemed to grow considerably.

The size of the place and the premium rate of rent the owners presumably pay for it, given its location, suggests it will have to pack its ‘Parisian’ interior from wall to wall if it is to stay in business. And then who would want to go - why get crushed in Café Vaudeville when you can do it in Robinson’s for less the cost?

Reviewed By Anthony McIntyre

Warm and welcoming with thick drapes, soft lighting and springy spotlessly clean carpets, any myths surrounding funeral parlours that I had were dispelled almost instantly due to the disappointing lack of anything remotely, well, morbid. It seems that the smell of death has updated itself to resemble the scent of lavender breeze Glade Plug-Ins. The funeral parlour I visited as part of a province-wide open night (aimed at giving people a chance to ask all they ever wanted to know about funerals) was as homely as my own living room, only more comfortable. Even the funeral director’s uniform was navy - her daughter confessed that they were plain sick of wearing black all the time.

The first attraction on show at the funeral parlour was a huge coffin in the style of a U-boat, known as an American casket. It can be yours for a hilariously expensive price and due to being constructed from thick stainless steel will ensure that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, your dead body (and cockroaches) will be all that remains unharmed.

With the noticeable absence of anything in the slightest dead and the fact that the embalming room was out of bounds on this particular evening, I rejoiced in steering the question and answer session with the funeral director over to subjects not suitable for the squeamish. As it turned out, the young attractive receptionist who let us in was actually one of three embalmers who, when you die, will cut into your carotid artery in your neck, pump you full of formaldehyde, drain out your blood, make incisions below and above your belly button and top you up with a solution that will dissolve all your internal organs. She assured me with a wry grin that if you are not dead when you arrive at the funeral parlour you most certainly will be when she’s finished with you.

Having grown up in the business and thus not finding the process as of embalming a dead body as unsettling as the average Joe, she did admit to not enjoying packing noses with gauze.

Apparently it makes a less than pleasant cracking noise. My delightfully morbid mother who came along with me for the night’s entertainment took great pleasure in adding that bodies these days 'go off' a lot faster than they used to due to central heating in houses. And unless you want to spend eternity dressed in a turtle neck jumper, leave strict instructions that if your dead body is left for whatever reasons in the hands of a pathologist that it is not a trainee one who - I have been reliably informed - have a tendency to open you up too far for it to be disguised without the assistance of a head-high ensemble.

Aside from all the slicing and stuffing, the funeral director also went into the financial aspect of funerals, which leads me to believe the only way I can afford to be laid to rest is if someone rolls me up in a carpet and throws me off a boat. Shockingly enough, a severe lack of burial ground afflicting the Belfast area means that those living in the Lisburn area have to pay nearly twice the amount of someone living in Belfast for a burial plot, despite the fact that - as the director pointed out - digging a grave for a corpse from Twinbrook entails nothing more than digging a grave for a corpse from the Ormeau Road.

On the way out one man remarked that he had enjoyed his tour, but he’d refrain from saying that he’d hope to

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malled again

see the funeral director again soon, to which she smiled and replied, 'Don’t worry, if you can see me, you’re alright'.

Reviewed By Laura Garland

The Victoria Square Billboards I hate shopping centres. If hell is being trapped in your least favourite place for all eternity, I expect to find myself condemned to spend the afterlife in Junction One on a day that is forever the Saturday before Christmas. I’ve never actually been to Junction One, your friendly local international shopping outlet ™, but I hate it anyway. I went to Sprucefield once, but I was wearing a bear costume and shaking a bucket for charity, and I fucking hated that as well.

Anyhow, Belfast is to get a new shopping centre, Victoria Square, which is being built in the big hole beside Cornmarket.

Except it isn’t a shopping centre, of course, but an ‘urban regeneration project’ which will be ‘the catalyst for a new Renaissance of Belfast,’ according to the development’s website. In fact, the marketing executive charged with promoting the Victoria Square project likes the ‘R’ word so much that it also appears on the banners and hoardings erected around the construction site.

Along with standard corporate schlock like ‘The Excitement Starts Here’ a banner hanging over the new, gentrified Kitchen Bar promises ‘A Renaissance for Belfast.’

Marketing executives, it seems, don’t recognise bathos. Italy’s ‘R’ gave us Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, Ireland’s meant Yeats, Joyce, Synge and Gregory. In Belfast, I give you the House of Fraser, ladeeez…

Like most branding vocabulary, this is language so drained it becomes pallid and without significance, but the attack on meaning is not expressed through words alone. Garish pictures accompany each empty phrase, featuring an assorted array of impossibly slim, cartoon women, each the bastard child of a threesome between supermodel aesthetics, ‘my ass is yours’ manga whores and the power puff girls.

Women do predominate, befitting the fact that most retail advertising is aimed in their direction. Shop here, says the image, and you will lose three stone, gain the perfect rear, get ‘have a blow job’ eyes and a neck like a swan. Men feature more sparingly, but the two that do are impossibly trendy and

metrosexual, smugly sipping cappuccinos at midnight beneath Victoria Square’s glass dome in brown ‘mee-jah’ polo necks and D&G glasses while God shines his light on Belfast’s Renaissance.

I know, I know. Images must be aspirational. It wouldn’t do to provide snapshots of your typical shopping centre inmate, fingering a three-pack of brown and green Yfronts while wondering how on earth they’re going to fill their dusty retirement years, or shoplifting a Burberry baseball cap, or fighting over the last pair of Muk-luk boots in the sale. The developers are also keen to stress the difference of the new Victoria Square, with its dome, glass lift (‘gee, just like Castle Court’) and new ‘ye old style’ water fountain in Victoria Street, from the old, ragged Victoria Centre, where I once watched a rat keel over and die on the stairs beside the café.

Yet at least the old centre knew its place, instead of trying to convince us that it sold redemption alongside 99 pence fry packs.

But recognising this still won’t stop us mistaking function for salvation in a little corner of Belfast which could be anywhere…

Reviewed By Robbie Meredith

This Human Season Louise Dean, Scribner 2005 ISBN 0-7432-7536-5 Louise Dean is a middle-class English-born author. She has children called Jules and Cassien. And she has written a novel about Northern Ireland in the late 1970s.

Do you feel it yet? Surely those opening sentences are enough to bring it on? A little twitch of irritation, perhaps? A raised eyebrow?

Well, here’s the clincher – she lives in Province ('doesn’t everyone?' she trills facetiously). Got you now, I bet. How dare she presume to write about our tortured, murky past while lying in a French lavender-field under endless blue skies? There’s nothing more certain to raise our collective hackles than ignorant, up-start interlopers wafting in to tell us how it really is. It even transcends sectarianism. We all rankle under the cool patronising stare of the ‘knowledgeable’ outsider.

It’s a similar reaction to the one you get listening to radio discussion programmes about the Troubles, when Dave from East Grinstead phones in with (duh! obvious!) answers to all the nasty problems that have been plaguing us here in the North for generations. Thanks Dave, glad you sorted that out for us. Mate. Try living here and see if it seems quite so simple.

But wait a minute. How far can we indulge these stroppy, antagonistic feelings, jealously guarding the grim years of conflict as our own private terrain? Let’s round all those hostile, reactive emotions right now, stuff them in a box, and sit on the lid.

Because once you get past your initial suspicions, Louise Dean’s novel is actually fairly readable, remarkably free of butt-clenching ‘love across the barricades’ moments.

Admittedly, the book is burdened by a rather plodding, predictable structure – unionist narrative, republican narrative, woven carefully together – but there are moments of sensitivity and humour that pull the obviousness of the plot back from the abyss. It’s the tale of beautiful, sexually-frustrated republican housewife, Kathleen (whose son Sean is interned in Long Kesh) and dour but decent ex-British Army man John Dunn, struggling to cope with his new role as a prison officer. Whodathunkit, but the plot culminates in a harsh and violent denouement.

It’s evident that Louise Dean did her research thoroughly, and impeccably evenhandedly. Just check out the acknowledgements – you’ve got both Danny Morrison and Finlay Spratt in there. Apparently, the novel is founded on nine months’ worth of intensive research, during which time Dean visited Belfast for at least one week out of every month and amassed more than 250 hours of interviews. Baps figure prominently in the book. Someone’s always buttering one, or rushing out to buy one. Were baps really so central to working-class life in 1979?

Recently Dean revealed her commitment to ensuring the book’s authenticity: 'At one point, I asked the man showing me around [the Maze prison, formerly Long Kesh] if he could shut me in a cell for a few moments so that I could feel what it would be like to be alone. You could see he thought I was completely eccentric, but he did it.' Yet you sense that Dean – like many a writer and commentator before her - feels more empathy with the colourful working-class Catholic community than with the joyless Prods. It was ever so.

The trouble is, for all her meticulous research, Dean’s characters remain static, never flaring with strange life, condemned to potter around the predictable little spaces she has allotted to them. So when tragedy comes, it seems formulaic, stunted.

Although an outsider, Dean approaches This Human Season without bombast or arrogance. But she fails to convince. Maybe the stench of our pain-ridden conflict blew away on the sweet zephyrs of Provence.

Reviewed by Fionola Meredith

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kyles sprinkler diverting musings

Crapper’s Delight If the measure of a civilised society is how it disposes of its waste, the zenith of our civilisation is represented by the Toto Neorest. This toilet greets the user by automatically opening the lid upon approach, then waves goodbye by closing and automatically flushing on departure.

An oscillating massage can be enjoyed from a cushioned seat, the temperature of which has been set to within a tenth of a degree by wireless remote control. Toilet roll is rendered obsolete by a robotic arm that squirts warm water of determinable pressure up your bum before drying with scented zephyrs of heated air, whilst fuzzy logic circuits analyse your usage patterns and simultaneously engage the catalytic air purifier. This is what billionaires shit into.

At the 2005 World Toilet Summit Exhibition in St George’s Market, the Toto Neorest was conspicuous by its absence.

Not only was the World Toilet Summit Exhibition lacking the World’s Best Toilet, it was also missing most of its exhibitors.

St George’s Market appeared deserted: half of it was screened off, and of the remaining space only a quarter was filled by booths from the washroom industry. One toilet trader estimated up to three quarters of the exhibitors had been scared off by the rioting that had taken place a couple of weeks before the conference, setting a depressing precedent for the first World Toilet Summit to be held outside of Asia.

To be fair, the World Toilet Summit was not just about the exhibition; delegates were invited to the Waterfront Hall to attend presentations from international speakers on a range of sterile-sounding topics ('Some Technical Issues of Toilet Sanitary Concerns', anyone?). Committees met to discuss philanthropic aspirations for higher standards of toilet provision, culminating with the signing of the 'Belfast Protocol', a global regulatory framework for public toilet provision. There also appeared to be a subliminal campaign to erase the term 'public toilet' from public consciousness, replacing it with the asinine 'away from home toilet'; a campaign that may have as much success as the degendering trend from some years ago. But the World Toilet Summit Exhibition is the most public manifestation of the World Toilet Summit; it’s where the the local TV and radio stations send their reporters to crack puns for a filler segment on the news, and as such it provides a measure (however inaccurate) of the impact of the summit.

On initial appearances, the World Toilet Summit Exhibition was inadequate.

Of the exhibitors brave enough to come to war torn Belfast, most were hawking cleaning products and toilet paraphenalia: disinfectants, air fresheners, tampon dispensors and the like. Only three stands

offered anything in the way of washroom innovation, and two of those were demonstrating the same product: a self dispensing toilet seat cover (the fear of catching germs off a toilet must be a serious issue). Even the frivolous extravagance of a rotating, self cleaning toilet seat was humbled; it was being demonstrated next to Vacuum contributor Dr Bindeshwa Pathak’s Sulaban International organisation.

Compared the two pence cost of each cleaning cycle of the rotating seat, Sulaban International public toilets integrate healthcare centres, baths, laundry facilities, schools, and biogas generators at the cost of half a penny per use. And they’ve built the worlds largest public toilet, which is cool.

Only one of the utilitarian, stainless steel public toilets on display aroused curiosity. Its little blinking electronic panel looked pretty retrofuturistic, but sadly it was for toilet engineer use only. But he was eager to show what it could do, and rightly so: this was the Toto Neorest of the public toilet world. Packed with sensors and fully USB compatible, these toilets output enough data for a thesis: soap levels, usage patterns, remote fault monitoring, numbers of people who wash their hands (although this doesn’t take into account users whose cocks aren’t dirty and who didn’t piss on their fingers) and, of course, automatic flushing on departure. It can even be configured to send you a text message if sensors detect cottaging in the disabled toilets, which you may or may not be pleased to receive. So where can you avail of one of these space age conveniences?

Closer than you think: Castledara Developments debuted the Automated Toilet System in Warrenpoint Park.

In fact, Castledara Developments and Sulaban International saved the World Toilet Summit Exhibition from mediocrity.

Otherwise, it would have been a load of shite.

Reviewed By Stuart Fallis

Geoff Gatt’s “Hippos In The Shower” Reviewed by Ciaran Tracey Anyone who has ever passed a glance at the playbills decorating the lower environs of the Empire Music Hall will realise that before tastes turned with the years, this Belfast institution was host to the crème of travelling show entertainment. The staging of this locally written and produced amateur play on the Empire’s hallowed boards then has something of an added air of authenticity and revelry about it, and not least a rekindled sense of pride in what is possible given a spark of creativity and a lot of hard graft.

The success of this feel-good musical tale of extraordinary events happening to quite ordinary people, when debuted in the Old Museum Arts Centre last year, took many by surprise. The move therefore to a bigger and more prominent stage was a welcome development, giving many who missed the first performances, now entered into something of a local lore, the chance to experience this zany world of marine biologists, psychedelic underpants and cheeky wines.

Taxi driver George (played by Gatt), is possessed with the notion that bizarre and colourful things can happen to anyone after viewing the shape of a hippo in a campfire – a hippo which then becomes the voice of his subconscious after a little too much ‘Vino Tito’, and which helps him to realize that going with the flow can be rewarding and exciting. Marine biologist Miss Grey (Elaine Murphy) is kind hearted but repressed until meeting George, though it isn’t long before his easy-going philosophy ensures they fall in love. Things are not so simple however: Miss Grey is destined to leave on a marine biology expedition within the fortnight. All seems lost until George breezily suggests he and his collection of colourful friends (an Elvis imitating janitor, a bongo beater and a tweed wearing deviant) come too. More drunkenness sees to shipwrecking on a desert island, whereupon a ruthless pirate and Bob Hoskins style sidekick are encountered; but love triumphs, with George and Miss Gray finally overcoming the odds.

Such a brief synopsis does not allow for the wealth of music and dialogue along the way, peppered with witty epigrams and jokes that are the product of steady refining and good directing. Drawing sometimes from both familiar showband and pop music modes, the songs are nonetheless entertaining romps; but better than this, there are moments of genuine poignancy, such as the lovers’ unlucky realisation that they are not both lobsters, and hence cannot mate.

The creative costumes and set, courtesy of Una Hickey and Adrian Cooke respectively,

help enormously here, with this romantic soliloquy being conducted both ‘underwater’ and in matching lobster claws. Elsewhere the vocal talents of all concerned are impressive, with multiple harmonies giving the show a well thought out and professional air.

Chief praise must go to the aforementioned Cooke (as janitor Elvis) and Robert Jameson (as the pirate), whose projection and flair both overcame the inadequate stage amplification that was to put the only blight on an otherwise heartwarmingly entertaining show.

Amateur playwright Gatt, son of artist Bill, and native of West Belfast, has within the past year gathered around him a pool of talent drawn largely from local musicians and the dramatically minded. From this, and from his own longer term composition, he has scored and arranged roughly ten songs each involving a singing cast of up to fifteen, and who in the course of one and a half hours combine to make this mini musical a highly entertaining spectacle. The undertaking is not a small one, and perhaps plaudits are due to the Empire for going with what was not by any means a surefire hit. The proof of tonight’s pudding however is that this play has now gained a five night run in May as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival on the basis of both its word of mouth and homegrown success.

One would do well to catch it. Layered, enchanting and well produced despite its amateur constraints, the play’s good nature and dreamlike moments are a heartwarming reminder that especially in Belfast, extraordinary things can be done by quite ordinary people.

Reviewed By Ciaran Tracy

archived i know where im going

THEE NIBBLES ROUNDABOUT ART UPDATE

is much championing of the fallacy of an 'elegant, stylish, luxurious and impressive' city, although Paul Rankin nearly gives the game away by revealing in an interview that people frequently throw pastie suppers at the window of his restaurant.

Just when you thought public art couldn't get any better, a new structure has finally been chosen for the Broadway roundabout.

The winning design, to be unveiled in 2008, is a towering nicotine-yellow three-fingered claw. Its location between the Village and the Falls has been chosen specially, with the right and left claws symbolic of the two distinctive communities while the middle claw is extended in a defiant gesture towards the city centre. It is hoped that it will become an interactive piece, with local bored youths being encouraged to add their own spontaneous and permanent features such as 'UTH', penis drawings and sectarian slogans.

END TIMES Describing itself as 'A wake up call to the people of Northern Ireland', this apocalyptic evangelical newssheet has also been making sporadic appearances around town. Several key arguments hinge rather unconvincingly on a 1993 TV interview with Paula Hamilton (a former model who once starred in a Volkswagen Golf advert) in which she blames Charles Darwin for her suicide attempt.

Subsequent questions such as 'Who am I?', 'What am I doing here?', 'How did I get here?' and 'Where am I going?' are perhaps best answered by consulting a copy of Inside Out.

HALLOWEEN CELEBRATIONS The Odyssey was indeed a frightening place to be this Halloween. Firstly a choir of children spooked the audience by singing Abba and Gloria Gaynor songs. The tension built and the firework display eventually began behind the Harland & Woolf cranes. Then, in one terrifying crescendo, Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' had people running screaming from the car park whilst tearing the flesh from their own faces.

INSIDE OUT It is often difficult to be certain whether or not Belfast has enough free listings guides funded by advertisements. The publishers of Inside Out obviously don't think it does and have provided us with another one just to be on the safe side. As usual there

VICOS RE-OPENS At least the sign above the door says ‘Vicos’ but this is an altogether different beast. In the new, sophisticated atmosphere of the downstairs restaurant policemen who used to raid the place will be able to take their wives out for a meal without the prospect of some pilled-up clubber sweating onto their pizza.

Future refurbishments are to see the techno floor converted into a health spa for minor celebrities and the hip-hop room re-invented as a fashionable animal clothing boutique.

SOMETHING MISSING? A spate of cryptic billboard posters recently appeared depicting street and road signs bereft of the letter �U�. But what were U/you/we supposed to be missing, or missing from? The existentialist conundrum was

later revealed to be little more than a cruel trick by Gerry Kelly and his ilk over at UTV and their new U105FM radio station. Which proves that the only thing missing is good judgment in the issuing of radio licenses.

the vacuum