The adventures of a Chinese Brit growing up in post-war liberal Britain

Anna Chen, UK’s first Chinese punk. Catsuit made for her by Vivienne Westwood. 
Pic Bob Carlos Clarke

Anna Chen launches her Substack account

Originally published at Anna’s Substack 25 March 25

“Charming, witty and sophisticated. ” – SUNDAY TIMES

“… extraordinary … independence and spirit. A very distinct voice, very funny …” – Jean Seaton, Director, ORWELL PRIZE

“Assured, funny, angry, exhilarating … A triumph.” – Alan Moore

Sui generis

Okay. In brief, here’s a bit about me before I throw myself into the world of Substack for your amusement and delectation.

I am the UK’s first Chinese punk, the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a published poet at 14, Orwell Prize shortlisted and longlisted, a TED speaker, a BBC writer and presenter of groundbreaking programmes back when there was an inch of space to do such things, a dissenting journalist (formerly Guardian, New Internationalist, Asia Times), critical thinker and political analyst.And, yes, contrary to the template, I am capable of original thought.

I was born and raised in Hackney, east London, the child of a Chinese father and an English mother. Growing up in the heart of two major civilisations at a historic crossroads, it was hardly surprising that I would end up as a cultural outrider.

Born into the belly of the imperial beast, it was difficult to miss how no Chinese were positively reflected in the culture. Realising young it was only supposed to be vampires, not humans, who cast no reflection, I kicked up.

My disquiet went far beyond the ghetto of identity politics, the safe zone into which minorities are usually shovelled. I grew to recognise this erasure as a manifestation of a larger class conflict that required women and labour, as well as empire minorities, to submit to a grinding world order. I may have found myself on the immediate frontline of sinophobia but it was one battlefield in a wider class war.

One of my objectives — to demystify and humanise the Chinese as a counterweight to the Yellow Peril stereotypes embedded in western culture – was never an effort to empower the bourgeoisie of one ethnic group to which I happened to belong. It was a matter of survival and solidarity with everyone else who fell on the wrong side of the divide.

It was also good training in discerning truth from illusion.

The pressure was always to be submissive and why should I submit? I was sensitive but I wasn’t a delicate lotus blossom. I didn’t giggle. I didn’t have a bell-like, tinkling laugh, more a throaty guffaw like Fenella Fielding had just been told a rude joke. I was never tiny and doll-like. My glutes were built for running 100 metre hurdles and I was likely to squish you if I landed on you.

I won my chess matches, I argued my case. A classic autodidact, I was into dinosaurs, astronomy and science. I read The Little Red Book by six. By twelve, I could tear a telephone directory in half. (Technique, baybee!) I’ve survived being mauled by a puma and swum with sharks (the fishy kind). I was never going to defer to pasty-faced Masters of the Universe.

So …

Undeterred by the absence of role models and fed up with deeply embedded stereotypes that were taken for granted, I defied the degrading western narratives and carved out new ground in my activities, my writing and my commentary on British politics and culture.

“Whatever current western propaganda demands that you believe, we are capable of altruism, fellow feeling, critical thinking and original thought. Of course we are. We’re human.”

Thirty years of writing inside the belly of the empire beast

There was a lot to learn from a lifetime of watching geopolitics unfold while living through the West’s cycle of capitalism. From post-war austerity, through its sparkling zenith of The Beatles and the arts to an ignominious end in crushing austerity redux (which we’re entering right now), I realised that we were in danger of completing the circle and ending up in another world war if we didn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Looking around me now, I’m shocked by how much that we took for granted we’ve lost. I’m a direct conduit back to a kinder time when the British working class were at peak confidence. Having the oldest working class in the world, the country had the greatest potential for social change for the benefit of the majority: AKA revolution. Karl Marx came to London and wrote about it. A century later, I lived it and saw the hope wax and wane.

In the expanding post-war economy we’d had it good compared to our cousins in the remnants of the British Empire. We were granted a National Health Service, housing, jobs and education which turned the majority into a society of high-functioning, apex proletarians with upward class mobility.

Don’t knock it; it gave us the space to raise the collective consciousness and for a while we soared.

However, it came with a dark perk: you, too, could join the ruling class should your moral compass fail. This perpetually dangling carrot kept profits high and seduced many of us away from the temptations of communism, a prospect that terrified our elites.

The 1960s were marvellous unless you were living in China or Northern Ireland or South Africa or the Gorbals or the USA’s deep south or any number of nations struggling to be reborn, but I digress.

We went on strike, we protested. We created marvellous cultural artefacts. The media had relative bandwidth, the press was benign up to a point. With access to the world’s art, literature, philosophy and politics, our souls and spirits were enriched, our empathy finely developed to embrace fellow humanity.

All these things we could do before the jaws of the State snapped shut. Because we understood too late that the State isn’t a charity. It isn’t our parents unless you count Wicked Stepmothers and brutish fathers. It does enough to keep itself in power and no more.

With the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc in 1991, our ruling elites no longer had to pretend to care. They started to claw back all our gains on turbo-charge.

As the elites of the declining empire cut us adrift like gangrenous limbs, preserving the core organs, I’m addressing a new generation I see cheated out of what was possible: dreams made concrete reality through cooperation rather than the fetish of “competition” — for which, read dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost.

Oh, but here comes an upstart: a Cinderella story of the world’s factory transformed into a fabulous Golden Goose. Our global lifeboat and growth engine bringing peace, stability and affordable stuff.

I bet the Wicked Stepmother and the Ugly Sisters are going to have something to say about that. “Load the cannon, fire the torpedoes and break out the bubbly. We have a class war to win!”

A detailed biography and blog archive can be found at Anna’s About page

Renew the spirit, free the mind, change the world. In the meantime, maintain.

In the tiny sliver of time that is my life, I managed to carve out a space in the culture from being the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival 30 years ago, the satirical trailblazer Suzy Wrong, Human Cannon, to making groundbreaking programmes for the BBC. But the Obama Pivot to Asia and Trump’s Captain Ahab schtick with the white whale of China means that’s all closed down. In order for the West’s Viking raiding party to turn the Golden Goose into a dead duck, it requires a dehumanised, cartoon China on whom to unleash their worst impulses. And that means no Chinese with whom to empathise. Blank canvases only.

The same goes for the working and middle classes everywhere. The Empire wants to do to the whole world what they did to the Native Americans, to India, Africa and China.

I’m here for kindred spirits who say, hell no!

I want to talk to those interested in critical thinking, who look around and says wtf!? To Brits, Americans and Europeans who wonder where their lives, livelihoods and hopes went in some of the richest economies on the planet. To people of Chinese heritage who wonder what the hell’s happened in the West. And to the Chinese emerging into their day in the sun, breaking out of their centuries-long cocoon as beautiful butterflies only to find the predators lining up — don’t be seduced into our bad habits.

Anyone interested in clarity, a different perspective rooted in 400 years of the Age of Enlightenment, is welcome.

I feel a special kinship with the young women being buried by a Gamergate generation bringing back the old oppressions dressed up in new clothes. Bright young women who decline to submit to the hierarchy of delusional ass-hattery and plonkerdom.

Let this be your spiritual home.

Anna’s Substack account is now live.

Charles Shaar Murray's Hothouse Journalism course returns to north London

Or learn how to pimp your prose.

Legendary author and journalist Charles Shaar Murray's excellent Hothouse Project "Journalism as Art and Craft" writing classes return to north London in September for eight weeks.

CSM has been dubbed "the rock writers' rock writer" and has accumulated a wealth of knowledge over his four decade career which he endeavours to impart to his students in his eight week course. Aimed at writers, editors, beginners, veterans wanting to raise their game, bloggers and the mildly curious, CSM's course adds a vital skillset in an increasingly competitive climate.

He may be my Loved One but he's also recognised way beyond our living room as a fabulous stylist who helped bring the liveliness of the counter-culture into the mainstream in the early 1970s when he was one of the star writers on the NME in its glory days.

He's also an engaging raconteur so expect to hear his stories about meeting some of the great men and women of the culture including Paul McCartney, The Who, Pink Floyd, John Lee Hooker, Marc Bolan, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, J G Ballard, Black Sabbath, Kurt Vonnegut and David Bowie.

“front-line cultural warrior” and “original gunslinger” Independent on Sunday

“The artistry of [Crosstown Traffic] matches that of its subject” Nick Tosches

“The Johnny Cash of rock journalism” Phil Campbell – Motorhead

“Next time you’re in Chicago, I’ll cook for you myself” Buddy Guy

“I’d go if I lived in London … if I could do it all over again, at age 17 … this is how I’d do it. CSM is the Yoda of music writing” Julie Burchill

“Charles Shaar Murray was always the best read” Tony Visconti

“The New Musical Express was one of the big things in my life … there was outrageous writing by Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent and, later, Julie Burchill — what they were writing was unbelievable! The NME was so important for lonely suburban kids. It was a lifeline” Danny Boyle

STUDENT TESTIMONIALS

“Charles’ course is personal, packed with anecdote, caters to the individual and is so helpful for anyone brushing up their journalistic skills or branching out into different types of writing. 5 shiny gold stars from me – I’d do the course again just for fun to be honest!”
Juliet Rossetti

“I thought your course was ‘write on’! You polished and perfected everyone’s writing style. I felt privileged to have been coached by you. You imparted a lot of knowledge. The course was well structured and more importantly, good fun. Would I recommend it? Absolutely.”
Tessa Christian

“For anyone interested in the processes of writing and assessing creative journalism, Charles Shaar Murray’s Hothouse Project courses are essential!”
David Hodson

If you are a writer, you need this course. More information here.

Chinese diaspora limelight in London: South China Morning Post

My column for the South China Morning Post magazine 9th June 2013.

City scope: Chinese bask in the summer limelight 
Anna Chen in London

Following one of the longest winters on record here, I've emerged blinking into the light to find my hometown has become a hot spot for Chinese diaspora theatre. An eruption of British East Asian talent on stage this summer is finally putting paid to the notion that Pacific Rimmers can play only one-dimensional, buck-toothed, orientalist monsters.

As the bass rumblings of theatre-industry initiatives and the clamour of international protest (prompted by the British East Asian Artists' objections to the Royal Shakespeare Company's casting of The Orphan of Zhao with predominantly non-Asians) have risen to a crescendo, the resulting pyroclastic flow of productions has been hard to ignore. Highlights have included Border Crossings' stylish love story Consumed, set in Shanghai; and Howard Brenton's #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (featured in an earlier column) at the Hampstead Theatre and streamed live over the internet. The most exciting of them all, however, has been the British premiere of David Henry Hwang's comedy Yellow Face, which last month launched London's newest venue, the Park Theatre.

Elegantly, but devastatingly, Yellow Face lampoons Western popular culture's embedded assumptions about white superiority, all served in the round by a seven-strong cast that includes David Yip - he of British television's The Chinese Detective fame - and the beautiful Gemma Chan.

The arrival in London of not only Yellow Face but Hwang, two decades after his mega-hit M. Butterfly - a Tony Award-winner on Broadway, New York - took London by storm, has been greeted by squeals of delight.

With all his accolades and achievements as a leading American playwright, Hwang is our Yoda, our pole star; living proof that we - the Chinese diaspora - exist. Yes, we knew it all along, but The Establishment didn't.

Children have been born and grown up since Anthony Hopkins and Glen Goei frolicked in the M. Butterfly limelight all those years ago. Now, a new generation of young, savvy East Asian audiences are flocking.

Park Theatre on press night was the place to be if you were a British East Asian creative type. Champagne flowed, oiling the sense of excitement and relief that the production of excellent drama could be as natural and normal an activity for Chinese as plotting to take over the world.

Baby great tit rescued from cat and fed by its mother

Oh, the heartbreak of trying to save a tiny life.

We even named him ... or her. That's how hopeful we were that we could save Cartman the baby great tit. Rescued from the neighbour's cat, Cartman looks robust enough but something's wrong and (s)he can't fly. To save it from cats and foxes, we keep it indoors overnight in a tub with water, small worms and seed but (s)he's too young to feed itself.

Put back out in the garden the next day, Cartman's mother finds and feeds it. This goes on until dusk when we take it back inside.

Sadly, (s)he doesn't survive this second night.

Lost in London with Flying Lizards' Deborah Evans-Stickland

Spent an enjoyable Sunday with my mate Deborah Evans-Stickland — she of the Flying Lizards and the definitive version of "Money" (1979, written by Berry Gordy in the 1960s) that you hear played every time there's an item on ... er ... money. Given that we're in the pits of a recession that's fast turning into a depression and financial meltdown at least for us poor stiffs at the bottom of the heap, that's a lot.

I was too spaced out from a week of bronchitis and pain to get behind a steering wheel so she picked me up in NW6 to go to Blackheath in South East London where TV cameraman Jeff Willis was going to video us with his home kit for a laugh. On a map of London — North West to South East — that's top left diagonally to bottom right.

Deborah arrived late with Mab the (possibly pregnant) husky because she'd neglected to bring a satnav and took a weird route. She'd stopped to ask directions and been given the "You don't want to start from here" answer which quite delighted me.

So we set off late and in the rain. It's amazing how much traffic turns out when it's raining, even on a slow Sunday like today.

"How do we get to the South Bank?" she asked me.

"Oh, down Abbey Road, cut though Camden and head for Waterloo Bridge." (Down and our left.)

This will mean nothing to those unfamiliar with our fair capital city but we ended up going down Abbey Road, west to Notting Hill, down through Hyde Park, and through Victoria. Instead of turning left for Westminster, we carried on south to Vauxhall Bridge, along the north embankment past Tate Britain, Millbank, Parliament Square and across the bridge to south of the river and no-man's land. To me. Elephant & Castle, Peckham, Deptford, Blackheath ... Instead of a nice straight line from top left to bottom right, we'd done a wide letter "d" and were now adding more letters of the alphabet.

A short detour for sushi, sarnis and a bean salad from an M&S refreshed us for the next leg of the journey and we were off again.

So a very very VERY late arrival.

In front of the camera, I asked: "So, Deborah, the iconic track 'Money' gets played a lot. Every time we hear it, does your bank balance go 'kerching' or does a kitten die?" Disappointingly, it doesn't go "kerching" but she did make one of the iconic records of the punk era, so who's counting?

We did good interview, everyone got fish and I directed us home — a straight line this time. But the unexpected deviations can't half be good fun when you're with a mate.

Video to come.

Danny Boyle backlash: what the Right know is being said at London Olympics 2012

In all the excitement of Danny Boyle's stunning London Olympics opening ceremony, I hadn't realised there might be a second phase of pleasure to be had for us armchair enthusiasts. Shrilling out from the widespread sigh of relief that Britain did not suck in front of a billion global viewers is a crescendo of protest from a section of Britain who've had it easy for so long they've forgotten what intelligent criticism looks like: Boyle lifted that rock on Friday and look what's emerged blinking in the light.

First off the block was Tory MP Aidan Burley whose instinctive reaction to the Olympics spectacle was to decry the inclusion of all those ethnic minorities that make up the fabric of Britain as "leftie multi-cultural crap". He was quite speedy with his now notorious Tweet, while for his spiritual bredren it's been like watching a dinosaur kicked in the tail and struggling to work out what's just happened, proving that Burley's brain-stem reflex is in better new world order than his mates.

Although Rupert Murdoch sensed political correctness, he is far too sly an old fox to express anything other than graciousness. (Watch out, Danny, your card may have been marked!)

Unlike a host of ill-wishing Tweeters such as @toadmeister Toby Young who saw "a £27 million Party Political Broadcast for the Labour Party," and Stephen Pollard (@stephenpollard) who "Found the torch ceremony truly unpleasant and deeply unsettling. Paganistic crowd manipulation" and described the whole show as "a piss-take of a lefty wet dream".

The climax of all this fear of "Other" was the hate-fuelled piece that stood out from some otherwise quite decent coverage in the Daily Mail online. “This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up."

On and on it went in the same unhinged vein until the inevitable complaints prompted someone on the paper to do a heavy edit. However, polishing a turd doesn't make it any less of one.

Apart from those of us of a duskier hue and less-abled being represented, what was it that disturbed the complacency of our dinosaurs so much? "Spelling out 'NHS' is an ideological statement, like spelling out 'Marxism'." said one Tweet. "The UKshould be celebrating our traditions and heritage, not nutty socialism." said another. Who'd have thought that anyone with fellow human feelings could find the wonder that is universal healthcare — a fine British invention — so upsetting? Or assume that the notion of public ownership in an equitable organisation of society for the good of everyone is not part of our tradition and heritage?

I suppose that depends on whose tradition and heritage you mean.

To think that I'd fully expected another stitch-up for the launch, such was the utter bottom-scraping build-up, as with the governments (Labour and Coalition) who sold our democratic civil rights to the lowest bidders in order to secure the 2012 games. For all I knew, Boyle might have been another chancer just like the former health and prime ministers, now carving up the NHS for their privatised personal gain. Or the ex-Home Secretary who's now a director of G4S and running the largest private army in the world.

Or he could have been a vacuous TV showbiz mogul and given us a variation on the dismal Jubilee concert, or made an idiotic attempt to out-extravaganza Beijing on a quarter of the budget during a recession.

Instead, Boyle pulled a people's Olympics opener out of the jaws of the plundering class who'd hijacked our games and tried to rip us off at every turn. (It's only through the efforts of organisations such as 38 Degrees that some of the sponsors have been pressured into abandoning their avoidance of paying their fair share of tax.)

The opening ceremony transcended party politics and took us back to root values.

In an age where the media shamefully allows lies to go unchallenged every time a supine minister or businessman caught with his hand in the till says, "Look over there", Boyle's cri de couer is refreshing. The Tory narrative that we are skint and the poor have to pay for the bankers' continuing excesses while the Sunday Times top 1000 is worth £440bn and corporate profits are at an all-time high is surely the sort of "crowd manipulation" a principled media should be challenging.

Instead it serves up the same dead-head business class in order to naturalise a status quo where the rest of us are fodder. How often do you see or hear a trade unionist or a working-class representative with the same pundit rights as Mary Portas, the Dragons' Den gargoyles, Alan Sugar, Secret Millionaires, abusive celebrity chefs, Simon Cowell and the whole finger-wagging, knife-wielding shouty gamut of grotesques now laying down the law at every level in our culture?

When Boyle decided to have the Olympics torch entry to the stadium flanked by the thousands of workers who built it, he was saying a big screw you to the business chiefs who Pollard, Young, Burley et al would have had celebrated on this occasion rather than their workers: the construction bosses who sneer at 'elf and safety, who destroy lives and blacklist anyone with enough of a conscience to seek to make the industry safer. You have more chance of dying on a British construction site than you do in Afghanistan.

Interesting that one slip of the mask can elicit such a howl of agony. The liberal press is unable to offer an analysis and, unlike the right, seems oblivious to the case being made, producing instead meaningless drivel like this.

On Friday, Boyle shone a searchlight allowing us to take stock of where we are now. The elegy was beautiful but we should do something to halt what he flagged up as being lost.

There are two great things to have come out of the London Olympics so far: the Thames cable car and the knowledge that there are still some brilliant people who can carve out a bit of space for the rest of us.

Well done Danny Boyle: reading the London Olympics 2012

Ian Sinclair in LRB: My Olympics.

Sour grapes over Ye Shiwen's swimming Gold. Although BBC commentators leapt to conclusions, it was an interview with the US coach that sparked fury following Clare Balding's intemperate accusation within seconds of the win on television.

Well done Danny Boyle: reading the London Olympics opening ceremony 2012

I'm not so sure Danny Boyle's expected establishment gong is as much of a dead cert as pundits assume now we've had a chance to unpack the movie director's critical state-of-the-nation London Olympics narrative. Last night's £27m opening extravaganza temporarily won me over from furious cynicism following the games' hijacking by Locog's pet corporations and their civil rights clampdown.

I should have realised — trust the creatives. The CREATIVES, not the crude showmen who might have turned in a vapid series of set pieces going no-where. I'm sorry I misjudged you Danny — the boy done good. This ceremony may have begun with a bucolic paradise with peasants tending their flocks but it ended with a vast setting sun as troglodyte primitives danced it into extinction.

Among the crowd-pleasers were woven some awesome subversive elements. Our unique selling points as a nation may be our musical back-catalogue, James Bond and the Queen, but even these were nicely handled. After watching Her Maj parachute into the stadium, I was hoping she might turn out to be the mystery cauldron igniter, maybe kicking a flaming football into the target, but Boyle had far more democratic plans for his climax.

He started with Kenneth Branagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a benign engineer kicking off the industrial revolution before top-hatted capitalists (reminiscent of the ones in Eisenstein's Strike) mess it up, tearing up the turf and turning the peasants off the land.

Branagh recites Caliban's speech from Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

As some have noticed, this is what Caliban says just before he tries to kill "an imperial innovator who took away his island". Hmm, I wonder what Boyle is saying here.

Filling the stadium with five huge chimneys and factories and foundries to the sound of 1,000 drummers, we're reminded that British power came from its industrial (r)evolution and the people who laboured in it. Of course, most of yer actual working class were working their arses off on stage for free, not sitting in the comfy seats they couldn't afford.

But they were represented, hammering drums and metal, actually making things, while the tool-free capitalists worked thin air, much as they do with their banking tricks.

What they eventually end up with is the forging of the five rings of the Olympic symbol (yeah, the one we're all banned from using even though we paid for most of it) rising above the audience like something hellish out of Mordor.

A parade of Windrush immigrants, 1960s cultural explosion (Beatles), cockneys and the ordinary people who helped make Britain, made the most of a diverse range of the population and ensured they weren't rendered invisible. Boyle might have had an eye on Brecht who asked, "Who built the seven gates of Thebes?".

However, it was the NHS segment that gave me the most squeeing pleasure as Boyle stuck it to Richard Branson and the privatisers. Melding the NHS and children's literature, a battalion of nurses and doctors wheeled in hospital beds occupied by children (two to a bed — how it will look when the Tories get through with it).

A childcatcher (Maggie Thatcher?), a terrifyingly oversized Voldemort and assorted monsters (coalition creeps and Big Biz) harry the children while NHS staff attempt to fight them off.


Best of all, who did Danny choose to read during this scene? None other than JK Rowling herself, not only creator of the monstrous Voldemort and most successful commercial British writer, but famously a supporter of the welfare state who sends her own children to state schools. What's more, she doesn't avoid tax on her vast fortune but spreads it out. Unlike certain others now running the nation. Danny, this leftie salutes you.

Rowling read from J M Barrie's Peter Pan. J M Barrie donated the income from his book to children's hospitals.

And the music to accompany this warning to the forces of evil to get their mitts off our NHS? Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Significance? Tubular Bells was the phenomenal seller in the early 1970s which made Branson's Virgin empire (he even named one of his Virgin America Airlines planes "Tubular Belle"). Branson's Virgin, now scheming to run the PRIVATISED NHS SERVICE, including children's healthcare!!! Kudos, Danny!

Also noted: national hero in his own head, Tony Blair, who's been jonesing for inclusion in the Olympics all week and is looking to carve up the NHS with his Mee Healthcare company, didn't even get a mention.

(Pic montage by Eddie Truman)

But the CND did, its symbol formed out of multi-cultural dancers — including some disabled — to a musical medley of our greatest pop and rock hits.

As did Tim Berners-Lee who invented teh interwebz. (Brits also invented carbon-capture coal-burning technology but we haven't built even one.)

Abide With Me was sung to an Anish Kapoor-influenced dying sun, a reference to Boyle's movie Sunshine. The song is not only used as the rugby anthem and at FA Cup finals, but it's sung at the funerals of miners. Or mines. Or our entire productivity and everything we've known.

After the athletes paraded in, the event ended with a spectacular cauldron-lighting ceremony, carried out, not by a tired old sleb, but by the next generation of athletes: seven young men and women.


Rupert Murdoch tweeted that it was 'a little too politically correct'. At least he wasn't as crudely reactionary as the Tory who complained about multi-cultural representation and was buried in an avalanche of tweets.

Meanwhile, outside the Olympic Park, the Critical Mass bike protest was being kettled and intimidated — so unlike Beijing which British commentators never tire of sneering at. The furious cynicism is still there for Dow, McDonalds, Coke, G4S and the rest of the greedy tax-avoiding exploiting bastards (only £700m out of the £9.3 bn cost is funded by the sponsors), but the performers and athletes are the stars of the show from now on.



I noticed after I'd written this that the Arctic Monkey's first song had the lyric refrain "1984", so Orwell was present last night. Here's another gem I missed from Alex Wolff in Sports Illustrated: "Somewhere in the cacophony of last night, during what might have been the world's largest Twitter storm, this nugget emerged: Hey Jude was No. 1 on the charts the day Smith and Carlos raised their fists -- and that single's B-side was Revolution." Thanks to Noel Currid for this.

[Okay, okay, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, not the internet. I'm still impressed.]

Not forgetting Danny's writer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce who did such a great job, including introducing Boyle to Henry Jennings's Pandemonium.

Ian Sinclair in LRB: My Olympics.

I wondered when this was going to happen. Danny Boyle Backlash: London Olympics 2012

Must read Chris T-T's hilarous sharp take on the gruesome Closing Ceremony.

Anna's Olympics Experience 2012: Stratford site and torch in Ipswich

View of the London Olympics site less than a month before the games, passing through on the train. Plus the day the Olympic Torch arrived in Ipswich.

This is as much of the live stuff that I want to see of the Dystopian Olympics. The rest will be enjoyed from my sofa where I can eat all the non-McDonalds chips I want, and drink any bottled stuff without having the Games fash on my tail.

Anna on the Dystopian Olympics in 2008.

Anna on the Dystopian Olympics last month.

3D pix of Olympic venues in an interesting virtual tour.

Shiny phallus dominates London: Shard puts Tyrell Corporation in the shade

Children, I was there when the Tyrell Corporation opened its mega-building in London, dominating the city skyline with its architectural statement of intent.

Skynet were the first occupants of the tower and now look where we are: terminated by the technocrats who serve the elite, skulls cracked under tank treads, children barely surviving in whatever cracks they can find in our crumbling society.

But what a pretty laser show they put on, a fitting match for the Unethical Olympics and the end of the Elizabethan era of plenty that came to a close with the Diamond Jubilee that year, 2012. If only we'd known that the lasers would soon be replaced by Skynet's working models, first tested out on a populace taken by surprise by missiles placed on the roofs of tower-blocks occupied by people who'd once had jobs and had shared in the wealth of the nation in their own humble way.

They told us it was all the fault of angry youth, the feckless over-breeding poor, the elderly who clung to life for too long, the dole-scroungers (but not the royal family or the lucky few at the top who resented paying for the shirkers in the form of tax) and the immigrants who worked for crumbs to shore up the remnants of our infrastructure. And then they set the Cyberdyne Systems T101s on us, the ones who looked like Jeremy Paxman and Allegra Stratton, only their hatchet faces and thousand-yard stares giving the game away.

The Mayans may not have been totally correct in predicting 2012 as being the year the world ended but it certainly felt that way.

London Olympics 2012 pastoral opening ceremony: sucking at every level

UPDATE 12 July 2012 at the end of this post.

Let them snort coke. It was announced today that the centrepiece of the London Olympics 2012 opening ceremony is to be a pastoral idyll. Sheep & cows will star — Marie Antoinette would be proud.

The fact that Britain was the world's first industrial nation with the first working class will take up ten minutes of the three-hour mediaeval fantasy opener — costing £27mn and directed by Danny Boyle — puts the politics into a screwed-up perspective. I wonder if Highland clearances and enclosures will feature, although I am reminded that modern clearances have already taken place with local authority housing tenants banished hundreds of miles away from their Tower Hamlets home. Not to mention the geographical exclusion zones that allow the games' organisers to bully small local businesses with the temerity to mock up their own olympic rings from flowers or hula-hoops.

How is it possible for such a major event to suck at every level? I mean at EVERY level. Even the Olympic Torch. Who cares if some of the 8,000 torch-bearers have emulated the sponsors (as above, so below) and tried to make a few bucks from their torches? It's penny ante stuff compared with the money to be made from fleecing a captive audience with overpriced food and drink (expect your water bottles to be confiscated at the border) and fewer than ten ATMs in the entire Olympic Park now that VISA have had the other twenty cash dispensers belonging to rivals ripped out.

Far more significant to the ethics of the event was the Olympic Torch route taking in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. No mention, of course, that Lewis was purchased by James Matheson (later Sir) in 1844 with his narcotics money made from selling opium to China alongside his partner William Jardine. Matheson created his own rural idyll by expelling 500 locals from Lewis in 1851 (1,771 in total), packing them off to Canada, and building Lews Castle at Stornoway for himself. So the Tower Hamlets clearances have at least one Olympic-connected precedent.

The sponsors comprise a rogues' gallery of some of the most despised corporations in the world. Food giants Coca-Cola and McDonalds — making us fat on crap (very athletic); Dow Chemicals who still haven't cleared up the mess and human misery resulting from the Union Carbide chemical explosion at Bhopal in 1984 which killed 3,000 within the first few weeks and injured half a million more; the ArcelorMittal steel giant whose queasy acquisition of Romania's national steel factories required the help of Tony Blair to whose party he'd donated £250,000; Adidas uses worker-abusing Li & Fung; perversely, ATOS, the French company chucking sick people off incapacity allowance is a big name behind the Paralympics (Jon Ronson video report here); BP whose corruption under Lord Browne and prior blowout in Azerbaijan two years before the Deepwater Horizon gush in the Gulf of Mexico is documented in Greg Palast's Vultures' Picnic.

Although the sponsors paid only two per cent of the total Olympics cost, they are receiving an estimated 38 per cent of the tickets while the actual talent — the athletes themselves — have been allocated a parsimonious two tickets for their own events. The ticket sales have been a long-running fiasco.


Then there's the militarisation of the event in the name of security. Missiles located on blocks of flats — Bow Quarter, a large apartment complex close to the Olympic stadium and Fred Wigg Tower, a 16 storey residential tower block in Walthamstow, east London — include a load that don't work in bad weather; G4S, the world's biggest security company in the world (actually an army) acted as hired guns for illegal Israeli settlers and will police the London games despite being accused of human rights infringements; HMS Ocean warship moored in the Thames; promises to shoot down hijacked planes even if they're over London's intensive urban sprawl: this is all increasingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's dystopian film Brazil, itself based on George Orwell's 1984.

And don't get me started on the transport nightmare expected to start a full TWO WEEKS before the start as media and athletes arrive. My home city turns into a no-go area for drivers; getting to the events; and the press are carping about stressed-out public transport drivers getting a measly £500 bonus. Cheap at twice the price.

But with several Goldman Sachs bankers — past and present — associated with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Locog) board, what do you expect?

If this turns out to be the final Olympics before everything turns to shit and World War 3 erupts for real, it will actually have been most apt and I congratulate the organisers for their cynicism and prescience. Have a nice day.

Bread and circuses but not for everyone: In this age of austerity and cuts imposed on those most in need, the government and Olympics organisers have some strange priorities. We found £11bn for the games, yet British people are struggling to survive. Interviews by Kate Belgrave.

Tax swindle at the "ethical" Olympics

The Austerity Games 23rd July, Hackney Marshes

Dave Renton on The Neo-liberal Games.

Comments on the games including the destruction of potential assets to the community such as the new bridge over the A11.

UPDATE 12 JULY 2012: It gets worser and worser, even.
G4S assured government of finding 10,000 security staff only two weeks ago, now admit failure. Army to send in 3,500 troops just back from Afghanistan.
Locals lose fight to halt ground-to-air missiles being based on their roof at Fred Wigg Tower. We note that there are none on the posh blocks lining the Thames.
Democracy and freedom of speech bite the dust as banned items at the Olympics include bottles of water and Che Guevara T-shirts.
Chips banned as MacDonalds demands right to be sole purveyor of fries at the Olympics.
Politicians trough down as MPs accept free top tickets, including from BT despite conflict of interest.
All the fat cats are larding up while poor musicians are expected to perform for free.
More exploitation.
And now a new TONY BLAIR SCARE ...
Not only back but rumoured to be showcasing his private clinic NHS bloodfest at the Olympics: Mee Healthcare (of course!

Thames Clipper video: Tower Bridge to Embankment, London

A lovely trip through the centre of London the other week by Thames Clipper, under the shadow of the absurdly huge Shard-enfreude which looks like the Tyrrell Corporation in Blade Runner.

Includes Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, City Hall, The Shard, Globe Theatre, Millennium Bridge, Tate Modern, St Paul's Cathedral, National Theatre, Royal Festival Hall, London Eye, Big Ben and Hungerford Bridge.

Only a fiver with a travel or Oyster card.

Garden haven, part II: acanthus, olives, hydrangea and more

A second batch of photos from my north London garden to cheer us up now that the weather has turned gloomy and we may never see the sun again this side of New Year.


The Lone Hydrangea.


Acanthus (Bear's Breeches), sedum, pulmonaria (lungwort), and an olive tree, which is already producing fruit, given to me by Denise.


The tall dramatic floral spire of the acanthus. Those spikes hurt!


I'm trying to grow sensible food like corander, basil and rocket. The pots in the garden are much more successful than those on the sunny south-facing window sill in the kitchen. Maybe it's too hot for them. But these look healthy.


Waiting for the tomatoes to ripen.


One wild strawberry left after the wood pigeons have been at them. Wild strawberries have the most amazing artificial flavour. Life mimicking art?


Several water bowls around the garden keep the wildlife happy.


Another cat deity stands guard.

See also Gardening Relief. Garden haven pt I

Garden haven, part II: acanthus, olives, hydrangea and more

A second batch of photos from my north London garden to cheer us up now that the weather has turned gloomy and we may never see the sun again this side of New Year.


The Lone Hydrangea.


Acanthus (Bear's Breeches), sedum, pulmonaria (lungwort), and an olive tree, which is already producing fruit, given to me by Denise.


The tall dramatic floral spire of the acanthus. Those spikes hurt!


I'm trying to grow sensible food like corander, basil and rocket. The pots in the garden are much more successful than those on the sunny south-facing window sill in the kitchen. Maybe it's too hot for them. But these look healthy.


Waiting for the tomatoes to ripen.


One wild strawberry left after the wood pigeons have been at them. Wild strawberries have the most amazing artificial flavour. Life mimicking art?


Several water bowls around the garden keep the wildlife happy.


Another cat deity stands guard.

See also Gardening Relief. Garden haven pt I

Mayor Boris Johnson seeks Madam Miaow's approval for London erection

Crikey! Well, Boris. It's big. And it's red. It certainly gets my attention. No more TV reception worries for you.

Were you trying for Tatlin's Tower, that revolutionary celebration of modernism? Only ninety-odd years too late. And I'm not sure the Bolsheviks, whose 1917 victory it was conceived to commemorate, are your cup of cha. Unless there's something you haven't told us and you were the young Philby, Burgess or Maclean of the Bullingdon Set.

You called it what? ArcelorMittal Orbit? (I wouldn't include anything that sounds like "arse", in there, Boris. That's just gagging for trouble.) Hmm, doesn't quite make the political statement or possess the street authenticity of, say, Watts Towers. But get that groovy capped M. How modern. Oh, hang on. Mittal. Surely not Lakshmi Mittal, the steel baron mysteriously promoted to billionaire status in 2002 by Tony Blair? Not a vanity project for you boys, then. Getting all that steel as a job lot, are you?

My lovely readers may be wondering why I should feel qualified to advise the Mayor so intimately on the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the 112 metre high "new artwork" built in London’s Olympic Park for the 2012 games, designed by Anish Kapoor, and unveiled on Wednesday 31st March (to be completed December 2011).

Today, London Mayor Boris Johnson asked me via a Tweet to "share my thoughts". Incredible considering Boris thinks the Chinese are incapable of original thought.

MayorOfLondon @MadamMiaow We just unveiled: http://bit.ly/d03oav What do you think? Pls RT and share your thoughts 3:44 PM Mar 31st via txt

I assumed this was a mass mail-out but, no, he really was addressing li'l ol' me. Oh, and nine others. According to a decidedly unimpressed Boriswatch:

... Boris’s newly interactive twitter account sought RTs and opinions on the contraption from the following accounts:
@creativereview
@tate
@designmuseum
@barbicancentre
@southbankcentre
@ICALondon
@RSAEvents
@royalacademy
@MadamMiaow
@culturelabel

Boriswatch then sniffily asks, " ... one left wing blogger and broadcaster (why was she singled out, anyway?)."

Search me, luv.

But gently, mind. Don't take it out on me that you weren't consulted.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, cockles and whelks, jellied eels, trouble and strife. Dunno me Arup from me Ova but I know what I like and I don't think it's the inelegant red tangle designed by computer and not even Kapoor's clever hand. Stick a track on it and turn it into a fairground ride to rival the London Eye and I might be a tad more impressed. Right now I'm hoping a band of scrap merchants cart it off in the night to suffer the same fate as the disappeared Henry Moores.

PS: It appears we'll be able to climb it for spectacular views and there will be a restaurant. If it wasn't for the fact that I'll be seeing environmental damage, Blair's Cash For Influence, slave labour allegations and an obscene level of personal wealth every time I look at the tower, I might even be tempted. As it is, look on my works, ye Mighty, and go somewhere else.

Mayor Boris Johnson seeks Madam Miaow's approval for London erection

Crikey! Well, Boris. It's big. And it's red. It certainly gets my attention. No more TV reception worries for you.

Were you trying for Tatlin's Tower, that revolutionary celebration of modernism? Only ninety-odd years too late. And I'm not sure the Bolsheviks, whose 1917 victory it was conceived to commemorate, are your cup of cha. Unless there's something you haven't told us and you were the young Philby, Burgess or Maclean of the Bullingdon Set.

You called it what? ArcelorMittal Orbit? (I wouldn't include anything that sounds like "arse", in there, Boris. That's just gagging for trouble.) Hmm, doesn't quite make the political statement or possess the street authenticity of, say, Watts Towers. But get that groovy capped M. How modern. Oh, hang on. Mittal. Surely not Lakshmi Mittal, the steel baron mysteriously promoted to billionaire status in 2002 by Tony Blair? Not a vanity project for you boys, then. Getting all that steel as a job lot, are you?

My lovely readers may be wondering why I should feel qualified to advise the Mayor so intimately on the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the 112 metre high "new artwork" built in London’s Olympic Park for the 2012 games, designed by Anish Kapoor, and unveiled on Wednesday 31st March (to be completed December 2011).

Today, London Mayor Boris Johnson asked me via a Tweet to "share my thoughts". Incredible considering Boris thinks the Chinese are incapable of original thought.

MayorOfLondon @MadamMiaow We just unveiled: http://bit.ly/d03oav What do you think? Pls RT and share your thoughts 3:44 PM Mar 31st via txt

I assumed this was a mass mail-out but, no, he really was addressing li'l ol' me. Oh, and nine others. According to a decidedly unimpressed Boriswatch:

... Boris’s newly interactive twitter account sought RTs and opinions on the contraption from the following accounts:
@creativereview
@tate
@designmuseum
@barbicancentre
@southbankcentre
@ICALondon
@RSAEvents
@royalacademy
@MadamMiaow
@culturelabel

Boriswatch then sniffily asks, " ... one left wing blogger and broadcaster (why was she singled out, anyway?)."

Search me, luv.

But gently, mind. Don't take it out on me that you weren't consulted.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner, cockles and whelks, jellied eels, trouble and strife. Dunno me Arup from me Ova but I know what I like and I don't think it's the inelegant red tangle designed by computer and not even Kapoor's clever hand. Stick a track on it and turn it into a fairground ride to rival the London Eye and I might be a tad more impressed. Right now I'm hoping a band of scrap merchants cart it off in the night to suffer the same fate as the disappeared Henry Moores.

PS: It appears we'll be able to climb it for spectacular views and there will be a restaurant. If it wasn't for the fact that I'll be seeing environmental damage, Blair's Cash For Influence, slave labour allegations and an obscene level of personal wealth every time I look at the tower, I might even be tempted. As it is, look on my works, ye Mighty, and go somewhere else.

Video: Madam Miaow in Winter Wonderland funfair, London

I finally got around to editing the bits of video of our visit to the German Winter Wonderland funfair in London's Hyde Park last week, and here it is.

I'm riding the Snow Storm at the end and that bit's shot by Harpymarx, all on my Nokia 5800 mobile,

Video: Madam Miaow in Winter Wonderland funfair, London

I finally got around to editing the bits of video of our visit to the German Winter Wonderland funfair in London's Hyde Park last week, and here it is.

I'm riding the Snow Storm at the end and that bit's shot by Harpymarx, all on my Nokia 5800 mobile,

Final Destination: Harpy and Madam Miaow at London's Winter Wonderland, Hyde Park

Hyde Park's Winter Wonderland at sunset

Strapped in and ready to go (pic by Louise)





Madam Miaow and Harpy under the Roller Coaster

It's just poor luck that both Harpy and I watched Final Destination 3 the night before our fun outing to the AMAZING!!! fairground from Germany in Hyde Park over the Christmas and New Year. Wiping out a group of young people with an array of imaginative set pieces in a funfair setting, those images were lurking not too far beneath my frolicsome demeanour. Oh, all the things that could go wrong. Thankfully, this wasn't likely to happen here: the kit's from Germany. Talk about heavy industry. These machines were SOLID! (Apart from the Roller Coaster which got stuck.)

We enjoyed various rides but I was the only one of our party to risk life, limb and upchucked breakfast on the Power Tower: a 66 metre vertical drop that takes you to zero gravity over and over. Muttering, "Final Destination" as an homage to the movie and hopefully appeasing any bad spirit that might have hopped out of the telly and followed us here, I took them on with gusto. Unless it's dropping me out of the sky or turning me upside down it ain't a proper ride.

If you like bratwurst, pancakes and pretzels, this is heaven. Sadly, I don't and I yearned for a spring roll. But then I do whatever the season.

The sky was clear, the light was perfect. And I didn't even notice the cold.

I hope to have video clips up soon.

More great pix at Harpy's

Madam Miaow among her people


Video posted here

Final Destination: Harpy and Madam Miaow at London's Winter Wonderland, Hyde Park

Hyde Park's Winter Wonderland at sunset

Strapped in and ready to go (pic by Louise)





Madam Miaow and Harpy under the Roller Coaster

It's just poor luck that both Harpy and I watched Final Destination 3 the night before our fun outing to the AMAZING!!! fairground from Germany in Hyde Park over the Christmas and New Year. Wiping out a group of young people with an array of imaginative set pieces in a funfair setting, those images were lurking not too far beneath my frolicsome demeanour. Oh, all the things that could go wrong. Thankfully, this wasn't likely to happen here: the kit's from Germany. Talk about heavy industry. These machines were SOLID! (Apart from the Roller Coaster which got stuck.)

We enjoyed various rides but I was the only one of our party to risk life, limb and upchucked breakfast on the Power Tower: a 66 metre vertical drop that takes you to zero gravity over and over. Muttering, "Final Destination" as an homage to the movie and hopefully appeasing any bad spirit that might have hopped out of the telly and followed us here, I took them on with gusto. Unless it's dropping me out of the sky or turning me upside down it ain't a proper ride.

If you like bratwurst, pancakes and pretzels, this is heaven. Sadly, I don't and I yearned for a spring roll. But then I do whatever the season.

The sky was clear, the light was perfect. And I didn't even notice the cold.

I hope to have video clips up soon.

More great pix at Harpy's

Madam Miaow among her people


Video posted here

Days out in London for free: South Bank larks

A free day in London can mean varied entertainment and practically no dosh required. This is how I spent yesterday.

We take the bus into town, intending to head straight for the Tate Modern a little way up from the stop at Waterloo Bridge. But London transport being the roulette game it is, we're all turfed off early in Trafalgar Square.

No great problem, though, as it allows us to have a look at the Fourth Plinth activity (artist Anthony Gormley's idea that more than 2,000 people will spend an hour each on the vacant plinth until October). This consists of a bored looking guy reading a newspaper. The safety net ruins the exciting possibilities of the unexpected so we move on past the National Gallery (free entry), down Villiers Street past Charing Cross Station, and over the beautiful pedestrian Hungerford Bridge with some of the most spectacular views of London, to the South Bank.

Here are London plane trees wrapped in red fabric with white polka-dots, giving the impression that they've caught lurgy — a precursor to the Swine Flu pandemic expected this year.

We'd normally pause at the National Film Theatre where you could once relax with a pint or a coffee on one of the democratic benches overlooking the bookstalls and river, and maybe chat to your neighbours, mostly film buffs. But some bureaucrat bean-counter had them all dug up earlier this year and replaced with chi-chi tables and chairs, surrounded by a barrier of topiary and clear messages that the hoi-polloi can frakk off! This is now for the haute bourgeoisie with spending power, not skint movie fans.

So on to the National Theatre where I bump into a friend, actor Stephen Hoo looking very fit, exercising with playwright Rikki Beadle-Blair and a bunch of mates. We exchange air-kisses and leave them to their exertions while we settle at a table on the almost deserted first floor of the NT. When the weather's nice, I sometimes pick up a box of sushi from the Embankment station Wasabi for a few quid and picnic outside on the balcony. Today it's grey and showery so we eat our Tesco's sandwiches in the warm.

We walk to the Tate Modern, running past the boarded up length of pathway where they're building a new entrance for Blackfriars station and which stinks of chemicals. It's like sniffing glue and I feel quite light-headed by the time we reach the gallery. We head straight for the Members Room (membership allows you and a guest free access to the exhibitions meaning you can save hundreds in a year if you're a regular visitor to the Tates) with its great views across the river to St Pauls and beyond. The Dunkertons perry cider is the best — a scrumpy-like earthyness, lovely flavour, and it's 7.5%! It costs £4 per 500ml bottle but definitely worth it as a treat. [Note: in the Members Room it's £4.05, in the other restaurants it's £4.50.]

A bit squiffy, we catch a bit of the art including animee films (Anna Lee) and some arty nude footage which look like parody but turn out to be the genuine item from the 1960s. Sorry we guffawed like the drunken philistines we were, but they made us do it!! I did haul at Delightful Chum's arm when he pointed at the Free Willy and chortled. Thus distracted, we're too late for the Futurism exhibition which we'll have to see next time.

Outside, the RSPB have set up telescopes trained on the top of the Tate Mod tower where a female peregrine and her mate have taken to hanging out for the past five years, feasting on the feral pigeons who don't seem the least bit bothered. She's sitting peacefully with nuthin' but the breeze ruffling her feathers — a good state to be in.

We intended to take the boat to the Tate Britain (a fiver) but it's nearly six and everything's closing so we note that you can get a day roaming pass for £12 which gets you to all stops between Westminster Pier and the O2 Centre downriver, and resolve to do this next time.

We cross the Millennium Bridge, now disappointingly stable since its opening week as the Wobbly Bridge. Halfway across, we meet a guy with a juvenile Asian python. For £2 he'll let you take pictures with it which we did. As you can see above.

St Pauls Cathedral is closed — tough if you're in a crisis and in need of something numinous. Thankfully, we're not, so we take the bus home having spent under a tenner each.