In among much blather about the riots, one friend of mine made the definitively sensible comment: “I think the rioters just need to calm down and listen to some Soft Machine”. He was thinking specificallt of the song Hibou, Anemone and Bear from the dazzling second album, the lyrics of which are as follows:
In the spring, I think of sex and means to ends
Summertime, I like to sit upon the grass
Autumn nights I go to parties with my friends
Winter time is when I think about the past
But of course I do all those things all year 'round
I mean, all the good things are there to be found
It's all here, pick-a-pack and get to work
If you don't, in actual fact you'll go berserk
Or indeed be bored to death, which is worse?
If something's not worth saying
Not worth saying
Not worth saying
Say it...
Pondering how else the feral hoodie teenpersons might be better occupied, I was reminded of a comment made three years ago by the blogger Elberry on his now defunct Lumber Room. Fortunately, I quoted it on my Hooting Yard blog at the time, so it has not vanished entirely into the ether. He was writing about knife-crime rather than brick-throwing, looting and arson, but his point holds good:
I imagine there are several thousand, or hundreds of thousands, of young men carrying knives ‘in self-defence’ who will, however, pull it as soon as they imagine a confrontation is in the air. They would be far better to carry expandable batons, and far less likely to accidentally kill someone. They would do even better to stay at home reading Sir Philip Sidney.
This always seemed to me a sensible, practical, and realistic suggestion, and I was happy to quote it in rioting context on Facebook. Cheering, too, that a number of my friends “liked” it and, as one commented,
I said (almost exactly) that to my partner. Why are they not at home reading a book? Any book, even.
I am afraid this led me to give vent to my inner misanthropic reactionary (as tends to happen on Facebook), and I immediately replied:
Probably because their teachers were too busy with the self-esteem and diversity lessons to get round to teaching that “reading” thing.
How is it that, after eleven years of compulsory education, reportedly twenty percent of 16-year-olds leave school pretty much unable to read and write? Illiterate, they're unable to feed their imaginations. Maybe that's why they wear hoodies, cutting off their peripheral vision to avoid seeing too much they can't understand.
We are always hearing the teenpersons and their adult representatives complain that “we have nothing to do”. No doubt this has been a teeny moan since time immemorial, but it is of course bollocks. Certainly in a city like London there is a myriad of “things to do” that don’t cost money, even if one is reluctant to sit at home reading a book. But if your mind and imagination are limited because you can't even read, you won't understand the things you can do. It's tragic.
For me, the most eloquent snippet of information on the riots was the fact that, in Clapham, an entire row of shops was trashed and looted, all except one shop, left completely untouched. Ir was a branch of Waterstone's. Asked why he wasn't closing early and boarding the place up, the proprietor said, “Well, if they loot Waterstone's, they might just learn something”. If only...
