Disgressed

Grass in Trafalgar Square? Where is it, then? You might have seen the pictures on Thursday of the square apparently laid to grass. It seems that in connection with some kind of tourist promotion, turf had been put down to turn the whole place into a kind of lawn. It looked rather nice. I don’t know whether there’s some kind of secret competition going on, but this is the second recent case of grass appearing in London where it wouldn’t normally be: they’ve also managed to grow grass seed on some of the walls of the National Theatre.

This latter project is a sort of vindication for me. Many years ago, when people used to complain about the lumpen concrete block appearance of the National Theatre, I used to tell them that they had misunderstood the plan, and that the whole place would look much better once the ivy had grown over it. It took years before I was ready to concede that I must have dreamed or imagined that particular idea: but perhaps after all it was a kind of unreliable precognition? Of course, growing grass temporarily up a couple of walls isn’t the same as shrouding the whole place in ivy, but who knows…

Anyway, at first sight Trafalgar Square appeared to be as stony as ever. (Though it has changed for the better in some other respects – it is much more accessible than it used to be, and you no longer risk being set upon by a swarm of dirty grey pigeons.) It truns out that only about a quarter or less of the square had actually been covered with turf: just about enough to allow a photographer with a fish-eye lens or something to get the impression of a rolling green lawn.

All the same, it was quite agreeable, and seemed strangely natural and appropriate. Perhaps there will now be a campaign for the permanent grassing of the whole square, turning it into a sort of coda to the large green slash, composed of Hyde Park, Green Park, and St James’s Park ,which runs through the middle of London.

I thought it was worth popping up there to have a quick look – the turf is being taken away again almost immediately and will end up being laid somewhere else. Perhaps there’ll be a little plaque to mark the fact that this grass once laid in Trafalgar Square? (They’re lucky people didn’t cut up bits to sell on eBay, come to think of it).

I haven’t got a fish-eye lens, but here’s a composite view -click to see a bigger version.

When is it polite to get up and change seats? There are times when you don’t care, of course: when the loud droning conversation on the mobile phone next to you or the wave of long-matured BO is so intolerable you just have to get away from it.

But it’s not always like that. I once sat opposite a man who bit his nails with such energetic thoroughness, sticking his chin out to ensure a good view was available to his fellow passengers, that I found it impossible to go on reading. But I didn’t want to be, you know, rude about it. In the end I pretended to get off the train, and at severe risk of being marooned, ran along to the next door and got on a different carriage. Unfortunately as I sat down again I caught his eye looking straight at me through the window in the connecting door.

Sometimes the only reason for moving is lack of room. Sometimes I travel on a packed train as far as Streatham, where suddenly a lot of people get out. Normally this frees up a bit of space, but from time to time lots of seats are left vacant while one little group of five remains tightly packed, struggling to manage the London Lite or whatever without poking each other in the face. Eventually common sense overcomes stoicism and somebody reluctantly moves.
The other day I had myself nicely positioned when this lady came and sat next to me. A large lady. Now I take up a fair bit of room myself, but this lady needed at least 150% of the seat width, and given her weight, there was really no denying it to her. I ended up perched on the edge, with my leg muscles straining to stop me falling into the aisle. But you can’t move, can you? I mean, someone comes and sits next to you, and immediately you get up and go somewhere else? A bit pointed? Obviously I didn’t know this woman from Eve, and I was in all probability never going to meet her again – but I didn’t want to be rude.

Maybe, I thought, if I left it a couple of stations I could move without it seeming quite so bad. Probably my calf muscles would last out that long. Unfortunately, I was hanging out into the aisle in such a way that everyone who came past slammed into my shoulder or hit me with their bag. Next stop, I resolved, I would definitely stand up, regardless. But at the next stop, she took out out one of those magazines – you know, Hello! or Yours! or Yes! or possibly The! This made things significantly worse for both of us, as it meant that instead both our arms being stuck out in front of us to minimise width, hers now had to come back to her side periodically, or as near to her side as was physically possible. Turning each page was a major event, but luckily she wasn’t a very fast reader.
Of course I couldn’t stand up now. To stand up immediately after she had taken out the magazine would clearly be to suggest that she was being inconsiderate, if not downright stupid. The fact that she probably was being inconsiderate was neither here nor there. And you know, aren’t fat people allowed to read? Wouldn’t standing up amount to saying

“My God, you’re fat, woman!”

She was fat. She knew she was fat. She knew the two of us did not fit on the two seats available. She knew there was no room for her to move her arms or suddenly scratch her ear, giving me a sudden blow in the chest. She must have realised that we should both be vastly more comfortable if I stood up. But you don’t want to be rude, do you? I’m not slim myself, after all…

Two stations later, she sighed impatiently and stood up herself.

I have ambivalent attitudes towards Civilization, by which of course I mean the classic PC game by the renowned Sid Meier. Classic is certainly the word – if I remember rightly, it once starred in a PC magazine’s list of Games which are still worth playing in CGA, CGA being the early graphics mode which allowed a magnificent four colours. It’s the only PC game of which I have owned three versions (if you count Call To Power, which apparently had nothing to do with Sid Meier. Sometimes the history of these games has the kind of break-ups and copyright arguments you expect from rock groups).

There’s no doubt that it’s a highly entertaining game which can hoover up hours of your time. Addicts apparently include the novelist Iain Banks, whose latest work has been delayed by three months spent doing little except playing the game, and who ultimately deleted all files and smashed the CD in order to escape.

That’s sort of part of the problem. As with nearly all PC games, a part of your mind gradually becomes acutely aware that all you’re really doing is shuffling numbers around inside your computer. Your well-trained riflemen are not actually sweeping across the plains of Gaia, wiping the smirk off the face of Louis XIV as his cheese-eating axemen buckle under the strain. Actually you’re spending hours sitting in front of something which fundamentally isn’t very different from those toys they give to toddlers, with the whirly wheel and the dinging bell.

But the main problem, the one specific to Civilization, is the slightly weird idea of realism it embodies. It’s not so much the peculiar double time scale which means it can take your troops a number of years to reach the next city, or the way a particularly tough spearman can sometimes destroy a helicopter gunship (Olympic standard throw into the rotors?), a fighter plane (er, if it were flying really low?), or a tank (er…?). It’s really the odd conception of history and culture.

These issues have been taken very seriously by some historians, notably Matthew Kapell, whose paper Civilization and Its Discontents: American Monomythic Structure as Historical Simulacrum (Popular Culture Review 13 no. 2 (Summer 2002), 129-136) criticizes earlier versions of the game for treating history as essentially the story of how the USA came inevitably to be Top Nation, passing through a predestined series of eras characterised mainly by the development of technology and capitalist democracy. A computer game might seem a rather small target for scholarly discussion, but since the teaching of history veered away from dates and kings, some pupils seemingly get much of their understanding of this aspect of the past largely from games and films.

It’s certainly true that Civilization standardises and homogenises all the participating cultures. They all, for example, have essentially the same military methods and technology, whereas in fact conspicuous military success has often depended on a new and imaginative way of fighting – Alexander’s souped-up phalanx, quick-firing medieval English archers; Zulus with stabbing spears. The designers, in recognition of this sort of factor, have made a small gesture by endowing each culture with one slightly superior form of one of the standard units. Instead of the standard rifleman, for example, the English get a slightly more effective version called a Redcoat (because after all, the most notable military achievement of the English army – no nonsense about British here – was muffing the American War of Independence).

This homogenisation is also noticeable in the treatment of religion. Religions here act primarily to predispose others towards or against you, help keep people happy, can buttress the economy and help with espionage if your own religion has adherents in other people’s cities. All religions proselytise, so we are treated to the puzzling figure of the Jewish missionary. Which religions your culture founds depends only on technological progress, so it is perfectly possible to have a Christian Gandhi leading his troops to wipe out the Hindus of Mansa Musa (surely in reality one of very few Emperors who have ever completed the pilgrimage to Mecca). The barbarians, the random people who arise in the dark unexplored areas of the early game, are forever outside the pale, and even if they build large cities, as they are capable of doing, their barbarianism apparently remains undiminished. This would matter less if they hadn’t been named after a number of historical tribes and peoples. Some of these have no identifiable modern descendants, but the naming is a bit random, and you can, for example, have the English waging a campaign to suppress their barbaric neighbours the Anglo-Saxons.

This kind of thing, and the traits attributed to various nations and leaders (the Indians have a special ‘fast worker’ unit, for example, which manages simultaneously to suggest that they are mere coolies and that everyone else is frankly a bit idle) is clearly capable of giving offence if taken at all seriously (though a lot of it is too silly for that to be very likely). One of the crassest pieces of tactlessness, in my view, occurs with the option of playing in a game world which instead of being randomly generated according to certain parameters, resemble sthe real world. In this one, all players start in the Old World, with the New World empty. Because, you know, there was no-one living in America before the Europeans got there.

Of course, some degree of standardisation is inevitable in a program like this. You can’t really invent new weapons, or work out the subtle implications of a unique culture, and if you did reflect the full complexity of world history, players would find the game much more difficult to learn and play. What could the designers have done to improve matters, and what could they do about it in version V? I think there are two possibilities. One is, in a nutshell, play it for laughs; exaggerate the sterotyping and incongruities so that no-one could possibly take it seriously. Safer and better, I think, would be to stop naming the characters and nations after real ones, and allow players to name and customise them themselves. Why not set the personality attributes of the various leaders yourself, as you do with charcters in The Sims? Why not design their appearance or paste your own features on to them?

Then we needn’t feel quite so embarassed about wasting so much time on this stuff.

The Butter Hill May Queen coronation took place today: this year, Sarah graduated to Prince. As you can imagine, there was a certain amount of preparatory activity going on this morning, what with Katharine finishing off the icing of the cake and Sarah discovering at the last moment that she had no socks suitable for a Prince. I didn’t really see anything wrong with short socks myself, but I gather that is in fact an absurd and untenable view.

The coronation itself, as always, took place down by the pond, the most scenic location nearby, especially since its recent restoration through the good offices of the Friends of Old Wallington Hamlet. A piper (a bagpipe player, that is to say) was once again in attendance, which although possibly not part of ancient Surrey folk tradition, gave the proceedings a dignfied, martial air. I don’t think this can have been the man who sometimes practises on the bagpipes in the park while I am passing through in the mornings, unless he has made great strides since I heard him last.

We then moved on to the traditional procession around Butter Hill itself, with the kindly assistance of some local police officers. I always feel there’s an agreeably assertive air to this procession: we’re staking out our turf. The fact that the marking out of the territory is being done by small girls dressed in peach-coloured silk in no way detracts from the fact that the community is showing off its strength, figuratively beating its collective chest.

 No doubt the procession also serves to mark out the blessed soil of Butter Hill as the rightful recipient of the benefits flowing from harmony with nature and history. Once again the annual rite has been performed and the health and good fortune of these streets assured for another year.

As I may have mentioned last year, May Queen participants normally pass through each of the various offices – Crown Bearer, Banner Bearer, Prince – in succession. Next year, all being well, I believe Sarah is in line to attain the ultimate dignity of being the May Queen herself.