Disgressed

As the annual festival of witches and ghosts approaches, it seems appropriate to mention Jon Ronson’s piece in the Guardian about Sylvia Browne. Ms Browne is an American psychic who has at times provided wildly inaccurate information about missing children (I suppose it should be ‘psychic’ and ‘information’, but perhaps gentle reader, I can ask you to strew your own quotation marks) but also passes on all sorts of information from the spirit world about dead relations and so on. Besides being disastrously wrong, it seems she is insensitive; often curt, discourteous, and unfriendly to those who seek her advice, even when they have paid substantial sums for it. In fact, if Ronson’s piece is to be believed, her fans seem to be upset almost as much by her uncharming behaviour as by the evidently poor quality of the information she hands out.

Robert S Lancaster has taken the praiseworthy step of setting up a site dedicated to ’stopping’ Sylvia Browne; but it seems we’re dealing here with someone who appears on television every week, and as Uri Geller proved, a couple of good positive TV appearances will outweigh a surprising amount of failure and general rubbish. I’m not sure Robert has a clear enough idea of what stopping Ms Browne would amount to, either: he surely ought to be calling on us to boycott all products advertised during any shows she appears on, and leaning on the sponsors of these shows to put pressure on CBS about such controversial content.Or content that ought to be controversial, anyway. Where are the fundamentalist Christians who are supposed to exercise such power in the USA? You would think it was evident that the practice of spiritualism was deeply unchristian, but in this case matters go far beyond that: Ms Browne is not only a professed necromancer but a really flagrant heretic. She has a small religion of her own which she describes as Christian Gnosticism; but she denies that Christ died for our sins or rose from the dead and believes in ‘at least’ two gods. How can it be that honest ol’fashioned Christians can rest content while this sort of person is displaying supernatural powers on mainstream TV?

Logically, atheists and serious religious believers ought to be able to make common cause against people like Ms Browne. Perhaps we could agree that it should be illegal to take money for psychic or magic counselling, say? The trouble is, I think, that if the respectable churches survey their flocks with a critical eye, they find that there are some pretty vague adherents out there: people who are enthusiastic about Jesus, perhaps, but see no great contradiction in being confirmed believers in ghosts or seances at the same time. If these people have stopped burning witches, it’s not because they realise there’s no such thing. it’s because they feel well-disposed towards the ladies in pointy hats these days.
If we could get Ms Browne on the record with some heterodox views about evolution and creation there might be a better chance…

We went to see the Terracotta Army at the British Museum. It was epic. Not the exhibition, the journey.

We made the mistake of attempting to travel by rail on Sunday. As we were about to leave for the station, I thought to check online and discovered there were no trains from Carshalton, just the legendary (or possibly mythical) replacement bus service. No problem, really, because we have another line nearby that goes from Wallington: it turned out that was also out of action.

Further research revealed that if we drove over to St Helier, it was still possible to get a train into Blackfriars – not ideal, but once you get onto the Tube system it doesn’t make that much difference. Although I’ve been through St Helier station a few times, this was the first time I’d ever been on the platform: it’s one of those small halts on the loop from Streatham that goes round via Wimbledon and Sutton. We just made it.

And then at Blackfriars, the District Line Tube wasn’t running. Apart from doing a small war-dance of rage and frustration – is London supposed to be shut on Sunday, or something? – there was no way round this except to trudge off to St Pauls. By now we were running out of time: instead of arriving nice and early, we were already almost at the beginning of the ten-minute arrival slot specified on our tickets.

When I was an undergraduate, I lived just north of the British Museum for a year, so luckily on emerging from Russell Square I was able to lead us in the right direction.

“Isn’t the Museum to the west of Russell Square?” asked Katharine a few minutes later.

“Yes, of course, and that’s why we’re… walking east…”

Just to round things off, when we got into the Museum we couldn’t actually find the exhibition. There were big signs everywhere, but none of them had arrows, and the biggest and most impressive were nowhere near the actual exhibition. Nor was the ticket office, where eventually I had to ask for directions.

“You see the big black sign?” said the young man in a tone of withering contempt.

“Yes, everywhere,” I replied, “but which one?”

“The one over there?”

“The one just behind the souvenir shop?”

“If you go over there and follow round the corner?” said the young man, “Jesus, there have been 150,000 people in here just today; half of them didn’t even speak English, but they all found it without coming over here and giving me grief. What the hell is your problem?”

He didn’t actually say that last bit.

It’s a very interesting exhibition. Besides the soldiers, there are terracotta bureaucrats and terracotta acrobats. The acrobats appear to have been designed as semi-working models: one had solid timber built into it so it could hold up another acrobat or something heavy at any rate; one has a hole in his upraised finger which seems to have been for something to spin in. This is odd. I understand the proposition of putting an army and servants into a tomb which will come to life in the afterworld; but why would the acrobats have to be working models? The archers don’t shoot and the soldiers don’t fight, so why did the acrobats have to spin and balance?

As I understand it, the whole business of the tomb is not part of a general tradition in China, as the pyramids were in Egypt, say, but unique to Shi Huangdi, the Emperor concerned; a colossal one-off. If I remember rightly, Borges has a story in which the same Emperor’s book-burning is represented as part of an effort to eliminate all memory of the past, so that the Emperor himself will gradually be identified in the Chinese memory with the Yellow Emperor of ancient mythology. A huge tomb would fit into that project, I suppose.

But I suspect Borges was wrong. One of the Emperor’s achievements was the creation of reformed and unified script, replacing the varied systems which preceded it, and providing the ancestor of the present-day script. My guess is that the book-burning was in part at least intended to effect the replacement of texts in outdated script. It seems possible to me that the tomb had a similarly practical motive. In the wake of the Emperor’s conquest of the other Chinese kingdoms, the economy must have been in a dire state; what better way to provide relief from unemployment and stimulate the economy, than a huge project of this kind. They always say that building houses provides a general stimulus to trade, because when they’ve got the house, people have to buy all the things you need to fill an empty house; much the same could perhaps be said of the Emperor’s comprehensive tomb equipment.

Heading home, we decided the safest thing was to retrace our steps to St Paul’s and back to Blackfriars, which we did. At Blackfriars, there were still no Tube trains, and now there were no trains back to St Helier either.

“The last one goes about four o’clock on a Sunday.” explained a lingering member of staff. Right – who would want to travel in London in the evening?

“We could walk to Waterloo, and pick up something there?” I suggested. So we did. trudging across the river and through the dark back-streets of Southwark ( I had to demonstrate that I knew my way around somewhere).

“So what train are we getting?” asked Katharine.

“Well, with any luck we can get the main line back to Carshalton, or failing that, Wallington.”

“Er, do you remember at all why we didn’t come that way in the first place?” she asked gently.

In the end the best we could do was a train to East Croydon. My ticket didn’t actually entitle me to go there, but the ticket collector was long past arguing, gazing with depressively unseeing eyes at the tickets offered to him. There, we got a taxi.

“Can you take us to St Helier station?”

“There aren’t any trains there now, you know?”

“Yes, I know – but that’s where our car is.”

I treated myself to a collection of Buñuel DVDs a little while ago. You know how it is. You’re randomly browsing through Amazon looking for a present for someone, you come across a book with a bishop on the cover and you think to yourself – ah, La Voie Lactée – now there’s a film I’ve always wanted to see again and isn’t shown all that often. I wonder if you can get it on DVD now?

You can’t, really: it only seems to be available as part of a boxed set with six other classic Buñuel films. Well, you know, I wouldn’t mind owning The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie on DVD. Or That Obscure Object of Desire. Or any of them. I can put it on my wanted list. The set is not really very expensive, when you consider you’re getting seven DVDS. You know, I really think it would be alright if…

The problem is that once they arrived it seemed I was never going to be able to do more than gloat over them. They’re not really suitable for the girls, and Katharine doesn’t like ‘intellectual’ films, even in English. Apart from staying up to watch them in the dead of night (any time after 10 pm these days, as far as I’m concerned), there didn’t seem to be any way I could find the time.

Now, I no longer have to escort anyone to school in the morning. It would have been natural to start going to work a bit earlier, but somehow so far I’ve stuck with the timing I’ve got used to over the last few years. One reason, really, is that this means I get half an hour or so entirely to myself after everyone else has gone in the morning. Half an hour to pursue some creative endeavour, or do a quiet bit of ironing (yeah, sure), or for that matter sit stupidly gazing into space. You’re way ahead of me obviously. I decided I could watch my DVDs in a series of short sessions each morning.
I would have to say that watching a film in half-hour slices is far from ideal, even a surrealistic one, but there’s another problem in a kind of leakage of affect. You know how it is sometimes when you wake up from a dream in which your spouse has been behaving badly: you can’t help holding it against them and behaving as if they really had done something wrong. It’s the same with films. If you watch a film in the evening, any mental effect has time to dissipate while you’re asleep; if you walk like a cowboy as you come out of the cinema, with one hand hovering over an imaginary holster, it doesn’t matter that much. The world looks a strange place when you start the day by putting your mind into Buñuel mode, although the French tourists suddenly seem inexplicably right and proper.

But at least Buñuel characters generally behave in a way which doesn’t look particularly out of place in a suburban street or Westminster tube station. I may be wondering whether the man opposite is a damned soul who’s going to cause an accident, but externally it just looks as if I’ve got a bit bored with the Metro. However, the other day, Apocalypto arrived as part of our regular DVD rental, and it became clear that no-one but me was going to watch that either. It had an 18 certificate on account of the violence for one thing (though the girls correctly pointed out that it only had a 15 certificate in Ireland for some reason. Sarah said she had no desire to see it anyway, because she understood it was full of nudie people – not actually the case though the ancient Maya certainly don’t wear all that many clothes by the standards of modern Wallington). So anyway, I decided I could watch it in the mornings. Alas, half an hour of slaughter, irrational superstition and human sacrifice isn’t really a helpful way to start the day (I’m not a stockbroker).

As I made my way through Beddington Park, I went naturally into an easy trot (no, no – it could never be natural for me to go into an easy trot, but you know what I mean; and I know that accuracy would have required me to run at full tilt while leaping over low branches, etc, but please see the foregoing remarks.) looking back every now and then in case of spears and arrows. I glanced from side to side in case there were men in the undergrowth.

There were men in the undergrowth. Half a dozen of them.

After the first moment of surprise, I realised that although they were standing in one of the densest groups of trees, they all had spades, and were wearing fluorescent tabards. If they had come to set fire to my village, sell the women into slavery and ritually murder the men, at least they had had the consideration to make sure they would be clearly visible while they were doing it. I looked at them, they looked at me (with a slight air of embarrassment, I think: it’s not easy for six men with spades to look nonchalant when they’re standing in the middle of a lot of trees and bushes for no obvious reason). I don’t know, but I think they must have been there to check out the proposed route of the new path direct onto Hackbridge station (Hurrah!).

But it was a bit of a shock. I think I’m going to try staring into space next week. Or even going to work.

I don’t object as strongly as some people to the practice of slapping on a bit of make-up while sitting on the train. A discreet application of some supplementary lipstick seems relatively tolerable compared to the unrestrained sneezing you often see, or that man who leans right forward towards you and obsessively chews away at whatever is left of his fingernails. In fact, there’s a kind of daredevil element in using a lipstick that you have to admire: no matter how careful you are, the possibility of a sudden lurch or nudge sending the thing up your nose can surely never be discounted.

But there was this woman the other day who was taking it to another level altogether. She was one of those people who have tanned and slimmed a little beyond what was strictly advisable: as she stuck her elbows out sideways to get going with the mirror and powder, the wrinkly skin hung off her arms in crepey folds. Why is that people with that syndrome also wear slightly too much jewellery? The correlation seems far too good for it to be mere coincidence. A genetic predisposition causing both effects separately? Or could it be that excessive exposure to ultraviolet has some deleterious effect on the brain’s bling perception centre (on the upper edge of Broca’s area in the cortex, I believe)? The performance took up three seats laterally, although she was a smallish woman. One to sit on, one for each flailing elbow. A fourth was occupied by her bags. You couldn’t deny the brio and energy with which she was applying the stuff; good big strokes with a fluid follow-though and a nice smooth wrist action; but it was all in vain really – no mere powder was going to make any difference to the Ronseal No.2 Hi-Build Antique Chestnut of her cheeks.

There is, of course, no way you can ask a woman to maintain custody of the elbows in these circumstances, at least not without causing social shock and horror far beyond anything you could achieve by merely shouting obscenities, taking all your clothes off, or threatening someone with a knife. None of those would cause your fellow commuters to lower their newspapers (quite the reverse). The wispily bearded man occupying seat number 5, who looked like a junior employee of the local council, and evidently an assiduous reader of cyber-punk novels (didn’t know they were still writing those) seemed ready to tough it out, although he was squeezing back into the corner as far as he could without making it obvious.

But by Tulse Hill, he had cracked, or perhaps that was just where he was going – he left any way. There seemed to be no prospect of the make-up session drawing into its final phases just yet, but now she had undisputed use of a full five seats. Perhaps that was the point all along.