EuroClarkson : A Tale of Two Toilets

This is a long one: be warned.

Hello Dear Reader

I’ve been having some thoughts. Before, when I would have these thoughts, I would rush to express them to anybody who would listen. Fortunately, this keenness coincided with life before social media and was confined to anyone unfortunate enough to still be stuck with my company down the students’ union on a Friday night when shots of what was apparently tequila only cost 50p and dinner consisted of eating cornflakes out of a mug with a fork. Unfortunately for you, I’m too old to go on a rant in the student union so this newsletter will have to do.

Much of my earlier childhood had been spent shuttling between the two extreme loci of Jersey and India. While I wouldn’t describe either side of my family as political animals, the Indian and Anglo-Indian side, particularly my uncles, would sit up late at night discussing the fragility of that part of the world and the sense that there were only ever uneasy truces among factions held together under the watchful - and heavily invested - eye of interested Western parties. Post-partition India was a complex muddle, and to quote that old Irish seer Yeats:  things fall apart: the centre cannot hold.

Burned into my memory is the carnage in the days following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. All hell broke loose in her home town, Allahabad, now Prayagraj, which was also my mother’s home town. (As an aside, Gandhi had been to the same school as my mother, the school which I, too, attended during an extended stay in the country.) I was at my great uncle’s house when the news broke, and my parents came home that afternoon concerned as looting took hold. We were advised that my father and I - being British Citizens - should leave town and head somewhere quieter, in this instance Rajasthan. Plans were made, trains booked, suitcases packed and the following day we arrived at the main train station, where dead bodies were being removed from one of the trains that had arrived earlier. A fight had broken out. The dead were Sikh, if I recall, in retaliation for those who had killed Gandhi.

I don’t remember feeling scared. Weird things were always happening in India - and India then was my only other place of reference. You would see poverty and death and disability everywhere - life was all at once precious and horribly cheap. It was part of the cultural maelstrom. Only as an adult did I fully process that one of the main reasons my mother and her siblings were shepherded out of India and into Britain in the 1960s was because to be anything other than a Hindu national in the years immediately after Partition was  - at best - to be robbed of meaningful opportunity and at worst, profoundly unsafe. While the British had always looked down on the Anglo-Indians and Indian Christians, for as long as they were there, they protected these mixed up people. But after 1947, all bets were off.

My father was calm and cheerful as we left for Rajasthan. His only gripe was that upon arrival in Udaipur, meat was off the menu there too, as the local Maharajah had just died and it was a period of mourning. At no point did he express concern for our safety. But then, this was a man who as a small boy had been on the last boat out of Jersey moments before the Nazis arrived, and who had narrowly avoided being bombed to smithereens as the Luftwaffe did their business and took out a bunch of innocent civilians standing on the quayside.

One day, when I was in my thirties, he described being a refugee as a child. It seemed so bizarre. My father, the refugee. But that is exactly what he and his family had been.

I tell you all this because in recent years I find myself bewildered. Not just bewildered by the worst of it - the horrors of war or displacement, for those are the constant tragedies going on at any given time and they have always been there and, I fear, will always be there - but also bewildered by the enthusiastic descent into hatred and division among largely Western observers who seem intent on re-creating an Orwellian Hate Week every week. Does any sane person think that life should be lived according to doctrine? This moronic adherence to any kind of ideology - be it Marx or Rand - is no different from those fundamentalist Christians putting this is just a theory stickers over the Darwinism bits in school science books.

I see the naked hatred in the eyes of these people, or in their deranged posts online, and I wonder, how do they not see that they are as bad as those perpetrating actual violence, and then I think: is this why we cannot have nice things?

As a teenager and legally disenfranchised, I was driven mad with frustration. Jersey has no party political system as such - just forty nine individuals with their own agendas which is just as chaotic as it sounds. Sometimes my father couldn’t be bothered to vote, and my mother seemed disinterested. Enraged, I would complain and yell at my mother that a woman had thrown herself under a horse and died for our right to vote and so voting was a moral obligation. I went on and on, accusing her of all sorts of things because I felt the political cause both mandated this and excused my vicious name calling.

One time she said to me, I might have been bothered to vote had you not been so rude and belligerent. Your manner put me off the whole business, darling.

And still the lightbulb moment did not come.

How we say something is as important as the what. And we have only the right to control what we say or think; it is not our business to gerrymander the thoughts of others. What I find depressing is the mountain of words but the paucity of work being made. Popping down the shops for a flag or a handy badge is easy; anybody can do that to the point that it becomes meaningless. If your work is political, you shouldn’t need to tell me that it is political - it should speak for itself. But we live in an age of the anodyne presented in the context of the political so that it won’t alienate a potential audience…which is just, um, soft capitalism?

When I’ve made political work, I’ve received some nasty and threatening messages from people, mostly those whose profile pics captured them with their very impressive gun collections and some flags. I don’t fear those people any more. I fear the people who send aggressive messages if you haven’t made public your position on whatever is on the menu this Hate Week.

This is where we’re at. Twenty years ago, you got shit if you were political. In 2024 you get shit if you aren’t.

It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, how humans labour under the misapprehension that dispensing with civility will somehow bring it into being. It’s how wars keep starting. They start with words and end with bombs.

A few years ago, roughly around the time of the Brexit vote, I identified myself as part of the problem and decided it had to stop. It was a small comment on an Instagram post I had made, making my position as a Remain supporter abundantly clear. One lone dissenting voice among those agreeing with me said ‘I can think for myself, thank you very much.’ A few weeks later, shocked from the result, I felt very stupid indeed. How had I not seen this coming? What had I missed? And the answer was quite obvious: I was incapable of listening to or engaging meaningfully with those who thought differently. I had consigned those people to the dustbin of people who don’t agree with me must therefore be stupid. And then the world set sail on a course where for the best part of a decade this has happened over and over again.

Since this incident, I haven’t changed my opinions, but I have made a concerted effort to empathise with opposing views and, as best I can, to never resort to unkindness.

It must be working, because a few weeks ago I had a meeting with a political show about being a potential guest and ten minutes into the meeting, the very nice producer immediately ruled me out and told me ‘it’s because you’re too rational and centrist, and I’m afraid that doesn’t make for good telly.’ This was a rejection I was happy to take.

But it hints at a much deeper problem. Polarisation equals clickbait which equals money. We are radicalising ourselves at the behest of the Murdochs and Lebedevs of the world.

Which brings me not so neatly to Eurovision.

How ironic that one of the greatest multinational flag-shagging events in the global calendar took umbrage with the winner waving their flag of choice. This before we get to the obvious issues surrounding which nations were included and those which were not. Meanwhile, others threatened not to appear because - oh, their reasons were legion - but still appeared because their self-interest trumped their supposed humanitarian concerns. So far, so ridiculous, but that’s Eurovision for you and why some adore it and some loathe it.

I remember when the UK were the pariahs, not because of our consistently poor musical offerings but because of our atrocious foreign policy, and nobody insisted we not watch the show. Awful things happened in the Balkans - this I remember vividly because a boy I had been at school with served as a peacekeeper and had his leg blown off out there before he was barely out of his teens - and nobody suggested we not watch it. We watched, learnt about countries whose names we could barely pronounce and understood that sometimes human beings need a beautiful bearded drag queen singing one of pop music’s all time bangers to help us make sense of the horror and absurdity and joy that is humanity. Hopelessly naive their tagline might have been, but I sympathised with the EBU’s Music Unites Us slogan.

There are plenty of things we could be doing to help end the misery in Gaza - our governments both current and future not supplying arms to anyone in the region might help, for example. On the list of things we could all do to make a difference in a hideous conflict of which most of us have scant real understanding, not watching Eurovision is very, very low down on the list.

Still, this did not stop someone from telling me off on Twitter because I was watching it and they didn’t want me to. I noticed that they didn’t privately message me to upbraid me for my viewing choices - no, they did it publicly. Because how else would they make it all about them?

The small cynical part of me, that I try to snuff out daily, thinks that it could be anything - badgers, class warfare, whether making sushi at home is cultural appropriation or not - it doesn’t matter the actual thing, it is about making sure to pick a side that best represents a personal brand.

Now even personal politics has become a capitalist commodity.

Which brings me not so neatly to Jeremy Clarkson.

My husband nurses a quiet dream of a move to deep country; he grew three courgettes in the pandemic and he’s never been the same since. Granted, farming is in his blood, but I suspect it is not the actual farming he finds so appealing as what it stands for: self sufficiency. Sticking it to the man. Being at one with nature as long as that nature isn’t badgers. So it stands to reason that he is an avid watcher of Clarkson’s Farm and when I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday, his was a simple request.

So it was we found ourselves joining the queue outside some nondescript sheds in the Oxfordshire countryside. He had been so excited on the drive there, I felt bad for him, but it was impossible to ignore the stark reality. Other pilgrims had come too, the crowd split neatly into two tribes: Clarkson fans and Countryside fans, but all of them united in disappointment that they were paying a tenner each for a bacon roll and a decidedly average cup of tea and having to queue for the best part of an hour for the pleasure.

That’s before we get to the portaloos. They were feral. The mother and baby changing room consisted of an unassembled changing table, still in its packaging (with what I think was Clarkson’s home address plainly visible) leaning against a flimsy cubicle wall. Sticking it to the man is all very well, but I defy anyone to come away from that miserable car park and not be  firmly on the side of West Oxfordshire District Council who want the whole thing shut down.

We decided to head to Avebury, and as penance, en route we would find a local farm shop to give them our custom. We picked the one with the most bucolic name, fired up the sat nav, our hearts full of good intent and visions of wholesome bounty. Upon arrival at the destination, we found two derelict barns in a concrete farmyard with a broken sign that said ‘eg’ swinging in the breeze. Deciding that it would be a sad business indeed to end up a casualty in a rural slasher movie on his birthday, we came away sans eggs but glad to be alive.

Avebury - all the National Trust’s efforts to turn it into a theme park notwithstanding - is astonishingly beautiful. It is a place full of feeling - benign mystery is the way one might describe it. Like Stonehenge down the road and Silbury Hill around the corner, we still don’t know for certain why it exists. But it is surreal, both alien and human at the same time. Also like Stonehenge, it is a victim of atrocious road planning, carved up by a main road which has the strange effect of superimposing modernity against the ancient. In the spring, most of the fields are used for grazing sheep and they are everywhere, impervious to this juxtaposition, shards of their virgin wool rolling like tumbleweed across the grass.

It was in the café toilets where I had a sad epiphany. There’s nothing wrong with these toilets - they’re really very charming, in fact; bright and airy and clean, if a little heavy on the instructional signage of which the National Trust is so fond. Somebody had gone to the trouble of filling jam jars with bunches of bluebells and dandelions and daisies - and it was these flowers that made me sad. They were so beautiful, no less beautiful than an expensive bunch of roses or oriental lilies, but they cost nothing, and it struck me that we live in a world now where if something doesn’t cost anything it is said to have no value. But these flowers were full of value; these flowers were priceless.

How many priceless things are we overlooking because the world is so geared towards monetising absolutely bloody everything? Why was I happy to spend money on a shiny green stone in the gift shop but trample what are perfectly good stones underfoot? Why do we prize one inanimate object over another? Why does something have to mean anything at all - why can’t we just let things be what they are for their own sake?

Which leads me not so neatly to tomorrow morning when I will be on the Patrick Kielty Show on BBC Radio 5 Live. How’s that for a non-sequitur?! I will be singing live in the studio and if he asks me the appropriate question during our chat I will be telling him - and you - about something terrifying I will be doing towards the end of this year that I’ve yet to tell you about. If he doesn’t ask me about it, I’ll just have to write you another newsletter with actual news in it, something I neglect do on a regular basis.

Thank you also for all your kind and beautiful birthday messages last month. It is still the season of the bull, and so my fellow Taureans, if you have enjoyed or are about to enjoy a birthday this month, I wish you love and happiness, and that kind of accidental joy you stumble upon when you least expect it.

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx