Chemistry Lessons - A Short Story

We were enemies from the very start.

He was everything I hated. Fading blonde wispy hair, small, wiry, untrustworthy and dressed like he managed a charity shop and took advantage of the position.

He was called Mr Jardine and as far as we knew lived in BillIngham. This was another black mark against him. BillIngham was a concrete mess, which on Teesside, was damning it with faint praise.

The Shopping Centre looked like it had been designed by a six year old using Lego as his medium. It was nothing of the sort either. Instead of being an enclosed, shopper friendly building, it was the opposite. It looked like an abstract painting, all impossible angles and grey shading in places where it shouldn’t be. Too bleak and macabre for the cheap and miserable stores like “The Stationary Box” and “Iceland” that inhabited it’s convex and concave corners. But there they were with their gaudy window displays adding unexpected colour in an unusual place, like somebody had splattered an egg box with ketchup.

People trudged by on walkways above the shops but you had no earthly idea about how they got there or where they were going to. Not for nothing is BillIngham also home to ICI’s vast plant. The inspiration for “Blade Runner”.

It was also the home of the BillIngham Forum. The local leisure complex as would be described by an American who had never seen it and as reminiscent of ancient Rome as a digital watch. It showed films but wasn’t a cinema. It hosted pantomimes and touring plays starring soap opera actors you hadn’t seen in years and in many cases had thought had passed on. It also hosted the local ice rink. Home to minor league ice hockey and local posers alike, the ice rink was a freezing cold and wet youth club. Giggling girls formed crocodile chains with their hands and teetered on their tiptoes on the ice, while sullen youths skulked on the other side of the barrier, smoking and pretending not to be interested. All the while suspiciously lithe men, some with even thinner moustaches, weaved in and out of the traffic with the speed and skill of a motorcycle courier at Oxford Circus in rush-hour. Ice Skating was an unusual pursuit which requires co-ordination, fitness and imagination. For the less gifted, the same experience could be replicated by sitting in a puddle for 30 minutes and slicing into the back of my ankle with a razor blade.

BillIngham also produced and attracted odd people. It was the only part of Teesside that could and did tolerate a nest of Mackems. (A collection of Sunderland supporters, nest being the appropriate collective noun). An unusually large proportion of the domestic violence and other, more sinister goings-on, occurred here. It was also Jardine’s home.

We had heard the rumours about him before we started our two year duel. We were studying GCSE Chemistry for the last two years of our school life and he was to be our guide. We heard about his unprofessional attitude to work, we heard about his lassez faire attitude to teaching, We heard about his crap car, a duck-egg blue Mark Two Ford Escort, we heard of the boys who waited outside the school gates for him to drive past and give him a ZZ Top-style hand wave culminating in a V sign. We heard he blissfully waved back.

We also heard the story behind his nickname, unusually from another teacher. They tend to stick together in the staffroom, The beaten brigade, trying to maintain a sense of authority and enthusiasm to a bunch that would most likely be either earning twice as much as them in a couple of years or would be serving them sandwiches at a cheap supermarket Deli.

It was a rare event for one of them to break ranks and give such useful information about one of their colleagues. It also signified the low standing he must have occupied amongst his fellows. That they were willing to turn him over to the hordes to save themselves.

School dinners are industrial food in every sense. In preparation, production and taste, they were put together with the unnerving accuracy of an automated production line. Credit must be given for the uniformity of results achieved from the ingredients. Without fail, every single meal was doughy, tough, and contained as much nourishment and culinary flair as a football boot smothered in gravy.

The Cheese pie was a good case in point. Unlike any cheese I have encountered before or since, it was a block of yellowish goop, similar in texture to Styrofoam but moist. It had a pie crust base but this could equally have been cardboard. If I was being charitable, I’d say the top of the concoction looked like a crème brulee, touched up with a blow torch like an expensive chef. It was more than likely burned and produced a film which lay on the top, the consistency and colour of which was reminiscent of the contents of the liquids pouring out from Ethiopians featured on the nightly news at the time.

This was Jardine’s favourite so this is how he became known as Cheese Pie which then became Cheese Pie, Private Eye which then became Cheese Pie scoffing bastard and finally, mainly for brevity, just Cheesy.

I sat on the back bench of the class with a couple of friends and Liam Pike. Pikey was amiable enough but not very bright. He often had to attend the remedial classes organised and taught by Mrs Rinquist. Remedial was the official term for the classes. To us, they were the Rinky-Dinks.

I once had to suffer the ignominy of sitting an entrance tests for the classes because the powers that be confused my terminal laziness with mental issues. I scored the highest total they ever had and told me that I wasn’t retarded but merely unfocused. I still take my victories where I find them.

The benches themselves were not conventional school tables. They were special science benches that had gas taps built into them for connecting bunson burners to for experiments. They also had sinks built within them that had covers that could be lifted out. They were big, rigid and more like the desks that Dickens would perch at and write with a flowing quill. There were five in all spaced at regular intervals. They were so big; you sat at them with a special stool, no standard issue plastic school chair for us. The teacher’s table was on a raised platform of about six inches at the front of the class like an altar. It was flanked by a curious glass contraption to the right known as a fume cupboard. It was like a glass wine cabinet with two large holes in the wall to the supply room behind it, there were also three or four small holes at irregular intervals in the wall. There was a door to the supply room to the left. This was the teacher’s door and only he and his assistant Grayson, Igor to his Frankenstein, could use it. We all had to use the pupil’s door at the back of the room and opposite the end of our desk.

The benches were organised according to the strict school social charter. The “popular” kids and members of the football team sat on the front bench. The brainy kids and ones who were good at science sat on the second, the girls sat on the third bench, the fourth was occupied by boys and girls who found themselves studying Chemistry because of some administrative error and would have been much happier doing home economics or needlework instead, and the fifth and final bench was us. The rebels, the outcasts, Tommy Sampson, the boy who attended school one day a year and spent the rest of it with his mother in their council flat eating pies and playing snooker, Janey, the girl who spent three months in school last year then vanished for the rest of it. She was back now but even we picked up the whispers and sideways glances she attracted from the other girls. My friend Billy, Pikey and me.

We began our Chemistry education with the wide-eyed optimism that would have cheered the heart of any science advocate. We wanted to learn; we were keen and eager and could not wait to take part in experiments and to do Chemistry. Jardine had other ideas.

It may have been his Mormon persuasion. He had confessed to Mormonism a couple of years earlier when another pupil asked him about it for the express purpose of putting around rumours and stories about what Mormons actually did. This opened the floodgates and being a Church of England school, misinformation about other religions was not as discouraged as it may have been. According to the stories he had three wives, he had seven children, their house didn’t have electricity and he made his five wives and ten children plough the back garden of their semi-detached house with forks to better grow the corn that they survived on because they weren’t allowed to go to the shops. His car was horse drawn because his god forbade transport and he was often seen strolling through BillIngham attended by his six wives and 12 children, he sometimes rode the horse to school if the wives and children had church business, and the family had to sit by candlelight in their house made of sticks and straw because electricity and bricks were also verboten by the vengeful Mormon God of BillIngham. Looking back, his actions and demeanour were classic reactions against inadequacy and blunted ambition but they could equally have been the strict covenants of a secretive suburban sex-cult. When you were 14, you weren’t really bothered.

His method of pedagogy was very much old school. As in Victorian. He beamed as he presented us with our brand new, freshly unwrapped textbooks. If it wasn’t against his god’s law, these books would have been his children. So much of his pride, hopes and joy were invested in them. The term began thus.

We read from Chapter One together. The class swots being invited to read the technical pieces to demonstrate their superior understanding and status, the rest of us as makeweights to plough through the text with the comic relief provided by the dyslexics and the stupid who were deliberately given paragraphs containing hard to read words and chemical compounds to pronounce. No actual Chemistry was hinted at or attempted. We assumed this was a scene-setting procedure. To make sure we were fully aware of the wonders we were about to experience and create.

We had two lessons a week and we looked forward to the second one. We came in, placed our bags down and after some lively preliminary chat amongst us, Jardine emerged from the backstage area behind his desk and took up his position. We then took out our books and began reading Chapter Two together.

It slowly began to dawn on us that the die was cast and that this was going to be our Chemistry career. Reading and comprehension exercises intermitted with an all-too-brief “practical” session where he worked through an already assembled experiment on his desk, which we were invited to gather round and watch. Like a dad who had spent too much time and effort assembling an elaborate board game like Mouse Trap that wasn’t for the kids. We would then go back to our desks and write up what we had witnessed.

Young minds are hard to cage. Even in a subject which contained little or no interest. Chemistry was different. It fired you. You had a multitude of chemicals to experiment with, bunson burners that produced flames on command, a water tap on your desk for god’s sake – and we were being asked to read from a collective book. It was like holding a consolidated accountants convention in Billy Smarts Circus.

Human beings have untapped psychic potential. I predict that mankind’s next evolutionary stage will be mental and will see the wide development of precognition, ESP and telekinesis amongst the race. You can already see this randomly and undisciplined with some young children and adults. Mothers and babies have an unspoken, almost supernatural bond. Mothers just know. It’s the same with kids. They can sense energy and messages that adults with closed minds cannot.

An unspoken idea grew between us. Transmitted by eye contact and some unseen energy. The group instinctively knew what they had to do.

If Jardine wasn’t going to teach us Chemistry. We would teach ourselves.

When he went to school, Jardine would have been the second-weakest kid in the class, the most vociferous and active in the bullying of the weakest. You could see this in practice during the reading sessions that we came to dread.

I became one of his victims. A slow and deliberate individual must be slow and stupid. He confused the manner and the method.

I had learned to hide my gifts in the previous couple of years. Due to the disinterest, lack of will or just plain dislike for me from our tutor, I was left to fend for myself in the classroom jungle. Despite being in a prosperous middle class area, the school I attended was a Church of England administered one that didn’t believe in segregation or selection. It opened its arms to the children of the roughest estates of the town and was repaid in kind. The nearest other school and our perpetual rivals, Manorsfield said “thank you very much” and proceeded to build a continuing legacy of achievement and excellence. We had our school gym set on fire.

Despite liking football, I also liked reading and using big words. At the time I hadn’t fully appreciated the necessity of a fashionable haircut, a trendy coat and good personal hygiene. I was easy prey.

One of the biggest ironies in football is that when a player retaliates to a harsh foul or bad tackle then he will be punished more severely than the original aggressor. So it was in the Tutor group. Punished for being myself, punished again for defending myself.

I eventually got wise and actually picked a haircut for myself rather than let the barber indulge himself with one of his wall pictures from 1977. I persuaded my parents to buy me a coat made by a company you’d heard of, rather than one that the guy on the market told them would be big in six months time, hence the good price today. I started taping the top 40 off Radio Tees and started reading my cousins’ “Look In” magazine. It was an effort but I started to fit in.

I also decided to curry favour with the bullies by picking on the genuine weirdo’s and idiots in the class. Kids who went to church and had bags and pencil cases as a result of a promotion by the Midland bank. Kids who were genuinely stupid and in one case, actually mentally retarded. Easy pickings for the prey turned hunter.

You do what you gotta do.

Jardine became a rarer and rarer sight. He was present at the start of the lesson to take the register and then he would disappear into the supply office. Who knew what he did in there? He was conducting experiments, he was reading The Sun, he was reading The Sun and masturbating in there, he was looking at us through one of the holes in the fume cupboard; he was looking at us through one of the holes in the fume cupboard and masturbating in there. The theories were rife, usually of a sexual and deviant nature and it spoke of his wilful lack of awareness or simple self-delusion that he we would be working away in our office while he was in his.

Chemistry was now ours. We started small time. Pikey was a smoker and always had a lighter on him which was essential for our work. The class swots all had a standard issue green Berol pen. For somebody with handwriting as borderline dyslexic as my own, these were fatal and I ended up getting more ink on my hands than on the paper but it was a badge of achievement amongst the intelligentsia of the 4th year. They also melted rather easily when subjected to a constant flame from a desktop gas tap. After a little while, we became performance sculptors operating in the medium of melted plastic. U-shapes, corkscrews, abstractions, we had it all. With a little more enterprise, we could have initiated Brit Art ten years earlier.

There was a primal beauty to lighting a gas tap and turning it to full power to singe the desk. It was even funnier when it was inches away from Laura Kinsey’s straw-like hair, just inches from our rudimentary flamethrower.

Our next project lay with an old video machine located in a cupboard at the back of the class behind us. It was a very early type with one spool so it predated Betamax by about five years. It might have even worked. Not that we were bothered. It was Jardine’s so it must be destroyed.

Billy was the technical genius so was able to advise us which pieces we should remove in order. Every lesson we removed some diode or transistor or rotary device. We should really have kept and catalogued them instead of throwing them in bushes or at other pupils. In amongst the mayhem, we did conduct our own experiments. We took one of the tapes from Cheesy’s Cyclops machine and tied one end to a lamppost opposite the school. We then placed the other end on a pencil and walked the long way home, approx two miles and we hadn’t even dented the reel. We had left a lot of tape in our wake but this was science at work so we felt we could explain it away if challenged.

We discovered a seemingly inexhaustible supply of exercise books in the cupboards in our desks and became a surrogate stationer for the other members of the class and others in our year. If we had been a bit more enterprising, we could have made some money of it but when a pretty girl asks if she can have an exercise book then you don’t really think of charging her. Alan Sugar I’m not.

We didn’t stop at Chemistry. Pikey moved onto advanced biology when he decided that he needed his ear piercing. A safety pin and a pile of paper towels were his instruments when he began the operation. Humans have a grim fascination with pain and the infliction of it. Even more so when they are inflicting on themselves. Nobody watches “You’ve Been Framed” to see cute kittens skidding about a polished wooden floor. They watch to see a pair of boneheads retiling a wet roof in the hope of seeing Darwinism in action.

Isembard Kingdom Brunel once performed an emergency tracheotomy on himself to remove a lodged sixpence in his throat. Pikey couldn’t spell Brunel but his spirit was just wiling as he plunged the safety pin through his earlobe.

Now we were the video nasty generation. Used to seeing bikini-clad teenagers decapitated on grainy films by various demons and hockey-mask wearing serial killers, watching films with titles like “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Driller Killer”, we’d seen it all. We’d laugh if we saw it on screen. Seeing a fountain of blood inches away from your eyes and your classmate’s face go through so many of shades of white in rapid succession that it was like someone making a flipbook out of a Dulux colour wall chart in front of you.

Girls screamed, Pikey fainted and we looked around at each other, as useless as seconds at a duel, waiting for an adult to do something. Of course, Jardine was away so two of the more mature members of the class lifted a slumping Pikey from the desk and carried him outside to seek attention, stemming the flow of blood from his ear with a darkening series of towels. When Jardine came back, he barely noticed the missing pupils.

Bored with Sculpture, we decided to move into Art. Billy was a born artist and like most born artists, was destined for a career in car design or kitchen brochure production. Thankfully that didn’t happen and his career has since bloomed into something approaching his original potential.

It highlights the inequities of the British education system. Exercise books filled with caricatures, designs, doodles and sketches were a valuable progress ional aid for an aspiring artist but that wasn’t important. What was more important was that you sat in a classroom for two hours on an afternoon reading about Chemistry instead of actual doing it or worse, running round a muddy field chasing a ball of various sizes and shapes. I’m not interested in how fast David Hockney could run the 1500 meters but the fact that someone; somewhere was employed to find this out tells you everything you need to know about our society.

We then went to work on our Magnum Opus. We planned our project in specific detail. What our aim was, what materials we would need, the scale, the colours, the dimensions. Billy even produced drafts. All we needed to do now was wait.

We returned to the school that night, after dark, with the materials and set to our task.

The next day, everybody filed into the Chemistry class as usual; Cheesy did the roll call but didn’t disappear off as usual. We became aware of movement outside the window and all eyes turned to look at faithful old Grayson scrubbing away at a large, fluorescent coloured, cartoon piece of cheese decorating the window like the centrepiece of a dairy cathedral. The sun shone through the yellows and oranges and blacks for holes onto the wooden floor. The difference between Art and vandalism is that Art speaks while vandalism shouts. This message was clear. Billy had even disguised his handwriting for the CHEESE PIE label next to it. An Urban Masterpiece.

We had, however, underestimated the malevolence of Jardine. I suppose it was naive of us expecting a humourless automaton to get a joke, let alone enjoy it, but teachers were professionals. We knew they had favourites and discrimination was as rife within the classroom as any banana republic but we forgot they were people. With people’s ideas and emotions. And that people hate things. Jardine hated us.

This was a declaration of war. I’d hinted at the self delusion that surrounded and covered his existence like a musty fog but this act blew it away with the cleansing force of a jet engine. He suddenly realised that he wasn’t the hard but fair master of the class, the big boy in the class of boys who could enjoy the joke but maintain discipline when required, or the charming, older man who girls could confide in and maybe have a crush on. In a stark, Day-Glo, 3D image of a piece of Swiss cheese, Dorian Gray saw his portrait for the first time.

Of course, we were having too much fun to spot, understand or even care about the subtle change in our world. The balance of power was shifting, or more accurately, about to reassert itself.

Meanwhile, the resistance escalated its destructive campaign and the cherished exercise books, his virgin children, were the next victims.

The violations were many and complete. We would deface a book uniformerly and then swap it with another pupil’s clean one. They were eager to enjoy the comedy, we were eager to exert our influence.

Every picture of a scientist wearing glasses in the books was defaced so the glasses became 3D with the addition of red and green lenses. Every eminent scientist with a pipe became a bubble blower or a cannabis smoker with glazed eyes and whacked-out comments to match.

Every animal was seen enjoying coitus with vigorous pervert, sometimes Grayson, more usually Jardine but never labelled.

Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man became a transvestite with a Basque and fishnet stockings for each of his four legs. This actually made him a dead ringer for Tim Currie in “The Rocky Horror Show”.

Molecules became Pac Men or Smiley Faces, The periodic table of elements now included Ice Cream, Hair Gel and of course, Cheese.

We began to pervert scientific knowledge itself through the skilful application of colour specific tippex and Billy’s perfect copperplate handwriting.

Covalent bonds between molecules vanished. Instead they were now held together by bits of string. Absolute Zero was discovered by Kevin Webster from Coronation Street, The Noble Gases were the invention of “posh bastards”, The hardest substance known to mankind was Boy George’s mascara, Destiny is the ratio of Macaroni to the volume on your ghetto blaster, Water in gaseous state was Philip Schofield, Potassium was best used as bath salts, Alkali metals reacted with non-metals to produce ironic compounds, which was the opposite of what they intended in the first place. It was even funnier than it sounds. So good a job had we done on those books that it was rumoured that they were just as funny as the notorious books used in Religious Education lessons. High praise indeed.

Hubris is a concept most adults struggle with, let alone 14 year olds but we had an appointment. I was about to discover that revenge, like cheese pie, was a dish best served cold.

About five months before the end of the course and our exams, Jardine began to take it a little more seriously. We saw more of him during the lessons and, amazingly, actually got more work to do ourselves. He would try and keep us on our toes by bursting in through the pupil’s door instead of his own one. This was met with general derision and shouts that “you’ve just missed your twin brother!” and the more effective “Doyle!” Nothing dissuaded him from the task at hand. Even when we burned a hole in his brand new protective goggles.

We should have realised something was amiss when we saw he was smiling.

He was conducting an experiment at the front of the class that we all had to gather round to get a better view with goggles and all. We seated ourselves at the edge of the desk. He was boiling a test tube with hydrochloric acid with another ingredient which gave off the most sulphurous disgusting smell I have ever come across. It was a mixture of death, bad eggs, mould, damp and inevitably, cheese.

He passed the test tube under the noses of a recoiling class from the far side of the bench toward us. We would be the last people to smell it, even though we could smell it from the other side of the classroom anyway. He came closer, edging his way towards us with the sickening smile of molester approaching a bound child. He was two feet in front of us to the right when he began to stumble. The momentum carried him forward towards the bench and his left arm instinctively came out to break his fall and balance him. The right hand containing the test tube stiffened it’s grip and instead of letting go, began to twist anti-clockwise, toward me.

I was sitting in the stool in my standard school issue navy jumper, black trousers and trainers. The test tube was level with my goggled eyes when it’s mouth began it’s downward path. Within a few seconds, the contents, smell, boiling acid and all, had poured all over and onto my crotch.

When people are shot, the body shuts down the immediate area so for a few seconds, they are unaware of what has happened to them. I felt an initial coldness the same way you do when somebody spills a drink in your lap. What doesn’t happen when a drink is spilled is that everybody in the group runs away from you as quickly as possible, the drink doesn’t begin to heat up expediential and smoke definitely doesn’t begin to rise from your crotch.

The smoke and the heat are greater now, just five seconds after contact, I’d almost forgotten the smell which was now, if it were possible, even worse and centred squarely on me. My sinuses are getting the full benefit now, eyes are filling up with water, my nostrils are trying to close of their own free will to prevent the body from taking in any more damage, and all the while the burning, burning, BURNING is spreading from my genitals to my thighs and my lower stomach.

My body took over. I remained sitting in the stool as my body leapt from it and crashed through the door of the supply room. I stood with the rest of the class, gathering round the door of the room and looking through the fume cupboard as a boy who looks familiar is pulling down his trousers, turning on the cold tap on the large sink as open as he can and trying to sit in the sink so the water soaks his horrible green boxer shorts. All the while, the heat, the pain and most of all the smell, that unforgettable signature stink, are actually getting worse, if such a thing was possible.

In chemistry, such things are possible. Some compounds and mixtures react badly with water intensifying their effects. We would have realised this had we been taught it.

The boy knows that the tap isn’t helping, that more pain is on the way to an area that is not designed to handle it. He knows that 100 meters from the chemistry classroom, down the main corridor to the side entrance to the building and across the playground is the school swimming pool. He lifts himself from the sink and finally manages to kick off his trousers. To anybody watching he resembles a drunken Oliver Reed taking part in “It’s A Knockout”. He makes for the corridor but time is now also his enemy. It’s 3.30pm, the end of the school day and the bell has rung and is ringing. The schools other pupils are vacating their classrooms with haste as they stream toward the exits. This doesn’t register. I am no longer with my classmates watching the situation unfold, I am firmly attached back in my own head as I am racing down a corridor full of school kids wearing a pair of soaking wet boxer shorts. I simply don’t hear the catcalls, laughter and mocking coming from the surprised onlookers and the pursuing group of classmates who have followed me. The pain and smell won’t allow it. I skid left through the double doors of the exit and run towards the pool, still hurting but becoming more aware of the crowds, crowds following, crowds watching, crowds blocking my way, crowds coming out of the changing rooms where I need to be.

I grab the heavy changing room door and pull myself inside, knocking a couple of younger pupils out of my way, I make a swift left into the main male changing area and through the showers and the footbath into the main pool area. Thankfully it is uncovered as I plunge head first, shirt, jumper and trainers into the pool. My one last hope.

Maybe the sheer volume of water counteracts the pain as it begins to numb as I surface in the pool but the smell, the smell of bad eggs and cheese is now amplifying throughout the changing rooms and the gym. I emerge from the pool soaking from head to toe, glancing at the windows, full of jeering, yelling, classmates, banging encouragement and abuse with equal force. I listen to the games teacher talking to me but I don’t hear him. I am an onlooker again but I wouldn’t have been able to hear him anyway as he has his hand and sleeve covering his mouth. He leads me by the arm to the entrance of the now empty changing rooms and drapes an old grey towel over my shoulders. I emerge from the entrance to a mixture of cheers and boos, like an early evictee from Big Brother but with no placards or happy family members to greet me. If the towel had been over my head I could have doubled as a sex criminal being led from a courtroom into a waiting van. How I wished there was a waiting van to take me away from the school. The crowd is swelled by the sports teams forced to evacuate the changing rooms due to the virulent smell which swept in like a phalanx of wild horses and took possession of the room entirely. They spared me the ignominy of ringing the fire bell to evacuate the gym but it had the same effect.

I walk alone, unaccompanied, soaking wet and humiliated back towards the main school building. Nobody dare approach me to say anything or to pull down my boxer shorts and inflict further humiliation because of the smell.

Whenever ICI in BillIngham had an ammonia leak, you could smell it in several miles away. I imagined that this would be the same. Local TV host Paul Frost’s bearded concerned face would appear on Tyne Tees TV to warn people to remain indoors and close their windows. There would be a picture of me in the corner of the screen subtitled “Stink Boy” and the picture would cutaway to a chemical expert, probably in a protective suit, talking about the situation.

I trudge slowly back up the corridor to the classroom because I am aware that is important to retrieve my trousers from the utility room. I am greeted by a sheepish looking Grayson who directs me back into the classroom where the trousers are. Some poor soul, most definitely Grayson from the redness of his eyes, had picked up the trousers and placed them in a carrier bag. They are hanging in the fume cupboard.

I walk on the platform, behind the desk to retrieve them and pick them up. I turn to walk back out of the supply room door and see Jardine stood at the end of the desk.

He is wearing his powder blue jacket and his cheddar yellow shirt with matching yellow and brown tie. His fine blond/grey hair is still in the side parting he wears it and he is smiling.

Smiling.

As I walk past I hear him say something like: “Sorry about that” and know that it is all he can do to stop himself from laughing hysterically in my face. I know that will come later for him. His victory total, my humiliation complete.

Grayson, poor Grayson, drives me home with the windows open and the cool air fans blowing on maximum to be greeted by my startled mother. She has seen me come in late before, muddied and bloodied from various escapades but she has never seen me emerge from a strange mans Volvo Estate soaking wet and trouser-less. She opens her mouth to say something but closes it very quickly when her nostrils catch the smell. I kick off my trainers at the front door and run into the bathroom. These were the days before ambulance chaser and frivolous law suits even though we would have had a really good case for compo. In those days, "you must have been doing something".

We attended the classes for the rest of the term. Nobody says anything much about the incident or the aftermath. A couple of half-hearted jokes at the start of the first lesson afterwards, one or two underwhelming choruses of “Great Balls of Fire” but that’s all. They can see in my eyes that I am broken. A lesson has finally been learned in chemistry. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

I leave the school some weeks later with my well deserved F I my back pocket, never to cross swords with Jardine again. I later returned to night school to study Chemistry again and actually found I enjoyed it. It made sense, was involving and the textbooks were so old and dull that I never felt the need to deface them.

It was also some years later and I was returning from a boozy night out in town. It was about 2.30am and for some reason I decided to take a short cut across through the school and planned to walk over the fields. I usually got a taxi home or if I did walk back with friends, we stuck to the roads.

For some reason, I wanted to walk that way.

It had been over ten years since I had been back at the school. New extensions had been built, There was new paint around the place, new grilles over windows, new signs to warn trespassers to keep away and new fences placed at various places to keep trespassers, like me, out.

I walked through the playground keeping to the shadows of the buildings so as not to fall in full view of the halogen lights and security cameras placed about the premises. I edged past the side entrance to the Upper School building and walked past the pool. I got to the edge of the field and was about to march forward over it when I stopped. I glanced up at the top of the gym building and reassured the camera was looking in another direction, made my way to the left.

I continued walking behind the building and turned left again until I was looking at the outside of the chemistry classroom. The blinds were down, as they always were but I crept up, onto the raised walkway that ringed the building to have a look in anyway. The benches, stools, even the fume cupboard, where the same. The posters around the room for various chemical equations and periodic tables were new but this was to be expected. Most importantly, the altar desk was still at the front. I edged along further to look into the Supply room. I could see a desk with two chairs either side and a folded copy of The Sun on the table. Two mugs were on either side.

I jumped down from the path that and was walking away when my foot caught on something hard. I looked down and saw a large stone, buried loosely in the soil near the base of one of the trees that grew in between Upper School and the old library behind it. I had been here before. I was an onlooker again as a familiar man picked it up and walked back toward the classroom. He stood four feet away from the window, underneath it, behind the raised path.

I surmised what was going on as he grasped the stone in my palm of his hand and assumed the classic shot-putter position. He then lobbed the stone high towards the window.

It rebounded off and landed at the base of the raised path. Breathing a sigh of relief, I was no longer an onlooker. I picked up the stone, fully meaning to place it back at the base of the tree but in one swift movement, I spun on my heels and lashed out with my arm as I turned, with a primal yell, I hurled the stone toward the window again.

There was no mistake this time as it shattered with a satisfying crash. I saw the large jagged shards at the bottom of the window and at the top right. It had gone through just to the left of centre.

I ran away from the school, behind the gym and towards where the beck ran underneath the field. Into the Valley which followed it. It was overgrown in places with some flat scrub which passed as a pathway. Pitch black it may have been and treacherous to a drunken man but I wasn’t a drunken man. I was a stone-cold sober 14-year old boy again and despite not using it for night on 15 years, I knew the way like the back of my hand. I ran for as long as I could until my lungs and legs both called time on me and I bent over for breath I reflected on my actions.

Numerous lessons occurred to me. That a substance needed a reaction to cause it to change. That just because you happened to make it to your 20’s it didn’t automatically make you a man and that bad things happened to good people and good people did bad things.

The only thing I could be sure of is this – that a grudge matures with age.

Like a good cheese.

A Valentine's Haiku

Saint Valentine, the martyr,

lost his head for being so brave,

now whirring in his grave.

Haikus

As part of my OU Writing course, I have come up with some Haiku's regarding various places I have lived or worked.

MILTON KEYNES
The city murmurs to itself,
"We are a major terrorist target"
as if anybody's fooled

READING
Licks of paint and branding
The scruffiest family in the street
has won the lottery today

MIDDLESBROUGH
Stark steel bridges over Tees
Rundown terraces, chippy but stout men all,
Not much but its home

BICESTER
No sheep in the street
named after them, no market for cattle
either, the soul has gone

KIDLINGTON
The longest straightest road you've
ever seen, numerous pubs, high street
not worthy of the name

Walton Lake

The swaying never ceases for the tightly-knit family of the lake. Like a drunken but friendly group gathered around a pub piano, swaying to a familiar song, reminding them of good times and old pals, both departed but remain here still in the warmth of the group. The gentle wind guides their rhythm but this happy golden band needs no encouragement.

They stand and sway in the lake like a fishing part that has given up on guppies for the day and began early on the Glenfiddich to them the warm, instantaneous joy of this particular catch.

The still water reflects them and if this is a gathering then the mood was misjudged. It’s not a party at all, but a wake. It’s only now that I even notice that the clearing in the lake is caused by the sacrifice of their others, their brothers.

Their broken bodies and submerged heads line in huge piles to the front and the side of the hide where I sit.

The wind and the sway begin anew but it plays a different beat. As I sit under a dark, oppressing sky in the dark, oppressing hide, the witness to bird watching and more besides if my nostrils don’t deceive me. The dark mood within matches the new mood without.

I hadn’t even noticed the gathering of the straw brethren at the opening to my left. They are close enough to touch but this is the last thing I want to do. Their forms fill the slit window like bamboo bars, as they turn from a jolly pub crowd to a rigid phalanx. Even the invisible animals that must reside within this place know better than to try their limited patience.

They have tolerated me so long that as the low gunmetal coloured clouds draw in, I need no invitation to take my leave of the numberless straw and their watery home, their lake.

The hide’s wooden supports creak their approval as I gather my books and wits and begin to brave the boardwalk back to shore. I’m confident enough that this time I will be granted safe passage to the bank. This time.

Damned Cloughie and Damned Leeds

The Damned United – By David Peace

David Peace chronicle’s Cloughs ill-fated 44 days in charge of Leeds United in 1974, and Peace is a curious name for the author of a book that is about the opposite. Conflict, strife, antagonism, treachery and regret.

The book starts with Clough reliving the challenge with Bury’s goalkeeper on Boxing Day 1962 that at the time looked like it had ended the career of the bright young Centre Forward. We all know now that it started it but the book questions rightly, how much the injury affected Clough himself and whether it gave an already fully functioning ego the necessary drive and force of will to make him the man he became. There is something to this as everybody remembers the great manager but Peace, and interview evidence backing him up, that Clough always saw himself as an injured player, always recovering, never retired. Maybe it was easier to bollock an out of form striker if the manager truly believed that he could replace him.

It’s an incredible story from any time period. The top manager in the country, between posts after leaving Derby in acrimonious circumstances taking over as manager of his most hated rivals. The equivalent of Jose Mourinho taking over at Old Trafford before being hounded out of town barely a month later by the combined forces of Ryan Giggs and Roy Keane.

The book takes no prisoners in its depictions of the intransigent Billy Bremner and scheming Johnny Giles – the Lords of the Manor who didn’t take kindly to the new Sheriff. Even Peter Taylor, Clough’s closest partner and right hand, comes over as a craven mixture of Phil Neal, Graham Taylor and David Pleat. Portrayed as a money-obsessed apologist, half in love with the main man and unable to function solo. The fact that Taylor refused to join Clough at Leeds indicates that this may have been a two-way street. Clough unable to function without his Yang as it reveals the thoughts of a confident man operating way outside of his comfort zone, in hostile territory with only himself to rely on.

Their careers at Middlesbrough are only mentioned in passing as the action flits back and forth between Clough’s rise with Derby, the one, true loves of his footballing life, and his constant travails in picking up the reins of Revie’s team.

The ghost of Revie haunts Clough through the corridors of Elland Road and it’s a curious thing that for two Middlesbrough men who fought their personal and professional battles away from the town, it’s only one that is recognised and embraced warmly by the town he left behind. The mention of Clough’s name brings a smile to the lips and a glint to the eye, whereas Revie is never mentioned, unless it’s as a byword for gamesmanship and cheating.

Their relationship reminded me of Salieri and Mozart in Amadeus. The proficient and gifted prodigy effortlessly eclipsing the competent, professional mentor. The twist being that here, Clough is the prodigy is obsessed with destroying and surpassing Revie with his own team.

Like the man himself, the book has some rough edges with some nods towards the seamier sides of the life of 1970s football manager, alone on the road and in a strange town. His harsh revisionist judges would do well to remember that he was a man first and foremost and a manager second.

It’s an interesting fiction and helps fill in the gaps for those of us who only remember Clough as a green jumpered caricature on the City Ground sidelines. We know that the Grove Hill General was so much more but then, so was his Nemesis from Costa Street.

I Hate Russell Howard

My darling wife is a big fan of "Mock the Week" on BBC-2. A Frankensteins Monster of a quiz, taking the best parts from the corpses of Have I Got News For You and Whose Line is it Anyway? and stitching them together with all the moral consequence of the good doctor himself.

Hosted by Dara O'Brien, and keeping up the Frankenstein theme, old Dara does more than a passable impression of Igor.

A consequence of watching means I have had the misfortune to discover that Pippin has left The Shire and begun a fledgling stand-up career. Using the pseudenum "Russell Howard" (Never trust a man with two first names. Cary Grant being the exception that proves the rule) he meanders along using a technique honed in the class of a supply teacher. Namely, loudly repeating what the funniest kid in the class has just said, or in Russell's case, Frankie Boyle or Hugh Dennis (the silver lining in this particular cloud). When not zinging Orcs or commenting on Aragorn's new tax policies, he shows the depth of his comic training and development have not moved on one iota from the 4th year.

Looking like two people have tried to iron both sides of his face simultaniously, looking at him face on is like standing opposite the bow of an ocean liner. Howard's repartee is as topical as it is well delivered. "I'd shag Hilary Clinton"; "Elves are real" and my personal favourite: "Birdseye potato waffles are waffly versatile".

Did you ever wonder what happened to the funny, fat kid in your class who made jokes and acted the clown to get attention and confuse bullies? Well, the spotty, gawky kid who liked Rick Astley followed him around, nicked all his best lines and is trying to pass them off as his own at 10pm on BBC 2 on Thursday Nights.

Don't you know your left from your right?

As a child of politicised parents, Observer columnist Nick Cohen followed in their tradition and became a trenchant voice on the liberal-left in the 1980s and 90s. But the Iraq War changed all that and forced him to rethink. In an exclusive extract from his incendiary new book about the failings of the modern left, he argues that anti-Americanism has left it blind to the evils of militant Islam.

Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer

In the early Seventies, my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldn't buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidising General Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either, because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of Antonio Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldn't have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for then President Richard Nixon or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

My sisters and I did not know it, but when Franco fell ill in 1975, we were in a race to the death. Either he died of Parkinson's disease or we died of scurvy. Luckily for us and the peoples of Spain, the dictator went first, although he took an unconscionably long time about it.

Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalie's house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book, I think.

'It's funny, Mum,' I said as we drove home, 'but I don't remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.'

'You've only just noticed? We didn't let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.'

'Ah.'

'We didn't buy you the Beano either.'

'For God's sake, Mum, what on earth was wrong with the Beano?'

'It was printed by DC Thomson, a non-union firm.'

'Right,' I said.

I was about to mock her but remembered that I had not allowed my son to watch television, even though he was nearly three at the time. I will let him read Beano when he is older - I spoil him, I know - but if its cartoonists were to down their crayons and demand fraternal support, I would probably make him join the picket line.

I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the left.

I'm not complaining, I had a very happy childhood. Conservatives would call my parents 'politically correct', but there was nothing sour or pinched about our home, and there is a lot to be said for growing up in a household in which everyday decisions about what to buy and what to reject have a moral quality.

At the time, I thought it was normal and assumed that all civilised people lived the same way. I still remember the sense of dislocation I felt at 13 when my English teacher told me he voted Conservative. As his announcement coincided with the shock of puberty, I was unlikely to forget it. I must have understood at some level that real Conservatives lived in Britain - there was a Conservative government at the time, so logic dictated that there had to be Conservative voters. But it was incredible to learn that my teacher was one of them, when he gave every appearance of being a thoughtful and kind man. To be good you had to be on the left.

Looking back, I can see that I got that comforting belief from my parents, but it was reinforced by the experience of living through the Thatcher administration, which appeared to reaffirm the left's monopoly of goodness. The embrace first of monetarism and then of the European exchange-rate mechanism produced two recessions, which Conservatives viewed with apparent composure because the lives wrecked by mass unemployment and business failure had the beneficial side-effect of destroying trade-union power. Even when the left of the Eighties was clearly in the wrong - as it was over unilateral nuclear disarmament - it was still good. It may have been dunderheaded to believe that dictators would abandon their weapons systems if Britain abandoned hers, but it wasn't wicked.

Yet for all the loathing of Conservatives I felt, I didn't have to look at modern history to know that it was a fallacy to believe in the superior virtue of the left: my family told me that. My parents joined the Communist Party, but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the 'root cause' of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.

Every now and again, someone asks why the double standard persists to this day. The philosophical answer is that communism did not feel as bad as fascism because in theory, if not in practice, communism was an ideology that offered universal emancipation, while only a German could benefit from Hitler's Nazism and only an Italian could prosper under Mussolini's fascism. I'm more impressed by the matter-of-fact consideration that fascist forces took over or menaced Western countries in the Thirties and Forties, and although there was a communist menace in the Cold War, the Cold War never turned hot and Western Europe and North America never experienced the totalitarianism of the left.

There were many moments in the Thirties when fascists and communists co-operated - the German communists concentrated on attacking the Weimar Republic's democrats and gave Hitler a free run, and Stalin's Soviet Union astonished the world by signing a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. But after Hitler broke the terms of the alliance in the most spectacular fashion by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, you could rely on nearly all of the left - from nice liberals through to the most compromised Marxists - to oppose the tyrannies of the far right. Consistent anti-fascism added enormously to the left's prestige in the second half of the 20th century. A halo of moral superiority hovered over it because if there was a campaign against racism, religious fanaticism or neo-Nazism, the odds were that its leaders would be men and women of the left. For all the atrocities and follies committed in its name, the left possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism. After the Iraq war, I don't believe that a fair-minded outsider could say it does that any more.

The long road to Baghdad

Iraqis have popped up throughout my life - indeed, they were popping up before I was born. My parents had Iraqi communist friends when they were students who came along to their wedding in the late Fifties. God knows where they are now. My mother certainly doesn't. Saddam's Baath party slaughtered the Iraqi left; and in all likelihood the Baathists murdered her friends years ago and dumped their bodies in unmarked graves.

I grew up in the peace and quiet of suburban Manchester, started out in newspapers in Birmingham and left for Fleet Street in 1987 to try my luck as a freelance. I wangled myself a desk next to a quiet and handsome young Iranian called Farzad Bazoft in the old Observer newsroom, round the corner from St Paul's Cathedral. In 1989, he went to Iraq, where extraordinary reports were coming out about Saddam Hussein imitating Adolf Hitler by exterminating tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds with poison gas. Farzad was a freelance like me, and perhaps he was looking for a scoop to make his name and land himself a staff job. More probably, he was just behaving like a proper reporter. He had heard about a sensational story of gigantic explosions at secret rocket bases and wanted to nail it down, regardless of the risk or reward. The secret police caught him, and after taking him to a torture chamber, they murdered him, as they had murdered so many before.

It is hard to believe now, but Conservative MPs and the Foreign Office apologised for Saddam in those days. Tories excused Farzad's execution with the straight lie that he was an Iranian spy - and one reptilian Thatcherite declared that he 'deserved to be hanged'.

By contrast, Saddam Hussein appalled the liberal left. At leftish meetings in the late Eighties, I heard that Iraq encapsulated all the loathsome hypocrisy of the supposedly 'democratic' West. Here was a blighted land ruled by a terrible regime that followed the example of the European dictatorships of the Thirties. And what did the supposed champions of democracy and human rights in Western governments do? Supported Saddam, that's what they did; sold him arms and covered up his crimes. Fiery socialist MPs denounced Baathism, while playwrights and poets stained the pages of the liberal press with their tears for his victims. Many quoted the words of a brave Iraqi exile called Kanan Makiya. He became a hero of the left because he broke through the previously impenetrable secrecy that covered totalitarian Iraq and described in awful detail how an entire population was compelled to inform on their family and friends or face the consequences. All decent people who wanted to convict the West of subscribing to murderous double standards could justifi ably use his work as evidence for the prosecution.

The apparently sincere commitment to help Iraqis vanished the moment Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and became America's enemy. At the time, I didn't think about where the left was going. I could denounce the hypocrisy of a West which made excuses for Saddam one minute and called him a 'new Hitler' the next, but I didn't dwell on the equal and opposite hypocrisy of a left which called Saddam a 'new Hitler' one minute and excused him the next. All liberals and leftists remained good people in my mind. Asking hard questions about any of them risked giving aid and comfort to the Conservative enemy and disturbing my own certainties. I would have gone on anti-war demonstrations when the fighting began in 1991, but the sight of Arabs walking around London with badges saying 'Free Kuwait' stopped me. When they asked why it was right to allow Saddam to keep Kuwaitis as his subjects, a part of me conceded that they had a point.

I didn't do much with that thought, but carried on through the Nineties holding the standard left-wing beliefs of the day. By the time New Labour was preparing for power, I was a columnist on The Observer, and my writing was driven by disgust at the near-uniform good press Tony Blair got in his early years. I felt the adulation was unmerited and faintly sinister, and became one of the few journalists to bang on about the dark side of the shiny, happy people who had moved into Downing Street. My pet topic was the treatment of asylum seekers. I was infuriated by the sight of New Labour pretending Britain welcomed the victims of persecution, while all the time quietly rigging the system to stop genuine refugees reaching Britain. Once again, I ran into Saddam Hussein. I had to. It was inevitable, because among the asylum seekers fleeing genuine persecution were countless Iraqis whom the Baathists had driven to pack their bags and run for their lives.

I got to know members of the Iraqi opposition in London, particularly Iraqi Kurds, whose compatriots were the targets of one of the last genocides of the 20th century. They were democratic socialists whose liberal mindedness extended to opposing the death penalty, even for Saddam Hussein. Obviously, they didn't represent the majority of Iraqi opinion. Equally obviously, they shared the same beliefs as the overwhelming majority of the rich world's liberals and leftists, and deserved our support as they struggled against fascism. Not the authoritarianism of a tinpot dictator, but real fascism: a messianic one-party state; a Great Leader, whose statue was in every town centre and picture on every news bulletin; armies that swept out in unprovoked wars of foreign aggrandisement; and secret policemen who organised the gassing of 'impure' races. The Iraqi leftists were our 'comrades', to use a word that was by then so out of fashion it was archaic.

When the second war against Saddam Hussein came in 2003, they told me there was no other way to remove him. Kanan Makiya was on their side. He was saying the same things about the crimes against humanity of the Baath party he had said 20 years before, but although his arguments had barely changed, the political world around him was unrecognisable. American neoconservatives were his champions now, while the left that had once cheered him denounced him as a traitor.

Everyone I respected in public life was wildly anti-war, and I was struck by how their concern about Iraq didn't extend to the common courtesy of talking to Iraqis. They seemed to have airbrushed from their memories all they had once known about Iraq and every principle of mutual respect they had once upheld.

I supposed their furious indifference was reasonable. They had many good arguments that I would have agreed with in other circumstances. I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to off er qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened - not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa ... in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn't think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by 'insurgents' from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn't think again when Iraqis defi ed the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted.

All right, you might say, but the reaction to the second Iraq war is not a good enough reason to write a book. The US and British governments sold the invasion to their publics with a false bill of goods and its aftermath was a bloody catastrophe. It was utopian to hope that leftists and liberals could oppose George W Bush while his troops poured into Iraq - and killed their fair share of civilians - while at the same time standing up for the freedoms of others. There was too much emotional energy invested in opposing the war, too much justifiable horror at the chaos and too much justifiable anger that the talk of weapons of mass destruction turned out to be nonsense. The politically committed are like football fans. They support their side come what may and refuse to see any good in the opposing team. The liberal left bitterly opposed war, and their indifference afterwards was a natural consequence of the fury directed at Bush.

It is a fair argument, which I've heard many times, although I wince at the implied passivity. People don't just react to a crisis: they choose how they react. If a man walks down the street trying to pick a fight, you can judge those he confronts by how they respond. Do they hit back, run away or try to calm him down? The confrontation is not of their making, but they still have a choice, and what choice they make reveals their character and beliefs. If you insist on treating the reaction to the second Iraq war as a one-off that doesn't reveal a deeper sickness, I'll change the subject.

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

A part of the answer is that it isn't at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists' atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.

It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America. I hate to repeat the overused quote that 'when a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything', but there is no escaping it. Because it is very hard to imagine a radical leftwing alternative, or even mildly radical alternative, intellectuals in particular are ready to excuse the movements of the far right as long as they are anti-Western.

The disgrace of the anti-war movement

On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini's old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs.

The French protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime went off without trouble. Between 100,000 and 200,000 French demonstrators stayed peaceful as they rallied in the Place de la Bastille, where in 1789 Parisian revolutionaries had stormed the dungeons of Louis XVI in the name of the universal rights of man.

In Ireland, Sinn Fein was in charge of the protests and produced the most remarkable spectacle of a remarkable day: a peace movement led by the IRA. Only in the newly liberated countries of the Soviet bloc were the demonstrations small and anti-war sentiment muted.

The protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime weren't just a European phenomenon. From Calgary to Buenos Aires, the left of the Americas marched. In Cape Town and Durban, politicians from the African National Congress, who had once appealed for international solidarity against South Africa's apartheid regime, led the opposition to the overthrow of a fascist regime. On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent's first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.

Saddam Hussein was delighted, and ordered Iraqi television to show the global day of action to its captive audience. The slogan the British marchers carried, 'No war - Freedom for Palestine', might have been written by his foreign ministry. He instructed the citizens of hdad to march and demand that he remain in power. Several thousand went through the streets carrying Kalashnikovs and posters of the Great Leader.

No one knows how many people demonstrated. The BBC estimated between six and 10 million, and anti-war activists tripled that, but no one doubted that these were history's largest co-ordinated demonstrations and that millions, maybe tens of millions, had marched to keep a fascist regime in power.

Afterwards, nothing drove the protesters wilder than sceptics telling them that if they had got what they wanted, they would, in fact, have kept a fascist regime in power. They were good people on the whole, who hadn't thought about the Baath Party. Euan Ferguson, of The Observer, watched the London demonstrators and saw a side of Britain march by that wasn't all bad:

'There were, of course, the usual suspects - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Socialist Workers' Party, the anarchists. But even they looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers: it is safe to say they had never experienced such a mass of humanity. There were nuns, toddlers, barristers, the Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women's Choir and "Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice)". One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the first march in any of their histories, by their mothers. There were country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham. I called a friend at two o'clock, who was still making her ponderous way along the Embankment - "It's not a march yet, more of a record shuffle" - and she expressed delight at her first protest. "You wouldn't believe it; there are girls here with good nails and really nice bags."'

Alongside the girls with good nails were thoughtful marchers who had supported the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan but were aghast at the recklessness of the Iraq adventure. A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet's Chile, published a letter to an 'unknown Iraqi' and asked, 'What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?'

His reply summed up the fears of tens of millions of people. War would destabilise the Middle East and recruit more fanatics to terrorist groups. It would lead to more despots 'pre-emptively arming themselves with all manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to Armageddon'. Dorfman also worried about the casualties - which, I guess, were far higher than he imagined - and convinced himself that the right course was to demand that Bush and Blair pull back. Nevertheless, he retained the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit to sign off with 'heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children'.

I don't think any open-minded observer who wasn't caught up in the anger could say that Dorfman was typical. Jose Ramos-Horta, the leader of the struggle for the freedom of East Timor, noticed that at none of the demonstrations in hundreds of cities did you see banners or hear speeches denouncing Saddam Hussein. If this was 'the left' on the march, it was the new left of the 21st century, which had abandoned old notions of camaraderie and internationalism in favour of opposition to the capricious American hegemony. They didn't support fascism, but they didn't oppose it either, and their silence boded ill for the future.

In Saturday, his novel set on the day of the march, Ian McEwan caught the almost frivolous mood: 'All this happiness on display is suspect. Everyone is thrilled to be together out on the streets - people are hugging themselves, it seems, as well as each other. If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.'

Most people, myself included, are not like Ariel Dorfman. In moments of political passion, we are single-mindedly and simple-mindedly sure of our righteousness. From the day of the marches on, liberal leftish politicians and intellectuals kept up a vehement and slightly panicky insistence that they were right and their goodness was beyond question.

In fairness to all of those who didn't want to think about the 'occasional genocide' or ask heaven's forgiveness for recommending that the Baath party be left in power, they were right in several respects. The protesters were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war. They weren't necessarily lying, in the lawyerly sense that they were deliberately making up the case for war - nothing that came out in the years afterwards showed that they knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and thought, 'What the hell, we'll pretend he does.'

But they were manipulating the evidence. The post-mortem inquiries in America convicted the US administration of 'collective group think': a self-reinforcing delusion in the White House that shut out contrary information and awkward voices. Lord Butler 's inquiry in Britain showed the Prime Minister turned statements that the Joint Intelligence Committee had hedged with caveats into defi nite warnings of an imminent threat. Before the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned in protest against the war, he pointed out to Blair that several details in his case that Saddam had chemical weapons couldn't possibly be true. Cook told his special adviser David Mathieson after the meeting that Blair did not know about the detail and didn't seem to want to know either.

'A half truth is a whole lie,' runs the Yiddish proverb, and if democratic leaders are going to take their countries to war, they must be able to level with themselves as well as their electorates. If Blair had levelled with the British people, he would have said that he couldn't be sure if Saddam was armed, and even if he was there was no imminent danger; but here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime and combat the growth in terror by building democracy, and he was going to take it. Instead, he spun and talked about chemical weapons ready to be fired in 45 minutes. If the Labour party had forced Blair to resign, there would have been a rough justice in his political execution.

The war was over soon enough, but the aftermath was a disaster. Generals, diplomats and politicians covered their own backs and stabbed the backs of their colleagues as they piled blame on each other, but for the rest of the world pictures released in 2004 of American guards with pornographic smirks on their faces standing beside the tortured and sexually abused bodies of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison encapsulated their disgust. To those who knew that the Baathists had tens of thousands of people tortured and murdered at Abu Ghraib, the pictures were evidence of sacrilege. It was as if American guards had decided to gas a prisoner in Auschwitz, while their superiors turned a blind eye.

Just as dozens of generals, politicians and diplomats shifted the blame, so journalists and academics produced dozens of books on the troubles of the occupation of Iraq. One point demanded far more attention than it got. Hard-headed and principled Iraqis, who knew all about the ghastly history of their country, failed to understand the appeal of fascism. The y worried about coping with the consequences of totalitarianism when the Baath party was overthrown. They talked about how many people you could reasonably put on trial in a country where the regime had made hundreds of thousands complicit in its crimes against humanity, and wondered about truth and reconciliation commissions and amnesties. They expected the invaders to be met with 'sweets and flowers' and assumed Baathism was dead as a dynamic force. They didn't count on its continuing appeal to the Sunni minority, all too aware that democracy would strip them of their status as Iraq's 'whites'. They didn't wonder what else the servants of the Baath could do if they didn't take up arms: wait around for war crimes trials or revenge from the kin of their victims? Nor did they expect to see Islamist suicide bombers pour into Iraq. Despite vocal assurances from virtually every expert who went on the BBC that such a pact was impossible, Baathists and Islamists formed an alliance against the common enemy of democracy.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, wasn't against elections because he was worried they would be rigged or because he couldn't tolerate American involvement in the political process; he was against democracy in all circumstances. It was 'an evil principle', he said, as he declared a 'fierce war' against all those 'apostates' and 'infidels' who wanted to vote in free elections and the 'demi-idols' who wanted to be elected. Democracy was a 'heresy itself', because it allowed men and women to challenge the laws of God with laws made by parliaments. It was based on 'freedom of religion and belief' and 'freedom of speech' and on 'separation of religion and politics'.

He did not mean it as a compliment. His strategy was to terrorise Iraq's Shia majority. To Sunni Islamists they were heretics, or as Zarqawi put it in his charac teristic language, 'the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom'. Suicide bombers were to murder them until they turned on the Sunni minority. He explained: 'I mean that targeting and hitting them in [their] religious, political, and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancour working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death.'

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffi ng up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed.

It is a generalisation to say that everyone refused to commit themselves. The best of the old left in the trade unions and parliamentary Labour party supported an anti-fascist struggle, regardless of whether they were for or against the war, and American Democrats went to fi ght in Iraq and returned to fi ght the Republicans. But again, no one who looked at the liberal left from the outside could pretend that such principled stands were commonplace. The British Liberal Democrats, the continental social democratic parties, the African National Congress and virtually every leftish newspaper and journal on the planet were unable to accept that the struggle of Arabs and Kurds had anything to do with them. Mainstream Muslim organisations were as indifferent to the murder of Muslims by other Muslims in Iraq as in Darfur. For the majority of world opinion, Blair's hopes of 'giving people oppressed, almost enslaved, the prospect of democracy and liberty' counted for nothing.

How the left went beserk

When a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein came, the liberals had two choices. The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to establish a democracy.

The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.

A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifi able anger to propel them into 'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region, but the bloody result of a 'financially driven mania to control Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent with the cross'.

They chose to go berserk.

The Time Shop

Craig was late for his interview. It wasn't his fault.

He got to the station in good time, but It was only when he crossed the

footbridge to his platform  that he realised. 


An overrunning freight train had caused a delay at the previous station

so the passenger trains behind were halted to allow its passage,

all the while, eating up precious minutes and seconds, adding them onto

his own. He would never be there on time now.


He didn't have a lot of experience in his chosen field, PR, but he more

than made up for it with exhuberence, enthusiasm and what he liked to

call "Razzle Dazzle". He had various notes with him he planned to go

over on the train but now he was unnerved. He was always punctual but

he knew that the train couldn't make up the time and he would now be at

least ten minutes late for his interview. It would take all the Razzle

Dazzle in Las Vegas to make a good impression after such a bad start.


His interview was with a company in Soho and he vaguely knew where it

was. Down one of the many numerous alleyways and passages that make up

London's answer to Montmartre. Replete with rougish charm, as much for

the tourists as the edgy new media companies that set up there hoping

some of that dark stardust would rub off on them.


He sprinted up the stairs of Oxford Street tube station and bounded off

in the direction of Soho as quickly as his painful interview shoes

would allow. He turned left at a GOLF SALE sign and then right, left,

left again through the narrow arteries of the district. He glanced up to

check his barings and slipped on the greasy surface landing flat on his

back.


Winded, he regained his senses seconds later and glanced to his left at

a bright Victorian-style shop front.                                                       

                                       
The window was full of clocks, all varying styles, sizes, colours,

shapes and languages. Some displaying numbers, some spelling the time

in letters, some small watches, some digital appliances and a large

grandfather clock in the middle with such a stately presence that the

rest of the clocks appeared as if they were looking up at it.


That wasn't the most striking feature of the window. It took Craig a

good ten seconds to realise that all the clocks were telling dfferent

times and the hands and digits were moving at different speeds both

backwards and forwards.


Craig was stunned. Not just at the sheer number of clocks in what

looked like such a small space, but mainly because his brain was

refusing to accept what his eyes were telling him.


They were definately moving backwards, and forwards, and at different

speeds! He stepped backwards from the window and looked up at the sign

above the shop.


It said: "The Time Shop - We've always got time for YOU".

Craig looked down at his own watch. It had stopped.

Unlike certain other North East football fans, we can take a joke

The Return of This Life

BBC Two, 11.20pm, Monday to Friday from November 6th














1996; 1997; Miles, Milly, Egg, Anna, Ferdy, Warren, O'Donnell, Hooperman, Kira
, Moloko, Oasis, Blur, The Prodigy, Sexual Politics, Smoking, Drinking, Working, Living, Loving, Fighting, Surviving, Moving In, Moving Out, Moving On, Standing Still, My Life, Your Life, Their Lives, This Life.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/09_september/20/thislife.shtml