From A Morning Train

Last week I attempted (or at least contemplated) the highly complex and technically ambitious project of twittering a photo essay from the train via Twitpic. Not being very technically savvy I soon gave up and read Private Eye instead. Here are the photos I took (from my phone hence the outrageously poor quality /what I like to think of as a Gerhard Richter-esque painterly quality) as the landscape flashed by, together with requisite mordant observations.

The English countryside is in a mess. It is neither green nor that pleasant on the whole. Generally understood to be charmingly unspoilt, it is in fact unnatural and being redeveloped all the time. The best place to view it is from a train window. Trains pass through the back end of everywhere, giving you the worst, most interesting viewpoint.



Very little open countryside is actually countryside. Vast pylons march across it. Reservoirs are sunk into it. Piles of debris, bricks and old agricultural equipment lie abandoned in it. As do burnt out cars, coaches infested with weeds, strange shacks, empty warehouses, tarpaulins covering mysterious bundles of materials, slag heaps and soil tips. Red and white candy striped tape flaps between timber poles, marking out the lines of new roads.



Trains pass through this liminal zone, a not quite there space between cities and villages. Houses march relentlessly out into it, their higgledy piggledy outlines forming an advance party into the green belt.



Motorways, canals, bridges, B-roads and adhoc car parks collide on the edges of towns as if designed by an insane Hornby model maker. Something about the view from a train, - elevated above the usual eye level - removes the landscape from reality. Tiny cars inch along country lanes. A tractor plods across a field. A 4x4 stops at a level crossing.



Huge sheds loom out of the middle distance guarding their mysterious contents. Small farm houses sit dwarfed by groups of crinkly tin barns containing piles of grain or thousands of chickens. Patches of concrete suggest where other buildings might once have been, structures phased out by advances in agribusiness. A bent piece of corrugated iron held down by bricks is home to a pig.



Power stations, factories and warehouses all follow the railway. Loading bay numbers flash by from a distribution centre. Pallets of blue circle cement are moved from one place to another. A skip is filled up with copper tubing.

Just outside Stevenage an advertising mast looms into view. TK Maxx, Old Orlean's, a Vue cinema, Halfords, Tesco and the conference centre. A business park appears like a pleasant oasis.

A van sits on a patch of concrete by a town's edge. Ubiquitous cheap apartment blocks, clad in brick and pressed metal look out over a landscape frequented by teenagers and others excluded from mainstream leisure activities. Scraps of torn up pornography get caught in the branches of a tree.

Electricity pylons are quite beautiful and mostly go unnoticed. Above the ploughed fields there is the constant hum of electricity. If you are lucky, you get to see a wind turbine too.

From a Late Night Train

The Protestant Playboy

I have a terrible weakness for James Bond books. I have read them all despite the fact that they are all essentially the same. I put it down to nostalgia. The only piece of popular culture that was really celebrated (- allowed actually - if you want to have a clue what my upbringing was like think Victorian Dad in Viz.) in our family was James Bond. It was one of the few areas of consensus in a household otherwise riven with bad tempered intolerance.

As a child I loved James Bond. I waited diligently and obsessively for the rare occasions one of the films would be on TV (in a pre VHS era that basically meant Christmas and possibly Easter, how fabulously austere and pious that sounds now). My elder brother had a James Bond Scaletrix track which I coveted. My Dad had the books which had covers featuring semi-naked women and long projectiles and contained references to breasts. But mostly it was the ritual of sitting down together to watch the films that I recall. The comparative peace that ensued as a result is a large part of my fondness for them. Even now they induce in me a strange beatific calm, a completely reliable form of escapism.



All this despite the fact that I find the worldview of their author fairly unpleasant. The books (much more clearly than the films) reveal Ian Fleming’s mindset and by extension a whole generation similar to him. Like Fleming, the books are compelling and repulsive in roughly equal measure. “Sex, sadism and snobbery”, said Paul Johnson about them famously and as a summation, it’s hard to beat.

Anthony Burgess once wrote a pithy introduction to the novels which dealt with their inescapably 1950’s quality. This lies not simply in the lists of consumer products and fashions, or even in the jet set glamour they offered to ration era Britain, but in a more fundamentally political sense. James Bond is a creature of the 1950’s, the fag end of imperialism and Victorian values. The films place him in the 1960’s and ‘70’s (and beyond) but this is not Bond's era. Crucially he was never cool or hip. He was pre-counter culture, and pre-rock’n’roll. There are hints of this in the films; in Goldfinger he admits tellingly to hating The Beatles.



Bond’s politics and worldview are a hangover from an earlier era. Although he is a pleasure seeker, he is emphatically not a hedonist. Bond’s pleasures are rewards for hard work and the performance of duty. The concept of duty is critical to his character and to the difference between him and the social revolutions that came after. In Goldfinger again, Bond is trailing the eponymous villain across the Swiss alps. A beautiful woman drives by in a soft top sports car. As they do. Bond’s urge to give chase, literally and metaphorically, is checked by his sense of duty. “Discipline, 007, discipline”, he mutters to himself.

In the book, Fleming imagines an entire love affair that could have occurred after Bond caught up with the girl. They would meet, have lunch and drive lazily down through Italy and fall in love. But Bond gives up this little daydream because he has a job to do. Work comes first.



Unfortunately this work involves killing people. Bond is unwaveringly loyal to the enforcement of a particular world order. He is an intensely ideological animal. In Fleming’s pre-war politics unpleasant personal habits and predilections can be brushed aside if one follows one’s duty. Crucially, morality and ethics are not assumed to lie within the private actions of individuals, but in the public adherence to a prevailing ideology.

The enforcement of abstract rules or external codes of behaviour always has the capacity to mask cruelty by removing one from the contingency of one’s actions. It's easy to behave badly in the name of 'doing the right thing'. What is interesting about James Bond and his enduring popularity is the archaic nature of his ideology.

Heroes usually have an element of rebelliousness about them, a certain nobility in their resistance to oppression or evil. Bond has none of this. The villains are cartoon lunatics whose threat is far too ludicrous for us to believe in. No, it is clear what James Bond is really fighting. The only odd thing is the support that he continues to generate. Not least from myself.