I always did wonder why the word “nigh” is only ever used in conjunction with the end of the world. Smart arses will no doubt tell me that it is nigh on impossible to make a statement like that without tempting people to contradict me. But the truth is, and you all know it, the word is well nigh useless and immediately marks you out as a repository of Biblical sayings, old Norse predilections, and most likely born not too far from the end of the Second World War.
Your language gives you away. And the older you get the quainter you sound, and the more impenetrable your prose to the unwashed semi-literate masses who think Harry Potter is an Adult Book. That said I took a quick browse through the “young adults” and “teen fiction” selection at the Commercial Press bookshop in Shatin just to see what I was missing, and came to the horrifying realization that when you are a Teen, one is expected to sound like a ‘Valley Girl” circa 1988, except with an iPod attached, and when you are a “young adult” you are expected to read “Little Women” and other such tedious classics. No doubt the result of thirty something marketing executives appealing to people who buy the books, rather than the people who are supposed to read them.
And there is another word that has just given me away: tedious! It is such a great word. It sounds very superior with an English accent and conjures up short hot summers along the banks of the River Cam with a boy in a boater and blazer, cricket bat under his arm, exclaiming how the prospect of the vicar turning up with his mother is going to be somewhat taxing that evening. All of which makes me want to reach for the Molotov Cocktail that I keep under my bed so that I won’t be late for the revolution. (Molotov Cocktail? What? You have no idea? Google it.)
My Class War targeting program built into me by a Comprehensive education and associating with spotty Trots of the sixties and seventies, locks onto a number of stereotypes picked out of Boys Own tales of Edwardian Empire builders and the long list of British poofter warrior poets who buggered for Queen and Country.
I am, and we are, because you too are in on this, trapped by our eras and cultures and the older we get, the inability to give the cadence of our youth, the fashionable posings of our pretentious ambitions, the boot and pick up the lingo of the moment with its short sentences, simplistic and overenthusiastic use of commas despite the shortness, and parodyable, if there is such a word, txt speaking Americanisms, betrays our eminently dumpable redundancy.
We are, in short, the very thing that the economic crisis of the moment and its concurrent political upheavals, are trying to eliminate. We are embodiments of old habits. And the young, of which a portion of my brain still is, only circa 1952, cry out, “Give us a chance now that you have fucked up!” The mere sound of Frank Muir and Dennis Norden once again holding forth on The British Broadcasting Company's Home Service on such seemingly never ending programmes as “My Word,” while the Rolling Stones were failing to get satisfaction, was proof enough to me that the old - anyone over forty - had to be put in homes and not allowed out to slow things down. Their world, and their sluggish verbal delivery of everything, seemed like sinking in treacle on a closed Sunday afternoon when whistling was banned.
If I so much as thought of escaping after Sunday lunch to my bike, and a surreptitious visit to friends who had tuned in their transistor radios to Radio London, a “pirate station”, was a sign that I was no better than a little heathen. The heathens, as you probably do not know because most of my readers are either aged unemployed African Americans, for reasons I cannot fathom but am grateful for, or young South East Asians checking to see if I am casting for another local film, were always portrayed in cartoons and comic books from the forties found lurking in Jumble Sales run by Scout Troops - proceeds of which to be sent to the starving lesser races - as having fuzzy hair and bones through their noses. Papuans were obviously in the crosshairs of evangelicals of the central decades of the 20th Century. And the observant among you will have picked up the tone of the pamphlets handed out to National Service squaddies of the fifties, that for reasons of nostalgic TV comedies of my youth still pervades my comedy mode.
Rambling though my nature is, and enriched by references to a chilly suburban culture of enormous deadliness unfathomable to the dwellers of tropical ex-colonies I now inhabit, the writings of those unaware of the cultural specificity of every moment and every word, are boring! They either appear pointlessly verbose or ridiculously stripped of meaning and texture and become as jargonized and clichéd as “The End of The World Is Nigh”. Which is probably why newspaper headlines and articles all seem like propaganda or irony to me. “Freedom Fighters!” “Liberation!” “Austerity Measures!” “Bail Out!” The world portrayed by the media is awash with naivety and irony at the moment, in some vain attempt to be hip and to dissociate itself from an old corrupt guard, who, unfortunately, taught us everything we know. And in twenty years from now it will all seem quaint and comical and dull and sinister and unimaginable. And it will be horribly imbedded in the psyche and language of those who think they have moved on. But we never do. We drag it all along with us and would be nothing without it, but always think ourselves better if we were.