New Order

I still have this mystery illness. I say ‘mystery’ because although in every respect it resembles the common cold, I’m sure there’s an element to it that in my case, will prove fatal. I’ve been trying to push it aside (as I’ve said before, I wasn’t allowed to be ill as a child), but it keeps lingering in the wings, threatening to overtake me and thereby spoil my forthcoming weekend of yachting on the high seas. So, I’m taking loads of drugs and overdosing on Vitamin C in the hope that I can chase it away for good.

It’s turning into a week of highly-charged emotions all round. If I were one of those people who believes in celestial influences, I’d be tempted to think that this is because of some shift in the fabric of the universe, but it’s more likely to be nothing more than the culmination of a collective anxiety caused by the everyday stresses of modern life. With illness, work pressures, ‘no-work’ pressures, matters of the heart, and matters of ever-shrinking available time, it’s no wonder that some of us end up in a somewhat febrile disarray. Just when I probably needed it most, I completely forgot to go to Buddhism last night. I might try meditating here; I’m sure it will help.

I was recently invited to write an article on my memories of the 1968 student riots in Paris. The problem with that is, I don’t really have any. All I can remember of that period is that being a bit of a Francophile, I was dismayed to see the destruction and unrest that was taking place. I was too young to understand the philosophical arguments of the movement, and struggled to work out what it was that the students and others were rioting and striking to achieve. I now learn that many of the students themselves didn’t have a clue what they were really rioting for. Sure, there were complaints about the centralisation of France’s education system, and there was certainly discrimination in the workplace, but why was that enough to spark a revolution of such importance? May 1968 has become iconic as a milestone in the development of today’s France, but I say that the intellectual ideology of that period was somewhat indulgent, and that the protagonists of the Situationist movement were driven more by philosophical fashion than by a desire to change the real order of things. For a start, it’s interesting to note how many of them were men and moreover, how many of them are now ‘establishment’ figures themselves.

This reminds me of a time when I sent a postcard to Tony Blair. It was about three years into his New Labour presidency, and a time when people were just beginning to express a slight unease about the way that old Labour principles were slowly being eroded. My postcard was rather rude if I remember – it said: “Hi Tony, now that you and your crowd are walking on hind legs, I wonder how long it will be before you start wearing clothes and sleeping in beds?”

I assume that he grasped the allusion.